Café de Nuit

The sun has to come up for anyone to give a darn. Domains like Cavitius missed this point and that's why they always felt out of place to me. A domain like Nosos is horrifying BECAUSE the natural world is being destroyed in real time. There has to be goodness for Gothic evil to make sense. The ...

When Domains of Dread introduced the Half-Vistani as a playable race for AD&D 2nd edition, it mentions there are also Elf/Vistani hybrids, called "Giamarga" to the Vistani/Human's' "Giamorgo". However, it also said that players should not be allowed to play them. But, years later, TSR did throw them ...

Since the ArcaneWeirdo asked me for this elsewhere, and I don't think they ever saw my reply, my two cents on the topic...

While I do get where you're coming from, aberration PCs are very hard to make work. For one, there's not much in the way of saner and more relatable species - flumphs, 5e's ...

When Domains of Dread, the third and final iteration of the Ravenloft setting for AD&D, was released, one of the things that made it unique compared to its Black Box and Red Box precursors (besides the time skip and geography reworking) was its focus on playing native-born Player Characters, rather ...

Speedwagon and I are doing a new project expanding the lore on Bluetspur.
One of my core ideas for this project is that as the biggest problem with Bluetspur is that most of the domain is too inhospitable to humanoids for them to have the slimmest chance of surviving a campaign there, the logical ...

TheArcaneWeirdo wrote: Fri Jul 17, 2026 8:24 am Of course, of course. I don't underestimate the creative work you had to do.
Actually, I'd like some advice in that regard. Can I message you in private?

What's on your mind?

Oh... I really thought it was original.
Were all the races in your article conversions of existing stuff, or were there inventions of your own?


All conversions, in that they were all ideas that originally appeared in either official Ravenloft materials or previous Ravenloft netbooks. The ...

To be clear, I didn't make up the name "Deathtouched" out of nowhere. The term was taken from Dragon #313, which used the term as part of its article "Born of Death", which introduced four new Half-Race monster templates (the Half-Ghoul "Ghul", the Half-Zombie "Ghedan", the Half-Ghost "Fetch" and ...

The simplest explanation? The Vistani view succumbing to static burn as such a horrible fate that a quick death is seen as merciful by comparison. If you read between the lines in the Guide to the Vistani and, frankly, every depiction of them in actual Ravenloft lore... there's an elitist streak to ...

Honestly, I've never devoted myself to figuring out how to make it work, but there's a LOT of stuff from the New World/Chronicles of Darkness setting I'd love to port into Ravenloft. The vampire clans & bloodlines are, frankly, a lot more flexible than most of TSR's original vampire varieties were ...

Long story short, I'm an old fan of a manga series called "Ranma 1/2", which features several characters who fell afoul of an enchanted valley. By falling into a spring in this valley, a person is cursed to physically transform into the creature that cursed that specific spring when it drowned in ...

Hello, I'm the author of this article.

I wrote that summer of 2003, and before the netbook was released on Halloween, RL 3e came out with a very similar idea.

Great minds think alike :)

This phenomena is explicitly likened to ethereal resonance in the article, and I was wondering if I could ...

Man, am I glad to hear that this isn't just me. It's really been annoying...

I was just going through the 2003 issue of the Undead Sea Scrolls, specifically the article "The Shadow Curtain", which talks about integrating the 3e Plane of Shadow into Ravenloft's internal cosmology. One of the more interesting elements in the article are "shadow tokens", which are strange ...

I'm deciding if I should or shouldn't cover the brand new races and subclasses from the 2025 remake of Grim Hollow and from the Last Citadel, a low magic zombie apocalypse dark fantasy setting, for this project as well, but for now, let's talk about the Guide to Drakkenheim...

Apothecary
The ...