The new book, Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, should not be a surprise considering how popular D&D’s horror setting is. Curse of Strahd was the sixth book released for 5E. RtHW will be the fifth book since the 2024 revised core books.
Still, 2021’s Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft was a terrific update to the classic horror setting, so what does. What does RtHW bring to the table?
“The lens for Horrors Within is completely different from Van Richten’s Guide,” said Wes Schneider, principal game designer and game design lead for RtHW. “With Van Richten’s, we had to had to introduce the broader domains of dread for the first time in 5th Edition. We’d already explored Barovia with Curse of Strahd, but here [meaning Van Richten’s Guide] was our opportunity to look at all of the other domains in one of D&D’s premier campaign settings, which has so much love from past editions. So with that it’s very much, ‘What’s the foundation? What’s our baseline? How to run horror games in D&D. What are some of the other domains of dread, like if you weren’t around in the late ’80s and early ’90s? So we needed to introduce all of that foundation.”
That sets the stage for the new book.
The Goal & What Makes It Different
“With Horrors Within, we wanted to go much harder on, ‘OK, you understand this, you get what the domains are. How do you play it? What do you do with it? What are the adventures you have here? How do I, as a player, create horror stories that I’m realizing through my characters in a spectrum of ways? I have chosen to play in those domains. What do I do here? What is the stat block for the darklords? How do they affect the domains? What’s a campaign arc here? What’s an adventure I can play?’” added Sneider.
“All of that play-focused material, that’s the lens for Horrors Within,” continued Schneider, “So we love Van Richten’s Guide. In many cases, we’re the same team that created Van Richten’s Guide. But with the new juice we got from the 2024 rules update, with way more resources than we had on the team in general with the art and the creative and the concept art that AJ is going to show you all, and hearing the community, 'I get what the domains of dread are Where are my tools to play with this? What can take this to the next level? We wanted to, 'Great, you all have the 101 now.' Of course, this might be somebody's first experience with Ravenloft, and we want to provide that grounding, but once you've gotten that, let's start telling some horror stories."
“This isn’t just a setting book. This is about what fear, obsession, and grief and can do to characters, and monsters and to the darklords. So players aren’t just surviving horror. They’re wielding it. This book, unlike some books that might just ask, ‘How do you beat the monsters? What are your player options?’ This one actually asks, ‘What happens when you become one?’ And you see that reflected in some of the character options.” said Greg Bilsland, executive producer for RtHW.
“We didn’t want to just reprint things. We said, we really wanted to imagine what would we do with Ravenloft today if we were starting from the beginning. That meant kind of visually and from a game design perspective re-imagining what it could be,” Bilsland added.
Fantasy Horror
Part of that re-imagining involved leaning into what makes D&D different from other horror settings.
“Our goal was to have magic-infused horror. We didn’t want it to be generic horror. We really wanted to bring that fantasy element into it,” said AJ Hanneld, senior creative lead, who guided the look and feel of RtHW. “Van Richten’s is such a beautiful book and an impossible act to follow. It’s really gorgeous. We went in a completely different direction. Josh Herman and Kara Kenna really let us take some risks here so we’re experimenting with a cinematic horror fantasy palettes… there’s a recurring colors that has a very distinctive palette.”
An Overview of What’s Inside
“At 288 pages, this book represents one of the longest player/DM hybrid books we’ve had since the launch of 5th Edition,” said Bilsland. “For DMs, it’s the most complete tool kit for running your horror games, probably in recent times. It has something for every DM regardless of what subgenre [of horror] you’re running, and for players, it’s the full tool set whether you’re just starting a Ravenloft campaign, already in one or starting to dabble. It’s got a ton of great options.”
Speaking of options, RtHW contains, by the numbers:
“A lot of this is letting folks play whatever horror they want and then create their own domains,” said Bilsland. “A big piece of this product gives players and DMs the ability to customize and tinker and build out those domains of dread, whether you want, to pick them up, modify it or go deeper on it.”
That includes more options for cosmic/eldritch horror than VRGtR had. Cthulhu makes an appearance in the Innsmouth domain of dread, which sort of brings RtHW full circle with old D&D. Long-time players might remember that the first printing of Deities & Demigods included both Cthulhu and material from Michael Moorcock’s Melnibonéan cycle. Those and their related entries were removed from the 1981 printing issues with copyright permissions.
Another difference from VRGtR is that RtHW has full stat blocks for the darklords. The new book has 17 stat blocks for darklords with lair effects, plus 42 new horrors in the bestiary (and 68 entries total in the monster section), including classic monsters like the dullahan, a.k.a. the headless horseman.
What Will the PCs Become?
“Players are partners to DMs in the storytelling. Duh,” said Schneider. “But when you’re telling a horror story, we want to be sure we’re giving players tools to create characters that are telling personal stories that are resonate and coherent with the same types of stories the DM is setting up. So you can absolutely come to Ravenloft and play the virtuous paladin, the exorcist. Absolutely. Those are great types of horror stories.
“But with Horrors Within, it’s very intentional with the name of the product to tell your own personal horror story,” emphasized Schneider.
RtHW features seven subclasses of horror, with the Reanimator being a new subclass for the artificer.
“We really wanted this to lean heavily into Frankenstein monster-builder archetype. We wanted this artificer, for lack of a better word, feel fleshier and more grotesque than any other artificers that have come before it.,” said Makenzie De Armas, senior game designer. “We really emphasized you getting to play with iconic horror films and make them your own. So this artificer has an undead companion that they take along with them on their adventures and this undead companion can die and get much more easily revived and rebuilt using magical prowess than, say, building a mechanical beast.”
“There are also options to level up and essentially add modifications to your reanimated companion and give them different strange or grotesque augmentations to further their abilities. I like to envision that as you taking actual parts from the monsters that you face and grafting them onto your companion to increase or vary its utility,” continued De Armas.
“One of my favorite stories from the creation of Horrors Within is getting the brief for this subclass and being told to make it as disgusting and grotesque as possible, and then after turning in that draft, being told, ‘OK, alright, let’s pull it back a little bit’,” Makenzie laughed.
So if body horror is your jam, the Reanimator subclass is worth a look.
The D&D team also realized they had a lot of fantasy horror, gothic horror, and such, but no folk horror. That led to the creation of the Hollow Warden Ranger.
“This is a ranger inspired by those cryptids and legends of the land and beings that are older than you and older than civilization. This ranger draws its power from those eldritch beings and in keeping with the ranger’s ties to the land, and uses it to transform to an eldritch being or cryptid themselves. It’s a ranger that embodies different monstrous qualities and wanted to lean into becoming the monster you hunt. So we created the Hollow Warden to lean into that wild, cryptid fantasy for horror,” aid De Armas.
A New Perspective on Horror
“Our overarching goal was what does horror look like when it’s infused with magic, and also, how can we draw on horror as it exists in pop culture through history,” said Hanneld. “So if you look at the logo, that has that Stephen King horror paperback kind of nod. And then on the alt cover, it’s a different logo. It’s sort of Frank Lloyd Wright Americana/American Horror Story vibe.”
RtHW’s creative design balances modern magic-infused fantasy with gothic horror that creates a setting that is eerily beautiful, unsettling, and charged with primal emotion. It draws from the saturated, surreal look of contemporary horror films from A24 and Blumhouse, like Midsommar, as well as their Italian horror predecessors like Darie Argento did with Suspiria. It creates a dreamlike look with unnatural lighting with elegant symmetry and psychological tension. Some of the art, as you can see here, has a color palette that evokes the saturated look of certain colors under blacklight bulbs.
“The biggest thing I wanted was for this to have Susperia energy. I wanted it to be super saturated, super immersive and really disturbing,” added Hanneld.
“When most people thought of Ravenloft previously, they thought Barovia, which is gothic horror, blacks, whites, maybe some red in there. I think what you’ve [meaning AJ] been able to bring to this is a diversity of expression across the subgenres of horror,” commented Bilsland.
“We really wanted to depart from black and brown, dusty parchment and expected horror stereotypes, so that was our guiding light throughout the project. One of the fun things that we got to for the first time ever was black pages, which sounds so simple but they were not sure are the pages going to be so saturated with ink that they wrinkle and we can’t get them to dry, is it going to actually make the book heavier so it’s more expensive to ship. A lot of interesting challenges but we were able to pull it off.
Contrary to common assumption, white lettering on a black backgrounds are not typically made with white ink on black paper. Instead they’re printed with black ink filling the background, hence the technical hurdles Hanneld mentioned.
“And then Trish Yokum did some beautiful graphic design where she was able to pull you in and out the dark backgrounds… We also get to have full bleed, full page artwork. There’s no portal that it’s peeking through. There’s no frame. We get to fill the whole page, the whole frame with minimal text, only a caption to describe what you’re looking at. It was super fun to experiment and R&D [research & development] with that,” added Hanneld.
“[Another consideration was] reading optimization. We had to have the right level of contrast with the text. It’s not a coffee table book. It’s a resource book. You need to be able to flip through and find what you need quickly. So I tried to optimize for that while keep that dark, horror, saturated energy,” said Hanneld.
“We have made a bigger investment in our artists’ pool. We’re even paying our artists more, and I think that’s really reflected in the quality of the art we’re getting and the quantity of art,” added Bilsland. “I think that’s important for horror because we put a lot on DMs to convey, but horror is a challenge for some DMs. Having a tool/resource to show their book for players to set the tone is really important.”
Bringing Ravenloft to Our World
For RtHW, Wizards is also offering a DM screen, map pack, and an all-new Tarokka deck. But there's more Ravenloft than ever also coming out with the new book.
Wizards is now also fully involving their partners for additional products. In addition to prior collaborations with WizKids for minis, for example, there are partnerships with companies like FanRoll Dice, Dark Horse Comics, Ravensburger, Displate, Sirius, and even Hot Topic for Ravenloft-inspired clothing.
“This is something D&D really hasn’t done to this degree before. I worked on D&D in the 2000s and early 2010s. The level of integration and partnership that’s happening around this season,we really hope will excite fans. Players will be able to not just engage in the game product itself. If they love Ravenloft and want to go around sporting Strahd on their apparel, they can do so,” said Bilsland.
“I want to call out that this is the first time we got a passel collection with Hot Topic. They saw the collection and actually bought into a full suite of products. and that’s the first time we won that in market,” said Hanneld.
Honoring The Past & Creating the Future
The credits for RtHW honors those who have had a lasting impact on the setting over the years.
“I want to acknowledge that this is built on the foundation of folks that came before,” said Bilsland. “I was sitting down with [Ravenloft's original creators] Laura [Hickman] and Tracy [Hickman] just a few months ago and hearing stories about their early work on Ravenloft and how very different that module was in its approach and how it really changed people’s impression of what a D&D adventure can be and so in the book we want to acknowledge the amazing work many people before have done on which this product rests.”
Schneider expanded on Bilsland’s comments with a look to how the past informs the future.
“I want to call something since we’re talking to this group of creators here as well. Two names on there are the Fraternity of Shadows and The Kargatane,” said Schneider. “These were fan sites, like back in the ’90s. My first writings on D&D period were on The Book of Shadows on The Kargatane website. These groups still run Mistopedia, a giant wiki for Ravenloft, so this is how integral some of these fan creators have been on this community on this setting for a decade.”
“I just want to make sure everyone on this call understands that the stuff you’re making these days, it’s going to impact somebody you don’t even know, and like 10, 20, 30 years down the road. They’re going to be on a slide like this,” continued Schneider. “I just want to highlight that.”
Ravenloft: The Horror Within releases on June 16, with both a mainstream cover and an alt cover exclusively available through game stores. Early access begins today on D&D Beyond. Check back soon for my in-depth review.
Still, 2021’s Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft was a terrific update to the classic horror setting, so what does. What does RtHW bring to the table?
“The lens for Horrors Within is completely different from Van Richten’s Guide,” said Wes Schneider, principal game designer and game design lead for RtHW. “With Van Richten’s, we had to had to introduce the broader domains of dread for the first time in 5th Edition. We’d already explored Barovia with Curse of Strahd, but here [meaning Van Richten’s Guide] was our opportunity to look at all of the other domains in one of D&D’s premier campaign settings, which has so much love from past editions. So with that it’s very much, ‘What’s the foundation? What’s our baseline? How to run horror games in D&D. What are some of the other domains of dread, like if you weren’t around in the late ’80s and early ’90s? So we needed to introduce all of that foundation.”
That sets the stage for the new book.
The Goal & What Makes It Different
“With Horrors Within, we wanted to go much harder on, ‘OK, you understand this, you get what the domains are. How do you play it? What do you do with it? What are the adventures you have here? How do I, as a player, create horror stories that I’m realizing through my characters in a spectrum of ways? I have chosen to play in those domains. What do I do here? What is the stat block for the darklords? How do they affect the domains? What’s a campaign arc here? What’s an adventure I can play?’” added Sneider.
“All of that play-focused material, that’s the lens for Horrors Within,” continued Schneider, “So we love Van Richten’s Guide. In many cases, we’re the same team that created Van Richten’s Guide. But with the new juice we got from the 2024 rules update, with way more resources than we had on the team in general with the art and the creative and the concept art that AJ is going to show you all, and hearing the community, 'I get what the domains of dread are Where are my tools to play with this? What can take this to the next level? We wanted to, 'Great, you all have the 101 now.' Of course, this might be somebody's first experience with Ravenloft, and we want to provide that grounding, but once you've gotten that, let's start telling some horror stories."
“This isn’t just a setting book. This is about what fear, obsession, and grief and can do to characters, and monsters and to the darklords. So players aren’t just surviving horror. They’re wielding it. This book, unlike some books that might just ask, ‘How do you beat the monsters? What are your player options?’ This one actually asks, ‘What happens when you become one?’ And you see that reflected in some of the character options.” said Greg Bilsland, executive producer for RtHW.
“We didn’t want to just reprint things. We said, we really wanted to imagine what would we do with Ravenloft today if we were starting from the beginning. That meant kind of visually and from a game design perspective re-imagining what it could be,” Bilsland added.
Fantasy Horror
Part of that re-imagining involved leaning into what makes D&D different from other horror settings.
“Our goal was to have magic-infused horror. We didn’t want it to be generic horror. We really wanted to bring that fantasy element into it,” said AJ Hanneld, senior creative lead, who guided the look and feel of RtHW. “Van Richten’s is such a beautiful book and an impossible act to follow. It’s really gorgeous. We went in a completely different direction. Josh Herman and Kara Kenna really let us take some risks here so we’re experimenting with a cinematic horror fantasy palettes… there’s a recurring colors that has a very distinctive palette.”
An Overview of What’s Inside
“At 288 pages, this book represents one of the longest player/DM hybrid books we’ve had since the launch of 5th Edition,” said Bilsland. “For DMs, it’s the most complete tool kit for running your horror games, probably in recent times. It has something for every DM regardless of what subgenre [of horror] you’re running, and for players, it’s the full tool set whether you’re just starting a Ravenloft campaign, already in one or starting to dabble. It’s got a ton of great options.”
Speaking of options, RtHW contains, by the numbers:
- 7 Subclasses
- 11 Feats
- 4 Backgrounds
- 4 Species
- 17 One-shots
- 68 Monsters
- 288 Pages
- 47 Maps
- 2 Magic items
“A lot of this is letting folks play whatever horror they want and then create their own domains,” said Bilsland. “A big piece of this product gives players and DMs the ability to customize and tinker and build out those domains of dread, whether you want, to pick them up, modify it or go deeper on it.”
That includes more options for cosmic/eldritch horror than VRGtR had. Cthulhu makes an appearance in the Innsmouth domain of dread, which sort of brings RtHW full circle with old D&D. Long-time players might remember that the first printing of Deities & Demigods included both Cthulhu and material from Michael Moorcock’s Melnibonéan cycle. Those and their related entries were removed from the 1981 printing issues with copyright permissions.
Another difference from VRGtR is that RtHW has full stat blocks for the darklords. The new book has 17 stat blocks for darklords with lair effects, plus 42 new horrors in the bestiary (and 68 entries total in the monster section), including classic monsters like the dullahan, a.k.a. the headless horseman.
What Will the PCs Become?
“Players are partners to DMs in the storytelling. Duh,” said Schneider. “But when you’re telling a horror story, we want to be sure we’re giving players tools to create characters that are telling personal stories that are resonate and coherent with the same types of stories the DM is setting up. So you can absolutely come to Ravenloft and play the virtuous paladin, the exorcist. Absolutely. Those are great types of horror stories.
“But with Horrors Within, it’s very intentional with the name of the product to tell your own personal horror story,” emphasized Schneider.
RtHW features seven subclasses of horror, with the Reanimator being a new subclass for the artificer.
“We really wanted this to lean heavily into Frankenstein monster-builder archetype. We wanted this artificer, for lack of a better word, feel fleshier and more grotesque than any other artificers that have come before it.,” said Makenzie De Armas, senior game designer. “We really emphasized you getting to play with iconic horror films and make them your own. So this artificer has an undead companion that they take along with them on their adventures and this undead companion can die and get much more easily revived and rebuilt using magical prowess than, say, building a mechanical beast.”
“There are also options to level up and essentially add modifications to your reanimated companion and give them different strange or grotesque augmentations to further their abilities. I like to envision that as you taking actual parts from the monsters that you face and grafting them onto your companion to increase or vary its utility,” continued De Armas.
“One of my favorite stories from the creation of Horrors Within is getting the brief for this subclass and being told to make it as disgusting and grotesque as possible, and then after turning in that draft, being told, ‘OK, alright, let’s pull it back a little bit’,” Makenzie laughed.
So if body horror is your jam, the Reanimator subclass is worth a look.
The D&D team also realized they had a lot of fantasy horror, gothic horror, and such, but no folk horror. That led to the creation of the Hollow Warden Ranger.
“This is a ranger inspired by those cryptids and legends of the land and beings that are older than you and older than civilization. This ranger draws its power from those eldritch beings and in keeping with the ranger’s ties to the land, and uses it to transform to an eldritch being or cryptid themselves. It’s a ranger that embodies different monstrous qualities and wanted to lean into becoming the monster you hunt. So we created the Hollow Warden to lean into that wild, cryptid fantasy for horror,” aid De Armas.
A New Perspective on Horror
“Our overarching goal was what does horror look like when it’s infused with magic, and also, how can we draw on horror as it exists in pop culture through history,” said Hanneld. “So if you look at the logo, that has that Stephen King horror paperback kind of nod. And then on the alt cover, it’s a different logo. It’s sort of Frank Lloyd Wright Americana/American Horror Story vibe.”
RtHW’s creative design balances modern magic-infused fantasy with gothic horror that creates a setting that is eerily beautiful, unsettling, and charged with primal emotion. It draws from the saturated, surreal look of contemporary horror films from A24 and Blumhouse, like Midsommar, as well as their Italian horror predecessors like Darie Argento did with Suspiria. It creates a dreamlike look with unnatural lighting with elegant symmetry and psychological tension. Some of the art, as you can see here, has a color palette that evokes the saturated look of certain colors under blacklight bulbs.
“The biggest thing I wanted was for this to have Susperia energy. I wanted it to be super saturated, super immersive and really disturbing,” added Hanneld.
“When most people thought of Ravenloft previously, they thought Barovia, which is gothic horror, blacks, whites, maybe some red in there. I think what you’ve [meaning AJ] been able to bring to this is a diversity of expression across the subgenres of horror,” commented Bilsland.
“We really wanted to depart from black and brown, dusty parchment and expected horror stereotypes, so that was our guiding light throughout the project. One of the fun things that we got to for the first time ever was black pages, which sounds so simple but they were not sure are the pages going to be so saturated with ink that they wrinkle and we can’t get them to dry, is it going to actually make the book heavier so it’s more expensive to ship. A lot of interesting challenges but we were able to pull it off.
Contrary to common assumption, white lettering on a black backgrounds are not typically made with white ink on black paper. Instead they’re printed with black ink filling the background, hence the technical hurdles Hanneld mentioned.
“And then Trish Yokum did some beautiful graphic design where she was able to pull you in and out the dark backgrounds… We also get to have full bleed, full page artwork. There’s no portal that it’s peeking through. There’s no frame. We get to fill the whole page, the whole frame with minimal text, only a caption to describe what you’re looking at. It was super fun to experiment and R&D [research & development] with that,” added Hanneld.
“[Another consideration was] reading optimization. We had to have the right level of contrast with the text. It’s not a coffee table book. It’s a resource book. You need to be able to flip through and find what you need quickly. So I tried to optimize for that while keep that dark, horror, saturated energy,” said Hanneld.
“We have made a bigger investment in our artists’ pool. We’re even paying our artists more, and I think that’s really reflected in the quality of the art we’re getting and the quantity of art,” added Bilsland. “I think that’s important for horror because we put a lot on DMs to convey, but horror is a challenge for some DMs. Having a tool/resource to show their book for players to set the tone is really important.”
Bringing Ravenloft to Our World
For RtHW, Wizards is also offering a DM screen, map pack, and an all-new Tarokka deck. But there's more Ravenloft than ever also coming out with the new book.
Wizards is now also fully involving their partners for additional products. In addition to prior collaborations with WizKids for minis, for example, there are partnerships with companies like FanRoll Dice, Dark Horse Comics, Ravensburger, Displate, Sirius, and even Hot Topic for Ravenloft-inspired clothing.
“This is something D&D really hasn’t done to this degree before. I worked on D&D in the 2000s and early 2010s. The level of integration and partnership that’s happening around this season,we really hope will excite fans. Players will be able to not just engage in the game product itself. If they love Ravenloft and want to go around sporting Strahd on their apparel, they can do so,” said Bilsland.
“I want to call out that this is the first time we got a passel collection with Hot Topic. They saw the collection and actually bought into a full suite of products. and that’s the first time we won that in market,” said Hanneld.
Honoring The Past & Creating the Future
The credits for RtHW honors those who have had a lasting impact on the setting over the years.
“I want to acknowledge that this is built on the foundation of folks that came before,” said Bilsland. “I was sitting down with [Ravenloft's original creators] Laura [Hickman] and Tracy [Hickman] just a few months ago and hearing stories about their early work on Ravenloft and how very different that module was in its approach and how it really changed people’s impression of what a D&D adventure can be and so in the book we want to acknowledge the amazing work many people before have done on which this product rests.”
Schneider expanded on Bilsland’s comments with a look to how the past informs the future.
“I want to call something since we’re talking to this group of creators here as well. Two names on there are the Fraternity of Shadows and The Kargatane,” said Schneider. “These were fan sites, like back in the ’90s. My first writings on D&D period were on The Book of Shadows on The Kargatane website. These groups still run Mistopedia, a giant wiki for Ravenloft, so this is how integral some of these fan creators have been on this community on this setting for a decade.”
“I just want to make sure everyone on this call understands that the stuff you’re making these days, it’s going to impact somebody you don’t even know, and like 10, 20, 30 years down the road. They’re going to be on a slide like this,” continued Schneider. “I just want to highlight that.”
Ravenloft: The Horror Within releases on June 16, with both a mainstream cover and an alt cover exclusively available through game stores. Early access begins today on D&D Beyond. Check back soon for my in-depth review.
