Author Topic: Revising 3.5 Ravenloft  (Read 1114 times)

Offline Skyrock

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Revising 3.5 Ravenloft
« on: October 16, 2018, 04:54:39 PM »
Between 2000 and 2005, Ravenloft was published as a 2nd party campaign setting by White Wolf (under its Sword&Sorcery imprint) under special license by WotC.

The fluff parts (especially the Gazetteers) were well-received in the Ravenloft fandom, but the crunch was mostly developed in the early 3.0 days, which were often overtly cautious about making things too powerful, mired in AD&D assumptions like Clerics=healbots (rather than CoDzillas) and for obvious reasons failed to account for later 3.5 developments like Tome of Battle. Especially virtually all of the prestige classes were straight downgrades from their base class, with all the hurdles to enter adding insult to injury. Also the Darklords leave much to desire as they are originally built, being push-overs for any moderately optimized character as soon as there isn't strong author fiat and DM fiat to save them.

The 3.5 update was also a rush-job still missing outdated skills like Wilderness Survival, failing to properly update and classify action types and being riddled with math errors.

The campaign setting is too good to leave it in such a state. I will go through it one crunchy bit at a time and revise it, also incorporating material outside Core such as Psionics or ToB.