User:Darklord-MRA

Playing Curse of Strahd and Van Richten's Guide since April 2022. This is a dumping ground for my game info.

Status of all 39 Domains described in VRG as they stand in my campaign.

• Barovia - Played very close to exactly as described in Curse of Strahd, with minimal influence from VRG or the older Ravenloft CS.
• Bluetspur - Intended for very sparing use. IMO memory modification doesn't work on players, so it can only influence the plot retroactively.
• Borca - Fairly uninteresting to me, but assumed to be canonical and connected to Barovian backstory. Dorvinia's subsumption fits in.
• The Carnival - Severely lacking in both detail and consistency; the DL being a sword might have been cool if it wasn't 1 of 2 examples.
• Cyre 1313 - Extremely interesting but too vague for me to make much use of soon; would really love to see a fully canonical expansion.
• Darkon - Cliche as f***, and broadly enough described that I don't have much to work with; unlikely to see use, though its DL is.
• Dementlieu - Personally unappealing to me, so unlikely to appear in my campaign, but assumed to canonically exist somewhere out there.
• Falkovnia - A huge fan of the retcon here; the setting is a little boring, but it's more likely to see limited use than several others.
• Forlorn - The old lore confused me completely, and the new lore is bafflingly vague; I don't have much to work with on this one.
• Ghastria - Exceedingly one-note and almost impossible to make significant use of anywhere but in a "players can & will die" one-shot.
• G'Henna - Conceptually interesting to me, but unlikely to have much applicability to gameplay. More likely to loosely inspire a new DoD.
• Har'Akir - One of my overall favorites of the DoD; more likely to play this one somewhat in line with old lore (eg Osiris rather than Ese).
• Hazlan - An example of what I tend not to like about classic D&D; will be used only when fits with backstory of eg FR-connected players.
• I'Cath - I could swear I know this story from another setting entirely. I would hesitate to try and use it, for fear of doing it poorly.
• Invidia - This will require deep study of the old lore to make sense of; currently it's an interesting idea but almost totally a cipher.
• Kalakeri - I might have preferred Sri Raj before the revision; nothing about the changed version strikes me as especially interesting.
• Kartakass - The whole "land of bards" shtick does nothing for me; neither version of Harkon Lukas makes much sense or is very interesting.
• Keening - A one-note setting with basically zero utility (though certainly better post-retcon as a city of the deaf, rather than dead).
• Klorr - My single favorite of the briefly described Domains, though requiring major work to actually make it usable. A key project for me.
• Lamordia - A broadly decent but not super-appealing setting, with lots of marginal utility; I'm unlikely to make it a central focus.
• Markovia - Entirely on the fence about whether this one is super-useful or totally useless; would take a lot of work to go anywhere with.
• Mordent - Uninteresting to me, though too significant to ignore completely; I've a headcanon for Godefroy, but find ghosts in general boring.
• Nightmare Lands - Too broad in their description in VRG for me to do anything with; major research of old lore might change this eventually.
• Niranjan - One of my favorite concepts in the book, but seems hard to use in a campaign without simply killing off all the PCs outright.
• Nova Vaasa - Confusingly schizophrenic; I can't tell if it's supposed to be Czarist Russia or the Mongol Hordes, & the VRG DL makes no sense.
• Odaire - I just don't particularly like this scenario and am unlikely to visit it, though it's on-theme enough to reference as a BG event.
• Richemulot - Stories of plague hit a little too close to home for my taste, and the wererat thing is kinda dull; I probably won't use it.
• Rider's Bridge - Hardly deserves to be considered a Domain at all; this is more like a wandering villainous event to shake things up.
• Risibilos - The story of Doerderon is interesting, but then the Strahd doll shows up and nothing makes any sense whatever. A terrible joke!
• Scaena - A boring one-off story as written; I could only make it cool by bringing in an out-of-setting element, such as SCP's Hanged King.
• Sea of Sorrows - DL is of little interest and unlikely to appear, but the Domain as a whole is dotted with points of interest to visit.
• Shadowlands - Generically described and would require massive expansion to get anything out of; I might or might not care about the old lore.
• Souragne - A very cool setting which I'd want to do true justice to, or else not try to use it at all. Many sources of inspiration apply!
• Staunton Bluffs - Discarded the original setting entirely due to misreading the writeup; now a totally new & slightly cool scenario.
• Tepest - This is a setting/story that loosely appeals to me as a reader, but I would entirely fail at properly portraying it for others.
• Tovag - I like the story of Kas & Vecna enough that both Tovag & Cavitius might see use someday, but there are some lore issues to work out.
• Valachan - Kinda okay but hard to get much outta as written; I'm of 2 minds about the DL switch - Urik is dull but Chakta is a woke Mary Sue.
• Vhage Agency - Too good of a story vehicle not to use, but not super interesting IMO, and certainly I don't adhere to the fan writeup I saw.
• Zherisia - Sodo is an awesome monster, but it'd be hard to reveal him to the players, and overall slasher stories bore me to tears.

Of the other domains that used to exist and haven't been explicitly subsumed, the only ones that I have much interest in ever doing anything with are the dark elf kingdom of Arak and the Shadow Rift, the islands of Rokushima Taiyoo, and possibly Vorostok if I ever get heavily into the Birthright campaign setting which it connects to, although that currently seems unlikely to happen. A couple others have minor interest value, such as the Saragoss ship-graveyard near Sri Raj and the tunnels of Paridon below Zherisia, but overall these don't generally convince me that they need to exist as separate-but-connected Domains, rather than simply distinct Locales under the same single Darklord. Sithicus and Verbrek are definitely not of any particular interest to me, while Vechor is a neat idea but too vaguely described in the amount of lore I saw. The only other canonical Domains I can think of include Bileplate, Sanguinia, Nidaria and the Phantom Forest (which falls into the Shadowlands easily enough), the two other desert Domains to the east of Harakir whose names I forget, and the former areas of Gundar and Dobrivnia, which are still present as regions in more important Domains.