Haunted Hospitality, twisting commercialism/tourism for Ravenloft.

[doctornecrotic]

So, haunted hotels. They're tropes. Resorts and whatnot, especially opulent and decadent ones, get kinda uncanny. They have these facades of imitating culture, wondrous places, lavish palaces, etc. Something's just weird about them. Now, add tragedy, abandonment, fallen grandeur, other gothic essentials, and you have an iconic trope of horror. The idea of hospitality turned inhospitable, a trap that may lure treasure hunters and thrill seekers. It's not a new idea though. The Shining, Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money, The Twilight Zone: Tower of Terror, debatably the first two Puppet Master movies, and maybe The Eagles' Hotel California certainly paint images of foreboding places of "vacation".
Plus, fancy resorts are all sorts of great settings for drama and conflict. This decadence can have an underbelly of greed and obsession. Maybe all manner of vices either operate behind the scenes or right past the clubhouse gates. Perhaps success has gone to some owner or caretaker's head, at the expense of staff and maybe even guests. And what better place to stage a murder than a lavish party, rented from some temporary shelter just out of reach from wider help.
Now, for Ravenloft? The idea of tourism and hospitality might seem a bit odd. After all, in olden times, these concepts were basically locked away to wealthy merchants, nobles, etc... but they still existed. The Grand Conjunction adventures kinda had this towards the end with Roots of Evil. Vallaki became a tourism town of sorts in the ages since Strahd "tragically fell", only for the GC to twist and contort it. There's a degree of such in the seeming backwater of Kartakass, but certainly not to Harkon Lukas's tastes. The iconic inn is known to delight in tales and music, as lavish celebrations of the arts also bring crowds. Of course, it's all a trap for beasts to cage in their prey. Of course, there are others. But, are there any other examples of Ravenloft twisting this sort of commercial enterprise? As a pocket domain of sinkhole of evil, this could work. But a wider domain? that could prove hard beyond a limited use Island of Terror. Barring that, are there any ideas you've made?

[The Dark]

It's one of the small domains that you seem to be expecting, but I wrote up a coaching inn as a traveling pocket domain loosely based on Psycho and using ideas from The Scarlet Brotherhood. It needs a pretty heavy re-write, but the basic concept is sound.

[doctornecrotic]

It's one of the small domains that you seem to be expecting, but I wrote up a coaching inn as a traveling pocket domain loosely based on Psycho and using ideas from The Scarlet Brotherhood. It needs a pretty heavy re-write, but the basic concept is sound.

That somehow passed me by, excellent! I had a mildly similar vibe of that meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Clan Rimpinzarsi in my Broken Cog Cluster. What you have so far is quite great!

[Jeremy16]

Hotels as we know them in the modern world didn't exist in the medieval cultures that Ravenloft takes from. Isolated boarding houses, sure. Small waystops at prominent crossroads, yes. But not multiple floors with long hallways and elevators like what was seen in The Shining.

That being said, there's precendent in the setting for mansions and other homes being converted into inns. There's even a small map that could be used which was published in 3rd edition in the Curse of Ashington Manor section from Dark Tales and Disturbing Legends.

[Mistmaster]

Hotels as we know them in the modern world didn't exist in the medieval cultures that Ravenloft takes from. Isolated boarding houses, sure. Small waystops at prominent crossroads, yes. But not multiple floors with long hallways and elevators like what was seen in The Shining.

That being said, there's precendent in the setting for mansions and other homes being converted into inns. There's even a small map that could be used which was published in 3rd edition in the Curse of Ashington Manor section from Dark Tales and Disturbing Legends.

In Ravenloft proper maybe not, in Gothic Earth on the other side...

[The Dark]

Hotels as we know them in the modern world didn't exist in the medieval cultures that Ravenloft takes from. Isolated boarding houses, sure. Small waystops at prominent crossroads, yes. But not multiple floors with long hallways and elevators like what was seen in The Shining.

That being said, there's precendent in the setting for mansions and other homes being converted into inns. There's even a small map that could be used which was published in 3rd edition in the Curse of Ashington Manor section from Dark Tales and Disturbing Legends.

Ravenloft draws from so many different cultures that it's likely to vary. In the real world, areas around hot springs often developed some sort of temporary lodgings, from early hospitia in the Roman Empire to ryokan in 8th-century Japan (hospitia later spread to other places that had large numbers of visitors as well). Converted houses were used as hospitia by the Romans, and we have a preserved example at Pompeii in the House of Sallust. There was also the stabulum, a hospitia with stables for animals in addition to guest rooms. State-run mansiones could also take in private travelers if there was space after boarding those on imperial business. Businesses like these disappeared in Europe because there was a massive collapse in travel and large-scale societal networks, but they existed both before and after that period and existed elsewhere in the world during that period (the caravanserai system started by the 9th century BCE and the Ottomans were still building them in Iraq during the American Civil War), so I would be careful about taking a particular situation and applying it universally.

Everyone's Ravenloft can vary to fit their needs, but I don't see a reason to assume all of the Core domains are as insular and parochial as medieval Europe. Some certainly could be (*side-eyes Falkovnia*) but it seems to me that any of the domains that engage in significant trade or have any sort of "tourist attraction" site (including pilgrimage sites like the Cathedrals of Ezra) are likely to have some sort of business in temporary housing that's run as a business.

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

Now listen up: A summer house for rent in Chateaufaux.


You're running 5e in Dementlieu, and your poor, poor party had to flee before deciphering the secrets of this domain. They don't know Chateaufaux is now merely a trick of the mists. They don't know what it looks like when Saidra closes the borders. All they know is that they are running across the endless green field, running, running, running, until they reach a small mansion. They are greeted by a housekeeper (who's a mist-creature in disguise), explaining the mansion's owner rarely visits it and prefers to rent it to travelers for short periods of time. The party is welcome to stay, for an affordable price, and offers many luxeries the players will find amusing or small mysteries to explore.
However, for every 1-2 hours the party spends in the mansion, they gain 1 level of exhaustion that cannot be removed while they're inside (the normal rule for staying in the mists while the borders are closed says 1 level per turn, but this wouldn't give us time to have fun before the horrific realisation!), and if they wish to leave, they'd have to go through the staff (which is, as we said, mist creatures in disguise.)

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

If you want something larger, how about a version of the trope centered less around the hotel itself and more about touring the city it's in?
A full sized domain, in which everything exists as an attraction. It's full of museums and theme parks and restaurants and theatres and gift shops, but not a single grocery store or school.
The darklord is a mayor or noble or real estate businessman who wanted to make his city more important and 'profitable', so he invested more and more in bringing in tourists and less and less in make the city actually livable for locals, until at one point he just enslaved all of the locals in service of the tourism industry? Something like that?
So now he and his city were dragged into the mists, and his torment is that no matter how many tourists come and how much fun they have, they always leave after a few days and forget they were ever there, never telling their friends about it and recommending, and any locals he sends to advertise in other domains soon forget where they came from and what was their job? So he keeps inventing more and more extravagant attractions - a doughnut-shaped hotel, a dragon theme-park, a restaurant serving gilded deserts - but nothing ever serves to bring him or his domain the riches and fame he believes he deserves.

[The Dark]

There could also be a domain where the dominant life is something wildly inhuman and powerful, like dragons or aboleths, and they keep the PC races on display in their equivalent of zoos. It's entertaining for them (and hopefully for the players), if not for the characters on display.

I'm torn on whether this would be more of a joke domain or something that could be made properly horrifying, but a Ravenloft Australia where all the plants and wildlife want to kill you. The natives are cheerful and hearty, with "normal humans" having character levels (something like Dark Sun starting everyone at 3rd level, but without the Brom beefcake artwork) and large bonuses to save vs poison. They also have a boundless enthusiasm for taking new friends hiking through a wilderness full of venomous creatures, or paddling up rivers full of rapids and crocodiles, or climbing cliffs that have yet more venomous creatures. Basically, it's the Outdoor Adventure Vacation From Hell.

Something like Scaena could be expanded to an entire movie backlot of prop "buildings" that are just flats with nothing behind them, unless the Darklord is there and they temporarily become real. People move around as if they're living their lives, but they're incorporeal without the Darklord's presence. For an added bonus, the characters could start in a "theme park" part of the domain where all the buildings are fake and all the people seem to be illusions because they're incorporeal, and then they end up in a "backstage" area where it's still the case that the buildings are fake and the people are incorporeal.

One I'm slowly working on for my own project centers around the reason for a lot of the early resort towns - separating visitors from their money, often at a casino. So you have a big, expensive casino, but you also surround it with theaters and opera houses and restaurants with really fancy decor and foreign chefs and exotic gardens and beautiful chateaus/villas/what-have-you for rent - but it's all designed to keep people there so they'll keep gambling.