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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8269975" data-attributes="member: 5948">Well, the only black darklord (and one of the very very few named black characters in the entire line) being an actual literal polymorphed animal was part of it.But more to the point, Valachan was ... boring.  Seriously.  Was anyone really interested in or attached to Valachan as it was?  It didn't really reflect any major horror tropes, it's darklord's origin was a convoluted mess (what did he even do in order for the Dark Powers to make him a Darklord?) and bad-GM-metagamey (his guards are all werepanthers and when he bites someone they turn into a werepanther and he can turn into a panther but SURPRISE he's a weird variant vampire so if your PCs came to fight him prepared for werepanthers, sucks to be you, oh and he lacks most of the regular vampire weaknesses so even if you did come prepared for vampires, sucks to be you too).  It was even tucked away in the corner of the Core with no reason for anyone to ever go there.Valachan was a stale, boring domain written entirely around one long-ago module in Dungeon magazine, and it was absolutely ripe for reinvention.  The racial issues around it would probably only have been a part of the reason why this was done. Could the authors have just left it out of the book completely?  Well, yes.  And honestly I'm not sure why they didn't - maybe they wanted to cover as many as possible of the domains of the old Core in the new book - but that doesn't explain why Sithicus or the Shadow Rift were left out.  And of course if WotC had been hyper-keen to populate the new book with rewrites of any and all problematic old domains to align more closely with modern principles, they certainly would have put a redo of Sebua  (the one with the darklord who fell in tragic love with her rapist...) high on the priority list.</blockquote>

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