The adherence to prior canon of the Gazetteer line. How much scope for deviating from the pre-3e line did Arthaus have? Obviously the timeline advanced a bit and there were the inevitable changes resulting from that, but if you wanted to could you have, for instance, replaced darklords, or had a new upheaval along the lines of the Grand Conjunction and rearranged domains, or similar? Or could you have even retconned some of the cities to be bigger? (Demographics and the lack of a really major urban centre in the Core is something we've discussed in the thread at length)
We (the Kargatane) had an extremely free hand, in a sense. More or less we were just told not to reference other settings and then left to our own devices. Our initial developer (who handed off to the developer team we had for the rest of run) actually gave us one creative note: to break up the Core into separate domains, the 5E approach. However, none of us wanted to do that, and we were handed such an extremely short deadline on the core setting book that we more or less just ignored it. (More on scope for using other settings in the next question.)
But to answer a lot of questions with one answer: While it's true that "White Wolf" published Ravenloft 3E, they did so under their Arthaus line. Arthaus was their "studio" for low-budget, small-audience books. To get RL 3E going, Arthaus hired us, the Kargatane, thanks to recommendations from various TSR/WotC folks who were familiar with us. And generally speaking, the Kargatane were a bunch of D&D 2E nerds with limited to no exposure to White Wolf's RPGs. So a lot of speculation about the "White Wolf" feel of the Arthaus RL books always tickles me.
Similarly, with Sithicus, were there limits on what Dragonlance-y material you were or were not able to use?
The thing about not using other settings is that there were instances - Soth most obviously - when we
had to reference them. Ignoring a lot of Domains of Dread's tie-darklords-to-other-settings-for-its-own-sake policy was easy. But you literally can't talk about Sithicus without involving Dragonlance (though the removal of Soth himself did make that easier). And the other thing about not using other settings is that we never received any
specific guidelines about what we could and couldn't use. So over time, we realized that the only way to figure out where the boundaries were was to start tapping the ground with sticks and seeing if we hit any landmines. (We never did.) So, in Sithicus, we used the names of Krynn's moons on purpose, basically just to see what would happen. Paladine being mentioned by name was probably an oversight that slipped through the cracks (I say without checking my notes); by then we'd well established (and preferred) our use of formal titles for "outlander" gods.
Thoughts on the place of demihumans and magic in the setting in general? There always seemed to be a tension between the humanocentric and low-magic gaslamp Gothic aesthetic that RL was emulating, and the mechanical realities of D&D where there's probably going to be a wizard and a dwarf or whatever in most parties, and the fighter is much more likely to be wearing full plate than greatcoat and tricorn. Did that ever bother you in the development process, and if so, how did you square the circle?
We basically had two primary creative principles when approaching Ravenloft:
1. We viewed Ravenloft 3E as a direct continuation and synthesis of 2E Ravenloft's continuity. The inability to directly incorporate other settings ended up being far more a tool that we could lean on to pursue our primary goal (of codifying Ravenloft into an adventure setting that made some kind of logical sense from a moment-to-moment basis) far more than it was ever any kind of "contractual obligation" that we had to work around.
2. Be as open as possible (from our POV) to incorporating as much of 3E D&D as possible.
So in the case of both setting continuity and rules options, our goal was to "say yes" in an internally consistent form. Keep in mind that we were coming out of the 2E era, which simply said "no" to a lot of PC concepts.
On top of that, we were, as I mentioned, deep lore nerds who wanted to bring to the fore some ideas we thought the setting had been playing around, as well as some ideas which, well, how to put this. Some ideas that were intended to be progressive at the time but haven't aged well. In the late 1990s-early 2000, pushing the idea that "Vistani are individuals; they're just people, like everyone else" felt important; looking back now, well, there's a lot of "half-blooded ethnic group" talk that wouldn't fly. When Curse of Strahd's depiction of the Vistani stirred up some controversy, several of us in the Kargatane chatted a bit, looking back at our own work, and generally speaking, our sense was "We did our best at the time; we'd do things differently now."
Any ideas on the origin/purpose of the memory-rewriting effect that happened to people who stayed in Darkon for too long?
That was part of Darkon from its first appearance, with extra details (the book) being added during the Grand Conjunction modules. With 3E Ravenloft, we wanted to incorporate as much lore as possible, so basically we would've made efforts to grandfather in everything we could. Rewriting as necessary when that lore was disjointed or wildly inconsistent of course. (Part of this is that, as with Nova Vaasa, if you just ignore the incompatible backstories that have come before while maintaining the overall continuity, then you're just adding a
fourth incompatible backstory to the pile.)
Which is to say, Darkon's memory-leeching power is something we inherited, and I can't speak to the Black Box authors' specific creative decisions. However, as a manifestation of Azalin's obsessive control freak personality, it worked for me.
Where DOES Strahd get his opera cloaks from, given he wears them all the time while there's no opera houses closer than Dementlieu?
Vistani, man. (The real reason, of course, is that Strahd's 1E-2E-3E look was based on the classic Lugosi/Lee Dracula, which was in turn based on the stage play of Dracula, in which Dracula is basically only ever seen attending dinner parties in England; he never wears the fashions of his homeland.)
