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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8546934" data-attributes="member: 5948">I assume what you mean is that you want to keep the character and the darklords of the 5e iterations of the domains, but the broader 'lived-in-world' feel of the earlier material, which makes some pretence to having a functional society beyond a whole bunch of oubliette dimensional pockets populated by shadowpeople?If so, it depends from domain to domain.  You can't just take every domain from VRGtR and dump it in the pre-5e core, some have changed too wildly for that.  Falkovnia, for instance.  If it's a wilderness of undead, then it's hard to see it fit in the Core.  You might have trouble with Richemulot as well, the cycle of plague that happens there would be problematic if Richemulot had neighbouring countries.Assuming you want the sort of old-style Ravenloft without mist tokens etc where people can just walk from domain to domain unless the borders are closed, and assuming you want to keep the map of the Core mostly as-is (I'm messing with a homebrewed total reconfiguration of the Core that turns all this stuff upside down, but that might not be your thing), here's some really rough ideas...Swap the positions of Mordent and Dementlieu in the Core.  Mordent and Lamordia can work together ok.  Make them one political unit with Ludendorf the capital - Lamordia is the bustling industrial big city, Mordent the more isolated rural regions with their local gentry and villages.  Mordent always needed a big city to contrast the foggy country moors against.  Godefroi can stay the Darklord of Mordent, he was never interested in politics anyway.East of Lamordentia (or whatever you want to call our new gestalt nation) there's a lot of haunted wasteland that slowly becomes Falkovnia.  Everyone knows Falkovnia is bad news and most are smart enough to keep clear.  While undead sometimes trickle across the border and cause problems, they're mostly wanting to kill Vladeska so mostly people in neighbouring domains can stay safe by just staying away.  Darkon stays in its original place in the Core.  Vlad and Azalin are both gone, there's no more overarching geopolitical tension between the two.  But the awfulness of Falkovnia is now blocking any access to Lamordentia from Darkon, so there's very little communication and no real trade.  Darkon remains mired in its own concerns.  The Shadow Rift can stay if you were in love with it, but personally I'd get rid of it and replace it with the southern bits of Darkon, slowly crumbling into the mists.New version of Valachan isn't really a good fit for the Core, it becomes an Island of Terror on its own in the mists.Richemulot becomes significantly bigger, expanding north taking some of what used to be Falkovnia (there was lots of good stuff in the 3e Gazetteers about what Richemulot looked like outside the cities) and west taking over most of Dementlieu.  It's now the breadbasket of the Core, replacing the role Falkovnia used to play.  Wages are always high there (because so much labor died in the last plague) so it attracts loads of immigrants from all over.  When the plague strikes though, hunger and unrest spread across the Core.  Dementlieu shrinks to just the size of the city itself (reflecting the limited horizons of its darklord) and sits on the coast as a sort of decadent glittering Monte Carlo (stick Ghastria just offshore here too).Kartakass moves to occupy the place where Verbrek was previously.  The art- and performance-obsessed culture fits well with neighbouring Dementlieu.  Kartakass remains as it's written, something of a backwater, except in years where the plague hits Richemulot and Richemulolish farms become uninhabitable plague pits, and Lamordentia and Dementlieu have to rely on grain shipments from Borca and beyond that make the long trip down the Musarde through Kartakass on riverboat.  In those years, Kartakass cashes in from the trade, and the wolves eat well of the traders.Borca takes over Invidia's territory, and is another major power.  (Invidia still exists, but is really just Gabrielle's estate and the local region.)  Borca returns to its Medici roots by being the banking and moneylending centre as well as the poison capital.  They're VERY rich from making Dementlieu and Lamordentia pay extortionate prices for food during plague years, and everyone owes them something.  Also, bring back the schism between the branches of the church of Ezra.  The Borca branch (centred at the cathedral where the faith originated) is rich, ritualistic, closely intertwined with Borcan politics and the Borcan aristocracy.  The Mordent branch is a small, stubborn localised church - the atheistic tendencies of Lamordia mean that it isn't taken too seriously in the big cities, but every small town in the Mordent countryside has its local vicar.  Mordentish see the Borcan branch of the church as overly gaudy and probably pagan, but on the other hand they keep quiet about their beliefs for feat of being deemed hopelessly provincial and superstitious should they ever go to the capital.Further upstream from Borca to the east and south we get into wilder and wilder territory - Sithicus and Verbrek (which occupies the land that Kartakass used to).  I'm not entirely satisfied with this as it puts wild domains right next to heavly-populated Borca, but short of massive changes to the map there's not much i can do,  Bring Soth back to Sithicus and make him a bit more proactive and territorial about Borcan colonists or soldiers entering uninvited, and that should do the trick.   Add a dragon that occasionally ravages the lands of southern Borca (with a blue-armoured woman riding it, just to mess with Soth) and that should keep most Borcans out.Daring and lucky travellers can sometimes find a path through the haunted forests of Sithicus and Verbrek to see the towers of Castle Ravenloft against the darkening sky.  Barovia is an isolated backwater far away from the populated core of the ... um ... Core, which fits well with how the domain is portrayed in CoS.East and north of this, it gets really messy.  Hazlan had nothing in common with any of its neighbours and never really made sense where it was, the only thing interesting about Forlorn was the castle, Nova Vaasa was a huge grassland domain with a very urban darklord stuffed in one faraway corner, and then there's the whole Shadow Rift business.  I know roughly how I'd do it, but it's not even remotely going to resemble the pre-5e Core so it's probably beyond the scope of this thread.What this version of the Core DOES lack is a military threat, the sort that Falkovnia used to be.  But really, how much need is there for war and international intrigue in most Ravenloft stories anyway?  Lamordentia is probably the best option as aggressor, should it come to that.  They've got a pretty high opinion of themselves and a low opinion of everyone else.  But there isn't really anyone obvious for them to fight.</blockquote>

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