D&D General Reading Ravenloft the setting

[Alzrius]

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.

What I find fairly ironic about this is that it works best with the type of campaign that I suspect is also the rarest kind: the multi-generational campaign (the only example of this that comes to mind isn't for D&D at all, that being Chaosium's Great Pendragon Campaign).

The Realm of Terror boxed set, which is earliest incarnation of the Ravenloft campaign, begins (if I recall correctly) in 735 of the Barovian Calendar. The Grand Conjunction takes place in 740, with the Revised Campaign Setting set shortly after its conclusion. Domains of Dread kicks things forward a full ten years, to 750. And Ravenloft Third Edition moves up to 755, with the Gazetteers beginning early in 756 (see page 4 of Gazetteer II).

Now, it's not unusual for D&D campaign worlds to advance in time between campaign releases. Even notwithstanding the timeskip after the Spellplague, quite a bit of time passed between the original Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and the Third Edition Campaign Setting, for instance. But insofar as Ravenloft's interwoven metaplot(s) go, there's some interesting possibilities raised if you play with the passage of time, since twenty years is enough time for a new generation of characters to come of age if/when your PCs retire.

It's entirely possible that you could have PCs who start out in 735 and are still kicking in 755, of course. But given how many ways there are to lose PCs - not just death; they might suffer under a debilitating curse that they can't remove, fail madness checks and go semi-permanently insane, or even fail powers checks and become monsters themselves - I think the idea of playing a multi-generational campaign arc could be compelling. RM4 House of Strahd is the "official" adaptation of the original I6 Ravenloft, for example. While you'd need to ignore its placement in the timeline, you could have the "first generation" of PCs go through the events of the Grand Conjunction, then decide to confront Strahd afterwards and be defeated or mostly wiped out, leaving what they learn about Sergei and Tatyana to their offspring, who are coming of age by the time 755 rolls around.

Really, there's a lot you can do with that; especially if the older generation get lost one by one in notable modules (e.g. one of them is stuck in Il Aluk after the events of the Grim Harvest. Another is lost trying to save Rudeolph van Richten at Bleak House, etc.). It's almost lends itself to using the "character tree" option from the Dark Sun Campaign Setting.

It's be hard to set up, but could be extremely rewarding if done right. (Bonus points if you can fold in ideas from Legacy of the Blood: Great Families of the Core, which give ways to make PCs related to various darklord family lines.)

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[humble minion]

I forget, was the whole gazetteer line 3.5 or did it switch from 3.0 part way through?

I believe it was 3.5, but memory escapes me to be honest. They're much, much more setting material than game mechanics though. A few monster stat blocks, NPCs (including Darklords) and the odd prestige class in an appendix in the back of the book. The real meat is system-neutral.

 

[humble minion]

That's the other odd thing I meant to raise about Hazlan - other than imprisoning Hazlik in Ravenloft, it doesn't really seem to be doing anything particularly personal to him, curse wise. Strahd is continually taunted with Tatyana's reincarnations, Azalin can't learn new magic, Soth is marooned in his keep which is a slightly wrong duplicate of Dargaard Keep back on Krynn and is surrounded by banshees who taunt him every night with slightly wrong tales of his own depravity - but Hazlik is just kinda ... there.

He doesn't even seem to be too tormented. Stuck and annoyed about it, sure, but that's about it. The acts that got him banished to Ravenloft probably weren't the worst things he'd even done to that point (if his Ravenloft career of live human magical mutation experiments are any guide...), and he doesn't seem to think about them very much, and neither do the Dark Powers apparently.

 

[Bedrockgames]

That's the other odd thing I meant to raise about Hazlan - other than imprisoning Hazlik in Ravenloft, it doesn't really seem to be doing anything particularly personal to him, curse wise. Strahd is continually taunted with Tatyana's reincarnations, Azalin can't learn new magic, Soth is marooned in his keep which is a slightly wrong duplicate of Dargaard Keep back on Krynn and is surrounded by banshees who taunt him every night with slightly wrong tales of his own depravity - but Hazlik is just kinda ... there.

He doesn't even seem to be too tormented. Stuck and annoyed about it, sure, but that's about it. The acts that got him banished to Ravenloft probably weren't the worst things he'd even done to that point (if his Ravenloft career of live human magical mutation experiments are any guide...), and he doesn't seem to think about them very much, and neither do the Dark Powers apparently.

His torment is basically nightmares of his humiliation. A few domain lords had punishments like this (where they were forced to suffer in some way each night). This was one of the domains that never really grabbed me as much as the others. His punishment is a bit fitting because of his past humiliation and because when he first came to Ravenloft he wandered around the Nightmare Lands for some time before the mists revealed a domain for him.

 

[tetrasodium]

That's the other odd thing I meant to raise about Hazlan - other than imprisoning Hazlik in Ravenloft, it doesn't really seem to be doing anything particularly personal to him, curse wise. Strahd is continually taunted with Tatyana's reincarnations, Azalin can't learn new magic, Soth is marooned in his keep which is a slightly wrong duplicate of Dargaard Keep back on Krynn and is surrounded by banshees who taunt him every night with slightly wrong tales of his own depravity - but Hazlik is just kinda ... there.

He doesn't even seem to be too tormented. Stuck and annoyed about it, sure, but that's about it. The acts that got him banished to Ravenloft probably weren't the worst things he'd even done to that point (if his Ravenloft career of live human magical mutation experiments are any guide...), and he doesn't seem to think about them very much, and neither do the Dark Powers apparently.

Check the last couple paragraphs here. I bet that hazlik is almost certainly one of the darklords getting a makeover though as it's pretty deep into "you printed... what?!?!?!?!?!?!" territory between the tattoos outing the closeted homosexual trans character who wants to snatch a woman's body. From the sounds of it hazlik's own body is his prison.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Check the last couple paragraphs here. I bet that hazlik is almost certainly one of the darklords getting a makeover though as it's pretty deep into "you printed... what?!?!?!?!?!?!" territory between the tattoos outing the closeted homosexual trans character who wants to snatch a woman's body. From the sounds of it hazlik's own body is his prison.

What passages are we looking for. Keep in mind the original entries for these characters and domains were much more sparse than what came in the d20 version of ravenloft ( I always felt the d20 stuff went into way too much detail and made choices that I just didn't really think were that great). But in the original boxed set, he is just a red wizard of thay who had his head shaved and tattooed because he made enemies (and in the culture, only women tattooed their heads). Ravenloft embraced him because of his desire for revenge. I suppose his function in the setting is his hatred of wizards (which provides a lot in the way of conflict if any PC wizards should wander into the domain)

 

[Alzrius]

and in the culture, only women tattooed their heads

I don't believe that's right. Maligor, Thay's Zulkir of Alteration (from the novel Red Magic) voluntarily adopted a tattoo of Myrkul's holy symbol on his shaven head.

 

[tetrasodium]

What passages are we looking for. Keep in mind the original entries for these characters and domains were much more sparse than what came in the d20 version of ravenloft ( I always felt the d20 stuff went into way too much detail and made choices that I just didn't really think were that great). But in the original boxed set, he is just a red wizard of thay who had his head shaved and tattooed because he made enemies (and in the culture, only women tattooed their heads). Ravenloft embraced him because of his desire for revenge. I suppose his function in the setting is his hatred of wizards (which provides a lot in the way of conflict if any PC wizards should wander into the domain)

Looks like a TSR era card, domains of dread, 3e RCS, gazetteer I & V, a module, a short story, & maybe others in all of those sources, that's why I linked to mistipedia to save the effort of tracking down all the individual parts. Rising did a nice job of giving a feel for things that previously needed a lot of source splicing & "oh wow these are connected" inferences for eberron so I imagine that this new ravenloft book will do similar given how popular that route was with rising.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Looks like a TSR era card, domains of dread, 3e RCS, gazetteer I & V, a module, a short story, & maybe others in all of those sources, that's why I linked to mistipedia to save the effort of tracking down all the individual parts. Rising did a nice job of giving a feel for things that previously needed a lot of source splicing & "oh wow these are connected" inferences for eberron so I imagine that this new ravenloft book will do similar given how popular that route was with rising.

My point is just the original entry is very light on specifics. For example we know he made enemies in the original RoT entry, we don't know with who (and there is no mention of a love interest for example). This is actually one of my gripes with Mistepdia, it merges all that different content, but I tend to see the 3E/d20 Ravenloft material as very non-canonical

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't believe that's right. Maligor, Thay's Zulkir of Alteration (from the novel Red Magic) voluntarily adopted a tattoo of Myrkul's holy symbol on his shaven head.

I don't know anything about Forgotten Realms, I am just going by the black box entry on Hazlik (there may be more nuance in the FR material---or it could have been developed further):