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]

Horror is not simplely adding zombies to a story, but when witch-hunters discover these are the innocent children from the orphanague, killed by the evil necromancer to be used as cannon fodder. Horror is when a member of the ship crew has been killed and eaten but you don't know who is the murderer hidden among us. Or a group of dark faes using magic to transform sentient creatures into delicious fruits to be eaten. Horror is not the Joker killing people with tricked joke articles but Batman hurry to find the innocent teen girl kidnapped by the serial killer "the birthday boy". Horror is not a evil dragon attacking a town, but discovering a dragon is infiltrated among the humans as a trader, and he caused an epidemic to sell medicines. Horror is not an assasin with a knife, but to discover the murder of a child was a initation ritual, and the applicant to enter a secret society has to commite a human sacrifice and like this to can be blakmailed for the rest of his life. Horror is not Sweeny Tood, the psyco-killer barber with a blooded straight razor, but Mrs Lovett using the flesh to bake meat pies. Horror is not a robot from the future killing all the people within a police station, but when the characters needs to be totally blinded or keeping total silence to avoid the alien monster.

* I think Ravenloft is too "small", even more than Dark Sun. It can't be only a Jurasic Park for the monsters of Universal Pictures, but it needs a lot of space to be explored and discovered.

This is a good point & the thing I worry about most. Ravenloft has never been shy about making massive changes to the system it's written for to support the needs of horror, but a ravenloft book needs to include those changes in print & 5e needs them even more than some of the past editions. We don't really have much other than anime to compare a lot of d&d to so using popular anime that mostly aired in recent years during prime time US timeslots (and streams most everywhere now) 5e is tuned more towards the dragonball/naruto end of the scale, but ravenloft needs to exist somewhere closer to the goblin slayer*/death note/tokyo ghoul/parasyte/the promised neverland/japan sinks/etc ends of the scale & there are a lot of mechanics still not seen in UA that need to be revisited in a ravenloft book for that to happen. Hopefully some of the upcoming teaser videos can talk about that sort of stuff.

*If the character called goblin slayer by everyone were in ravenloft, the whole series would take place in his domain prison

I'm not trying to say you can't like Ravenloft for whatever reason you want. I don't care why you like it.

What I am trying to say is that if you want to sell someone on the setting of Ravenloft, saying, "Playing 2e in Ravenloft with the Van Richten Guides so you can customize the monsters" isn't selling Ravenloft. It is selling a very particular set of books and options.



I understand that geography matters. I understand that international politics involving islands in a sea are different than those involving land and different than those involving mountain ranges. That is blatantly obvious.

But, when I've asked "What about the previous geography was usefuly? What are you losing?" your answers have been:

1) The Freedom to Travel (not lost by making them islands, just a different form of travel. Unless you make them specifically like the old Islands of Terror and make the area impossible to navigate which I am not assuming)

2) Falkovia going to war (they redid that domain it seems, so in terms of the geography that is a non-issue)

3) You lose international politics (You don't)

So... really I think what it comes down to for you is the bolded section. It is different. And it is completely fair that you as a fan of the old 2e version love the version you have used for decades and you don't want to change it. I hope you continue to use what has worked for your for decades. But, as a new player getting introduced to this setting? "It is different than it used to be" isn't a convincing argument for me to want to go back to the old version. I have no connections to either version, so I am seeing them as baseline equal to begin with.




That does sound interesting, and exactly like the type of thing I would want to include in this style of game. I'll have to think about how I want to include it.



Okay, I can see that angle of sympathy, and that does work to an extent. Though I find it to be a thin thread combined with every other aspect of him.

I also think that reading those really does highlight the Vlad Tepes comparison, in a lot of ways that I'm not sure I like. So there is a lot of give and take there. I think, all in all, it is a well-written character from an older time. I can see how he is compelling, but I can also see where I would never use him as written.







You know what? I was not sold on this concept until you made the comparison to an evil terrarium. THAT makes sense and I think makes a great concept for this setting, for me.

having a fear of "it's different than it used to be" is perfectly reasonable & even has reasons to support it. 4e eberron was a travesty that avoided filling in vaguely hinted parts of he setting to cram in supporting elements for printing a planescape/Mystarara/FR metaplot in setting books for a setting violently incompatible with many of the baseline assumptions that metaplot needed causing a setting that was in conflict with itself in its own setting books. 5e eberron recognized how awful & misguided that attempt was & between wayfinders/morgraves/rising/EE managed to do a generally great eberron release, but 3 of those aren't technically made by wotc & that's important. Ravenloft in 5e has a heavily faerunized CoS making it the third edition rehashing CoS. People don't point to those ancient ravenloft books from 2e & 3e because of some 3.5 edition onward fork in other directions, they point to them because so many years have been spent with wotc focusing entirely on CoS to the point where they tried to se it in faerun expecting nobody to care. With that said, I think the islands could work better at capturing the essence of ravenloft but can only hope that the mechanics needed to support the rest of what ravenloft needs & we haven't really even seen UA for most of that. What little info we have doesn't yet hint that this is going to be a dropped ball, but there's not much saying otherwise for certain to give what seems to be a skeptic already sporting burns like @Bedrockgames hooks for hanging optimism on.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

I hadn't even thought about them being geographical islands. My read was them being metaphorical islands, defined by the mists. For most people there's no reliable way to get back and forth between specific domains.

Like a dark version of Gargoyles' Avalon. "I thought ye understood. The mists don't take you where ye want to go, they take ye where ye needn't be!"

 

[Azzy]

It depends. Are they totally isolated islands, or islands with a single difficult to find and use Channel Tunnel to the next, or islands with multiple, easy-to-use bridges to other islands, or islands surrounded by shallow straits that you can, at your own risk, wade across to the others? Or some combination of the above? Or completely up to the DM or players?

It could be literal islands, but I suspect it's more metaphorical—that they are more isolated realms, separated by the Mists. I also suspect that travel between the realms will be up to the DM (the book might provide several options). I'm guessing that it will be easy to ignore the fractured Core bit (in the same way some DMs ignored the Shadow Rift) and be able to run New Ravenloft as Old Ravenloft. But we'll see once the reviews star pouring in, closer to the release date.

 

[Charlaquin]

This is the primary reason I will never run Ravenloft out of the box. I’ll use it’s elements to run a game where what the PCs do matters, at most.

I’m not sure that it makes much practical difference either way. If the players defeat the Darklord, they defeat the Darklord. For the purpose of any individual campaign, that’s all that matters. The whole resetting thing always just seemed to me like a cheeky way to acknowledge the fact that the adventure keeps getting rehashed, with the details tweaked but fundamentally the same beats.

 

[Aldarc]

Again we just disagree here. It seems a lot of posters pushing this idea didn’t like Ravenloft in the first place though. I think it would make more sense to create the new material with people who liked it rather than those who didn’t like it in mind (maybe you liked it and this is just one aspect that annoyed you but getting the sense that is one of the dividing lines here)

The roster of people implied to be among the "people who liked it" in this conversation don't seem particularly interested or invested in playing 5e D&D so I'm not sure why WotC should care about them more than the people who bought and played the Curse of Strahd 5e adventure and made it into a success.

I don’t think of them as theme parks, and the fact that they have neighbors, are part of a setting that exists beyond the core premise of the domain makes them much more life like. It provides greater contrast. Also the full purpose of Ravenloft is not fully known. It is likely a prison but it could be something else. The intentions of the dark powers were deliberately left mysterious.

Life like? These are Domains of Dread in the Shadowfell curated by mysterious Dark Powers to torment the ruling Dark Lords and their inhabitants. How does having neighbors make them more life like and why is that even important for this setting? I'm not sure why these Domains would or even should be "life like" as part of the gestalt setting or how having them as separate islands somehow makes the intentions of the Dark Powers any less mysterious.

I am not familiar enough with the shadow fell concept to comment on that. In the old version it is more connected to the ethereal plane

I believe at least people, myself included, have provided a basic overview of the Shadowfell without any real engagement on your part. Furthermore, if you are not familiar with the Shadowfell, a basic Google search is your friend as there are plenty of freely available online resources that provide background on the plane.

 

[MGibster]

Was it 3rd or 4th edition that really emphasized shadow type creatures as bad guys? I don't mind the occasional shadow creature but there seemed to be an overabundance of them at one time. Heroes aren't scared of the dark.

 

[Charlaquin]

Again we just disagree here. It seems a lot of posters pushing this idea didn’t like Ravenloft in the first place though. I think it would make more sense to create the new material with people who liked it rather than those who didn’t like it in mind (maybe you liked it and this is just one aspect that annoyed you but getting the sense that is one of the dividing lines here)

The impression I get is that a lot of us in this conversation (at least @Chaosmancer and I) aren’t super familiar with Ravenloft. We’ve heard about it second-hand, and there are some aspects of it we thought sounded really cool, and some we thought sounded weird and didn’t really “get.” I also get the impression that we’re the ones the new book is being written for, because it seems to double-down on the ideas that make the setting sound really cool in an elevator pitch (Prison worlds isolated by magical mist! A domain for every flavor of horror! Make your own domains and plop them in!) and downplay the ideas that seem strange in that context (why do you have two Dracula-themed domains? Why are some domains themed after other D&D settings instead of horror subgenres? Why are so many of these prison-worlds connected in a single land mass that you can easily travel across?) I’m sure these questions have answers that are satisfying to many existing Ravenloft fans, but from an outside perspective they seem ill-fitting with the very cool premise we’ve been pitched, and from that perspective it makes sense when bringing the setting over to a new edition to clean up some of those apparent incongruities and tweak the setting to more closely align with the expectations new people will have based on the hook.

 

[tetrasodium]

The impression I get is that a lot of us in this conversation (at least @Chaosmancer and I) aren’t super familiar with Ravenloft. We’ve heard about it second-hand, and there are some aspects of it we thought sounded really cool, and some we thought sounded weird and didn’t really “get.” I also get the impression that we’re the ones the new book is being written for, because it seems to double-down on the ideas that make the setting sound really cool in an elevator pitch (Prison worlds isolated by magical mist! A domain for every flavor of horror! Make your own domains and plop them in!) and downplay the ideas that seem strange in that context (why do you have two Dracula-themed domains? Why are some domains themed after other D&D settings instead of horror subgenres? Why are so many of these prison-worlds connected in a single land mass that you can easily travel across?) I’m sure these questions have answers that are satisfying to many existing Ravenloft fans, but from an outside perspective they seem ill-fitting with the very cool premise we’ve been pitched, and from that perspective it makes sense when bringing the setting over to a new edition to clean up some of those apparent incongruities and tweak the setting to more closely align with the expectations new people will have based on the hook.

It's useful for those of us who knew it too. Trying to run ravenloft having to convert things across so many editions & not having something we can point a player at to say "this is what I'm running" is extremely difficult with how tightly aligned 5e is with the needs of FR. In some ways even moreso than trying to run eberron or darksun in that situation can be because you wind up tearing things out to replace them with teaching unknown things the players should never know.

 

[Bedrockgames]

If this is what you want, I think a much easier solution is keep the core but just have the misty borders be up all the time between granted. Granted not all domains had literal mist for borders (some had things like walks of flesh). But this way you can keep the core and make the constant isolation an optional switch for the GM to use

The impression I get is that a lot of us in this conversation (at least @Chaosmancer and I) aren’t super familiar with Ravenloft. We’ve heard about it second-hand, and there are some aspects of it we thought sounded really cool, and some we thought sounded weird and didn’t really “get.” I also get the impression that we’re the ones the new book is being written for, because it seems to double-down on the ideas that make the setting sound really cool in an elevator pitch (Prison worlds isolated by magical mist! A domain for every flavor of horror! Make your own domains and plop them in!) and downplay the ideas that seem strange in that context (why do you have two Dracula-themed domains? Why are some domains themed after other D&D settings instead of horror subgenres? Why are so many of these prison-worlds connected in a single land mass that you can easily travel across?) I’m sure these questions have answers that are satisfying to many existing Ravenloft fans, but from an outside perspective they seem ill-fitting with the very cool premise we’ve been pitched, and from that perspective it makes sense when bringing the setting over to a new edition to clean up some of those apparent incongruities and tweak the setting to more closely align with the expectations new people will have based on the hook.

I will do my best to answer those questions later (other fans might be able to do so before I get back online). Definitely I think the new material created very different expectations with the setting. I honestly think the old setting is best understood by reading black box or domains of dread. There is only so much we can highlight and the black box makes a very passionate case for what it is trying to achieve (plus I think it is better if people can see it and judge for themselves: our reporting can only be second hand info to you). That said I get that chaosnancer and some others have no of little experience with 2E Ravenloft and are genuinely curious. I don’t mind answering their questions. But what I am saying is there also seems to be a contingent of older fans who didn’t like Ravenloft, and are basically trashing it as a setting. I don’t understand writing new setting towards people who disliked or were unsatisfied with the old setting (there has always been the didn’t like Ravenloft crowd, but they didn’t but the books generally). The fans like me genuinely have deep love for the setting. And there are a lot of us. And many of them okay 5E and want 5th edition Ravenloft that feels like the old. I see them in conversations in several forums. I think for a large chunk of the old Ravenloft fans this notion of having a core, for a variety of reasons which I will get into in another post, is very important. I am not trying to attack people for preferring the new cosmology or liking CoS: but I am trying to convey why I am so enthusiastic for the 2E line (and it definitely wasn’t perfect, I would be happy to talk about aspects of 2E Ravenloft I thought had issues and problems with gaming and D&D at that time: one reason I keep mentioning van Richten books is they are a solution to some of these problems)

 

[Voadam]

It depends. Are they totally isolated islands, or islands with a single difficult to find and use Channel Tunnel to the next, or islands with multiple, easy-to-use bridges to other islands, or islands surrounded by shallow straits that you can, at your own risk, wade across to the others? Or some combination of the above? Or completely up to the DM or players?

4e: My memory is isolated islands in the Shadowfell with no connections.
3e: Some have single somewhat reliable, possibly one way Chunnels, though mostly those are between a domain in the core and domains in mini-core connected clusters.
2e: Most are completely isolated.

The core is like real life geography, most areas border a number of others and there are roads and you can walk. Domains that are physical islands off the core can be gotten to by boat. Islands of Terror are different and are fully separated, Sri Raji from the original boxed set had no regular connection or commerce with any other domain and outsiders are as likely to be from the Forgotten Realms as from Barovia or Har Akir. It later became part of a cluster and had more connections to other domains.

2e Realms of Terror original boxed set on Islands of Terror: "Each is permanently surrounded by Mist and has no physical link to any other domain. The domains are pictured as a group on one of the color maps in this boxed set, but their position on the map is arbitrary. No sailor in the vast sea of Mists can chart a course to these islands."

3e Ravenloft book on Islands of Terror: "Islands of Terror are domains surrounded by the Mists; they do not share stable borders with neighboring domains. They are among the most secluded domains in Ravenloft, though solitary wanderers always seem to find their way to such remote places."

Based on past treatment I expect if they say they are going with Islands of Terror it will each be their own isolated thing as the default. Barovia from the individual modules of I6, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, and Curse of Strahd will be the model instead of Barovia from the various campaign settings so there will not be a default of any domains having any other ongoing Ravenloft connections besides possible ones of past connections like a lord who started off in another domain but "earned" their own new one. Which means the core wide secret societies will not make as much sense nor will adventures where the agents of a Darklord are operating in another domain. The smaller domains which are single cities or towns or haunted houses/castles will stand out more obviously as metaphysically odd if they are default not part of a larger continuity.