Café de Nuit

Good evening!

I've been planning a one-shot for Ravenloft, mainly struggling to find a system I want to use to run it in. I've experimented with 5e, and ShadowDark for other ttrpgs, but neither really checked all the boxes I was looking at. I'm currently looking through Basic Role Playing, but I've been also considering dusting off my sister's ex-husbands old Warhammer 2e books. (Long story, he left them when he moved out.)

My main struggle is that I'm looking for something that has support for the kind of guns, swords, and both combat and non-combat roles. I know there's been some talk of a "RavenHammer" campaign elsewhere in the forum, but the topic has been dead for sixteen years. All in all, I'm open for most anything. Thank you for your time!

Warhammer is easily hackable to Ravenloft. Falkovnia is practically a Warhammer campaign in itself. In terms of WFRP support, you're probably best looking for wider communities dedicated to that. Through that, you'll no doubt have all manner of homebrew to expand on what's there. Though, most homebrew threads I've noticed for a while are WFRP4E with a little 2E.
BRP has a bunch of setting content you could farm from already. Pulp, Gaslamp, and Dark Ages Cthulhu should prove a gold mine alone.

Amusingly, I found great success for several years in running Ravenloft games using the Exalted mechanics, more specifically the 3e "Mortal" system (meaning, for those in the know, the actual base mechanics of the system, before Charms and stuff muck it all up)

Characters in Exalted 3e are simultaneously low-powered enough to "work" in a horror setting, while still being capable enough to be fun to play. In addition, the base Exalted mechanics make combat interesting (and frightening, no Cure -x- Wounds here!), social interactions actually a mechanic, sorcery/magic weird and more in-depth than D&D, etc.

After the end of 3e, I eventually switched to Shadow of the Demon Lord and Black Sword Hack for Ravenloft/Creepy Fantasy.

"Demon Lord" is the more detailed game, but these days, I almost exclusively run the very "Stormbringer"-y "Black Sword Hack". Both don't quite emulate the Ravenloft of the Kargatane and the Frat - but they get close enough:

"Demon Lord" is basically a horror-themed 5e custom built, and notably is also built around what's very much the same premise as RL. (The name-giving "Demon Lord" is basically a "Dark Power", sort of like the Red Death on Gothic Earth.)

"Black Sword Hack Ultimate Chaos Edition" (BSHUC), a much more basic fastplay game, is probably closer to "Stormbringer" (the old Chaosium game) than to D&D. However, it syncs surprisingly well with Ravenloft, and with Warhammer as well. I am currently running my version of Warhammer 1e's "Doomstones" campaign with it, and the players are definitely having fun.

Warhammer 2e for Ravenloft I have tried once - a brief campaign set in Tepest. Might have been the DM's fault, back then that it didn't work out all too well. (Well of course I know that DM. He's me.) My main problem with Warhammer 2e for an emulation of Ravenloft is that WHFRP is not written to run a longer series of encounters:
Speaking as a guy who has played (not DMed) and survived multi-year campaigns built around both "Paths of the Damned" and "The Thousand Thrones", the main difference between FoS-style Ravenloft and Warhammer 2e is that running a longer series of encounters without a lot of strategic rests and slowdowns is nearly impossible. Even a D&D-style wilderness run ("track the wild animal down to their lair") is too tough under Warhammer 2e rules, unless you give your players a lot of leeway - leeway that the system does not plan in, usually. If you want a story that feels like 2e/3e Ravenloft, I am not sure I personally would pick WHFRP again.


TLDR - long games, "Hyskosa's Hexad", "Grim Harvest": "Shadow of the Demon Lord", almost definitively. Shorter/one-to-three-sessions games, BSHUC.