Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd Cover, Synopsis Revealed

The cover and synopsis for Penguin Random House's new Dungeons & Dragons novel has been revealed. This week, Penguin Random House revealed the official title and cover for Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd, a new novel by Delilah S. Dawson. The new novel is due for release in April 2025. The new novel follows a group of adventurers who arrive in Barovia under mysterious circumstances and are summoned to Castle Ravenloft to dine with the infamous Count Strahd. This marks the first Ravenloft novel released in 17 years.

Penguin Random House has slowly grown its line of novels over the past few years, with novels set in Spelljammer, Dragonlance, and the Forgotten Realms released over the last year. Characters from The Fallbacks novel by Jaleigh Johnson also appears in art in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide.

The full synopsis for Heir of Strahd can be found below:

Five strangers armed with steel and magic awaken in a mist-shrouded land, with no memory of how they arrived: Rotrog, a prideful orcish wizard; Chivarion, a sardonic drow barbarian; Alishai, an embittered tiefling paladin; Kah, a skittish kenku cleric; and Fielle, a sunny human artificer.

After they barely survive a nightmarish welcome to the realm of Barovia, a carriage arrives bearing an invitation:

Fairest Friends,

I pray you accept my humble Hospitality and dine with me tonight at Castle Ravenloft. It is rare we receive Visitors, and I do so Endeavor to Make your Acquaintance. The Carriage shall bear you to the Castle safely, and I await your Arrival with Pleasure.

Your host,
Strahd von Zarovich

With no alternative, and determined to find their way home, the strangers accept the summons and travel to the forbidding manor of the mysterious count. But all is not well at Castle Ravenloft. To survive the twisted enigmas of Strahd and his haunted home, the adventurers must confront the dark secrets in their own hearts and find a way to shift from strangers to comrades—before the mists of Barovia claim them forever.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

A kenku in Ravenloft shouldn't too strange if the ravenkin appeared in 2nd ed and even as playable race/specie in Dragon Magazine #262 "Heroes of half-pint".

We can't agree what is the 100% Ravenloft spirit because each group has got their own style. Someones would rather "Army of Darkness" and others "Alone in the Dark" or "Silent Hill". Someone would mix the lore of Ravenloft with a softer version of "Kult: Lost Divinity".

Hasbro doesn't want Raveloft in 5e was only for mature readers, but with space for younger generations style R. L. Stine's Goosebums. or Scooby Doo.....or Bettlejuice. And the strategy is to allow different styles from several subgenres.

In Ravenloft I miss the fight among factions we can see in World of Darkness. Other point is if there was a "saturation" of predators, the demographic decline too great to allow generational replacement. Innistrad is also relatively small. Have you played any city-builder and survival videogame? Now let's imagine the survival of towns with thousands of citizens.

Lots of darklords in 2nd Ed was created to can be defeated in a "one-shot" adventure. The domains in 5e have been designed to live adventures where the confrotation against the dark lord wasn't necessary and then low-level PCs can live adventures there.

Ravenloft could be right for a new class: the avenger or slayer, something like stealth and divine magic, style Blade vampire hunter or survival horror hero with a piece of divine help. Other class could be the haruxpex, close to the biomancer from Paizo's starfinder, like necromancer but altering living tissues, like an atificer using game mechanics like incarnum soulmelds.

* Who would wear clown shoes in Ravenloft, any fool from the "Clownspace" or Pennywise's second cousin?

* My theory is in the future some canon dark lords will die or be destroyed, as if there was a slow mini-metaplot, only to show those characters haven't to be eternal.

* Some time I tried to imagine something like a Duskmourn spinoff in a postapocalypse urban zone.

* Off topic: How would be a crossover Kamiwaga: Neon Dinasty and Dandadan? Too weird, wouldn't it?

 

[DarkCrisis]

It wasn't. It was TSR's answer to World of Darkness.

The classic blunder most people make about Ravenloft is assuming the players can't win. That has never been the case. Heroes win in horror all the time. Final Girl is a trope for a reason. And Ravenloft has always been fantasy inspired by horror rather than true horror. The players are supposed to defeat the vampire, even if the vampire will eventually return.

My rule of thumb is that if you are running Ravenloft as a meat grinder, you are missing the point.

Last time I ran RL, the original module, a couple of years ago, there was 1+1 survivor. Strahd defeated and one PC walked out of the castle, thinking they were the only one left alive. Another woke up buried (entombed) alive but with hope that the other PCs would find him before he expired.

I thought that pretty thematic.

 

[TiQuinn]

You mean dangerous clown shoes?

In our local meta, dangerous clown shoes means a magic item that looks silly or goes against the look of strong heroic character but offers a strong bonus or magical ability.

Usually only two types of players endure using dangerous clown shoes. Either those min/maxers who can't resist the bonus/magic and will wear those clown shoes to get it, or silly player who love the idea of their PC wearing the clown shoes and the bonus is just icing on the cake.

I am amused everyone is talking Ravenloft's changes and Masque of the Red Death is just sitting here unchanged and probably more in line as a D&D horror game anyway.

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

MotRD is in my book.

 

[Remathilis]

I've been running Ravenloft using 2E again for some time, and I think the best way is to avoid metaplot, still focus on story but be open to character death when it happens

My issue was here is with the style of 2e adventures: which tended to be very narrative driven. The intention was for PCs to see the story through to the end, and that doesn't jive well with mechanics where a PC can die to very trivial encounters. Now, if you don't use the classic modules, you can avoid that problem, but much of the writing for Ravenloft (pretty much from black box on) tended to create overly intricate storylines and plot contrivances that required PCs to simultatneously be tactically smart (as per AD&D rules) and plot dumb (to keep the narrative on track).

This I would disagree with with very strongly. Ravenloft was definitely horror. I will agree if we are talking Domains of Dread, they shifted that dial back towards dark fantasy, and later editions also kept the dial more at Dark Fantasy, but from black box to red, I found it to very much be a horror game set in a world with fantasy elements. Even the fantasy felt distinctly non-medieval (the setting was always schizophrenic but from the art to the actual setting content, it often felt more grounded in hammer studio 18th and 19th century locations

Now it is still D&D. So it is D&D and horror. But I think that is different from horror tinged dark fantasy. I ran it purely as a horror setting and it works great

AD&D was a terrible fit for the type of horror Ravenloft wanted, and it is reflected in how much of each ruleset is spent houseuling the PHB to make it work. Ravenloft wanted magic to be rare, mysterious, and dangerous, the absolute opposite of how D&D treats magic. Ravenloft wants grounded, non-supernatural heroes, but AD&D characters grow into superheroes. Ravenloft wants Victorian trappings, AD&D was medieval. In some ways, Ravenloft was like Dark Sun in that it was trying to be a different RPG that used the AD&D ruleset rather than an actual D&D setting.

Now don't get me wrong, that's not a criticism, but I think the feel of early Ravenloft (anything pre DoD) would have been better served with a dedicated ruleset that took into consideration the kinds of heroes it wanted rather than trying to jam square pegs into round holes. DoD and 3e tried harder to reconcile that with D&Ds actual playstyle, but their attempts were all over the place. WotC era Ravenloft (Expedition on) was absolutely dark fantasy.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

My issue was here is with the style of 2e adventures

Yeah. Sit and listen whilst the DM tells you what your characters think and do. Don’t want to stay in the cabin in the woods? Tough, your character thinks it’s a great idea. Most of those 2e Ravenloft adventures were terrible.

To run a Ravenloft adventure that is actually fun, every PC is a final girl. The victims are all NPCs. A good trick it to make the NPC annoying. Then the players guilt-trip when they die horribly.

 

[Bedrockgames]

AD&D was a terrible fit for the type of horror Ravenloft wanted, and it is reflected in how much of each ruleset is spent houseuling the PHB to make it work. Ravenloft wanted magic to be rare, mysterious, and dangerous, the absolute opposite of how D&D treats magic. Ravenloft wants grounded, non-supernatural heroes, but AD&D characters grow into superheroes. Ravenloft wants Victorian trappings, AD&D was medieval. In some ways, Ravenloft was like Dark Sun in that it was trying to be a different RPG that used the AD&D ruleset rather than an actual D&D setting.

Now don't get me wrong, that's not a criticism, but I think the feel of early Ravenloft (anything pre DoD) would have been better served with a dedicated ruleset that took into consideration the kinds of heroes it wanted rather than trying to jam square pegs into round holes. DoD and 3e tried harder to reconcile that with D&Ds actual playstyle, but their attempts were all over the place. WotC era Ravenloft (Expedition on) was absolutely dark fantasy.

This is just something we probably disagree on. I think Ravenloft work better because it drew on D&D. One of the reasons I loved it, is I loved D&D. What Ravenloft brings to the table is the strength of the D&D structure, which I think is sound. And as with all the settings they modified the core rules to fit the tone they were going for. There is nothing wrong with that. It is hard to do. But there are examples of success with it. Cthulhu d20 did a pretty good job of making that kind of change for example, and so did Masque of the Red Death.

Personally I think Ravenloft was wildly successful in achieving the tone and flavor it was going for. If you read those early 90s Ravenoft supplements, that is clearly horror and the modified rules clearly play as horror as well. Now, not everyone loves them. But I think what Ravenloft did here is not that much different from what you see a lot of OSR games doing (taking a genre and fitting the genre or concept to the core conceits of D&D, adjusting the rules as desired, etc).

 

[Bedrockgames]

My issue was here is with the style of 2e adventures: which tended to be very narrative driven. The intention was for PCs to see the story through to the end, and that doesn't jive well with mechanics where a PC can die to very trivial encounters. Now, if you don't use the classic modules, you can avoid that problem, but much of the writing for Ravenloft (pretty much from black box on) tended to create overly intricate storylines and plot contrivances that required PCs to simultatneously be tactically smart (as per AD&D rules) and plot dumb (to keep the narrative on track).

I would agree the Ravenloft modules had a lot of '90-isms'. It was a very different era of gaming. I don't think though that means you couldn't leave death on the table. There was a growing expectation that it wasn't. But just because you have an adventure where story is important, that doesn't mean character death has to interfere with that. I figured this out over time, where it can actually just become an interest pivot point. As long as the GM knows how to roll with it. Even a TPK isn't the end of the world (if you are in a story driven adventure and the PCs all die, well I guess that was just the prelude to the actual movie, helping to set the stage). At a certain point though, if you are playing a game with random elements like dice, you just have to accept the flow might not happen the way it does in a book or movie because there is that game aspect to things. The good thing about leaving death on the table is it makes the game more scary in my opinion, because character death means the stakes are higher.

But plot immunity was an issue then. There is a module called The Created, which is great. I have run it a bunch of times and really like it. But it gives a particular NPC plot immunity at a crucial point, where no matter what the players do, this character will live. I always found that odd (even when it came out, but especially when I went back and ran it in 2010).

I have run a bunch of the classic modules as they were intended, and as I remember running them when they first came out. I enjoyed it. My players enjoyed it. But we went in knowing we were going to have a 90s gaming experience. Normally the way I approach Ravenloft these days is to adjust the modules, use them for parts, or focus more on investigations and monster hunts in the style of the Van Richten books (over the course of the 90s I radically adjusted my approach to adventures because I realized the examples Van Richten gave of him and his team, looked way better than what was happening in modules, and clearly they had more freedom to engage with the threat how they wanted).

 

[TiQuinn]

But plot immunity was an issue then. There is a module called The Created, which is great. I have run it a bunch of times and really like it. But it gives a particular NPC plot immunity at a crucial point, where no matter what the players do, this character will live. I always found that odd (even when it came out, but especially when I went back and ran it in 2010).

I actually rewrote this module for my own game and took the plot immunity away, and you realize the module never needed any of that stuff to begin with. The villain has a plan, the PCs are thrown into the middle of it, and all that needs to happen is let the players figure out what’s going on and let them do whatever they’re going to do. It works because most of the time, and I’ve played this a couple of times now, the players end up walking into the trap on their own accord, and it just works perfect.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I actually rewrote this module for my own game and took the plot immunity away, and you realize the module never needed any of that stuff to begin with. The villain has a plan, the PCs are thrown into the middle of it, and all that needs to happen is let the players figure out what’s going on and let them do whatever they’re going to do. It works because most of the time, and I’ve played this a couple of times now, the players end up walking into the trap on their own accord, and it just works perfect.

I found this with a lot of the modules as well. Changing this choke point, or expanding on this feature, or just having in your mind the idea of using the adventure as a premise or set up, without worrying where it goes, etc. Also a lot of these modules, were still filled with tons of useable content even if you never ran them straight through. Never ran a group from through Adam's Wrath but used tons of material from it.

 

[BB Shockwave]

The worst thing Strahd could have encountered... entitled millenials. He does not stand a chance.
But seriously, these are not the type of characters you would want to play in Ravenloft, of all places.