D&D's Ravenloft: Horrors Within fixes the College of Spirits bard subclass

Dungeons & Dragons' new Ravenloft: Horrors Within book takes a swing at fixing the College of Spirits, a bard subclass widely considered one of the weakest and most frustrating options from the original Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

The core problem with College of Spirits has always been its reliance on randomness. The subclass lets bards channel spirits through a Spiritual Focus, rolling on a table of Tales from Beyond to produce wildly unpredictable effects — some powerful, some nearly useless. In actual play, that variance made the subclass feel unreliable compared to other bard colleges, where you know what you're getting. Horrors Within addresses this directly, though the article stops short of detailing every mechanical change, the revision is framed as a meaningful improvement to how the randomness is managed and how often the subclass produces useful results.

College of Spirits launched in 2021 as part of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, one of 5th edition's more beloved setting books. The subclass had a strong thematic identity — a bard who communes with the dead and weaves their stories into magic — but the mechanical execution left a lot of players cold. It's a recurring tension in tabletop design: randomness can create memorable moments, but when it's baked into a core class feature, it tends to punish players more than it rewards them.

Horrors Within is positioned as a companion to Van Richten's Guide, expanding the Ravenloft setting with new Domains of Dread, monsters, and player options. Fixing one of the setting's own subclasses in the same book is a tidy move — players who want to run a Ravenloft campaign now have a more functional version of the College of Spirits to work with right out of the box.