Ravenloft

There is a thing that happens with certain types of creative people. They encounter a thing. Fall in love with it, flaws and all. But they don't engage with the flaws.

Then they create something in response to it. They try to fix the flaws in that response. Try to make it right while still loving being in love with that thing as it was when they first encountered it.

I don't know if there is a name for it. There probably is. Ravenloft is one of those things I fell in love with, flaws and all.

I didn't come to Ravenloft via the adventure. That disappointing encounter would be years away. I instead found it, as I did many things at that time, in Waldenbooks. And I found it without even understanding what it was.

If you have been reading my newsletter for a while, you know I have an unhealthy obsession with Dragon Magazine. I have, in fact, already covered it in this series.

So of course I found Ravenloft via the magazine. Through my very first issue I purchased based on the cover. No thoughts of gaming, just this evocative cover and that tantalizing name, Ravenloft.

Even before I stumbled on this setting for Dungeons & Dragons I was a horror nerd. I emphasize nerd here. I didn't dig Dean Koontz or Stephen King then. Slasher films didn't work for me.

No, I came by my love of the genre through Poe, Brontë , Shelly, and Stoker. I was the kid that read the classics at a young age and they never lost their hold on me. So nerd.

Of course the idea of Ravenloft was a revelation for me...

And that is the important thing to realize when I talk about it as a key part of my game tastes... Or gaming influences more appropriately...

I fell in love with the idea of it. The very notion that a game could capture the horror... The seduction... The romance... All of it coming out as you traipse along playing at elves and magicians.

You see the issue with this right?

These are incongruous things smashed together. D&D is about violence as a means of engaging with the world. A steady rhythm of death as medium of communicating. It's about the illusion of meritocracy. It has no space for emotion. A haunting is a condition to be overcome, not an emotional state to be explored.

The gothic fiction and the romantic movement that creates the framework for Ravenloft is incongruous with this. It is an emotional connection with nature. It is being haunted as a defining characteristic, even if that haunting is a ghost. It is an exploration of fear as a constant, not a -2 on your rolls until the ghost is destroyed.

I could never reconcile that. I never could get a game to work. An odd one off adventure would feed into something, but it never felt right. Never felt like that stunning cover by Kevin Ward.

So instead I created my own attempt at reconciling some of these things. I house ruled the shit out of things. I tried playing other games that seemed closer to the mark. Then I wrote a game called Conspiracy of Shadows, then rewrote it a year later.

It wasn't just in my game design that I was haunted. The original Stephan Fabian art for the game also came to me at night. It sat just outside my vision as I tried to become a better artist.

If I am honest, it hindered me more than it helped. It trapped me in a style and mode, that while wonderful at times, hindered my growth. I was chasing something creatively that I would never catch...

And not the healthy kind of creative chasing.

I was Heathcliff haunted by Catherine's ghost. I was the narrator hearing the heart beating beneath the floorboards. I was Dorian, hiding my shame and living a lie.

I didn't stop this chase until I played the perfect gothic game, Analise. It hit all the notes Ravenloft missed, and helped me drop the chase. There is a reason is it number fourteen in this series of articles.

Dropping the quest helped me engage with Ravenloft honestly for the first time. So much so that our family Torchbearer game is set in Ravenloft. It comes by it honestly though and can best be described with this particular meme...

Because, Ravenloft isn't about gothic literature. It isn't about horror and longing. It isn't about wrestling with fears and the awesome power of nature. It isn't a transformative experience that haunts you until your last, gasping breath.

It is funny and weird. It is scary because vampires in games are powerful, not because they seduced your lover. It is Abbot and Costello meets the monsters. It is about murder hobos coming to collect from a Dracula knockoff the money he owes.

And that is absolutely ok.