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chuckroI picked up the the Ravenloft Dungeon Master's Guide at I-Con for an exhorbitant $5; it's easily worth $20. (Though the cover price of $35 is still a little problematic for me, because I'm cheap.) More's the point, it's great; I'm really impressed. If you ever had an interest in running Ravenloft in any edition (or Call of Cthulhu, actually--a lot of the horror tropes are just as applicable), you'll want a copy of this book.
The book includes extensive notes on setting mood, creating memorable NPCs (including suggestions for accents and affectations), using cutscenes effectively, and using curses and cursed items effectively. There are plot hooks galore, including a short list of possible plots in each sample setting description. They give a new way of calculating party level (to compare with encounter level) and give extensive suggestions on scaling difficulty levels of encounters. They give entensive sugggestions on creating memorable villians, focusing on their motivations and role in a plot with only suggestions as to their likely stats. There's an entire chapter dedicated to tarokka decks and using prophecy in games.
If there's any weakness to the book, it's that the prestige classes and psionics/spellcasting crunch (basically, the rules of how they're changed in Ravenloft) are pretty much all just references to the Ravenloft PHB as "see this section, it's the same". Though the details they're clear about make sense to me as things to keep the mood, mostly summed up as four rules: 1. You can't detect alignments, 2. You can't cross closed domain borders, 3. Summoned/conjured/companion creatures are always evil and always have a chance of trying to kill you, and 4. You can't escape Ravenloft. Which are all both important to the mood of the setting and consistant with the rules of the cosmology.
D&D is is a game of killing things and taking their stuff, and 3.5E specifically tends to be overwhelmed by the idea that players should be able to read and know everything (out-of-character) and characters should have a video game style ability to destroy everything in their path, whether normally or through rules abuse. This book is very good at making clear that if you're playing in Ravenloft, you're playing a horror game, where the rules are different. The Dark Powers have no stats and cannot be killed. The demiplane of dread cannot be escaped until it decides you're allowed to leave. And picking up a cursed item means much more than just, "Well, I have enough CON points to last until you cast Remove Curse."
Makes me want to run a horror campaign. That bodes poorly, given that it wasn't at all the intended mood for the current one.
The book includes extensive notes on setting mood, creating memorable NPCs (including suggestions for accents and affectations), using cutscenes effectively, and using curses and cursed items effectively. There are plot hooks galore, including a short list of possible plots in each sample setting description. They give a new way of calculating party level (to compare with encounter level) and give extensive suggestions on scaling difficulty levels of encounters. They give entensive sugggestions on creating memorable villians, focusing on their motivations and role in a plot with only suggestions as to their likely stats. There's an entire chapter dedicated to tarokka decks and using prophecy in games.
If there's any weakness to the book, it's that the prestige classes and psionics/spellcasting crunch (basically, the rules of how they're changed in Ravenloft) are pretty much all just references to the Ravenloft PHB as "see this section, it's the same". Though the details they're clear about make sense to me as things to keep the mood, mostly summed up as four rules: 1. You can't detect alignments, 2. You can't cross closed domain borders, 3. Summoned/conjured/companion creatures are always evil and always have a chance of trying to kill you, and 4. You can't escape Ravenloft. Which are all both important to the mood of the setting and consistant with the rules of the cosmology.
D&D is is a game of killing things and taking their stuff, and 3.5E specifically tends to be overwhelmed by the idea that players should be able to read and know everything (out-of-character) and characters should have a video game style ability to destroy everything in their path, whether normally or through rules abuse. This book is very good at making clear that if you're playing in Ravenloft, you're playing a horror game, where the rules are different. The Dark Powers have no stats and cannot be killed. The demiplane of dread cannot be escaped until it decides you're allowed to leave. And picking up a cursed item means much more than just, "Well, I have enough CON points to last until you cast Remove Curse."
Makes me want to run a horror campaign. That bodes poorly, given that it wasn't at all the intended mood for the current one.
