#setting: ravenloft

[illastrologist]

Vasili von Holtz 🫀

[luckyblackcatxiii]

THE CoS MERCH CONTINUES this time I'm aiming to do a 3D charm with my take on his canon portrait!

I've always really, really, reaaaaally adored that portrait--mainly for the mirror bg, such a good attention to detail and silent story telling--and I thought it could be fun to capture it with a layered effect. (Also still don't have a fully defined idea on my take for his canon outfit, but I'm still messing around with ideas via merch as you can see)

[ilariel]

Hey our husband saw you across the mists and we hate your vibe. We're going to kill you.

Strahd's lovely consorts

[probablybadrpgideas]

Escape Ravenloft by going down the stairs to the Ravenlanding and then leave through the Ravenfrontdoor and catch a Ravenbus back home.

[curse-of-dming-strahd]

lately i've been trying to picture the Strahd that is somehow a tactical genius, a 9th level wizard, and a guy who filled his house with goofy Home Alone style traps

I was telling my partner about my theory that he just got really stir-crazy about 150 years in and started building Rube Goldberg style traps to stave off the boredom, and they were like, "Did he put the traps there to scare off adventurers? Or are the traps to mess with his staff?"

listen Strahd says they're for adventurers but I now know in my heart that 100% of his traps are to prank his roommates

[oldschoolfrp]

Strahd at a monument to Tatyana (Robh Ruppel box art for the 1994 Ravenloft Campaign Setting)

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Ravenloft: Forbidden Lore Box Set Art by Clyde Caldwell

[lightsandsoundgo]

Photos of the three-story set I designed and built for my D&D Curse of Strahd finale session last weekend! At 1" scale, it's just over 18" tall and about 2 feet wide, and features a grid of ~130 WS2812B LEDs under the floor which I used to indicate various environmental effects over the course of the battle.

Props such as the pews and statues as well as the minis were either purchased or downloaded from shapeways or thingiverse, though I did construct the wooden golem made of pews myself and all but a few minis were hand-painted by myself or my partner.

[honourablejester]

My Top 3 Ravenloft Domains

My three favourite (non-Barovia) Domains of Dread, essentially. With maybe some honourable mentions. Apropos of nothing, I’m just idly rereading some things.

No. 3: Bluetspur

The mind flayer domain. It would get points just because I love cosmic horror, but the thing I actually love most about Bluetspur is that it’s not designed for humans. It’s not a domain you can live in. It’s a domain people get taken to, have horrific things done to them, and then (if they’re lucky) get spat back out of again. It’s alien. A dying world, a vast, tortured, chaotic landscape under a dying red sun, such that even its alien inhabitants, the mind flayers, have to live underground. In, to quote, ‘their ancient metropolis-laboratory’, ruled over by a dying god. It’s not survivable. Not for anyone, not even its god. Bluetspur isn’t a domain you adventure in, it’s a domain that is forced upon you. A domain you have to escape, or rescue someone from, but never, not once, a domain you stay in.

If you’re in the mood for alien abduction, wiped memories, horrific psychic experimentation, incredibly inhospitable environments, and an alien world that is genuinely dying all around you, Bluetspur is worth a look. It’s a fantastic backstory horror to give to inhabitants of other domains, too. Extremely Lovecraftian, think the Plateau of Leng, with some William Hope Hodgson throw in for good measure.

No. 2: Richemulot

The plague domain. Look. Have you played Dishonored? Did you enjoy Dishonored? Would you like to play in an equally plague-infested series of cities ruled over by incredibly corrupt aristocrats who would not remotely balk at using bioweapons on their own people for their own selfish ends? Because if so, Richemulot is the domain for you! The rhythm of the domain is dictated by a rat-borne plague that ebbs and flows but is never successfully eradicated, and it may turn out there’s a reason for that. Navigate the fear, the sickness, the quarantines. Do you intend just to survive, to make it out? Or are your sights set higher, towards the eradication of this ever-present threat?

Look. The Pied Piper of Hamelin was one of my favourite fairytales, and Dishonored is one of my favourite video games. Richemulot is about paranoia, terror and control, the claustrophobia of the quarantine, the horror of corruption. Which, granted, given recent events, might not be what anyone’s in the mood for, but I do enjoy it.

No. 1: Lamordia

The Frankenstein domain. With some other influences mixed in. Lamordia is a fascinating mix of gothic, industrial and environmental horror, with a little bit of nuclear paranoia sprinkled in. An industrial hellscape of cities and universities pinned between a frozen sea and an irradiated mountain range, Lamordia is all mines and factories and broken bodies, relentless and remorseless progress, the flesh blackened and burned (by frostbite or radiation) and fed to the machine. You will be ground down, you will be broken, and you will be remade. Lamordia is a very 19th-to-mid-20th century sort of domain, the horrors of the industrial revolution made manifest. Staked out in a frozen and lethal world, this industrial hub uses science to write its own horrors, as terrible as anything one might find in the wastes. There are iron-clad whaling ships carving through the ice to feed the cities, there are mines where strange ores emit dangerous radiation and mutated monsters roam, there are universities where amoral scientists exploit the poor for experimental subjects, there are vast industries fed by bodies both living and dead. It’s a fantastically evocative setting, and I adore it. Lamordia is easily my favourite domain of dread. If you want a campaign built around bodily autonomy, class conflict, mad science, industrial revolution, worker’s rights, and environmental pressures, this is the domain for you.

(For real, I want to play a campaign where the party’s trying to get a worker’s revolution off the ground in Ludendorf, complicated by the facts that a) without industry the city literally freezes and starves to death, b) it’s hard to maintain morale when the factory bosses can, with the help of the universities and their mysterious backer, literally kill you, rebuild you, and put your corpse back on the assembly line, and c) death is the least worrying fate you could be landed with for trying to shake up the status quo. I don’t know, I feel like that would be an interesting storyline, you know?)

But, yes. Favourite Ravenloft domain, for sure.

Honourable mentions:

Cyre 1313, The Mourning Rail. It’s a haunted train that travels the Mists, fleeing a disaster they don’t realise has already killed them, inhabited by ghosts who don’t realise they’re dead, and a mysterious passenger who damned them all once upon a time. It’s fantastic, no notes.

The Sea of Sorrows. Just. The whole thing. I love nautical horror, we all know this.

Mordent. It’s just a good old-fashioned haunted-house-and-ghostly-moors domain, and I’m a sucker for a classic ghost story.

So, for a summary, I did rather enjoy Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft? Heh. I do like my fantasy (and science fiction) with a generous dash of horror for spice. And Ravenloft has a lot to offer outside of Barovia and Strahd, though of course I’d never knock the OG darklord and his domain.

Pardon the random diversion, and carry on!

[antichrist-vevo]

.... hear me out

[disgruntledexplainer]

D&D elves

[illastrologist]

Estella-Marie Audrey

reblogs > likes

[aqours]

weeeeh i wanna remade my old Warlock for D&D 2024 but Hexblood isn't in 5r...

like it's a post Tasha's race so it should fit seamlessly into 5r rules wise but also like i think most people DMing 2024/5r rn prefer to focus on the core PHB as of this moment

[tea-with-eleni]

On the subject of Castle Avernus

The architect should be fired.

Into the sun.

Like, I found an actual map of the place from one of the AD&D? 3.5? dunno but the quality was Not Great? adventures and I am having a devil of a time getting my head around how the weird central round towers work. Not helped by the isometric view of the original poster map.

I may have to draw the dang thing on tracing paper, layer by layer, to turn it into something moderately useful.

Since I am insane enough to think that might actually be a Good Idea despite it being objectively not since we may not even need a comprehensive battle map...

would any other DMs be interested in a, like, good quality map of Castle Avernus if I manage to create one?

[probablybadrpgideas]

Ravenloft AU where the dark powers have no sense of irony.

Regardless of their personality, past or sins, every darklord is punished by being repeatedly hit down by a car.

[ravenloftbythelamplight]

Tinkering with my Saidra redesign/rework and oh, oh I think I'm gettin' somewhere with this-