I'm not a horror junkie by any means. Maybe it's because I've never really been scared by horror. OK, not true as I remember Poltergeist scaring the hell out of me as a kid. That tree that almost eats the kid? That was my nightmare. The clown wasn't helping either. But once I became a discerning tween and young teen horror did nothing for me. It seemed too ridiculous to be scary. Still scary atmosphere appealed to me. No, I didn't believe in ghosts or monsters. But I did believe that old graveyards were spooky.
Back in the second edition days, the Ravenloft boxed set fulfilled my love of spooky atmosphere with my love of D&D. Vampires, Ghosts, and my fantasy characters? Yes please. Yet somehow, we never went anywhere beyond flirting with the setting back in those days. Maybe we were stuck in our Dragonlance world. Or maybe the Ravenloft boxed set was just too much awesome. After all, there were so many different domains of dread. Where should we start? So we never did play in Ravenloft, though I did go through the campaign book over and over. The interior art was amazing. (Stephen Fabian is so good. He also did the interior illustrations of the Dragonlance Tales series which I also really love) I also picked up a few of the Ravenloft novels. Especially loving the tie-in with Dragonlance where Lord Soth is brought into the Mists.
So when I finally got back into D&D a few years back it was almost inevitable that my mind would go back to that Ravenloft setting. It helped that one of my group members waned to play in it. So, I picked up some of the Ravenloft I missed in the intervening years. Starting with the Swords & Wizardry version for third edition. We were a 3.5 group at the time and I figured if we were ever to play Ravenloft then 3rd edition rules were the way to go. The book was disappointing to say the least. There was nothing evocative about it. Nothing spooky. It had no flavor. Part of the problem is that I wasn't too familiar with 3.5 rules. Yeah, that was what I was playing and I could fumble through, but I couldn't make a sweet spooky campaign while trying to grind through rules that I didn't really know, and I honestly didn't really like. The other problem? No Stephen Fabian art. (Guy is amazing)
Eventually though our group started playing 5th Edition with me as the DM. Unfortunately Curse of Strahd wasn't out yet so we started playing a mix of Homebrew and and stuff I found on the Internet. There's a certain joy to be found exploring many adventures and tying them together. When Strahd did come out we were mired deep in my campaign and frankly it wasn't interesting me anymore. For a variety of reasons. Mostly from DM burnout
I should have just called it and jumped right into Curse. It would've kept me interested and make life as a DM a little easier. I didn't, and eventually I relinquished the DM duties to another who had wanted to run something. I ached to run Curse but I was okay to let him be the DM.
Then I did a quick fill-in session. So I ran Death House, the Curse of Strahd introductory adventure. I was so excited to tie the new batch of characters into Ravenloft. The session went well. It was great. We could then move into the whole campaign! But, it was just a fill-in session and it didn't look like we would continue for awhile. And by this time I was burnt out on the long nights and time-commitment the group wanted. I had to drop out for my own D&D health.
Again Ravenloft was lost to me. Would I forever be cursed not to play this Setting that I loved so much?
