I ran the next adventure in Book of Crypts: The Cedar Chest. I've always liked the title of the adventure for some reason, and it has a great backstory, but it is also one of the entries in the book that I had issues with as a GM. This will have some spoilers.
Again this continues with an almost monster of the week approach (though all of these adventures can be weaved organically into a campaign when the players happen to be in the right place or through other adaptations). The premise is the players, after having been in the port town of Armeikos for a few days are approached by the captain of the constabulary, Jovis Blackwere, who asks their help solving a series of murders by a sadistic killer. As the players investigate they discover that the killer is using one of them as his host, murdering people when the player character falls asleep (and using a Sleep spell on the rest of the party). The killer is Erik Spellbender, an aging wizard who wanted immortality but lacked the power to become a lich so kludged together his own phylactery with a cedar chest and by using Magic Jar on the player character in question. The players must find out which of them is the host, and discover the cedar chest which contains the necromancer's heart so they can stab it.
Some will immediately notice a potential issue with this adventure. I think it is entirely fine to have a wizard using a PC as a host to commit murders (just as a PC who doesn't know they have lycanthropy can be an interesting development). The problem with this set up, is it imposes a backstory on the player that they just have to accept and I find that always makes it weird (even back in the 90s when I first ran it, it was a little odd). When the player discovers that they are the host, they learn about the history of Ejrik (there are other places in the adventure where these details can be uncovered as well). Among the details they learn are that they went hunting skeletons that were attacking a local village, and that these skeletons were bait set up by Ejrik:
The above is taken from Ejrik Spellbender's entry in the back of the adventure. This is what the player learns about themselves when they discover they are the host. It is a great premise, but it creates a situation where the GM has to effectively say "this happened to you some time ago". I prepared my players for this sort of development, and they are pretty good about rolling with things, but I've had players who do not like this at all. However it does offer up alternatives to this at the start of the adventure, including using an NPC:
Again, I think the premise is really good. I love the way the necromancer uses magic jar but it goes a bit awry (he only has control when the host sleeps for example, and he wants full control). Another issue that emerges is the timeline, which the adventure isn't especially clear about, and that is going to be a problem because the when and where is enormously important here. The players are investigating recent murders, but there are also crimes that happened six months ago and it just doesn't do a good job of explaining if these older crimes were committed by the PC or not, and if so, how (given that they could have been hundreds of miles away). It also does require the GM to puzzle through the initial backstory and figure out how that would have worked based on where the player character was at the time (for example if the players only entered Ravenloft weeks ago).
The mystery itself is good, at least the points of investigation they provide. One issue here is they give you a few key places fully described, but also say the adventure is open and allow the players to explore the town. It provides a town map which is very good, but the GM will need to do more work if they want further exploration to be meaningful (I think given that the adventure is ten pages, this is fair, but I would have liked to see some clever method like they had in the Dark Minstrel adventure for doing a larger exploration on the fly (even if it was just some bare bones notes).
In terms of mood and atmosphere, I think the adventure works well. A lot of the boxed text can be lengthy and if the GM falls into the trap of letting the boxed text guide the adventure, then it can be stale. If you just run it straight down, without fully exploring the points where it says let the players explore freely, then it can be a bit railroady, and because I am running these this time around as written, it felt a little linear (importantly this isn't how it would normally be run though). The players did end up breaking that linearity by getting leg shackles and shackling themselves together (which forced Ejrik to go in an unexpected direction).
I do like how it lays out the clues. The points of investigation it does provide are well done, and they are highly cinematic as well. One thing it does right is basically tell the players at the first point of investigation that one of them is the host. So rather than have to slowly figure that out (which I think would be how most writers would have handled this adventure) its out in the open and the real mystery is figuring out which one of them is the host. I really like this decision because I think it makes the adventure work much better than if they have gone the other way. I also like a lot of little details in the adventure. For example that they picked the name Blackwere for the captain because he seems to be filling a similar role to Rapacion from Blood in Moondale and it tends to get the players' suspicions up if they've been through that adventure. And then there are cool locations like this one:
Liked everything here from the home that is a "hoary, old galleon" to the woman's name: Sinara Doom (sounds very Thulsa Doom to me). Also the names over all are a good mix of sounds, which helps when trying to fit this backstory to different settings, places and worlds.
This is one entry where I am honestly on the fence. I think the core idea is wonderful. And I love the idea of a cedar chest with a necromancers heart in it that needs to be destroyed. I think the adventure has some really great parts. I think it does make good use of its ten pages to covey a sense of place. But I feel it really needed to make weaving that backstory in much easier, and it could have provided some more details (again space being a considering even something like a list). It also really doesn't tie together things like a bundle of clues the players acquire at the start of the adventure (pieces of paper with notes at the past five murder sites----these needed little more explanation in my opinion).
One thing I am also noticing about the NPC entries is many of them have very inflated stat blocks (multiple high scores, etc). I vaguely recall this might have just been how many NPCs were done back in the day but there are a few where it really feels like they shouldn't have as many high stats as they do have. This might just be personal preference though, and I am not sure which method they used to generate these stats, or if they merely assigned them (which I think is a fair way to do things for NPCs, I don't think they need to be rolled, it just feels a little off if important characters always have many very high stats. At the same time, I get the reasoning and the temptation to give NPCs 18s, 17s, etc.
All that said, I think different people will have different reactions to this one, and I do think it still provides a solid evening of entertainment. When I ran it last night, I think we finished it pretty neatly in about a little over two hours.
NOTE: I am fighting with autocorrect on these names. Think I caught all the instances where it turned people like Jovis Blackwere into Bon Jovi but just note some of these names might be inaccurate for that reason.
