Domains of Dread - I'm Not Sure I Get Them

[Grey Watcher]

So, the Ravenloft campaign setting (distinct-but-closely-related-to the various adventures centering around the castle of the same name): you've got these small geographical regions that are quite literally cut off from the rest of the world, tucked into little demiplanes somewhere in the multiverse (usually attached to the Shadowfell or local equivalent), attached to each other like some sort of patchwork quilt. It's the go-to brand for Gothic horror run on a D&D engine.

Except I feel like putting Strahd (D&D/Ravenloft's copyright-friendly answer to Dracula) off in his own little bubble kingdom kinda undercuts the horror part. While there's plenty of precedent in the genre for being trapped with no chance of escape (I'm looking at you, Poe), it seems to me that a big part of what makes Dracula, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, or Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde work is that these things are right there. Dracula is only a land purchase and a boat ride away from the familiar streets of London. Frankenstein creates his "monster" at a prominent university. Mr. Hyde wanders about mugging, murdering, and who-knows-what-else based out of the home/laboratory of the respectable and proper of Dr. Jekyll.

(For that matter, this extends to more recent horror stories: Cthulhu's cultists are in a town in Massachusetts, the body snatchers are quietly replacing people one-by-one in a small town in California, the zombie apocalypse generally starts at some university or military laboratory, etc.)

Point is, there's very little standing between these horrors and their wreaking havoc on day-to-day life. In the more hopeful stories, that "very little" might be "a stalwart band of heroes" in the more despairing ones it might just be a simple quirk of luck. (The former is obviously much better suited to an RPG in general and D&D in particular.) So why remove that and make it such that, even if the heroes all die horribly, Strahd is no more of a threat than he ever was? (The Barovians are already under his thumb, so unless the PC's goad Strahd into a "scorched earth" move, things can't get much worse for them.)

I get that, out-of-fiction, having a single brand to released "gothic horror D&D adventures" under is a good marketing strategy. Just why remove one of the pillars of what makes horror horrific? Or is there something to this that I'm not getting?

[Vitruviansquid]

Just why remove one of the pillars of what makes horror horrific? Or is there something to this that I'm not getting?

Well, there's your problem.

The understanding that the uncanny can be among you is but one of many sources of horror that are used. But there are many sources of horror, because horror taps into the primal fears of the human creature, and the human creature has much to fear.

The fear of Mr. Hyde strolling around a Neighborhood Much Like Ours is horrific like a home invasion, and you might think of it in the same way as the feeling of violation if an ancient person realized a lion was wandering around in his familiar foraging grounds. But Domains of Dread taps into a different kind of fear, the fear of being in a predator's home. It's that feeling of trespass and danger if an ancient person had, for some reason, had to enter a lion's den. For examples, Strahd's domain is less like the stories you've listed, and more like... The Shining, which has at its core a horror about an unfamiliar and evil space, or any number of stories about haunted houses.

[Darth Ultron]

So, the Ravenloft campaign setting (distinct-but-closely-related-to the various adventures centering around the castle of the same name): you've got these small geographical regions that are quite literally cut off from the rest of the world, tucked into little demiplanes somewhere in the multiverse (usually attached to the Shadowfell or local equivalent), attached to each other like some sort of patchwork quilt. It's the go-to brand for Gothic horror run on a D&D engine.
Or is there something to this that I'm not getting?

Each domain of Ravenloft is like a ''normal world'' with ''horror'' in it. If your a character in a domain then the horror is in your land. The rest of the universe does not matter.

The ''Ravenloft'' idea is just a way to make a ''patchwork world'' made of ''all the examples of horror''. And the ''classic horror'' that Ravenloft is based off is more ''the boring real world'' and not ''an adventure fantasy world''. The ''horror'' is only real and scary if the people are helpless. They need to be one hit point nobodies to be scared. The ''horror monsters'' are not scary to a normal D&D character.

After all the core D&D rules don't have any ''horror rules'', and you can't really have a ''horror game'' with no rules, unless your talking about effecting the players with atmosphere and mood(but you can't sell that...).

[Tiktakkat]

I get that, out-of-fiction, having a single brand to released "gothic horror D&D adventures" under is a good marketing strategy. Just why remove one of the pillars of what makes horror horrific? Or is there something to this that I'm not getting?

No, you get it perfectly.

The people who set up Ravenloft as a setting are the ones who failed to get not just that pillar of horror, but several others as well, going overboard to turn Strahd into a Marty Stu from . . . well, from the Domain of Dread, with a side order of Tomb of Horrors/Kobayashi Maru dungeon that "nobody" can defeat.

And then they managed to make it even worse by setting up the corruption to be beneficial for the first few stages, so even minimal optimizers were all over the first few levels for the free power and gratuitous evilz, missing that what the entire setting is predicated on pyrrhic victories at best there is no reason to actually try and fight the good fight for more than the overture.

So, yeah. It isn't you, the setting just fails completely once you get past the veneer of horror as writing stuff with extensive backgrounds and more motivations than rampaging orcs.

[Thrudd]

Ravenloft is a campaign setting intended to be distinct in tone and flavor from the norm of D&D, with that classic horror-monster vibe. The whole demi-plane thing is just an excuse to fit this distinctly different flavor into a normal D&D campaign. I don't think it really works. This type of horror doesn't work in D&D: no matter how much moody music and creepy description you use, a single werewolf is still just a single werewolf, and as soon as the PCs figure out who it is, they'll kill it. Putting Strahd and creepy gothic castles into your normal campaign world doesn't make it scarier. It just means there is one more bad guy to fight and one more dungeon to explore. Vampires aren't scary in D&D, except when you are not yet strong enough to fight them.

Stuck in a castle with a vampire you have no hope of defeating would be the closest to horror you can get. But to make it work and not be contrived and pointless, you'd need to be willing to kill off PCs in the process. The reason Ravenloft is supposed to be so scary is that it is hard to survive- harder than the normal campaign world. It's like the "Tomb of Horrors" in that way - only the bravest or most foolhardy should think about it, and the majority who try it are going to die. If that is its reputation, characters who end up there and their players should be scared out of their wits and do everything they can to escape before it's too late.

[Velaryon]

No, you get it perfectly.

The people who set up Ravenloft as a setting are the ones who failed to get not just that pillar of horror, but several others as well, going overboard to turn Strahd into a Marty Stu from . . . well, from the Domain of Dread, with a side order of Tomb of Horrors/Kobayashi Maru dungeon that "nobody" can defeat.

And then they managed to make it even worse by setting up the corruption to be beneficial for the first few stages, so even minimal optimizers were all over the first few levels for the free power and gratuitous evilz, missing that what the entire setting is predicated on pyrrhic victories at best there is no reason to actually try and fight the good fight for more than the overture.

So, yeah. It isn't you, the setting just fails completely once you get past the veneer of horror as writing stuff with extensive backgrounds and more motivations than rampaging orcs.

That's a rather biased point of view. You're not wrong exactly, but you're definitely giving all the weight to one point of view and then blaming the setting for not sharing that point of view.

Ravenloft, when it was written as a distinct setting rather than a loose collection of adventures you can drop into another game, is definitely an awkward fit for D&D. As others have said, the vampires, mummies, werewolves, etc. are just another monster to a normal high-fantasy D&D party. D&D does not lend itself well to gothic horror because the mindsets are completely different. A lot of Ravenloft fans back in the 3.X days would actually use the world with a different game system for that reason. I imagine it would work with a slightly tweaked version of Call of Cthulhu, though I've never played that system so I'm not sure.

As a more-or-less cohesive setting, Ravenloft does have its flaws. The ability of most Darklords to seal the borders of their land, the rules for fear, horror, and madness saves, the chance of corruption for using a lot of your class's normal features, the fact that in at least one edition a paladin's aura is strong enough to be sensed by darklords as soon as you enter their land, are all tools that lend themselves really well to the worst sort of DM railroading. But they don't have to be used that way.

I will say that D&D is probably not the right game system for the Ravenloft setting. I'll even go a step further and say that I find it a setting more enjoyable to read about than actually play in. But the fact that it's a poor fit for D&D doesn't make it a failure, at least I don't think so.

Though oddly, in the 2e and 3e versions of Ravenloft at least, the OP's complaint about Barovia being isolated from the rest of the world actually isn't true. There were plenty of domains that floated out in the mists with no connection to any others, but Barovia wasn't one of them. It was connected to a bunch of other lands into one solid continent that the books referred to as the Core, and it was right in the middle so didn't border the mists directly at all.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Well, there's your problem.

The understanding that the uncanny can be among you is but one of many sources of horror that are used. But there are many sources of horror, because horror taps into the primal fears of the human creature, and the human creature has much to fear.

The fear of Mr. Hyde strolling around a Neighborhood Much Like Ours is horrific like a home invasion, and you might think of it in the same way as the feeling of violation if an ancient person realized a lion was wandering around in his familiar foraging grounds. But Domains of Dread taps into a different kind of fear, the fear of being in a predator's home. It's that feeling of trespass and danger if an ancient person had, for some reason, had to enter a lion's den. For examples, Strahd's domain is less like the stories you've listed, and more like... The Shining, which has at its core a horror about an unfamiliar and evil space, or any number of stories about haunted houses.

+1 to this, right here. It's not about The Evil Inside Us, it's We're Stuck Here With The Monster.

[Winter_Wolf]

I like the Ravenloft setting...for novels and short stories. To game in, not so much. The domains are prisons for the Dark Lords, and the Mists and Dark Powers torture those lords in ways that the normal folk caught up as collateral damage usually don't need to deal with.

Just look at Strahd; a fearsome terror to all his subjects, but constantly denied the one thing he wants above all else.* He's angry, evil, batspit crazy, and is being tortured by the dark powers that gave him his realm in the first place. If he were capable of recanting his actions he might just escape his fate, but he's too far gone for that.

*Based on the novel _Vampire of the Mists_

[Verbannon]

I only know about Domains of Dread in the D&D 4e PoL setting, and it sounds like they are different from Ravenloft. In the PoL setting the domain of dread is supposed to be a sandbox like extreme danger adventure area. I don't know about fear, but the one time I used a domain of Dread the party noted it as one of their favorite and most tense adventures. The entire Domain is influenced and affected by the will of its Dread Lord, so there are no real allies or areas of safety at all. In the PoL setting though the Domains of Dread center around the sin commited to create the domain of dread more then even the Dread lord Himself. And so the citizens in the domain are going to be people who share that sin as a dominant crime of their life. Which means there aren't going to be many innocents around.

So for my Domain of Dread the Dread Lord is the city itself. The City is a Giant Mimic. A cobalt Dragon wanting a more powerful servant to boast about cultivated and grew this mimic feeding it his entire city (not his servants though) so his entire city was this mimic. But the mimic became the target of corruption, and started to devour his servants. The Dragon ignored this and ignored, unwilling to accept this favored servant, his favored treasure needed to be destroyed. Until finally the Mimic devoured the dragon. Resulting in a domain of dread. Then the sin of willful Ignorance (I couldn't think of a more accurate description, Selfish Denial?) In this domain however everyone who gets trapped here is eventually eaten. The party entered the city and saw it completely empty but saw food cooking, you know that whole "looks like it was occupied a few seconds ago" thing. And well I tried to remain subte but everything was trying to kill them. Eventually they figured out there were a whole lot of mimics around, the lore they read however only described the dragon turning his city into a giant mimic. It didn't tell them the dragon was eaten, so they thought the dragon was the dread lord. They sought him out, slew the dragon only to have the dragon turn into a mimic when killed, killing it angered the city and the treasure chamber sealed off and the mimic core rose out of the ground forcing them to fight and kill it. But instead of that killing the city, being in the shadowfell the city animated as an undead city they now had to flee. As they fled they saw the streets opening up revealing hungry mouths that devoured the terrified and fleeing object mimics. The gates, which before had simply been unopenable were now again giant tentacled filled mouths and teeth eating any mimic that tried to escape. And the party had to fight the gate, the streets and an undead Cobalt Mimic Dragon descending upon them.

And my players said they thought they were going to die that somehow they had screwed up bad by killing the mimic core and now were going to TPK. And I think thats the key. A domain of Dread is sandboxed, you as DM aren't giving them a clear path, they have a rough objective "escape" but they don't know how to do it and you aren't giving them much help.

[Tiktakkat]

That's a rather biased point of view. You're not wrong exactly, but you're definitely giving all the weight to one point of view and then blaming the setting for not sharing that point of view.

When the "point of view" is "a particular type of horror" and the setting fails to do that particular type of horror, then what exactly am I supposed to blame:
The definition for not being something the setting does?
Or the setting for not being what it advertises itself as?

D&D does not lend itself well to gothic horror because the mindsets are completely different.

Which is why the original Ravenloft module is so poorly regarded.
Oh wait . . .

And then there are all the other adventures and settings that manage to incorporate horror, including Gothic Horror, without the flawed rules and structure of the Ravenloft setting.

[weckar]

I find it useful to consider the DoD as the bounds of a story. Strahd being the menace over a small village is the story that is being told there. If him travelling to London were to be part of his story, London would have been included in the DoD.

[hymer]

A lot of insightful stuff has already been said, I'll add a thought I didn't see:

Ravenloft's discrete locales are made like that, so that the DM can completely change the scenes (and the rules), without doing a lot of the heavy lifting of world building. You want each lord of the local place to be the biggest and baddest and most evillest and ruthless and cunning... So they better not have any neighbours, or you'd have to think deeply about how all these evil beings interact. Keep them separate, like separate movies (which may have a lot of actors overlap, playing suspiciously similar roles, btw.). That way you can (fail to) save the world again and again and again, with the most high-strung drama you can engineer.

[BarbieTheRPG]

Ravenloft is/has become this new thing. As before it was tactical, now it is story-based. Why not both?

My horror games tend to break characters and players. Find out what your players don't like and do that. Observe character limits and push them. Push them for effect.

[Beleriphon]

The thing with Ravenloft as a setting, rather than an adventure, is that the domains aren't supposed to be travelled about as one chooses freely. If you're in Barovia and you made Strahd mad enough to come out of his castle, guess what? He's coming out and you can't flee, no matter what you're stuck until Strahd finds you and murder faces the PCs.

[tomandtish]

Each domain of Ravenloft is like a ''normal world'' with ''horror'' in it. If your a character in a domain then the horror is in your land. The rest of the universe does not matter.

The ''Ravenloft'' idea is just a way to make a ''patchwork world'' made of ''all the examples of horror''. And the ''classic horror'' that Ravenloft is based off is more ''the boring real world'' and not ''an adventure fantasy world''. The ''horror'' is only real and scary if the people are helpless. They need to be one hit point nobodies to be scared. The ''horror monsters'' are not scary to a normal D&D character.

After all the core D&D rules don't have any ''horror rules'', and you can't really have a ''horror game'' with no rules, unless your talking about effecting the players with atmosphere and mood(but you can't sell that...).

Very much this. Ravenloft is supposed to be mostly normal people with a few above normal (your characters) caught in a really bad place.

I like the Ravenloft setting...for novels and short stories. To game in, not so much. The domains are prisons for the Dark Lords, and the Mists and Dark Powers torture those lords in ways that the normal folk caught up as collateral damage usually don't need to deal with.

Just look at Strahd; a fearsome terror to all his subjects, but constantly denied the one thing he wants above all else.* He's angry, evil, batspit crazy, and is being tortured by the dark powers that gave him his realm in the first place. If he were capable of recanting his actions he might just escape his fate, but he's too far gone for that.

*Based on the novel _Vampire of the Mists_

And definitely this. If there's a problem with the settings, it is that they don't go far enough. You are supposed to be trapped in what is basically the personal hell of that particular lord. Strahd is doomed to keep chasing and losing his lost love (and slaughtering anyone who gets in his way). Lord Soth keeps trying (and failing) to possess Kitiara (and slaughtering anyone who gets in his way). And so forth.

The thing with Ravenloft as a setting, rather than an adventure, is that the domains aren't supposed to be travelled about as one chooses freely. If you're in Barovia and you made Strahd mad enough to come out of his castle, guess what? He's coming out and you can't flee, no matter what you're stuck until Strahd finds you and murder faces the PCs.

Yeah. Anyone who has the power to leave domains is probably powerful enough to end up having one created for them, which they cannot leave.

(And before anyone mentions Soth, that whole thing was a fiasco brought on in part when Weiss and Hickman were not on speaking terms with TSR).

[weckar]

Aren't the Vistani capable of mistwalking?

I've played a couple of games of Ravenloft before. As long as you don't let your players get that ability OR let them be Dark Lords... it's a hell a lot of fun.

[Zaydos]

Aren't the Vistani capable of mistwalking?

This would be a reason why only Half-Vistani were allowed as a PC race.

[Corsair14]

The domains of dread are not just a couple of one off adventures. One single realm can be an entire campaign. Many people there, including the adventurers if they start there have no clue how bad they have it and live life perfectly normal and most NPCs might never see a monster. The entire concept of the game is different, from stark beauty in the day to the dread of noises in the dark. Is that an owl in the trees or is something sneaking up? Oh look zombies, oh crap I cant turn them. I love the Ravenloft realms, as much as I enjoy running and playing Greyhawk or reading Spelljammer(too hard to DM though). Your average PC who gets sucked into the realm has no clue where he is, why the gods dont answer, why spells dont work like normal, and why the night is creepier than normal. NPCs and native PCs arent much help, its perfectly normal to them. Not to mention very low resources, there isnt freedom of movement, and nothing is as it seems. The dread lords are indeed evil bad guys, but some are tragic villains stuck in a rut.

I am planning on running a campaign in a land I am creating based on dark fae. Very anti-dwarf as an entire village of them is viciously torn apart every full moon by the great hunt and then resurrected the next day not remembering anything as part of the Dark Lady's eternal punishment. Everything is both brighter but darker at the same time. For the short term they wont be able to leave the realm to go to other realms. It will have everything from missing children to red widows. I havent figured everything out yet entirely and am still in the early design and brainstorming phase. I even plan on some Old One type intrigue.

[weckar]

Ravenloft works best if the players are not aware they are playing Ravenloft. Just treat it is any other setting. Hell, some of the Domains of Dread, or Dark Realms; whatever you prefer, are the size of a good country - the characters may not even realize it has an edge!

(And, considering some of the mist's mechanics that vary by DoD, some technically don't as the edges just wrap around like a mini planet.)

[LibraryOgre]

Ravenloft works best if the players are not aware they are playing Ravenloft. Just treat it is any other setting. Hell, some of the Domains of Dread, or Dark Realms; whatever you prefer, are the size of a good country - the characters may not even realize it has an edge!

(And, considering some of the mist's mechanics that vary by DoD, some technically don't as the edges just wrap around like a mini planet.)

It can also vary with the Ravenloft era... there was a significant period where it was assumed that most of the major domains were adjacent, and that people would cross over them relatively easily... except for the rare times the Dark Lord was angry. So you might go from Falkonia to Barovia and it's just two adjacent countries, one of which has a dictatorial human monarch, and the other of which has an ancient, reclusive leader. Unless the world is ending or one of the leaders is mad, you can more or less ignore that you're in Ravenloft.

[Segev]

This thread has made me consider a campaign where the premise is that a Domain Lord is working on making his particular Domain border a Prime world. That is, he's trying to make the Mists appear more frequently in one particular place, so that he can influence that world. Turning it from a rare occurrence that snaps up adventurers to a more frequent menace.

Now the heroes can be typical adventurers...and even retreat to safety...if the Mists are cooperating today. But the horror lies in the encroachment of the Domain on their world. And the risk that powerful horror monsters might bring the Mists down in a way to swallow parts of their homeland.

[weckar]

Been there, done it. Sucked all of Sharn into 'the realm that is Frankenstein but totally not Frankenstein'.

[Segev]

Been there, done it. Sucked all of Sharn into 'the realm that is Frankenstein but totally not Frankenstein'.

So your PCs lost? Or was the campaign about separating back out? How'd it go?