D&D’s Virtual Play Campaign Heads For Ravenloft
Dungeons and Dragons is taking players to Ravenloft with a brand new virtual play campaign kicking off in July. See what lurks online and in the Mists.
The Demiplane of Dread beckons at the start of a new campaign, as announced earlier in Dragon+ which brings adventurers deep into the Mists of Ravenloft–this is the next Adventurer’s League/Virtual Play Weekend campaign.
Titled Mist Hunters, the upcoming campaign promises to be a different experience than previous Adventurer’s League campaigns have been. For those who’ve never participated, Adventurer’s League is the official organized play for D&D–it’s where the old PHB+1 axiom used to come from, though that has long gone by the wayside. Adventurers can still expect to come across monsters, magic items, and more, but the new campaign promises a little more immersion. As Chris Tulach, Product Manager for D&D Play outlines:
Ravenloft: Mist Hunters [is] a different experience than previous Adventurer’s League games. Each of its adventures focus on story, social interaction, and investigation with a de-emphasis on tactical combat, making them perfectly suited to theater-of-the-mind play. Along the way, players will unravel a mystery that has far-reaching consequences, culminating in an epic confrontation with an implacable foe.
It’s unusual for Adventurer’s League to embrace theatre of the mind like that, but I’m here for it. With Ravenloft’s themes of horror and intrigue having your mind fill in the blanks should hopefully bring in a lot more of the immersive horror feeling that Ravenloft wants.
More details emerged in the latest Dragon+:
Ravenloft: Mist Hunters is a horror-themed campaign, packed with atmosphere and immersive interactions, and the storyline is being developed for a wide audience. Each adventure focuses on one or more subgenres of horror as a thematic anchor, as players explore several Domains of Dread—including some fan favorites! All adventures contain content warnings to help players understand if there’s anything they might want to discuss with their Dungeon Master prior to play. That way, everyone knows what to expect from the session.
As D&D matures into its 7th year, it’s great to see them embracing safety tools as well–many other designers have been developing and using these tools for years now, but things like Session Zero and the X-Card/lines and veils were included in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, and it looks like Adventurer’s League is following suit.
The campaign will take place over fourteen adventures total, forming a “nice, tight narrative,” as Tulach describes it. Two adventures are planned to be Epics, which are big, multi-party adventures that are designed to emulate multiple-group play and interaction and will bookend the campaign.
All of this kicks off July 9th in D&D’s Virtual weekend:
The upcoming D&D Virtual Play Weekend, featuring House of Lament in support of Jasper’s Game Day, takes place on May 7-9, 2021. Ravenloft: Mist Hunters makes its debut at the Virtual Play Weekend on July 9-11, 2021. Follow the D&D Adventurers League on Twitter, join the official Discord server, or subscribe to the Yawning Portal blog to see more details as they’re released.
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Happy Adventuring!
