OSSR: Ravenloft Boxed Set (reviewed by Frank and K)

[K]

Ravenloft Campaign Setting: Realms of Terror

Frank:

It was requested that K and I do a piece on the Realms of Terror book for the Ravenloft campaign setting, so that's what we're doing. It's important to note that the book we're reviewing is not the oldest school Realms of Terror book. This book was redesigned rather extensively several times. We have the version from the Red Box that came out in 1994, which has a lot of differences from the box that came out in 1990. But that's why the nice lady on the front still has extremely 80s hair. A lot of people don't remember that 80s fashion sense continued well into the early 90s, but it totally did.

K:

This is probably the point to note that the lady on the front of the cover in the book is dead sexy (possibly dead and sexy). As a consumer of RPG products at the time, this was an important selling point for me.

I had yet to realize that hot women on the cover art was a bad sign.

Frank:

Ravenloft was the inspiration for all of the World of Darkness. Rein*Hagen literally decided that he was going to make Vampire: the Masquerade when he saw TSR unveil Ravenloft at GenCon. His earlier draft was apparently just Ars Magica in the grim future of 1999. So for all its faults, Ravenloft is very important historically. I'm not really sure which of us is team nostalgia and which is team rage for this one. Probably a little bit of both for each of us.

K:

I’m definitely on Team Nostalgia. I bought the boxed set, saw that it was unplayable, and then promptly dug into it with the glee of someone who knew that he would never suffer through a Ravenloft game and could enjoy the book on whatever merits remained.

It’s like that feeling you get when you read a Rifts book.

Frank:

Ravenloft comes early in the period when TSR was releasing a new setting to radically rethink how the game should be played every single year. The year before there was Spelljammer, the year after there was Darksun. And all through this period there are “setting expansions” that turn established worlds into new directions. Like Time of the Dragon for Dragonlance, and Al-Qadim and Maztica for Forgotten Realms.

K:

I was happy for a new setting. At the time, I was collecting new settings like there was no tomorrow and I was really happy with the content coming out. RPG designers really were selling to a demo of “kids who have birthday money to spend and made the damned trip to the FLGS into the bad neighborhood and will not be happy if they can’t leave with something.”

Credits & Foreword

Frank:

OK, let's get this out of the way: this is an amateur product. The idea that you would hire actual “writers” or something to write books did not appear to occur to TSR until much later. TSR doesn't even credit “writers” during this period, just “designers”. They come right out and say that the authors met in college while they were working for TSR. Yes, really. Back in the 80s Andria Heyday and Bruce Nesmith apparently did freelance work for TSR while going to school in Wisconsin. Because there wasn't an internet back then and TSR literally recruited their employees by talking to kids at the local gaming clubs and seeing if any of them were passionate enough about their nerdiness to write RPG materials for them. It's pretty boring in Wisconsin, so I gather they got enough takers. And now my glass of Metaxa is all empty again for some reason.

K:

I have nothing to add to the DnD history here. I’ll let Frank continue on for a bit.

Frank:

I've actually met Tracy and Laura Hickman, and I was not favorably impressed. Laura in particular likes to make Gully Dwarf jokes, which are simultaneously offensive and interminable. But the idea of doing Gothic Horror in D&D was genuinely theirs. I mean, it seems rather obvious now, but in 1982 it was a revelation of sorts. The original Ravenloft boxed set was cobbled together in less than a year, and the connection to the work of the Hickmans is rather tenuous – basically they are just appropriating the name to try to drum up sales of their horror setting. The assignment was given in 1989 and it was on shelves in early 1990.

If Ravenloft could be said to have a driving design goal it is to “get the crazy high level stuff out of player hands as much as possible”. People in TSR pretty much knew that the game went to crazy town at high level, so settings from this period try to address that issue in some way. Spelljammer and Darksun just went with the flow, blowing up planets and having ships full of psionic monsters spewing death all over everything. Ravenloft went the other way, trying to torture the game system to keep the “mood” of a gothic horror game. We'll get in to the methods involved as they show up later in the book. But just think about that driving goal as we go through things.

K:

Yes, Ravenloft wanted to do horror in DnD. This seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, but in hindsight we should have known that it would end up like that Van Helsing movie with Hugh Jackman (mostly lame, and with some slightly racist Gypsy caricatures).

Introduction

K:

This is the part where they tell you that Gothic equals more sex and and death.

At this point, I was in. “More sex! More death! Where do I sign?!?!?!” There are also reading lists of people you will never actually bother to read (Byron) and shout-outs to things that you do care about (Dracula).

The prose is appropriately purple and it tells you that Gothic adventures are supposed to be emo journeys into the human soul….completely ignoring that DnD is not designed for that.

Frank:

The Silver Age of Gaming has much to answer for, but pretentious reading lists and pithy literary quotes at the beginnings of chapters was stone cold awesome.

K:

It really was. Nothing communicates flavor better.

Frank:

The “What is Gothic Horror” tirade is pretty weird. On the one hand, it's trying to take the side of cerebral horror over slasher fare. On the other hand, we are still talking about Dungeons & Fucking Dragons. Your characters still carry longswords and have hit points, so poo-poohing “maniac with a knife” style horror seems equal parts pretentious and inane. It is of course equally bizarre to go off on a rant about the gothic horror genre and speak of its emphasis on Evil vs. Virtue and Spiritual Strength bereft of its Christian context. The result is somewhat incoherent, because of course D&D is secular and in this case was in its “desperately attempting to not offend Christians” mode, so they don't even mention the religion angle. This makes discussions of “spiritual strength” and “virtue” rather incoherent.

K:

I just assumed that it was Christian dog-whistling. This was the era when demons had to be called tanari and we all knew that they were fucking demons, so a setting that basically told you do redemption themes while rubbing off all of the Bible-banging serial numbers was par for the course.

(On an unrelated note, my first draft of this section originally said “god-whistling.” I think that should be a term.)

Frank:

I'm not going to say that they are wrong that Vampires are a fundamentally better villain than Freddy Kreuger, although it does sort of date the piece to the late eighties that they use the Nightmare on Elmstreet franchise as an example of “modern” horror that fails to capture fundamental emotional resonance in the way that Dracula does. Indeed, just the fact that talking about Nightmare on Elmstreet makes the piece dated and talking about Dracula fucking doesn't means that they were fundamentally correct. Doesn't mean that their take-home message that “hunchbacks are essential to horror” wasn't batshit crazy though.

K:

They lost me here. Freddy Kreuger would fit perfectly in Ravenloft, but this was the start of the “I went to community college and now I’m going to show off my reading list” in RPGs and pissing on pop-culture is pretty much key to doing that.

I could totally see a Freddy domain where the peasants are all sleep-deprived and brew very strong coffee and teas.

The problem is that not enough Freddy movies have been made. Dracula, and vampires in general, are enough of a genre unto themselves that you get really deep stories mixed in with the splatter. I sincerely doubt that they ever intended for people to use Dracula vs. Frankenstein as source material, but I did watch that movie one Saturday afternoon.

Frank:

The pretentious disdain for “hack n' slash” gamers is probably what attracted Rein*Hagen in the first place.

K:

Well, the core of most 1e and 2e stories that you heard from other gamers tended to sound like mad-libs, so I could see the appeal of wanting to focus on stories.

You can have fun during the adventure where (a medusa) has a plan to (desecrate) a (aquaduct) with a (dwarven bread), but actually taking things a little more seriously and crafting a story with themes and shit has traction that even hacks recognize.

Frank:

One advantage that Ravenloft had over Masquerade was the setting. And I mean that in a literal sense. Ravenloft took place in an imaginary world rather than “Atlanta”. That meant that they could bring gothic landscapes to horror, and that goes a long way. It's just way more evocative when things look like this:



Than if it's just “Atlanta, but you know, at night or something.”

K:

The improbable mists was a tad on the nose, but you have to remember that the Gothic horror TV shows you got the 80s and 90s tended to camp up the setting super hard, sometimes just tossing a dark filter into the middle of an establishing shot to show that the setting was “going to get dark.”

I mean, Tales from the Crypt was literally MCed by a mummy in a crypt/dungeon. Horror was mainstreaming in very unusual and obvious ways.

But I get it. The deep forests of the Carpathian mountains are scary as shit, and that’s just better than anything in Atlanta.

Frank:

Honestly, I think that if you're quoting more than one paragraph of Poe in a single italics block, that you should probably have your citation privileges revoked.

K:

It’s not even a good Poe quote. Fucking community college reading lists.

Frank:

The emphasis on color in their introduction is pretty odd, considering that Ravenloft is like the least colorful setting that TSR ever put out. And also that it's an RPG which rather notoriously is played without much of a visual element. Not really sure where they were going with their tirades about shading.

K:

It was telling people to purple the prose up.

I don’t know how that is supposed to work since DM descriptions need to be brief and evocative and not chew the scenery too much, but as a primer on themes I was pretty happy.

More sex and death!

[Username17]

Chapter 1: The Demiplane of Dread

K:

This chapter starts out with a bit from the Tome of Strahd, and then it helpfully provides a timeline that tells you that the only important character in the setting of Ravenloft is the vampire living in Castle Ravenloft: Strahd.

He’s both the first domain lord and the reason for the first domain, and it’s kind of assumed that he’s the DM-penis NPC you are going to deal with the most because he is featured in the bigger modules where Raveloft originally appeared. The timeline also helpfully places the various modules that existed before the boxed set into their chronological order.

Frank:

You can tell that Strahd was originally written up by the Hickmans because he is a Baron from Barovia. These are the geniuses who brought you a god of Paladins named Paladine. This was in the days before the internet, and apparently before thesauruses.

K:

You then jump straight into the fantasy metaphysics where it talks about how Ravenloft is a demiplane that’s not part of the Prime and the Ethereal plane does weird things with mists.

Some of that is cool because it talks about the demiplane kidnapping people and trapping people with in it and that’s very Goth, but it feels very heavy-handed. You could let PCs do day trips into Ravenloft and not lose anything thematic, but I guess they really wanted a reason for tinker gnomes from Krynn to be forced to hang out with sun elves from the Realms.

Mostly you hear about Conjuctions where Ravenloft bites off parts of other worlds or suddenly appears in other worlds because…. planes be weird, dude.

Frank:

The stuff about the mists grabbing people and hauling them off to the Demiplane of Dread (which sounds way more Metal and way less Emo than Ravenloft actually is) is basically straight up MC railroad bullshit. The concept is basically that the MC announces that you're going to have a fucking Ravenloft adventure now and there is fuck all you can do about it. Oddly enough, this was considered a good thing back in the day, because players would often bring characters from different campaigns (and presumably, different worlds). So being able to declare that different characters from different campaign worlds all get mistnapped at the same time and have a one-shot adventure in Ravenloft was pretty helpful. I'm normally against MC railroading bullshit, but in this case it worked surprisingly well.

K:

Things start to get interesting when it talks about Domain Lords. This tells you that each mini-country has a boss monster, and I guess that’s good to know.

It talks about little lords making little domains and powerful ones making big domains, but then tells you that killing the boss monster is no easy way to escape a domain. This is not helpful at all because killing boss monsters is supposed to have some effect in heroic storytelling, but they didn’t want people “winning Ravenloft” and so they had to keep it around in some way.

It should be noted that this device does get used to good effect when you actually play adventures. I remember one particularly good one from Dungeon Magazine where the domain lord was a magic sword and the domain was a single mansion that you get randomly pulled into by the Mists and then sent home when it’s done, and that’s basically the perfect one-shot adventure set-up.

But that doesn’t get talked about because this section is fully in character. It’s not a game, man.

Frank:

I've never really “gotten” the domain lords thing. From a metagame standpoint, the idea is that each domain is a little mini adventure you can have that can have different flavors of horror. So to write that in, they decide that you're basically in the ironic Tales From the Crypt nightmare of some dude who isn't you. And that dude is the domain lord. But I really never saw the point of having domain lords at all, you could just have the different mini-nightmare worlds be bad in different ways for no reason and it would make pretty much exactly the same amount of sense.

K:

The next section is about how you aren’t going to get out of Ravenloft. This is a bit weird because players who wanted to play a Ravenloft campaign probably don’t want to leave, but it basically says that the DM lets you leave when he lets you leave.

Because planes.

Frank:

Not only can the DM just decide to not let you leave, he can have new domains spring up each session that each have a different ironic twist to the horror. So you can just keep having episodic adventures and the DM can talk in a squeaky voice and cackle a lot while referring to himself as the “crypt keeper” or something. The chapter is 12 pages long, but it's mostly ranting about planar mechanics. And when AD&D talks about Planar Mechanics, it looks like this:



So... we're not really going to get into that. The final page is a tirade about how they acknowledge that the “Grand Conjunction” is going to piss off a lot of Dungeon Masters. That was because for this version of the boxed set, they removed a bunch of domains that were considered too “high fantasy” or “weird” and replaced them with various other stuff. So there's no longer a realm of Drow based horror, and stuff like that. If we were using the 1990 boxed set, the Grand Conjunction wouldn't be in here and I don't remember whether that would make the planar explanations make any more sense.

So it's not just because planes. It's also because of a bunch of heavy handed retcons.

K:

The next chapter is about the arbitrary changes to class mechanics. Because planes.

[Red_Rob]

I always like the idea of Ravenloft although I never got to play it. The whole mists thing was a flavourful way to get characters into a one-off horror scenario (which is what you want, a whole gothic campaign could have worn a little thin), and the idea that there are a number of realms all based on classic horror novels was a fun one. I guess our group was more into high fantasy than gothic horror, although the fact we couldn't really see how a gothic adventure was supposed to happen with D&D rules certainly helped.

Talking of Rein*Hagen (how do you pronounce that dot??) didn't White Wolf end up publishing Ravenloft stuff for 3e? Funny how these things come around.

[K]

Chapter 2: The Reshaping of Characters

Frank:

A bunch of character abilities work differently in Ravenloft from how they work in other campaign settings. A lot of this is to keep you from solving mysteries quickly with stuff like Detect Evil. I can't even follow the logic behind some of the stuff. The explanation for this is actually more insulting than if they just said it was like this for no reason. Sadly, in order to review the changes, it is necessary at times to remember how 2nd edition character abilities actually worked.

K:

This is the start of the genuinely unplayable bits.

I mean, the first thing you should be thinking when someone tells you that you are playing a horror campaign should be “ok, now it’s time to use my horror character…..”

Fuck no. This is is Ravenloft and the last thing you want to play is a horror-themed character because here you either suck or are turning NPC. No necromancers in the horror campaign where they’d fit perfectly because Ravenloft is the campaign that hates players.

Frank:

The whole chapter is six pages long, and covers arbitrary changes to each of the five “class groups” that 2nd edition tried to make you care about (Warriors, Rogues, Priests, Mages, and Psionicists). Most of the changes involve removing or reducing the effectiveness of abilities that make you do well against “horror monsters”. So it's harder to turn undead, it's harder to cure magic diseases, that sort of thing.

K:

I like the “if you are a Ranger with a wolf and you even enter Strahd’s domain, he gets your wolf forever.”

There is nothing like starting a campaign with the most popular options cut out.

Frank:

Even the authors of this book can't be fucked to read and understand the Psionics rules, so they just give you some guiding principles about how to bone the player and tell the MC to figure it out his own damn self.

K:

The writers had a mad hate for psionics that starts here and gets worse through the rest of the book. Psionicists get worse insanities, almost all of their powers force Powers or Horror checks, and they get straight nerfed in PSPs just by walking into Ravenloft.

The sections on Psionics should be one line that reads “Fuck no to psionics.”

It’s almost like there was a turf war in TSR where one gang went and did Dark Sun and another did Ravenloft and no one mentioned the burning hate they had for the other.

Frank:

The big thing for non-human PCs is that the people of Ravenloft are fearful and insular and racist douche nozzles. So they suggest that elves and such should disguise themselves as humans to avoid getting lynched by Romanian hillbillies. Also, the rules suggest nerfing the Elvish 90% resistance to sleep effects down to a 50% resistance, although I am damned if I can figure out what difference that makes.

K:

Remember, this is Ravenloft and it’s the campaign that hates players. Players actually having abilities that would be useful or thematic to a horror campaign need to be punished for their desire to be good at things in this campaign.

Fantasy racism is a new one though.

[hogarth]

The Silver Age of Gaming has much to answer for, but pretentious reading lists and pithy literary quotes at the beginnings of chapters was stone cold awesome.

Only if by "awesome" you mean "usually misleading" (e.g. "If you want to play D&D, you should read Conan stories!", even though 90% of good Conan stories would make terrible D&D games and vice versa).

Although I have to admit that Dracula has a nice D&D-ish vibe to it (a party of adventurers goes around to different buildings looking for monsters).

[CapnTthePirateG]

Loving the review. Think a lot of the 3e Ravenloft stuff keeps the "no necromancers, powers checks, no escape" stuff. So, yeah, woo.

[wotmaniac]

didn't White Wolf end up publishing Ravenloft stuff for 3e?

It was 2nd-partied to Sword&Sorcery.

[Username17]

Chapter 3: Fear, Horror, and Madness

K:

Now that you’ve decided to play a horror game, here is the part where you make checks to be afraid and go insane. That’s expected.

This chapter starts out with a snipe at pretzel-eating players. I’m not sure why they don’t like pretzels, but I guess we should be happy that it’s the only snack-food in the crosshairs.

Frank:

The term at the time was “beer and pretzels”, so I think that this was as close as they felt they could get to referencing drunk players. Because nothing says “pushing the boundaries of horror” like intense self-censorship. It also dates the work to the 80s, if you were going to associate a snack food with RPG players in the modern era it would naturally be Cheetohs.

K:

The next section is the Fear vs. Horror section, but I’ll skip that because it’s actually well written. I was pretty clear that Fear was for immediate threats and Horror was when anything gross happened.

The rules for Fear were terrible. You make fear checks in instances like “the monster could one-shot someone” or “the monster has twice the HD of the party.”

So you basically make fear checks when there is a chance that the party is getting TPKed, thus worsening your chances of getting a TPK because some PCs will go bugfuck and stop being playable characters just long enough for the monster to eat you.

That’s horror RPGing, but…. WTF man?

Frank:

Yeah: Fear is for things that are dangerous, horror is for when naked ladies decapitate themselves in a really creepy way. I can get behind that dichotomy actually. My only thought with the Fear checks was that the fact they exist was supposed to make the players want to solve things in DM-railroady puzzle fashion rather than fighting it out. The actual Fear check mechanics are terrible. A 5th level party is supposed to make fear checks when confronted by 20 hobgoblins,

K:

The interesting twist was that you got bonuses for having magic that makes you immune to the thing you were fighting.

I’m not completely sure why having a ring of fire resistance shouldn’t make you immune to Fear checks from a Hellhound, but they say that you only get a +4 to the Fear check. Apparently knowing that your enemy’s only dangerous attack will fail to hurt you does not make you less of a little girl.

Frank:

That bit about how monsters get to make saving throws against your protection spells to keep those spells from giving you bonuses on your save versus Fear is enough to make me hate AD&D all over again.

K:

The next bit is Horror checks. Failing those mostly forces you to roleplay in a certain way for the next month, but a few have actual mechanics attached where you get worse at Fear checks or something. The random conditions last a month, so mostly you take a month off between adventures so that people get their brains on straight for the start of any new adventure.

Unless you are a fighting guy who gets Senseless Rage. That one is awesome and doubles your attacks and only makes you flip out when you face a similar Horror check scenario, so it’s a straight combat upgrade for the crazy.

This section also mentions that you can magic away the results of failed Horror checks by using things like memory-wiping magic, and I figure you are going to get that online ASAP so that you can do Ravenloft adventures by selective wiping people’s minds during adventures, so that’s an interesting twist. Very sci-fi.

Frank:

When discussing the jadedness of players vis a vis horror and revulsion. They refer to these jaded players as “popcorn munching”, which I assume is a reference to people who watch gore films and are jaded to horrific imagery. And not, for example, a systematic attempt to provide a disdainful litany against all forms of snack food. Still, I find it more than a little odd how all the analogies in the Fear and Horror chapter are food related. I think TSR probably should have fed their authors more.

K:

The next section is Madness checks. These are the special Fuck You to anyone stupid enough to try to use divination magic or anything else remotely divination-like.

Madness doesn’t go away without specialized treatment that takes forever to work, magic won’t help, and it almost always turns you into an unplayable character through straight mechanics or demands to RP badly. Fuck you for wanting to solve mysteries with your magic, you spellcasting characters.

Special shout-outs to Schizophenia that is designed to specifically make psionic characters unplayable.

The divination-like abilities forcing Madness checks are especially bad. Boning characters who want to use a claw of magic stealing to steal spells from monsters just starts to feel like a personal vendetta against players having nice things.

Frank:

Madness isn't just unplayable dickery to fuck over players who try to use their character's abilities to interact with the story, it's also 1980s pop psychology that is insulting to people with actual mental illness. They try to give themselves cover by claiming this is for “interesting opportunities in role-playing” rather than “exact medical definitions”, but for fuck's sake: they have Schizophrenia as multiple personalities wackiness. They're basically setting themselves up for Fish Malks, which kills the horror genre as dead in D&D as it does in Vampire. That, and taking penalties like having a 50% chance to be unable to act during combats is not so much an “interesting opportunities in role-playing” as it is a “death sentence”.

I really don't know what they were going for. The Madness rules are dickish, mood breaking, insulting, and unplayable. Several pages long, but worse in every way than having no rules at all and just giving the players the suggestion to “go crazy”.

K:

This section ends with a bit about Sanitariums to cure Madness, but I feel like they missed the boat here. I mean, sanitarium-based adventures are completely within the Horror genre, so they really should have mentioned something here about how some sanitariums are places where vampires feed on you or demons make you more crazy.

Second, since only spellcasters are going into sanitariums and going insane, I’m not sure why that isn’t mentioned. The potential adventure hooks of powerful and insane spellcasters is just too rich of a vein to not tap.

Frank:

Agreed. Major missed opportunities here. Sanitariums full of wizards are one of the few really good excuses to have a “dungeon adventure”. I mean, we're talking about a literal series of locked rooms full of dangerous madmen of various strengths, some of whom have vital clues and some of whom have valuable treasure. This Dungeons & Dragons, they're just going to let that opportunity pass?

[wotmaniac]

self-censorship. It also dates the work to the 80s, if you were going to associate a snack food with RPG players in the modern era it would naturally be Cheetohs.

so ..... Funyuns were, what, a '90's thing?

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Talking of Rein*Hagen (how do you pronounce that dot??)

Last time I heard it was "Rein Dot Hagen". I might be wrong though.

[squirrelloid]

self-censorship. It also dates the work to the 80s, if you were going to associate a snack food with RPG players in the modern era it would naturally be Cheetohs.

so ..... Funyuns were, what, a '90's thing?

I believe we can blame the Cheetohs association on the Dead Alewives, and I don't think we're ever going to escape it.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I believe the snacks things are jabs at people who don't take the game seriously enough. This was prime time for the thespian roleplayer jackasses who were all into in-depth experiences and fought tooth-and-claw for their right to play quadriplegic shit-farmers.

[hogarth]

I really don't know what they were going for. The Madness rules are dickish, mood breaking, insulting, and unplayable. Several pages long, but worse in every way than having no rules at all and just giving the players the suggestion to “go crazy”.

This is exactly how I felt about the Call of Cthulhu insanity rules, and that's usually how we ended up playing them (just go crazy in an interesting way).

[Lago PARANOIA]

Agreed. Major missed opportunities here. Sanitariums full of wizards are one of the few really good excuses to have a “dungeon adventure”. I mean, we're talking about a literal series of locked rooms full of dangerous madmen of various strengths, some of whom have vital clues and some of whom have valuable treasure. This Dungeons & Dragons, they're just going to let that opportunity pass?

I don't know. While setting adventures and stories in sanitariums has a rich history, making them the site of dungeon crawls has the potential to be very tasteless in my opinion. Even if the residents are things like zombies and ghosts.

[Voss]

Talking of Rein*Hagen (how do you pronounce that dot??)

Last time I heard it was "Rein Dot Hagen". I might be wrong though.

Indeed. Everyone I've met who has referenced him in some way always says 'dot' in the middle of his name. He apparently had enough screaming fits about it (and certainly emphasized it in various white wolf products) that it sticks with almost everyone who encountered old world of darkness products. There is also the tie-in with skill/ability/power dots from the games themselves.

For clarification, however, it is almost always said mockingly. Air quotes, however, are optional. And usually considered beneath rabid WoD fans, though that means little, since they traditionally considered everything beneath them.

[Red_Rob]

Wow. According to the White Wolf Wiki:

When asked about the meaning and pronunciation of the dot in his last name, Rein•Hagen once reportedly replied, "It's unpronounceable, and symbolizes how meaningless are the labels that we attach to ourselves." It is interesting, however, that the country he now lives in, Georgia, uses the • as a comma, thereby making it meaning-laden. Mark no longer uses the dot in his name, replacing it with a more pedestrian hyphen.

Well, that certainly fits the image Ihave in my head of the guy who wrote Vampire...

[wotmaniac]

Wow. According to the White Wolf Wiki:

When asked about the meaning and pronunciation of the dot in his last name, Rein•Hagen once reportedly replied, "It's unpronounceable, and symbolizes how meaningless are the labels that we attach to ourselves." It is interesting, however, that the country he now lives in, Georgia, uses the • as a comma, thereby making it meaning-laden. Mark no longer uses the dot in his name, replacing it with a more pedestrian hyphen.

Well, that certainly fits the image Ihave in my head of the guy who wrote Vampire...

This appears to be nothing but a total rip-off from what Prince had done earlier ..... except with Prince, it was in reaction to contract and copyright disputes (i.e., "sticking it to 'the man'"); with this tool, it's just unbelievably pretentious (even by WW standards).

[squirrelloid]

Wow. According to the White Wolf Wiki:

When asked about the meaning and pronunciation of the dot in his last name, Rein•Hagen once reportedly replied, "It's unpronounceable, and symbolizes how meaningless are the labels that we attach to ourselves." It is interesting, however, that the country he now lives in, Georgia, uses the • as a comma, thereby making it meaning-laden. Mark no longer uses the dot in his name, replacing it with a more pedestrian hyphen.

Well, that certainly fits the image Ihave in my head of the guy who wrote Vampire...

This appears to be nothing but a total rip-off from what Prince had done earlier ..... except with Prince, it was in reaction to contract and copyright disputes (i.e., "sticking it to 'the man'"); with this tool, it's just unbelievably pretentious (even by WW standards).

Okay, Vampire might not quite qualify as *unbelievably* pretentious... But Mage? I'm not sure its pretention is any less crazy.

[Surgo]

Woo, thanks much for doing this review!

Ah, so many fuck you mechanics. I have to wonder why they wanted so badly to set this in something like D&D, when it's so ill-suited to the kind of low-level low-magic bullshit that they desired to have for their setting. Must be because it was just the popular game at the time.

I don't really know if I can take the gothic horror idea seriously upon looking at the book cover though. Sure it's a good image, but it makes me expect Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, to start talking about our hilarious upcoming attraction. Not that I'm about to take deadly seriously what I'm about to read.

[Voss]

Wow. According to the White Wolf Wiki:

When asked about the meaning and pronunciation of the dot in his last name, Rein•Hagen once reportedly replied, "It's unpronounceable, and symbolizes how meaningless are the labels that we attach to ourselves." It is interesting, however, that the country he now lives in, Georgia, uses the • as a comma, thereby making it meaning-laden. Mark no longer uses the dot in his name, replacing it with a more pedestrian hyphen.

Well, that certainly fits the image Ihave in my head of the guy who wrote Vampire...

Really? How did you picture him? He's always come across a pretentious but hollow asshole to me, so that seems fairly fitting.

[K]

Chapter 4: The Ravenloft Powers Check

K:

Here is the section on Dark Powers, the omnipresent and undefined evil god-things that reward and punish villainy, give Domain Lords their domains, and I assume take annex classes at the local college in Getting More Irony Out Your Ironic Punishments.

The short version is that whenever you did anything “bad”, you’d make a check and, if you failed, then the DM would MTP up a new power and some disgusting cosmetic effect that probably hit your Charisma score.

Frank:

The Dark Powers were a vague and potentially omnipresent excuse for the MC to fuck with you in vague but terrible ways that might include removing you from the ranks of player characters. To the extent that they were “for” anything from a metagame perspective, I would say that they were there to make players feel paranoid and reticent about using powerful abilities. For that, I would say that the few times I actually got to play in a Ravenloft game they were pretty successful. People did in fact walk around like they were on eggshells, which was probably the goal of the subsystem.

That being said, the things they apparently wanted to discourage are extremely weird to me. It's a horror game, so naturally they want to bone people for wanting to play... Paladins, Diviners, and Necromancers. Because those the kinds of characters who would actually fit in a horror game? I don't get it. That's 40% of the Diablo II cast and all of the new classes in Heroes of Horror for a reason. And that reason is that those are the kinds of characters who have an obvious place in the horror milieu and are the sorts of characters you would naturally reach for if you were told that we were going to play a D&D game with horror themes.

K:

To take it one more step, I’m not even sure that even basic adventuring is possible.

I mean, they want to you make Powers checks for LYING, so when the monster asks you where you’ve hidden the children that he wants to eat and you say “in the church” because you have an ambush waiting for him, the fucking Dark Powers might turn your mouth into spider parts or some shit.

Most of the chapter has to be ignored to make a playable Ravenloft game. Then you address the problem of making necromancers and paladins unplayable in a horror game.

Frank:

When an AD&D book talks about “poetic justice”, they are really just talking about MC dickery. This is the era of “wish twisting”.

K:

Up to a point, that makes sense. You want to preserve a certain play style, so you tell players that you are going to punish stupid behavior.

So you tell them, “this is a horror game about pure good vs. monstrous evil and don’t be bad guys or I’m going to give you a tail.” That’s workable, if dickish.

The thing is that there is a missing section here that needs to be entitled, “The Dark Powers shouldn’t punish everything because you need to have a playable game, so ease off Cursey McCursington.”

Frank:

One of the conceits of the whole Powers Check formula is that you really don't want to do anything “Evil” in Ravenloft, because the DM is going to turn you into a slime monster or some shit. This is really weird, because it actually means that players aren't “tempted” to compromise with Team Evil at all. It really undermines the whole “virtue vs. evil” thing they claim to be trying to set up, because you don't really need to draw upon “spiritual strength” to avoid doing Evil when you know that there are large and immediate consequences for doing Evil even when no one is around. Simple, wicked self interest keeps players from committing crimes in Ravenloft, which rather shits all over the supposed themes.

Probably the worst thing about Powers Checks is the way it suggests boning people because they did “evil” things that don't even sound bad. Their example is taking stuff out of an abandoned temple of goodness. Because that's stealing. From people who don't exist. Or something. The standard of behavior they hold up doesn't make any internal sense, so when they ask DMs to extrapolate from this and find creative ways to bone players with it, it just comes off as capricious dickery.

K:

On a hilarious side-note, it also means that Ravenloft may have the lowest petty crime rate in all of DnDLand.

I mean, there are no guys who get into bar fights because after a month of that you are now a wereboar living in some shitty domain that’s a bar where no drinks are served. There are no pick-pockets because those guys end up with slime trails and get caught almost immediately. There are no bandits because they end up as cannibal serpent people in some forest domain within a few weeks.

You can’t even cheat at cards or sell fake merchandise without getting burning dominoes tattooed on your face or having your eyes turn into solid gold so that you can see hidden wealth.

So I’m not even sure how you can have Romanian hillybillies who lynch elves. I guess it happens just often enough to keep the were-sheep population stable.

Frank:

We won't get there until Chapter 6, but the Powers Checks make playing a high level caster virtually impossible. One of the ways the genre is enforced is that if you cast a bunch of higher level spells, you're almost certain to get turned into an NPC. In that way, higher level casters basically don't exist in Ravenloft. And that keeps things on the “shit covered peasants” end of the scale that the authors are going for.

K:

The weirdest thing is how this interacts with the Redemption rules in this chapter.

So those rules say that the DM is supposed to give you chances to again face the act that is turning you into vampire or a ghost or something, and if you make the correct moral choices then the Stages of Evil get reversed.

So what happens if your Powers check was the result of casting Animate Dead? Is the DM supposed to offer up really tasty corpses for you to animate, and then you get redemption if you don’t? Do you get redemption if you stop playing dead because you failed a Dark Powers check while casting Feign Death. Do you get redemption if you stop trying to deliver touch spells with magic hands because you failed a Powers check for casting Spectral Hand?

I guess it doesn’t matter because the Redemption check is at the same percentage as the Dark Powers check, so the odds of you rolling low twice (both the Powers and the Redemption) is low enough to not happen at all.

Frank:

The chart which shows the different chances of getting the interest of the Dark Powers for player characters and NPCs is actually pretty insulting. Still, for all its weirdness, it's actually still a better and more consistent morality system than Humanity in New World of Darkness. Zing!

Seriously though, this shit is unplayable. A 2% chance of getting baleful MC interference every time you threaten someone with violence in Dungeons & Dragons? WTF?

K:

Still, it has to be said that my younger self loved the Stages of Evil chart. I assumed that it was mostly just for NPCs so you’d run into a lot of weird villains, but I had hopes that I could convince a DM to let me go a few stages and get some cool powers. I mean, Charisma was a dump stat even in 2e.

Frank:

Honestly, for all the strange and terrible that is on the stages of evil chart, the thing that really leaps out at me is the part where you can get “Type F Poison”. I had forgotten how bizarre and unhelpful the AD&D poison classifications were.

K:

That’s a good entry.

It mean, it doesn’t even tell you how you use that forked tongue. Is it an attack? Is it a weapon? Can I spend a proficiency slot to specialize in it? Is it contact poison, and if so can I lick weapons (did type F poison work like that)?

Fuck if I know. MTP it, I guess.

[K]

Chapter 5: Curses

K:

I think we can gloss over the Curse chapter V with a single entry. It's kind of a non-section that is basically just RP advice for making curses more cursey.

Frank:

Yeah, it's 12 pages long, but pretty much the entire thing is just a call for more magic teaparty in cursing. Special points do go out to having the Powers Check numbers in this chapter be totally different from the Powers Check numbers in the previous chapter for the same actions.

Next up: Spells in Ravenloft!

[wotmaniac]

That being said, the things they apparently wanted to discourage are extremely weird to me. It's a horror game, so naturally they want to bone people for wanting to play... Paladins, Diviners, and Necromancers. Because those the kinds of characters who would actually fit in a horror game? I don't get it. That's 40% of the Diablo II cast and all of the new classes in Heroes of Horror for a reason. And that reason is that those are the kinds of characters who have an obvious place in the horror milieu and are the sorts of characters you would naturally reach for if you were told that we were going to play a D&D game with horror themes.

See, I've never had a problem with this. I've always just rationalized it as these concepts are just so awesomely tailor-made for this setting that it necessarily has an unbalancing effect. Every single one of your class abilities should probably not be awesome all the time.

/2cents

[virgil]

I always saw that discouragement thing as Shadzar-logic, if you describe something as dangerous it needs to be dangerous. If you actively refrain from such behavior, you'll be seen as a meta-gamer and a rollplayer.

[norms29]

To take it one more step, I’m not even sure that even basic adventuring is possible.

I mean, they want to you make Powers checks for LYING, so when the monster asks you where you’ve hidden the children that he wants to eat and you say “in the church” because you have an ambush waiting for him, the fucking Dark Powers might turn your mouth into spider parts or some shit.

actually lying is only a Powers Check when you lie to an Innocent (note the capital I, that's important).

The important thing to know about powers checks was that you got your chance of failing the check and transforming was determined by cross referencing the crime with the victim,

There were four categories for potential victims, which I expected you two to rip into the weirdness that was the classification system as the least defensible part of the system, how could you skip?

I mean come on! Powers Checks are only two pages, and the chart is like a quarter of a page. I refuse to believe you missed that.