5e announced!

[Mortavius]

I kind of echo the statements of a lot of people on the 5E boards about this.

I don't care for it.

I'm glad that they're actually acknowledging that Ravenloft exists, that's great. But it's supposed to be this little place that really no one knows about, unless you get pulled in. When it was a demiplane that was easy; it didn't have a fixed location, you could even say it moved through the Deep Ethereal. To make it a border plane, and the opposite of the Feywild, while that sort of fits, it means people can and will travel to it, or at least know of it a lot more.

[alhoon]

Well, people won't be able to leave, so I doupt they'll travel there often. Or Ravenloft could be a part of the negative border plane and shadowfell another part. Which is what I'm planning to do in any case. I don't see why the whole border negative plane should be a low-magic trap with darklords.
Also, with that take, Lord of the Necropolis becomes canon-er!

[Mortavius]

But people will notice it simply because folks disappear. Planar Sages will realize that the planes have mirrors. So when they find the Feywild, they'll look for the mirror, and find Ravenloft. And when everyone they send their disappears...well, they'll know *something* is there for sure.

I think the problem is how Ravenloft was compared as a mirror to the Feywild. Since 5E is going back to the whole "symmetry" planar style, you would expect the Feywild and Ravenloft to be approximately the same size. People have it in their heads that the Feywild is big, so Ravenloft must be big too.

Personally, I think a better setup would be to have the Shadowfell back as the mirror to the Feywild, and Ravenloft is a small, little-known part of the Shadowfell, perhaps deep in, closer to the negative plane.

This has the advantage of letting people customize Ravenloft how they like, and if they don't want domains and darklords, or perhaps want dark fantasy with less emphasis on gothic horror, people have the Shadowfell to fill that niche.

[Zilfer]

But people will notice it simply because folks disappear. Planar Sages will realize that the planes have mirrors. So when they find the Feywild, they'll look for the mirror, and find Ravenloft. And when everyone they send their disappears...well, they'll know *something* is there for sure.

I think the problem is how Ravenloft was compared as a mirror to the Feywild. Since 5E is going back to the whole "symmetry" planar style, you would expect the Feywild and Ravenloft to be approximately the same size. People have it in their heads that the Feywild is big, so Ravenloft must be big too.

Personally, I think a better setup would be to have the Shadowfell back as the mirror to the Feywild, and Ravenloft is a small, little-known part of the Shadowfell, perhaps deep in, closer to the negative plane.

This has the advantage of letting people customize Ravenloft how they like, and if they don't want domains and darklords, or perhaps want dark fantasy with less emphasis on gothic horror, people have the Shadowfell to fill that niche.

I don' tthink Ravenloft is necessarily small only that it seems small. Most have mentioned it being closterphobic.... (sp?) but it also mentions there may be more lands out there in the mists. There could be millions of Clusters and Islands out there. The world just isn't defined fully thus making it seem like a smaller place. The Dread Realms itself could be nearing on infinite.

[Mortavius]

Well that's very true Zilfer, and many DMs here on these boards have experimented with making Ravenloft bigger by changing the distances and populations by as much as a factor of ten.

But that doesn't change the fact that as it is written, Ravenloft actually is rather small, when compared to other D&D worlds. That's not a bad thing; I like that it can take no more than a week to travel between some of the cities, and others even less than that.

But when you're comparing it as a mirror to the Feywild...it's tiny. The Feywild is supposed to be a mirror of the Prime Material (at least), and every Prime Material world that has been presented is bigger than Ravenloft, both in geography and populations. I think that's intentional, but it presents an odd problem when you consider this whole symmetry thing they have going on with the planes now.

[Zilfer]

*Shrugs*

It's been pointed out the population of Ravenloft for the amount of death is off. Big or small....

I'm actually not sure the distance of ravenloft's domains to tell you the truth. The party takes as long as I deem it to the next town usually based on Inch movement rate for a day's travel.

I still stand by the fact that the misty boarders are only the boarders of the 'known' part. With the addition of the Shadowfell it's gotten bigger, and I think probably might continue to grow.



Then you take into account that we don’t know how much “space” the mist takes up between the islands and clusters. I mean people wander weeks through the mist to come up somewhere. Ravenloft seems to be infinite in the fact that it is able to take lands from other realms and plop their duplicate in ravenloft. (or maybe it takes the whole land and the original disappears? Unlikely but possibly.)

I would wager if the Dark powers wanted to copy and paste all of Faerun or Toril they could do it if they were that ambitious.

I would like to say now that I have 0% knowledge of what the Feywilds are…. And now that you have said their name I have 0.5% knowledge of what it is. The name. xD

I don’t mean to start an argument just pointing out that it ‘could possibly’ be that big. However big the feywild is…. I mean certain hells go on forever in the patheon....xD

[Nyarlathotep]

I think the problem is how Ravenloft was compared as a mirror to the Feywild. Since 5E is going back to the whole "symmetry" planar style, you would expect the Feywild and Ravenloft to be approximately the same size. People have it in their heads that the Feywild is big, so Ravenloft must be big too.

This is a problem of people not thinking it through. Ravenloft (and the Feywild, and any other plane) is not part of the prime material. It isn't made of matter. That means that distance, as we think of it, is meaningless (for that matter, time should be as well). This has always been an issue that is right upfront with Ravenloft. You can walk into the mists and come out in an Island of Terror. How big is the intermediary misty area? How would you measure it? How many Islands are hiding in it?
Time and space are functions of our reality, they wouldn't be the same in another reality.

[Bluebomber4evr]

I was a bit put off at first, but after thinking about it, I'm okay with it. Especially if that means we'll see more of the setting.

1. It's been established as far back as 1st edition AD&D that demiplanes are not static. They can grow or shrink. The Demiplane of Electromagnetism was absorbed by the Plane of Quasi-Elemental Lightning (or a combination of the Plane of Elemental Air and Positive Energy Plane, if you want to use later terminology). In contrast, the Demiplane of Shadow is now the Plane of Shadow and is a major transitive plane.

2. While others have mentioned that its size is flexible and is more Mists than physical land, throughout its history as a campaign setting, the Demiplane of Dread has continued to grow larger and larger, with new domains constantly being added.

3. Given the above, one could say that by the time of 5th edition, the Time of Unparalleled Darkness has occurred, and this new shift to being a major plane could be a result of that event.

[Zilfer]

An interesting ideas but what has changed and why is this so bad?

[Mortavius]

So just so that everyone knows where I'm coming from...

I get the whole thing with the Mists and the land being mutable. I understand that there could be a lot more out there that we haven't seen. I get that the Mists haven't been mapped, and how big is that space.

But what I'm saying, is, there is a scale in Ravenloft for the maps. There has been since the beginning. Now I understand many folks have a problem with that scale, and have changed it. That's great. But we're not talking about what people do in their own games; we're talking about how the stuff is, as presented.

And I know that some of the products have talked about the mutability of the land, saying that the time it takes to get from place to place can vary. Again, really cool. Again, up to the DM to implement when and how they feel it's right. Again, in the absence of DM implementation, there is a scale to fall back upon, that says the distance between point A and point B is X miles.

This scale is much smaller than the scale of a Prime Material world.

Now, if the designers change the size of Ravenloft to make it comparable to a Prime world, then one problem is solved. It can be the mirror to the Feywild, and all is good. It doesn't solve the problem of Ravenloft supposed to being a myth that hardly anyone outside of it knows about, but that's another problem.

Saying things like "it's another plane and doesn't follow our rules" creates another question though. The whole planar model of 5E is symmetry. Air vs. Earth, Celestia vs. the Nine Hells. Opposites and balance. So you have the Feywild (which is a cool plane, I feel), which, unless it is changed, is a mirror of the Prime. If there's a mountain in the Prime, there's a mountain in the same spot in the Feywild (albeit probably a much more primal, bigger mountain). The Shadowfell was likewise a mirror, just with darkness and negative emotions. But Ravenloft isn't a mirror of the Prime. It's a construct, based as much on the Dark Powers as the individual Darklords. And that's cool, and it works great for the setting. But Ravenloft was never designed as a mirror of the Prime, and the designers are talking about putting it into a position where it suddenly *is.*

Maybe the designers will circumvent this problem by saying that the Feywild is no longer a mirror of the Prime. That also fixes the problem; then you can say the Feywild is as big as you like, and it can actually be a lot smaller than it was in the past, and closer to the size of Ravenloft.

Then the designers just need to explain how everyone does or doesn't know about Ravenloft in the cosmology...

As an aside, I wouldn't hope that we'll see more of Ravenloft just because it has an established place in the setting. It had a documented place in 4E, and the most we ever saw of it was some articles in Dragon and the odd reference to it in a few books. I was discouraged to see that in the very planar write-up we're all talking about, although they set up a place for Ravenloft, at the bottom of the article, the author references many campaign settings like Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, etc., but doesn't say anything about Ravenloft.

[alhoon]

An interesting ideas but what has changed and why is this so bad?

What has changed? Well, for starters some times in non-RL campaigns I want my players to go to what is like the shadowfell of 4th edition etc. RL has a very specific set of rules. Domain borders, Darklords, Power checks, the Unspoken pact, curses, Mists etc.

However: I can understand the border between material and negative being a trap. That way unless Azalin goes crazy again, the "forces" of negative energy plane can stay where they are.

I think that something like the following is better:
Border like the shadowfell, no closed borders, no (or not necessarily) imprisoned darklords, nice post-apocalyptic stuff, shadar-kai, etc. This is the equivalent of the volcano and magma lakes of the fire.
Deeper but still border, it's Ravenloft. The buffer zone between deeper negative energy plane and the Shadowfell. Like the city of Bronze if you want, in the plane of fire. More dominated by fire than border elemental plane of fire (where the rest exist and fire is dominant) but still, it's not pure fire.

[Mortavius]

I like that idea too, alhoon. I would prefer the Shadowfell stay there and have Ravenloft be a deep part, hidden away. It solves all the problems and questions, and still allows Ravenloft to do what it wants and how it wants.

[Zilfer]

So just so that everyone knows where I'm coming from...

I get the whole thing with the Mists and the land being mutable. I understand that there could be a lot more out there that we haven't seen. I get that the Mists haven't been mapped, and how big is that space.

But what I'm saying, is, there is a scale in Ravenloft for the maps. There has been since the beginning. Now I understand many folks have a problem with that scale, and have changed it. That's great. But we're not talking about what people do in their own games; we're talking about how the stuff is, as presented.

And I know that some of the products have talked about the mutability of the land, saying that the time it takes to get from place to place can vary. Again, really cool. Again, up to the DM to implement when and how they feel it's right. Again, in the absence of DM implementation, there is a scale to fall back upon, that says the distance between point A and point B is X miles.

This scale is much smaller than the scale of a Prime Material world.

Now, if the designers change the size of Ravenloft to make it comparable to a Prime world, then one problem is solved. It can be the mirror to the Feywild, and all is good. It doesn't solve the problem of Ravenloft supposed to being a myth that hardly anyone outside of it knows about, but that's another problem.

Saying things like "it's another plane and doesn't follow our rules" creates another question though. The whole planar model of 5E is symmetry. Air vs. Earth, Celestia vs. the Nine Hells. Opposites and balance. So you have the Feywild (which is a cool plane, I feel), which, unless it is changed, is a mirror of the Prime. If there's a mountain in the Prime, there's a mountain in the same spot in the Feywild (albeit probably a much more primal, bigger mountain). The Shadowfell was likewise a mirror, just with darkness and negative emotions. But Ravenloft isn't a mirror of the Prime. It's a construct, based as much on the Dark Powers as the individual Darklords. And that's cool, and it works great for the setting. But Ravenloft was never designed as a mirror of the Prime, and the designers are talking about putting it into a position where it suddenly *is.*

Maybe the designers will circumvent this problem by saying that the Feywild is no longer a mirror of the Prime. That also fixes the problem; then you can say the Feywild is as big as you like, and it can actually be a lot smaller than it was in the past, and closer to the size of Ravenloft.

Then the designers just need to explain how everyone does or doesn't know about Ravenloft in the cosmology...

As an aside, I wouldn't hope that we'll see more of Ravenloft just because it has an established place in the setting. It had a documented place in 4E, and the most we ever saw of it was some articles in Dragon and the odd reference to it in a few books. I was discouraged to see that in the very planar write-up we're all talking about, although they set up a place for Ravenloft, at the bottom of the article, the author references many campaign settings like Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, etc., but doesn't say anything about Ravenloft.

From the products I have... I don't really have a sense of how big it is.... Is there a scale that I missed in the 3e Players/DM's guide to ravenloft? As far as I knew the 'space' was undefined and up for you to determine and that there was no 'offical scale' of how big it was.... O.o'



To Alhoon:

I realize I didn't add much to that sentance for you to understand what I was actually asking. (I was like "cool idea" to the post above me. and then was asking well what would have changed if the Time of Unparrelled Darkness happened and explained why it was opposing the Feywilds)


Which question since I seem to have forgotten myself...

Just where is ravenloft in current 3e?

Isn't it on the negative energy plane? Or the Plane of Shadows? (if it's shadows, I think Fraternity of Shadows is ironic xD)

[Mortavius]

If you use 3E and before cosmology, Ravenloft is still a Demiplane in the Ethereal Plane, specifically in the Deep Ethereal.

In 4E, Ravenloft is in an unknown and remote location in the Shadowfell. And just to avoid any confusion, in 4E, the Shadowfell is not the same as the Plane of Shadow. The Shadowfell is a dark mirror of the Prime Material Plane, rather than an abstract realm composed of shadowstuff.

I'll have to look up the scale in my old Ravenloft stuff when I get home Zilfer, to give you an idea.

[Zilfer]

Etherel.... isn't that the plane where ghosts are supposed to live yes?

Also thanks for taking the time to look it up!