What is ravenloft? What are Darklords?

[NecroDancer]

From what I managed to peice together when a person does horrible things they are brought to ravenloft where they are given their own pocket dimension. In this pocket dimension they have complete control but are tormented by the "dark powers" with some form of poetic justice.

Is this correct? Could you give me some examples of Darklords and their realms.

[the_david]

I know next to nothing about the Ravenloft campaign setting, but I do own the original adventure. (The campaign setting came some ten years later, I think.)

I think you've written a very good synopsis for as far as I can tell.

Strahd von Zarovich would be the most famous example. His realm is known as Barovia and is not-eastern Europe with not-gypsies. There's a mostly empty village and a castle that is taller than any castle in our world. (That would be castle Ravenloft.) Barovia is surrounded by a strange mist. Anyone who inhales the mist finds that it is impossible to leave Barovia without choking to death.
Strahd is a vampire wizard who pines for his long lost love who reincarnates every now and then. Unfortunately, this girl isn't in love with Strahd but with his brother! Who is dead...

So yeah, that would be the source for the whole demiplane and torment stuff comes from.

[Mechalich]

Oh dear, this question prompts a rather deep dive in 2e AD&D lore.

1. Ravenloft is also known as the Demiplane of Dread. It is a demiplane that is very large and is canonically sitting somewhere in the Ethereal Plane - except planar travel is explicitly one way. If you slam into the planar boundary on the ethereal by mistake, congratulations, you're now in Ravenloft and cannot leave.

2. Ravenloft is controlled by nebulous 'dark powers' which are strongly implied to be some sort of manifested intelligence from the Negative Energy Plane engaged in a long term project to use their weird demiplane creation to obliterate the extant multiverse somehow, but in practice it's just supposed to be a horror setting for D&D.

3. The actual zone of Ravenloft is composed of sub-realms, each with a master who was chosen by the dark powers and had their realm created accordingly to torment them specifically. So its a landscape composed of funky puzzle-pieces who can be moved around as the dark powers create new realms and/or old realms are destroyed for various reasons (like the internal publisher infighting that led to Lord Soth of Dragonlance fame getting a realm and then getting yanked back out again).

4. Everyone else stuck in the setting is basically fodder for the games of the dark powers and their chosen playthings the realm lords and they explicitly cannot ever win and get shackled with an insanity system and a bunch of other mechanisms designed to make horror happen in D&D.

[Zaydos]

Well one this should probably be in Roleplaying Games not Homebrew.

As for examples... let me go find my domains of dread (note Domains of Dread is not the original campaign setting but one of the first books to deal with natives as PCs which actually goes against the implications in the original campaign setting that except for the Darklords everyone native to Ravenloft might just be sort of quasi-real phantoms).

First off we have the 2nd most important Darklord (Strahd is the most important) Vecna Azalin who is missing from the book. Iirc though he was pretty much Vecna (powerful lich, tried to become a god, was betrayed), got destroyed, found himself in Barovia, worked for Strahd for a while, then became a darklord in his own right, ruled Darkon until he tried to escape with some negative energy plane fueled superweapon. He was cursed so he couldn't learn new spells.


Then we have:

Adam: i.e. Frankenstein's monster, he shares his curse with Dr Not-Frankenstein (Victor Mordenheim), except when Adam murdered Victor's wife and kidnapped their adopted daughter they got pulled into the mists of Ravenloft and Adam became a darklord. Adam and Victor are bound and actually feel each others' pain. Except in this Victor actually raised Adam who had a bit of an Oedipal thing and was given life by the gods just to cause his atheist creator pain. Oh and Victor occasionally murders women in their sleep to use their bodies to keep his mostly dead wife alive.

Dominic D'Honaire: The grandson of a mesmerist whose homeland became part of Ravenloft when he was a kid. He became a mesmerist, got his kicks causing people to fight and suffer, used his powers to convince his dad to brave the mists, and became a darklord. He was curse so that the deeper an emotional bond he forms with a woman the more repulsive and hideous she finds him. This caused him to murder his first wife.

Vlad Drakov: Dracula! I mean... a brilliant and ruthless mercenary commander who worked for whoever paid most. Brutal and vicious (worked primarily for Evil Fanatics) and ended up in Darkon. Decided to declare war on Vecna Azalin without knowing who Azalin was. Impaled a bunch of people, and relaxed while watching them writhe in pain. Then they reanimated as zombies, the undead swarmed over him and his men, and he was forced to flee into the mists and became a darklord. Dude wants to impress powerful lords, but Azalin is so powerful as to laugh him off and the others tend to be women or fops and Drakov doesn't care about them. He also can't conquer anywhere no matter how much he tries.

Just the first 3 in the book.

[Kish]

From what I managed to peice together when a person does horrible things they are brought to ravenloft where they are given their own pocket dimension. In this pocket dimension they have complete control but are tormented by the "dark powers" with some form of poetic justice.

Is this correct? Could you give me some examples of Darklords and their realms.

Lots of people do horrible things and aren't brought to the Ravenloft demiplane, but every darklord is utterly, irredeemably evil. Each is nearly omnipotent in their own domain, and nearly all have the power to close the borders of their domain so no one can enter or leave, but each also has a curse that ensures they can never have what they want most, and none can leave their domains. A lich who desires knowledge of magic above all is unable to learn any more magic than he knew when he became a darklord, including gaining XP; a warlord who wants his neighbors to fear and respect him finds his efforts to invade neighboring domains simply make him look ridiculous; someone who spent her pre-darklord life justifying her own selfish, ruthless cruelty with the belief that everyone was ultimately just as bad as she was rules over a domain where no one can deceive themselves, her least of all; a werewolf priest who preaches hatred of humans finds any strong emotion forces him into his human form.

The mysterious and speculative "dark powers" maintain Ravenloft. They don't tempt anyone to do evil, they merely respond to freely chosen evil. However, they aren't exactly benign either. Notably, the fact that their "poetic justice" guarantees a lot of innocent people are at the mercy of incredibly vile and thoroughly angry overlords doesn't seem to matter to them, and they make no efforts to prevent the darklords from abusing their subjects--unless, of course, a given darklord's primary desire is to hurt other people.

[NecroDancer]

Thanks for the info, I'm going to move this thread to "roleplaying"

[Name1]

The Darklords are essentially everyone who get's drawn into the Demiplane of Dread, or at least it's the final state of everyone who ends up there and can't escape. Until now, there are two known escapees: One of the was Vecna (yes, that Vecna) who was able to overpower the Dark Powers. The other one... I don't remember his name, but he went on to accept his puishment and decided to have fun with his near omnipotence instead, which got him booted because it bored the Dark Powers.

Every Darklord is, by his very nature, Evil. Mostly they become cruel and evil for the simplest reason, often things others get for free and they have to take and then get punished. Ravenloft is the ultimate "life sucks, deal with it, 'cause trying to change it will only make it worse"-plane.

As an (short and not fleshed out) example for a Darklord: "Smithy Johnson was a street child. One day, after another night of hunger, he couldn't take it anymore and stole a loaf of bread from a merchant, because he couldn't afford to buy it. As he was discovered, he went into the fog surrounding the city that day and was never seen again. Today, Smithy resides in Ravenloft. His Demiplane consists entirely of gold, as that is what his touch turns everything into. He looks like an extremely thin, frail humanoid, dressed in expensive robes and decorated with all sorts of jewelry. Every morning at sunrise, his eternal hunger claims his life, only for him to return to life at the end of the day, at the brink of starvation."

[Platinius]

It is hell, but it is not your hell. The Darklords? They are the actual prisoners and The Dark Powers are the jailer. And They like it when you do bad things, they reward it and They enjoy seeing you slowly turning yourself into a corrupted and twisted mockery of your former self.