but they're not necessarily eternal ones.
I also very much appreciate that the domains in Van Richten's Guide are indeed ironic prisons. 5e has correctly identified that darklords are not the main characters in the story - they're a central figure in the premise and themes of their little setting, but the story is not about them. The more modern take on domain-design has created a more diverse tableau of spooky places, with more of an eye on game-able information rather than metaplot, deep lore, or dry statistics.Īt first I thought it was strange that the 5e book doesn't give bespoke stat blocks for darklords, but I've come around on it in a major way. I much prefer domains as isolated powder kegs of horror rather than an interconnected setting. I've been a fan of every version of Ravenloft, but the 5e treatment is my favorite. As an actual place where people live their lives and adventurers are born, raised, have connections, friendships, and history, and so on, we really just have the tail-end of 2e and then 3e in all its robustly detailed, well-supported, well-round setting with good, meaty substance. The weekend in hell vibe used in 1e/early 2e and now in 5e may make for decent adventures, but those are adventures, not a campaign setting. It also understood that evil isn't something that you just butcher with a sword, as we can see in the number of Dark Lords who aren't much of a combat threat at all. 3e cared about making an actual world and giving characters more depth. Van Helsing (err, Richten) was pushed to the back in favor of the Weathermay twins, and we also received the acerbic S., who may never have come to the forefront of the setting (as far as I know), but whose narration in the gazetteers provided a lot of character and revelation about who she was as a person.
It took a grab-bag of theme parks and turned them into an actual cohesive setting with depth and character that went beyond just random horror movie rip-offs. Though I'm putting down 3.5 specifically because I think that's more though in all of the setting info it presents.ģ/3.5 by a mile, though it owes a lot to 2e, particularly toward the end when the setting started congealing as an actual setting.
Personally I would say drawing from Van Richten's Guide and the 3.5 Ravenloft Gazettes together are your best bets. Some of the changes are latteral, like genderswapping Doctor Mordenheim and changing who of the pair of the doctor and the monster are the darklord, but I particular enjoy 5e's Dementileu as a twisted fusion of Masque of the Red Death and Cinderella is much more interesting than its previous incarnations, where it was mostly just "the setting for political intrigue games" (that being said you could easily slot in Dominic as a lesser darklord in the making in Saidra's realm, unrelated to her except maybe as a councilor and/or lesser noble.)
That being said, now that 5e has leaned into making Ravenloft its own setting rather than just Barovia, I've been enjoying many of the rewrites, even if they don't especially emphasize the connections between the dread realms like 3.5's version. I'm a personal fan of the Core, during Sword and Sorcery's 3.5 edition of the setting, it was the one that really attempted to make a coherent setting out of Ravenloft, rather than the more typical "weekend in hell" vibes that were more common in prior editions.