Ravenloft
I'm at a weird place today when I discuss Ravenloft because I think what we wanted Ravenloft to be when I was coming up is what +Scott Mathis's Transylvanian Adventures is: a rollicking, Hammer Horror-inspired ass-kicking vampire stake-fest. Well, you know what I mean. The thing is, we've all been exposed to the horror tropes so many times over and over through the past decades, nay, centuries, that when TSR announced that it was taking its unreasonably-popular I6: Castle Ravenloft module and expanding it into a full-blown setting, we should have known it wasn't going to do what it claimed on the box. How many vampires, wolf-men, Frankensteins and mummies can we possibly see rehashed and believe that a gaming company who was making its money by playing it safe (at the time) and not innovating was likely to bring something new and interesting to horror gaming?[I'll clear this up right now by saying that I believe that, yes, it is possible to innovate in horror gaming, even when using traditional horror tropes. It's just really freaking hard. Much harder than TSR was capable of back in the late 80's & early 90's.]
Why we can't have nice things |
Sure, that sounds kind of cool. Or, nearly so. It has its toe dipping into "No Exit" waters, which I should be happy about, but the whole concept of this particular prison introduces an unfortunate moralistic dimension: there are people trapped in the domains of dread with the big bad evil guys. Because we as players (or DMs) tend to think of these poor saps as "innocent bystanders" (or at least that they have the potential to be innocent bystanders, even if they're jerks), and because of the very existence of big bad evil guys in the same inescapable locations as the bystanders, we're forceably shoehorned into that classic 2e-era trope of having to be to good guys. The monster hunters. The saviors of the village. The VanHelsings or, if you prefer, VanRichtens.
Booooooring.
This setting might have been interesting if it focused on (and thereby rewarded) the sort of stories that make sense in the dark domains. I'd vast prefer playing both sides -- which are probably a werewolf and a hag -- against the middle to get the vampire slain. Don't burn down Castle Frankenstein, you blackmail the Baron into giving you the alchemical/arcane knowledge you need to make your escape from Ravenloft. Why settle for the lesser evil, especially when that way lies eternal imprisonment in the domains of dread? That's what I want to see out of Ravenloft, but we were given the same treatment that TSR gave everything back then and that was especially reinforced by Hammer horror. Not scary, not interesting, nor fun.
Jakandor

You, dear reader, I'm sure are keenly aware of the "except" or "but" or other interjection that looms large before whatever I say next. At this point, I think we know each other well enough to take it as read, don't we?
So here's my problem: the faction books for this setting spend way too much time demonstrating that their side is the good side. And not by showing you how evil the other side is, either (remember, this was written in the 90's and bipartisanship still had a chance in the US back then), but by showing you remarkably dull and utterly banal the factions are. I expected to love the Charonti, particularly with their CA Smith-style embrace of Necromancy as a solution to their society's woes. I was hoping for a twisted form of Nietzschean nihilism writ large across society and instead was given a zombified Rosie the Riveter and a "we can do it!" speech. The Knorr were kind of haughty at least, and self-righteous in most of the right places, but all in all this setting was too kindly and, frankly, not nearly brutal enough. Add to this extensive support of WotC's "2.5e" supplements and reliance on more kits and proficiencies than are healthy and you've turned an exciting Skraeling/Vikings vs. Aztec/Sumerians cross-cultural, morally-void slugfest into an option-clogged round of one-upsmanship, each faction one-upping the other on the ladder of tedious self-affirmation. It's not really a wonder that Jakandor never received more than 3 books, nor that WotC, after killing the setting, released those three for free on their website at the turn of the edition.
Whew. Well, thanks for joining me for another slog through the settings of yester-edition. I'm only planning on one more of these, then we'll start looking at what I would do with them. Next up is the setting so good, TSR had to steal it from itself: Mystara & the Hollow World.
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