Premise

FOR FOOLS rush in where angels fear to tread.

—Pope, Alexander

Imagine, if you will, a world beyond worlds. A demiplane beyond planes. Held fast in the jaws of some scurrilous pocket of reality are realms which cast no light of their own, reflecting only shadow. Here you will find dark, gloomy castles, desolate landscapes, black clouds racing against the moon—all trappings of something deep, ancient, and Gothic. Here speak no gods. Here reigns only the potential and folly of man. Here heroes and villains alike fear one thing, and fear it ultimately.

The Land of the Mists. Ravenloft.

For some, home.

Despite the ambiguous nature upon which the Realms of Terror reside, it is no question how these islands formed. Many centuries ago the noble general Strahd von Zarovich settled in a land called Barovia, in a castle known as Ravenloft. Here and no other would such horrid events transpire that Barovia was wrestled from the Prime Material to beyond the Misty Border, where it has been ever since. Strahd, changed, would put to pen his version in a tome now entombed in the very castle which tombed him.

A page:

I AM THE ANCIENT. I AM THE LAND. MY BEGINNINGS ARE LOST IN THE DARKNESS OF THE PAST. I WAS THE WARRIOR, I WAS GOOD AND JUST. I THUNDERED ACROSS THE LAND LIKE THE WRATH OF A JUST GOD, BUT THE WAR YEARS AND THE KILLING YEARS WORE DOWN MY SOUL AS THE WIND WEARS STONE INTO SAND.

ALL GOODNESS SLIPPED FROM MY LIFE; I FOUND MY YOUTH AND STRENGTH GONE AND ALL I HAD LEFT WAS DEATH. MY ARMY SETTLED INTO THE VALLEY OF BAROVIA AND TOOK POWER OF THE PEOPLE IN THE NAME OF A JUST GOD, BUT WITH NONE OF A GOD’S GRACE OR JUSTICE.

Another:

THE DEATH SHE SAW IN ME TURNED HER FROM ME. AND SO I CAME TO HATE DEATH, MY DEATH. I MADE A PACT WITH DEATH, A PACT OF BLOOD. SHE FLED FROM ME. I PURSUED HER. SHE FLUNG HERSELF FROM THE WALLS OF RAVENLOFT AND I WATCHED EVERYTHING I EVER WANTED FALL FROM MY GRASP FOREVER.

I DID NOT DIE. NOR DID I LIVE.

I BECAME AS UNDEAD, FOREVER.

For a while, Barovia was the only land in the Realms of Terror. Soon, however, others stepped from the Mists. Some were good and some were evil, and not all of them were men. Azalin, a lich, would create the second domain of Darkon—now Necropolis—when he left Barovia after discovering secrets he believed to be truths about the Mists and the nature of Strahd’s imprisonment, for he was imprisoned. In the ensuring years other such domains have formed, each holding captive these people of inexorable evil.

But they are darklords, and they are not the players of this story.

The Realms of Terror are what they are, but they are also home to countless folk each living their lives independently of their rulers or the cosmic drama which orbits them. Some are farmers, merchants, cobblers or even—yes—adventurers, among them Outlanders who have been brought beyond the Misty Border from their original worlds among the Prime Material, led here by the very Mists that today entrap all. It is these people, their triumphs and tragedies, which form the fabric in the great tapestry that is the Core.

The going will be troubled, struggling and rough, but Ravenloft seeks to crystallize the greatest good inasmuch as it harbors the greatest evil.

Synopsis

It is the autumn of 755 BC, some five years after the Requiem that consumed the metropolis Il-Aluk and waylaid the rest of Darkon, desecrating it into the rogue “nation” called Necropolis. Azalin Rex is presumed gone or destroyed as thousands of Darkonian refugees spill across her borders, some native and others who remember now their true, stolen lives from elsewhere. Another casualty of the Requiem was the destruction of the Core’s connection to any outside Clusters, with all previous Mistways shuttered.

Curiouser still was the disappearance of neighbors Hazlan and Nova Vaasa, with those who once lived in either finding their memories fading, as if the two domains are “sliding out of history”. Conjoined also are the former territories of Verbrek and Valachan, now called simply the Veldt, or “the killing fields”.

It is a precarious time in the Core, as from the corpus of Hazlan and Nova Vaasa has sprung Cordova, a vast domain containing the Tirimisce Lands demidomain, a country of ambitious imperials fighting their ancient enemy in the northwestern pagans as well as undead seeping from the carcass of Darkon, worshiping on the altar of their militant religion. The Western Core fares little better, as Falknovia has descended into outright civil war with sections of Richemulot occupied with the Treaty of the Four Towers left seemingly paralyzed.

Upheaval has reached even old, sinuous Barovia as Count Strahd von Zarovich has closed his borders until an entity he has named only as “the Stargazer” is found, captured, and spirited to him at Castle Ravenloft. Meanwhile old enemies in Borca conspire to advantage both the situation in their east and the brewing call for arms in their west.

Transformed by the Grand Conjunction and now the Requiem, the Core now barrels toward a collective future that has never before been more uncertain.