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]

"More mature" meaning "more grimdark".

No, he means more heavy on the sex and sensuality, leaning more into the players being evil monsters. There were moments in the 90s line you could see sparks of that (for example some optional rules for the PCs as monsters were put out in one of the boxed set adventures).

I do think there tends to be a lots of "just look at how tragic my character is, aren't they cool" when it comes to 2e Ravenloft. As I mentioned earlier, that was very much a 90s thing, people trying to outdo each other with how grimdark they can get.

This wasn't how I ran Ravenlft in the 90s. Some characters might get into tragedy. In terms of NPCs, any tragedy in the backstory I think was pretty in keeping with the gothic genre. I do think it also hit the zeitgeist of that in the 90s. But I wouldn't call it grim dark. Ravenloft could be corny, it was never mature like Vampire, and it wasn't about blood and guts. It was about subtle horror, atmosphere, gothic tropes, etc. To do that you needn't an occasional rough edge, like a hammer movie has, but you don't need to go full tilt into grim dark like Warhammer.

*And, as someone who grew up in the 80s, I loved the original two adventures (both of which were written in a way that the PCs were expected to win), but hated the 2e boxed set and grimdark railroad adventures.

I grew up in the 80s too (though I graduated high school in the early 90s, so we may be slightly different time periods in our upbringing if you were older than me). And I was a horror movie buff. I think the original adventure is incredible. And I think the boxed set does an amazing job of taking the premise of that adventure seriously and trying to expand its core ideas into a setting. Not saying you or others need agree, but I think Ravenloft was still a tough adventure where player characters could die. Ravenloft the setting though was during an era when a lot of GMs were giving PCs plot immunity and you can see traces of that in the books. One of my criticisms of 2E Ravenloft is it sometimes doesn't lean as heavily into let the dice fall where they may, and seems to support this notion. Of course it is schizophrenic about it, by aslso throwing things at the party like those crazy lightning bolts in Bluetspur. But I wouldn't say it is a setting where the players aren't expected to win (at least not more so than the original module). But it was horror, so the party was vulnerable, threats were harder to sometimes than anticipated (and Strahd is the OG of this: everything in Ravenloft emanates from how Strahd was handled in the first module). Atmosphere is important. A sense of danger is important (how heavily the GM leaned into that danger varied a lot but I would say personally I think the setting is more scary when death is on the table).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Ravenloft has a wide range of domains. Barovia is human dominated, but other domains are not, and in the days of the core, inter-domain trade should have made other races a familiar sight.

And I see no reason to treat "Tolkienesque" races any different from other non-humans. And elf is just as non-human as a tabaxi, and as for warforged, "don't mind him, he is from Lamordia".

Personally I think making war forged commonplace, and not horrific, doesn't really fit Lamordia. But you are right the core was varied. Most core domains though were human-centric. With exceptions like Darkon. This was another thing that made demihumans possible there. If you had demihumans in the party, there were certain domains you would want to be more cautious in

 

[Bedrockgames]

Good covers, terrible literature.

As I said, I suspect this cover hasn't been given much attention because they expect most sales to be digital, and digital covers don't matter.

They varied. Some of the writers were actual writers who had successful lines of novels and knew how to writer, some were less experienced or had most of their experience writing for TSR. And of course, no one is saying these books were Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the House of Seven Gables. They were novels written to help breathe some life into a campaign setting. And that often came with mandates the writers had to adhere to. I always thought Knight of the Black Rose was very well done. And I remembered really enjoying Tapestry of Dark Souls as well. This led me to read the rest of Bergstrom's books (she also wrote the novel Mina: The Dracula Story Continues, and she had a whole line of vampire novels). I, Strahd was also quite good. Heart of Midnight is another I recall being good. It has been a long time since I have read many of these. So I can't vouch for the quality of them all. I do remember Bergstrom being a good writer. And I recently re-read the first sections of Knight of the Black Rose, and that is really well done in my opinion. Knight of the Black Rose is a good example because that is essentially a monster rally book (which I think shows Ravenloft can do sinister horror in a way that still veers into fun, without having the strutting quality of that new cover)). Again, they are TSR novels. They are written with a certain aim. But at the least you can say they are in keeping with the tone and feel of Ravenloft

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Personally I think making war forged commonplace, and not horrific, doesn't really fit Lamordia. But you are right the core was varied. Most core domains though were human-centric. With exceptions like Darkon. This was another thing that made demihumans possible there. If you had demihumans in the party, there were certain domains you would want to be more cautious in

If you wanted to add warforged in Ravenloft, you do it properly and refluff them.

Lamordia's alliance with Falkovnia leads them to provide Drakov with a "better" sort of soldier, but the revealed truth is that the Lamordians are unable to truly create life (Mordenheim's creation of Adam is the only time this ever happens, and with the Dark Powers assistance), so what warforged are instead is the traumatised souls of dead Falkovnian soldiers placed into new bodies, and sent back to the front to die again against Azalin's unending undead soldiers.

That's actually something that can work on a thematic level.

 

[Bedrockgames]

"More mature" meaning "more grimdark".

Also for the record, I was not into some of the stuff they did later int he line, like the events that happened in Darkon for example. Some of those later adventures did get more into grim territory and didn't invest as heavily, at least in my opinion, in the atmosphere of the first half of the line

 

[GreyLord]

I still think there should have been a dragon in Sithicus. It's the Dragonlance domain, after all. A dragon darklord (or at least a dragon presence) would have been a far better option than that silliness with Magda's daughter as replacement Darklord after Soth got yanked out of the domain for use elsewhere.

But there's all sorts of myth/story.legend about evil dragons, from St George to Fafnir to Beowulf to the Lair of the White Worm in more classically Gothic times. I assume it was a deliberate design choice to distance Ravenloft from 'conventional' D&D monsters, but it seems odd that all the horror potential there was never really explored at the time.

The most fitting type of dragon born would be with a Dracolich. Make them more a living horror as Dracolich Spawn or something where they are basically the living skeletons of Dragonborn, empowered with magic and tortured by an eternity of hunger, a hunger they cannot sate (because they have no internal organs to start with) and thirst they cannot be relieved of.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

They varied. Some of the writers were actual writers who had successful lines of novels and knew how to writer, some were less experienced or had most of their experience writing for TSR. And of course, no one is saying these books were Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the House of Seven Gables. They were novels written to help breathe some life into a campaign setting. And that often came with mandates the writers had to adhere to. I always thought Knight of the Black Rose was very well done. And I remembered really enjoying Tapestry of Dark Souls as well. This led me to read the rest of Bergstrom's books (she also wrote the novel Mina: The Dracula Story Continues, and she had a whole line of vampire novels). I, Strahd was also quite good. Heart of Midnight is another I recall being good. It has been a long time since I have read many of these. So I can't vouch for the quality of them all. I do remember Bergstrom being a good writer. And I recently re-read the first sections of Knight of the Black Rose, and that is really well done in my opinion. Knight of the Black Rose is a good example because that is essentially a monster rally book (which I think shows Ravenloft can do sinister horror in a way that still veers into fun, without having the strutting quality of that new cover)). Again, they are TSR novels. They are written with a certain aim. But at the least you can say they are in keeping with the tone and feel of Ravenloft

Elrod's Strahd novels were pretty good as well.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Elrod's Strahd novels were pretty good as well.

Yes, I think I mentioned that one. But that was a very well done book IMO. I was kind of Strahd'ed out at that point, but the writing and story were all good

 

[QuentinGeorge]

The most fitting type of dragon born would be with a Dracolich. Make them more a living horror as Dracolich Spawn or something where they are basically the living skeletons of Dragonborn, empowered with magic and tortured by an eternity of hunger, a hunger they cannot sate (because they have no internal organs to start with) and thirst they cannot be relieved of.

You see, no, having the player being undead is really not going along with how Ravenloft worked as a setting either. The setting was always about being that lone candle against the darkness, not a super-cool powerful monster.

 

[humble minion]

Ravenloft has a wide range of domains. Barovia is human dominated, but other domains are not, and in the days of the core, inter-domain trade should have made other races a familiar sight.

The VAST majority of domains are human-dominated. I did a thread a while back which was a readthrough of the Gazetteers, and almost every domain was heavy-majority human, and a significant majority were specifically called out as being hostile to non-humans (and usually spellcasters too)

Off the top of my head, Sithicus is largely populated by elves. Darkon is a chunk of Conventional D&D World transplanted across the Mists entire, and has a D&D-typical mix of races. Certain quasi-monster races like mongrelmen, shadow fey, and broken ones have specific domains where they constitute the majority. I know Vechor has an elf Darklord, not sure about the population off the top of my head. But to the best of my knowledge there's no dwarf domain, no halfling domain, no gnome domain, out of probably hundreds published.

Ravenloft has always been very very human-centric.