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If the music industry had developed along the same lines as role-playing had, it would look very much like a world in which every new band's ambition was to remake Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band. Not to innovate from it, or to reinterpret it through a dramatically different lens, or to take the next step forward and make something new using it as a base; no, the overall intention would be to produce something that sounded almost exactly like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but with different instruments and maybe a dfifferent singer. Hip-hop, country, metal, ambient, death metal, prog rock, emo - there'd be a little of that. But everybody who listened to music would have their first project be a remake of something that's already been done just fine. You wouldn't even get an attempt to replicate Abbey Road or Let It Be, because, after all, they didn't listen to those albums first.
I can live with Castles & Crusades because Castles & Crusades is an attempt to deliberately appeal to a nostalgic audience; it's not promoting itself as a direct competitor to D&D so much as a way to get New Coke long after New Coke was discontinued. I, myself, don't own Castles & Crusades, but I did get a chance to review Tainted Lands thanks to DriveThruRPG's reviewer program.
And it's just tragic. It's a clumsy, adolescent attempt to remake Ravenloft; there's a weird land that physically taints those within it (check), has portals that drop you into its center (check), has weird mists that come out of said portals (check), is wall to wall with undead (check), has a race of pseudo-Gypsies who travel in clans (check). However, it's poorly written and edited, mechanically sketchy, and has some of the worst advice for running horror that I've ever seen. In short, it's a pretty major failure, and not worth your money.
First: Tainted Lands reads a lot like a bright thirteen-year-old's campaign notes, and it's edited - and, I'm guessing, playtested - to about the same standard. First off, it adds on two entirely new attributes to the core of a game that's lasted for approximately thirty years without getting beyond the classic six. These attributes only function within the Tainted Lands, so you create a rules situation where the number of attributes that your character has wiggles around depending on your physical location - it's like having Dexterity in one location, but Perception and Agility in another. Worse, the two attributes function to jam even more special powers up the player character's butts, so that there's never a chance of the characters feeling that they don't have a minor arsenal of powers at their disposal in what's supposed to be a horror game.
You're supposed to pick either supernatural or psychic as a primary attribute - but the two attributes can't be equal, for no particular reason given within the text. Picking supernatural allows you to control and dispel undead - further weakening any fear of the undead, as a random encounter with the skeletons may wind up creating free reinforcements for the party - while picking psychic allows you to resist charm/suggestion/hold effects as you level up. This is just a sampling of the lack of balance. For instance, at 5th level, with Psychic as your primary attribute, you can cast Dimension Door once per day. If you have Supernatural, you only take half damage from physical damage from the undead at 7th level - and this is just a sampling. These powers feel like they were added in to assuage player whining, rather than out of game balance; they damage game balance, they upset the caster/fighter ability list, and they for damn sure mess with the atmosphere of horror that Tainted Lands is supposed to be about. I mean, this is just a brief sampling of the problems that the two new attributes occur; it should have been the editor's job to proof it for balance and theme, but that didn't happen.
Four new character classes add a touch of levity. For instance, the Metals Masters kills the undead and then make weapons from them, but - well, let me see if I can explain this: You pick a new kind of undead at each level, which gives a 1 to strike / 3 to damage per level. However, you have to have all of your weapons on your person in order to allow them to retain that bonus, creating the kind of weapons-shop-on-two-feet effect that you used to see parodied in articles about encumbrance. I also can't tell if the bonus is applied across the board - in other words, having seven different weapons that have 7 to strike and 21 damage to each particular kind of undead at 7th level - or if each weapon is levelled up separately, so that your first weapon is 7/ 21 and your latest is 1/ 3. It does accurately reflect heroic fictional characters like Elric, who would bring a small weapons shop with him into battle and dick around picking the right one from his golf bag for half an hour before actually engaging in battle. ("Let's see, a penaggalan - kind of like a vampire, but I suppose it could also be a sort of ghost, so - caddy, hand me my 8 Bohemian Ear Spoon Against Ghosts.")
The Portal Keeper is another interesting character class in that you can actually find spots within the writeup where the authors forgot to replace "rogue" with "Portal Keeper" in the description of the abilities. Just to dick over anybody who chose to be a rogue, the Portal Keeper has a bunch of rogue abilities, but is a spellcaster like a wizard, neatly usurping the rogue's role within the party and making his presence in the party redundant. The Portal Keeper also has the ability to create secret doors by sacrificing a gold bar (1,000 GP) or a blue diamond (5,000 GP) to cast a spell which, essentially, creates a secret door in a wall. I'll bet you that a thousand gold pieces lets you buy a lot of dwarven craftsmen - or buy the goblins to whip the dwarven craftsmen to make the secret door - but I guess that makes sense, and so must be diligently excluded from the Tainted Lands.Oh! It also costs you a permanent hit point, so that's an extra reason never to use that spell ever.
I should also note that as a fourth level spell, the Portal Keeper can destroy a Tainted Lands portal and ensures that a Tainted Lands portal can't be created within a fifty-mile radius of that spot. In a more rational game, this might be the goal of an entire campaign - this is a fourth level spell. In a clumsy attempt at balance, the character classes have their experience levels doubled if they step outside of the Tainted Lands, but that's easily fixed by never leaving the Tainted Lands.
I should also note that one of the playable races, available at first level, is the honest to god vampire. At first level, you're strutting around with a good chunk of the vampire's basic abilites - Dominate, Blood Drain, Energy Drain, Gaseous and Alternate Form, Children of the Night and Spider Climb - and only loses his powers when exposed to sunlight, as opposed to burning alive. I should note that most of the abilities above would take a good chunk of experience - maybe a year of play - to give a Vampire: The Requiem vampire these abilities - Dominate, Animalism, Potence and Protean - but you, a first level vampire in the Tainted Lands, get 'em for free. It's pretty ridiculous.
The GM's guide offers some of the worst advice on running a horror game that I've ever seen. It's really difficult to create an atmosphere of horror in a game where a monster that would terrify the living shit out of a CoC investigator is casually chopped down and turned into magical components; it's even harder when your characters are armed to the teeth with eight different kinds of magic. Tainted Lands suggests that to run a horror game, you want to emphasize helplessness, a sense of the unknown and unexplained, put on increasing pressure and have a powerful villain.
I would argue that running a horror game involves none of those things, and that horror has to be built up from the ground - and that doing it in a game like D&D might be a fool's errand - but that's an essay for another day. Consider, however, the execution of their advice. We're told that in order to enforce a sense of helplessness, the GM should taunt the characters if they complain about being helpless, and that they should be told that there's absolutely no way out of the Tainted Lands - then, once they do a little research, they'll find out that there are ways to get out of the Tainted Lands. First, you never want to give the players the impression that their characters are helpless, because it presents them with no option - they'll just say "Okay, well, there's nothing we can do, why are we playing?" If you provide them with a series of increasingly unlikely escapes and allow them to take a shot at each, that reinforces the horror, because then you have the chance at making it out - look at The Descent for a perfect example of how this works. If you make them helpless, they'll just get pissed off and quit. But even more seriously, telling them one thing and then allowing them to realize that you're not telling the truth destroys your credibility, and that's something that should never be pissed away. The fact that the book actually advises you to do this indicates that the authors don't know what they're talking about.
Or take the idea of things unknown: One of the suggestions for things that might weird out the players is the idea that a good guy vampire is guarding a village (in a game where the vampire is offered as a choice in the player's guide), or the idea that they're exploring a continent shaped like a skull. I don't know if you read Achewood - and you should be - but if you've seen the strip where Lie Bot terrifies a five-year old Phillippe with the suggestion that there's a skeleton in a nearby closet, you'll have a rough idea of the unknown that the authors are thinking of. To keep pressure on the characters, it's suggested that the characters be subjected to all kinds of damage, but any attempt at actually disadvantaging the players is destroyed by a parallel suggestion that the characters be given all kinds of treasure in order to compensate for the level of the threat. That has nothing to do with horror, and more to do with munchkinism. And a powerful villain only makes the players engage in the metagame of trying to figure out how to kill him - send Dracula against them, and they'll be loaded down with all kinds of anti-Dracula devices. Neuter them, and they'll get the feeling that you're just jerking them around; let them keep them all, and Dracula will last a round, tops.
A lot of the suggestions feel like reskinned D&D by a bunch of fourteen-year olds.. Plot ideas revolve around the PCs being sent on various FedEx quests - wizards needs three artifacts, a lich geases the characters to go out and get some fancy jewel, ogres travel in a wind-blown wagon train and have centuries of treasure inside. A suggestion of how to throw the unexpected at the players consists of hinting heavily at wolves, then throwing skeletons at the party instead, or having a bunch of skeletons turn out to be the work of an evil human wizard instead. At points, it's almost unintentionally comic - for instance, a section on wave attacks consists of basically five variations on "One monster attacks. Then four monsters attack. Then a whole bunch of monsters attack." A suggestion about keeping hit points a secret is possibly a good one, but it creates an enormous complication in the form of reducing attributes as characters lose hit points. For instance, at 50% hit points, your character will have lost four points of Dexterity, four points of Constitution, and a point of Strength. All of your rolls relating to those attributes now have to be recalculated to take those into account. It's utterly ridiculous.
To finish out the comparison to Ravenloft, the Tainted Lands and their portals are apparently created and/or maintained by seven liches. Rather than Ravenloft's tortured attempts to shove the square peg of gothic fiction into the round hole of D&D, the liches are...well, just liches, without anything particularly interesting about 'em. The description of various locations around the Tainted Lands sound very much like somebody's campaign notes, complete with NPCs that were cool when the DM came up with them - Don o' the Staff, Tom o' the Sword, the Emerald Archer, the Black Mage - but again, if you're reminded of the world you built when you were fourteen, you're not far off.
As there's no possible chance that anybody's going to play in this campaign world, I hesitate to describe the section on buffing the undead, but what the hell: Rather than creating new and interesting undead, the books gives you a random table to roll on in order to give some buff to the undead - fire breath, a charm attack, poison, gas that spurts out when you hit the undead, that kind of thing. One of them is amusing in that it suggests that the GM light an evergreen candle at the table and have greater skeletons attack the party all night, so that "when they smell evergreen, they will always think of the terrible monsters and know a little fear". I do not suggest giving your players a sense memory of your attempts to scare them, because you will see them snickering every time they smell evergreen and then you'll have to beat them up.
Weirdly enough, the art in this thing is really good - I mean, not great, but it's very solid, and conveys a generally spooky atmosphere. It's not particularly inspired, and a lot of the compositions tend to be conglomerations of spooky things rather than attempting to convey a particular event, but it's competently executed.
Lollygag Inn is included as an adventure, intended to give the GM a way to get the characters into the Tainted Lands. It's essentially an inn - built out of an old castle, apparently - in the middle of nowhere, which turns out to be so packed with the undead that I'm amazed that they don't come shooting out of the windows and doors in pressurized streams, like EZ-Cheese. There's several suggestions to make the players feel what their characters are feeling - for instance, putting red-dyed toothpaste on their hands to make them feel the tingle of zombie spores, or giving them apple vinegar to drink to show them how their drinks have turned bad, or rattling chains to represent the ghostly chains of some wraiths. It's not a terrible idea, if you don't mind the players simulating what it's like to have your gas tank sugared at some point in the near future.
In any case, the players will go from room to room, a different type of undead in each - and this while it's described as an inn, it's really a castle - encountering vampires, skeletons, night hags, ghasts, zombies, and usually in quantities of ten. Don't worry too much, though, because there's huge amounts of treasure available to them once they win. There's even a room where rows of giant rats float in midair, in rows, sleeping - you can't help but to think of a giant rat supermarket, like they just got dropped off by some spectral deliveryman. In fact, you could paint Lollygag Inn as a gigantic supernatural supermarket; maybe them bump into a lich with a shopping cart full of bored-looking ghouls. (In fact, that gives me an idea - what would a supermarket for the powerful undead look like? - but I'll have to write that adventure later.)
It has to be read to be believed, really. I mean, create an inn, check. Put a monster in every room, check. Give them lots of treasure for killing each undead, check. This is a published product. Troll Lords Games put their names behind this.
There are a few creepy images. One rooms is full of dismembered body parts floating in midair, some of which gently drift towards the characters and attempt to grab at them. (I'm reminded of one of the terminals from Marathon: Infinity - "Seven hundred and sixty one armless and legless corpses float inconspicuously around the inside of hangar ninety six." ) Another involves a steady flood of centipedes out of one hole in the wall and into another, like a gently chittering stream of chitin and rhythmically flailing legs. The adventure also notes that the players will likely complain about how tough the adventure is, and that the GM should tell them that this is part of being in a horror game, but difficult combat encounters have nothing to do with horror per se; in fact, giving them tough challenges just reinforces their confidence when they beat it, which in turn makes it that much more difficult to scare them.
It's a nostalgic product, in a sense; it's a throwback to the first time that you wrote an adventure, or the time that you came up with something that you thought was pretty cool but which was really a copy of something else in your own words. There's nothing particularly wrong with that. But the problem here is that the authors of this are charging money for that, and once you do that, you become a professional - and the work done here is not professional. It's not worth the $20 you'll spend for it as a PDF, and it's surely not worth $30 as a physically printed product.
In my review on DriveThruRPG, I was under the impression that the original Ravenloft PDFs were still available in PDF format, which no longer seems to be the case; that's a shame. I think that it would be easier--and cheaper--to simply create your own gothic world in the style of Ravenloft than to pay somebody else to do it for you with less competence.
-Darren MacLennan
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