Ask me anything about VRGTR! (Spoilers)

[Hell_Born]

So, I just got my hands on the new 5e campaign setting version of Ravenloft. If anyone wants to ask me anything about its contents, please feel free to go right ahead. In case it's not obvious, this will be spoiler-y by its very nature.

[Mephisto of the FoS]

Do you like it?

[alhoon]

Is it written in a way that we can retro-put in the old material?

[Hell_Born]

Do you like it?

VIEW CONTENT:

I haven't really sat down and fully digested it, but from what I've seen of it... it's sort of "meh" to me. There's definite gems in there, and the advice on building horror/dark fantasy games is really useful to DMs, but... just focusing on the domains, I found myself largely indifferent. Not a huge fan of the "tokenistic" flips, I must confess.

Is it written in a way that we can retro-put in the old material?

VIEW CONTENT:

Keep in mind, only half of the domains get a particularly in-depth writeup, with the others being just a paragraph long. Of the in-depth domains, they show roughly the same level of concern for preserving canon as Curse of Strahd did. Most are retcons, of degrees varying from "completely rewritten the darklord's backstory" to "the entire domain has been changed as part of the new backstory" - only Darkon and Valachan are explicitly supposed to be "continuing" from their pre-5e incarnations. Retro-fitting older lore in is a task whose difficult varies from domain to domain - Dementlieu and Falkovnia are basically In Name Only domains, for example, whilst Richemulot is fairly easy - the new Hazlan is somewhere in between. I'd personally have it that it started falling apart after Hazlik tried his "Great Work", have the Darklord be Eleni (or at least Hazlik in Eleni's body), and drop the whole "Hazlik now has Azalin's curse too" angle, but it might be possible to have it make sense otherwise.

[KingCorn]

Was I'Cath any good?

[Hell_Born]

Was I'Cath any good?

VIEW CONTENT:

Magnificent. We've gone from an uninhabited domain that's little more than a glorified Chinese dungeon crawl to a complex, fleshed out realm. I'Cath has been rewritten from the ground up, and is now a city that exists simultaneously in both the waking world and the plane of dreams. Those who fall asleep are placed in a deep magical slumber, from which they wake only intermittently; in the dream version, they labor ceaselessly to rebuild the shining and beautiful city-state of I'Cath to suit the ever-changing whims of Tsien Chiang, acting as little more than mindless automatons to her every whim. When they do wake, they do so to starvation and poverty in a crumbling, decaying version of the dream-city, where they need to scavenge for food and avoid the legions of jiangshi that patrol the city and reconstruct it to match the dream version, because the jiangshi will only attack those who are awake. They can escape the hunger and the unquiet dead by returning to sleep, but that sends them right back to slavery.

[Jester of the FoS]

Is it written in a way that we can retro-put in the old material?

So far, not without rewriting large chunks.
There's a handful of new ideas and some good advice, but other than a couple lands most of the setting content would be hard to incorporate without writing your own hybrid book.

[Mephisto of the FoS]

There's definite gems in there, and the advice on building horror/dark fantasy games is really useful to DMs

Are there really different than previous "sage advice" from older books/boxed sets of the setting, of how to create horror in your games?
I mean if you are a new player who have played only 4th or 5th edition OK, but are the tips, advices and ideas reallly different from 2nd/3rd edition material?

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Any signs of anything exclusive to the 3e/Arthaus-era that got used?

[onmyoji]

There's a handful of new ideas and some good advice, but other than a couple lands most of the setting content would be hard to incorporate without writing your own hybrid book.

New ideas and good advice is about the best way to describe it. I got mine and speed-read the info relevant to me. Some stuff is pretty good. Other re-workings are...... less than meh.

VIEW CONTENT:

I find myself particularly disturbed at how they decided to write themselves out of the corner in which Jander Sunstar somehow appears outside of the Domains of Dread in Descent into Avernus. Apparently, they decided that he made it to the Apparatus in Mordent and it malfunctioned, creating dozens of copies of himself in different planes, each thinking they're the original Jander.

I'm sorry. Bad fanfiction writers can think of better explanations than that.

Hell, even my explanation is better. I'm currently having the Dark Powers release him to send him on a very specific errand in an attempt to stop the Grand Conjunction from happening. During that year, he participates in the events of DiA. But then, when the GC happens as planned, and then is overturned, his soul is sucked back into the domains.

Oh, also somehow, one of the Janders made a dhampir "daughter" that hates him. And pretty much nothing else is said about this. I get the feeling that someone just drew art of two vampires fighting, and WotC decided Jander had a "daughter" because of the picture. For being so interested in including him in their products, it doesn't look like anyone ever bothered to read VotM. Ugh.

[Hell_Born]

There's definite gems in there, and the advice on building horror/dark fantasy games is really useful to DMs

Are there really different than previous "sage advice" from older books/boxed sets of the setting, of how to create horror in your games?
I mean if you are a new player who have played only 4th or %th edition OK, but are the tips, advices ideas reallly different from 2nd edition materials or even 3rd?

Eh... well, I guess technically? Detail wise, it's not that much different to past editions; the biggest change is the explicit analysis of horror genres other than Gothic, such as Body, Cosmic, Folk, Ghost and Dark Fantasy, in contrast to previous editions focusing pretty much exclusively on Gothic Horror despite domains with other genres being a thing.

Any signs of anything exclusive to the 3e/Arthaus-era that got used?

Nothing that stood out to me. Like I said, this book shows about as much respect for Ravenloft canon as Curse of Strahd did. This is a book where the Eternal Order is a benevolent cult of mystics amongst the elves of Neuchevar Springs and Baron von Kharkov used to hunt humans, Most Dangerous Man style, with his preferred victims being an ethnic minority called the Oselo who were almost all true werepanthers and wereocelots.... something I very much don't remember from Darklords or the Ravenloft Gazetteer IV, but I admit it's been a while since I read those.

[Rock of the Fraternity]

Yyyyeah, no.

Benevolent EO variants were pretty much all fanwork.
3E didn't show Von Kharkov hunting any special minorities, just people who got on his bad side -- or when he was especially hungry, I suppose. He got by on shallow feeding on a large scale, which was actually a clever wheeze in that it allowed him to enthrall a LOT of people.

[Igor the Henchman]

Any signs of anything exclusive to the 3e/Arthaus-era that got used?

The book avoids doing it, sometimes deliberately pushing the lore in a different direction. For example, Keening's infamous City of the Dead, dubbed Marbh-Cathair in 3E, is named Anwrtyn here.

[Cromstar]

Was I'Cath any good?

VIEW CONTENT:

Magnificent. We've gone from an uninhabited domain that's little more than a glorified Chinese dungeon crawl to a complex, fleshed out realm. I'Cath has been rewritten from the ground up, and is now a city that exists simultaneously in both the waking world and the plane of dreams. Those who fall asleep are placed in a deep magical slumber, from which they wake only intermittently; in the dream version, they labor ceaselessly to rebuild the shining and beautiful city-state of I'Cath to suit the ever-changing whims of Tsien Chiang, acting as little more than mindless automatons to her every whim. When they do wake, they do so to starvation and poverty in a crumbling, decaying version of the dream-city, where they need to scavenge for food and avoid the legions of jiangshi that patrol the city and reconstruct it to match the dream version, because the jiangshi will only attack those who are awake. They can escape the hunger and the unquiet dead by returning to sleep, but that sends them right back to slavery.

Any details on our good dark lords curse as part of this? 'City isn't real and is crap' is not super interesting to me, by and of itself as a curse.

[Hell_Born]

Any details on our good dark lords curse as part of this? 'City isn't real and is crap' is not super interesting to me, by and of itself as a curse.

Per the writeup of Tsien's Torments, and incidentally Tsien is a lot more nuanced here instead of a 4-obsessed psychotic misandrist, Tsien has 3 curses:

VIEW CONTENT:

Firstly, she wants the real I'Cath to be as glorious as her dream vision, but her inability to focus and accept what she has just makes the real I'Cath ever more disorganized, chaotic and decrepit, because she keeps the population enslaved in the dream-city to enact her changes and her jiangshi legions just keep rebuilding the city into an ever-shifting labyrinth.
Secondly, she hates the fact that I'Cath in reality is crumbling into ruin and tries to hide from it in her perfect dream-world, but the rot is constantly leaking into the dream-city as her people wake and carry the knowledge of the waking world back into the dream.
Finally, she wants, more than anything, to have her four beloved daughters back, who were killed in the leadup to her Act of Ultimate Darkness. What she's got is two equally unpleasant options; the monstrous-looking warped versions of her daughters that haunt the real I'Cath, or the ultra-idealized living dreams of them in dream-I'Cath, which she can't escape from the fact are pure fiction.