humble minion
Legend
So the book announcement inspired me to do a bit of rereading of some of the old Ravenloft material. Heavily focusing on flavor, because that's what's relevant to the upcoming 5e implementation, and the 3e incarnation of the setting, because that's predominately what I own. And since all the cool kids are doing it, I figured I'd quasi-blog it here as i go along.
First off the rank is Gazetteer volume 1. This was the first of a planned series of 13 books, looking at all the domains from a first-person perspective, with a definite emphasis on everyday life in the setting rather than the Big Stuff of domain lords and the nature of the Dark Powers. These books were written by a group of fans dubbed the Kargatane, well known for their excellent 'Book of S...' netbooks, who were hired by White Wolf to write for the line when they acquired the rights from WotC under their Sword and Sorcery imprint.
Anyway, down to it.
Gazetteer 1 opens with a cross and testy explanatory note from our in-world narrator. In a rather crotchety tone, we are informed that our chronicler is a Darkonese scholar with an interest in the morbid (and is rather annoyed to be pulled away from an in-depth study of the undead of Necropolis for this task). But an 'invitation' by a patron our scholar accurately guesses to be Azalin (Azalin himself contributes the occasional marginal note in a very gothic font) is not easily refused. We are told the task is to do a survey of the current state of the Core, and report back, as Azalin has only just reappeared after the disaster of the Requiem, and has a lot of catching up to do. Our narrator, having an interest in the eldritch, seems to accept the existence of domain lords, and the closing of borders, and new lands appearing out of nowhere and other tropes of the setting that us omniscient readers know about, as not-yet-explained phenomena but nonetheless real enough. However, we're told that this knowledge is not particularly widespread - an interesting wrinkle for someone creating Ravenloft-native PCs to consider.
First domain off the rank is Barovia.
(The book is ordered by domains, and as national borders rarely cross domain lines this kinda works, even if by fiat)
A trend we see starting here that will continue through the line is overwhelming human majorities in the population. Here we have 98% human (plus 1% 'half-Vistani' which is a distinctly queasy aspect of 3e Ravenloft when looked at through modern eyes). How will this translate to 5e? I don't think 4e had a serious iteration of Ravenloft - where do dragonborn and tiefling PCs fit into a setting when even dwarves are seen as creepy inhumans? I half suspect we'll have a couple of new dragonborn- or tiefling-dominated domains to explain how they showed up, despite how badly-received that strategy was in 4e FR...
We then have some pages of geography. Summary - Barovia is a land of windswept forbidding peaks and dark wolf-haunted forests, with old stone roads and towers slowly crumbling. All very Dracula Movie Central Casting. Then we have a summary of Barovian history, basically war hero Strahd I, tragic attack of assassins at his brother's wedding killed the royal family, ruled by Strahd's descendents (all male only children, also called Strahd) ever since. Our narrator is not an idiot and calls this out for the clear cover story it is, but what's perhaps a bit more interesting is that we are referred to Van Richten's Guide to Vampires as well. Are Van Richten's Guides widely read throughout the Core (banned as seditious in Barovia, of course?)? What does that mean for traders dealing with Barovia, for instance?
In the history section we're also introduced to an array of ethnic tensions in Barovia, which are clearly being set up as a major source of tension for groups who don't immediately want to take on Strahd. There's small groups of refugees understandably fleeing Bluetspur and Forlorn, but the biggest group are the Gundarakites. Gundarak was a domain whose relatively uninteresting vampyre darklord was killed in a complicated series of events in the very early Ravenloft module Feast of Goblyns, but what's interesting is what happened after. No new Darklord arose, and the old one (mostly) stayed dead, but the land comprising the domain actually persisted beyond the existence of the domain or its lord, and ended up being split between Barovia and Invidia. There's a bit of discussion about how this happened temporally (Strahd sent troops to take over) but none about how/why the mystical domain/prison of Barovia expanded accordingly. Anyway, Gundarakites are pretty much a second class in Barovia, very culturally similar to Barovians, but enough difference in language, customs etc for there to be strife. There's oppression, and freedom fighters, and a Gundarakite revivalist movement worshipping an ancestral butcher-god, and so on.
Then we have culyural details. This is all flavour, aimed to help GMs make the place seem real. Eastern European peasant cliches ahoy, miserable serfdom, unfriendliness to strangers, cabbage dumplings and plum brandy (talked about as the quintessential Barovian drink, which makes the prominence of wine in CoS feel a bit odd...), superstition, prejudice against non-humans and hatred of magic (shades of Dark Sun here, be a wizard and risk getting burnt at the stake - which makes things awkward when you border on magic-heavy Hazlan and elf-heavy Sithicus). A bit on religion, the Morninglord being the main deity (in his 2e -ovel-related guise as a gold elf with blood on his face, heavily borrowing from FRs Lathander)
Then we have a tour, focused on major settlements. There's only a few major locations discussed, a bit about the local boyars (Strahd's governors), some local politics and plot hooks, our narrator's acerbic reviews of inns, etc. One thing that does really get my goat - the numbers don't add up. Barovia, which has a standing army, a serf economy, many noble houses, etc etc is listed as having a total population of only 27000, and there's several apparently bustling towns whose descriptions simply don't fit their demographics. Vallaki, for instance, is listed as the 'prosperous economic heartland' of Barovia, having a 'significant' population of fishermen, the realm's most renowned orchards and distilleries, clanging blacksmiths shops, multiple fish markets, multiple sages in residence, a burgomaster with an 'extensive family', a garrison, and a noteworthy number of bookshops specialising in arcana and eldritch topics. And its listed population is ... only 1547. They must all be VERY busy is all I'm going to say about that.
There's a few secret societies and plot hooks scattered about. The assassins that supposedly killed Strahd I way back. An interesting thief-assassin-mercenary who lost her head a while ago but is cursed to keep living, borrowing other heads from those she slays while she tries to recover her own.
What we DON'T have here is much about Strahd personally. He's obviously deeply embedded in the history of the place and he looms fearfully over all aspects of the politics, but he's not present in person, and our narrator doesn't even visit Castle Ravnloft. There's an appendix about Tatyana's current incarnation, who is actually middle aged now after leaving Barovia as a young girl when her parents heard a fortune teller's prediction that if she stayed she'd be dead by 20. I'm torn about this. The Strahd/Tatyana story is so classic that it'd be unfortunate to deny PCs a chance to get involved, but on the other hand this incarnation of Tatyana has real interest of her own, and Strahd confronting the idea that he missed the boat and that his eternal lost love is now middle-aged is an interesting wrinkle to the story. But it's a wrinkle best suited to those players who already know the basic Strahd story and want to play through a variation. It's very plainly targeted at long-time Ravenloft players and fans, as is a lot of the Kargatane's work. So I'm not sure how i feel about it, really. Giving the DM a variety of options to choose from might have been a better idea.
So, first domain down. My impression of the overview of Barovia here is that it's put first in the book as something like a default case, as probably the most familiar domain, and everything that follows will be at least partially defined by how it differs. There's real determination here to make the Core a functional world of its own with politics etc outside the whim of the darklords or the Mists - the emphasis on the friction between the Barovians and Gundarakites in really seems like part of an effort to make it more grounded rather than that Place All About The Vampire. But it does tend to take over the narrative a bit. Hmmm. And there's also the sheer size of the place - the various Castle Ravenloft modules (and computer games) that have spanned edition after edition of the game barely move beyond the immediate environs of Barovia village and the Castle itself, but here they're almost afterthoughts, isolated in the mountains somewhere while the real life (excuse pun) of Barovia happens in the much larger towns of Vallaki, Teufeldorf, Krezk etc.
Next up is Hazlan, which will be interesting as it's basically a Red Wizard of Thay ripped root and branch from Forgotten Realms and dropped into Ravenloft, which in the very second domain in the series is putting a big 'nope' to the idea that everything in the setting draws influence from classic horror, or even any horror at all...
First off the rank is Gazetteer volume 1. This was the first of a planned series of 13 books, looking at all the domains from a first-person perspective, with a definite emphasis on everyday life in the setting rather than the Big Stuff of domain lords and the nature of the Dark Powers. These books were written by a group of fans dubbed the Kargatane, well known for their excellent 'Book of S...' netbooks, who were hired by White Wolf to write for the line when they acquired the rights from WotC under their Sword and Sorcery imprint.
Anyway, down to it.
Gazetteer 1 opens with a cross and testy explanatory note from our in-world narrator. In a rather crotchety tone, we are informed that our chronicler is a Darkonese scholar with an interest in the morbid (and is rather annoyed to be pulled away from an in-depth study of the undead of Necropolis for this task). But an 'invitation' by a patron our scholar accurately guesses to be Azalin (Azalin himself contributes the occasional marginal note in a very gothic font) is not easily refused. We are told the task is to do a survey of the current state of the Core, and report back, as Azalin has only just reappeared after the disaster of the Requiem, and has a lot of catching up to do. Our narrator, having an interest in the eldritch, seems to accept the existence of domain lords, and the closing of borders, and new lands appearing out of nowhere and other tropes of the setting that us omniscient readers know about, as not-yet-explained phenomena but nonetheless real enough. However, we're told that this knowledge is not particularly widespread - an interesting wrinkle for someone creating Ravenloft-native PCs to consider.
First domain off the rank is Barovia.
(The book is ordered by domains, and as national borders rarely cross domain lines this kinda works, even if by fiat)
A trend we see starting here that will continue through the line is overwhelming human majorities in the population. Here we have 98% human (plus 1% 'half-Vistani' which is a distinctly queasy aspect of 3e Ravenloft when looked at through modern eyes). How will this translate to 5e? I don't think 4e had a serious iteration of Ravenloft - where do dragonborn and tiefling PCs fit into a setting when even dwarves are seen as creepy inhumans? I half suspect we'll have a couple of new dragonborn- or tiefling-dominated domains to explain how they showed up, despite how badly-received that strategy was in 4e FR...
We then have some pages of geography. Summary - Barovia is a land of windswept forbidding peaks and dark wolf-haunted forests, with old stone roads and towers slowly crumbling. All very Dracula Movie Central Casting. Then we have a summary of Barovian history, basically war hero Strahd I, tragic attack of assassins at his brother's wedding killed the royal family, ruled by Strahd's descendents (all male only children, also called Strahd) ever since. Our narrator is not an idiot and calls this out for the clear cover story it is, but what's perhaps a bit more interesting is that we are referred to Van Richten's Guide to Vampires as well. Are Van Richten's Guides widely read throughout the Core (banned as seditious in Barovia, of course?)? What does that mean for traders dealing with Barovia, for instance?
In the history section we're also introduced to an array of ethnic tensions in Barovia, which are clearly being set up as a major source of tension for groups who don't immediately want to take on Strahd. There's small groups of refugees understandably fleeing Bluetspur and Forlorn, but the biggest group are the Gundarakites. Gundarak was a domain whose relatively uninteresting vampyre darklord was killed in a complicated series of events in the very early Ravenloft module Feast of Goblyns, but what's interesting is what happened after. No new Darklord arose, and the old one (mostly) stayed dead, but the land comprising the domain actually persisted beyond the existence of the domain or its lord, and ended up being split between Barovia and Invidia. There's a bit of discussion about how this happened temporally (Strahd sent troops to take over) but none about how/why the mystical domain/prison of Barovia expanded accordingly. Anyway, Gundarakites are pretty much a second class in Barovia, very culturally similar to Barovians, but enough difference in language, customs etc for there to be strife. There's oppression, and freedom fighters, and a Gundarakite revivalist movement worshipping an ancestral butcher-god, and so on.
Then we have culyural details. This is all flavour, aimed to help GMs make the place seem real. Eastern European peasant cliches ahoy, miserable serfdom, unfriendliness to strangers, cabbage dumplings and plum brandy (talked about as the quintessential Barovian drink, which makes the prominence of wine in CoS feel a bit odd...), superstition, prejudice against non-humans and hatred of magic (shades of Dark Sun here, be a wizard and risk getting burnt at the stake - which makes things awkward when you border on magic-heavy Hazlan and elf-heavy Sithicus). A bit on religion, the Morninglord being the main deity (in his 2e -ovel-related guise as a gold elf with blood on his face, heavily borrowing from FRs Lathander)
Then we have a tour, focused on major settlements. There's only a few major locations discussed, a bit about the local boyars (Strahd's governors), some local politics and plot hooks, our narrator's acerbic reviews of inns, etc. One thing that does really get my goat - the numbers don't add up. Barovia, which has a standing army, a serf economy, many noble houses, etc etc is listed as having a total population of only 27000, and there's several apparently bustling towns whose descriptions simply don't fit their demographics. Vallaki, for instance, is listed as the 'prosperous economic heartland' of Barovia, having a 'significant' population of fishermen, the realm's most renowned orchards and distilleries, clanging blacksmiths shops, multiple fish markets, multiple sages in residence, a burgomaster with an 'extensive family', a garrison, and a noteworthy number of bookshops specialising in arcana and eldritch topics. And its listed population is ... only 1547. They must all be VERY busy is all I'm going to say about that.
There's a few secret societies and plot hooks scattered about. The assassins that supposedly killed Strahd I way back. An interesting thief-assassin-mercenary who lost her head a while ago but is cursed to keep living, borrowing other heads from those she slays while she tries to recover her own.
What we DON'T have here is much about Strahd personally. He's obviously deeply embedded in the history of the place and he looms fearfully over all aspects of the politics, but he's not present in person, and our narrator doesn't even visit Castle Ravnloft. There's an appendix about Tatyana's current incarnation, who is actually middle aged now after leaving Barovia as a young girl when her parents heard a fortune teller's prediction that if she stayed she'd be dead by 20. I'm torn about this. The Strahd/Tatyana story is so classic that it'd be unfortunate to deny PCs a chance to get involved, but on the other hand this incarnation of Tatyana has real interest of her own, and Strahd confronting the idea that he missed the boat and that his eternal lost love is now middle-aged is an interesting wrinkle to the story. But it's a wrinkle best suited to those players who already know the basic Strahd story and want to play through a variation. It's very plainly targeted at long-time Ravenloft players and fans, as is a lot of the Kargatane's work. So I'm not sure how i feel about it, really. Giving the DM a variety of options to choose from might have been a better idea.
So, first domain down. My impression of the overview of Barovia here is that it's put first in the book as something like a default case, as probably the most familiar domain, and everything that follows will be at least partially defined by how it differs. There's real determination here to make the Core a functional world of its own with politics etc outside the whim of the darklords or the Mists - the emphasis on the friction between the Barovians and Gundarakites in really seems like part of an effort to make it more grounded rather than that Place All About The Vampire. But it does tend to take over the narrative a bit. Hmmm. And there's also the sheer size of the place - the various Castle Ravenloft modules (and computer games) that have spanned edition after edition of the game barely move beyond the immediate environs of Barovia village and the Castle itself, but here they're almost afterthoughts, isolated in the mountains somewhere while the real life (excuse pun) of Barovia happens in the much larger towns of Vallaki, Teufeldorf, Krezk etc.
Next up is Hazlan, which will be interesting as it's basically a Red Wizard of Thay ripped root and branch from Forgotten Realms and dropped into Ravenloft, which in the very second domain in the series is putting a big 'nope' to the idea that everything in the setting draws influence from classic horror, or even any horror at all...
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