Ravenloft: The Horrors Within hits store shelves on June 16, and if you’ve been waiting for a reason to dust off your black primer, this is it. The Domains of Dread are finally getting the official D&D treatment, complete with Lovecraftian horrors, gothic dread, and a Cthulhu that’s apparently now a Dark Lord. For painters, this is the most exciting D&D content drop in a while, and it comes with a built-in shopping list.
Here’s what’s coming for Ravenloft miniatures, what you can grab right now to start practicing, and the techniques that will make your minis look like they crawled out of the mist themselves.
What’s Actually in Ravenloft: The Horrors Within
The new sourcebook leans hard into cosmic horror. Alongside returning Ravenloft favorites like Strahd, the book introduces Mythos creatures (Cthulhu among them) as new Dark Lords and monsters for the setting. WizKids has already announced a full miniatures line to go with it.
Two pre-painted Icons of the Realms sets are coming this October: Maddening Monsters of Ravenloft (Gug, Yithian, Nightgaunt, and friends) and Eldritch Enemies of Ravenloft (Mi-Go, Elder Thing, and Shoggoth), each priced around $49.99. There’s also a standalone Cthulhu figure on a 100mm base with an iridescent “wet” paint job, priced at $79.99 painted or $69.99 unpainted.
The good news for painters specifically: several of these creatures are also getting the unpainted treatment in the D&D Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures line, including a Shoggoth and an Elder Thing. Those are scheduled for a December 2026 wave, pre-primed and ready to paint straight out of the blister, exactly like the rest of the Nolzur’s line. If you want to mark your calendar, you can find them on the WizKids store as pre-orders go live.
But you don’t have to wait until December to start painting in a Ravenloft style. The gothic horror palette and techniques below work on almost any undead, monstrous, or sinister miniature you’ve already got sitting in your to-paint pile.
Start Practicing Now: Grab a Skeleton
If you want a low-stakes mini to test out gothic horror techniques before tackling a Dark Lord, the D&D Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures: Skeletons pack is about as cheap and thematically appropriate as it gets. They come pre-primed, they’re a great canvas for the undead skin and dark wash techniques below, and at a few dollars a pack, mistakes don’t sting.
Building the Gothic Palette
Horror minis live and die on contrast and restraint. The goal isn’t to throw bright colors at everything, it’s to create a scene where one or two things glow and everything else recedes into shadow.
Base tones: Lean into desaturated purples, sickly greens, and cold grays for clothing, stone, and skin. These read as “wrong” without being cartoonish, which is exactly the gothic horror vibe.
Undead skin: Skip warm flesh tones entirely. A pale gray-green or ashen violet base, built up with lighter highlights in the same cool family, sells “dead” far better than anything with pink in it. If you’re using Contrast-style paints, a thin green or purple glaze over a bone-white base does most of the work in one pass.
Dark washes: This is non-negotiable for horror minis. A heavy black or dark brown wash in all the recesses, especially around eyes, joints, and fabric folds, creates the grimy, decayed look that separates “spooky” from “just kind of dirty.”
The Technique That Sells It: Object Source Lighting (OSL)
If there’s one technique worth learning for Ravenloft minis, it’s OSL, or Object Source Lighting. This is the effect where a candle, torch, or magic item appears to actually cast light onto the surrounding model, with nearby surfaces glowing warmer and brighter the closer they are to the source.
It sounds intimidating but the core technique is simple: pick a saturated, slightly translucent color for your light source (yellow and orange are the classics for candlelight), and thin it down into a glaze. Apply that glaze to the areas nearest the light source, then fade it out as you move away. The contrast between the glowing area and the dark, washed recesses around it is what makes the whole thing pop.
Two paints that make this easier:
Citadel Warpstone Glow is a community favorite for OSL precisely because it’s translucent enough to glaze and saturated enough to actually glow. It leans green, which works great for eerie magic effects, but thinned down it also works for general glow buildup.
Reaper MSP Golden Glow is the go-to for warm candlelight and torch effects. It’s translucent by design, made for exactly this kind of glaze work, and pairs well with a darker orange for the very center of the light source.
For a Ravenloft mini, try this: prime with a dark spray primer, build up your base colors, hit everything with a heavy dark wash, then add OSL glazes around a candle, glowing eyes, or a cursed weapon. That single glowing element against all that darkness is what will make the mini feel like it belongs on the cover of the new book.
Get Ready for October and December
Ravenloft: The Horrors Within launches June 16, the pre-painted Icons of the Realms sets land in October, and the unpainted Nolzur’s versions (including that Shoggoth) are expected in December. That gives you a few months to get comfortable with gothic palettes and OSL on cheaper practice minis, like that skeleton pack, so you’re ready to do the new releases justice when they land.
Either way, the Domains of Dread just got a lot more interesting for painters. If your brushes are ready, your Ravenloft miniatures collection is about to get a lot more interesting.
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