Café de Nuit

I'm looking at expanding my collection of D20 materials over the next year and am curious as to which D20 books would be good at evoking inspiration and porting mechanics (races, classes, feats, etc.) into a Ravenloft game.

There have been a few old threads about this already: Recommended 3/3.5 material, and Recommendations of non-WoTC books for RL.

Here are a few old threads about d20 sales, in which you will find some discussion of what's good for Ravenloft:
Green Ronin d20 sale (some of these are still availabel at paizo for real cheap! Can't beat $2 for a real book, it's cheaper than most pdfs!)
Goodman games 3E pdf sale

The review section on this site has a subactegory of "Wizards of the Coast Books" and "Other D20 books" which should yield a few interesting hints.

Here are two threads about Midnight: D20 Midnight, and Ravenloft vs midnight.

And here's a great thread on ENworld about little known d20 gems and another one on the top100 3E era books though not necessarily pertaining to Ravenloft.

And now for something new:

Take a look at Mystic Eyes Games' Hunt the Rise of Evil line. I bought the adventure collection and 2 monster books from them recently which are very flavourful. Here are two reviews: Of Places Most Foul, D20 NIGHTMARES & DREAMS II: Creature Collection. The Loch Durnan adventures look very interesting too and very Ravenloftish. They also have a line called Foul Locales. I havn't gotten my hands on their Foul Locales: Urban Blight yet, but it sure comes with high recommendations. Most of these are available for very cheap on ebay or amazon marketplace.

I am also very interested in the three Lords of the Night books by Bottled Imp Games. Here are some reviews: LotN: Zombies, LotN Vampires, LotN Liches.

My recommendations:

Sourcebook: "Heroes of Horror", by Wizbro.
Not very consistent, but came in surprisingly handy.

Setting Material: "Thieves World d20", by Green Ronin. Very close to my personal feel of Ravenloft, and splendid for any form of low-magic campaign.

Adventure: "The Doom of Listonshire", by Ari Marmell.
An epic tale with many very pictoresque moments for the party;
not a "Gothic" adventure, but obviously written in the spirit of the old 2e adventures.

Rafael wrote:Adventure: "The Doom of Listonshire", by Ari Marmell.
An epic tale with many very pictoresque moments for the party;
not a "Gothic" adventure, but obviously written in the spirit of the old 2e adventures.

1e even. That's Necromancer Games for you. 3rd Edition Rules, 1st Edition Feel. NG has a lot of other nice products out there.

As for porting mechanics (races classes and feats), all the WotC books have something which you can bring to RL. The Complete xxx, Races of xxx, Unearthed Arcana, PHB II, DMG2, Cityscape, Expanded Psionic Handbook and Psionic handboook and even the (Frostfell, Sandstorm), all have much material that you can use. There were a few articles in the netbooks about how to use some of the prestige classes from the Complet books and the old 3.0 splatbooks.

The environment books (Frostburn, Sandstorm, Stormwrack) all can be used in RL. For example NeoTiamat used Sandstorm for his Akiri campaign.

Dion has put out a very nice Ravenloft netbook: Shadow and Steel: Weapons of Legacy in Ravenloft, which is available at the Midway Haven. It contains new Weapons of Legacy for Ravenloft as well as tips how to use the rules and weapons from WotC Weapons of Legacy book in RL. It does not duplicate the rules for WoL, so you need access to that book too.

The Monster Manuals and monster from other books can be adapted, see the Teeny Tiny Tales of Terror threads in this forum. Libris Mortis has more info on undead though i would prefer VRGttWD, Lords of Madness can be used for more material on the Mindflayers and/or other Aberrations.

Book of Vile Darkness, and to a lesser extent Book of Exalted Deeds have material on fiends and angels that can be made good use of in RL.

Ghostwalk might be interesting for playing undead in Necropolis.

Heroes of Horror stands out because it is more fitting thematically for Ravenloft. But i find lots of stuff in the others too.

Hollowfaust: City of Necromancers could be a very interesting resource for campaigns in Necropolis. Here's a review

I tended to use a ton of books in my campaigns, but I think the single most helpful one is Libris Mortis. It has tons of new undead (I'm particularly fond of Skirrs and Hulking Corpses), as well as dozens of variant undead, including the Ravenloft classics, vampires, ghosts, zombies, etc.

I found Tome of Horrors to be pretty handy, it converted a lot of old 1st edition monsters to 3rd edition (creatures like the Drelb and Mihstu work well in Ravenloft).

Bluebomber4evr wrote:I found Tome of Horrors to be pretty handy, it converted a lot of old 1st edition monsters to 3rd edition (creatures like the Drelb and Mihstu work well in Ravenloft).

DRELB!!!!

Haunting custodian!