One of the upcoming subclasses in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is the College of Spirits Bard. Yes, Bards got a new subclass in another setting book - the Eloquence Bard in Mythic Odysseys of Theros - that was reprinted in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything so that it would be setting-agnostic and AL-legal, but the flavor of this subclass plays beautifully into the Gothic Horror theme of Ravenloft.
The typical Bard is usually portrayed as someone who casts their magic and inspires their allies using music - Bards get to use musical instruments as spell foci and they have abilities like Song of Rest that imply their arts are purely musical in nature. But the truth is that Bards are ultimately weavers of stories and lore more than anything else. I like to think that a Bard is basically an emotion-mage. They can induce a useful mood for their companions while also messing with the emotions and perceptions of those around them - Bards tend not to use big destructive spells like Fireball, but have pretty broad access to mental-manipulation magic. Indeed, their beneficial spells can be thought of as just another form of mind-manipulation, only in this case it enhances the subject's capabilities rather than hindering.
"Spiritualism" was a major craze in the 19th Century. While belief in ghosts and unseen spirits and demons has been part of human culture since, well, humans have had a culture, the Spiritualist movement of the 1800s was, in large part, a reaction to the age of reason and the enlightenment. The enlightenment saw a huge transformation in the way that society was run - people started asking questions like "hey, why is that king allowed to rule over us when all he did to be king was be born into a certain family?" The enlightenment brought massive cultural change, and also powered technological change, which in turn also brought massive cultural change. Naturally, there were some who felt that all this change was leaving some things behind - the Romantics (who, among others, included Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein - which one could argue is the most important work in all of speculative fiction) sought to bring emotion back into what had become a cold and ultra-rational style in fiction.
Of course, with the wave of rationalism and science becoming a major part of the common person's daily life, the stage was set for pseudoscience - fantastical (sometimes intentionally misleading) beliefs garbed in the trappings of science. Rather than odd mystics and witches, people who presented themselves as doctors or professors would suggest that they had a scientific method for interacting with a supernatural world.
Spiritualists would often provide entertainment at parties or on stage, performing séances to contact the spirits of the dead. To what degree people were "in on the joke" or not depended I think on the individual - I'm sure for some fans of spiritualism it was more like going to a magic show than some religious rite. (I'm assuming most people who go and see magicians these days understand that it's all clever sleight of hand and not actually supernatural power.) But the people who would give these performances would certainly be the model for a College of Spirits Bard.
While this archetype could certainly be a model for your Spirits Bard, there are, of course, other models as well. At the heart of the imagery of this subclass is its reading - using a divinatory device to get various "stories" that then provide buffs to allies or problems for foes. One of the main suggestions for how to do this is to use a deck of cards. Tarot cards are associated with fortune-telling, and you could easily play a Spirits Bard as someone who draws cards from a deck to determine the spirits they call upon.
The Tarot deck is not too dissimilar to a standard deck of playing cards, with four suits that have numbered cards, with the top numbers represented by things like "queens" and "kings," though there are four "face cards" for Tarot as opposed to the standard deck's three. The big addition, though, are the many Joker-like "Major Arcana" cards (as opposed to Minor Arcana.) Things like "The Tower" or "Death" or "The Hierophant" exist outside of the four suits. In a lot of works of fiction, these Major Arcana are the only cards we see dealt in a Tarot reading, perhaps because of their iconic looks. But I believe that most fortune-telling practices also incorporate the "Minor Arcana," assigning meaning to cards like the Five of Cubs or the Eight of Wands.
The fortune-teller character is a trope often associated with the Romani people. Traveling carnivals are often associated with the itinerant Romani people, and whether genuine Romani or merely appropriating cultural signifiers, a lot of fortune tellers trade on the exoticism of being from a different culture to appear more credible, or at least add to the mystery and atmosphere.
The Vistani in the Ravenloft setting are modeled on the Romani people. This... has come with a bunch of problematic stereotypes (sadly, the Romani have historically been treated pretty terribly throughout Western history) and I have big hopes that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft will work to address some of the harmful tropes it inherited and carried on from earlier genre works.
As Curse of Strahd begin, one of the first things the players do is get a card reading from Madam Eva, the leader of Barovia's Vistani people. This is a crucial part of the adventure, as the readings she makes literally determine where certain items and characters are found in the adventure. Much of the adventure's middle act is the discovery and collection of the items hinted at by Madam Eva, so this reading is crucially important.
Madam Eva uses a Tarokka deck, which is very clearly meant to be an in-universe equivalent to the Tarot deck, though it has different cards. As such, though, I think a College of Spirits Bard, especially in a Ravenloft campaign, could use a Tarokka deck as their spellcasting focus. WotC even sells actual Tarokka decks. There's also an artifact in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything that is a very powerful Tarokka deck that houses spirits trapped within it.
Now, the carnival fortune-teller or the 19th century spiritualist are two archetypes you can definitely play into with this subclass. Both would, I think, fit nicely in the Ravenloft campaign setting, which is where this subclass will primarily be promoted. Much like the Undead Warlock, it adds a Gothic spookiness to the players themselves.
Still, just as Bards can play against type as any kind of powerful story-weaving character (I can imagine playing one as some kind of tribal story-weaver for a stone age civilization, for instance) I think you could definitely flavor this in other ways as well.
I've always been kind of fascinated by the broad categories of animism and shamanism. To profoundly boil these ideas down (and I could totally have the definitions off, to disclaim) animism is a type of spiritual worldview in which everything - from living creatures to natural objects like hills, rivers, and stones - contains a spirit that we can communicate with. Shamanism is related, but its focus is on invisible spirits that permeate reality, sometimes requiring a shaman to contact the spirit world.
I could absolutely see a College of Spirits Bard lean into these belief structures, perhaps more the latter. Remember that not all priests are Clerics and not all Clerics are priests (though the latter case is more common,) and you could play a College of Spirits Bard as a religious shaman who interprets the will of the spirits through your practices, aiding your community by serving as a connection to the spirit world, trading the Western trappings of the 19th Century Spiritualist for a more diverse set of real-world cultural inspirations.
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