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Ravenloft: Grand Conjunction Series #3
Feast of Goblyns
For 4-6 Players, Levels 4-7:
Beware the Mists of Ravenloft,
for they will envelop you in terror!
In Feast of Goblyns, a party of adventurers is mysteriously transported from the lands they know to the dark
and dangerous demi-plane known as Ravenloft.
Trapped in this realm of terror, they must use all their skills to escape the manipulations of one of Ravenloft's most
powerful lords as they attempt to seek out
the accursed Crown of Soldiers.
If all goes well, they just might live long enough to
escape this dread land and return to their homes.
The first module supporting the new
RAVENLOFT™ Boxed Set, Feast of Goblyns
includes:
• A full 96 pages of gripping adventure
set in the dark domains of Ravenloft.
• A special AD&D® game character
record sheet designed especially for
Ravenloft campaigns.
• An invaluable addition to the AD&D
Dungeon Master's Screen that
incorporates all the most vital
information from the RAVENLOFT™
Boxed Set.
• A full color poster by one of TSR's
most popular artists, Clyde Caldwell.
This is the 3rd module in the Grand Conjuction Series.
Here are the other modules in the Grand Conjuction Series, listed in the order of play:
Night of the Walking Dead - Levels 1-3
Touch of Death - Levels 3-5
Feast of Goblyns - Levels 4-7
Ship of Horror - Levels 8-10
From the Shadows - Levels 9-12
Roots of Evil - Levels 9-12
It should be noted, that many Dungeon Masters have noticed that if they run the adventures in the order written, they end up needing PCs of level 8-10 for the second sign of the Hexad, yet PCs of level 3-5 for the third sign of the Hexad (etc.).
The solution to this continuity problem is to simply change the order of the hexad to suit the levels.
Just change the order of the Hexad Verses to match this, (in the order the game modules are listed above), and you will be able to run a Grand Conjunction Campaign without this problem.
It should be noted that the Hexad and notion of the Grand Conjunction was started after the first few modules had already been published and the prophecy was retroactively applied to those.
Beware the Mists of Ravenloft,
for they will envelop you in terror!
In Feast of Goblyns, a party of adventurers is mysteriously transported from the lands they know to the dark
and dangerous demi-plane known as Ravenloft.
Trapped in this realm of terror, they must use all their skills to escape the manipulations of one of Ravenloft's most
powerful lords as they attempt to seek out
the accursed Crown of Soldiers.
If all goes well, they just might live long enough to
escape this dread land and return to their homes.
The first module supporting the new
RAVENLOFT™ Boxed Set, Feast of Goblyns
includes:
• A full 96 pages of gripping adventure
set in the dark domains of Ravenloft.
• A special AD&D® game character
record sheet designed especially for
Ravenloft campaigns.
• An invaluable addition to the AD&D
Dungeon Master's Screen that
incorporates all the most vital
information from the RAVENLOFT™
Boxed Set.
• A full color poster by one of TSR's
most popular artists, Clyde Caldwell.
This is the 3rd module in the Grand Conjuction Series.
Here are the other modules in the Grand Conjuction Series, listed in the order of play:
Night of the Walking Dead - Levels 1-3
Touch of Death - Levels 3-5
Feast of Goblyns - Levels 4-7
Ship of Horror - Levels 8-10
From the Shadows - Levels 9-12
Roots of Evil - Levels 9-12
It should be noted, that many Dungeon Masters have noticed that if they run the adventures in the order written, they end up needing PCs of level 8-10 for the second sign of the Hexad, yet PCs of level 3-5 for the third sign of the Hexad (etc.).
The solution to this continuity problem is to simply change the order of the hexad to suit the levels.
Just change the order of the Hexad Verses to match this, (in the order the game modules are listed above), and you will be able to run a Grand Conjunction Campaign without this problem.
It should be noted that the Hexad and notion of the Grand Conjunction was started after the first few modules had already been published and the prophecy was retroactively applied to those.
108 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 19, 2020
Mediocre adventure module which carries AD&D 2E adventure drawbacks: railroading, long-winded read-alouds, lots of unnecessary backtracking and preconceptions about characters'/players' reactions (emotional and otherwise). Maps are fancy but occasionally non-functional (isometric sections that hide the floorplans) and don't are not compass-oriented. Organization is absurd.
In theory it could be tightened up by removing lots and lots of fat and doing a re-organizing, but I don't think that the plot or the ideas are worth that much trouble. Still, there are some good parts (the towns' descriptions, the six-armed magical statue) that could be scrounged.
In theory it could be tightened up by removing lots and lots of fat and doing a re-organizing, but I don't think that the plot or the ideas are worth that much trouble. Still, there are some good parts (the towns' descriptions, the six-armed magical statue) that could be scrounged.
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August 22, 2022What makes a gothic horror fantasy adventure? Excuse me, I meant to say, what makes a _good_ gothic horror fantasy adventure? The core box set and the monstrous compendium seem to argue that it's description and uncertainty that makes for scares: don't tell the players they face a goblin, tell them it's a horribly misshapen humanoid, or something.
But that's scares, fear -- what makes for a fun horror-filled and dread-fueled adventure? The box set offers some adventure seeds, but while a few are certainly horror ideas (trapped in a manor with a monstrous snake baby), not all of them are, and none of them quite rise to the level of gothic.
(Will I be defining "gothic" here? No, I will not. But I do take my cue from one of the first works of Gothic literature, "The Castle of Otranto": if you do horrible crimes in the past and then a giant helmet falls out of the sky to crush your child and heir -- you might be in a Gothic.)
So, my unnatural thirst for answers unslaked (eh, eh?), I turn to the first three published adventures for Ravenloft, and half of the Grand Conjunction series (which is a bit of metaplot nonsense I'll get back to).
FEAST OF GOBLYNS
First, have to shout out Clyde Caldwell's work on the covers here, which look like posters for trash-classy B-movies.
Feast, being the first Ravenloft adventure, also tries to sell you on it having poster of that cover, a DM screen just for Ravenloft, and an intro that reminds you that gothic horror is about uncertainty and long description. Do these adventures have overly-long boxes text for the DM to read to the players? Yeah, they do, but that's also just the TSR style, I think. But besides that ding, I do want to praise this book for offering the DM some ideas for scary things (you hear breathing) that aren't just "and then you have to fight wolves."
That said, I laughed (in a not so nice way) at the way one page noted the importance of subtleties in horror, while the facing page is a full-page illustration of a procession of hooded men, the leader carrying a man’s head on a stick, walking from a town where the walls are made of skeletons and the town center hill has what looks like giant rib bones in a standing stone formation with something floating up to or down from the stormy sky. (Later in the adventure you can learn that this is the necromancer’s tower being rebuilt stone by stone.)
And that kind of sets the tone for me of this adventure: sometimes it wants to be a certain type of horror -- you get stranded in a farmhouse under siege by wolves, you might get caught in a sanitarium run by a vampire therapist! -- and sometimes it doesn't.
Again, praise where praise is due: as this is the first adventure and it heavily features the domain of Kartakass -- run by a bard and werewolf creature -- it acts a bit like a supplement for that land, offering description of the town and some cultural notes (you sing before a meal to the man of the house to show you want to be there and after the meal to the woman of the house to praise the cooking). Like, is this a fully-realized world built up, like Tolkien would, from a language and history? No, this is a Hollywood backlot where everything is supposed to push towards some theme or mood.
And while I like that in the world, the plot seems to be leaning away from that. That is, here's the general plot:
* the PCs learn that werewolves (and, sigh, wolfweres) are an issue here when they get accidentally caught in a jail with one -- perfectly nice little isolation/trapped horror there;
* they get recruited by the dark lord's kid, who is scheming with the vampire protege of another dark lord (here, vampire lord Gundar of, sigh, Gundarak) to get a magical artifact to overthrow their dads -- except they are both lying to each other and plan to double-cross the other;
* meanwhile, the magical artifact actually houses the soul of a necromancer who wants to absorb his last offspring's life force in order to break out, which will eventually result in that full-page illustration I mentioned above.
So, if you step back, you see a lot of power struggles between parents and offspring, which could be nicely thematic. And yet it just feels a little overly complicated. Like, there's the whole thing about werewolf and vampire planning to overthrow their parents, but not really, which introduces a needless complication and takes away from the theme, I think. Or put it this way: the bad news for people here is that the necromancer wants to break out of the magical crown, but his descendent has been cursed with immortality, so if the PCs never get involved, nothing bad happens. (Or nothing worse happens.)
Honestly, this overstuffed plot -- it's a werewolf, oh, working with a vampire, oh, against a necromancer, oh, and a priest of death -- is exactly the template I brought to writing out adventure seeds when I was 13.
So: overstuffed, with a few good set pieces.
Oh, and "goblyns" are a weird little humanoid monster that the magical artifact can turn people into -- and I would definitely put a scene of transformation in.
SHIP OF HORROR
I have an outline for a campy, dumb script that I am currently calling "CRUISE OF DEATH" and that doesn't seem that far from "Ship of Horror," but they're not trying to be funny here. No, this is a very serious and grim story that just happens to have a title that seems real easy to tip over into parody.
What is that story? Well, the adventure is in three parts, so hopefully the book jumps right in. Hopefully, and yet what we actually start with is a bunch of information on ship-to-ship combat and the layout of the _Endurance_, before eventually getting to their curse: hired to deliver dead bodies to a family mausoleum, the captain instead chucked the bodies overboard and is no haunted by the ghosts.
That's a solid setup for a ghost-haunted gothic. See, the captain is not a bad person -- just check his alignment -- he just did a bad thing, and because the PCs are not stuck on this boat, now they are caught too. Except these ghosts aren't vengeful, they're mostly just sad, until you help the captain retrieve their dead bodies (insert underwater adventures here) -- then they become helpful, filling in the clues of how they died on the island of Graben, at the hands of the Graben family.
Wait, these murdered people are haunting the ship where their bodies were manhandled rather than haunting the killers who killed them? That seems like a funny choice of a place to haunt. (It's implied -- or maybe stated, remember I'm skimming -- that their ghosts are attached to their bodies, so that will help you find them, I guess, so maybe it makes sense. I mean, maybe it even makes sense that they aren't really dangerous since they aren't actually all that angry at the captain -- they're just stuck.)
So then the PCs -- out of the goodness of their own hearts -- goes to this island village and uncovers the truth that this family is actually all undead, which you could have fun with, I suppose. I might want to hint they're undead and then show off their strange abilities (they can take off and reattach body parts), but otherwise it's a little light investigation and then combat.
And then the final third is all combat: these killers are shipping bodies -- grave-robbed or newly made -- to a necromancer on a frozen mausoleum island, and now the PCs have to (for some reason) destroy the necromancer.
Which to me really shows how easy it is to write a typical D&D adventure (there's a big monster, but to get there you have to fight their minion, and to get there, you have to finish some quest) and give it a veneer of horror tropes: necromancer! undead! ghosts!
The best part of this adventure, for me, is probably the first plot, which is also the part where they take the most time to build up the atmosphere of being stuck on a boat at the mercy of the elements, and also where the enemy isn't something you can stab, exactly -- the enemy is the mistakes that were made in the past and that still haunt the present.
TOUCH OF DEATH
The shortest of the adventures here and I wonder why. It's the first in-depth look at a realm mentioned in the core box -- what Feast of Goblyns did for Kartakass, this does for the Egyptian-themed setting of Har'Akir... except it doesn't. The intro says that you can read the Egyptian chapter of Legends and Lore (formerly Deities and Demigods), but then also adds that some stuff is different here. Honestly, it feels like they're relying on you to just sort of know the tropes of an Egypt-like land: it's hot and sandy, the people are superstitious, and the priests are double-faced.
Or at least this priests is: once good, she read a scroll that told her how to control a mummy, and now she's evil. There's no real note about why she's evil or what concrete thing she wants from raising a mummy. I mean, she's already the powerful priest of a superstitious people, seems like enough power. So put that in the negative column.
The mummy she raised is only slightly under her control, and wants his own power/revenge against the dark lord who rules Har'Akir, so at least he has some motivation. And to get that power, he summons in outsiders to turn into undead.
So the PCs have to survive a week of undead attacks, interspersed with attacks from the superstitious villagers who want to sacrifice them, and eventually figure out they need to go dungeon-crawling in a tomb, and unleash the big bad to destroy the mummy. I don't mind "if we wake up this dragon, then it will kill this orc army" as a plot, per se, but the villains are all a little boring here, so I don't really care who destroys whom.
But that's scares, fear -- what makes for a fun horror-filled and dread-fueled adventure? The box set offers some adventure seeds, but while a few are certainly horror ideas (trapped in a manor with a monstrous snake baby), not all of them are, and none of them quite rise to the level of gothic.
(Will I be defining "gothic" here? No, I will not. But I do take my cue from one of the first works of Gothic literature, "The Castle of Otranto": if you do horrible crimes in the past and then a giant helmet falls out of the sky to crush your child and heir -- you might be in a Gothic.)
So, my unnatural thirst for answers unslaked (eh, eh?), I turn to the first three published adventures for Ravenloft, and half of the Grand Conjunction series (which is a bit of metaplot nonsense I'll get back to).
FEAST OF GOBLYNS
First, have to shout out Clyde Caldwell's work on the covers here, which look like posters for trash-classy B-movies.
Feast, being the first Ravenloft adventure, also tries to sell you on it having poster of that cover, a DM screen just for Ravenloft, and an intro that reminds you that gothic horror is about uncertainty and long description. Do these adventures have overly-long boxes text for the DM to read to the players? Yeah, they do, but that's also just the TSR style, I think. But besides that ding, I do want to praise this book for offering the DM some ideas for scary things (you hear breathing) that aren't just "and then you have to fight wolves."
That said, I laughed (in a not so nice way) at the way one page noted the importance of subtleties in horror, while the facing page is a full-page illustration of a procession of hooded men, the leader carrying a man’s head on a stick, walking from a town where the walls are made of skeletons and the town center hill has what looks like giant rib bones in a standing stone formation with something floating up to or down from the stormy sky. (Later in the adventure you can learn that this is the necromancer’s tower being rebuilt stone by stone.)
And that kind of sets the tone for me of this adventure: sometimes it wants to be a certain type of horror -- you get stranded in a farmhouse under siege by wolves, you might get caught in a sanitarium run by a vampire therapist! -- and sometimes it doesn't.
Again, praise where praise is due: as this is the first adventure and it heavily features the domain of Kartakass -- run by a bard and werewolf creature -- it acts a bit like a supplement for that land, offering description of the town and some cultural notes (you sing before a meal to the man of the house to show you want to be there and after the meal to the woman of the house to praise the cooking). Like, is this a fully-realized world built up, like Tolkien would, from a language and history? No, this is a Hollywood backlot where everything is supposed to push towards some theme or mood.
And while I like that in the world, the plot seems to be leaning away from that. That is, here's the general plot:
* the PCs learn that werewolves (and, sigh, wolfweres) are an issue here when they get accidentally caught in a jail with one -- perfectly nice little isolation/trapped horror there;
* they get recruited by the dark lord's kid, who is scheming with the vampire protege of another dark lord (here, vampire lord Gundar of, sigh, Gundarak) to get a magical artifact to overthrow their dads -- except they are both lying to each other and plan to double-cross the other;
* meanwhile, the magical artifact actually houses the soul of a necromancer who wants to absorb his last offspring's life force in order to break out, which will eventually result in that full-page illustration I mentioned above.
So, if you step back, you see a lot of power struggles between parents and offspring, which could be nicely thematic. And yet it just feels a little overly complicated. Like, there's the whole thing about werewolf and vampire planning to overthrow their parents, but not really, which introduces a needless complication and takes away from the theme, I think. Or put it this way: the bad news for people here is that the necromancer wants to break out of the magical crown, but his descendent has been cursed with immortality, so if the PCs never get involved, nothing bad happens. (Or nothing worse happens.)
Honestly, this overstuffed plot -- it's a werewolf, oh, working with a vampire, oh, against a necromancer, oh, and a priest of death -- is exactly the template I brought to writing out adventure seeds when I was 13.
So: overstuffed, with a few good set pieces.
Oh, and "goblyns" are a weird little humanoid monster that the magical artifact can turn people into -- and I would definitely put a scene of transformation in.
SHIP OF HORROR
I have an outline for a campy, dumb script that I am currently calling "CRUISE OF DEATH" and that doesn't seem that far from "Ship of Horror," but they're not trying to be funny here. No, this is a very serious and grim story that just happens to have a title that seems real easy to tip over into parody.
What is that story? Well, the adventure is in three parts, so hopefully the book jumps right in. Hopefully, and yet what we actually start with is a bunch of information on ship-to-ship combat and the layout of the _Endurance_, before eventually getting to their curse: hired to deliver dead bodies to a family mausoleum, the captain instead chucked the bodies overboard and is no haunted by the ghosts.
That's a solid setup for a ghost-haunted gothic. See, the captain is not a bad person -- just check his alignment -- he just did a bad thing, and because the PCs are not stuck on this boat, now they are caught too. Except these ghosts aren't vengeful, they're mostly just sad, until you help the captain retrieve their dead bodies (insert underwater adventures here) -- then they become helpful, filling in the clues of how they died on the island of Graben, at the hands of the Graben family.
Wait, these murdered people are haunting the ship where their bodies were manhandled rather than haunting the killers who killed them? That seems like a funny choice of a place to haunt. (It's implied -- or maybe stated, remember I'm skimming -- that their ghosts are attached to their bodies, so that will help you find them, I guess, so maybe it makes sense. I mean, maybe it even makes sense that they aren't really dangerous since they aren't actually all that angry at the captain -- they're just stuck.)
So then the PCs -- out of the goodness of their own hearts -- goes to this island village and uncovers the truth that this family is actually all undead, which you could have fun with, I suppose. I might want to hint they're undead and then show off their strange abilities (they can take off and reattach body parts), but otherwise it's a little light investigation and then combat.
And then the final third is all combat: these killers are shipping bodies -- grave-robbed or newly made -- to a necromancer on a frozen mausoleum island, and now the PCs have to (for some reason) destroy the necromancer.
Which to me really shows how easy it is to write a typical D&D adventure (there's a big monster, but to get there you have to fight their minion, and to get there, you have to finish some quest) and give it a veneer of horror tropes: necromancer! undead! ghosts!
The best part of this adventure, for me, is probably the first plot, which is also the part where they take the most time to build up the atmosphere of being stuck on a boat at the mercy of the elements, and also where the enemy isn't something you can stab, exactly -- the enemy is the mistakes that were made in the past and that still haunt the present.
TOUCH OF DEATH
The shortest of the adventures here and I wonder why. It's the first in-depth look at a realm mentioned in the core box -- what Feast of Goblyns did for Kartakass, this does for the Egyptian-themed setting of Har'Akir... except it doesn't. The intro says that you can read the Egyptian chapter of Legends and Lore (formerly Deities and Demigods), but then also adds that some stuff is different here. Honestly, it feels like they're relying on you to just sort of know the tropes of an Egypt-like land: it's hot and sandy, the people are superstitious, and the priests are double-faced.
Or at least this priests is: once good, she read a scroll that told her how to control a mummy, and now she's evil. There's no real note about why she's evil or what concrete thing she wants from raising a mummy. I mean, she's already the powerful priest of a superstitious people, seems like enough power. So put that in the negative column.
The mummy she raised is only slightly under her control, and wants his own power/revenge against the dark lord who rules Har'Akir, so at least he has some motivation. And to get that power, he summons in outsiders to turn into undead.
So the PCs have to survive a week of undead attacks, interspersed with attacks from the superstitious villagers who want to sacrifice them, and eventually figure out they need to go dungeon-crawling in a tomb, and unleash the big bad to destroy the mummy. I don't mind "if we wake up this dragon, then it will kill this orc army" as a plot, per se, but the villains are all a little boring here, so I don't really care who destroys whom.
August 17, 2012
To me, this was a 2nd edition classic and set, what was at that time, the bar for the new Ravenloft setting releases when they decided to give the setting its own boxed set. The black box was awesome, especially for back then, and when paired with this fun, in-depth adventure I think it hit just the right mark for the setting.
There was some weird parts in the module as far as one or two truly bizarre locations that might make the players wonder exactly how or why they were/would be built, but by and large the game has tons of style, some good backdrops, plenty of creepy action and lots of substance. There was some work on the back-end with it, but I think that would be typical of most grand Ravenloft adventures of such scope.
There was some weird parts in the module as far as one or two truly bizarre locations that might make the players wonder exactly how or why they were/would be built, but by and large the game has tons of style, some good backdrops, plenty of creepy action and lots of substance. There was some work on the back-end with it, but I think that would be typical of most grand Ravenloft adventures of such scope.
May 9, 2020
2.5 stars.
An ok module. There isn't much information given to the players as to what is going on (other than a cheesy monologue from a bad guy at the end. A bad guy, I might add, that the players meet nowhere else in the adventure and so probably won't care much about) and some of the traps are very deadly or even instantly fatal, with no way for the players to really surpass them safely other than guesswork or luck.
I can see this being a lot better with a bit of tinkering from a clever DM.
An ok module. There isn't much information given to the players as to what is going on (other than a cheesy monologue from a bad guy at the end. A bad guy, I might add, that the players meet nowhere else in the adventure and so probably won't care much about) and some of the traps are very deadly or even instantly fatal, with no way for the players to really surpass them safely other than guesswork or luck.
I can see this being a lot better with a bit of tinkering from a clever DM.
October 22, 2008
I enjoyed this module, but it's very, very complex. It took a whole lot of work on the back end for only a moderate turn-out on the part of the players. There is a boatload of political intrigue in this module, and that's really what makes it fun and interesting for the players. If they don't have a vested interest in the political happenings in Ravenloft, they won't have a lot of incentive to play it to the fullest. Therefore, I really don't recommend this one for a one nighter. It should really be played as part of an ongoing story, preferably for players that spend most, if not all, of their time in the Demiplane of Dread.
August 8, 2015
I do not understand the high rating of this module. Once I run it, I may change my opinion, but for now I feel like it is too long, with too little information to help the PCs figure out what's going on, and is the only module that was a bear to convert to pathfinder. I do not recommend.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews