Dragonloft+Ravenlance=True?

[Frostmarrow]

After this article by Chris Perkins the results of a recent poll is unveiled:

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Lies My DM Told Me)

Dragonlance revisited is the most popular proposition closely followed by Ravenloft revisited. Is it just me that sees a golden opportunity to wed these two lovebirds and create a new setting drenched in the flavor of both worlds?

What would it be like? A true crossover with Lord Soth as the main antagonist or a crossover in spirit with an entirely new setup? Is Dragonlance the America to Raveloft's Europe?

 

[Stormonu]

Just no. I don't want to see a Ravenloft/Dragonlance crossover. Soth's realm was a sore thumb in Ravenloft, and Ravenloft has no business existing in Dragonlance.

I wouldn't mind seeing Ravenloft get a bit of a makeover (To me the Grand Conjuction and the Shadow Rift mucked the campaign setting up) into an more integrated and less set-piece world, or see the War of the Lance be revisited for 4E or such, but not a mash-up.

 

[MrMyth]

Merging the two would be a terrible and pointless idea - they are very different, both thrive on their core theme, and blending those two different elements would only hurt them both.

 

[jonesy]

They go well together, but they don't belong together.

Like an old married couple long divorced who still hang around.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I wouldn't mind a new Ravenloft setting with all new Dark Lords without all of the Gothic fiction analogues.

 

[Dragonhelm]

Oh, I don't know. They could go the Neverwinter/Evernight route with Dargaard/Nedragaard Keep.

I should say that Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman disagree with Soth going over to Ravenloft, a setting originally created by Tracy and Laura Hickman. That being said, TSR held the copyright on Soth, so they could do with him as they will.

The way I figure is that if you like the idea of Soth in Ravenloft, then he was there. If not, then he wasn't.

 

[Mark CMG]

You're getting Count Chocula in my PB&D.

 

[fireinthedust]

Soth was the Deathknight darklord. If they'd had an alternate, fine.


I liked the original concept: the single module where the PCs have to get through the castle if they ever want to leave Castle Ravenloft.

Granted, I like the wider setting as my intro to D&D, but the jarring divisions between Domains bothered me a lot. That and how NO ONE BUT THE PCs noticed any of this. That and how everyone knows everything about Ravenloft's cosmology, except that in the setting the PCs aren't supposed to know a thing, and all the NPCs are part of the setting. Yet there was constant emphasis only on Darklords, characters who just couldn't be found and killed. Or how everyone dressed like 1600s quakers, but used 1200s weapons and armor.

If it had been a solid world geographically, but with seemingly invisible borders between realms, that would have been fine in terms of a setting (as opposed to a mash-up setting puzzle).

The best part was the simple idea of revisiting spooky horror tropes: Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy, they all had their own settings built around them. That and the spooky art.

 

[Alzrius]

The parts of Ravenloft that were originally from other campaign settings were awesome, but you can have too much of a good thing. The two campaigns shouldn't be entirely merged.

Lord Soth's domain in Ravenloft was really great, both for the adventure it had and the two novels about it (still among my top D&D novels), but that's about as good as it gets (though there were a few other Dragonlance influences in Ravenloft if you knew where to look; it's just that all of them were originally written for Ravenloft, and given a history in Dragonlance).

 

[Viking Bastard]

Rather than see Ravenloft as a fully fledged setting, I'd emphasize the whole Domains of Dread aspect and semi-periodically release a sandboxy domain book. The first one being, of course, Domains of Dread: Castle Ravenloft. Minor domains could be released as Dungeon articles.

It seems to me that a lot of the work has been done already via the Shadowfell, so put the Domains into a corner of the Shadowfell (or that you merely enter the DoD through the Shadowfell; that the DoD are connected to the Shadow Planes of all worlds yaddayadda-something-something-cosmological-blahblah). The darklords could be from a Variety of Other Worlds, but they could just as easily be from your homebrew's past. As you like it.

Ravenloft never seemed a cohesive setting, anyway (but I've mined it heavily in the past).