Café de Nuit

Just to lighten things up and get over Jim gloating over his copy of Farewell to the Flesh I came up with my top 5 worst Ravenloft products list. Excluding novels. They would take up the entire list. Agree or disagree, let's have fun with this.

5. Book of Crypts.
I get the idea behind this. Ravenloft is young and only has one adventure at the time. D&D being module oriented had to come up with some quick adventures for the new Ravenloft. The problem is the lack of execution. The adventures could have taken place anywhere and in fact did take place in new places not even mentioned in the Ravenloft Boxed Set. And really, most of the adventures did not feel like Ravenloft at all. A big swing and a miss.

4. Forged of Darkness.
During this period Ravenloft was coming out with a product every month. Those were great days. But something had to be filler and Forged of Darkness is the poster boy for filler product. Maybe a few good ideas but mostly forgetable stuff just not worthy of the purchase price. But hey, at the time we all knew it was filler so why dwell on it.

3. Dark Tales and Disturbing Legends.
Was this an attempt to sneak in adventures when White Wolf was not having it. Was this an attempt to just get some scary stories published. Who knows. The impression I got after reading Dark Tales was what the hell was that. The book is hard to read, boring, and overly complex. The adventures within are more trouble than they were worth. In a time when we all knew Ravenloft's days were number, I expected better from one of it's final products.

2. Howls in the Night.
Woe is Mordent. Long neglected, long forgotten, but wait here comes an adventure set in Mordent called Howls in the Night. What a let down. Hands down the worst Ravenloft Module by far mainly for being such a missed opportunity. What we hoped for was Gaz type module detailing its land and people. What we got was a short Choose your own Adventure type module about some dogs and a curse that could have taken place anywhere there was a swamp. I could go on cursing this product but I don't want to get mad.

1. Champions of Darkness.
I could do a full page essay on why this product sucks eggs. I could go on about how the freelance writers didn't know jack about Ravenloft. I could go on about what a souless read this book is. I could go on and on. But all I have to do is mention the three most vile words known to Ravenloft fans. Sheriff von Zarovich. UGH!

Thats all for today folks. Join me next time when I ramble my two cents about the top 5 best Ravenloft products.

I guess we do not have the same taste all the time.

Please spare the bogeymen from DT&DL. Also, the time warp adventure is fun. I DMed it and the players loved it.

Howls in the Night? I had a lot of fun too DMing this one, and my players too. The ending scene is great.

Joël

Isn't that the one with Mother Fury in it?

Yeah, I'm with Joel... Howls in the Night is a cute little quest. Very thematic and atmospheric. It's Mordent, it's a ghost story. What more could you ask for. I could make a list of just the worst RL modules and it wouldn't crack the top 5. Thoughts of Darkness, anyone? A Light in the Belfry? Die Vecna Die?

Also, I like that DT&DL was "an attempt to sneak in adventures when White Wolf was not having it." It was hit and miss, but more hits than misses.

Also, I disagree that the novels would dominate the list. Death of a Darklord is the only really terrible one. Most are great, IMHO, and the rest range from mediocre to good.

Gonzoron of the FoS wrote:Die Vecna Die?

Even that, I had fun DMing it. It was a killer adventure (and fun, not just lethal).

It's biggest problem: it's not Ravenloft! Only about a third. So it shouldn't be in this list. The rest was high fantasy. The scenario is going in strange direction (the Sigil part!), but overall the players liked it.

Joël

tarlyn wrote:Isn't that the one with Mother Fury in it?

Nope, that CotN:W.

Dark Tales is a matter of taste and it left a bad taste with me and one can argue the point. Howls in the Night is not so much the adventures itself. I have ran the adventure and had fun with it. It was more about the missed opportunity. At that time Mordent had not been flesh out and it really needed to be fleshed out. The modules tended to do that. The only legacy from Howls in the Night is a sentence in the Mordent Gaz.

Thoughts of Darkness gets a bad rap. It may not be the most playable adventure but it adds alot to the lore of Ravenloft. It also seved to be a Gaz on Bluetspur which very little was known about it at the time. I would argue that it's legacy is pretty good. It gave us the Brotherhood, The God-Brain, Lysa von Zarovich, among other things.

If you're going to judge products on wasted potential, then the Ravenloft Player's Handbook definitely needs to be on the list, and arguably Secrets of the Dread Realms. And really, no mention of Heroes of Light, A Light in the Belfry or the Grim Harvest adventures?

I actually like Forged of Darkness as a quirky little product--the hands are delightfully ghoulish, the tables for random magic item quirks are the kind of thing that Next is now trying to do over 15 years later, and the list of 'presumably destroyed' items from the Black Vault is one of those things that really sparked my imagination. Plus, the hourglass of souls gives us a look into the lost potential of the Grim harvest.

woodsdarkman wrote:Dark Tales is a matter of taste and it left a bad taste with me and one can argue the point. Howls in the Night is not so much the adventures itself. I have ran the adventure and had fun with it. It was more about the missed opportunity. At that time Mordent had not been flesh out and it really needed to be fleshed out. The modules tended to do that.

Agreed that Dark Tales is a bit hit-or-miss, although the parts that I like (Ashington Manor and To Honor and Obey) I really really like, so I don't think I would ever include it on a worst product list.

Definitely disagree about Howls from the Night; I think it was one of the best adventures for the setting (and transplants well into other domains or settings if you're not playing in Ravenloft, unlike say The Evil Eye or Circle of Darkness, both of which are fantastic but very closely tied to the specific campaign world). Also, Mordent had been fleshed out fully well before Howls... granted, as it appeared in 579 BC, but it was to a striking level of detail to the point that most of the population of Mordentshire received names (and even if the we're dealing with descendents now, the maps of Heather House and Gryphon Hill work just as well now as they did in I10).

For poor adventures, I would place Adam's Wrath on the low end of quality as well. It tried to expand Lamordia, but an awful lot of the inclusions fall into the "why?" category, in a large part because they were trying to enforce a very poor plot. The ideas are workable, but the overall combined product comes off as ''meh,'' and if they really wanted to go gazetteer style, they should have focused on Ludendorf or Neufurchtenburg rather than the Monastery and the Aubrecker estate.

I don't think Mordent had been fleshed out really well. Nowhere near the level of Kartakass. And I10 was not so easy to get a hold of in those days. I am not so hard on Adam's Wrath. Yeah it could have gone in a different direction but it was a compainion piece to the Van Ritchen Golems Guide.
The Grim Harvest series is universally panned but one can not ignore the impact it had on Ravenloft. A Light in the Belfry is the crazy experiment which was thankfully never tried again but did provide plenty of info on the Shadowborn legend. Heroes of Light is much better than Champions of Darkness and I fell actually has some worth.
Secrets of Dread Realms could have been on the list especially after it was rendered useless by the Gaz 's. But that would be too easy and we all know troubled history with it being White Wolfs just starting the Ravenloft line and the decisions that were made. That was more of a company blunder than a bad product.

For me, the most disappointing Ravenloft products are the ones that didn't get made.

The "S" series non-Core Gazetteers, and the Ebonacht novel trilogy.

http://www.flamesrising.com/cover-screaming-tower/

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Expedition to Castle Ravenloft or Masque of the Red Death by White-Wolf (may they both rot in obscurity). Biggest wastes of money ever.

The Hyskosa's Hexad adventures were so confusing and sometimes contradictory I thank Gonzoron and others for Mistipedia telling us what the signs were and the gist of the adventures involved. I used to have them in e-format, but they're either lost amidst hundreds (literally!) of 3.5" floppies or deleted. Those wouldn't be a big loss, but the Dark Sun books...time to fire up the ancient machine that can read floppies.

May I bring up a scar long since forgotten?
Blood and Iron: Warriors of Ravenloft

The video games and Red Death series were not considered. They are not "really" Ravenloft.
Expedition to Castle Ravenloft is also not Ravenloft. Just some piece of trash that I pretend never was made.
I'm surprised one product has not been mentioned or asked why it was not on the list. The Forgotten Terror. Did I goof or is it number 6. Perhaps I like it.

woodsdarkman wrote:I'm surprised one product has not been mentioned or asked why it was not on the list. The Forgotten Terror. Did I goof or is it number 6. Perhaps I like it.

The Forgotten Terror was indeed... bad. I remember a comment in the Secrets of the Kargatane reviews section that the Forgotten Realms lead-in (Castle Spulzeer) was actually more appropiate to Ravenloft than TFT. I tend to agree with that statement, even though Castle Spulzeer sometimes went a bit over the top with the gory scenes (see the ghostly vision of the perverse party where elves are eaten alive )

As for those already listed, Book of Crypts definitively left me a "Meh..." impression after reading it.