D&D General New art with a bit of text from Ravenloft: Horror Within

[beta-ray]

Or ChatGPT.

Not this again

 

[bedir than]

I'm more interested in hearing about the mechanical gm support in this book and the silence on that has been absolutely deafening. I can make plenty of themed dark fantasy landscape images from copilot grok chatgpt midjourney and so on. What I can't do is point to an official page of mechanical rules supporting me as a gm in running a campaign with those sorts of themes and baseline expectations that me say "these rules are being used and we won't be descending into arguments about how they are badwrongfun in conflict with the polls wotc did. Nor will we allow Bob to join then repeatedly revive that debate by deliberately making an effort to play in a way that proves these rules can't be fun while claiming innocence over malicious compliance."

If you're willing to use LLMs for art you should have no objection to using them for rules -- it's good at either thing and the theft is there no matter what.

But if you're honestly looking for the mechanics I don't know why you'd expect them in a designed-for-Instagram post.

Instead I would look at the DnD Beyond blog entries on the book.

Everything You Need to Know About Ravenloft: The Horrors Within

Discover Ravenloft’s new horrors, character options, Darklords, campaign tools, and nightmare-fueled adventures in the Domains of Dread.

www.dndbeyond.com

 

[tetrasodium]

If you're willing to use LLMs for art you should have no objection to using them for rules -- it's good at either thing and the theft is there no matter what.

But if you're honestly looking for the mechanics I don't know why you'd expect them in a designed-for-Instagram post.

Instead I would look at the DnD Beyond blog entries on the book.

↑Look at money bags here↑ commissioning bespoke hand drawn art for one off illustrative purposes to show your players just for something fun to flash onto the table and maybe never use again. What's your average budget per session? Do you fund it yourself or do your players pay by the session?

Everything You Need to Know About Ravenloft: The Horrors Within

Discover Ravenloft’s new horrors, character options, Darklords, campaign tools, and nightmare-fueled adventures in the Domains of Dread.

www.dndbeyond.com

Seen it. Some monsters alongside lots of toys for PC builds but nothing about mechanics supporting theme tone or really anything else. That absence is the problem.

Thanks everyone for showing the need for wotc to do better when it comes to the GM's running this stuff.

 

[AlViking]

I like the art well enough, not sure how you get "whimsical" from a person holding a head by the hair while grimacing. As far as the rules I'll have to wait until we know what they actually are before making a call. Then again some people seem to want a very different style of game than I want when playing D&D.

 

[Selas]

I wouldn't expect WotC to do an in-depth article on DM toolkit mechanics like they did with the DMG until close to the official publish date (on or after 2 week early release)

 

[bedir than]

↑Look at money bags here↑ commissioning bespoke hand drawn art for one off illustrative purposes to show your players just for something fun to flash onto the table and maybe never use again. What's your average budget per session? Do you fund it yourself or do your players pay by the session?

I play theater of the mind almost entirely, with the art I feature coming from the publishers and artists I support. That's almost entirely maps or scene-setting stuff.
It's not that I'm wealthy. It's just I feel that it is my duty to pay people for the work they do rather than steal.

Thanks everyone for showing the need for wotc to do better when it comes to the GM's running this stuff.

I expect it'll be similar to what was in Van Richten's with lots of advice on how to use specific Domains for specific stories, leaning into the two pillars with lighter mechanical support rather than oppressive player-hostile checks.

I've found that suggestion to work quite well when I was a PC in Barovia. The table leaned into the narrative. Things were dark and foreboding, using the art in the books over a VTT.

 

[Selas]

The book will likely have more crunch than VGR had, from everything we've seen so far; that is at least a win in my books. The art shown so far is a step up from the PHB, and I'd say on par with the MM (which had the best of the new core books)

 

[Reynard]

WotC does seem relatively reticent to introduce new GM facing subsystems, as opposed to new bits and bobs for PCs. But I have not been following the project. It's entirely possible that there are such rules in the book.

 

[Desdichado]

Not this again

What exactly do you think "this" is? On a whim a year or so ago, I used ChatGPT to generate some names of new Lovecraftian entities so I wouldn't have to just use the same old Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth and Tsathoggua and all that that everyone always uses. I wasn't very happy with the results, but they curiously sounded very much like "Domain of the Imprisoned Apocalyptic." Out of 100 names or so that I generated, I got maybe half a dozen that were OK. Not good, but OK. But the text associated with these images is very representative of the kind of output ChatGPT gives you.

If you think I was going for the typical reddit and ENW screech and head for the fainting couches at the very mention of AI, you've definitely called this one wrong.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

, I used ChatGPT to generate some names of new Lovecraftian entities so I wouldn't have to just use the same old Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth and Tsathoggua and all that that everyone always uses.

It's easy to create names for Lovecraftian entities, you just string random consonants together "Q'fknjopuc". So it's pretty sad that anyone needs a computer to help them do it. But one thing these LLMs have been taught now is grammar, so it's very unlikely to confuse an adjective with a noun. That's the sort of mistake (or more likely in this case deliberate creative choice) that takes a human.