Borca, and the first thing I notice is that the terrible, terrible maps are back. Huge blurry grayscale lines and patterns (good luck distinguishing between forests and hills, for instance, or roads/borders/rivers) labelled with massive fonts, and some text randomly sideways because that was the only way the dreadful graphic design could squeeze them. I mean, sure they COULD have just dropped the font size about 72 sizes, but who wants THAT, hey? Major geographical features referred to in the text like Mt Gries are illustrated on the actual map but frequently not labelled, so I don't think it's fair to blame the cartographer, someone doing graphic design or lettering dropped every possible ball here, after some editor decided to magnify a chunk of the endpiece map for the domain maps in each chapter rather than commissioning something new. Ugh.
Another thing that bugs me about the editing choices in the whole Gazetteer line is that for every domain we get a complete stat block for an average watch member or guard. Every. Single. Domain. Despite them only differing in minor details re weapon choices etc - even in 3.5e, there's only so much customisation you can do with a first-level warrior. What a waste of space.
What Borca gives us is basically the de Medici tropes with a layer of Eastern European landscape and aesthetic on top. Geographically the western end of the domain is darkly forested (with lots of poisonous herbs, fungi etc, to rub in the theme) and lightly populated with the few estates run largely by crooked thugs retained by absentee noble landholders, while towards the eastern end it becomes more cultivated, rockier, and culturally a bit more reminiscent of Barovia, though with a noticeably larger population. There's still more than a bit of italian influence visible - the sprawling houses of the wealthy with their atria and enclosed courtyards, the emphasis on crossbows is reminiscent of the famed Genovese mercenary crossbowmen, and there's more than a touch of the Roman church in the location of the heart of Ezra's worship here, the pretty much universal and sincere worship of Ezra among the populace, and the links and tension between church and secular authority.
Again, a largely human domain with few conventional D&D monsters in evidence barring a few undead and some plant critters in the deeper reaches of the forest. In Borca, your PCs enemies will be mostly human, for a given value of 'human'. Wizardry is feared but you're not treated as a monster for using it, just dangerous. Borcans understands using power where you can find it, and whether that's the spellbook or the account book or the poison vial, they just recognise your ambition as dangerous rather than magic specifically.
Historically, we have shades of Mordent here, a dogs breakfast of a history cobbled together from an inconsistent and sometimes contradictory body of Ravenloft canon. Modern Borca is a combination of two domains, the old Borca, and the now defunct Dorvinia, both of which seem to share a common history with Barovia and Strahd. Dorvinia's origins are in the Strahd story - the ruling Dilisnya family plotted to murder the von Zarovitches at Sergei's wedding, except Strahd got there first, then blamed the Dilisnyas for the crime they attemped but didn't manage to complete, and hounded them into near extinction (note there a several versions of this story). The specifics are blurry, but the Dilisnya patriarch who plotted this was either killed and his bones hidden in Castle Ravenloft, or else turned into a vampire by Strahd and then entombed to exist in starving madness forever, or else escaped completely and died later. Regardless, his gigglingly murderous descendent Ivan Dilisnya was the darklord of Dorvinia until recently. Old Borca, on the other hand, originated in the same messy world of corrupt infighting city-states as Barovia and Dorvinia, but made its way to Ravenloft independently when its darklord, Camille Boritsi (a distant cousin of the Dilisnyas), poisoned her unfaithful husband and his lover. Camille's rule progressed with increasing caprice, bitterness, and paranoia, during which time the Church of Ezra was founded in Borca by her vision-smitten brother Yakov, until she was poisoned in turn by her daughter Ivana in revenge for Camille's vindictive seduction of Ivana's intended. Ivana inherited the darklordship, and when Borca and Dorvinia arbitrarily merged relatively recently, the two became co-Darklords of the new combined domain with Ivana distinctly the dominant of the two. How much of this matters to the great majority of Ravenloft games is pretty questionable.
Societally, money rules, although poison sometimes comes over the top with a late spoil to the boundary (I won't overuse the Australian football metaphors in future, I promise...) We theoretically have a legal system centred around contracts and indentures, with Ivana owning basically everything in Borca and letting it to her nobility of the moment, who sublet it further and further, and every layer adds their own batch of fees and graft on top, and corruption is a way of life everywhere and everything is for sale including justice so good luck getting your contract enforced if someone higher on the ladder decides to cheat you. Predictably, Borca is a terrible place to be poor, you're basically a serf with less recourse, and it's not a much better place to be a noble, cos the politics is lethal and lethally expensive, and if you have an attractive child they might be unfortunate enough to attract the attention of Ivan or Ivana. Lots of noble young Borcans are sent off to study in Dementlieu etc to avoid this very possibility. Economically, there's of course agriculture and winemaking and some crafts, but the place runs around money - it's the banking heart of the Core, though in an oddly missed opportunity to lay out some plothooks, we don't hear much about which nations, domains, or individuals are deepest in debt to Borcan financiers.
The protrayal of Ivana is a bit inconsistent. We're told she's flighty, vengeful and romantic, uninterested in governance except for when it comes to raising taxes to fund her own luxuries, but we're also told that she orchestrated a seamless takeover after killing her mother, and that she's one of the driving forces behind the anti-Falkovnia alliance of western Core nations, and we have a scene where she shakes S down for intelligence so expertly that S only notices later. From a plot point of view, she's your classic black widow trope, with a trail of poisoned lovers behind her, who twists and crushes the loves of others for the bitter sport of it. I suppose you could try to get a PC romantically involved with her, but do PCs really ever buy into that sort of thing? Having her enthrall an NPC the PCs care about might be a better option. Van Richten's Arsenal had a great plot suggestion where one of the high-ranking anchorites of Ezra in Levkarest, an aging, crippled man of great and renowned holiness who was a long-time trusted ally of van Richten, develops a hopeless late-life obsession with Ivana, and it had tragedy written all over it. If i wanted to run a black widow plotline with Ivana, I'd probably mine that. Her curse is pretty underwhelming - she looks ugly when she sleeps. Me too, sister, me too. Camille's curse was much more interesting - she was doomed to be betrayed by anyone who she trusted, which paradoxically led her to kill Yakov after the founding of the Church of Ezra - she never trusted him, so he remained faithful to her until the day she murdered him.
I wonder at the necessity of Ivan. Granted, in a domain themed around vicious backstabbing and untrustworthiness it makes sense to have an uneasy balance of Darklords at the top, but he doesn't seem to add much. He's a grinning foppish shock-value psycho, the 'crazed playwright forcing others into roles in his plays' thing is already done by Lemot Sediam Juste, and it's not like he and Ivana even actively seem to plot against each other much. There's hints that the lunatic image is a facade covering something more competent and dangerous (and his destruction of a Falkovnian incursion argues in favour of that), but what are his goals? The only one really talked about here is his paranoia about his advancing age while Ivana remains eternally 18. Why she doesn't simply try to turn him into a ermordenung (the inhuman venom-impregnated agents she creates alchemically from the prettiest of her young favourites, who i believe do not age) I'm not 100% sure.
Actually using Borca in a game - hmmm. For a one-off weekend in the Mists type thing, you're probably looking at a more evil Romeo and Juliet situation here - amazing dresses, upper-class debauchery, veiled barbs, feuds, duels, exotic poisons, doomed lovers, and a truly massive body count at the end when all the plots come to a head and Ivana and the ermordenung start cutting loose. It could work - though integrating a party of foreign PCs into a situation like that can be tough. And there's the obvious problem that so many of the nobility are just horrible people (or they wouldn't stay part of the nobility very long), PCs might be tempted to do a Mercutio and wish a pox on all their houses. The other way you could go is to emphasise the dilemma of the church of Ezra, an obvious Christianity-analog, a religion of the poor, that preaches humility and mutual protection against a dark world, but which is intricately entwined with the profoundly vile secular (and supernatural) rulers. Johann the anchorite and his crush on Ivana could be something to work with here, shades of Ambrosio from The Monk, except with Ivana wanting to find out how far a once-virtuous man would be willing to immerse himself in debasement and evil. Though the temptress femme fatale playing with the hearts of innocent men is an overdone and predictable trope I'd prefer not to run straight, there'd need to be a twist on it.
As a part of a living world setting, it's not my favourite, though it's reasonably well depicted here, and it serves as a nice thematic bridge between the 'advanced' domains like Richemulot and Mordent, and the more medieval places like Barovia and Nova Vaasa. I don't have anything against it, it just lacks ... pizzazz, once you get out of the big city and away from Ivana, Nostalia, and the Great Cathedral. It is another 'humans-are-the-worst-monsters' domain like Falkovnia, but I think it's more playable than Falkovnia in most travelling-around-hunting monsters campaigns. Falkovnia's role is to be the bad guy in a Falkovnian-militarism campaign. Borca is more flexible. I do like the ermordenung though, there's a lot of plot potential there. And if you're running a Strahd campaign that isn't CoS, there's a lot you can do with the Dilisnya family history too.
Borca is going to be a hard domain to translate to 5e though, simply because of the way the 5e poison mechanics work. Poison damage is once-and-done (and even the nasty ones don't cause much damage), and it rarely lingers. The poisoned condition is very nasty, sure, but you can sleep it off and it goes away if you can cure the poison. And in that department, Protection from Poison is a lowly second level spell that basically makes poison trivial unless it kills you outright first try before your cleric/druid/paladin/whoever can get the spell off. At least in previous editions you had Slow Poison at 2nd level to delay things a bit so you could frantically hunt for antidotes or try to concoct herbal remedies or whatever, and Neutralise Poison only came along as a 4th level spell. 5e really isn't set up for many classic poison-related plots - the one where someone is poisoned into a coma and you have to quest for the antidote (rather than just hiring a 3rd level cleric to Protection from Poison them), or the one where a bad guy poisons you and demands a favour for the antidote, or where poisons weaken you or make you more suggestible or similar rather than just wiping hit points off, or whatever. Simply bung a Protection from Poison on and you're fine - and it's not even a big investment of resources and for something with a really solid duration. Given poison is really Ivana's thing, they're going to have to do some work to make her (and the ermordenung) scary. Still, you could possibly do that with a sidebar containing game mechanics for a couple of dozen more interesting poisons than we currently get, and maybe some special rules for anti-poison magic being less reliable here.
Will Borca make it to 5e? I dunno if it's been revealed yet, but I suspect it will in some form. Wouldn't be surprised to see some major surgery in the interests of simplification though. Probably removal of one of the Darklords, excision of all the old history with Strahd. The classic black widow trope will be something that likely gets re-evaluated or de-emphasised, which i think is partly a shame, because it's a great trope for drama, but also could be a positive if it leads to Ivana becoming a more rounded character with interests beyond the romantic. i wouldn't even really particularly mind if Borca became a sort of pocket-domain centred around Ivana's court, or a Verona-style city state (I almost typed 'Vernon' there, which would have been a very different place...). To be honest in a Ravenloft where all domains are islands in the mist and Borca is not only surplus to requirements when it comes to 'the geography between Barovia and the Western Core' and we lose scope for the sort of nasty international politics where Ivana can shine, but also Borca loses its historical Barovian connection ... I'm not really sure what value we get, from a setting point of view, from rural Borca.
In light of me arbitrarily deciding we don't need rural areas in Borca any more, of course the random class generator gave me ranger. So this is a monster slayer ranger, built using a bunch of the Tasha's alternative Ranger class features to make it less wilderness-y. I figure she's an insignificant daughter of tenuously lower-middle ranked aristocracy, who found a copy of some of Van Richten's guides in an old library and has since secretly applied their lessons to a number of minor undead creatures and the like. However, pretty soon she'll have to go to Levkarest with her family to fulfil their social and contractual obligations. Her parents don't have the cash to send her out of Borca away from Ivana's circle until they can safely marry her off, and are afraid of what might happen. They'd be more afraid if they knew what she was up to in secret - she killed an ermordenung a while back, under the misapprehension it was a monster of some sort, and how she reacts when she realises ermordenung comprise half of Ivana's inner circle is anyone's guess.
Next up is metaplot-world, Invidia!
