The Caliban Chronicles: Nonhuman-Friendly Ravenloft
Posted: Mon May 10, 2021 3:31 am
I'm a distinct oddity amongst Ravenloft fans in that I prefer a more Castlevania-inspired "Dark Fantasy" approach to the setting as a whole. In particular, I've never been a big fan of the humanocentric nature of Ravenloft, or really of TSR's settings as a whole - one of the reasons I took so firmly to the Nentir Vale setting. With Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft almost upon us, and not being extremely impressed with the races on offer in it (I mean, they're not BAD, just a little underwhelming, and only being three of them doesn't help). So, I decided to finally stick my neck out and attempt this project, which will basically be a kind of homebrewed "expanded 5e Ravenloft Player's Handbook", but focusing on non-human player character races for the Ravenloft setting or use in homebrewed dark fantasy worlds.
The focus will be on a combination of collecting and refining ideas, creating and testing PC stats, and refining "lore writeups" for the resultant races, hence why I compare this to the Player's Handbook. I want to get these races looking at least as fleshed out as those.
So, what races are actually going to be present in this project? Well, that's a pretty big part of why I'm looking for some helping hands. I have rough categories of potential races, but not so much races themselves, if that makes sense? Not helping is that some of these would overlap a lot - the Book of Secrets gave rules for Flesh Golem PCs in AD&D, for example, but in 5e, I'd say that's more of a lore adaptation for the Warforged race, for example.
Pseudo-Official Ravenloft Races:
Ravenloft has had other people try to make non-human PC races appropriate to it before. White Wolf's Caliban, masterfully revamped in Quoth the Raven #8, immedaitely springs to mind. This portion of the project would focus on finding those older "suggested" races and updating them to 5th edition. This would be things like calibans, braunchen, broken ones, paka, and dread genasi.
Ravenloft Demihuman Subraces:
We have the iconic D&D non-human races; Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Halfling. But Ravenloft has never really tried to canonically make them "fit" into the setting in the way that the Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance did. In this portion of the project, I'd like to correct that mistake. In particular, I want to explore potential "revamped" races - maybe Sithican elves are no longer just Krynnish High Elves in Ravenloft, but have changed into something else as a result of the lingering essences of Lord Soth, Inza and the nature of the Demiplane of Dread itself.
Adapted Races from Other Settings:
This section could technically be broken into two subsections; pseudo-official races from Dragon that could believably fit into Ravenloft if brought back - for example, the "Deathtouched" family of races from Dragon #313, which consist of the Khatane (dhampir), Ghul (half-ghoul), Ghedan (half-zombie), Fetch (half-ghost) and Mortif (undead ancestry tiefling-equivalent), would be a perfect fit for Ravenloft - and official races from other settings that just would work so well in Ravenloft with some lore touchups.
Of course, in that last part, I'm pretty much only thinking of Warforged and Shifters from Eberron. Shifters make so much sense in Ravenloft with the amount of therianthrope-infested domains. And Warforged? Well, if we ditch the idea that Dread Golems have to be inherently evil, then Warforged would make perfect mechanical basis to build dread golem PCs from - perhaps the downside to being born from the spark of madness and passion is that dread golems are more "alive" than regular golems, which manifests in their increased mortality as well as their increased intelligence. I mean, I can just see a Warforged Storm Herald Barbarian based on Golem from Castlevania: Judgment.
....Well, alright, I also think of the revenants and vryloka from Nentir Vale, too.
Revamped Ravenloft Monsters:
Let's face it; Ravenloft is crawling with near-human monsters who largely exist to be killed, in a slightly more "horror-themed" version of the disposable goblinoids and orcoids of TSR's other settings. But... they don't have to be one-note always hostile creatures. I mean, even the Books of S explored the idea of playable broken ones, flesh golems and werebeasts, whilst Quoth the Raven #19 took the paka, one of the many one-note enemy humanoids, and recast them as a playable race. Tone down the powers as necessary (since you can compensate with class powers), and there's probably a few (monstrous) humanoid races that could be revamped into something playable.
Take the quevari, for example. In and of themselves, they're kind of unimpressive; the only place I really thought they were used well as in the netbook domain "Wayward on the Bone Sands", and I've even seen them denounced as racist. But imagine if you tweaked them, playing around with their "jekyll & hyde: the race" basic starting point? Imagine quevari as a race wrestling with a literal inner demon, a monstrous alter ego that craves blood and suffering - and rather than just embracing a mixture of fatalism and denial and letting others suffer, the quevari actively try to work against it. They keep other people at a distance so they won't be hurt, they take steps to control their dark selves, and some even become adventurers - some to seek a possible cure for themselves if not their race, others under the mentality that if they must be become beasts, then better to sate their bloodlust on the wicked and corrupt. That's an interesting angle, I think, and it's something that offers players something you could only get in Ravenloft.
And there's gotta be other monstrous humanoids who could be similarly fleshed out. What about hebi-no-onna? Or red widows? Vampyres and vorlorgs could make for interesting alternative lore-skins or even subraces to the dhampir? If it's intelligent enough to walk amongst humanoids and to integrate into society effectively, then why does it have to be inherently, irredeemable evil?
Completely Original Stuff:
The last and least important category would be just making up races from scratch. For example, Richemulot, to me, seems just perfect to include a sort of wererat-specific "neo-shifter" race, simply because there's so many wererats interbreeding freely with humans and rats alike; that's got to be doing something to the local bloodlines, even before you take the Gothic tropes into account!
So... yeah. Long story short, I feel that there is a lot of untapped potential for non-human PC races in Ravenloft, and I'd like to try and explore that unexploited niche, hopefully to the extent I can get something meaty put together for Quoth the Raven this year. Would anyone be interested in giving me a hand? Because, I'm afraid I really don't know where to really begin tackling this on my own, not having anybody I can turn to for help with this in real life.
The focus will be on a combination of collecting and refining ideas, creating and testing PC stats, and refining "lore writeups" for the resultant races, hence why I compare this to the Player's Handbook. I want to get these races looking at least as fleshed out as those.
So, what races are actually going to be present in this project? Well, that's a pretty big part of why I'm looking for some helping hands. I have rough categories of potential races, but not so much races themselves, if that makes sense? Not helping is that some of these would overlap a lot - the Book of Secrets gave rules for Flesh Golem PCs in AD&D, for example, but in 5e, I'd say that's more of a lore adaptation for the Warforged race, for example.
Pseudo-Official Ravenloft Races:
Ravenloft has had other people try to make non-human PC races appropriate to it before. White Wolf's Caliban, masterfully revamped in Quoth the Raven #8, immedaitely springs to mind. This portion of the project would focus on finding those older "suggested" races and updating them to 5th edition. This would be things like calibans, braunchen, broken ones, paka, and dread genasi.
Ravenloft Demihuman Subraces:
We have the iconic D&D non-human races; Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Halfling. But Ravenloft has never really tried to canonically make them "fit" into the setting in the way that the Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance did. In this portion of the project, I'd like to correct that mistake. In particular, I want to explore potential "revamped" races - maybe Sithican elves are no longer just Krynnish High Elves in Ravenloft, but have changed into something else as a result of the lingering essences of Lord Soth, Inza and the nature of the Demiplane of Dread itself.
Adapted Races from Other Settings:
This section could technically be broken into two subsections; pseudo-official races from Dragon that could believably fit into Ravenloft if brought back - for example, the "Deathtouched" family of races from Dragon #313, which consist of the Khatane (dhampir), Ghul (half-ghoul), Ghedan (half-zombie), Fetch (half-ghost) and Mortif (undead ancestry tiefling-equivalent), would be a perfect fit for Ravenloft - and official races from other settings that just would work so well in Ravenloft with some lore touchups.
Of course, in that last part, I'm pretty much only thinking of Warforged and Shifters from Eberron. Shifters make so much sense in Ravenloft with the amount of therianthrope-infested domains. And Warforged? Well, if we ditch the idea that Dread Golems have to be inherently evil, then Warforged would make perfect mechanical basis to build dread golem PCs from - perhaps the downside to being born from the spark of madness and passion is that dread golems are more "alive" than regular golems, which manifests in their increased mortality as well as their increased intelligence. I mean, I can just see a Warforged Storm Herald Barbarian based on Golem from Castlevania: Judgment.
....Well, alright, I also think of the revenants and vryloka from Nentir Vale, too.
Revamped Ravenloft Monsters:
Let's face it; Ravenloft is crawling with near-human monsters who largely exist to be killed, in a slightly more "horror-themed" version of the disposable goblinoids and orcoids of TSR's other settings. But... they don't have to be one-note always hostile creatures. I mean, even the Books of S explored the idea of playable broken ones, flesh golems and werebeasts, whilst Quoth the Raven #19 took the paka, one of the many one-note enemy humanoids, and recast them as a playable race. Tone down the powers as necessary (since you can compensate with class powers), and there's probably a few (monstrous) humanoid races that could be revamped into something playable.
Take the quevari, for example. In and of themselves, they're kind of unimpressive; the only place I really thought they were used well as in the netbook domain "Wayward on the Bone Sands", and I've even seen them denounced as racist. But imagine if you tweaked them, playing around with their "jekyll & hyde: the race" basic starting point? Imagine quevari as a race wrestling with a literal inner demon, a monstrous alter ego that craves blood and suffering - and rather than just embracing a mixture of fatalism and denial and letting others suffer, the quevari actively try to work against it. They keep other people at a distance so they won't be hurt, they take steps to control their dark selves, and some even become adventurers - some to seek a possible cure for themselves if not their race, others under the mentality that if they must be become beasts, then better to sate their bloodlust on the wicked and corrupt. That's an interesting angle, I think, and it's something that offers players something you could only get in Ravenloft.
And there's gotta be other monstrous humanoids who could be similarly fleshed out. What about hebi-no-onna? Or red widows? Vampyres and vorlorgs could make for interesting alternative lore-skins or even subraces to the dhampir? If it's intelligent enough to walk amongst humanoids and to integrate into society effectively, then why does it have to be inherently, irredeemable evil?
Completely Original Stuff:
The last and least important category would be just making up races from scratch. For example, Richemulot, to me, seems just perfect to include a sort of wererat-specific "neo-shifter" race, simply because there's so many wererats interbreeding freely with humans and rats alike; that's got to be doing something to the local bloodlines, even before you take the Gothic tropes into account!
So... yeah. Long story short, I feel that there is a lot of untapped potential for non-human PC races in Ravenloft, and I'd like to try and explore that unexploited niche, hopefully to the extent I can get something meaty put together for Quoth the Raven this year. Would anyone be interested in giving me a hand? Because, I'm afraid I really don't know where to really begin tackling this on my own, not having anybody I can turn to for help with this in real life.