TSR had developed a new style of play, one which added more story elements to our games, which is healthy to long term play. Today you have many people rebelling against the concept, as it does take some skill to pull off properly: what it does is that it gives the DM more of a presence in their games. The Dungeon Master isn’t simply refereeing the game, and judging, s/he is an active participant, inventing a series of events that are not random, but serve to draw in the players; providing direction and intrigue. Deep to the core, it allows the DM to figure out what is going on around the PCs very quickly. A well written scenario doesn’t feel like it is written at all, it still captures all of the magic of random play as the players aren’t confined to story elements; instead they must try to find story elements. They aren’t restricted the story if they don’t want to be, but the story is still playing itself out around them.

The end product shouldn’t be a module at all. This story shouldn’t be scripted, if we do that then we eliminate the player, which serves no point. TSR’s meta-gaming philosophy was dual-sided, on the one hand, the modules introduced a more interactive and rewarding concept, but on the other, they hijacked our tables. From a marketing standpoint, this was how TSR was able to finally make the company profitable again; where the Gygax team gave you the methods to enrich your playing experience, giving clear and concise examples of exactly what you should do from now on, the module itself being more of an example of the principles in action. In 2e these lessons could only be gleamed by critical thinking. They were still there, but they weren’t obvious. The DM had to have some background in fiction writing and find the concepts themselves, they weren’t pointed out to you, they weren’t explained, they were there but they were hidden. They didn’t encourage you to take the principles presented and use them yourselves; they wanted you to buy the next module.

TSR developed a subversive marketing plan that is still used to this day within the industry, and that is to target almost all of your products at new players. The longer you can keep the users from actually figuring out how the game works, the more products you can sell them! This marketing plan began as soon as Gygax was sacked, but it really took root in 1991.

Within the industry, the Forgotten Realms franchise was selling very well, that is because the company itself was fleshing out the world, and many users who were new to the hobby, as well as experienced players who didn’t want to do it, purchased into it. The advanced users were either ignoring most of the Forgotten Realms products, or sticking to Greyhawk; this made the Greyhawk Adventures setting appear to be stagnate. How do we get money from advanced users cheaply? The answer is gimmicks!

The Greyhawk Adventures module line was still kind of successful. TSR had used it to keep money flowing in while they established Forgotten Realms, but by 1991 the Realms was open for business. They now wanted to focus their attention on 'fixing' Greyhawk Adventures. All they needed was an epic story that would get even the advanced users excited. This story was Greyhawk Wars.

It started with Carl Sargent, a prolific writer from TSR UK; he understood the meta-game concept and was an excellent writer of it! He was assigned to “revitalize” Greyhawk Adventures, and he did, with modules WGS1 Five Shall Be One, and WGS2 Howl from the North. The series was supposed to conclude with a third module in the series, however, even though the WGS line was selling, TSR figured that they could add a gimmick to really boost sales. WGS3 was scrapped and reworked into a board game.

This is exciting! Wargaming is a neglected part of the hobby, it is expensive and completely different from D&D. Even with TSR’s BATTLESYSTEM rules, the size and scope of the battles that we can simulate is still limited. If we want to have all out war, we’ve got a problem. This has always had to be home-brewed, though most of us DMs write around it out of necessity, but what if there was a product that allowed us to simulate a huge war? This is a very sound concept and one that would appeal to even advanced users of the game. They even put their best man on the project, Dave Cook. If anybody could figure out how to get this done, and in a way to not be sued from other companies (namely the manufacturers of RISK and Axis & Allies) it would be Dave Cook. Whether he actually got that done, we’ll never know, because typical of TSR suits, the concept was ruined by interference from the very beginning.

As far as I am concerned, and do take my opinion in regards to this product with a grain of salt because I’ve never actually played the thing, all of my knowledge in regards to it is through research, and looking at it through the eyes of the few people who have and were willing to talk about it, but like I said, as far as I am concerned this thing is not just a failure, but an outright lie.

One would assume that if they bought this box, then they could play a game which would revitalize the World of Greyhawk as a whole, and make the events which take place core to their table. Boarders would change, nations would die, power would be redistributed, and it will be fantastic! And I think that this game can do that, but not on its own. As written, this entire game is pointless. The events which you are allowed to simulate have already been predetermined by TSR. Even if you get different results from the game, you’re told to ignore them.  This isn’t the only problem with it either. Not only did Cook have to design a game which was rigged, but he had to tap into two different markets, fans of Table-Top Role-Playing, as well as fans of Board Games. The rules had to be simple, and easy to master. The final results were unsatisfying to say the least.

The World of Greyhawk, which is a complex place, was dumbed down and over simplified to the point where it was unable to properly simulate the actual war, and users at the time who were extremely excited to get this thing had no idea until they took it home and tried to play it. No matter how you look at it, no matter how you spin it, or what happened afterwards, this product was a bold-faced lie. It did not keep any of its promises. This wasn’t due to David Cook, nor Carl Sargent, but to TSR marketing who misrepresented the product and what it could and couldn’t do.

Now, Greyhawk Wars wasn’t a total loss. The users of Greyhawk were angry, but they were still precocious, and typical of the grit and attitude of advanced users, they weren’t afraid of putting forth effort to rework the thing so that it can function. It was a sound concept, and it was a step in the right direction. Simulating an epic war is kind of the holy grail of table top RPGing. At least this product gave us some of the tools that we needed to get the work done. I guess, in a way, this is the product that progressive users like. We enjoy taking concepts and ripping them apart, stripping them down and rebuilding them the way that WE want them to be, so in effect, the people that were most injured from buying this game were the new users, which is a change of pace.

I am not going to insult your intelligence by rating this game, as I  haven’t played it. It sounds like a fun concept, and since I myself am also working on methods to simulate huge wars, researching it has been incredibly helpful in pointing out pitfalls that I hadn’t anticipated myself. Greyhawk Wars spawned its own sub-genre as people still network to make the game functional, and many tables were able to succeed! With a bit of research one can find completed alternative rules of play, or join the networks and further develop it, which is attractive!

At one point, the cost of it was stupid high. At the end of the day, this is a paper product and not worth the $100+ resellers were trying to milk out of it, especially considering that the game isn’t functional for what most of us want it to do. Our friends at DriveThru RPG, I feel, had fixed this issue by selling the PDF for $5. This allows the user to just print and assemble the game themselves. Now you can find the game selling for around $35, which is a lot closer to what it is really worth.

Do I recommend this game? No. I think that more can be learned by reading about Greyhawk Wars than actually trying to play it. If you are like me, and would rather spend your time actually gaming than developing a new system, you’d be best served by avoiding it. If the game was functional out of the box, that would be a different thing, but it isn’t.

If you have played this game, I ask you to please speak up and give your impressions of it, there really isn’t much out on the web when it comes to the product, and any contribution that you may have is highly valuable. Much of what I have written is based upon the observations of the handful of people who had experienced it and wrote about it, reading between the lines,  and reaching my own speculative conclusions.

Regardless of if you have played the game or not, TSR attempted to hijack Greyhawk Adventures with “From the Ashes” a box set released in 1992 that fleshed out the setting, divorcing it from its original concept of a user generated milieu, and inserting their meta-gaming concepts which boosted sales, and pleased new users, but alienated and ultimately led to the abandonment of TSR's involvement with the Greyhawk Campaign Setting.

While the WGS series was successful and is mostly well-remembered today, the implications of TSR’s meta-gaming (verses user created storylines) was catastrophic. It should have served as a lesson to the company, as well as other game publishers, but it didn’t. They wanted to provide games with rich and deep storytelling elements, but they did so at the expense of their advanced users. It is one thing to publish a module and flesh out a small part of the world map, and provide a few simple scenarios which can be shared between all users, but it is another to modify an entire setting just to make money.

I don’t think that TSR ever figured out what advanced users really wanted from Greyhawk. All we wanted was a muse. We wanted design concepts fleshed out, not completed. We wanted to learn new styles of play, not have things dictated to us under the guise that it is now a Living Greyhawk. We wanted difficult and boring things to be done for us, so that we could focus on having fun. We enjoyed the story and fictional theories presented, but we resented that TSR began directing traffic, implying that events in the modules were core and your games are garbage. Greyhawk was supposed to be a different experience depending one who was DMing; that has always been its charm. Experts like Joseph Bloch have found things in the setting that I had never notice before because they took their time really learning and enjoying the setting. They were allowed to interpret the same source material as the rest of us had, but spin it in unique ways. This can still be done, but not until you acknowledge when gaming companies are micromanaging the users, and take the proper steps to take your creative control back.

Are advanced users still in the market for new products? I think that we are, but those products are a lot different from the ones that are typically being published. As far as our delving into 2e, friends, our journey is about to get darker.

Published in August of 1990, 2108 Legends & Lore is a very noteworthy title, seeing that it had been updated three times by one of the books original writers, James M. Ward, who together with Rob Kuntz wrote the original Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-gods & Heroes in 1976; the two would be assigned to update this to Deities & Demigods in 1980, a book steeped with controversy so fierce that the title was changed to 2013: Legends & Lore in ’85, but besides losing some content, the text itself had gone relatively unchanged for 10 years.

If you ask around the web, which Legends & Lore book is the best, you will usually be told 1^st Edition. I myself had suggested 1^st Edition, but until writing this, and directly comparing the two, I have come to a very surprising conclusion. You can’t talk about one and not talk about the other. There is a glaring problem with the 1^st Edition book: Forgiving the absurdity of a Monster Manual filled with gods, the title did not support TSR’s existing product lines, nor was it all that useful for world building. This isn’t a new complaint. Visually, the 1e book is superior, the artwork is what people love, they even let it slide that they were marketing nudie pictures to 10-year-olds. While visually appealing, the content itself left something to be desired.

By 1990, Rob Kuntz had left the company with Gary Gygax, so James M. Ward was teamed up with Troy Denning to once again rewrite Legends & Lore in an attempt to make it more functional. The work the two did was impressive, as the content was completely revised. All of the entries were researched again, and a new templet was designed.

There are two sets of index, one in the form of the Table of Contents, in the beginning, and a detailed index in the back, which is nice, but the content itself is what counts, right? Each pantheon is divided into separate chapters, just like the 1^st Edition, but a lot was added. We can learn a lot about a culture by examining the gods that they worshiped, but the 2^nd Edition took this a step further, each chapter starts with a very quick history of the people, not the gods. Granted it isn’t of high quality, this is a gaming book, the idea is to emulate a culture. It edits it down into a formula which is believed to function well for writing pulp fantasy stories set in historic times. It basically gets a DM interested, points him in the right direction and lets him go!  There is some really great stuff in here that serves to add color.

Next it adds a few new spells; spells that are unique to the pantheon and placing examples of unique Magic Items as well, not the things that the gods necessarily use, but things that your players might be gifted or able to find along the way. They also had some maps drafted which allows a DM to get an idea of their temples or what-not.

Finally, we get to the gods themselves, and instead of just being insane monster entries, each god gets at least half a page with a brief description, complete with role-playing notes and specific statistics. The Avatars are described with stats that have been recalculated to make more sense, but the primary focus being the tools the DM can use to bring the NPC to life. Finally you get the Duties of the Priesthood, with special attention given to the RP aspects.

This book isn’t just for DM eyes only, it was also written to aid players.

So, you have a really superior product to its predecessor! Unfortunately, it isn’t all sunshine and roses. With the high level of detail going into the entries themselves, decisions had to be made and material had to be cut. The 2^nd Edition created a fictionalized American Indian culture (which I kind of wished that they hadn’t), the Arthurian, Celtic, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Japanese, and Norse mythology were all maintained, the Central American mythology was rename Aztec, and the Nehwon property which TSR had permission to use from its creator, Fritz Leiber was also included, but much was dropped.

I want to say that most, if not all minor gods have been removed, the oriental monsters found in 1e had been moved to MC6 Monstrous Compendium Appendix, non-human faiths would get their own book as well, but Finnish, Babylonian, and Sumerian mythology were dropped completely, leaving many of us wishing that they had published a second volume.

As a work of reference, this product is superior to its predecessor, so why do people not like it? Is it all the art, or is it the memories that go along with it? There is an illusion going on, the 2e L&L is a longer book, yet it feels like there is more information in the 1e L&L, even though there really isn’t. Everybody has an opinion about this, the missing mythology is definitely a factor, which points a finger at TSR, 2108 is a clear case of appealing to a mass audience, and thus, they alienated everyone who actually would use this book. Setting a game in Roman times is much simpler than researching and designing Finnish or Babylonian cultures, and when it comes to gaming books, we expect to pay for the really difficult work to be done for us, and this really wasn’t the case here.  I think that the problem is, even if TSR were to ask the consumers what they wanted, just as Dave Cook did when writing the Players Handbook, they would had still ended up with the same finished product, as people who had no intentions of buying the book would respond with common answers, and that is exactly what this book is: Common answers.

Now, to really be honest, the cultures detailed in this book are familiar tropes within fantasy fiction; Fantasy authors want them to be different but still identifiable, so they generally tend to stick to them. How different is Finnish Culture from the Norse? It probably isn’t too different at all, though we like the Finnish pantheon because it is distinctive. Then we have Sumerian and Babylonian, these faiths are unique from everything in the book, but are mirrors of each other; just as Roman mythology is common with the Greek. Why wasn’t one of them in the book? I think that TSR made some inappropriate choices.

There is also, and always has been, an element of racism in the system when it comes to black cultures. They are notably avoided, as is the case with this book. Where are the examples of South African faiths? Now, to be honest, we could convert the fictionalized American Indian Mythology as the belief in spirits were common, but then again, Shamanism is very easy to simulate, but that really isn’t the point.

I suppose that it is easy to fault this book for racism, it is an old argument, but placing that aside, TSR has notably always made It difficult to play specific characters out of stereotype, but beyond that I think that we expect to get a fairly broad view of the old world with this title, and it really never did deliver. What we got was a perpetuation of our very Western World view. To make as much money as possible from the product it didn’t really challenge us with the Slavic influence upon Europe, the Oriental Faiths are all bastardized into one undefined time-period which only serves to conform to pop-history, which really is the purpose of the book. Pop-History, written for a Western Audience: This defines all incarnations of Legends & Lore; I just wonder how much of an influence this book actually has upon Fantasy Fiction. If Slavic was ever included, would we see it more often in popular literature?  This is something that I will never really know.

The physical specs of this book are fantastic: it is hard bound and constructed to last with normal use and since this book has haunted our bookshelves, rarely coming out, it has fared very well. It is not a collector’s item; it is worth $7-$20 with a mint book worth no more than $25.

As far as rating the book goes, at the time, I would had given this book a D, preferring the previous editions, but once actually sitting down, comparing them and really looking at the content, I now give this book a B. The information is very good, it can be used to add different cultures to the published settings, but its usefulness is primarily limited to world builders and your more experienced Dungeon Masters. Since it doesn’t cover all of the work done in previous editions, there is still a lot of work left for DMs to supplement themselves, but the fact that it prizes the people over insanely bloated stats which conform to no rules outside of it, is a huge factor to me. Many of those that choose to knock it as inferior probably never actually read the title; I know that that was the case with me.

1990

2105 Monstrous Compendium Vol. 4 (Loose) January

2111 PHBR2 The Complete Thief’s Handbook (soft bound) January

2106 Forgotten Realms Adventures (Hardcover) March

DMGR1 The Campaign Sourcebook & Catacomb Guide (Soft bound) March

DMGR2 The Castle Guide (Soft bound) May

2107 Monstrous Compendium Vol. 5 (loose) May

2113 PHBR3 The Complete Priest’s Handbook (soft bound) June

2115 PHBR4 The Complete Wizard’s Handbook (soft bound) July

1053 Ravenloft Campaign Setting (Boxset) June

2116 Monstrous Compendium Vol. 6 (loose) July

2108 Legends & Lore (Hardbound) August

2109 Monstrous Compendium Vol. 7 (loose) August

This was a fairly successful year for TSR as well as fans of AD&D, they completed the 4 core Complete Class Handbooks, plus advanced users got some of the best world building tools ever produced by the company! 

Things were really starting to look up! Unfortunately the core Complete Class Handbooks, and the best world building tools had been published. Where do we go from here?

Everyone knows that I6 Castle Ravenloft (a very well documented module) inspired a very financially successful line of products that is still being published to this day, be it in a very diluted form compared to what came before it, new players introduced to Strahd von Zarovich in later editions of the game have no idea just how short changed they have been.

Written by Bruce Nesmith and Andria Hayday; 1053 RAVENLOFT: Realm of Terror was first released in June of 1990. It not only expanded the realm of Count Strahd von Zarovich, it created a new style of play and a new way to look at an old product.

A quick search of this blog will reveal that I have done a lot of writing in regards to Ravenloft, most over-critical or grossly inaccurate; I wasn’t always too keen on doing real homework and did a lot of speculations. This blog has been a learning experience and you can see me grow as a DM and as a blogger through the passage of time.

To be clear, I am reviewing what we refer to as “The Black Box”, this is the original 1^st printing that sold out very quickly, it was repackaged, redesigned, and republished as 1108 Ravenloft Campaign Setting, or “The Red Box” in 1994 which updated the timeline (a flaw), and included information from product 1079 Forbidden Lore Boxset supplement that had been released in 1992.

It is also worth saying, right from the start, that the Black Box is beyond rare. I am not even going to bother placing a value upon it, that is a collector’s item and because those that purchased this boxset fell in love with it, I don’t think that it is even possible to find a truly complete set. By 1995 this was already a rare item. It came with lots of stuff that really isn’t necessary to play the game, namely a stack of loose card-stock pages that had color pictures of building, castles, and people on one side and stats on the other, a few of these cards were cheat sheets to the rules system which is a heavily modified version of the 2e ruleset, as well as a fold-out castle. You don’t need any of this stuff to enjoy the product, all you need is the maps, there were four, but you can get away with just having a map of the core, and the 144 page booklet Realm of Terror. You can sometimes find this stuff loose on the web, but in this case, a PDF file is probably preferred to the physical copy as you can just print off what you need from it, and paste together your own maps.(Upon investigating my links, it appears that Drivethru RPG only offers a legal copy of the Red Box, which is a bummer, but serviceable).

What is most important is the book! So, let’s open it up and see what we find.

CHAPTER I: From Gothic Roots

Hands of Orlac (1924

Ravenloft has an identity crisis, the suits in charge of TSR didn’t have much faith in it, and it was too different. They figured that people would pull it out once or twice a year, have a one-shot adventure, and then return back to where they came from. That isn’t what happened, players of AD&D found Ravenloft to be something new and totally different and fresh! Ravenloft was moody, it was dark, and it showed us how to go about making a new system that isn’t just Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk with different names. Instead of playing high fantasy, this was gothic horror, and it was a big departure from what we players of AD&D had been doing up to that point.

This chapter quickly gets down to the business of telling you that this is not Dracula with swords and sandals; the land itself is alive, the npcs require special treatment, the laws of physics and magic don’t  always work here, this is different! It also included something that wasn’t different, but a throwback to 1^st Edition, including a list of books that it suggests that you read to properly understand the mood and setting.

CHAPTER II: The Demiplane of Dread

The land itself is unusual; the entire world is unstable, and bizarre. Here you will find the original Timeline, and a definition as to what exactly is going on in this place. This chapter tells a story, it doesn’t tell you why this is happening, who caused this to happen, it just tells you that it is. At this stage of the game it did not support native PCs, all of the PCs had to begin play in their own worlds and were somehow drawn into the mists. This goes back to the belief that the system couldn’t stand on its own, but, for many of the people who bought it, they would rather do this for a while. It was a true campaign setting that suggested that you don’t have campaigns there; well, we did. Since the rules didn’t support this, much like what took place in the 70’s, where everybody was inventing their own house rules, Ravenloft users got to experience the same sense of fun and exploration as they tweaked things here and there so that they could game here full time. More on this later.

CHAPTER III: The Reshaping of Characters

This was a new concept which works well, by slightly altering how some classes work, and not telling the players about it, allowing them to find out for themselves, it allows the players to feel like they are learning a new game, without having to learn a new game.

This chapter also introduced Powers Checks, if the player violates any of the secret lists of actions, a 1d100 is rolled to see if the dark forces notice or not; it is a fun mechanic, but I think that 1d100 is a bit too small of a window, bad things happen when a player fails a powers check! And while it is fun for a one-shot campaign, for full-time enjoyment this needs to be altered. You want it in play, just not at the frequency suggested in this book. At least that has been my experience; the Powers Check is definitely wonky.

CHAPTER IV: Fear and Horror Checks

Another wonky mechanic that requires tinkering, but it is effective. If the player role-plays fear, or horror, this can usually be bypassed, unless the DM has a reason for using it. This is one of those Ravenloft mechanics that actually gives the DM permission to control a PC. It does have its place in the game, but it is a prime example of a rule in the wrong hands.

CHAPTER V: Werebeasts and Vampires

This chapter is one of those that changed how I played the game, though this chapter is dated, as it was written before the Ravenloft monster compendiums were published; the DM had to modify his own monsters to allow them to do what we want them to do. If you look in the MM under mummy, you’ll see Greater Mummy, this is a Ravenloft monster that was altered, it took a common monster and made him very difficult to handle, but it didn’t stop there, we were instructed to write a history for the mummy, a full-fledged back story that provided motivations for what he does. He isn’t a high-fantasy baddy, he should be almost pathetic in some way, he was wronged and if the story was written from his perspective, he’d be the hero . . . except he’s a killer.

It gave attention to lycanthropy and vampires to get us started.

CHAPTER VI: Curses

Attention to detail: that is the lessons of Ravenloft. Avoiding all mention of mechanics and focus on storytelling. Curses are typically what takes a normal mummy found in the MC, and makes it the exceptional mummy found in the MM. It teaches you to fuss over the right details, players probably can’t handle the mummy in the MM, but they might be able to break the curse.  You can tell many different stories using curses, and since you are modifying monsters, this is an easy way to account for it. While in normal AD&D all vampires are the same, in Ravenloft, they are all different and unique because the curses placed upon them are different and unique.

CHAPTER VII: Gypsies

In this book, gypsies are a new race and class, later publications would allow you to play a half-vistani (gypsy), this goes back to the one-shot premise, and gypsies were mysterious and powerful beings that moved our stories along, much like the Dungeon Master character in the 80’s cartoon. They could be evil, or they could be good, or neither. It suggested to use gypsies to talk to your players, as these people knew all of the mysteries of the world, and could be cryptic enough to point the players in a helpful direction (else betray them). We are delving into a world that supports DMPCs, this was a way out of doing that.

CHAPTER VIII: Telling the Future

Because it sounds like it is telling you to railroad the players (cause it is), just like the module that inspired the setting; they thought that this mechanic would help randomize things, or at least give the illusion of it. Telling the Future is hard, especially when a player attempts to do it, you don’t want to give away too much information, but you don’t want to give them nothing either. The Divination spells in the AD&D system are basically more fleshed out here, you don’t want any mechanics showing, and since we were told to use gypsies as story-tellers, this chapter can be helpful for quickly informing the players what their goals are.

Another example of: In the wrong hands. During full-time play, this will quickly turn into a cliché.

CHAPTER IX: Spells in Ravenloft

Many spells, and we are talking about major spells, don’t function as written in the PHB. During one-shot games, this can lead to the players feeling like they are playing a new system without having to learn a new system, but if you are playing full-time here, you are going to have to make some judgement calls. If you play this section to the letter, all the time, it won’t be fun, it will be frustrating.  Just allowing the priest to cast cure light wounds can be an issue, if the party is someplace safe to lick their wounds, I allow it, however if they are in our mummy’s tomb, in the heart of darkness itself, then I’ll stick to the modified version of the spells.

This game can either make or break you as a DM. The potential to really abuse PCs is there, it is in their face, and you want it to be or what’s the point? But you want them to have fun too.

CHAPTER X: Magical Items in Ravenloft

These things must also confirm to the laws of Ravenloft, or at least to the laws of the Darklord. It also has some spooky and fun magical items that are native to this setting. Unlike the other D&D settings, magical items are rare here, just like we pay special attention to crafting our monsters, we must pay even closer attention to crafting magical items. What the players would refer to as their +2 Sword, must have a back story because if the Darklord found out about this thing, he’d destroy it. Somebody had to secret it away, and finding a weapon capable of harming a monster is a big deal. Attention to detail! This can and should apply to all games.

CHAPTER XI: Lands of the Core

This is it. This is the whole reason why you want this specific book. All of the lands of the core are here, in their original form, with all of their mistakes and errors for you to adjust as you see fit. There is political turmoil going on in this version of the setting, and I feel that it is more interesting to see where this goes at your table rather than it being dictated to you from a module or a TSR driven time-line.

Each land is quickly described with broad strokes to maximize its potential role in your game. It has a great templet that you can use to create your own domains, and gives you some guidelines to do just that. Want to try your hand at world building? Well here is the perfect environment to try it out!

CHAPTER XII: Islands of Terror

This is a demiplane, so you have stuff floating around out there, maybe it will connect to the core, and maybe it won’t. These are just smaller versions of Ravenloft that aren’t politically connected to those in the core. How one gets there, who knows? The Dark Lords in these places aren’t as powerful as those found in the core, so your chances of destroying them are much higher if that is what you want to do.

CHAPTER XIII: The Who’s Doomed of Ravenloft

This chapter helps you designed your own Darklords, or modify the existing darklords to fit your campaign, but it more than that as Ravenloft has its heroes as well. Crafting NPCs is a big deal here; every major character requires his own backstory, motivations, and personality to make him a full-fledged character. The character template is very useful here, even when gaming outside of Ravenloft, you can take these lessons to make your game stronger. There are a couple of characters found in this book that never reappear again, which was kind of a shame.

CHAPTER XIV: Bloodlines

How advanced are these NPCs? So advanced that some of them have a family tree in the core rule book! The idea behind Ravenloft is that it is a patchwork of many different worlds, and a few Darklords were so evil that they had doomed their entire bloodline. While they themselves are among the undead, their families live on for generations. Even just creating one of these things can lead to interesting scenarios.

CHAPTER XV: Techniques of Terror

The last chapter is the most inspirational, while some of the ideas are hokey and cheesy, some of them are not. Many of these ideas took the way we game into the direction that it is today. What Greyhawk did for Wilderness Exploration, Ravenloft does for adventure design. It is interesting to be able to really pinpoint something like this. The ideas were there, but ravenloft taught us that our adventures can be more polished, that we can get really creative with DMing and provide actual experiences or a form of art for our players to enjoy. It emphasized the importance of setting and pacing. It isn’t a perfect system, it requires you to filter it, to refine it further and make it playable, which is fun as hell! In some ways, Ravenloft challenged the DM a lot more than it ever challenged the players. If you have a weakness, this system will find it and expose it so you can work on it. It gives you all of the tools necessary for you to hang yourself, friend. It really does, but if you can master it, it makes it all worthwhile.

SUMMERY

No other product that TSR ever produced has been such a huge inspiration for me. I cannot praise it enough! Now I will admit that your players are going to have to put up with you screwing up from time to time, but the investment is worth it. They’ll get a DM who can modify things on the fly, who isn’t afraid to break the rules when they should be broken, and knows when to follow the rules when they should be. While it appears that Ravenloft promotes railroading, it doesn’t. This aspect isn’t necessary, not if all of your ducks are all in a row. It teaches you the art of storytelling, and applying it in a way where the players are drawn in, they don’t HAVE to complete story goals, they are drawn in and they want to see were this goes. They want to understand what is going on. They want to live within a mythology, and that is what this turns into.

This setting is only as strong as the DM wielding it. If you are uncomfortable with adjusting mechanics yourself, or just get overwhelmed with the idea, find a hard-copy of 2174 Domains of Dread, it contains much of the modifications that we applied to the setting over the years, including creating PC’s that are native to the setting, which is a good deal. I’ve been overly critical of the DoD through the years, and it had nothing to do with the mechanics of it, it was the timeline.

Ravenloft: Realm of Terror, as primitive as it is, will always get an A+ out of me. Next time your players say, “Man, it’s trolls again.” Or “Not another Dragon, please!” it is time to download this PDF, gather up the mists, and try something different for a change. Who knows, you might just decide to stay!