Ravenloft Novel Coming in 2025

Penguin Random House will publish a new novel set in the Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting of Ravenloft in 2025. A listing for an untitled Ravenloft novel has recently appeared on various book retailer websites, along with Penguin Random House's official website. No author was named in the listing, but a description for the book states that it will feature the infamous Count Strahd and potentially other Domains of Dread as well. The book will have a recommended retail price of $30 and will be released in April 2025.

Penguin Random House has upped their Dungeons & Dragons novel releases in recent years, with books set in the Dragonlance, Spelljammer, and Forgotten Realms settings. While some books (such as the recently completed Dragonlance Destinies trilogy) have featured classic writers, other books have used contemporary fantasy authors and are geared more toward a mix of existing, new, and casual D&D fans. Some characters from the Fallback novels have also appeared in art slated for the 2024 Core Rulebook release. Given that we're getting more D&D novels, it seems this new line of licensed novels is a success for Penguin Random House.

You can check out the description of the new Ravenloft book below:

Journey to the Domains of Dread and face the fearsome Count Strahd von Zarovich in this upcoming official Dungeons & Dragons novel!

A group of adventurers must fight their way through a dark and twisted realm known as the Domains of Dread, where powerful darklords rule over worlds filled with supernatural horrors.

 

[teitan]

It's really a shame that that the book is about Strahd and Barovia instead of elsewhere in Ravenloft. In my opinion, Strahd has been done to death.

There was a whole book called Van RIchten's Guide to Ravenloft you should check out. Very cool.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

No bad business choices killed TSR

And one of those bad business choices was becoming dependant on book sales and neglecting the core game.

We know one of the things that happened when they went bust was they had warehouses full of undistributed novels. Why was TSR even doing the warehousing and distribution of novels? Why didn't they licence a publishing house to do it? Bad business decisions certainly, but bad business decisions related to the novels.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I suspect he's not a major character, rather he MIGHT be the quest giver, heroes show up in Barovia, go to Castle Ravenloft, and Strahd sends them on a mission thst takes them across multiple Domains.

That would be my hope, but there is no evidence to support that based on what we know so far. What it sounds like from the description is a novelisation of Curse of Strahd.

 

[teitan]

And one of those bad business choices was becoming dependant on book sales and neglecting the core game.

We know one of the things that happened when they went bust was they had warehouses full of undistributed novels. Why was TSR even doing the warehousing and distribution of novels? Why didn't they licence a publishing house to do it? Bad business decisions certainly, but bad business decisions related to the novels.

Yep they were using the book pre-sales as essentially loans and then their market fell out in the novels and they got a ton of returns, plus the dice game and Spellfire.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

One of the reasons because WotC would rather to bet for the digital market, to avoid that type of troubles.

* I wonder if some time we could see an Innistrad-Ravenloft crossover. Why? Because the dark domains are relatively small for confrontation between different factions. Each dark domain is like "Rhode Island" when supernatural conspirancies like Camarilla vs Sabatth in WoC needs as much space as Alaska.

And a crossover Duskmourn-Ravenloft? Maybe, the demon Valgavoth tries to conquer new zones from other planes (really a trick by Vecna), and he fails, but those zones are tainted and then here the Dark Powers arrive to reap what other has sown.

* What about the 2008 Ravenloft novels?

* Have you imagined any time a dark domain like "the Town" of "FROM" (TV serie)? With modern technology, but without firearms.

 

[Remathilis]

There used to be, descendents of the middle brother Sturm, but I don't know if he's even canon anymore. There was a great niece of Strahd that became a vampire and used a ghost to age herself to become more powerful.

Lyssa Von Zarovich is mentioned in Van Richten's Guide as a story hook. She's a vampire still, but not explicitly connected to vampire mind flayers anymore.

 

[Alzrius]

We know one of the things that happened when they went bust was they had warehouses full of undistributed novels.

That's spoken to more in Ben Riggs' Slaying the Dragon, which tells us that TSR decided to release twelve hardcover novels in 1996, as opposed to the one or two they'd released in previous years.

Now, in that sense there was a "glut" due to TSR tossing out an absurdly high volume of novels (in their most expensive format) all at once in an ill-considered attempt to generate an influx of cash as they were going under, but the reason they were going under in the first place wasn't because of those novels; in fact, the reason they put out so many novels for their last-ditch Hail Mary play was because they'd traditionally been a reliable revenue source. (And of course, once those twelve hardcovers didn't sell at unprecedented rates, their return, along with Dragon Dice, dealt TSR its finishing blow.)

 

[Bedrockgames]

That's spoken to more in Ben Riggs' Slaying the Dragon, which tells us that TSR decided to release twelve hardcover novels in 1996, as opposed to the one or two they'd released in previous years.

Now, in that sense there was a "glut" due to TSR tossing out an absurdly high volume of novels (in their most expensive format) all at once in an ill-considered attempt to generate an influx of cash as they were going under, but the reason they were going under in the first place wasn't because of those novels; in fact, the reason they put out so many novels for their last-ditch Hail Mary play was because they'd traditionally been a reliable revenue source. (And of course, once those twelve hardcovers didn't sell at unprecedented rates, their return, along with Dragon Dice, dealt TSR its finishing blow.)

Yeah it wasn't the novels themselves, there was a lot of mismanagement I think and also the landscape was changing too. They were getting serious competition from things like Vampire, and then Magic came along and started siphoning players from groups (I don't know the numbers at a grand scale were but locally I remembering losing tons of active D&D players to magic almost overnight, across multiple groups (many of them may have continued to play D&D occasionally but their money and time was largely going to magic).

On the customer side what I also remember is around the mid-90s, the TSR books started to look cheap and bare. So even those of us who stuck it, really began to slow down our purchasing. I was huge into Ravenloft and the line went through a dramatic and ugly facelift midway through the decade (even if the adventures were good, the art, the layout, etc sucked: and that was from a line that had an award winning art-layout design so it wasn't unimportant to its success). Also those awful revisions to the PHB. Put the black PHB and DMG up against the ones released in 1989 and the difference in look and feel is stunning.

 

[Bedrockgames]

If only they hadn't ruined Lord Soth by putting him in Ravenloft! You don't put Darth Vader in the corner!

Some of us made the leap from Dragonlance to Ravenloft because of that choice. For my money, even though I know the original writers disliked the choice, I think Soth thrived in Ravenloft and made Ravenloft a more complete setting

 

[Bedrockgames]

Just the opposite for me. Having only read a few DL novels, I get nothing but a bad taste from these novels. However, I am happy they are making them for other people who do like them!

I was pretty into the TSR novels. They are a broad mix in terms of quality but most were at least a fun read and helped give you a better idea of possible life on the ground in a given setting. Some did this better than others, but I a lot of them were helpful for opening up the worlds for GMs trying to visualize them (and because they were novels the material felt highly optional at the time in terms of what you brought in and left out)