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Please don't think of that stuff from the 3.5 RLPHB as 'mainstream' Ravenloft--it was very much an aberration, added by the line developers, and rejected by both the original 3E design team and most of the fans. It don't think it's purely coincidence that the WW line died soon after its release.

The high concept for S was the 'anti-van Richten', according to comments from the Kargatane.

To be fair, that only showed up in the 3.5 Player's Handbook, which was a developers' gloss/conversion attempt on the original 3E book. Don't treat it as representative of the designers' original intent.

That usually only happens when the clerics start staking his playthings or running interference against his latest attempt to claim "Tatyana," though. According to the older material (I'm not intimately familiar with CoS), Strahd typically cares little for the Barovians beyond a food source, so...

There was a Let's Read thread of this box on RPGNet a few years ago.

They filled that and the gap between the first two books about 14 years ago with the Lost Chronicles books. Dragons of Deceit is the only one of the original modules that hasn't been covered by a Weis & Hickman novel at this point.

My money's on during--specifically, the Gilthanas/Silvara expedition to Sanction, which gives them a way to introduce new characters with a familiar and much-wondered-about starting point, and then spin off into new material. Some of this is because Dragons of Deceit, the placeholder name for...

Didn't the lawsuit describe the working title of the first book as Dragons of Deceit? That's the title of DL9, the module that covers the expedition to Sanction, and Weis & Hickman have never written about what happened to Gilthanas and Silvara in Sanction.

Well, Takhisis did in the War of Souls, but a) she's supposed to be the Big Bad of the setting, and b) I don't take the War of Souls as canon for my vision of Krynn. (And then there's my Anti-Canon, where Paladine, Takhisis, Gilean and Chemosh team up with the goal of keeping everyone on Krynn...

The Cataclysm bugs me in some of the material surrounding it: the Kingpriest of Istar was supposedly a good man, the corruption wasn't dramatic enough to merit such extreme measures (compare it to the depiction of Numenor in the Akallabeth, one of the likely inspirations), and the 'gods' sulk...

More and more, I think Mentzer Basic had the right idea when it said "The D&D game does not deal with the religious or ethical beliefs of characters in the game."

No idea. It happened very early on--you can find the 'Kingpriest offended the gods by demanding things' take in DL5 Dragons of Mystery, and it's pretty well-established by the second and third novel. Traces of 'the Kingpriest tried to summon the gods' show up in DL12 Dragons of Faith and Tales...

IMO, the Cataclysm makes more sense when one goes back to the original concept--the Kingpriest tried to magically summon a god to purge evil from Krynn, and the Cataclysm was the natural consequences of such an act. (You have to dig into Hickman's notes and hints in the oldest game material to...

Publication of a major new Weis & Hickman DL series has always been followed by or simultaneous with a gaming tie-in--Legends and Dragonlance Adventures, DoSF and the Fifth Age, War of Souls and 3E, Lost Chronicles and the continuing SP/MWP license. No reason to believe this would be any different.

You misundertand. I don't care about canon, and I don't care about 5th Edition. I love the old Ravenloft setting, and found the version presented in Curse of Strahd severely underwhelming in comparison. The only thing that annoys me is the misconception or pretense that CoS is the same thing as...

'Driven by the novels' in the sense that 'best-selling novels get TSR/WotC to try to kick the gaming football again.' (Yes, 3E DL was successful … for Sovereign Press. But success for a small game company that doesn't have major competition for resources is different than success for a company...

The pattern becomes clearer when you reverse the lenses--it's not that the games drive the novels, it's that the novels drive the games for DL, and for various reasons (timing, past failures), the games have tended to go with what's currently 'hot.'

It was. I followed the Fifth Age line from beginning to end and had contact with several designers, and they've all said the same thing. The bit about W&H proposing a trilogy with game tie-ins is true, but TSR had contracted them for one final Chronicles novel and held to that plan. The presales...

It goes against the spirit of the 2E/3E setting, at least, where the Dark Powers were supposed to forever remain undefined. The one product that tried to define them is one of the only Ravenloft products ever declared 'non-canonical' (the novel Lord of the Necropolis, written in an era when TSR...

Which is the very point of the argument--Curse of Strahd, whatever its merits (I found it unimpressive on a readthrough), is not in 'continuity' with the 2E or 3E incarnations of the setting. For most people, that doesn't matter, but there are a few of us who prefer the earlier to the latter...