I realize that I've been posting about this book for, well, months, but I've now finished reading it cover-to-cover, and I'm now ready to give my informed impressions:
This might be my favorite campaign setting sourcebook for 5th Edition. Let me see if I can articulate why:
There are other strong contenders for that top spot. Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica makes great use of its ten guilds to give you options for all sorts of interesting adventures and plot hooks. Explorer's Guide to Wildemount not only has great guidelines for building a campaign around your players' characters, but is also profoundly useful as a granular guide to the setting itself, allowing a DM to easily let the players go anywhere on the map and then just grab the book and come up with an adventure for them appropriate to the place where they arrive.
Van Richten's focus is on tone. Apart from what seems like an excellent starter adventure in The House of Lament (that has replayability and drips with atmosphere,) you're not going to find dungeon or battle maps here (though Curse of Strahd has you covered if you ever want players to go to Castle Ravenloft or other locales in Barovia.) While it does have some fantastic horror-themed monsters, you might be surprised to find that just about every NPC in the book, including its Darklords, is represented by stat blocks from the Monster Manual, some of which are not terribly high CRs. Granted, the book pointedly describes the various characters as having a stat block "like" X Monster Manual entry, and speaking from experience, I highly recommend customizing monsters to suit your purposes (that said, there are also reasons to keep a Darklord low-CR).
Many of the classic Domains of Dread and their Darklords have been reimagined, sometimes gender-swapping them, or sometimes having an old Darklord replaced by a new one. There are also some new domains. I'll confess that some of these don't scream "horror" as obviously as others. While Dementlieu is now a paranoia-inducing Cinderella-meets-Masque-of-the-Red-Death, a place like Hazlan feels like it could exist in a more traditionally broad fantasy genre.
But, of course, horror is sometimes more about how you tell a story than the pieces at play.
Rules bloat is something that I think can threaten to overcomplicate an already complicated game like D&D - something I'm given to understand was a big issue in 4th Edition. The new subclasses and Gothic Lineages are easily incorporated into the modular system of D&D, but the big headliner new mechanic, Dark Gifts, are, I think, probably simple enough not to bog down a game. The alternate Fear and Stress rules might be a little much, but if you and your players can handle them, could make for a tenser, scarier game.
This book is, I think, more aimed at helping DMs run games better than probably any book since the DMG. Not only do they give the DM lots of lore and locations, but the guides on designing a domain of dread and its darklord and the later "Horror Workshop" have some really great tips for making a Ravenloft game feel different (though as a DM who tends to have horror elements in his normal D&D, it's useful for any such game.)
One of Van Richten's strengths is that the setting itself is cool: A series of disconnected demiplanes all linked by the Mists. The DM is given broad discretion to shape the narrative and draw the players where they want them to go, but also allows for myriad types of game. A Ravenloft game could easily be a one-shot in which the party only gets swallowed by the Mists for a harrowing night of terrors and then gets spat out back into their home world, or it could be an extended attempt to escape the Mists. Or the party might simply be Ravenloft's new permanent residents, or even have grown up there and never knew anything else. Likewise, the scope of a game can be whatever you want - you can easily run an entire campaign in a single domain, or have the players regularly travel through the Mists between different locales.
While I'm certain to pillage some things from this book for my own homebrew campaigns, I'm also very tempted to simply run a Ravenloft game. (When the players of my Ravnica campaign eventually get to Innistrad, I'm for certain going to employ some ideas from this book.)
So, let's break it down:
Pros: Excellent guidance for thematic storytelling. Exciting new subclasses and "races." Thorough details and inspiration for a number of adventure types, including outlines for how to run a zombie siege, the cycles of a plague, a high-stakes costume ball, and more. Super cool monsters. And a great starter adventure. Also, the book has some hidden secrets that reveal themselves when you piece together certain evidence.
Cons: Effectively no magic items. No unique stat blocks for Darklords. "Other" Domain descriptions are very short despite seeming, in some cases, cooler than some of the featured ones. Lycanthropy really feels like it could have been redesigned as a Gothic lineage, but wasn't.
I'd definitely recommend this one, but I will say that if you're just going in for stat blocks and subclasses (something I'm sometimes guilty of) and ignoring the lore and DM guidance, you're going to be missing out on this book's best strengths.
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