 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and I wanted to do another video on Ravenloft because I cannot audibly tell you how cool the shit in this book is. I already covered the lineages, the subclasses, and gave a brief overview of the Domains of Dread, but now I'm going to go in-depth on this setting and teach you all about the Lords locked in their misty purgatories. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if hearing about the cruel and ironic punishments of tragic villains will leave you a little misty-eyed, feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So to talk about Dark Lords, I have to talk about the Domains of Dread, and to talk about the Domains of Dread, I have to talk about the Shadowfell. If you've watched my Inner Plains Guide, then you know that there are other worlds beyond the material realm that have a direct impact on our day-to-day lives. The elemental planes give us, well, the elements. The Feywild is often misconstrued as a realm of pure chaos, but that is only because it is actually a realm of pure emotion, and since humans are poorly equipped to deal with their emotions, they call it chaos. To understand the Shadowfell, you have to understand this distinction of the Feywild, because the Shadowfell is the opposite of the Feywild, but it is by no means a place of order. The Shadowfell is a place where emotions go to die. If the Feywild is the sea flowing all emotions into the normal world, then the Shadowfell is the sand that sucks up the emotions before they hit the shoreline. Without the Shadowfell, any feeling we had would never stop. In fact, it would only, it could only, get stronger. Imagine that moment of happiness you feel when you complete a task, but it never goes away, and it keeps getting added on every time you do something else, until you're a giant bubble of never-ending happiness and then you explode and die. Now consider that happiness isn't the only emotion that you have, and that is why the Shadowfell is important. The reason I'm giving this lesson on the cosmic flow of the universe is because what a lot of people don't know is that the mists of Ravenloft, the same kind that pull you into Berovia to meet old Simply Strahd, aren't pulling you into a pocket dimension or an outer plane, they're pulling you into the Shadowfell, just like how you can walk into the woods and get kidnapped by the Fey. Understanding the Shadowfell is imperative to understanding the mists, and by extension, the domains of dread. When a person from the material plane commits an act of evil so atrocious that it can never be forgiven, such as spoiling the ending of a TV show with a trendy meme, the Shadowfell senses this mass of terror and like a vacuum to a cat, it rolls in and sucks the monster, kicking and screaming into their own domain of dread, trapping them for all of eternity. My personal headcanon is that the Shadowfell does this because intense moments of evil are filled with so much emotion that the dark powers pull it out of the material plane as a sort of cosmic quarantine, but that is just my headcanon, so please don't recite that as fact, I just think it's cool to think about. In any case, once they're swept up by the mists, the mad memeor is thrust into their own little sectioned off Shadowfell that looks and behaves exactly like the realm that they used to terrify, with a few noteworthy differences. Most obviously, they only get a certain amount of sandbox to play in, just enough to keep them from getting bored, and their designated play area is surrounded by an inescapable mist that will choke out and spit back anybody that tries to walk through it. Any souls that were in the vicinity when the mist bomb went off will be pulled in with the Dark Lord to be tortured for all eternity, for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. These souls can technically leave if the mists want them to, but if Ravenloft wants them, nothing can help them escape, not even death. Don't get me wrong, if you die in the mist, you die in real life, but dying in a domain of dread will just slingshot your soul into a new body faster than you can say riff and chat. Reincarnation is a big factor to the domains, and there are normally no more souls in a domain than what were originally pulled into it, which begs the question, if a baby is born, but all of the souls are currently occupado, what happens to the baby? The answer is, the Shadowfell gives them a soul. But, given that the Shadowfell is the emotionless husk of darkness and low saturation, permanent residents, as we will call them, are barely passable as humans. They can make basic conversation, accomplish tasks like a normal human would, but behind their cold, dead eyes, there's not a real soul, it's just a body. These victims of late stage capitalism can never leave Ravenloft because there are only manifestations of it, so if the mists were ever to disappear, so too would they. That's why visitors to the crappiest place on Earth often find Ravenloft filled with so much hopelessness. It's not depression, it's super depression. And at the source of that depression lies the Dark Lord. The Dark Lord is the person that everything was created for, the one who committed an act so heinous that the universe had to put them in time out, and now they rule over this new land, terrifying the populace and generally just being a really uncool dude. The entire narrative of the domain is based around how much of a dick this one person is, and it seems like every negative thing that happens in the world stems from the dickishness of the Dark Lord. Because of the revolving perpetuity of Ravenloft, over time, everyone seems to forget about the lands beyond their domain, to the point where if you try to tell them that there is life where the Dark Lord can't reach, they'll tell you you're a dummy. Obvious solutions to problems are never considered. No one can summon up the emotion to fight back, and the nature of reincarnation means that even if they do find a way to make things less miserable, they'll just reincarnate eventually, and go right back to being a sad dog. You would think that having a realm to rule forever with people who fear you and monsters that will serve your beck and call would be, like, totally poggers dude, but no, it is most un-poggers. The demands of dread are ultimately a punishment for the Dark Lord, trapping them in the moment that they're the most emotionally vulnerable, and curating a world that will constantly taunt them with their emotional vulnerability. Tekstrad, for example, the most famous Dark Lord and the one that started it all. In his lust for a woman who did not want him, he beseeched the Dark Powers for, well, Dark Power, and was transformed into a vampire, then killed his brother, and was all like, ha ha Tatiana, you were banging my brother. But because Tatiana was not a middle schooler from 2009, she was not wooed. She instead responded by saying, watch this, and then throwing herself off a balcony and plummeting to her death, as one does. It was this moment that the shadows of Ravenloft chose to Marcus Strahd's defining moment, when the lands of Bororio were overcome with so much grief, all in one day, all due to one individual. When the mists formed, Strahd became the ruler over a land that he did not care for, but what he did care for, he could never have. Tatiana, the woman of his dreams, would constantly reincarnate into a new person that Strahd would get his vampiric thirst on for, but fate would prevent him from having her for long, or from him finally being able to find satisfaction in his work. The constant nightmare of chasing after Tatiana would drive him mad, and thus is the curse of the Dark Lord. What you have, you will never want, and what you want, you will never have. Also, as of the newest book, Tatiana's soul can inhabit anybody, boy, girl, twins, a literal golem of falselying flesh, which means that Strahd officially is the by-disaster we always knew he was. Such is the fate of all Dark Lords, to be taunted by their past failures, and also be by disasters. From nobles who poison their family for power to vengeance-seeking warriors-seeking vengeance, the mists hold hundreds of worlds cast out by the material plane for being too uncool. My personal favorite is the express train Sire 1313. In the realm of Eberron, one of the most impactful events was the day of mourning, the day that one of the five warring nations exploded in magical mist that enveloped the entire country. The capital of Sire knew that the explosion was imminent, and so they took to the magical train known as the lightning rail. Specifically, the passenger ship Sire 1313. The train waited too long for one particular influential passenger to board, and by the time it got moving, it was too late. The morning happened, the mists rolled all over the train, and all of the inhabitants were cast into the shadow fell. The train itself became a mobile domain of dread, and the influential passenger became its Dark Lord, constantly waiting for the final stop that would never come. In a perfect world, a Dark Lord would be capable of escaping their domain of dread, should they acknowledge the futile repetitiveness of their selfish acts. Strahd would stop stalking Tatiana, the nameless passenger of Sire 1313 would finally stop the train, but this potential way out could never happen. People in the domains of dread don't change, either because of their own stubbornness, or because the shadow fell doesn't want them to. Try to convince Dark Lord that what they're doing is wrong, and they might have a moment of cognitive dissonance until they find a justification for their actions. Kill the Dark Lord, and the mists will just bring them back, with the memories of being murdered, maybe, but none of the lessons that they could have gotten from it. The mist isn't just in the air, it's inside the people of Ravenloft, and it fills their head so that no one will change, no one will learn, and nothing will get better. The only way to save yourself is to leave, and as you may have picked up on by now, the mists do not like to let people go. Luckily, there are a few ways to get off of the no fly list, but none of them are easy. The first, and most straightforward, is to kill the Dark Lord. The Dark Lord is the reason why the mists are there. If the Dark Lord is gone, the mists will find him and bring him back. This will give you the time to escape, but it will also unlife all of the permanent residents, because they only exist because of the mists. Obviously, this is easier said than done, because to kill the Dark Lord, you have to know who the Dark Lord is, and then you have to manage to, you know, actually kill them. Which is hard to do, when some of them are 9th level vampire wizards who can body-check Mordenkanen. The alternative to cracking open the good ol' Curse of Strahd is to find an item known as a Mist Talisman. But this is sort of putting a bandaid over a third degree burn. A Mist Talisman is a fanciful way of saying trash that was taken out of a domain of dread, and things that leave domains always manage to find their way back. So if you held onto one, and then wandered into the mist, you'd be protected from it just long enough to find yourself thrown into whatever domain that object belongs to. The reason that this isn't a permanent solution is obvious. This method can't get you out of Ravenloft, but it can help you navigate it. Because if you started collecting talismans, you could theoretically just wander throughout all of the places that you've been before, and perhaps you could meet another Mist Wanderer and trade talismans like their pogs. However, Dark Lords are still the rulers of their own domains, and if a Dark Lord closes off their land from the rest of Ravenloft, then trying to travel it will just send you flying into a random part of the mist. Your last option however is the most dangerous. More dangerous than rolling dice with the vape cloud of death, and even more dangerous than tea posing against Strahd. You can beseech the dark powers that rule Ravenloft to grant you one of their own dark gifts. This gift could be anything from an animated shadow to monsters that stay out of your peripheral vision but silently watch over you, to the gift we're looking for, Mist Walking. This gift lets you travel throughout the mists unharmed, effectively making you a Mist Talisman, and as long as you know the name of a domain, you can go there. If the dark powers allow it, you might be able to even get back to the land of the living, but there is never a give without a take, and Ravenloft will take everything from you. Accepting the dark gift will give the dark powers something in return, and that sacrifice may be obvious, but the implications never are. Despite how dire they become, and even if you manage to escape, the breath of the Mist may have already infected you. Your survival is never guaranteed, and one day, you may get a postcard from a friend that says, Welcome to Ravenloft. Wish you were here. Buuuuut, then I'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, bring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can stay inside of this perpetuity of my own domain of dread. But yeah, dabby out.