Experience the Horror Firsthand with Survivors in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft offers a menagerie of tools to help Dungeon Masters and players of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons sink their teeth into genres of horror. We’ve already written about preparing horror games, running horror games with atmosphere and pacing to enhance the experience of your 5E D&D group. However, if you really want to sell the horror flavor and show players how grim and unforgiving the world can be then Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft suggests the use of survivors.

Using survivors for 5E D&D horror

Full disclosure: when I first read this section, I interpreted it as being a way to introduce NPCs who were survivors of horror and were intended to offer insights into historical events. By offering customization options, I thought Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft was offering tons of customization support for NPCs in Dungeons and Dragons.

While you could certainly use survivors in this way, this section is intended for players to customize these survivor characters and play as them to experience horrific events more directly, with full knowledge that the prospect of death is imminent due to the temporary nature of these characters.

Cut scenes, dreams, and memories

The idea of players using these survivors is intended for self-contained adventures, which does not mean a romp into the memories of a character or their dreams. Rather, the idea is you might take an aside in which players set their characters on the back burner for a session or two while you present past events as though they are happening in the moment.

This increases the suspense and tension of the whole scene and offers a gritty connection to otherwise distant events. This offers new perspective to events the player characters might discover themselves in the session immediately following the self-contained side quests.

By allowing players to encounter the aftermath of events they just played through, the players are rewarded with evidence of their previous actions. The allure of discovering unsolved mysteries or unexplained events from the horrors encountered by the survivors offer new perspectives and satisfaction to what would otherwise be an incomplete story.

Mindtaker Mists

One option for triggering asides in the notion of the Mindtaker Mists — the idea a person might be yanked from their body and superimposed into another’s in order to experience the horrors of that survivor’s life.

This adds a layer of tension and suspense if the danger of death in the survivor’s perspective results in the player character’s death. After all, not all survivors… well, survive. (Insert shrug)

You can also explore more vicious and visceral experiences with survivors, especially in dreamscapes, and you can really mess with players’ heads by having their characters experience death firsthand.

In Ravenloft you’re not even safe in the comfort of your own psyche, and while this can allow for some interesting “die without dying” and reset button shenanigans, it can also up the ante if you make returning to your players’ characters’ bodies contingent on them being able to navigate the events their survivors experience.

Terrifying freedom, delightful doom

As I mentioned, survivors’ survival is by no means a guarantee. Survivors are (intentionally) more fragile and vulnerable than the player characters.

It’s important to emphasize to players going into it that their survivors can very well die and any stakes you have predetermined for failure or death or whatever else in these asides need to be made clear from the beginning.

It’s one thing for a playersto plunge headlong into danger with their survivors because they made a reckless, headstrong daredevil. It’s another to learn after the survivor’s untimely and story-satisfying death there are tangible consequences for the player’s long-running character.

If I’m being honest, being able to cut loose and know there will be no consequences for a survivor’s death allow players freedom to explore more interesting options they might hesitate to when controlling their precious rogue, fighter or what have you. Sometimes the fun of asides with survivors is you can be free to let your controlled survivor die.

What’s old is new

One thing to keep in mind is the rules for survivors mimic some base 5E D&D classes. Your fighter, rogue, wizard and cleric become the squire, sneak, apprentice and disciple respectively.

While traditional D&D is a power fantasy at its heart where epic heroes slay terrifying monsters, horror doesn’t always facilitate the same power fantasy. To play a grittier horror game you can have your players’ main characters be survivors. This can be especially effective for more narratively-driven, mechanics-light groups in a similar way to sidekicks from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.

Tools for terror

You can absolutely build your own survivors and play them as main characters in a campaign. This section of the book introduces the four core survivor archetypes mentioned earlier.

Creating a survivor

This section of the book explains how to build and customize survivor characters. It’s worth noting that survivors are really only intended to advance up to 3rd level. By giving survivors a stat block this enables them to more mechanically participate in the story and this can definitely feed into my initial impressions of survivors being made into NPCs.

Inserting survivors as NPCs allows Dungeon Masters to supplement the party’s capabilities with necessary utility. For example, if your party has no cleric yet a plot point requires a divine character or a character with a divine connection to a specific god then a disciple survivor might be a much-needed asset. If your party is more intrigue-heavy and you know a difficult combat is approaching, offering a squire who can frontline some muscle would come in handy and also provide a face for the party to care about if you need to kill someone to show a truly savage or brutal threat in the Domains of Dread.

As it stands, whether using your survivors as NPCs or PCs, the options for customization allow you to flesh out your survivors into real characters, complete with mechanics to back them up.

The notion of survivor talents more or less peg these characters even further into their archetypes and honestly if I were to change anything here I would suggest removing the restrictions of the talents to allow for any survivor to take any talent. This would spice things up and this whole section is ripe for some heavy homebrew.

Either way, being able to level and customize your 5E D&D survivors is a great way to further cement these stat blocks as playable for your gaming group and can offer some interesting dynamics with the lore you seek to present. Survivors also can offer a much-needed break, if players just want a couple of sessions’ reprieve from their current roster to break up the monotony of a long-form campaign.

Overall thoughts & additional options

If I’m being honest, part of why I love horror and Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft on the whole is the story-focused aspects. This book does a phenomenal job of empowering and guiding DMs and players alike to telling better stories and introduces a genre I perceive relatively few people engaged with in 5E D&D prior to this book’s release.

If you haven’t I highly recommend picking up your own copy of Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft on DnD Beyond or in hard cover. Also, if you just really want to scratch the horror itch or you want to supplement the book with some more specific horror content then check out the Nerdarchy store, where we’ve got loads of PDFs ready for you to plug into your own games and play to your heart’s content… or discontent, given that we’re talking horror.

*Featured image — In Har’Akir, an ancient curse awakens the Children of Ankhtepot. Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft illustrates how using survivors helps create horror experiences focused on the dread inherent to having limited resources and facing impending doom without forcing players to risk their favorite 5E D&D characters. [Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast]

New videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel here