Nova Vaasa, and we start the final Gazetteer. I was hoping to get to the end of the Gaz series well before the new book came out, and maybe look at domains extensively detailed in other products if I get the chance, and so far I think I'm on schedule.
Gaz V was actually written before/during and published after the complete breakdown in relations between White Wolf and the Kargatane, who'd done most of the heavy lifting on the line up until this. What the exact details of this were I'm not entirely sure, and I'm sure it'd depend on who you asked, but creative differences were a big part of it, as well as an increasing disgruntlement on the part of the Kargatane about perceived poor editing, graphic design, and management choices on WWs part. My completely uninformed guess is that on the WW side, the Kargatane were starting to be viewed simply as freelancers who were getting above themselves and becoming more demanding than they were worth, and probably the deadline issues with Borca in the previous Gazetteers didn't exactly help - although again, this is entirely speculation on my part. Books like the 3.5e Ravenloft Players Handbook and Champions of Darkness, which were largely done outside the Kargatane's creative circle and oversight, were fairly widely believed to be of low quality, thematically poor, inconsistent with what the Kargatane were writing at the same time, and lacking an understanding of the setting. Now admittedly when all this was happening I was lurking on the Kargatane's messageboards so I very much got their side of the story and was immersed in a community that shared their view of the setting, so it's quite possible I'm a bit blinkered on this, but personally I've always strongly come down on the Kargatane side of the argument purely judging on quality of output. The line did stagger on zombie-like for a little while after this, but the Great Falling Out (as the Kargatane always called it) pretty much marked the end of 3e Ravenloft. Gazetteer V has a few scars from this brawl, if you know where to look. There's a lot fewer of the sidebars discussing plothooks or little details of the setting or touchstones back to old adventures than we're used to, and to the best of my understanding that's because by the time the work was submitted there was basically no relationship between the Kargatane and WW, and so the editing process was limited to WW simply cutting out the bits that were easiest to cut out, rather than go back and forth and discuss what was most dispensable. And what was easiest to cut was the sidebars. So Gaz V is a lot more wall-of-text and has a bit less colour and fewer plot hooks than previous Gazetteers.
Anyway, Nova Vaasa.
Geographically, it's big and it's flat. I'm starting to recognise the signs a little having binged all of these books in such a short time, and when the 'geography' bit of a writeup starts going into loving detail about the different flora found in different parts of the domain that can still come under the same general description (grassland, in this case), it's maybe a sign that we're going to be a bit light on content and plothooks. Anyway, Nova Vaasa largely slopes downwards from the west (with the Mountains of Misery, and the rugged eastern fringes of Barovia and Hazlan) though grasslands ranging from rich prairie to stony semi-desert, to a rugged, rocky eastern coast. Successful settlements tend to cling to the rivers, though there's a lot of struggling or abandoned villages out on the plains where people fleeing the grinding poverty and filth of the cities have tried and failed to make a living from the harsh terrain before being killed by hunger, thirst, or bandits. Horses are everything here, Nova Vaasa is really big, over twice the size of Barovia and only exceeded in population by Darkon, but it's also very large and the places of interest are far apart. So horses are important, a lot of the land is given over to grazing for the nobility's herds, and we get a paragraph or so on each of the most important breeds. Stone and good building timber are both at a premium, which is possibly one reason why the cities are so small and cramped despite there being so much space available.
We get more history than we need here, and I believe it's mostly because the canon-fiends in the Kargatane tried to use this section to reconcile the various completely irreconcilable versions of Nova Vaasan history that had appeared in various sourcebooks prior. Early on, Nova Vaasa was written as being taken by the mists from Vaasa in Faerun, and the history here has allusions to peoples very very similar to FR Damarans, Tuigan, and Thayans. However, Nova Vaasa shares basically nothing culturally or geographically with FR Vaasa, and the dominant faith of the Lawgiver is an obvious reskin of Bane from FR, but Bane's faith was never particularly prominent in Vaasa as far as i know. It's all very messy, and irrelevant to most actual games played here. We devote about three full pages of unrelieved text to explaining how modern RL Nova Vaasa could have possibly evolved from this melting-pot of quasi-Faerunian cultures, short version is that the Vaasans adopted the horsey lifestyle from the Tuigan, then a powerful devotee of NotBane welded the scattered people into an autocracy ruled by iron-fisted military nobility. Which is pretty much where we stand today. The Lawgiver's faith is dominant, and power is in the hands of a small number of noble families who rotate the Princedom between them every five years - although the current Prince Othmar is significantly overdue to give it up, and refuses, and probably has the power to back up his refusal and make it something resembling permanent.
Again, over 90% human though at least this time there's very little actual prejudice against other races; again, attitudes to arcane magic make it real difficult for most adventuring parties here. Arcane magic is actually illegal and punishable by imprisonment at best, and so is practicing the worship of gods other than the Lawgiver. Nova Vaasa, given its size, has sometimes been recommended as a good homeland or starting point for PC parties. Not sure about how THAT is meant to work - basically any PC party you could care to name will be hunted criminals by the end of the week (especially if they want to have a priest of a non-LE god in the group). All very thematic, sucky for playability.
Socially, we have basically a skin-deep LE version of religious medieval feudalism. The nobles talk about duty and honour and protecting the weak while treating lower classes with unbelievable callousness and intriguing viciously among themselves. The peasantry and indentured working classes talk about community and religion and righteous behaviour, but wallow in intoxicants and bloodsports and the sex trade and gang violence and every other vice imaginable, and would sell their parents for a flask of spirits. The theme is (predictably, given the darklord), one of two-facedness. Everyone preaches, nobody practises. As far as analogies go, the place is kinda the Riders of Rohan as run by the Russian mob out of the pre-Scouring Shire, though the aesthetic is feudalist steppe Russia.
We then have four solid pages of text describing the political balance between the five major noble families, their attitude to Othmar's effective assumption of the throne, their leaders, and their relationships with each other. Massive wall of text stuff. This is weary, repetitive reading and a few of the missing Dread Possibility sidebars or similar here would have been a welcome relief. Unless your PCs are planning to get heavily involved in Nova Vaasan politics (and seriously, who starts a Ravenloft game in order to do that?), this isn't going to be much use to you. The lack of plot hooks really drags this down. There's another couple of pages on the economy and trade, which again could be halved in size without losing much of use. The regular tour of major cities is basically more of the same, doubling down on the filth, the gambling, and the gap between noble and peasant with a couple of sidetrips to namedrop past ravenloft products (the abandoned asylum of Dr Illhousen, from the Nightmare Lands box set, and Ehrendton, which was the site of a major fiendish presence in Van Richten's Guide to Fiends and which gets half a page here to, infuriatingly, tell us that there's nothing interesting here any more. I can only assume one of the excised Dread Possibilities would have done something PC-relevant with the Beast of Ehrendton).
Things start to differ a bit when we get to Liara and Castle Fairhaaven, which is the holdings of Tristan Hiregaard. Both the crime lord Malken and the un-evocatively dubbed serial murderer the Signature Killer have been mentioned earlier and have been active all across the domain at various points in time, but here is where they're most prominent. The whole two-faced theme becomes stronger here - Hiregaard has been portrayed as significantly the best and most dutiful (of a bad lot) of the Nova Vaasan barons, and during the day Liara reflects that - less obvious poverty, more orderly and better-maintained streets. At night, the place goes wildly nuts with a kind of self-destructive brittle exuberance - there's a serial killer (Malken) roaming around who's killed well over a hundred women, and the nightlife is in the grip of a murderous crime ring (under Malken) who'll sell you anything but really make you pay for it. Not the most stable of places.
The darklord here is nominally Malken, but it's really one of those weird ambiguous cases like Adam/Mordenheim where there's two intertwined individuals who could really raffle the darklordship between them. Tristan Hiregaard was the son of an insanely jealous man who murdered his wife when he found her in the arms of another man (really, her dance instructor), and who was cursed by her with her dying breath to kill every woman he loved. That's a messed up curse, can i just say, and punishes innocents far more than the person she's actually cursing? Anyway, Tristan's father couldn't deal with the guilt and killed himself, and the curse passed to Tristan. Tristan was (and still is, at age 90+! Though the Dark Powes have kept him young) quite the womaniser, and the curse's definition of 'love' seems to have been quite elastic. In the grip of the curse he murdered the first woman he kissed, then another 9 women over the years, hating that he was enjoying it more and more each time. Eventually he decided to kill himself, but then was swept off to Ravenloft. Why was THAT the trigger for him to be picked up by the mists, rather than, y'know, actually when he was murdering people? Why did he suddenly change his mind about suicide once he got to Ravenloft? There's no good explanation for either of those questions as far as I'm aware. Anyway, once he arrived, his curse developed an entire separate identity, Jekyll and Hyde style. Malken still does the serial killer thing (and the definition of 'love' has been broadened to barmaids Tristan flirted with at inns nowadays, so the body count is getting horrific) but has branched out into crime lording as well, and he basically rules the Liaran (and Nova Vaasan) underworld, knows where a lot of the bodies are buried re the current political turmoil, and gleefully devotes his life to making Hiregaard as miserable as possible. Malken was Hiregaards bete noire for most of his career, the dutiful baron trying to hunt down the evil criminal, but by the time the Gazetteer is being written in-world, Hiregaard has realised that Malken shares his body and tries to restrain himself (the transformation is triggered by jealousy or anger) without noticeable success so far. The book is silent about why he hasn't killed himself as he originally intended, although it notes that if he did, the curse would just pass down to his sons anyway. Whether he knows about the curse's origin with his mother is not detailed. Mum made a massive mess of that one, though it's hard to be too critical of her specific curse-wording skills given she was in the process of getting brutally murdered by her husband at the time. Hell, does Tristan know or suspect that Malken/the curse actively targets women he romances? Cos if so, continuing to date or hit on barmaids is a giant scumbag move on his part. Buy yourself a chastity belt or join a monastery, dude.
This is all a bit muddled, to be honest. Malken is the Darklord (the way i read Tristan is kinda an aspect of his curse, like Mordenheim was for Adam), but it was Tristan who committed the murders that dragged him to Ravenloft in the first place at a time when Malken didn't even independently exist, and he only did it because he himself was under a curse and not in control of himself at the time. Was his seminal act of darkness refusing to kill himself when he knew he was losing his grip and committing murder? Bit rough, since out of character we know it wouldn't have made any difference. Does Hiregaard remember the murders he committed pre-Mists pre-Malken, and does he remember enjoying them? I don't actually mind Hiregaard as a character, he's very human. His pride is a double-edged sword, driving him to be honourable in his dealings with his underlings but demanding he deal with Malken himself and blinding him from seeing the best thing he could do would be to retire to a hermit's life in the steppe somewhere so that even if Malken escaped control, there'd be nobody else around for him to victimise (though on the other hand if he did, his son would take over his duties and he's a selfish jerk who'd make life miserable for thousands). It's a good illustration of a flawed LN character, a balance of pride, honour, shame, arrogance, and duty with a strong thread of moral cowardice running under it all. And if the PCs ever (somehow, I have no idea how...) find out that Tristan himself in his non-Malken persona actually has a history of maniacal serial-killing himself, then that's a really nice Horrible Revelation moment. "He seemed like such a nice normal guy..." There's apparently a novel about Hiregaard, which contradicts a lot of the info in any/all sourcebooks (Nova Vaasa is like that, sigh), but I haven't read it.
Malken though, is a fair bit less fleshed out. He's defined as the anti-Tristan, or more accurately, the anti- what Tristan would like to believe himself to be. He runs a crime ring because Tristan wants a well ordered city, he supports Othmar because he loves watching Tristan caught in the cleft stick of his respect for authority and the church vs his personal dislike of Othmar and outrage over Othmar's annexation of power. Malken lacks personal goals independent of Tristan, though to be honest that's fair enough given what he is.
However - what does ANY of this have to do with Nova Vaasa? It's a huge sprawling place, but the struggle with its darklord is uniquely close and intimate, inside the soul of a single man. Hiregaard doesn't even live in the capital, his holdings are up in the northwest near the Tepest border (presumably he did live in the capital during his term as Prince, but that was 20 years ago now). And while the barely-controlled LE, two-faced nature of Nova Vaasan society in the cities does somewhat reflect the Hiregaard/Malken dynamic, the majority of the domain is horse-herds on the prairie which seems (to me) quite disconnected.
Cats are a bit of a thing here. The wild plains cats are hugely iconic for the nation, are much-feared predators whose fur and claws are prized for clothing and ornamentation, and Malken has some sort of affinity with cats as well (which isn't detailed here, it's apparently referred to in a dubiously-canon novel I haven't read, though even his name clearly derives from Graymalkin, the witches familar cat from Macbeth). Why isn't Urik von Kharkov here? He and the cat of Felkovic would fit much better in Nova Vaasa than they do in Valachan.
For usage in a game, frankly the more I read Nova Vaasa, the more problems i see. Your cleric's choices are 'lawful evil god of tyranny' or 'hunted criminal', and arcane spellcasters can't even select option A from that list. You could probably escape the worst of the Lawgiver's dictums by staying out of the cities, but the darklord is very city-focused. The empty space, the number of small isolated settlements, and the lack of any overwhelmingly evil presence that's going to eat you on day 1 like Verbrek's werewolves promotes the idea of this being a good starting domain for low-level PCs, but as soon as you head to more populous areas, you're going to have a lot of issues.
For a one-off, obviously the scenario is Malken and Tristan, probably set in Liara, or perhaps in Kantora if you want to bring Othmar and the political situation into play. What would the denouement look like though? Tristan's mother is nearly a century dead, do you get her ghost to lift her curse? The book says the only way to lift the curse is to kill every single Hiregaard through the male line, which sounds like a fast way to become the new darklord to me.
In a wider campaign, the cultural religious and magical restrictions make it hard for many non-native PC groups to visit here (or at least those areas of 'here' that are populated, you could probably use Nova Vaasa as a travel route from Barovia to Darkon without meeting too many other people, if you were so inclined). On the other hand, there's plenty of space, and while this books is relatively devoid of plothooks as discussed, there's loads of room to insert your own. Speaking purely personally, I find the desolate prairie wilderness areas of the domain much more interesting and compelling than the cities which is supposedly where all the action is. There's a distinct Western or outback Australian feel, the wide open spaces full of promise, with hopeful refugees fleeing the squalid cities in the hope of a wholesome life on the land but finding only hardship, crop failure, lawlessness, desolation and thirsty death. Of course Nova Vaasa lacks an indigenous population to brutalise, so the parallel isn't perfect. The cities - are cities. The only thing that makes them different from any other crowded fantasy city is the ubiquity of the Lawgiver's church that lends religious authority to an awful aristocratic rule. And sure, that's a good fantasy dynamic, but is it horror/gothic, particularly?
I suspect Nova Vaasa will appear in 5e in some form, it's been around for a looong time in Ravenloft after all, and it seems that the 5e developers prefer to reinvent domains rather than discarding them completely. Though i suspect it'll shrink a lot to focus more tightly on Tristan and Malken. Personally, if I was All-Powerful Ravenloft Grand High Poobah in charge of doing it all again from a blank slate, I'd excise Hiregaard/Malken from the domain completely. They'd get shuffled off and dressed in cravats and monocles to be darklord of Paridon (Sodo is an over-complicated and uninteresting darklord anyway, and Tristan/Malken's misogynistic rage-killings are a much truer Jack the Ripper expy than Sodo's ritual to feed his knife) along with all the urban squalour side of Nova Vaasa. Thematically and in terms of his Jekyll/Hyde gothic literature origins, Malken fits far better in an urban gaslight domain, and we no longer have to shoehorn jam-packed slum-ridden cities into a domain like Nova Vaasa which has empty space everywhere. Meanwhile, the remainder of the domain, the more wild grassland bits, becomes a new domain, probably a reminiscent of the old West, a lawless semi-desert frontier survival domain, with the darklord perhaps the slimy provision merchant who sells misleading maps and tainted provisions and shoddy equipment to hopeful families before they wander off into the wilds to see their dreams turn to dust and their livestock and children starve. Othmar and his political ambitions can go away, nobody cares about him anyway.
On leaving the domain, S drops in at a seedy orphanage and purchases a baby. This is going to end well...
Random PC class of the week is druid, and i'm going with my favourite bits of the domain by having this guy someone who tried to strike out from the city and make a living off the land, and lost everyone and everything in the process before discovering, in extremis, a measure of druidic power as he lay between life and death gasping for water in a parched creek bed. I've made him mounted, as Nova Vaasa is a very horsey domain - has anyone every run a game in a place like that successfully? (And why isn't Find Steed a druid spell?) Horse-heavy cultures have some really iconic imagery, from the Mongols to the Old West to Scythians and mounted medieval knights, but in every actual D&D game I've seen, horses tend to be largely ignored or forgotten. D&Ds mounted combat rules haven't exactly been its strongest point as long as I've been playing, and tend to limit the group according to the least capable rider and be a major inconvenience when the PCs want to head into a dungeon. 5e is very forgiving as far as i know when it comes to riding - there's no proficiency required to do the basics, although you'll have the same issue as previous editions have had, where at higher level horses inevitably die to the first fireball in any given encounter and PCs end up fighting on foot regardless.
Next up, the last domain in the core with vaguely normal inhabitants - Tepest.
