Ravenloft/Characters

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Darklords

Strahd Von Zarovich, Darklord of Barovia

The oldest established of Ravenloft's Darklords, Strahd fought a lifelong battle to reclaim his ancestral lands from the Tergs. After they were pacified, his younger brother, a cleric named Sergei, came to live with him. When Sergei fell in love with a village maiden named Tatyana, Strahd coveted her and tried to woo her away, failing due to his greater age and her love for Sergei. Finally, he transformed himself into a vampire, slaughtered his brother and his brother's wedding reception, then tried to Mind Rape Tatyana into becoming his wife with the use of his innate Charm Person ability, only for her to resist and leap to her death over the castle wall. His curse is that, every generation, Tatyana is reincarnated and he tries to woo her again, but she invariably dies.

Strahd is the main antagonist of the original House of Strahd module and the later 5th Edition adaptation Curse of Strahd. He is the Villain Protagonist of the novel I, Strahd by P. N. Elrod.

  • Affably Evil: He can be very civil, and even nice when he wants or needs to be.
  • Cain and Abel: The Cain to his brother Sergei's Abel.
  • Deal with the Devil: He makes a deal with an entity[1] called Death to become a Vampire.
  • Dogged Nice Guy: How he acts towards Tatyana, his brother's fiancee. At first.
  • Green-Eyed Monster: Invariably reverts to this when Tatyana's latest reincarnation stays out of his reach.
  • Love Makes You Evil: He murders Sergei just so he can have Tatyana, not that it works out.
  • Necromancer: A very, very good one.
  • Ominous Pipe Organ: He is quite good at playing one, as shown when he has his duet with Jander Sunstar in Vampire of the Mists.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: He became a vampire by making a Deal with the Devil instead of being infected like a lot of other vampires.
  • Reincarnation Romance: What Strahd tries to engineer with Tatyana about once a generation. It'll NEVER work.
  • Sibling Triangle
  • Shadow Dictator: While he's the king and political ruler of Barovia, few of his subjects have ever seen him, as he rarely appears in public. Few Barovians believe he's anything other than human, although they do know he is a wizard who has lived longer than any man has a right to. Some call him "the Devil Strahd", but do not mean it literally.
  • Slouch of Villainy: Is shown this way on the cover of the 5th Edition hardcover campaign book, Curse of Strahd.
  • Stronger with Age: His advanced age as a vampire has made him tougher than most. Garlic, mirrors, and holy symbols don't bother him [2] , and he can survive sunlight for a full turn (about ten minutes) safely.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: His longing for Tatyana is an obsession that can be used against him.
    • Also, by his own account, Sergei had a sword which Strahd fears even more than he does the sun, although just what power it has over him is unknown.

Azalin Rex, Darklord of Darkon

A powerful and tyrannical wizard-lord, who executed his own rebellious son and then turned himself into a lich to try and ensure his legacy would live on despite that. Was initially brought into Ravenloft as an "ordinary" lich and spent time as an unwilling servant to Strahd before he escaped into the Misty Border, which opened up to reveal Darkon. His curse is that his magical abilities are locked where they were when he entered the Mists; he cannot increase his magical power, nor can he learn any new spells, even though he can still design new magic. Azalin in the main antagonist of the Requiem: The Grim Harvest trilogy.

  • The Archmage: The most powerful Wizard in the Core, perhaps even in the whole Demiplane, and this is in spite of his inability to learn any new spells.
    • The most politically powerful, certainly. Meredoth is actually higher-level than Azalin, but he's a recluse.
  • The Chessmaster / Magnificent Bastard: Has blown up the world TWICE in his endless quest for freedom, and is all set up for another go.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: Azalin's name is his Knurl title, Azal'Lan, as misspelt by Barovians. Azal'Lan means "Wizard-King". Yes, Azalin Rex translates to "King Wizard-King"
  • Evil Sorcerer
  • Evil Tower of Ominousness: Castle Avernus is a jumble of towers stocked with undead, fell magic and such. Oh, and it kills any bird whose shadow falls upon its walls (except scavengers).
  • Fail O'Suckyname: In the module Death Triumphant, Azalin names his ultimate weapon "the Doomsday Device". Yeah, seems as powerful a sorcerer as he is, he's not very creative.
  • I Have No Son: Subverted. He executed his own son in a heartbeat when he found him hiding rebels, but has secretly regretted it ever since.
  • Necromancer: His control over the dead of his Domain cannot be overstated.
  • Our Liches Are Different
  • Promethean Punishment: One of the more blatant examples in Ravenloft. With his curse came vast magical powers, absolute control over all undead in Darkon, and the ability to read and rewrite the memories of any of his subjects. He easily rivals Strahd for being the most powerful Darklord, both in and out of game.
  • Ravens and Crows: His elite spies are a breed of sentient ravens (King's Ravens, or Corvus Regi).
  • Training from Hell: When Azalin occasionally takes on an apprentice, this is his method. He also raised his own son this way to make him a fitting heir for the kingdom. It didn't work out well.
  • Xanatos Gambit: Specifically stated again and again to be his modus operandi.

Death, Darklord of Necropolis

A necromantic experiment of Azalin's that went way out of hand, a human turned into a unique form of elemental. Its transformation sent it insane, convincing it that it really was Death incarnate. When an attempt to escape Ravenloft left Azalin discorporated, Death was outraged, convinced Azalin had escaped it, and sought to send him to true oblivion, killing hundreds of people in the process. When Azalin returned, Death's mass murder earned it its own domain. Its curse is that it cannot escape the truth of what it originally was, no matter how deluded it becomes. It is the main antagonist of the module Death Triumphant (where it first appeared), making it the secondary antagonist of the overall trilogy Requiem: Grim Harvest, although at the time, it was implied that it and Azalin were the same being, which was later Retcon.

  • A God Am I / The Grim Reaper: While Death believes itself to be the real thing, it's not.
  • Gone Horribly Wrong: Not only was his creation an unintended result of Azalin's experiments, but he murdered the entire city of Il Aluk soon after. It later became his Domain.
  • The Necrocracy: Necropolis is a Type I
  • Necromancer: Can create and command undead.
  • One Steve Limit: Averted (we think). The darklord Death isn't the same creature Strahd bargained with.
  • The Scrappy: His Domain is nigh-unusable due to that it's surrounded by a barrier that kills and reanimates the victims into an undead monster under Death's control and considered inferior to Azalin.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Death has an aversion to objects associated with birth, and will recoil from objects such as an infant's blanket. It will also lose some special abilities it has if it hears the crying of a newborn creature.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Though, at least according to S, he was already unhinged - the transformation just undid the final screw.

Tristen ApBlanc, Darklord of Forlorn

Conceived when his newly-turned vampire father bewitched his mother, Tristen's mother was murdered by a lynch mob shortly after his birth, but Tristen himself was saved by druids. When his vampyre nature emerged at age 15, he was seen running down and drinking the blood of a doe by his adopted mother, Rual. Knowing she had seen him, and later seeing her talking to some of the other druids, Tristen was convinced she had betrayed him and attacked her while she was meditating. She impaled him upon the point of a blessed deer antler when he leaped at her, and so he went into a frenzy and drunk her blood - as she had just drunk holy water before, though, this caused him intense pain. Beliving she had poisoned him, he beat her to death, unaware that he was actually being cured of his vampyre nature. With her dying breath, she berated him for his fatal distrust of her and cursed him, causing him to be trapped in the small grove in which they had fought, as well as condemning him to walk as a vampyre by day, then painfully die and become a ghost each night, only to be resurrected equally painfully every morning. Tristen did not become Darklord of Forlorn until over three centuries later, after engineering a bloody civil war to become the ruler of the land that became Forlorn after the Mists took it.

  • The Beast Master: Wolves and worgs (giant evil wolves), with the added twist that he can raise dead ones as zombies.
  • Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Tristen's good at pretending to be nice, but that's all it is - a pretence.
  • Haunted Castle: Castle Tristenoira is home to the ghosts of Tristen's family.
  • Involuntary Shapeshifting / Painful Transformation: Every sunset, Tristen dies and becomes a ghost; every sunrise, he rises once more as a vampyre. The process is agonising.
  • Offing the Offspring: Tristen's first son died at the jaws of wolves his angry father set on his dog (Tristen didn't intend to kill him, and in fact attacked the wolves trying to save his son, but failed), and murdered his second son while intending to kill his son's priestly mentor. He merely locked his daughter up in the dungeon, but she was spirited away by unknown powers (revealed in the official adventure to be time-travelling adventurers).
  • Our Ghosts Are Different
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Tristen is a vampyre, a living species similar to vampires that also drinks blood.
  • Pater Familicide: Falls short only because his daughter's fate is undetermined (see above).
  • The Scrappy: Tristen isn't too well regarded by fans of Ravenloft, who regard him as one of the most ridiculous and stupidly complicated of the Darklords. The fact his domain is almost solely empty of everything besides Goblyns and beasts (as well as conveniently small and out-of-the-way) means most simply avoid Forlorn, in universe and out.
  • Tailor-Made Prison: Of particular note in Tristen's case; he can't go more than 300 feet beyond a specific tree in the courtyard of Castle Tristenoira. The domain itself is somewhat larger.
  • Telepathy: With every goblyn in Forlorn.
  • Unstuck in Time: Castle Tristenoira.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifting: As a vampyre, Tristen can transform into a worg.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Tristen can't approach people or places with deer antlers, a consequence of his original death.
  • Wicked Cultured: He was once, long ago. In Forlorn's current state, there's usually no-one for him to bother with.

Hazlik, Darklord of Hazlan

A Red Wizard of Thay who had a bitter rivalry with a Red Wizardess named Thantosya, not helped by the fact Hazlik desired her lover, a man named Ordiab. Hazlik's downfall came when Thantosya and Ordiab engineered a plan to end the rivalry with Hazlik at last; during a night of courtly intrigue, Ordiab approached Hazlik, suggesting a tryst, but when Hazlik succumbed to passion, Thantosya stepped out with several of their superiors and accused Hazlik of assaulting Ordiab. The higher ranked Red Wizards tattooed arcane symbols of femininity over Hazlik's head and chest, burned his estate and cast him out of their ranks. Hazlik retreated to a bolthole, plotting revenge, and managed to chance upon his two enemies while out gathering reagents. He immediately attacked them, cutting out Ordiab's heart and forcing Thantosya to drink Ordiab's blood before he slashed her throat with a silver knife, for which the Mists claimed him.

  • Bad Dreams / Recurring Dreams: His curse. In Hazlik's dreams, he's powerless before the enemies who humiliated him. As a consequence, he tries to stay awake as long as possible. It never lasts long.
  • Bald of Evil
  • Ban on Magic: Prior to the Grand Conjunction, Hazlik outlawed arcane magic in Hazlan. After the Conjunction temporarily returned him back home, and he saw how his enemies had advanced, he revoked the ban in the hopes of gaining revenge.
  • Depraved Homosexual: Averted. He is a highly depraved individual, and he is homosexual, but the two factors have almost nothing in common. His Act of Ultimate Darkness was related to the man he had lusted after, but he was banished to Ravenloft for cutting out the man's heart and forcing his girlfriend to eat it, not for lusting after another man.
  • Embarrassing Tattoo: Played for Drama. Hazlik's tattoos, inflicted on him by his enemies, mark him as effeminate. Literally; the tattoos he has all over him basically proclaim "I am a woman".
  • Evil Sorceror: He's a member of the Red Wizards of Thay; it comes with the territory.
  • Evil Tower of Ominousness: The Red Tower in Venificus, Hazlik's personal estate.
  • Forgotten Realms: His world of origin.
  • Omnicidal Maniac: Is planning a genocidal ritual that will kill every Mulan (Hazlik's ethnic group) in existence—not just in the Demiplane, in existence. Hazlik wants revenge that badly. (He himself has a way out, though.)
  • Revenge: Seeks revenge on his enemies back in his homeland.
  • Invisible to Gaydar: It's subtle, but someone who reads his backstory will realise he is actually a homosexual.
    • Retcon: In the first version of the Ravenloft setting (Realm of Terror) he was simply tattooed as humiliation by his enemies. The second version of the setting (Ravenloft Campaign Setting aka the Red Box), the love-triangle element was added but he murdered his female lover and fed her heart to her boyfriend (TSR at the time did not want homosexuality brought up in game settings). The lover was gender-flipped when White Wolf acquired the setting (at the very least, it gives a better reason why his punitive tattoos stigmatize him as a woman!).

Adam, Darklord of Lamordia

A highly intelligent Flesh Golem created by Dr. Victor Mordenheim. He earned his domain after one particular night, which saw his creator's adopted daughter disappear, and Mordenheim's wife beaten almost to death at Adam's hands—the precise details are ambiguous, neither Adam or Mordenheim being the most reliable of narrators on this subject. Mordenheim placed his wife in a complicated apparatus that keeps her trapped in perpetual agony, suspended on the verge of death while he tries -- and fails—to devise a method to restore her to life.

Adam is the main antagonist of the module Adam's Wrath, while Mordenheim himself was the Villain Protagonist the 1994 novel, Mordenheim, written by Chet Williamson.

Ivana Boritsi, Darklord of Borca

Ivan Dilisnya, Darklord of Borca

Lord Wilfred Godefroy, Darklord of Mordent

  • Achilles' Heel: For all his power, Wilfred can do nothing to prevent the ghosts of his family from tearing him apart each night.
  • Affably Evil: Very rarely and usually for very short periods of time, but he can be charming if he wants to.
  • Aristocrats Are Evil
  • Bad Boss: Relentlessly beats up his servants for the slightest mistakes, imagined or not.
  • Cane Fu: He wields a cane that literally beats its victims into submission (manifesting as Charisma drain in-game).
  • Ghostly Goals: A strange aversion. He simply became a ghost because members of his bloodline always do.
  • Hair-Trigger Temper
  • Haunted House: Gryphon Manor is packed by lesser spirits, all of them serving and cowering before Lord Godefroy.
  • Heir Club for Men: Killed his wife in a rage when she failed to give him a son.
  • I Have Your Wife: Lord Jules Weathermay's wife, anyway.
  • Offing the Offspring: Killed his daughter in the same fury that drove him to kill his wife.
  • Our Ghosts Are Different

Tristessa, Darklord of Keening

  • Ax Crazy: If you're alive, it doesn't matter what you do; sooner or later, she'll attack.
  • Dark-Skinned Blond / White-Haired Pretty Girl
  • Even Evil Has Standards: In life, she and the cult she led were depraved even by the standards of the Unseelie Court of the Shadow Rift - which is a pretty high bar to clear.
  • Freak-Out: Tristessa's death sent her insane. She believes her child is still alive, but has been taken from her. A surrogate can satisfy her... but only temporarily.
  • Non-Human Undead: Undead shadow fey.
  • Our Banshees Are Louder: She can kill up to ten people with a single scream. Fortunately, she can only do it once a day.
  • Retcon: In the earliest editions she was a Drow, but she was changed to a Fae when Ravenloft was sold to White Wolf and it stuck.

Kas the Bloody-Handed, Darklord of Tovag

  • Insane Admiral: Kas turned his entire domain into a militaristic nightmare. Every available resource is utilized for his endless war against Vecna. Everyone is expendable, and he would sacrifice them all if he didn't need some people alive to raise crops and build things for his troops.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Like Strahd, he became a vampire through a curse, not from another vampire.
  • The Starscream: To Vecna.

Vecna, Darklord of Cavitus

Anton Misroi, Darklord of Souragne

  • Affably Evil: Much like Strahd, he can be very civil and nice.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: He is a Zombie Lord, and he has control of and can see through the eyes of all of the zombies in Souragne.
  • Tailor-Made Prison: Slightly more restricted than other Darklords - he can never leave Souragne's swamps.

Sodo, Darklord of Paridon

  • Blessed with Suck: Who wouldn't kill for a touch that can heal all wounds and even raise the dead? A sadist addicted to pain, that's who.
  • Blood Magic: Sodo keeps himself immortal by killing six people once every 13 years with a magical dagger, and using their blood in a dark ritual.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Rose to power by engineering the death of his superiors, like so many other Darklords.
    • Even more so, he's treacherous even by dread doppleganger standards-betrayal of one's brethren is about the only crime they find truly abhorrent.
  • Cold-Blooded Torture: Loves it, but can't enjoy it anymore. Torture devices? He transforms too fast to use them effectively. His bare hands? That's where the "healing touch" part comes in.
  • Involuntary Shapeshifting: Subverted. He can take any form he likes, but is unable to hold them for more than a minute, less when agitated (read: All the time).

Gwydion, Darklord of the Shadow Rift

  • Dream Weaver / Fake Memories: But only in regards to the shadow fey.
  • Eldritch Abomination
  • Hair-Trigger Temper: Notably, he dropped everything to punish the shadow fey for escaping from him - and got trapped as a Darklord.
  • Necromancer: Not one of his better-known powers, but he can control any undead in the Rift.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: He's trapped in the Obsidian Gate, unable to directly affect the Demiplane, but he can mentally influence the shadow fey and throw out the occasional magical effect.
  • Viral Transformation: Can transform 'normal' fey into shadow fey at will, but can't compel their obedience.

Other Characters

Dr. Rudolph Van Richten

  • Badass Normal
  • Direct Line to the Author: The various Van Richten Guides are presented as the same publications Richten himself has written, although a few sidebars are in them to point out contradictory views in regards to canon; Richten is very knowledgeable, but he's not always right.
  • Expy: Of Abraham Van Helsing.
  • He Who Fights Monsters: Inverted.
  • The Hunter
  • The Mentor: To the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins, Gennifer and Laurie, who have continued his legacy, both as monster hunters and authors of hunting guides.
  • Politically Incorrect Hero: For most of his career, he despised the Vishtani, given what one group of them did to his son.
  • Staking the Loved One: He had to kill his own son who had been turned into a vampire. This is, along with the murder of his wife by the same vampire that turned his son, what set off his monster hunting career.
  • Tontine: He entered an agreement like this with a greenhag whom he called a truce with to collaborate on his final guide, Van Richten's Guide to Witches. When they parted company, they both agreed that their truce was over, and that when one of them was confirmed to be dead, the survivor would publish the work. Canon-wise, the book was published posthumously by the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins; while they concede in the epilogue that their uncle is presumed dead, they have no proof of this, but do have proof of the hag's death, meaning Van Richten technically won the wager. For all the good it did him....
  • Vampire Hunter: Initially, but he eventually expanded to other supernatural terrors, like werebeasts, golems, ghosts, and many others.

Jander Sunstar

  • Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: He is perhaps the only nice vampire in the entire setting.
  • Mistaken for Gods: He is mistaken for the Sun god Lathander in Vampire of the Mists. This even influences the artwork produced by the Church of the Morninglord in Ravenloft, as the Morninglord is depicted as looking like him.
  1. ↑ Likely a manifestation of the Dark Powers
  2. ↑ He still has no reflection and can still be turned by divine spellcasters
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