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="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8210196"><p>Something worth pointing out here as well: the original Ravenloft line had a few schools of thought within it and it evolved. I have been largely advocating for the black boxed set (Realm of Terror). But Domains of Dread made Ravenloft more of a stable, complete setting with native characters (Steven Miller specifically says in the DoD intro that he felt one weakness of the line in its first four years was it felt too much like the show the prisoner and campaigns revolved around escape). Lots of people liked the approach the DoD book brought. And even those like me who cut their teeth on the black box, admired its overall crafting and completeness. Basically whether you are more of a black box GM or a DoD GM is going to depend on your style (for modern GMs one big appeal the DoD book might have is it does lend itself better to things like sandboxes as it is just easier to navigate the material as the players go from one place to another). Also for those who want a more natural world feel, Domains of Dread provides that. It also clarifies things when it comes to tech. In the black box, it was a lot less clear how tech worked (it felt like they were trying to still say this was medieval fantasy but the art and many other aspects seemed to suggest later periods, or at least the intrusion of later periods). Domains of Dread provides cultural levels for domains, and each one has a clearly identified cultural level (so you now know concretely that Lamordia is Renaissance, Borca is Chivalric, and Falkovnia is Medieval. This matters if you want to explore things like trade, politics, war, etc. We certainly might have quibbled over the assigned cultural levels, but they were there and now you had some foundation for understanding why Lamordia had technology that Barovia didn't. It still important to remember though, that while these lands are physically connected, 'spiritually' they are not, they are still reflections of their dark lord and that connections produces the nature of the domain (which is why a medieval domain still won't upgrade to the renaissance simply because it shares a border with a domain that is (though in fairness a GM could explore that as a thought experiment and figure out how far the dark powers would led technological change arise in the medieval domain). The book also has rules for native characters. I personally still liked running PCs as outsiders, but I knew plenty of people who liked the native character approach (and I did run games with the players as natives).</p></blockquote><p></p>

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