4e Ravenloft - Dragon 368

[Remathilis]

Not that they won't make it work. They will. My guess is this will all be glossed over in about a sentence or two regarding how scary-xenophobic the place is and how the DM should play this up by having the PC's get a cold reception wherever they go. That will be enough for most people, I'm sure. But a 4e tiefling warlock is not a hero for a Gothic Europe-esque setting. It's a fine hero for a Fantasy Hodgepodge, but part of the appeal of other settings is that they aren't a Fantasy Hodgepodge. For a lot of purists, this will basically be blasphemy.

Two things:

1.) IIRC, wizards, paladins, clerics, bards, druids, elves, dwarves, half-orcs, halfllings, and half-elves were all feared, shunned, or hated too, depending on the domain. Really, unless you were a human fighter or thief, you could COUNT on someone hating you based solely on appearance.

2.) Fantasy Hodgepodge? As compared to the setting where Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf-Man, Vlad Tepest, Dr. Jekyll, and Amenhotep all are neighbors and you could have an all native-born party consisting of a renaissance scientist with a flint-lock, a sylvanesti elf white-tower wizard, a iron-age knight, and a Priest of Osiris adventuring in a vaguely Slavic nation.

 

[I'm A Banana]

1.) IIRC, wizards, paladins, clerics, bards, druids, elves, dwarves, half-orcs, halfllings, and half-elves were all feared, shunned, or hated too, depending on the domain. Really, unless you were a human fighter or thief, you could COUNT on someone hating you based solely on appearance.

True enough. Part of the appeal, really.

2.) Fantasy Hodgepodge? As compared to the setting where Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf-Man, Vlad Tepest, Dr. Jekyll, and Amenhotep all are neighbors and you could have an all native-born party consisting of a renaissance scientist with a flint-lock, a sylvanesti elf white-tower wizard, a iron-age knight, and a Priest of Osiris adventuring in a vaguely Slavic nation.

Yes, in that all of those are targeted at one genre, while the Core really isn't per se.

 

[ShadowDenizen]

They will. My guess is this will all be glossed over in about a sentence or two regarding how scary-xenophobic the place is and how the DM should play this up by having the PC's get a cold reception wherever they go. That will be enough for most people, I'm sure. But a 4e tiefling warlock is not a hero for a Gothic Europe-esque setting. It's a fine hero for a Fantasy Hodgepodge, but part of the appeal of other settings is that they aren't a Fantasy Hodgepodge. For a lot of purists, this will basically be blasphemy.

This.

I've been a RL fan since the original module (I6), and have been following it faithfully through it's many incarnations.

I think WW/Arthaus did a great job of keeping the setting alive and sheperding the system to 3.0/3.5. There were MANY things they did right, and (realistically) a few things they could have improved on.

But I see 4E and RL as being antihetical to each other, at least in mood, tone and theme. While 4E professes a "PoL" world, it seems (IMO) to take it's cue from Anime/Warcraft and more modern influences.

Ravenloft, on the other hand, has always been more cerebral, and has taken its cues from the "Gothic Horror" themes of classic films and literature, amongst other sources.

I know we haven't heard much about 4E Ravenloft specificially, and as much as I hate to say, I fear the creators of 4E (from all that I've seen, heard and read from WotC over the last year or so), wouldn't "get" Ravenloft. (The Forgotten Realms was an easier transplant, and they totaly (IMO) botched that; how are they going to handle Ravenloft, which is a fundementally different setting?)

Sorry if this comes off as a bit of a rant, but I tend to get very protective of Ravenloft, as it's one of my all-time favroite settings!!

 

[malraux]

Would foreign include any PCs that are able to traverse the mists? Foreign is any character that wasn't born in that domain, right?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Would foreign include any PCs that are able to traverse the mists? Foreign is any character that wasn't born in that domain, right?

Well, it's not a hard-and-fast kind of thing. It's a continuum. "Foreign" in most of Ravenloft probably means "not from this village," but there's a swath of territory in between "not from this village," and "tiefling warlock" where probably the majority of D&D would be able to find a rough fit. Not everything, but certainly the lion's share.

That said, anything that travels the mists (such as PC's who arrive from other lands) probably has some bad juju going on and should probably be avoided unless they are giving a direct and obvious benefit to you, and then maybe if you take the benefit, you are risking an unpleasant demise, so they better make it VERY worth your while.

You might eventually let the human paladin sleep in the barn after he's saved your family from zombies at least twice, but he's going to have to WORK to get that barn-bed, because what's to say he won't die in his sleep and rise as one of those same things tomorrow?

 

[Alzrius]

But I see 4E and RL as being antihetical to each other, at least in mood, tone and theme. While 4E professes a "PoL" world, it seems (IMO) to take it's cue from Anime/Warcraft and more modern influences.

QFT.

The PoL theme seems (to me at least) to be fairly black-and-white in its depiction. There's a very clear ascendancy of evil, and a need for heroes to overthrow it, to the welcome joy of the rest of the (relatively powerless) world.

Ravenloft doesn't play that way. It is, for the most part, a place where there's just progressively darker shades of grey that lead to black. Heroes who look inhuman and/or dark aren't going to be treated as heroes, regardless of what they do, by the local populace. That's part of what I like about the Demiplane of Dread - heroes are very often punished, not rewarded, for being heroes; to me, that makes them all the more heroic.

 

[TheSleepyKing]

I know we haven't heard much about 4E Ravenloft specificially, and as much as I hate to say, I fear the creators of 4E (from all that I've seen, heard and read from WotC over the last year or so), wouldn't "get" Ravenloft. (The Forgotten Realms was an easier transplant, and they totaly (IMO) botched that; how are they going to handle Ravenloft, which is a fundementally different setting?)

I'm not really sure if it's a question of whether the designers "get" the setting (I give the enough credit to think that they do), it's more, I think, whether the Powers That Be at WoTC feel strategically comfortable putting out a setting that deviates in any way from core assumptions or invalidates any part of the PHB (like denying the presence some of the races, for example, as others have noted in this thread).
In FR, at least, they showed that they didn't have the nerve to do so, even refusing to allow the Elven races of Toril to keep their names and making a kingdom of dragonborn magically appear out of nowhere. Given that Ravenloft is only appearing in Dragon for now, however, they might be willing to do so. Sales aren't going to be an issue for them, so hopefully they'll abandon some of the extreme caution they've demonstrated with 4e publishing so far and go all-in with Ravenloft as a setting of gothic horror. We'll find out soon enough, I suppose.

 

[The Little Raven]

even refusing to allow the Elven races of Toril to keep their names

That's funny, because the information about sun, moon, wild, wood, and drow elves in the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide would disagree.

and making a kingdom of dragonborn magically appear out of nowhere.

That's how everyone else got into the Forgotten Realms, too. It's the setting of "a portal opened up and another fantasy race showed up to join the melting pot."

 

[ProtoClone]

That is cool they are bring Ravenloft back into the company fold. Of the setting I only really liked Strahd and Azalin. I am sure Strahd will be the one staying for the merger in to 4e. As for Azalin, I really hope he makes it. Besides Strahd, his story and damnation in Ravenloft was good, real good. But when he had been duped in to thinking he could escape, priceless.

Soth died back on Krynn when he rejected Takihisis' proposal of ground general of the new super power...after, as Mina put it, Takihisis went through all that trouble and effort to rescue him from that very dark place.

 

[Banshee16]

DING DING DING DING DING.

Someone's tiefling warlock and someone's dragonborn paladin and someone's eladrin ninjarogue will be able to tackle the castle and kill Strahd.

For most people, this will be a good thing.

For some purists who don't like the idea of monsterous dealers with the devil running around in Barovia's "A little like Transylvania!" town, it will cause momentary outrage.

Wheee!

Some people might like having a paladin in the domains of dread, or a scaly skinned, horned demonspawn warlord. And that's cool. But it's not Ravenloft....at least it's not Ravenloft the way the setting was conceptualized.

It's Dracula....not Hellboy..

If someone happens to like that, fine. I just wish they would give it a new name, rather taking a much-loved setting, and turning it into something very, very different.

Banshee