D&D 5E Ravenloft in 5e: rating the domains....

[humble minion]

oh....crap....42.....pages :/

Well, (speaking as the OP in that thread...) there's about a 15 page flamewar in the middle about the portrayal of female darklords, you could probably skip that bit and miss absolutely nothing of value...

 

[Casimir Liber]

Yeah...trying to sift through diversions where arguments happen is always so fun here....

The other issue is the thread predates the 5e release..so interesting marrying the canon...

 

[humble minion]

Yeah...trying to sift through diversions where arguments happen is always so fun here....

The other issue is the thread predates the 5e release..so interesting marrying the canon...

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about continuing it with coverage of the new book, now that I’ve had a bit of time to digest all the changes etc. Theres some interesting takes and changes, and VRGtR goes to some domains that the gazetteers didn’t cover. There’s a lot less material to work with though, the 3.5 gazetteers routinely had 20+ pages of material per domain and another couple of pages of with write ups of the history of darklords and other major npcs. VRGtR is obviously more constrained, you only get a double page spread at best.

 

[Faolyn]

Agree. No one got damned to these domains because they had daddy issues or their girlfriend broke up with them. There was a unique, horrific darkness from which there was no coming back (these darklords don't want to), and that required some dark, adult-level imagination. Out of all the realms of existence, these are the most delicious tales for the Dark Powers. That's saying something.

...Strahd's entire backstory is literally the girl he was stalking preferred his brother over him. Soth wouldn't trust his wife. D'Honaire was a spoiled brat with innate hypnotism powers. Aderre and Boritsi both had mommy issues. Dilisnya, Inza, and the Three Hags were all born evil. Von Kharkov wanted a girlfriend but ended up killing them because he's a cat.

They each had committed terrible deeds that they refused to acknowledge, let alone even attempt to make up for... but the reasoning behind it was rarely that "adult-level."

 

[J.Quondam]

...Strahd's entire backstory is literally the girl he was stalking preferred his brother over him. Soth wouldn't trust his wife. D'Honaire was a spoiled brat with innate hypnotism powers. Aderre and Boritsi both had mommy issues. Dilisnya, Inza, and the Three Hags were all born evil. Von Kharkov wanted a girlfriend but ended up killing them because he's a cat.

They each had committed terrible deeds that they refused to acknowledge, let alone even attempt to make up for... but the reasoning behind it was rarely that "adult-level."

Heh! Put like that, the whole Domains just sounds like high school. Which, by my recollection of high school, actually makes sense. In a morbid kind of way.

 

[toucanbuzz]

...Strahd's entire backstory is literally the girl he was stalking preferred his brother over him. Soth wouldn't trust his wife. D'Honaire was a spoiled brat with innate hypnotism powers. Aderre and Boritsi both had mommy issues. Dilisnya, Inza, and the Three Hags were all born evil. Von Kharkov wanted a girlfriend but ended up killing them because he's a cat.

They each had committed terrible deeds that they refused to acknowledge, let alone even attempt to make up for... but the reasoning behind it was rarely that "adult-level."

Heh, well, boiled down it does sound a bit like people I went to school with (except the killing part) like JQ said, lol.

But what pushed Strahd over the edge was (1) his belief the natural process of aging was the reason Tatyana preferred his brother and saw him like a father, (2) his anger and rage that he could not overcome old age, (3) his anger and rage that someone who never saw blood and battlefield should deserve to "win" a prize like Tatyana, and (4) an arrogance that he "deserved" that prize because of his sacrifice and service.

This simmered nicely in a pot for years until he was willing to sell his soul to roofie a woman into being with him, murder his own brother, and not give a damn about anything but his own need to win and prove his entire existence wasn't merely a shadow of the real thing. This is the delicious environment that the Dark Powers then put him in: a land of soul-less carbon copy shadows, mocking his shadow existence by living alongside him in his personal hell that, even to this day, he firmly believes he can overcome...this time.

But that's all too much for a product that has to sell as PG and fits better into a novel.

Going back to the OP's original question that I dodged earlier, I classically liked Lamordia. It's Dr. Frankenstein, but what I like is that too often PCs may see bad guys as bags of hit points to be solved. You're a boss, so I kill you, loot the body, and get the XP. Sometimes there's just evil locked away in its own private little hell, and there's nothing to be solved. Adam and his creator are eternally bound in their love-hate relationship. Like Strahd, the Dr. is incapable of understanding he's just as responsible for killing Elise as Adam, that his life is a failure, and that Elise is gone (replaced by a shadow that simulates just enough life to make the Dr. continue to harvest "for her sake").

There's a horror in knowing that no matter what you do, you're not going to solve this. No matter how much sense you make, the Dr. won't see differently. He can't. No matter if you destroy everything, the Land and Dark Powers aren't letting go of their playthings, and they'll just come back. You can't "win," at least not in the traditional sense you're used to in other settings where you kill the bad guy and the good guys prevail. Sometimes, like in Barovia, the victory comes in creating even the tiniest bit of genuine "hope," the one thing a Land of horror and despair seeks to quash.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The 5E write-ups seem more geared towards actual use, where the older one were more loaded towards presenting the dark lord's story (with the realm being secondary). The 5E write-ups, to me, seem less geared about interacting with the dark lords themselves and more about what sort of adventures can occur in the realms.

This. The 2e material mostly strikes me as useful for reading on the throne imagining the campaigns you're going to play, while the 5e gives you just enough to be inspiring and have usefulness and not enough to get tangled.

interesting contrast with Wild Beyond the Witchlight I guess....

It's a minor spoiler but the two carnivals are explicitly and linked.

 

[humble minion]

This. The 2e material mostly strikes me as useful for reading on the throne imagining the campaigns you're going to play, while the 5e gives you just enough to be inspiring and have usefulness and not enough to get tangled.

Prior to 3e, Ravenloft was a lot more module-driven. I think historically, the module (which heavily focused on the history of the darklord etc) usually came first. Then later on the domain and darklord got incorporated into one of the big setting books like Domains of Dread, but there was rarely pagecount to go into any detail (those books usually devoted much less page space per domain than VRGtR). Then later still, the 3e line elaborated on it and incorporated all the off-hand mentions of it from sources like the Book of Crypts and Van Richten's Guides, and tried to make it fit into a functional world with native PCs etc (if it was a domain they managed to cover in the Gazetteers before the line got cancelled, of course)

Of course there were exceptions, like in products like Islands of Terror which prioritised covering the domain rather than presenting an adventure. But as a whole, historically, domains grew fairly organically rather than being systematically designed.

 

[dave2008]

So I've always loved Ravenloft since 2e and have recently got VRGtR - love almost all of it.....but have a little trouble getting excited about some of the domains. Barovia, Hazlan and Souragne probably pique my interest the most but some of the others seem a bit cookie-cutter or samey (just an impression and hope I'm wrong if/when I play/DM/expand/write more in/for them). Keen to hear what other people think - which ones they like or dislike and why, which have potential or some really interesting 3rd party content written for them.

Not really what your looking for, but from the information provided in VRGtR I made stat blocks of the dark lords:
Project Dark Lords

Not really any lore, just the stat blocks, but it may be useful to you.

 

[jgsugden]

I loved the first Ravenloft idea, but I was running a Homebrew campaign and none of it really fit in my world - so in the 90s I created my own Domains of Dread based upon the core ideas of Ravenloft. Since then, with the exception of occasionally stealing a little for a one shot scenario, I have found that running my own Ravenloft domains is a much better idea than using pregenerated material.

More than any other setting, Ravenloft requires mystery and anxiety. If the group has familiarity with the source material, it loses the Dread that forms the core of the setting. The players can't feel like they have the answers until they've earned them.

And, as a result, all domains published end up in a last place tie.