UPDATE: Amazon's webpage has leaked the title of the book and a brief description: Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which, I'll note, I predicted would be the title (not that it wasn't obvious.) The amazon page describes the book as a campaign setting book, and teases the following:
It will detail an "expanded Domains of Dread" with each domain given its unique flavor of horror, story hooks, and cast of characters.
It will give you guidance for creating your own D&D horror settings, with optional rules and advice for running a game that's "ghastly in all the right ways."
It will have rules to create characters with lineages tied to vampires, undead, and hags (the Gothic Lineages we saw in UA,) horror-themed subclasses (the Gothic subclasses in UA,) the Investigator background, and "Dark Gifts" that seem likely to be sort of like Theros' divine gifts but with a dangerous trade-off.
There will also be an expanded bestiary and a collection of mysterious trinkets (not sure if this is the "Gothic Trinkets" from CoS or if it's magic items).
And there will apparently be a standalone adventure that can either be run on its own or dropped into an existing game.
Read on for the older post.
Wizards of the Coast has a page on Amazon for an upcoming book, and they just posted this image on twitter.
The image is a "spirit board" (aka Ouija, but that's a brand name.) The... uh, thingie with the lens you use with a Ouija board, whatever that's called, hovers over letters spelling out "The Mists Beckon."
This is almost certainly the announcement of a new Ravenloft book.
Combine this with the "Gothic Subclasses" and "Gothic Lineages" that have come to Unearthed Arcana in the past year, and the evidence seems to be stacking up.
The Ravenloft setting takes place within a place called the Demiplane of Dread. While I believe this was originally said to be located in the Ethereal Plane, the 4th Edition creation of the Shadowfell gave it a new home, and I believe the canon location of it is now in the Shadowfell.
Ravenloft is a gothic-horror themed setting, but rather than simply being a normal world of the Material Plane, it's actually a place bounded by magical rules and dark powers (known as the Dark Powers) that create a sort of endless punishment for the Dark Lords who inhabit the Domains of Dread.
The most famous, and first of these Dark Lords is Strahd Von Zarovich, the vampire who rules over the land of Barovia. Curse of Strahd, one of 5E's first published adventure books, recreates the original Ravenloft adventure from AD&D, but Strahd is just one of several Dark Lords in this realm.
The Mists of Ravenloft are a mystical barrier that prevents anyone from leaving these realms, and so a Ravenloft adventure typically involves a group of adventurers who get trapped in one of these realms and must find a way to escape, usually requiring a confrontation with the realm's Dark Lord.
One of the common elements of the setting is the Vistani people, who are... well, they've generally carried a lot of the problematic baggage of old Gothic Horror, namely racism against the Romani people.
In Ravenloft, the Vistani are an itinerant culture who have the unfettered ability to cross the Mists - returning to the material plane or journeying between the various realms of the Domains of Dread. While they can be allies for the party, many of them are said to serve Strahd (and I presume other Dark Lords, though their original connection to Ravenloft was through Strahd.)
This, unfortunately, brings in a lot of hateful old canards about the Romani people - that they cannot be trusted, or that they have magical curses they can place on you. It's not exactly the sort of positive representation that a historically oppressed people deserve.
WotC has been making an effort lately to try to address some of the racism that has been baked into a lot of D&D (something that they inherited from their source materials, to be fair, but we in the modern day have a responsibility to choose what cultural tropes we pass on).
My hope is that they put in a lot of effort to fix these issues. Because the overall Ravenloft setting is really cool.
While I think it's not impossible that this could be another adventure book, I think that 5th Edition already has a fantastic Ravenloft adventure, and given the shift in focus to sourcebooks, I am relatively confident that that's what we're looking at: a Ravenloft sourcebook.
What, then, can we expect from this?
5E's campaign setting books, with the exception of Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, follow a certain format.
Generally, they start with character creation. We typically get a couple subclasses, some new races, and sometimes some extra sort of affiliation the player can have - things like Guilds, Dragonmarks, Gods in Theros, etc. Then, we get something more for the DM (though useful for players writing a backstory,) which describes the world and its various locations.
Following that, things get a bit more DM-focused. We usually get a few magic items to throw into the mix, and then an extensive bestiary, giving us more monsters.
In terms of player options, I think we're likely to see these Gothic Subclasses (likely rebalanced - much as I'd love it, I don't think an Undead Warlock is supposed to do 2d10 with each Eldritch Blast attack), namely the College of Spirits Bard and the Undead Patron Warlock.
We're also probably going to get those Gothic Lineages - given that Ravenloft owes more to Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelley, and Bram Stoker than it does to Tolkien, there's less of an emphasis on a bunch of fantasy races, which makes variants on humans work a bit better (please give us playable werewolves!)
In terms of bestiary, getting more variants on lycanthropes, vampires, hags, and various undead creatures would help out a lot in this setting. It'd also be cool to get a bunch of Dark Lord stat blocks, similar to the Demon Lord and Archdevil ones in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes.
Other campaign setting books have also given us a short adventure (or four, in the case of Wildemount) to introduce the setting, which I think seems likely.
Anyway, we can expect plenty of new information once the announcement actually comes (likely tomorrow.) Until then, I'm going to be pretty excited and then start ranting about how the next one should be either Planescape or Spelljammer.
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