Few names send a shiver down the spine quite like that of Ravenloft. Ever since this mist shrouded domain of dread debuted in 1983, its windswept moors, eerie castles and dark rulers have fired our imaginations. But what of its inspirations? Jack Shear, goes in search of Ravenloft’s literary roots.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been drawn to Gothic imagery and themes. My first comic books were about vampires and haunted castles, my favorite novels all belonged to the Gothic canon, and the movies that thrilled me featured imperiled women fleeing from terrifying houses and the villains lurking within them. When I first found Ravenloft, I knew I had discovered a setting for my roleplaying games that would give me the space to explore all the elements of Gothic horror that I had fallen in love with. As I delved into the setting, I realized that it was steeped in the Gothic literature and films that I adore. Its creators clearly conversant with the Gothic’s long literary history.
Gothic literature began with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole did not set out to create a new genre or mode of writing, but the premise of his novel—a medieval principality is usurped by an unjust ruler until the ghost of a former prince grows large enough to sunder the titular castle—set the blueprint for similar fictions that followed. Walpole’s literary heirs indulged in stories that emphasized the barbarity of the past, the irrational power of overwrought emotions, and the possibility of the supernatural.
By the 1890s, these “Gothic” fictions had become wildly popular, even if they were looked upon with worry by cultural commentators afraid that they would instill the wrong messages in the youths and middle-class women who were their primary audience. Works such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) solidified the Gothic’s literary conventions, inspiring both similarly themed tales and outright imitations.
The Gothic’s history is one of peaks and valleys. In the early years of the nineteenth century, its popularity was eclipsed by a newfound interest in more staid historical fiction. Yet, by the end of the century, the Gothic was back in full force, introducing the world to some of the famous monsters that continue to dominate the global cultural imagination.
Even if you haven’t read the texts from which they emerged, you know the basic story of Dracula, Mister Hyde, and Frankenstein’s monster. The Gothic has achieved a form of omnipresent artistic influence that renders it both ubiquitous and also sometimes invisible despite its prodigious reach.
The Gothic endures. It’s survival is rooted in its innate adaptability. The Gothic method of transforming current cultural anxieties into fictive terrors, combined with the metaphoric flexibility of its monstrosities, is capable of keeping the mode fresh and modern. Consider Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as a stark example of the Gothic’s process of reinvention. Shelley moved in a circle synonymous with Romanticism; she was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley and began writing her most well-known novel while visiting with Lord Byron.
Romanticism, with its emphasis on the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” was deeply inspired by the Gothic mode. But as Shelley began work on what would become Frankenstein, she fed Romanticism’s focus on individual genius and the importance of emotional bonds back into the Gothic, simultaneously initiating a new, hitherto unknown kind of tale and revitalizing the Gothic by hybridizing it with an outside influence.
The Gothic exceeds formal boundaries, which has been a key element of its continuance. Though it began as a form of prose fiction, the Gothic has attached itself to stage drama, film, and television, as surely as the archetypal vampire latches on to the neck of his victim. Of course, the Gothic has also exerted its baleful influence on the world of games as well. Ravenloft is our case in point—as one of the strongest inheritors of the Gothic’s mantle, the setting both reiterates and reinterprets familiar figures, imagery, and themes drawn from the Gothic tradition.
Join me then, won’t you, on a brief tour of the allusions, references, and points of inspiration to be found in Ravenloft’s dreadful domains.
Barovia is where Ravenloft began. In I6: Ravenloft (1983), the original module penned by Tracy and Laura Hickman, Barovia is a thinly sketched setting—essentially a shadowy Ruritania that borrows liberally from the depiction of Transylvania in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and the cinematic adaptations it inspired. The aesthetic conceits that flavor Barovia come straight from central casting and the studio backlot: Barovia is a land of ominous forests, its villages are full of superstitious peasants, it is inundated with fog, haunted by untrustworthy “gypsies” and a lonesome Gothic castle is perched “atop a natural pillar of stone.”
In this first Ravenloft adventure, Barovia is simply a pretext to introduce the characters to Count Strahd von Zarovich. Strahd may hold the honor of being Dungeons & Dragons’ most obvious pastiche; Strahd is D&D’s Dracula. “Strahd” rhymes with “Vlad,” and his pseudo-Slavic patronymic gives his full name a suitably Eastern European flair. Of course, it goes without saying that, like Dracula, Strahd is a vampire.
However, as his stats in I6 attest, Strahd is more than an average bloodsucker, he is also a potent magic-user. Strahd’s arcane abilities have a precedent in Stoker’s story. The novel notes that Dracula’s family received tutelage in black magic: “The Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.”
Strahd’s resemblance to Dracula isn’t simply a question of ability, it’s also a matter of theme. The Hickmans conceived of Strahd as the antidote for the kind of faceless villainy that dominated early D&D adventures—a horde of goblins here, a tribe of lizardmen there, and a gelatinous cube waiting in the hall.
Like Dracula, Strahd personifies the metaphoric sexual menace that radiates from the idea of a predatory undead creature who seduces and destroys his prey. Strahd’s possible goals in I6, randomly determined by drawing a card, roughly correspond to Dracula’s aims in Stoker’s tale: the possibilities lean toward an acquisitive desire for power or the claiming of a woman against her will. In Dracula, both Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker are the vampire’s targets; in Ravenloft, Strahd might repeat Dracula’s richly symbolic conquest of woman-hood by setting his lascivious sights on Ireena Kolyana.
Though Strahd attempts to win Ireena’s love in I6, the more recent Curse of Strahd (2015) makes the rapaciousness of Strahd’s dark love central to the adventure as a corrective measure. As Tracy Hickman states in the introduction, “The vampire we so often see today exemplifies the polar opposite of the original archetype: the lie that it's okay to enter into a romance with an abusive monster because if you love it enough, it will change. When Laura and I got a call from Christopher Perkins about revisiting Ravenloft, we hoped we could bring the message of the vampire folktale back to its original cautionary roots.”
As Hickman notes, Strahd’s predatory nature isn’t solely borrowed from Dracula. In their research into the origins of vampire fiction, the Hickmans found Lord Ruthven, the vampiric rake of John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). Lord Ruthven’s combination of charm and arrogance were inspired by the antics of Lord Byron. John Polidori, Byron’s doctor, had a first-row seat from which to view the Romantic poet’s life of debauchery —elements inherited by Strahd that have only become more pronounced over Ravenloft’s many iterations. In Curse of Strahd, for example, Strahd’s endgame is not limited to turning Ireena into a vampire; he might choose any man or woman as his plaything.
The Realm of Terror (1990) box set expanded Strahd’s tragic backstory, presenting him as both villain and victim. Due to his treachery and an unenviable fall from grace, he is cursed to continually seek the love of his life—Tatyana, who is herself doomed to die and be reincarnated over and over again as the eternal object of desire for an immortal monster. Interestingly, this element of Strahd’s backstory has fed back into the Dracula mythology. The Dracula of Francis Ford Coppola's silver- screen adaptation of Stoker’s novel is similarly afflicted by a mad desire to reclaim the love that he has “crossed oceans of time” to find once more.
The publication of Realm of Terror not only expanded on Strahd von Zarovich’s personal history, it also expanded the scope of the Ravenloft setting as a whole. Ravenloft was no longer focused just on Barovia—it was now its own demiplane of domains, each the playground and prison of a central villain referred to as a Darklord.
Included among these domains is Borca, an Italianate land of scheming nobles, intrigues, and, above all, poisonings. The domain’s name reveals its primary inspiration: “Borca” is intentionally similar to “Borgia,” an allusion to the infamous family of Spanish-Aragonese nobles noted for their nepotistic accumulation of political power and Ivana Boritsi, Borca’s Darklord, is modeled after Lucrezia Borgia.
Although the historical record cannot confirm the rumors that swirled around Lucrezia, rival contemporary factions painted her as a femme fatale who indulged in incest, and murder. The most persistent accusation against Lucrezia was that she secreted deadly toxins inside a poison ring to dispatch both enemies and lovers who had lost her favor.
Ivana Boritsi takes the “poisonous woman” archetype one step further: she permanently envenomed her body to take revenge against a faithless lover and her rival for his attention. Poison is literally part of her being, and her kiss is deadly.
However, this has not slowed her ardor; Ivana is notorious for taking lovers to her bed, even though her affections are invariably fatal.
The version of Ivana Boritsi presented in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft (2021) downplays her role as a “black widow” luring men to their doom. Her backstory still involves the inciting event of an unfaithful lover, but in this depiction she is a poisoner who murdered her own family to clear the way for her rise to power. This alternative Ivana connects to a different branch of Gothic anxiety obsessed with the fear of monstrous women.
Ivana is a symbolic double of the “gardens of evil” she maintains in Borca. It is from these gardens that she gathers the raw materials to craft her poisons and cultivate botanical monsters. The revision of her character places Ivana even more firmly into a particular archetype of feminine monstrosity by emphasizing metaphors that associate the deadly fecundity of nature with the seductive allure of beautiful women.
Like Beatrice in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter (1844) she is a hybrid of feminine charm and nature’s wrath. Like the venereal woman in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Á rebours (1884), she represents the excesses of earthy pleasure turning ever to decay. And like the title character in Hanns Heinz Ewer’s Alraune (1911), she is a dangerous hedonist shaped by the tainted soil from which she grew.
Dementlieu is the domain of Dominic d’Honaire, a mesmerist and beguiler patterned after the villainous Svengali in George du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1894). Like Svengali, d’Honaire uses his hypnotic abilities to exploit others, enrich himself, and rise in prominence and prestige.
However, unlike Svengali, who largely only uses his power to turn a tone-deaf laundress into a diva of the stage, Dominic d’Honaire exerts his pernicious influence over Marcel Guignol, lord-governor of Dementlieu. Besides their uncanny mesmeric ability, Svengali and d’Honaire share a sense of terroir; since Svengali’s stomping grounds are nineteenth century Paris, the domain of Dementlieu is depicted as a land of French urbanity, complete with fashion, style, and genteel refinement. Indeed, Marcel Guignol’s name is itself a play on the gory Grand Guignol theater of Paris.
Dementlieu was given an extreme makeover in the pages of Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. In its new iteration, Dementlieu is a realm of social-climbers—everyone is pretending to be someone or something they’re not. Dominic d’Honaire has been replaced by Saidra d’Honaire, a woman who died at a masquerade ball when her rags-to-riches Cinderella story was interrupted by a devastating plague.
Saidra re-emerges as a villain inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842). Saidra entertains the populace of Dementlieu by hosting the Grand Masquerade—a gala event at which she unmasks those who pose as nobles and assume positions of unearned status. When she is not fulfilling her role as perpetual hostess, Saidra stalks the streets of Dementlieu as “the Red Death,” a spirit who punishes pompous frauds.
Surprisingly, Barovia isn’t the only land inspired by Dracula. Strahd has always been a mirror image of Dracula as a vampire, but the writers of Realm of Terror presented Vlad Drakov, the tyrannical Darklord of Falkovnia, as an encapsulation of Vlad Tepes—the historical Dracula who inspired Stoker’s novel.
Falkovnia is a military dictatorship; though there are elements of Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany in the description of Falkovnia, the most dominant elements in the domain refer to Vlad Tepes.
Like Tepes, Drakov is a warlord, but in contrast to his historical antecedent he is doomed to see his military ambitions stymied time after time.
Most importantly, Drakov shares a grisly predilection attributed to Tepes in the German propaganda of his era: both men have a fetish for impaling their enemies on sharp wooden stakes.
As with Dominic d’Honaire, Vlad Drakov received substantial changes and a gender-swap in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. The new Darklord, Vladeska Drakov, finds herself weathering an endless zombie siege—though she, like the two Vlads before her, believes in the strength of martial law and favors “impalings as punishment for even the slightest crimes.”
The domain of Ghastria focuses with a laser-like intensity on one aspect of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890): the eventual boredom that troubles an aesthete’s jaded palette.
Once exposed to the philosophy of hedonism by Sir Henry, Dorian Gray indulges in one aesthetic pleasure after another— burning out on each in turn until finally he succumbs to ennui.
This scene is replicated in Stezen D’Polarno’s plight in Ghastria; the food grown in the domain is flavorless, leaving the decadent gourmand utterly unfulfilled. Additionally, d’Polarno’s name may be a reference to “polari,” slang used in gay subcultures, perhaps a subtle nod to the transgressive sexual subtext of Wilde’s novel. “Ghastria” is, of course, also a terrible double pun that refers to both the ghastly nature of the domain and the gastric horrors that await there.
Har’Akir, Ravenloft’s approximation of pharaonic Egypt, springs from a more general movement in the Gothic rather than a specific work. Nineteenth-century Europe was gripped by Egyptomania—a powerful fascination with all things ancient and Egyptian.
This mania filtered into the fiction of the era; tales of exploration and adventure amid the sands held the interest of the reading public. Ever adaptable, the Gothic assimilated Egyptomania into its textual corpus and produced a number of works, such as Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1899), Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), that paired tales of terror with aesthetics and setting elements drawn from an imagined Egypt.
Har’Akir performs the same feat and both the domain and its Darklord, Anhktepot, also owe a large debt to Universal’s The Mummy (1932). Both Anhktepot and Imhotep are priests punished for their sacrilege, cursed to suffer immortality as mummies.
Lamordia’s Darklord, Victor Mordenheim, is Ravenloft’s version of Victor Frankenstein. Both men are scientists who animate dead flesh, giving figurative birth to monsters. Additionally, they are thematically united in that their monsters’ ire falls on the women in their lives.
Elizabeth in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is killed by Frankenstein’s creation, but her character is split into two in Mordenheim’s backstory—and both meet tragic ends. Elise, Mordenheim’s wife, is left in a comatose state by his creature and Eva, his adopted daughter, was presumably thrown off a cliff.
Furthermore the name of Mordenheim’s creature, Adam, is a direct reference to a line from Shelley’s novel, spoken by Frankenstein’s tragic creation: “Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.”
Like Lamordia, Markovia is the domain of a Darklord who transgresses against the natural order. Rather than spark life into base matter, Frantisek Markov creates mongrel folk by performing horrible experiments on the animals who live in his domain.
As a monstrous vivisectionist, Markov is a fairly straightforward adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Like Moreau, Frantisek is a similarly disturbed scientist worshiped as a god by his hideous creations. Realm of Terror introduces one noteworthy embellishment to Wells; original—here Markov’s body has become as bestial as those of his creations.
Nova Vaasa’s Darklord, Sir Hiregaard, is based on Henry Jekyll from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
Like Jekyll, Sir Hiregaard transforms into a brute named Malken who, as with Edward Hyde, “has terrorized many poor young women and murdered the men who crossed him.”
Hiregaard is novel as a Darklord; unlike most of his peers in Ravenloft, he actively struggles against his malignant character traits and hopes to free himself from the bifurcation the indulges and enables his evilest impulses.
Oddly, this re-imagining of Stevenson’s characters is missing the scientific aspect—Hiregaard inherited a curse after his father strangled his mother in an Othello-esque scenario, not as an imbiber of transformative potions—and the domain he rules over is inspired by Tsarist Russia.
The initial presentation of Valachan in Realm of Terror was, frankly, a mess. The domain’s original Darklord, Baron Urik von Kharkov, had a pointlessly convoluted backstory; he was a panther given the form of man, who then later became undead, making him a hybrid of werecat and vampire.
As such he’s a wild mix of unrelated themes and imagery culled from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Jacques Tournier’s Cat People (1942) that just doesn’t work.
In Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, Kharkov’s rule of Valachan was usurped by Chakuna, a huntress who will stalk anyone who trespasses on her domain for sport.
Chakuna was clearly inspired by Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game (1924), though General Zaroff’s Cossack menace has been replaced by vague Mesoamerican trappings.
By way of conclusion, I want to note that the references, allusions, and inspirational departure points noted above are only the elements that I have observed and been able to trace in Ravenloft’s expansive product line.
I can virtually guarantee that there are Gothic tangents in the setting that I have missed. The setting is now the work of several hands, each with their own set of influences and their own perspective on the Gothic.
Nevertheless, even if this article is but an incomplete record of Ravenloft’s intersection with the Gothic tradition, the sheer weight of the characterizations, imagery, and motifs borrowed from the mode and reinterpreted as the raw material from which to create “Gothic Dungeons & Dragons” illustrate how the setting not just draws upon the genre but actively participates in the Gothic’s continual resurrection.
From the pages of I6: Ravenloft to the most recent Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, Ravenloft has been a site where the Gothic is revived in all its terrible glory.
Some genres emerge onto the literary scene, only to falter and become an artifact of the past, never to be revisited in a meaningful way. Similarly, some roleplaying settings have their day in the sun before inevitably fading until dimly remembered.
But the Gothic, and Ravenloft, are different. Like the vampire tales it spawned, the Gothic always rises from the grave—and in Ravenloft, the dead never rest easy.
Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft is out now published by Wizards of the Coast, & all previous editions of Ravenloft are currently available via DriveThruRPG.com
Buy Clyde Caldwell's incredible art at clydecaldwell.com
This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 3 (Oct '22)