Thursday, December 31, 2020

Ravenloft 1934


Perhaps it was merely all the death from war and disease that open a portal some dread place, or maybe it was the purposeful act of malevolent intelligence of the Outer Dark? Whatever the cause, at the end of the Great War a strange mist settled over much of Europe.  Supernatural beings of legend were again free to walk the Earth...

The idea is to take the style and ahistorical setting of the Universal and RKO horror films of the 30s--what in Shadows Over Filmland Robin Laws called the "Backlot Gothic"--and apply it to Ravenloft, whether the Masque of the Red Death version of Ravenloft or the original recipe would be up to you, but I think recasting various Ravenloft denizens as "off-brand" Universal Monsters stand-ins would be the way to go.

6 comments:

Erik Jensen said...

I'd been thinking about something similar, although definitely late-Victorian rather than 1930s, ever since I picked up 'Horror in the Windy City' (a 5e thing vs H.H. Holmes) to run for my true-crime-loving wife. Beyond the big Ravenloft names, some of those lesser-known adventures would work great.

Deadtreenoshelter said...

Have you read Mike Mignola's Baltimore comics? I feel like they're almost exactly this.

Deadtreenoshelter said...

Have you read Mike Mignola's Baltimore comics? I think they're a pretty fun example of this setting

Trey said...

Hmmm. In what way? They are both horror sorts of rifts, but Baltimore takes place during the War as I recall and doesn't really have a Universal hero aesthetic particularly (at least no more than Mignola's other stuff)?

Scott said...

Weimar era Germany is really ripe for this... you can have techno-horror ala Metropolis included really easily.

Dick McGee said...

Might be interesting to do a campaign where every war in history (and prehistory) has spawned a Ravenloft-style realm of terror reflecting its own unique brand of awfulness and trapping both some of the original participants and random wanderers in them. The realms get larger and increasingly more impersonal over time as the nature of war changes. The realms might work like Valhalla's supposed to - fight and die every die, do it again tomorrow and every tomorrow. Whether the inhabitants regard that as heaven or hell is going to vary. If you could avoid getting too heavy-handed about the obvious moral message it could make for a unique game.