The Ravenloft Gazetteers were born out of this desire for a more self-supporting setting, as well as a way to slip in new content for players and DMs that simply couldn't be placed into other splatbooks. This, honestly, was, in my opinion, a very good step, as it helped Ravenloft feel more "real" as a setting - downplaying the outlander origins of the Darklords and replacing the borrowed gods with more organic "native" deities put the focus on the Demiplane of Dread, diminishing the "artificiality" of the world. It probably bears mentioning that Sword & Sorcery also had run into some legal issues they were uncertain, at the least, if they could legally get away with directly referencing other D&D settings, and so they minimized and obfuscated the details wherever possible. Instead, the norm was now that the players would be natives of Ravenloft, putting an end to the feeling of the world being nothing but demigod-crafted simulacra in oversized theaters. Their goal was to focus on Ravenloft as a "living" world, to make players invest in it more than they did back during the days of the weekend in hell being the norm. The Ravenloft setting was licensed to White Wolf, by way of their "Sword & Sorcery" subdivision, and they decided they wanted to take a different approach. Now, this did not give players much of a reason for to care about the NPCs they were passing by during their adventures - indeed, many fans began to take the "dread possibility" raised in the setting lore that Ravenloft HAS no native denizens, only unaware simulacra crafted to order by the Dark Powers from the demiplane itself, as canon. And because Ravenloft in AD&D focused on the idea that players would originate from other settings and then be brought into Ravenloft and spend their time there looking for an escape route home until they either succeeded or died - a concept that was enshrined in the fanbase's personal lexicon as "the weekend in hell". The number one problem for many players (aside from "why is this setting so railroady?") was "why should I care about these NPCS?" A good horror story works because you actually care about the people being victimized when you don't care, that's when you get the stereotypical slasher movie. No, the problem I'm talking about is this: for many players, it was extremely hard to get invested in adventuring in Ravenloft. But that's not the specific issue I'm talking about. Even in TSR's days, this lore resulted in some decisions that were, on hindsight, rather foolish - like placing the land with a theme of "religious horror" rooted in a deranged cult that demands its population starve to death to win the favor of a non-existent god right next to the land that was literally the "core's" breadbasket, which led to them publishing a second, metaplot-inspired version of the setting book specifically to fix mistakes like that. Its most prominent problem was, ironically, its very lore as a piecemeal assortment of different lands created as prison-paradises for different villainous Darklords. It had its devoted fanbase, but it also had a number of problems that arguably kept it from finding a wider audience. The Van Richten's Guides I'll save for their own Let's Read, so let's start things off with a general overview/opening thoughts, shall we?īorn from the unexpected popularity of the module I6: Castle Ravenloft, the setting of Ravenloft was TSR's attempt at doing a "dark fantasy" spin on the typical D&D world, using the tropes of Gothic Horror to frame their world and create a piecemeal, horror-slanted D&D sort of world.
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