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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4565344" data-attributes="member: 2067">You could be right. Still, Strahd had stats and killing him to liberate Barovia from his tyranny was a pretty solid plan in the 3e module, so there certainly is precedent.My greater point was that I don't think there's going to be a 4e "Ravenloft Campaign Setting" that focuses on Gothic Horror as a variant fantasy milieu for all sorts of adventures. Rather, the Domains of Dread will be more like dungeons: You enter them, you solve their puzzles, you fight their monsters, you probably make your way back home at the end. Ravenloft won't exist to bring the worlds of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelly to life in D&D, allowing you to play troubled heroes in a land of oppressive fear.Rather, it will exist to tack on different kinds of dungeons that might give some particularly horrific flavor.It's a Ravenloft designed as an enhancement to your ongoing D&D campaign, rather than a Ravenloft designed as a replacement for your typical D&D campaign. There are good things and bad things about this choice, just like there were good things and bad things about the choice to make it a stand-alone setting.Good thing about making the Domains dungeons? You can stick your characters in, give them a good horror challenge in a world where they can stake Dracula and wrestle Frakenstien's Monster and kill the Mummy and take it's stuff. There's a lot of fun in that. Bad thing about making the Domains dungeons? You loose the more powerful message of the genre. Ideas of science run mad and predatory royals and barely repressed Victorian sexuality and Mysteries Better Left Mysterious and such get a bit weaker when you're playing a tiefling warlock who has pledged his soul to the dark forces of Hell as a heroic character.You get to change your games up a bit, but you don't get to re-define what it means to be a hero. It's still D&D -- it's still "kill things and take their stuff." Strahd or Tiamat or Grazz't or Orcus or Asmodeus or the Mummy or a physical manifestation of scientific hubris gone mad, that's what you do to these things. Kill them, take their stuff. It's not gothic horror (which isn't generally so much about killing things and taking their stuff as it is about opulent awfulness). That's how you resolve conflicts, in D&D.That's not expressly a negative thing, though many trufans of old school Ravenloft will probably be disappointed. Really, it's designing to D&D's strengths. I think a "Ravenloft" setting that focused on gothic horror's true zeitgeist might be better suited for a d20 Modern-style interpretation, anyway. They're not going to re-define what D&D is for Ravenloft.That's a choice with both some positive and negative aspects.And right now it's just rampant speculation, anyway, so who knows, I could be shocked by WotC yet.</blockquote>

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