Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) is launching its latest expansion, “The Chill of Ravenloft.”This new expansion is set in the frosty realm of Lamordia. With a summer release, you may be thinking it’s the perfect place to beat the heat. And you’d be wrong. Few adventurers have set foot in its inhospitable frozen lands, and fewer still have returned to share their nightmarish accounts of the region’s horrors.
We got to talk with DDO developers Amanda Grow and Charles Miles, the producer and Narrative Lead for Dungeons and Dragons Online, respectively. During our time together, we talked about Lamordia, an area trapped in eternal winter and threatened by famine. But more importantly, we discussed Dr. Viktra Mordenheim, a woman inspired by Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein who blends science and magic to create her own horde of creatures, even if the people of Lamordia are counting on her science to save them from the curse.
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Filled with greedy graverobbers, mad scientists, strange monsters, and Dr. Mordenheim’s own chilling creations in a decaying, snow-bound industrial city, players can expect to explore a Victorian Gothic nightmare in “The Chill of Ravenloft.” And of course, bringing Victorian Gothic elements and, more importantly, the mother of modern science fiction, Mary Shelley, to Dungeons & Dragons Online.
On choosing the location for Dungeons & Dragons Online’s latest expansion, Producer Amanda Grow explained, “We have been to the Ravenloft universe before. Years ago, it proved to be very popular with [DDO] players [Ravenloft] has always been a really popular D&D setting… As we were trying to think of places to go in the D&D universe, we decided we loved Ravenloft so much, and it was still really popular with our players, that we wanted to come back. And now?”
But if you loved Ravenloft already, don’t worry Amanda Grow promises that “The Chill of Ravenloft” in Dungeons and Dragons Online will give players a chance to explore more parts of that specific universe.
Additionally, Narrative Lead Charles Miles explained horror and how this expansion is approaching it differently from past visits to the horror genre. The first thing that sets “The Chill of Ravenloft” apart from DDO’s previous visits to Ravenloft is that it’s all about Gothic horror. Miles explained, “The thing about Ravenloft, which is the horror setting for DDO, is that it’s not just one place, it’s many different places. There’s a different place in Ravenloft for every type of horror. The last time we [visited] the famous Ravenloft setting, it was basically Transylvania and Dracula. This time around, we’re doing Lamordia, which you might be able to guess is Frankenstein and Germany during the 19th century.”
In Lamordia, sinister secrets fester beneath the surface amidst bleak alleys, derelict factories, and grotesque laboratories. Chief among them are mysterious disappearances, grisly murders, and ghastly experiments. While “The Chill of Ravenloft” is set to embody Gothic horror, as Miles said, this iteration is deeply concerned with this through current of science and science fiction. In Lamordia, players will confront the scientific horrors crafted by the brilliant but terrifying Dr. Mordenheim.
And when it came to adapting Lamordia for Dungeons and Dragons Online, Charles Miles explained that it all starts from the book, and by that he means Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. Still, Miles explained that the limited discussion in the book about Lamordia, allowed the development team to be creative in their apporach to “The Chill of Ravenloft.”
Miles continued, “In order to get the entire expansion up on its feet, we think about what tropes of the setting players want and expect. What are the things we can sneak in that they won’t expect? And how can we create a classic Dungeons and Dragons experience that is also a classic Gothic horror experience? This is tough because we are an MMO, so you’re doing all this while accompanied by up to five of your friends.”
Saying, “Now, almost all of our content is based around dungeons, which are tightly scripted missions that are in specific places. So each of those dungeons can have a storyline, objectives, and so on. There are things that can happen in our game that can’t happen in, say, a Resident Evil because it’s not a single-player game.”
When it comes to his role as Narrative Lead, Miles also explained the difficulty of using horror when scaring the player isn’t your primary focus. “It’s harder to be horrifying when people are in different places in the same dungeon, and they’re talking about what they saw on TV last night,” he explained. “So, what we aspire to, which also fits with the setting, is we’re less about moments of intense horror and more about a general feeling of creepiness and being disturbing. Because we can create that atmosphere, but we have a hard time creating a super specific, you know, jump scare.”
Amanda Grow jumped in with more context, and more specifically, the role of the Dungeon Master in adapting Gothic horror to Dungeons and Dragons Online. “Now, one of the other advantages we have, unique to DDO, is the idea of a Dungeon Master. In our case, we integrated that concept into most of the storytelling.”
Quests in our game, when you’re going through a quest, in addition to the visuals that you’ll have from the art and the monsters and the character abilities, there’s actually a narration happening during the dungeon that’s filling in extra bits of detail to spark your imaginatiod,” She said. “If you have the actual narrator telling you that your character is feeling the ominous presence, you let your imagination go off. To me, that’s some of the best horror is when a reader or viewer can take what’s happening and let their mind imagine how bad it can be.”
DDO uses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as inspiration, but also the historical circumstances under which she was writing the novel.
Looking at Dr. Mordenheim, one of the primary figures in “The Chill of Ravenloft” expansion, we asked the developers what inspired the homage to Frankenstein and putting science over magic for this Dungeons and Dragons Online expansion. To which Miles said, referencing DDO’s past looks at Ravenloft, “If you start with Dracula, what do you say next, right?” Referencing the lineage of Universal Monster movies. But that’s only one answer. The longer one? Well, it’s a natural progression of Van Richton’s Guide to Ravenloft and its explanation of life in Lamordia.
“There’s one setting in the book which is about a masquerade where everyone wears masks, and it’s about a city where there’s a giant party all the time, but that doesn’t quite work so well for DDO, because our game’s ultimately about killing monsters, not attending a party. We need something that works within the paradigm of a bunch of monsters you can kill, and flesh golems, as you know, count as a monster you can kill.
Viktra is making a whole bunch of flesh golems. Why is she doing that, and why do you need to stop her? That’s answered in this expansion,” the Narrative Lead explained.
Amanda Grow has something similar to say about DDO’s focus on science over magic, “The other nice piece [for a science focused approach] is that for Dungeons and Dragons Online, in addition to what you might consider the very classic D&D experience of a place like Forgotten Realms, we also go to places that are a little more mage punk, a little more steampunk like Eberron, and so. For us to go here is not that far of a leap because the players have already gone through a lot of Eberron storytelling where technology and magic are intermarried.”
But the focus on science as the method of Gothic horror all goes back to Mary Shelley. So, we talked about it. “This is Frankenstein, but it’s different,” Charles Miles started. “[The inspirations] include a big chunk of the Boris Karloff Frankenstein, but it also includes a big chunk of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in particular the main monster that Viktra has created. However, she’s not actually a monster. The main creature Viktra has created is an intelligent construct who is fully self-aware and completely articulate, much as the creature was in the original novel. Likewise, a lot of the setting is based on Mary Shelley.”
He asked, “How much do you know about the winter of 1816?” Referencing the year that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written. “The winter of 1816 is known as the year without a summer, due to a volcanic eruption in Indonesia. It was very cold the entire year in Europe, leading to a lot of scenic snow but also famine. That was the year that Mary Shelley decided to go to the Swiss Alps to write Frankenstein. And if you have read your Frankenstein, there’s a whole bunch of scenic descriptions of the Alps. That’s the environment in which [Lamordia] is created, and that’s part of this setting as well.”
Mary Shelley is honored in “The Chill of Ravenloft,” but DDO lore remains at the forefront.
Lamordia is trapped in an endless winter and locked in a perpetual cycle of snow. This is because Viktra, who is the Dark Lord of this realm, is cursed. And what you need to do is break the curse and break that endless winter. There’s a lot of Mary Shelley in there, both in the weather backdrop and in the creature that the Dr. Frankenstein proxy has created. And one of the big things you will do in this expansion is find that creation and learning what Viktra’s deal is,” Miles concluded.
One thing struck me as we discussed the historical reflections in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Her monster lives while many don’t recognize her impact. Ultimately, Shelley is the mother of modern science fiction and horror. Her exploration of the body, morality, and God complex continues to ripple through popular culture. And for Dungeons and Dragons Online, the development team is honoring her and the legacy she left.
Responding to that idea, Amanda Grow said, “I think for me at the moment, I have a lot of disappointment about the fact that Mary Shelley got sort of shuffled away. And I think another part of the story itself was also shuffled away. Is that so many people like when I was growing up, and you talk, you know, Frankenstein?
You always think of it like the big monster, but that’s not who the monster was meant to be in this story. That wasn’t the horror, right? It was more about the hubris, and I think that’s why I really enjoy this Ravenloft-type setting—most of what they call the domains of dread. This is where all of these big figures like Strahd or Viktra here in Lamordia are either trapped, being punished, or have created a punishment upon themselves.”
She continued, “They’ve manifested these realms out of their own hubris, so you’re experiencing this environment. I think that’s an opportunity to sort of recapture that, that piece of the narrative of the horror stories, which was that element of questioning hubris and decision making and all of these elements that, over the centuries, people sort of leaned more into the monster part of [Frankenstein]. And I think [Dungeons and Dragons Online] has an opportunity to learn more about the psychology of the human condition, pieces of it.”
“The Chill of Revenloft” introduces a new race, the Dhampir, and it’s a whole new look at combat in dungeons.
The choice to add the half-vampire Dhampir as a playable race was top of mind, especially given the big investment the devs have put into Lamordia and its Shelley inspirations. Grow jumped right in when asked why the team chose to add the half-vampires.
“When we were pondering what we always do when we do a major expansion for the game, we like to introduce an interesting new way for players to play characters that go along with the themes of it,” she started. “In this case, we were like, OK, we’re going to Lamordia, what’s all happening there. We knew that we had concluded the story in Borovia, which was very focused on your classical vampire, right? We were like, ‘Well, we are still in this wheelhouse of Victorian horror.”
She continued, When you think Victorian horror, even though we’re focused on the more Mary Shelley side of the fence, you still find that you think about either vampires directly, such as the fictional writing, or you think about the cultural threats to people that had all of these different myths and legends where they’re worried about ‘what if I become a vampire?’ all because they were trying to make sense of the dangers in the world, like disease. It was a natural fit to introduce a vampire character.”
We didn’t have a direct vampiric character for players to play prior to this. This was a great opportunity because thematically it is still in that same setting that you would expect to see a vampiric character in. Even though Ravenloft has many settings, one of the most prominent settings is Barovia; people always think of Strahd, right? This was a way for us to touch that flavor still,” Grow said.
Then, Miles captured exactly what we all know to be true: “People really want to be vampires.”
Where Mary Shelley inspires Dr. Viktra Mordenstein, the Dhampir is all Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.
“You could have a vampire in Lamordia, it’s the same general setting when we were talking about like making the assets for this expansion, one of the artists was saying, ‘What do the buildings look like? What does the city feel like?’ And, you know, initially I would get pictures of actual European villages with drawings or paintings, etc., and I would send them all of this stuff.
But then the Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu hit streaming, and at that point I was able to say watch that because there’s a Transylvanian section of that movie, which is Borovia, right? It’s Dracula, after all. But the rest of the movie is set in a 19th-century German town, and it has exactly that vibe we were going for in terms of being a creepy Victorian industrial adjacent city [for Lamordia],” Miles said.
The excitement between both the Producer and Narrative Lead was palpable at this point. Both Shelley and Nosferatu frame our continued conversation. “And then in terms of the gameplay, a big component was how the Dhampir can look. So we wanted to make sure we had lots of good customization options so that a person could sort of steer their dhampir to being really, towards the vampire end of the spectrum, or maybe more towards the human end, or somewhere in between.”
She added, “Whatever sort of fits [players’] feel. Also, in terms of whether they want to look more like an ancient powerful vampire, or do they want to look more creepy, we want to give them the choice to play what they’ve seen in popular culture. Are they Vampire Hunter D? Are they Blade? There are so many different paths a Dhampir can go.” Miles interjected, “Or you can go full Nosferatu too!”
But looks are one thing, and combat is another. Grow continued, “There’s a lot of visual excitement for folks… We have many different types of combat in the game, and I think this will be one of our first opportunities for players to play a character whose focus is on fighting stuff, right? A lot of our other heroes are either they’re using weapons or maybe they’re using some claws. But this is a character they’re going to do a lot of damage and sustain themselves through. In terms of their combat, the way that we want the biting to feel is like a signature move.”
And when you see somebody biting you, [we] don’t want it to be something trivial or weird-looking like a Pac-Man. [The bite] is something that you build to, and that’s sort of how we want it to feel. The Dhampir has the ability to go ahead and slash at things with their claws but at a certain point, they’re ready to bite.” She added, “And right now we’re trying to strike the right balance of, how often can they bite? Players love it so much that they’re, like, ‘Let us bite stuff more!’ And that’s a great problem to have if everybody’s primary concern is how often they can bite because they want more.”
“The Chill of Ravenloft” expansion also offers personal touches for the developers.
When we asked Grow and Miles about what small element of the game means most to them as a personal touch they added, Amanda Grow went first. “I try to let the team, you know, do their thing and mine was more about asking questions sort of after the fact,” she said. “We talked about settings like Nosferatu, and we talked about The Terror [from AMC]—which was a really awesome show in terms of that bleakness and that human struggle, but also there’s a mystery problem happening.”
For Miles, it was all about history. “There is a lot of stuff where, if you’re a fan of classic universal horror movies, you’ll be really happy with the machines. Those machines are exactly what I want to see in the Frankenstein story. But the thing I was telling Amanda was that I do a bunch of research for these expansions and some of the best stuff for this expansion is from the real world, not from fiction.”
He continued, “During the early 19th century, there was a bunch of grave robbing going on in Europe. And because Criminals were stealing, although technically they weren’t criminals because technically, it wasn’t illegal. People were stealing corpses from graveyards to give to medical students because medical students need to do dissections, and one of the first things the players will find in the game is a pamphlet for a mortsafe.”
After asking if we knew what a mortsafe was, he explained the concept. “A mortsafe is a cage you put around a coffin when it’s buried in the ground. And why do you do that? Well, a lot of people today, if you like, look at YouTube, will tell you it’s because they thought the people were going to turn into vampires and pop out of the coffins. But that’s not why mortsafes existed. In the real world, they existed because grave robbers would break into the coffins and steal the bodies. So that’s part of the game!”
The attention to historical detail of the Victorian era also plays directly into Dr. Mortenstein as a character. Miles continued, “The first section of the game is in fact about grave robbers, because in order to make our army of flesh gollums, Viktra needs corpses. So that’s the thing that leads you into the story: What’s the deal with these grave robbers? And that part is perfectly based on history and not fiction. And then there’s another story, which will turn into a quest.”
This is a newspaper story from the real world, from the north of England in the first half of the 19th century, police were called in to investigate a mysterious light at night in a local graveyard. This flight appeared for several nights, and everyone just assumed, ‘This must be the grave robbers I was describing before coming after bodies.’ So, they send the policeman to the graveyard, and what do they find?”
They find a woman who says I’m here guarding the grave of my son, who passed away recently. Because if I don’t do that, they’re going to come and steal his body. And that’s a real-world story. That’s just the start of our quest, of course, because being Dungeons and Dragons Online, there’s more afoot,” Miles teased.
From Victorian ghost stories to the virtual worlds of DDO.
To end our time together, we asked the developers how it felt to be a part of the legacy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein after contributing to it with Dr. Viktra. Charles Miles started, “It’s very cool. That’s what it is to me. The coolest thing about Dungeons and Dragons is that it empowers you to take a powerful set of stories or tropes and, like you said, add your own little bit to it. You get to concentrate on the things that interest you and bring them to the world.”
Amanda Grow answered, “I don’t even know what to call it. The feeling of you know, you take somebody who wrote this very interesting dynamic piece of fiction, especially for her time, right? And she’s imagining the horrors of science and what people might go on to do with science.”
She continues, “And then, for us, making video games is practically science fiction! The idea that we can take all these bits and bobs and turn it into what you see on a flat device and we’re all working sometimes thousands of miles away from each other, and I like to think, ‘Did [Mary Shelley] ever imagine how technology could evolve to tell those stories? Like the storytelling we’re doing now, how would she even react to that as a concept?”
Miles added, “[Mary Shelley] and the others were curled up around a fireplace in 1816, saying, ‘Let’s write a ghost story.’ And today, we’re making these virtual worlds based on that. It’s a very mind-blowing concept.”
The Chill of Ravenloft will be available for pre-order soon, but you can try out the new playable Dhampir race, Dark Bargainier Iconic, and more this week on our Lamannia open beta.
