The Mists of Ravenloft drift across worlds, sowing fear and abducting unsuspecting souls. These forces don’t claim individuals at random, though. The fear of innocents, the turmoil of the corruptible, the resolve of the truly heroic—the 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 character’s 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 aren’t prepared to engage with some degree of suspense. By the same token, the DM can’t craft an enjoyably spooky experience if they’re 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
You’ve been invited to play a scary game. What does a horror adventure or campaign mean? Who’s 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 unsettling—everyone’s 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 you’ll all be creating. If you’re uncertain about aspects of the game, ask about them—before the game, during play, or whenever a concern arises. Everyone’s 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. Don’t consider fear a tactical disadvantage or something to be avoided. As part of playing a frightening game, you’re 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 adventure’s 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 game’s 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 adventure’s 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 adventure’s overarching sense of dread.
Know Your Fears
Knowing what frightens your character provides insight into their past and can motivate their behavior. A character’s fear of cats might stem from a terrible sight they witnessed at their grandmother’s 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 you’re playing a character who pits themself against fearful foes. That said, if you’re 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 game’s 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. You’re not embracing or contributing to the adventure’s moody atmosphere when you’re 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 player’s character, always ask that player’s permission before acting. Their enjoyment is more important than shock value.
Know What’s Too Far. If a game gets too intense or goes a direction you don’t 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, don’t 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 “What happened to me?” 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 you’re 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 game’s 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 aren’t any longer. You now possess only your lineage’s 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 class’s “Quick Build” section offers suggestions on which scores to increase. You’re 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 character’s creature type is.
Here’s a list of the game’s creature types in alphabetical order:
Aberration
Beast
Celestial
Construct
Dragon
Elemental
Fey
Fiend
Giant
Humanoid
Monstrosity
Ooze
Plant
Undead
These types don’t 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 doesn’t work on a creature of the Construct type.
