Nerd Immersion always seems to have lightning-fast updates on D&D news, and the stream they put on two days ago gives us a ton of details about the upcoming Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, the 5E sourcebook for D&D's horror-themed setting.
Paging through the book, they answered many questions on stream, and I'm going to try to sum them up as best I can. We won't get into every gritty detail, but I'll try to get the important bits:
Let's start with the more disappointing details, just to get them out of the way:
The first is that the Dark Lords don't have unique stat blocks. In most cases, the book recommends existing stats - even recommending the standard Vampire stat block for Strahd von Zarovich, which is odd given that Curse of Strahd gives him a unique block (one I'm not going to look up given that I'm playing in a Curse of Strahd campaign and it's bad enough that I read the book already about four years ago.)
I can sort of see the logic of just not giving a stat block to monsters that the players shouldn't be able to defeat or kill, but I've been thinking about maybe creating stat blocks that simply have no hit points, so you can still know the kind of threat they pose without allowing the party to be a threat to them.
There obviously isn't going to be enough room to detail each domain as much as Barovia got in Curse of Strahd (which, to be fair, was basically an entire book built around Barovia's various locales.)
There also aren't any new spells or magic items (except one item wielded by one of the Dark Lords).
The book's structure seems to give each of the featured domains a few pages to talk about the Darklord and the domain, with a map, but the "other domains" like The Nightmare Lands or Cyre 1313: The Mourning Rail, only get a quick paragraph.
But with that out of the way, let's get into the more exciting things.
First, there's the obvious stuff. New monsters, races (well, lineages), and subclasses.
The bestiary doesn't seem to be enormous, but what's there looks suitably creepy, and I'm particularly interested in the Dullahan, which I'd feared would be some CR 4 or 5 thing that a tier 1 party could easily survive and defeat, but is instead I believe CR 13 and has mythic actions similar to the mythic monsters in the Theros book (it's also undead, which I get, though I kind of like the Kobold Press' version that has it be Fey instead). Likewise, I believe the Loup-Garou (which is the French word for werewolf) is a significantly-beefed-up werewolf stat block with a different kind of infectious lycanthropy.
The gothic lineages have been changed somewhat: there is no longer any dual-typing, so Reborn and Dhampir are now simply humanoid, rather than potentially being Undead or Construct as well (which is probably for the best, as the rules were decidedly not intuitive as to whether Cure Wounds would work on a Dhampir character, and you no longer need to worry about the Cleric's Turn Undead.) Hexblood are now just Fey, which has precedence with the Satyr and Centaur races from Theros and Ravnica.
Gothic lineages also carry over proficiencies and movement types if the character had been another race previously. So a Triton will still retain their swim speed if they are Reborn, and an Elvish Dhampir will still get their automatic Perception proficiency. Also, the Dhampir's bite has been clarified - you use your Constitution modifier for it instead of, not in addition to, your Strength modifier, and you only heal for the piercing damage it does, so you can't boost it with Smite (also, sadly, it's not a finesse weapon so no sneak attack.) Still, I think Hunter's Mark will still boost both the damage and healing, so fun!
The Undead Warlock has gotten one very predictable nerf, which is that the bonus die when converting your damage to necrotic while under Form of Dread is now a once-a-turn thing, rather than every attack. Given that that could have effectively made ever Eldritch Blast hit a crit, and every crit a double-crit, I think this was fully to be expected and can't really complain. Otherwise, the subclass looks more or less unchanged.
I'll confess the College of Spirits Bard got enough changes to make my eyes glaze over, but I think the majority of it was just rejiggering and rebalancing the various Spirit Tales on the big table that sits at the core of the subclass.
In addition to a reprint of the Haunted One background, there's also an Investigator background as well as some suggestions for various additional background features for existing ones.
It does seem that a good chunk of the book is dedicated to helping DMs craft their own content, with guidelines for building a Darklord NPC, a domain of dread, and how to make existing monsters spookier and tied in more clearly to a domain of dread and its lord.
But let's now get to the juiciest stuff:
The book contains new rules for Stress, which are treated a bit like exhaustion - different levels of stress will give more and more detriments, and to lose stress, the character has to either take days off to fully relax and recover, or they'll need lesser restoration to suppress stress or greater restoration to actually remove stress levels.
Tied into this are stress triggers - a character might gain various stress triggers after going through traumatic events (or based on their backstory). These might include claustrophobia making it harder for them to squeeze through tight spaces, or phobias (maybe they start fearing spiders after a giant spider crits them). Stress is gained when a stress trigger appears and the character fails a Wisdom saving throw.
I think this is a great way to amp up the challenge - one of the toughest parts of running a game like D&D in a horror setting is that D&D adventurers are built to confront and slay monsters, so it's hard to reflect the terror of encountering such monsters with the existing mechanics.
But to take a much further step, there's a system called Survivors.
Designed to be a kind of step away from the campaign proper, Survivors are characters that players take on who are absolutely not adventurer-types. Survivors come in four classes (I can't recall all their names, but there's the Squire and the Sneak, and I think the four are basically your Fighter/Thief/Mage/Priest classic quartet) and can level up and gain talents, but their skills are built much more around escaping monsters than fighting them - for example, one allows you to choose to become frightened of a monster and then increases your speed with which you can run away from them, and another allows you to let out a piercing scream (that can be heard at long distances) that gives you bonuses or advantage to saving throws against a monster's abilities.
I imagine there are similarities here with the Sidekick system detailed in Tasha's, but when I get my hands on these, I'm really curious to maybe run a one-shot with all Survivor characters and see how well this turns D&D into more of a Call of Cthulhu-style survival horror game. (Depending on how well it works, I have a concept for a Ravenloft campaign in which the players play teenagers from Earth, maybe in the 1980s, and get dragged into the Mists, and have to first survive as Survivors before they can choose proper character classes. Essentially it'd be like Ash in Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 and then upgrading to him in Army of Darkness when they get a real character class.)
It definitely looks like they're doing something different with this book compared to existing campaign setting books. I guess the proof is in the pudding, and I'll just have to run a Ravenloft game after I get my hands on it.
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