Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9012956" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 76: Sep/Oct 1999part 2/5The House on the Edge of Midnight: Bringing people back to life never goes well in Ravenloft. But there’s always someone who’s not genre-savvy enough to do it anyway and doom themselves to an eternity of ironic punishment. The Ramsay family forgot that everybody needs good neighbours and sailed off to a little island in the Sea of Sorrows where the dad could pursue his unethical experiments on human subjects without anaesthesia in peace. His wife gave birth to two handicapped sons, which were obviously no use as successors so he ignored them and focussed all his attention on their daughter. When she was blown off the cliffs in a particularly nasty storm, he snapped and killed the rest of his family to use their body parts to bring her back to life. This almost worked, but because the Dark Powers knew what a horrible petty little man he is, they gave her one minor flaw of green eyes instead of blue, with any subsequent eyes also turning green as soon as they were put in. This simply will not do for him, so now he’s trapped in a cycle of fruitlessly stealing eyes from any visitors that happen by the island while keeping her locked up in the basement, (and quite insane by now) all the while haunted by the ghosts of the other three family members. The PC’s will be the next group shipwrecked and washed up on his shores instead of their original intended destination. Will they be able to keep all their eyes & other appendages and escape alive? As is often the case for Ravenloft darklords, regular killing won’t keep him dead for long, and you have to resolve the familial psychodrama to get rid of him for good and lay everyone else to rest. So while there’s plenty of room for you to do an atmospheric slow build here where he invites you for dinner and then strikes when the PC’s guards are down, it’s also built robustly enough mechanically that the adventure doesn’t fall apart if you jump straight to the conclusion that the creepy guy living all alone in a dilapidated mansion is a bad guy. There’s plenty to explore and the new monsters are used effectively to set the tone, not just as combat challenges. This does indeed manage to work as both a story and an adventure, although the default ending with a convenient trip home after winning is a bit deus ex machina. Overall, more good than bad here, putting it firmly in the usable level of quality.Nodwick is brought back to life so frequently and with so little consequence that the idea of meddling with the veil between life & death loses all it's blasphemousness.</blockquote>

Verification