D&D General The thread where I review a ton of Ravenloft modules
- Thread starter der_kluge
- Start date
Stormonu
NeoGrognard
I always figured it would be gold-plated, tipped or somesuch, not solid gold. But if its the only way to kill them, you do what you gotta do.
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
I think in some instances this sort of distinction is clarified but I can't remember off hand. I think if the distinction isn't made in the entry, then gold plated is fine. but I do recall quality issues was one of the draw backs of cold forged iron
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
Oh don't even talk about cold-forged iron, lol. I have a friend who is a metalsmith and they will go on for quite awhile about it.
Curiously, 3e made "cold iron" a special magic resistant material, heading off such arguments at the pass.
Curiously, 3e made "cold iron" a special magic resistant material, heading off such arguments at the pass.
der_kluge
Adventurer
Did I need to write a 2 page review for Horror's Harvest? No. Did I? Yes.
Horror’s Harvest (Dungeon #38)
The science nerd in me has always been annoyed by Ravenloft’s cosmology, or the lack thereof, or whatever it is. Ravenloft is a solid, physical dimension within the ethereal plane, and follows its own mystical set of laws. So sayeth the black box. Planescape informs us that the Demiplane of Dread is “forever lost in the deepest mists”, which is to say that it exists in the opposite direction from the so-called “border ethereal” which exists somewhere between the ethereal plane and whatever plane you crossed over from. Yet, deep within this plane, domains in Ravenloft still have stars in the night sky, and moons, and some domains have more than one moon, and Sithicus has a black one that only evil creatures can see. Every domain has a different night sky.
The module “Dark of the Moon” specifically requires GMs to track the phases of the moon, specifically with regards to the absence of the moon (what one might call the new moon). The fact that a moon has phases, implies there is a sun, of course, and that the world is a sphere, otherwise you couldn’t get a crescent moon. This contradicts VRGtR, which states that the world being round is a lie.
Given this mess, it is amazing that Horror’s Harvest is a Ravenloft module with an astronomer NPC at its core. Written by Chris Perkins, this module is for levels 2-4. It is set in Falkovnia. Here, Thull, the astronomer in question, was looking through his telescope, charting the constellations, and observes a falling star. This, of course, raises a whole host of inevitable questions. Do the constellations change with the seasons? Why are there seasons – does the domain have an elliptical orbit around a fake sun? Is there a sun? Where did this comet come from? Are there asteroid belts in Ravenloft cosmology? So many questions.
I should take this moment to point out that technically what is being described here is a meteor. A comet is a ball of ice and dust that zooms through space. A meteor is what enters our atmosphere. But let’s continue. Thull invites the PCs to his tower, where he informs them he had predicted the “comet’s” fall from the sky (a laughably impossible mathematical exercise), and then implores them to find its location, which he has also apparently calculated. Again, impressive, given that it’s 1 inch in diameter. Also, less than 5% of meteors survive the burn of the atmosphere and make it to the surface.
The meteor crashes into the burgomaster’s house in a small town known as Delmunster – a town described as having fewer 40 citizens, only 12 of which are female. That’s got to be one lonely place! Ahem Anyway, the burgomaster, Yuri, finds the rock, and decides to bury it deep in the forest behind his house, because it creeps him out. There, it very quickly grows into a full-sized doppleganger plant, has 16 pods, and has already managed to enslave 10 people, two of which are dead. Either that’s one fast-growing plant, or Thull took forever on his mathematical calculations.
The PCs scour the supposed landing site, only to come up empty-handed. Eventually, it’s assumed, they’ll end up in the nearby Delmunster. Here, they can investigate the town. This is where things get interesting. The town, small though as it is, is incredibly detailed. Every NPC and every location has a story. Some of these people are podlings and will attempt to throw the PCs off the trail. More than half of this 20-page module is spent detailing nearly every nook and cranny of this town, and it’s great, if not perhaps a little overwhelming.
And, because it wouldn’t be a 2nd edition module, there’s of course a 3-level floorplan of the burgomaster’s house which is excruciatingly detailed, most of which is superfluous, and just seems to pad the word count. The goal here is to get the burgomaster to tell the PCs where the meteor fell. By this point, they should suspect that a bunch of people in town have been affected adversely by the thing, and even though the burgomaster has not been, he’s insane due to the radiation.
Obviously, much of this review up to this point has been kind of tongue in cheek. Good-natured ribbing aside, this isn’t a bad module, though it has enormous problems to overcome. The flow of this is straightforward, and logical – PCs are hired to find the meteor (yes, I die on the inside a little bit every time this module calls it a comet). Failing that, they end up in Delmunster. Makes sense. Delmunster is CRAZY detailed with closed to 40 people and over a dozen locales. Eventually, they dungeon crawl the burgomaster’s house, where a dizzying array of barricades are put up to prevent them from getting the clue they need to find the meteor. Is it just me, or does every writer give the villain a ring of mind shielding? It seems to be standard issue for Ravenloft villains. To get the actual information, the party is somehow supposed to wrestle this guy to the ground, remove his ring, and get it out of him that way. That’s a pretty big leap.
As a side note, it’s hilarious to me that Perkins specifically calls out spells like Speak with Dead, Force Wall, Otiluke’s resilient sphere in specific areas in a module designated for 2nd-4th level. But in all seriousness, the doppleganger plant, while not really a combat challenge, gives all its podlings essentially a hive-mind and genius-level intelligence. They can work together to coordinate plans to thwart, stop, bribe, coerce, manipulate or any other myriad ways the GM can think of to stop the PCs from getting to the destination. That all makes perfect sense, of course, but does mean this module should basically be impossible to solve.
The way this likely plays out is that the GM spends days trying to understand every NPC in town. The PCs get to the town, and without any direction whatsoever are going to stumble around aimlessly for quite a while. The podlings will inevitably find them and will easily throw them off any scent. I mean, smart money is on having several podlings inform them that the meteor was recovered and taken to a larger city for study. “Hell, we’ll even give you a ride to the outskirts of town to save you the trouble”, where they promptly take them 12-14 miles outside of town (within the 16-mile radius of the plant), give the PCs a loaf a bread “for the road”, wish them luck on their quest, and bid them farewell. That’ll teach those pesky PCs from trying to interfere with the town!
Yea, I’m having a hard time taking this quest seriously. I like it, but I think to pull it off successfully requires a great DM, and really great players. The DM has a mountain of work to understand all the townspeople’s relationships, and PCs, being completely naïve about the town and its people are going to be very easy to manipulate by a “genius-level” plant. Eventually, the players are going to get frustrated by all the clever misdirection and are going to just start lashing out, and still might come up short if the burgomaster is slain, then they might not ever be able to locate this plant. But, if you’re ever wanting to really (and I mean, really) flesh out a small village for some other purpose, this is an amazing resource.
How does one fix this? For starters, reduce the number of podlings, and make the plant less powerful overall. The fact that the burgomaster has juju zombies as servants just invites PCs to want to kill him. You might make his servants regular people, and one of them might be privy to the location of the plant. Perhaps the burgomaster rode out to the site on horseback, so a horse in the stables could tell the PCs where it is (with speak with animals). You could reduce the size of the burgomaster’s house and remove all the unnecessary stuff (I don’t need a room full of detailed paintings, for example). You could consider giving all the podlings some sort of “tell”. That would at least help the players figure out who they are based on some subtle mannerism, or behavior. Like, in Men in Black, the “bug” alien kept wanting sugar. That was his give-away. Enough of that, and this becomes a much more solvable challenge.
Horror’s Harvest (Dungeon #38)
The science nerd in me has always been annoyed by Ravenloft’s cosmology, or the lack thereof, or whatever it is. Ravenloft is a solid, physical dimension within the ethereal plane, and follows its own mystical set of laws. So sayeth the black box. Planescape informs us that the Demiplane of Dread is “forever lost in the deepest mists”, which is to say that it exists in the opposite direction from the so-called “border ethereal” which exists somewhere between the ethereal plane and whatever plane you crossed over from. Yet, deep within this plane, domains in Ravenloft still have stars in the night sky, and moons, and some domains have more than one moon, and Sithicus has a black one that only evil creatures can see. Every domain has a different night sky.
The module “Dark of the Moon” specifically requires GMs to track the phases of the moon, specifically with regards to the absence of the moon (what one might call the new moon). The fact that a moon has phases, implies there is a sun, of course, and that the world is a sphere, otherwise you couldn’t get a crescent moon. This contradicts VRGtR, which states that the world being round is a lie.
Given this mess, it is amazing that Horror’s Harvest is a Ravenloft module with an astronomer NPC at its core. Written by Chris Perkins, this module is for levels 2-4. It is set in Falkovnia. Here, Thull, the astronomer in question, was looking through his telescope, charting the constellations, and observes a falling star. This, of course, raises a whole host of inevitable questions. Do the constellations change with the seasons? Why are there seasons – does the domain have an elliptical orbit around a fake sun? Is there a sun? Where did this comet come from? Are there asteroid belts in Ravenloft cosmology? So many questions.
I should take this moment to point out that technically what is being described here is a meteor. A comet is a ball of ice and dust that zooms through space. A meteor is what enters our atmosphere. But let’s continue. Thull invites the PCs to his tower, where he informs them he had predicted the “comet’s” fall from the sky (a laughably impossible mathematical exercise), and then implores them to find its location, which he has also apparently calculated. Again, impressive, given that it’s 1 inch in diameter. Also, less than 5% of meteors survive the burn of the atmosphere and make it to the surface.
The meteor crashes into the burgomaster’s house in a small town known as Delmunster – a town described as having fewer 40 citizens, only 12 of which are female. That’s got to be one lonely place! Ahem Anyway, the burgomaster, Yuri, finds the rock, and decides to bury it deep in the forest behind his house, because it creeps him out. There, it very quickly grows into a full-sized doppleganger plant, has 16 pods, and has already managed to enslave 10 people, two of which are dead. Either that’s one fast-growing plant, or Thull took forever on his mathematical calculations.
The PCs scour the supposed landing site, only to come up empty-handed. Eventually, it’s assumed, they’ll end up in the nearby Delmunster. Here, they can investigate the town. This is where things get interesting. The town, small though as it is, is incredibly detailed. Every NPC and every location has a story. Some of these people are podlings and will attempt to throw the PCs off the trail. More than half of this 20-page module is spent detailing nearly every nook and cranny of this town, and it’s great, if not perhaps a little overwhelming.
And, because it wouldn’t be a 2nd edition module, there’s of course a 3-level floorplan of the burgomaster’s house which is excruciatingly detailed, most of which is superfluous, and just seems to pad the word count. The goal here is to get the burgomaster to tell the PCs where the meteor fell. By this point, they should suspect that a bunch of people in town have been affected adversely by the thing, and even though the burgomaster has not been, he’s insane due to the radiation.
Obviously, much of this review up to this point has been kind of tongue in cheek. Good-natured ribbing aside, this isn’t a bad module, though it has enormous problems to overcome. The flow of this is straightforward, and logical – PCs are hired to find the meteor (yes, I die on the inside a little bit every time this module calls it a comet). Failing that, they end up in Delmunster. Makes sense. Delmunster is CRAZY detailed with closed to 40 people and over a dozen locales. Eventually, they dungeon crawl the burgomaster’s house, where a dizzying array of barricades are put up to prevent them from getting the clue they need to find the meteor. Is it just me, or does every writer give the villain a ring of mind shielding? It seems to be standard issue for Ravenloft villains. To get the actual information, the party is somehow supposed to wrestle this guy to the ground, remove his ring, and get it out of him that way. That’s a pretty big leap.
As a side note, it’s hilarious to me that Perkins specifically calls out spells like Speak with Dead, Force Wall, Otiluke’s resilient sphere in specific areas in a module designated for 2nd-4th level. But in all seriousness, the doppleganger plant, while not really a combat challenge, gives all its podlings essentially a hive-mind and genius-level intelligence. They can work together to coordinate plans to thwart, stop, bribe, coerce, manipulate or any other myriad ways the GM can think of to stop the PCs from getting to the destination. That all makes perfect sense, of course, but does mean this module should basically be impossible to solve.
The way this likely plays out is that the GM spends days trying to understand every NPC in town. The PCs get to the town, and without any direction whatsoever are going to stumble around aimlessly for quite a while. The podlings will inevitably find them and will easily throw them off any scent. I mean, smart money is on having several podlings inform them that the meteor was recovered and taken to a larger city for study. “Hell, we’ll even give you a ride to the outskirts of town to save you the trouble”, where they promptly take them 12-14 miles outside of town (within the 16-mile radius of the plant), give the PCs a loaf a bread “for the road”, wish them luck on their quest, and bid them farewell. That’ll teach those pesky PCs from trying to interfere with the town!
Yea, I’m having a hard time taking this quest seriously. I like it, but I think to pull it off successfully requires a great DM, and really great players. The DM has a mountain of work to understand all the townspeople’s relationships, and PCs, being completely naïve about the town and its people are going to be very easy to manipulate by a “genius-level” plant. Eventually, the players are going to get frustrated by all the clever misdirection and are going to just start lashing out, and still might come up short if the burgomaster is slain, then they might not ever be able to locate this plant. But, if you’re ever wanting to really (and I mean, really) flesh out a small village for some other purpose, this is an amazing resource.
How does one fix this? For starters, reduce the number of podlings, and make the plant less powerful overall. The fact that the burgomaster has juju zombies as servants just invites PCs to want to kill him. You might make his servants regular people, and one of them might be privy to the location of the plant. Perhaps the burgomaster rode out to the site on horseback, so a horse in the stables could tell the PCs where it is (with speak with animals). You could reduce the size of the burgomaster’s house and remove all the unnecessary stuff (I don’t need a room full of detailed paintings, for example). You could consider giving all the podlings some sort of “tell”. That would at least help the players figure out who they are based on some subtle mannerism, or behavior. Like, in Men in Black, the “bug” alien kept wanting sugar. That was his give-away. Enough of that, and this becomes a much more solvable challenge.
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Remathilis
Legend
Ha!
So Van Richten Guide to Ravenloft has a section in every domain that gives adventure seeds and low and behold, this one appears:
"The characters are sent to investigate a fallen star that crashed near the village of Delmunster. The village proves remarkably peaceful and free of zombies, in large part because it's populated by the podlings of a bodytaker plant (see chapter 5)."
Never let a good idea go to waste, eh?
(This plot was also used in the Ravenloft streaming game Black Dice Society. At the time, I assumed the DM was using the hook above, but it's completely possible he used the module above.)
Anyway, when I ran this idea, the villagers asked the PCs to help them because there was a "black knight" that rode out every night and slaughtered the townsfolk. They wanted the PCs to find and destroy him. The knight however was a vengeance paladin who was trying to thin the herd in hopes of striking at the plant. The PCs confronted him, learned the truth, and allied with him to slay the plant.
I named the adventure The Uncanny Valley.
This adventure reminds me almost entirely of Against the Cult of the Reptile God. In fact, I’ll bet if you sub out the monsters in that module with this one, you end up with something a little better. I remember running this one and there was this weird monster - an animated executioner’s hood - that attacked the party in the burgomeister’s house. Why in the world would that even be there?
Also, with a module like this, I always like to emulate its inspiration in some respect, in this case, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Unfortunately, I think it kind of misses the mark in setting up the paranoia around people being replaced by pod people. Great idea, loved the little coda, but execution was off.
Also, with a module like this, I always like to emulate its inspiration in some respect, in this case, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Unfortunately, I think it kind of misses the mark in setting up the paranoia around people being replaced by pod people. Great idea, loved the little coda, but execution was off.
Necropolitan
Hero
I have a few ideas:
Have one of the podlings be revealed when a freak accident kills them while the PCs are nearby. Debris collapses on them, a kick by a panicking horse breaks their neck, a different monster kills them, etc. The inside of their corpse being partially hollowed out/the corpse melting into goo (depending on which version of the plant you go by) will clue the PCs in on the fact that something strange is happening.
The plant may be a genius, but that doesn't mean it fully understands people. Have the podlings give themselves away in various ways as they interact with the PCs. The PCs might be clued in by podlings trying to get them to leave the village while the rest of the villagers want them to stay and deal with the obvious supernatural happenings for example.
Have the PCs fight a few podlings before they find the plant, building up suspense until they discover the true horror of what's going on.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
I mean, most of them are "spot the classic movie plot".
Paul Farquhar
Legend
There is a whole table of ways podlings might give themselves away in VGR.
When I used the bodytaker plant in an adventure I gave it two bodies (connected by underground roots) one was a decoy, the other hidden away. I don't know about the version in this adventure, but the 5e version is very vulnerable to ranged weapons. I gave mine some psionic spells to compensate.
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