Something Spooky: ‘Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft’ #1 Rolls A Lot Of Ones

Welcome to the table,

It’s Spooky Season, so I thought it was a good time to take a look at the Dark Horse Comic Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft.

Let’s get into it!

Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft is written by Amy Chu, illustrated by Ariela Kristantina, colored by Roman Stevens, and lettered by Haley Rose-Lyon.

The story kicks off in the space between spaces, where a letter from the monster hunter Dr Rudolph van Richten is shown addressing his friends and companions. There is a cloaked figure with a dark beard on the same pages as the passages from Richten’s letter show up on, but as Richten is typically old and grey, I don’t think this is the good doctor himself.

I would rather get this out of the way first and foremost before we dive into the story elements of this issue. I’m not sure if the figure actually has a dark beard or not; there are shadows on their chin and face that don’t make a ton of sense with the way their hood falls. They may have long silver or blue hair, but it could also just be a lot of the texture that is being liberally used in this issue. The pages are kind of a mess, and the font is really difficult to follow compared to the other books that have been coming out in this space.

All of that feels really hard to say for me, as I love Dark Horse Comics and I have an extensive collection of Ravenloft material from other years. Ravenloft is probably my favorite published official D&D setting, so I was excited to read this book, Even better, the protagonist is none other than disabled D&D icon Ezmerelda D’Avenir, a monster-hunting adventurer and main character in most of the modern Ravenloft lore.

It’s always really refreshing to see a protagonist with a prosthetic bob-about in an unforgiving landscape. The way she is written in these pages feels almost tropey. There is a lot of exposition, visuals, and dialogue about her metal leg that feels clunky, When it’s paired with the selected font that showcases singing and weird narrative boxes, the whole thing reads a bit like someone was making it in Photoshop back in 2003.

The story goes to some cool places, and we get some fun monsters, including flesh golem and Gremishkas. It’s a really cool pull from the monster manual to pit against Ezmerelda as she traverses the frozen landscape of Lamordia.

It really gets to me when I don’t like something, but the texture used in this book is so distracting that it made it difficult to finish the first issue.  It’s not that the art is bad, or the colors are bad, or the lettering is all bad. It’s that together, in this combination, it makes for a really difficult reading experience, and it feels even more out of place when you see the other D&D books Dark Horse is putting out.

It has good bits as well though. Don’t let me totally dissuade you from reaching for the book. There is a really rad moment where a Tarokka deck is put into play, something I use regularly at my own D&D table as I’m running an ongoing Ravenloft campaign right now with the 5.5 rules. It’s always so fun to see that item being used in stories set in the Dread Realms.

Eventually, Ezmerelda is captured by Dr. Viktra Mordenheim, a Victor Frankenstein analog in the world of Ravenloft, and there is some more conversation about Ezmerelda’s disability.

As a disabled person with a mobility impairment, I have always championed Ezmerelda. I love the fact that she is brash and bold and has a beautiful prosthetic. I love that the character is a main character in the space with a disability.

So it feels awful to be this critical of the book, but it feels inauthentic in so many ways. I don’t own the character, so by all means, the team was talented enough to be pulled together to do this project, and they saw something through from start to finish. However, as someone who grew up disabled, lives and breathes D&D, and loves Ravenloft the most out of all the D&D setting spaces, this book misses way more than it hits.

It’s not bad. It just suffers from that thing where it feels like a non-disabled person and a non-D&D player (or at least someone super familiar with the lore) tackles a project that is very much the cross-section of those things.

This team is talented. I would never try to take that away from them. I may just love the source material and be too close to it. This is a big miss for me and a real disappointment as someone who is both disabled and really, really loves both D&D and Ravenloft.

Until next time, I so rarely review things I don’t like, and I love D&D, Dark Horse, and Ravenloft… but this combo is missing a lot of the marks, and I can only hope the next issue is better.