Ravenloft: Present and Future — Curse of Strahd, Van Richten's Guide, and the Horrors Within

This is the final post in a three-part series on Ravenloft across the editions. The first covered the origins: Ravenloft: Past — The Module, the Mist, and the Second Edition. The second looked at the d20 era and White Wolf: Ravenloft: The d20 Era — Sword and Sorcery Studios, White Wolf, and the 4th Edition Silence.

I am writing this in July 2026, which feels like an appropriate moment. New Ravenloft material has arrived, and it gives the series a present-tense anchor. But before I get to that, I want to think about what happened when the setting came back under 5th edition.

Curse of Strahd: the return to Barovia

When Wizards of the Coast announced Curse of Strahd in 2016, it was positioned as a return to the original adventure rather than a full setting revival. The decision made sense. Rather than attempting to revive the entire Demiplane of Dread immediately, they went back to the source: Barovia, Strahd, Castle Ravenloft, and the Gothic horror premise that made the original I6 module distinctive in the first place.

Curse of Strahd is, in many ways, an expansion and refinement of the original module’s design. The card-draw randomisation returns — the Tarokka deck reading that determines where key items are hidden, what Strahd’s current fixation is, and which ally will aid the party. That mechanic gives the campaign genuine replayability and was, I think, a deliberate act of homage to the Hickmans’ original design. The adventure does not pretend the 1983 module did not exist; it treats it as the foundation and builds on it.

The execution was widely well-received, and I think it earned that reception. The adventure is not a conservative exercise. It expanded Barovia into a full-scale campaign region, developed Strahd into a genuinely complex antagonist rather than simply a powerful monster, and incorporated a level of emotional and narrative texture that distinguished it from the typical dungeon-crawl adventure. The setting materials for the village of Vallaki, the Vistani, and the various allies and complications give a GM real material to work with.

Whether it captured the original Gothic horror atmosphere of the second edition campaign setting is a different question. Curse of Strahd is excellent 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. It is atmospheric and well-designed. Whether it is genuinely Gothic in the way the Hickmans intended is, I think, something each table will answer differently depending on how they run it.

Curse of Strahd Revamped

Curse of Strahd: Revamped appeared in 2020 as a premium edition of the same adventure with revised content, updated maps, and additional material including a Tarokka deck as a physical inclusion. It was not a fundamental reimagining — the core adventure remained the same — but it addressed some of the original release’s shortcomings around the Vistani representation, which had attracted legitimate criticism. The revisions were made thoughtfully, in my view, and improved the product.

I do think the premium presentation matters for a setting like Ravenloft. The visual and tactile elements of play — the card deck, the handouts, the atmospheric staging — are part of how Gothic horror operates at the table. Gothic fiction is about sensation and atmosphere as much as plot, and a well-produced physical product supports that.

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft: the wider Demiplane returns

The more significant development came in 2021 with Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. Where Curse of Strahd had focused on Barovia, Van Richten’s Guide opened up the full concept of the Demiplane of Dread: multiple domains, multiple Darklords, a wider toolkit for horror campaigns across very different registers.

This was the book that told me Wizards of the Coast were taking the setting seriously rather than treating it as a one-off nostalgia product. The decision to expand beyond Barovia — to revive the idea that the Mists could contain Gothic horror, cosmic horror, body horror, psychological horror, and folk horror all within the same framework — was the move that the second edition setting had been founded on. The return to that structural openness matters.

The book also updated the moral architecture. The Darklords of Van Richten’s Guide are defined by contemporary sensibilities around trauma and harm as well as the classical Gothic model of damnation and obsession. Whether that update strengthens or dilutes the original premise is, in my honest opinion, a question that depends heavily on the specific domain in question. Some of the new domains feel genuinely fresh; others feel like horror-genre exercises with a thin connection to the Demiplane’s deeper themes. That is, I suppose, an inevitable consequence of breadth.

What I will say without reservation is that Van Richten’s Guide is an excellent book for GMs who want to run horror campaigns within Dungeons & Dragons. The toolkit it provides — the horror genre guidance, the domain structure, the advice on safety and consent at the table in horror-adjacent play — is genuinely useful independent of how attached you are to the Ravenloft brand.

June 2026: Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft: The Horrors Within

And now June 2026 has brought new material: Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft: The Horrors Within.

I am not going to pretend I have read it cover to cover at the time of writing — it is newly released and my copy is recent. What I can say is what the release signals.

The fact that Wizards of the Coast have committed to a new Ravenloft title less than five years after Van Richten’s Guide suggests confidence in the setting’s commercial and creative viability within the current edition. It also suggests they believe there is more to say within the Demiplane of Dread than the previous releases covered.

From the available information, The Horrors Within continues the work Van Richten’s Guide began: expanding the Demiplane, developing domains and Darklords further, and providing material for GMs who want to run sustained Gothic horror campaigns rather than one-off encounters with vampires and fog. That trajectory is, in my view, the right one.

The original Ravenloft was a setting about the nature of damnation — about what it costs to want the wrong thing, to fail at the crucial moment, or to become something monstrous in the pursuit of something worthwhile. The Darklords were not simply powerful antagonists; they were cautionary figures with genuine interiority. If The Horrors Within develops that tradition, it will be doing what Ravenloft does best.

I will write a fuller response once I have spent more time with the material. For now, the series closes here: a setting that started as a single module in 1983, became a full campaign world, survived the d20 transition through an unconventional collaboration, weathered a fourth-edition silence, came back to life under 5th edition, and has now produced new material four decades after a Welsh couple wrote a vampire into a castle in Barovia and changed what horror could mean in a tabletop game.

That is a long shadow to cast from a cardboard module.

Source material

The following resources informed this post:

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ravenloft dungeons-and-dragons ttrpg rpg horror gothic-horror review 5e curse-of-strahd