Ravenloft - your experiences?

Seventeenth thread of a series on the old classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules. It is interesting to see how everyone's experiences compared and differed.

Ravenloft


Did you Play or DM this adventure (or both, as some did)? What were your experiences? Did you complete it? What were the highlights for your group?

Quasqueton

You might want to qualify this with Ravenloft (the module).

I saw it, and thought you were talking about the boxed set. Which I think is uber cool. But I digress.

Never played the original module.

die_kluge said:

You might want to qualify this with Ravenloft (the module).

I saw it, and thought you were talking about the boxed set. Which I think is uber cool. But I digress.

Never played the original module.

Click to expand...

I played the updated version House of Strahd. Very good, heh we were all very paranoid that day.

both.

lost my first and favorite character to this module.

Lothar Ironhand Lawful Dwarf.

converted him to 1edADnD from OD&D (1974).

played him for many years. the rest of the party included:

human cleric
human ranger
human magic-user
human fighter
human thief
Elf converted to Ft/mu


the cleric was the first to die. and progressively the others went until it was just the thief, elf (tho he was unconscious), and i left. we spiked Strahd. and started to drag the loot and the elf clear... but...

We went through the 2nd edition reprint. Strahd and the DM were vicious. The party was dominated one by one. Our climatic battle was in the flooded torture chamber. Strahd kept lightning bolting us and then diving back under the water. Most of us did survive, but we never even came close to killing Strahd.

I never got to play it, but it is one of the best written adventures I have ever read.

It is wonderfuly Gothic in mood, the adventure can be inserted into almost any adventure, the design of the castle is effective, the beating heart at the top of the tower seemed like something out of a Hammer Film and the half-flooded torture chamber is probably one of the five top dungeon rooms of all time.

I started running House of Strahd as a modern-day Call of Cthulhu adventure shortly before D&D 3E came out. It worked very well, and the players were genuinely creeped out. Some favorite moments were:

One player used his laptop with satellite Internet access to purchase a rocket launcher to be helicoptered in--the next day, they were out in the village streets waiting, when they heard the whup-whup-whup of a copter, which proceeded to fly over the village and to the castle (which had a helipad). By the time the players got there, they found only the copter, a big pool of blood, and an empty crate with the instruction manual for the rocket launcher (and you thought Strahd throwing lightning bolts down the stairs was bad? )

It was also fun seeing the players deal with some of the stuff in Strahd's castle. They ran into a shadow, for example, and there is definitely a different dynamic in CoC when the players realize there is one more shadow in the room than can be accounted for by the lighting than there is in D&D. I also had some yellow lichen fall off the ceiling as a couple of players walked under it. One player, metagaming just a little (knowing that this was originally a D&D module, although never having read it), assumed it was yellow mold or something and screamed for something sterile to wash it off with. The two players agreed between themselves that urine was the only available sterile substance...first horror game I've ever run that had the PCs not only wetting themselves, but also wetting each other.

Unfortunately, after several highly enjoyable sessions, D&D 3E came out, and we all eagerly switched to try out the new system, so the players never did figure out if Strahd was a vampire, a werewolf, or just a really, really sick psychotic murderer.

Edit: I have also run several other classic Ravenloft mods under 3E--it's become a personal tradition to one-shot a Ravenloft game every October. Just mentioning the word "Ravenloft" to my old players back in Logan will produce the most interesting reaction.

I played in this under 1e long before I ever ran it as a DM. The module had just been released and my DM had played in it himself and suffered a TPK at the hands of Strahd. So, naturally, he wanted to try it out on me. It hurt.

We were completely duped by the false reflection of Strahd and decided that he wasn't really a vampire and we were probably going to be OK. We wandered about the place getting progressively creeped out, until we finally ran across his diary. Just reading that handout in a candlelit gaming room was a horrifying experience. All ideas of getting out OK fled. And then Strahd turned up and the running and screaming started.

Our Stupid NPC Sorceress was first to bite the dust (as per usual we sacrificed her to give us the chance to flee) and we began a panicked flight to reach the highest point in the castle possible. Our fortune telling had told us that we would find help there and so most of the adventure became a terrifying hit-and-run battle upwards through the spires of Castle Ravenloft. The goodie in the tower turned out to be the Sun Sword, which my fighter's assassin girlfriend took possession of. Strahd didn't seem able to enter the tower, so we rested up, girded our loins and went leech-hunting.

Of course, the DM had been concealing Strahd's magical powers from us up to now, and we had just assumed we were fighting a buffed-up vampire. I was particularly smug because of the fact that my fighter had one of those wonderful 1e negative ACs (it was -8 or something silly like that) and I figured there was no way in hell that Strahd was ever going to land a hit on me and drain my lovely levels away. Umm, yeah, right.

One polymorph other spell later and my ubercool fighter became an ubercool small white chicken. Whom Strahd promptly drained down to level 6 (from level 10) in a couple of rounds flat. I panicked. I ran. I squawked. I flapped my wings and did that stupid "look at me I can't fly for " thing that chickens do. Soon after that we ran into the iron golems.

During the battle with the golems (I had been de-chickened by this point) another player from the TPK game arrived to spectate. Being the unsporting swine that he was, he stood behind the DM and mimed that we should look for the hidden gem. It was all that saved us. We nailed Strahd a little later. So, yeah, I only made it through Castle Ravenloft by being a dirty little cheating ratbastard.

Like a few other posters, the adventure has become a staple of my games as DM. Usually I mix it up with House on Gryphon Hill, either using that as a direct sequel or as an intersperal of linked scenes. I still have an audio recording somewhere of my first TPK in Castle Ravenloft and the subsequent meld into awakening in the Sanitarium in Mordentshire for Ravenloft II. Lots of fun. Well, for me anyway. It also gets used as a perennial one-off and is generally the adventure I use when I want to introduce someone to RPGs in general.

I loved the way it developed into a whole setting and I guess the highlight of the Ravenloft campaign setting for me had to be the whole "Grand Conjunction" era with that terrific return to Castle Ravenloft throughout its ages. There's a killer mini-campaign set around the castle in the making there somewhere. But that's another thread I guess...

I love it!

It's been rainy here all summer, so I took a chance of reading back old adventures, when I came along this one in my 25th anniversary box.

I'm planning to run this adventure in the near future, since I haven't run it yet.

Reading it was a treat though!

Strahd

I played this module then later bought it to read. A younger cousin started playing D&D a few months before this module came out. He was starting to DM and bought this module to use. He TPK'd his friends from school and bragged about it to my gaming group, saying it was the best adventure ever and that he could TPK any group with it.

Naturally we had to accept the challenge. We drug out a group of characters we had retired after literally playing for years, and we were a power-hungry group at that time, and brought our level 30+ party into the adventure. Wayyyy overpowered party. Not only did we complete the module but we destroyed the castle and my cousin didn't speak to me for months.