Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is my favorite book in all of 5E. To me, it really does what a campaign setting book should do, which is to outline very clearly and comprehensively what makes that setting different. Ravenloft is a very distinct setting compared to other D&D settings, and its tone and aesthetic is also quite distinct as well.
I was a bit skeptical about Forge of the Artificer when it was announced: certainly getting a 5.5 update for the Artificer made sense after the 2024 core rulebooks came out, but we already had a very extensive sourcebook for Eberron in Rising From the Last War. Arguably, a second Ravenloft sourcebook is even less essential given that it didn't introduce a whole new class that might want a 5.5 update (I like the 5.5 Artificer - it's probably more powerful overall, but I don't fault my Artificer player for choosing to stick with the 5.0 one because of the loss of that amazing capstone. My campaign is at level 18 and I've promised my players that they'll have been level 20 for a bit before it ends).
But I actually think Forge of the Artificer worked, in part because it wasn't there to replace RFtLW (ok, I don't love that shorthand), but rather to supplement it.
Van Richten's was a fantastic book, but there are some things that I did feel were kind of missing, and I wonder if Horrors Within will address those.
First and foremost, let's talk Darklords.
Ravenloft is built around its cast of Darklords, the irredeemably evil masters of their prison domains. Strahd Von Zarovich was both the first of these to appear in D&D, but also canonically the first to be bound to his Domain of Dread, Barovia. We have gotten unique stat blocks for him, but not in Van Richten's (they appeared instead in the two adventures in which he is fightable - Curse of Strahd and Vecna: Eve of Ruin).
The approach in Van Richten's was instead to present a generic statblock for each Darklord, found in the Monster Manual or, in I think one or two cases, Van Richten's itself (Harkon Lukas I think is a Loup-Garou, which is basically a werewolf of equal CR to a Vampire).
This meant that some Darklords are represented by shockingly low-CR stats, like Viktra Mordenheim being a mere Spy.
Now: in fairness, the idea here is that Darklords are not inherently stronger than an ordinary person. The key is that they always come back even if killed and their domain echoes them in strange ways. Viktra Mordenheim, for example (her domain of Lamordia might be my favorite - think the icy frame narrative of Frankenstein as a whole domain) can build remarkable constructs, but is herself not really a warrior.
The terrifying encounter with her is not one in which she fights you directly, but rather when she sends an army of flesh-golems to tear you apart. (Or, as suggested in the book, an encounter in which you find your head removed from your body to be part of a construct, with the only promise of returning to normal being obedience to her commands.)
All that being said:
I'd prefer to have unique, bespoke stat blocks. If for nothing else, this would allow a little more specificity: in Mordenheim's case, there's nothing in the Spy stat block that relates to her engineering and scientific abilities. Having a stat block that feels more like an Artificer would be preferable.
Next, let's talk subclasses:
In an Unearthed Arcana earlier this year, we got "horror subclasses," which included 5.5 revisions of the Bard and Warlock subclasses found in Van Richten's, but also Grave Clerics, Phantom Rogues, Shadow Sorcerers, Hexblade Warlocks, and brand-new Reanimator Artificers and Hollow Warden Rangers.
Now, while I might complain about a bunch of revisions tossed at us, I should concede here that this would be adding two brand-new subclasses just like Van Richten's did, so who am I to complain?
In the case of the revisions, I'm really eager for some of them - Warlock subclasses could all use a revision to allow their Expanded Spell Lists to work now as Patron Spells (something easily home-ruled with pencil-and-paper, to be fair). But there are also some old designs like Shadow Sorcerers having a non-scaling stat block as one of their key features that I'd be happy to see revisited.
Of all of these, I'm least excited about the Hexblade, which I've always felt struggled to have really compelling flavor, and was overpopular because of the massive mechanical advantages it granted (I'd argue even today, using the current version is a more viable way to make a Bladelock because of the armor and shield training it grants you from the get-go, though 5.0's Pact of the Blade not letting you attack using Charisma made this basically the only reasonable choice if you wanted a martial Warlock). The "sentient weapon" idea feels less obviously horror-themed than the other ones here.
I really want the Spirits Bard to be good - conceptually I think it's fantastic, but I hear complaints about its power level.
Now, for the new subclasses, the Reanimator Artificer fits so perfectly with the setting - I'd actually had as a backup character for a Curse of Strahd campaign a Lamordian Artificer who was going to be a battle smith whose Steel Defender was basically a flesh-golem. This subclass would perfectly encapsulate that concept.
I hope that the Hollow Warden gets a good revision - much has been said about 5.5's focus on having Ranger concentrate on Hunter's Mark as opposed to their many other concentration spells, and this is a subclass that doubles down on that idea.
One thing I do think is a missed opportunity here is that the horror-themed subclasses all make the player character a part of the horror. But in gothic adventures (which Ravenloft is arguably closer to - D&D characters are equipped to fight monsters, and horror usually thrives as stories about people who either cannot fight back against the monsters or who must do so despite not being the kind of person who ought to be able to) our heroes are often quite different.
To be fair, there are a lot of existing subclasses that work great in a horror setting. Who better to face a world of all-consuming darkness than a Light Cleric? (I especially like that, given the mix of radiant and fire damage, you can really play a Light Cleric as some zealous inquisitor - the kind of person you generally don't want around unless you've got terrifying monsters threatening you).
Now, I always liked the concept, at least, of the Monster Slayer Ranger from Xanathar's. Not a popular subclass, and some of its ideas were incorporated into the 2024 Hunter subclass. But I've always found that idea of a character who knows everything there is to know about monsters and comes prepared with wooden stakes for vampires and silver bullets for werewolves to be the most compelling version of the Ranger archetype (and aspect that is, if anything, downplayed with the removal of the old Favored Enemy from 2014).
Now, I don't think this was announced anywhere, but it looks like we're also getting updates to the Gothic Lineages, much as we did with the Eberron species in FotA, and like there, we're also getting a new one in the Lupin, which seems to be our playable werewolf species (though you could argue that Shifters were sort of that already). My hope, though, is that they don't tie all of their species traits into some kind of natural weapons (though I'm sure they'll get some). Natural weapons seem cool but unless you're playing in a game where the players lose their equipment often, I think you're almost never going to see it come into play.
But ok, beyond the modular pieces like stat blocks, species, and subclasses, what else might we find?
See, I think Van Richten's was brilliant and pretty thorough. Really you could argue that the only thing missing was a set of bepsoke statblocks for its Darklords. In many ways, the adventure ideas for the various Domains kind of presaged the adventure ideas we got in Forge of the Artificers for various aspects of the setting. Van Richten's gave us ideas for curses and stress mechanics, as well as survivor stat blocks and a whole exploration of different kinds of horror (I love that book so much).
Now, I'd honestly be pretty happy if we just got some new domains (or more details on domains that were only touched on in Van Richten's - I think everyone's imaginations lit up when we heard about the Cyre 1313. I've been kind of obsessed with the Vhage Agency (I'd love to use it as a home base hub for a mist-hopping campaign, where the party is working for Filmira Vhage and slowly discovers her villainous nature).
The book won't be as long as Van Richten's (which was among the biggest in 5E) so I honestly don't even know how much space there will be for other stuff after the character options and stat blocks.
Still, I'm really eager to see this one (also think I've got to get that alternative art cover).
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