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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8703916" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 55: Sep/Oct 1995part 5/5Sea Wolf: Lisa Smedman has come a long way since her first adventure in here. Her tastes still run quite strongly towards the gothic though, as here's another little Ravenloft adventure to chill your player's hearts with. While on a ship journey, the mists roll in and a mysterious murder starts happening each night. Can you figure out who the killer is and stop them before nearly everyone dies and the monster gives up on subtlety, just attacking the PC's because we've only got so long in a session and need to get to the action eventually if they can't add up the clues? As the title makes fairly obvious, it's a werewolf, although there's some interesting backstory twists that I'm not going to spoil going on that make fingering the correct culprit unlikely at first. Trouble is, if you don't solve it quickly, it's quite likely some of the people attacked who survived will become infected lycanthropes, so even if you do kill the original one, you have to deal with repeated jump scares of other people transforming and attacking without any of the subtlety of a true lycanthrope at the end, in the style of many a horror movie that just doesn't know when to stop. So this is quite interesting because it gradually goes from slow and atmospheric to increasingly obvious and schlocky, while still being short enough to fit in a single session. It feels like one of the video nastys that James would have rented & reviewed a few years ago rather than something more literary. Hopefully that was the intended tone when writing, and whether it was or not you can probably make it fun to play as long as your players aren't completely mindless hack & slashers.An issue in which all the adventures are high quality, interestingly written and with plenty of opportunities for roleplaying … which is the problem, as the letters page shows many people are getting increasingly fed up of that and want to go back to dungeon crawling like the name of the game says. That makes it one that's particularly demonstrative of the gulf between the TSR writers and their audience. Onward to see if the gulf only grows right up to the point where they go under, or there will be some vain attempts at course correction in this department at least.</blockquote>

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