Ravenloft: The Perfect Horror Setting? (Domains of Dread Campaign Setting Review)

Ravenloft has long been one of my favorite D&D settings. The publication of Curse of Strahd was one of the first things that made me think about going back. I think it was the lack of PDF that stopped me.
A very long time agon - 2nd ed era - I ran one of my best convention games set in Ravenloft. As a con game, it was a one shot where all the characters were some flavor of evil with some dark marks from the Dread powers. They were trying an Enemy Mine against the dark lord, but the intent was that one of them would end up replacing them, and in a rare thing for me, PVP was acceptable. As I said, it was a con game. I'll change things up for those vs. what I'll do for a long term home game. Everyone had a blast, and there were actually two survivors - the eventual victor, who I think was an Anti-Paladin, and the cat burglar who was arguably the lightest of the dark characters (Neutral Evil, I believe.)
Unfortunately, it's lost to time, unless I find the floppy disk it's on and a computer that can read it.

Oh my, that is a very VERY nice calendar you got there... Goodness! 😍

Well...its a bit late for the review, but have at my favorite setting and DM world style🤣👍🏻❤️

I've always been kind of tempted to turn the Vestani into an almost jailor or caretaker role of sorts. The reason that they are able to freely travel between the domains is that they are there to maintain a balance of sorts, and it's also why they have a particular gift for magic. They are agents of whatever creates and maintains the Domains, or judges the Dread Lords.

They blend in to the domain to be more comfortable for the people of the domain, and so the Dread Lord doesn't grow too deeply suspicious. They are as they are in Barovia as Strahd finds their mannerisms oddly calming to what remains of his humanity. They may appear as nobles in Dementlieu, or perhaps tailors or dressmakers.

They can help those that are inadvertantly pulled into the Mist, and make sure that the Dread Lord never manages to escape their domain. They maintain the status quo, one way or another.

Maybe tying into the soulless angle, maybe they are a different kind of life that doesn't have a "Soul" like a regular mortal would, because they are an entirely different kind of being. Maybe that's what allows them to freely travel the domains. The Mist traps souls, they don't have one in a conventional sense, so they can freely move through it.

I usually introduce the solace aspect only with relatively high level characters who are interested in what's behind the domains as opposed to the story of the specific domain in question. As such, both they and the mists are the proxies for the deep powers of the setting. This also means that it is the treatment of these people that becomes the measure by which the deep powers judge people, especially characters, in their application of influence. This means that characters that treat them well earn duse ex mackinga help from the mists and related phenomenon. Whereas characters who treat them badly drift towards becoming dark lords themselves.

My favorite thing about the Domains of Dread is that they ao easily set up a framework where I can take any bad guy from any old episode of the Twilight Zone and make them a minor villain trapped in an endless loop of their episode.

I think soulless NPCs can be very meaningful if they are aware. They are people that know, or at least suspect, they have no afterlife. Their existence is dependent on the continuation of a limited world that itself exists for suffering and specifically for someone else's experience. It adds to the horror that these people know that the world and their lives do revolve around someone else and that all that they struggle through only really matters for what it means to that dark lord.
Additional thought is that the horror player character options creates a really fun contrast if you use them for The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. With the Domains of Dread and Domains of Delight they are companion books. Plus there is hag connections for the hexbloods and you can set up the inevitable collision between the carnivals.

Thank you for really good caption s. You talk very fast and they help. 👍

Amazing calendar work, Mike.

I've DMed a really cool campaign set in Richemulot. I took inspiration from Dishonored and changed setting a bit, but it still was a lot of fun.

Thank you for the spoiler warning for CoS. I'm going to play it at the beginning of the year and want to go in blind. I'll come back to this video later. ^___^

You tell them Pooh Bear

You could do something like the "Friday the 13th" TV series (not related to the Jason Vorhees movies) or Warehouse 13. In both, there are basically powerful but cursed magic items that get out into the public and need to be recaptured. There are also the Denarians from the Dresden Files novels: Holders of one of 30 tarnished silver coins from ancient Rome, each of which has a Fallen angel inside. When a human (or humanoid) touches one of the coins, the Fallen within begins offering them power, and the more the individual accepts, the more the Fallen corrupts and transforms them. Of course, the One Ring is another example. In any of these stories, the object is the real villain, and anyone using it is just another mortal host ensnared by the curse.

There's a podcast called The Wonderful World of Darklords where the hosts come up with domains based on Disney villains, which I thought was a really fun way of exploring the concept! It's well worth checking out.

Omg, the way the setting is described sounds a LOT like season 5 of The Magnus Archives (different domains with different types of horror in each, hard to pass between them, most npcs being stuck in their domain, a singular dark lord in the center who can't leave his own domain but still rules things).
It makes me want to run a re-skinned version based on it (I'd even get to keep the carnival setting).

I haven't run a Domains of Dread game (well, I haven't run any games period, but I'd like to try one day), but one thing that concerns me is the villain always coming back and their domain being essentially an endless loop. Is there any way to ensure the players' actions actually matter outside of just surviving? If there's no way they can defeat the villain permanently or bring any kind of change to the setting, I'm just trying to figure out what the actual point of adventuring there is. And if the NPCs are all soulless extensions of the villain, it's not like they can save anyone either. Like, what is the GOAL of the PCs in one of these domains. Is there any possibility besides just "survive and get back to our original world?"
(So just while typing this I came up with something. Maybe there's an artefact or magical resource that the PCs need in their world and it can only be found in one of the Domains. So it's a desperate race to get what you came for and leave before the Darklord finds you. Maybe.)

My current campaign is a Domain hopping campaign. The players have the endgame goal of defeating Strahd and finding a way to save the domains from the dark powers. I’ll freely admit I have changed the lore so winning is possible, but I feel it works.

If there wasn't soulless, the birth and death rate would have to be exactly the same. Cause no one leaves. I'm fine with this as a solution to that problem. Also... that calendar. 😅

Actually seems like a cool setting, never thought to look into it until now

Although this does bleed over more into the van richtens guide to villains video, but any domain of dread can also easily be toned down slightly and give a bit more external resistance to the status quo and the dark lord and you can basically take a domain of dread and put it literally anywhere else in your games, really great guidelines for your evil empire (star wars empire, garlemald, adrestia, shinra, rigel, something that isnt from either final fantasy or fire emblem they're just all the names coming to mind at the moment)

my current campaing had a very brief interlude to fairly small homebrew domain of dread it was too brief for me to have any real good ideas for advice but I can see their offer so much potential to use

Now I want to build a Crystal Sphere-sized Domain where a Spelljammer crew gets to play the Dead Space series.

Hey, I actually did run a campaign that was Dark Souls 2! The unease of knowing your enemies will come back to undeath within a few hours was great.

I think the souls idea at least in ravenloft is so cool. Like, you really can't enter or leave ravenloft without Strahd's permission. You can't even enter by being born. since no one can enter, all new children are born without souls. and not even dying can free you. Your soul stays behind and eventually just inhabits one of the already soulless bodies. It just means there are a finite number of souls in Barovia.

You make good videos, Mike.

I don’t know if you ever saw the Black Dice Society on the Dungeons & Dragons channel but it was hosted by B. Dave Walters and my introduction to Ravenloft. I would absolutely recommend it if you’re into that sort of game

pooh bear voice acting was on point.

One of the campaigns i run has recently finished CoS and I'm now easing them into other domains of dread. I have so many ideas for my own domains of Dread and fit some of the established ones into their character concepts

When you said it's November, I had to take your word for it. I got distracted.

Awesome costume!

So, uh... Prolly a weird question but why do your patrons keep fluctuating from ~500 to ~600 xD? Is it a bug on my end?

If you watch the movie "The Mist" it will seriously mess you up, it is a great movie. It is a case where the people making the movie made it better (and so much more horrifying) than the book it was based on.

I’m running a domain-hopping Ravenloft campaign currently and the biggest tip I have is to giving them an external reason/force to do said domain hopping. In my DoD, Van Richten has created an organization (which the party are the inaugural members of) called the Last Hunt which he hopes will carry on in his stead (he’s preparing to take on Strahd, which he hopes will be his last hunt). It functions as a mercenary group which gives them leads to go chase down across domains.

The main drew I have for the inhabitants of Barovia to not have souls is because if you fail to save your beloved NPC (or character if you're ballsy), they are DONE. 100% DONE! Since they don't have a soul, there are a bunch of spells that won't work to bring them back. It adds to the hopelessness and dread that the people feel. Can't stop a vampire attack and a small child dies. Can't undo it. Consequences are more permanent. I think it will also open the door to examining why the citizens act the way they do or how they see people that might have been proven to have a soul. Maybe you find a citizen that decides to do everything and anything they can because they know there is no life at this one for them. Maybe you have people who don't want to connect with anyone because 'what is the point'. Maybe people with souls only interact with people with souls because it is seen as more valuable especially when going to the next life. I personally would have it where the souls exist but can't get to the body. Since there is a bubble, all the souls within the bubble stay in the bubble, hence why there is a bunch of reincarnation. I would have it where the main issue with the mists is that it is infested with the souls that could never get to their body within the bubble. It also gives the players motivation to stop Strahd so that maybe, just maybe, they can actually undo the damage done.

Woooo sexy calander easter egg
Love tis video because I am SUCH a horror buff and I am running a horror arc for my very first self-written adventure in between a string of premade modules. I feel like it's going pretty well (and to anyone writing their own stuff; I used Mikes's very helpful and friendly discord to review my concepts and ideas before I started!)
Curse of Strad is one adventure I've always wanted to play in and ditto almost any of these Ravenloft ideas. But if I cant find a way to play in them, I may just run one myself. I had no idea that there was a whole world around it since I want to play Strad and therefore intentionally avoid spoilers about it, and I love how it sounds! Its like everything I love about horror stories mixed with the way me/my regular group tend to use/interpret the Feywilds. Even though I have never played 5E and don't own a single thing of it...this book is the first one that I just might really need to get.
Thank you as always!
(P.S loved the Winnie the Pooh bit)

I can't believe Mike wore whiteface. So insensitive. /j

I have a campaign where the party is wandering through different domains under the urging and coersion of the Caller, replacing their darklords. It's been a blast so far, and that setup has both led to great boss fights, while also forcing them to engage with the citizens of the domain to find a worthy replacement. And of course there's been some wonderfully creepy moments.

Dear lord you look amazing as Kratos! :D

“Them lot that lives down by the lake, they en’t Vistani. Not true Vistani anyhow. They left the right to that name behind when they swore fealty to the man in the castle, far as I’m concerned. We’re a proud people, with ways and laws and language of our own. Where d’ye think your word vista comes from? It’s the land we walk while settled folk look on. No, they en’t Vistani, and they make a mockery of our proud name, playin’ into stereotypes tellin’ fortunes, and walkin’ only so’s they can bring folk back for their master to toy with. The Vistani owes no fealty ’cept to the Vistani, and a life o’ servitude such as they’ve chosen for themselves is no way for a Vistana to live.”

—Ez D’Avenir, per my canon.

Can we acknowledge that our boy here painted himself for a 45 second joke. Proud of this man. o7

I've wanted to do a Ravenloft campaign about freeing the Domains of Dread. Basically end up removing the ruler of each domain permanently and killing whatever entities trapped not just the lords but the innocent people with them

Also I think the "soulless" thing is new lore so players won't feel bad about the fact they can't actually do anything meaningful for anyone in Ravenloft.

Grim hollow by ghost fire gaming is also a really cool “horror” themed campaign setting. It draws inspiration from dark fantasy so it’s more gritty sword and sorcery than horror but it has horror elements everywhere in the setting. I recommend checking the setting out it’s really cool IMO

Coming back to this video to say that my group just started CoS and my mate who's DMing it has accidentally sidestepped a lot of the issues with the Vistani by making them southern (USA) bc it's the only accent he can do reliably lol

as everybody knows, November is the spookiest month because no one expects it to be spooky!

My opinion is that we need to keep the Vastani. I understand the instinct to just drop them out of the broader narrative, but I worry that to people from a Romani background, that could read as being denied even the ham-fisted scraps of representation they've been given. Being told that they "don't belong".

I prefer to do a better job at pulling on threads from real Romani cultural threads and portray them as full characters, rather than a stereotype. So often, I find that fantasy media neglects other cultural influences and the diversity of the time periods it draws on. For example, I've talked to a Jewish friend of mine who never sees elements of Jewish culture or history reflected in fantasy media, even though Jewish people were very much present in the areas and periods of history our conception of fantasy draws from. I think very often our "default" approach to fantasy (focusing mainly on our perception of a archetypal European medieval period) cuts a lot of people out.

I think everyone deserves to see themselves represented in fantasy, and I think there are respectful ways of doing that. I think it's harder, and takes a lot of work and reflection, but I think it's worth the effort. That's why I think the Vastani deserve better.

100% okay if people disagree with me here, just giving my 2 cents. Lots of love!

I've only made one domain of dread, but it was entirely based on how some people have souls and some don't. The BBEG has found that if he is truly worshiped by others he gains a level of divine power. But soulless minds don't count.

So the plot revolves around the BBEG despereately trying to get the nonbelievers to worship him (not knowing he'll just hit a ceiling) and also dragging in new people to worship him.

the online ravenloft community has been pretty close-knit since the 2e days when the original ravenloft campaign setting book came out (I6 ravenloft and I10 the house on gryphon hill both came out for 1e but the comprehensive setting was 2e) and its great. also im pretty sure like 75% of ravenloft domains were created for modules published in 2e and 3e and then promoted to part of the campaign setting - making your own domain and darklord is a core part of the setting's identity. my fave setting for sure, its so flexible but also has plenty of resources to help out.

van richten's guide is a very faithfully and thoughtfully made book that does good by the soul of ravenloft as it was originally designed and its probably my favorite campaign setting sourcebook.

also black dice society rules. 10/10 do watch

As someone who has met and been with some Romani I think it's a shame people just erase the Vishtani when they could just write them better.

The Romani are an interesting culture, why not lean into it instead of ignoring their presence?