Ravenloft is where most of D&D’s horror likes to live. From vampires to Frankenstein’s (and their monsters), one plane has it all.
Ravenloft is many things. It’s a place where everyone from designers to DMs and players gets to flex their horror-tuned creative muscles. It’s one of the most popular campaign settings out there. You’ll find some of the most popular campaigns and adventures set within its misty confines.
But one thing Ravenloft is not is a contiguous world. It’s one of the few campaign settings out there that, even if you were able to map it all, you wouldn’t have a world map. Because Ravenloft is actually a collection of pocket dimensions.
Ravenloft Is Not A Dump Truck, It’s A Series Of Pocket Universes That Are Also Torment Prisons
In order to understand Ravenloft, you have to understand the reasons surrounding its creation. Specifically, Ravenloft was the answer to its creators ‘disappointment with D&D’. Tracy and Laura Hickman had a longstanding Halloween game and had experienced the lackluster embers of trying to run a cool vampire as a bad guy in D&D, so they took a different approach. They created one of D&D’s most iconic villains, Strahd von Zarovich, to serve as the antagonist in an adventure.
Ravenloft sort of rose up around him, starting with a module in 1983. And then, years later, Ravenloft was reimagined as a campaign setting at a time when players were ravenous for new worlds to adventure in. Only Ravenloft had a different hook from other settings. Where you had whole campaign worlds before, Ravenloft was more like a Rogue’s Gallery.
Billed as the Realm of Terror, Ravenloft as a campaign setting houses a number of classic horror villain archetypes with a D&D flavor. And though the flavors of horror have changed slightly over the years, that still holds true.
Ravenloft is a lot like the Twilight Zone. It’s not so much a world you travel to as it is a realm you stumble into. Often not realizing it until it’s too late.
Ravenloft is a bundle of pocket dimensions, each one housing a different villain. Surrounding the edges of these pocket demiplanes, are eerie mists that keep travelers trapped within the demiplane of Dread. Wander into the mists, and you’ll wander back out somewhere else in the same realm – in other words, one does not simply walk away fro arovia. Or Sithicus. Or any of the other places.
Each different “pocket” of Ravenloft contains dark and sinister powers that seek out particularly selfish and evil individuals and imprison and torment them by making them masters of their own realm of terror. Also called the islands of terror, these realms all are ruled over by a powerful villain called a darklord. Strahd, for instance, is the darklord of Barovia.
But Strahd is only one example. Throughout Ravenloft are many examples of villainy. From Lord Soth, the first ever Death Knight, to mad scientists and their creations. Even liches. All of which you can discover for yourself in their latest incarnations in the upcoming Ravenloft: The Horrors Within.
See you in the Demiplane of Dread!
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