Bedrockgames
Legend
Found the session logs (the first two should roughly cover the 100 Bushels of Rye inspired adventure, seven covers the Feast of Goblyns adventure):
Session One
Session Two
Session Seven
Revisiting Old Modules
Found the session logs (the first two should roughly cover the 100 Bushels of Rye inspired adventure, seven covers the Feast of Goblyns adventure):
Session One
Session Two
Session Seven
John Desmarais
Explorer
It’s good, solid adventure; with a reusable town built in. I used it several times. The Deus Ex Machina is annoying (I don’t have him join the party but instead give the party some material aid instead. There are also a few errors that I can’t remember the details on (and have to re-research every time I use it) but I’ve had fun with it with multiple game systems.
Bedrockgames
Legend
I ran the third adventure in Book of Crypts on Friday: The Dark Minstrel.
This is one I used to run all the time, largely because it is easy to do even if you don't have the book once you know the information. So if I was at a friends house and we all wanted to play D&D but I didn't have my Ravenloft material, this adventure was a good option.
The basic premise is quite simple. The players arrive in Claviera where they receive an invitation from Baron Lyron Evensong to attend a banquet at his mansion. Once there they feast and then are brought to his study where he plays a song for them on a harpsichord. After finishing the song, he explains that they are all trapped in the room for the next 100 years (and investigation confirms that the room is surrounded by void). The Baron doesn't want to hurt the party, he just wants them to keep him company for the 100 years night. They soon find out he is a spirit, and seemingly impossible to defeat. The players must find the Baron's weakness so they can defeat him and escape.
I quite like the premise and basic structure of the adventure. Playing it again, even decades later, I still really enjoy this aspect. It essentially takes place in a single room, so it is role-play heavy and an extremely confined investigation. The players can learn more about the situation by talking with the Baron, by reading the books on his shelves and studying features of the study. It isn't particularly difficult, I've never had a party that failed. But it is still quite fun.
The Baron is a pretty interesting character and I am realizing it fits a pattern so far with the adventure: many of the villains see themselves good and the designers take pains to create moral grayness within the parameters of the objective D&D alignment system. Obviously this is true for lots of evil NPCs, its just clear there is a conscious choice to play with this aspect of alignment in Book of Crypts.
This was always an interesting feature of Ravenloft. You can't detect Good or Evil in the demi plane, but good or evil still exist as part of the alignment system and cosmology.
Baron Evensong is something of a musician vigilante, seeing himself as extremely moral, to the extent that he acted as judge, jury and executioner for transgressions he perceived in others. He is a very enjoyable NPC to play. He sees himself as Lawful Good, when in reality he is Neutral Evil. I thought this was a good use of an alignment system that can break down under scrutiny (describing an NPC as NE but who stating they believe themselves to be LG is an easy feature to latch onto when running the character). In that respect he is walking a similar line to Dante in Blood in Moondale (a vampire who is presently CN and striving to be good by not drinking the blood of people, but rather drinking animal blood), and Victor Mordenheim as well.
The adventure itself is very well done in terms of providing lots of things for players to do. The bulk of the investigation revolves around the book shelf (though other clues exist) and I rather like the system for dealing with it which is as follows:
If the players roll anything but a 9, 10 or 11, they find books that might be interesting but don't help with solving the adventure. It generally takes an hour to skim through a given volume. If they roll a 9, 10 or 11, then they discover books such as the Baron's personal journal, a book of his poems and a book about imbuing musical instruments with magic. All of these three categories of book provide crucial details for solving the adventure. There is a similar section in the adventure dealing with sculptures in the room.
The riddle to solve is that the Baron's spirit is tethered to his harpsichord due to a spell he had cast upon it that went awry. If the players destroy the harpsichord, the mansion crumbles and they are freed.
By far this was the easiest adventure to run in the book to this point and I think it very much has to do with the simplicity of the adventure premise and the how easy it is for the GM to manage the clue finding (due to how it is organized and how elegantly it is presented).
All that said, there are some issues with the module, as with some of the other adventures around railroading and heavy handedness. Here is a good example of one such moment. The invitation the players received was cursed and whoever read it suffers phobias that do psychic damage until the players go to the mansion:
And the introductory hook is especially difficult for the party to avoid:
It is very evocative, and I like the way they bring music into the players being drawn into Evensong's domain, but it may be a concern if you want the players to have more freedom to choose not to go on the adventure or to approach the adventure from different paths. However, for monster of the week style play, I think it works well. I just made a point of telling my players in advance that these adventures would be run in a different style from my usual approach to play.
I did find a notable typo in this adventure where the Baron's name is misspelled in a key header, but otherwise it was free of any errors I could discern. I do recommend this adventure with the above caveats. I think it is useful for GMs to help them develop certain skills. Running an NPC in a room with the PCs for an entire adventure is much easier than it sounds, but it is probably something people might find daunting or challenging at first. Luckily the Baron is stark enough that I don't think this is much of an issue, and the Baron has a strong built in motivation (to keep the PCs as his guests to ward of loneliness and boredom) and the players have a strong enough built in motivation (to escape the Baron's curved room so they don't die of old age), that I think it is fairly effortless.
This is one I used to run all the time, largely because it is easy to do even if you don't have the book once you know the information. So if I was at a friends house and we all wanted to play D&D but I didn't have my Ravenloft material, this adventure was a good option.
The basic premise is quite simple. The players arrive in Claviera where they receive an invitation from Baron Lyron Evensong to attend a banquet at his mansion. Once there they feast and then are brought to his study where he plays a song for them on a harpsichord. After finishing the song, he explains that they are all trapped in the room for the next 100 years (and investigation confirms that the room is surrounded by void). The Baron doesn't want to hurt the party, he just wants them to keep him company for the 100 years night. They soon find out he is a spirit, and seemingly impossible to defeat. The players must find the Baron's weakness so they can defeat him and escape.
I quite like the premise and basic structure of the adventure. Playing it again, even decades later, I still really enjoy this aspect. It essentially takes place in a single room, so it is role-play heavy and an extremely confined investigation. The players can learn more about the situation by talking with the Baron, by reading the books on his shelves and studying features of the study. It isn't particularly difficult, I've never had a party that failed. But it is still quite fun.
The Baron is a pretty interesting character and I am realizing it fits a pattern so far with the adventure: many of the villains see themselves good and the designers take pains to create moral grayness within the parameters of the objective D&D alignment system. Obviously this is true for lots of evil NPCs, its just clear there is a conscious choice to play with this aspect of alignment in Book of Crypts.
This was always an interesting feature of Ravenloft. You can't detect Good or Evil in the demi plane, but good or evil still exist as part of the alignment system and cosmology.
Baron Evensong is something of a musician vigilante, seeing himself as extremely moral, to the extent that he acted as judge, jury and executioner for transgressions he perceived in others. He is a very enjoyable NPC to play. He sees himself as Lawful Good, when in reality he is Neutral Evil. I thought this was a good use of an alignment system that can break down under scrutiny (describing an NPC as NE but who stating they believe themselves to be LG is an easy feature to latch onto when running the character). In that respect he is walking a similar line to Dante in Blood in Moondale (a vampire who is presently CN and striving to be good by not drinking the blood of people, but rather drinking animal blood), and Victor Mordenheim as well.
The adventure itself is very well done in terms of providing lots of things for players to do. The bulk of the investigation revolves around the book shelf (though other clues exist) and I rather like the system for dealing with it which is as follows:
If the players roll anything but a 9, 10 or 11, they find books that might be interesting but don't help with solving the adventure. It generally takes an hour to skim through a given volume. If they roll a 9, 10 or 11, then they discover books such as the Baron's personal journal, a book of his poems and a book about imbuing musical instruments with magic. All of these three categories of book provide crucial details for solving the adventure. There is a similar section in the adventure dealing with sculptures in the room.
The riddle to solve is that the Baron's spirit is tethered to his harpsichord due to a spell he had cast upon it that went awry. If the players destroy the harpsichord, the mansion crumbles and they are freed.
By far this was the easiest adventure to run in the book to this point and I think it very much has to do with the simplicity of the adventure premise and the how easy it is for the GM to manage the clue finding (due to how it is organized and how elegantly it is presented).
All that said, there are some issues with the module, as with some of the other adventures around railroading and heavy handedness. Here is a good example of one such moment. The invitation the players received was cursed and whoever read it suffers phobias that do psychic damage until the players go to the mansion:
And the introductory hook is especially difficult for the party to avoid:
It is very evocative, and I like the way they bring music into the players being drawn into Evensong's domain, but it may be a concern if you want the players to have more freedom to choose not to go on the adventure or to approach the adventure from different paths. However, for monster of the week style play, I think it works well. I just made a point of telling my players in advance that these adventures would be run in a different style from my usual approach to play.
I did find a notable typo in this adventure where the Baron's name is misspelled in a key header, but otherwise it was free of any errors I could discern. I do recommend this adventure with the above caveats. I think it is useful for GMs to help them develop certain skills. Running an NPC in a room with the PCs for an entire adventure is much easier than it sounds, but it is probably something people might find daunting or challenging at first. Luckily the Baron is stark enough that I don't think this is much of an issue, and the Baron has a strong built in motivation (to keep the PCs as his guests to ward of loneliness and boredom) and the players have a strong enough built in motivation (to escape the Baron's curved room so they don't die of old age), that I think it is fairly effortless.
I spent a good chunk of yesterday evening preparing a scenario for Torchbearer. The dungeon plan and backstory is mostly my own, but in terms of particular features I drew inspiration from two old modules on my shelf: the old ICE MERP module Southern Mirkwood, which has details for Dol Guldur; and and adventure card from the late 80s Greyhawk City Boxed Set, Shadows of Terror.
Neither is as interesting as the adventure @Bedrockgames describes just upthread, but I did get some interesting ideas for architecture, traps and occupants.
Neither is as interesting as the adventure @Bedrockgames describes just upthread, but I did get some interesting ideas for architecture, traps and occupants.
Voadam
Legend
I ran a lot of the Book of Crypts adventures in my Ravenloft campaigns and think very highly of a lot of them, particularly at the lower level end where they are very atmospheric. In my Dark Minstrel one, a PC saw the void when they opened the doors to leave the party and eventually decided that it must be an illusion to trap them so he jumped out to break it. And kept falling and falling and falling. He continued to try to disbelieve for a while, but then just started to scream. Eventually the lycanthropy he got from the Moondale adventure manifested in his freefall so there was a ticked off and terrified dwarven werewolf eternally falling through the void growing more and more insane.
Bedrockgames
Legend
I remember the MERP books. I don't recall the adventure cards that well (I remember a variety of cards showing up in the 90s but wasn't a huge greyhawk person). What were they?
I like cobbling together pieces of different modules as needed. There is a really cool adventure for Ravenloft called Castles Forlorn. Not only does it have a cool castle in three different time periods with a monster who is different depending on the era, but it also includes a bunch of, I am not sure what you would call them, but just a bunch of scenarios and encounters that you can use. I like pulling from stuff like that
the Jester
Legend
I've been running The Secret of Bone Hill in 5e, using my "ale and whores" variant xp system (you only get xp for spending money frivolously, in ways that give you no actual benefit, such as on ale & whores). So far it has been pretty awesome. I took the time to draw out battlemats for the entire main castle on grid paper, and have been gradually unveiling them as the pcs move through the place. Good stuff!
I first saw them in the City of GH boxed set. And then there were some in From the Ashes. They are a two-sided cardstock page (about A4 size, though probably on an American rather than Australian standard) with a complete scenario, typically with a colour map or illustration on the front.
The other product from around the same time that resembles them is the Book of Lairs. But I think the scenarios on the adventure cards are generally better quality. (Not all. Some are bad. Some are just 5 room dungeons. But some are moderately clever!)
Bedrockgames
Legend
That’s something I miss from the old days of gaming. You see it now occasionally (usually with kickstarters it seems), but I loved those kinds of extras that were all about making the best use of space.
The Ravenloft boxed set cans with page sized card stock sheets with images of important locations on the front for the players and a map on the back for the GM (like the orinigibal Ravenloft module they, and most other maps in the line, were 3D isometric style. Also had card stocks with setting tables, stars for local militias in each domain, etc. and there were a few domain lore portraits with background info on back.
On the size, we don’t use A4 size is the US, but I believe our closest in the US would be 8.5 by 11 inches. So if it was that measurement then it was the American Standard.
Stormonu
Legend
I need to pull my (partial) 4E conversion* and do this adventure in 5E for Halloween...
*Sadly, I only got to just prior to the finale before I stopped on it.
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