Could someone explain ravenloft's Darklords please

[NecroDancer]

From what I managed to peice together when a person does horrible things they are brought to ravenloft where they are given their own pocket dimension. In this pocket dimension they have complete control but are tormented by the "dark powers" with some form of poetic justice.

Is this correct? Could you give me some examples of Darklords and their realms.

[GungHo]

From what I managed to peice together when a person does horrible things they are brought to ravenloft where they are given their own pocket dimension. In this pocket dimension they have complete control but are tormented by the "dark powers" with some form of poetic justice.

Is this correct? Could you give me some examples of Darklords and their realms.

That's correct.

Examples are Strahd, elf vampire Dracula expy who can never regain his lost love. Azalin the lich who can't do... something that I can't remember. There's also a Frankenstein guy, a Jekyll & Hyde, Werewolf... basically, if there was a Hammer Film, there's a realm for it. There were even some crossovers like Soth from Dragonlance.

[Joe the Rat]

It's sort of an ironic Hell - You have everything you want, except the one thing you want most of all. If you could grow past that flaw, that obsession, you could escape.
I don't remember how Soth did it.

[Beleriphon]

It's sort of an ironic Hell - You have everything you want, except the one thing you want most of all. If you could grow past that flaw, that obsession, you could escape.
I don't remember how Soth did it.

As far as I can remember by refusing the play the games of the Dark Powers, accepting that he was trapped and there was nothing to do about it.

[Kish]

He did it by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman playing the "you no longer have the right to write about our character" card. Soth's "escape" is something that doesn't fit Ravenloft and happened for a meta-reason, and none of the handwaves to make it do so are anything but blatantly kludgy. If you care about Ravenloft's meta-rules and don't care about Krynn's ownership of Soth, my advice is to declare that in your game someone destroyed him instead of him escaping. Under any circumstances where you're using Ravenloft, my advice is not to try to get into "how Soth escaped."

[oxybe]

Soth escaped Ravenloft because the beat the Dark Powers through aggressive apathy.

He could not give a f*** and became so boring to them they just let him go. Dude just refused to let the horrible stuff he did weigh him down and went "Yeah... so?" when they tried to throw it in his face and spent all his time in his castle, eating oreos or something, i dunno.

[Zejety]

Isn't Ravenloft Strahd's territory specifically? I think the general pocket dimension is called the Demiplane of Dread.

[oxybe]

Nah. Barovia's the name of Strahd's domain, the "Demiplane of Dread" is the name of the entirety and Ravenloft is the name of the setting akin to how Forgotten Realms is the name of setting and Toril is the name of the main world while Faerun is the name of the continent.

[Beleriphon]

He did it by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman playing the "you no longer have the right to write about our character" card. Soth's "escape" is something that doesn't fit Ravenloft and happened for a meta-reason, and none of the handwaves to make it do so are anything but blatantly kludgy. If you care about Ravenloft's meta-rules and don't care about Krynn's ownership of Soth, my advice is to declare that in your game someone destroyed him instead of him escaping. Under any circumstances where you're using Ravenloft, my advice is not to try to get into "how Soth escaped."

They tried, TSR pulled the work for hire card and basically went with "We own the character, suck it."

[Âmesang]

If I remember correctly, the only other major villain to successfully escape the Demiplane of Dread was Vecna…

[GungHo]

Isn't Ravenloft Strahd's territory specifically? I think the general pocket dimension is called the Demiplane of Dread.

Ravenloft was Strahd's castle in Barovia (which isn't Bavaria... i had a big argument with someone on that). It was essentially Bran castle... down to a lot of the artwork matching the Bran battlements and towers. There were also some cereal-box versions of Romani running around in big round wagons issuing curses. That part of it was before roleplaying games became a little more enlightened.

[Giggling Ghast]

I recall when 4E came out, they created a new dark domain called Monadhan. Its Dark Lord was Arantor, a silver dragon-turned dracolich who had accidentally destroyed a refugee camp during the war between tieflings and dragonborn.

Arantor also murdered his daughter when she suggested they confess to their crimes and continued attacking tieflings. When he was later killed by dragonslayers, Monadhan was created. The realm is a dark reflection of the valley where the refugee camp was located and is populated by traitors, including the vampire Kas, former lieutenant of Vecna.

Arantor's punishment is being haunted by the spirit of his daughter. Her smaller skeletal form is actually housed inside of his own and constantly repeats the names of his victims. Arantor is now quite mad.

Each Dark Domain has an escape clause for its respective Dark Lord. Arantor could escape his personal hell if he felt genuine regret and uttered his daughter's name with heartfelt sorrow.

Generally speaking, all Dark Lords could leave their domains if they admitted their crimes and sought forgiveness. But if they were capable of doing so, they wouldn't be Dark Lords.

[Mordar]

From what I managed to peice together when a person does horrible things they are brought to ravenloft where they are given their own pocket dimension. In this pocket dimension they have complete control but are tormented by the "dark powers" with some form of poetic justice.

Is this correct? Could you give me some examples of Darklords and their realms.

I think that's pretty close - you can (and should) quibble about the complete control/pocket dimension specifics...the lords don't really have any omnipotence/omniscience and can be thwarted, subverted and in some ways defeated. In addition to not being able to achieve satisfaction (in whatever form that would take for them) they also cannot travel beyond the borders of their realm. The Vistani can travel between the pockets and so can the PCs (with assistance).

Ravenloft was Strahd's castle in Barovia (which isn't Bavaria... i had a big argument with someone on that). It was essentially Bran castle... down to a lot of the artwork matching the Bran battlements and towers. There were also some cereal-box versions of Romani running around in big round wagons issuing curses. That part of it was before roleplaying games became a little more enlightened.

Optimizing characters to collect phat lewts is more enlightened than getting to play in a (admittedly cliched) wonderful near-gothic setting straight from the pages of some wonderful fiction/films against an iconic villain that every child knows? Give me the dark ages every time then.

- M

[Kish]

Using a real-world ethnicity for a race of supernatural creatures and explicitly saying "yes, these 'gypsies' totally do things their real-world analogues have been murdered on suspicion of, like reflexively robbing and conning everyone else" was particularly unenlightened. Of course, 5ed brought it back and made it far worse.

[Âmesang]

Optimizing characters to collect phat lewts is more enlightened than getting to play in a (admittedly cliched) wonderful near-gothic setting straight from the pages of some wonderful fiction/films against an iconic villain that every child knows?

You know, that's not too far off…

Spoiler

Show

[Ravian]

You know, that's not too far off…

Spoiler

Show

You know the funny thing is, Ravenloft is actually the original. Came out in 1983 while Castlevania only debuted three years later.

Kind of goes to show how popular D&D was in the 80's that video game companies were copying adventure modules for their box art.


As for the Dark Lord discussion itself, one thing I always kind of felt was interesting was that it seems like a majority of Dark Lords aren't actually picked as such by the Dark Powers. A good majority of them seem to arrive in Ravenloft as normal people (if often inclined towards evil) before becoming Dark Lords while in Ravenloft.) This actually makes a lot of what the Dark Powers do seem far more suspect. There's some theories that they're doing the multiverse a favor by imprisoning all these powerful evil individuals. (if in a fairly malicious way.) However, when you really look at it, a good number of those Dark Lords only qualify as Dark Lords a good deal after they've been taken, which points less at Ravenloft being a prison, and more like some kind of intentional act to create Dark Lords through creating an environment that evil flourishes in.

(People have mentioned that the Dark Powers don't do a ton of tempting, but I would argue that that feels less like they're impartial wardens and more like they're detached experimenters. Overt tempting would be messing with the experiment, better to just create an environment and see what ends up happening.)

Granted this does kind of ignore the elephant in the room. Strahd is not only the original Dark Lord, he's also in the minority of Dark Lords that arrive in the Demiplane of Dread fully fledged as a Dark Lord. It makes one wonder...

[Giggling Ghast]

It's not clear if the Dark Powers imprison people in the Dark Domains in order to punish them or just for their own twisted amusement.

[Ravian]

It's not clear if the Dark Powers imprison people in the Dark Domains in order to punish them or just for their own twisted amusement.

I personally lean more towards amusement. They capture far too many otherwise normal individuals who end up becoming Dark Lords after they arrive in Ravenloft for it not to be intentional (Vlad Drakov, Azalin, Harkon Lukas, Tristen ApBlanc, all inhabitants of other planes, who were taken by the mists, but only became Dark Lords later on.) Then there's all the Dark Lords that were born in the plane itself. Then you add in the Dark Lords that were actually born as natives of Ravenloft. (such as Death, Ivana and Ivan of Borca, Gabrielle Aderre, Inza, Alfred Timothy) and you really wonder how many Dark Lords are really being imprisoned by the mists rather than created by them.

Sure a great deal of those Dark Lords were evil before the mists ever claimed them, but you really have to wonder if some of them were twisted enough to justify Dark Lord status before the mists got involved and they were suddenly in an environment that drove them to acts that led them to Dark Lord status.

Harkon Lukas is the classic example in my opinion. The guy was just some Wolfwere from Cormyr with delusions about ruling over humans. Than the mists take him, he ends up in Barovia and goes on a rampage. Strahd drives him out, but the rampage qualifies him for Dark Lord status and Karakass appears for him to rule. Lukas was hardly a nice guy when he was still in Cormyr, but he was no more dangerous and twisted than others of his kind (just more interested in humanity.)

He'd likely never would have amounted to anything in the Forgotten Realms if the Mists never took him. Probably have just ended up as some sort of forgettable adventure mini-boss for a party of adventurers. But once he got to Ravenloft, he went crazy and got rewarded with new powers, and an eternal prison full of other people to suffer.

Just seems that if the Dark Powers aim was to imprison particularly evil people, they're doing a bad job at it, considering that so many of their prisoners were created by the prison system itself.

Either Ravenloft is an allegory for the failing rehabilitation in prison systems, or the Dark Powers are after something else. Maybe it's just their own sick amusement. But it all seems a little too elaborate to me for that to be the case.

[Lapak]

That's correct.

Examples are Strahd, elf vampire Dracula expy who can never regain his lost love. Azalin the lich who can't do... something that I can't remember. There's also a Frankenstein guy, a Jekyll & Hyde, Werewolf... basically, if there was a Hammer Film, there's a realm for it. There were even some crossovers like Soth from Dragonlance.

Azalin was unable to learn any new magical knowledge. IIRC, he sought lichdom to extend his existence specifically so that he could continue his magical studies, so yeah. He is absolute ruler of his domain, and was the most personally-powerful Dark Lord in the original setting as an 18th level wizard-lich... but he will never, ever grow any stronger. His domain's boundaries are set by the Dark Powers, he can never learn a new spell or create a magical item he doesn't already know about, he's bound to an eternity of personal stasis.

[GungHo]

Optimizing characters to collect phat lewts is more enlightened than getting to play in a (admittedly cliched) wonderful near-gothic setting straight from the pages of some wonderful fiction/films against an iconic villain that every child knows? Give me the dark ages every time then.

That's not where I was going. I got no problem with a smash & grab setting where you don't gotta think about which came first... the chicken or Dagon.

Using a real-world ethnicity for a race of supernatural creatures and explicitly saying "yes, these 'gypsies' totally do things their real-world analogues have been murdered on suspicion of, like reflexively robbing and conning everyone else" was particularly unenlightened. Of course, 5ed brought it back and made it far worse.

Yeah, that's where i was going. OWoD also had this same problem... with the same group of people, in fact.

[Kyberwulf]

Didn't Soths time in Ravenloft end up with him making atonement or something in Krynn's world?

[Kish]

I hear that he apparently did achieve some measure of redemption on Krynn in the end. But as far as Ravenloft affecting it goes, the Krynn books don't acknowledge he was ever in Ravenloft.

[iceman10058]

If I remember correctly, the only other major villain to successfully escape the Demiplane of Dread was Vecna…

I believe becoming a god is the only true way to escape iirc