Commentary on Ravenloft
Looking Back on a Very Old Grognardia Post
Looking back now, more than a decade after I wrote my original post and more than forty years(!) since Ravenloft first appeared, I find my overall feelings about the module are largely unchanged, though perhaps somewhat mellowed. If anything, time has clarified why I think module I6 occupies such a pivotal and contentious place in the evolution of Dungeons & Dragons and, by extension, the larger hobby of roleplaying.
When I first played Ravenloft, what struck me most was how different it felt. Its brooding tone, integrated story elements, and overt theatricality stood in stark contrast to the almost documentary sparseness of something like The Keep on the Borderlands or even The Village of Hommlet, which, by comparison, is much more fleshed out. In those older modules, the referee and players were co-authors; the adventure’s meaning emerged through play. Ravenloft, by contrast, presented a story — a Gothic tragedy — in which the players participated but did not truly shape. That shift, subtle at first, has proven profound in hindsight.
My original post was an early one, written in the first calendar year of Grognardia. In it, I focused on the ways Ravenloft planted the seeds of later excesses: the rise of the “super NPC,” the dominance of scripted storylines, and the eventual triumph of the “adventure path.” I still think that argument holds up, all these years later. However, I’ve also come to see that Ravenloft’s innovations weren’t inevitably corrosive. The problem wasn’t the presence of atmosphere, theme, or structure — all things older modules sometimes neglected — but rather how these elements came to replace player agency rather than enhance it.
In this light, Ravenloft feels to me more like a missed opportunity than an outright abomination. Castle Ravenloft remains a genuinely excellent dungeon, nicely interconnected and deadly in all the right ways. Its fortune-telling mechanic remains a clever innovation, a rare instance of narrative randomization that could easily have evolved into a more open, generative design tradition of the sort I’m hoping to achieve in Dream-Quest. But the adventure’s insistence that Strahd and his doomed romance are the “real story” undermines what could have been an enduring model for blending story and sandbox.
Revisiting Ravenloft today, I’m struck by how much its success influenced the tone of D&D ever since, particularly the over-emphasis on mood, character, and “cinematic moments.” It’s not that those things have no place in the game; rather, they were allowed to crowd out the qualities that once made D&D distinctive, such as its unpredictability, its emergent narrative, and its indifference to preordained outcomes.
There’s also something to be said for how Ravenloft has aged better than many of its descendants. The module’s structure — a haunted castle filled with traps, monsters, and secrets — remains eminently playable with only modest adjustments. If one downplays or even ignores its melodramatic framing, Ravenloft becomes a fascinating hybrid, a transitional artifact between the freeform design of the late ’70s and the more heavily plotted adventures of the mid-’80s.
In that sense, Ravenloft deserves the attention it continues to receive. The module is both a warning and a touchstone, a reminder of what was lost and what might still be reclaimed. If the module had leaned just a little more toward player-driven exploration and a little less toward amateur theater, we might be talking about it today not as the first step down a terrible road, but as the high point of classic design reimagined.