This was actually one of the best campaigns that I ever ran... but I ran this module concurrently with the original. Ravenloft II was run as a more modern story while, every time the players slept, we would pick up the original module as an on-going dream sequence which was, in fact, the ancient past. Every player had two different characters, with Ravenloft I giving them hints and background information that directly aided and informed their efforts in Ravenloft II. It took some re-writing, but came out epic.
@@RougeMephilesClone Thanks! I'm actually revisiting Ravenloft again, for the first time in 20 years, as a chapter in my Reign of Winter campaign. VERY different take from the last time.
I like how one of the end game rewards is the deed to the House on Gryphon Hill...which may have been burned to the ground by an angry mob earlier on. After all the railroading and having your accomplishments yanked out from under your feet it's almost a fitting reward: Lord Byron- Oh, brave adventurers! You saved our town...well, maybe not so much SAVED it so much as stood in the vicinity while the problem sorted itself out...slew terrible horrors...which, now that I think about it had the souls of the townsfolk trapped inside so now they're gone for good. Umm...here! Have the deed to your own mansion! Party Leader- But the villagers burned it down. Lord Byron- I know. Now get out of my home and stop eating my food!
Any good DM can adjust the railroading stuff to appeal to his players. (Unless this mod is just broke-dick) Like, I'm so confused by DMs who are always like "goooood gosh my plaaaaaaayers are craaaaaazy." Just make them think that things are their idea. Appeal to whatever they care about. They love that one random NPC for no good reason? Put them in trouble. Greed? Guess where the treasure is. It's not that hard. Just let them be bored when not adventuring and they'll choose the adventure hooks. Rant over -- sorry!
I just wanted to say I appreciate your use of clips and pictures as visual references. They definitely add something to the video, with clever and sometimes humorous subtext. I'm sure a lot of work went into putting that together. I'd say it is effort well spent.
I thought the same. A lot of removing unnecessary elements, trimming the fat if you will. Frankly, I'd have the employer, his family and staff running out his estate because it getting infested with ghosts (sounds like a more plausible response). Maybe do away with the soul switching/body snatching gimmick along with being too complicated to track down distinct personalities of NPCs that little more than window dressing. Really play up the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde aspect with the players hired to investigate strange attacks at night by a menacing figure. Maybe use some of the excess NPCs as witnesses or something for the players to help their investigation. I, personally, would keep the hallucination stuff to a minimum (If I use them at all). Although, if a must, maybe have it come from a hallucinogenic powder or whatever. Perhaps an encounter or two with the mysterious figure where the BBEG uses the powder to distract and incapacitate the PCs as he makes his escape. Another aspect to consider is maybe have the witnesses give wildly different accounts due in part to being drugged by the substance. If young Strahd is kept, maybe have him be known as a renowned alchemist/scientist who helps/"helps" the players with their investigation. As for young Strahd... If kept, I would make him the dark lord's descendant, like say Strahd 4th. Play him up as a rather nice fellow who's familiar with his ancestor being a cainist but not becoming a vampire. Naturally, when the players bring this up it should come as a shock to Strahd just how far his ancestor and namesake fell from grace. Have him both know and fear the darker side of his nature and his quest to rid himself of this evil side. Maybe he suffers from sort of dissociative or split personality disorder, or he's using experimental drugs or whatever that's inducing the change. And lastly have the Climax happen at Gryphon Hill. Maybe Strahd's fiance finds his journal or he morphs into his darker alter ego in front of her or perhaps both. With evidence in hand, the players would want to confront Strahd who was seen fleeing to his estate of Gryphon Hill. Now young Strahd would likely lock himself in his laboratory, forcing the players to find an alternate way inside (maybe a foreshadow if the players visit Strahd at his estate prior to the final Act). I don't think a boss battle would necessary, maybe the players instead find young Strahd in an Apparatus designed to separate the two sides of Strahd (essentially creating two different beings). How it ends is largely up to the player's choice and the DM's discretion. Either good Strahd dies; bad Strahd dies; both die or both live. Maybe Strahd 1st shows up at the last minute, gives a villainous monologue, and takes the Dark Side Strahd with him (yeah, it's a cop out and wouldn't recommend it unless you plan on having Count Strahd as a recurring villain. Although why he'd help his great grandson as up to the DM).
@@chadsmith8966 This is a great suggestion, actually! My thoughts would be that if you have Strahd come in and take the evil half, it would likely depend on what version you're playing - for the possible explanation I came up with, I know the 5e version best so I'll use that: Perhaps strahd sees the creature as a possibly worthy successor to his throne, and by extension, his place in the prison on the demiplane? If he's going to be a recurring villain (or, at least, a villain in the background since he can't exactly leave the demiplane), he either tries to take the creature in as an apprentice - in a way, perhaps, he uses the creature to do his bidding outside the plane? - or, like all the others, he finds him unworthy and kills him (perhaps both, with the party watching as he seems to grow close to his evil grandson and then, one encounter, turns him into a spawn or just outright murders him, depending on how the DM sees it going with the party thwarting his plans possibly multiple times) Depending on how the creature is run, it could make for an interesting dynamic between the two - perhaps the creature is chaotic evil? Did strahd charm the creature for the time it takes to determine if he'd make a good successor? Tbh if I were to have recurring strahd in a campaign, I might actually do this lol
Could use Escher from curse of strahd, instead of strahd for the creature and the alchemist, creature escher could have been found by Strahd and he took the younger vampire under his wing, then if Escher survives CoS the party could play a 5e version of ravenloft 2
I made ghostly wilfred godefroy the villain of my story, he's pretty much obsessed with becoming human again so he builds the apparatus and does experiments to try and do this. I made three new settlements with random tables that makes every playthrough different. He also is obsessed with becoming the lord of all mordent and plots to usurp the title from weathermay after he possesses his body or restores his own. That allows him to switch from his ghostly form to a solid state at will.
I regret donating all my Ravenloft stuff to a library before leaving with the Army. The last thing I heard while walking out the door was the librarian saying “my husband will love this!” I was so ticked.
Honestly you can rename Straud to something else. Rework the plot and take as many artistic liberties as needed to make it work. Premise seems good. I kinda wanna rip it apart and make it my own mystery adventure.
Agreed! I think my main problems with the adventure is that the party is just reactive most of the time and they don't have a choice whether to fuse the alchemist and the creature again, i would also show more of the story happening on the background through subtle hints so the party could piece them out, this could've been a good standalone adventure.
the bit about the creature having a centuries-long backstory while being a relatively recent creation honestly ties in really well with the theme of "false history" explored in 2nd edition ravenloft, where newly created domains of dread have their inhabitants remembering a false, storied past often spanning back centuries
Yeah, never been a fan of such a concept; in a story in which you're supposed to be a significant factor, you should know what's actually happening and what has actually happened. It's a concept I don't mind in a novel, but not something I care for in a story I'm supposed to be a part of. Not saying there's not some room for mystery, but questions should at some point have answers the players can discover. Mystery for the sake of mystery just gets frustrating.
@@troodon1096 I respect your reasons for disliking this trope, but as someone whose two favorite movies are The Matrix and a slightly more obscure movie from the same period with a similar premise and themes, I absolutely can't get enough of this kind of cerebral, uncertain, thought-provoking story. Even if your DM runs the module exactly as written and leaves you outraged, you can't help but end up thinking about how you could have done it better, and that's a sort of quality in and of itself. It's way better than being totally boring, or even "so bad it's good" in a way that suggests only mockery rather than alternative interpretations.
I honestly have a lot of fondness for this oddball module -- with some modifications to make the plot less baffling to players, the randomized townfolk dynamics can add to so many fun scenarios. Like you said in the video, running a custom module that just used the townfolk could be a lot of fun! That ending though...y i k e s
As someone who's run CoS exactly 3 million times I actually think The House on Gryphon Hill has some salvageable parts you can throw into, at least, CoS as the first publishing is a little less open world. Having a pre-written haunted house is nice to plop into this spooky scenario. That and PB Publishings "The Haunt" are fun to put into the scenario as side quests and fun locations to explore. Game On!
I just read this module for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and it's an absolute mess. It commits a couple of cardinal sins that you never, ever want to do in a D&D game (retconning the PC accomplishments and having them just as bystanders watching the climax unfold). The way information is presented to the DM is also confusing as hell, as mechanics and important details will be introduced very early on, then ignored for several sections before being referenced again, forcing you to keep going back and forth between sections just to keep track of what you're expected to do. That's not to say there's not a few nuggets of interesting ideas to use for a D&D adventure, just that they're poorly implemented here, or don't work particularly well as a direct sequel to the original Ravenloft.
It occurred to me listening to this that having the destruction of the Apparatus at the end send out a holy pulse is missing the entire theme of the adventure and the device itself, and that a ritual, battle, or other puzzle/struggle amidst the finale for the PCs to make it, say, a holy bomb instead of a negative energy bomb when it cracked apart might be pretty epic.
Sure it's a mess, but it's a FASCINATING mess. Definitely worth salvaging for ideas. Don't think it's worth running as the modifications you would need to do are so great.
Wonderful walkthrough! I actually bought this module and adopted it (with very heavy alterations) for 5e, as Mordent is one of my favorite Ravenloft domains (the others being Barovia and Lamordia). I ditched Strahd entirely from it, focusing instead on the Alchemist, Lord Godfrey's ghost, and the cult of Osybus (that I homebrewed in). Mordent is a wonderful setting, but the module was marred by the attempts to shoehorn Strahd into it and some bizarre railroading.
hahaha. yeah i loved that dragonlance was written by TWO WOMEN. i thought that was cool as most of dnd stuff didn't have many women involved. i mean i thought that in the EIGHTIES lol. so kind of a letdown for me, i thought tracy hickman was this lady who was just kicking ass over there at tsr since the 80s
I literally hated this module. I remember being a player looking forward to it then all it was was ' random stuff happens to you'. For no adequately explained reason. After 2 sessions we abandoned it. No one was really enjoying it. Not players or DM. Shame as the original was great fun.
Wait, I remember this! My DM isn't the best DM in the world, but when he said the previous Ravenloft was all a dream, the 5 of us demanded to see the book to prove it. We were all so angry, and ironically, so was the DM. But he had to play it because he already opened the packaging and the bookstore he went to offered him a 90% refund. We lasted 2 sessions before we went full murderhobo due to frustration. We killed a lot of villagers before all of us declared the first Ravenloft as Canon and agreed never to mention this hateful, poorly written, disgusting module ever again. We backtracked the lore and timeline, and took the first party to a home-leveled 'When a Star Falls' and had a much better time. My advice; don't buy or play Ravenloft 2.
My read on your anecdote is that your GM got his money's worth (especially if it was only 10% of the original cost) by giving you this memorable an experience, even if it was a bad one. Sure, the module is bad if taken literally, which might have been the common attidue back then, but there's SO much you can do with it, from a modern perspective; just leave out the crappier tropes and build it out with a bit of creativity.
@@EnvisionerWill Damn, I typed too fast and moved on too quickly. I meant to say he got a refund with a charge of 90% of the original price, or a refund of 10%. My wires must have been crossed when I was on the metro. But in any case, we were young. It's easy for me to judge him with hindsight, but we were all fallible when we were young.
Wizards, at one point, gave away Ravenloft II, Dungeonland, and Land Beyond the Magic Mirror for free as part of a series on the education of D&D on their website. That is how I obtained Ravenloft II, and I still think I want my money back. Everything mentioned in the website was touched on here in more detail and I finally understand why the module was such a failure.
@@RPGmodsFan Just remember. Despite being absolute killer GM territory, with the exception of caterpiller, cheshire cat and the end-game, none of the NPCs initiate combat. The players are always the cause of the combat starting.
I came to Ravenloft maybe in 1993. I was only vaguely aware of the two modules dating back to the mid-80s. I started really getting into it over the next few years, never knowing till now that these major characters had such a humble start.
I think that maybe secretly throwing most of this in after a party continues post strahd could be really interesting. Rig the possessions, and BOOM, you have a solid mystery.
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Please also review the boxed set!!! I owned that and still ike the material a lot... I kind of adapted that for my Eberron Campaing, as my Eberron is very Steam/Arcana -Punky... They match a lot. plus Eberron allready uses a lot of *Noir* inspiration that lines up excelent with Gothic Horror...
The reference to kingdom hearts in the video seems on point; the way the apparatus works splitting into different forms reminds me of the Heartless/Nobody system present there. Overall this module feels like like a bit more polish it could be really good as a way to make a sequel without just raising power levels.
Thanks for this. I like how it sounds. I read how some are frustrated with how it contradicts Ravenloft 1 and how it was internally disjointed. I think that's great for the premise of Ravenloft being a waking nightmare
Great video and Review of the adventure! I have a youtube channel to talk about Ravenloft Lore, and the events of this adventure are vague and mysterious even in canon sources of the campaign setting history. Although I have to agree that the adventure as written is a mess, it has a lot of good material and inspiration and can be quite fun with some adjustments. If you can work out a more simple and cohesive plot, and take out the goofiness and railroading of the players, you got an adventure with a good mystery, a gothic mood, and three Darklords (Strahd, Azalin and Godfrey). I have inserted the original Ravenloft I6 and this adventure as extended time travels of the From the Shadows module, where the players are subjected to a time travel machine by Azalin, in the Grand Conjunction series.
I've played through this module. We spent years being swallowed by the mists attempting to leave and wandered through many dark and deadly places. If run right its a good module. Unfortunately it also ends up playing exactly as Fear the Boot (the best podcast if they're still going)describes playing in Ravenloft. Have you ever seen Richard Pryor in Running Scared? Its basically that. Only we didn't realize it at the time. Thank the morning lord we had 2 clerics, 2 wizards and a guy with a flamethrower. Even then we almost got TPKed at least four times. The thing about the setting is you're never exactly sure who you can trust. At least if its done right. Especially if the DM has good hearted NPCs courrupted from the players actions or behind the scenes. This Module taught me to never trust anybody who keeps a giant portrait of themselves anywhere. Also i think we played through a later edition. It seemed more tailored to the setting. Either that or our DM was really good at adapting the story. Edit: hey we went through hour of the knife too. I now also dont trust anybody eating red licorice because of that one. My third also real life phobia is looking up. Everytime i look up a scorpion falls on me. Don't ask. It happened at the table and in my house. I haven't looked up in 15 years.
I actually ran a heavily-modified Pathfinder spin using this as the basis, as a followup for my group that played Expedition to Castle Ravenloft years prior. It took some serious tweaking, but the result seemed a lot more coherent and actually had decent payoff. Azalin played a much bigger role as an antagonist. Essentially, he and Strahd build the Apparatus in Barovia as a means of escaping the demiplane by transferring souls. Strahd uses the device first and escapes to Mordent (then still on its Prime Material plane), where he disguises himself as a human alchemist. He begins rethinking his existence and is drawn to the idea of finally purging himself of his vampire nature, building his own Apparatus but modifying it to remove the curse. It works in splitting him into the Alchemist and Creature, but the Creature is unintentionally banished back to Barovia. While the Alchemist doesn't remember his time as the vampire and thinks he has always existed, the Creature does, robbed of any of his other-half's morality and driven purely by passion. Azalin, who's been waiting to see if the device works (and counting on Strahd's hubris to be the first test subject) sees a safer way to cross and uses the Creature as a "lifeline" between the two planes, his soul still somewhat bound to the Alchemist. The next time the Alchemist uses his Apparatus, it pulls the Creature and Azalin through. The Alchemist is able to last-ditch sabotage the machine before he flees Gryphon Hill, unleashing the ghostly energies he was using to power the Apparatus, but it's not enough to stop the lich. Azalin continues to goad both Strahds while he operates the Apparatus, converting the villagers as a means of perfecting the transfer process before he shifts to a living body (in this case he singled out one of the PCS to be his eventual host) and truly escapes the Dark Powers. The big hook for the PCS is that all have memories from the first Ravenloft adventure, but wake up in the inn as completely different people than they remember being - new names, classes, races, the works. The reveal at the end was that they were the souls of the previous party transferred through the Apparatus into the adventurers Lord Weathermay hired to check on Strahd; the delirium episodes were side-effects of this transfer. Why? Because Creature Strahd remembered his defeat at their hands and wanted a chance at revenge.
I really like how you make this reviews, you give more details than other reviewers, do. I hope you review later B3 "The princess of the Crystal Palace", "Queen of Spiders", and the Vecna Trilogy.
I do think that a Queen of Spiders video is something we might be able to hope for someday. Their third-or-so most recent video (probably after you made this comment) was about the first Vecna adventure; I'm not sure they're ever going to do the sequels, but definitely check that one out if you haven't.
i gotta say i dont no shit really about tt dnd but whoever choose the pics and clips for this semi pp presentation, actually, all of them on this channel, is fucking hilarious. subbed fo sho
Hey guys I would love to see a set of videos on the History of the Classes and how they became apart of DnD. Like the barbarian, Ranger, warlock, and the like.
That would be a great video series, but it's not really the kind of thing this channel does. They produce a very small number of extremely in-depth module walkthroughs and the like; if you're just looking for a deep dive into lore then I'd suggest you explore other, more productive channels where guys that love D&D just *talk* for a while, and hopefully eventually you'll find the information you're hoping for. Of the four or so channels I can think of off the top of my head, I would most recommend AJ Pickett, then Taking 20, and would not recommend Web DM very highly, or Nerdarchy basically at all (maybe they have good stuff, but I haven't seen it, and wasted a fair amount of time looking). Every other D&D channel I can think of offhand would fall in between those two pairs, with this one being the best one, but VERY specific in what they do and how well they do it.
You mean how they did ones on how the Rogue and Monk changed and evolved? And I mean exactly the same sort of thing going from edition to edition seeing what changed and what stayed the same
@@crazyscotsman9327 Ah yes, they did do those two, so I stand corrected; I suppose it's conceivable they might do other classes the same way. Although "the worst" has a certain cachet that "the second or third worst" generally does not, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
I remember running the original. It was that campaign the DM decided to off all the characters in his own campaign (which he did). We didn't really struggle; he can really thank himself, early on we ended up w/some really top end gear that made it Ravenloft just another adventure.
I liked the AD&D2E Ravenloft setting, but honestly it felt more entertaining to just read the lore of the setting rather than actually play it. I still like a few of the TSR Ravenloft novels after 25+ years. I reread some of them not long ago, and that's more than I can say for the more popular Forgotten Realms novels. I haven't played this particular module, but I wouldn't have been very happy with the DM telling me that the entire last adventure had been "just a dream". I can handle part of an adventure being a dream sequence, but to retcon out an entire adventure is bullshit.
I hope an episode on oddball rules shows up. Like automatically getting a fully stocked keep as a level 9 Fighter or the fact that 2 AD&D 1e Rangers were not aloud to work together permanently.
@@Ando2k10 2nd edition was full of odd rules because of Lorraine Williams. When she gained control of the company, one of her first acts was to declare no playtesting of any rules because you weren't "supposed to be playing on company time." As a result, nothing made any real sense in 2nd edition.
Great video! I've never heard of this module before, and here I thought I knew Ravenloft. Thank you for filling in the gaps of my knowledge, I'm looking forward to the next one. :D
I really enjoyed this adventure. We made some modifications. But very minor. We assumed that the first ravenloft did happen. But it was fun making the players think that they just might be mad. I found it quite fun.
Oh. An adventure module. I assumed it was gonna be about the half-assed 3rd Ed and beyond Ravenloft publications where they skimped on info to save space, and, like the Monster Manuals, crammed 3-4 Darklords per page, sacrificing the depth of information the setting kind of needs.
Another excellent review. I think that Ravenloft 2 seems like TSR was trying to leverage some of the Call of Cthulhu magic. I assume that they eventually figured out that D&D and CoC are not interchangeable. Each game does its own thing best. There does seem to be a dungeon crawl here and the setting material seems the real problem. Well, that and game balance, believability and a weird convoluted story.
And eventually learning that few players enjoy basically being forced to sit in a corner while the story happens without their input. It's a game, not a novel.
I never had the chance to run this module, and frankly it looks a bit of a nightmare to do so. But I've read through it a couple of times at least, and the writing and the atmosphere it generates is incredible! Indeed Jekyll and Hyde is the inspiration. The switching of souls, the crazy mystic/scientific apparatus, the dwelling of the creature in the body of another, the mesmeric (literally!) means of selecting the parameters of the adventure, the story telling and descriptions of the region are the very essence of the gothic. I love this about it, and its probably at least partly inspired my own fan fiction. I can see many of the scenes still in my mind, almost as if I'd lived them! So for me, well worth my time and money, even if I never used the campaign.
I would never play the module but in any campaign I would run in the ravenloft setting would mention it and utilize some of the mechanics like if you go to castle ravenloft to deal with strahd you will find the apparatus and I would randomize whether or not strahd is using it or left it alone for centuries
There are a lot of fun ideas here, but it's very clear that the writers wanted to make more of a movie about their awesome Strahd character than a module towards the end. It definitely feels STRONGLY like the ending to a classic Universal era monster film. It needs a lot of work but there really are some great moments and ideas here
Man just from what I learned from this video, if you put it in a more horror/mystery accommodating engine, tighten up the plot and let the players actually affect the ending/know what's going on before the ending, I think this module could shine.
I have a feeling you could make a really good three-part adventure if you added this, as well as that one module based around a 'Freakshow'. Maybe streamline the randomized nature, remove some of the more obtuse enemies and wrap it up with a few hints to other realms that Azalin and Strahd may have visited as part of their respective research and you could make a really interesting adventure out of it.
Still have copies of both modules from AD&D. My Ravenloft is worn, stained and wrinkled. Ravenloft II still in pristine condition. Even the cards haven’t been separated.
I DMed curse of strahd to completion with my players and hoped to one day return to strahd. All though the sequel is a mess, I can definitely fix up the story a bit to get it to be consistent with how it ended with my players and have a cool part two. Thanks for the great video on the module, it’s been a great help to me.
RPGmodsFan I’ll definitely check that out, I’ve binge watched enough hammer and universal movies recently that I already have a few good ways to fix things up. It would be interesting to see how the release date matches up with when the hammer film of Frankenstein with the soul transferring machine. 🤔
RPGmodsFan now that you mentioned it they definitely were since they were late 50’s to the mid 70’s, for Dracula and Frankenstein at least. Definitely worth watching for gothic and horror inspiration.
I think that 5e is a horrible fit for Ravenloft. As a setting, much like Dark Sun, it took the inherent deadliness of AD&D and ramped it up to the maximum. 5e as a rule set is just too player-biased and removes all the teeth from the game and by extension the setting.
20:30 I suppose one could assume that the undead invasion is actually a recent occurrence, even only having happened within the last few hours. Does anything actually suggest they've just always been there milling around?
there are some fun game ideas here! I think I would run it with the party being called to a (medieval) village in their world. The village can have whatever weird/haunted problems as long as it does not overtake the plot. The first time the players rest they wake up in a Victorian mansion. The Victorian mansion is in a Victorian world but the mansion gets periodically sucked into a pocket-dimension or demi-plane. This pocket-dimension also becomes accessible from multiple other dimensions, thus the monsters and the haunting that the old house is infamous for. Items, weapons, and clothes 'travel' from the Victorian mansion back to the possessed village very successfully but generally NOT the other way around so items can become unavailable in the mansion but hoarded in the characters room in the village. Injuries heal and rest occurs if the characters fall asleep in the village but generally NOT in the mansion. There is no sleep, healing or rest to be found in the mansion while it is trapped in the pocket dimension. There is no way that this new vampire/entity should be considered Straad. It should be a completely new case. It's an interesting concept to start out with a DnD party who slowly become Lovecraftian/Dirk Gently detectives. This is an interesting second case for the characters to take on as long as it's not Straad. For the finale, either the creature or the alchemists or the characters attempt to use the apparatus but accidentally switch the souls of the monsters in the mansion with the villagers in the village. This has interesting implications for the haunt-girl and others. Please add-on any thoughts of your own.
That was lengthy, but definitly good ideas. I am tempted to use it in a YT Video. :-P Anyway, I think the Mod can be improved by breaking all links with the I6 Ravenloft Mod.
Any adventure where the path forward is unknown or explains little is bad. Any adventure where the players do not factor into the end is bad Any adventure where the DM has to research HOW this is supposed to work is awful. What a mess.
Depends. Intrigue, mystery, self imposed objectives are factors. You can be presented with a confined space where activity is taking place, and it up to the players to discover them through exploration. There are various situations players can be thrown into the unknown because they aren't generic hero/villain troupes where everything, including their options, gets thrown into their lap. Not all adventures focus on the players. Largely dependent on the type of rpg and story that is being engaged with. Structured/rail roady play, especially following alongside existing/established moments, can have a specific set of events that happen which cannot be intervened with. Again, there is room for structured/rail roady play. Some DMs are good at making players think they were the ones making choices. Some ideas are just very well thought out not to be used. I've just refuted all of your broad stroke opinions with exceptions. You are still free to be closed minded.
@@Kindlesmith70 There's a difference between being open-minded and having a hole in the head. It's OK to have some elements that are beyond the players' control, but the majority of the story should be about the players; that's what makes it a game instead of a novel. Player agency is key, otherwise they may as well just read a book. The primary focus of any given adventure should be how the players take an active role in the adventure. If they're not the focus, what's the point? Why do they even need to be there? Simple litmus test: if the story is not affected by what the players do, that's when it's TOO much of a railroad. The whole point of this (and any other) role-playing game is that the players are supposed to be creating a story, not just having one read to them.
@@troodon1096 hehehe. Love it! That first sentence. :D Depends on the rpg and story told. Let's be clear first the difference between players and characters they play. I took your initial comment as characters should factor into the end. My mistake if that assumption was wrong. A character is just one piece in the overall game but doesn't mean it must be the central focus. I do agree players should be participating in the narrative, but the game doesn't have to be about their influence either. Why play a game, read a book or watch a film you've played/read/seen before? Every game played, every book read, every film watched is just a repeat of another. Playing any and all rpgs is just going over the motions that have been done already somewhere else, either within rpgs or another form of media. I'll throw in one example. Imagine The Lion King 3 didn't exist, and the group decides to run with the film's idea. The characters are Timone and Pumba pushing the events of the other films into what they are. Effectly the players are restricted heavily in what they are able to do to get the desired results. Some people may like this sort of thing. There's actually a world build rpg where the entire concept is make something then play out the scenarios that make this conclusion happen. I don't remember the name of the rpg tho, I've seen way many. Role-playing games are people getting together to participate in a shared story telling experience. There are absolutely no rules how much freedom a player (who isn't the dm/gm/st/insert other title) should have besides what the group decide upon. There are rpgs based on DM governing everything (final say, etc), and then there are games where everyone is basically a DM. True enough, I prefer games where players have some impact on what is going on, but the game doesn't revolve around their characters. To put it in other terms, it's about what they fail to accomplish or manage to accomplish is more important than their characters living to see the next session. They may have personal goals, but those may never be achieved given how they stumble into the middle of situations or get side tracked by a plot hook I've thrown in.
Mike, As elements for a Novel, it probably would make a good book. As a Module... Well, as you pointed out, a lot of things do not make this a good D&D module.
@@Kindlesmith70 you are just wrong. I dont get why you are even trying to argue or justify D&D not being all about the people playing and the choices they make . Period plane and simple . You must make a extremely terrible and argumentative DM . Would be terrible to be sitting there getting the shit rail roaded by you hour after hour while you lay out your thesis on how entertainment should work talking about the lion king telling all the PC's how there wrong for wanting to be the focus and have agency lol. MY GOD DUDE.
I don't know why, but I like the idea that the whole Mordentshire adventure should be more treated as an adventure/alternate plot road with some tweaking. Such as Strahd using a complex illusion to fool the PCs and make them willingly leave Barovia should they refuse an offer to let them leave alive. Assuming they haven't played the original, or heard of this adventure. The goal would be Strahd attempting to trick the PCs into finishing a machine that might aid him in taking the body of a young Alchemist living on Griffon hill, which is an old lab of strahds. The plot itself involves Strahd faking his death to the PCs in an early encounter (in a long campaign) and then, by clever means, using illusions to "Haunt" the PCs and the alchemist to the point that the Alchemist has gone insane - writing the Alchemist's and Beast Journal. By the end of this plot, if the PC's don't realize what's going on, they end up swapping the Alchemist and Strahd's souls, believing they've severed the good and evil halfs. This will allow Strahd to leave Barovia in the Alchemist's body, free from the curse, while the Alchemist is killed in Strahd's body. Thus setting up an interesting plot when Strahd and the Party escape (or don't) for later fun down the road.
At 22:52, it specifically says that Godefroy is "no longer" a haunt but is instead a ghost; that combined with his personality change seems to make it obvious that he went from CN to CE specifically as a result of how the "canonical" version of his encounter with PCs in this module went down. Perhaps his failure to banish the spirits of his family upon this chance, after 400 years of waiting in his crypt and dreaming of doing nothing else, snapped his mind entirely and destroyed his capacity for remorse. I haven't read the Mordent chapter in Van Richten's guide, so it may contradict this, but my inclination is to rule based on the information in this video alone, that he was a selfish and hot-tempered but still basically redeemable guy originally, and that only after the events of this module did he become truly worthy of Darklord status (after all, it was during the period of time represented by this module that The Creature Strahd came to Mordent/shire; if not wanting to imagine that there were PCs involved, then maybe Strahd's evil presence and/or some aftereffect of the Apparatus was responsible for what ended up happening, perhaps retroactively (Azalin the high-level spellcaster could have done something with time), to turn Godefroy from a not-very-good person into an outright beast of a man.
This adventure feels like the type of thing the more modern versions of Strahd would put the PCs through in a dream just to mess with them. In fact, that gives me an idea... Run a more modern version of the Ravenloft adventure, and any time the PCs sleep, switch to Ravenloft II. When they sleep in Ravenloft II, switch back to the original Ravenloft. Repeat until the players complete one of the adventures, at which point you reveal that the Ravenloft II interludes were all a trick by Strahd to confuse the PCs and leave them exhausted.
As mentioned in conclusion, I've never used a pre written module as written. I will use the maps, some of the NPC's some of the descriptions and so on. But mostly all sessions are quite flexible, as they should be as players tend to do all the unexpected stuff that there's no scripts for. As a DM you also have to be flexible and make stuff up on the hoof and guide the players to where you want them to go without them thinking that's what you've done. They are in control of what they do, go along with it and they will enjoy the adventure more. I probably write 50-60% for what actually happens the rest is made up and seamlessly added into the main arch of the story. As anyone who DM's knows, you have to make stuff up on the spot, especially when you're players decide they ain't going to that place all the people are saying that's where they should go. Fine, just use most of what you've written in the place they eventually get to. Or let them go down blind alleys, let them make up their own reasons as to what's going on, even when it's 100% wrong. It's all fun in the end. Lastly, who replays any module? Why would you want to do that? Do people just play one module and then create new characters for a separate module? I've never done that, always started at level 1 and worked through months of a never ending campaign. AD&D, (Greyhawk) MERP, Earthdawn, and some others, but not for very long periods of time.
This is such a cool premise for an adventure tho, replace Strahd with someone else, and do a bit of rewriting, and it could be a fantastic sandbox adventure.
You said this module was a failure experience, but honest some of the ideias inside it sounds awesome. Gonna steal some of these for another campaign :)
Ok... this module feels really salvageable. For the Vyron house, you only need to tweak it so that the NPCs dwelling there are oblivious to the undead being strange or unusual. Like, it's that kind of dream logic that everything is wrong, but only you can see it. I'm tempted to mod this, and run it after my Strahd campaign.
I am running Curse of Strahd (with homebrew elements) and I think HoGH could be an interesting follow up with some heavy Homebrewing. Kind of using the story as a framework but then actually tweaking it so it is more satisfying and makes a little more sense. I agree with someone down in the comments that if you play it like a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde premise. If you want to link it to OG Ravenloft or Curse of Strahd, you could use 'The Creature' as one of the dark powers that be.
So I ran 5e’s CoS by allowing one of my players to take over Strahd’s “curse” by effectively repeating the betrayal and murder Strahd undertook to become what he is. I sort of left it ambiguous if Strahd may ir may not return, but I personally felt like it would be dumb if he just came back in Barovia. However, learning about this, man I’m getting so many ideas. Obviously still an asspull for Strahd to just return after his death, but the idea of strahd inheriting a new domain that functions as a parallel to barovia is very fun, to me.
I think one way to handle the confusing nature of this module is to lean into it. The adventure makes no sense because it's a dream. Or rather, a nightmare spawned in delirium. The idea is that you run Ravenloft I (or Curse of Strahd) as normal. But if, at any point, the party experiences a TPK - a not unlikely occurrence - they wake up in Ravenloft II with amnesia. After a bit of time, they "remember" the setup of that module, and can proceed with the module. Especially the delirium, which gets more and more vivid as time goes on. At the same time, the strangeness of the Ravenloft II adventure not only becomes more pronounced, but more obviously senseless. If a PC is ever bitten by a vampire (or werewolf, or whatever), they get flashes of being bitten instead by Strahd - the normal Strahd, not the Alchemist - while the PC is strapped to a table, surrounded by the other PCs similarly bound. In truth, the whole of Ravenloft II is a hallucination. After they fall in battle, Strahd stops the party from dying, instead imprisoning them in a chamber and dosing them with drugs. Feeding on them gradually, each in turn, while they remain in a shared nightmare from the drug-induced delirium. Nothing makes sense, because it's a mental trap. Even if the PCs discover this, though, they can't escape until they complete the module. In this scenario, I suggest dispensing with any kind of trans-universal or body-swapping nonsense, and just start throwing stuff at the party. By realizing the fakeness of the world, they cause the reality of the nightmare to break down. They're drawn towards the Apparatus, as every villager (now a monster) tries to stop them. Destroying the machine will cause the party to awaken in Castle Ravenloft, and can pick up with Ravenloft I where they left off. You know, once they figure out how to free their bonds, of course.
Back in the day I ran I6 Ravenloft and killed a party of 8 10-12 level characters. When Ravenloft II came out and I was intrigued to see how this was a sequel. I was turned off by the seemingly psychotic plot that was trying to be a murder mystery, a horror story, and a pulp adventure using rules that didn't support the story or setting. After trying for almost a year to figure out how to run it without it being a disaster I just gave it away. This was probably one of the 1st of the downward spiral of TSR adventures for 1E. Fortunately I had plenty of other games to play in the groups I was involved with in the Army and afterward.
Ravenloft has always been my favorite campaign setting but man I hated when they screwed with the setting to make it more of a Victorian time line, I borrowed aspects of it like the style of clothing/ minor technology/ etc but still kept it as a fantasy setting . I never wanted the use of guns to become normal in my campaign though I did blend some clockwork technology as I felt this could be explained fairly easily. I think the whiplash of conflicting time periods is what killed the setting for many people, I remember in a 3rd Ed splat book it even advised running different domains in different time periods and that's just silly. You can't have one area where your players are wearing full plate welding a bastard sword then when the cross domains it's a country that has never seen an elf and people wear no armor at all because black powder has made it obsolete. I know many DM's just ran campaigns as pure Victorian time but I really think this takes a lot of what makes D&D special away. I am interested in hearing everyone else's experience of this. How did you guys solve this issue in one shots/ campaigns/ or short stays in the demiplane of dread?
I appreciate that in the context of playing the first Ravenloft and looking forward to the sequel, this would be a huge disappointment... But I think I really like it! Every time you gave an example of something bad about it, I would pause the vid and think of a way to get around that problem. By the end, I was totally convinced that I could, with only minimal time dilation and dimension hopping, totally make everything fit. But ignoring trying to make it fit into canon, I still see a lot of fun to be had here as long as you give people opportunities to see more behind the scenes (have townsfolk/pcs wake up from sleepwalking to find that they have written some of the creature Strahd's never-to-be-seen letters, for one example). I dunno, this just seemed like a good time to me, and the issues fully overcomable
I think an interesting way that this module could work is if it has no, or little connection to the original module. Imagine for a moment that the Alchemist is not named Strahd at all, he’s given a completely different name. Maybe his name is Albrecht von Succumvitch or something, and he’s created a machine that is capable of taking parts of unexplored and unknown dimensions, and using them for study. Accidentally, he has allowed some of the Dark Powers that control Barovia into the player’s world, and they begin a massive plot to create a new Barovia, one that encompasses the Prime Material Plane, and all they need do is drive the inventor mad, mad enough to serve as a vessel for Strahd, whom the players have already destroyed. Bound with cosmic energy stolen from other planes, the devil Strahd will now become even more powerful than before.
I feel like this actually could have been great if they had followed through with some of this in one more entry to tie up the trilogy. There's lots here to set up a very interesting possibility of both the worlds in the first and second module being real, but separate planes that allow slipping between each other because of the soul swapping machine. A third one could have revealed the lich to have tampered with the machine in an attempt to get access to the plane from ravenloft 1, and even reintroduced a now rejoined Strahd. If I'd gotten to play this at the time of release, I think I would have thoroughly enjoyed how it played with the first one, if not been pissed that a third never came.
Man, if this module weren't so wonky, it might actually be a lot of fun to play. Having to basically run two games in parallel sounds like an absolute nightmare of a time as a DM. I can barely keep track of one game, which is why my session notes end up being entire essays, cause god forbid I forget some detail to bite me in the butt later. Side Note, that is probably the first time I've seen a clip of /Geist/ in any video ever. I owned that game and my nephew played it religiously. I think we got stuck at some point and then completely forgot about it. And it's not necessarily a game i go look up just to watch.
Ran this exactly once. At the end of the first session, one of the players said, "This really seems pointless. If I wanted to investigate everything, I'd play Call of C'thulhu. Can we just do Keep on the Borderlands instead?" Total play time: 3 hours. Someone else asked in the second session, "What if we just burn down the town? Can we stop playing this boring module?" I was already planning on running something else that day.
In my opinion, there's some salvageable material here, enough to make a pretty decent campaign if... the DM is willing to put in the effort. I understand that's a big IF. Haha!
You know... I think I could do something with this. I may get it for some things to stir into Curse of Strahd. I feel like it was almost good, but they badly screwed up a couple things that, if fixed, could make a fun module
![[FREE] Lil Tony type beat "Honestly"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YcYAKCKVCFA/mqdefault.jpg)
This was actually one of the best campaigns that I ever ran... but I ran this module concurrently with the original. Ravenloft II was run as a more modern story while, every time the players slept, we would pick up the original module as an on-going dream sequence which was, in fact, the ancient past. Every player had two different characters, with Ravenloft I giving them hints and background information that directly aided and informed their efforts in Ravenloft II. It took some re-writing, but came out epic.
I love this idea
Nice!
great idea!!!
That's a baller campaign.
@@RougeMephilesClone Thanks! I'm actually revisiting Ravenloft again, for the first time in 20 years, as a chapter in my Reign of Winter campaign. VERY different take from the last time.
I like how one of the end game rewards is the deed to the House on Gryphon Hill...which may have been burned to the ground by an angry mob earlier on. After all the railroading and having your accomplishments yanked out from under your feet it's almost a fitting reward:
Lord Byron- Oh, brave adventurers! You saved our town...well, maybe not so much SAVED it so much as stood in the vicinity while the problem sorted itself out...slew terrible horrors...which, now that I think about it had the souls of the townsfolk trapped inside so now they're gone for good. Umm...here! Have the deed to your own mansion!
Party Leader- But the villagers burned it down.
Lord Byron- I know. Now get out of my home and stop eating my food!
Any good DM can adjust the railroading stuff to appeal to his players. (Unless this mod is just broke-dick) Like, I'm so confused by DMs who are always like "goooood gosh my plaaaaaaayers are craaaaaazy." Just make them think that things are their idea. Appeal to whatever they care about. They love that one random NPC for no good reason? Put them in trouble. Greed? Guess where the treasure is. It's not that hard. Just let them be bored when not adventuring and they'll choose the adventure hooks. Rant over -- sorry!
You Rock brother ! 😂 love your comment
I just wanted to say I appreciate your use of clips and pictures as visual references. They definitely add something to the video, with clever and sometimes humorous subtext. I'm sure a lot of work went into putting that together. I'd say it is effort well spent.
I feel with few revisions and removing all connection to Ravenloft this could be a good sandbox adventure module.
I think the Mod would have been better as a Novel, instead of a D&D Mod.
I thought the same. A lot of removing unnecessary elements, trimming the fat if you will. Frankly, I'd have the employer, his family and staff running out his estate because it getting infested with ghosts (sounds like a more plausible response). Maybe do away with the soul switching/body snatching gimmick along with being too complicated to track down distinct personalities of NPCs that little more than window dressing.
Really play up the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde aspect with the players hired to investigate strange attacks at night by a menacing figure. Maybe use some of the excess NPCs as witnesses or something for the players to help their investigation.
I, personally, would keep the hallucination stuff to a minimum (If I use them at all). Although, if a must, maybe have it come from a hallucinogenic powder or whatever. Perhaps an encounter or two with the mysterious figure where the BBEG uses the powder to distract and incapacitate the PCs as he makes his escape. Another aspect to consider is maybe have the witnesses give wildly different accounts due in part to being drugged by the substance. If young Strahd is kept, maybe have him be known as a renowned alchemist/scientist who helps/"helps" the players with their investigation.
As for young Strahd... If kept, I would make him the dark lord's descendant, like say Strahd 4th. Play him up as a rather nice fellow who's familiar with his ancestor being a cainist but not becoming a vampire. Naturally, when the players bring this up it should come as a shock to Strahd just how far his ancestor and namesake fell from grace. Have him both know and fear the darker side of his nature and his quest to rid himself of this evil side. Maybe he suffers from sort of dissociative or split personality disorder, or he's using experimental drugs or whatever that's inducing the change.
And lastly have the Climax happen at Gryphon Hill. Maybe Strahd's fiance finds his journal or he morphs into his darker alter ego in front of her or perhaps both. With evidence in hand, the players would want to confront Strahd who was seen fleeing to his estate of Gryphon Hill. Now young Strahd would likely lock himself in his laboratory, forcing the players to find an alternate way inside (maybe a foreshadow if the players visit Strahd at his estate prior to the final Act). I don't think a boss battle would necessary, maybe the players instead find young Strahd in an Apparatus designed to separate the two sides of Strahd (essentially creating two different beings).
How it ends is largely up to the player's choice and the DM's discretion. Either good Strahd dies; bad Strahd dies; both die or both live. Maybe Strahd 1st shows up at the last minute, gives a villainous monologue, and takes the Dark Side Strahd with him (yeah, it's a cop out and wouldn't recommend it unless you plan on having Count Strahd as a recurring villain. Although why he'd help his great grandson as up to the DM).
@@chadsmith8966 This is a great suggestion, actually! My thoughts would be that if you have Strahd come in and take the evil half, it would likely depend on what version you're playing - for the possible explanation I came up with, I know the 5e version best so I'll use that:
Perhaps strahd sees the creature as a possibly worthy successor to his throne, and by extension, his place in the prison on the demiplane? If he's going to be a recurring villain (or, at least, a villain in the background since he can't exactly leave the demiplane), he either tries to take the creature in as an apprentice - in a way, perhaps, he uses the creature to do his bidding outside the plane? - or, like all the others, he finds him unworthy and kills him (perhaps both, with the party watching as he seems to grow close to his evil grandson and then, one encounter, turns him into a spawn or just outright murders him, depending on how the DM sees it going with the party thwarting his plans possibly multiple times)
Depending on how the creature is run, it could make for an interesting dynamic between the two - perhaps the creature is chaotic evil? Did strahd charm the creature for the time it takes to determine if he'd make a good successor?
Tbh if I were to have recurring strahd in a campaign, I might actually do this lol
Could use Escher from curse of strahd, instead of strahd for the creature and the alchemist, creature escher could have been found by Strahd and he took the younger vampire under his wing, then if Escher survives CoS the party could play a 5e version of ravenloft 2
I made ghostly wilfred godefroy the villain of my story, he's pretty much obsessed with becoming human again so he builds the apparatus and does experiments to try and do this. I made three new settlements with random tables that makes every playthrough different. He also is obsessed with becoming the lord of all mordent and plots to usurp the title from weathermay after he possesses his body or restores his own. That allows him to switch from his ghostly form to a solid state at will.
I regret donating all my Ravenloft stuff to a library before leaving with the Army. The last thing I heard while walking out the door was the librarian saying “my husband will love this!” I was so ticked.
Honestly you can rename Straud to something else. Rework the plot and take as many artistic liberties as needed to make it work. Premise seems good. I kinda wanna rip it apart and make it my own mystery adventure.
Agreed! I think my main problems with the adventure is that the party is just reactive most of the time and they don't have a choice whether to fuse the alchemist and the creature again, i would also show more of the story happening on the background through subtle hints so the party could piece them out, this could've been a good standalone adventure.
thats what i was thinking, just renaming the npcs and the 2 different strahds and some edits to the story
the bit about the creature having a centuries-long backstory while being a relatively recent creation honestly ties in really well with the theme of "false history" explored in 2nd edition ravenloft, where newly created domains of dread have their inhabitants remembering a false, storied past often spanning back centuries
Is the Waking World real or is it the Dreaming World that is real?...
Yeah, never been a fan of such a concept; in a story in which you're supposed to be a significant factor, you should know what's actually happening and what has actually happened. It's a concept I don't mind in a novel, but not something I care for in a story I'm supposed to be a part of. Not saying there's not some room for mystery, but questions should at some point have answers the players can discover. Mystery for the sake of mystery just gets frustrating.
@@troodon1096 I respect your reasons for disliking this trope, but as someone whose two favorite movies are The Matrix and a slightly more obscure movie from the same period with a similar premise and themes, I absolutely can't get enough of this kind of cerebral, uncertain, thought-provoking story. Even if your DM runs the module exactly as written and leaves you outraged, you can't help but end up thinking about how you could have done it better, and that's a sort of quality in and of itself. It's way better than being totally boring, or even "so bad it's good" in a way that suggests only mockery rather than alternative interpretations.
@@RPGmodsFan is all that we see or seem, a dream within a dream?
This could be an interesting horror/mystery one-shot with a bit of work and the removal of the name Strahd.
I honestly have a lot of fondness for this oddball module -- with some modifications to make the plot less baffling to players, the randomized townfolk dynamics can add to so many fun scenarios. Like you said in the video, running a custom module that just used the townfolk could be a lot of fun!
That ending though...y i k e s
Yeah, by the time of the ending in this Mod, the PCs become spectators instead of participants.
As someone who's run CoS exactly 3 million times I actually think The House on Gryphon Hill has some salvageable parts you can throw into, at least, CoS as the first publishing is a little less open world. Having a pre-written haunted house is nice to plop into this spooky scenario. That and PB Publishings "The Haunt" are fun to put into the scenario as side quests and fun locations to explore. Game On!
I just read this module for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and it's an absolute mess. It commits a couple of cardinal sins that you never, ever want to do in a D&D game (retconning the PC accomplishments and having them just as bystanders watching the climax unfold). The way information is presented to the DM is also confusing as hell, as mechanics and important details will be introduced very early on, then ignored for several sections before being referenced again, forcing you to keep going back and forth between sections just to keep track of what you're expected to do. That's not to say there's not a few nuggets of interesting ideas to use for a D&D adventure, just that they're poorly implemented here, or don't work particularly well as a direct sequel to the original Ravenloft.
It occurred to me listening to this that having the destruction of the Apparatus at the end send out a holy pulse is missing the entire theme of the adventure and the device itself, and that a ritual, battle, or other puzzle/struggle amidst the finale for the PCs to make it, say, a holy bomb instead of a negative energy bomb when it cracked apart might be pretty epic.
F.B. Totally agree with you. The I10 Mod is a mess.
@@hamsters7760 The Apparatus serves as a MacGuffin.
Sure it's a mess, but it's a FASCINATING mess. Definitely worth salvaging for ideas. Don't think it's worth running as the modifications you would need to do are so great.
Wonderful walkthrough! I actually bought this module and adopted it (with very heavy alterations) for 5e, as Mordent is one of my favorite Ravenloft domains (the others being Barovia and Lamordia). I ditched Strahd entirely from it, focusing instead on the Alchemist, Lord Godfrey's ghost, and the cult of Osybus (that I homebrewed in). Mordent is a wonderful setting, but the module was marred by the attempts to shoehorn Strahd into it and some bizarre railroading.
This explains the apparatus, Lord Byron, & other content in the newer Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft.
Extremely underrated channel
Truth.
Holy hell... Tracy is a GUY LOL You learn something new every day.
hahaha. yeah i loved that dragonlance was written by TWO WOMEN. i thought that was cool as most of dnd stuff didn't have many women involved. i mean i thought that in the EIGHTIES lol. so kind of a letdown for me, i thought tracy hickman was this lady who was just kicking ass over there at tsr since the 80s
I literally hated this module. I remember being a player looking forward to it then all it was was ' random stuff happens to you'. For no adequately explained reason. After 2 sessions we abandoned it. No one was really enjoying it. Not players or DM. Shame as the original was great fun.
I hated it too. Instead of a D&D Module, it should have been a Novel.
Wait, I remember this!
My DM isn't the best DM in the world, but when he said the previous Ravenloft was all a dream, the 5 of us demanded to see the book to prove it. We were all so angry, and ironically, so was the DM. But he had to play it because he already opened the packaging and the bookstore he went to offered him a 90% refund.
We lasted 2 sessions before we went full murderhobo due to frustration. We killed a lot of villagers before all of us declared the first Ravenloft as Canon and agreed never to mention this hateful, poorly written, disgusting module ever again.
We backtracked the lore and timeline, and took the first party to a home-leveled 'When a Star Falls' and had a much better time.
My advice; don't buy or play Ravenloft 2.
My read on your anecdote is that your GM got his money's worth (especially if it was only 10% of the original cost) by giving you this memorable an experience, even if it was a bad one. Sure, the module is bad if taken literally, which might have been the common attidue back then, but there's SO much you can do with it, from a modern perspective; just leave out the crappier tropes and build it out with a bit of creativity.
@@EnvisionerWill Damn, I typed too fast and moved on too quickly. I meant to say he got a refund with a charge of 90% of the original price, or a refund of 10%. My wires must have been crossed when I was on the metro. But in any case, we were young. It's easy for me to judge him with hindsight, but we were all fallible when we were young.
Another fantastic deep delve into D&D history & lore plus a great breakdown of the module. Never ran it but as a collector I intend to get it.
Wizards, at one point, gave away Ravenloft II, Dungeonland, and Land Beyond the Magic Mirror for free as part of a series on the education of D&D on their website. That is how I obtained Ravenloft II, and I still think I want my money back. Everything mentioned in the website was touched on here in more detail and I finally understand why the module was such a failure.
LOL, Ravenloft 2 was free on WOTC website, and you want your money back. I feel the same way!
@@RPGmodsFan Yup. Less so with Dungeonland. Great module, that one.
@@jesternario I need to do a video review of the EX1 & EX2 Mods. Someone else requested a review of those Mods from me. So...
@@RPGmodsFan Just remember. Despite being absolute killer GM territory, with the exception of caterpiller, cheshire cat and the end-game, none of the NPCs initiate combat. The players are always the cause of the combat starting.
@@jesternario Thanks for the info. :-)
Being realistic, I do not think I can top DM It All's review of the EX1 & EX2 mods.
I have only run the 5e Curse of Strahd. It is great to see the background for it.
Please review 2ed ravenloft box & the realm of terror. I missed most early Ad&d and really didn’t get into gaming before 1990.
I came to Ravenloft maybe in 1993. I was only vaguely aware of the two modules dating back to the mid-80s. I started really getting into it over the next few years, never knowing till now that these major characters had such a humble start.
I really enjoy your creative way of using video games to provide visuals
I think that maybe secretly throwing most of this in after a party continues post strahd could be really interesting. Rig the possessions, and BOOM, you have a solid mystery.
Please also review the boxed set!!! I owned that and still ike the material a lot... I kind of adapted that for my Eberron Campaing, as my Eberron is very Steam/Arcana -Punky... They match a lot. plus Eberron allready uses a lot of *Noir* inspiration that lines up excelent with Gothic Horror...
The reference to kingdom hearts in the video seems on point; the way the apparatus works splitting into different forms reminds me of the Heartless/Nobody system present there.
Overall this module feels like like a bit more polish it could be really good as a way to make a sequel without just raising power levels.
Yeah; it definitely seems like it has some cool ideas but suffers from rushed development and could be something neat with polish and refinement.
Thanks for this. I like how it sounds. I read how some are frustrated with how it contradicts Ravenloft 1 and how it was internally disjointed. I think that's great for the premise of Ravenloft being a waking nightmare
ah, the Castlevania 2 of ravenloft.
Hahahahaha true
That's not fair. Castlevania 2 gave us Bloody Tears.
Yep, I am not a fan of either.
@@FuriousGorge While Ravenloft 2 gave us... uhm?... Give me a minute, let me think about this...
@@RPGmodsFan Migraines
YES NEW VIDEO FROM MY FAVORITE CHANNEL
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Great video and Review of the adventure! I have a youtube channel to talk about Ravenloft Lore, and the events of this adventure are vague and mysterious even in canon sources of the campaign setting history.
Although I have to agree that the adventure as written is a mess, it has a lot of good material and inspiration and can be quite fun with some adjustments. If you can work out a more simple and cohesive plot, and take out the goofiness and railroading of the players, you got an adventure with a good mystery, a gothic mood, and three Darklords (Strahd, Azalin and Godfrey).
I have inserted the original Ravenloft I6 and this adventure as extended time travels of the From the Shadows module, where the players are subjected to a time travel machine by Azalin, in the Grand Conjunction series.
I've played through this module. We spent years being swallowed by the mists attempting to leave and wandered through many dark and deadly places. If run right its a good module. Unfortunately it also ends up playing exactly as Fear the Boot (the best podcast if they're still going)describes playing in Ravenloft. Have you ever seen Richard Pryor in Running Scared? Its basically that. Only we didn't realize it at the time. Thank the morning lord we had 2 clerics, 2 wizards and a guy with a flamethrower. Even then we almost got TPKed at least four times. The thing about the setting is you're never exactly sure who you can trust. At least if its done right. Especially if the DM has good hearted NPCs courrupted from the players actions or behind the scenes. This Module taught me to never trust anybody who keeps a giant portrait of themselves anywhere. Also i think we played through a later edition. It seemed more tailored to the setting. Either that or our DM was really good at adapting the story.
Edit: hey we went through hour of the knife too. I now also dont trust anybody eating red licorice because of that one. My third also real life phobia is looking up. Everytime i look up a scorpion falls on me. Don't ask. It happened at the table and in my house. I haven't looked up in 15 years.
I actually ran a heavily-modified Pathfinder spin using this as the basis, as a followup for my group that played Expedition to Castle Ravenloft years prior. It took some serious tweaking, but the result seemed a lot more coherent and actually had decent payoff.
Azalin played a much bigger role as an antagonist. Essentially, he and Strahd build the Apparatus in Barovia as a means of escaping the demiplane by transferring souls. Strahd uses the device first and escapes to Mordent (then still on its Prime Material plane), where he disguises himself as a human alchemist. He begins rethinking his existence and is drawn to the idea of finally purging himself of his vampire nature, building his own Apparatus but modifying it to remove the curse. It works in splitting him into the Alchemist and Creature, but the Creature is unintentionally banished back to Barovia.
While the Alchemist doesn't remember his time as the vampire and thinks he has always existed, the Creature does, robbed of any of his other-half's morality and driven purely by passion. Azalin, who's been waiting to see if the device works (and counting on Strahd's hubris to be the first test subject) sees a safer way to cross and uses the Creature as a "lifeline" between the two planes, his soul still somewhat bound to the Alchemist. The next time the Alchemist uses his Apparatus, it pulls the Creature and Azalin through. The Alchemist is able to last-ditch sabotage the machine before he flees Gryphon Hill, unleashing the ghostly energies he was using to power the Apparatus, but it's not enough to stop the lich.
Azalin continues to goad both Strahds while he operates the Apparatus, converting the villagers as a means of perfecting the transfer process before he shifts to a living body (in this case he singled out one of the PCS to be his eventual host) and truly escapes the Dark Powers.
The big hook for the PCS is that all have memories from the first Ravenloft adventure, but wake up in the inn as completely different people than they remember being - new names, classes, races, the works. The reveal at the end was that they were the souls of the previous party transferred through the Apparatus into the adventurers Lord Weathermay hired to check on Strahd; the delirium episodes were side-effects of this transfer. Why? Because Creature Strahd remembered his defeat at their hands and wanted a chance at revenge.
I really like how you make this reviews, you give more details than other reviewers, do. I hope you review later B3 "The princess of the Crystal Palace", "Queen of Spiders", and the Vecna Trilogy.
I do think that a Queen of Spiders video is something we might be able to hope for someday. Their third-or-so most recent video (probably after you made this comment) was about the first Vecna adventure; I'm not sure they're ever going to do the sequels, but definitely check that one out if you haven't.
I enjoyed both Ravenloft reviews. Would love a review on the 1990 Realm of Terror boxed set (“black box”). Please?
i gotta say i dont no shit really about tt dnd but whoever choose the pics and clips for this semi pp presentation, actually, all of them on this channel, is fucking hilarious. subbed fo sho
Hey guys I would love to see a set of videos on the History of the Classes and how they became apart of DnD. Like the barbarian, Ranger, warlock, and the like.
That would be a great video series, but it's not really the kind of thing this channel does. They produce a very small number of extremely in-depth module walkthroughs and the like; if you're just looking for a deep dive into lore then I'd suggest you explore other, more productive channels where guys that love D&D just *talk* for a while, and hopefully eventually you'll find the information you're hoping for. Of the four or so channels I can think of off the top of my head, I would most recommend AJ Pickett, then Taking 20, and would not recommend Web DM very highly, or Nerdarchy basically at all (maybe they have good stuff, but I haven't seen it, and wasted a fair amount of time looking). Every other D&D channel I can think of offhand would fall in between those two pairs, with this one being the best one, but VERY specific in what they do and how well they do it.
You mean how they did ones on how the Rogue and Monk changed and evolved? And I mean exactly the same sort of thing going from edition to edition seeing what changed and what stayed the same
@@crazyscotsman9327 Ah yes, they did do those two, so I stand corrected; I suppose it's conceivable they might do other classes the same way. Although "the worst" has a certain cachet that "the second or third worst" generally does not, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
Well, that was certainly something. And explains why I haven't heard of it before.
You should revisit the Lendore Island modules, specifically The Secret of Bone Hill. I spent months running my players through that way back when.
Another great D&D Video. Love your work!
I remember running the original. It was that campaign the DM decided to off all the characters in his own campaign (which he did). We didn't really struggle; he can really thank himself, early on we ended up w/some really top end gear that made it Ravenloft just another adventure.
I liked the AD&D2E Ravenloft setting, but honestly it felt more entertaining to just read the lore of the setting rather than actually play it. I still like a few of the TSR Ravenloft novels after 25+ years. I reread some of them not long ago, and that's more than I can say for the more popular Forgotten Realms novels. I haven't played this particular module, but I wouldn't have been very happy with the DM telling me that the entire last adventure had been "just a dream". I can handle part of an adventure being a dream sequence, but to retcon out an entire adventure is bullshit.
I hope an episode on oddball rules shows up. Like automatically getting a fully stocked keep as a level 9 Fighter or the fact that 2 AD&D 1e Rangers were not aloud to work together permanently.
Cool ifea
That's a great idea. AD&D and AD&D 2nd Edition were rife with odd, odd, odd rules.
@@Ando2k10 2nd edition was full of odd rules because of Lorraine Williams. When she gained control of the company, one of her first acts was to declare no playtesting of any rules because you weren't "supposed to be playing on company time." As a result, nothing made any real sense in 2nd edition.
At 9th level you gain the ability to attract free random followers upon raising a stronghold, you didn't just get one for free.
This module is more dysfunctional than my family....
Have you ever met the Ambers from Averoigne?
@@RPGmodsFan Ahh yes, Castle Amber. Man that was a long time ago.
Great video! I've never heard of this module before, and here I thought I knew Ravenloft. Thank you for filling in the gaps of my knowledge, I'm looking forward to the next one. :D
Loving this series very enlightening. Keep it up dude.
If you added the beasts journals, sounds actually like a decent adventure
What a strange module. I look forward to more Ravenloft videos!
Awesome work, as usual.
I can only imagine what those expanded Ravenloft micro planes of dread have in store if this is the sort of story made.
I really enjoyed this adventure. We made some modifications. But very minor. We assumed that the first ravenloft did happen. But it was fun making the players think that they just might be mad. I found it quite fun.
The 2nd module that I ever had. It was given to me for Christmas. I really didn't understand it at the time because as I was 13.
I Love your videos! keep up the great work
Oh. An adventure module. I assumed it was gonna be about the half-assed 3rd Ed and beyond Ravenloft publications where they skimped on info to save space, and, like the Monster Manuals, crammed 3-4 Darklords per page, sacrificing the depth of information the setting kind of needs.
This shit is really well done! This and Seth's are the best tabletop rpg channels currently.
Another excellent review. I think that Ravenloft 2 seems like TSR was trying to leverage some of the Call of Cthulhu magic.
I assume that they eventually figured out that D&D and CoC are not interchangeable. Each game does its own thing best. There does seem to be a dungeon crawl here and the setting material seems the real problem. Well, that and game balance, believability and a weird convoluted story.
And eventually learning that few players enjoy basically being forced to sit in a corner while the story happens without their input. It's a game, not a novel.
Next time- Ravenloft III: The Netflix Adaptation
If Netflix were to do an adaptation, I think they would go with the 5E title "Curse of Strahd".
Isn't that Castlevania?
God, no!
@@johnstuartkeller5244 BUT, it's from the creative team behind Castlevania.
Yep, TSR "dropped the ball" with this one...
I never had the chance to run this module, and frankly it looks a bit of a nightmare to do so. But I've read through it a couple of times at least, and the writing and the atmosphere it generates is incredible! Indeed Jekyll and Hyde is the inspiration. The switching of souls, the crazy mystic/scientific apparatus, the dwelling of the creature in the body of another, the mesmeric (literally!) means of selecting the parameters of the adventure, the story telling and descriptions of the region are the very essence of the gothic. I love this about it, and its probably at least partly inspired my own fan fiction. I can see many of the scenes still in my mind, almost as if I'd lived them! So for me, well worth my time and money, even if I never used the campaign.
You got Cthulhu in my Ravenloft!
I would never play the module but in any campaign I would run in the ravenloft setting would mention it and utilize some of the mechanics like if you go to castle ravenloft to deal with strahd you will find the apparatus and I would randomize whether or not strahd is using it or left it alone for centuries
There are a lot of fun ideas here, but it's very clear that the writers wanted to make more of a movie about their awesome Strahd character than a module towards the end. It definitely feels STRONGLY like the ending to a classic Universal era monster film. It needs a lot of work but there really are some great moments and ideas here
Man just from what I learned from this video, if you put it in a more horror/mystery accommodating engine, tighten up the plot and let the players actually affect the ending/know what's going on before the ending, I think this module could shine.
I have a feeling you could make a really good three-part adventure if you added this, as well as that one module based around a 'Freakshow'.
Maybe streamline the randomized nature, remove some of the more obtuse enemies and wrap it up with a few hints to other realms that Azalin and Strahd may have visited as part of their respective research and you could make a really interesting adventure out of it.
Still have copies of both modules from AD&D.
My Ravenloft is worn, stained and wrinkled.
Ravenloft II still in pristine condition. Even the cards haven’t been separated.
*vampire killer plays in my mind as i hear this*
I DMed curse of strahd to completion with my players and hoped to one day return to strahd. All though the sequel is a mess, I can definitely fix up the story a bit to get it to be consistent with how it ended with my players and have a cool part two. Thanks for the great video on the module, it’s been a great help to me.
If it helps, I also have a video on the I10 Mod. However, I think the I10 Mod is better as a "stand alone" and break all links with the iconic I6 Mod.
RPGmodsFan I’ll definitely check that out, I’ve binge watched enough hammer and universal movies recently that I already have a few good ways to fix things up. It would be interesting to see how the release date matches up with when the hammer film of Frankenstein with the soul transferring machine. 🤔
@@Beastlango You inspired me to do some research on Hammer Films. If I am not mistaken the Hammer Films came out before the I6 and I10 Mods.
RPGmodsFan now that you mentioned it they definitely were since they were late 50’s to the mid 70’s, for Dracula and Frankenstein at least. Definitely worth watching for gothic and horror inspiration.
I think that 5e is a horrible fit for Ravenloft. As a setting, much like Dark Sun, it took the inherent deadliness of AD&D and ramped it up to the maximum. 5e as a rule set is just too player-biased and removes all the teeth from the game and by extension the setting.
I gotta now know the story of the Spider queen...that or talk about castle Grey Hawk and all the weirdness involving that LOL
20:30 I suppose one could assume that the undead invasion is actually a recent occurrence, even only having happened within the last few hours. Does anything actually suggest they've just always been there milling around?
I kind of dig the idea that there's another half of Strahd who is supposed to be the good half.
Would you ever consider covering some of the other Domains of Dread? Just an overview of favourites or something?
there are some fun game ideas here! I think I would run it with the party being called to a (medieval) village in their world. The village can have whatever weird/haunted problems as long as it does not overtake the plot. The first time the players rest they wake up in a Victorian mansion. The Victorian mansion is in a Victorian world but the mansion gets periodically sucked into a pocket-dimension or demi-plane. This pocket-dimension also becomes accessible from multiple other dimensions, thus the monsters and the haunting that the old house is infamous for.
Items, weapons, and clothes 'travel' from the Victorian mansion back to the possessed village very successfully but generally NOT the other way around so items can become unavailable in the mansion but hoarded in the characters room in the village.
Injuries heal and rest occurs if the characters fall asleep in the village but generally NOT in the mansion. There is no sleep, healing or rest to be found in the mansion while it is trapped in the pocket dimension.
There is no way that this new vampire/entity should be considered Straad. It should be a completely new case. It's an interesting concept to start out with a DnD party who slowly become Lovecraftian/Dirk Gently detectives. This is an interesting second case for the characters to take on as long as it's not Straad.
For the finale, either the creature or the alchemists or the characters attempt to use the apparatus but accidentally switch the souls of the monsters in the mansion with the villagers in the village. This has interesting implications for the haunt-girl and others.
Please add-on any thoughts of your own.
That was lengthy, but definitly good ideas. I am tempted to use it in a YT Video. :-P
Anyway, I think the Mod can be improved by breaking all links with the I6 Ravenloft Mod.
Any adventure where the path forward is unknown or explains little is bad.
Any adventure where the players do not factor into the end is bad
Any adventure where the DM has to research HOW this is supposed to work is awful.
What a mess.
Depends. Intrigue, mystery, self imposed objectives are factors. You can be presented with a confined space where activity is taking place, and it up to the players to discover them through exploration. There are various situations players can be thrown into the unknown because they aren't generic hero/villain troupes where everything, including their options, gets thrown into their lap.
Not all adventures focus on the players. Largely dependent on the type of rpg and story that is being engaged with.
Structured/rail roady play, especially following alongside existing/established moments, can have a specific set of events that happen which cannot be intervened with.
Again, there is room for structured/rail roady play.
Some DMs are good at making players think they were the ones making choices.
Some ideas are just very well thought out not to be used.
I've just refuted all of your broad stroke opinions with exceptions.
You are still free to be closed minded.
@@Kindlesmith70 There's a difference between being open-minded and having a hole in the head. It's OK to have some elements that are beyond the players' control, but the majority of the story should be about the players; that's what makes it a game instead of a novel. Player agency is key, otherwise they may as well just read a book. The primary focus of any given adventure should be how the players take an active role in the adventure. If they're not the focus, what's the point? Why do they even need to be there? Simple litmus test: if the story is not affected by what the players do, that's when it's TOO much of a railroad. The whole point of this (and any other) role-playing game is that the players are supposed to be creating a story, not just having one read to them.
@@troodon1096 hehehe. Love it! That first sentence. :D
Depends on the rpg and story told. Let's be clear first the difference between players and characters they play. I took your initial comment as characters should factor into the end. My mistake if that assumption was wrong. A character is just one piece in the overall game but doesn't mean it must be the central focus. I do agree players should be participating in the narrative, but the game doesn't have to be about their influence either.
Why play a game, read a book or watch a film you've played/read/seen before? Every game played, every book read, every film watched is just a repeat of another.
Playing any and all rpgs is just going over the motions that have been done already somewhere else, either within rpgs or another form of media.
I'll throw in one example.
Imagine The Lion King 3 didn't exist, and the group decides to run with the film's idea. The characters are Timone and Pumba pushing the events of the other films into what they are. Effectly the players are restricted heavily in what they are able to do to get the desired results. Some people may like this sort of thing.
There's actually a world build rpg where the entire concept is make something then play out the scenarios that make this conclusion happen. I don't remember the name of the rpg tho, I've seen way many.
Role-playing games are people getting together to participate in a shared story telling experience. There are absolutely no rules how much freedom a player (who isn't the dm/gm/st/insert other title) should have besides what the group decide upon.
There are rpgs based on DM governing everything (final say, etc), and then there are games where everyone is basically a DM.
True enough, I prefer games where players have some impact on what is going on, but the game doesn't revolve around their characters. To put it in other terms, it's about what they fail to accomplish or manage to accomplish is more important than their characters living to see the next session. They may have personal goals, but those may never be achieved given how they stumble into the middle of situations or get side tracked by a plot hook I've thrown in.
Mike, As elements for a Novel, it probably would make a good book. As a Module... Well, as you pointed out, a lot of things do not make this a good D&D module.
@@Kindlesmith70 you are just wrong. I dont get why you are even trying to argue or justify D&D not being all about the people playing and the choices they make . Period plane and simple . You must make a extremely terrible and argumentative DM . Would be terrible to be sitting there getting the shit rail roaded by you hour after hour while you lay out your thesis on how entertainment should work talking about the lion king telling all the PC's how there wrong for wanting to be the focus and have agency lol. MY GOD DUDE.
I don't know why, but I like the idea that the whole Mordentshire adventure should be more treated as an adventure/alternate plot road with some tweaking. Such as Strahd using a complex illusion to fool the PCs and make them willingly leave Barovia should they refuse an offer to let them leave alive. Assuming they haven't played the original, or heard of this adventure.
The goal would be Strahd attempting to trick the PCs into finishing a machine that might aid him in taking the body of a young Alchemist living on Griffon hill, which is an old lab of strahds. The plot itself involves Strahd faking his death to the PCs in an early encounter (in a long campaign) and then, by clever means, using illusions to "Haunt" the PCs and the alchemist to the point that the Alchemist has gone insane - writing the Alchemist's and Beast Journal. By the end of this plot, if the PC's don't realize what's going on, they end up swapping the Alchemist and Strahd's souls, believing they've severed the good and evil halfs. This will allow Strahd to leave Barovia in the Alchemist's body, free from the curse, while the Alchemist is killed in Strahd's body. Thus setting up an interesting plot when Strahd and the Party escape (or don't) for later fun down the road.
At 22:52, it specifically says that Godefroy is "no longer" a haunt but is instead a ghost; that combined with his personality change seems to make it obvious that he went from CN to CE specifically as a result of how the "canonical" version of his encounter with PCs in this module went down. Perhaps his failure to banish the spirits of his family upon this chance, after 400 years of waiting in his crypt and dreaming of doing nothing else, snapped his mind entirely and destroyed his capacity for remorse. I haven't read the Mordent chapter in Van Richten's guide, so it may contradict this, but my inclination is to rule based on the information in this video alone, that he was a selfish and hot-tempered but still basically redeemable guy originally, and that only after the events of this module did he become truly worthy of Darklord status (after all, it was during the period of time represented by this module that The Creature Strahd came to Mordent/shire; if not wanting to imagine that there were PCs involved, then maybe Strahd's evil presence and/or some aftereffect of the Apparatus was responsible for what ended up happening, perhaps retroactively (Azalin the high-level spellcaster could have done something with time), to turn Godefroy from a not-very-good person into an outright beast of a man.
This adventure feels like the type of thing the more modern versions of Strahd would put the PCs through in a dream just to mess with them. In fact, that gives me an idea...
Run a more modern version of the Ravenloft adventure, and any time the PCs sleep, switch to Ravenloft II. When they sleep in Ravenloft II, switch back to the original Ravenloft. Repeat until the players complete one of the adventures, at which point you reveal that the Ravenloft II interludes were all a trick by Strahd to confuse the PCs and leave them exhausted.
Would you consider also talking about some Pathfinder Adventures? Like Rise of the Runelords?
Hmmm I kind of like the idea of making the strahd dream being a flashback to their near death and making the delirium being a kind of PTSD thing.
It sounds more like a Call of Cthulhu module than a D&D one, but I think I have an idea for the Apparatus and a tweak I have planned in the 5e Module.
As mentioned in conclusion, I've never used a pre written module as written. I will use the maps, some of the NPC's some of the descriptions and so on. But mostly all sessions are quite flexible, as they should be as players tend to do all the unexpected stuff that there's no scripts for. As a DM you also have to be flexible and make stuff up on the hoof and guide the players to where you want them to go without them thinking that's what you've done. They are in control of what they do, go along with it and they will enjoy the adventure more. I probably write 50-60% for what actually happens the rest is made up and seamlessly added into the main arch of the story. As anyone who DM's knows, you have to make stuff up on the spot, especially when you're players decide they ain't going to that place all the people are saying that's where they should go. Fine, just use most of what you've written in the place they eventually get to. Or let them go down blind alleys, let them make up their own reasons as to what's going on, even when it's 100% wrong. It's all fun in the end.
Lastly, who replays any module? Why would you want to do that? Do people just play one module and then create new characters for a separate module? I've never done that, always started at level 1 and worked through months of a never ending campaign. AD&D, (Greyhawk) MERP, Earthdawn, and some others, but not for very long periods of time.
This is such a cool premise for an adventure tho, replace Strahd with someone else, and do a bit of rewriting, and it could be a fantastic sandbox adventure.
You said this module was a failure experience, but honest some of the ideias inside it sounds awesome. Gonna steal some of these for another campaign :)
It had a lot of great ideas but all poorly executed
Ok... this module feels really salvageable. For the Vyron house, you only need to tweak it so that the NPCs dwelling there are oblivious to the undead being strange or unusual. Like, it's that kind of dream logic that everything is wrong, but only you can see it.
I'm tempted to mod this, and run it after my Strahd campaign.
I am running Curse of Strahd (with homebrew elements) and I think HoGH could be an interesting follow up with some heavy Homebrewing. Kind of using the story as a framework but then actually tweaking it so it is more satisfying and makes a little more sense. I agree with someone down in the comments that if you play it like a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde premise. If you want to link it to OG Ravenloft or Curse of Strahd, you could use 'The Creature' as one of the dark powers that be.
So I ran 5e’s CoS by allowing one of my players to take over Strahd’s “curse” by effectively repeating the betrayal and murder Strahd undertook to become what he is. I sort of left it ambiguous if Strahd may ir may not return, but I personally felt like it would be dumb if he just came back in Barovia. However, learning about this, man I’m getting so many ideas. Obviously still an asspull for Strahd to just return after his death, but the idea of strahd inheriting a new domain that functions as a parallel to barovia is very fun, to me.
I think one way to handle the confusing nature of this module is to lean into it. The adventure makes no sense because it's a dream. Or rather, a nightmare spawned in delirium.
The idea is that you run Ravenloft I (or Curse of Strahd) as normal. But if, at any point, the party experiences a TPK - a not unlikely occurrence - they wake up in Ravenloft II with amnesia. After a bit of time, they "remember" the setup of that module, and can proceed with the module. Especially the delirium, which gets more and more vivid as time goes on. At the same time, the strangeness of the Ravenloft II adventure not only becomes more pronounced, but more obviously senseless. If a PC is ever bitten by a vampire (or werewolf, or whatever), they get flashes of being bitten instead by Strahd - the normal Strahd, not the Alchemist - while the PC is strapped to a table, surrounded by the other PCs similarly bound.
In truth, the whole of Ravenloft II is a hallucination. After they fall in battle, Strahd stops the party from dying, instead imprisoning them in a chamber and dosing them with drugs. Feeding on them gradually, each in turn, while they remain in a shared nightmare from the drug-induced delirium. Nothing makes sense, because it's a mental trap.
Even if the PCs discover this, though, they can't escape until they complete the module. In this scenario, I suggest dispensing with any kind of trans-universal or body-swapping nonsense, and just start throwing stuff at the party. By realizing the fakeness of the world, they cause the reality of the nightmare to break down. They're drawn towards the Apparatus, as every villager (now a monster) tries to stop them. Destroying the machine will cause the party to awaken in Castle Ravenloft, and can pick up with Ravenloft I where they left off.
You know, once they figure out how to free their bonds, of course.
Back in the day I ran I6 Ravenloft and killed a party of 8 10-12 level characters. When Ravenloft II came out and I was intrigued to see how this was a sequel. I was turned off by the seemingly psychotic plot that was trying to be a murder mystery, a horror story, and a pulp adventure using rules that didn't support the story or setting. After trying for almost a year to figure out how to run it without it being a disaster I just gave it away. This was probably one of the 1st of the downward spiral of TSR adventures for 1E. Fortunately I had plenty of other games to play in the groups I was involved with in the Army and afterward.
Ravenloft has always been my favorite campaign setting but man I hated when they screwed with the setting to make it more of a Victorian time line, I borrowed aspects of it like the style of clothing/ minor technology/ etc but still kept it as a fantasy setting . I never wanted the use of guns to become normal in my campaign though I did blend some clockwork technology as I felt this could be explained fairly easily.
I think the whiplash of conflicting time periods is what killed the setting for many people, I remember in a 3rd Ed splat book it even advised running different domains in different time periods and that's just silly. You can't have one area where your players are wearing full plate welding a bastard sword then when the cross domains it's a country that has never seen an elf and people wear no armor at all because black powder has made it obsolete. I know many DM's just ran campaigns as pure Victorian time but I really think this takes a lot of what makes D&D special away.
I am interested in hearing everyone else's experience of this. How did you guys solve this issue in one shots/ campaigns/ or short stays in the demiplane of dread?
Since I prefer running campaigns at Medieval Technology level, I just downgraded the Tech to that level.
What you doing when DM it all uploads? You click that upload, that's what.
I appreciate that in the context of playing the first Ravenloft and looking forward to the sequel, this would be a huge disappointment... But I think I really like it! Every time you gave an example of something bad about it, I would pause the vid and think of a way to get around that problem. By the end, I was totally convinced that I could, with only minimal time dilation and dimension hopping, totally make everything fit. But ignoring trying to make it fit into canon, I still see a lot of fun to be had here as long as you give people opportunities to see more behind the scenes (have townsfolk/pcs wake up from sleepwalking to find that they have written some of the creature Strahd's never-to-be-seen letters, for one example). I dunno, this just seemed like a good time to me, and the issues fully overcomable
I think an interesting way that this module could work is if it has no, or little connection to the original module. Imagine for a moment that the Alchemist is not named Strahd at all, he’s given a completely different name. Maybe his name is Albrecht von Succumvitch or something, and he’s created a machine that is capable of taking parts of unexplored and unknown dimensions, and using them for study. Accidentally, he has allowed some of the Dark Powers that control Barovia into the player’s world, and they begin a massive plot to create a new Barovia, one that encompasses the Prime Material Plane, and all they need do is drive the inventor mad, mad enough to serve as a vessel for Strahd, whom the players have already destroyed. Bound with cosmic energy stolen from other planes, the devil Strahd will now become even more powerful than before.
Do more ravenloft adventures!!!
I feel like this actually could have been great if they had followed through with some of this in one more entry to tie up the trilogy. There's lots here to set up a very interesting possibility of both the worlds in the first and second module being real, but separate planes that allow slipping between each other because of the soul swapping machine. A third one could have revealed the lich to have tampered with the machine in an attempt to get access to the plane from ravenloft 1, and even reintroduced a now rejoined Strahd. If I'd gotten to play this at the time of release, I think I would have thoroughly enjoyed how it played with the first one, if not been pissed that a third never came.
Good job !!!
me listening to this review "You keep using that word, delirium. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Man, if this module weren't so wonky, it might actually be a lot of fun to play. Having to basically run two games in parallel sounds like an absolute nightmare of a time as a DM. I can barely keep track of one game, which is why my session notes end up being entire essays, cause god forbid I forget some detail to bite me in the butt later. Side Note, that is probably the first time I've seen a clip of /Geist/ in any video ever. I owned that game and my nephew played it religiously. I think we got stuck at some point and then completely forgot about it. And it's not necessarily a game i go look up just to watch.
Ran this exactly once. At the end of the first session, one of the players said, "This really seems pointless. If I wanted to investigate everything, I'd play Call of C'thulhu. Can we just do Keep on the Borderlands instead?" Total play time: 3 hours. Someone else asked in the second session, "What if we just burn down the town? Can we stop playing this boring module?" I was already planning on running something else that day.
Please do a series on the 2e Darksun boxed adventure series
In my opinion, there's some salvageable material here, enough to make a pretty decent campaign if... the DM is willing to put in the effort. I understand that's a big IF. Haha!
Strange, clunky retcon with different people sharing the same name actually fits the way Hammer Horror films were pieced together quite well.
You know... I think I could do something with this. I may get it for some things to stir into Curse of Strahd. I feel like it was almost good, but they badly screwed up a couple things that, if fixed, could make a fun module