Ravenloft was the first setting I ever played in or ran.
I've been a long time fan of DnD since the early 90s but without a group I was a passive consumer of the brand/lore for a long time. In the summer of 2003 things finally came to fruition when I convinced a group of friends (with zero experience among them!) to huddle together around the coffee table and grab some dice. 3.5 had just been released and we all owned the core books but I was a DM who knew nothing about playing or running a TTRPG.
I had owned the original Black Box set of Ravenloft in 2e as well as a few of the splatbooks, so the misty essence of Ravenloft had lived in my head for a decade before I propped up my first DM screen. White Wolf had been putting out some 3.0 Ravenloft material when I started formulating my campaign and those pages, lavished with moody black-and-white art, provided a macabre refresher on the domains and history of the setting. One thing I realized as a game master right away though, was the idea of running/learning someone else's world, filled with detailed history, locations, NPCs, etc, seemed like more work than just making stuff up. I decided to create a domain instead of using one out-of-the-box.
18 years later and we're about to see the 5e reinvention of the setting. I'm thinking about building another dark domain based on a fog-filled analog of Victorian London. A sinister secret society grows like a cancer in the body politic, enacting occult rituals and sacrifices in the dark corners of the city. Lightless alleys, haunted sanitoriums, crowded cemeteries, effluvia filled sewers, and gothic cathedrals crawl with horrors both real and imagined, manifested by the forbidden rites enacted by this mystery cult. The PCs wage a war of shadows on an unknown enemy that stains the fabric of society. Who holds power? What is their aim?
It seems like the most obvious, trope-y gothic horror sort of setting but as far as I can remember there isn't really a version of archetypal urban horror in Ravenloft. I'm reading through the Red Box right now to jog my memory and see if there's not something super obvious that I'm missing.
My biggest world-building issue pops up when I look at existing domains, realizing both their size and populations. Most domains are small and their population are absolutely tiny compared to 19th century London. How would a city of millions eat? If it's an industrial center like London was, how does that economy even function in the context of the Core in Ravenloft? It's really going to bother me to be super hand-wavey about the world building aspect here but it seems hard to drop a big urban domain into the setting and have it make sense.
