NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voadam" data-source="post: 9376395" data-attributes="member: 2209">Ravenloft is very multiaspect.The Black box sets up gothic horror as a specific style of horror, not slasher gore, or cosmic horror, or over the top supernatural evil, but growing dread from uncertainty and twisting the normal and good to the wrong with well fleshed out revealed tragic stories. Lots of Ravenloft material goes in other directions.There are intense themed dark lords with stories and personal curses and powers and connections to the land and intrigues against other lords, and then there is everybody else, monsters and villains and NPCs that can also be focused on. Dark lords can be the focus as either godlike untouchable drivers of plot, or ultimate boss villains to be overthrown, or background you never directly come across as you go ghost hunting.Power levels are all over the place. Dark lords can be energy draining vampire lords more powerful than standard vampires, or a 4 hp evil manipulator guy who could be taken out by a thief not even backstabbing. Top tier villain lords could be overpowered by the customization options for monsters of the same type in the Van Richten guides.Monsters can be rare and unique or fairly omnipresent. A Kolchak night stalker monster of the week theme works for a Ravenloft campaign and the monstrous compendiums give you cool options. Monsters can have interesting stories and thematic powers but also be all over the place in power or abilities with Jack the ripper madmen types being essentially fourth level thieves but there being Borcan courtesan spies with save at -4 poison touch abilities. Monsters can be customized in the Van Richten's guides to match their stories, but also to make them complete party killers by enhancing energy drain up to five levels a shot or aging to extra decades per power bump so that they are one shot killers in D&D combat. Weaknesses can be thematic or just fairly random and esoteric. It is gothic horror with a focus on the normal and beautiful and good intruded upon by growing dread of the unnatural and it is oppressive and cruel evil. There is a mundane base, but also full D&D with magic and monster fighting heroes. It is a twist on D&D with many PC magic either having possible bad twists or not providing the normal divination knowledge certainties to work from.The Van Richten's guides provide an investigative D&D monster hunting model that focuses on the stories of individual monsters to build up to climax fights against tragic foes the PCs know.The setting books set up both weekends in hell and a full ongoing campaign.The modules are all over the place with some being investigations or helping people, some being complete railroads, some being complete PC screw overs with slasher gore shock or heavy handed loss of PC agency and character concepts. Some are focused on the low key and tragic gothic set ups while others are D&D high magic excesses like multiple books of vile darkness being ground up to enhance and coercively turn evil a formerly canonically mundane army and D&D specific rules loopholes for power gaming like a vampire NPC specifically enraging a ghost to use their age attack to advance the vampire to elder categories for greater power bumps.The setting can be nightmare illogical isolated domains with heavy mist separations and two adjacent lands having different moons or it can be a core with regular different domain interactions and the lords often actively scheming against each other with Birthright/Game of Thrones politics including many power players being hidden behind the throne.It is a small geographic area and small populations, but lots of monsters and death.It is a young setting created a few hundred years ago but also includes rules for monsters centuries older than the setting.Ravenloft experiences can vary hugely as well as what aspects people enjoy or hate.</blockquote>

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