Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="gonzoron" data-source="post: 3974804" data-attributes="member: 31753">Ain't broke, don't fix it.  Have your cake, eat it too.What is Ravenloft at it's core?  (forgive the pun) Gothic Horror D&D.  With that in mind, all the funky stuff some people seem to want to chuck out (the demiplane, domains, darklords, the patchwork world) are vital DM tools to allow the premise to work.  Horror is such a varied hodge-podge of ideas, it needs to be able to draw from anywhere, and make sense when it does.   The genre needs (apparently) unstoppable bad guys that the protagonists can only hope to foil time and again.   It needs the mystery and unpredictability of the Mists.  It needs the Deus ex machina of the vistani.No matter how mapped out and filled in Ravenloft got due to the Gazetteers, no matter how much gets added in the future, there's still room to stick in whatever you want.  And you can always blame it on the Mists.  The world can look as real or as forced as you want it to and still the Mists are out there.   The Gazetteers and other 3e books (along with 2e's Domains of Dread) went out of their way to make a lot of the patchwork stuff make sense, at least from a native's point of view.  Why mess that up to attract new players while alienating the old?A 4e RL player who's never played before doesn't need to know who Azenwrath is, or what happened to Eva Mordenheim, but why should they be bothered if old school players have that info?  An ideal 4e book would summarize and build on what's come before, not destroy or reinvent it.  The emphasis should be: here are the basic facts, here's the mood of the setting, and here is how you can ignore or change anything you want to because of the handy Mysterious Mists.Sure, you might want to shake up a few things, so it's not just the same old fluff with new crunch.  (I've got 5 editions of the RL Campaign setting.  I don't really need another just to convert the rules.)  Advance a few latent plots here and there.  Maybe change out a darklord or two.  But leave the TouD to the DMs.ETA: I might add, I agree both Jon Wake's & Remathilis write some great evocative imagery above.  But none of it is incompatible with Ravenloft as it stands.  (OK, the talk of the darklords making direct pacts with the Dark Powers is a stretch, but otherwise, how exactly does those moods not work with the existing demiplane?)</blockquote>

Verification