Radical changes in Ravenloft in your campaign

[Teravala]

5e ravenloft books just feel so...commercial

they have the aesthetic aura of throwaway plastic, a pseudo-product that was made in 90s China or something simply petty and insulting to claim ti has a connection to the actual atmosphere and gothic horror itself. Its not horror, its horrible and pitiful. Its a waste of energy, of paper of everything. We want things of quality, things that are worth it.

Couldn't have said it better myself. In most cases, I feel like RL works best as gothic horror, with light fantasy. 5E did high fantasy, with accents of gothic horror. It's shoddy, cringe, and kind of insulting. In particular I found "Van Richten's Guide" to be the worst of it. I'm all for inclusivity in DND, but gender bending existing villains, or queer washing established characters, rather than creating new ones where that can be an actual part of their identity is obnoxious. As a gay man myself, this is not the kind of representation that we were hoping for. Trying to keep it non judgemental, but I, personally, truly despise 5e, and what they did to ravenloft is only the tip of the iceberg on that hate fueled rant haha. But I'm sure every new edition was probably met with similar views by the players of the previous one. (Though one could argue that 4th edition has it coming)

[Isolde]

This mix-grilling of people's personal lives and preferences into politics and things of the sort are nothing but a destructive degrading solvent.
Gothic horror offers the potential for great atmospheric and aesthetic depth. Sexualizing, and all the other -ing and -isms, everything just ruins the core of what we seek. It is like experiencing or trying to a great story and suddenly there is this injection out of nowhere, this breach hull, of utterly irrelevant stuff.
If cohesion is not attained and maintained then we can never have all the mental and emotional experience that we seek. Even if its a "fun" game.

[Isolde]

How to radically improve a future version of Ravenloft, a radical change in structure of products. Basic stuff. Keep all the good elements of 2e and of any other version, get rid of the bad, and add new good things.

20 to 30 adventures published in proper order. Not this; here have a 1-3 level (night of the walking dead )module for you and now a 12-15 level (thoughts of darkness, which is actually 24-30 level). 2/3rds of the adventures should be under level 10 and only 1 per 2 levels over it. Most of them should be levels 1 to 6.

Offering alternate stats for those low levels adventures so they can be played on higher levels as well. Of course this would require reworking of some things that make the game a computer game where you teleport all over the place and just do things like a grocery checklist, but you understand.

Taking a list of all gothic horror classical stories and making one adventure out of each.
Taking the pre-existing adventures and making them playable.

All the years that passed, nothing was done with value from the official company, other than by fans or 3rd parties. We got official Remakes of a handful of old material and degraded and twisted it, bad art, bad this and bad that.

[Isolde]

gender bending existing villains, or queer washing established characters, rather than creating new ones where that can be an actual part of their identity is obnoxious

They even got all the names wrong linguistically when they feminized them. Its ridiculous. If you check out the name changes its just hilarious.

The queer element was used to destroy the male/female and evil/good polarity so there is just a relativistic flatness that is as interesting as a doorknob while declaring "We are so great, we are owners of the D&D brand, we work here so our word is Law".

They ruined the old characters and did not create anything new or anything truly interesting. They did not expand the pre-existing characters for which we had so little material.

Great characters exist in classic horror stories that have not been used and even if you exhaust them, which they have not been exhausted, and go into more recent Gothic horror material then you can create your own, but they never intended or could i would add actually create.

Where is this amazing truly mist of mystery that was flowing out of the 2e material, even in the badly written stuff? It seeped in your mind and suggested or implied great hidden secrets and horrible things that go bump in the night indeed.

[Isolde]

There was this anime, called Ergo Proxy, and a fan-subbed version had at the end notes about the real world lore related to each episode. And this enhanced the episode colossally.

Something like this is needed for Gothic horror adventures, not only for the DM as this will be transmitted to the players by him, indirectly, as its a great resource and a source of inspiration.

Another radical change in Ravenloft, which i never tried but had in mind, is to just outright play it as a Hell realm. No more, no less it is a collection of domains/kingdoms in tartarus. The dark powers are evil deities torturing the darklords and they are in turn trying to lure others into taking their place and corrupt them. This poses problems like; what about the npc humans and others? Is everyone a fiend in disguise? Or someone that fell into the abyss and now plays a role? It can get stuck in certain things and malfunction. It gets too paranoid and overwhelming. That i had not worked out fully but its an idea.

[Teravala]

gender bending existing villains, or queer washing established characters, rather than creating new ones where that can be an actual part of their identity is obnoxious

They even got all the names wrong linguistically when they feminized them. Its ridiculous. If you check out the name changes its just hilarious.

Oh you mean like Vladeska Drakov? it literally smacks of middle school level fanfic where a 12 year old thinks they've subverted all societal expectation when in reality they just stuck a pair or boobs on someone else's work and called it a day. When my group got to falkovnia, they stumbles upon a village where a wedding ceremony was taking place. The couple said their vows, and the wedding was interrupted by a group of soldiers arriving on behalf of Vlad Drakov to perform prima nocta (basically, Vlad had rights to the bride on her wedding night, or one of his soldiers as proxy). instantly, they had a grasp of the level of tyranny in the realm, a clear idea of just how evil his regime was, and an emotional investment in resisting him and his rule. We even had a player who, when we discussed upcoming content, decided this wasn't something she personally wanted to play out, so she skipped a couple sessions while her character travelled ahead to mordent to confer with some contacts and resupply. Our stance has always been, if you have trauma and experiences that keep you from enjoying a story arc, that's ok. But perhaps a session, or even setting, all about trauma, isn't really the one for you, and that's ok too. rather than diluting the content so they feel comfortable, they recuse themself so that others who do want to explore that story can. Like, my group didn't hate strahd because he was a tyrant, they didn't even particularly care about Irina Kolyana. They did however find his incel behavior and attitude towards his brides and women in general to be horrific, and that was the motivator. I'll never forget a player telling me that they were uncomfortable with the campaign because of their own experiences with people like this, and demanding we edit out all content related to such behavior. As a group, we talked about it, and decided that while you do have a right to feel comfortable in your game, your past trauma doesn't get to dictate story content, and perhaps this just wasn't the right space or game for them. Because without his obsession over Tatyana, and his desire to possess her eternally, what even is Strahd?

[Isolde]

Victor into Viktra and Vlad into Vladeska

[Teravala]

One other major change I made is to warlocks (not the hala followers, the eldritch blast machines) and their patrons. There are far more interesting options than simply devils and demons available. Ancient Dead, Maeve the fairy Queen, the hags of Tepest, hell even Madame Eva or your namesake, Isolde of Carnival would all make wonderful, well flavored patrons.

[Teravala]

Victor into Viktra and Vlad into Vladeska

uhg Viktra. That story beat made me physically cringe. I wish I would have recorded my reactions to reading through VRG, I'm sure it was almost cartoonist. Huge smile at first, then just slowly spreading look of horror and disappointment.

[Teravala]

Oh snap I can't believe I forgot this one. If someone plays a non-typical race (tiefling, tabaxi, lizardfolk, dromite, etc) I often just handwaved it as people assumed they are a Caliban. This doesn't change their stats, or racial traits, but is rather public perception by the majority of people they encounter. Bit of a cop out, I'll admit, but it worked relatively well, and was a huge time saver. This also created some interesting moments where an NPC outlander would recognize their race, and could either work as a bonding moment or to drive a wedge between the character and the NPC.

[Mistmaster]

Well, I have many changes the bigger of this being the fact that my Mistworld is bigger and a true material plane. And there are no personal Darkopowers, but the impersonal power of the Mists themselves.

[Isolde]

Another radical change was how fear and horror functioned.

There were and are classes, and kits, which can be immune to fear. And i did not want to distort the class and just have cavaliers* (2e fighter's handbook kit) and a few others run away and in general act out of character just because of the fear/horror Ravenloft rules.
So those characters, if they failed the roll just got a penalty (similar to been shaken or the later 3.5 rules but they never ran away or acted in a cowardly unbecoming manner) during which they felt a disturbance (they felt fear and horror but could control them brushing them away and what they felt was a spiritual attack) and they could continue acting.
This worked great, as they got a sense they were under spiritual predation and a palpable presence of spiritual wickedness that sought to oppose them whenever it could.

*The Cavalier is completely immune to the fear spell. Because he is so brave, he inspires others to courage, and so, while he is fighting, he actually radiates an emotion spell in a 10' radius. This emotion spell radiates courage (see the writeup for the 4th-level wizard spell emotion), but only to the extent that it negates fear; it does not bestow the berserk fury that the actual wizard spell provides.

[Teravala]

An especially good way to handle fear and horror saves, since it doesn't remove the player's agency over their character, but does impose penalty for the circumstances occurring. I rarely have my players simply run away in fear, but often toss out status effects like shaken, make them drop their held item in a moment of panic, etc,

[Lucius]

I changed the nature of the Dark Powers

How did the heroes learn about them directly?
How was any sort of exposition made perhaps naming them, by using npcs etc?
How did they "interact" with them indirectly?
How were they not assumed to be deities or fiends?
Were they differentiated from the deities themselves in the stories?

The campaign didn't get to the point where the player characters discovered anything along those lines.
It was more of a "secret DM justification" decision.
However, my plan was that little by little the party would discover clues about the existence of a previous demiplane, and about the existence of the "Fraternity of Shadows", which could lead them to discover that, when that demiplane was "destroyed" a group of mortals took on the role of the entities that had created the original Land of Mists.

[Galeros]

1.Demons and Devils are not from the Outer Planes, they are formed from the land itself.
2. Most people who die in Ravenloft stay in the Demiplane as a Ghost, spending most of their time resting in a coma of sorts until roused by some factor, perhaps someone disturbing their grave.