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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8506404" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 42: Jul/Aug 1993part 5/5The Price of Revenge: Steven Kurtz continues to write adventures that are more interesting, but also more problematic than the average writer here, as he goes straight for the now very out of fashion gypsy curse trope. A pair of nosferatu vampires got particularly greedy and sloppy in their feeding on a small Valachan town and wound up killing a young Vistani girl and turning her into another vampire. This quite reasonably got her mother to pronounce a curse on said vampires. In come the PC's through the mists, albeit 10 years late, to hopefully save the day. Can you give her and her creepy child vampire trying to resist it's hunger a happy ending, or will you fall before the physical and social defences of the evil vampires and die, fail even worse and become trapped in undeath as well, or never even get close to the mystery and be sucked into the mundane life of the village. Actually, the last one isn't very likely, as this is a fairly linear adventure where the spooky hints are laid on pretty thick right from the start and the antagonist's actions in play aren't nearly as subtle as they're talked up to be in the backstory. Once again for him, direct combat would be a bad idea at the intended character level, so you're expected to look for the macguffins that'll weaken the vampires first, and make sure they can't just turn gaseous & escape even if you are strong enough, letting you have multiple encounters with the same enemies before defeating them for good. So there's a lot of him recycling things he does, that very few other writers here do, and for good reason, as they're literary conventions that might be cool in a story but don't work very well under the D&D system, particularly with genre savvy players who can spot a villain amongst general NPC's in the talky bits well before they're supposed to and short-circuit the plot. Unlike Willie Walsh, he's rapidly becoming irritatingly predictable with repeated submissions. Very much at the bad end of 2e style adventures, where the writer is telling their own story rather than letting the players create one in play, and has to do a lot of bending the rules to make that happen if the dice fall the wrong way. Ravenloft does seem to be particularly prone to those.An issue where there's a strong negative correlation between adventure length and quality, with the longer ones leaning increasingly towards telling a story rather than building an adventure. This means that in terms of page count, the ratio of stuff I'd personally want to use vs not is actually pretty low. It does seem like they're on a downswing overall at the moment. Let's see if that trend continues in a couple of month's time.</blockquote>

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