humble minion
Legend
Invidia. Full of sound and fury, but signifying?
Invidia has been (with Falkovnia) the axis around which much of the international politics and plotting have centred for the past three-and-a-bit Gazetteers, so it's a bit jarring to finally arrive here and realise how tiny it is. Population of under 7000, but a few hundred extra 'allied' Falkovnian troops in addition to that. Oh, and we're supposed to believe that it managed to sustain over 1000 people in the military. That's not how economies or societies work - at least not for long without collapsing in a starving heap.
Yep, it's another nation that's overwhelmingly human and doesn't like arcane magic.
Geographically, we've got the sort of Eastern European gothic we've seen before in Barovia and to some degree in Borca. No actual mountains, but deep and old forests rarely touched by the axe, deep slow rivers trafficked by barges and riverboats, and a range of difficult hills in the middle that serve as a quasi-border between the rival rulers of the place. It's noticeable how samey the descriptions are here - there's several different forests described here, each with their own prevailing flora and rumours, but the upshot is that it's a lot of trees with not much else. The place is largely uncharted, especially in comparison to similar-sized domains like Richemulot or Mordent, where the writeup went to some lengths to plonk ruins, plothooks, and mysteries on the unlabelled bits of the map. Not here.
Given it's a bit less cultivated than other neighbouring domains, we do have some more monsters here than we've seen elsewhere. In particular, Invidia is called out as a place where giant-type creatures are common - ogres, trolls, fomorians, and ettins in particular, which is a bit unusual for Ravenloft. There's reference to Malocchio being able to control or direct them against his enemies, but it's really only a few allusions. Also not sure whether they were here before he showed up. Neighbouring forested domains like Kartakass, Verbrek, Valachan don't get called out as harbouring many, neither do mountainous domains like Barovia, Forlorn, or the Mountains of Madness in Darkon. Perhaps their existence is linked to the Dukkar somehow?
What other typical D&D monsters never really appear in Ravenloft? There's vanishingly few dragons, but they have made appearances from time to time in some of the higher-fantasy domains or in older products. I don't think I've ever read about beholders or ropers or owlbears, umber hulks or rust monsters, or the metal-bull implementation of gorgons, but they're D&D-specific creations with no folkloric roots, so that's perhaps not a surprise. No genies have ever appeared in a Ravenloft product that i can remember, which is a bit of a surprise now I think of it, they'd be a really great fit for places like Pharazia. In fact it surprises me a bit that TSR never created a al-Qadim themed domain during their 'let's put a domain based on EVERY campaign setting in Ravenloft!' phase. Actually, come to think of it, other than fiends or the odd very very rare celestial, there's almost no planar creatures in the setting - no slaad or modrons or phoenixes or couatl or or maruts or whatever - you don't even get regular elementals here. Most aberrations could probably find a home in Bluetspur, and there's a drow colony in Darkon where you could put most of the standard underdark critters if you felt the need i guess. There's a domain with a medusa darklord, from memory. Hobgoblins? Pegasi? Remorhaz?
Now I want a giant-centric domain. Every so often, when you're sowing beans in a mist-heavy area, one beanstalk will grow monstrously higher than the others, and if you climb to the top you find a mighty fortress in the clouds, and a domain of giants who will grind your bones to make their bread. I do like that the Invidian giants are very much the grotesque malformed varieties rather than the elemental-themed regular D&D giants though. Adds a point of difference (speaking as someone who's currently playing through Storm King's Thunder and has never been a huge fan of D&Ds tendency to have classical-element-themed varieties of everything)
But I digress. Socially, the place is Barovia but more so. Superstitious illiterate impoverished peasantry, oppressed by ironfisted tyrant, not really much new or novel here. We get our second of three full-on pogrom domains here - sucks to be a nonhuman in Falkovnia, sucks to have Vistani heritage here. Malocchio is trying to murder them all, and given he's immune to the evil eye and Vistani curses, he's having much better luck than anyone else would. Again, this makes it very inconvenient to be here if one of your PCs is of the target demographic. Still, there's bugger-all people in the domain and if you need to pass through here you can probably sneak through the woods if you have a decent ranger with you, or face down most of Malocchio's patrols if you've got a few levels under your belt, and unless you've specifically got something to do in Malocchios's part of the domain, you can always avoid it entirely by travelling via Borca and Barovia.
Historically, we've got another combined domain, Invidia absorbing part of the now-default and never particularly well detailed realm of Gundarak, after its maniacal vampire darklord (who basically existed as a foil to more interesting Darklords like Strahd and Lukas) was weakened and then killed off entirely in a couple of very early 2e products. Invidia itself was originally a werewolf-themed domain, until its darklord was killed by Gabrielle Aderre, who assumed the mantle. More recent history centres around Gabrielle and her children. She is half-Vistani, and her Vistani mother had a vision very young that warned of the misery that would come to pass if Gabrielle were to ever have a family or children. When Gabrielle grew, she became obsessed with her unknown father, and eventually blackmailed her mother into revealing his identity. She didn't react well to being told she was the child of rape when her mother was a prisoner in Falkovnia (her father is heavily implied to be Vlad Drakov), and abandoned her mother to die. However, once she was ruling Invidia she was visited by the Gentleman Caller and became pregnant. Heavy Rosemary's Baby vibes here - the baby is a half-fiend with Vistani ancestry, called a Dukkar, and is very powerful and precocious. So precocious in fact that as a child Malocchio took over temporal rulership of Invidia from his mother (she's still the Darklord though) and started his persecution of the Vistani. Gabrielle survived, however, with the aid of her wolfwere lover, and now controls the northern ex-Gundarak part of the domain with the help of the wolfweres and of a Gundarakite separatist movement led by her other lover. She has another child now, whose fatherhood is uncertain, and things will soon go very bad for her when the child either does or doesn't turn into a wolfwere, thereby alienating the lover who is not the father, and half her power base...
Whew. Got all that?
So, what's it like as an actual place to play? Honestly, as written in the Gazetteer, the whole thing is so heavily focused around the Kargatane's much-beloved Dukkar metaplot that unless you're going to get deeply involved in that, there's better places in the Core to run almost any story you can run here (unless giants are your thing?) This is very much a domain that fits into the Core-as-living-setting model of Ravenloft. It's all about politics and international power and even naked war - between Gabrielle and Malocchio, or between Invidia and Barovia, or as part of a larger conflict involving Falkovnia and the western Core domains. I think Invidia was once written as the domain that riffed off 'evil prophecied child' horror, like the Omen or even Exorcist, and could be used as a one-shot sorta setting for that kind of story. (Does that still work when the mother is also evil?) However, in the metaplot, Malocchio was allowed to actually grow up to adulthood and start doing his thing, so that much more interesting angle is long gone now and we're left with a rather uninspiring by-the-numbers adult bad guy. If you're deep, deep into Ravenloft historical canon, or the nature and culture of Vistani and their prophesies or whatever, then this might have something for you. I'd be interested to hear what experiences others have had with the place, because it really doesn't do much for me personally.
Will it make the transition to 5e? I suspect it might be on the chopping block and if it was, I wouldn't really miss it, but sheer real-world history might get it through. If it does, it'll look very very different. We already know Vistani are going to be less bloodline-based, and there goes half of Gabrielle and Malocchio's backstory, and the rape aspect may be toned down, so there goes a chunk of the rest, and as discussed at length in this thread, a large amount of what Gabrielle does is all based around her lovers and her children etc etc - if Invidia makes the 5e cut and she's still around, I reckon she'll get a rewrite to give her more agency and motivations and ambitions outside the reproductive space.
Random class generator gave me wizard, in a very non-wizard-friendly domain. It occurs to me that Ravenloft was originally created before sorcerers and certainly before warlocks. The various domains that are prejudiced against arcane spellcasters operated under various assumptions, especially that the majority of arcane casters were wizards and so identifiable by their spellbooks etc, but also that arcane magic was meaningfully distinguishable from divine magic, which isn't really true any more. The Gazetteers, being 3.5e era, do make some distinctions between the perception of wizards vs sorcerers from time to time, but the whole edifice of anti-arcane sentiment is starting to creak more than a little. Anyway, this guy is a cart-driver who helps his father run caravans to Barovia. He got to know one semi-regular passenger who was indignant he'd never learned to read, and taught him his letters. Slowly he discovered that this passenger was a wizard, and he begged to be taught magic so he could escape his drudgery and the unwelcome marriage his father was planning for him. The wizard refused, saying he was too busy to spend multiple years educating an apprentice. So this fellow blackjacked the unsuspecting wizard and threw him overboard from a river ferry one dark night, and took his spellbook and other stuff. Pictured here admiring one of his new magic items. Has no idea what it does...
Next up, Verbrek.
Invidia has been (with Falkovnia) the axis around which much of the international politics and plotting have centred for the past three-and-a-bit Gazetteers, so it's a bit jarring to finally arrive here and realise how tiny it is. Population of under 7000, but a few hundred extra 'allied' Falkovnian troops in addition to that. Oh, and we're supposed to believe that it managed to sustain over 1000 people in the military. That's not how economies or societies work - at least not for long without collapsing in a starving heap.
Yep, it's another nation that's overwhelmingly human and doesn't like arcane magic.
Geographically, we've got the sort of Eastern European gothic we've seen before in Barovia and to some degree in Borca. No actual mountains, but deep and old forests rarely touched by the axe, deep slow rivers trafficked by barges and riverboats, and a range of difficult hills in the middle that serve as a quasi-border between the rival rulers of the place. It's noticeable how samey the descriptions are here - there's several different forests described here, each with their own prevailing flora and rumours, but the upshot is that it's a lot of trees with not much else. The place is largely uncharted, especially in comparison to similar-sized domains like Richemulot or Mordent, where the writeup went to some lengths to plonk ruins, plothooks, and mysteries on the unlabelled bits of the map. Not here.
Given it's a bit less cultivated than other neighbouring domains, we do have some more monsters here than we've seen elsewhere. In particular, Invidia is called out as a place where giant-type creatures are common - ogres, trolls, fomorians, and ettins in particular, which is a bit unusual for Ravenloft. There's reference to Malocchio being able to control or direct them against his enemies, but it's really only a few allusions. Also not sure whether they were here before he showed up. Neighbouring forested domains like Kartakass, Verbrek, Valachan don't get called out as harbouring many, neither do mountainous domains like Barovia, Forlorn, or the Mountains of Madness in Darkon. Perhaps their existence is linked to the Dukkar somehow?
What other typical D&D monsters never really appear in Ravenloft? There's vanishingly few dragons, but they have made appearances from time to time in some of the higher-fantasy domains or in older products. I don't think I've ever read about beholders or ropers or owlbears, umber hulks or rust monsters, or the metal-bull implementation of gorgons, but they're D&D-specific creations with no folkloric roots, so that's perhaps not a surprise. No genies have ever appeared in a Ravenloft product that i can remember, which is a bit of a surprise now I think of it, they'd be a really great fit for places like Pharazia. In fact it surprises me a bit that TSR never created a al-Qadim themed domain during their 'let's put a domain based on EVERY campaign setting in Ravenloft!' phase. Actually, come to think of it, other than fiends or the odd very very rare celestial, there's almost no planar creatures in the setting - no slaad or modrons or phoenixes or couatl or or maruts or whatever - you don't even get regular elementals here. Most aberrations could probably find a home in Bluetspur, and there's a drow colony in Darkon where you could put most of the standard underdark critters if you felt the need i guess. There's a domain with a medusa darklord, from memory. Hobgoblins? Pegasi? Remorhaz?
Now I want a giant-centric domain. Every so often, when you're sowing beans in a mist-heavy area, one beanstalk will grow monstrously higher than the others, and if you climb to the top you find a mighty fortress in the clouds, and a domain of giants who will grind your bones to make their bread. I do like that the Invidian giants are very much the grotesque malformed varieties rather than the elemental-themed regular D&D giants though. Adds a point of difference (speaking as someone who's currently playing through Storm King's Thunder and has never been a huge fan of D&Ds tendency to have classical-element-themed varieties of everything)
But I digress. Socially, the place is Barovia but more so. Superstitious illiterate impoverished peasantry, oppressed by ironfisted tyrant, not really much new or novel here. We get our second of three full-on pogrom domains here - sucks to be a nonhuman in Falkovnia, sucks to have Vistani heritage here. Malocchio is trying to murder them all, and given he's immune to the evil eye and Vistani curses, he's having much better luck than anyone else would. Again, this makes it very inconvenient to be here if one of your PCs is of the target demographic. Still, there's bugger-all people in the domain and if you need to pass through here you can probably sneak through the woods if you have a decent ranger with you, or face down most of Malocchio's patrols if you've got a few levels under your belt, and unless you've specifically got something to do in Malocchios's part of the domain, you can always avoid it entirely by travelling via Borca and Barovia.
Historically, we've got another combined domain, Invidia absorbing part of the now-default and never particularly well detailed realm of Gundarak, after its maniacal vampire darklord (who basically existed as a foil to more interesting Darklords like Strahd and Lukas) was weakened and then killed off entirely in a couple of very early 2e products. Invidia itself was originally a werewolf-themed domain, until its darklord was killed by Gabrielle Aderre, who assumed the mantle. More recent history centres around Gabrielle and her children. She is half-Vistani, and her Vistani mother had a vision very young that warned of the misery that would come to pass if Gabrielle were to ever have a family or children. When Gabrielle grew, she became obsessed with her unknown father, and eventually blackmailed her mother into revealing his identity. She didn't react well to being told she was the child of rape when her mother was a prisoner in Falkovnia (her father is heavily implied to be Vlad Drakov), and abandoned her mother to die. However, once she was ruling Invidia she was visited by the Gentleman Caller and became pregnant. Heavy Rosemary's Baby vibes here - the baby is a half-fiend with Vistani ancestry, called a Dukkar, and is very powerful and precocious. So precocious in fact that as a child Malocchio took over temporal rulership of Invidia from his mother (she's still the Darklord though) and started his persecution of the Vistani. Gabrielle survived, however, with the aid of her wolfwere lover, and now controls the northern ex-Gundarak part of the domain with the help of the wolfweres and of a Gundarakite separatist movement led by her other lover. She has another child now, whose fatherhood is uncertain, and things will soon go very bad for her when the child either does or doesn't turn into a wolfwere, thereby alienating the lover who is not the father, and half her power base...
Whew. Got all that?
So, what's it like as an actual place to play? Honestly, as written in the Gazetteer, the whole thing is so heavily focused around the Kargatane's much-beloved Dukkar metaplot that unless you're going to get deeply involved in that, there's better places in the Core to run almost any story you can run here (unless giants are your thing?) This is very much a domain that fits into the Core-as-living-setting model of Ravenloft. It's all about politics and international power and even naked war - between Gabrielle and Malocchio, or between Invidia and Barovia, or as part of a larger conflict involving Falkovnia and the western Core domains. I think Invidia was once written as the domain that riffed off 'evil prophecied child' horror, like the Omen or even Exorcist, and could be used as a one-shot sorta setting for that kind of story. (Does that still work when the mother is also evil?) However, in the metaplot, Malocchio was allowed to actually grow up to adulthood and start doing his thing, so that much more interesting angle is long gone now and we're left with a rather uninspiring by-the-numbers adult bad guy. If you're deep, deep into Ravenloft historical canon, or the nature and culture of Vistani and their prophesies or whatever, then this might have something for you. I'd be interested to hear what experiences others have had with the place, because it really doesn't do much for me personally.
Will it make the transition to 5e? I suspect it might be on the chopping block and if it was, I wouldn't really miss it, but sheer real-world history might get it through. If it does, it'll look very very different. We already know Vistani are going to be less bloodline-based, and there goes half of Gabrielle and Malocchio's backstory, and the rape aspect may be toned down, so there goes a chunk of the rest, and as discussed at length in this thread, a large amount of what Gabrielle does is all based around her lovers and her children etc etc - if Invidia makes the 5e cut and she's still around, I reckon she'll get a rewrite to give her more agency and motivations and ambitions outside the reproductive space.
Random class generator gave me wizard, in a very non-wizard-friendly domain. It occurs to me that Ravenloft was originally created before sorcerers and certainly before warlocks. The various domains that are prejudiced against arcane spellcasters operated under various assumptions, especially that the majority of arcane casters were wizards and so identifiable by their spellbooks etc, but also that arcane magic was meaningfully distinguishable from divine magic, which isn't really true any more. The Gazetteers, being 3.5e era, do make some distinctions between the perception of wizards vs sorcerers from time to time, but the whole edifice of anti-arcane sentiment is starting to creak more than a little. Anyway, this guy is a cart-driver who helps his father run caravans to Barovia. He got to know one semi-regular passenger who was indignant he'd never learned to read, and taught him his letters. Slowly he discovered that this passenger was a wizard, and he begged to be taught magic so he could escape his drudgery and the unwelcome marriage his father was planning for him. The wizard refused, saying he was too busy to spend multiple years educating an apprentice. So this fellow blackjacked the unsuspecting wizard and threw him overboard from a river ferry one dark night, and took his spellbook and other stuff. Pictured here admiring one of his new magic items. Has no idea what it does...
Next up, Verbrek.
