D&D Ravenloft The Horrors Within review – I’m scared for all the wrong reasons

Dungeons and Dragons is trapped in a Dread Domain of its own making. In this mist-shrouded bubble, nothing new grows. When a soul dies, it reincarnates in a new form, its stories endlessly recycled. New ideas rarely enter, and none ever leave.

Alright, I’m being a little dramatic. When you’re talking Gothic horror, that’s par for the course. But strip away the frilly metaphor, and the sentiment remains true. For the past few years, 90% of the DnD release schedule has been recycled content. Recycled settings, remastered DnD classes, and revamped adventures. In a fragile economy where major companies rely on safe bets, original ideas rarely get a look in.

Ravenloft: The Horrors Within is no different. Despite this, I was looking forward to D&D’s first release of the year. Ravenloft keeps coming back from the dead because the setting still feels fresh and malleable.

You could create endless pocket dimensions exploring real-world anxieties through its Darklords. Characters like Strahd von Zarovich have a timeless quality, and it’s not just because he’s a vampire.

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, our last proper visit to the Domains of Dread, was one of my favorite books to come out of fifth edition. It fine-tuned the existing lore of Ravenloft, and the writing was excellent. It offered plenty of quality advice on running horror in your game. The new subclasses and species weren’t a min-maxers dream, but they were flavorful and more than playable.

Releasing another sourcebook in this style for 5.5e is an idea that’s about as original as doing another Friday the 13th movie. But the caliber of Ravenloft and the track record of Wizards meant my hopes were high.

I’ve now spent time with my review copy, reading closely and tinkering with the new rules. My reaction has been…mixed.

While there are some clear winners and losers among the new subclasses, they’re pretty great overall. There’s some exciting new additions (not you, Reanimator Artificer), and the remasters are clear upgrades. If you’re only playing with 5.5e rules, this is solid stuff.

Similarly, the species are welcome additions to 5.5e. They fill build niches not covered by the overhauled Player’s Handbook, and they’ve had a few quality-of-life tweaks since they first appeared in Van Richten’s Guide.

I’m less impressed by the Dark Gift feats, which are low in power and whose consequences vary drastically in their fairness. The DnD backgrounds‘ choice of Origin feats are disappointing, but I’ll forgive these few sins. These character options are intended to be Ravenloft-specific, so it’s no great loss to power-builders that they lack bite.

One of the major highlights is the new Bastion options. The Horrors Within makes it possible for your Bastion rooms to be haunted. The status might mean your Bastion’s power fails to fire until you’ve cleansed the space. It might also make your Bastion room better at its job, and having multiple haunted rooms can even improve your chances of producing magic items. Plus, it’s great for roleplay.

The Horrors Within has one major upside that Van Richten’s Guide doesn’t, and that’s stat blocks for the Darklords it spotlights. That’s great news – until we compare the new rules with those from existing Darklord stat blocks.

I’ve waxed lyrical about how Strahd has been weakened by the jump to 5.5e, and it seems Lord Soth has gone a similar way. The other 15 stat blocks, while new and shiny, subscribe to the same design school – consistent but uninspiring. We lost a lot by moving away from monster spellcasting and lair actions. If you’re looking to stage an epic final fight, many of these bosses will need their power upped.

The intriguing lore for each Darklord remains, as does the excellent advice for running horror games, but it’s been seriously stripped back. That’s probably to make room for the absurdly gorgeous art in this book (seriously, Dungeons and Dragons has never looked this sexy). Still, it sucks to lose the fluff that made Van Richten’s so compelling to read.

It sucks even more that D&D doesn’t seem to have advanced the lore of its world in any major way. Van Richten’s Guide established new Darklords and tweaked familiar worlds, but The Horrors Within has not continued its trend. The biggest change I noticed was the quiet erasure of the incest subtext in Saidra d’Honaire’s backstory.

We see some vintage Ravenloft concepts (from the Core to Ebonbane) make a comeback. We also get a significant number of brand-new monsters, as well as a healthy dose of Van Richten’s Guide reprints. Welcome back, Boneless, my beloved. We’ll gather what clues we can about the canon from these monsters’ brief descriptions.

However, our only new Darklord is Cthulhu. And considering he appeared in the game’s earliest additions, even that newness is a technicality. Cthulhu’s domain, Innsmouth, has very little to do with the original Lovecraft setting. It’s also not very fleshed-out, with two maps and a handful of key locations described at bullet point length.

The Horrors Within, like pretty much every 5.5e book, suffers from a serious lack of depth. Wizards of the Coast has regularly defended its succinctness, saying this shows how simple it is to prep a D&D game. However, to us readers, this philosophy just looks like stinginess.

Each Domain of Dread comes with one of D&D’s signature new campaign frameworks, as well as a full scenario, complete with battle maps. The material is infuriatingly sparse. In one case, the prompt we get for our campaign planning is “the characters become shipwrecked”. That’s it. That nugget of inspiration is meant to drive three levels of play.

This shallowness isn’t new, but it especially stings with Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, because we have such a similar book to compare it to. It’s so like Van Richten’s Guide that I expect many long-time D&D players to skip this book entirely, because they already own at least half of its contents.

Which is a shame, because The Horrors Within is a pretty good sourcebook. In the isolated domain of 5.5e, it’s an excellent one. But this is the age of the internet. We’re all painfully aware of what came before – heck, Wizards even encouraged us to consider older 5e books “cross-compatible” with its new offerings.

The Horrors Within might be the final nail in the coffin of the idea that these editions are compatible. The future of D&D is, apparently, remaking everything Wizards did in the past 10 years of D&D. The occasional bright idea – an eldritch god, or a Hollow Warden Ranger – sneaks in, but everything else is old, well-trodden ground.

Safety and nostalgia sells. The ouroboros continues to eat its tail. We’re never getting out of Barovia.

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Source: Wargamer