I'm currently playing in a 5e Curse of Strahd campaign, and part of the fun for me as An Old is the confusing deja vu bits as I run into bits of lore and comparing them to the 1990s version of the setting
For a while I thought they had chucked the whole rest of the setting away and focused only on Strahd, but yesterday we ran into a monster hunter who explained that there are many of these pocket dimensions, each ruled by its own cursed lord, so it's just like the olden days
I do think that dimension-hopping monster hunters vs the monster boss of the week, Saturday Morning Cartoon style, is a better fit for D&D than the straight horror that Ravenloft tries to do
Or just "There are dungeons. They spring up on occasion for Reasons, or We Don't Know Just Go With It. Plz solve or be overrun with monsters."
Works super well. Some of my friends wrote a campaign setting around it that has been very successful!
I think the Ravenloft thing can be a kind of Buffy/D&D crossover: you drop into a new pocket dimension, you have to figure out what's the story with its cursed boss, what drove them to madness, what their weakness is, and then you kill them, and move on to the next one
It is, and I will stand by you on this opinion.
Obviously I like other settings and stuff but on the top of the list, it’s Beastworld. Both the setting and its community!
