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Dark Tales & Disturbing Legends is a supplement for the Ravenloft D20 setting. It's supposedly 3.5 compatible, although I'm not personally familiar enough with the differences to tell for sure.
Each chapter opens with a different piece of fiction, then describes how to run it as an adventure on its own, or as part of an adventure of your own.
To Inherit Eternity
The first tale is about the death of a wealthy, eccentric and (according to rumor) very long lived nobleman. Or rather, it's about the auctioning off of his personal collection of strange artifacts to a select group of bidders. One of the newcomers is actually a murderer, come to seize a particular artifact by force, and the author goes to some effort to try and hide the murderer's identity.
Unfortunately, while the plot has potential, the execution is poor. The initial narrative section uses too many coincidences and has obvious holes in the plot. In particular, after a couple of accidental deaths (including a guy who just happens to stumble backwards onto something spiky) I was really hoping that the author would reveal that the villain had telekinetic powers or that some powerful magical curse was at work. No, the characters are just really clumsy.
Worse, the narrative suffers from the author's indecision... sometimes he writes like the PCs aren't present in the story at all and other times they're unnamed and undescribed characters who are nevertheless doing important things. I think it would have come out better if it had been written as though the PCs were completely absent, rather than go through this awkward "referring to them without identifying them" bit.
So, the overall plot (which, as you'd guess from the title, involves the secret of the late nobleman's longevity) has potential, but I'd want to basically rewrite the sequence of events from scratch. Incidentally, any serious mystery novel fans are going to see right through the forms of misdirection included... I knew who the bad guy was long before he was revealed in the story.
Also, there is at least one unbalancingly potent magical item that doesn't get any stats at all... and it's the villain's secret weapon that he breaks out at the climax of the story. It's not so much the implied railroading that bugs me (the item, of course, gets destroyed in the story) but the fact that the GM will have to just plain make up stats what it does for the big fight at the end.
In short, a fairly poor adventure where you'd be better off stealing the bits you liked to use yourself elsewhere.
The Curse of Ashington Manor
The second entry, though, does a lot to make up for the first one. You get a lot more game information and predefined stats for the NPCs, so it's far more playable just as is.
The premise involves a foul murder in the distant past that has caused echoes... every 17 years, the dark events repeat themselves with whatever unlucky unfortunates happen to be occupying the Manor at the time. When the PCs find the place, it'll be a burnt out ruin in "normal time", but once they get trapped in the curse, they'll find the environment changing randomly from one time period to another. The only way out involves changing the sequence of events in at least two time periods.
This is a very atmospheric premise; the Manor, you see, was originally just that... the manor house of a wealthy nobleman. After his brutal death, it was turned into a temple of healing... until the curse caused the priests and their guards to turn on each other. Then it became an inn of ill repute... and after that ended in bloody murder, it became a sanitarium... and finally it burnt and only ruins remain.
So while the PCs are poking around the old ruins investigating the mystery, they could suddenly find themselves wandering the halls of a sanitarium (an old style sanitarium that is, where they're good at confining people and not so hot at curing them) and being questioned by curious orderlies. While being escorted to see the head doctor, the place might change into a bustling inn and now the guards are taking them to see the innkeeper. Or when they are taken to a cleric for magical healing, the whole place might turn back into a burnt out ruin again, leaving them alone and still wounded.
We get a full map of the Manor, and each room's entry discusses what the room looks like and what will be there during each time period. Some clues are only available in certain time period, so the party will need to investigate all of them. Since the whole place changes at once (with only "real" people remaining unchanged), you don't have to worry about having PCs caught in separate time periods.
All in all, I thought this was a niftily executed and atmospheric horror adventure and one that could readily be applied to even a modern-day campaign with enough changes. There are a few bits I'd probably change or tweak... like the one foe with a "usable once per month death ray", but overall it's very good.
The Brood of Blutkalte
The third chapter basically puts the party up against an entire family of wandering serial killers. It includes a lot of advice on running a scary serial killer game, such as making sure that the PCs can't gang up on individual foes and ways to split up the party ("No! Never split up the party in a horror game!").
I'm not sure how much I can discuss about this one without giving away the plot. Each of the villains kills people in different ways with different techniques and different weaknesses. There's one overarching thing that unifies them all, though... and, while nifty, it's a bit of a stretch of your suspension of disbelief.
Hm. A big spoiler (highlight to reveal the bit secret):
Noises in the Night
This one really isn't even an adventure as such... rather, it introduces a new kind of foe and gives suggestions for how the PCs could come into conflict with them.
One nice thing about these enemies is that only the most heartless of PCs could ignore their depredations... their primary prey is little children. The monsters are boogeymen, living embodyments of scary stories.
Of course, that makes doing away with them rather difficult. How exactly, do you kill a story?
Well, Noises in the Night goes over how it can be done (and man, it's difficult) and gives you writeups of 6 example boogeymen. There's also a fair bit of discussion of ways to use them as antagonists, quite possibly reoccuring ones.
There's the relatively inoffensive Bad Thing, a tiny scuttling horror that's a coward at heart. Mr. Fox may be the most dangerous (although far from the most powerful), appearing as a charming and personable man with a bag full of toys... little lethal gifts for unsuspecting children. Alligator Lenny is a huge and monstrous ogre that haunts the sewers while the dreaded Scissorman stalks little children who disobey their parents. The last two are Monsieur and Madame Croquemitaine, obviously inspired by Jack Spratt and his wife... Monsieur can only eat the lean meat of little children, while his wife can only eat the fat.
It's a quite appropriately horrific assortment. Given that they all possess the Eyes of Innocence power (which means that only little children can see them as they are), protecting a marked child from a boogeyman could be quite a dangerous task.
To Honor and Obey
The last "adventure" is again more of an adventure seed than a real adventure. The basic premise involves the use of a horrific magic potion that rips out the imbiber's soul and leaves their body as a docile servant for whoever fed them the potion.
There's a plot involving a family of depraved nobles and an upcoming marriage between their eldest son and the daughter of a wealthier but non-noble family, but the real villain here is the "Voodan" priest who is selling the potions. In fact, one of the suggestions for using the plot involves having the events of the opening fiction be set far in the past, with the PCs trying to deal with the ghosts of those who were slain.
A good part of the chapter is a discussion of the Voodan religion and the Loas that they serve. The author readily admits that the religion is inspired by its real-world equivalent, but includes a disclaimer that it's not meant to be an accurate representation.
We get a Voodan character class, which is actually kind of interesting. They can draw divine spells from the lists available to Clerics, Rangers, Druids and Bards (bardic spells are considered divine when cast by a voodan), but must specialize in two classes of magic (the exact set you can take depends on which Loa you take as a patron). Their most nifty power is probably the ability to make gris-gris, spell tokens that can be given to other people and used to cast the spell that has been placed in it. The voodan can't use that spell slot until the gris-gris is used up or wears off and the spell will be weaker than if he cast the spell himself, so it's not as unbalancing of a power as it might otherwise be.
We get short descriptions of the 11 major Loa in the region, so your voodan character will at least get a variety of choices. These range from the benign (the Maiden of the Swamp holds domain over healing magic) to the neutral (Brahmbei the Oracle can direct you towards your destiny, for good or ill) to the outright malignant (Ohuwaghnn the Serpent King yearns to destroy human civilization so that the wild beasts will rule the land once more). It's basically a standard pantheon of deities, but a nice one.
I didn't care for this adventure as much as some, but it's not bad.
Overall Summary
So, is Dark Tales and Disturbing Legends for you? Well, of the 5 chapters, I liked The Curse of Ashington Manor the best. It's also the most complete actual adventure and would require the least additional preparation to run.
Noises in the Night is good and very atmospheric. I liked their example set of boogeymen, and it's obviously easy for a GM to devise new ones if necessary.
The Brood of Blutkalte is probably the second easiest to run and it does have an amusing plotline. The PCs will have to do some investigation before figuring out what's going on as there are several layers of mystery to be explored.
To Honor and Obey is decent and gives us a nifty, vodoun (voodoo) based character class. It's basically a kind of priest with a few nifty abilities added and its own pantheon of Loas.
To Inherit Eternity I consider the worst of the lot. It could definitely use better editing and a clearer focus. The giant quest-for-immortality that the PCs could conceivably end up going on seemed more interesting to me than the adventure described in the opening narrative.
Overall, the book is pretty high quality, although I did notice some editing errors (an amusing one: in the opening fiction for The Brood of Blutkalte, the killer is listed as one of the dead victims at the end). I'm not enough of a D20 expert to comment on their use of the rules, especially since I don't own 3.5.
It looks like they've tried to use the same artist for all of the illustrations in each chapter, giving each one it's own distinct look. A very nice touch. The art itself is high quality grayscale illustrations and adds a lot to the text. The pics are usually quite appropriately placed, as well. I particularly liked the "group portrait" of the six boogeymen in the back.
Well, when I first started reading it, I thought this book might be getting a 2 overall... certainly that was all I could give To Inherit Eternity. But the other chapters were better and I came out with some ideas that I'll probably use in campaigns of my own even though I don't play much D20... good, spooky adventures can be applied to any fantasy setting. It's hard to come up with a good rating, since there were some bits I'd call 5/4 and some I'd call 2/3. I'm going to call it 4/4 in the end, since the art was good and most of the chapters were good. The editing could use work, though.
