Quote from: HappyDaze on May 29, 2021, 12:13:37 PM
So, despite being billed as a setting book, it's more of a horror genre sourcebook (of questionable quality) than an exploration of the Ravenloft domains. That's not really what I'd buy a setting book for. I certainly didn't buy the Eberron book for details on running games in a post-war (or between wars pulpy) period; I bought it for setting details (and I was somewhat disappointed).

Oh theres setting info in the book. But all I saw felt so spartan that I came away from it knowing little more than came in with half the time. Each domain gets i'd guess 8 pages. But the formatting is such that it felt more like Im reading half that at best and alot of page is taken up by lists and other non info things.

One thing I did note was that they devote several pages to making your own domains. And a whole lot of pages on describing various genres of horror.

So that reinforces my assessment that they are going for a very "make it your own." sort of ideal. Personalize things. Change things.

Quote from: mightybrain on May 29, 2021, 05:48:27 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 29, 2021, 12:53:30 AMThat's the understatement of the year. This changes the entire Ravenloft campaign experience from being an internal and external struggle against the corrupting power of temptation/sin, into being a kind of scooby-doo scary-ride theme park that also gives you superpowers.

The way it works is that whenever you roll a 1 on an attack, ability check, or saving throw, you get a an effect. The effect is random, usually 1 to 6 with most of the results being bad for you or your party.

So, you're saying I just need to play a halfling, and I can ignore any penalties?  Cool.

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 28, 2021, 11:04:08 PM

Quote from: jhkim on May 27, 2021, 08:53:58 PM
The list of gifts is shorter but each is more detailed than the 2e dark gifts, and the gifts each have down sides, like "Touch of Death" where you automatically harm anyone you hold. Mechanically, that's not a big deal (you deal necrotic damage any time you grapple someone), but it's a pretty significant issue for a character's personal life.

Characters can also choose to have a Dark Gift upon character creation, but as mentioned, they all have their down sides.

And, since you're trying to be so helpful, can you quote us what the book says about the NEGATIVE consequences of taking a dark gift? Because from what I was told, there is effectively NONE. I don't mean risks or side-effects of individual powers, I mean the idea that the Dark Powers are a CORRUPTING evil that gradually corrupts the character who embraces them both physically and morally, turning them into evil beings?

I'm not arguing how you want to interpret the down sides. If you don't like them, you don't like them. ​I just don't think it's been clearly communicated what they are.

For example, I mentioned Touch of Death where the character damages anything they hold. This has gothic horror roots like Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1844 story Rappaccini's Daughter about a woman with such a condition. In that story, it was viewed as tragic - because she couldn't even hug the people she loves without hurting them. I can see that in some games, it's just a pure superpower, because they can combine damage with a grapple.

If I were running Ravenloft, though, I know my players would all think twice before taking that - because it'll really mess with their character, and I as DM would surely look for situations where, say, they are called on to carry a living creature and so forth.

The full list of the Dark Gifts are:

1) Echoing Soul: You have a past life with useful memories, but sometimes the past overwhelms you and you see uncontrolled echoes of your past.

2) Gathered Whispers: You are haunted by spirits that whisper to you. They can help you sometimes, but they have their own agenda and can also harm.

3) Living Shadow: Your own shadow is a living separate being. Again, it can be helpful, but can also cause problems or mischief.

4) Mist Walker: You have some ability to navigate Ravenloft's mists, but you must keep moving on and cannot remain in one area.

5) Second Skin: Like Jeckyll and Hyde, you can shift yourself to a second appearance, but you can change involuntarily based on a randomly-determined trigger.

6) Symbiotic Being: A creature lives inside your body (of random type). It dies if you die, so it will help to keep you alive and can advise you, but it has its own agenda.

7) Touch of Death: mentioned above

8 ) Watchers: Tiny creatures appear that constantly watch you - like ravens or spiders. They can alert you to things (aid perception), but NPCs can react badly to their presence and of course, they must report somewhere.

Personally, I like these except for Mist Walker. They've got nice gothic horror connections, and they get the players more actively involved. Whenever a player uses a Dark Gift, it directly connects to the creepy side of things. So it's more something players have the temptation to use, and they give the DM good hooks to mess with them.

Quote from: jhkim on May 29, 2021, 07:44:31 PM


The full list of the Dark Gifts are:

3) Living Shadow: Your own shadow is a living separate being. Again, it can be helpful, but can also cause problems or mischief.

I always thought Neverland had a bit of Dark Domain in it...

Quote from: Crawford Tillinghast on May 29, 2021, 10:21:35 PM

Quote from: jhkim on May 29, 2021, 07:44:31 PM
... 3) Living Shadow: Your own shadow is a living separate being. Again, it can be helpful, but can also cause problems or mischief.

I always thought Neverland had a bit of Dark Domain in it...

I thought of Peter Pan too when I first read this "Dark Power"...

And in my opinion I think it speaks to Pundits larger point.

IMHO these powers fall very much into the "Oh-so-Random Tricksy!" category, rather than the "Fuck, I'm cursed!" category.

The type of so called "gothic horror"  one feels that the Neu-Ravenloft conveys is closer to what one would feel when they were young and went on the Haunted Mansion Ride at Disney Land for the first time.

Not the type of Gothic Horror OG-Ravenloft tried to convey where the player was supposed to be in fear of their characters very life.

Neu-Ravenloft was written for a very different audience than OG-Ravenloft, but WOTC is trying to market it like there is no difference.

I am not not so sure on that point.

It feels like yet another WOTC schizo book where they say one thing and do the opposite.

The book reads, far as I got, as mostly geared to Horror with a capital H rather than Moral Guardian Censor Board horror.

They have these loved by (nearly) all aloof doing my own thing not-Vishtani which totally do not fit the scenery of horror, madness, and fates worse than death they have laid out and encourage.

Going to be a couple of days before can get another glance at the Beyond version.

But the general impression is schizo writing.
Its very watered down - its very not watered down.

The first few pages try to take the wind out of horror and GMs. Then the rest of the book proceeds to huff and puff and blow that house of X-cards down. Then butchers and eats the little pigs one by one while the dwindling survivors watch.

I think the randomness of the effects is a good choice because then the players can't work around the problems. But I'd also prefer the effects to get worse over time.

I did a bit of digging into the history of Wallachia and Vlad Dracula. It seems, in terms of his relationship with the Romani he was considered something of a folk hero. And while he did terrible things to the Turks and the boyars, they weren't friends of the Romani. Their folk stories had him freeing the country, and fighting the vampires (strigoi) and other evil spirits with an army of Gypsies and Angels behind him. The rumours about him being a vampire and drinking blood were started by the traders of the neighbouring countries, as his locking down the borders had disrupted their ability to trade.

It seems to me, to fictionalise it, it would make much more sense for the Vistani to be in league with Strahd than to oppose him.

Quote from: mightybrain on May 30, 2021, 11:09:25 AM
I did a bit of digging into the history of Wallachia and Vlad Dracula. It seems, in terms of his relationship with the Romani he was considered something of a folk hero. And while he did terrible things to the Turks and the boyars, they weren't friends of the Romani. Their folk stories had him freeing the country, and fighting the vampires (strigoi) and other evil spirits with an army of Gypsies and Angels behind him. The rumours about him being a vampire and drinking blood were started by the traders of the neighbouring countries, as his locking down the borders had disrupted their ability to trade.

It seems to me, to fictionalise it, it would make much more sense for the Vistani to be in league with Strahd than to oppose him.

As Kosh said, understanding is a three-edged sword. The truth of the matter is in the middle. Vlad Tepes was most certainly a brutal man, the result of his times. He brooked no challenge to his authority or rule -- and in those days, life was cheap indeed. But he was a patriot of sorts, and the old saw about a man being able to carry a bag of gold from one end of his holdings to the other had a lot of truth to it (bandits avoided his territory like the plague, since his favorite pastime was 'find new and interesting ways to kill people').

Sometimes, all we can do is adhere to Bruce Lee's maxim: take what is useful, discard what is not.

QuoteI did a bit of digging into the history of Wallachia and Vlad Dracula. It seems, in terms of his relationship with the Romani he was considered something of a folk hero. And while he did terrible things to the Turks and the boyars, they weren't friends of the Romani. Their folk stories had him freeing the country, and fighting the vampires (strigoi) and other evil spirits with an army of Gypsies and Angels behind him. The rumours about him being a vampire and drinking blood were started by the traders of the neighbouring countries, as his locking down the borders had disrupted their ability to trade.

But let's just make it clear. You are 100% sure you mean ROMANI (ergo Gypsies, IndoAryan nomadic nation) folk hero and not ROMANIAN (which is East Italic nations born from settlers from Italy mixed with Eastern Europeans to which Vlad Tepes belonged - also known as Vallachians). Because Romani and Romanians are not really that friendly to each other, and names can be misguiding.

Heres another thing that I've pointed out before.

The "steriotypes" of the gypsies are anything but. And Ravenlofts presentation is actually spot on.

In my home town well into the 70s we had recurring problems with gypsies of the worst sort and they had a very bad rep locally because they would come through and pretend to be handymen and such. But were really casing homes out to rob.

Then when was staying at Kats place for a few years she warned me very specifically about a band of gypsies who would park out in the forest on her land. They were VERY dangerous. But she had a standing agreement with them and they left her alone. That was well into 2000.

Far as I know most people are unaware of that darker side of gypsies and the general outlook and perception is fairly positive. Most movie depictions are. And even when they are shown to also be thieves, it is usually for some reason like an oppressive land or whatever. And far as I know most gypsie bands are pleasant and cause no trouble at all.

As usual though the Woke cult makes things worse. The more they try to scrub and censor things the more people are going to see the dirt. And the worse its going to get for whatever minority they are feeding off of currently.

Quote from: Jaeger on May 29, 2021, 11:34:02 PM
IMHO these powers fall very much into the "Oh-so-Random Tricksy!" category, rather than the "Fuck, I'm cursed!" category.

It depends what sort of horror game you like.

One version of a horror game is very black and white. There are good guys, and there are bad guys. If the good guys try anything morally corrupt, then it obviously will go badly for them. In these cases, the players know to stay on the straight and narrow - and they might die, but the lines stay clear.

The Call of Cthulhu campaign I just wrapped up was like this, which we played for over a year. The GM was using Masks of Nyarlathotep. We encountered a bunch of eldritch tomes and strange items, but we quickly found that they were horrible and using them was a loser's bet. Thus, the campaign as a whole was about us as PCs just killing cultists with shotguns and dynamite. We collected and used resources like money, mercenaries, and weapons - but our growing pile of eldritch material was largely untouched. We had a bunch of tactical challenges, and had four PCs die over the course of the campaign. It wasn't a cakewalk. However, the death didn't have much shock value. The player would just roll up a new character.

---

By contrast, I've played in a number of horror campaigns where there were a lot more shades of grey -- where the players weren't sure which side they were on, and some PCs descended into various sorts of dark corruption. In my friend Jan's campaigns set in the 1930s, most of the PCs joined in a worldwide conspiracy that some others described as a cult, and used various ancient secrets to try to fight off the impending apocalypse. Most PCs had some sort of strange powers that they were influenced by in order to fight the other side - but we had severe arguments about whether the power we were accepting was good or evil. In my 1890s Golden Dawn campaign, the PCs all went through arcs of corruption based on what they put their faith in, leading to their self-destruction in the end as they took down the other side with them. In my gothic horror games, I also had a bunch of PC who had varying degrees of darkness, and they accepted deals from dark forces because they considered them the lesser evil. For example, a shadar-kai character took a deal from the Raven Queen as he was on the brink of death to return so he could return and fight Strahd.

From my view, the deals have to look enticing at the start - or the players simply won't want to accept them. There's no temptation. In the Masks campaign, we just abandoned a PC if they went mad, and burned or destroyed books if they seemed corrupting. Now, the GM can simply impose horrible curses on the PCs without them willingly taking it, but that rapidly turns into just another way to die. This happens in CoC as characters go insane. In the recent Masks campaign, we also had two characters go insane - but we just put them in a sanitarium and abandoned them. I think when a character gets too cursed, they just quit or get themselves killed, and the player rolls up a new PC.

I enjoyed our Masks game as a great war/crime campaign of cult-killing. But I feel like including plausible temptations makes for more classical horror aspects. Having characters like Rappaccini's Daughter or Dr. Jekyll make for players who are more invested in the horror aspect.

Quote from: Wrath of God on May 30, 2021, 07:36:28 PMBut let's just make it clear. You are 100% sure you mean ROMANI (ergo Gypsies, IndoAryan nomadic nation) folk hero and not ROMANIAN (which is East Italic nations born from settlers from Italy mixed with Eastern Europeans to which Vlad Tepes belonged - also known as Vallachians). Because Romani and Romanians are not really that friendly to each other, and names can be misguiding.

In particular I am referring to the epic poem Țiganiada by a Romanian scholar, but about a group of Gypsies (Romani) fighting alongside Vlad the Impaler.

Quote from: mightybrain on May 31, 2021, 08:14:24 AM

Quote from: Wrath of God on May 30, 2021, 07:36:28 PMBut let's just make it clear. You are 100% sure you mean ROMANI (ergo Gypsies, IndoAryan nomadic nation) folk hero and not ROMANIAN (which is East Italic nations born from settlers from Italy mixed with Eastern Europeans to which Vlad Tepes belonged - also known as Vallachians). Because Romani and Romanians are not really that friendly to each other, and names can be misguiding.

In particular I am referring to the epic poem Țiganiada by a Romanian scholar, but about a group of Gypsies (Romani) fighting alongside Vlad the Impaler.

Is that where Bram Stoker got the idea for Dracula to hire Szgany (Romani) from?

Quote from: jhkim on May 30, 2021, 08:55:29 PM

Quote from: Jaeger on May 29, 2021, 11:34:02 PM
IMHO these powers fall very much into the "Oh-so-Random Tricksy!" category, rather than the "Fuck, I'm cursed!" category.

It depends what sort of horror game you like.

One version of a horror game is very black and white. There are good guys, and there are bad guys. If the good guys try anything morally corrupt, then it obviously will go badly for them. In these cases, the players know to stay on the straight and narrow - and they might die, but the lines stay clear.

The Call of Cthulhu campaign I just wrapped up was like this, which we played for over a year. The GM was using Masks of Nyarlathotep. We encountered a bunch of eldritch tomes and strange items, but we quickly found that they were horrible and using them was a loser's bet. Thus, the campaign as a whole was about us as PCs just killing cultists with shotguns and dynamite. We collected and used resources like money, mercenaries, and weapons - but our growing pile of eldritch material was largely untouched. We had a bunch of tactical challenges, and had four PCs die over the course of the campaign. It wasn't a cakewalk. However, the death didn't have much shock value. The player would just roll up a new character.

---

By contrast, I've played in a number of horror campaigns where there were a lot more shades of grey -- where the players weren't sure which side they were on, and some PCs descended into various sorts of dark corruption. In my friend Jan's campaigns set in the 1930s, most of the PCs joined in a worldwide conspiracy that some others described as a cult, and used various ancient secrets to try to fight off the impending apocalypse. Most PCs had some sort of strange powers that they were influenced by in order to fight the other side - but we had severe arguments about whether the power we were accepting was good or evil. In my 1890s Golden Dawn campaign, the PCs all went through arcs of corruption based on what they put their faith in, leading to their self-destruction in the end as they took down the other side with them. In my gothic horror games, I also had a bunch of PC who had varying degrees of darkness, and they accepted deals from dark forces because they considered them the lesser evil. For example, a shadar-kai character took a deal from the Raven Queen as he was on the brink of death to return so he could return and fight Strahd.

From my view, the deals have to look enticing at the start - or the players simply won't want to accept them. There's no temptation. In the Masks campaign, we just abandoned a PC if they went mad, and burned or destroyed books if they seemed corrupting. Now, the GM can simply impose horrible curses on the PCs without them willingly taking it, but that rapidly turns into just another way to die. This happens in CoC as characters go insane. In the recent Masks campaign, we also had two characters go insane - but we just put them in a sanitarium and abandoned them. I think when a character gets too cursed, they just quit or get themselves killed, and the player rolls up a new PC.

I enjoyed our Masks game as a great war/crime campaign of cult-killing. But I feel like including plausible temptations makes for more classical horror aspects. Having characters like Rappaccini's Daughter or Dr. Jekyll make for players who are more invested in the horror aspect.

Horror can exist on a wide range, from morally gray horror to black and white. I like all kinds of horror, and I like all kinds of stories (from morally gray to black and white). But Ravenloft had an established flavor and concept in this respect. Old Ravenloft was black and white with strong tragic elements. It specifically says in the black box that the dark powers respond to all of the seven deadly sins, with the possible exception of sloth. There is one aspect to Ravenloft that is potentially gray: that we don't know the nature of the dark powers. They respond to evil, but we don't know if the dark powers themselves are evil, good, or disinterested enforcers of an objective moral standard (but powers checks themselves create an objective morality in the setting). I don't what the case is with the new Ravenloft in terms of morality as I haven't read the book. If they have eliminated alignment, but retained good and evil as concepts, it can still work. But this is a setting where just using Necromantic magic warrants a powers check. In most settings necromancy is afforded more gray. In Ravenloft it isn't (or wasn't). They can change those things about Ravenloft, and maybe that attracts more young fans. However it definitely is the kind of thing that loses an old fan like me (and not because I am outraged over alignment----I can entertain different thought exercises about setting cosmologies---but because the old black and white morality approach to Ravenloft was one of the things that made it work and made it interesting. Doesn't mean there wasn't nuance or conflict within that (you often faced truly horrible choices). But there was cosmic heft to the morality. Doing evil, corrupted you physically, mentally and spiritually. It wasn't something to adorn yourself with to make your character unique and stand out. I feel like the new setting, at least with much of the preview material and marketing I am seeing, treats things like curses, cursed bloodlines, bodies corrupted by evil, as fashion choices for your character. Going down that path in old Ravenloft was about your character's destruction, not about having cool fangs. Again, these things can work in certain genres. To me the new Ravenloft feels very urban fantasy (where characters embrace being monsters, and monstrosities are often just misunderstood). I love stuff like the Dresden Files. But this wasn't the Dresden Files. Making Ravenloft more like Harry Potter or the Dresden Files, in my mind, doesn't make it a better setting, it stripes out the bold qualities that gave it flavor in the first place.