NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Paul Farquhar" data-source="post: 8208980" data-attributes="member: 6906155">Some thoughts on "the break up of the core"When the original Ravenloft module was published it was designed to drop into an ongoing campaign. It was, therefore, part of "the real world" of the setting.However, the second module, The House on Griffin Hill, connected to the first not by geography, but by dream. The suggestion was each time the party slept they would transfer between Mordentshire and Barovia.This was based on a strong tradition in gothic horror (gothic romance too) of blurring the line between dreams and reality.When the campaign setting was released it complicated matters. Now it was explicitly not the real world of the campaign setting, PCs where transported from their "real" fantasy world through the mists - a sort of dream within a dream. However, running counter to that was the fixed geography of the core. With real world issues such as international trade, diplomacy, economics and politics entering the setting - not such things as dreams are made of! And, along with economy, the need for people to be able to live productive lives in the world without being ripped to shreds by monsters as soon as they stepped outside their doors.With the break up of fixed geography in 5e, combined with the placement of Ravenloft in the Shadowfell (reiterated in Tasha's) it makes the setting more dreamlike. Non-static geography - I walk down my childhood street in Liverpool and enter a familiar London pub  - is a feature of dreams, as is a constantly changing reality. The peasant we saw eaten yesterday is back at work today. And the soulless folk introduced in CoS start to make sense - they are shadow-people, native to the Shadowfell. This also explains the horror trope of the villagers refusing to accept there is anything unusual going on, despite all evidence to the contrary!So, this making Ravenloft more dreamlike also makes it more gothic. At the same time as introducing non-gothic horror! But one thing you can do with these individual mini-worlds is drop them into your "real" world campaign setting, losing any dreamlike element, and making the horror entirely real. Which takes us back to the original I6 Ravenloft Module.Has the top stopped spinning?</blockquote>

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