Making Ravenloft more self-contained

[Galeros]

Anyone here thought of ways to make Ravenloft more self-contained as its own world? It can still pull in people and lands from elsewhere, but I am talking about giving it its own cosmology like other settings. The work that is going on in the Dread Elemental Domains is a part of this. One thought I had was that normal elementals are not summoned from an elemental plane, but are instead created by the spellcaster. The Dread Elementals can sense when a spellcaster is doing this and can take the opportunity to take the place of the forming elemental. Ravenloft could also be given its own afterlife, I have my own ideas for one. Oh, and something someone else mentioned is to have Fiends be a unique form of evil within a corrupted individual's soul instead of coming from the Lower Planes.

Any other ideas?

[Dion of the Fraternity]

If a self-contained Ravenloft would follow the current D&D cosmology (all settings are self-contained), you might as well give it something similar to what Manual of the Planes has for each setting.

1 - Give it two reflections called "Echoes," which correspond to the Feywild and the Shadowfell.

2 - Give it two dominating forces, which correspond to the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos.

3 - Give it a freefloating realm of dreams.

4 - Give it a "beyond," similar to the Far Realm.

[Galeros]

If a self-contained Ravenloft would follow the current D&D cosmology (all settings are self-contained), you might as well give it something similar to what Manual of the Planes has for each setting.

1 - Give it two reflections called "Echoes," which correspond to the Feywild and the Shadowfell.

2 - Give it two dominating forces, which correspond to the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos.

3 - Give it a freefloating realm of dreams.

4 - Give it a "beyond," similar to the Far Realm.

I do not really care about 4E, so I would not work its Cosmology into Ravenloft (I mean, this thread is for discussing different ways to make it self-contained, so that could work, but I do not play 4E, so I do not take it into account). The cosmology I would make would be somewhat based on the 2E/3.X Cosmology (Ravenloft is still in the Deep Ethereal).

Mine would look something like this.

Ravenloft Proper: This is the "main" area of the demiplane, it could be considered correspondent to the Prime Material Plane of other worlds.
Dread Elemental Domains: These can be reached from the main area of the demiplane via either gates or magic.
Afterlife: This area can only be reached by dying. Seems obvious I know, but with adventurers able to travel to the outer planes in other worlds I figure I needed to say so.

[Strahdsbuddy]

I'd say a lot of this has already been done, though I will summarize things here.

Bluetspur is the Moon. I wish I knew who first suggested this, because it is a stroke of genius. A little less popular is the idea that the Nightmare Lands are the "dark side" of the moon, though I think having them as akin to one of your elemental realms works just as well.

Nova Vaasa doesn't have 5 moons and Sithicus doesn't have Krynn's constellations. In a similar vein, the night sky is uniform over the entire Core, if not the entire demiplane. The Vaasi moons can easily be constellations or planets (though I'm not sure how far into space you want to go. ARE there planets?) Also, the Sithicans had to try really hard to connect the dots of Krynnish constellations, which are up for debate among other Core residents. For instance: "Yeah I see where you're pointing, mate, I just don't see the 5-headed dragon you keep talking about. Looks like a crow to me."

Map the Islands of Terror. Mistways were a good idea to add a little more reliability to finding your way to important places, though I favor placing the Island of Terror and the Clusters on a map with physical relevance. Instead of uncharted Mists surrounding Souragne and being able to get there from anyplace, its across the Sea of Sorrows a good distance and you can reliably reach it by ship. This probably rubs some of the purists the wrong way, but it definitely makes the whole setting seem more "real" if you ask me. I have a beta version of a map that accomplishes just this which I hope to release soon.

Put the lid back on the Shadow Rift. Some people consider the Rift to actually be a forest, which is fine with me. According to the temporal fugue, the Arak have had thousands of years to tunnel beneath the entire Core, so to think that their realm only exists beneath what used to be GHenna and Markovia is a little silly, especially since they seemed to have migrated southwest from the original placement of Arak. Stick some homebrew domains, or some obscure Islands of Terror. I like Souragne and Kislova, personally.

Of course, what's real to us isn't necessarily real in a fantasy setting. I still think Ravenloft works just fine as a more structured set of continents than fluid islands of earth. My version of the ToUD is the judgement of the setting and its allowance to become a "real" world instead of the sandbox of DP-godlings. It would behave according to much more structured rules, even if those rules don't line up with those of Earth.

[Galeros]

Hmmm, in my case I would like to keep it a Demiplane, and so there is no "real" moon, or Sun for that matter. Although, the night sky would be the same across the entire demiplane. I also like Mistways and how there is uncharted mists surrounding the Islands. I do agree that making the Shadow Rift into a forest would be cool. It would make it look less out of place. There are no planets, flying up into the sky will merely lead one into the Mists, which will eventually turn a person back and they will be forced to head back to land.

[Strahdsbuddy]

I'm not sure how being a demiplane would preclude it from having a moon or sun or even other planets. My understanding of a demiplane is a self-contained universe within the ethereal plane. However, I could see the "discworld" representation making a lot of sense just from its geography.

[ewancummins]

In a fantasy setting the sun, moon, and stars may not be anything like our real world bodies. The sun may be the golden palace of a goddess, or a gigantic lantern crafted by the Master Smith of the Cosmos. The stars may be pinholes in the great blanket of night, or even living beings. I would suggest you look at the myths of ancient peoples for ideas. I'd also suggest the Narnia books (the world is round like a table/not like a ball, the stars are sapient beings, etc).


As presented in canon the Demiplane of Dread is not a solid, spherical planet. Yet it has seasons, lunar cycles, magnetic North, and so on. I'm not sure, but I think I've seen references to a horizon. These things may simply be the will of the mysterious Dark Powers (a perfectly good explanation for most campaigns, and one that fits the mutable nature of the world). Of course, the various nations will have their own ideas, their own myths and stories to explain such things.


IMC, magnetic north is pretty much consistent in the Cire and adjacent seas. Compasses do work most of the time, in most places (usless in navigating the Mists, of course). The explantion for why & how compasses work is a subject of some debate among scholars. Dfferent theories have been advanced.

[alhoon]

Well... for self contained you actually need to make it larger. The rest is just D&D cosmology. People die and go to Heaven(s) or Hell(s) beyond the reach of the Dark Powers.

[Manofevil]

Back when I was reading both Dragonlance and Ravenloft, I tossed around the idea of how Krynn and RL could exist, not in separate universes, but in a universe exactly like our own- planets, solar systems, gravity, everything like that.
Krynn has exactly 108 stars, 5 planets, 3 moons, and 1 sun. I figured that the only way that could work would be if the Krynnish pantheon surrounded the solar system with a large cloud of cosmic dust which block out all but the stars they choose to shine through to the planet. They would also have to place Krynn's solar system in a specific space of the universe so that the stars they allow to shine through would form specific shapes, and all so that they can convince the peoples of Krynn that THEY created the universe.
Ravenloft was rather more challenging. I finally decided on a gas giant made up entirely of mists that are contolled by the Dark Powers. The realms are landmasses which sit on top of this mist/gas. It's what allows the land masses that make up the core to be moved around and rearranged in the way that they are as new land masses are added. These land masses would have to reach several miles deep below sea level (such as it is in Ravenloft) and this includes the the seas in which case the land mass would be over run with water. The Grand Conjunction would have been more than just a reshuffling of the realms. It would have been a major structural reshaping for all of them. Most still have their borders in rudimentarily the same place with the land shaped fairly the same way with maybe the loss of an acre or square mile here and there-though, make no mistake, everyone felt the earth shift. Some realms, however, like Hazlan and Valakhan, would not have been just relocated but completely reshaped, at least as far as the exterior borders are concerned. The entire structure would be terribly unstable and would include thousands of tiny instabilities that would be almost impossible to keep track of. It would seem like a good sneeze would shatter it. If this were the way the DPs worked, it would speak to their power levels.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

The thing about fiends is actually Dr. Van Richten's own theory about the origin of such beings: that they're not natives of some other plane, but manifestations of the evil within a mortal's psyche. Victims of transposition aren't being displaced by an extraplanar force, but taken over by the dark side of their own natures. Each fiend is therefore an individual, unique in its own right, rather than a member of a race.

In canon, this was just Van Richten's way of reconciling the bewildering variety seen among the very few fiends that'd made their way to Ravenloft. He didn't know about "other planes", being a native of the Land's fishbowl-of-a-reality, and couldn't fully accept the notion that HUGE numbers of such powerful threats could exist, beyond the Mists. But in a self-contained version of the setting, it's a viable alternative hypothesis.

This would, of course, entail some serious re-working of the backstory for the Gentleman Caller and Isolde. Perhaps they could each be the products of a pair of long-ago human lovers: a man who horrifically betrayed his true love, becoming a malign spirit of seduction, and the woman who selflessly dedicated her soul to stopping his "dark side", becoming a holy avenger of innocence.

[alhoon]

The thing about fiends is actually Dr. Van Richten's own theory about the origin of such beings: that they're not natives of some other plane, but manifestations of the evil within a mortal's psyche.

But that's more or less Powers check loss... I.e. instead of transposition/PChecks you keep just power checks.

This would, of course, entail some serious re-working of the backstory for the Gentleman Caller and Isolde. Perhaps they could each be the products of a pair of long-ago human lovers: a man who horrifically betrayed his true love, becoming a malign spirit of seduction, and the woman who selflessly dedicated her soul to stopping his "dark side", becoming a holy avenger of innocence.

Oooooor... they could be the product of the device that split Strahd or a similar device. A single man or woman that was split in two sides. One bad, one good.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

But that's more or less Powers check loss... I.e. instead of transposition/PChecks you keep just power checks.

It's similar, true. Perhaps that's where VR got the idea: he'd heard rumors of evildoers who'd been mutated by their own crimes, i.e. failed Powers checks, and assumed these two processes were the same. I do think there's a difference, though, in that someone who fails a bunch of Powers checks is still basically the same person -- a person with progressively-altered game stats, and eventually an NPC, but still them -- whereas someone who undergoes this non-canon variant of transposition would essentially be gone, their original personality subsumed and annihilated by the evil inside.

[Jack of Tears]

Bluetspur is the Moon. I wish I knew who first suggested this, because it is a stroke of genius.

Myself and another poster on the old (now very old) Ravenloft mailing list hammered this out years back. We had a lot of very talented people on that list; these days I only recognize a handful of faces ... I pretty much drifted away with 3E.

[Morte Rouge]

Bluetspur is the Moon. I wish I knew who first suggested this, because it is a stroke of genius.

Myself and another poster on the old (now very old) Ravenloft mailing list hammered this out years back. We had a lot of very talented people on that list; these days I only recognize a handful of faces ... I pretty much drifted away with 3E.

I agree, the moon/Bluetspur thing is a helluva idea. I also am all for adding some of the more Lovecraftian beasties from either CoC d20 or Pathfinder to heighten the whole "aberrant/madness" motif. Plus, moon-dwelling shoggoths are just very... Lovecraftian, and as the mind flayers are basically minor Cthulhu stand-ins, hey, play that Mythos goodness to the hilt.

[Germaine]

IMC, I had the Demiplane more or less cut off from the Outer Planes for various reasons. Any and all priests other than those of Ezra, Hala, and the Morninglord (who was a cooperative fiction backed by the former two) unwittingly received their "miracles" from the DPs. Ezra and Hala had their own little section of the Ethereal-generally inaccessible- that housed their dead faithful who didn't hang around. Everyone else who died either hung around- a la the Ghostwatcher idea- or were trapped in a Limboish section of the Border Ethereal only accessible to a few of the living-the "spirit world" mentioned in VRGtG and Gazetteer 3- to later be used for the DPs' own purposes. As mentioned elsewhere, I also expanded the Seas and placed most of the domains in them, with sometimes unreliable navigation and travel. The only domains I kept Mist-bound were generally the really weird (Nightmare Lands, Bluetspur), the very isolated (Frozen Wastes, Burning Peaks), or the potentially problematic (Odiare, Nosos, Farelle).