Help identifying contents of the Ravenloft box set and House of Strahd

[Ilak Ackula]

Hi, first time posting here...

I'm starting up a 2E game this weekend for the first time in almost 10 years(!) and I want an eventual goal to be involving the 16 Ravenloft/House of Strahd module. I've decided to get the House of Strahd versus the original because I want to run 2E rules. Problem is, this is becoming quite a challenge to find a complete module for an affordable price.

I'm looking at an auction on eBay and I can't really tell if everything is there or not..it has the Ravenloft Red Box and assorted other odds and ends..but mainly I want to be sure it has the maps for House of Strahd, and the seller has no clue if it does or not..he "thinks" it does.

What I'm wanting is to see if anyone here can look at the picture from the listing and identify the House of Strahd map(s)..because I can find no pictures in google that show the module with the maps..as such I have no clue what the maps even look like for this module.

So if anyone could help me out, I'd really appreciate it. Here is the image in attachment.

 

[Stormonu]

Yes, I think I see the castle maps on the bottom set, about 10 down from the top (the one with lots of light blue and sepia circles/walls on it. Most of the rest of the other stuff is from the 1st Ravenloft boxed set (2E) + Forbidden Lore. Note, it doesn't look like there is a Tarracota deck or the Dikesha dice (no big loss, though the Tarracotta deck can be used with House of Strahd).

One thing to note as a difference between I6 and House of Strahd - in the latter, they've greatly reduced the height between the floors of the castle, though they didn't change the image. It ought to be a lot squatter looking, but doesn't really affect the gameplay if at all.

The map you're looking for is like this one (this is but half the castle), but in House of Strahd, it's "in color" (sky blue background). You might want to point the seller to this image somehow to check for sure.

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On the back is a map of Barovia.

 

[Ilak Ackula]

Awesome, thanks for all the information. The guy actually does have the Tarracotta deck, but he doesn't know if he has them all, and I can't find how many there are supposed to be anywhere. Do you know how many cards there were? I'd like to get this set, it has a lot of stuff I'd need to run Ravenloft, but I don't want to get it and end up missing some crucial map or something.

 

[Echohawk]

The Ravenloft Tarokka deck has 54 cards.

And you could be forgiven for misremembering the name of the deck, even TSR seems to get confused between Tarroka and Tarokka

There's a link to a full list of the Tarokka cards (and for that matter a list of the box contents) under the "More Information" section of this page, and here's the equivalent page for Forbidden Lore.

 

[Ilak Ackula]

Haha, yeah I actually thought they were Tarokka, but saw Stormanu say Tarokkacota and I thought I must be remembering wrong! Guess not, haha. Thanks again for all the info, the links are very helpful. I never had any of this stuff back in the day, I used to run off of the Domains of Dread book mostly. Ravenloft stuff was extremely hard to find in the tiny town I grew up in.

One last question, what do you think a reasonable price for this set would be?

 

[Echohawk]

So it looks like you are getting (most of Forbidden Lore) plus all of (you hope) House of Strahd and The Created.

Hmmm... there's a shrink-wrapped Forbidden Lore on ebay right now with a BIN $70 plus another complete copy sitting at $21 with half a day left for bids. An incomplete set without dice or box and possibly without a full Tarokka deck is probably worth at most half that -- so maybe $10.

There are two copies of The Created on ebay right now with BINs of $15 and $23, plus that's one of the titles now available as a PDF on DNDClassics, so $15 is probably pushing the upper limit of what that's worth. As for House of Strahd, there are multiple copies on ebay, with BINs ranging from $25-$40, Noble Knights also has one for sale at $32. Again, those prices are probably the upper limit of what that's worth -- very few 2nd Edition items are particularly collectable so you can easily pick them up on ebay.

As a set, I'd thumbsuck a price of about $25-30, maybe a little more if there is a Tarokka deck included. FWIW, if you'd bought these three new back in the '90s, you'd have paid $37.90.

Then again, I'm probably not a great person to do price estimates. When I buy stuff online, about 50% of the cost is postage/shipping, so I tend to be less price sensitive when it comes to the item price.

 

[Jester David]

It's an odd miss-mash.

I see all of Forbidden Lore photographed. There are the cardstock building and portrait images from the first boxed set (the Black Box) but the DM screen from the second box (the Red Box) plus the two adventures. And what looks like the 2e Character Sheets cover. There also looks to be eight poster maps, which makes sense. Both the Red and Black Box had maps of the Core and Islands of Terror and the Black Box had a map of cities. Plus the maps from House of Strahd and Created. Not sure what the eighth map is...
I don't see any of the setting books in the picture though.

 

[Remathilis]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ravenloft-A.../221194989382?pt=Games_US&hash=item33803faf46

This is the 25th Anniversary version of Ranveloft, which uses Domains of Dead and House of Strahd updates for 2e to redo the classic module. And its $5.00 USD.

Well worth it.

 

[Ilak Ackula]

This is the 25th Anniversary version of Ranveloft, which uses Domains of Dead and House of Strahd updates for 2e to redo the classic module. And its $5.00 USD.

Well worth it.

In what way does this Ravenloft differ from House of Strahd?

 

[Echohawk]

The 25th Anniversary version is a slightly edited down version of House of Strahd, to get the adventure to fit onto 48 pages instead of 64. But it doesn't look like much of the content was removed, most of the space was recovered by reducing white space and tighter typesetting.

However, the 25th Anniversary has the same double-cardstock maps as the original module instead of the poster map that comes with House of Strahd. You also don't get -- as far as I can tell -- the maps of the Burgomaster's Manor House and the Temple of Barovia that are on the inside cover of House of Strahd.

I think I actually prefer the adventure booklet in the 25th Anniversary version -- it has a cleaner layout than House of Strahd. But the maps from House are nicer than the ones in the 25th Anniversary reprint.