CLASSIC RAVENLOFT ADVENTURES: BOOK OF CRYPTS PART ONE

This is a short series for Halloween gaming, where I run the book of Crypts for players who haven't experienced 2nd edition Raveloft before.

 

Book of Crypts is an adventure anthology for Ravenloft 2E, released in 1991. It has been many years since I ran any of these adventures. There were three adventures I remember running pretty regularly from it: Bride of Mordenheim, which I used very often as an introductory adventure; Blood in Moondale and The Dark Minstrel.  When I've gone back to 2E Ravenloft in the past, I ran stuff like Feast of Goblyns and The Created (the module not the supplement). Because I wanted to do a campaign leading up to Halloween and I was hoping to give my players a glimpse into the history of this line from the 2E era, I thought it would be fun to run Book of Crypts entirely as written, on its own terms. If this goes well, I hope to do other adventures, like Castles Forlorn in the future. 

Book of Crypts was written by Dale Henson and J. Robert King (I loved his Ravenloft Novel Heart of Midnight when I was young). It was edited by Anne Brown, J. Robert King and Jean Rabe.

 

Another aspect of this short halloween campaign is I will be using the 2E revised PHB and DMG. Personally I prefer the 1989 edition, but that is difficult for my players to find (the revised PHB and DMG are readily available on Drivethru). This is a system I like going back to on occasion, because it was the main system I grew up playing (I played 1E for a few years prior to 2nd edition being released, but all through middle school and high school we played 2E).

 

ADVENTURE ONE: BRIDE OF MORDENHEIM

 

READING BRIDE OF MORDENHEIM 

The first adventure is Bride of Mordenheim and it was fun going back to something I haven't read in a long time. These are my initial thoughts reading through it this time around. 

 

There is also a short introduction on Fear and Horror at the start of the book, which I might get more into later as this is a key feature in many of the Ravenloft adventures (Feast of Goblyns has a similar section). These are just some initial observations. I will post again after I run it next week.

 

I used to run Bride of Mordenheim a lot. It is a very good introductory adventure (though it is meant for characters levels 2-4: so not an adventure suitable for 1st level characters). This definitely comes from a very different period in D&D history, and not all the books are the same, nor are all the adventures in this particular book the same in terms of adventure structure. Bride of Mordenheim is very much about getting into the action and there is an adventure that is going to unfold.

One of the things I like about this opening section and the paragraphs that follow is they do a good job, at least for me, of capturing a surreal dream like monster of the week style adventure (which I do enjoy). It can be heavier handed than I would normally run things, but with Ravenloft I find it works pretty well. I do plan on explaining to my players this is different from how I normally run things and I think they are all pretty good about playing something as it was originally intended.

 

A good example of some of the heavier handedness would be a moment like this:

Some of this stems from it being an introductory adventure. I used to use this adventure in a similar way to the Aleena adventure in the in red box. It is a useful way to walk the players through many of the key elements of Ravenloft, and to give them exposure to the fear and horror mechanics. Overall it is very focused on story and atmosphere.

 

There is more room for choices as the adventure goes on, but it tends to anticipate things in terms of if players do A, if players do B. It can easily be made more flexible, but for my purposes I am going to run it purely from the text.

 

It is also an interesting choice to start the Anthology with Mordenheim (who is the setting's Victor Frankenstein analog), and to lean into the Bride of Frankenstein as inspiration in the title. It starts the anthology on a very clear note, and one of the strengths of Book of Crypts (at least from what I remember) is its variety of tones. The adventures are all pretty distinct.

 

RUNNING BRIDE OF MORDENHEIM

The adventure is still fun to run (last time I ran it was probably the 90s), and I particularly like a couple of things about it. I think most importantly, it is specifically designed as an introduction to the Horror Check and it does a good job of that (one of our characters failed his Horror Check and went into a violent rage towards the experiment and towards Victor at the end of the adventure. It is also interesting because it really isn't that combat focused. There may be a confrontation at the end, and in my case there was, but even that fight, can easily turn into a conversation that doesn't have to be resolved through fighting. This is an aspect of this adventure and of Ravenloft in general that worked so well for me when I first became a Ravenloft fan. 

 

In our case, because one player was lost in a violent rage, fighting happened and reached its inevitable conclusion, but because Mordenheim is mostly disinterested in the PCs and focused on his experiment, he isn't the sort of antagonist whose goal in the adventure is the destruction of the party. I think the GM also has a lot of room to run Mordenheim (and a key NPC they introduce) as he or she thinks is natural based on his entry in the RoT boxed set. 

 

It is also very good at establishing mood and works well as an introduction to the anthology of adventures. I like that it goes right into Lamordia and Mordenheim, because it sets a clear tone. In the RoT boxed set Mordenheim is explicitly described as "...Ravenloft's 'Doctor Frankenstein,' loosely based on the character from Marry Shelley's classic Gothic novel....", so they aren't coy about what he is in the setting. Using him in this first adventure provides a pretty stark introduction to the world and/or to the anthology. 

 

Some of the issues I noticed with it are mostly things related to the structure and presentation. There is the railroading I pointed out earlier, which went well with my group but I explicitly prepared them for things like that (I don't know how it would have landed if they thought this was just one of my normal sessions). I think less of an issue than that though (because the book is pretty clear that it is railroad here, it isn't doing it accidentally so its at least a conscious choice) is some of the details in the boxed text (which generally are quite good) aren't always sufficiently elaborated upon in the rest of the text. 

 

As an example there is a moment in the adventure where, if the Players are loud going up a set of stairs, Mordenheim props a chair against the door to the room he is in (from outside the room) and it doesn't explain how he does so while remaining in the room itself (i.e. did he use a secret passage to go in the hall and place the chair, did he use some kind of rope or device to put the chair in place, etc). It is possible in this or in other instances I missed a brief explanation but read it three times and didn't see any. That said, it is fairly easy to extrapolate and were I running it more as part of a normal game, I would have done so, but I was in D&D history mode, trying to run it as close to the intention as possible and so I found that aspect challenging because it wasn't always clear what the intention was. I do think most GMs can adapt pretty easily to these missing details, the only thing is it would be best to consider these parts of the module in advance so your answers all make sense. There are similar issues with things like some of the secret passages that are mentioned elsewhere in the adventure. 

 

The adventure also assumes a specific course of events. It is pretty easy to adapt if things go in other directions but there is also an art to running an adventure structured like that when the players go in other directions. The adventure assumes the players take a straightforward approach to entering Mordenheim's mansion (they go up the hill, in through the front door, and up the stairs where they meet Mordenheim for the first time). This is perfectly fine, but our party thief, expectedly, climbed the walls and looked for other points of entry. Neither the adventure nor the cardstock entry for the mansion in the boxed set give you the kind of precise details that make running that easy. That shouldn't be an outrageous maneuver in an adventure, and it wasn't, but the way everything is presented, something as simple as going through an alternate point of entry into the mansion, is harder to pull off than it ought to be (because so much of the adventure hinges on the precise path into and up through the house). 

 

It is still entirely manageable, but because of this structure, I think it might be challenging for some GMs to adapt and it might be hard for them to decide on the fly key details about the mansion. However that said, this adventure and the mansion are very far from dungeon crawls and not really meant to be map centric. So it isn't a huge deal in my mind. Just stuff to consider as players will try all sorts of things and the GM needs to have some rough ideas going in or be very good on their toes. 

 

There was also, I believe a somewhat substantial error in the text. And this error has caused me to misunderstand an important aspect of it. I always believed there was an unnamed servant (an Igor like character in the adventure) because of the following passage: 

 

Again many details in the adventure's boxed set are not cleared up in the text that follows so I just assumed there was an assistant character and would give him a name. I also assumed he was helping Mordenheim throughout the adventure (it kind of helps explain some of the things Mordenheim does). But one of my players suggested that "another man" might have been intended to refer to the man's other eye (maybe it was meant to be "the other eye" "another eye"). Or perhaps the text is correct and it refers to an assistant. I read three times through the module and don't recall seeing any other references to a helper (I could be wrong as by the third pass you can sometimes miss details due to familiarity). And I don't recall mention of it in Mordenheim's entry in the Realm of Terror boxed set book: though to be fair I only read that once in preparation for running it. But if anyone reading this feels the error here is in my reading then please post in the comments as I welcome the clarity. 

 

One thing it does do is provide forks where different outcomes are specified based on different choices or results. They do tend to be binary, but it is nice having those in there. They are also not inconsequential. The different outcomes can be very meaningful. 

 

Overall I enjoyed running Bride of Mordenheim. I think it is best run in a creative way where you take what is presented as a most likely scenario but try to keep things open so that the players don't feel like they are being led from one event to the next (and I think the intention is this is meant to be the most likely scenario). May have more thoughts, which I will post later. If not, next entry is Blood in Moondale.