Rotwald is a rustic domain, and as far as I can tell has no relation to the town of the same name from Ravenloft’s pre-5th Edition Valachan. Western Rotwald is home to open plains and villages of friendly yet magic-intolerant locals, with Lake Tranen in the center providing rivers that serve as the lifeline for civilization. The Rotwald Forest occupies the east, a dangerous place full of all kinds of monsters that nobody ventures into unless they have a death wish. The monsters of the forest are a persistent danger to the western villages, and finding ways to guard against their incursions dominates day-to-day life, be it practical defenses such as walls or word-of-mouth superstitions that may or may not work. The Nordsilber Mine is just as important as the river, for it is used both to mint currency and supply the population with silver weaponry. No one person owns the mine, as a democratic council of miners sees to its operation.
The inhabitants of the domain are known as Gromanites, who have a common creation story of an ancestor named Gromund who fathered 30 sons and 30 daughters, all of whom were kidnapped by monsters before their father rescued them by slaying them all. Buying his children enough time to escape, they scattered across the land, becoming the people of Rotwald today. He is now worshipped as a mortal saint reflecting lofty ideals such as community, protecting the innocent, and accepting others. Reflecting their ancestor, polyamory and extended family units are common, and family members are defined as “who sits with me by the fire” in addition to biological relations.
All sorts of monsters can be found in Rotwald, from blights to hags to werewolves and more. Even many mundane animals in the forest are often giant-sized dire versions. We do have a new stat block for a Living Curse, a CR 4 undead that has a special possession attack that inhabits a creature and imposes upon them the effects of a Bestow Curse (and a list of other folkloric curses) for those so possessed. There is a foul cave known as the Spawning Pit in the easternmost reaches of Rotwald Forest, continually creating monsters so that the darklords and other monster hunters in the domain face an endless war.
Rotwald has two darklords, the siblings Hans and Margrit Jager. They were born to a family of woodsmen hunters, the survivors of a vicious attack by hags and their monstrous minions. Hans and Margrit traveled from town to town, using their talents to scrape by as orphans. When they got old enough, they returned to their homeland to kill the hags and their servants. Unsatisfied, Hans and Margrit swore that “all monsters must die” and continued plying their new trade as monster hunters. Eventually, they came to a village that had positive relations with a group of mages known as the White Witches. Seeing no difference between hags and rustic spellcasters in general, the Jager siblings ventured into the woods and slaughtered them. This news soon got back to the village, and an angry mob was formed to bring them to justice. Hans and Margrit killed the mob, and also everyone else in the village, believing them to be willing associates of monsters. Even worse, they found themselves enjoying ending so many lives.
So the Dark Powers gave them a domain of their own, where they can hunt all the monsters they want. While the siblings are unknown to the populace at large, only coming into settlements to replace and repair tools and weapons, they are so blinded by bloodlust and hate that they cannot tell the difference between monsters and non-monsters. And so they have claimed the lives of many innocents.
Hans and Margrit Jager have their own unique stat blocks, but what they share in common is that they’re both CR 11 human Rangers. They have a variety of proficient skills, ranger spells, are adept at both melee and ranged combat, as well as Legendary Resistance and Actions along with having darkvision, regeneration, and immunity to exhaustion to make them better hunters. Margrit has a higher Strength score and favors wading into the thick of things, while Hans fights with a heavy crossbow and prefers hit and run sniping tactics.
Thoughts: I don’t have any strong opinions on Rotwald. While I do get the Jager sibling’s curse and the futility of their endless war, the Spawning Pit’s creations feel like the bigger threat to the domain’s people. Typically, the darklord is the main threat or primary cause of the land’s woes, so while it is their prison and they don’t care about innocent casualties, their crusade feels more like a side problem than the main one.
Scelus is one of our two Industrial-era domains, a sprawling urban hell of factories, crowded tenements, polluted air and rivers, and warring crime syndicates who effectively run the government. The reigning aristocracy and business magnates are either crime lords themselves or allied with them, and the common folk suffer lives of sickness and drudgery. The omnipresent pollution has led to the festering of Scum, sludge-like amoeboid colonies infused with demonic magic that can spawn various ooze monsters. The Scum also corrupts people living near it over time, causing them to grow progressively more violent, insane, and sadistic. A drug known as dross can be brewed using Scum as an ingredient, which grants temporary hits points and immunity to the charmed and frightened condition as benefits, but side effects make it harder to regain hit points naturally, addiction where the user is unable to feel anything without getting high on the drug, and cannot rid themselves of Scum corruption without magical healing.
Scelus is a port city, surrounded by the ocean to the south and mountains to the north. It is divided into four districts, each ruled over by a major crime syndicate. Brineside is the docks and run by the Canners, responsible for supplying much of the city’s food and whose factories are full of indentured servants. Downfall was the former slum known as Pinewood that got burned down 10 years ago, and is made up of ruins inhabited by salvagers. The Raze reigns here, burglars and fences who are willing to do virtually anything for the right price. Greylock Heights is home to the city’s upper class, and a secret society of drug-dealing occultists known as the Circle entered into warlock pacts with entities known as the Dark Ones. They regularly kidnap people to offer up as sacrifices to their patrons, and they’ve recently found ways to make contact with the darklords of other domains. Ironskin Hold is a smoggy neighborhood in the mountains, home to the city’s mining industries. The Aurumite syndicate run the city’s mines, banks, and smithies, and has a monopoly over protective gas masks that they use to ensure the loyalty of their citizens.
Scelus’ various crime lords have fantasy and supernatural angles to them. The Raze’s upper leadership is actually one doppelganger assuming multiple identities, the Aurumites are ruled by a gold dragon corrupted into evil by Scum, and the Circle is run by a nothic who was a former wizard stripped of his power. The Canner’s are the closest in having a down-to-earth non-supernatural leader, a woman who puts up a “sweet, kindly motherly” front to Canners but is ruthless against everyone else.
Beyond the humanoid element, monsters which are common in Scelus tend to be morphic, aberrant, and/or oozelike in nature, such as Oblexes, mimics, and black puddings. “Slasher horror” style Relentless Killers from Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft are also present here. Our sole new monster is a Putrid Ooze, a CR 6 creature whose poisonous pseudopods can infect a target with a random disease.
The domain’s darklord is Azalea, the daughter of a bladesmith whose father was murdered after refusing to make weapons for a local gang. She dedicated her life to revenge against the crime lord who put out the hit on him. While Azalea became an accomplished warrior, she needed a magical edge and researched dark magic, eventually making contact with an unknown entity who offered her power in exchange for giving it the souls of the murdered to consume. It was Juiblex, the demon lord of slime and oozes, and she accepted its bargain. Azalea became an accomplished killer, tracking down and slaying the various gangsters, growing in power with every life she took. But one day, she ended up claiming an innocent casualty: after murdering the crime lord in his sleep, his wife woke up and was about to scream, but Azalea silenced her.
At that moment the woman realized she crossed a moral threshold, but Juiblex wasn’t about to lose her. It mentioned that Azalea’s crusade didn’t have to end there, that the city was still full of evil souls in need of killing. She lost whatever moral fabric she had left, and the Night of Widows went down in history as she went from house to house, killing not just criminals but their friends and family members who had nothing to do with their misdeeds. Azalea earned the nickname the Widowmaker, and the powers of a darklord. She doesn’t remember her old life, but still acts the same: as a serial killer who only knows how to stop crime with violence. The more she kills, the more Juiblex gets a hold in the domain, as Scum infestations continue to grow.
In terms of stats, Azalea is a CR 15 half-elf with Rogue and Warlock abilities, specifically the Assassin and Fiend subclasses. Her spells tend to focus on debuffs and battlefield control, using a dagger and sneak attack as her main method of offense. She has Legendary Resistance, and Legendary Actions allow her to teleport, move and take the Hide action, or cause a grievous wound that continues damaging the target and reducing its maximum hit points until staunched via healing.
Thoughts: I like Scelus’ variety of criminal factions with their own unique themes and supernatural backing. The Scum infestation being a supernatural infestation is also cool, and it gives me strong vibes of Dishonored, a game series I love. As for its darklord, I feel that she’s a bit too close in theme to Rotwald’s, although I’d regard her more highly as her crusade is more directly tied into the domain itself and the crime syndicate’s systemic nature reflects the fact that indiscriminate violence won’t make things better.
Sgail is our other Industrial-era domain, albeit it takes place in a sleepy seaside hamlet rather than a claustrophobic urban center. The village of Sgail relies heavily on fishing to make a living, but its inhabitants are rude and distrusting of outsiders. It is a dark and gloomy place, with torrential downpours occurring at least once a week and thick fog fills the bay from morning until mid-day. There are stranger things that become apparent when staying here for a time, such as the fact that the fish have extra eyes or that every timber has a patch of mold growing in it. The townsfolk are aware of these things, but do their best to ignore them. The island of Longstone is home to Trinity Lighthouse, which has been abandoned and its light glows on its own during dark nights with a strange purple hue. A smaller island known as Noc’s Reef has been forgotten by most inhabitants, holding coral-choked shrines to undersea gods where sea spawn gather after the island’s floods over in order to worship away from human eyes.
Monsters in Sgail tend to be aquatic and aberrant, like aboleths and deep scions, as well as water elementals and water weirds. Our new monsters include different varieties of sea spawn: Wretches (CR ¼, weaker versions of the base monster that are forced into doing labor others of their kind don’t want to do), Snappers (CR 3, have shark-like maws that can swallow Medium and smaller creatures), Urchins (CR 5, covered in poisonous spines), and Cephalids (CR 7, big bruiser types with grappling tentacles).
The domain’s darklord is Captain Thomas Darling, the captain of the Harvest Queen which is the largest ship in town. He is a quiet, introverted man that rarely shows emotions and doesn’t care for much besides his work, and most in town don’t really know much about him. His backstory is that he was a sailor ever since he was a child, retiring as a lighthouse keeper and settling down once he got too old for the job. His wife died in childbirth, but his daughter Grace survived. She had a close brush with death at ten years old, coming down with an incurable illness. Captain Darling found himself unable to watch his daughter waste away, so he took to sailing again. One day, a giant sea monster attacked his ship, and dragged him below the depths. Darling came face to face with Arkyvathigoss, the Sire of the Deep, a godlike Lovecraftian entity who saw potential in the Captain. In exchange for becoming his servant, Arkyvathigoss would grant Grace a new life. He accepted, although the terms of Darling’s servitude were to bring the god of the deep people for it to devour, which he did by tricking his latest crew into sailing out into the ocean.
Content Warning: Child Death, Assisted Suicide
Thomas Darling is still a servant to Arkyvathigoss. He still hopes to revive his daughter, but not in the way it was done before. He knows better than to trust the Elder Evil, but still brings out sacrifices in the belief that the entity would destroy all of Sgail if not satisfied. As for Arkyvathigoss, it is not the domain’s darklord but is equally trapped, its undersea realm now confined to a much smaller sea cut off from the rest of the planes. The various aquatic monsters serve it, out of fear if not loyalty, and deep scions are its favored spies in town where they pose as regular humans.
In terms of stats Captain Darling is a CR 15 warlock who has a swim speed and can breathe underwater, attacks with a harpoon that can pull struck targets back towards him, can summon spectral tentacles to attack and grapple targets, and oddly his Legendary Actions are a misprint of Azalea’s abilities. I checked his stat block in d’Avenir’s Pocketbook, and noticed that they are to move or summon/attack with a tentacle. In spite of being listed as such, Darling has no warlock spells, so his major means of offense are harpoons and tentacle summons.
As for Arkyvathigoss, it can manifest an Aspect of itself which is a CR 28 aberration. It can fight multiple tentacles, fling grappled objects and targets as a thrown attack, can swallow grappled targets, and has two different AoE attacks: a gaze from its cone that paralyzes targeted creatures, and burst of energy dealing psychic damage and forces targets to move in a random direction on a failed Intelligence save. Its legendary actions include its physical attacks, the energy burst, and summoning an aboleth minion.
Thoughts: It may not be the biggest or most diverse domain in terms of adventuring material, but Sgail hews close to the Innsmouth-style Lovecraftian seaside vibe, and I like how its darklord still has a human element in spite of the more alien influences of the Elder Evil and related monster. Even though he’s not the strongest threat, Thomas Darling is still perpetuating the cycle of death and misery rather than defying his patron, which keeps the domain ever-vulnerable to Arkyvathigoss’ depredations.
Content Warning: Child abuse, including the torture and murder of children, is an omnipresent theme throughout this domain’s writeup.
Winterhall (once again, no header) is our second brand-new domain. It is a boarding school specializing in teaching the magical arts, and its student body is separated into three houses based on age range: preteens, adolescents, and adults, with the elementary school-aged children the most numerous and the adults the least. The campus is surrounded by forest and remains cold for most of the year, and exemplifies the “tyrannical teachers” trope seen frequently in children’s media albeit cranked up to Ravenloft’s levels of horror. Winterhall poses as a respectable institution that delivers scholarship letters across the planes, but shortly after students arrive do they realize it’s a prison and they’ll never leave. But there is a fate worse than death, as students who consistently fail to perform or cause too much trouble are “expelled.” In reality they have their minds drained by the headmistress and turned into thrulls, creepy psionic husks with shrunken heads who serve as Winterhall’s prefects.
Pretty much every subject and facility has some sadistic adult (usually a literal monster such as a hag, efreeti, and the like) whose purpose is to make student’s lives a living hell. For example, the gymnasium has dangerous obstacle courses and regiments that can inflict injuries; the library is run by a nagpa who casts Feeblemind on anyone who makes any kind of noise, and the building is designed as a confusing maze whose bookshelves constantly shift in order to prevent students from finding what they need; students are disciplined by being imprisoned overnight in a public restroom converted into a row of cells, and monsters from the forest regularly come out to bang and rattle the bars of the cells; and homework is made to be difficult beyond the means of student’s grade levels. Even scoring highly will cause scorn and division, as a higher average of test scores merely causes the faculty to increase the minimum for passing grades from then on out. Students who die are revived by the school nurse, done to show that even death is not an escape.
What’s the purpose for all this child abuse? Well, that lies with the background of the domain’s darklord, Headmistress Amelia Read. A tiefling born to an impoverished peasant family, a wizard by the name of Diana recognized her magical talent and offered her family the option to tutor Amelia. Diana’s insight proved correct, and Amelia became an accomplished mage. Viewing her like a daughter, Diana entrusted her estate to the tiefling, and from the resources and connections of her tutor Amelia was able to become an even greater wizard. But magical research proved pricey, so she decided to teach magic to children and formed a boarding school to fund her efforts. Amelia hated children, and at first she wanted to coast on by teaching noble scions easy-to-learn cantrips. Amelia began expanding the classes to more advanced courses, selfishly motivated by the idea of molding young minds into a new generation of wizards loyal to her. By the time the tiefling was approaching the end of her life, she feared that her magic would be unable to delay the inevitable. She ended up researching ways to become a lich, which required one to commit an act of unambiguous evil. That very act would be to trick her students into a ritual designed to devour their minds and add their intellect to hers.
Amelia was able to become an immortal lich, but she also became a darklord. However, unlike most liches she still required sustenance by devouring the minds of others. The minds of adults couldn’t feed her, so she’d have to rely exclusively on children, and the smarter the child the more filling. Her new school of Winterhall was created to provide a steady stream for this, and filled her faculty with all sorts of social rejects and exiles in need of a safe haven. The punishing curriculum is designed partly out of Amelia being a hate-filled person who still resents children, and also in the belief that the students who could weather it would provide the strongest minds of all.
However, showing her true face and wickedness caused students to resent her, which caused a violent yet failed rebellion. So now she poses as a sweetly-saccharine headmistress who acts unaware of how bad things are at the school and fills children with false hope and promises that things will get better. In terms of stats she is a CR 22 lich, but has no phylactery and much less spells. She can cast Fireball and Tasha’s Mind Whip at will, and most of her spells revolve around enchantment. Instead of Frightening Gaze and Disrupt Life as is typical for liches, she has a Mind Drain Attack (mislabeled Soul Drain in the Legendary Actions) that deals psychic damage and she regains hit points equal to the damage dealt.
All sorts of monsters can be found in Winterhall, usually as faculty or being some kind of servant. Undead are quite common, as are Brains in Jars and Mist Apparitions. Thrulls come in two varieties: Hall Monitors (CR 4, spider climb and blindsight make them good at catching up to hiding students, are immune to enchantment spells and psychic damage, can create psionic lassos as a ranged attack and teleport itself as well as willing and grappled targets) and Tormentors (CR 8, big bruisers whose slam attacks also create AoE shockwave cones and can mentally grapple a target, paralyzing and charming them on a contested Athletics vs Intelligence check).
Thoughts: Using Winterhall in a typical session will be harder than others, even if the idea of an evil magic school serving as a prison can make for an offbeat adventure or campaign. First off, adult PCs who are visiting the domain are likely to see through the Headmistress’ kind act and realize something’s up, that someone in charge of such a hellish place doesn’t use her power to reign in sadistic teachers. Additionally, there are few things that bring out someone’s anger and desire for justice than people who sadistically torture and murder children, so many gaming groups are going to be very eager to ignore academic politics and want to go around murdering the teachers. The book notes that the NPC teachers and darklord were made to be high CR monsters on purpose to make parties act in a subtler way. But while I can see this working for some gaming groups, others may find it too depressing and disempowering, where the most they can do is make the best of a bad situation in finding ways to save the children without rolling for initiative.
Normally this would be a lengthy entry of its own, but as I covered pretty much every prior monster and NPC we only have two entries to discuss here. The first is a Bandit Lord, a CR 6 humanoid who is primarily a melee fighter but unlike most bandits has three proficient saves (Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom) and Legendary Resistance and Legendary Actions. The latter don’t have anything truly unique, just bonus movement and an attack. The Hunter is a CR 5 humanoid who is akin to a veteran spell-less Ranger, having proficiency in various outdoorsman skills, equipped with silver arrows and daggers, a single Favored Enemy, and can Mark Quarry which basically acts like Hunter’s Mark.
Thoughts So Far: Sgail is my favorite of the last four domains, with Scelus a second. Winterhall is perhaps my least favorite, although I don’t necessarily think that it’s a
bad domain, only one that is of limited use due to the subject matter. I did find that Rotwald’s and Scelus’ darklords to be a bit too similar, and in being right up next to each other the similarities are harder to ignore.
Final Thoughts: With a dozen domains of various themes and a grab-bag of lineages and subclasses, Ezmerelda’s Guide to Ravenloft is a book packed full of content bound to be useful for most Ravenloft DMs. The domains are versatile in subject matter, potential adventures, and levels of play, which is a plus. However, I have noticed recurring similarities among its darklords that feel repetitive: noble background, turning to dark magic to become immortal, and so on. There were also sections in need of another editing pass, such as mislabeled monster names or Captain Darling having the Legendary Actions of the darklord of the prior domain. But they weren’t so frequent from my reading that they took away from the bright spots. I heartily recommend this book to anyone looking out for intriguing fan-created domains.
Join us next time as we visit the Last Waffle Shop in Barovia, a darkly comedic domain and mini-adventure!
