Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on October 31, 2024, 01:18:41 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 31, 2024, 12:46:17 PM

Quote from: Opaopajr on October 31, 2024, 12:27:29 PMthe perpetual victim enchantress domain

I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of Ravenloft, but they actually went there? They made the enchantress from Beauty and the Beast into a darklord? I always thought she was the fairy tale equivalent of an ambulance chaser, especially in the Disney version. TSR actually called that out in the 90s?

I am not sure who is referring to but I think it might be someone like Gabriele Adere. And I haven't seen Beauty and the beast so I can't weigh in on whether that character is someone who made it into Ravenloft. Generally they were pulling in hammer studios, universal and gothic horror story characters with the serial numbers filed off. Sometimes they took from Shakespeare and fairy tales or myth. Disney I don't recall being hugely on the table.

Beauty and the Beast would fit into Ravenloft reasonably well. It's an old French fairytale. If memory serves, the best known version of it before Disney got their hands on the story was published in the 18th century. The enchantress character would be an odd fit for a dark lord, though. In the older versions she's kind of a generic "wicked fairy", and in the Disney version she curses the prince/beast as way of teaching a moral lesson. The beast might make a better dark lord if you twisted the story around a bit, make it so that he killed Beauty in a fit of jealous rage or something, making the curse permanent.

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on October 31, 2024, 12:11:13 PM

Quote from: ForgottenF on October 31, 2024, 10:18:24 AMI think a Victorian-themed setting or a historical hodgepodge like Mystara would help in terms of Ravenloft not feeling like such an anachronism, but I don't think it gets you any closer to a Gothic horror tone. System dictates setting as I always say, and D&D is at its core a game of heroic fantasy adventure. Your own earlier anecdote ably demonstrates what happens when you take a group of D&D characters with D&D expectations and throw them at a supposed horror setting. Unless you're going to make substantial changes to the rules, I think the closest you'd get would be something like the 2004 Van Helsing movie. I love that movie, but it's not horror at all. It's action schlock with a gothic paint job.

The changes won't work for everyone. But in fairness The core rules (from Black Box to DoD) had substantial changes to the AD&D rules system. Many spells were altered. Some class abilities were altered. Powers checks are an enormous change. The monsters are fundamentally altered. And the GM is considerably empowered. There are also fear and  horror checks (later they would add madness---I think with the red box but can't recall). It is still D&D (honestly that is one of the things I like about it). But you can really hit a strong hammer studio vibe if you know how to run the setting. Mileage may vary of course. But it always worked very well for me 

Changing the rules for the more unique settings is one of the things I think TSR had absolutely right, and which WOTC has tended to get wrong. That said, I've always wondered how it worked out in practice, particularly with Ravenloft. The approach of going through and coming up with line-item changes to individual elements of the game seems like something that would work well enough for an independent campaign setting, but with Ravenloft being something you're supposed to drop into your existing campaign, it seems like it'd require the DM to have a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of the variant rules and be constantly on the lookout to enforce them. In either case I would guess it led to a lot of resistance from players not wanting to deal with variant rules. That's why I suggested in the other thread that settings like Ravenloft or Dark Sun would benefit from being published as distinctly separate games based on the same rule structure.

Quote from: RPGPundit on October 31, 2024, 07:58:59 AM

Quote from: S'mon on October 30, 2024, 05:33:19 AM>>Five strangers armed with steel and magic awaken in a mist-shrouded land, with no memory of how they arrived: Rotrog, a prideful orcish wizard; Chivarion, a sardonic drow barbarian; Alishai, an embittered tiefling paladin; Kah, a skittish kenku cleric; and Fielle, a sunny human artificer.<<

While this is utterly laughable, I never felt TSR had any real grasp of Victorian Horror either. It's not Gnostic, Evil is not Strongest, the Dark Powers make no sense within that Christian moral frame. The horror is in estrangement from God, not that Satan is stronger than God.

Well, I think that the premise is more that Ravenloft is a place where the powers of evil are particularly concentrated, and it imperils one's soul.

Thats never been the Domains of Dread Ravenloft premise. Its a cross between a prison and an ant farm.

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on October 31, 2024, 08:21:40 AM

Quote from: Omega on October 31, 2024, 04:04:08 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit on October 30, 2024, 02:19:11 AMIt changes nothing; you can't have a Victorian Horror setting where the characters are half-monster hipster narcissists.

Pretty sure this is not a Victorian horror setting. It is Domains of Dread style Ravenloft which was a mish-mash of Victorian, fantasy, Renaissance and more. Every domain was its own era half the time.

I suspect the author was basing off the mess that was 5e's Van Richten Domain book which botched most of the domains.

Its the "Heirs" part that is bothersome.

I don't blame the author. They are probably just writing a book according to whatever specs they were given. But raising Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is a good point. One of the big changes they made was shifting Ravenloft from gothic horror to multi-genre horror. And I think that was a huge mistake (also people don't really talk much about Van Richten's guide to Ravenloft, despite all the fanfare and I think part of that is they made changes that a lot of fans didn't like). But shifting from Gothic Horror to Multigenre really just goes against what Ravenloft was about.

Changing Ravenloft/Barovia is a pretty vexing one. Its mostly a Vampire setting really.

But 5e Curse of Strahd tried to cram in everything. You have werewolves, evil druids, hags, ghosts, a bride of frankenstein sort of thing, and more. All crammed into Barovia's map.

Then comes the mess of 5e's take on Domains of Dread with Van Richtens and its a mess at every turn. This was the WORST place to experiment with removing alignment! And that is before even getting to the changes to most of the domains they touched on. Near invariably for the worse.

This novel is just building on that.

The title makes me wonder if this was originally intended to be a Baldurs Gate or Neverwinter book and wotc changed gears for whatever stupid reason.

It might end up being a good book. But its going to be hampered at every turn.

I think a mismatched band of characters totally unsuited for Ravenloft fits in perfectly with even the original Ravenloft module's run. I mean you could have a half-orc, an elf, and such party blundering into Barovia, and things got weirder, sometimes alot weirder if the DM was allowing Dragon magazine races and classes. And skip forward just 2 years and you could have official weirdness like OA races and classes in the party.

I doubt any of that was even a throught in this new book. And dod no one get the memo about were-ravens being a thing in Ravenloft and that various evil favtions really dont like them? How long is the kenku going to live?

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on October 30, 2024, 08:46:12 AMalthough WotC has made it worse by adding the "most people are soulless".

They are in Seattle!

Quote from: ForgottenF on October 31, 2024, 04:24:59 PMThat's why I suggested in the other thread that settings like Ravenloft or Dark Sun would benefit from being published as distinctly separate games based on the same rule structure.

100% agree.

Distinct settings need their own distinct rules and need to be self-contained so they can emphasize what makes them unique from other settings.

Quote from: Spinachcat on October 31, 2024, 06:24:08 PM

Quote from: ForgottenF on October 31, 2024, 04:24:59 PMThat's why I suggested in the other thread that settings like Ravenloft or Dark Sun would benefit from being published as distinctly separate games based on the same rule structure.

100% agree.

Distinct settings need their own distinct rules and need to be self-contained so they can emphasize what makes them unique from other settings.

TSR is vindicated again! But then this was also roughly attempted with White Wolf and their monsters: same base engine, distinct rules so they are not truly compatible, and published as separate lines. And we've seen *repeatedly* the first thing the public wants to do with it is mash it up into a large Coliseum arena battle royale.

You can't take the human stubbornness out of the human systems. Even if you get what you want, that's not what people will do with it. Like a bunch of grade school boys out in the forest and finding sticks, stones, and pine cones... soon it's about King of the Hill. Might be a human thing, or just a life survival thing.

Quote from: ForgottenF on October 31, 2024, 04:24:59 PM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on October 31, 2024, 01:18:41 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 31, 2024, 12:46:17 PM

Quote from: Opaopajr on October 31, 2024, 12:27:29 PMthe perpetual victim enchantress domain

I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of Ravenloft, but they actually went there? They made the enchantress from Beauty and the Beast into a darklord? I always thought she was the fairy tale equivalent of an ambulance chaser, especially in the Disney version. TSR actually called that out in the 90s?

I am not sure who is referring to but I think it might be someone like Gabriele Adere. And I haven't seen Beauty and the beast so I can't weigh in on whether that character is someone who made it into Ravenloft. Generally they were pulling in hammer studios, universal and gothic horror story characters with the serial numbers filed off. Sometimes they took from Shakespeare and fairy tales or myth. Disney I don't recall being hugely on the table.

Beauty and the Beast would fit into Ravenloft reasonably well. It's an old French fairytale. If memory serves, the best known version of it before Disney got their hands on the story was published in the 18th century. The enchantress character would be an odd fit for a dark lord, though. In the older versions she's kind of a generic "wicked fairy", and in the Disney version she curses the prince/beast as way of teaching a moral lesson. The beast might make a better dark lord if you twisted the story around a bit, make it so that he killed Beauty in a fit of jealous rage or something, making the curse permanent.

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on October 31, 2024, 12:11:13 PM

Quote from: ForgottenF on October 31, 2024, 10:18:24 AMI think a Victorian-themed setting or a historical hodgepodge like Mystara would help in terms of Ravenloft not feeling like such an anachronism, but I don't think it gets you any closer to a Gothic horror tone. System dictates setting as I always say, and D&D is at its core a game of heroic fantasy adventure. Your own earlier anecdote ably demonstrates what happens when you take a group of D&D characters with D&D expectations and throw them at a supposed horror setting. Unless you're going to make substantial changes to the rules, I think the closest you'd get would be something like the 2004 Van Helsing movie. I love that movie, but it's not horror at all. It's action schlock with a gothic paint job.

The changes won't work for everyone. But in fairness The core rules (from Black Box to DoD) had substantial changes to the AD&D rules system. Many spells were altered. Some class abilities were altered. Powers checks are an enormous change. The monsters are fundamentally altered. And the GM is considerably empowered. There are also fear and  horror checks (later they would add madness---I think with the red box but can't recall). It is still D&D (honestly that is one of the things I like about it). But you can really hit a strong hammer studio vibe if you know how to run the setting. Mileage may vary of course. But it always worked very well for me 

Changing the rules for the more unique settings is one of the things I think TSR had absolutely right, and which WOTC has tended to get wrong. That said, I've always wondered how it worked out in practice, particularly with Ravenloft. The approach of going through and coming up with line-item changes to individual elements of the game seems like something that would work well enough for an independent campaign setting, but with Ravenloft being something you're supposed to drop into your existing campaign, it seems like it'd require the DM to have a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of the variant rules and be constantly on the lookout to enforce them. In either case I would guess it led to a lot of resistance from players not wanting to deal with variant rules. That's why I suggested in the other thread that settings like Ravenloft or Dark Sun would benefit from being published as distinctly separate games based on the same rule structure.

This really wasn't that much of an issue. I never really heard a complaint from GMs about complexity. And players complained about as much as they would with anything else in the game (it really boils down to how much they like buying into a setting premise). It didn't require encyclopedia knowledge to run. When a spell came up, you ran teh spell as you always did and checked the list in teh rulebook (or on teh Ravenloft GM screen) to see if it was altered. If it was altered you read the altered description. Eventually you learned the ones that came up repeatedly well enough you didn't need to look them up. All the other stuff was more part of the fun (creating a more customized werewolf or vampire for example, for me, was much more fun than dropping in a standard one).

On different systems. I think part of the issue though is by having Ravenloft be a version of D&D, you get the built in advantages (the system just works well for campaigns, you have a larger player base to draw on, players already know the basic system etc). There have always been other horror RPGs. Like I said, I played Cthulhu and Orrorsh for TORG at the time as well; and a couple of my friends were running vampire campaigns I was in). I think with TSR, they knew AD&D worked for people and it was wise for them to go with what they did best. Even now I still run Ravenloft with 2E when I play it. I could always go with another system, but I really like how it comes together (that is just me of course).

Quote from: Omega on October 31, 2024, 05:48:08 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on October 31, 2024, 07:58:59 AM

Quote from: S'mon on October 30, 2024, 05:33:19 AM>>Five strangers armed with steel and magic awaken in a mist-shrouded land, with no memory of how they arrived: Rotrog, a prideful orcish wizard; Chivarion, a sardonic drow barbarian; Alishai, an embittered tiefling paladin; Kah, a skittish kenku cleric; and Fielle, a sunny human artificer.<<

While this is utterly laughable, I never felt TSR had any real grasp of Victorian Horror either. It's not Gnostic, Evil is not Strongest, the Dark Powers make no sense within that Christian moral frame. The horror is in estrangement from God, not that Satan is stronger than God.

Well, I think that the premise is more that Ravenloft is a place where the powers of evil are particularly concentrated, and it imperils one's soul.

Thats never been the Domains of Dread Ravenloft premise. Its a cross between a prison and an ant farm.

I would push back on this a little bit. After all it is a world that concentrates evil by drawing evil in from other places and giving them domains they can't escape.  Certainly the lords are described as prisoners. We don't know what the purpose is because we have no idea what he dark powers are and why Ravenloft exists in the first place (like I said I personally always saw it more as a hell or purgatory type place, but you can read it any number of ways). The dark powers are not defined. I do think the whole part about imperiling your soul is definitely true. They prisoners of Ravenloft, but prisoners because of their own evil. And the path to corruption in Ravenloft always comes with a both a blessing and curse (so it is a place that seduces characters who aren't careful to the dark side). The powers check the mechanical manifestation of that process. Also you don't have the become a domain lord to imperil your soul in Ravenoft. Lots of people fail powers checks, become horrendous monsters through the process, and never get a domain.

Quote from: Omega on October 31, 2024, 06:09:20 PMThen comes the mess of 5e's take on Domains of Dread with Van Richtens and its a mess at every turn. This was the WORST place to experiment with removing alignment! And that is before even getting to the changes to most of the domains they touched on. Near invariably for the worse.

Agree 100% on this one. If there is a setting where alignment makes sense, it is Ravenloft. I bought a copy of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, and to me it read like what someone would make if they wanted to alienate an existing fanbase for a setting (and it didn't seem like folks really understood what people had liked about the setting to begin with). If their aim was to just take the concept because they thought it was cool, and aim it at a new set of fans, fair enough. But I feel like I haven't heard much discussion of it since it came out

Quote from: Omega on October 31, 2024, 06:09:20 PMI think a mismatched band of characters totally unsuited for Ravenloft fits in perfectly with even the original Ravenloft module's run. I mean you could have a half-orc, an elf, and such party blundering into Barovia, and things got weirder, sometimes alot weirder if the DM was allowing Dragon magazine races and classes. And skip forward just 2 years and you could have official weirdness like OA races and classes in the party.

I doubt any of that was even a throught in this new book. And dod no one get the memo about were-ravens being a thing in Ravenloft and that various evil favtions really dont like them? How long is the kenku going to live?

I mean you can have non-humans as stars in a Ravenloft novel. Like I said before, Ravenloft did monster rally really well. Soth was the main character of Knight of the Black Rose, and Jander Sunstar was a vampire in Vampire of the Mists. And half orcs and elves were a thing (though by 2E, when the setting books we are talking about were coming out, half orcs weren't a PHB option). But there were the complete books, and I had a deep gnome in one of my campaigns. That works if you at least have the people in the setting react to it the way they are supposed to. I think having a whole party is probably a mistake. It would probably work better if they had 1-2 main characters to follow. I have less sympathy for Trifling characters though (that may just be may own personal hang up as an older gamer).

But the issue with the cover is more about the attitude, not even the races (the Kenku is the only one that manages to look cool, oddly enough). It is the sass, the strutting, the haircut, the triumphant raising of the arms. To me that looks like a team on a tv series with bitchy dialogue. Nothing in the image really conveys the mood of the old novels to me (and I get maybe they aren't going for the old mood). This looks like the cover of a heist novel

Quote from: Omega on October 31, 2024, 05:48:08 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on October 31, 2024, 07:58:59 AM

Quote from: S'mon on October 30, 2024, 05:33:19 AM>>Five strangers armed with steel and magic awaken in a mist-shrouded land, with no memory of how they arrived: Rotrog, a prideful orcish wizard; Chivarion, a sardonic drow barbarian; Alishai, an embittered tiefling paladin; Kah, a skittish kenku cleric; and Fielle, a sunny human artificer.<<

While this is utterly laughable, I never felt TSR had any real grasp of Victorian Horror either. It's not Gnostic, Evil is not Strongest, the Dark Powers make no sense within that Christian moral frame. The horror is in estrangement from God, not that Satan is stronger than God.

Well, I think that the premise is more that Ravenloft is a place where the powers of evil are particularly concentrated, and it imperils one's soul.

Thats never been the Domains of Dread Ravenloft premise. Its a cross between a prison and an ant farm.

Indeed. Ravenloft (the module) was originally a prison for Strahd and then it got expanded on later, different prisons for various really evil beings. It's just sometimes non-evil people got caught up in it.

There was also the Masque of the Red Death, which was a gothic horror setting (Gothic Earth they called it) using the 2e rules and most of Ravenloft's stuff but on Victorian era Earth.

Cover may be AI. Some of the hand positions are janky.

The vibe of the cover is more Scooby Doo than Gothic Horror.

Quote from: Omega on November 01, 2024, 12:11:50 AMThe vibe of the cover is more Scooby Doo than Gothic Horror.

Scooby Doo would almost be an improvement

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on November 01, 2024, 08:00:38 AM

Quote from: Omega on November 01, 2024, 12:11:50 AMThe vibe of the cover is more Scooby Doo than Gothic Horror.

Scooby Doo would almost be an improvement

It's like they went full Scrappy Doo.

I'm not going to watch a video reviewing something that the presenter hasn't read.