Hi everyone,
Today I’m going to be sharing something slightly different. So first a little pre-amble and a disclaimer: Van Richten’s Encyclopedia to Darklords & Domains is a product you can buy and which I would earn money on — but what I’ll be sharing about it isn’t part of the product itself as such. With that out of the way:
I am a massive horror fan. That probably comes as little surprise to anyone who has read any of the stuff that I’ve posted here over the past many months. But I do have a particular liking for psychological horror and classic gothic horror. (Most modern horror doesn’t do it for me, but give me the old George Romero Night of the Living Dead, and I’m a captive audience). That said, you should also know that I’m old (41) and I’ve been gaming since I was 13. And the second-ever campaign setting I ever put eyes on (the first being Dragonlance) was Ravenloft. And Ravenloft struck a chord with me. It fulfilled some deep, dark place inside and presented a world where evil had truly taken over. It was in CHARGE and the heroes were fighting a desperate fight against this.
But, time went on and while the D&D 3.0 and 3.5 interpretations were great (in some ways superior to the AD&D ones), the 4th edition changes where it was in the Shadowfell fell flat for me, as did the Curse of Strahd (great campaign, but it lacked the scope of the original Ravenloft – the possibilities for horror and I think it in particular weakened Strahd beyond where he should be. Suddenly he was the vampire from the Monster Manual when it came to stats, rather than a unique and extremely dangerous individual.
And as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who felt that something had gone missing. And after I put out a modern reinterpretation of an older adventure (both a spiritual successor as well as an actual one called Night of the Walking Dead: Under a Bloody Moon) I was contacted by a fellow author and Ravenloft aficionado – one who, funnily enough, had never experienced the older days of the campaign setting, but only the modern interpretation.
And together we set out on a journey. One that became a bit longer than we had anticipated, and with a team that grew to encompass 4 people and a project that exploded in scope. The end result was a project to uncover EVERY SINGLE DOMAIN AND DARKLORD ever published for Ravenloft – regardless of edition and regardless of source (as long as it was official) and then move them into a modern context and rules system. So everything had to be converted and changed over. Some things we left as they were, other things were changed dramatically to increase the horror that was attached to that particular domain and darklord (my best example of this is the domain called Bluetspur. Bluetspur used to be landlocked with other domains in the main continent, called the Core. It was inhabited by mind flayers and was an alien landscape where people disappeared. So when an event happened within the campaign setting (called the Grand Conjunction) the domain was displaced and left to float alone and isolated. But we had an issue with this. The domain was the epitome of body horror and the fear of the alien, but if the alien cannot get to you, how is it horror? So we moved it – to the MOON. And not only that, it would now be possible for the mind flayers to visit any other domain (albeit infrequently) as long as the moon was visible in the sky.
Other things we had to more or less invent ourselves, such at the Darklords and Domains featured in the various Ravenloft novels, Dungeon and Dragon Magazines, and the like. Many of these had never had any information added to them beyond that limited exposure to the public, so we had to update and create the content for these so that they were more useful to GMs and interesting to players out there.
All told – this whole project took us well over 2 years. And overcoming a number of issues along the way. The DMsGuild only allows a select number of graphics artists to do layouts on physical books, and none of those were available to us. So one of the team took it upon themselves to upgrade their skill set to that. Some of our domains required maps that didn’t exist, and another team member created those.
In short, it was a huge struggle and an INSANE amount of work. But, between the 4 of us on the team, we created nearly 800 pages of content for Ravenloft, published in Hardcover books – and as it turns out, it seems to be the biggest project ever to hit the DMsGuild – certainly, that made it into print. We simply couldn’t fit it all into one book (the spine would break), so it had to be in two.
And I hope you’ll check them out. 🙂
Kim Frandsen
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