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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 4669697" data-attributes="member: 55271">For me, the 2nd Edition Ravenloft CS was all about fighting the darkness. Part of that, I suspect, is my ornery nature. When an RPG rulebook says "you can never", my first impulse is to reply, "Oh yeah? Watch me." Plenty of people certainly told me that I was playing it "wrong" -- that Ravenloft is supposed to be about evil that's impossible to overcome.For me, the ultimate tale of Ravenloft, though, was "freeing a domain from the Mists". Maybe that means finding a way for a Domain Lord to redeem themselves; maybe that means defeating the Domain Lord; maybe that means something else.OTOH, I think this epic goal isn't necessarily of central importance. Although it's nice to have one, it's more important to have that "core concept" from which individual adventures can be endlessly generated. After all, you might (might!) achieve that epic goal once in the course of a campaign. But you'll need to generate dozens of adventures over the course of that campaign.So, with that in mind, I think the core concept of Ravenloft can be understood as the inversion of the core concept of traditional D&D. The traditional D&D dungeon crawl can be summed up as: "The heroes go to a place of danger." A Ravenloft adventure, on the other hand, can be summed up as: "Danger comes to the PCs and they must survive it or defeat it."If we wanted to make this more specific, maybe we need to give the PCs' something to protect. Make the village a core component of the concept: A home which can be assaulted by an number of horrors and yet must be protected. (The term "village" like the term "dungeon" can encompass many things: Maybe it's a monastery. Or Buffy's Sunnydale. Or Angel's Los Angeles. Or a ship named Serenity.)OTOH, it might also be useful to look at Call of Cthulhu, inarguably the most successful horror RPG ever published. Here, too, you'll have people tell you that the PCs are supposed to be destined to lose. But plenty of Cthulhu adventures and much of Lovecraft's own fiction feature victories. Yes, the Deep Ones are still out there and Cthulhu is still destined to rise... but Cthulhu will not rise today and the Deep Ones have been driven back into the depths of the sea.So, in that sense: Yes, the Mists will always be there. But that doesn't mean that victories cannot be had.In Call of Cthulhu this means that the central story is one of investigation. So it is possible to do "go forth and adventure" structures within the context of horror.And one more thought for the road: Part of the problem in trying to distinguish Ravenloft from standard D&D is that there isn't much to distinguish them. D&D has been heavily steeped in horror traditions since Day #1. But, like Conan, it tends to kill the Cthulhu-oid monstrosities and take its stuff.So maybe Ravenloft doesn't need a distinct core concept: Maybe it's still just a place where you kill stuff and take its loot. The difference is that Ravenloft is a more dangerous place to do it (with rewards commensurately higher). In this scenario, Ravenloft isn't a place for a 1-20 campaign and trying to figure out how to make it work like that is like trying to figure out how to run a heroic 1-20 campaign in Mordor: Mordor/Ravenloft is where the campaign goes when the Barrow Wights/Orcs aren't cutting it any more.</blockquote>

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