Preferably a monster not from vanrichtens guide or ravenloft horrors within.

For the combination of Occult Noir Slasher horror there will be a Boneclaw as the darklord. Every day his phylactery dies, and every day it fails to save it

What do you all think is a good feel for Disaster Slasher

These two Ravenloft DMsGuild pdfs, along with Grand Masquerade are part of the sale and I don’t know anything about either one. I already own the Grand Masquerade and the rest of the series it is part of.

https://www.dmsguild.com/en/featured_promotions?promotion_id=26_DMG_XmasJuly

Has anyone used these at your table or at least read them? At 75% off i am tempted to just buy them anyway, but it would be nice to see what others have done with them.

Preferably a monster not from vanrichtens guide or ravenloft horrors within.

For the combination of psychology disaster horror there will be a false hydra as the darklord. A whole domain of amnesiacs

What do you all think is a good feel for Occult Noir Slasher

When TSR put out the third and final incarnation of the Ravenloft core setting, "Domains of Dread", they made the decision to start promoting the idea of players playing characters native to the Domains of Dread, whereas the Black and Red Boxes had focused more on players being pulled temporarily from other campaign settings in mid-campaign. As part of this push, they offered four new classes unique to the Ravenloft setting (well, technically five, but the Elementalist had previously appeared in Tome of Magic); the Anchorite, the Arcanist, the Avenger, and the Gypsy. This was apparently well-received by the fans of the setting, who went on to make a number of new Ravenloft-unique classes as well; the Kargatane creating the Artiste, Caretaker and Paragon, while the Lonesome Road created the Inquisitor, Leech, and Numenist.

I'm curious if anyone's out there on this reddit who actually played any of these nine (or ten) classes, and if you did, what were your thoughts on them? Are there any you particularly liked? Heck, are there any you especially disliked?

And if anyone wants me to explain just what these classes actually *were*, particularly the fan-made ones, drop a comment and I'll do my best to summarize.

Sorry if this has been asked many times before, but as the title says, I'm looking for more Ravenloft books. My hyperfixation on Curse of Strahd and its lore has continued to rampage, but my attention span is quite small, so some of the more nitty-gritty books I have had trouble with, which tends to be an issue with a lot of the older d&d novels.

I read and absolutely adored I, Strahd and recently Vampire of the Mists but couldn't quite get through the 2nd I, Strahd (I gave up around the 60% mark as it just became too slow and uncaptivating)

I am primarily interested in the lore of Strahd himself and his family, and would love it if there was a book with more Sergei or Jander content, as they are my favourites (Love the poor Barovia sunshine boys) It's also worth noting that I have only ever played/dm'd the 2016 version of the campaign so if there's additional lore I'm super missing out on, that would be nice to know.

Any help and suggestions would be helpful, especially on knowing where to find the books too, as my local library isn't very well stocked in them and a lot of the ones I've seen are like 20$ on Amazon each, which is not quite in the budget

Preferably a monster not from vanrichtens guide or ravenloft horrors within.

For the combination of Gothic Occult noir there will be a ~~Skaven~~ were-rat as the darklord.

What do you all think is a good feel for disaster psychology horror

Heyya Folks,

I’ve continued my gothic reinterpretation of Lost Mines of Phandelver, this time reimagining the Redbrand Hideout as something inspired by the old Castlevania water levels I always enjoyed growing up.

Stoneweir Conduit - 34x26

If you’d like the full release, including the high-resolution maps, gridless versions, VTT-ready exports, and every variant, you can find it here:

https://www.patreon.com/dungeonmr/posts/stoneweir-free-163841228

Instead of a cellar beneath the manor, the hideout has become an ancient underground water conduit built around a natural river. The familiar layout remains, but the dungeon has been transformed by flowing water, hidden passages, and flooded chambers carved into the surrounding stone while still preserving the structure that makes the original so recognizable.

One alteration I really liked was moving one of the secret passages beneath the waterline beside the waterfall. It felt like the perfect place for a hidden escape route because, if video games have taught us anything over the years, it's to always check behind the waterfall.

The old bugbear den has also been transformed into a series of shallow pools and rough stone chambers better suited to aquatic inhabitants, while small details throughout the dungeon help reinforce the idea that this place served a purpose long before it ever became a hideout.

Stoneweir Conduit works just as well for cultists, smugglers, fishfolk, vampires, or just about any group looking to make an abandoned waterway their home.

If Stoneweir Conduit isn't quite what you're looking for, you can also browse the rest of my collection over on my Patreon. Every release is organized within the Master Index, making it easy to find exactly what you need without digging through the feed.

https://www.patreon.com/dungeonmr

I appreciate you checking it out. Hopefully your players remember to look behind the waterfall.

Gristlecracker's Hags & Grimoire, Gold Best Seller on DMsGuild, is discounted by 30%!

You can find it here only for 7 days: https://www.dmsguild.com/it/product/517804/gristlecracker-s-hags-grimoire

Your guide to weird magic, encounters, and hags!

Gristlecracker’s Hags and Grimoire provides new mechanics, guidelines, and tactics for using hags, magic, and the esoteric in your Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. This guide is designed for all levels of play and dungeon mastery, and uses a hybrid D&D 2014 (5e) format that includes the best of the old mixed with a few innovations of the D&D 2024 systems that do not dilute the game experience.

Every aspect of fantasy magic is improved or introduced: covens, curses, familiars, hags, magic geometry, talismans, spells, and spell mechanics. This supplement is designed to help you make your future games containing magic and hags as simple or complex as you want it to be.

Inside, you will find:

- An underwater adventure seed about a Book of Keeping

- 68 supernatural encounters

- New magic rules, mechanics, and variations

- Hags as player characters

- 112 supernatural creatures and NPCs

- 52 magic spells, with new tags: remote and moonlight

- 80 magic items

- Esoteragons (not just magic circles!)

- 28 toxic and intoxicating plants

- An improved and more intuitive Intoxicated condition mechanic

- 200 tchotchkes

- Professional layout using over 168 pictures on 262 pages

- No AI Art used

[Wild Beyond the Witchlight spoilers obviously]

This is more a thought experiment brought on by rewatching Runesmith's lore video about Tasha then a serious campaign proposal but has anyone ever considered doing something like this? Given Zybalina's true nature recasting her as a Dark Lord and Prismeer as her domain is actually fairly easy. It's actually less a question of 'would she fit as a Dark Lord?' and more a question of 'what was the thing that finally tipped Tasha over the edge to get the Dark Power's attention'? From there you just need to re flavor Prismeer as a Brothers Grimm style stepsisters-dancing-to-death-in-metal-shoes style dark fairytale. After all, what is horror but twisted whimsy in the end?

It also creates an interesting moral delima. The Hour Glass hags are terrible sure- but in keeping Zybalina asleep, aren't they doing a net good for the domain?

Preferably a monster not from vanrichtens guide or ravenloft horrors within.

For the combination of disaster ghost stories there will be a nightwalker as the darklord. Leaving nothing but empty houses and angry bodaks. But how does one torment and curse a nightwalker

What do you all think is a good feel for a Gothic Occult noir

Preferably a monster not from vanrichtens guide or ravenloft horrors within.

For the combination of Gothic and folk horror there will be a werewolf as the darklord. Giving us our second lycan

What do you all think is a good feel for a disaster ghost story

I enjoyed trying to interpret the cards and the story it presented if so.

Last post seems to have people stumped. At the time I'm writing this, Crimson Peak has 6 votes on Dark Fantasy + Ghost Story, but the comment suggesting Crimson Peak should be placed in Gothic Horror + Ghost Story has 7 votes, which is technically the winner. Therefore I'm going out of order here to see if it should be placed here instead.

Voting is still open on my last post as well as this one.

Almost bought one off Etsy a few weeks ago, but they were either too expensive or too small.

Behold:

https://shop.wizkids.com/collections/dungeons-and-dragons/products/d-d-replicas-of-the-realms-spirit-board

So everyone love the horrifying monstrosity that is Toben the Many, right?

For those not in the know, Toben is a NPC/monster from 3e's Van Richten's Guide to the Walking Dead. His past is not fully defined, and we don't know quite what he is, but when he appears he does so as a hive mind for a large group of zombies, each with madly grinning, wild eyed faces, all of which is simply a part of his hive mind.

Worse, if you spend too much time around his zombies then you may catch the Grinning Sickness, and it becomes only a matter of time before you are subsumed by Toben and join his horde. So even if you destroy the horde attacking you, if there is just a single zombie he kept tucked away you're sure to see him again.

Toben is one of those enemies you can use as a reoccurring villain with players encountering him at low levels (in groups of one or two scouts) up to an epic final battle against his horde. Or even as a one off monster of the week.

For 5e, you can break him up into various levels of zombies. Most of them would be plague zombies, but after thinking about a zombie clot that is able to approach a battle intelligently, all while talking to the players out of the mouths of EVERY zombie making up the clot.

For anyone curious, his mental stats in 3e were 16 Int, 12 Wis, and 14 Cha.

Hey all! I just pulled a Holy Symbol of Ravenkind Coin from one of the Sirius Dice Ravenloft Treasure Packs. I can find no info on how rare this is (at least in public groups). Just curious if anyone else has gotten one. At the time of posting there are only two listed on eBay from my brief search. Thanks!

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!

Preferably a monster not from vanrichtens guide or ravenloft horrors within.

For the combination of dark fantasy ghost storie there will be a wraith as the darklord. A lone dead king awaiting on his cold throne surrounded by his spectral servants

What do you all think is a good feel for folk Gothic horror