TheTallTom

Yeah, the soulless made no sense and were also on the cutting room floor of my campaign. Especially as one of the aspects of the Ravenloft setting I like is the sort of heroic horror, where there's a chance you might win the day and save the people just at a terrible personal cost - why would you strive to save the people of Barovia, or care about their suffering if they are these numb empty husks. It's one of the elements of original 2e Ravenloft I didn't like much - the idea that the mists create people to inhabit a domain they make for a darklord. Far more horrific that the mists hoover up the innocent inhabitants of an entire valley as accessories to the torture of one evil person.

The trade offs sound great - like casting a spell in Call of Cthulhu there should always be a cost (in that case SAN or POW) for using supernatural abilities in a horror game, I reckon. I like Curse of Strahd for the most part, but the Vestiges are Dark Powers definitely got removed from my play of it! Lost the best part of the original setting for me, the way the land itself corrupts. I gave it my best stab at giving them dark gifts as their actions warranted it but home brewing it in 5e was a challenge, especially in a way that felt like it grew as they did worse things. Liking the sound of Fortune too. I think for Gothic horror the element of morality is really important and having an easy to implement system to support that would be really helpful.

That's really exciting. I remember an old Dragon magazine article which offered proficiencies for Red Death like mesmerism which I thought was a very cool and straight forward way of bringing magic in to a low-magic setting. I am also very excited to see that you are considering Dark Powers as a core aspect of the setting. It's one of the aspects which most appeals to me, but always seemed cumbersome and haphazard in practice.

I know it's been a couple of years but just wanted you to know that this all looks great and if you offer any other resources I'd be really excited to seem them.