Yeah, they just announced the book and it's not coming until mid-May (making it a couple weeks early for me to get it as a birthday gift to myself) but I have gone down a deep rabbit hole of obsession over the potential for Ravenloft content.
Anyway, as a setting based in horror, I thought it would be interesting to explore the possibilities of what kind of places we might find or design to fit within the Ravenloft setting.
The emphasis for Ravenloft has historically been gothic horror. But how, then, do we really define Gothic Horror? And is that truly all of Ravenloft, or are there other horror subgenres that we can touch on?
First off, Gothic Horror is typically associated with the 19th Century. That being said, the classics of the genre are extraordinarily wide-spread. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the novel that arguably created the entire science fiction genre along with the Gothic Horror genre, was published in 1818. Bram Stoker's Dracula, on the other hand, came out in 1897. While Frankenstein and Dracula are, arguably, the most iconic figures within the genre, but consider how different the same distance of years looked in the 20th Century - the end of World War I compared with the year that Final Fantasy VII came out.
Granted, I think that these two icons of horror are likely better-linked by the Universal Horror films of the 1930s
Stoker's novel takes an unusual approach to form, composed of letters, diaries, and newspaper articles that, collectively, tell the story of the vampire Count Dracula, who seeks to corrupt and turn the innocent woman Mina Harker. The collection of heroic men who save her (yeah, gender dynamics were not super evolved in the 1890s) includes their expert, Abraham Van Helsing, whose rational worldview and breadth of scientific knowledge arm the heroes with the tools they need to defeat and destroy Dracula, saving Mina from the damnation of undeath.
That this embrace of rationalism and science is part of one of the iconic works of Gothic Horror is sort of ironic given how the genre started. Mary Shelley, along with her husband Percy and their friends (including Lord Byron) were part of the Romantic movement. The Romantics were a response to the previous style in vogue, which had been a literary style defined by an almost fussy precision with language and a hyper-rational manner of description. The Romantics embraced the emotional, with characters whose motivations were passions (often un-virtuous passions) rather than carefully-deliberated ethical decisions.
Also, fun fact, the same friendly competition to write "ghost stories" that led to Frankenstein also led to a fragment of a story by Lord Byron that became the basis for the first English Vampire novel, so maybe there is a deep connection after all.
Amongst American authors, you cannot talk about Gothic Horror without mentioning Edgar Allen Poe. His stories, like Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, the Pit and the Pendulum, and maybe my favorite, the Casque of Amontillado (though damn if Tell-Tale Heart isn't awesome as well,) along with the Fall of the House of Usher and his poem, The Raven (which the first Simpsons Halloween episode adapted fantastically,) are crucial to the canon of the genre.
So, then, how are we to define Gothic Horror?
Monsters are certainly a common trope to most horror, but there is a common element to basically all gothic monsters - they are all some sort of perversion of humanity. Vampires are human in shape, but they are entirely uninhibited. Vampires are usually portrayed as hedonistic, but they are just as uninhibited in their wrath and violence - all restraint and respect is gone, and they simply take what they want. This makes them a bit seductive - after all, wouldn't it be nice to just be able to take whatever you wanted, however you wanted it? There's almost a Nietzschean superman aspect to the vampire - and Nietzche was a creature of the 19th century.
Frankenstein's monster (who, by the way, is also a Frankenstein as he takes his "father's" last name) is particularly tragic because his evil is not inherent, but what was taught to him by a neglectful creator. Though he is built of the parts of several dead people, Adam is a unique, new individual. But by showing him nothing but hatred thanks to his unsettling nature, Viktor Frakenstein ensured his creation would become the monster he saw him as.
Werewolves don't, I believe, have quite the same iconic exemplar, apart from Lon Chaney's Wolf Man (but we're talking literature for now.) Still, they represent a certain abandonment - the beast within humanity, some deep animalistic instinct that manifests monstrously as a transformed body and a bestial mind. Robert Lewis Stephenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde explores similar themes, along with themes related to the Nietzchean superman - a timid scientist creates a serum that transforms him into the hulking brute, and the allure of being free of those inhibitions allows him to remain a monster.
Man, I guess all of Gothic Horror is about the desire to break out of a repressed culture!
Well, hold on. We haven't touched on Poe.
In Poe's works, there's often only the suggestion of the supernatural. Of the stories I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, the only really explicitly supernatural event occurs at the end of Masque of the Red Death, when the terrifying visitor's mask is removed and only empty robes fall the floor, the Masque representing the plague's ability to strike both the poor in the town below and the decadent nobles in the castle above.
But the Tell-Tale Heart's still-beating heart of the man the narrator murders could simply be a hallucination based on his overwhelming guilt. The Raven's seeming connection to that narrator's grief over his lost love is probably all in his head.
Poe's focus is not so much monsters that represent the corruption of human morality, but the fallibility of the human mind, and the possibility that madness can alter someone's behavior to transform them into an all-too-human monster.
It's still about the breakdown of reason and rationality, but where the British works externalize that to physical monsters, Poe's focus is internal fracture.
And that, finally, takes us to the next subgenre: cosmic horror.
There's no author more closely associated with Cosmic Horror than H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft's work is often difficult to read as he was considered particularly bigoted even within the context of the 1920s. The casual, matter-of-fact way that he spouts racist canards, tropes, and slurs can be shocking and take you out of the narrative, which is unfortunate given that he also created some of the most enduring and fascinating horror concepts in the genre.
Lovecraft was a massive fan of Poe's, and even name-checks him in some of his early works. The notion that one's mind cannot be trusted is a common trope within his work.
But in many ways, Lovecraft was, like the Romantics a century earlier, reacting emotionally to the scientific developments of the era. In the early 20th Century, the fundamental understanding of how the universe is structured and works was overturned by Einstein's theories (the more you learn about physics, the more mind-blowing it is that A: Einstein came up with so many ideas and B: that they turned out to be mostly right).
In the face of a universe that was now known to be so profoundly old, so profoundly big, and in which the relationship between space and time on a cosmic scale was actually so different than the relatively intuitive Newtonian model that had preceded Einstein inspired a kind of existential dread that Lovecraft turned into horror fiction. If humanity was so small and so recent, what other things might lurk out there that are so much grander than we are?
Much as Mary Shelley had effectively created science fiction by having Victor Frankenstein as the original combination of ambitious innovation without thinking through the implications, Lovecraft helped to create the notion of the callous and powerful alien. (H.G. Wells of course had really pioneered the alien invasion genre with War of the Worlds, though despite the technical victory for Earth at the end of it, I think you could say that that work was also one of Cosmic Horror.)
But I think what distinguishes Lovecraft from the alien-invader stories that became particularly popular in B-movies in the 1950s, though, is that his emphasis was on a breakdown of the rational. Lovecraft connected the ideas of extraterrestrials or prehistoric lost worlds with the tropes of fantasy, fairy tales, and myth. He imagined that these alien beings might as well be gods, given their level of power, and then extrapolated the idea that the gods we humans worship are only naive fantasies - that on a cosmic scale, the only things that could have such a level of power would be utterly unrecognizable and incompatible with the human psyche.
In a weird way, Lovecraft more or less seeks to recreate the feeling of hiding from monsters under your blankets as a little kid - you'd rather just not know they were there, capable of destroying you any moment, than to test reality and potentially confirm their presence.
We've got a lot more horror genres to talk about here, so I might have to make this a multi-part post. But before I lose the thread entirely (can you tell that I don't write multiple drafts of these?) I wanted to talk about how these tropes can apply in a D&D setting.
Being a fantasy game, there's already a certain abandonment of the rational - you already live in a world of magic and gods whose existence is provable. But there's also another approach to take: after all, a rational person who entered a world with such things would simply have to adjust to new data - science has no "canon," and therefore any information that contradicts previously-believed theories simply means that the theories need to adjust to account for the new information.
I think it's clear that any gothic horror villain should be some perversion of humanity - which could mean a monster like a vampire, werewolf, ghost, etc., or it could mean an actual person whose behavior has begun to stray from what is acceptable (like, to use an example from the upcoming book, someone who decides they'd like to hunt other people for sport.)
There's something appealing to becoming a monster, even if, when you think about it, it's actually horrifying. But the monster can use that to their advantage. Giving the monster appealing attributes, even making them kind of likable, will go a long way. I think Strahd is a great example of this, because he's a villain you can empathize with - which might lure you into thinking there's some good in him. The horror, then, comes from the fact that he's actually a complete narcissist, and that his "love" for Tatyana is nothing more than a toxic desire to take control of another person. (Weirdly, I think the portrayal of Thanos in Infinity War and Endgame actually works in a similar way - throughout Infinity War you see him constantly arguing that his plan is actually altruistic, and that he's really just a good guy who can see what others can't. But, in fact, once we see things from a different perspective in Endgame, we can see how this is really just a self-serving narrative he's using to allow himself to pursue ultimate power, and that he's ultimately, yes, just a narcissist.)
In fact, a self-serving narrative might be one of the major common elements between the British gothic works and Poe - Montresor in the Casque of Amontillado and the unnamed narrator of the Tell-Tale Heart give themselves weird and off-hand justifications for their murderous actions. The former claims that Fortunado insulted him and thus deserved to be walled-up in the wine cellar, and the unnamed narrator claims that his victim's blind eye contained some sort of evil, which sounds like some major BS.
Thus, I think that any gothic horror antagonist should have some kind of justification for their actions. In their minds, they are the hero, not the villain.
Now, things get complicated with Cosmic Horror.
Tonally, the two can be very similar, especially if you lean into the cults-and-conspiracy vibes common to cosmic horror. However, the worst monsters in cosmic horror are anything but human-like. Indeed, the scariest thing about them is that we have no frame of reference for what they are or what they want. The bizarre barrel-shaped star-fish-headed creatures from At the Mountains of Madness are actually closer related to plants than animals, but they are intelligent, and seem to have vivisected some of the researchers that the narrator finds - and they're not even the actual monsters of the story!
Lovecraft's monsters are of the "kill it with fire!" or the "run away screaming" variety, when they're not "hope I have a psychotic break and can't remember seeing this" levels of terrifying.
However, there is an avenue to connect this with the tropes of gothic horror, as Lovecraft often did: the monsters themselves are too alien for us to even understand as "evil" per se. However, other humans (or, given that it's D&D, humanoids) have different ways of reacting to these monsters. For some, the promise of power might be worth selling out the rest of humanity to get it. Some might seek transformation, to abandon humanity and become something more like these alien beings. Others might act purely out of a misunderstanding of what the effects of their actions will be.
I think you can layer the tropes of Gothic Horror with those of Cosmic Horror in this way. One manner would be to have a gothic figure of evil whose narcissistic worldview makes them believe they can handle what mere mortals couldn't, and threatens to unleash something a whole lot worse than vampires or the like.
The other is to invoke Nyarlathotep.
While beings like Azathoth, Yogg-Sothoth, and such are so vast and powerful that it's hard to imagine they truly want to do harm to humanity (if they're even aware of us,) Nyarlathotep is the horrifying exception: a Great Old One who does, in fact, take actions intended to directly affect us. Granted, Lovecraft was creating an entire mythos in which there was no separate category for demons or the like - his Nyarlathotep is a kind of cosmic Mephistopheles.
But that also means that you can play with these tropes using fiends as well as aberrations. (In fact, Demogorgon, the demon lord, has some elements of his lore borrowed strongly from Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow, a work that heavily inspired Lovecraft and whose eponymous figure was appropriated into the Cthulhu Mythos.)
The monsters in Lovecraft can be the source of the kind of madness that animates the villains of Poe's horror stories.
In fact, the Ravenloft setting itself is, in its own way, somewhat cosmic in its horror. While the Darklords are center-stage, the mysterious Dark Powers remain emphatically unexplained, which could suggest that there's something even more terrifying going on underneath all the predatory vampires and zombie hordes. (Hey, you ever play Bloodborne?)
This far in, and we've only really addressed two subgenres of horror. These are also limited to Western culture. Horror, as a genre, is pretty universal given that fear is a pretty universal emotion. In fact, the line between horror and other genres can be a blurred one - indeed, the entire fantasy genre (and the myths that the genre grew out of) are about overcoming monsters symbolic of real-world fears.
One I think I'd like to touch on (though I have very little familiarity with it) is the Japanese Kaidan, which are ghost stories. I highly recommend the movie Kwaidan (which is just an archaic transliteration of Kaidan), by Masaki Kobayashi).
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