Lore You Should Know - Barovia

welcome to another segment of lore you should know i am greg tito and i'm joined by mr chris perkins hello hello today in this segment where we like to go into little bits of dungeons and dragons lore for uh use within your game or just because it's really fun to know all this stuff we are going to go through the mists into brovia a domain of dread and talk a little bit about its lands and how it was devised but also uh some stuff you'll need to know if you're going to be running cursive strong revamped which comes out on october 20th so chris berrovia started as just one castle uh in its creative genesis is that right well yeah i mean um the original ravenloft predated uh anything that was written about the idea of domains of dread domains of dread did not exist at that time so ravenloft was just this land called borovia which was a small um you know lap of land with a castle in the center and a small village at its base that was borovia yeah and it wasn't even cordoned off by mists or anything it was just here is a land like you know transylvania or romania or any other place you can actually visit uh that you can just plop into your own game the the thing of course is borobia has a very strong um transylvanian eastern european flair yeah taking the the dracula and and all of those gothic horror tales as jumping off points for inspiration exactly but it wasn't it wasn't uh back then in its original form this cordoned off domain that you could only get to uh you know by traveling through the mists was it even placed in a in a d d setting or was it very just setting agnostic it was setting agnostic so it was meant you could just drop it into wherever wherever it was thematically appropriate for your own campaign so then what was uh the idea behind creating what we now refer to as domains of dreads so that kind of separated you asked yeah so in the ts in the tsr era ravenloft was so well received there seemed to be such an appetite for gothic horror both in the community and at tsr itself that um it was decided that raven loft would not just be the name of the castle but the name of an entire campaign setting and as you know second edition was big into campaign settings um and creating new ones and ravenloft was one of the first that kind of got away from the idea of a campaign setting as a normal world like a normal medieval world this was a real opportunity to redefine what a campaign setting could mean and so out of that came this idea of ravenloft is the sort of the banner name we give to the campaign setting uh that represents all of these barovial-like places um and making each of them uh their own standalone standalone pieces it's it's kind of weird because when you think about it ravenloft is not a contiguous campaign what it is it's a collection or assemblage of a bunch of micro campaigns that are all separated from each other and unified only by the theme of horror uh and in fact it wasn't even until you got deeper into the raven loft line that you could sort of march from one domain to another that there were technically borders that could be crossed so you could go from borovia into la mordia or um [Music] one of these other domains that were created so ravenloft was an opportunity a tsr for every designer to sort of create their own domain in a way and there was seen as like no limit to the number of domains of dread that could fall under the raven loft banner the only thing you needed was some touchstone that people could relate to whether it was like zombie films or the mummy yeah or you know ghost pirate ship you know if you could if you could identify a touchstone that had a horror uh had horror its core you could build an entire domain around it but of course the classic domain of dread the original is borobia and in second edition it changed from being this lap of land that isn't cut off by mists into its own miss shrouded realm uh with straud the vampire trapped at the center of it that makes sense and so when you were returning to uh cursive straw and writing that up you had the chance to be able to flesh out what that you know lap of land transformed into yeah exactly sort of to push the mists back and show a little bit more of the area around the castle and that had been previously done in second edition as well there were efforts to try to explain that there was more in virovia than just the castle and the village but when we were when the group of us who were sort of tackling cursive straw conceptually sat down with um tracy and laura to have conversations um it was very important that the borovia wii show felt like a true extension of what they had originally envisioned from the uh from the i6 uh yeah from the 86 yeah so it was very important that we start there and use that as our base and not try to bring in a bunch of the other stuff that may have been uh created uh without tracy and laura's oversight interesting okay yeah um before we go on how how big and roughly uh square miles do you think borovia is like does it feel like you know the size of texas is it the size of connecticut oh it's it's not that it's it's not as big as uh as a state um i would say looking at the map that it's about oh bless you like it's probably about maybe 30 miles across okay so you know the the like a metropolitan area like around around one major major city with a few villages uh around it yeah but if you as you can imagine um 30 miles is a considerable distance when people are basically accustomed to moving around just on foot yes or on horseback you know it's it's you know in that in the day and age in medieval times if you if you moved more than 30 miles away from your homestead you were considered an explorer yeah right i always think of that that quote from peter jackson's lord of the rings for like if i take one more step i'm further away from home than i've ever been and right yes that would happen like this very often and so you can do a lot in in 30 miles of space and and drop a lot of interesting sites there and so i mean the key with cursive straw is you even with the new the expanded page count there's still a finite amount of space uh and so some decisions had to be made about okay how many locations can we do what should those locations be how complex are each of those locations and which ones can we fit which ones do we have to leave behind yeah so uh you window down that list but then what are what are some of the highlights there that people should be aware of so it was important that or we felt at the time it was important that we have more than one village or settlement in order for it to feel like a province or something something that felt provincial that there would be a couple settlements that the characters could move between and then thematically we could set we could make those settlements very distinct from each other by giving them problems that felt very unique and had a certain flavor of horror to them so that the village of borovia feels very different from the town of valaki which feels very different from the village of kresg which is sort of further deeper back in the mountains um and then we added we threw in a ruined town essentially a town that did not survive straw's depredations and uh it's just sort of this haunted ruin of a town called perez and those four sort of um survived and then everything else is uh more like an adventure location like the old windmill on the on the windswept crag or the the spooky crumbling bridge that spans the icy chasm in the mountains or the vineyard where the the wizards of wine winery is which was important uh because we were talking about you know how do how do barovians survive or get by you know um how do they cope with the day-to-day mystery of being sort of trapped in this domain and it's not too different from being trapped in our domain of dread that we're in right now yeah yeah a little bit it's like okay what am i going to what am i going to lean on in these hard times and it's like well with barovians it might very well be wine that wine is a coping mechanism that helps them endure and so that became an important element of the landscape now were these towns there before strad's influence or and the people within them or were they once this became a uh a place that you can only visit by by traveling through the mists um were they grown from there so the the idea is is that um when straud first came to this domain because he basically conquered it um he before he became a vampire he was basically a warlord and was going through and eradicating his enemies and then he came to this land and was so sort of struck by its beauty and its seclusion that he said you know this is where i'm going to build my castle and we presume that these settlements uh maybe not the village of borovia because that probably grew up around the castle to an extent but the other settlements probably existed and he just took them over um but they they would have transformed quite a bit in the in the in the conquest because one of the things straud was very fond of doing was not only conquering the people but forcibly relocating them so he'd he would move people that he had previously conquered into places that he had newly conquered in order to sort of well and truly establish now that these places were his and that he could do what he wanted with them and so i think you would have seen a lot of people flee these towns and then a lot of people take them over and but most of the people i suspect who who grew to live in borovia under strad's rule probably came with him or came after him and settled there but the structures that they were inhabiting some of them would have pre-existed the invasion got it um now are people in borovia people or are they they trapped souls are they you know how how should a dungeon master approach this when uh that is a very good question because this is not something that tracy and laura had to wrestle with in the original because burobia was just a land yeah it wasn't separated they were just people but when uh with the idea that this is a domain of dread and it's cut off from the rest of the world you know there's a finite number of people there eventually that's going to sort of it's just going to dwindle down to nothing um unless they're very unless they're very precocious sexually um which they probably wouldn't be under the circumstances but well there is maybe the wine helps yeah there is the wine would help the lion would certainly help um but uh what we decided on what we thought would be creepy is that uh because in dracula the the bram stoker novel yeah there is this recurring theme of resurrection that people get basically reborn into new bodies but they're kind of the same people yeah um uh like uh like a dracula's wife and then um you know the woman he pursues he sees his wife in her basically um uh that because resurrection and rebirth are sort of part of the dracula motif that we would incorporate in the story by saying that souls so when a barovian when a barovian dies and their soul takes flight to go to the afterlife it doesn't get through the mists it gets it gets sort of steered back and sort of like snared and funneled back into a new birth so when when a child is born in virovia it actually contains an old soul that is just constantly being recycled over and over and over and over again and then we also presumed that not everybody in borovia actually has a soul that some of the people in brovia are merely shells projections created by the domain of dread to create the illusion of a living breathing society or ecosystem and so there are some people who when they die they just don't come back and that that helped us in a number of ways because um we we can have imagery in the adventure of you know here is tatiana straud's true love here is irina kolyana who looks just like her it's the same soul recycling through new bodies but then there are other characters that just die and disappear and never return and we just say oh those are the shells those are the those are the fake people the people who don't know that they're not really people um that's almost like creepier uh thinking of borovia as this uh snow globe trap that souls can sometimes come and get out of maybe but mostly yeah and then visually um live there one of one of the things that was important too was that we should when we show borovians who don't have souls their faces look lifeless that there's no spark in their eyes they've just sort of got these dead expressions and so if you meet a barovian you may not be able to tell if they have a soul right away but there's something there's something there that betrays the fact that they're not truly but they're they're truly just sort of soulless husks parading through the daily routine without any love passion or desire really to do anything i don't know what's more horrific right yeah and not knowing i think is part of it um yeah and it's really interesting to set this up as a dungeon master that that the the player characters are outsiders that they're coming into this with no knowledge necessarily of what's uh you know what we're just talking about here but they'll discover it along the way and how those creepy things manifest themselves precisely there's also the potential for a very bittersweet moment at the end where if you destroy strawd and you free borovia from the mists that a bunch of people just fade away in in like a you know avengers infinity war yeah they just sort of ashes blow away like oh my god those people were trying to help weren't actually real i love that yeah did you do a good thing just then or not right yeah like it's it you can't tell you know their life wasn't happy but at least they had life yeah now they just cease to exist wow all right well all of the fun moral quandaries uh as well as horror themes that uh you just brought to light in a way for for people who are going to be picking up cursive straw revamped hopefully playing it around this halloween time uh thank you thank you for all that i i feel creeped out but also uh excited to run something so that's good yeah yeah uh all right well i'm gonna go get some of my wizards of wine uh uh you know juice and uh get into reading curses trod uh thanks chris for for coming through if people have any questions for how to potentially run this campaign uh or just want to show you some cool art they made what's the best way that they can do so i am on twitter at chris perkins dnd excellent all right well thanks again chris and we'll be back with some more fun stuff next week

Channel: Dungeons & Dragons

Views: 32,340

Keywords: Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, gaming, roleplaying game

Id: e22q8l2Jpak

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020