Dungeons and Dragons Van Richtens Guide to Ravenloft Really Embraces Its Horror Roots

Dungeons and Dragons: Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft Really Embraces Its Horror Roots

Contents

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft is the newest sourcebook for DnD 5e, and with it comes a deadly injection of classic horror and dread.

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Dungeons and Dragons Van Richtens Guide to Ravenloft Really Embraces Its Horror Roots

Dungeons and Dragons saw the release of its newest sourcebook last week with the arrival of Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. Following up one of DnD’s most popular adventures Curse of Strahd, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft introduces new Domains of Dread and gives DMs and players the tools to create morbid atmospheres and new creepy characters. The more than 250-page compendium introduces a lot of new material and goes a long way to embrace its horror roots.

DnD is more popular than ever and its fifth edition is now packed with different adventures and worlds for fans to explore. While plenty of its adventures feature some frightening elements like Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Rime of the Frostmaiden, the new Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft is the first book since Curse of Strahd to explore more classic horror themes and it does so with aplomb. The new sourcebook provides more than a dozen new Domains of Dread for players to explore and gives DMs the tools to create their own while giving solid breakdowns of several different genres of horror.

Exploring Horror in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft

Horror can be difficult to incorporate into DnD games. The tendency to break tension at the table by making jokes or other silliness can pull players out of an ambient world crafted by the DM. Ravenloft goes a long way into injecting a fresh dose of horror into any game, whether that be a short diversion for a single night of terror, or for full campaigns full of doom and gloom. One way the new sourcebook does so is by giving DMs an extensive breakdown of different types of classic horror genres, alongside tables full of ideas to use as inspiration or to be pulled out directly and placed into a game world.

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Ravenloft’s second chapter includes a section that helps define body, gothic, cosmic, and folk horror alongside traditional ghost stories and dark fantasy. Those sections are full of information about the nature of the genre, and tools to help create a world based around a singular/mix of genres.

It provides brief overviews about what makes each genre unique, and Ravenloft also helps identify tropes to avoid in each. Tables present full of ideas for an overall villain, adventure location, and general plot hooks to use in each genre. The tables work both as good inspiration for a DM looking to build a wholly unique game, or as quick references for one looking to build a quick one-shot game for a single night in the Mists.

What’s useful about the nature of Ravenloft’s Domains of Dreads is that each one is wholly its own plane of existence. DMs can make travel between them as (relatively) simple or essentially impossible as they please. This goes a long way in helping to contain a story to a relatively small area, which can help a game flow and can also engender dread all on its own, as players find themselves trapped by the Mists that border each domain.

This allows for multiple worlds that embrace different horror genres to feel distinct while still existing simultaneously. What this means is that DMs can also bring players from a dark fantasy-styled world more similar to the upcoming Dark Alliance into a more cosmic horror-themed adventure that feels more like Bloodborne than traditional DnD fairly quickly.

Embracing both its roots in classic horror and the success of its spooky contemporaries across a wide range of mediums is at the heart of Ravenloft’s success. Bringing even creepier new monsters to DnD, allowing players to create characters steeped in the horrific worlds they inhabit, and giving DMs inspiration in a multitude of ways means that Ravenloft can potentially offer loads of new content for fans. It’s likely that Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft will be providing classic horror to DnD tables for quite a long time.

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Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft is available now both in physical and digital formats.

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