The Dark Powers are one of the most mysterious forces in D&D lore.
Now, I'm very much an advocate for tinkering with lore to make it your own while running a D&D campaign. In my 4+ year Ravnica campaign, I've invented a ton of lore that has no basis in the canonical materials for Magic's most popular plane. For example, the formerly-Orzhov cleric in the party learned not only that he was a reincarnation of one of the founding members of the Obzedat Council (and more or less responsible for the Church's descent into corruption) but that at its founding, the Church incorporated reverence for a being known as the Transcendent Phoenix, which was more or less the embodiment of Red Mana. None of this is remotely found in the canon, but it has served my campaign well. Likewise, I've started to reveal that House Dimir is actually just one of a number of "Houses" that span not just the Magic the Gathering mutliverse but also the D&D one. And I haven't yet decided whether these Houses were all ultimately created by Vecna (I tend to treat House Dimir as True Neutral rather than Neutral Evil, so I'm hesitant to say that its root cause was such a vile figure - I see House Dimir as amoral rather than evil, willing to do whatever it takes to pursue their goals, but not actually trying to further the aims of evil overall).
Ravenloft is built around the idea of very visible primary villains - its Darklords - and then extremely nebulous background forces that keep the whole thing running - its Dark Powers.
The setting is also filled with ironies - the very Darklords who are empowered within their Domains of Dread are also prisoners. Strahd, Azalin, Akhtepot - all of these people have been locked away in their domains after committing heinous acts of profound evil. Thus, one could imagine the Dark Powers as benevolent figures, plucking truly vile villains from the multiverse and depositing them away in these Domains of Dread where they cannot reach the rest of the cosmos.
But, of course, there are also innocent people trapped within the Domains. And even if the Darklords are subject to an endless torment, they also inflict their monstrousness upon the people in their domains.
Despite being made of nightmare logic, the Domains of Dread are also, to a certain extent, functional lands where people live their entire lives. It's not a, you know, great place to live - one gets the sense that what happiness can be found there is always fleeting and always leads to tragedy.
So, what are we to think of the Dark Powers? Are they guardians, jailing the worst people in the cosmos? Or are they fiendish (maybe literally) monsters who have picked the Darklords out not to punish them, but to use them as engines of pain and torment and terror, using the horror generated by the Darklords as some kind of fuel or resource for some distant agenda?
As far as I know, the only named Dark Power we have in 5th Edition at least is Osybus - but in a weirdly roundabout way. Osybus was a lich, with a cult dedicated to him, but, ironically, the Priests of Osybus are actually the ones who turned against him, betraying him, only for Osybus to join the Dark Powers and basically curse his former priesthood to eventual destruction.
It's strange, of course, because our other encounters with the Dark Powers are always through the Amber Sarcophagi - most prominently found in the Amber Temple, but evidently seeded across all the Domains of Dread. I imagine these Sarcophagi as not being so literal. I suspect that in most cases, they're more of a portal or a relay between their physical location and some distant space or plane of existence.
To a large extent, the Dark Powers strike me as being more akin to Great Old Ones - beings of Cosmic Horror that are incomprehensible. Indeed, while in the movies they look more like demons, I'm reminded of the Cenobites from the Hellraiser series (note: all I know about them is from pop culture osmosis and wikipedia, so forgive me if I get things wrong). As I understand it, the Cenobites aren't truly malevolent - they just think agonizing pain is something to be explored and experienced, and they wish to share these sensations as a sort of path to enlightenment. In other words, what comes across as unquestionably evil and terrifying in our human experience is really just the goal of a being whose experience of existence is so different from ours.
However, I feel like there's another possible interpretation:
Most of the beings in the Ravenloft setting don't have souls. It's a somewhat troubling and semi-solipsistic conceit, but it means that most people you encounter in the Domains of Dread aren't exactly people in the strictest sense of the word. Personally, I've always interpreted "soul" to mean the religious/spiritual word for "consciousness," with an assumption that there's something substantive to this consciousness that allows it to, for example, persist beyond the body's death. Thus, most people in these lands would be "philosophical zombies," who in theory would be indistinguishable from conscious people (unless you had some kind of "soul detection" magic) but would not actually internally feel fear or disgust or anything at all.
One could imagine, then, that perhaps these soulless people were created to function as props and "set dressing" for the Domains of Dread - that the Darklords had to be convinced that they were surrounded by real people, but the intention was only to punish and torment them, and so these beings who would display all the outward behavior and expression of all manner of emotion would in fact not suffer at all from the pain and terror inflicted upon them.
Then, however, if some people became trapped within the Domains of Dread - real people with real souls - maybe the Dark Powers either never noticed or were unable to extract them and send them on their way.
Thus, we could imagine that the Dark Powers are actually benevolent - only trying to capture and punish the wicked (setting aside for now the very real philosophical question of whether any act, no matter how heinous, deserves eternal punishment) and only accidentally subjecting real people to the horrors that the Darklords inflict upon their domains.
Of course, there's also the flipside:
It might be that the Darklords are not there to be punished at all. If the Dark Powers feed off of horror and torment, the wickedness of the Darklords might not be a crime to be punished, but a skill to be exploited.
In this case, the torment of the Darklords might be something like a by-product, while the main resource is the terror they inflict upon those trapped in their domains. The Darklords are too valuable a resource to let go, and this is why the Domains are trapped in these endless loops, with nothing ever fully changing except in rare circumstances (when the engine breaks down, such as in Darkon).
And here, the normal people in the Domains act as one of two reagents (the others being the Darklords) to generate the terror that the Dark Powers use.
This, then, paints them in a more malevolent light (even if they're unknowable cosmic beings, from our perspective they are intentionally creating suffering, which is more or less the definition of evil).
And... well, the latest 5E adventure, I'd argue, points more in this direction.
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR VECNA: EVE OF RUIN
At the tail end of 2nd Edition, an adventure series that culminated in Die, Vecna, Die! acted as the prologue to 3rd Edition, similarly to how Eve of Ruin ushers in the updated core rulebooks. In this, both Vecna and Kas had become trapped in the Domains of Dread, given connected Domains so that they would war with one another endlessly. Vecna, well before Azalin's partial success, managed to break free and escape (they must have put all the major villains in Ravenloft back in the 90s - Lord Soth was also one for a time, which his creators were not happy with, and eventually it was explained that Lord Soth was so self-aware of his evil that the Dark Powers couldn't really do anything to torment him and just let him go).
Kas, on the other hand, has been trapped in Tovog since then, tormented I believe by the thought that he was still at war with Vecna, even though his former ally had long ago left.
And it's notable that in Vecna: Eve of Ruin, Kas is a major antagonist, and was freed from Tovog by the Dark Powers.
Kas' agenda is incompatible with the characters' in Eve of Ruin. While both oppose Vecna, Kas intends to essentially usurp Vecna's ritual, taking the archlich's place to become the cosmos' supreme being.
Why, then, do the Dark Powers allow this?
I don't think there's an obvious answer here. In terms of power, it seems clear that anyone who successfully completes Vecna's ritual would be incredibly powerful - more powerful than any other being in the cosmos. And that would seem to allow Kas to become more powerful than the Dark Powers themselves.
Assuming that Kas is really in control here.
One notion here is that you could imagine that Kas is actually being controlled - either subtly or fully puppeteered - by the Dark Powers. What would a cosmos then look like controlled and shaped by the Dark Powers? Well, I think it would look basically like the Domains of Dread... just that it would be that way everywhere.
The other, more prosaic idea is that the Dark Powers picked Kas as a Darklord because he fits their profile of cruelty and terror to generate the "horror resource" they live off of. By making him the cosmos' supreme being, they expect to feast on a lot of that... er, garmonbozia that will naturally result.
The only interpretation that I can imagine that allows the Dark Powers to have any claim to being in any way benign is if Kas' release is calculated to ultimately lead to the players' victory over Vecna. This one seems a stretch - the only real benefit of having Kas out there in the world is that the players learn Vecna's location after defeating him. Still, the complicated tangle of fate and all that.
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