I have so many horror RPGs that I have tools for just about any type of horror game I ever want to run. I have not even gotten into doing things like adding WitchCraft's Book of Hod to Ravenloft (and I have been doing it for years) or even getting into the material from World of Darkness or Call of Cthulhu RPGs.
WitchCraft, World of Darkness, and Call of Cthulhu are all fantastic games. Each one has a different approach to their own types of horror. If I am fighting against the cosmic horrors then CoC is my game. If I want to explore the horrors of existence within myself as a monster tr something that is no longer truly human then WoD. If I want a mixture of the two with a grounding in philosophies of the world as all being true then WitchCraft/Armageddon is my game of choice. This is only three games. I can grab from Chill, Kult, Little Fears, and more. All are great. All are fun. Not every one of them is great for a Ravenloft game.
So. Let's build another Darklord like I did last week with Darlessa. I am not going to go into the same level of detail as I did with her. Instead, I am going to use some other horror sources to do my heavy lifting. NOW to be sure, I don't NEED to add anything to Ravenloft for me to use it. Everything I am doing here I could do from scratch from the material in Chapter 2 of VRGtR. I happen to also have all these other books with great ideas.
I have this thing that happens with all my campaigns. I collect a lot of data, materials, products whatever for a campaign. I pick, I choose, I write, I rewrite and in the end, I get something that is often not at all exactly like what I wanted, but that is great really. But I also have this stack of other "Stuff" that I didn't use but is still compelling to me. My campaign "Ogre Battle" grew out of my old "Shadow War" for example. I ran this huge war that worked as a prequel to this big AD&D campaign. The Second Campaign grew right out of Come Endless Darkness. Right now my big campaign taking a lot of my creative energy is War of the Witch Queens. I have barely got into it (characters are 3rd level) and I already have leftovers and plot threads that have grown larger than the campaign can handle.
Before I pull that into this conversation let me shift gears and talk about Pathfinder.
Pathfinder is the biggest alternative to D&D out there. They gained a lot of traction in the 3e days and boomed in the 4e days as the go-to choice for D&D-like games. I have a lot of really cool, really well-written Pathfinder books. None of them are currently in use because I am not currently playing Pathfinder.
For Ravenloft, the best Pathfinder book you can get is Pathfinder Horror Adventures. I reviewed this book a while back and there is a lot overlap between what this book does and what Ravenloft does. The Pathfinder book is more "Domain agnostic" so it has more room for things like new classes and spells. The Pathfinder book also covers sanity, fear, and madness. I mentioned in my overview of Ravenloft that I usually don't like how most games do "madness." What they do here works well, for Pathfinder, I am not sure how it would work for D&D 5. I do like Pathfinder's approach to Darklords in their Dread Lords. I am going to keep this in mind for the next bit.
Note: The Horrific Inspirations on pages 252 to 253 in Horror Adventures covers movies, television, and print for the same types of Horror Genres found in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.
Land of the Ice and Snow
Pathfinder forever gets a special place in my heart because it gave me Irrisen, the land of the Witch Queens. Home to the Daughters of Baba Yaga and has included such notables as Tasha/Tashana/Iggwilv. I have a bunch of material from the Winter Witch Queen adventure path from Pathfinder and other books. I love the idea of Winter Witches, both in fiction and history. If I am going to pull in some Pathfinder bits from various books then why not build a Dark Domain that is Pathfinder based.
So. Let's do this. Irrisen is a land ruled by a Witch Queen and she gets 100 years to rule until Baba Yaga comes in a pulls her out. There have been a few that rebelled and try to go longer and there is always a rivalry between the various Daughters of Baba Yaga over who will get to rule. Queen Elvanna is a good example. There is a lot of potential her then for someone to be a little more pissed off and try to kill her rivals. Now. That in of itself is not a good enough reason to drag someone into the mists. In fact, Baba Yaga encourages such machinations to guarantee the strongest one will rule. It's hard to imagine then what a Witch Queen would need to do to get the mists' attention. One would have to assume a crime or act so vile that mists have to take notice.
Let's take an easy example. I'll start with Elvanna, but I don't have to. Let's just say any Winter Witch Queen. We don't know what happens to these queens when Baba Yaga is done with them. Tashanna is the only we do know about, but she has been banned from returning to Golarion. We can assume that Grandmother Bony Legs doesn't let them retire to a beach home in Florida.
When Elvanna was defeated let's say she came up with a plan, if she could not rule Irrisen then no one could. She whips up a ritual to destroy the whole land in a winter that even the inhabitants of Irrisen would fear. She started her ritual managed to wipe out a village or two, the key here is that people important to Baba Yaga have been killed. Either the mists open up to grab her OR maybe Baba Yaga has the power to summon them. One thing is for certain. She killed her own sister, who was going to be the next Queen. Her name likely ends in "-anna."
I would steal some ideas from the 4e adventure Winter of the Witch. I could even use Koliada the Winter Witch. I did 5e stats for her, but I really don't need stats. I also have access to the Snow Queen a Winter Fey creature from Kobold Press' Tome of Beasts for 5e.
If it looks like I am going for evil Elsa, then you would be right. Well. Elsa actually was evil before Disney got to her.
The idea with this Domain is to use the rules presented in Pathfinder Horror Adventures to get my ideas and then the rules from Ravenloft Chapter 2 to detail them.
I do admit, I am likely to steal some ideas from the old Domain of Vorostokov from the 2nd Ed Darklords book. The Darklord of that land, Zolnik, was not all that interesting as a Darklord, but the land was.
Think of a landlocked in an endless deadly winter. Everyone is poor, miserable, cold and the only source of food is what the hunters can bring in. I would call it Ikkesen. Combining the Norwegian word for "not" (Ikke) and Irrisen.
The Dark Domain (5e) / Realm (Pathfinder) is one of Dark Fantasy, but it is also really Survival Horror and just enough Folk Horror to keep you on your toes. Ikkesen rarely gets above sub-zero temps and never above freezing. It is a dark land of endless winter. Wolves of the worst sort roam the woods. There are skinwalkers, wendigos, undead and worst things. It is what happens if Ragnarök occurred and the Frost Giants won.
I will detail this one some more, but I am also waiting to see what I have leftover from War of the Witch Queens.
