Review of The Vampire of Havena

The Vampire of Havena is a solo adventure for the Dark Eye RPG, a solid introductory into a setting and game system that is worth a look. I was taking some coursework over the summer and needed a break from my reading. With luck, I wasn't far from a local gaming store and spent time poking around, looking for a game I could play during my downtime in my hotel room, and finally, this 64 page book grabbed my attention.

First, let me just say I love solo adventures. In an era of nostalgia for the classics and a return of writing old school fantasy adventures, we could use more solo adventures. Learning how to play Basic D&D with the old Red Box via a simple, sweet solo adventure was a great way to get into the hobby. Ulisses deserves love for tossing some support behind a product like this and offering it up as a change of pace. I could definitely see a group using the Dark Eye RPG offer this up for someone new to the game or new to the hobby to get a taste of the experience.

Second, I do want to share that I backed the Dark Eye RPG on Kickstarter a year or two back, but while the game was interesting enough to back, I hadn't spent much time with it. So, this solo adventure offered a good chance to get acquainted.

What You Get

For about $20, you get a 64 page adventure that serves as both a basic introduction to the Dark Eye RPG and its sprawling world. The production values are excellent, full color artwork, a moody cover page with some kind of swashbuckler ogling or being ogled by a sinister shadow man, solid readable layout, and a nice glossy feel to the book. It just felt good to pick up and hold. Really, really solid production values overall.

How It Plays

The Vampire of Havena is set in the city of the same name. You play a rogue on a quick little jaunt around the city, getting tangled in some sinister stuff, and end up with a shot to be a hero. Along the way, the game teaches enough of the rules to deal with the situations that come up. The main mechanic is a D20 roll under the relevant skill kind of thing. Where it changes is that even an action like Climb ends up requiring three rolls - a roll under your hero's Courage, Agility, and Strength. His climbing skill then acts as a sort of pool of skill points which can be spent to turn a roll from a failure to a success, i.e. if you need a 10 to succeed and roll a 13, you can spend 3 to lower your roll. The explanations are straightforward - and if you have played any D20 game, it's not any sort of surprise. Obviously, if you don't have dice with you, it's a challenge - but we live in the internet age, so a dice roller online is a click or two away.

The story itself is not particularly groundbreaking, but it is fun enough to pick through once or twice. Your thief begins the story in a mad chase to get away from... well... someone. You end up in a combat with a "broad-shouldered, red-haired woman" (seriously) and are hopefully able to slink away into the fog to escape other pursuers. Then - the story shifts, going back in time to sort of catch you up to the moment of your rogue's flight out of danger. You discover a little more background, take some time to gather some information, of course, at a local tavern, and then return to the main quest. This leads your rogue into a warehouse to poke around, looking for some stolen documents. Unfortunately, things go awry - and your hero ends up running for their life. The rest of the adventure takes a couple of other surprise twists, leading you to the wrong side of town and ultimately ending up with a conflict with the villain of the story.

The book rounds itself out with a short introduction to the city and a bit more on how a rogue can be a hero. A 4 page character sheet concludes the book, other than maps of the city and one of the locations in the adventure.

I have seen creative things done with solo adventures, and the Vampire of Havena does tweak the sometimes rigid structure of going from one section to another. Some of the sections can be marked off, which means if you end up back to a section, you go in a different direction. Likewise, at least one section has noise markers - the more stealth rolls you fail, and the more likely your rogue gets caught sneaking around. This adds a bit to the playability, meaning you can go back to a section and see what else you might have missed.

Of course, despite that, this is a solo adventure, so there are limits. It was disappointing to play through one section multiple times and discover that there wasn't much to miss. The plot twist wasn't really surprising. And, there were few dead ends in the story, aka, "you have died". I'd prefer more, but you can't always get what you want.

I didn't get the sense either that there was enough in the adventure to make it bigger - to play it with multiple players or build something more out of it. You aren't going to buy this and be able to launch into a full Dark Eye RPG of your own. There just isn't enough of the game system here to fill in other blanks - but that's not the intent, of course.

Conclusion

Need a solo adventure? Want to try out the Dark Eye RPG? The Vampire of Havena is good enough as an introductory experience and a solid enough solo adventure in its own right. While it wasn't perfect, it would be great to toss into a backpack or suitcase on a long trip somewhere and potentially serve as a solid gift to a youngster interested in gaming. I hope Ulisses will make more solo adventures. I've got more coursework on the horizon, so I could use another adventure like it.