Tuesday, February 23, 2021

30 Domains in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft

 Ravenloft, as a setting, is quite different from most because while it is all within the same plane (or rather, demiplane, as 4th and 5th Edition canon places it as a sort of partition of the Shadowfell) the lands are not exactly physically related to one another the way that, say, the major cities of the Sword Coast are.

While there is a continent, of sorts, referred to as the Core, on which many of the famous realms exist, each realm is separated by the Mists of Ravenloft, which act as an ethereal gateway as well as a boundary that prevents people from escaping. It's also the way that people arrive in the realms, and these Mists do not follow the normal rules for spatial relationships - they can arrive anywhere (well, I think anywhere in the Material Plane, other than the Phlogiston, which will only be relevant if you're doing a Spelljammer campaign) and sweep you into these realms of terror.

We've gotten a list of some of these 30 realms, so let's go through them:

Naturally, Barovia will be included. This is the realm of the Vampire, Strahd von Zarovich, who is trapped in an endless cycle. He drove the woman he is obsessed with to suicide when he killed his own brother - her fiancé - out of jealousy. Now, every generation he searches for Tatyana's latest incarnation as her soul is trapped in Barovia just as he is, but every time she is reincarnated, when he finds her, he always winds up killing her as she resists or he is overcome with bloodlust. Within Curse of Strahd, you resolve to help Irena, Tatyana's latest reincarnation, escape Strahd's grasp.

But we already know a lot about Barovia thanks to the expanded lore in Curse of Strahd, so let's move on.

Dementlieu is ruled by Saidra diHonaire, and is where a twisted fairy tale inspired in equal parts by the courts of the Feywild and Edgar Allen Poe's Masque of the Red Death. Here, an endless decadent party continues while death and darkness stalk the realm.

Lamordia is home to Dr. Viktra Mordenheim, who chases her creation, Elise, across the land. Mordenheim is a take on Victor Frankenstein, and both the good doctor and her creation pose threats to the party, along with some of the mad scientist's other experimental crimes against nature.

Falkovnia is a land dominated by the tyrannical Vladeska Drakov, but which is now undergoing a plague of zombies, and endless and unwinnable war against the undead.

Kalakeri draws from Indian folklore (and was written/designed by an Indian-American writer, which... is for the best). This realm is the site of a constant war between three Darklords who each wish to dominate the region.

Finally, Valachan is a dense jungle in which the darklord, Chakuna, hunts people for sport - kind of a "The Most Dangerous Game" situation.

That's only six, though, meaning we only have a fifth of what is mentioned. There are plenty of other established regions that I'm sure will show up.

I am curious how detailed they will be with these settings. The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount I think really spoiled us for granular detail, giving us at least a paragraph and one or two quest hooks for every city, town, or even small village in the whole continent. I'd love it if we were able to get the same sort of characterization for the various settlements in, say, Lamordia that we do for towns like Krezk or Vallaki in Barovia, but I wonder how much room they'll have in the book for that.

Personally, the realm I most hope to see (even though canonically it might have dissipated given that its darklord escaped) is The Burning Peaks, which was a realm fought over between the evil Lich God Vecna and his lieutenant/nemesis, the vampire Kas. Vecna's side of the realm was called Cavitius, and was a massive, haunted desert wasteland with a city that stood inside an enormous skull.

The book will also have guidance on creating one's own domain in the setting, which is something I really appreciate as someone who prefers to homebrew settings. I'm curious to see what they say about the magical mechanics on Ravenloft, like how the realms relate to one another and how the threshold of the Mists can be crossed.

While I think I'd be most interested in running a straightforward campaign, I do have a concept for a campaign called (working title) Ingothicous Basterds (seriously, need to work on that) in which Van Richten recruits the party following the events of Curse of Strahd, to try to convince the other darklords to attend a big party at Castle Ravenloft after you've backed the crypts with enough explosives to destroy the castle with all the monsters Monster Mash-ing within.

The book will have a section about tailoring a horror game to the sensibilities and sensitivities of the players - one thing to consider is that horror, as a genre, isn't inherently an adults-only genre. Scooby-Doo is an example of a spooky mystery that's still perfectly appropriate for younger and/or more sensitive audiences. While most people I play with would automatically try to check in with players and make sure that people are having fun as the top priority, having tools like soft and hard limits and a general framework for players and DMs to talk about what they're comfortable having at their table is a good thing to have written into the official rules, even if it's a more philosophical chapter.

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