The Ultimate Ravenloft Thread

[Bedrockgames]

Ravenloft is very multiaspect.

The Black box sets up gothic horror as a specific style of horror, not slasher gore, or cosmic horror, or over the top supernatural evil, but growing dread from uncertainty and twisting the normal and good to the wrong with well fleshed out revealed tragic stories. Lots of Ravenloft material goes in other directions.

There are intense themed dark lords with stories and personal curses and powers and connections to the land and intrigues against other lords, and then there is everybody else, monsters and villains and NPCs that can also be focused on. Dark lords can be the focus as either godlike untouchable drivers of plot, or ultimate boss villains to be overthrown, or background you never directly come across as you go ghost hunting.

Power levels are all over the place. Dark lords can be energy draining vampire lords more powerful than standard vampires, or a 4 hp evil manipulator guy who could be taken out by a thief not even backstabbing. Top tier villain lords could be overpowered by the customization options for monsters of the same type in the Van Richten guides.

Monsters can be rare and unique or fairly omnipresent. A Kolchak night stalker monster of the week theme works for a Ravenloft campaign and the monstrous compendiums give you cool options. Monsters can have interesting stories and thematic powers but also be all over the place in power or abilities with Jack the ripper madmen types being essentially fourth level thieves but there being Borcan courtesan spies with save at -4 poison touch abilities. Monsters can be customized in the Van Richten's guides to match their stories, but also to make them complete party killers by enhancing energy drain up to five levels a shot or aging to extra decades per power bump so that they are one shot killers in D&D combat. Weaknesses can be thematic or just fairly random and esoteric.

It is gothic horror with a focus on the normal and beautiful and good intruded upon by growing dread of the unnatural and it is oppressive and cruel evil. There is a mundane base, but also full D&D with magic and monster fighting heroes. It is a twist on D&D with many PC magic either having possible bad twists or not providing the normal divination knowledge certainties to work from.

The Van Richten's guides provide an investigative D&D monster hunting model that focuses on the stories of individual monsters to build up to climax fights against tragic foes the PCs know.

The setting books set up both weekends in hell and a full ongoing campaign.

The modules are all over the place with some being investigations or helping people, some being complete railroads, some being complete PC screw overs with slasher gore shock or heavy handed loss of PC agency and character concepts. Some are focused on the low key and tragic gothic set ups while others are D&D high magic excesses like multiple books of vile darkness being ground up to enhance and coercively turn evil a formerly canonically mundane army and D&D specific rules loopholes for power gaming like a vampire NPC specifically enraging a ghost to use their age attack to advance the vampire to elder categories for greater power bumps.

The setting can be nightmare illogical isolated domains with heavy mist separations and two adjacent lands having different moons or it can be a core with regular different domain interactions and the lords often actively scheming against each other with Birthright/Game of Thrones politics including many power players being hidden behind the throne.

It is a small geographic area and small populations, but lots of monsters and death.

It is a young setting created a few hundred years ago but also includes rules for monsters centuries older than the setting.

Ravenloft experiences can vary hugely as well as what aspects people enjoy or hate.

That is an excellent synopsis

 

[JLowder]

That is probably more of an accurate description. It was just more the surprise of seeing how much of a challenge Ravenloft was, and also me not understanding as a reader how tied to the land Strahd was. Really made me curious about it. I remember devouring the black box after I read Knight of the Black Rose. It was the thing that turned me from wanting more bog standard fantasy as a gamer and seeing the potential in a more horror infused world.

That was the intent, on both fronts.

Soth was used to rolling over everyone and everything and found Strahd was both powerful and tied to his domain in ways that made him more than a standard vampire lord. (In the novel, that material is an attempt to translate the game mechanics into fiction without the sound of the dice overwhelming the story.) Strand would have been in for a similar shock had he ever confronted Soth in Sithicus. Soth and Strahd share a tendency toward monomania, which makes them both susceptible to manipulation. Strahd saw that similarity between them, which he weaponizes, even if he cannot fully recognize and deal with his own flaws.

Lack of self-awareness and a predilection to mistake their (broken) worldview for The Truth are among the most interesting things to explore with villains in fiction--for me, at least. That's the core of the Cyric material I wrote for Tantras and the entirity of Prince of Lies, too. In Knight, the theme of perspective is foregrounded early on, overtly with Caradoc and his broken neck causing him to see the world in a new way; less directly toward the start of the book, where we see Soth's point of view on a battle shown in the original Margaret and Tracy novels. For anyone who has read the original version of the battle, they know Soth's assumptions about the Heroes of the Lance and their actions are simply wrong. But Soth can't imagine another perspective. He exists too much inside his scorched helmet for that.

Anyway, that was the intent. And the comments suggest at least some of that came though. Very happy to hear it!

On the books and the game, for me as the initial Ravenloft series fiction editor, the goal was to publish good fiction with a strong authorial voice, which also showcased the setting and characters. The books should stand alone as good fiction, good stories (which can be a common weakness in some game-related fiction), but ideally encourage people to look at the RPG material, too. The company had done fiction-game crossovers before, of course, but with projects such as Avatar, Empires, the initial Ravenloft line, and Dark Sun (all of which I edited), my goal from 1989 to 1992/3 was more deliberate cross-department collaboration, often with the game material and the novels--along with licensed comics, miniatures, etc--all being created at the same time. That was new ground and quite a creative challenge pre-Internet.

The early Ravenloft fiction line was coordinated with Bruce Nesmith, Andria Hayday, and Bill Connors on the game side. I was reviewing the early game material as it was being designed, too, and contributing my own domain to Darklords, so it was very much a cross-department effort. It's only been in the last five years or so, with sales numbers Ben Riggs uncovered for his book about TSR, Slaying the Dragon, that I realized how much the fiction outsold the RPG material (by more than 100,000 copies, for the initial novels, just in English). We were hoping the fiction would reach a wider audience, including non-gamers, and that some would give the setting a try.

Again, that was intent, and the comments suggest it worked as intended for some readers.

In any case, thanks for the kinds words about the books and the line. While far from perfect, we got at least some of what we were hoping to accomplish right.

 

[Bedrockgames]

That was the intent, on both fronts.

Soth was used to rolling over everyone and everything and found Strahd was both powerful and tied to his domain in ways that made him more than a standard vampire lord. (In the novel, that material is an attempt to translate the game mechanics into fiction without the sound of the dice overwhelming the story.) Strand would have been in for a similar shock had he ever confronted Soth in Sithicus. Soth and Strahd share a tendency toward monomania, which makes them both susceptible to manipulation. Strahd saw that similarity between them, which he weaponizes, even if he cannot fully recognize and deal with his own flaws.

Lack of self-awareness and a predilection to mistake their (broken) worldview for The Truth are among the most interesting things to explore with villains in fiction--for me, at least. That's the core of the Cyric material I wrote for Tantras and the entirity of Prince of Lies, too. In Knight, the theme of perspective is foregrounded early on, overtly with Caradoc and his broken neck causing him to see the world in a new way; less directly toward the start of the book, where we see Soth's point of view on a battle shown in the original Margaret and Tracy novels. For anyone who has read the original version of the battle, they know Soth's assumptions about the Heroes of the Lance and their actions are simply wrong. But Soth can't imagine another perspective. He exists too much inside his scorched helmet for that.

Anyway, that was the intent. And the comments suggest at least some of that came though. Very happy to hear it!

On the books and the game, for me as the initial Ravenloft series fiction editor, the goal was to create good fiction that showcased the setting and characters. The books should stand alone as good fiction, good stories (which can be a common weakness in some game-related fiction), but ideally make people want to look at the RPG material, too. The company had done fiction-game crossovers before, of course, but with projects such as Avatar, Empires, the initial Ravenloft line, and Dark Sun (all of which I edited), our goal fromn 1989 to 1992/3 was more deliberate cross-department collaboration, often with the game material and the novels--along with licensed comics, miniatures, etc--all being created at the same time. That was new ground and quite a creative challenge pre-Internet.

The early Ravenloft fiction line was coordinated with Bruce Nesmith, Andria Hayday, and Bill Connors on the game side. I was reviewing the early game material as it was being designed, too, and contributing my own domain to Darklords, so it was very much a cross-department effort. It's only been in the last five years or so, with sales numbers Ben Riggs uncovered for his book about TSR, Slaying the Dragon, that I realized how much the fiction outsold the RPG material (by more than 100,000 copies, for the initial novels, just in English). We were hoping the fiction would reach a wider audience, including non-gamers, and that some would give the setting a try.

Again, that was intent, and the comments suggest it worked as intended for some readers.

In any case, thanks for the kinds words about the books and the line. While far from perfect, we got at least some of what we were hoping to accomplish right.

Thanks so much for weighing in James. Especially for giving us that background information. I think a lot of us are working off what we vaguely remember from playing at the time, what we have heard over the years, etc. Knight of the Black Rose had a massive influence on me as a reader and a gamer (I wouldn't have done a deep dive into Gothic fiction in high school if I hadn't encountered Knight of the Black Rose and then gone on to read the Ravenloft Black box. I still think the black box is one of the most beautifully put together and written boxed sets ever. And I always felt you made Soth fit in perfectly with Ravenloft. I can't thank you and Bruce Nesmith, Andria Hayday and Bill Connors enough for radically influencing my tastes in literature, game books, settings, etc. Before I read Knights of the Black Rose, I was into bog standard fantasy. Went on a completely different course after that. And Knight of the Black Rose in particular helped me get over some serious reading issues with Dyslexia (I wasn't really reading books cover to cover until I read Knight of the Black Rose, and that gave me the confidence to read the Black Box cover to cover). I still consider it the first proper book I read from beginning to end.