D&D 5E Everything We Know About The Ravenloft Book

Here is a list of everything we know so far about the upcoming Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

Art by Paul Scott Canavan​

• May 18th, 256 pages
• 30 domains (with 30 villainous darklords)
• Barovia (Strahd), Dementlieu (twisted fairly tales), Lamordia (flesh golem), Falkovnia (zombies), Kalakeri (Indian folklore, dark rainforests), Valachan (hunting PCs for sport), Lamordia (mad science)
• NPCs include Esmerelda de’Avenir, Weathermay-Foxgrove twins, traveling detective Alanik Ray.
• Large section on setting safe boundaries.
• Dark Gifts are character traits with a cost.
• College of Spirits (bard storytellers who manipulate spirits of folklore) and Undead Patron (warlock) subclasses.
• Dhampir, Reborn, and Hexblood lineages.
• Cultural consultants used.
• Fresh take on Vistani.
• 40 pages of monsters. Also nautical monsters in Sea of Sorrows.
• 20 page adventure called The House of Lament - haunted house, spirits, seances.

​

D&D 5E - Full Wraparound Cover Art For Ravenloft

We've seen the cover already, but here's a look at the full wraparound art by Anna Podedworna. https://www.enworld.org/threads/updated-with-cover-the-d-d-book-is-van-richtens-guide-to-ravenloft.678411/ https://www.enworld.org/threads/heres-the-ravenloft-alternate-cover.678414/...

www.enworld.org

D&D 5E - Here's the Ravenloft Alternate Cover!

As usual, there is an alternate hobby-store exclusive cover for the upcoming Ravenloft book. Here's a look at it! And here's the full wraparound art. https://www.enworld.org/threads/updated-with-cover-the-d-d-book-is-van-richtens-guide-to-ravenloft.678411/...

www.enworld.org

D&D 5E - [Updated with cover!] The D&D Book Is.... Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft!

Yesterday's hints that a new D&D book would be announced today have born fruit -- we now have a product description and a title! It's a Ravenloft setting book, with tools and new rules for horror-themed games, and new horror-themed character options. I'll update this post with a product image as...

www.enworld.org

 

[tetrasodium]

Ripley was more or less a final girl in Alien, and the sequels were more action than horror. And the final girl is very much not a heroic role. Being the last one left alive is very different than being the triumphant hero.

Van Helsing isn’t a hero, he’s an eccentric professor with a weird obsession. Later adaptations made him more heroic, but those adaptations are generally less horror and more action.

Stranger Things is also an homage to 80s coming of age sci-if adventure movies. And in the first season, Eleven is narratively as much a monster as a hero. Later seasons drop this, but later seasons also lean less on the horror and more on the 80s cinema nostalgia.

Well, it’s a sliding scale, right? Stranger things is a really good example, because it definitely has strong horror elements, but it blurs the line quite a bit. I don’t think it’s right to put horror in a tiny box, but I also don’t think it’s right to call anything with horror trappings horror. Genres are fluid things, but they do have conventions.

As far as Ravenloft goes, I think it’s appropriate to call it a horror setting for D&D, which I don’t think is appropriate to call a horror game. The vast majority of games set in Ravenloft will end up being a fusion of genres. The precise blend will vary from group to group, with some leaning heavily into the horror and others keeping it purely as set dressing, but most falling somewhere in-between. I expect the default presented in the book, and therefore the way most groups will engage with it, to basically be action-adventure with a horror tone and some light horror themes.

I think you could say that the intensity of horror, but the different subgenre's of horror are pretty distinct with a pretty well accepted grouping of themes & tropes that when combined are X type of horror. You can introduce other elements into it , but it's usually pretty important that the main themes & tropes being used color the things being added or vice versa. 28 days, the walking dead, world war z, the walking dead, shaun of the dead, the girl with all the gifts and many others are all zombie movies/shows, but not all of them are zombie horror. Two of them are comedy & one blnds a good bit of science fiction. TWD's descent into horror is more in the form of the shared emotional breakdown of everyone trying to hold the mental pieces together one more day while surviving with frequent thrusts into people are the real monsters. You could replace the zombies in TWD with xenoorphs aliens robots or even angry biker gangs & not need to change too much.

Stranger things is a good example of doing this because the two main themes that color everything are pretty much growing up & the 80s as 80's kids saw with a good dash of 80's movies stuff. Everything in stranger things is colored by those or somehow feeds into them.

 

[Ash Mantle]

I'd suggest that the horror elements in D&D can be amplified or de-emphasised from its inherent horror-game skeleton, especially with the game's strong play to narrative elements. PCs don't necessarily have to feel helpless to be scared, and the crafting of a suitable atmosphere with descriptors emphasising the horror could ideally in itself already create a horror game (of course with player buy in).

I do heartily agree that D&D at its core is a fantasy game with horror elements and has horror settings, I also feel that D&D inherently lends itself well to genre-shifting and genre-blending within its core structure.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Ravenloft is its own horror subgenre, maybe epic horror. Sam Raini's "Army of Darkness" is horror-comedy, but with some pieces of epic when the characters want to defends the peasants in the castle against the undead hordes. Blade, Buffy and other titles about vampire-hunters are epic horror. Ghostbusters is comedy with some pieces of horror, but also epic when they have to save the day and protect the innocents.

Castlevania and Blizzard's Diablo are epic horror, but Dark Soul or other more difficult videogames aren't horror. Doom Eternal or Mortal Kombat are gore, but not horror. Warhammer Fantasy RPG is mainly dark fantasy, and also may be epic horror.

Ghost'n'Goblins (Capcom's videogame from 80s) has got zombies in the first stage, but it is not horror. Horror is when the heroes discover the evil necromancer has used the innocent children from the orphanage like cannon fodder to create his little zombie squad. Data East's "Night Slashers" is a beat-em up arcade with lots of monsters and zombies, but it is not really horror. Ghost Wisheperer is a supernatural drama, sometimes with some little pieces of horror. Capcom's videogame "Dark Stalkers" is supernatural action, but not true horror. Silvester Stallone's "Cobra" is mainly action, but some scenes of the Night Slasher is horror.

Ravenloft as horror product has to be different because most of times teorically the main characters should survive, when in the rest of horror fiction is only "one-shot" stories (and in other TTRPGs the creation of new PC is easier and faster because the survival rating is lower), but the players worry more about the survival of their PCs.

OK, maybe Ravenloft isn't 100% gothic horror but sometimes only epic+supernatural, but it is a franchise with a big future and even it could become popular among the non-players thanks the right action-live movie produced by Entertaiment-One.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Wiki

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a series which combines a collection of short horror stories for children, written by Alvin Schwartz and originally illustrated by Stephen Gammell. The three books each feature numerous short stories in the horror genre. Author Schwartz drew heavily from...

scary-stories.fandom.com

Vampire Hunter - TV Tropes

Someone who hunts vampires. May be a Hunter of His Own Kind (vampire hunting seems to be a common profession for Dhampyr and the Friendly Neighborhood Vampire who feels compelled to protect humans from his less charitable kin). If not all …

tvtropes.org

Hemlock Grove Wiki

hemlockgrove.fandom.com

Category:American horror fiction television series - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Paul Farquhar]

What is horror? I believe anyone who thinks they know the answer to this question is wrong.

Let us take a movie as an example. In this movie pretty much every character is terrified at some point. It features real world fascism, the death of a pet animal, impalement on spikes, blood splatter from someone being sliced up by blades, rooms full of corpses, and people getting their faces melted off and their heads exploding.

And snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

Spoiler

The movie is, of course, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Which isn't usually considered horror. Why isn't it horror? I would suggest it is because the audience never feels the heroes are in real danger. But how does the audience know the heroes are not in danger? Because the movie isn't a horror movie. So it's just down to presentation. Maybe the only way to tell if something is horror is to look at the label. It's horror if the label says it's horror.

 

[Remathilis]

I'll quote the ghoulish Sandy Petersen in his wonderful book Cthulhu Mythos for 5E...

*Horror is a delicate topic. When horror is combined with another genre, the usual result is that the other genre wins out. For example, most horror-comedies are really just comedies with a horror element. Many attempts have been made to mix horror and superheroes, and, again, the end result is generally a superhero story with a horror element. Most players of fantasy role-playing games understandably are focused on high adventure, derring-do, and sword and sorcery. And of course, when horror is added to the adventure theme, just as with other genres, the adventure is what remains, though now horror-tinged.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Consider the difference between the films Alien and Aliens. The first is a horror movie. The second is an adventure movie with horror elements. Both are great films*

As with many things horror gaming related, Sandy is right.

Agreed. And I don't think Wizards is especially trying to hide the fact it's a horror overlay to a fantasy adventure game. Strahd is terrifying, but ultimately the PCs get to take him down. I think anyone trying to use D&D to emulate "classic horror" is going to have to force D&D into very unnatural positions to do so.

That is not too say that D&D can't have horror elements; mood, tone, tension, dread, loathing, and the macabre. And D&D's horror ultimately involves the power to stop the monster in physical ways. D&D can't be Call of Cthulhu, nor should it be. It is D&D with a Halloween costume on. Let it do what it does well. Let it be Gabriel Van Helsing or Simon Belmont fighting Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man with a magic weapon in Transylvania. That's what I signed up for.

 

[overgeeked]

Agreed. And I don't think Wizards is especially trying to hide the fact it's a horror overlay to a fantasy adventure game. Strahd is terrifying, but ultimately the PCs get to take him down. I think anyone trying to use D&D to emulate "classic horror" is going to have to force D&D into very unnatural positions to do so.

That is not too say that D&D can't have horror elements; mood, tone, tension, dread, loathing, and the macabre. And D&D's horror ultimately involves the power to stop the monster in physical ways. D&D can't be Call of Cthulhu, nor should it be. It is D&D with a Halloween costume on. Let it do what it does well. Let it be Gabriel Van Helsing or Simon Belmont fighting Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man with a magic weapon in Transylvania. That's what I signed up for.

Exactly right. All I’ve been saying is it’s a mistake to call “D&D with a Halloween costume on” horror. It isn’t. That’s it. Ravenloft isn’t Saw. It can’t be. Nor should it be.

 

[Remathilis]

Exactly right. All I’ve been saying is it’s a mistake to call “D&D with a Halloween costume on” horror. It isn’t. That’s it. Ravenloft isn’t Saw. It can’t be. Nor should it be.

I think part of the issue is terminology. Ravenloft is horror for D&D , but not necessarily horror as other media defines it. It's not wrong to call Ravenloft "D&D's horror setting" with the caveat it's going to lean heavy on the "D&D" part of that description, but it's not exactly the same kind of horror you'll see in a Stephen King book or a Fulci movie.

 

[darjr]

Books are showing up!!!!

 

[overgeeked]

I think part of the issue is terminology. Ravenloft is horror for D&D , but not necessarily horror as other media defines it.

I'd argue that horror is horror. Doesn't matter which medium we're talking about. A horror comic book is still horror, just as a horror movie is still horror, just as a horror game is still horror. I think your previous statement is most apt. Ravenloft is "D&D with a Halloween costume on".

It's not wrong to call Ravenloft "D&D's horror setting" with the caveat it's going to lean heavy on the "D&D" part of that description, but it's not exactly the same kind of horror you'll see in a Stephen King book or a Fulci movie.

Let's go with your previous statement. Ravenloft is "D&D with a Halloween costume on". I think that works. Walk with me. It's Halloween and you have a kid at your door wearing an ill-fitting Michael Meyers costume complete with William Shatner mask and one of those plastic knives that has blood dripping down the blade if you hold it just so. Now, if you point to that kid and think there's a real supernatural serial killer at your door, you'd be mistaken. It's a kid in a mask, fishing for candy. Likewise with Ravenloft. It's not horror, it's "D&D with a Halloween costume on". Pointing to Ravenloft and saying horror is akin to pointing to the kid in the mask and saying serial killer. They're both trying to evoke the thing, but they're not the thing itself.

I'm not saying Ravenloft is less than or bad or anything. Ravenloft is one of my favorite D&D settings. It's fantastic. But it's not horror. Call of Cthulhu is horror. Ravenloft is "D&D with a Halloween costume on". I sincerely hope the new Ravenloft book pushing the setting more towards horror. I honestly do. But I'm not getting that vibe from what we've seen so far.

By the way, the Bagman is fantastic. I absolutely love the concept. I cannot wait to terrorize my players with that. If you're a Ravenloft DM and you want more new nasties to throw at your players, check out Call of Cthulhu. There's a lot of amazing monsters to throw at your party. Using spells and magic items from CoC also works wonders in throwing D&D players for a loop. Even the most jaded D&D player will be completely surprised by them.

 

[overgeeked]

Books are showing up!!!!

Holy crow. How does one get that box? Damn.