D&D 5E Everything We Know About The Ravenloft Book

Faolyn said:

We'll see when it comes out.

What if the zompocalypse was caused by Azalin sending self-replicating zombies into Falkovnia because he got tired of Drakov constantly bugging him with doomed-to-failure invasions? I mean, even if there was absolutely no actual danger from Falkovnia, an invasion from one domain into another has to be at least a bit annoying, when you're a being who at least has some awareness of when another DL tries to invade. I can imagine Azalin saying "Oh, come on! I just got my dead son to go somewhere else for a while and I was trying to do some research. Please stop ringing my doorbell! We all know it's going to end up with you dying horribly! Just go away!"

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humble minion said:

I have no issues with the islands-in-the-mist concept itself, I just want to see domains implemented in such a way that regular citizens can live relatively regular lives in them, and travel/trade/etc between them, while certainly not risk-free, is not only possible but frequent.

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QuentinGeorge said:

Azalin's not getting his dead son to go away while he's living in his body!

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Faolyn said:

The one-apartment domain is an outlier and you know it. Most of the time, players will be wandering around one of the actual country-sized domains.

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Shardstone said:

A lot of people in this thread have a tremendous amount of Ravenloft baggage that the vast majority of customers will not share. To people who only know D&D through 5E, Ravenloft is going to be an expansion of CoS, which did have ample combat throughout it, and a feel not all to different from Castlevania — which itself takes inspiration from Castle Ravenloft.

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Voadam said:

Sure. So is the headless horseman one. And Scaena which is just a theatre. There is also the small town of Odiarre in RM2 The Created.

And most of the nation ones are actually pretty tiny. The second biggest city has 15,000 people.

"Lekar, Ravenloft's second largest settlement, lies on the east side of Falkovnia. Ravenloft has only a few walled cities; Lekar is one. Over 15,000 people live within the city's walls, and nearly a quarter of them are soldiers."

I forget what the surface area of the core was, something like the size of Kentucky?

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humble minion said:

Though to be honest - and heresy alert here - if i was designing Ravenloft from scratch right now in 2021, I'd be sorely tempted to discard the concept of the mists entirely and just draw up a damn world map. I get the reasoning behind them - you want an in-setting way to deposit PCs in a place they have no intention of going - but I think mostly they were just a plot device created to keep people in Barovia waaay back in the first iterations of the Castle Ravenloft module, and just spun a bit out of control and as the setting expanded they started to be more of a hindrance than a help. But for better or worse, they're a fundamental part of the setting now, and you can't just discard them.

I have no issues with the islands-in-the-mist concept itself, I just want to see domains implemented in such a way that regular citizens can live relatively regular lives in them, and travel/trade/etc between them, while certainly not risk-free, is not only possible but frequent. I don't want the various domains reduced to a bunch of one-shot adventure sites hanging around in some sort of limbo, populated by fake people spawned from Strahd's imagination or whatever, waiting for a PC party to show up and bash the darklord. They should be living worlds populated by people with agency and agendas and lives of their own, like any other campaign world. Except if it's one of those domains where everyone's dead...

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Faolyn said:

Well, no matter what the canonical answer is, I'm keeping the Mistways and upping their importance. Heck, I'd even go so far as to build regular highways between domains--and the highways may be domains of their own.

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Faolyn said:

And that's something I really hope is emphasized in the upcoming book: that Domains are prisons and acts of true evil are punished more than they are rewarded.



But you guys all know I was talking about the countries, not the lands of the "demilords."


You are very correct here. However, the thing that made Falkovnia a very interesting read also makes it, IMO, less fun to play in. It's such a depressing Domain that I never really wanted to do anything with it. While I have ideas that would work well within the domain (I wanted to use the 3.x "half-golem" templates to make horrific Falkovnian super-soldiers, and I wanted to figure out how those vampyrs were getting by in such a militaristically horrific place), actually getting into the domain, and dealing with all the crap there, is just... well, it's unfun for me as a DM.

Now, turning Falkovnia into a zompocalypse domain is quite a bit different than any other bit of speculation I've seen as to where the domain would go post-Drakov. I'm not really a huge fan of zompocalyses in general so I don't know how well it will inspire me.

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Faolyn said:

In 3e, at least--can't remember 2e--they had Mistways, which were mostly reliable ways to get from one domain to another by walking (or sailing) into the Mists, even without the Vistani. This included traveling to Islands and Clusters. It was, IIRC, something between a 50%-90% chance of getting where you wanted to go, depending on the quality of the Mistway. Traveling with a Vistani increased that to (close to) 100%.

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