D&D General The thread where I review a ton of Ravenloft modules

The thing was, I too once expected Ravenloft to adhere to the concept of "normal" as a default to allow the horror to be the unnatural and it drove me to a place where I could not stand Ravenloft after a while. The Mists, the landmass, the inherent contradictions of geography and politics, it didn't make bloody sense! Because I was trying to make it Faerun but spooky and that wasn't Ravenloft. Ravenloft is a dream. It's based on vibes not logic. It allows a vampire to be the Lord of a land for 400 years and nobody in the country questioning it. It was when I accepted that Ravenloft is surreal that it made sense again. It allowed me to let go of trying to make it a living world (something Arthaus tried, but I feel ultimately, failed at) and embrace each realm as its own nightmare. It's an anthology made into a setting, and once that clicked it all made sense again.

Paul Farquhar said:

One of the reasons I really don't like the 2nd edition Ravenloft Boxed set was the way it stated up all the dark lords as monsters that could be fought. I know a lot of players treated that as a hitlist and travelled round the land killing dark lord for the LOLs. Not exactly horror gaming when the monsters should be hiding from the PCs!

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I really like the 3.0 Ravenloft Campaign Setting book for this. Other than an appendix on monster variants it is a PC oriented view of the setting to the point of not listing who the Dark Lords of the various domains are let alone statting them to be a specific CR.

For instance in Lamordia the domain entry notes it is ruled by Baron Von Aubrecker and mentions locals disdain the shady surgeon Victor Modenheim who conducts strange experiments. No direct reference to the hidden Dark Lord at all.

TiQuinn said:

The House on Gryphon Hill is a fascinating idea but the module is such a damn mess. I've read that thing so many times and if I were to ever run it, I'd have to basically re-write it to make it coherent.

On another note, Captain Kronos is probably the best Hammer horror movie of all time, and one of the best inspirations for a Ravenloft adventure, right down to the lead character basically being a D&D character.

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I ran I10 Gryphon Hill and I6 Ravenloft simultaneously back in 2E (using the "Dreams of Barovia" advice in I10), and I agree that the latter needs a lot of work - the latter is attempting to replicate some of the events when Strahd gets to London with a bit of Invasion of the Body Snatchers/Jekyll & Hyde thrown in to keep the PCs off their game. Years later I'm convinced they were heavily drawing on the Call of Cthulhu RPG because its so different in tone (especially deciphering clues from the Shipping Manifest - such a CoC staple).

But overall, that module is a confused mess and the staged ending very unsatisfying. As I said above, it plays so unlike a typical D&D adventure and they players have to really buy into the gothic atmosphere and tropes hard time to sell it an make it work (and that is difficult to do when your hard-earned character's rear is on the line). And I think the same thing goes for Ravenloft as a whole - playing much better under the likes of Masque of the Red Death PC creation than standard D&D.

The original Ravenloft box set was deliberately campy, and until 5E was very much a "DM's playground" where the DM gets to have their fun and thrills reading about and playing NPCs who have backgrounds and minions as rich and intricate as the PCs, and set-piece encounters that are dramatic works of art meant for the DM to drool over than actually be fun to be involved in. It makes it a "weekend in hell" and frankly unfun to be on the Player's side of the screen (mostly because you don't ever get to see the side of the story behind the screen), and the one redeeming quality of 5E's Van Richten's guide was that it made a serious attempt to make it enjoyable for both sides to have fun, engaging adventures that have a proper fantastic gothic bend in the dreaded lands of the mist (even if it did royally screw up some of the established Dark Lord entries) and not be a "humans only club" where everyone will lynch the wizard on sight because that's the only way to keep magic from ruining the horror aspect of the campaign.

Voadam said:

How do you handle the presence of magic and PC races and classes?

Ravenloft has traditionally been all over the place in this respect, some domains have been described as not even believing in magic, others go all in on people knowing and dealing with magic and monsters but just being generally afraid and oppressed.

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I've never fully embraced the idea in any campaign of people being scared of monsters or magic and wanting to put them to the torch. I think it's a self-defeating idea from a practicality standpoint. No one wants to play a half-orc if their half-orc is going to constantly be treated as if they're a monster who needs to be hunted down, and they have to wear a cloak all the time, and have arbitrary negatives that no other character has. If I felt that it was truly something that I couldn't get past because people could envision a tiefling character in a Victorian-esque setting, I'd start limiting in Session zero, but I've never really had to do that. I disregarded this stuff even back in the 2e days because it was so "anti-fun".

What I have done is treat magic and science as competing ideas. I brought Paradon into the Core way back in a campaign. I had a railroad on the western side of the Core well before the latest Van Richten's guide added Cyre 1313. Lamordia has always been about science gone wild, and subsuming magic.

Remathilis said:

Look, Ravenloft is a place where monsters roam the forest, killers stalk the alleys, and even the local entertainment (theaters and carnivals) are run by darklords. You can't get normal with that. So creating a functional society where the normal and the surreal sometimes exist side by side makes it easier to explain why people go to the Carnival or the Grande Masquerade.

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I think we do it all the time in TV shows like the ones we mention. Carnival is not too much different from the carnival of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Stephen King has turned the entire Northeast into his own "not quite reality" connected horror universe. Maine's lost towns to vampires, aliens, a demon spider thing, the Devil! And yet, life still continues on somehow.

TiQuinn said:

I think we do it all the time in TV shows like the ones we mention. Carnival is not too much different from the carnival of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Stephen King has turned the entire Northeast into his own "not quite reality" connected horror universe. Maine's lost towns to vampires, aliens, a demon spider thing, the Devil! And yet, life still continues on somehow.

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I'm currently using the Carnival (as detailed in VGR), and it's a tremendous setting, because it's timeless and cosmopolitan.

Remathilis said:

The thing was, I too once expected Ravenloft to adhere to the concept of "normal" as a default to allow the horror to be the unnatural and it drove me to a place where I could not stand Ravenloft after a while. The Mists, the landmass, the inherent contradictions of geography and politics, it didn't make bloody sense! Because I was trying to make it Faerun but spooky and that wasn't Ravenloft. Ravenloft is a dream. It's based on vibes not logic. It allows a vampire to be the Lord of a land for 400 years and nobody in the country questioning it. It was when I accepted that Ravenloft is surreal that it made sense again. It allowed me to let go of trying to make it a living world (something Arthaus tried, but I feel ultimately, failed at) and embrace each realm as its own nightmare. It's an anthology made into a setting, and once that clicked it all made sense again.

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I've always played fast and loose with the timelines - I've never really paid canon timelines much mind. For Strahd, it's been easy.

"He's from a noble family whose line stretches back generations. Count Strahd II was the father of Count Strahd III, and how strange that they are so similar, but then the bloodline is very strong with the Von Zaroviches. I hear he's taken a new bride. Perhaps another heir someday soon?" -- some Burgomeister.

Removed. Better explained below.

TiQuinn said:

I've always played fast and loose with the timelines - I've never really paid canon timelines much mind. For Strahd, it's been easy.

"He's from a noble family whose line stretches back generations. Count Strahd II was the father of Count Strahd III, and how strange that they are so similar, but then the bloodline is very strong with the Von Zaroviches. I hear he's taken a new bride. Perhaps another heir someday soon?" -- some Burgomeister.

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That's my point. Nobody questions how Strahd the third looks, acts and sounds like Strahd the second, or when or where he was born, or how he came into possession of the Castle. It's just another surreal aspect they shrug and accept while drinking from a tavern literally called Blood on the Vine. It doesn't faze them they are in a ghost story because ghost stories are all they know.

Remathilis said:

That's my point. Nobody questions how Strahd the third looks, acts and sounds like Strahd the second, or when or where he was born, or how he came into possession of the Castle. It's just another surreal aspect they shrug and accept while drinking from a tavern literally called Blood on the Vine. It doesn't phrase them they are in a ghost story because ghost stories are all they know.

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I guess I don't see these things as surreal, per se. I think of them more in the terms of a wild conspiracy theory. Surreal to me is when a truly reality bending occurence happens like a border closing, and suddenly the way you were going just leads back into the domain. But then I've always dialed back on some of the more obvious and over the top excesses of Ravenloft, largely because TSR was so bad at it.