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We all float down here in Ra5Enloft. :)

I think Hazlik’s sexuality was first floated on the Ravenloft mailing list in the mid-90s by one of the designers, and fans sort of picked it up and ran with it. Sadly, my archives of the list are in a format I can't unpack right now.

I expect this is because it's the traditional date of the Crucifixion, and the Comedy definitely takes place over the Easter Triduum (although Good Friday in 1300 fell on April 8th; Dante wasn't a stickler for details like that, it seems). It's also the date of the Annunciation, since Christ is...

It's entirely possible I was wrong; it was just the impression I got from a brief flip-through. But WotC hasn't produced anything I've really enjoyed for nearly a decade, and everyone in the D&D space seems united in telling me that whatever makes 'real' or 'good' D&D, it's not for me, so I...

This, but I think it will be called '6th Edition' or '50th Anniversary Edition'--I think the '3.5' nomenclature backfired on WotC back in the day, and they won't want to market something along those lines again. I also expect it will incorporate the changes in gaming/corporate culture from...

I glanced at it about a year ago and got the impression of strong nostalgia for the days of the Satanic Panic and the 'edgy and dangerous' feel ascribed to the game in that era. It's one of many reasons I'm skeptical of WotC's direction for the game.

What I'd like: Reprint the Rules Cyclopedia. What I expect: 6th Edition

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...