Editing Ravenloft (section)

== What's Ravenloft Like? ==
The setting has been described (by [[Counter Monkey|Noah Antwiler]]) as "Hell, but not for you." 
[[Image:Count_Von_Count.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Contrary to popular opinion, ''detect evil'' does actually work in Ravenloft, but [[3.6_Roentgen|the world returns an integer]] and the spell expects a boolean.]]

The first rule of Ravenloft is not to touch anything, ever. Assume everything is cursed unless you saw someone pick it up and put it down without becoming a zombie, and even then that's no guarantee. Second, alignment-detecting magic can only say if something is lawful or chaotic, so you can't use those spells to check if anything is [[3.6 Roentgen|''safe'']]. Third, beware of curses, as they're especially powerful and anyone can place them if they're angry enough and get the Dark Powers' notice when they speak the curse. Any deed that could be considered "evil," like unprovoked assault, murder (especially of family), oath-breaking, or using specific naughty spells (usually necromantic) pings the Dark Powers' attention and calls for a "Powers check," a percentile roll against a number determined by the act committed and the victim. Roll above the number and you're safe (for now). Roll below and the Dark Powers like what they see, "gifting" you with something that seems beneficial, but pushes you to commit more nefarious deeds, which prompt further Powers checks. Soon, the Dark Powers' gifts come with obvious curses and debilitating drawbacks that end in either your death, transformation into something inhuman, or "ascension" to the rank of Darklord.

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 in a way that you can never have what you wanted that power for in the first place. Standard operating procedure is for you to be cursed to be alone or separated from one specific loved one - a wife, a son, etc. This is something detrimental in D&D, where the likes of good, evil, law, and chaos are tangible cosmic forces, case in point: outsiders who have good or evil as a subtype come into the place with "reality wrinkles," regions centered on themselves that have their own laws of reality, effectively their own portable domains that overwrite the local area.

Also, you can't leave unless the Dark Powers let you. There are rumors of other ways out, but they are always unclear and extremely dangerous to attempt. Attempting to use ''plane shift'' or other dimensional magic never get you out of Ravenloft; each domain is treated like its own plane, so you'll likely end up in a different domain instead. 3.5 allows to get in and out ''via'' OP1's [[World Serpent Inn]], which shows up in the Demiplane of Dread at certain set intervals. The WSI fistula pisses the Dark Powers off to no end to the point they immediately threaten and scare anyone away from the door that leads to the inn as and when it appears in their domains. This whole "You can't get out unless we let you" schtick gave birth to so called [[Weekend in Hell]] adventures, where the players act like the unwitting pawns of the Dark Powers to torment a Darklord and are magnanimously granted a ticket out if they succeed without being corrupted themselves.

At the hands of a bad DM, 3.5's security-breach allows spells and powers unique to the plane to seep elsewhere, like into the ''Forgotten Realms''. One of the prime reasons that make the Demiplane of Dread so dangerous is that it's home to spells so broken and dangerous that if they became planes-wide knowledge, everything could get screwed in a mere matter of days. A good example of this would be Strahd's unkillable zombies in the hands of a [[Dread Necromancer]] with the right feats, resulting in zombies that never die, endlessly heal if limbs are severed, only to turn into more undead that also explode and heal other undead in an endless cycle. But the seepage problem wasn't a new one; it's long been known to ''any'' worldbuilder, since Pizarro first stepped into Peru. DMs with three neurons to rub together can rule that the spell or ability in question simply ceases to function anywhere outside its domain of origin - so restraining Strahd's super-groovy zombies, in our example, to Strahd's prison.

Incidentally, as a result of the "no one can leave" thing, using conjuration magic is an ''extremely bad idea'', as most summoned entities will be quite upset when they realize they can't go back home when the spell expires - and they will usually take their anger out on the conjurer with lethal results.

Fun fact: Only three prisoners have ever managed to escape from Ravenloft permanently. One is Vecna, of interest because the PCs can track his career in a series of adventure modules, culminating in that more-''Planescape''-than-actual-''Ravenloft'' module ''[[Die, Vecna, Die!]]''. Another was [[Lord Soth]], formerly of [[Dragonlance]]. One more was [[Jander Sunstar]], but he eventually killed himself out of guilt. Soth's case is the most interesting: 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 and that he's reached a state resembling repentance the Dark Powers release him from Ravenloft after manipulating events so his downfall would be re-enacting in a way that he could no longer numb himself to the evil of his actions by living in the past. One final thing worth mentioning on the subject of things leaving Ravenloft is the Red Death of [[Masque of the Red Death]]. An early preview and [https://web.archive.org/web/20120222014403/http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?int_dnd30_WWC a developer] state it was a Dark Power banished by the others for some violation of their code of conduct.