Innsmouth added as new Ravenloft Domain of Dread, bringing Lovecraft to D&D

Innsmouth, the iconic home of several HP Lovecraft stories, is being incorporated into Ravenloft as a new Domain of Dread. Earlier today, Wizards of the Coast revealed the contents of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, including the number of subclasses, ancestries, and new creature statblocks in the game. Wizards also revealed that 16 Domains of Dread will be profiled in the book, including the new domain Innsmouth. Assumably, its Darklord will be Cthulhu, who was previously confirmed to be in Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, complete with a statblock.

Cosmic horror has long had a place in Dungeons & Dragons lore, with Cthulhu originally appearing in early copies of Deities and Demigods. Due to a licensing dispute with Chaosium, TSR removed Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian creatures from later printings of the book. Cthulhu along with Lovecraft's other creations have since passed into the public domain, thus removing any restrictions on featuring the characters in a D&D book.

Of course, Innsmouth (at least in Lovecraft's work) is supposed to be a turn of the century New England coastal town, which doesn't exactly jive with the high fantasy trappings of Dungeons & Dragons. We'll have to see how much of Innsmouth is changed to line up with D&D when Ravenloft: The Horrors Within releases later this summer.

 

[Autumnal]

Do we actually have any reason to believe Cthulhu is in it? The article writer said “presumably”; I don’t remember WotC giving thm reason for the presumption.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

My suspects is Hasbro is very interested into Ravenloft for intercompany crossovers with horror franchises, style "Dead by Daylight".

Resident Evil 4 and Village are perfect for a crossover with Ravenloft. If Hasbro talked with Capcom..

How would be a dark domain designed by Junji Ito? And if KPop Hunters could be mixed with K-Horror..

 

[gban007]

Do we actually have any reason to believe Cthulhu is in it? The article writer said “presumably”; I don’t remember WotC giving thm reason for the presumption.

Cthulhu is in the book, one of the other previews had his statblock, the presumably here is whether he is the Darklord for the domain or not.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Would you have the town retain its American history?

Anyways this Innsmouth Domain is bigger then just the town of Innsmouth, and it includes lovecraftian creatures other then Deep Ones & Cthulu.

I think this is inspired by Lovecraftian horror, creatures, and settings, but with a D&D twist to all of it. So I don't expect reference to the United States of America or New England themselves, but just towns and cities.

Like I don't think there will be a bus route.

An interesting question. I would say it certainly needs an early 20th century Americana feel to it. As I suggested earlier, I think they may try and make it Stephen King-land as well as Lovecraft-land. Lovecraft can be fun, but it isn't really scary for a modern audience, whereas King is. And Welcome to Derry is currently popular on TV, and is both King and Cosmic Horror. And uses 20th Century America (New England) as it's setting. Stranger Things and Sinners also use 20th C America. I believe Wednesday is supposed to be set in New England (but 21st century).

Now, is anyone going to try and phone Washington DC? That I doubt, and we can get into how Ravenloft actually works for that. Does it scoop up lands from the material planes, leaving a patch of bare earth where Barovia used to be? Or does it fashion domains from Shadowfell material to create a familiar environment for it's zoo? I would go for a bit of both. I would suggest that this is not the real (fictional) Innsmouth, that lies on the mainland coast of real world New England. It's a copied environment to house it's captives. I've never been to New England but I believe it has a number of large inhabited islands off it's coast. The advantage of an island location is they tend to be isolated, without access to the latest modern technology. A comparable Island I have been to is Shetland.

Oh, take a look at the old Doctor Who story Carnival of Monsters and compare Ravenloft to the miniscope if you can access it.

 

[Autumnal]

Okay, so I didn’t miss anything. Thanks. It’s just that Cthulhu is down the list some of Great Old Ones I’d link with Innsmouth. (What I’d do with it is a write up of not as an intrusive element in an existing setting, but that’s just me.) Guess we’ll all know in a couple of months.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Dagon was a Demon Lord in 3e and possibly before.

Dagon is a real world Mesopotamian god though, not a Lovecraft invention.

NB, this is an interesting snippet from Wikipedia:

The creature that appears in the story is often identified with the deity Dagon, but the creature is not identified by that name in the story "Dagon", and seems to be depicted as a typical member of his species, a worshipper rather than an object of worship. It's unlikely that Lovecraft intended "Dagon" to be the name used by the deity's nonhuman worshippers, as Robert M. Price points out: "When Lovecraft wanted to convey something like the indigenous name of one of the Old Ones, he coined some unpronounceable jumble".<a href="Dagon (short story) - Wikipedia"><span>[</span>14<span>]</span></a>

Price suggests that readers of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" may be mistaken as to the identity of the "Dagon" worshipped by that story's Deep Ones: in contrast to the Old Ones' alien-sounding names, "the name 'Dagon' is a direct borrowing from familiar sources, and implies that [Obed] Marsh and his confederates had chosen the closest biblical analogy to the real object of worship of the deep ones, namely Great Cthulhu.

To summarise, the deity worshipped in Innsmouth is falsely identified with the real world deity Dagon (who was not actually a fish god) by Obed Marsh and is actually Cthulhu. It seems likely that WotC are going with this interpretation.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Yes.

View attachment 434671

I don't think San Francisco counts as a real place.

 

[Deset Gled]

Dagon is a real world Mesopotamian god though, not a Lovecraft invention.

NB, this is an interesting snippet from Wikipedia:

To summarise, the deity worshipped in Innsmouth is falsely identified with the real world deity Dagon (who was not actually a fish god) by Obed Marsh. And is actually Cthulhu. It seems likely that WotC are going with this interpretation.

This makes no sense to me at all. In "Dagon" Lovecraft literally calls his version of Dagon a "fish-god", and described it differently than Cthulhu. He also described Dagon's fish people minions that sound a lot like the Innsmouth folk. I can think of nothing in The Shadow Over Innsmouth that would suggest Dagon is actually Cthulhu.

If you're going to change the story, just admit you're changing the story. I have no idea what the point of all the weird mental gymnastics is.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

In "Dagon" Lovecraft literally calls his version of Dagon a "fish-god

Lovecraft is not the narrator. His PTSD protagonist is. There is no 3rd person “voice of God” narrator in anything by Lovecraft, everything is unreliable. All the narrator in Dagon sees is a huge fish man. One of many, judging by the carvings he sees. He later tries to explain it to himself using now debunked myths about the god Dagon. Likewise, in SoI we only have Marsh’s word for the name “Dagon”, there is no indication that this is the true name of the being in question, who never physically appears in the story.

 

[dave2008]

If you're going to change the story, just admit you're changing the story. I have no idea what the point of all the weird mental gymnastics is.

Paul provided evidence by others (see the wiki snippet) to this interpretation. I have definitely seen the deep ones aligned with Cthulhu worship in other sources and I agree the creature seen in "Dagon" appears to be intended as a species of creature* represented in the monolith not a demigod of some type, but this was my first time hearing Dagon = Cthulhu.

*Of note I have also seen before the terms "Father Dagon" and "Mother Hydra" as titles given the deep one elders/rules not unique creatures themselves. The idea being that deeps continue to grow as they age and become giants and leaders if they survive to ancient ages.