Ravenloft Campaigns: What’s the meta-point?

[gonzoron]

Now we're drifting from "the problem with Ravenloft is you can't win" to "the problem with Ravenloft is it's an artificial world." Different argument, but I'll still take it on. IMHO, Ravenloft's artificiality is one of its strengths and adds to its uniqueness as a game world, and it's usuability by DMs.

In Ravenloft proper, What becomes of a domain once its darklord is destroyed?

Depends, one of 3 things. From the FraternityofShadows.com FAQ:

• The domain disappears (most likely with smaller Island-type domains).
• A nearby domain absorbs the land (as occurred with Gundarak during the Grand Conjunction).
• Some other evil being in the domain takes over the Lordship. (as occurred in Richemulot and Invidia).

I would add "the domain disppears" doesn't necessarily mean everyone in it disappears. For domains that were pulled from Prime Material worlds, it could mean the whole land returns to the world it came from.

If the PCs manage to kill Strahd, what happens to Barovia? Could the PCs try to hold Barovia and make it a better place? If not the domain, how about establishing a safe-haven in the domain? In ANY domain?

Depends, could be any one of the above. And it's up the DM to decide. Since we know from the Roots of Evil module that the original Barovia still exists in the Prime Material plane, it probably wouldn't go back there. But I doubt it would dissolve, being part of the Core. Most likely I'd say absorbed by its neighbors as Gundarak was. Or perhaps falling to another darklord, likely Lyssa von Zarovich. But either of those situations is likely a change for the better.

Just because there's a new darklord in the domain doens't mean they are instantly in charge. Mordent, Lamordia, and Nova Vaasa, for example, all have political leaders that are not the darklord. In all three cases, the darklord lurks at the fringes of power, and in the case of the first two, the political leaders are even relatively benevolent. There's nothing stopping the PCs from crafting such a society in Strahd-less Barovia. Heck, if they can defeat Strahd, they can probably do so even without killing him, just deposing him. There ARE (relatively) safe havens in Ravenloft, Mordentshire being the foremost.

In any case, unless the DM goes with the "Barovia and everything in it dissolves" possibility, killing Strahd is always a change for the better. No matter how many darklords may take his place, no matter if Strahd Rises from the Grave, there's one less bloodsucker for a while, and THAT'S A VICTORY.

A concrete, canon example: The people of Gundarak may not appreciate being second-class citizens in Barovia, but they are far better off than when Duke Gundar was alive. (er... undead... er... the first time around... let's just say "when Duke Gundar was darklord of Gundarak".) At least they don't have to worry about their daughters being seized by their ruler. (Unless she's the latest Tatyana reincarnation, I guess, but for the most part, no.). They are utterly unaware of the metaphysical underpinings that changed in their land. Just that one tyrant was slain, and a neighboring, less brutal one took his land. The ones on the Invidia side of the border were even better off, at least until Malocchio took over. But that's situational. If someone killed Von Kharkov, for example, and his domain was absorbed by Mordent, the Valachani would be way better off. And it can happen. Gundarak is the proof.

The point in subtle, but its there. Gothic Earth still conforms to Earth standards; there are no magically appearing seas every just accepts, portions of Africa don't go missing one day, trade isn't interrupted because Lord Drakov is having a hissy-fit and closing his borders, and the racial, cultural, and technological advancements (let alone weirdness like moon changing from domain to domain ) of the world don't radically shift by walking from Spain to Turkey. Too much of Ravenloft is cliche stitched together without rhyme or reason creating a world that doesn't FEEL natural, even to a native. Its a collection of pieces, not a harmonious whole.

The "patchwork vs. real world" argument is one that has raged among Ravenloft fans for years, and if an artificial world isn't your cup of tea, I'm not likely to convince you otherwise, but there a few misconceptions here.

1) The realms don't shift on a daily basis. There was one major reshuffling during the Grand Conjunction, a single catclysmic event that hasn't been repeated. Cataclysms are supposed to change the world in fantasy settings. Just ask the people of Krynn, or Atlantis, or Dominaria, or Alderaan. Other than that one time, there have been the addition of new lands, including new seas, but except in the infancy of the demiplane, these have occurred simply by the Mists rolling back and revealing new land, whose inhabitants claim it was "always there."
2) Nitpick: Drakov can't close his borders. But if another DL were to do so, disrupting trade, how is that different than a dragon preying on trade routes or magic ritual gone awry making a road impassible? These things happen rarely, but this is a fantasy world.
3) The really weird stuff like the moons has been smoothed over in recent editions of the setting. Nova Vaasa's five moons were debunked in Gazetteer V, and Sithicus, which used to have only Nuitari, the black moon only evil people can see, gained a normal moon as well as of Spectre of the Black Rose.
4) Cultural advancements take time to spread, and the Core simply hasn't existed together for very long. Add to that the natural resistance to long distance travel of the average peasant and the added danger of such travel in a horror-fantasy world, and you can easily have different cultures side-by-side.
5) Much work has been done in the 3e line to bind the world together as a cohesive whole. Just because the domains started separately doesn't mean they have to remain that way. The Ezran religion has spread across the Core, diplomacy between the domians has become important.

The climate issue is, admittedly, a little weird, but much like the Misty Borders themselves, and the "new lands" being revealed, the people of Ravenloft have no reason to think this is unusual. This is the only world they know; the science of even the most advanced domains doesn't go much further than Earth's 1800's. If it's the way it's always been, it would seem perfectly normal. The "ends of the earth" is a real tangible place in Ravenloft and the demiplane is a world that's just a little closer in time to its creation "myth" than most. And if you're a Barovian farmer for whom a long trip is to the marketplace in town, who cares? PCs are a different breed, of course, and in the course of their adventures may naturally start to figure out something weird is going on. But does that make it less worthwhile to save the day?

 

[Irda Ranger]

Blech. Pretty much everything in gonzoron's last post is a turn-off for me. Artificiality sure is unique, but so is puke-flavored ice cream. I like how Remalthis summed it up as (to paraphrase), "But for the Dark Powers, Ravenloft would exist as a normal D&D world."

A few thoughts though, as long as I'm here ...

1.) Either accept demi-humans across the core or remove them utterly.

I agree that how the xenophobia in Ravenloft was implemented was annoying and artificial feeling occasionally, but I also like the concept of xenophobic villagers. It drives home the feeling of how afraid people are most of the time.

I think a better way to handle it (rather than race) would simply be "Are you from around here?". A particular village or region's inhabitants would be somewhere on the xenophobia scale between "Parisian" and "All Wanderers Must Be Burned Alive", and it would apply to all strangers equally - human or otherwise.

2.) Standardize technology. <snip>

3.) Create a common or trade tongue.

I don't see these as necessary. Although extreme in Ravenloft, it's not like these things don't happen in other campaign settings. There are primitive and advanced (technologically and magically) parts of Faerun, Ansalaon, the Flanaess, etc.

And "the common tongue" was always a cop-out to ease of play, IMO. This is really campaign-dependent.

5.) Lastly, (and this is something Arthaus started by necessity) remove as many other-world references as possible.

I'd rather "smooth them out" then eliminate them. Although normalizing the moons, stars and other "big picture" items makes sense, keeping as much as possible of the original setting is a great source of inspiration. Just try to find a reasonably non-stupid explanation that fits into the greater tapestry of the world you're building. It's not like other campaign worlds don't have odd transitions in them (like the desert Aunorach, Thay's plateau, etc.).

 

[Imaro]

I'm not really feeling alot of these so called "fixes" for Ravenloft. I honestly think the strangeness and artificial nature of the world are one of the key factors to making Ravenloft a "horror" setting, especially as far as D&D goes. This is what makes Ravenloft horror, especially when dealing with characters who kill and maim monsters on a regular basis for little incentive but coin and can eventually arise to hunt and kill gods.

They need to be somewhere strange, isolated, unfamiliar, almost incomprehensible, basically already out of their usual element (which most commoners on other worlds would consider horrific already) to be anywhere near approaching a gothic horror feel given D&D's power levels. I also like and even think the Dark Powers are a good setting element. A good DM when invoking an atmosphere of fear needs something the players can't quantitatively measure against themselves or totally understand the motives of. All the Dark Powers (and to a lesser extent the Darklords) are is a gameworld sanctioned tool for this.

IMO, gothic horror is about uncertain heroes as the underdog, evil in a position of almost overwhelming power, isolation, the unfamiliar or alien and villains with often too human failings and weaknesses taken to an almost grotesque level. I get the impression some people want Ravenloft to be similar to the movie Van Helsing... cool I gues, but certainly not gothic horror.

 

[Toras]

Honestly, I think the big trick for the 4e Ravenloft would be to make the Dark Powers thieves of a sort. The land they take from Prime Material worlds and bind to them through the anchor of the land's inherent evil inhabitants, particularly the dark lord.

It is why they combine Realms or promote a new Darklord, because otherwise the land will return from whence it came once its Darklord has been shuffled loose its moral coil. Which would mean that each Darklord you defeat gets you one step closer to saving the lands within Ravenloft from the Mists and those who dwell within it.

Once your heroes get an area to slide back into the mortal realm, they face an even greater choice. Do they go back for more, rushing back into hell to save more people now that they have know it works? Can they? And who have they left behind?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Ravenloft, for me, boils down to one pretty basic gameplay motif:

Defend the Fort

In many ways, in standard D&D, and blatantly so in 4e, the basic idea is aggressive -- you go somewhere, you change things, you come back better for the experience. You are encouraged to go out.

Ravenloft is kind of the opposite impetus. You stay in, you resist change, and, if you succeed, you are better for the experience -- better equipped to handle it the next time it comes for you. You are encouraged to stay in.

This kind of urge should be as present for the PC's as it is for the window-dressing townsfolk that farm the dirt of Barovia. Namely, the PC's should feel a strong pressure to hunker down, defend a location, and be thankful with nothing leaping at their throat in this one moment, because that could change in the next. You win not by killing all the goblins, but by protecting your local orphanage from the rampages of dark things beneath the stairs -- if you go out to kill all the goblins, you will die. If you just drive them off...then you'll be fine...for now...

The inherent conflicts that I see all boil down to this: in Ravenloft, the conflict isn't between Good and Evil. It's between Bad and Worse, and often these lines are fluid.

#1: Trust No One vs. Die Alone. In Ravenloft, if you try to achieve something on the power of your own heroism, you will fail, and probably be mocked by dirt-farmers for trying. YOU can't do anything by yourself. At the same time, everyone you do team up with will have some big issues (see below) that are likely to endanger you and everyone around you. A PC is constantly torn between working with people who are stabbing him in the back (even if unintentionally), and working alone against things trying to stab him in the face (again, even if unintentionally). Success lies in balancing these -- trust your friend the Paladin of Pureheart too much, and chances are he'll go mad in his sleep and kill you all. But if you don't trust the Paladin of Pureheart at all, he won't be able to defend you from the Zombie Hoard that is knocking down the walls of your medieval shopping mall.

#2: Skeletons in the Closet vs. Zombies in the Streets. In Ravenloft, everyone has their secret sins and problems -- the Dark Powers have fondled everyone's collective soul, and even the most devout priest of Pelor probably does dark things at night in the privacy of his own priory. However, revealing these things, calling them out and making them well-known, is just going to make the problem into something that hurts everyone. If what that priest does becomes known, it will weaken his position, rendering his family, his friends, his entire community, vulnerable. Every PC should have a secret, and the balance should be between hiding that secret (and the danger it does to you) and having that secret revealed (and the danger it does to everyone around you). Success is minimizing the damage you do to everything around you, and still managing to live.

#3: Save Yourself vs. Save Everyone Else. In Ravenloft, one of the big goals has always been "escape." You don't wanna be here, it's a horrible place, and everybody smells funny and sounds vaguely Eastern European. But that's self-interested...you're also a heroic figure, and you want to end this evil blight upon the land, too. This is ultimately the corrupting influence of the plane -- if you save yourself, you "win" but to win in Ravenloft is to become part of its evil and vile nature. If you save everyone else, you "loose", but loosing in Ravenloft is the only way to keep your soul intact. Success in the context of a game with challenges and whatnot means saving as many as you can, and counting that as better than the alternatives (loosing everyone, or dying yourself).

Ravenloft is thus a defensive game of conservation -- you're more the things defending the MacGuffin than the guys who go to get the MacGuffin.

The things discussed mostly here are just corollaries -- the xenophobia is a trait that NPC's and PC's develop to defend themselves against risking trust in someone that they don't know at all. The prominence of villains over heroes is the result of villains being "pure" and the assertive yang-force in the setting, and heroes never being perfect and being the defensive yin-force in the setting.

It ain't just D&D with vampires instead of dragons.

It's totally possible to do this within the 4e ruleset but I am concerned that the 4e team's mandate to make "everything core" ultimately means that we get the same game with different window dressing, rather than a real exploration of what it means to be a different sort of hero. Standard D&D heroes are action heroes --bustin' up heads and takin' names. Ravenloft heroes are of a different sort: They are scared. They are flawed. They consider saving one house in a town tormented by animate nightmares to be a success, and if the rest of the town fell, it is a tragedy, but to save the rest of the town means to die, rather than to live to fight another day.

This is what concerns me about Dark Sun, too. It doesn't really concern me about Planescape, because 4e isn't so much doing a "planescape setting" as they are using planescape elements in the default setting, which is fair enough.

But ultimately, I think different setting books, rather than just providing maps and menaces, should be providing me a way to play a character that is a different sort of hero, and to run a world that demands that kind of hero. Ravenloft heroes should not be the same thing as FR heroes.

 

[Thanael]

Darkness certainly works too. I just prefer Madness.

I say replace both with Gothic Horror, as that is the essential theme of Ravenloft.

 

[Thanael]

Spot On! The goal isn't to stop the Dark Powers by reaching level 20/30 and fighting them, but the Dark Powers (and extension, Dark Lords) need something resembling a weakness to exploit. Too many Ravenloft conventions (sealing domains, domain lord omnipotence, the powers themselves) give evil no discernible weakness beyond hubris, which gets to be an old idea after a while. There needs to be someway that, the village they liberated from the werewolf last week, isn't overrun by zombies the next week because Strahd got upset a group of heroes ruined his werewolf alliance.

The thing is the Dark Powers are not on the side of the darklords! They are their greatest tormentors. And the darklords are the most tormented beings in the whole of Ravenloft. Every single one of them has a tragic sad tale about human choice and evil, a tale of gothic horror. The darklords are not revelling in their evil they are tormented and every single one of them hates his torment. The DPs won't rain death down on the PCs if they fight against a darklord and unmake all their efforts. Rather they will study the choices and evil everyone commits and give a nudge here and there and produce more gothic horror and tragedy in the end. But there's no gothic horror and no tragedy without hope. It is Gothic horror after all and not just slasher-horror.

It is a common misconception of the setting that stems from running a campaign in an antagonistic mindset. That same mindset can be applied to any campaign world and all the arguments would apply to that campaign too. Heck Gygax sort of ran his Greyhawk that way. But in the end in D&D you can't win against the DM. The game is about telling a story together or providing challenges to overcome and in Ravenloft the theme of these stories and challenges is Gothic Horror, and the challenge is to hold out against the Darkness and achieve small victories while keeping the stain of evil from oneself. The goal is not ultimate pawnage and defeating the DPs. All arguments that arise from this mindset are equally applicable to every campaign world that is run in this mindset if you substitute gods for the DPs and BBEG NPCs for Darklords.

Fighting and defeating the Dark Powers is not the goal. The DPs are just Ravenlofts personification of DM fiat. And the darklords all have a weakness for the PCs to exploit. This weakness is the central defining theme of the darklord and always hidden in their tragic backstories. But exploiting that and defeating them doesn't necesarily equal killing them. It is not that simple in Ravenloft and winning is more complicated than killing things and taking their stuff.

 

[Thanael]

The ultimate goal "to make the world a better place" is not only infeasible, its literally impossible (there is no world to make a better place, and no way of making actually better).

This is often cited as an argument against playing in RL, but i wonder if "making the world a better place" is really the main motivation of the players in most regular D&D campaigns. Sometimes it is not more along the lines of kill things and take their stuff and "bustin' up heads and takin' names" as KM said aptly.

I think Planescape and Ravenloft seem to those kind of players to be unfair meddling with their ability of pawnage.

 

[Thanael]

Well, my problem is.. it really depends on the theme. "Bram Stoker's Dracula" Strahd is going to be different from Hammer Horror Strahd and both are going to be a lot different than "Interview With the Vampire" Strahd. They're fundamentally different types of stories. The first is about a relatively normal man learning of a great evil and eventually challenging it and winning, the second is going to be a lot more bloody and gruesome and will feature more over-the-top fights between skilled opponents, and the third is going to be about a descent into darkness.

In some, the "monster" wins, and some, the monster loses. Likewise, in some, the monster's "defeat" comes through exploiting a weakness, and in others, it's simply a matter of surviving long enough for its wrath to be deflected elsewhere or to naturally abate of it's own accord. In some, the player is the monster, and the story is thus how they go from moral human to amoral monster, while in others, the player is the monster hunter, and the story is how they go from unaware nobody to heroic monster killer. In some, it would be a bad idea to go beyond Paragon or even Heroic tier; in others, starting at Paragon and finishing in epic might not be a bad idea at all.

Your're right of course. And Ravenloft is no different in this from all the other settings. I would be hard pressed to sum up a single theme for campaigns in the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk or Eberron. They all accomdate very different adventures and themes, and it is only the basic tropes and the general setting tone that differ.

In the end your first post sums it up nicely, Ravenloft provides a way to adventure in the different Gothic Horror tropes, while Eberron has a more Pulp/Noir feel, the Realms provided High Fantasy, and Greyhawk has a more old-school Sword & Sorcery theme mixed up with some other whacky elements.

 

[DarkKestral]

Your're right of course. And Ravenloft is no different in this from all the other settings. I would be hard pressed to sum up a single theme for campaigns in the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk or Eberron. They all accomodate very different adventures and themes, and it is only the basic tropes and the general setting tone that differ.

In the end your first post sums it up nicely, Ravenloft provides a way to adventure in the different Gothic Horror tropes, while Eberron has a more adventure pulp feel, the Realms provided High Fantasy, and Greyhawk has a more old-school Sword & Sorcery theme mixed up with some other whacky elements.

Yeah, that's what I tried to get across. It's not one single "campaign arc" it's a set of thematically interconnected possible campaign arcs. Gothic horror, for all of it's similarities, shows a pretty wide range of plots. Plus, if you were to do as I'd be wont to do, and open up Ravenloft to a variety of sub-settings that include the classic ones already written about, and then expand them to "modern day" ones that emulate other forms of horror fiction, the thematic range could be quite extensive without leaving the general themes behind.

For example, I've got some ideas for a "final girl" type sub-setting. (I'm not yet sure how to deal with the big bad for that type of game, but in 4e-isms, it would probably be a Lurker-type monster/NPC that can do extensive damage in a short timeframe, but is easy to escape if the players can survive the initial assault.) The point of leveling up in that game is that it enables them to take bigger, longer assaults as the thing gets more desperate/willing to kill, with the goal to eventually traverse the domain and enable escape through the Mists. It would still be rather Gothic-flavored; no tech past early 1800s, and would be pretty Eastern European in thematics.

Likewise, I think it would be possible to do a sort of Oriental Adventures-themed version of Ravenloft, and maybe ones set clearly in the modern day or near future, without losing that Ravenloft edge. Orientalism featured heavily in the writings of many of the writers we know for their Gothic horror, so I think those two would blend really well if you don't go too far with ninjas and other "wuxia" or "jidaigeki" type character classes, favoring ones that are more perhaps a bit less flashy, even if they do big magical effects, (ninjas, while stealthy, are flashy stealthy... rogues are "just there" stealthy) while more modern campaigns would require a bit of tweaking and some careful consideration to the setting. That said, modern urban dark fantasy owes a great deal to Gothic horror, which lends me to thinking it could work, if done well. I've seen ideas for a near-future cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk Barovia, so there is that...

EDIT: Now that I've thought about it some more, personally, I'd nix any classes that are clearly derived from Japanese sources, for the simple fact that Japan and the West hadn't had contact yet by the time most classic Gothic horror was written. The reason I'm not totally convinced of the idea is that if you can do a cyberpunk Ravenloft, you could probably do a Ravenloft that included Japanese elements. I think. The reason Chinese- and Arab-derived classes would probably work pretty well is that most D&D gamers are Westerners using stereotypes of Asian/Middle Eastern culture when they use them at all, which is totally analogous to the way the Romantic writers who made Gothic horror what it was used such sources. They were less interested in the actuality, and cared more about the feelings that were evoked, so for them consistency with reality wasn't a major issue. Given that, all of the inconsistencies that will develop as a part of building up a game system become far less verisimilitude-destroying.