Remedial Ravenloft: The F Game

So, we passed through the last of the D game.  Ravenloft doesn't have an A game.  Barovia and Lamordia get B minuses.  Darkon, Borca and Dorvinia, Richemulot and Dementlieu get Cs, and some of them just barely scraped by there.  Falkovnia is a D that lost a lot of points (it might have been a C) by trying to make it's Darklord Hitler + Vlad Tepes, Verbrek was a D because it was simply lazy, with no effort, just the notion that there has to be a werewolf Domain because Wolfman.  Invidia and Kartakass were Fs that got curved to Ds because the former has conflict baked in and the latter is too odd to just write off.

Along the way, we've already had a series of stunningly insensitive, ignorant and lazy choices about culture, and we're about to jump off from Kartakass into the abyss of Domains that came from other D&D settings (Kartakass also falls in this category, apparently being the immigrant from Forgotten Realms [and if you heard me roll my eyes at the mention of that pile of dogshit, you heard correctly - I despise FR, though it did put me on the path to writing {I read Spellfire when I was 10 and recognized that I could do better}] - Cormyr, which I am guessing is a country run by Bards, or something.  Harkon Lukas wanted to take it over, but got distracted by eating a village and ended up in Barovia, then ran into the mists and got Kartakass as a booby prize.  Yeah, that's his story. *unenthusiastic fake vomit noise*).  So, let's take a look at everything that fell below 60%.

Mordent - Heathcliff, it's me Kathy, come home.  I'm so cold.  Sadly, this is wild windy moor totally lacking in Kate Bushian fun and weirdness.  There's some ruined mansions and some ghosts.  Shit is servicible, and probably deserves a D, but being lazy with ghosts is lazier than being lazy with wolfman, and ghosts require a little more explanation and planning - as in what are ghosts and what do they mean - and the monster manual entry for ghost doesn't do the job, in this case.  Also, putting something English on the mainland is just weird.

Forlorn - It's a Scottish Vampire who is also a Welsh Ghost.  Or a Welsh Vampire who is also a Scottish Ghost.  It's also east of Barovia, because that makes no less cultural sense than Dutch Polish steppe (we'll get there) or Latin speaking Russians (we've been there), I suppose.  The Domain is maybe or maybe not populated.  It shows up as the origin for a couple of dozen redheads who live in southeast Barovia, at least.

Tepest - Conetinental interior Ireland, sort of?  With Celtic gods running the Inquisition?  I don't know.  It's got a lake and a banshee.

Sithicus - It turns out that WotC (publishers of D&D and rights owners of Ravenloft) do own the rights to Darth Vader Expy Lord Soth.  Tracy Hickman considers Soth's creation a creative highlight of his career, apparently, and I weep for the man (more than I would normally for any man named Tracy - that must have been a rough fucking middle school experience) if it's true.  Sithicus is the immigrant from Dragonlance and shoot me.  When White Wolf got hold of doing 3e Ravenloft, they tried to do something interesting with it, but the fact is that the stupid Domain was made for Lord Soth, and then he got yanked back out to Dragonlance to try and shore up the flagging value of that property (seriously, there appears to have been a lot of miscommunication in TSR about where Soth was supposed to be).  Anyway, it's full of elves in constant fugue state, and, okay, now I remember what White Wolf did with it, and it wasn't interesting.  It was just random and racist***.

Souragne - White Zombie as a Domain.  That could be worse, but this was TSR we're talking about, so I am failing it summarily based on the fucked up racist shit that's bound to be in there before I even look.  I know that the Darklord was a Dr. Facilier sort of guy, and the Voudoun loa were shoehorned in there somewhere.  It's supposed to be late 19th century New Orleans, and I have always been of the opinion that, once steam engines come in, the assumptions and choices underlying D&D really start to fall apart.  Also, fuck steampunk.

Valachan - Scream, Blackula, Scream.  Valachan has potential, but not in the hands of the people who held it.  Exploitation and Gothic have a complicated, mostly antagonistic relationship, but you *could* make them work together, if you were smarter than I am.  Also, making the Darklord (one of the handful of Darklords of Color) a transmuted black panther (as in, born a panther, turned into a man, and then into a vampire) is super fucked up.

Hazlan - Another immigrant from Forgotten Realms, this time, the evil magic empire of Thay.  It's Darklord, Hazlik (or maybe he's Hazlan and the Domain is Hazlik, I always forget) got attacked by rivals and had the equivalent of  "Ur a Girl, Lol" tattooed on his head (red wizards tattoo their heads; these tattoos are apparently differentiated by sex).  This has led some folks to speculate that Hazlik is gay, and I endorse that.  In fact, when I figure out what I am going to do with Hazlan, that shit is canon.  Still, there's not a lot to the domain.  I assume they assumed that everyone would be familiar enough with Thay that they could fill shit in on their own.  I'm not, because fuck the Forgotten Realms.  Honestly, I have no idea why I hate that setting so much, but I do.

Nova Vaasa - Erm... I don't know, maybe it's another FR immigrant.  They worship Bane, a diety from the setting (yes, they have a god named Bane.  Okay, that, I think is a good illustration of what I hate about Forgotten Realms).  It's supposed to be a little like Poland (Soviet-satellite Poland, I think) but everyone has Dutch names and the Darklord is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  It's just odd and does not hang together at all.

Har'Akir, Pharizia & Sebua - A cluster of 3.  First one is where the mummy's tomb is located, second one is where some crazy charicature imam is, and the last is just desert.  Boring and racist.  Spin on.

Sri Raji, Wildlands & Saragoss - Another cluster of 3.  Sri Raji is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, just straight out.  Wildlands is sort of Gothic Jungle Book, and Saragoss is a Sargasso of shipwrecks and that's about it.  The Wildlands might be interesting on their own.  Sri Raji needs a LOT OF WORK.  Actually, it needs to be taken out entirely and something else put in its place.

Arak, Bluetspur, The Nightmare Lands & The Shadow Rift - Arak got rolled into Darkon.  It was run by the Drow.  Yeah.  Bluetspur got sent elsewhere in the mists, and it was run by the Mind Flayers.  It's a place that gives you headaches.  That's about it.  The nightmare lands is full of illusions that come out of your brain, maybe some tatooed First Nations people and... well, it was never well developed.  The Shadow Rift kills you if you go in it, so what fucking use is that?  It's full of Shadow Fae, which is to say, it's full of mor 1990s Fantasy tropes than the mortal frame can withstand.

G'Henna - I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.  Like Bluetspur and the Nightmare Lands,  it used to be where the Shadow Rift ended up.  It's telling that these three Domains got thrown out of the setting in favor of a deep dark hole you can't visit.  This was the least boring of the three, what with a beast god made up by a crazy guy who runs a national starvation cult and turns people into patchwork monstrosities.

Sanguina & Vorostok - Endless winter and boring.  Seriously, there's just not much there.  I think this one, and a lot of the ones to follow only exist in modules and in the context of modules.  Information is thin as hell on the ground for any of the ones to follow.

Nidala, The Shadowlands and Shadowborn Manor - Named for the Shadowborn family, whose destiny is entwined with shadows.  I'm pretty sure that's a direct quote.  Actually the manor and the stuff between it and Nidala is uninhabited.  Nidala is a little interesting, a white-knuckle totalitarian regime run by a holy knight whose edicts keep a dragon from killing everyone.  Maybe.

Vechor - MAD KING!  And... um.  MAD I TELL YOU, MAD.

Markovia - The Island of Dr. Moreau, without the common decency for so much as a reacharound.

Zherisia - What happens when you put Jack the Ripper's Whitechapel on top of LV-426.  It sounds cooler than it is.  The LV-426 part is called Timor, to boot, because TSR was full of laziness.

Blaustein - Bluebeard + Blackbeard.  What could possibly go wrong?  Actually, what did go wrong?

Ghastria - Someone needed to tell the guy who wrote this up that Ravenloft already has a Dorian Grey expy (It's Ivan Dilisnya), but no one did...

Grabben Island/Todstein - They're not even trying anymore.  This one comes from the Mystara setting (my favorite of the traditional D&D canonical settings, though that bar is kind of low), with a necromancer who killed all the things.  Tiddly-pom.

Liffe - Run by a bard, who is also a crook.  And... it's an island.

L'ile de Tempeste or something like that - Man-Bat living in a lighthouse.

Isle of Ravens - Some carzy lady who used to talk to birds.  Kimberly Lam did a lot better .

I think there are a couple of others.  There's a village with evil Pinnochio and evil Gepetto and only children otherwise and a pirate ghost who fails to impress who holds domain over one of the seas, but that's about all I can remember.  Also, some Domains just got axed entirely - Arkendale, which was stretch of river with a gambling boat run by a werewolf; Staunton Bluffs, which was... I have no idea.  Boring.  Oh, there's a ghost.  Woo.

Any and all of the above may appear in this project if and as it goes forward, but they may appear very different from their canonical designations.  Some may not appear at all.  Some may appear as kernels of ideas in renamed and completely different Domains.

*** I can't say what they did without explaining an elephant in the room.  Ravenloft had its own set of fictionalized Romani-"inspired" folks called the Vistani, who have not been mentioned in my project thus far, because I am not sure if I can add a fictionalized Romani-inspired people in a way that would be any better than erasure (and I am well aware that if I cannot, this project is totally not worth doing, even as self-indulgent blog twaddle).  Anyway, the Vistani are othered and exoticzed out the whazoo, and while they do not get pinned with child-theft, every other racist stereotype is there.  When White Wolf got the nod to do the Ravenloft setting, they brought their emense cultural sensistivity (Trigger Warning - that link is for a book that contains a slur in the title) to the setting with them.  Half-Vistani is a race**** you can pick for characters in the 3rd Ed version of Ravenloft.  Anyway, to Sithicus.  Since Lord Soth was not available for use in Ravenloft, they first made a werebadger in charge, but then decided to create a Vistani prophecy that made this lady who turns into tears, and does a thing.  Or something.  The idea was never developed.

****Race in D&D terms is species in other terms.  Dwarves and Orcs and shit like that.  The writers protested that Vistani were completely human, but mechanized them as if they were a different species, one that players could not play, except in partial form (crossed with humans.  Well, humans who were not Vistani).  They did this for game mechanics reasons which are too boring to relate, but the upshot was that they othered the Vistani both fictionally and mechanically, and the unfortunate implications of that move cause ripples today***** as number 2 behind Drow blackface in the list of fuckery RPGs have to answer for.

*****Several LARPs I know of list the commonly used and little-recognized in the US as a slur for Roma as a D&D-style race you can play.  At least as of 2006.