WotC has broken out the big guns, horror-wise, for Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, as we got to see in a special sneak preview.
Ravenloft: The Horrors Within is night. And this past week, at a press preview, we got a glimpse between the covers of the horror-shrouded book. What unearthly terrors lurk within? What shadowy new tools will GMs and players unlock to unleash new angles on horror in D&D?
Some of the answers are below. And while it was cool to see some of the new art, what really struck me was the passion the team had for this title. Because it isn’t just revisiting one of the most popular settings in D&D. It’s taking another swing at a genre and pushing the envelope of what people can get away with when making a D&D book. In terms of both the mechanics design and the art design. So prep your holy symbols and your wards against evil, let’s take a look inside Ravenloft: The Horrors Within.
Ravenloft: The Horrors Within – What’s In The Book?
First things first, though, you might be wondering exactly what awaits you within? Well alongside the sneak preview, you can also, right now, check out the table of contents for Ravenloft: The Horrors Within. So if you don’t mind a little bit of spoilage, let’s go ahead and do exactly that.
Here you’ll see a surface-level overview of the contents of the game. All 17 Darklords and their 16 Domains of Dread; all 7 new subclasses, the 4 backgrounds and species (including the new Lupin, for your werewolf fantasies), even a list of the various genres and tools you can dig into.
But all this will only tell you part of the story. In the sneak preview, one of the things that came through the strongest was how excited the team was to be working up horrors again. Wes Schneider, the design lead on Ravenloft: The Horrors Within spoke at length about what the new book let them do, and how the team got to iterate and improve on the previous Ravenloft outing, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft.
“With Horrors Within, we wanted to go much harder on [storytelling questions like] … How do you play it? What do you do with it? What are the adventures you have here? How do I, as a player, create horror stories that I’m realizing through my characters in a spectrum of ways? I have chosen to play in these domains, what do I do here? What is the stat block for the Darklords? How do they affect the domains? What’s a campaign arc here? What’s an adventure I can play?”
And it’s this focus on play that seems like it got the designers cooking. It’s the “extra juice” that, combined with the 5.5E rules update, lets them play with more concepts in the book. Greg Bilsland, executive producer on the book spoke about how they wanted to have the subclasses and new species and dark gifts act as ways for players to “wield” horror, not just survive or experience it.
One of the questions the book asks, is what happens when you become a monster? What happens when you have the powers of one of the Dark Gifts, for instance? With eleven new feats in the works, there are plenty of ways to bring boons upon yourself, though at a risk for harm to you or the party.
Putting The Fantasy In Fantasy Horror
As you might imagine, a lot of this comes down to magic. The old saying, “they aren’t called Fighters of the Coast” rings true, because one of the things that kept coming up in the sneak preview was wanting to evoke the magic of Ravenloft. To capture the feel of magic-infused horror, as opposed to just generic scary stuff.
AJ Hanneld, senior creative lead (whom you’ll have seen in the Darklords of Ravenloft State of the Game) talked about really wanting to capture the fantasy elements in the art and aesthetic design of the book.
“Our overarching goal was ‘what does horror look like when it’s infused with magic? And also, how can we draw on horror as it exists in pop culture through history? […]
AdvertisementThe biggest thing I wanted was for this to have Suspiria energy. I wanted it to be super saturated, super immersive, and really disturbing.”
That goal presented some technical challenges. One of the things you’ll note if you pick up the new book is that there are a number of not just full-color art spreads, but black pages opposite the lush, rich ‘Suspiria-esque’ visuals, topped with white letter. And one of the worries was that the pages might have made the book heavier, because the white lettering against the dark backdrops is just the empty space with black ink filling up everything around it.
All that to say, Ravenloft: The Horrors Within is an ambitious book. It’s one of the longer hybrid GM/Player books that WotC has put out in a while, weighing in at 288 pages. It includes the full Artificer class (because not everyone will have Forge of the Artificer), as well as a new Artificer subclass, and also adds a ton of new stuff for DMs to play with.
Each of the Darklords gets their own full on stat block, which is something Van Richten’s Guide didn’t have going for it. And you get a guide to making your own, complete with a Domain of Dread to torment your custom bespoke Darklord. The book has a lot going for it, and all the art I’ve seen so far is absolutely gorgeous. It’s just a question of seeing how the rules play when the dice hit the table now.
You can pre-order Ravenloft: the Horrors Within at the link below. The book is out in two weeks!
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