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D&D General The thread where I review a ton of Ravenloft modules

der_kluge

Adventurer
I really like Castles Forlorn, though it is a bit of work and has no real goal (other than maybe rescue the Vistani boy) or explore the castle and try and find your party members across time . The relatively free roaming sandbox approach might be a good thing after the railroads of Gryphon Hill though.

Also to be fair Castles Forlorn was produced as a Box Set setting with adventure hooks rather than an adventure module so in that Lisa Smedman did a remarkable job with the shtick of the castles history being explored across 3 time periods (including colour coded maps!) and apBlancs revenge expanding out to blight the wider wilderness of the Domain.

@Paul Farquhar I didnt pick up The Castle of Otranto, inspiration (probably because of the Scots setting) but that does make sense, and now I wish they had included a giant suit if armour in Forlon, or made it less celtic - afterall Aggie doesnt do much and the druids …
I agree that the druids and the sea monster could have used a bit more oomph in terms of story and involvement. Which is why I think I'll be leaning into the druids quite a bit more when I get to it in my campaign.

Aggie could really use a lair, too. Fighting it in open water seems clumsy and, I don't know... unsatisfying, I guess. PCs are going to expect treasure for that, and they wouldn't find any
 

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der_kluge

Adventurer
Someone graciously gave a copy of the tracks to A Light in the Belfry. So, without further ado...

A Light in the Belfry ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

This module, for levels 6-8, comes with a CD. There were a handful of products of this nature published by TSR in the mid-90s after CDs became all the rage. This adventure takes place in an uninhabited island domain called Avonleigh, that is perpetually shrouded in darkness. Why the PCs are here is anyone’s guess. The module describes various ways in which to get the party here, all of which boil down to “Oops, you’re in Avonleigh now.”.

To start, the GM is instructed to listen to tracks 1-13 on the CD which details the story of the necromancer Morgoroth. In short, he arrives in Avonleigh and swears allegiance to a paladin lord, to atone for the sins of his past. Using magic, he constructs a keep on a parcel of land. He falls in love with the lord’s sister, Aurora, though her vows to the church keep them apart. Eventually, Morgoroth’s past catches up to him, and a paladin from his former home comes for vengeance, and Morgoroth kills him, heads back to his keep, and turns the paladin into a zombie. The Lord convinces the order that Morgoroth is still good, and seeks an audience with him at his keep, but finds the zombie instead, and is never heard from again. Morgoroth heads back to the temple, kidnaps Aurora, and the remainder of the paladins arm themselves and attack the necromancer’s keep to finish him once and for all. Like the lord, all the paladins were never seen again. Ironically, if they had just waited a day, they would have seen that Ravenloft itself would pluck Morgoroth and his keep into the domains of dread. There, Morgoroth fashioned a magic mirror to act as a portal home, only the mirror shattered into 13 shards upon its creation, trapping a bit of Morgoroth’s soul into each shard. Aurora remains in the castle, in a glass coffin frozen in a stasis.

The story is OK but does sound a bit like a cheesy romance novel at times. Morgoroth comes across as a narcissistic incel, honestly. But he’s not really meant to be a sympathetic character, anyway. The module plays out a bit like Castles Forlorn – the PCs are just expected to show up at the gates of the castle, and a track on the CD is tied to each room of the keep, to enhance the gaming experience.

The first area is the gate to the keep. The track gives a great description of the gate, and its pointed iron spikes that make up the wall. The rusty padlock can be removed with magic, picked or, curiously, the gates will open if the PCs say the wizard’s name “Morgoroth”. And I’m over here completely scratching my head trying to fathom how anyone would know this wizard’s name in the party, because with nary a soul in the entire land, and the PCs being plopped here, basically randomly, that seems impossible.

This proceeds in a room-by-room fashion until the PCs finally arrive to the final showdown. There are some 45 tracks in total for the various rooms and the various endings that could result in the final showdown. The final 27 tracks on the disc are there just to use as sound effects. These vary from the sound of breaking glass to a grown man crying. All the tracks evoke a kind of “Vincent Price” style of narration, heavy on the style at the time. It’s almost campy or kitschy today, but amazingly enough – I kind of like it!

Here's the thing. This module would make an incredible module for a beginning GM to run. Like, yes, the tracks on the CD are somewhat cheesy, but they are good. And, along the way, the GM gets to hear what describing the rusted iron gate of an abandoned keep should sound like. In a way, the GM gets to lay out a map, have their players wander around it, and for each room, simply click a button to play that track. Oh sure, there are some game mechanics to resolve, and some combat along the way (it’s kind of light on the combat), but for the most part, this should be an easy ride on the GM’s part. Honestly, I think I’ll give this to my daughter to run for her friends. She’s never ran a D&D game before, but I think this one could be quite doable for beginner GMs.

That doesn’t mean there’s no prep here. Obviously, unless you’re running this using 2e rules, you’ll have to convert stuff. Morgoroth is a 13th level necromancer, which kind of sounds like a TPK for a party of 6th-8th level. Moreso for the 6th level party, but still. He has a lot of abilities and would be quite difficult to defeat in regular combat. Fortunately, clever parties can destroy his mirror, which kills him, so there is kind of an easy button here. Lastly, I’m not sure I would place this in Avonleigh. There isn’t a compelling reason, IMHO, to place this within its own isolated domain, devoid of anything but heavy-handedness getting you there and back again.

Some online reviews I’ve read of this suggest this to be either a “love it” or “hate it” kind of adventure. It will probably be necessary to forewarn the party of the hokey nature of some of the tracks, and to just take it all in stride. The other chief recommendation here is to find a transcript of the tracks. If someone has a question about a room, the only option is to play the track again, so having a text of the room’s description will speed that process up. You might want to create an actual reason for the party to be here, unless you're just planning on running it as a Halloween one-shot, or something.
 

Some online reviews I’ve read of this suggest this to be either a “love it” or “hate it” kind of adventure. It will probably be necessary to forewarn the party of the hokey nature of some of the tracks, and to just take it all in stride. The other chief recommendation here is to find a transcript of the tracks. If someone has a question about a room, the only option is to play the track again, so having a text of the room’s description will speed that process up. You might want to create an actual reason for the party to be here, unless you're just planning on running it as a Halloween one-shot, or something.

This was one I remember really hating when it came out. I think, even though it carries forward the vincent price tone of a lot of the text in earlier adventures, it fell flat in the execution (I loved the tone of the text of the Ravenloft line, but I had the luxury of imagining it in the voice of someone like Vincent Price). The performance on the CD wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as it needed to be to not sound goofy and off-putting. I honestly don't remember much about the actual adventure, I mostly remember how bad I felt the CD sounded. In fairness this was a period where they were including CDs in tons of stuff and trying to experiment. I remember around the same time an issue of Dragon came with a CD that included a very awkward roundtable discussion among the editorial staff
 


And I’m over here completely scratching my head trying to fathom how anyone would know this wizard’s name in the party
Frankly, if I had to guess the name of an evil wizard, Morogroth would be pretty near the top of the list!

[I think the point of the password is so the wizard and his minions can use the door, not so the players should guess it.]
 
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der_kluge

Adventurer
I want to have a conversation about lycanthropy. In my last game, I had a werewolf (and a troll) that were attacking some caravans of peasants. The werewolf was something I wanted to explore further, but it never really came to fruition. But at the time, one of my players was like "OMG, I want to be a werewolf!", and she was super excited by the prospect. So, I absolutely know this is going to come up in this campaign - probably when they get to "Sea Wolf", and encounter a werewolf for the first time.

But the 5e rules for this seem weak. Basically, they get damage immunities, the same attacks, movement and a slight bump in strength and AC. And.. that's basically it.

The section on lycanthropy talks about how this happens during the full moon (Which means I'm now tracking lunar cycles, apparently, which almost feels like it could be different in the different domains. I mean, in Avonleigh, in the module I just reviewed, it's described as having two moons, and is perpetually dark. So yea.

Has this come up in any game, and if so, how was it handled?
 
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Voadam

Legend
I want to have a conversation about lycanthropy. In my last game, I had a werewolf (and a troll) that were attacking some caravans of peasants. The werewolf is kind of an idea that I wanted to explore further, but it never really came to fruition. But at the time, one of my players was like "OMG, I want to be a werewolf!", and she was super excited by the prospect. So, I absolutely know this is going to come up in this campaign - probably when they get to "Sea Wolf", and encounter a werewolf for the first time.

But the 5e rules for this seem weak. Basically, they get damage immunities, the same attacks, movement and a slight bump in strength and AC. And.. that's basically it.

The section on lycanthropy talks about how this happens during the full moon (Which means I'm now tracking lunar cycles, apparently, which almost feels like it could be different in the different domains. I mean, in Avonleigh, in the module I just reviewed, it's described as having two moons, and is perpetually dark. So yea.

Has this come up in any game, and if so, how was it handled?
Lycanthropy varies a lot by edition. In AD&D it was supposed to make you an NPC if you ever give in to the urges. Which makes it a fairly terrible thing to include in games casually. In 3e it gives you essentially a couple levels in a really crappy class (animal HD) with an LA on top of it, plus losing control during the transformation.

I have not read up recently on 5e's take.

At the end of my last Ravenloft campaign one of the characters unknowingly contracted weretiger lycanthropy after they had switched from 2e to 3e but it had not manifested yet. I was planning on having it be a viable PC thing to keep playing, I had allowed a different PC to keep playing even though he had been turned into a wight.

I had pretty much decided in the 3e era to go with a mostly Werewolf the Apocalypse theme and make lycanthropy mostly hereditary and non communicable, with a few one off curse exceptions. So mostly essentially wolfweres as a default instead of D&D contagious werewolves.
 

I want to have a conversation about lycanthropy. In my last game, I had a werewolf (and a troll) that were attacking some caravans of peasants. The werewolf was something I wanted to explore further, but it never really came to fruition. But at the time, one of my players was like "OMG, I want to be a werewolf!", and she was super excited by the prospect. So, I absolutely know this is going to come up in this campaign - probably when they get to "Sea Wolf", and encounter a werewolf for the first time.

But the 5e rules for this seem weak. Basically, they get damage immunities, the same attacks, movement and a slight bump in strength and AC. And.. that's basically it.

The section on lycanthropy talks about how this happens during the full moon (Which means I'm now tracking lunar cycles, apparently, which almost feels like it could be different in the different domains. I mean, in Avonleigh, in the module I just reviewed, it's described as having two moons, and is perpetually dark. So yea.

Has this come up in any game, and if so, how was it handled?

Generally in Ravenloft Lycanthropy was something that happened to your character, not something the player chose (at least in 2E Ravenloft). It does distinguish between natural lycanthropy (people born with it) and infected. If a player wants to be a lycanthrope, a natural lycanthrope may be the way to go. But infected is just a random result the player is not aware of from being scratched or bitten by a lycanthrope. In my old Ravenloft campaigns a player might acquire that, then the full moon or after another trigger, black out and wake up with blood all over their clothes and mouths, unsure what transpired. It is meant to be something horrible that you don't want to have. It isn't like WW. You may want to look into the Van Richten's Guide to Werebeasts. Lots of good advice in there. Generally, lycanthropes make better adversaries than PCs in the setting
 

James Gasik

We don't talk about Pun-Pun
Supporter
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So while looking at this, while you do gain a potential stat boost, plus the advantages of your other forms, it very clearly states that the DM has the option to take control of your character should your alignment change due to the curse (I'm not sure what "embracing the curse" entails- not seeking to get the curse removed makes sense, but what if there's no opportunity to do so? You just get a powerup while bemoaning your horrible fate? lol).

Amusingly, if there is no alignment change, it seems like you'd be in total control of your character, which I find hilarious (though I don't really see any possibility of a player taking advantage of this, unless they somehow know lycanthropes are going to feature heavily in your game ahead of time).

I still wouldn't want to deal with it as a DM- if the player retains control, they end up with a more powerful character. If they lose control, then they sometimes can't play their character while the rest of the party tries to cure them? Hard pass.

Don't get me wrong, a character who tries to use a curse for good while fighting their primal urges makes for good narrative, but the juice here isn't worth the squeeze- if you want that kind of existential angst, play a Warlock, thanks!
 

der_kluge

Adventurer
I still wouldn't want to deal with it as a DM- if the player retains control, they end up with a more powerful character. If they lose control, then they sometimes can't play their character while the rest of the party tries to cure them? Hard pass.

Don't get me wrong, a character who tries to use a curse for good while fighting their primal urges makes for good narrative, but the juice here isn't worth the squeeze- if you want that kind of existential angst, play a Warlock, thanks!
Completely agree - there doesn't seem to be a happy middle ground here. Either you get some bonuses to your character, and absolutely no downsides whatsoever, or you basically lose your character. I'm going to have to think on this some more. Maybe there's a middle option here somewhere....
 

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