Ravenloft

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Count Strahd von Zarovich, contemplating the miserable little pile of secrets that is a man.

Trapped in another world, each area of the world is its own little plane of existence, ruled by the baron! Vampires, ghouls, zombies, wights, undeads, witches, curses and no way out - DUN DUN DUUUUUN

Ravenloft is a campaign setting made of lofts and ravens...well, ok, it's a D&D campaign setting that threw away the shiny high fantasy heroism cliches and largely substituted them with 19th century gothic novel material. Ravenloft itself is a demiplane, divided into several domains each ruled by a different lord, inspired by traditional horror tales. The first rule of Ravenloft is not to touch anything, ever. It will kill you, rape your corpse and use your soul for thong underwear.

The entire plane is composed entirely of innumerable prisons, each one for something that really deserves it, and is caught in some kind of ironic hell as a result. The DM could connect this plane into your regular adventure just by saying, "thick mists rise up around you", and this meant you were royally borked. Ravenloft featured a big bad evil guy named Count Strahd von Zarovich, a massively powerful Dracula analogue that you could never really destroy.

Basically, every evil deed is punished by karma. This means that it's entirely possible to lie, cheat and steal your way into power, only to find yourself ironically cursed. Standard operating procedure is for you to be cursed to be alone or separated from one specific loved one - a wife, a son, etc.

The setting has been described as "Hell, but not for you"-- the prisoners mentioned above? They're the rulers of each land. Each ruler is also the prisoner, as it wouldn't be an ironic hell for these ambitious pricks if they didn't have almost everything they ever wanted.

When horror themes started becoming popular again in the years around 2010, people remembered again that Ravenloft existed. Wizards of the Coast reintroduced the world to the mainstream D&D cosmology by saying that its domains lie within a mirror-plane of the Prime Material, making the aforementioned connection device canon. There were also a bunch of imitators in settings and games where you really wouldn't expect it.

So, yeah. If you like Wuthering Heights, Ethan Frome, or Castlevania, you'll love Ravenloft.

(Fun fact: Only two prisoners have ever managed to escape from Ravenloft permanently: Venca, in a set of modules that make both Matt Ward's oeuvre and Twilight look positively well-written, and Lord Soth, formerly of Dragonlance. Soth is the more interesting of the two in that he escapes by not giving a crap. To explain: Soth eventually accepts that he deserves to be tormented by the Dark Powers and admits his failures. He refuses to rise to anything they present him with, be it despair or hope; eventually, realizing that it's pointless to keep him around since he won't respond to anything they do, the Dark Powers release him from Ravenloft.)

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