The Mists of Ravenloft drift across worlds, sowing fear and abducting unsuspecting souls. These forces donāt claim individuals at random, though. The fear of innocents, the turmoil of the corruptible, the resolve of the truly heroicāthe Dark Powers savor these traits. Whether for a night or an eternity, Ravenloft seeks heroes of all sorts and pits them against their greatest nightmares.
This chapter explores how to create a character prepared to face the horrors of Ravenloft, while also forging ties to the haunted pedigrees and grim fates common to the Domains of Dread. This chapter offers you, the player,
the following tools and choices:
Haunted Heroes. Explore your role in creating a tale of terror and how you might design a character that contributes to frightful adventures.
Lineages. Consider an origin that ties you to a grim progenitor or inexplicable experience. Lineages can serve as your characterās race or overshadow your previous race.
Dark Gifts. Determine whether the Dark Powers of Ravenloft have exerted their influence upon you, granting you a double-edged supernatural gift.
Subclass Options. Consider choosing the College of Spirits Bard or the Undead Patron Warlock subclasses to give voice to ageless forces.
Backgrounds. Choose a fateful cast to your origins with optional features for any background. The Haunted One and Investigator backgrounds also explore how mystery might drive your character.
Horror Trinkets. Learn what creepy curio inspires or haunts your adventures.
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Haunted Heroes
Ravenloft encourages you and your group to safely explore the thrill of all manner of ghost stories, mysteries, and other tales of terror. The spookiest scenarios will fall flat if you and the other players arenāt prepared to engage with some degree of suspense. By the same token, the DM canāt craft an enjoyably spooky experience if theyāre not aware of your interests in and thresholds for participating in fear-focused adventures. This section highlights elements common to frightening D&D games, features that you should be mindful of as a player and that will help you create a character prepared to participate in suspenseful adventures.
But it all begins with one question:
Are you sure?
Invitation to Nightmare
Youāve been invited to play a scary game. What does a horror adventure or campaign mean? Whoās it supposed to be scary for, you the player or your character? Is it scary like a mystery cartoon or a slasher movie? What content makes it scary?
What do you not want to see in a horror story?
These are all legitimate questions and ones you should have answers to before participating in a fear-focused D&D adventure. Horror, as a genre, covers broad swaths of material. What you shrug off other players might find personally unsettlingāeveryoneās experiences and tolerances are distinct and real, even if they differ from your own. Before creating a character, ask your DM and the rest of the group the aforementioned questions, along with any others that come to mind. DMs are encouraged to facilitate pregame discussions to make sure the entire group agrees on content, boundaries, and tools to keep the terror fun. Think of this as establishing a film-like rating and content warning for the story youāll all be creating. If youāre uncertain about aspects of the game, ask about themābefore the game, during play, or whenever a concern arises. Everyoneās comfort and enjoyment of spooky adventures are what matter most!
Prepare to Be Scared
When planning to play a scary adventure, create a character prepared to be scared. Consider how your character reacts to being frightened and how that affects the creepy atmosphere of the adventure. Donāt consider fear a tactical disadvantage or something to be avoided. As part of playing a frightening game, youāre a participant in building and reinforcing a sense of dread for everyone at the table. If your character laughs in the face of every danger, they undermine the adventureās threats and its broader atmosphere.
When creating and playing your character, consider courage not as the absence of fear but as the process of overcoming it. How might your character react in surprise before they rally to overcome the terror they face? Do they scream, flee, or freeze? Or might they throw themself into battle, perhaps recklessly or for too long? Record a default reaction on your character sheet so you can respond consistently when shocking events occur.
Beyond this, discuss with your group how much fear ties into the gameās rules. Would you prefer to keep frightful reactions narrative, or would you like to use game rules that present additional challenges and benefits? Ask your DM about the possibility of using the rules for inspiration to motivate fearful character reactions. Using this system, a character who possesses particular fears and uses them to guide their responses to horrific scenes might earn inspiration for reinforcing the adventureās frightful atmosphere. The DM might not employ these rules every time something frightening occurs, but your group might use them as a way to highlight individual fears and build an adventureās overarching sense of dread.
Know Your Fears
Knowing what frightens your character provides insight into their past and can motivate their behavior. A characterās fear of cats might stem from a terrible sight they witnessed at their grandmotherās home, while a fear of earthquakes might hearken back to the experience of being trapped after a tremor. Consider two or three things that unsettle your character, what they tell you about their past, and if those fears shape who they are now.
Evil Inside
This book assumes youāre playing a character who pits themself against fearful foes. That said, if youāre eager to play a character with a shadowy past or sinister origins, the lineages and Dark Gifts presented later in this chapter provide such opportunities. How a character engages with the evil inside themself can make for exciting conflicts. Be sure that your choices allow your character to remain a reliable part of your adventuring group, though, and not a near-villain the other heroes only tolerate.
Habits of Horror Heroes
Playing horror adventures is similar to telling ghost stories around a fire. You and the gameās other players are allies in creating a fun, safe, moody atmosphere for your game.
Contribute to this by keeping the following elements in mind:
Focus on the Game. Atmosphere requires attention. Youāre not embracing or contributing to the adventureās moody atmosphere when youāre focused on something else.
Limit Comedy. Be aware that comedy breaks tension. Nothing dispels an ominous atmosphere like jokes, be they in character or otherwise.
Player Fears Versus Character Fears. Understand the difference between scaring characters and scaring players. If you know a player has a fear of spiders, never employ that knowledge when contributing to a creepy scene.
Consent Is a Priority. If a plot leads you to consider a path involving another playerās character, always ask that playerās permission before acting. Their enjoyment is more important than shock value.
Know Whatās Too Far. If a game gets too intense or goes a direction you donāt want to explore, make sure you and the other players have a method for raising concerns mid-game and support one another in doing so.
Add to Your Own Terror. Feel free to make horrific circumstance worse for your character. If your character has a fear of goats and the DM describes some eldritch horror, donāt hesitate to ask if the creature has hooves or hourglass eyes.
Enjoy the Struggle. Not everyone can expect to escape a horror story unscathed. While your character should do everything they can to survive and triumph over challenges, any scars they gain along the way are part of what makes the horror meaningful and memorable.
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Lineages
In the Land of the Mists, power and dread lie in the simple question āWhat happened to me?ā The following lineages are races that characters might gain through remarkable events. These overshadow their original race, if any, becoming their new race. A character might choose a lineage during character creation, their transformation having occurred before play begins. Or, events might unfold during adventures that lead your character to replacing their race with this new lineage. Work with your DM to establish if youāre amenable to such a development and how such stories unfold.
Creating Your Character
At 1st level, you choose whether your character is a member of the human race or of one of the gameās fantastical races. Alternatively, you can choose one of the following lineages. If you choose a lineage, you might have once been a member of another race, but you arenāt any longer. You now possess only your lineageās racial traits.
When you create a character using a lineage option here, follow these additional rules during character creation.
Ability Score Increases
When determining your ability scores, you increase one of those scores by 2 and increase a different score by 1, or you increase three different scores by 1. You follow this rule regardless of the method you use to determine the scores, such as rolling or point buy.
Your classās āQuick Buildā section offers suggestions on which scores to increase. Youāre free to follow those suggestions or to ignore them. Whichever scores you decide to increase, none of the scores can be raised above 20.
If you are replacing your race with a lineage, replace any Ability Score Increase you previously had with these.
Languages
Your character can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for the character. The DM is free to add or remove languages from that list for a particular campaign.
If you are replacing your race with a lineage, you retain any languages you had and gain no new languages.
Creature Type
Every creature in D&D, including every player character, has a special tag in the rules that identifies the type of creature they are. Most player characters are of the Humanoid type. A race option presented here tells you what your characterās creature type is.
Hereās a list of the gameās creature types in alphabetical order:
Aberration
Beast
Celestial
Construct
Dragon
Elemental
Fey
Fiend
Giant
Humanoid
Monstrosity
Ooze
Plant
Undead
These types donāt have rules themselves, but some rules in the game affect creatures of certain types in different ways. For example, the text of the cure wounds spell specifies that the spell doesnāt work on a creature of the Construct type.
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I started a Lineage on FR and I worked really hard on it and was super excited to release it alongside their first hatchlings and the first raffle! Hoping to see this lovely guy go to a good home.
The lineage is all about my little Alien starfall Aethers!! Take a look at our founders and the little guys parents.
For research purposes,
I know that the Dooku, Qui-gon, Obi-wan, Anakin, Ahsoka line is called the Disaster lineage.
And that the Mace, Depa, Caleb/Kanan, Ezra line is called the Shatterpoint lineage.
Are there other lineage names like this or are these the only ones?
Also I know some people start the disaster lineage with Yoda, and I agree, but he also has had so many padawans duing his 900 years of being alive (possibly including Mace) which means the disaster lineage would be huge!!! So do you think each of Yodaās padawans kinda branched off and became their ownĀ āLineageā even though itās origins were from the disaster lineage?Ā
I just need answers for this, because I love this idea so much.
Oh of course!
Humans generally don't like anyone. And are very much pro-human. Unless those humans are mages. Then FUCK those guys too. But also, they don't like it when a human comes from another kingdom either. So, fuck THOSE GUYS TOO. And then there are those humans who have children outside of their species. So what if they found love and happiness? FUCK EM.
It's really just a list of middle fingers all around.
Sirens tend to dislike those above land because of what they did to their Foremothers, The Benvarrey. Some do go to the surface to make a life for themself, but the process can be fatal. Those land dwellers are considered to be traitors and their children, the Merrow, to be demon spawn.
Drakes are the children of dragons. The original thieves. Many of the other races view them to be monsters just like their fathers. However, there are Cities and Villages near the border that tolerate them at the most. Drakes tend to view others of their kind favorably. Something you'll see more of in chapter four.
Aveles are one of the few races not treated with immediate distrust or hatred- outside of the Naga. They are excellent hunters and warriors whose main mission is believed to be rather honorable: defeat the rot of the eternal night and bring back their god, Uldor, back to life.
Naga are a wild card. Their race is so few that it's hard to have a real answer. However, they are the most inhuman looking of the other races. So many fear them. Their children, the nag'i are treated like Drakes. Just because they sorta look alike to the average human. Naga don't truly care enough about the other races to form an opinion.
Mages can be born of any of the races (save the Naga/Nag'i). They are generally seen as monsters with powers not meant for their bodies. Since magic is so volatile it is usually forbidden to be used. However, since the rise of the Witch Queen in the Bridge Isles, more and more mages have taken the chance to make a name for themselves.
Gavanthi, Lilibuel, titans, Gods, and Godlings are feared by the other races. To each other, all they see is another meal in their bid for power.
The only race liked by all the races is the Dwarva, masters of the rock and sea. They just do their own thing. The Dwarva view the other races as childish and too weak for their own good.
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for @jedijuneāā - I thought Iād contribute some more to all the Jedi love. PressĀ ājā to skip, itās horrendously long.
A quick (lmao) tour of the Jedi Orderās views on blood ties and nuclear/traditional families in LucasFilms canon.
Basically, instances of Jedi calling each other brother, sister, father, etc. and their peersā reactions to this. Itās a common misconception that despite the Jedi having their own unorthodox family structures and own ways of demonstrating love,Ā āregularā familial bonds are taboo. Letās see what canon has to say about that.
(This is already a very long post, so Iām ignoring Luke and Vaderās relationship, as well as Anakin and Shmiās. Those cases are unusual and very complex, and my goal is to showcase the Jediās general take on family, not their opinions on two exceptions.)
1) Likening your Master to a family member = fairly common
Jedi Crash, TCW s1e13
Aayla Secura to Ahsoka, about Quinlan Vos and Anakin
Gone Without a Trace, TCW s7e5
Ahsoka to Trace Martez, about Anakin
Ahsoka and Anakin may be unusual Jedi, but Aayla isnāt. In RotS and TCW s7, we see her in a Council meeting despite her being a Knight. It means she is respected and trusted despite her youth and low rank. Aayla isnāt characterized as a maverick in any way despite her chaotic Master, and we have thus no reason to believe her openness about her relationship with Quinlan is an exception. Whatās more, in the episode sheās specifically using that relationship to explain toĀ Ahsoka how love for oneās Master and the importance of letting go arenāt contradictory.Ā
Obi-Wan doesnāt appear in the least uncomfortable after Anakinās admission. He actually takes it so casually it seems to imply this is not the first time heās heard this. Far from dismissing Anakinās feelings or rebuking him for calling him a father figure, Obi-Wan uses the analogy to ask Anakin why he isnāt better behaved - heās literally asking āwell if Iām your dad, why canāt you be a good kid?āĀ
In all four cases, the Jedi comparing their Master to a family member is either talking to a non-Jedi or within earshot of one. Clearly they are not worried about giving a wrong image of the Order, so itās safe to assume theyāre not alone in their views. So yeah, calling your Master a father/brother - and probably a mother/sister? Not taboo.
2) Having blood ties within the Order = perfectly okay
The Unknown, TCW s6e1
Tiplar and Tiplee
Wookieepedia
Stass Allie and Adi Gallia
These four women are Masters, not Knights. It means they have proven themselves to their peers - theyāre not under scrutiny for potentially being āattached.ā Adi and Stass both served on the Council, indicating the rest of the Council is fine with people having blood connections with other Jedi. If you look up the origin of Stassā character, youāll find it was Lucas himself who made her Adiās cousin.Ā
Tiplar and Tiplee call each otherĀ āsisterā in public, they are co-generals and they wear matching outfits (same cut, but the colors are inverted). Tiplee openly displays grief and affection for her sister, in front of Jedi (Anakin) and non-Jedi alike (the troops). Again, no taboo here.Ā
(Edit: Depa Billaba, Mace Winduās padawan and Caleb/Kananās Master also had a sister in the Order, Sar Labooda. She died on Geonosis and her parentage to Depa is such an obscure piece of trivia that no material in the Legends EU or the Disney EU ever made use of it, but still. Depa served on the Council several times and both Depa and Sar were Masters, so the point stands.)Ā
3) Acknowledging blood ties to non-Jedi = perfectly okay
Kidnapped, TCW s4e11
Ahsoka to the Jedi Council, about the people of Kiros
RotJ
Obi-Wan to Luke, about Leia
Ahsoka claims a connection to the people of Kiros in front of the whole Council, (sheās from Shili btw - sheās thus claiming blood ties as a Togruta, not geographical ties) and nobody reacts in any way to her outburst - no censure, no disapproving looks, nothing. Identifying with your biological people is fine.Ā
Obi-Wan goes a step further with this and praisesĀ Luke for caring about his sister. He is very clear about why Luke shouldnāt acknowledge the connection: their sibling bond is a good thing, but itāll be used against them. You canāt see it in the screenshots, but Luke actually nods twice in this scene: once when Obi-Wan tells him to bury his feelings, and once when Obi-Wan explains why. Luke agrees that he shouldnāt show his feelings for Leia - so this isnāt a case of a Master forcefully repressing his studentās emotional life.
4) A broader view
a) Obi-Wan and Anakin
RotS
Obi-Wan to Yoda, about Anakin
RotS
Obi-Wan and Anakin
Essays have been written on these two, so Iāll stick to this: when Obi-Wan tells Yoda he cannot kill Anakin because of the bond between them, Yoda does not condemn him. He does not say something along the lines ofĀ āsuck it up, attachment is forbidden and you should have known better.āĀ
He says insteadĀ āhe isnāt your brother anymore. The man you love as part of your family is gone. Itās not your brother youāll be killing.ā Thatās very, very, very different. Yoda acknowledges and accepts the connection between Obi-Wan and Anakin, but he cannot let it stop them from doing their duty to the Galaxy. (As Aayla said in Jedi Crash, you canāt lose thousands of lives for the sake of one.)
b) According to the Order itself
The Gathering, TCW s5e6
Narrator to the audience, about the Order
Narration guy is rarely entirely objective, so you can take it with a grain of salt. Still, Ahsoka and Ploās relationship is generally accepted as the more overtly familial one of the show, and thatās whatās illustrating narration guyās claim here. Seems legit.
c) Outsider POV
The Citadel, TCW s3e18
Osi Sobeck to his droids, about the Order
Osi Sobeck is a complete psycho and an enemy of the Jedi, so make of that what you will.
5) BONUS CONTENT (not LucasFilms)
Darth Vader (2017)
Kirak Infilāa to Darth Vader, about the Order
Darth Vader (2017)Ā
Jocasta Nu to the Grand Inquisitor, about the Order
RotS novelization, Matthew Stover
Dooku to Palpatine, about Obi-Wan
(Please note that I added those last bits because they fit in well, not because I see the old EU or the Disney EU as basis for characterization. For example, Iām not touching Dookuās convoluted Disney backstory with a twenty-parsec pole.)
tldr: The Jedi Order is portrayed in canon material as pretty chill with traditional family structures among its own members. The Jedi have nothing against brotherly/sisterly bonds and they acknowledge that Masters are very much like parents. Using the complicated issue that is Anakinās relationship with his own mother as the measure for our understanding of Jedi views on family is unfair and ignores tons of what Lucas (and later Filoni) showed on screen.Ā
