D&D 5E (2014) Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft Table of Contents

As shared by DMs Guild brand manager Lysa Penrose.

D&D 5E - D&D Van Richten's Guide To Ravenloft showing up in the wild!

Here's the first one I saw by the fantastic Lysa Penrose! Any others folks have seen?

www.enworld.org

 

[bedir than]

I get why they have small entries, because do we really want huge reprints of older material?

Because the vast, vast, vast majority of D&D players and GMs have never encountered the older material before. The increase in the player base means that every book is an introduction to something that is new.

And, because 5e is very much about table-canon rather than their own canon, the modern version of D&D is about giving story outlines and plot points, not stone-etched plot arcs and railroads.

 

[Faolyn]

At a guess, they’re fat and happy with their magically created food whilst the rest of the population starves.

In Van Richten's Guide to the Walking Dead, they \had a ghoul with that backstory; he'd been executed for either stealing food or magically making food (can't remember which), and now was always hungry. He could swallow Medium creatures whole. I'm not fond of the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins, but there were some pretty cool creatures in the three guides they narrated.

 

[Charlaquin]

The irony of someone complaining that shortening it to Ez is racist when it's not even a Romani name... I've never heard this bullocks that shortening people's names is intolerance. Obviously a lot of nicknames are, but just being shorter isn't anything.

I mean, it can be a micro aggression to shorten someone’s name, depending on context. Like, if you’re shortening it because you find their whole name difficult to pronounce and you can’t be bothered to try? That’s pretty insensitive. But this isn’t that. This is a Vistani character who was named after one of the most famous “Romani” characters in fiction, whose name isn’t actually Romani, and who by the way was secretly a white girl who had been abducted in the original story. Changing her name is probably for the best, but since it’s been established in the canon for so long, that’s not necessarily a great option either. Shortening it makes a lot of sense in that context.

Personally, I have it be an assumed name. She’s known for employing disguises and false identities, so having a fake name - particularly one that plays into what ignorant Barovians think sounds quintessentially Vistani - makes a lot of sense. But shortening it to Ez is probably the better option for the published book. Especially because that way individual groups can choose whether they want Ez to be a nickname, or to retcon it to be her whole name, or ignore it and keep calling her Ezmerelda, as suits their table’s needs.

 

[Parmandur]

I wish it had a bit more player side and as usual when there is only a small amount of players options its for magic users. I am sure martial types have adapted there ways to deal with some of the horrors they face.

Based on Mythic Odysseys of Theros, the Dark Gifts likely have application to a broad range of character types.

 

[AmerginLiath]

My first thought looking at this, after reading other notes on the book, is how easy it would be to use the Creating A Dark Domain rules to build a version of The Village from The Prisoner, a bucolic bureaucratic nightmare that chaotic murderhoboes can neither escape from nor seem to rile up any…

 

[Remathilis]

Based on Mythic Odysseys of Theros, the Dark Gifts likely have application to a broad range of character types.

Appears so

 

[Tonguez]

My first thought looking at this, after reading other notes on the book, is how easy it would be to use the Creating A Dark Domain rules to build a version of The Village from The Prisoner, a bucolic bureaucratic nightmare that chaotic murderhoboes can neither escape from nor seem to rile up any…

And a giant bouncing ball for the Darklord

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

No Grave, Blood, Pyre and Mist Elementals...
Even though it's easy to modify an Elemental with some "corruption" abilities.

Yeah, just make half their damage necrotic and you're basically done.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Must be nice to get the books for free AND unique stuff like the Ouija board box.

"Free" in the sense that they put in tons of time and labor?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I’m wondering why they didn’t get more pages and expand the other domains. There’s certainly enough material to draw from to flesh most if not all those listed domains to the “full” treatment. They could have easily done another 50-100 pages. I’m glad we’re getting this much but honestly wondering why it wasn’t 320-some pages like Eberron.

They probably sat down, went through all the domains and decided which merited the treatment. Even on our threads here, there's lots of consensus that there was plenty of duplication and overlap. Scrapping the weaker domains and giving whatever good stuff it had to a similar but better domain makes for a better product overall. If people really want the OG versions, they're all over on DMs Guild/DriveThruRPG or on the (semi-illegible) Ravenloft wikis. (Seriously, who puts navy blue on a black background?)