Okay, so: for those who aren’t familiar with it, the premise of D&D’s Ravenloft campaign setting is that it’s a gothic horror world where some myterious force elevates its most evil inhabitants into godlike rulers called Darklords. Each Darklord is granted a domain in which they wield absolute power, but also labours under a curse that denies them the one thing they want most. Basically, it’s a setting where the existence of boss monsters is a concrete phenomenon.

That’s not the whole gimmick, though. The other half of the equation is that each Darklord is a thinly disguised version of a particular historical or public domain literary figure. There’s a Darklord based on Victor Frankenstein, a Darklord based on Dr. Moreau, a Darklord based on Count Dracula, and so forth.

(Actually, there are two Darklords based on Count Dracula, one modelled on the literary Dracula and one modelled on the historical Dracula, which is just hilariously meta – but I digress!)

And then there’s the weird ones.

For example, there’s a Darklord who’s literally an evil William Shakespeare. He has the power to put on illusory dramatic productions that seem absolutely real to outside observers, but all he sees are wooden puppets and cardboard backdrops; his thing is tricking adventurers into participating in his contrived tragedies in the hope of wringing emotionally genuine performances out of them.

Similarly, there’s a Darklord who’s an evil Pinocchio, and wants to capture the player characters to use them as test subjects in weird experiments that he hopes will uncover the secret of becoming a real boy – experiments which are doomed to failure, of course, because that’s what the Darklords’ curse is all about, but don’t tell him that! (Also, evil Pinocchio’s name is “Maligno”, because of course it is; this is not subtle material.)

So, with all that context in mind, one of my perennial campaign ideas I hope to run some day is a Ravenloft game where the first Darklord the player characters come up against is an evil Billy Mays.

