Recent content by Paul Farquhar

He is about as quietly menacing as an angry dormouse. True, he was much better in that. Shame hardly anyone saw it.

Kang was a boring generic one note villain in Quantumania. It’s only that the rest of the movie was so terrible… The problem was the character, the actor just provided the motivation to change direction.

I'm just a bit narked that you persist in calling it a "mess" when it clearly isn't. There really isn't any significant conflict with Ravenloft lore, aside from the presence of Azlin perhaps, which is easily fixed by a simple name change for a character whose later use does not matter for the...

Azlin isn't a dark lord in this adventure. He is just some random lich lackey of Strahd. If it bothers you so much call him Izlan instead! I mean, Strahd and Godfrey technically aren't dark lords either, since dark lords don't exist yet, but it doesn't make any difference. Godfrey's role is...

It didn’t fail. It has lots of positive reviews dating from publication, there is nothing to suggest sales were poor, and it got a sequel in the form of of the boxed set.

It’s straightforward enough if you think in Gothic logic. It is both a prequel, and a sequel, and takes place at the same time as Curse of Strahd. So what? Minor character is minor. Not everything in Ravenloft has to be about a dark lord. Of course it needs reworking. No one here is suggesting...

It doesn’t matter about that, it’s different characters on different planes of existence where time can flow differently. And it’s characteristic of Gothic literature for the past to bleed into the present in any case. It was in trying to have a concrete history that the 2nd edition Ravenloft...

You create an robot duplicate indistinguishable from an actual teenager and send it out into the wild to invite real teenagers to play D&D and record their responses. Hey, it works for wildlife!

The Hunger Games is brutal and dark. Cosy it ain’t.

Setting romanticy aside for a moment, one of the things to consider when discussing cosy fantasy in D&D is a role playing game is not a novel. This might be why some people have the idea that cosy is synonymous with low stakes. In a novel, you can have high stakes, but still write it in such a...

Breaking the rules makes for a good story, especially when the rules are well known. The dark powers aren’t omnipotent. Vecna got out, so has Azlin. Strahd managing to psychically project his influence (hay, we have psionics now) into another domain isn’t too much of a stretch, especially if you...

Technically, domains hadn’t been invented when the module was written, so it hadn’t been established that he couldn’t do that. I think the mind swapping of villagers with “monsters” was the most difficult bit to make work, but you could use ghosts/spirits instead of random hobgoblins for better...

Gryphon Hill or Against the Drow could each make a full book when reworked. They need a lot doing to them, but there are plenty of ideas.

Didnawannabe.

Or maybe it refers to Cosy Spice, the sixth Spice Girl who left before they were famous.