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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 9375878" data-attributes="member: 7635">I will tell you about my journey through Ravenloft. Maybe it will help both your dual personalities. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I loved Ravenloft when I first heard about it. I always liked scary stuff, so a setting built around Dracula and the Wolfman sounded right up my alley. I never actually ran Ravenloft (most of the DMs I knew ran their own homebrews, so I followed that trend) but I did do the "weekend in hell" model of grabbing PCs for a few sessions (or a module) and then depositing them home. There were a few times an adventure spiraled out of control (leading to the dread [USER=6877472]@James Gasik[/USER] alluded to) but for most of us, it Ravenloft was a bunch of drag-and-drop mini adventures you ran around Halloween. When Domains of Dread dropped though, the notion of running Ravenloft as a world really came into its own. Up to that point, every Ravenloft product assumed the Mists deposited a bunch of foreigners into a domain and true to form, the first thing they did was look for a way to get home. Kill that Strahd guy? If it gets me outta here! DoD did some of the important lifting for trying to make Ravenloft a setting where natives could adventure in. Unfortunately, it made a lot of OTHER not so great choices that detracted for it (why did DoD need to reprint whole parts of the PHB? what a waste of space!) Arthaus took that idea and ran with it, but ironically, thats about the time I noticed all the cracks in the very premise. Ravenloft was never designed to be a coherent, rational world. It's a collection of mini nations that have no bearing on each other tossed together into a hodgepodge of geography and culture. Each nation was effectively an island even if borders were touching, and the concept of Ravenloft being a place where trade, commerce, travel, and politics happen felt strained. The coast disappeared randomly on the west, the number and phase of the moon differed from domain to domain; technically advanced societies were only a stone's throw from medieval peasantry, and a nation steeped in magic like Darkon (with demihumans and a D&D level magic) shared a border with Lamordia (where everything was so rational that magic and non-humans were considered myth. Hello; your next-door neighbors are steeped in the stuff)!Ultimately, it disillusioned me. So much so, I abandoned the idea of ever running Ravenloft. If I was going to do a horror setting, I would pick one that was internally consistent. Innistrad was a contender for more than a hot minute. Lots of horror kickstarters flittered onto my radar. Anything but that amalgamation of mismatched body parts that Ravenloft was. It would be Van Richten's Guide, with the return to "a weekend in hell" style of design, which made me fall in love with Ravenloft again. Gone was the pretense of a functioning economy or geopolitical landscape. In its place was dream logic. Realms that could only exist in the artificiality of pockets lost in the Mist. It was no easier to get from Barovia to Forlorn than it was to get to Souragne, Har-Akir, or anywhere else. Nations did not interfere with each other. Only a few types of people (Vistani, Anchorites of Ezra, and player characters) traveled between domains. I wanted a setting that had consistent internal logic, but I got a setting that told me logic had no place here, and once I grasped that, I fell in love with Ravenloft again. My experience is unique to me, but my takeaway point is that to enjoy Ravenloft, you must embrace the absurd. It cannot make sense. It runs on vibes, not logic. If you cannot accept it, there are hundreds of excellent horror settings on Kickstarter that do a far greater job of presenting an internally consistent horror setting than DoD/Arthaus did. But you cannot look at Ravenloft as anything other than a soundstage for horror stories and nightmares to play out on. Asking if the world is round and follows a heliocentric model is asking too much; the sun is a prop created by Hollywood lighting to provide the story with a sense of normalcy. Any other attempt to explain it is madness.That's my take, at least.</blockquote>

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