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

Voadam · Mar 3, 2021

I was playing in a CoS 5e game before it went on hiatus due to DM burnout. At the end I was a 9th level flesh golemized bladesinger Esmerelda who was immune to non magical attacks and had ridiculous stats and skills and attacks. The party paladin had the two big undead smiting artifacts. We were about as high powered as can be expected in the module. I still felt the horror of the setting and figured Strahd had better than 50 50 odds of wrecking us as we drew closer to the culmination. We were all expecting it was probably going to end horrifically poorly, but possibly not and we were working hard through a comedy of errors to try for that possible not horrible ending for our monster hunters.

5e Ravenloft can work for not super low level PCs.

humble minion · Mar 3, 2021

overgeeked said:
The problem is both hit point inflation and access to higher level spells. Fewer hit points is good, but once the PCs can throw a fireball or lightning bolt those low-level critters become speed bumps rather than anything you could describe as dangerous.

Yeah, I get here you're coming from there. Big flashy combat spells and the gothic aesthetic are an uncomfortable mix. But unless you're willing to rewrite a lot of the monster manual, a lot of classic Gothic monsters are going to be out of reach. A bog-standard vampire, for instance, is CR13 with 144 hit points, legendary resistance, and resistance to any non-magical physical damage. There's no way known that any party of 3rd level PCs is going to be able to deal with that. And an advanced vampire, like Strahd? Forget it.

One way of Gothicking things up bit would be to just flat-out ban the entire school of evocation (and take an axe to a lot of transmutation as well) for all spellcasting classes. And pile on a Powers check (or 5e equivalent) for using damaging necromancy spells. Makes spellcasters more support-oriented than fireball cannons, and magic in general less flashy and more subtle. Of course that leaves a lot of other PC abilities like Radiance of the Dawn untouched, not to mention what horrible things it'd do to anyone wanting to play a warlock...

Maxperson · Mar 3, 2021

Faolyn said:
So let's say your adventuring party decides to kill Strahd, succeeds, and takes over, determined to make Barovia into a better place. They can do that! There are other domains that are actually fairly nice places to live (the political ruler of Mordent is Lawful Good), so Barovia could be changed for the better. Your PCs could make it so that the Barovians no longer huddle in fear of the creatures of the night, that they have access to education and higher technology.

But the actual lord of Mordent is evil, and if the PCs were to kill Strahd, the next most evil person in Barovia becomes Lord.

Bedrockgames · Mar 3, 2021

Faolyn said:
So let's say your adventuring party decides to kill Strahd, succeeds, and takes over, determined to make Barovia into a better place. They can do that! There are other domains that are actually fairly nice places to live (the political ruler of Mordent is Lawful Good), so Barovia could be changed for the better. Your PCs could make it so that the Barovians no longer huddle in fear of the creatures of the night, that they have access to education and higher technology.

You can't just take over because you kill a lord. The domain chooses someone else if there is a worthy individual, or it dissipates. They could gain political power in a domain. But then they would probably end up contending with the new lord (and political power wouldn't stop the monsters from coming)

Also, if you raise education and tech, they'd just be having horror adventures in a more culturally advanced domain. It wouldn't make the domain less horrifying.

Bedrockgames · Mar 3, 2021

Faolyn said:
I don't know how much Ravenloft lore you know, but historically, most of the domains are either copies of real places or are made whole-cloth by the Dark Powers. Killing Strahd won't send Barovia back to its original world because there is no original world for it to go back to.

I am pretty sure this isn't true, but it has been a long time since I've poured closely over the lore. I believe Barovia is a domain that was actually pulled from its original location. Again I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure the options are:

a copy of the place
a newly crafted place
the original place gets pulled into ravenloft

tetrasodium · Mar 3, 2021

humble minion said:
One possibility would be to allow PC advancement beyond a set level threshold (maybe 5th, I'm just brainstorming without any playtesting here..) but there's no hit point gain beyond that point. So you can dish out more as you get more experienced, but a couple of decent hits and you go down. It keeps low-level critters like zombies and wolves dangerous longer, if you're even only a little bit careless.

Whatever those kinds of rules suggested & declared lacking over the last page or so wind up being for optimum ravenloft feel their bulk needs to come from wotc rather than expecting ravenloft GMs to hand out a huge chunk of houserules before even starting to tweak ravenloft for their campaign's needs. It's al well & good that @Bedrockgames didn't like some of those elements in the past, but that kind of enforced one true way by omission from wotc to save someone from saying "we aren't going to use this thing" while forcing others to invent the thing whole cloth would be completely unreasonable for a 5e ravenloft book.

Not only is that unreasonable, it's completely unacceptable given how much of the system was rewritten by past ravenloft books. Put into perspective just how extensive the changes are... in the 3.0 ravenloft campaign setting book 28-35 goes over the races similar to how rising does for eberron versions of phb+eberron races33-44 classes & class feature changes, 45-47 rebuilds skills, 47-48 is a bunch of new feats. 49-54 rebuilds not only faiths but the nature of faith in ravenloft for classes like cleric/paladin that need it, 55-59 equipment, 60-61 bunch of character related questions to consider, 64-75 lets say rebuilding save mechanics & madness, 76-82 curses, it's already up to about 50 pages so far & it doesn't stop till about 107 when chaper4 rolls around. People expecting a sizable body of serious system level rules changes aimed at cranking the dial back from 5e's super saiyan target are on extremely solid footing when talking about an official ravenloft book like is being discussed.

overgeeked · Mar 3, 2021

Voadam said:
I was playing in a CoS 5e game before it went on hiatus due to DM burnout. At the end I was a 9th level flesh golemized bladesinger Esmerelda who was immune to non magical attacks and had ridiculous stats and skills and attacks. The party paladin had the two big undead smiting artifacts. We were about as high powered as can be expected in the module. I still felt the horror of the setting and figured Strahd had better than 50 50 odds of wrecking us as we drew closer to the culmination. We were all expecting it was probably going to end horrifically poorly, but possibly not and we were working hard through a comedy of errors to try for that possible not horrible ending for our monster hunters.

5e Ravenloft can work for not super low level PCs.

Right. That’s CoS, and you’re at 50/50 on taking out the Dark Lord of the Domain. So, what can you do in the rest of the setting? At that point nothing but bringing Dark Lords is a challenge. So what is there to be worried about that’s not Dark Lord smiting? Basically nothing. Nothing else in the setting that wouldn’t also give Strahd himself a run for his money is a challenge for your group. I don’t see how anything else would be a challenge. That’s not horror anymore. That’s not even gothic horror. It’s superheroes painted in black, white, and red. I want my Ravenloft games to be horror. So a low level cap.

Maxperson · Mar 3, 2021

Bedrockgames said:
I am pretty sure this isn't true, but it has been a long time since I've poured closely over the lore. I believe Barovia is a domain that was actually pulled from its original location. Again I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure the options are:

a copy of the place
a newly crafted place
the original place gets pulled into ravenloft

Yes. Barovia itself was drawn into the demiplane and became the first domain of Ravenloft.

Faolyn · Mar 3, 2021

Maxperson said:
But the actual lord of Mordent is evil, and if the PCs were to kill Strahd, the next most evil person in Barovia becomes Lord.

Right. I was talking about political rulers versus Darklords, who are not always the same individual.

Faolyn · Mar 3, 2021

Bedrockgames said:
You can't just take over because you kill a lord. The domain chooses someone else if there is a worthy individual, or it dissipates. They could gain political power in a domain. But then they would probably end up contending with the new lord (and political power wouldn't stop the monsters from coming)

Also, if you raise education and tech, they'd just be having horror adventures in a more culturally advanced domain. It wouldn't make the domain less horrifying.

Right, that was my entire point here. Doctorbadwolf was saying that there was some sort of reset that happened upon killing Strahd which made the whole thing pointless and bad, but I was trying to explain that in Ravenloft, killing the Darklord would could cause other things to happen.