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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 7706323" data-attributes="member: 19857">I'm not Iosue, but I have a lot of experience with Castle Amber.  It was one of the handful of adventures I participated in as a player back in the day when I first started playing D&D (along with The Keep on the Borderlands and the Lost City) and is one that I've run multiple times for various groups of players.Given what you've written, you didn't get to the best parts of the adventure.  The adventure is inspired by the works of Edgar Alan Poe, Clark Ashton-Smith and HP Lovecraft (with a heavy dose of CAS) and it's a horror/fantasy adventure for D&D written before Ravenloft - meaning that they didn't yet know how to convey horror in an adventure.  There are some scenes in the adventure that are truly horrific when you know the atmosphere you're supposed to be evoking as a DM (like the ghostly banquet that is early in the adventure, or the scene inspired by Poe's Fall of the House of Usher - or really any of the scenes with the mad d'Ambreville family members, or the tentacled Brain Eater in the crypt that can come off as comical if you don't know the Lovecraftian inspiration for the beast but played as Lovecraftian horror you can really get a level of creepiness out of it).  And then there's the back half of the adventure where the PCs explore a number of dark fantasy locations in a parallel world looking for the keys to open the portal and return home.  (I suspect that we won't be getting Castle Amber in these revamps mostly because of that last bit.  Averogine is not an old TSR property and I'd bet they would have to negotiate the license with the Ashton-Smith estate to do anything new with it).The adventure suffers from a lack of explanation of what it's trying to be - it assumes that the DM has read Clark Ashton-Smith and HP Lovecraft and Edgar Alan Poe and that the DM will understand what's going on.  That was a poor assumption when it was published, and while more people have probably read Lovecraft now than then the same can't be said for Smith.  It also has a "mystery" in it but never makes it clear to anyone - player or DM - that there's a mystery to be solved.  And it has a lot of straight-up dungeon crawl elements to it that don't seem to make sense except when you remember the era it was written in.  Played as a straight-up dungeon crawl the adventure is not very good.  Played as a mystery/horror game along the lines of Ravenloft the adventure can really shine.  Definitely something I'm willing to run over and over again for the right groups.(Moldvay's "The Lost City" suffers from similar problems in my eyes.  It's also a fantasy/horror setting that is better thought of in the mold of a Robert E Howard or Clark Ashton-Smith model for fantasy and played that way it's a great adventure.  As a straight-up dungeon crawl the Lost City works better than Castle Amber does, and can probably still be considered a classic, but I definitely feel that it is not as good without the creep factor.)</blockquote>

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