Are you ready to head back to the gloomy gothic lands of Ravenloft? Dungeons and Dragons Online players can begin doing this as early as this week, as Standing Stone Games said it’ll start testing the Return to Ravenloft expansion content this week. The preview won’t feature any of the quests or landscape — yet — but does include the new vampiric Dhampir race.

“We are excited to announce our first preview of the Dhampir this week on our public preview server Lamannia! We expect to open our public preview for the Dhampir on Wednesday, May 28th starting at 11:00 AM Eastern (-4 GMT), and we will provide more information about the preview at that time. We are also hosting a special invitation-only preview of the Dhampir for people like content creators, press, wiki editors, and others who can benefit from early access to the Dhampir. This will allow those we’ve invited to check things out, make content, livestream, and get people ready to do their own previewing on Wednesday! The invitation only preview begins at 9:00 PM Eastern (-4 GMT) tonight (Tuesday, May 27th) and continues until the public preview opens on Wednesday.”

Play DDO for freeAccording to the February producer letter, “Lamordia features the distinct ‘Victorian’ style horror theme Ravenloft is famous for and introduces a new playable character race called the Dhampir, who are poised between the worlds of the living and the dead.” SSG said at the time that “[s]tory-wise, players will discover who has been working to free Dark Lords from their Ravenloft domains and why. Dark Lords breaking loose is a big problem!”

In other DDO news, the studio is getting ready for the new 64-bit worlds and the expected transfers to them.

Source: official site, YouTube. Thanks Mick!