Creating a Darklord to Terrorize 5E D&D with Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft

Salutations, nerds! We’re elbows deep in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft and today I’m going to create a Dark Lord for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, by which I mean going over this section of the book and also following the instructions to do so because it sounds like a lot of fun to me.

Developing a central rival for your 5E D&D horror adventures

So first of all Domains of Dread (and other Domains of Dread!) are prisons for the entity they’re housing. The Big Bad Darklord fuels the horror of the area the party is adventuring within. This means the set up comes with it’s own bad guy.

Sinister Reflections

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft suggests asking your players about their characters and shaping your dread lord to contrast and complement the party. This is an excellent idea except I don’t have a 5E D&D party sitting in front of me right now to ask about and there’s probably a good chance you don’t either so I’m gonna skip this part. But there’s a lot of good advice here so if you have the chance to work with your players, absolutely do it.

To sum it up though the idea is to exaggerate and twist the core of the characters kind of like how Sherlock and Moriarty are both wickedly intelligent people. Good villains share traits with their heroes and this is an excellent opportunity to bounce off of the characters in your campaign.

Past Life

Who was your Darklord before the Mists of Ravenloft took them prisoner? This passage emphasizes how Darklords were fully realized people before they became full on monsters. There’s a list of questions here and the book also suggests reading the Genres of Horror section to see if any of those flavors strike your fancy. I think I want to play with a kind of twisted Peter Pan figure.

Who was the Darklord’s family? How were they oppressed, oppressive or both? What was the Darklord’s childhood like? All of these are important questions. The Darklord I’m creating was a street urchin in a populated city. Orphaned at an early age she didn’t really have a family to speak of and the city forgot her.

It was an oppressive environment because as much as people want to believe humans are basically good, when left to their own devices the bigger kids push the littler ones around and often when those littler ones get bigger they find their taste of power more important than changing the status quo. And so the cycle goes on.

She had friends once upon a time and saw a lot of them starve to death or their bodies broken beyond repair by beatings from older kids or uncaring city guards. She learned very quickly the best way to keep yourself safe was to make them afraid of you.

I’m going to go with her appearing around age 14 or 15, so not entirely grown up but grown up enough that most of the players I run for won’t be uncomfortable taking the fight to her — that’s part of how she’s being punished. She’ll never grow up and her body is always going to be weak.

Wicked Personality

In this section Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft details going into the traits you would give most NPCs — ideals, bonds and flaws. The book points to Chapter 4: Creating Nonplayer Characters in the 5E D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide for guidance here.

Ideal. Our Lost Girl’s ideal is simple. Adults think they’re keeping the order but it’s amazing how quickly this stops mattering when the person they’re looking down on is so much smaller. She has a disdain for anything too grown up. Everything operates on child rules or it does not operate at all.

“The way adults do things is unfair. Children’s rules are superior.”

Bond. A Darklord’s bond isn’t about simply their ties to the world. It’s about desire. They want power as a way to obtain this bond being held from them. We’re not going with parental love — this would be too easy. Our Lost Girl had a best friend. When you’re 14 your best friend is the most important person in your life. This friend was a girl of a similar age who raged as hard against the city as our Darklord did. But at a certain point the best friend said, “No, we’ve gone too far,” and our Lost Girl will do anything to get her back.

“My best friend was with me until she saw blood; I’m going to prove to her we were right.”

Flaws. Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft describes this as the irrational habit causing the Darklord or others harm. Darklords aren’t reasonable. If they were the Mists wouldn’t capture them and provide a Domain of Dread. Obviously our Lost Girl doesn’t trust grown ups but this is less a flaw than a symptom of one. I am looking at small and irrationally angry, the kind of person who organizes an entire cadre of orphans into burning a good section of the city down.

There’s also a table of suggested flaws with quite a few good ones in there and I highly recommend checking it out.

“Anyone who isn’t my friend is my enemy, and I only have one way of dealing with my enemies.”

Corrupt Beyond Redemption

The point is for the Darklord to have passed the moral event horizon. This person has done something absolutely abhorrent — something they can’t come back from.

Evil Acts. These are the things your Darklord did for which the Dark Powers punish them. Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft specifically details that forced or coerced actions do not qualify…but if she was the one doing the coercion that’s another thing entirely.

I’ll go with the detail from the flaws section. She led a cadre of orphans into burning a section of the city down. Over a period of time our Lost Girl got together a small army of the kids who fell through the cracks and because a good number of them were children when she directed them to light the torches they did it without hesitation.

Those Harmed. The book states how the Darklord’s victims need to feel real. They need to have names and should have agency. In the case of our Lost Girl a lot of innocent people burned in the fire but the real victims here were the other street kids. If I were going to flesh this out all the way I’d probably pick a couple of adults, but most of the characters who survived the fire were other young ones. The Best Friend, for example, is the only one our Lost Girl let walk away after she said no. Others who questioned what was happening weren’t so lucky.

I’d probably work in some smaller kids who didn’t really like what was happening anymore but knew if they refused they’d be beaten or worse. Maybe a runaway who tried to stop what was happening or get their own family out of the city was rewarded with bad burn scars and a failed attempt.

Irredeemable. We’re past the point where the Darklord’s misdeeds can be corrected. This is hell. Hi, have a seat and get comfortable because you’re never leaving. My take here is this is the part where you decide the last stop before the moral event horizon — the last chance to make this right.

For example our Lost Girl could have listened to her friend when she warned against going too far. By the time her gang of street kids was blocking people’s doors to stop them from getting out and lighting houses on fire, well…you put two and two together.

Developing a Darklord

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft provides another set of questions you can poke at to flesh out the Darklord you started shaping in the first few sections. At this point we have a pretty defined silhouette and this is the part where we go into details to add some color and shading.

To illustrate using our Lost Girl I’ll focus down on one of these questions to further develop our Darklord’s backstory.

“How did the Dark Powers use these acts to craft the perfect prison domain for the Darklord?”

Our Lost Girl’s Domain of Dread is the burned out husk of a city and the area surrounding it. This burned out husk is partially overgrown and dominated by feral children with sharpened sticks and makeshift weapons.

No one ages a day in this place. I’m throwing around the idea that adventurers who end up here arrive as younger versions of themselves. Our Lost Girl took her rage out on the adults who didn’t care about the plight of the street kids and ended up creating an environment where it’s far easier for a lost child to get stepped on…but she’s far more focused on staying on top and in command than anything else.

Monstrous Transformation

This step isn’t absolutely necessary but a lot of Darklords have features making them appear monstrous. By the sheer number of vampires on the list of existing Darklords I’m seeing the pattern.

All of the suggested transformations are, as you would expect from a book like this, horrifying. None of them particularly fits our Lost Girl, however. She doesn’t get any older. She’s always going to be short, skinny and 14 years old. As creepy as it is to open one’s mouth and have a cloud of flies come out — an option on the table of Monstrous Transformations — I don’t feel like any of them fit appropriately.

She got here burning a part of the city so maybe parts of her smolder and smoke in a very Silent Hill kind of way, particularly in moments of rage, and maybe this leaves wounds that don’t actually hurt her but can take days to close.

Birth of a Darklord

This represents the moment the Mists of Ravenloft took them. This is the part where the creation of the Darklord moves into the creation of the Domain of Dread that formed around them based on all of the above.

Creating a Darklord for 5E D&D using the resources and guidance in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft was a lot more fun than I expected. Go have fun, go crack into this and create your own Darklord. I’d love to hear about it in the comments or on Twitter @Pyrosynthesis. Of course, as always, stay nerdy!

*Featured image — The rivalry between Darklords Strahd von Zarovich and Azalin Rex spills through endless ages and countless domains revealed in Van Ricthen’s Guide to Ravenloft for 5E D&D. [Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast]

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