Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd Cover, Synopsis Revealed

The cover and synopsis for Penguin Random House's new Dungeons & Dragons novel has been revealed. This week, Penguin Random House revealed the official title and cover for Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd, a new novel by Delilah S. Dawson. The new novel is due for release in April 2025. The new novel follows a group of adventurers who arrive in Barovia under mysterious circumstances and are summoned to Castle Ravenloft to dine with the infamous Count Strahd. This marks the first Ravenloft novel released in 17 years.

Penguin Random House has slowly grown its line of novels over the past few years, with novels set in Spelljammer, Dragonlance, and the Forgotten Realms released over the last year. Characters from The Fallbacks novel by Jaleigh Johnson also appears in art in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide.

The full synopsis for Heir of Strahd can be found below:

Five strangers armed with steel and magic awaken in a mist-shrouded land, with no memory of how they arrived: Rotrog, a prideful orcish wizard; Chivarion, a sardonic drow barbarian; Alishai, an embittered tiefling paladin; Kah, a skittish kenku cleric; and Fielle, a sunny human artificer.

After they barely survive a nightmarish welcome to the realm of Barovia, a carriage arrives bearing an invitation:

Fairest Friends,

I pray you accept my humble Hospitality and dine with me tonight at Castle Ravenloft. It is rare we receive Visitors, and I do so Endeavor to Make your Acquaintance. The Carriage shall bear you to the Castle safely, and I await your Arrival with Pleasure.

Your host,
Strahd von Zarovich

With no alternative, and determined to find their way home, the strangers accept the summons and travel to the forbidding manor of the mysterious count. But all is not well at Castle Ravenloft. To survive the twisted enigmas of Strahd and his haunted home, the adventurers must confront the dark secrets in their own hearts and find a way to shift from strangers to comrades—before the mists of Barovia claim them forever.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

3. You are judging a book by its cover, again.

I see no indication of the book being judged. The cover is being judged by the cover. The book will have to wait for reviews.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If Ravenloft, runs differently than Planescape, runs differently than Eberron, runs differently than Greyhawk, runs differently than Dragonlance, with differences in options, tone, and mechanics, that is not homogenization.

Ravenloft runs differently to Ravenloft.

There are many ways to run a game of D&D, irrespective of setting.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Darkon is a generic fantasyland, with all the standard fantasy races present and correct.

If by "all races" you mean elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and human, then yes, it is.

And it traded with all the other core domains, so anyone visiting it would naturally encounter non-humans. They don't have to be in a majority to be familiar, in most D&D settings non-humans are not a majority. But of course, one of the reasons the core was such a terrible idea was non-humans would have migrated over the whole core and been found everywhere.

Huh? They did migrate and they were found in other domains.

But demihumans weren't even a majority in Darkon (population around 120,000) so it's not like there's enough of them to create crowds of halflings in Richemulot. Plus, you do realise that before the last century or so, people didn't tend to travel as much, right? Especially since Darkon was objectively the best place to live if you were one of non-human races - it was rich, had established communities, and possessed one of the few darklords who was a decent ruler. An elf is not going to leave Nevuchar Springs to go and live with Barovian hicks or go and get himself made state property in Falkovnia.

So yeah, there might be the occasional gnome tutor in Nova Vaasa, but not to the absurd level of cosmopolitanism that 5E presupposes even isolated villages possess.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The top half definitely is Gothic - compare it to the Castle of Otranto cover I posted earlier. The bottom half is definitely not gothic

I agree. Though the bottom half is what drew all my attention so I don't think I noticed the castle until my third or fourth look at it (I saw Strahd just not the castle)

 

[Bedrockgames]

If by "all races" you mean elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and human, then yes, it is.



Huh? They did migrate and they were found in other domains.

But demihumans weren't even a majority in Darkon (population around 120,000) so it's not like there's enough of them to create crowds of halflings in Richemulot. Plus, you do realise that before the last century or so, people didn't tend to travel as much, right? Especially since Darkon was objectively the best place to live if you were one of non-human races - it was rich, had established communities, and possessed one of the few darklords who was a decent ruler. An elf is not going to leave Nevuchar Springs to go and live with Barovian hicks or go and get himself made state property in Falkovnia.

So yeah, there might be the occasional gnome tutor in Nova Vaasa, but not to the absurd level of cosmopolitanism that 5E presupposes even isolated villages possess.

For me the explanation is less important than the feel it creates. By establishing Ravenloft is humantric and lower magic, it fits the gothic horror vibe better IMO. Part of the whole thing they are signaling is this is not a land of elves, dwarves and gnomes. Obviously they are in places like Darkon the experience of being an elf in Ravenloft is totally different from being one in Forgotten Realms or Draagonlance.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I see no indication of the book being judged. The cover is being judged by the cover. The book will have to wait for reviews.

To be fair I was judging the book in that I was saying the cover fails to make me interested in reading it and it suggests the book might not be the kind of Ravnloft story I like. I fully acknowledge I could be wrong. But when I see a book on a shelf, I'd be lying if I said the cover, title and blurb didn't inform my decision about buying it. Usually I am not even looking for great art, just a sense of the feel of the book, something to intrigue me about the contents to indicate what the thing is

 

[Bedrockgames]

Ravenloft runs differently to Ravenloft.

There are many ways to run a game of D&D, irrespective of setting.

Every campaign for any setting can be different. I think especially Ravenloft has long had a division of styles and approaches. As we have seen from these threads, even the old school 90s fans tend to be divided around certain preferences and points of view on how well the setting succeeded or failed at different things (and what it ought to do to work). Perhaps the sharpest division being people who prefer the early 90s approach to the late 90s DoD approach (and of course you have folks who prefer the d20 Ravenloft material from SS&S). Some genres are just like that. I do a lot of wuxia and I've noticed wuxia RPG fans have similarly sharp divisions because everyone each has their own vision of what wuxia ought to be at the game table

 

[Bedrockgames]

I have mixed feelings about KotBR, but Soth in the original Dragonlance Chronicles was absolutely 100% classic Gothic horror character, even though he happened to appear in a high-fantasy romantic melodrama.
.

He was always, for me, the scariest character in the Dragonlance books

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If by "all races" you mean elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and human, then yes, it is.

It says generic fantasy races, not generic Tolkien races. It's not Middle Earth. Orcs, tieflings, dragonborn, goliaths, and everything in the Monster Manual all canonically exist in Darkon.

But demihumans weren't even a majority in Darkon (population around 120,000) so it's not like there's enough of them to create crowds of halflings in Richemulot.

"Majority" is meaningless. The majority of the population in England is English, but that doesn't mean I'm shocked to meet a Norwegian.

But hobbit is derived from rabbit. You have two, and before you know it you have thousands.

How long did the core exist? Hundreds of years? Thousands? Tens of thousands? That's plenty of time for populations to intermingle and homogenise.

Plus, you do realise that before the last century or so, people didn't tend to travel as much, right?

Of course they did, how do you think humans are found all over the planet?! And the core doesn't have much in the way barriers to travel such as oceans, deserts, or even large distances. The core was only a couple of hundred miles across.

 

[Remathilis]

For me the explanation is less important than the feel it creates. By establishing Ravenloft is humantric and lower magic, it fits the gothic horror vibe better IMO. Part of the whole thing they are signaling is this is not a land of elves, dwarves and gnomes. Obviously they are in places like Darkon the experience of being an elf in Ravenloft is totally different from being one in Forgotten Realms or Draagonlance.

Ironically, the rules of D&D do not reflect that vibe in any iteration of the game. Ravenloft is humanocentric but puts no restrictions on race selections, indeed since it pulls from many different D&D worlds it has a high chance of pulling anything and everything. It's lower magic, but aside from some moderations to specific schools and a few class feature alerted, the game is as magical as any other D&D setting. You still have wizards throwing fireballs and cleric's healing hit points. That is as true in the Black Box as it is in VRGR.

Ironically, Domains of Dread tried the hardest to enforce those flavor points in chargen with higher stat requirements to playing a demihuman, the banning of paladin, bard and druid, and the introduction of four new classes (avenger, anchorite, arcanist, g*psy) that were way toned down magically. (The problem was, they were presented next to fairly unchanged fighters, clerics, mages and thieves which were all more powerful than the Ravenloft specific classes. And it takes a lot to say a 2e thief is powerful compared to anything!). But even still, you could play a dwarf cleric or elf mage in Ravenloft natively and you would be 98% equal to a Greyhawk character of the same race and class.

Which is why I felt mechanics don't matter nearly as much as some people say. If Ravenloft was supposed to be a humanocentric, low magic world, it would have looked more like Masque of the Red Death where humanity was the only option and magic was heavily nerfed (limited options, long casting times, chance of corruption). But it's just normal D&D options, most unaltered, save for a few gotcha changes to make sure magic doesn't solve the plot instantly. Everything else is tone and world building.