D&D 5E (2024) Ravenloft: The Horrors Within preorder page lists the book's contents

You can now pre-order preorder Ravenloft: The Horrors Within over on D&D Beyond--the ultimate bundle costs $149.99, while the book alone comes in at $59.00. There are pages for the new DM screen, map pack, and Tarokka cards as well. The pre-order page lists the book's contents.

• 16 Domains of Dread, including the new cosmic horror domain Innsmouth.
• 17 Darklords for your party to face or flee from, equipped with challenging stat blocks.
• 7 subclasses (including the new Reanimator and Hollow Warden), 4 species, 4 backgrounds, 2 Origin feats, and 9 Dark Gifts for building tortured protagonists.
• 10 genres of horror from gothic to dark fantasy.
• A bestiary of 41 monstrosities and 10 domain denizens for your party to encounter.
• 47 maps and 28 digital quickplay maps for Maps VTT.
• Digital Pre-order Bonus: the Mists of Ravenloft Digital Dice Set, Ravenloft Play-Along Pack, and D&D Encounters: Shadows of Sithicus mini-adventure.

Tonight, your party’s greatest nightmare... is the one you create.

Bring fear to the table with the Ravenloft: The Horrors Within Ultimate Bundle, the complete horror toolkit with everything you need to create a personalized horror campaign – and strike fear into the hearts of your players.

The Ultimate Bundle includes:

• Physical and digital versions of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, containing 16 Domains of Dread, 17 Darklords, 7 subclasses, 4 species, 4 backgrounds, 11 feats, 68 monsters and 47 maps including 28 digital quickplay maps for Maps VTT.
• Physical Ravenloft: The Horrors Within Tarokka Deck for weaving terrifying twists into your campaign with 54 fully illustrated cards.
• Physical Ravenloft: The Horrors Within Dungeon Master’s Screen for keeping your plans enshrouded in mystery.
• Physical and digital versions of the Ravenloft: The Horrors Within Map Pack for plotting out eerie encounters for your party.
• Digital Pre-order Bonus: the Mists of Ravenloft Digital Dice Set, Ravenloft Play-Along Pack, and D&D Encounters: Shadows of Sithicus mini-adventure.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Im interested in how the Hexblood is gonna be in this book.

So far they haven’t made major changes to non-core species, so I suspect it will still boil down to “you know change self and Hex, and can spy on people with an old fingernail”.

 

[tetrasodium]

The only “tool” you need in a GM toolbox is being a good storyteller.

The original rules about mental illness were replaced because they stigmatised mental illness - something Lovecraft reasonably feared, given that he, like so many others, struggled with mental illness himself. As do many people who play D&D, so WotC had good reason to remove the rules. But D&D isn’t Call of Cthulhu, it doesn’t need to track psychological damage to the PCs (whilst the players giggle). That’s not part of what makes D&D what it is, a game of fantasy heroes (that is sometimes scary).

We are talking about a game with rules not your third place amusement park to hang out while someone writes your personal self insert fanfic for you. The gm runs the world and that means the gm requires tools that support them in doing so. The fact that you take issue with the mere concept of a gm toolbox shows that you view the world as something far beyond a mere 2 dimensional amusement park that exists only to serve the PCs, not every gm runs that "world" and you shouldn't expect them to any more than the rules should try to force them into doing so.

Because D&D is in service of the main character.

Two person games with a single gm serving a single player are very much not the norm. Look closely at the phb. You will find a line along the lines of "for 3-5 players" plural. You can not have 3-5 Main Characters side by side who are each treated as The Main Character without downgrading some of them to support sidekick or similar. If a player sits down at the table thinking "I am The Main Character" and can't dial that back to look across the table at their gm and fellow players in a way that moderates that to "we are playing a game to have fun", it's likely that there is something very toxic flowing across the table and it's not the gm lamenting the lack of tools in their gm toolbox and lack of support from the system. It's d&d with real people not mazes & monsters with poor poor Robbie Wheeling.

Let me ask you something. Can D&D do horror without the Ravenloft setting? At all? Tomb of Horrors, Pharaoh, Ghost Tower of Inverness, those can't be horror adventures? Nor could anything being discussed in this thread because they lack Ravenloft's fear and horror mechanics (let alone the other systems to keep players subservient, like Powers checks). Obviously they cannot be, since the players are under no mechanical compulsion to be afraid. There is no mechanic that forces the PC to flee upon the realization that Accerack's skull repels all attacks. No horror check at the realization of what the face of the devourer is. No madness check for entering the Shrine of the Kuo-Tao. D&D cannot actually do horror without something approximating the Ravenloft rules, therefore D&D (and all it's 3pp spinoffs) cannot do horror. Would you agree or no?

I believe that I completely answered this earlier and you aren't phrasing it in a way that changes the question enough to add anything so I'll quote what I said earlier about it: Just like Darksun & Eberron, Ravenloft needs rules that apply a different set of baselines for PCs than forgotten realms because the genre's themes and tones require players to play their PCs in a way that said PC is aware of a different set of things to consider in risk calculations reward paths and concerns.

Because if true, much of D&D's most famous horror adventures, including the original I6 Ravenloft, are not horror. No mechanics de power your PCs. Their spells function as written. No fear or stress rolls are needed. An adventure like Rime of the Frostmaiden, clearly coded as a survival horror adventure, is little different than Wild Beyond the Witchlight without those mechanics to instill fear in the characters.

And if that's not true, if Frostmaiden and Carrion Crown and Tomb of Horrors are actually horror adventures as D&D sees it; why do we need Ravenloft fear rules when it's clear D&D can do horror without them?

5e has one single setting. Omniman Saitama Kal-El Wolverine and Doctor Manhattan. Deviate from that and it quickly runs into problems because the power level is too high, the risk is too low, the stakes are too low for the PCs, and the PCs are starfish aliens without needs who don't need to exist within the world.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Some times I would like for 5.5 a mental-health system working like levels of exhaustion and borrowing some ideas from "Unknown Armies". Now Epic Games gifts "Stone of Madness" where if PCs (who suffer their own phobias: darkness, fire, death, mirrors&altars and gargoles statues) loses all their sanity points they are KO during a day and a handicap is added.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So far they haven’t made major changes to non-core species, so I suspect it will still boil down to “you know change self and Hex, and can spy on people with an old fingernail”.

Hexbloods are cool as hell, so I hope they don't tweak much. The audience for the ancestry is looking for creepy vibes and roleplay opportunities, which it delivers on.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

What a pity. Another missed opportunity to restore Ravenloft to its original flavor.

Ravenloft's original flavor was a bunch of joke names on the tombs in the basement of Castle Ravenloft.

I think the memory of what Ravenloft used to be doesn't always match with the reality, which was more Haunted Mansion at times than Salem's Lot.

 

[tetrasodium]

Ravenloft's original flavor was a bunch of joke names on the tombs in the basement of Castle Ravenloft.

I think the memory of what Ravenloft used to be doesn't always match with the reality, which was more Haunted Mansion at times than Salem's Lot.

To be fair though the early editions were so lethal that even those credibly presented as something that could be dangerous enough to warrant caution. It's not reasonable for an edition to swing the plausible lethality dial beneath zero & then lament that people are talking about fixing the result with things that gets called punitive.

 

[plecostomus]

Im interested in how the Hexblood is gonna be in this book.

WOTC's new actual play series has a Hexblood PC, so you might be able to sneak a preview of it that way.

• Crem, a Reanimator Artificer, played by Neil
• Eloin, a Winter Walker Ranger, played by Christian
• Wesley, a Grave Domain Cleric, played by Mayanna
• Zora, a Hexblood Shadow Sorcerer, played Devora

The campaign will also preview Lord Soth's domain.

Inspired by the dreadful setting, character options, and monsters in Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, the first campaign of Dungeon Masters opens with a fractured band of unlikely allies becoming trapped in a haunted land ruled by the infamous fallen paladin, Lord Soth.

What begins as a desperate search for a way home soon becomes an apocalyptic struggle, as Soth’s fury threatens to consume everything and everyone within his crumbling Domain of Dread.

 

[Remathilis]

WOTC's new actual play series has a Hexblood PC, so you might be able to sneak a preview of it that way.

The campaign will also preview Lord Soth's domain.

Man this reminds me of watching Black Dice Society for Van Richten spoilers.

 

[M.L. Martin]

Ravenloft's original flavor was a bunch of joke names on the tombs in the basement of Castle Ravenloft.

I think the memory of what Ravenloft used to be doesn't always match with the reality, which was more Haunted Mansion at times than Salem's Lot.

When I acquired a used copy of I6 in the mid-90s, it was annotated by a DM who had replaced most of those joke names (and also given the witches spells from DRAGON #114's Witch class), so people were using it for different purposes even back then.

2E Ravenloft and *D&D were always an uneasy fit, but that was probably the only period in D&D's history when you could even try something like the 2E setting. 5E has evolved in such a direction that 2E Ravenloft's style would clash tremendously with it. (So would Lovecraft, though ... and so would authentic J.R.R. Tolkien.) WotC has reached the 'leave no IP unMarked/unexploited' phase of the game, so I'm not surprised we're getting something marketed as Ravenloft and with certain family resemblances to the old stuff. But it almost has to go in a different direction to fit what the game has become.

Fortunately, there are options aplenty out there that those of us who preferred the more purely Gothic flavor that 2E sometimes aspired to have alternatives to paying homage to the Orthodox Church of Asmodeus patronizing WotC.

 

[Remathilis]

Ravenloft's original flavor was a bunch of joke names on the tombs in the basement of Castle Ravenloft.

I think the memory of what Ravenloft used to be doesn't always match with the reality, which was more Haunted Mansion at times than Salem's Lot.

I think it's a failing of the 2e setting that it took itself too seriously when it came to itself. Especially for a genre built on Hammer horror and Monster Mash films.