Kain
Monarch of Nosgoth
Patriarch Vampire
Posts: 1,226
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Post by Kain on Nov 30, 2010 15:11:45 GMT -5
Its been confirmed for 4th quarter 2011. Now I certainly am not switching to 4th edition for it, but I'm curious to see what storyline changes they make and may buy the books for that alone and convert stuff to 3.5 if need be. The only confirmation characterwise is Strahd as they had artwork of him at Gencon, but I'm assuming the usual suspects will turn up like Azalin, etc. community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/25564109/Ravenloft_the_DD_setting_for_2011
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Kain
Monarch of Nosgoth
Patriarch Vampire
Posts: 1,226
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Post by Kain on Nov 30, 2010 15:26:20 GMT -5
It seems they are putting Ravenloft in a plane called the Shadowfell.
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Reno
Deity
I can't have you do that. No one gets in the way of Reno and the Turks...
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Post by Reno on Dec 2, 2010 5:37:02 GMT -5
Considering how they bastardized the Forgotten Realms with 4th edition, I do not hold high hopes for Ravenloft. If I learn that they hired some of the 3rd edition writers I might feel a little more confident, though.
Then again, much of the raping of the Realms is due to the fundamental changes to the game's magic system. Ravenloft as a whole is lower-magic, so maybe it won't be screwed up as badly. We can hope. Maybe.
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Kain
Monarch of Nosgoth
Patriarch Vampire
Posts: 1,226
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Post by Kain on Dec 2, 2010 10:59:27 GMT -5
I also don't have too much hope that the setting will be written well, but maybe there will be a few cool things to use.
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Reno
Deity
I can't have you do that. No one gets in the way of Reno and the Turks...
Posts: 1,853
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Post by Reno on Dec 2, 2010 14:32:29 GMT -5
I remember hearing that they were releasing one campaign setting per year or something like that, back when they announced the way they were doing things with 4th edition. I guess it's good that means some older settings will be revisited and reintroduced to new players, but it also means they probably aren't doing full product lines of these worlds.
So chances are we will have the same thing as happened with 3rd edition, where 95% of the detail in the book is about the Core which we already have tons of information on, and we'll still only have 2 paragraphs of description about the various clusters and islands (if they even acknowledge clusters, that might have been a 3e invention).
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Kain
Monarch of Nosgoth
Patriarch Vampire
Posts: 1,226
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Post by Kain on Dec 2, 2010 15:42:09 GMT -5
I remember hearing that they were releasing one campaign setting per year or something like that, back when they announced the way they were doing things with 4th edition. I guess it's good that means some older settings will be revisited and reintroduced to new players, but it also means they probably aren't doing full product lines of these worlds. So chances are we will have the same thing as happened with 3rd edition, where 95% of the detail in the book is about the Core which we already have tons of information on, and we'll still only have 2 paragraphs of description about the various clusters and islands (if they even acknowledge clusters, that might have been a 3e invention). Yeah the clusters very well might have been a 3rd edition thing.
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Reno
Deity
I can't have you do that. No one gets in the way of Reno and the Turks...
Posts: 1,853
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Post by Reno on Dec 23, 2011 0:18:47 GMT -5
So did you ever look into this book? I guess it must have come out fairly recently.
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Kain
Monarch of Nosgoth
Patriarch Vampire
Posts: 1,226
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Post by Kain on Dec 23, 2011 15:02:22 GMT -5
Honestly no I forgot all about it lol.
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Reno
Deity
I can't have you do that. No one gets in the way of Reno and the Turks...
Posts: 1,853
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Post by Reno on Dec 23, 2011 17:46:20 GMT -5
I poked around a bit online, and it sounds like instead of giving it a full book they just did a thing in the online Dragon magazine. It also sounds like they ignored the 3e continuity entirely, meaning all of Darkon is considered to be Necropolis instead of just the one city, and Azalin is dead.
So basically I have no interest in it.
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Kain
Monarch of Nosgoth
Patriarch Vampire
Posts: 1,226
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Post by Kain on Dec 25, 2011 14:05:56 GMT -5
I poked around a bit online, and it sounds like instead of giving it a full book they just did a thing in the online Dragon magazine. It also sounds like they ignored the 3e continuity entirely, meaning all of Darkon is considered to be Necropolis instead of just the one city, and Azalin is dead. So basically I have no interest in it. What!?!?! That's ridiculous!
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Reno
Deity
I can't have you do that. No one gets in the way of Reno and the Turks...
Posts: 1,853
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Post by Reno on Dec 26, 2011 13:18:48 GMT -5
Yep. All the stuff that was made when they licensed it out, they're just ignoring. Which means no Darkon, probably no clusters, and no plot advancement since 2nd edition except for whatever they included in their Dragon blurb or whatever.
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Kain
Monarch of Nosgoth
Patriarch Vampire
Posts: 1,226
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Post by Kain on Dec 27, 2011 9:35:22 GMT -5
Lame! Our group could have come up with something 100 times better. No story line advancement? Grumble cakes...
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Reno
Deity
I can't have you do that. No one gets in the way of Reno and the Turks...
Posts: 1,853
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Post by Reno on Dec 27, 2011 14:09:55 GMT -5
Yeah, I can't bring myself to be at all excited about this.
Honestly, that's what bugs me about 4th edition even more than the fact it's a completely different game with the D&D name slapped on to increase sales. They mishandle the existing campaign settings. I mean, in the case of Ravenloft I don't know if they own the continuity and stuff that was created for 3rd edition or not. It would be weird if they don't, since the writers pretty much said that they couldn't publish the rest of their planned timeline after the Ravenloft license went back to WotC. So that would imply Wizards owns it.
Also, Wizards has a history of claiming ownership of things to cover their asses legally. Fiction submissions to Dragon magazine become the property of Wizards, which is highly unusual for publications that accept original fiction like that (normally the publication gets first publishing rights, then after a certain amount of time the author can try to get it published somewhere else). And then there's the contest WotC had that eventually resulted in the creation of Eberron. Every other campaign setting world that was submitted to that contest became the property of Wizards of the Coast, meaning they could publish any or all of those worlds if they wanted to, without any compensation to the creator.
With that kind of precedent, I would be highly surprised if Wizards don't own the rights to everything published under the Ravenloft name, including the 3e material that they licensed out. So why ignore that continuity?
I also don't know if they created any new stuff or not. Given what they did to the Forgotten Realms with the Spellplague and all that, I don't really want to know what they might have done to Ravenloft.
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Kain
Monarch of Nosgoth
Patriarch Vampire
Posts: 1,226
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Post by Kain on Dec 29, 2011 9:41:50 GMT -5
Yeah it's just kind of upsetting to me because:
1.) Like you said, it seems like they have no respect for the continuity after what they did to Forgotten Realms, but...
2.) They seem to not give a crap about Ravenloft anyway. Once WotC did get a hold of the 3rd edition Ravenloft, they pretty much stopped producing useful books as if to say, we own this but it doesn't make enough money for us so we don't care about it. I think the Family Tales and Disturbing Legends book, or whatever it was called was one of the last books made.
Now that Wizards has their 4th edition it seems like the writers probably never even really read the old material and are just rewriting the setting to however they want. I mean, you can mess with darklords and the domains and all, but Strahd and Azalin can't be removed from the setting permanently...sorry, but they just can't. Even strictly speaking if you wanted to run a campaign and have the party kill Azalin or Strahd it would be d**n near impossible given all the tricks and undead they have at their disposal; not to mention they are high level wizards and Azalin can summon and infinite amount of undead basically to just throw in front of people.
Anyway...I feel better now lol.
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Reno
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I can't have you do that. No one gets in the way of Reno and the Turks...
Posts: 1,853
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Post by Reno on Dec 30, 2011 16:09:53 GMT -5
It's essentially impossible to permanently defeat a high level wizard unless either they're monumentally stupid or not prepared for you (in which case the odds of their making it to high levels in the first place are pretty low), or you are also a high-level wizard or other powerful spellcaster.
This is true in 3rd edition as much as if not moreso than it was in older editions, if I am to believe various random strangers on internet D&D forums. Certainly it's true in 3rd edition if the wizard in question has the kind of time on his hands that Strahd or Azalin have. Granted both of those guys have things to distract them, as well as hard and fast limitations on their power that few others have to deal with, but they're still among the most powerful people in their world.
A lot of the old Ravenloft published adventures revolved around a certain formula of outworlder adventurers getting sucked into the Mists, ending up in the domain-of-the-month, and unraveling the darklord's personal tragic history before foiling his plan, defeating him, and going home. But once they stapled all those domains together into an actual campaign setting, the whole "kill the darklord" adventure really becomes a lot less sensible as a choice. I mean sure, you can do it, but the darklords are (mostly) the most powerful beings in the land. Once you start bumping them off, there's not much else to really do besides move up the chain to the next more powerful baddie and take him out too, hoping the land doesn't disappear around you or make you the next darklord or whatever. It's for that reason that killing one darklord is often the end goal of a campaign.
And certainly, there is no character in Ravenloft more iconic than Strahd. The whole campaign setting is inspired by him - it's named after the original adventure from which he comes, which in turn is named after his castle. He's even more integral to the setting than Elminster or Drizzt are to the Forgotten Realms. Without Strahd, you have no Ravenloft.
I would say that Azalin is very nearly up there as well. He's probably the second or third most iconic character in the setting, the only other contender I can think of being Dr. van Richten. Offing Azalin (however temporarily) at the end of the 2nd edition storyline is like the Ravenloft equivalent of the death of Superman. It's a major, world-changing event, and if you're going to continue the storyline then it's probably not permanent (especially given that he's a lich, so he's literally designed to keep coming back).
In the case of Wizards, their choice of not making use of the 3rd edition material is the sort of thing you'd expect them to do if they did not own the rights to that material. The characters are all their intellectual property, or at least the ones that already existed pre-3rd edition. You'd think that any created for 3rd edition would revert to them when the license for the setting went back to them too, but I don't know the technicalities of how that stuff works.
If there is no legal issue, then the only reasons I could think of to ignore that continuity would be:
-They intend to rewrite those events themselves, and come up with their own retcon of what happened after the end of the 2nd edition timeline. -They simply don't care and shoveled out this work simply as a halfhearted attempt to grab a few magazine sales from fans of the old product or people who enjoyed Expedition to Castle Ravenloft and are curious about the rest of the setting (what I think is the most likely explanation). -They are somehow unaware of the existence of those 3rd edition products, perhaps through gross incompetence or total lack of research on the part of whoever wrote the material.
Any way you slice it though, it's a shame they're not acknowledging the Arthaus material, and since that's what I'm invested in (financially and emotionally), I'm not particularly interested in what they've done with Ravenloft in 4e.
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