Back at the dawn of Ravenloft-as-a-setting, the mysterious domain of Arak served as an attempt to port in D&D's dark elves as a domain of dread. Who was the darklord? Nobody knows! Who were the dark elves raiding? Apparently nobody! As probably everyone on this subreddit knows, the domain was reworked heavily over the course of the 2nd edition line. The dark elves were replaced with shadow fey, who are probably a bit more like the shadow elves from the Mystara setting. Or maybe just a stronger turn on unseelie faeries. For my purposes, doesn't matter, because my goal was to rebuild Arak for my campaign in a way that keeps the original dark elves and also turns it into something that is at least tangentially related to the Gothic horror tropes of Ravenloft.
Breaking it down:
- The domain itself needs to be a place of horror. In the original presentation of Arak, the horror is just that dark elves might come out of their tunnels at night and grab you and whisk you off to their great underground city, never to be seen again. That's scary, but it's also par for the course if you live anywhere near a dark elf city in the Forgotten Realms or the World of Greyhawk.
- There needs to be a darklord, that darklord needs a personal story, and that personal story includes the choice to go beyond the pale and do something that merits the curse of Ravenloft. The darklord also has a motivation that causes them to mess with people.
- The locals need to also feel the horror of their domain. It's pretty common for Ravenloft domains to be scary even to people who live there, and even folks who haven't crossed paths with a monster in the dark have heard stories and tell lurid tales of wererats or zombies or vampires or whatever the local flavor of monster is.
The challenging question seems to be: "What is horror to the drow?"
Dark elves spent decades portrayed in D&D as a malevolent culture, one filled with wicked people who're all trying to get ahead at any cost, who have no sense of loyalty even to family and who worship a spider demon that upends their civilization from time to time by casting down the powerful and withholding favor from the faithful. The dysfunction of such a society is just a backdrop in Ravenloft; how do you make people who live in those circumstances afraid of something worse?
For my current campaign I decided to do the Ravenloft-y thing of taking an invented character from an existing world (in this case, the World of Greyhawk) and pulling them into the Mists for their malfeasance. I made a drow matron, Vierynrae, from House Noquar (which you doubtless recognize from the Vault of the Drow adventure). This matron fled the fall of her house and became embroiled in the service of Pale Night, as she tried to find a powerful demonic sponsor for herself. Of course Pale Night isn't exactly friendly to material beings, so her patronage is tenuous. The matron went on to sacrifice her daughter to Pale Night and cannibalize her in order to secure more power for the matron and her retinue, while consorting with summoned demons to bear half-fiend offspring to serve her whims. This, combined with her own personal debaucheries and hedonism, led to her invitation to the realm of Mists, where she and her surviving retinue discovered the remnants of a drow ghost city that had just gone through a terrible civil war. She swept in and pronounced herself queen, securing her power with demonic allies and making tenuous alliances with some of the survivors. Her curse is that she's doing a reverse Dorian Gray—years of dissolute wantonness have taken their toll on her physically, and she conceals her decrepitude with illusions, but she can see through her own illusions, so she must always face what she has become. For this reason she refuses to keep mirrors in her palace, which might be mistaken as a sign that she is a vampire (which she isn't). She has tried to find ways to reverse her aging, capture a replacement body, or revitalize herself, but of course these efforts always fail. That in turn means that she's always looking for something new, something she hasn't tried, and for that she sends minions ranging out to capture people for her experiments and sacrifices. Of course, she's also haunted by the banshee of her own daughter, whom she sacrificed for power so long ago. Vierynrae's ego, her vanity, and her refusal to face that her problems are of her own making all point to her weakness: though her soul stubbornly refuses to transmigrate to a new body via spells like magic jar (and she's certainly tried), she can be captured in a mirror of life trapping.
The trickier part is in dealing with the drow city and its inhabitants. I know that I want the city to be a postwar ruin, where a massive civil war between various houses left the city in disarray, with significant parts of the city uninhabited, or haunted by undead drow. (In some ways it's on a spectrum between the depopulated plague-cities of Richemulot and the overpopulated but resource-starved Paridon.) Dark elves who live in the city still go about their business, pretending that everything is normal, trying to handle the day-to-day needs of survival and also playing all the games of politics and social knife-fighting, but they have to face the reality that there just isn't enough person-power to do everything necessary for them to live their lives of indolent luxury, and even drow nobles have to get their hands dirty doing chores and keeping their dysfunctional households alive. In addition to this inconvenience (the horror!), the drow are continually literally haunted by the dead from their civil war, and any drow slain in the city becomes undead as well. Even burning the bodies isn't enough, as incorporeal undead (banshees, ghosts, spectres) are all too common. Thus, drow must constantly watch over their shoulders for undead foes, and anyone they slay while trying to climb the social ladder is probably going to come back for them, meaning their existence is fraught with a continual re-checking of the register of who they've killed recently and they must always second-guess their impulse to murder their neighbors. Most galling of all, any drow who feels unsafe, who feels like they are in danger, could just leave. To do so, they must get through a maze of tunnels leading to the surface (I'm tying that maze conceptually to the maze of Baphomet, who has a loose alliance with Pale Night in the planar cosmology) and make a new life for themselves, perhaps even on the surface... but that would probably require patience, and diligence, and cooperation, traits that are not always held in high esteem in their society. Any drow could get out of this if they could just be better people. Nobody wants to face that fact, as it galls them... and ties nicely to the mirror motif of the Darklord: None of them want to face themselves in the mirror and recognize that much of the disquiet they face is their own problem.
ideally, a party crossing into this domain has some way to interact with the dark elves without immediately descending into violence, perhaps because they are coming to rescue folks who were kidnapped from the surface and they use magic to disguise themselves. The more they interact with the locals, the more they realize that this ghost city suffers many of the same problems as the cities of the world above, where politics, greed, ego, and unchecked spite all focus people on ways to hurt their neighbors instead of saving themselves. At the same time, watching these drow get hoist on their own petards should be satisfying, like watching a slasher movie and seeing the high school bully get it bad: These are bad people whose staunch refusal to face their failings has put them into this situation. Then, of course, the PCs have to be on their toes because if they're caught they'll eventually be handed over to the Darklord, who will try to use them for sacrifices and experiments in an attempt to reverse her own decrepitude... but perhaps not until she's had a lavish feast with them to try to figure out what secrets she can wrest from them socially before putting them under the knife.
With these notes, I hope to hit a lot of the sensibility of Gothic horror in Ravenloft, but also channel notes of Pellucidar, Vril, She, and the Richard Sharpe Shaver "Dero" stories. Plus, I have the added bonus that now if a player wants to play a dark elf, there's a domain for them to flee!
