The World of Ravenloft II this was forgot in contemplating the How to Use This Book glorious and awful scenery before him — light struggling with darkness — and You now hold the core book for the D20 dark-ness menacing a light still more Ravenloft setting. It contains all the guidelines you terrible, and announcing its menace in the blue and need to play in a Ravenloft campaign or to apply livid mass of cloud that hovered like a destroying its Gothic atmosphere to any setting of your own angel in the air, its arrows aimed, but their direction creation. You will need the Player's Handbook, awfully indefinite. Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual to make full use of these new rules. — Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer If you plan to run a Ravenloft campaign, you Beyond mortal senses, beyond your reality, may find the next two Ravenloft releases useful: there lurks a boundless plane. It permeates your Secrets of the Dread Realms is filled with forbid- world and fills the void between worlds. It is the den lore for the DM, including the identities and border between the lands of the living and of the powers of Ravenloft's infamous darklords. Deni- dead. There, mind and matter become one; thought zens of Darkness is a compendium of the most and passion, fear and yearning can become more chilling and lethal creatures known to lurk in tangible than iron. It is the Ethereal Plane. Ravenloft's misty realms. Somewhere, lurking deep within those ethe-real mists, a dark and nameless dimension is ruled by Chapter by Chapter dark and nameless powers. Some say it is a prison This chapter introduces the Ravenloft setting, for the damned; some say it is a crucible to test the including a lexicon of common terms used in virtuous. Others simply call it home. It is a land of Ravenloft campaigns. mist and shadow, love and death, sacrifice and Next, Chapter Two: Player Characters pro- seduction, beauty and horror. It is a land of whis- vides all the changes needed to reshape heroes for pered fears made manifest. It is the Realm of Dread. Gothic adventures. This chapter also introduces a Perhaps you have sensed its touch. At the new race, the giogoto, and new skills, feats, reli- bidding of the Dark Powers, tendrils of the ethereal gions, and equipment. Mists that bind this land reach out to caress the Chapter Three: Ways of the World offers the Material Plane. They stroke the skin at the back of game rules that form the foundation of Gothic your neck when a creaking floorboard warns that adventure campaigns. These include new rules for you are not alone in the dark. Their invisible fingers fear, horror, and madness; laying curses of ven- crawl down your spine when inhuman shadows geance; powers checks; and the changes imposed rustle at the edges of your vision. on spells and magic items. The Mists do more than merely caress. The Dark Chapter Four: The Dread Realms provides a Powers are drawn to innocence and villainy, to player's guide to more than forty of the domains loathing and desire, to obsession, and to despair. that compose the world of Ravenloft. They seek out squandered dreams and inner demons. They savor the decay of the spirit. Their Mists Chapter Five: Horrors of the Night offers snatch up fiends at the moment of their ruin and expanded rules for the most infamous creatures steal upon heroes in times of doubt. known to haunt the Realm of Dread, from vam- pires to lycanthropes to hags. A DM can use these To what end do the Dark Powers add these souls rules to ensure that her players will never know to their tarnished collection? To torment them? To exactly what to expect from their foes. This chap- purify them? None can say, for few souls drawn into ter also details Ravenloft's mysterious gypsies, the the Realm of Dread ever leave to tell the tale. Yet Vistani. perhaps you will soon learn for yourself, for tonight, the Mists have come for you. Finally, Chapter Six: The Ravenloft Campaign Welcome to the Land of Mists. Welcome to the offers advice to players and DMs on how to crucible of virtue and the spoils of damnation. explore the themes and concepts inherent to Welcome to the Realm of Dread. Gothic adventures. Welcome to Ravenloft. 5 Chapter One Changes Wrought Early Gothic Tales With this edition of Ravenloft, you will note Early Gothic novels were tales of mystery, the obvious systemic changes to the Dungeons & romance, and brooding horror. They were Dragons, 3rd Edition rules. typically set in earlier times, though their authors Also, it is our intent with this presentation of were more concerned with instilling an the Ravenloft setting that whole campaigns be atmosphere of decadence and decay than with played herein. While the Realm of Dread is still as achieving any sense of historical accuracy. At the heart of these early tales sat the vast and suitable for a "weekend in hell" for outlanders, the crumbling Gothic castles that gave the genre its setting has been made more internally consistent name. These ancient citadels were more than mere and suitable for extended games. It is, by nature, a scenery. Their slow descent into picturesque ruin darker world this time around, but still evocative reflected the spiritual decay of their masters, their of the fantasy environment. While we have no secret passages spoke of ancient mysteries, and the intention of introducing the introspection and specters that walked their halls decried old crimes, sometimes florid horror of some of White Wolf neither avenged nor forgotten. Game Studio's other settings, we still want you to The master of the castle — and villain of the gather around the table to play and occasionally tale — was a murderer and usurper who had jump or cringe at Ravenloft's terrors. It is a world unwittingly sacrificed all hope for happiness in a of Gothic adventure, ready for your heroes to relentless, Faustian pursuit for knowledge, power, or pleasure. The protagonist paled in comparison, brave its dangers. Much less emphasis is placed on usually assuming the role of a lovely and innocent getting in and "going home"; this edition presumes young maiden imperiled by the villain's desires, or that your exploits in Ravenloft will occur on a a brave young man laid low by a stolen birthright. much longer-term scale. To that end, we've Gothic tales were infused with an atmosphere emphasized cohesion and scaled back on the of supernatural dread. Ancestral curses and camp. mournful ghosts manipulated events and eroded the characters' sanity. Unnatural deformities such The Gothic Mystique as scars, strange birthmarks, or hunched backs turned men into monsters, apparent punishments t might be said that the Gothic novel is a for the crimes of their fathers. Gothic tales evoked primitive detective story in which God subtle horrors, deriving terror from foreboding, or Fate is the detective. not gore — the knowledge that the coming sunset —E. F. Bleiler, editor, Three Gothic will free a vampire from its crypt, not the grisly Novels details of a werewolf s rampage. Indeed, the Imagine a scene set in an earlier age, resem- supernatural was presented so subtly in early bling a highly romanticized version of our own Gothic novels that it was often explained away medieval era. It is a world still beholden to ancient entirely once the tale's central mystery was superstitions. A meager handful of valorous young resolved. In the brightness of day, ghosts became men and women explores an ancient ruin, seeking tricks of the light; eerie creatures became mad to uncover the sinister web of mystery locked hermits. within its maze of secret passageways. In these One supernatural presence could not be de- shadowed halls, our heroes face many supernatural nied. Behind the scenes, the forces of divine Good threats — but none are so terrible as the powerful and Evil dueled to drive the tale to its conclusion. and corrupt master of the keep, who sits at the Most early Gothic tales adhered rigidly to the center of both the ruin and its mystery. These images, familiar to any dungeon- same story arc. The tyrannical villain has crawler in modern fantasy roleplaying, first burst committed a terrible crime and escaped justice, but to literary life with the birth of the Gothic genre in his sins have made his existence corrupt and the latter eighteenth century. The father of this hollow. The innocent young protagonists arrive in genre was Horace Walpole, a dilettante author the villain's realm. Incensed by their purity, or enraptured with his romantic vision of the Middle fearing that they will expose his guilt, the villain Ages. His novel The Castle of Otranto laid the persecutes the young innocents. As the tale thematic foundation that all early Gothic novels unfolds, twists of fate and spectral interlopers would closely observe. reveal the villain's crimes and the young hero's stolen birthright. 6 The World of Ravenloft It is the villian’s own foul deeds and the divine come Dorian Gray, who hid a portrait of his true forces of justice — far more than the hapless depravity; Dr. Moreau, who sought to make men protagonists — that drive the villain to his final of beasts and a god of himself; and Dr. Jekyll, ruin. In the end, all crimes are avenged, evil whose struggle with suppressed savagery would devours itself, and true love emerges victorious. form the foundation of the Gothic werewolf. As the nineteenth century gave way to the The Late Gothic Tradition twentieth, one aspect of the early Gothic tradition The Gothic genre blossomed in the early nine- started to make an unexpected comeback: the teenth century.