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

 

[Ruin Explorer]

We're in agreement here. The more I've learned about TSR the more convinced I've become by how lucky they were to stay in business for so long. Still, even at TSR, whoever made the final decision thought that Ravenloft would be something their customers wanted. But then I'm sure whoever made the decision to produce Maztica thought the same thing.

Right? Sometimes it worked out. I'm pretty sure no-one would have voted for Time of the Dragon and it's a minor masterpiece of setting design, and incredible for 1989. Likewise Planescape. I'm pretty sure trying to "sell" that a focus group of D&D players wouldn't have gone great. Dark Sun might have worked out, and Spelljammer probably would have, but Spelljammer actually wasn't very successful, it seems.

And yeah then sometimes you get Maztica, a setting which is both deeply racist, and just plain boring and bad and like, what gets me is, when I first saw Maztica, I was 13. I wasn't a particularly special kid in terms of being "right-on" at that age. But even at 13, in 1991, I saw the cover of Maztica, and read the description and thought "Wow, this seems kind of bizarrely racist... like what kind of utter maniac glorifies conquistadors, of all people?!". We knew they were bad people in 1991! (as an aside, we knew Christopher Colombus was a bad person even bad in the time he was alive! One of the people on his expedition wrote a diary and the stuff on Columbus is basically, to paraphrase in more modern terms "This man is a psychopathic and truly monstrous and despicable enemy of god!" and it was clear that this wasn't an unusual opinion at the time - but he brought in the $$$ so...). Like, I'd literally just done a module on that sort of thing in school, and it did NOT paint a pretty picture yo! Wow.

 

[Parmandur]

Right? Sometimes it worked out. I'm pretty sure no-one would have voted for Time of the Dragon and it's a minor masterpiece of setting design, and incredible for 1989. Likewise Planescape. I'm pretty sure trying to "sell" that a focus group of D&D players wouldn't have gone great. Dark Sun might have worked out, and Spelljammer probably would have, but Spelljammer actually wasn't very successful, it seems.

And yeah then sometimes you get Maztica, a setting which is both deeply racist, and just plain boring and bad and like, what gets me is, when I first saw Maztica, I was 13. I wasn't a particularly special kid in terms of being "right-on" at that age. But even at 13, in 1991, I saw the cover of Maztica, and read the description and thought "Wow, this seems kind of bizarrely racist... like what kind of utter maniac glorifies conquistadors, of all people?!". We knew they were bad people in 1991! (as an aside, we knew Christopher Colombus was a bad person even bad in the time he was alive! One of the people on his expedition wrote a diary and the stuff on Columbus is basically, to paraphrase in more modern terms "This man is a psychopathic and truly monstrous and despicable enemy of god!" and it was clear that this wasn't an unusual opinion at the time - but he brought in the $$$ so...). Like, I'd literally just done a module on that sort of thing in school, and it did NOT paint a pretty picture yo! Wow.

Well, what you learned in the UK in the 70's might be different from what schools were doing in rural Wisconsin in the 50's-60's.

My mom grew up in rural Wisconsin in the 50'-60's and, um, I've heard a disturbing thing or two.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think very few people "wanted" most of the domains in the original Ravenloft (beyond a core few derived from classic horror). In particular, I don't think players or DMs were going "Oh, you know what I want, a setting that's EXACTLY like a Hammer horror movie, even down to the only inhabitants of a bunch of the places being humans who are super-racist!". Pretty much 100% sure that wasn't "a thing". Pretty sure NOTHING about the original Ravenloft was really driven by the what players or DMs wanted, and pretty 100% of it was driven by Bruce Naismith and Andria Hayday being bigass Hammer/Unviersal nerds who wanted to replicate Hammer/Universal stuff even when it made no sense, and didn't work well for D&D at all.

Nah someone upthread pointed out that it actually looks like after the first few domains they kind of reaching, and a lot of them are just, iffy attempts to replicate Hammer movie scenario/vibes, which causes them to end up with town after town of what basically amount to scared puritans, even though that's not really a D&D thing.

it wasn't just hammer, but I think you are not appreciating the impact hammer and universal had on gamers at that time. Ravenloft resonated with me, largely because those classic horror movies were clearly an influence and I grew up watching those kinds of films. I thought that, and the gothic horror influence, worked well. People can poo poo it now, and people at the time sometimes didn't like it, but my memory is it was immensely popular with gamers in my area.

Personally I really liked Ravenloft as it was presented in the black boxed set. I thought Nesmith and Heyday did an outstanding job. I remember getting pulled into Ravenloft because I read the Knight of the Black Rose, then almost immediately getting the black box and Feast of Goblyns. I thought the material was spooky, a bit campy, atmospheric and really compelling for gaming. Did full length campaigns set in Ravenloft all through high school and the 90s. Loved the Van Richten books (they were great tools for adventure), loved Feast of Goblyns and Castles Forlorn. And I quite liked the concept of the core (also I liked that you could easily modify it to fit your taste as a GM given how amorphous the setting was).

 

[Parmandur]

While I find it entirely believable that the creative side had no sales figures, I find the idea that they had no idea how popular the I-6 module was to be implausible. They would have seen the mostly positive written reviews and likely received feedback from fans via letters or gaming events. I know we weren't as connected in the 80s as we are today, but people wrote letters and still met face-to-face at times.

And we should note. You can believe something will sell even if you don't have market data to prove it.

Things also probably deteriorated between the 1980's and the buyout: but when WotC took over and met with the Dragonlance Saga team and shared sales data that TSR had on the line, that was the first indication that the creative side knew Dragonlance Saga wasn't a bestseller.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

We're talking about TSR here.

They had absolutely no market research and basically no clue whatsoever what their customers wanted. Do we need to drag out Ryan Dancey and stuff to talk about this? You people cannot both tell me that TSR made mistake after mistake after mistake with publishing settings, and that they "knew their market". It's not both. Pick one - you (the board) already picked "TSR had no idea what they were doing". Therefore unless you're going to claim TSR did, in fact, know what they were doing, I'm going to have to go with "TSR had no idea what they were doing" and "a bunch of their decisions with Ravenloft reflect this".

Art & Arcana -- produced in close cooperation with WotC -- is pretty unsparing on this issue. (I know, it's marketed as an art book, but it's also an extremely good history of D&D.)

 

[darjr]

Art & Arcana -- produced in close cooperation with WotC -- is pretty unsparing on this issue. (I know, it's marketed as an art book, but it's also an extremely good history of D&D.)

Fantastic book. Everyone interested in D&D history should get it.

And get the delux version if you can.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yup, if anything it's supposed to be this "horror" place, why is it only non-humans being subjected to this? Why wasn't there an all-hobgoblin domain where humans are chased out of town or something?

My take is the main reason for this was to emphasize that Ravenloft was a human-centric, low fantasy setting (with things like Darkon being the exception rather than the rule). In a world where people were superstitious and affraid of monsters, and demi-humans were rare, it made sense to have them perceive demihumans as potentially evil. I didn't run Ravenloft as weekends in hell where the characters were pulled from an ongoing campaign and plunged into Ravenloft. I ran Ravenloft as full ravenloft campaigns (the players were still outsiders pulled in, but they knew going into it that this was a Ravenloft campaign, so anyone who chose a demihuman would know what to expect also---and some people seemed to quite like roleplaying that.

 

[tetrasodium]

I wonder if we will get one or more new rest mechanics to something more incremental. It's hard to really sell tension when you recover so much from long & short rests

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't feel confortable with Elena Faith-Hold, darklord of Nidala because she is the trope about the danger of faith without mercy nor good sense. This trope has been abused too much in the last years. I want to be a vampire-hunter PC, not to feel like the main character of "the tale of the maid". You may think this a ridiculous opinion, but we have to remember today old titles are now "politically incorrect" and they need special disclaimers. Maybe in the next decade "the tale of the maid" or Netflix's "Cursed" will need a disclaimer like the one from "Gone with the Wild".

I am struggling to see how this is a bad trope. History is filled with people doing awful things in the name of good, and with people who killed in the name of righteousness and failed to show mercy. And I would say mercy is a really important trait to balance out darker parts of human nature. Fanatical zeal lacking mercy seems like an appropriate feature of a dark lord to me. Definitely has some resonance for me as a player and GM.

As Domain Lords go she was fairly minor anyways (and part of a supplement that had domains in it I rarely saw used at the table). If she were part of the core, she might have been a more interesting persona. But the islands of dreads and clusters were pretty easy to ignore and overlook as you generally just selected them as a GM based on need

 

[Bedrockgames]

I wonder if we will get one or more new rest mechanics to something more incremental. It's hard to really sell tension when you recover so much from long & short rests

I can't speak to 5th edition, as I don't really play it much. But mechanics definitely matter here. I played Ravenloft through the 90s 2E, into the d20 S&S version. With the 3E rules I found my campaigns didn't really feel the same anymore and the atmosphere wasn't there. I thought it was just me getting older, and maybe a bit of nostalgia for the 90s or something. But in 2008 I ran Ravenloft again with the 2E rules, and for me at least, it instantly felt like it had the same atmosphere as when I ran it in the 90s. If you find this part of the game hinders tension, you might try retooling it and see if that changes things.