Check Out This Early Ravenloft: The Horrors Within Artwork

As part of today's reveal of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, Wizards of the Coast also released several pieces of early preview artwork for the new book. You can check the artwork out in all its full glory below:

And here's the cover artwork (by Anna Podedworna) and alternate cover artwork (by Pam Wishbow):

Ravenloft: The Horrors Within was one of several products announced today. You can find a full rundown here.

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[Voadam]

Yeah, attacking Cthulhu physically by ramming a boat into him was what I was referring to. I don't remember anything similar with Azathoth, he is there with the piping gods outside of rational space but essentially it is just a distant god/being that cultists connect to and that Nyarlathotep says he works for. Protagonists don't physically interact with Azathoth directly as a character.

Cthulhu is in a ruined city and you can stumble upon his physical body and have to run from his attacks, as if you were Conan looking for jewels in a ruined city and having to deal with whatever unanticipated monstrous thing you encounter down there.

Azathoth story wise is distant and more abstract. Cthulhu is distant to start with the disturbing dreams and cultists, but then he is very physically present as a concrete individual.

 

[Stormonu]

There was a 3.5 book Elder Evils, that I believe had some Cthulhu-isk beings within. I don't think any of them ever grabbed anybody in a way they lasted beyond that book's printing.

But I don't mind straight up Cthulhu and his ilk showing up in a Ravenloft book. We've had variations of the Lovecraft mythos in D&D all the way back to Deities and Demigods - and 3E got a Call of Cthulhu rulebook where you could just straight port their 3E stats over to D&D if you wanted. They're all over Pathfinder and a lot of 3rd party books have done the mythos up for use in D&D (most notably, the hard-to-find Sandy Peterson 5E Cthulhu Mythos book).

I would prefer to just have the various stats in the book, but not tie them into a Realm of Terror. Just something you could drop into a horror-themed game if you felt like it - or as I might do, having Lovecraftian horrors be the true manipulators and Dark Powers behind Ravenloft.

 

[TravDoc42]

Here...

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Gotta love the Erol Otus art in that book! His depictions of Lovecraftian entities are some of my favourites.

 

[TravDoc42]

But Yithian do have a lot of story potential, both for body swapping story lines, and just being incomprehensibly alien, without actually being evil.

I ADORE monsters that are incomprehensible and not evil. Entities that are so beyond our understanding of morality that the concept of evil fails to work for them. It's difficult to pull off in D&D given the alignment system, but when it does, I love it.

The potential uses of the Great Race of Yith in my games has me excited for this book! I am excited to play around with them in my games, if that is what the art depicts.

 

[Charlaquin]

I ADORE monsters that are incomprehensible and not evil. Entities that are so beyond our understanding of morality that the concept of evil fails to work for them. It's difficult to pull off in D&D given the alignment system, but when it does, I love it.

The potential uses of the Great Race of Yith in my games has me excited for this book! I am excited to play around with them in my games, if that is what the art depicts.

The Great Race in Ravenloft does bother me much less than Cthulhu does.

 

[TravDoc42]

The Great Race in Ravenloft does bother me much less than Cthulhu does.

Understandable!

While I'm on the fence about Cthulhu in D&D, I do understand your point of view here. I like both D&D and Lovecraft, but I also like Godzilla, for example, and while a reference in some way to the Kaiju genre in a 5e book is cool (we've seen some of it so far!), having actual, literal Godzilla show up in this book would weird me out. There's "two great tastes that taste great together", and there's "pop culture for the sake of pop culture".

 

[Parmandur]

I mean it's not needed. VRGR took great pains to remove the "copy my homework but put it in your own words" elements from a lot of domains. Putting actual Chthulu feels a bit out of place. Not that cosmic horror shouldn't have a place, but it should probably be D&D's take on a cosmic entity rather than a famous literally character. D&D could have used Tharizdun for example. Or any of the Elder Evils they used before.

Then again, if Ravenloft can survive Lord Soth and Venca being trapped, it can survive Chthulu...

Revisiting Red Masques in this book would not be impossible.

 

[Parmandur]

The crossovers will continue until morale improves.

I mean, it is working for Magic financially, so I wouldn't bet against it, yes.

 

[Parmandur]

I’m unfamiliar with that, but it sounds like something I wouldn’t like

It was 2E AD&D in Pulp Victorian London, taking full advantage of public domain material:

Would not surprise me if they go there along with Cthulu.

 

[Parmandur]

Beginning? It feels like 1979 all over again to me! I really missed that 1st edition wacky crossover spirit. After that D&D started taking itself far too seriously.

Yeah, honestly modern media needs more of this energy, not less. A lot of companies are doing it poorly but anything worth doing is worth doing porrly.