Ravenloft

• 1. Introduction

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  Ravenloft is a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, built around a pocket dimension its designers call the Demiplane of Dread. Floating land pieces called domains make up that dimension, held together by an unseen force known only as the Dark Powers. Each domain traps a single ruler, called a Darklord, behind walls of magical mist that ruler can never cross. Strahd von Zarovich, a vampire from the very earliest version of this world, became the first ruler condemned to that fate. He is both king and prisoner of his own home, a domain called Barovia. Over the decades since, Ravenloft has grown into a run of novels, video games, comic books and streamed actual plays. It has also forced its publishers to confront the stereotypes built into some of its oldest ideas. Why would a group of designers build an entire dimension out of prisons shaped by guilt? And what happens when a decades-old fantasy setting has to answer for who it borrowed its monsters and villains from?

• 2. Creation of a Villain

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  In 1978, Tracy and Laura Hickman began writing adventures that would later become the Dungeons & Dragons modules Pharaoh and Ravenloft. Tracy has said the idea took shape after a disappointing D&D session. He felt the game's version of a vampire was written like just another dungeon threat, ranked alongside goblins, zombies and other monsters. That struck him as a waste of the character. He and Laura set out to build a vampire villain with real motivations and a personal history behind him.

  Vampyr was the working title they used while testing the concept. They played it out with the same group every Halloween for five years, running it on their own house rules. The name Ravenloft only stuck because players kept asking about their "Ravenloft game" instead. TSR's original publishers eventually noticed the Hickmans' creation. They hired the couple to adapt it into the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, releasing it as Module I6: Ravenloft in 1983.

  The name that had stuck almost by accident was about to become much bigger than a single adventure module.

• 3. From Module to Setting

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  A year after Module I6 hit shelves, in 1984, it won the Strategists' Club Award for Outstanding Play Aid. Demand for it was strong enough that TSR released a 1986 sequel, Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill. That same year also brought an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Gamebooks novel called Master of Ravenloft.

  Ravenloft was launched as a full campaign setting for AD&D 2nd Edition in 1990, arriving as the Realm of Terror boxed set, widely nicknamed the Black Box. That box won the Origins Award in 1991 for Best Graphic Presentation of a Roleplaying Game, Adventure, or Supplement of 1990. The setting was revised twice more during 2nd Edition: first as the Ravenloft Campaign Setting, known as the Red Box, then as the hardback Domains of Dread.

  In 1994, Ravenloft spun off into a sub-setting called Masque of the Red Death. It relocated the action to Gothic Earth, an alternative 1890s Earth shaped by the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, where fantasy creatures and magic hid in the shadows of ordinary civilization. TSR also published a running series of Ravenloft novels, most centered on individual Darklords, several built around Count Strahd von Zarovich himself. A number of the writers behind those early novels went on to wider fame in horror and dark fantasy, including Elaine Bergstrom, P. N. Elrod, Christie Golden, and Laurell K. Hamilton.

  TSR would not remain in charge of that world for long. Within a few years, the company itself would no longer exist as an independent publisher.

• 4. Changing Hands

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  A major revision of Dungeons & Dragons arrived in 2000, the first edition published under Wizards of the Coast after that company acquired TSR in 1997. That same year, Wizards licensed the Ravenloft brand out to White Wolf Publishing. Working under its Sword & Sorcery Studios imprint, and later its Arthaus imprint, White Wolf released the 3rd Edition d20 System Ravenloft Campaign Setting in 2001 and a 3.5 Edition Ravenloft Player's Handbook in 2003.

  White Wolf's campaign settings made a number of changes, many forced by conflicts with Wizards of the Coast's existing intellectual property. Specific D&D deities disappeared from the White Wolf books. Bane, for instance, became a figure called the Lawgiver instead. The Ravenloft trademark license reverted back to Wizards of the Coast on the 15th of August 2005, though White Wolf kept the right to sell off its remaining back stock until June 2006.

  That handover had one real casualty. The planned Van Richten's Guide to the Mists never reached print through White Wolf. Instead, the book appeared as a free download released in late September 2005, even though most of the wider Van Richten's Guide series had already been published by TSR back in the 1990s. In October 2006, Wizards of the Coast released Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, a hardcover update of the original Module I6 adventure, rebuilt for the Dungeons & Dragons v.3.5 rules and including maps from the original module.

  Shannon Appelcline, author of Designers & Dragons, later pointed to that same book as an early signal of change at Wizards. He noted that by 2006 people were already wondering whether a fourth edition might be coming, and that the hardcover "might just have offered another clue to the changing winds that lay ahead" by closing out the 3.5 edition line while also looking back fondly on one of the AD&D era's most notable adventures. Once fourth edition was officially announced, Appelcline noted, those 2006 Expedition books were revealed to have been part of Wizards' slow slide toward it.

  Two new Ravenloft novels were already being teased for release the following year, a sign the brand was far from finished.

• 5. Into New Planes

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  In 2007, Wizards of the Coast announced two new Ravenloft novels for the following year, Black Crusade and The Sleep of Reason, fueling speculation about the setting's future. On the 31st of October 2007, Wizards posted a Halloween short story by Ari Marmell called "Before I Wake" on its website. It was set across the realms of Darkon, Lamordia, and Bluetspur, and featured characters inspired by H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

  Ravenloft was confirmed for a return in 2008, folded into the newly launched 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, a reveal made in the October issue of the Dragon online magazine. That same year, the 4th edition supplement Manual of the Planes relocated the Domains of Dread within a retconned cosmology, placing them inside the Shadowfell, a mirror-plane of death and gloom sitting next to the mortal world. A planned 4th edition update to the setting was announced at Gen Con 2010, but that product was never actually released.

  In 2010, Ravenloft became the setting for the Castle Ravenloft Board Game. It also appeared later in official magazine articles, including Dungeon #207, titled "Fair Barovia," and Dragon #416, titled "History Check: Strahd and Van Richten," both published in October 2012.

  Barovia became the centerpiece of a new adventure module in 2016, Curse of Strahd, adapting the original Ravenloft story for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards developed the module in-house, led by Christopher Perkins, with story contributions from the setting's original creators, Tracy and Laura Hickman. Charlie Hall, writing for Polygon, explained that Perkins brought the Hickmans in directly, drawing on their nearly annual home sessions of the original Ravenloft over the decades to produce "a torrent of ideas for new locations, characters and encounters." That same year, Ravenloft was also the setting of a limited series comic, Dungeons and Dragons: Shadows of the Vampire, written by Jim Zub and illustrated by Max Dunbar and Nelson Daniel.

  Wizards released Curse of Strahd: Revamped on the 20th of October 2020. It was the first Ravenloft product built under the publisher's new focus on diversity and inclusion, including a revised depiction of the Vistani, the setting's fictional people based on stereotypes about the Romani. The following year, on the 18th of May 2021, Wizards published Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. It was a new campaign sourcebook that introduced additional Domains of Dread to the 5th edition line.

  A 2022 limited series comic, Ravenloft: Orphan of Agony Isle, by writer Casey Gilley and artist Bayleigh Underwood, featured the mad scientist Viktra Mordenheim, the Darklord newly introduced for the Lamordia domain. The novel Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd followed in 2025, written by Delilah S. Dawson, the first new Ravenloft novel to appear in 17 years.

  Wizards announced a new seasonal content format for Dungeons & Dragons in March 2026, with a Season of Horror scheduled to begin in June 2026 and bring the game back to Ravenloft. That season includes a 5.5 Edition sourcebook, Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, detailing sixteen Domains of Dread, including a new cosmic horror domain called Innsmouth, along with a bestiary of Ravenloft monsters and options like subclasses, species, and Dark Gifts. A board game, Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons - Ravenloft, is scheduled for July 2026. A new comic series, Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft, written by Amy Chu and drawn by Ariela Kristantina, is due to begin on the 19th of August 2026, following a monster hunter named Ez D'Avenir who is hunted in turn by Viktra.

  Whatever this new season eventually reveals, the setting's oldest force, the one still keeping every Darklord locked in place, was there from the very beginning.

• 6. The Dark Powers

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  Dungeon Masters are encouraged to build toward Ravenloft's core Gothic horror beat, an eventual face-to-face meeting with a nameless evil, using scenes designed to build apprehension and fear along the way. Characters who act with real moral corruption risk drawing direct attention through a game mechanic called a dark powers check, which can gradually turn them into figures of evil themselves.

  Their exact nature and number are kept deliberately vague, a malevolent force said to control the entire Demiplane of Dread. That vagueness is by design, following a Gothic tradition of storytelling where heroes are constantly outmatched by evil forces beyond their understanding. Academic Martine Gjermundsen Ræstad has argued that Ravenloft's Darklords retain "intention and free will," which gives them "a level of accountability" even as the Dark Powers judge and punish them. That punishment cycle raises real questions about whether the Dark Powers are delivering "just punishment to evil souls" or are simply "a force propagating and nourishing evil."

  Vecna and Lord Soth are the only two Darklords ever known to have escaped Ravenloft entirely. Vecna got out by becoming a Greater God, growing too powerful for the Dark Powers to contain. Lord Soth escaped by ignoring his domain and punishment until the Dark Powers lost interest, at which point agents from his old curse on the world of Krynn came to collect him instead. Most other Darklords have no such exit. Barovia's own ruler, Strahd von Zarovich, spends his story trying and failing to win back his love, Tatyana, with the Dark Powers arranging matters so he never truly loses hope.

  Strahd himself never names the Dark Powers directly. In his own memoirs, he describes only a force he calls Death, one that mocks him using the voices of his family and former colleagues throughout his life. Vlad Drakov, the Darklord of Falkovnia, appears entirely oblivious to any such non-mortal hand behind his own repeated military failures. Yet the Dark Powers are not purely cruel. Some tales describe innocents escaping Ravenloft for happier lives elsewhere, judged worthy of release and reward rather than further punishment.

  Not every Darklord is a monster by nature. Some, like the ones who rule over Ravenloft's stranger corners, were shaped entirely by the shame of a single unbearable crime.

• 7. Domains, Darklords, and the Vistani

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  The magical mists of Ravenloft can appear anywhere across the Dungeons & Dragons universe, drawing evil-doers, or entire parties of player characters, into the setting without warning. One notable exception is the phlogiston of the Spelljammer setting, which blocks all other planar travel. Even so, the Complete Spacefarer's Handbook notes that Ravenloft's mists can still appear in deep space inside crystal shells. Luis Javier Flores Arvizu has pointed to the constant presence of these supernatural forces as one reason Ravenloft became such a well received setting over 33 years.

  Every Domain is ruled by a Darklord, imprisoned there in the first place by the Dark Powers, who are believed responsible for creating the Dread Domains entirely. Ræstad describes these Domains as facsimiles of real homelands, each one built as "a reflection of its Darklord's psyche and sins," engineered to grant just enough power while denying its ruler the one thing they want most.

  Ravenloft: Realm of Terror, the 1990 sourcebook that introduced most Domains beyond Barovia and Mordent, put the setting's size at 40,000 square miles across 26 different domains, plus eight additional "islands." A revised 1994 boxset removed Domains destroyed during the Grand Conjunction storyline and added new ones, trimming the total to 20 core domains and nine islands, according to Ravenloft designer David Wise. By 2021, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft had expanded the setting again, to 39 Domains, with many receiving what the book called a "wholesale revision."

  Every Darklord was originally an ordinary individual who committed a truly horrific crime, one severe enough to draw the attention of the Dark Powers. Their punishment doubles as a promotion of sorts. Within their own borders, a Darklord gains real power, even the ability to seal the domain shut with a single thought, but can never leave. Every Darklord is left permanently tormented by the very things they once committed their crime to obtain.

  Barovia, Strahd von Zarovich's "foreboding" home domain and the first ever introduced, draws directly on Bram Stoker's Dracula for its inspiration. Carnival wanders the mists under its own power, populated by wild performers and a living, sentient sword. Darkon is a broken land whose central castle sits frozen mid-explosion, its rooms endlessly trying to reassemble themselves in midair, a Domain now in decline since its Darklord, the lich Azalin, vanished.

  Falkovnia originally gave its Darklord little more depth than a stand-in for Vlad the Impaler, ruling through raw ultraviolence. Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft reimagined it instead as a nightmarish, Groundhog Day-style loop, where a nation under siege by hordes of the walking dead discovers those undead share the faces of people its own warlord once killed. That warlord, Vladeska Drakov, is described as a tyrant whose "ruthless efficiency and relentless perfectionism" keeps her rebuilding the same barricades every day, barricades that trap her as surely as they hold death back.

  Hazlan is a magocracy run by the Red Wizard Hazlik, who treats the entire domain as his own "vast magical laboratory." Wes Schneider, lead designer of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, said the domain's "technology" had simply kept pace with decades of evolving ideas about what an evil magical dystopia could look like, producing "weird monsters, amoral experiments, magical contagions, unnatural weather" and more. Lamordia, meanwhile, paid homage to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Originally a small coastal domain ruled by Adam, a flesh-golem creature made by Doctor Victor Mordenheim, it is now ruled instead by Viktra Mordenheim, a mad scientist unable to replicate the device keeping her reborn lover Elise alive even as Elise keeps fleeing from her.

  Modeled directly on real depictions of the Romani people, the Vistani have appeared as Ravenloft's fortune-tellers since the very first module. They became a unifying element across both the Ravenloft and Masque of the Red Death settings, both built around Gothic horror scenarios. In practice, the Vistani control much of the passage through Ravenloft's mists, and player characters confined to a single domain typically need Vistani help to travel to another.

  Early depictions described the Vistani as "superstitious" and as heavy drinkers, with abilities to curse, hypnotize, or cast spells like Evil Eye on player characters, alongside a stereotype of being "uncivilized." Curse of Strahd: Revamped removed that "uncivilized" and heavy-drinker framing, and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft went further the following year, dropping the "superstitious" label and grounding Vistani abilities in the same magic systems used throughout Dungeons & Dragons.

  Rudolph van Richten, Ravenloft's most famous monster hunter and the author of an entire series of hunting guides, spent most of his career holding a deep enmity toward the Vistani. That changed while he was writing his own Guide To The Vistani, during which he became friends with a mortu, a Vistani outcast, and his opinion of the people he had once distrusted improved.

  That shift in one hunter's heart mirrored a much larger reckoning still to come, one that would eventually reach Ravenloft's critics and its publisher alike.

• 8. Reception and Legacy

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  Game designer Rick Swan wrote in 1994 that Ravenloft initially "just didn't seem special, a Forgotten Realms variant with a few more bats." After later supplements like Forbidden Lore, The Created, and the Van Richten's Guide series, Swan changed his view. He concluded the setting had become "a credible adventure alternative for players interested in the dark side of the AD&D game," calling it, despite lacking the flamboyance of Call of Cthulhu, "the hobby's most enduring fusion of horror and fantasy."

  Darker Days Radio has called Ravenloft the "greatest D&D campaign setting," pointing to its unique Gothic horror elements and classic villains such as Azalin Rex. Writing for Io9, Rob Bricken argued that the novel Vampire of the Mists "isn't scary, per se," but that Strahd brings enough horror and carnage to prove Ravenloft is "much, much more sinister" than the Forgotten Realms, complete with vampires that turn into bats and mist, cannot cross running water, and must be invited into a home before entering.

  Shelly Jones, writing in the journal Analog Game Studies, highlighted the Tarokka Deck mechanic shared by the original Ravenloft module and the modern Curse of Strahd module. Jones argued it randomizes play in a way that also reflects fragmented, traumatic memory and reifies the dynamics of an abusive relationship. Jones also noted that without sunlight to track time, players in Barovia must rely on other cues entirely, deepening a disorientation that comes from feeling abandoned from anything familiar or real.

  The Ravenloft setting has been criticized for reinforcing harmful stereotypes through its portrayal of the Vistani, Ravenloft's in-fiction stand-in for the Roma people. In 2020, Wizards of the Coast said it had worked with a Romani consultant during the editorial process for the Strahd reprint and two upcoming products, aiming to present the Vistani without relying on reductive tropes. Jon Ryan, writing for IGN, noted that even after the update, the book's illustrations "still evoke Romani culture," and some players might still associate certain abilities with outdated cultural stereotypes.

  Julie Muncy, writing for Io9, called the resulting changes "granular" and not very extensive. She argued that starting a promised deeper reckoning with a "fancy collector's edition" felt "less like a promise to do better and more like a victory lap." She also noted that unrevised elements, including the art and certain magical abilities, still leaned into tropes historically used to target the Romani for persecution. Christian Hoffer, for ComicBook.com, took a more positive view of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. He wrote that its revised Domains now function as originally intended, prisons meant to fit each Darklord's specific crime, with much of the "misogynistic, colonialist, or racist" material purged from the new version.

  In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath described Strahd as "a vessel for the audience's relationship with an ever-changing and evolving vampire legend," broadly drawn enough that "every group of players can make him their own." Ravenloft's reach has extended well past the tabletop. Three PC and console games carried the name in the 1990s: Strahd's Possession in 1994, Stone Prophet in 1995, and Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft for the original PlayStation in 1996. Decades later came the Dungeons & Dragons Online expansion "Mists of Ravenloft" in 2017 and a Ravenloft module for Neverwinter released on the 26th of June 2018.

  Wizards opened a new licensing path in 2016, letting individuals and third-party publishers sell Ravenloft-inspired content through the Dungeon Masters Guild storefront under the 5th Edition open game license. That same ecosystem fed an official actual play series, Tales From the Mists, streamed from 2019 to 2020 with TK Johnson as Dungeon Master. Its rotating cast was anchored by Lysa Chen, Kayla Cline, Hadeel Al-Massari, and Ashley Warren, set in the city of Harmonia within the Kartakass Domain of Dread. Christian Hoffer, again writing for ComicBook.com, called it "a masterclass on how to run a horror campaign using mood and environment to set the tone."

  A second series, premiering on the 1st of April 2021, sent Dungeon Master B. Dave Walters and a cast of six, including Tanya DePass, Noura Ibrahim, Deejay Knight, Mark Meer, Saige Ryan, and Becca Scott, across multiple Domains of Dread at once. Ravenloft: The Horrors Within is still due to add a sixteenth domain, Innsmouth, to that spreading map before the next round of players ever rolls a single die.