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.

 

[Bedrockgames]

In fact, the party from the cover is PERFECT for the "weekend in hell" style games WotC wants Ravenloft to be.

Just personal preference but I wouldn't allow that party in my Ravenloft campaign. It just feels too out of genre to me and not a good fit for the setting

 

[Bedrockgames]

This, so much, and not just in Ravenloft. I prefer a dispersed population who may be close-knit and skeptical about outsiders, but cautious rather than hostile, and inclined not to waste any source of potential help. And I like a common attitude of “anybody could be your good neighbor and friend, even if they look different”. That’s compatible with good defenses.

I generally didn't read it as automatic hostility, more like caution, a bit of paranoia, and a tendency to misread demihumans as possible monsters. But the rules were really more of a modifier on the reaction roll and a modifier to the demihumans charisma. The whole mob forming things is mentioned as an extreme case, not the norm. It basically lowers your reaction roll so it is never friendly but that doesn't always make it hostile. And it makes the point that demihumans can still find friendly reactions

My whole approach to demihumans was explain to players the deal with them in the setting before they make a decision (generally encouraging players to be humans, but allowing the standard races if they want to join----however I never adopted the new Ravenloft specific races that cropped up over iterations of the setting). That way they at least understand what the situation is. I also was generally pretty generous with disguises working. From time to time, an issue might crop up, especially if they were in a place like Falkovnia. But I never saw it as something intended to make the character's whole stay in the setting non-functional

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Not at all. I ran many long term Ravenloft campaigns. I almost never ran it as weekend in hell

Just personal preference but I wouldn't allow that party in my Ravenloft campaign. It just feels too out of genre to me and not a good fit for the setting

Well you answered yourself here. You run long-term Ravenloft games and you wouldn't allow this party. However, this party is suited to a weekend in hell, which you do not run, and which is also the scenario they find themselves in.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Well you answered yourself here. You run long-term Ravenloft games and you wouldn't allow this party. However, this party is suited to a weekend in hell, which you do not run, and which is also the scenario they find themselves in.

That is fair on multiple counts. Most of my Ravenloft gaming was from 1991 to mid-2000s before Teiflings were a common thing for PCs, and I never adopted them or things like Dragonborn. And when I run Ravenloft now I exclusively use the 2E rules (I did used to run it with 3E, but I found the system doesn't quite for the setting enough for me).

I did run some weekend in hells initially (the issue with it was I just wanted to run Ravenloft so didn't see the point in making it an occasional venture). Even in those though, I would have avoided monstrous races. All that said, sometimes you accommodate people. I had a player who really wanted to be a deep gnome and allowed it. But most parties in my Ravenloft campaigns were 90% human

 

[QuentinGeorge]

D&D is the same game regardless of setting, not a variety of different games. Ravenloft and Forgotten Realms should play similar and the difference is in tone and theme, not rules.

No, sorry, that's wrong. If you want to fight vampires and have it play similar to Forgotten Realms... fight vampires in the Forgotten Realms. If your Ravenloft adventure is just a Forgotten Realms adventure with vampires and gothic castles, then...it's just a Forgotten Realms adventure with vampires and castles.

If you want a game where the PCs are made of tissue paper and the monsters are impossible to destroy, find another game. D&D, even Ravenloft, is about heroes fighting villains and winning, most of the time.

No one here is proposing a strawman of that sort so you can stop beating it up.

 

[Mercador]

Cover doesn't fit Strahd from my point of view

 

[Bedrockgames]

No, sorry, that's wrong. If you want to fight vampires and have it play similar to Forgotten Realms... fight vampires in the Forgotten Realms. If your Ravenloft adventure is just a Forgotten Realms adventure with vampires and gothic castles, then...it's just a Forgotten Realms adventure with vampires and castles.

No one here is proposing a strawman of that sort so you can stop beating it up.

Yeah for me the whole point of Ravenloft was the rules and style of GMing feed an entirely different tone than Forgotten Realms. The thing that makes it tick is the land of mists operates by different rules

 

[Bedrockgames]

Cover doesn't fit Strahd from my point of view

I have to admit I am still getting used to Strahd's hairdo from like ten years ago

 

[Remathilis]

No, sorry, that's wrong. If you want to fight vampires and have it play similar to Forgotten Realms... fight vampires in the Forgotten Realms. If your Ravenloft adventure is just a Forgotten Realms adventure with vampires and gothic castles, then...it's just a Forgotten Realms adventure with vampires and castles.

No one here is proposing a strawman of that sort so you can stop beating it up.

D&D still has a familiar gameplay loop. Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms or Planescape doesn't change that. You fight monsters, you get treasure, you level up, you fight harder monsters. Neither vampires nor castles, (nor PCs or treasure) change significantly when you move them from Forgotten Realms to Ravenloft. The tone changes, the themes change, but an elf fighter with a +1 sword fighting a vampire is pretty much the same regardless of the setting.

That is not to undersell the importance of tone and theme, but anyone who somehow thinks Ravenloft radically redefines D&D is making mountains out of molehills. Its still D&D at the core.

 

[Bedrockgames]

D&D still has a familiar gameplay loop. Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms or Planescape doesn't change that. You fight monsters, you get treasure, you level up, you fight harder monsters. Neither vampires nor castles, (nor PCs or treasure) change significantly when you move them from Forgotten Realms to Ravenloft. The tone changes, the themes change, but an elf fighter with a +1 sword fighting a vampire is pretty much the same regardless of the setting.

This feels a bit reductive to me. But even if we stick with this core notion of a loop, Ravenloft definitely shifts it around a lot. And that wasn't exclusive to Ravenloft. Many of the 2E settings did a good job of tweaking mechanics to make for a very different feel (just look at how different a Dark Sun campaign feels for example). But in Ravneloft take treasure, that is pretty much cut in half, sometimes it is not even a thing (in my Ravenloft campaigns players hardly ever got treasure the way they would in my fantasy campaigns). And take fighting monsters. In a more typical fantasy campaign, there might be a large number of fights with multiple monsters, and random encounters. But Ravenloft was more about the planned encounters, and when it came to fighting the big bad, it was always a much more involved prospect (the way Ravenloft customizes monsters has a substantial impact on how the game plays in that respect). There is just a lot more emphasis on an adventure as a story than as a dungeon crawl.

Still though, I think just focusing on this idea of a play loop really misses a lot of what goes on in D&D. That play loop is largely just about the progression and reward. But Ravenloft radically reshapes characters with powers checks when they commit evil deeds, or evil just cast a necromantic spell, it alters the classes, magic items, spells, etc. It has fear and horror effects (and later madness effects). It incorporates fortune telling mechanics. Pretty much all the major monsters have a Van Richten book. Those also have a substantial impact on play. Obviously it depends on whether you are running the first two boxed sets or DoD. But I would say the mechanical changes make for a very different experience. Just look at how the game suggests handling encounters.

YMMV, but Ravenloft always felt extremely different from running something like Forgotten Realms. Just to go back to vampires. A forgotten realms vampire is going to be a much more predictable affair, and not nearly as difficult. You can still have run of the mill vampires in Ravenloft. But Ravenloft really focuses on making monsters into puzzles (which I would say, if we are looking for a core game loop, it has more to do with that than treasure and leveling)----though I have never found the idea of game loops useful myself