The Inside Scoop on Gaming

I've been trying so, so hard not to compare apples to oranges. When the product is Raveloft, and you're quite familiar with Call of Cthulhu and assorted supplements, the temptation is nigh-well overwhelming.

And I suppose that I shouldn't resist too hard. Both of them deal with horror, but their approach - and quality - is light years apart from each other. Call of Cthulhu, while it does have its share of cliches, has always pretty much set the bar for horror role-playing; it also has some truly innovative ideas from authors that don't adhere to the standard Lovecraftian cliches of evil monsters and here's-how-the-monster-works-oops-I'm-dead NPCs. Ravenloft, on the other hand, seems to work purely around the idea of Gothic cliches and railroading, with the only shocks coming through heavy-handed GM fiat and denial of information that any other game would allow you to get. And, to boot, the adventures don't transcend their source material - they just ape it, clumsily, with the result feeling like you're holding a dungeon crawl through the setting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. You can do horror based in a Gothic world, but you have to be intimately familiar with your source material and aware of the limitations that'll be placed upon you by the setting that you're using - and, in The Book of Crypts' case, neither seems to be true.

Just for a good straw man to beat the hell out of - and spoil, so be warned - let's examine the first chapter, Bride of Mordenheim. The characters meet a pretty girl who's searching for her aunt, join up with her - or not, which ends the adventure - and find a mansion in the distance, out of which an eerie glow and occasionally lightning emanates. Quick quiz: What famous Gothic novel is this going to be based on?

So the adventurers run up to the hill, meet Victor Mordenheim, sack out in his place for the night, then hopefully wake up in time to find Victor trying to transfer the mind of his dead-but-still-living wife into Katrina's noggin. If they don't stop him, the experiment fails and Katrina dies, with Victor's wife still in the rotting corpse. That's the entire adventure, and if you feel cheated, you're not alone. Even worse, you can't kill either the mad scientist or his wife, since the powers of Raveloft - I.E TSR fiat - want to keep him alive so that he's constantly tormented. The player characters really have nothing to do with the adventure; they're just along for the ride. And that's extroardinarily bad for a game; players get fed up and quit pretty quick when that happens. I pity the poor rookie GM who stumbles onto this and thinks that it's a good way to play.

Other adventures aren't as bad, but they all feature railroading as a central tenet of the game. Call of Cthulhu, I should note, tries very hard to avoid railroading, replacing it instead with complete character freedom - including the ability to get killed in a bloody quick hurry. You can go check out those mysterious screams and chanting in the abandoned garden, but if you're not prepared - both beforehand and to run - then you're going to arrrive back at your place as a fast-moving cloud of blood and body parts.

The structure of the adventures kills them. In order:

Blood in Moondale has probably the most potential of all of the adventures in the book, dealing with mysterious killings in a small town that's been buried in snow; something is killing the townspeople, and the PCs are conscripted by the local guard to help fight them. However, there's railroading even here - the PCs must be separated from going on patrol with two prospective victims, for example. The murder mystery is okay, but there's only a few clues leading to the perpetrator, and creating new clues on the fly may be difficult. The setting here is what really caught my eye, but the adventure itself is bulked out with lengthy "read this to the players" dialogues that just seem to waste space.

The Dark Minstrel is a weird one; the characters are trapped in an enclosed space with a cursed noble who's music room has a time curse placed upon it. There's some nice researching oppurtunities for the players, but the scenario's answer ultimately revolves around Breaking Something Real Good, rather than working through the curse's own internal logic. In addition, there's a lot of poetry, some of it amateur, and psuedo-elegant prose that may cause more amusement among the players than appreciation.

The Cedar Chest treads a line between being effective and being simply goofy. A hunt for a murderer, it has some ham-handed touches - the notes given to the players are fairly blunt, and the notes from the murderer will inspire laughter rather than dread - but it also has a nice touch in terms of characterization. It's a little simple, and the way that you discover the mystery's solution is way too pat, but it could be punched up a few notches to provide a genuine scare or two.

Corrupted Innocents, in which a cute little girl travels with the part....ah, hell, the title gives it away from the beginning. It's got some nice touches, one of them designed to pitch one player against the others, and some obvious dream sequences. But there's not a whole lot to do - while the characters do have some pitched battles versus some monsters, the adventure's resolution may rest on a single character's fighting ability. It's okay, but in this case, okay just doesn't quite cut it.

The Rite of Terror is the weirdest adventure in the crop, occurring in the Forgotten Realms and not making a whole lot of sense. It's got a maddeningly screwed up layout, where settings are described point by point, with NPC encounters at each location. However, the result of this is that you can't really get a grasp on the adventure as a whole; the central conflict of the adventure is a dungeon described midway through the book, and the central idea running the whole thing is skimmed over. However, there are some nice, subtle clues about the nature of the bad guys, and while other clues are really, really blunt, you could run this adventure without a whole lot of trouble. You might want to make sure that the players and/or characters are familiar with the cosmology of the Forgotten Realms, though, since it 's an important plot point.

The Man With Three Faces is probably the best of all the scenarios, capturing the same paranoia and uncertainty as some Call of Cthulhu scenarios - it reminded me of "Within You Without You", from Pagan Publishing, and that's high praise. Everything shifts around the PCs on a nonstop basis, and the characters won't immediately be able to figure out what's going on unless they observe carefully and talk, rather than slapping something around. It's not perfect - the townspeople are a little monodimensional, and there's a witch-burning scene that seems to not fit with the rest of the adventure - but it catches the dislocation and fear involved with a good horror scenario.

The Living Crypt has a single interesting monster, and that's about it - it feels a lot more like a trap to give the characters a permanent adversary rather than a decent adventure. The shortness of length of this adventure is kind of ridiculous, especially since there's a lot of wasted material on the central villain's past - information that's hardly needed by any stretch of the imagination. You could do a lot better with the adventure's featured monster, I'd imagine.

Death's Cold Laughter is yet another story about somebody wicked who wound up getting his comeuppance through some extravagant magickal means - however, the player characters won't find that out until the very end. The characterization seems a bit silly, and the players have to wind up in a particular situation in order for the adventure to proceed; that won't be hard, given one of the ludicrous laws that this particular part of the country has, but it's still a bit of railroading. The central encounter, with a mad jester, is going to be more painful than scary - every time the jester answers a question, he tells a painfully lame joke. The adventure is about the townsfolk being made to do something mandatory that should be fun, and that reminds me of this adventure.

Overall, I'd say that you could easily skip this book, and, if other books are similar, the entire line as a whole. The Man With Three Faces is a neat little adventure, but the rest of the book's good points are few and far in between.

-Darren MacLennan

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Book of Crypts
Author: Dale "Slade" Henson with J. Robert King Category: game Company/Publisher: TSR Line: Ravenloft Cost: $11.95 Page count: 96? ISBN: 1-56706-142-3 SKU: RR2 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 01/04/00. Genre tags: Historical Horror Vampire Gothic	I've been trying so, so hard not to compare apples to oranges. When the product is Raveloft, and you're quite familiar with Call of Cthulhu and assorted supplements, the temptation is nigh-well overwhelming. And I suppose that I shouldn't resist too hard. Both of them deal with horror, but their approach - and quality - is light years apart from each other. Call of Cthulhu, while it does have its share of cliches, has always pretty much set the bar for horror role-playing; it also has some truly innovative ideas from authors that don't adhere to the standard Lovecraftian cliches of evil monsters and here's-how-the-monster-works-oops-I'm-dead NPCs. Ravenloft, on the other hand, seems to work purely around the idea of Gothic cliches and railroading, with the only shocks coming through heavy-handed GM fiat and denial of information that any other game would allow you to get. And, to boot, the adventures don't transcend their source material - they just ape it, clumsily, with the result feeling like you're holding a dungeon crawl through the setting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. You can do horror based in a Gothic world, but you have to be intimately familiar with your source material and aware of the limitations that'll be placed upon you by the setting that you're using - and, in The Book of Crypts' case, neither seems to be true. Just for a good straw man to beat the hell out of - and spoil, so be warned - let's examine the first chapter, Bride of Mordenheim. The characters meet a pretty girl who's searching for her aunt, join up with her - or not, which ends the adventure - and find a mansion in the distance, out of which an eerie glow and occasionally lightning emanates. Quick quiz: What famous Gothic novel is this going to be based on? So the adventurers run up to the hill, meet Victor Mordenheim, sack out in his place for the night, then hopefully wake up in time to find Victor trying to transfer the mind of his dead-but-still-living wife into Katrina's noggin. If they don't stop him, the experiment fails and Katrina dies, with Victor's wife still in the rotting corpse. That's the entire adventure, and if you feel cheated, you're not alone. Even worse, you can't kill either the mad scientist or his wife, since the powers of Raveloft - I.E TSR fiat - want to keep him alive so that he's constantly tormented. The player characters really have nothing to do with the adventure; they're just along for the ride. And that's extroardinarily bad for a game; players get fed up and quit pretty quick when that happens. I pity the poor rookie GM who stumbles onto this and thinks that it's a good way to play. Other adventures aren't as bad, but they all feature railroading as a central tenet of the game. Call of Cthulhu, I should note, tries very hard to avoid railroading, replacing it instead with complete character freedom - including the ability to get killed in a bloody quick hurry. You can go check out those mysterious screams and chanting in the abandoned garden, but if you're not prepared - both beforehand and to run - then you're going to arrrive back at your place as a fast-moving cloud of blood and body parts. The structure of the adventures kills them. In order: Blood in Moondale has probably the most potential of all of the adventures in the book, dealing with mysterious killings in a small town that's been buried in snow; something is killing the townspeople, and the PCs are conscripted by the local guard to help fight them. However, there's railroading even here - the PCs must be separated from going on patrol with two prospective victims, for example. The murder mystery is okay, but there's only a few clues leading to the perpetrator, and creating new clues on the fly may be difficult. The setting here is what really caught my eye, but the adventure itself is bulked out with lengthy "read this to the players" dialogues that just seem to waste space. The Dark Minstrel is a weird one; the characters are trapped in an enclosed space with a cursed noble who's music room has a time curse placed upon it. There's some nice researching oppurtunities for the players, but the scenario's answer ultimately revolves around Breaking Something Real Good, rather than working through the curse's own internal logic. In addition, there's a lot of poetry, some of it amateur, and psuedo-elegant prose that may cause more amusement among the players than appreciation. The Cedar Chest treads a line between being effective and being simply goofy. A hunt for a murderer, it has some ham-handed touches - the notes given to the players are fairly blunt, and the notes from the murderer will inspire laughter rather than dread - but it also has a nice touch in terms of characterization. It's a little simple, and the way that you discover the mystery's solution is way too pat, but it could be punched up a few notches to provide a genuine scare or two. Corrupted Innocents, in which a cute little girl travels with the part....ah, hell, the title gives it away from the beginning. It's got some nice touches, one of them designed to pitch one player against the others, and some obvious dream sequences. But there's not a whole lot to do - while the characters do have some pitched battles versus some monsters, the adventure's resolution may rest on a single character's fighting ability. It's okay, but in this case, okay just doesn't quite cut it. The Rite of Terror is the weirdest adventure in the crop, occurring in the Forgotten Realms and not making a whole lot of sense. It's got a maddeningly screwed up layout, where settings are described point by point, with NPC encounters at each location. However, the result of this is that you can't really get a grasp on the adventure as a whole; the central conflict of the adventure is a dungeon described midway through the book, and the central idea running the whole thing is skimmed over. However, there are some nice, subtle clues about the nature of the bad guys, and while other clues are really, really blunt, you could run this adventure without a whole lot of trouble. You might want to make sure that the players and/or characters are familiar with the cosmology of the Forgotten Realms, though, since it 's an important plot point. The Man With Three Faces is probably the best of all the scenarios, capturing the same paranoia and uncertainty as some Call of Cthulhu scenarios - it reminded me of "Within You Without You", from Pagan Publishing, and that's high praise. Everything shifts around the PCs on a nonstop basis, and the characters won't immediately be able to figure out what's going on unless they observe carefully and talk, rather than slapping something around. It's not perfect - the townspeople are a little monodimensional, and there's a witch-burning scene that seems to not fit with the rest of the adventure - but it catches the dislocation and fear involved with a good horror scenario. The Living Crypt has a single interesting monster, and that's about it - it feels a lot more like a trap to give the characters a permanent adversary rather than a decent adventure. The shortness of length of this adventure is kind of ridiculous, especially since there's a lot of wasted material on the central villain's past - information that's hardly needed by any stretch of the imagination. You could do a lot better with the adventure's featured monster, I'd imagine. Death's Cold Laughter is yet another story about somebody wicked who wound up getting his comeuppance through some extravagant magickal means - however, the player characters won't find that out until the very end. The characterization seems a bit silly, and the players have to wind up in a particular situation in order for the adventure to proceed; that won't be hard, given one of the ludicrous laws that this particular part of the country has, but it's still a bit of railroading. The central encounter, with a mad jester, is going to be more painful than scary - every time the jester answers a question, he tells a painfully lame joke. The adventure is about the townsfolk being made to do something mandatory that should be fun, and that reminds me of this adventure. Overall, I'd say that you could easily skip this book, and, if other books are similar, the entire line as a whole. The Man With Three Faces is a neat little adventure, but the rest of the book's good points are few and far in between. -Darren MacLennan Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 2 (Sparse)