RAVENLOFT IS BACK.

[A G Thing]

I could see Ravenloft being connected to the Shadowfell but I don't like the idea that it is meant to be diced between the various worlds and is just a dark world verson of such places... Now if perhaps the weekend in hell thing was in supplement to the idea that crossing the misty boarder was a way to travel to other domains and still have a setting beyond your halfling vistani EtCR mock up would be good but they are throwing out the horse with the cart and tying the riegns to a goat it seems... I gotta see more but I don't exactly like what I am hearing...

Igor the Henchman wrote: "twisted", "terrifying", "scary" and "utterly alien".

All of these are fine in moderation but I worry what will happen if they attempt to make these things "more accessable" meaning dumbing it down until it is not a viable or frightening...

[Joël of the FoS]

Igor the Henchman wrote: "twisted", "terrifying", "scary" and "utterly alien".

A big Bluetspur in all direction...

Dump the gothic horror and shovel in the aberrations? (aka EtCR)

Not sure RL would have the same appeal if it wasn't a place where one could also live a normal life.

Yep, it's Weekend in Hell time, everyone.

Oh, crap... And RL will again have a bad reputation among uninformed players, aka the return of:
To the DM: "No! I don't want to get there, it's hell, my PC will get killed or drained or diminished, and it's hell again to find a way to get back"

(But let's not start panicking until we read the actual thing ... )

Wow... it really sounds like they're erasing everything I like about Ravenloft.

If our assumptions are true, then yep, I'm not sure I like it (was an euphemism maximo)

Joël

[Jester of the FoS]

Interesting.

And keeping in line with WoTC's "redesigning" of the other campaign settings (core D&D, Forgotten Realms), this is 90% retcon and 10% "let's keep things simple for the newbies".

I'm really going to be following the developments with interest and, hopefully, open mind.

Actually, one of the big things about the FR update was there was NO ret-conning (other than Abeir being another world and some gods being primordials).
They changed much, but the past was still the past and everything that did happen still happened, just additional things occurred very long ago and recently.

And Eberron's timeline is only advancing a year at most.

Even Sigil and Planescape seem to be relatively intact in their presentation, but we'll have to see if ret-conning occurs regarding the Great Wheel.

[Igor the Henchman]

The Shadowfell and Feywild, however, are different. There aren't all-encompassing Feywild and Shadowfell planes. Instead, there's countless such planes, one for each world.

The 4e cosmology, as presented so far, isn't a multiverse. There's only 1 material world (the world), hence only 1 Shadowfell. The impression I got.

[Jester of the FoS]

Anyhoo, posted my thoughts on the WotC board:
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1090774

It's a tad angry...

[Igor the Henchman]

There are points about the 4e "Domains of Dread" that weren't actually stated in the podcast, but are pretty easy to assume overall:

Namely, they didn't actually say there wouldn't be good people living a normal life in villages and cities of the Domains, but it kinda follows from the concept of "utterly alien place that the PCs will want to escape as quick as possible" that it won't have the coherent campaign world feel we here have come to take for granted. Or the "Ravenloft is a place worth fighting for" mentality. From the few words Chris Youngs dropped about it, you imagine a gloomy, hostile world of utter despair. They also said they wanted the Domains to "give the people a look at what Shadowfell actually looks like".

And to be fair, Ravenloft has been described like that in the past. The 2e Planescape campaign setting described the Demiplane of Dread as place of pure horror, "where Evil plays with mortals as a child plays with a toy". As in, a "nice" place to visit, but no PC would want to live there. That was before Bill and Steve sat down to write Domains of Dread. Seems like they are returning to an older model.

[Lord Soth]

The Shadowfell and Feywild, however, are different. There aren't all-encompassing Feywild and Shadowfell planes. Instead, there's countless such planes, one for each world.

The 4e cosmology, as presented so far, isn't a multiverse. There's only 1 material world (the world), hence only 1 Shadowfell. The impression I got.

Well, we know that isn't the case as we have at least four worlds. The one where you'll find the core setting, Forgotten Realms (which gives us two worlds. Abeir and Toril), and Eberron. And since they're planning on bringing back Dragonlance, Greyhawk, and possibly Dark Sun, that's another potential three.

The question is, do they all connect to the same Feywild/Shadowfell, or do they all have their own version of the Feywild/Shadowfell? I believe the answer is the latter, and that travelling to Evermeet in the Feywild doesn't mean you can travel to Mithrendain, which is a city existing in the Feywild of the Core setting.

Oh, crap... And RL will again have a bad reputation among uninformed players, aka the return of:
To the DM: "No! I don't want to get there, it's hell, my PC will get killed or drained or diminished, and it's hell again to find a way to get back"

Exactly. That was terrible, because people signed up to play in one campaign setting, only to suddenly find themselves stuck in another. If I'm going to play Forgotten Realms then I want to play Forgotten Realms. I want to go to Waterdeep and the Moonshae Isles, and try to loot Undermountain and Myth Drannor. I don't want to spend game time trying to break out of Forlorn. I want my knowledge of languages like Chondathan and Damaran to be useful, not become utterly useless in Ravenloft as nobody in the party can speak the languages of the land. All things being equal, if I want to play in the Realms, I want to play IN the Realms. I don't want to waste time on a sidetrek through Dominia when that time can be better spent crossing the Anauroch.

Knowing ahead of time that you're going to be playing a Ravenloft campaign with an outlander character is fine. But "Weekend In Hell" is a crappy concept, as it basically amounts to the players signing up to play in one setting, and ending up in another. It sucks the fun out, as you have to sit through one, two, three games before you get to the actual gaming experience which you wanted in the first place.

[Igor the Henchman]

Hey, you know what? I just imagined a loophole out of this mess. So the domains of dread are supposed to be the norm of what Shadowfell actually looks like (from what I gathered of Chris Young's comments). They are "twisted reflections" of Material world places.

Let's keep that.

Now, imagine a world, a perfectly ordinary world, where the Mists rolled suddenly in to envelop the land, that fateful night when Strahd made his dreadful pact. Since the Mists have arrived, things... haven't been the same. Bits of the Shadowfell have been overlapping over the familiar landscape. Ghosts and other creatures with ties to that dimension have arisen to haunt the countriside. Poetic curses uttered against the wicked have started to manifest in the flesh. Humanity was forced to retreat to the relative safety of "points of light" in the darkness: stable "domains", that are like islands of stability in the savage, unknownable land.

But safety comes with a price: each domain is ruled by a darklord, an evil being whose ego keeps the land stable, by imposing aspects of his own personality to all things inside. Barovia and its nightly horrors. Borca and its decadent towns. Dementlieu and its veil of secrets. Falkovnia and its opression of military order. Nova Vaasa and its conflict between stately order and homicidal chaos.

Within the Feywild, the change to the natural order has also been felt. A dark and powerful fey demigod Gwydion, utterly corrupted by Shadowfell's evil, attempted to create a Shadow Fey race, and quicken the dominion of Shadow over all Fey Realm, before being driven out, imprisoned behind an Obsidian Gate within the confines of that Shadowfell he loved so fondly. He did achieve a division among the fey order, and the creation of Seelie and Unseelie courts, as well as the appearence of Widderribhinn. A whole race of fey, the Elvenkind, have fled the Feywild altogether, to live among the mortal kind. King Azalin and several other rulers extended these people their hospitality in exchange of their skill and knowledge of the Shadow that threatens to devour all.

Slowly, and inexorably, tendrils of the Shadowfell seem to wrap themselves more tightly around what is left of the material world. Quite soon, the Time of Unparallelled Darkness is said to occur, where the whole of the world will finally collapse, to be one with the Pale realm and the mysterious Dark Powers who rule therein. But small groups of brave souls still fight on to keep the lights of the world from being snuffed out completely. To keep the world's beauty intact, at least by day. To maybe one day restore the world to the way it was. Their defiance makes them Heroes.

...well, its one attempt at having it both ways, anyway.

[Archedius]

This is actually worse then the throw-in-a-dragon-just-cause-and-throw-glitter-on-it-oh-yeah-it's-a-ninja-too that I expected. *flips Wizards of the Coast the bird*

I think it's pretty apparent that it's now up to the Frat and the RL community to preserve and expand the REAL Ravenloft we love. It's like Wizards has ripped out the settings' liver and left the rest of the meat to rot.

*sigh* at least the Midnight campaign setting is still loved by the company that publishes it.

[HuManBing]

I agree with your post entirely.

Especially your comment about ninjas with glitter, which was awesome.

I want glitter ninjas now. I'll put some in Forlorn, how about that?


Wizards really turned me off in summer 2007 when they announced the new edition. Then they dug their own grave with the forum board merge, the cancellation of print Dragon and Dungeon mags, and the underwhelming actual release of 4E itself. DDi seems a transparent coingrab exercise, and the fact that their promised online game tools are still not around months after the alleged release date doesn't help either.

The fact that they're hamfistedly trying to squeeze Ravenloft into their even-more-fantasy style 4E just shows to me that they have no real concept of the intellectual property they inherited, nor how to use it properly.

Ultimately, it's become nakedly clear to me that Wizards is milking its fans for cash and that overrides issues of quality control or aesthetic continuity. To some degree, this is unintentional (like the boards merging gongshow... which was such a crap idea they even had to retrench from it and have reinstated the boards, though not the actual posts). But I think this controlled drip of teaser info about Ravenloft is essentially a cynical project to maximize profits at the expense of campaign cohesion. Fan loyalty certainly doesn't play a major role in this. If they can entice more Eberron and FR gamers to spend a couple of bucks on a watered-down version of a Ravenloft game, they won't care that a lesser number of RL fans buy it and recoil in disgust.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: d20 isn't well suited at all to Gothic horror. That doesn't mean that TSR and WW failed. Quite the opposite - I think their work in writing atmospheric and evocative works (the "fluff") was average at worst and truly exceptional at best. But these latest developments have me scratching my head and wondering why Wizards thinks people will pay money for this, and some of the responses here make me wonder why people do that anyway.


It was a popular argument for a while that Wizards is a company and must mind the bottom line. This argument was used a lot to defend very insensitive moves like the board merging, the killing off of the print mags, and the decision not to renew the WW license. (I haven't heard much of it now that the boards have unmerged. Guess all those "wasted" funds weren't so essential after all.) Not only do these sound like wobbly post facto rationalizations intended to console rather than illuminate, it still comes with a second side.

It's true that corporations are there to make money, but many choose to keep customer satisfaction high. The reason for this may be hard for some people to grasp - but it basically boils down to the fact that buyers do NOT have to reflexively buy everything the company puts out. Buyers should assess the wares critically and refuse to buy something unless it will be useful. Buyers should have high standards and should take their money elsewhere when it would give them better results.

And believe it or not, this is just as much a mantra of capitalism and market freedom as the "they're a corporation - what do you expect?" argument. Many people seem to forget that. The company is free to choose to stiff you in the name of profits. But you are free to deny them your custom if they don't give you what you need. Indeed, in many constructions of the market theory, you're almost under a duty to do that, as the consumer's primary means to punish an unscrupulous or unsatisfactory merchant.

No prizes for guessing what my role is modelled on...

Even for those less strident in their anger than me, if you're dissatisfied with 4E, then just move on - seriously. There's plenty of excellent 2E and 3E stuff, and the power to make more product for it lies in our hands right now, not on some expensive bookstore shelf. Outside of d20, too, it's hardly like there's no alternatives - especially for Gothic horror RPGing, of which there is a profusion. They may not have the same resources that Wizards has, but they understand the craft better.

And from an economic viewpoint, I'm sure plenty of competitors are watching the turmoil of Wizards' spastic contortions and breathing a sigh of relief that this Goliath, this IBM, this Sony Playstation 3, appears to be cutting off its own previously-strangling market share and alienating diverse communities in a shortsighted attempt to maximize profits.





But I really mean it about the glitter ninjas though. Seriously awesome.

[Isabella]

I'm just curious if you have any idea how insulting and condescending you sound right now.

[WolfKook]

Amen, Bro*!

From now on, Forlorn will be known by all because of its haunted castles, its dangerous lakes, its murderous goblyns and its glitter ninjas!!!!

And sorry to say this, but... Long Live Ultimate Ravenloft!

*Is it ok for fellow members of the fraternity to address each other as "bro"?

[Joël of the FoS]

Ladies and gent, just a friendly reminder to keep your anxiety and anger in check when discussing here. We can talk any subject, as long as we do not throw names and insults at anybody.

Yes, that means at WotC too. Let's not presume what they have in mind, as we are not there

But we can surely freely discuss and criticize the products coming out and what we'll do about it. Let's stick to that type of discussion!

Joël

[HuManBing]

I'm just curious if you have any idea how insulting and condescending you sound right now.

I had no intention of targeting you specifically. As for the rest of my post - sure, I was making a point. I am extremely dissatisfied at Wizards' policy and I see little value in those above-mentioned arguments that people make in defense of its poor judgment.

If you took my post as a personal critique of yourself (or indeed against any other forum poster by name) then I can assure you it was not intended. You could put me on the rack and I wouldn't be able to name a single poster here who might fit that description. I haven't been following posts by specific users per se but it does distress me that this type of rationalization thinking seems to have a fair bit of traction here.

If this is unwelcome, I can go elsewhere.

[Lord Soth]

Buyers should have high standards and should take their money elsewhere when it would give them better results.

I do have higher standards. That's why I'm wholeheartedly supporting the 4E rules system financially.

While I love the ruleset, I'm not to keen on what they've done to the Realms and Ravenloft, though. The 4E Realms sucks, for the most part, and I likely won't play in it with the exception of Living Forgotten Realms. Didn't care for the FRCG at all, though I do like the FRPG, as I like the mechanical stuff in it.

This, though, ugh! It's one thing to do what they did to the Forgotten Realms. It's a whole other thing to, from the looks of things, take a setting and chop it up into little bits, essentially dismantling the setting altogether. And for what? For more Weekend In Hell games? What exactly about Ravenloft as it existed prevented those games? Why was it necessary to eviscerate the setting to get that, when they were already very much possible within the setting?

What gets me is that Eberron is seeing little to no changes. What... the... hell. If Eberron can make an edition change with no real changes (despite the fact that it was designed specifically for 3E), then why the hell can't the Realms and Ravenloft survive similarly intact? Hell, forget the Realms. I'm willing to offer it up as a sacrifice in order to keep Ravenloft intact. So why not keep it intact? It's current form certainly doesn't prevent the Weekend In Hell style of play in any way, and it's not as if the new format is more open to it. But doing this to it essentially closes the door on making it a campaign setting in the future, so what the hell?

You know what especially gets me? Demiplanes still exist in the 4E cosmology. Despite all the cosmological changes, demiplanes still exist. Rich Baker has stated as much. So why keep demiplanes around if you're not going to keep the most infamous demiplane of them all?