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

 

[Faolyn]

I've said it elsewhere, but if i was rewriting Ravenloft, I'd advance the whole thing to a tech level around the 1800s for the trappings of the more classically Gothic Dracula/Frankenstein time period (early steam age, routine use of blackpowder firearms in most places but melee weapons still relevant, etc), and redo the Vistani as a railroad company that runs (mostly reliable...) services between the different domains. You still can try to make your own way through the mists of course, if you don't want anyone to know where you're going. And heaven help you if you lose your ticket!

I always wanted to do a higher-tech RL as well. I hadn't thought about Vistani railways, though--neat idea!

 

[Bedrockgames]

A lot of people in this thread have a tremendous amount of Ravenloft baggage that the vast majority of customers will not share. To people who only know D&D through 5E, Ravenloft is going to be an expansion of CoS, which did have ample combat throughout it, and a feel not all to different from Castlevania — which itself takes inspiration from Castle Ravenloft.

I don’t think it’s baggage: we liked and played the old Ravenloft setting and respect it. We may be older, we might not be as significant as some of the younger fans (and I am personally not concerned if new Ravenloft goes a direction I don’t like, as I am not that into 5th), but we do buy books, and a new Ravenloft setting that hit the same feel as the original and got things right (and honored the material that came before) would certainly earn my dollar (and nudge me into 5th. Also I know plenty of people who played old Ravenloft, who also play 5th edition, who were interested but put off by the new take. We don’t get to demand anything but we can have our opinions and voice them (they aren’t going to change course but maybe people will get exposed to a less combat intensive version of Ravenloft, or at least have a better understanding of where it comes from). Again, I realize I am too old to be the target audience.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Great idea @DEFCON 1.

Should I try to run a Ravenloft campaign, I'd probably go with my good ol' Adventure in middle-earth as a mechanical core. The rarity of healing and the necessity of safe spots to recover, the existence of a corruption mechanic, the need to gather magic thru magic items rather than pure leveling; all this fits the mood of the Domain of Dread quite well.

I'm also sure that many virtues (aka racial feat in AiME) could be made to fit Ravenloft easily.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Well I guess WoTC in 2008 had the same reasoning for 4E Forgotten Realms.

I take the point, but if none of the new fans care about the existing setting, Why use the old domain names? Is Falkovnia, for instance, a name that new fans want to see, even if it doesn't resemble any previous incarnation?

Perhaps they use the old name either (a) out of tradition (after all, the current zombies aren't going to give it a new name) and/or (b) there's a connection to the old realm that that hasn't been revealed yet and will make sense once we have the full text of the book.

 

[Chaosmancer]

the issue with making them all islands is you lose a lot. It basically reduced the setting to isolation and entrapment, while taking away the flavor and adventure hooks that came with having lands connected. The key thing is in the boxed set, you had both. I can tell you from experience long term campaigns didn’t work as well with islands as they did with the core. But if you wanted isolated domains: that was still there.

But islands are not inherently entrapped. If I fly down to England, and I want to leave, there are plenty of boats. I don't need to be able to walk to leave the island.

And, if a hook is how two realms interacted, doesn't that take away from the realm being specifically crafted for that punishment? I mean, even in the case of Vecna and Kas, they were both in the Realm, it wasn't two really separate realms.

 

[Chaosmancer]

So a Horror RPG with local dark lord analogies where the PCs can go from domain to domain but the dark lords are pretty tied down?

Vampire the Masquerade. "This city is getting too hot with the Malkavian prince after us, let's go to another one, maybe that one with the Toreador prince. Anybody know who is the prince of Toledo?"

Never played much Vampire, but isn't about half the point the in-depth political intrigue between the various powers? Also, never really heard of it as a Horror RPG.

 

[Bedrockgames]

But islands are not inherently entrapped. If I fly down to England, and I want to leave, there are plenty of boats. I don't need to be able to walk to leave the island.

And, if a hook is how two realms interacted, doesn't that take away from the realm being specifically crafted for that punishment? I mean, even in the case of Vecna and Kas, they were both in the Realm, it wasn't two really separate realms.

In Ravenloft an Island of Terror is isolated in the sea of mists. I agree that doesn't mean it has to be entrapped (it might just be hard to navigate to). But I was responding to people who said they need to be islands of dread that are not connected so that you can have all entrapment scenarios.

I think if you look at the core in the 2E boxed set, you see it is pretty easy to have domains be connected as part of a central landmass, with some resembling one another geographically, others being more oddly 'stitched on', and still have those realms reflect the darklord and serve well as their prison for punishment. With Falkovnia, they need places on their border to attack. And it makes sense those places should be other domains. I suppose the mists could just have places for him to invade inside his domain. I think it was more interesting have it be Darkon so that he was a constant pest to Azlin, and the lich lord could send back his solders as undead.

The Vecna Domain, if I recall, wasn't created for the line till Domains of Dread** (though its possible it appeared in the Red Boxed set or some other supplement and I forgot). Technically it though those were two connected domains (these were a concept called clusters that were introduced after the black boxed set and they were essentially like miniature cores). The core is really just, for lack of a better word, a Ravenloft continent made up of domains that are connected to one another. A cluster is just a smaller continent. The cluster was called The Burning Peaks, but it was made up of two domains: Covitius (whose lord was Vecna) and Tovag (whose lord is Kas). And some of the core domains could even have co-domain lords. But overall the borders in the core, generally corresponded to the borders of the realm as well.

Basically in the 90s TSR version of Ravenloft you had a core, which was the main continent, and this had tens of domains in it (it is where Barovia, Lamordia, Falkovnia, Tepest, Darkon, Kartakass, etc were located). There was a sea here, and later on they added a sea on the other side so it eventually had two coasts. This entire area was surrounded by mists. Beyond those mists were the Islands of terror and the clusters. In addition you had smaller domains that could show up within other domains (haunted houses, rooms, that kind of thing). It all worked really well. You had the core which provided a regular place for the players to exist in, but you had the more amorphous landscape deeper in the surrounding mists where islands of terror could be found.

I don't know. If the core doesn't work for you as a concept, that is fine. I just think it was such an obviously workable idea in practice, from all the years of play I had at the table, I don't understand why this is being treated as a controversial opinion.

**A note about this because this term seems to be causing a lot of confusion: I am talking about the Domains of Dread rulebook, released for 2E in 1997. The Ravenloft 2E line starts with the Realm of Terror Boxed set (the black boxed set, which expands the original ravenloft module and the house on gryphon hill into a complete setting), followed by the Ravenloft Campaign Setting (the red boxed set, which reshapes rravenloft according to the events of the Grand Conjunction: which were part of a series of modules), then that was followed by Domains of Dread. There were also lots of supplements in between for new domains, and a boxed set called Forbidden Lore (expanded rules with fortune telling dice and cool methods for bringing visitani fortune telling into the game). A lot of the modules also kind of served as setting supplements, like Feast of Goblyns and Castles Forlorn.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Never played much Vampire, but isn't about half the point the in-depth political intrigue between the various powers? Also, never really heard of it as a Horror RPG.

When it came out we all thought of it as a horror RPG (at least everyone I knew did, things were not as connected back then so maybe it was different outside my area). It was a horror RPG with an almost directly opposite school of thought from Ravenloft, but still horror (it was horror in the style of something like Anne Rice, where the horror comes from the loss of your humanity). I was very into horror at the time. There were different camps. Ravenloft was more subtle horror (it was based in gothic, but I considered it a game for classic horror fans). But at the time slashers were a big genre (classic horror fans would often look down at slasher films, but I liked them too, and they were still horror). Then you had more body horror stuff like clive barker. Just different flavors. Vampire was a bit more romantic and gothic as I recall. I tended to prefer games where you are facing the horror rather than becoming the horror. But it is worth pointing out that vampire proved so popular it gave TSR a run for its money, and Ravenloft actually did eventually provide rules for playing things like undead if I remember (and at the time I felt it was a response to Vampire's popularity).

 

[Alzrius]

and Ravenloft actually did eventually provide rules for playing things like undead if I remember (and at the time I felt it was a response to Vampire's popularity).

Yep, that was in the Requiem: The Grim Harvest boxed set, with a few additions provided in Dragon #234.

Note also that there were rules for playing undead characters in AD&D 2E in an appendix of The Apocalypse Stone (specifically death knights, with alternative templates for non-martial characters).

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yep, that was in the Requiem: The Grim Harvest boxed set, with a few additions provided in Dragon #234.

My only memory of Grim Harvest at this point is being struck by those rules and realizing that the old presentation and layout were replaced by a very spartan white background and new style of art----which I have to admit, kind of turned me off a bit)