The Domains of Dread
THERE EXISTS a land between all that is Known and all that is Not Known. In this land fear, hesitation and repudiation soaks a dying man as would water. A land wrought—I am certain—from men, foolish men. Men who thought themselves gods. Men who in their hour of what they thought their triumph were made to look upon this land, our land, and despair. And it is our home.
— Anonymous, Annals of the Unknown Arcanist
The Domains of Dread is a persistent world hosted on Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, blending a custom ruleset modified from Dungeon and Dragons Third Edition and Pathfinder First Edition sources with a storyline inspired by Advanced Dungeon and Dragons’ original Ravenloft campaign setting. It is a heavy roleplay server pursuant to Gothic horror themes, choices, and consequences.
It is slated to be announced to the public in late 2025, with a full release intended for autumn 2026. Development began in early 2024.
The Vision
First codified in 1983 by Tracy and Laura Hickman, Ravenloft has endured to this day as one of the most beloved TSR modules—by 1990, campaign settings—for Advanced Dungeon and Dragons. It is from this period that The Domains of Dread owes most of its inspiration, rather than Sword and Sorcery’s Third Edition or later edition work such as Fifth Edition’s Curse of Strahd and Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft.
What The Domains of Dread seeks to provide is a cohesion of modern design principles both in gameplay and storytelling viewed through the lens of OSR, or Old School Renaissance. In many ways it is an “alternate” Third Edition, one created with the benefit of hindsight while not losing what makes Gothic fantasy so compelling even to an audience forty years removed from the blue book original. It is not a retelling, rather an expansion founded on the good bones of what came before, remaking and adding where necessary to push Ravenloft to its most logical, coherent and well delivered conclusion.
It will never be perfect, of course, and neither were the originals, but it is ours and may well be yours.
Low-Medium Magic
In keeping with OSR principles, The Domains of Dread may be generically described as a “low-medium magic” server, with a level cap of 14. Barring ephemeral circumstances the largest Enhancement Bonus to expect on any weapon or armor is +3, wielded by characters who have earned them while already at the maximum level, with +1 and +2 equipment considered good and excellent specimens respectively.
Consequently, soft attribute bonuses are capped at +10 and soft skill bonuses at +15. Equipment and class features are designed with these limits in mind.
Classes have been redesigned to be less reliant on magic items, as the quantity of being a magic—Influenced, in server terms—item carries specific drawbacks in The Domains of Dread, imperiling those who use them recklessly. This means classes are richer in features, especially those owed to their archetype, which may be conceived as a mandatory subclass chosen by all characters within their class. Multiclassing is disabled to account for greater class expression within archetypes.
Still, it should be expected that a class’s total possible power will be lower than other servers which are higher magic, such as those from the Forgotten Realms. It is the intent of our design to ensure that even if “depowered”, every class archetype—including martials—will have a wealth of options to use during roleplay and combat, hence the need for a server that is higher magic than low magic without compromising the tone of Ravenloft.
Technical Specifications
The game server is hosted locally by the Server Owner and Operator, located in upstate New York State. Roughly, the following ping ranges may be expected:
Eastern North America:5-30msEastern South America:30-120msMidwest United States:30-60msWestern North America:45-80msWestern South America:50-150msWestern and Southern Europe:70-140msEastern Europe and the Middle East:90-160msNorth and South Africa:90-200msAsia and Oceania:100-180ms
The alias of the game server will always be nwn.thedomainsofdread.com, which will resolve to the present IP. For the NWSync shard, this will be nwsync.thedomainsofdread.com. Overall, measures have been taken to ensure players may connect globally with minimal difficulties owed to geographic location.
In terms of hardware, the server is equipped with the latest Ryzen workstation-class CPU, enough RAM to distribute the game server, NWSync shard, testing repositories and backup solutions without any bottleneck to server performance.