Ravenloft

Beyond the edge of every map lies a country the maps refuse to hold: the Demiplane of Dread, a patchwork of small, damned lands stitched together by a wall of living Mist. Ravenloft is the Gothic corner of the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse, a place assembled one prison at a time by unseen Dark Powers, each domain shaped around the sins of the monster condemned to rule it. The Mists reach out and take the unwary from other worlds; once you have breathed them, the road home is gone. The line gathers standalone novels, each a self-contained tale of a single domain and its Darklord, a villain cursed to reign forever over the one thing he can never possess. Christie Golden's Vampire of the Mists opens the shelf, following an elven vampire dragged through the fog into Barovia, the mountain realm of Count Strahd von Zarovich; Strahd sets down his own confession in I, Strahd. Elaine Bergstrom (Tapestry of Dark Souls, Baroness of Blood), James Lowder (Knight of the Black Rose), Gene DeWeese, and J. Robert King raise other lords over other borders, a werewolf's cabaret land, a fallen knight bound in mist, a lightless necropolis. No single arc threads them; the Mists are the only thread. What binds these books is flavour, not plot. This is horror by pastiche, each domain answering a classic terror, Dracula, Frankenstein, the wolf-man, the mummy, reworked so the fiend is also the prisoner. Expect candlelight and confession, doomed romance, and the slow dread of a land that watches back. A newcomer may enter almost anywhere, but Vampire of the Mists is the natural first step, and I, Strahd the essential companion, the master of Barovia in his own words before you ever cross his threshold.