Bath Imaginable

One of my favourite things about Ravenloft is its wacky worldbuilding: each Domain of Dread is a mind-prison tailored by mysterious Dark Powers to eternally torture its Darklord. Made of shadowstuff and the Darklord’s own memories, these domains are unreal yet populated by very real, trapped souls.

The most famous Darklord is Count Strahd, imprisoned in Barovia and tortured by repeated reincarnations of his beloved Tatyana. The campaign’s most horrifying reveal is that this loop repeats endlessly just to punish Strahd, regardless of the collateral damage. You are, effectively, meaningless in a cosmic struggle between an asshole and an even bigger asshole.

Darkon stands out among the domains in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft (2021) because it is on the brink of destruction. Before your campaign in Darkon even begins, the Darklord–the Lich King Azalin Rex–has already won. He escaped.

During the Hour of Ascension, Azalin vanished, leaving Darkon to dissolve into the mists. Without a Darklord to punish, the Dark Powers have no use for the domain, and the Shadowfell is reabsorbing it. As the mists fracture the land, familiar people and places simply fade from memory.

The authors write:

“Despite facing gradual annihilation, Darkon’s living population largely ignores the threat, dismissing reports of vanished regions as rumors and fearmongering.”

And this is why I can’t stop thinking about Darkon.

On Saturday, my city broke a 100-year temperature record. The heat, paired with 85% humidity, triggered intense nausea, headaches, and a profound sense of anxiety–and I’m a healthy 32-year-old with no respiratory conditions.

Simultaneously, an extreme heatwave claimed over 1,300 lives across Europe. Throw in an impending energy crisis, and things start to look pretty bleak for the inhabitants of the domain we call Earth.

Friend-to-pedophiles and eBay billionaire Peter Thiel is planning to leave society behind for a floating, libertarian nation built for profit. Epstein-black-book-reject and son-of-an-emerald-baron Elon Musk plans to leave Earth altogether for Mars, having already become the world’s first trillionaire when SpaceX went public. Piss-bottle-enthusiast and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has expressed a similar desire to abandon the world he helped to ruin.

While it is tempting to compare the elite billionaire class to Azalin Rex or other Darklords of Ravenloft, the reality is much more terrifying: our world is a rudderless ship drifting on the currents of capital, and no one can stop it from crashing into the rocks. The fallout of the impending climate disaster will kill more people than any historical atrocity. Despite their immense creativity, the writers at Wizards of the Coast cannot engineer a Darklord whose evil rivals the real-world systems that are set to doom us all.

Yet, one element of their worldbuilding remains hauntingly accurate: how people respond to the inevitable end. Like the citizens of Darkon, we will be forced to watch the people, places, and traditions we love disappear first from reality, and then from our collective memories–like so many souls lost to the mists. To speak of it will be dismissed as fear-mongering and rumors.

I guess the weather just does that.