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

 

[JEB]

Falkovnia invading Darkon was neat

Occurs to me this may be why some of the domains were overhauled; a realm like Falkovnia, where endless war against an unbeatable enemy is a core element, doesn't work so well without a neighbor to invade.

 

[JEB]

You may have heard already, but it’s confirmed Sithicus is in, Soth is out.

Where was that confirmed? I heard both Soth and Sithicus were out, but there'd be some Easter eggs referencing them.

 

[Charlaquin]

Where was that confirmed? I heard both Soth and Sithicus were out, but there'd be some Easter eggs referencing them.

Todd Kenrik’s video. Though I suppose it’s possible I misunderstood him.

 

[JEB]

Todd Kenrik’s video. Though I suppose it’s possible I misunderstood him.

Unfortunately, looks like you did. Darn, I was hoping you had another source.

"Though Lord Soth is not in Ravenloft at this time and very likely will not be in the future, there are hints and references to Lord Soth and to the existence of Sithicus within this book. So there are lots of Easter eggs and homages to the past of Sithicus as well. So, really the answer is, no Lord Soth in Ravenloft in 5th edition..."

 

[Zardnaar]

That is the one. Lisa Smedman's stuff was usually very good in my opinion.

Yeah her Drow books were good as well.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There is Forlorn where you have Goblyns who tend to kill the human inhabitants. It isn't quite what you are looking for here, but I think there were places in the setting that definitely made humans feel that way. But again, to me this wasn't so much about picking on demihumans as emphasizing that it is a human-based setting, with really provincial inhabitants who mistake an elf for a spirit. It is there to play up the backwards nature of many of the locations more than anything else.

It doesn't make much sense, though. Why were the Mists only taking humans in the first place in so many areas?

The answer, I suggest, is Doyle-ian, that being that the people who wrote the Black Box version watched a ton of Hammer/Universal movies but eventually ran out of imagination when it came to coming up with domains and started getting lazy and just making it "basically all humans" which made zero sense, because the population of D&D settings typically wasn't that.

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.

And that makes no sense for D&D or for the passionately stated purpose of Ravenloft. It made no sense in-setting for it to be the case, particularly. It made increasingly less sense as time went on, and the lore of Ravenloft was developed further, and remained at odds with the humanocentric dullness of a lot of the domains.

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).

I obviously can't speak for people older than me, but I'm 42, and Hammer/Universal didn't have a huge impact or resonate particularly strongly. I could appreciate them, but they seemed outdated and anything but scary. I have no doubt it was popular - my suggestion is that had it started moving on from just being Hammer/Universal as the sole source sooner, then it would have been more successful.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

Sure, but Maztica was written by adult, in 1990/1991, not a child in the 1960s, an adult who did an absolute ton of research because the books contain a lot of stuff very specifically derived from both South American/Mesoamerican mythology, and from the history of the European invasion of the area.

There's no way he didn't know that conquistadors were basically extremely bad news. Indeed, there are references to that sort of thing in Maztica, and to casting a faith (I forget which? Torm?) as the Catholic church in a bizarre way, but at the same time, the bulk of the setting glorifies the conquistador-types, and basically as them to as there to help the poor natives.

It's messed-up in the extreme.

EDIT - Also btw exactly how OLD do you think I am? 60? Learned in the 1970s? I was barely born in the 1970s! I learned about the that stuff in 1990-ish, when I was 11/12. Point is though, this was stuff in textbooks for kids. It wasn't risky or novel or shocking. The text books were from earlier in the 1980s (they had them on the Vikings too, I remember that, because it influenced some of the D&D I was running!), with lovely colourful art. It didn't dwell on the conquistadors being horrible monsters, but it did acknowledge it.

So I feel like an adult doing research on the same era, in the same time period, had to know all this and more - but they clearly thought it wasn't important and it was fine to re-write things so invaders were heroic saviours and so on.

It's bizarre though because for all Oriental Adventures' sins, it's much less bad the Maztica, because it takes the approach of "these people are just as good as Westerners, but do things their own way". Had Maztica been written by Zeb Cook as OA was, I strongly suspect the Mazticans would have been a bunch of badasses like the OA crew, and would have been sailing to the Sword Coast etc., not vice-versa, with no need for a conquistador narrative at all (of course it might have ended up getting called "Americas Adventures" and yet focusing solely on Incan myth or something lol).

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Today gothic horror isn't the one influence into the new generations of players, but also the lore of lots of movies and survival horror videogames and other franchises: Clive Baker's Jerico, Doom Eternal, Resident Evil, Evil Within, The medium, Silent Hill. The geography of the demiplane has changed to be more sandbox, allowing to add lots of new ideas. (Have you seen the web "the fraternity of shadows"?

I would bet WotC wants a future D&D videogame about killing hordes of zombies.

And somethings may be very unconfortable, even if you don't notice yet. For example, Gustavo Adolfo Bequer, a Spanish romanticism poet wrote some gothic horror stories with his own touch. One of these is "La Rosa de la Pasion" ( = the Rose of the Passion) about a Jew, Daniel, who didn't want a Christian tried to date his loved daughter. I have mentioned this as an example of something today is not welcome because it is politically incorrect. Now let's imagine that Daniel as a new dark lord in a sourcebook for DM Guild, but the author doesn't say a word about his faith, but a Spanish Jew notices what is the original source of inspiration and the title is reported. Now let's imagine other example: Edgard Allan Poe's "the pit and the pendulum". Do forgive me this spoiler. The storyteller and main character is found by a Napoleon's soldier. He was a victim of "Spanish Inquisition" and then the Frenchs were the good guys who wanted the end of the "dark age" in Spain. This is not only offensive, but potentiall dangerous as the islamophobia or anti-Jewism. And the fact is the Napoleon's troops for the Spanish indepence war commited horribles crimes against the civil population, but nobody talked about this. What if anybody writes for DM Guild a new dark domain whose dark lord is a Napoleon's captain who burnt a Catholic convents because the nuns were hidding food and injuried members of the guerrilla? You can bet French players wouldn't be happy reading about Napoleon's troops showed as war criminals, but they were for the Spanish indepence war (and the Englishs destroyed a Spanish porcelain factor that was not a militar target, only to avoid this to be a rival of their products).

And my rage against the fiction "the maid's tale" is worse when I read news by Fides agency and I know that nightmare is happening in the real word, Christians girls and women being kidnapped in Egypt and Pakistan to be forced to convert into the islam and marry Muslims. How do you dare to try teach me to me feel shamed and guilty when you ignore many things I know?

If this is a reboot, what will happen with the modules about the grand condjuction? These are too linked with the metaplot.

Lord Sorth in Sithicus?

 

[Coroc]

Wouldn't it be relatively easy to run it as a campaign setting through? I'd be unsurprised if they have specific advice on how to do that, too. It does mean you won't have all the nonsensical "incursions" and "invasions" from one realm to another, but honestly they made me roll my eyes every time I read about them.

well the island approach certainly makes it easier for dms with pcs who think lore=raw to separate those chunks he wants in his setting from the whole.

otoh, if you want to run some campaign spanning over several domains, the fact that e.g. Killing a dark lord opens up the border for mundane travel also makes an interesting quirk. The more so if you take the shadowfell approach and fiddle with jumping in and out of it to get to locations.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Well I think the new dragon+ article on the book will push @QuentinGeorge away from this book, but I like what I am reading (in particular I like the bolded part):

"This incarnation of Ravenloft reimagines a great deal of what came before. Past explorations of the setting directly linked many of the domains of Ravenloft into a pseudo-continent called the ‘Core’. We’ve taken the Core, the heart of the Ravenloft setting, and shattered it. In this new interpretation, every domain is a lonely island drifting through the mists."

It's like they interviewed me, asked me "What sort of changes would you absolutely hate?" and then did it. Good to see Wizards treat another setting with all the care and devotion they showed the Forgotten Realms in 2008.

(As an added note of hilarity, one of the promos refers to "Haslan". The domain is "Hazlan"...unless they've randomly changed the spelling to annoy me as well!)

Why take the Core, change all the domains except for the names, and turn them into Islands of Terror instead of .... just creating a whole new bunch of Islands of Terror and leaving the rest alone? Why? WHY?!