So definitely check it out because while it has its gory scenes (it is an Omen movie after all and elaborate deaths are a must), there’s more to it that I think takes some typical tropes and makes them relevant, and even finds some new ways to make people squirm.
D&D General The thread where I review a ton of Ravenloft modules
- Thread starter der_kluge
- Start date
Paul Farquhar
Legend
Not something I would ever do - I always plan much further in advance, and wouldn’t do anything without reading it thoroughly first.
Not that I couldn’t wing that situation if it did come up. “Look out for the mountain!”
Stormonu
NeoGrognard
Found it and bought! Thanks!
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
When it streams I may take your advice and watch it (generally don't go to movie theaters anymore). As it is a prequel is the premise anything like Rosemary's Baby (that is one of my favorite horror movies)
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
A-yup. (Brevity to avoid going into spoilers)
Cool. Rosemary's Baby is classic (and the book is excellent as well)
der_kluge
Adventurer
Lol, lemme stop you right there.
If you're going to approach all these with the the expectation these modules will make sense, as if the game was Quasi-Medieval Life Simulator, you're gonna get a whole lot of disappointment.
It's like reviewing Pirates of the Caribbean and saying "it was unrealistic and people behaved illogically" thus completely missing the point.
Of course the woman won't simply hire the heroes when she can instead pretend to be a damsel in distress and also insert a McGuffin into the plot.
Also, if you expect gender equality or sensitive handling of traumas you don't know anything about the era these modules were written in. Things that are hot button issues now simply were not controversial then. More, they simply weren't issues at all back then. (They weren't just unproblematic issues - because that implies someone evaluated them - they weren't issues at all)
I'm not saying it's wrong to care about these things. I'm saying it's futile to hope for sensitivity back then. It wasn't that men chose to be insensitive. It was that the issues weren't problematized at all, at least not by the general population and definitely not by the predominantly young males that were the expected audience.)
Let me stop you right there...
Imagine my surprise when I see 4 new pages of posts in this thread this morning. lol You seem to have struck a nerve.
Yes, I am approaching these modules as if they should make sense. Why should Ravenloft modules be above this level of scrutiny? I have 5 players. One of them is getting her MBA, one owns his own business, one is disabled (and is also a GM), and one is a Veterinarian, and the other a pharmacist. Point is, these are smart people. The veterinarian, in particular, likes to really over-analyze plots and considers every angle. If there's a plot hole in the story, they are going to shred it to pieces. If I were to simply handwave something and go "I know this is dumb, just humor me here..." that's doing a disservice to them, and frankly I'm a better GM than that.
I would do the same thing if I were reviewing Dark Sun modules or Planescape modules. A plothole is still a plothole, and a railroad is still a railroad. And I don't think I'm finding a lot of disappointment with these modules. Oh sure, some of them are absolute stinkers, but I've honestly been pleasantly surprised at how good some of these are. As someone who was largely unfamiliar with this canon of work, I had my trepidations about what I was going to find when I embarked on this journey. I generally considered all 2nd edition modules (of any kind) to be absolute garbage. So yes, imagine my surprise when I read "Evil Eye" and actually got excited about running it and could visualize the scenes in my head and am looking forward to the day when we complete that. There is good stuff in here. Unfortunately, Feast of Goblyns isn't it.
And I am 51 years old. I lived through that time. I also recognize how much gate-keeping and misogyny was baked into the hobby back then. While I could run these modules using 2e rules (shudder), I can't replace them with people who are still living in the 90s. People have traumas, and some of my players definitely do. We cover things like redlines and x-cards because it's important for me to keep these people around. In my last session in my Sunday game, the PCs ended up buying a bunch of slaves at a market, and one of the bidders was a woman I described as a "madam" (i.e., a brothel owner) and the idea that some of these slaves could be sold into sex slavery was enough trauma for one of my players that she had to pull over on the side of the road on the way home so she could stop crying. I don't need that for my game, and I certainly don't want that for my player! I like my players, and would like to keep them around. So, if I can highlight potential triggers in these modules, I'm definitely going to do that. A lot of that stuff here can probably be avoided, but some of it is harder to do so. One of my own personal redlines is violence against children. Which makes the villain at the end of Evil Eye problematic for me. But we discussed it in my session zero, and everyone seemed OK with it, so I'm planning on moving forward with it (it'll take us a while to get there anyway).
(Incidentally, I retconned the madam as a spymaster, and my player was grateful for the change. They even agreed to give some of the slaves back to her because they knew they'd end up going into a good place, and have an interesting life) - in exchange for possible favors in the future.
I value your feedback here, truly. But I do feel like there's a lot of nostalgia around some of these modules. Maybe I'll go back and re-read Feast of Goblyns one of these days. Bleak House is another that people seem to view through rose-colored glasses. I was reading reviews online yesterday (what few there are), and someone had listed "Blood in Moondale" as one of his favorites - a module I gave 1 star! Thing is, when I read context around some of these (the Kargatane site is particularly bad in this case), people are like "yea, I changed a bunch of stuff" - well of course it was good, you removed all the bad!
I started this project because I'm running Ravenloft campaign. First session is on Thursday (6/13), and we had our session zero two weeks ago. I decided to try and lessen the amount of work I needed to do (ha!) by running prepared modules, and since I wasn't familiar with ANY Ravenloft module, and the corpus was large, that surely I could find stuff to run. So yes, my eye is towards usability for me, and how good it is. But I also realized just how few reviews there are of these modules. So, eventually I decided that I should write actual reviews (mostly because it helped focus my effort) and also because I knew other people could benefit from all these reviews. I smiled yesterday when this thread's link came up in my own search of reviews like 3 links in. I hope others find value here. That's the point.
Yes, my standards are high, both because I respect my players' time, and I'm a good GM who enjoys a good story. I don't have a specific metric for my reviews, and because I didn't have a half-star character in my word document, I decided to just stick with whole-star reviews. I've only reviewed 4 5-star modules at this point. Out of 42 modules, that's only 10%. But there are 13 4-star reviews, and I'm planning on running most of those. I might end up changing my impressions of some of these after I run them. But that's just life.
Lastly, I'll just add this. I gathered brief feedback on what reviews I could find, and I was really looking forward to Feast of Goblyns since it's so universally beloved, it seems. Imagine my dismay when I found it to be an utter railroaded disaster. Perhaps I judged it unfairly (I did stop reading it halfway through after all), but the problems were basically insurmountable in my mind. Every review just heaped golden praise upon this module, though I recognize that there are entire threads devoted to repairing the NPC's motiviations here. But in my mind, even that isn't enough. Finding some lost magical crown (which incidentally, is just in a canyon a few miles away) all because she wants to be with her "lover" in the next domain over feels like a plot written by a 9 year old.
The other one that really baffles me, and perhaps I should take another more objective look at, is Bleak House. This is another one of those people consistently (I mean, there are less than 5 threads in the world on this topic, but still...) rank as one of the best Ravenloft modules. Which, again, I find absolutely bonkers. Bleak House is a terrible module by every objective stanard of that word. So, I'm generally curious if I missed the mark on these two, since my reviews seem to be in the minority here.
Bleak House did inspire me, however, for my own first session. My PCs are going to start in an Insane Asylum with amnesia, and they'll want to find a way out of it. Maybe I'll gather up all my notes on it, I can post it here if others can find value in such a thing.
I never played The Evil Eye or ran an adventure in Invidia but the idea of using Rosemary's Baby and The Omen as inspiration sounds fantastic.
der_kluge
Adventurer
I wanted to touch on this, because I think it's an important thing to consider.
I think the 2e rules, in general, were terrible. I've no interest in recreating that experience. I like 5e, but even 5e rules are overly-powered when it comes to Ravenloft, which is why I'm choosing to use LFG (Low Fantasy Gaming) for my campaign. Even those rules aren't entirely perfect, but they get me very close. One of the things that frustrated me in my last campaign was how easy it is for PCs to acquire magical attacks. The first major villain I had in that campaign was a succubus, which is an easy villain to kill if the entire party has a magic weapon in their hand. In Ravenloft (I'm looking at you, "Sea Wolf"), a werewolf isn't really a threat if the warlock can just shoot magic arrows at it from a circle of darkness with impunity.
But I think the other reason why D&D rules don't work super great here is because Ravenloft isn't a high fantasy setting. I wanted my Asylum doctor to use electric shock treatments, and Sea Wolf has a Steamboat in it for crying out loud. I opted for Renaissance-era technology, which makes a lot of this more plausible. While I would imagine that there would be some domains that are much less technologically advanced, the idea that I could have an actual printing press, and ruffled collars is quite appealing for this setting.
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
It is a good adventure from what I remember. I personally didn't like that they advanced that meta-plot with her, because she was one of my favorite dark lords as written (so replacing her with Malocchio was kind of a bummer in my opinion. But I think that sort of thing would work
