The Ravenloft (setting) thread

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Alt XP is an interesting discussion... :trigger:

I think the big key for me is resonating to Ravenloft's aesthetics (it is very Hammer horror). Ravenloft box set (was it Domain of Dread or Original?) suggests to keep the world in a state of passionate extremes: lush natural beauty contrasted with primal forces of nature; clannish, provincial people who celebrate with an almost desperate zest; the allure of evil's power with its chastizing curse; etc. Basically Romanticism. :wink:

Original. Unfortunately, it wasn't well-presented by many fans and followup products. There might be a variety of reasons for this:
  • I6 casts a long shadow over the setting, and that's a pretty relentlessly grim environment. Hickman, at the very least, interpreted the setting as a whole as hopeless and miserable, which is one of the reasons for his expressed dislike. Ironically, the darkest version of Barovia is arguably the one in Curse of Strahd, where he had the most influence since the original, and the most room to play. :smile:
  • The zeitgeist of the era tended to the grimdark--remember, cyberpunk was just getting started, and the World of Darkness would hit a year later.
  • I"m not sure how many of the designers were on board. William Connors almost certainly was--he's quoted in Dragon #315 as saying that "the moral choice is more important than the valiant choice" in Ravenloft--and I expect Andria Hayday was as well. On the other hand, I think Bruce Nesmith was more of a 'scare the players by threatening the PCs' type.
  • Evil, dark and nasty are easy for many creatives, especially in this hobby. Good, beautiful and sublime seem a lot harder to pull off. :smile:
 
Ah, Original box set... :heart: Well that explains why I liked it (hipster... :shade::coffee:).

I dunno, seems sad that lush and passionate is so hard for gamers. There is something beautiful and sublime in the darkness, so why would it be so hard for doing the same for the beautiful and radiant? :errr::sun:

Maybe it has to do with the challenge on how to do melodrama? Maybe gamers do not watch as many operas or soap operas? Can't be, fantasy literature is very lush and romanticized, and superheroes are nothing if not melodramatic. :trigger:

Maybe it's the question of how to embed the reward into the structure? How about make Locations and NPCs with "joys" and "secrets" and then give those XP values when they are found? :thumbsup:

Lover's Cataract
View: [add purple prose here], known to locals and favored by lover's trysts.
joy -- waning moonlight softens face to its ideal beauty. (50 XP, with romantic partner 100 XP)
secret -- full moon reveals lover's true form; True Sight to see your beloved. (200 XP)
horror -- unseen flirtatious caresses, usually excusable. Darklord Ire, these turn into aggressive nibbles and pinches.
 
Hi @ opaopajr opaopajr if I understand you correctly, one could structure XP rewards to stack like so:

Discovering the Demon Caves: 100 xp
Surviving the Demon Caves: 500 xp
Sacrificing something dear to seal the Demon Caves: 1000 xp

Please correct me if I am wrong. I think this could work along with "sidequest" XP rewards to incentivize exploration and getting shit done

Between you and Shipyard Locked Shipyard Locked I think I have enough to work with.

I am reskinning and tweaking the 5e ranger to recreate a classic Warhammer-meets-Solomon Kane-style hunter for the wife. We agreed that a pragmatic hunter who uses a little sorcery to get the job done is more fun. She wants to do the whole pistol & rapier bit with a little sorcery, gothic bling, and (most importantly) a fabulous Puritan-style hat. I don't think a 16th century get-up would be out of place in Ravenloft as Barovia seems like a backwater. Anyway, I would love to hear some feedback. Please note that our 5e games use a soft cap of 12th level so we don't need to go any further than that.

Favored Enemy: I prefer the updated version of this ability as presented in the UA: the Ranger, Revised article because the PHB version is terrible.
Natural Explorer (1st, 6th, 10th): I am thinking of replacing all of this with the Ritual Caster feat.
Primeval Awareness (3rd): The ability is fine and just needs to be reskinned.
Spellcasting (3rd): The list is too rural for what I have in mind. I'm thinking of mixing and matching with other lists. Any suggestions?
Land's Stride (8th): Replace with Fleet of Foot from UA: the Ranger, Revised
Hide in Plain Sight (10th): I'm thinking of replacing this with the Steady Eyes ability from XGtE

Naturally, the archetype would be Slayer from XGtE
 
Yes, that Demon Caves example would be one way to Alt XP for Discovery, Survival, & Moral Heroics. :thumbsup: In fact, yours is a very orderly and clean example!

My above is to 3x5 index card a Location with beauty, discovery, and horror. It ties in Darklord temperment for added flavor. :eat: It is a bit more loose for sandbox side-quests, but the impulse is the same.

Give me a moment to read through the other 5e stuff... I am of the opinion that the 5e PHB Ranger really needs Ritual Casting outright as a feature -- which might be better than dumping Natural Explorer for the Ritual Caster feat. Also, you could do awesome alluding things with animal communication and Ravenloft. :devil:

That said sounds like you want a more worldly spell list, so give me a moment. :happy:

OK, first question: Why must this be a Ranger? What are you getting out of it that are must haves?

Most 5e classes are magic classes, and nearly every class has its magic archetype. Then there are the martial casters. And then there's feats and multiclassing.

Tell me what is turned off due to setting and what is PC mandatory and you might not need to do most of this adjusting.
 
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Yes, that Demon Caves example would be one way to Alt XP for Discovery, Survival, & Moral Heroics. :thumbsup: In fact, yours is a very orderly and clean example!
Thank you.

My above is to 3x5 index card a Location with beauty, discovery, and horror. It ties in Darklord temperment for added flavor. :eat: It is a bit more loose for sandbox side-quests, but the impulse is the same.
I like to use 3x5 cards as a shorthand at the table and believe I get the gist of what you are saying.

Give me a moment to read through the other 5e stuff... I am of the opinion that the 5e PHB Ranger really needs Ritual Casting outright as a feature -- which might be better than dumping Natural Explorer for the Ritual Caster feat. Also, you could do awesome alluding things with animal communication and Ravenloft. :devil:
Yes I have a whole thing planned with the Raven archetype and coincidentally enough, the wife wanted a raven familiar.

Ritual Caster is a cool feat that lends itself well to investigation, mysteries and That Which Man Was Not Mean to Know. I like inserting custom rituals into my games.

That said sounds like you want a more worldly spell list, so give me a moment. :happy:
I'm not sure what you mean by worldly but the ranger list is too focused on woodcraft for what I have in mind. I think investigation and a little combat would work better.

OK, first question: Why must this be a Ranger? What are you getting out of it that are must haves?
It doesn't have to be a ranger reskin at all. I just thought a ranger base would be the easiest to work with. I want a finesse, monster hunter with a little sorcery. DEX and WIS seem like appropriate stats.

Tell me what is turned off due to setting and what is PC mandatory and you might not need to do most of this adjusting.
In 5e we do a level cap of 12 and no demihumans. This will be a private game for my wife and maybe one other person.
 
Thanks for the fast reply! :grin:

OK, the reason I ask is part of me can see you getting something Solomon-Kane-similar faster with Eldritch Knight Fighter with Ritual Caster feat -- possibly from 1st lvl if you allow variant human. Abjure & Evoc schools for first 2/3 of spells, then any school after, and a spell swap each level further in EK. (There might be an errata later @ which schools you can swap into... but it is easy to ignore a small clause than do a larger kit-bash). That with Rituals I think covers most of the witch hunter needs.

Or, you could go some variant of Cleric? Ranger, Paladin, even Celestial Warlock, are also options. :trigger: But the problem is after awhile you can paralyze with options. :quiet: So unless you have specific must-have tricks in mind I am of the KISS (Keep It Stupid Simple) school of design. :hmmm:

Fighters are great because they straight up whoop ass, are quick and easy, can recharge via Second Wind, and get an Action Surge for tricks (like cast two "casting time: one action" 1st+ lvl spells on your turn). And since casting is the flavor splash to the Solomon Kane pilgrim-hat witch-hunting, I say go for the hardiest ass-whooper that's streamlined ready-to-go. :thumbsup::dice:
 
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@ opaopajr opaopajr

The Eldritch Knight is a good option which I will take into consideration. It would be a helluva lot less work, that's for sure.

FYI I've allowed a character to swap Evocation for Necromancy for a different flavor, it didn't break anything

Edit: I'm convinced, Eldritch Knight works better. Thanks!
 
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I6 casts a long shadow over the setting, and that's a pretty relentlessly grim environment. Hickman, at the very least, interpreted the setting as a whole as hopeless and miserable, which is one of the reasons for his expressed dislike. Ironically, the darkest version of Barovia is arguably the one in Curse of Strahd, where he had the most influence since the original, and the most room to play.

I think the missing ingredient is that I6 was once an independent module intended to be dropped into an existing world and campaign that was, at the time, far less likely to be grimdark. Barovia could afford to be relentlessly awful because your party was probably entering it from a realm of heroism, shiny palaces, helpful eccentric wizards, feisty but good-hearted princesses, gold dragons, funny gnomes, epic quests on behalf of the good gods themselves, etc.

Yes, as soon as you plop Barovia in the middle of five other dystopias, which is what you get in the setting, the important contrast is lost.

That said, although I've been casting a lost of shade on the canon setting, I think much of it is actually salvageable, simply by putting a positive spin on the information you're given.

Not much you can do about the overwrought names though; the Domains of Dread and their NPCs suffer from some of the worst naming in published campaign settings.
 
Much like the Cthulhu mythos, Ravenloft works best when the players don’t know about the campaign world they’re about to begin in. Rvenloft has always been a love/hate relationship for me. Once that nice, chunky boxed set hit the table, the players knew what they’re getting themselves in to.

A lot of what came out of the product line never met my expectation. I wanted an acutely-taut psychological horror game, but instead got a serialized “Undead Land” magical mystery tour of the Domains. That being said, the best product to come out of the line was Feast of Goblyns. I know that Nights of the Shed (podcast group) are running the adventure, but recast it in the real-world Renaissance, use Zweihander RPG rules and recording a fantastic radio play of it:



Admittedly, we ran the new Curse of Strahd using Zweihander RPG. We made it 7 sessions in, until we abandoned it. It was just too contrived, left nothing to the imagination and - once again - players already knew what they were going to get into as they beheld the book. Although I changed up some of the lore (assumed Strahd had been killed, Tatyana made the domain a fascist state that was purging Vistani and Strahd was going to be reborn unwittingly by the PCs), it just didn’t work out:



All the players were extremely dissatisfied, particularly because we just came off a 20 session, heavy psychological horror campaign I wrote for Zweihander RPG called The Dunhallow Mystery. In it, the players had no idea that it was going to turn from something as simple as recovering a land deed to becoming something terrifyingly supernatural:


[/QUO
So let me get this straight. Coming off of a psychological horror adventure. You moved into a hammer horror adventure. Changed the game system. Completely rewrote the background, premise, and details of the adventure. Then are dissatisfied? Huh...:quiet:
 
So I'm up to session 7 on my latest Ravenloft (setting) campaign, 5th edition rules. I'm in the rare position of getting to run it for players who've never had the setting's secrets spoiled for them, so I'm milking the sense of mystery for what it's worth.

Here are some of the edits I've made to the setting.

NPCs who know about 'The Dark Powers' never call them that. Instead they are referred to as 'The Powers That Be'. This helps hide the setting's fundamentally sinister nature a bit better for a bit longer. Similarly, the term 'darklord' is not used by NPCs who are in on the secret. They refer to such an individual as 'the backbone', in the sense that each prison-country is metaphysically an extension of the entity it encloses and depends on.

I've renamed 'Powers checks' to 'Damnation checks' because I've decided to fully commit to the Christian motifs that I've concluded are essential to Gothic horror. To hammer this fact home, I"ve made the church of St. Ezra much more prominent, universal, and trustworthy in the setting to serve as my movie-Catholicism stand-in. I've also simplified the Damnation checks to speed up play. There are only three stages of damnation, you have a flat 5% chance of being noticed by the Powers That Be each time you commit a serious sin (1 on a d20 roll), you gain evil benefits equivalent to a feat at the second stage, and you become an NPC (but not necessarily a backbone) at the third stage. This system is for player characters only, NPCs slip into damnation at whatever pace I feel is dramatically appropriate given the setting's population numbers.

From past experience I've noticed that most D&D players really, really don't like Ravenloft's human-psychology-based fear rules. They constantly argue over whether their tough, hardened, jaded character concept really would be afraid of this or that situation. To save myself the hassle, I've just explicitly given most inhuman monsters a supernatural fear effect similar to 5e's dragon fear rules. For similar reasons I've simplified Horror checks to only occur in unnatural places of great evil and they inflict levels of exhaustion instead of all the complicated effects that the traditional system espouses. I'm not using madness rules, that's something for NPCs and Lovecraftian investigators, not Gothic heroes.

I'm also incorporating elements of the Silent Hill video games. Sometimes when you wander through the mists, you end up in a place that seems familiar but it's eerily empty except for twisted creatures and landmarks that reflect the sins of the backbone. It then becomes a struggle to find an 'exit' back to the normal version of the landscape.

cKTpJiY.jpg
 
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Has anyone ever adapted Ravenloft adventures for other horror game mechanics?

I'm considering doing this for a medieval setting in Chill/Cryptworld. As others noted earlier in this thread, a human-only setting might be a turn off for those who would normally play Ravenloft, but I'm hoping to generate some interest in this, and I'm really loving the 2e modules. Night of the Walking Dead might be the adventure I playtest this with.
 
Has anyone ever adapted Ravenloft adventures for other horror game mechanics?

I'm considering doing this for a medieval setting in Chill/Cryptworld. As others noted earlier in this thread, a human-only setting might be a turn off for those who would normally play Ravenloft, but I'm hoping to generate some interest in this, and I'm really loving the 2e modules. Night of the Walking Dead might be the adventure I playtest this with.
I once ran Night of the Walking Dead for a Vampire: The Masquerade group, with the characters being drawn into the Demiplane. Unfortunately, my only recollection of it after all these years is one player attempting to be the uber-munchkin, to the point we mocked him for years at his attempts to do everything at once, unless it threatened his character, in which case he never said he was doing that.
 
Interesting adaption choices, Shipyard. :thumbsup:

I know the pain about players not wanting to "Buy In" to horror. But the Frightened condition is core rules, and outside Halflings (hah! suck it elves!), no one else I can immediately think of is natively immune. Just remind players, just like in CoC SAN checks, the rules are there to help you stay "in character" despite one's suspension of disbelief.

I dig your use of exhaustion for your "unnatural places of great evil!" I think you may want to check out 5e MM Lair Rules and extrapolate them for these areas as well, just in case you want something with more pyrotechnics but less mechanical teeth. Exhaustion spiral is rough, and Lair widgets are fun! More options, more finesse!

As for the discussion of Ravenloft being human-centric... Yes, and maybe no? Bluetspur is the Illithid plus psionics Domain. Essentially uninhabitable outside and descends into an illithid Shub-Niggurath cult (supposedly by non-illithid who accidentally mind swaps then is transformed against their will into a runaway gestalt). One could say it is an Illithid nightmare of their community being infiltrated by an alien psionicist who then enslaves them beyond either's control.

Which brings up a good exercise. There is nothing stopping the creation of new homebrew Darklords. And all those other non-human races could definitely have their nightmares represented. Elves stuck as stock exchange day traders, halflings without elevensies meals, and orcs stuck in the Peace Corp :hehe: ... or some more serious non-human Darklord would be a good contribution.
 
Which brings up a good exercise. There is nothing stopping the creation of new homebrew Darklords. And all those other non-human races could definitely have their nightmares represented. Elves stuck as stock exchange day traders, halflings without elevensies meals, and orcs stuck in the Peace Corp :hehe: ... or some more serious non-human Darklord would be a good contribution.

I once started, but never finished, a halfling domain based on the Jan Švankmajer film Little Otik. The Darklord was a halfling woman whose trajectory more or less followed the film's story (described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Otik). Her evil lay in her willingness to sacrifice anything and anybody for the benefit of her monstrous plant-child, while her curse was to know deep down the creature wasn't really her biological offspring, that she would never impress the town biddies with him, and that she missed the childless-but normal normal life he had devoured.

The whole place would have drawn a lot from Mystara's Five Shires for its culture. Heck, I might have eventually decided the mists took her from there.

 
The Birthright Halflings are alluded to be more in touch with walking through the ethereal veil, transversing through territories with miraculous stealth, while the whole land alludes to changeling and faerie influlence. Could be another take on this idea as it brushes against Ravenloft.

I'll keep an eye out for this movie on streaming, thanks!
 
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I once started, but never finished, a halfling domain based on the Jan Švankmajer film Little Otik. The Darklord was a halfling woman whose trajectory more or less followed the film's story (described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Otik). Her evil lay in her willingness to sacrifice anything and anybody for the benefit of her monstrous plant-child, while her curse was to know deep down the creature wasn't really her biological offspring, that she would never impress the town biddies with him, and that she missed the childless-but normal normal life he had devoured.

The whole place would have drawn a lot from Mystara's Five Shires for its culture. Heck, I might have eventually decided the mists took her from there.


Love Švankmajer and this is my favourite film of his.
 
I love Ravenloft but it suffered heavily from the writers sticking to the original premise that wasn't that great of an idea, "Let's summon player characters from a high fantasy realm to a Gothic Horror one where the deck is stacked against them." The problem was that when they made the actual setting, they attempted to keep that and the Dark Lords were ridiculously invincible. So, it was essentially a game where the player characters were not the "stars" but the invincible NPCs who (as often as not) were outright immortal

"If you kill Harkon Lukas, he will return 3d6 weeks later by possessing a dire wolf and come to hunt the players down."

The fact the Demiplane of Dread was so WEIRD didn't help matters because "you're on an artificial flat world" doesn't actually contribute to the sense of horror. It contributed to the sense of not being terribly invested in the game world because it was even less possible to make it "better" than Warhammer 40K since if you DID get rid of the Darklords then their Domains would dissolve and kill everyone or be taken over by another Dark Lord.

I think the 3rd Edition "Kargatane" period was the closest to actually making it a playable horror setting. A place where there's an overwhelming amount of evil but you can score small but legitimate victories against evil like Van Ritchen--who got done dirty by the setting as well, IMHO.
 
if you DID get rid of the Darklords then their Domains would dissolve and kill everyone or be taken over by another Dark Lord.

This is why I preferred Gothic Earth when we switched to it during the 2e era. A group could defeat Dracula or Moriarty and things would get better. Has anyone ever run Ravenloft where a group could get rid of a Darklord and "cure" the domain so that it returned back to where it came from? I made such an ending when running Castle Forlorn as mini-campaign. It worked out far better than other Ravenloft games I ran.
 
This is why I preferred Gothic Earth when we switched to it during the 2e era. A group could defeat Dracula or Moriarty and things would get better. Has anyone ever run Ravenloft where a group could get rid of a Darklord and "cure" the domain so that it returned back to where it came from? I made such an ending when running Castle Forlorn as mini-campaign. It worked out far better than other Ravenloft games I ran.

Yeah, my last attempt at a Ravenloft campaign just did away with the Demiplane conceit entirely. The Dark Lords were just incredibly powerful evil doers that had dominion over the regions.

The change was never noticed by the players.
 
I love Ravenloft but it suffered heavily from the writers sticking to the original premise that wasn't that great of an idea, "Let's summon player characters from a high fantasy realm to a Gothic Horror one where the deck is stacked against them." The problem was that when they made the actual setting, they attempted to keep that and the Dark Lords were ridiculously invincible. So, it was essentially a game where the player characters were not the "stars" but the invincible NPCs who (as often as not) were outright immortal

"If you kill Harkon Lukas, he will return 3d6 weeks later by possessing a dire wolf and come to hunt the players down."

The fact the Demiplane of Dread was so WEIRD didn't help matters because "you're on an artificial flat world" doesn't actually contribute to the sense of horror. It contributed to the sense of not being terribly invested in the game world because it was even less possible to make it "better" than Warhammer 40K since if you DID get rid of the Darklords then their Domains would dissolve and kill everyone or be taken over by another Dark Lord.

I think the 3rd Edition "Kargatane" period was the closest to actually making it a playable horror setting. A place where there's an overwhelming amount of evil but you can score small but legitimate victories against evil like Van Ritchen--who got done dirty by the setting as well, IMHO.

Sounds a lot like the tension between Cthulhu and more "classical" monster hunting horror games, where either the PCs don't have a chance to defeat the evil, or they are heroes and can defeat it. I plan on running Ravenloft much more in the latter variety.
 
Sounds a lot like the tension between Cthulhu and more "classical" monster hunting horror games, where either the PCs don't have a chance to defeat the evil, or they are heroes and can defeat it. I plan on running Ravenloft much more in the latter variety.

The trick was to have the players face other monsters within a domain as the evil threats (the lord doesn't have to be the villain) and use the lords as a kind of example of how to engineer a villain: lords are really powerful and hard to kill but many are also like solvable puzzles. This really got expanded on in the van richten books. Not to everyones taste, but I always found this a really solid approach to adventures in the setting. You can still have them face a lord from time to time, but they are major foes. Some lords are also more killable than others (which is one of the things that can make them so scary if you don't know their stat block: you kind of are unsure what you are facing exactly)
 
The trick was to have the players face other monsters within a domain as the evil threats (the lord doesn't have to be the villain) and use the lords as a kind of example of how to engineer a villain: lords are really powerful and hard to kill but many are also like solvable puzzles. This really got expanded on in the van richten books. Not to everyones taste, but I always found this a really solid approach to adventures in the setting. You can still have them face a lord from time to time, but they are major foes. Some lords are also more killable than others (which is one of the things that can make them so scary if you don't know their stat block: you kind of are unsure what you are facing exactly)

Part of the issue was the fact that this was a great way to interpret the Dark Lords. That each of them had a "secret way" to kill them like the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind or getting the ghosts of their murdered children to kill them. The problem was that this wasn't the intent and instead it was actually the developers having a weird idea that the Dark Lords were meant to be immutable parts of the setting and the players were not supposed to be able to oppose them. It was sort of like Divis Mal in Abberant where developers got angry whenever players said they wanted their player characters to kill him.

And the Developers are like, "He's too powerful for any players to kill and an essential part of the story so that's just them being bad gamers."

As an adult, I'm like, "That's just silly. Who cares what happens at your home game?"
 
Part of the issue was the fact that this was a great way to interpret the Dark Lords. That each of them had a "secret way" to kill them like the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind or getting the ghosts of their murdered children to kill them. The problem was that this wasn't the intent and instead it was actually the developers having a weird idea that the Dark Lords were meant to be immutable parts of the setting and the players were not supposed to be able to oppose them. It was sort of like Divis Mal in Abberant where developers got angry whenever players said they wanted their player characters to kill him.

And the Developers are like, "He's too powerful for any players to kill and an essential part of the story so that's just them being bad gamers."

As an adult, I'm like, "That's just silly. Who cares what happens at your home game?"

Now, if only the World of Darkness guys could learn that lesson... :grin:

But that is another discussion for another thread.

Also, Barovia and Souragne are my two favorite domains.
 
I think that so many forget the core conceit that Ravenloft is in the Deep Ethereal and don't play up to that. The Darklord bosses are Puzzle Bosses, (e.g. Legacy of Kain:Soul Reaver) and "killing them" really just "dispells" their slice of demiplane Hell away. The Darklords are to be tortured forever and most of their "supporting cast" victims & thralls are dream-stuff NPCs reliving themselves and any straggling collected travellers caught since the last "solving." It's a repeating vivid nightmare that can be your moment of heroism, your fall from grace... or your depressing prison until you make your choice.

That said, no plan survives contact with players. My luck the one time I care for them to be heroic they'd rather start a vaudeville act with the Vistani and corner the concessions market. :hehe:
 
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