Does the map of Barovia extend beyond the top and bottom of the map?

Question

I'm currently running Curse of Strahd and plan on extending the adventure beyond the end of the published material. There are a couple of areas that the party have not gone to and I do not expect they will go to before finishing the adventure (so I can include them in my extended adventure so we get to see everything), but otherwise, I don't want us to be just going through the same old locations again; I wanted to add some new areas and extra content.

Looking at the map of Barovia on p. 35, I can see that the left and right edges of the map are likely the edges of Barovia, since the right hand edge is labelled A, which is where the party first arrive after walking through the fog (which I take to mean that going back in that direction just leads them getting lost and spat back out into the map, as per "Mists of Ravenloft", pp. 23-24), and the left hand edge is likely more of this fog, given the description in Chapter 14: Yester Hill (p. 200):

Any creature that enters the deadly fog is subject to its effects (see the "Mists of Ravenloft" section in chapter 2).

This is the reasoning I'm using to conclude that the left and right edges of the map really are the edges of Barovia itself, and that there is nothing further in either direction (although, if I'm wrong about this conclusion, I'll happily be challenged on that in an answer).

My question, however, is about the top and bottom edges of the map. At the top of the map is Mount Baratok and the various locations marked M. The bottom of the map is Mount Ghakis and a road that leads south from Amber Temple (although this could just lead off the edge of Barovia like A and road that leads west from Krezk, but it could be a road to somewhere else in Barovia). There's nothing written in this adventure that implies that these are the edges of Barovia itself (yes, there's the "fog effect" around the edges of the map, but I assume that's just for style, since otherwise Barovia is a neat rectangle shape - unlikely).

Of course, I as the DM could just decide that these aren't the edges of Barovia as that suits my purposes, and if it turns out that these are actually edges of Barovia, that's likely what I'll do, but I wanted to know if there was anything published about Barovia (likely from older editions of D&D, but if there is anything I've missed in 5e, I'd prefer that) that describes what might be beyond the edges of the map. Are there any maps in previous editions that roughly match up with the map in Curse of Strahd, but that shows anything further north and south, or anything I've missed in Curse of Strahd?

Another way of asking this might be "is Barovia the same size as the map, or is Barovia bigger than the map"? Also note that I'm interested in Barovia as the demiplane¹, the Domain of Dread, not anything relating to what is was back when it was presumably a place on the Material Plane before Strahd and the Dark Powers happened.

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¹ _{I'm interested only in the area referenced as being "spirited away" (which is hopefully bigger than the map on p. 35) on p. 9:}

[Strahd] had destroyed the family bloodline and doomed all of Barovia. The castle and the valley were spirited away, locked in a demiplane surrounded on all sides by deadly fog.

Answer 1

Barovia exists within a larger demiplane

Since as far back as at least 3rd edition, Barovia has been a location within the Demiplane of Dread, sometimes called Ravenloft. Curse of Strahd mentions this in the sidebar "A Classic Retold":

...Ravenloft, home of the Domains of Dread.

[...]

...The lands of Barovia are from a forgotten world in the D&D multiverse, and this adventure gives glimpses into that world. In time, cursed Barovia was torn from its home world by the Dark Powers and bound in mist as one of the Domains of Dread in the Shadowfell.

You can find more information about Barovia's placement in the Demiplane of Dread within the Ravenloft Campaign Setting – Core Rulebook for 3rd edition which has a section on Barovia beginning on page 112.

This section exists among other descriptions of some of the Domains of Dread that lie within the demiplane.

This chapter describes most of the known domains of Ravenloft. Particular attention is devoted to those domains that might be homelands for Ravenloft PCs. The catalogue that follows is by no means comprehensive. Other domains almost certainly exist, and as the ages roll on, the Land of Mists will no doubt continue to grow like a creeping cancer, spawning new lands brimming with new nightmares.

Barovia is unique in that travel outside of its borders is prevented:

No matter how far a creature travels in the fog, or in which direction it goes, it gets turned around so that it eventually finds itself back in Barovia.

...However, the 3rd edition rulebook mentions travel between the Domains of Dread (albeit with some side-effects of note)

Journeying from one domain of Ravenloft to another — and even within the bounds of a domain — can be a perilous and maddening undertaking. The Land of Mists has its share of physical dangers, including treacherous terrain and waters, inclement weather, and wild predators. These hazards aside, overland travel often involves risks that are subtler, though just as hindering and frightening.

[...]

...Travelers learn quickly that in the embrace of the Mists, time and distance can be meaningless.

There is also mention of Mistways which are routes between the Domains of Dread. Only one of these charted routes connects to Barovia, and knowledge of it among navigators that live in Barovia may have been lost since Barovia has been isolated for so long.

The Bleak Road: Southern Barovia — Northern Vorostokov (Poor Reliability, Two Way).

Aside from that, travel through the mists outside of the chartered Mistways should be possible once Strahd is defeated:

The fog that surrounds the land thins, and it no longer harms those who pass through it...

The Barovians take the sunlight as a sign that the evil in their land has been purged. Though escape is now possible, most Barovians realize that they have nowhere to go and no reason to leave. A few depart, fearing the return of the darkness or longing to see their ancestral homelands. Those who have souls can leave the valley, while those without souls fade into nothingness as they take their first steps beyond the edge of Strahd’s former domain.

...a map of at least part of the Demiplane of Dread can be found in 3rd edition's Ravenloft Campaign Setting – Core Rulebook. It is split into a few parts, but below is an image which combines them (source):

Answer 2

I found this while looking for an answer to a different question. Not sure if you're still looking for answers to this but if so I hope this helps. The World Map from the 2nd edition Ravenloft setting shows that Barovia is a bit bigger than what is presented in CoS. The CoS map is just a slice of northern Barovia and therefore excludes Zeidenberg (SW of Krezk), Teufeldorf (SE of Zeidenburg, along the Gundar River), and Immol (SE of Mount Ghakis). Now, the thing with the Ravenloft setting is that, canonically speaking, the various demiplanes that make up the "countries" are in a constant state of flux with the realms of the Core (which Barovia is THE core which all of the other countries are formed around) being more stable than the others. Even still they do get reshaped from time to time (like with the conclusion of the Grand Conjunction) with bits ceding to other countries or disappearing completely. For example, after the Grand Conjunction (740 BC and five years after the events in CoS) part of Gundarak gets annexed into Barovia which further extends its size.

Barovia is Ravenloft, or more correctly there would be no Ravenloft without Barovia. It is the first country to make up the Dread Domains and Strahd is the linchpin that holds it all together. If he was to somehow undo his curse the Dread Realms would cease to be as is what happened (temporarily) during the Grand Conjunction (Look up the adventures "From the Shadows" and "Roots of Evil" from 2nd edition for more information). To quote the 6th verse of Hyskosa's Hexad "The bodiless shall journey to the time before, Where happiness to hate creates land and lore." This happens in the module "From the Shadows" where the player characters minds are sent to the past by Azalin to the wedding of Sergei and Tatyana where they effectively possess the bodies of several wedding guests. As the line in the Hexad implies that was the moment when the Dread Domains were created. The realms being called Ravenloft is due to the fact that the first two adventures (I6 Ravenloft and I10 Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill) are the basis that everything else is built around. Something to point out though is in reading through the old source books I don't recall once any character inside the game referring to the Dread Domains as Ravenloft. I could be mistaken on that, but if I'm not then Ravenloft inside the world of the game would only refer to the castle and not the domain as a whole. Yay for IC/OOC conundrums.

Now with regards to Barovia being part of the Shadowfell. In I6 and I10 (which takes place in Mordentshire, capital of Mordent) the realm in which they are located in is never mentioned, however I'm fairly certain that the 2nd edition Ravenloft setting firmly established that the Dread Domains are located within the Demiplane of Shadow. This demiplane has since been made a full plane (I think that happened in 3rd) and was then combined with the Negative Energy Plane being rechristened the Shadowfell by the time 4th rolled around. When you take all that into consideration the various realms that make up the Ravenloft setting would have always been part of the Shadowfell.

Answer 3

I'm going to reference a similar question's answer that I gave here.

Barovia being a location in Ravenloft instead of its own world is a relatively new concept, and Curse of Strahd is (to my knowledge) the first time it was given a map and explicitly placed it within Ravenloft. Ravenloft, the Domains of Dread which contain it, and the larger demiplane of the Shadowfell all have other locations that you can visit outside of Barovia.

So, you as the DM can choose to extend the boundaries of Barovia (which in turn, gives Strahd more land that he controls), or you can have another location be on the border of Barovia. The layout isn't set in stone, so you have a lot of leeway to decide what's beyond the mist.