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

 

[Bedrockgames]

It was the best they could do in one paragraph, but if you must keep plantation slavery as an important part of the domain, I guess nothing was going to save it.

A couple of things. Content in media does not equal message. This cannot be said enough. You can enjoy media maturely and understand that. So a domain with plantation slavery could be viable as an interesting place based on something from real world history (especially if you are trying to model it after something from America). But number two, I didn't mention plantation slavery. Number three: Sauragne in the black box and DoD is a little vague on what the exact situation is. Black Box has almost nothing. DoD says lower class people are basically serfs, but it isn't based on race. There are black people there, there are white people there, but it says there is no issue of racial prejudice. The only thing that matters is class. Which is why I made the remark about having class based bigotry in a domain isn't an endorsement of it. It is essentially a feudal domain with serfs if I recall (the wealthy own land and the lower classes, if I remember, live off that land. I don't think there was specific mention of slaves (I could be misremembering, as it has been a while but I just checked Black box and skimmed DoD and am not seeing reference to slavery----perhaps Night of the walking Dead has some reference to it: lost my copy of that so can't check it). But that wasn't the point I was making. Still I don't see why interesting historical backdrops like that have to be taken off the table. Horror often is set against terrible things (the witch craze for example was horrible, but can provide all kinds of interesting things for a horror campaign). Having the witch craze in a setting wouldn't be an endorsement of witch hunts.

 

[humble minion]

The old I'Cath always seemed to me like someone had been doing a bit of reading about Chinese hells and wanted to write a domain very faithful to those concepts, but gave very little thought about how on earth anyone would ever actually use it in a real-life game session. As far as actual practical use of the domain, SOME sort of rewrite was almost mandatory.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Serious question (and one that's largely unrelated to the rewrite/retcon/change debate) - what did you do with Valachan, in-game? Other than the main plot with Urik von Kharkov and the Cat of Felkovic (which was the plot of the dungeon module), it always seemed like a domain with very few points of interest. In the let's read thread I was really wracking my brains to think of anything to do with the place, outside telling that single story. I'd love to hear from anyone who grokked it in a way I didn't - if you really liked Valachan and ran a game there, what was the attraction, and what sort of game did you play?

It has been some time since my peak days of running Ravenloft so my memory is pretty fuzzy on details. These days I run it more as a once in a while thing between my regular campaigns. But I can say my memory is initially Valachan was a domain I overlooked. But if I remember there was a Dungeon Adventure set there in 1994, and that really made the domain pop for me. I don't recall exactly why, but it had something to do with giving me a better sense of towns or locals or something. Whatever it was, I started fleshing out the domain a lot more (black box Ravenloft you really were expected to extrapolate and it was a question of whether the domain spoke to you and inspired you). Generally the way I used domains wasn't to center them on the main figures in them. If you do that most are pretty lean actually (they would basically just be places to go domain lord hunting). Instead I used domain lords as models and blueprints for the logic of the domain. So I had a lot of Nosferatu vampires, but because he was a panther, I also ran a lot of cat people or sleepwalkers style adventures (I remember making a monster entry for creatures based on the movie sleepwalkers and using them). I imagined clusters of Nosferatu in the cemeteries and countryside. Also there was some mention of Valachan I believe in one of the Van Richten books. I can't remember the details. But those books often gave me a knew way of seeing domains because you were plunged into many of Van Richten's hunts. And I think I got inspiration for some kind of bog golem or were bear scenario there (I really can't get it straight in my memory, but I do recall doing stuff based off that).

In terms of geography, Valachan shifted quite a bit during 2E. So there is the very remote version in black box, and the less remote version in red box and DoD. I liked both placements for different reasons. The latter placement had it bordering mordent, verbrek and sithicus, which worked really well for me. I had a lot of Kartakass domains and Mordent is a good home base for lots of adventures because of Van Richten. So in that instance, there was always a good reason to pass through and I remember having a lot of 'on the road' adventures through Valachan and Sithicus (and the on the road stuff was often the best). But as a remote domain it worked too. I think it worked very well for example for a kind of Dracula style adventure. The domain is similar in lots of ways to Barovia, but has a much different vampire lord. And because Nosferatu drain con, that is a little less lethal for a low level party, and also a little more in line with how things are described in Dracula. I believe the 94 dungeon adventure was built around this type of scenario. But any nosferatu scenario involving Baron von Kharkov, his vampire slaves, or another cluster of Nosferatu led by some NPC (this is the sort of adventure I tended to prefer). Also with its wilderness it was the kind of place that was easy to imagine having anything you needed for an adventure (an old forgotten tomb, a creature ravaging homesteads, etc).

I don't t think it was introduced till after the black box (the domain was pretty lean in black box: von Kharkov didn't even get an entry until the Darklord book if I remember). But I remember really liking that the domain had inhabitants who were black with straight black hair but culturally it seemed vaguely German to me (they might have been going for something else, but the names to me resonated as German). I think the reason it struck me as interesting was just the world building. It reflected the dark lord, but also it separated culture from ethnicity. I am sure it had been done many times before but this was my first encounter with that in a game product and it influenced how I approached world building as a GM (I still see merit in both approaches, since sometimes you want to clearly invoke a historical period or something). But I remember quite liking this detail (especially since it was just kind of expected, if a place sounded German, the people would look German).

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

Why wouldn't the reboot and change everything the author's didn't like?
That's what they did for the Forgotten Realms in 4th Ed, for Dragonlance SAGA, and Greyhawk after GREYHAWK WARS. And the fans all universally loved those products and they became the new standards for those settings.

 

[Remathilis]

A couple of things. Content in media does not equal message. This cannot be said enough. You can enjoy media maturely and understand that. So a domain with plantation slavery could be viable as an interesting place based on something from real world history (especially if you are trying to model it after something from America). But number two, I didn't mention plantation slavery. Number three: Sauragne in the black box and DoD is a little vague on what the exact situation is. Black Box has almost nothing. DoD says lower class people are basically serfs, but it isn't based on race. There are black people there, there are white people there, but it says there is no issue of racial prejudice. The only thing that matters is class. Which is why I made the remark about having class based bigotry in a domain isn't an endorsement of it. It is essentially a feudal domain with serfs if I recall (the wealthy own land and the lower classes, if I remember, live off that land. I don't think there was specific mention of slaves (I could be misremembering, as it has been a while but I just checked Black box and skimmed DoD and am not seeing reference to slavery----perhaps Night of the walking Dead has some reference to it: lost my copy of that so can't check it). But that wasn't the point I was making. Still I don't see why interesting historical backdrops like that have to be taken off the table. Horror often is set against terrible things (the witch craze for example was horrible, but can provide all kinds of interesting things for a horror campaign). Having the witch craze in a setting wouldn't be an endorsement of witch hunts.

Souragne did tiptoe around race-based slavery inserting some language like that to cover their butts, but it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots between it and Antebellum Louisiana and Voodoo, which are topics that should be treated with the same care as the Vistani have recently gotten (or do you think that the VIstani should remain a pastiche of Gypies, since the media isn't the message?)

 

[Remathilis]

Why wouldn't the reboot and change everything the author's didn't like?
That's what they did for the Forgotten Realms in 4th Ed, for Dragonlance SAGA, and Greyhawk after GREYHAWK WARS. And the fans all universally loved those products and they became the new standards for those settings.

Maybe WotC should just play it safe and only release Forgotten Realms modules and Magic: The Gathering crossovers.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Souragne did tiptoe around race-based slavery inserting some language like that to cover their butts, but it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots between it and Antebellum Louisiana and Voodoo, which are topics that should be treated with the same care as the Vistani have recently gotten (or do you think that the VIstani should remain a pastiche of Gypies, since the media isn't the message?)

I don't think they used that language to cover their butts, they used that language to make it explicitly not about race. So they aren't tiptoeing at all. It certainly could have been antebellum Louisiana, but it also could have been modeled after something in the Caribbean as well. In all likelihood whatever it was based on probably had race based slavery, but they didn't include it as far as I remember. In fact it looks like they specifically separated race out of the equation just to make sure it wasn't an issue. But my point is even if they had, that period in history existed, it is something you could draw on in a setting, and doing so wouldn't be an endorsement of slavery. It would be using something we recognize in order to provide a setting appropriate to horror (slavery is a terrible thing, particularly racially based slavery). I am not saying Ravenloft needs to have that or should. I am just saying if they did, I don't think it is automatically a problem, in a horror setting (unless they are doing something awful like defending it---but they wouldn't be doing that)

I just re-read the vistani section in the black box and I thought it was fine (actually I think the curse of strahd Vistani had more negative traits than the black box but I could be wrong). But I liked the idea of vistani who could move freely from domain to domain, and existed slightly outside of time, and were connected to the gypsy horror trope. But again, I grew up in the states. Gypsies really weren't something we encountered. So the trope had very different meaning here. And I think the usage of it in Ravenloft was one where they were holding up gypsies as cool (they had a very bohemian vibe).

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

Maybe WotC should just play it safe and only release Forgotten Realms modules and Magic: The Gathering crossovers.

I imagine the difference is now there's so many more newbs who don't give a flip about old lore and continuity changes, there'll be less bother about the revisions
Expect to see an equally changed Dragonlance or Greyhawk now

 

[Bedrockgames]

since the media isn't the message?)

please don't change my language. I never said the media isn't the message. I said content does not equal message. By which I mean, using something like the holocaust as a backdrop or something like racial conflict and tension as a conflict in the game, isn't an endorsement of either one.

 

[humble minion]

I imagine the difference is now there's so many more newbs who don't give a flip about old lore and continuity changes, there'll be less bother about the revisions
Expect to see an equally changed Dragonlance or Greyhawk now

It's worth remembering that even when old lore was new lore, lots of people hated it. In Dragonlance, the 'new' War of Souls lore is so old that it's closer in real-world time to the 'old' 1980s War of the Lance lore than it is to now, and is older than a large percentage of the modern D&D player base. And in Greyhawk, jeez. If you're adhering to the old lore, do you stick to the old 1992 From the Ashes continuity which was so hated at the time? And do you respect the lore from the clown-shoes original Castle Greyhawk module which was written as a middle finger to Gygax as he left TSR, or the more serious retcon later on in Greyhawk Ruins? Sometimes old lore was just bad. Did anyone like Dark Sun MORE after the Prism Pentad blew up the setting? Retconning half the original 2e DS line and winding the timeline back to post Kalak is one of the few things in DS 4e that got almost universal approval.