Look! More reviews!! Some of these are slogs to get through... but this batch is mostly good! In case you can't tell, I'm mostly starting with some of the lower-level stuff first, since I'm primarily interested in piecing them together into a campaign.
Night of the Walking Dead 
This module takes place in Souragne (think, New Orleans) amidst a swamp. It’s worth noting that even thought the module is advertised as being for 1st to 3rd level, it requires a total of 9 levels. Some of the fights, as written, would be a TPK for a smaller 1st level party. To start, the PCs make their way through said swamp, possibly have a few random encounters with the wildlife, until they find a small Vistani camp. The Vistani give the PCs some dire warnings, and some information about what’s up ahead. The fortune they can deliver is a little heavy on the foreboding, but it could just as easily be ignored, or just done randomly to feel more natural. The Vistani camp has their wagon on a small island in the swamp, with no real explanation as to how it got there. In the morning, if the PCs choose to camp with them, through heavy-handed means, it magically disappears without a trace. Yea, ok.
Finally, the PCs find Luc in a shack in the swamp. He’s catatonic from recent events (one of his brothers died). A playthrough I read of this online had Luc playing the banjo, and honestly, that’s just brilliant. Despite not being able to communicate well, he follows the PCs back to town of Marais d’Tarascon. There’s a decent description for all the major buildings in town. After a few days, the PCs watch a strange funeral with a zombie in a coffin – banging on the coffin from the inside.
What follows from here is a little a confusing. There’s an attempted murder by one of the main villains (or, at least, the brother of the main villain), and there are zombies, and eventually the PCs end up at the brother’s house, where they find a bunch of ghouls, and they kill the brother, and then all is right with the world, except no, it’s not. Then finally, a literal army of zombies descend upon the town. The PCs are supposed to then find the dead brother, who’s now a zombie lord, and defeat him. Once that happens, the zombies wander off.
Ok, there’s a lot going on in this module, and a fair amount of it is a little convoluted, and maybe a bit messy. But all of it is quite salvageable, depending on how you want it to play out. A lot of this feels like it’s wrapped around the plot device of the Hyskosa scroll. If you don’t care about that scroll, you could easily substitute it for something else, and suddenly this thing might start to make a little more sense, ironically. It’s not entirely clear to me why Jean (the alive brother) tries to murder people. He’s insane, I guess? When the zombie lord is killed, all the zombies just wander off? You don’t even have to use a zombie lord for his. Marcel could be a wight, too. Those can create zombies as well. And 4 ghouls in the Tarascon estate is probably a TPK for a 1st level party, so you’re going to have to adjust this. At any rate, like every Ravenloft module, this one requires some cleaning up, but all in all, it’s solid, especially for the set dressing, the NPCs, the detail of the town, and the (mostly) believability of the plot.
Death House (from Curse of Strahd)
Death House is a module in Appendix B in the Curse of Strahd campaign setting. As it is 5th edition, I would like to think the writers would have moved beyond pale imitations for plot hooks and railroading, but alas, the very introduction features two ghost children (nothing creepy about that, right!) in the street, asking the PCs to take care of some monsters in their house. Any interactions with the children reveal them to be illusions. At this point, most rational people would leave, but no – the mists force them into the house. Lame. A more interesting hook would be just giving your PCs a key to the place, randomly. Maybe it is delivered by a courier, or just shows up outside their room at an inn. That’s already more interesting, and less heavy-handed than what’s going on here. The module is only 10 pages long, plays out more or less like a dungeon-crawl, and is designed as an intro adventure to CoS, and is for 1st-3rd level PCs.
This is a tough, tough module for a party of 1st level characters. Like, several TPKs worth, honestly. It could probably be scaled down a bit (it doesn’t need to be 4 ghouls, it could be 3, or even 2). 5 shadows is also nightmare-inducing. The crux of the adventure involves exploring the house, meeting the children – ultimately putting them to rest, and placating the spirits of the cultists who lived here. The house is inextricably tied to Barovia, but with a few changes, it doesn’t have to be. All in all, it’s a pretty solid adventure (with a few tweaks), though if you do plan on running this for 1st level characters, to be very careful.
House of Lament (Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft)
This module originally appeared in the 2e Darklords supplement. There, it was presented solely as a combination of a location mixed with some story and maybe some stat blocks, along with several other darklords.
There are quite a number of haunted house type adventures in the pantheon of Ravenloft modules. This is another one, though it’s execution is quite a bit different than the rest. The module gives you a fairly complex backstory involving the house and its spirit inhabitants, but instead of a dungeon crawl (there is some of that), it’s much more engaging and interesting. The module has you performing a séance in order to glean information about the house which is, frankly, a
chef’s kiss approach to this module, and so on-brand for the setting.
There are a variety of endings to this – some far better than others, and will likely create a bit of discussion from the player’s to try and reason out which approach makes the most sense. But the variety of NPCs here, the spirits at play, and the variety of this quest are all top-notch. My only real beef here is that this module is probably a TPK waiting to happen for a party of 1st level characters, as the module suggests. In order to be survivable, you’d have to really pull back on the combat here. It would be far easier to scale this up, and then make the creatures more terrifying, which would only add to the module. I would recommend a party of 3-5 in all actuality. Out of the book, it might be easy, but very easy to scale up.
The Evil Eye
The Evil Eye is designed for a party of 4-6th level characters. The introduction is straightforward – get the PCs interested in a strange Vistani blacksmith outside of town. That shouldn’t be too hard – just make the town’s blacksmith incompetent, and have people talk about the “better” one just out of town. There are numerous other hooks for this, but most just seem overly complicated. Once they find the smith, the PCs see he has a sickly infant with him. A decent amount of text is devoted to what happens if the party kills the guy, which is kind of nuts, in my opinion. I’d curse my entire party if they did that and make them all reroll characters. Of course, they can choose to help him, and they learn that his dead wife visits the child at night to nurse the baby. Creepy, but ok.
There are a couple of things here that probably should be mentioned that could be triggering for some people. A ghost nursing a baby? Yea, that could be problematic. But even more so, is that if the PCs mess up somehow, the baby could die. Now you’ve given all your PCs the “baby-killer” achievement, which could also be super triggering for some people. This also goes directly against my own redline which is “no violence against children”. So, this module walks a very thin line here. Of course, as GM, you have final say over whether the child dies or not, and if you let it die, you’re more a monster than anything in any monster manual.
The mists surround the party at the conclusion of, well – we’ll call it “ACT I”. Here, they find themselves on an island in a river. Here they meet a bully of a man and his hunting retinue after briefly coming to terms with their surroundings. The encounter seems largely unnecessary, because shortly after that, the party meets a river boat captain (did I mention both the captain and the hunter are werewolves?). In an excessive amount of text, the captain explains he won’t let the Vistani on his boat but agrees to the take the rest to town. It’s mostly here so the captain can describe his prejudice against Vistani and seems to serve as a bit of foreshadowing.
At night, the boat captain attacks the party (of course), and flees if the fight doesn’t go his way. This fight could go in one of three ways as I see it – the party all dies, the party kills the captain, or the captain gets away, and then groggily pretends that he was asleep the entire time when he rejoins them. Only stupid players would be fooled by that ruse. Also, it’s possible that one or more PCs could be inflicted with lycanthropy at this point.
Assuming nothing has gone sideways by this point, the PCs arrive in Karina, in the domain of Invidia. At the port (assuming they arrive by boat), they encounter Malocchio, a creepy 10-year old boy, who tries to kill some other children by unleashing large casks of wine onto them. The author of this module really hates babies and children, it seems.
The party once again meets the hunter they briefly encounter in Act II, though again it is only meant to be a brief interlude. And he even offers to pay them 5 gp per day to locate his love, Gabrielle. He has horrible taste in women, it seems. There’s a LOT that happens in Karina, and a lot of it would be cool and great fodder for some excellent role-playing but might take a very seasoned GM to pull off effectively.
Next, the party encounters the Zarovan Vistani camp. The Vistani tell the PCs they are here to find Malocchio, the young demon boy. The last part of this adventure sees the closure of many different storylines, and has several possible outcomes. In the end, the PCs can possibly earn the trust and even favors from a powerful Vistani tribe, which the GM could easily use to propel further adventure from. Suffice it to say, there’s a LOT going on in this adventure, and as this review is already long enough, allow me to summarize at this point.
This adventure is excellent! But there’s SO much going on, it isn’t a module for inexperienced GMs. You could, in theory, drop the entire first part, and just start the module with the Vistani tribe asking for help hunting down Malocchio. But I think that would be a mistake, as it introduces such an interesting assortment of characters, and can be a good vehicle for transporting your characters to where you need them to be. You could also largely ignore the werewolf captain, or at least downplay him, as he seems kind of unnecessary to me. The “werewolf” bar in the city is completely over the top, and also kind of gratuitous. Nothing more is mentioned about the baby, but presumably he is cured when the curse is broken by the Vistani tribe. I don’t think this module is perfect, really, but there’s so much that’s good here, it’s hard not to give it 5 stars.
