Earlier this year, we got Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. This is, by a significant margin, my favorite book we've gotten in 5th Edition D&D (outside of, I guess, the core rulebooks, as the game wouldn't function without those. I might extend that to the rules-expansion books as well, but work with me here.)
5th Edition has had other campaign setting books - we've gotten two imports from the world of Magic the Gathering (of which I think Ravnica succeeds better primarily because it's a more interesting setting) but also some original-to-D&D settings like Eberron and Exandria (and I guess Forgotten Realms if you count Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide... I don't know what else you'd call SCAG) (Also, I guess if you want to get very technical Exandria is original to Pathfinder, as that's the game system Critical Role was using before they started streaming).
I've always been drawn to the oneiric side of fantasy. Fundamentally, I think fantasy is a genre that operates on a kind of irrational logic. I've often wrestled with the idea of what magic exactly is in fiction. In stories in which magic works predictably and repeatably, it seems one could just apply the scientific method to it and really just consider it a set of phenomena within the greater field of physics. In a lot of fantasy stories, that's basically what it is, lending these stories a bit more of a science fiction structure (a kind of "this is how this works, and therefore here's how human experience would change.") To my mind, fantasy fiction is, in its classical forms, less about this kind of logical thought experiment delivered through a drama than it is an attempt to recapture the wonder and scope of humanity's very first stories. In other words, I see fantasy as the creation of myths that we all accept as pure fiction. Even if ancient peoples viewed their myths largely as metaphorical, there wasn't a strong scientific tradition to explain all the ways in which the stories couldn't be true.
But given its modern authors and modern readers, fantasy fiction has tended toward a bit more rationality and obedience to certain rules we believe in about reality. And I think that most of the standard D&D settings more or less work "like the real world, but with supernatural things layered on top." Like, yes, there are provable gods at work and things like dragons and demons and wizards, but the scientific laws that we know about in our world still apply, with exceptions made for the supernatural.
But not Ravenloft.
One of the most chilling notions in Ravenloft is the idea that not everyone there has a soul.
The inhabitants who do just find themselves reincarnating over and over into the various Domains of Dread, trapped in a cycle in this bleak-at-best nightmare reality. But the majority of people one sees and interacts with are soulless.
The actual functional definition of a soul is something people, as well as religions and spiritual traditions, don't always agree on. To me, the only definition I've felt makes the term worthwhile is the idea that it represent consciousness - the soul is the part of a person that actually experiences all the sensations, emotions, and thoughts that the person has. Essentially, if your brain is a big computer, your soul is the one sitting, watching the monitor.
So, the way that I think of these soulless people in Ravenloft is that they are philosophical zombies, without any true inner life or experience.
When I was in my early 20s, zombie movies were a huge fad in pop culture. Preparing for the zombie apocalypse (or "zombacalypse," as I like to call it) was a common opportunity for people to speculate on how they'd fare and how clever they were.
I never really liked zombie stories. The idea of fighting the undead in a fantasy setting appealed to me, but I preferred big skeletal armies and not some mindless infection. I think one of the ideas that disturbed me was the glee with which friends and peers of mine imagined bludgeoning or blowing away former people. There was something kind of misanthropic about the zombie apocalypse story - like a way to get out a feeling of violent hatred toward the rest of humanity.
But a philosophical zombie isn't a brain-eating undead monster - it's someone for whom you'd have every reason to assume is a real person, but just... isn't. They could be friendly. They could even seem very strongly to have a meaningful and important bond with you - but there is nothing actually in there that looks back at you.
The soulless people of Innistrad weren't swept in by the Mists. They're products of it, along with the very land upon which you walk. And that means that they could easily be conjured when necessary.
Ravenloft operates on dream logic - more nightmare logic, but a nightmare is, of course, just a kind of dream.
Perhaps nowhere better is this demonstrated than Chateaufaux in Dementlieu. The many nobles and patricians of the city claim to have vast, luxurious estates in the countryside, when in fact the borders of the domain end not far outside the city limits. However, unlike in other domains, where the Mists simply exist as a barrier wall, here you can, in fact, wander out into the countryside.
But you never get very far. The manor houses and farms are just visible on the horizon, but you never get any closer. And if you turn back, you're never all that far from the city.
Ravenloft doesn't stick to any physical rule that doesn't suit it.
Another example - in the cosmic nightmare that is Bluetspur, there is an impossibly enormous mountain that exists always on periphery of your vision while you're above ground. It's bad enough to imagine that you can never quite look directly away from it. But if you read closer, you realize that neither can you look directly at it.
Any fiction is at least in the slightest way a break from reality. Even a well-observed literary drama with no fantastical elements whatsoever is still conjuring something that doesn't truly exist. And I think there's absolutely a place for realism. And fantasy exists along a spectrum of the more realistic and the more fantastical.
But I think that Ravenloft manages to move off into a more dream-like, more fantastical place. It's a setting where the narrative dictates the reality.
Happy Halloween!
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