Any good adventures in Ravenloft?

[Jefe Bergenstein]

And of course, you absolutely cannot beat the original I6: Ravenloft.

I personally find that module terrible. It's essentially everything later products warn against... a large collection of rooms featuring "scary" monsters and random encounters with d4+1 wolfwere golem liches.

Many of the published adventures were awful, and encouraged the "Sliders" feel of the way many bad Ravenloft games were run, where you ported into a domain, beat the big boss, and moved on to the next in a constant search for your golden ticket back home.

As a whole, the 2nd edition Ravenloft modules suffered from the style of adventure writing at the time. Choo-choo! They're usable, but they take some elbow grease. There were some decent ones. Children of the Night: Created, Bleak House, Carnivale, Night of the Walking Dead and the Evil Eye were some of the better written ones. Circle of Darkness was also pretty good, as it offered a darklord a chance at redemption. I was a player in Servants of Darkness/The Shadow Rift, and Neither Man nor Beast, and enjoyed those, but dont know how much was changed from the source material. If you can dig up the old dungeon adventure, The Last Dance, I enjoyed it as well.

I prefer a more subtle version of the setting than many of the written modules implied, where it could be mistaken for our world, and where the supernatural wasnt glaringly obvious to everyone, with skeletons walking the streets during broad daylight and giant walls of gibbering skulls appearing constantly.

The worst of the offenders was the god awful Death Ascendent trilogy. While the modules would frequently ignore the setting advice on the difference between gore and horror, these three were among the worst. Slapping blood fountains and giant skulls on everything doesnt make it scary. Not to mention it nuked one of the better domain lords and left the world with Halloween town out of the Nightmare before Christmas.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

That reminds me: Adam's Wrath and The Created both have explore the theme of PCs trapped in other bodies. I find it fascinating. I ran both and I found The Created to be a little stronger, though probably because the PCs in Adam's Wrath split up and got themselves a TPK.

I love the Created, though probably for all the wrong reasons. I've run it three times now for various groups, and always played it for camp value. My friend still gets a chuckle out of the cat fight, where the poor beast had its whiskers pulled, its tail yanked, and its junk burned with a piece of tinder in one round. Morale check = failed.

I'm also fairly sure the hag battle TPK in Adam's Wrath was planned, though I'd have to dig out my copy to verify.

 

[Treebore]

I personally find that module terrible. It's essentially everything later products warn against... a large collection of rooms featuring "scary" monsters and random encounters with d4+1 wolfwere golem liches.

As someone who has ran this module 15 times now, I can say I whole heartedly disagree with your assessment.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

As someone who has ran this module 15 times now, I can say I whole heartedly disagree with your assessment.

Its a dungeon filled with a bunch of monsters. You open a room, and hey, there's gargoyes! You open another, and spectres and wraiths! You open another and its a banshee!

There's also a fair amount magical loot, for a 5-7th level adventure in addition to the sunblade and symbol/icon, including 3 +3 maces (in the same room!) and several +2 swords - one of which is intelligent, but isnt bothered to be given a name... I guess too much space was used statting out various 0th level humans in the town in case the DM couldnt improvse when the PC's went on a rampage. Its also got about 100,000 GP to destroy the local economy (including 20,000 electrum pieces to confuse the local economy), a 50,000 gp book, etc. I guess they needed to give people level bumps by rolling in gold to erase those level drains or something.

Kill things, take stuff.

Its a basic dungeon crawl, where you collect pieces of the triforce... err, sunblade, holy symbol and icon of ravenkind to help defeat the big boss. If it was published today, people would be complaining about it being video gamey. Its got some well written boxed text, but in my opinion, the biggest thing I6 has going for it is nostalgia. Otherwise its a fairly standard haunted house adventure. I do take back the terrible statement... its not actually terrible, just very over rated.

 

[Treebore]

Its a dungeon filled with a bunch of monsters. You open a room, and hey, there's gargoyes! You open another, and spectres and wraiths! You open another and its a banshee!

There's also a fair amount magical loot, for a 5-7th level adventure in addition to the sunblade and symbol/icon, including 3 +3 maces (in the same room!) and several +2 swords - one of which is intelligent, but isnt bothered to be given a name... I guess too much space was used statting out various 0th level humans in the town in case the DM couldnt improvse when the PC's went on a rampage. Its also got about 100,000 GP to destroy the local economy (including 20,000 electrum pieces to confuse the local economy), a 50,000 gp book, etc. I guess they needed to give people level bumps by rolling in gold to erase those level drains or something.

Kill things, take stuff.

Its a basic dungeon crawl, where you collect pieces of the triforce... err, sunblade, holy symbol and icon of ravenkind to help defeat the big boss. If it was published today, people would be complaining about it being video gamey. Its got some well written boxed text, but in my opinion, the biggest thing I6 has going for it is nostalgia. Otherwise its a fairly standard haunted house adventure. I do take back the terrible statement... its not actually terrible, just very over rated.

I still don't agree. Its the most requested "Can we run through it again?" module I have ever run, and I have ran the vast majority of old ones. Maybe you read it that way, or it was ran that way for you, but this module is one of the best ever.

 

[ProfessorPain]

I still don't agree. Its the most requested "Can we run through it again?" module I have ever run, and I have ran the vast majority of old ones. Maybe you read it that way, or it was ran that way for you, but this module is one of the best ever.

I tend to agree. The module was written in the early 80s, so you have to take that into account when running it. But it is a solid module and it definitely isn't a straight dungeon crawl. For sure it has dungeon crawl elements, because it was written in a time when that was the norm, but it really did have a lot of role play and investigation stuff.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

II'm also fairly sure the hag battle TPK in Adam's Wrath was planned, though I'd have to dig out my copy to verify.

Oh, that was planned. The one the PCs made up on their own wasn't.

While the basic layout of the original Ravenloft is a disconnected series of rooms, there is enough else woven through the structure of that adventure that I believe it does surpass the standard problems of its day.

 

[Plane Sailing]

And under no circumstances, ever, should you buy Thoughts of Darkness. It was the first module I ever bought that was wholly unredeemable.

Was that the one in the mind-flayer zone?

If so, I concur. I bought it as it sounded interesting and it was awful beyond belief. Uninteresting, railroady and at the end the party gets saved by a third party NPC IIRC.

I don't recall even one good idea from the whole thing.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I personally find that module terrible. It's essentially everything later products warn against... a large collection of rooms featuring "scary" monsters and random encounters with d4+1 wolfwere golem liches.

Even so, how many adventure modules were considered so successful that they spawned an entire campaign setting?

Although I've not played or run I6, from what I understand from those that have it is not the 'dungeon' which made it memorable, but rather everything else.

Cheers