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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition
Bleak House: The Death Of Rudolph Van Richten: Ravenloft Boxed Adventure:
Old soldiers never die...
For more than three decades, Dr. Rudolph van Richten stood against the forces of darkness, and hunted their servants in the far corners of the land of Mists.
Now he had thought his long battle over, had thought he could spend his declining years in quiet enjoyment with old friends.
But for some, a tragic end is inevitable.
Dark forces have been gathering in the Mists.
Their objective is to see Ravenloft's foremost expert on the supernatural destroyed, shattered in spirit as well as in body.
From the crumbling edifice of Van Richten's childhood home, an enemy long thought vanquished spins a web of powerful evils and lost souls, drawing Van Richten to his doom.
And then a group of heroes gets trapped in the web as well....
Witness the final stand of Rudolph van Richten!
Inside this box is a grand-scale RAVENLOFT adventure that pushes heroes to the brink of madness, and draws them into the terrifying scheme to annihilate Rudolph van Richten.
Sea of Madness, a 96-page book detailing the island of Dominia and relating the events that start the cycle of doom.
Homecoming, a 64-page book describing the Van Richten family estate and the large haunted mansion known as Bleak House.
Suitable for use with the Bleak House campaign or the Masque of the Red Death setting, this adventure is designed so that it can be played several times, and no two experiences will be the same
Heroes, Monsters, and Settings, a 32-page book containing game statistics for some of Ravenloft's best known, yet never detailed, villains; a new type of vampire; information on Martira Bay in Darkon; and maps intended for use with the Bleak House campaign.
A color map revealing the layout and secrets of Bleak House itself.
Format: 96-page book, 64-page book, 32-page book, fold-out map.
For more than three decades, Dr. Rudolph van Richten stood against the forces of darkness, and hunted their servants in the far corners of the land of Mists.
Now he had thought his long battle over, had thought he could spend his declining years in quiet enjoyment with old friends.
But for some, a tragic end is inevitable.
Dark forces have been gathering in the Mists.
Their objective is to see Ravenloft's foremost expert on the supernatural destroyed, shattered in spirit as well as in body.
From the crumbling edifice of Van Richten's childhood home, an enemy long thought vanquished spins a web of powerful evils and lost souls, drawing Van Richten to his doom.
And then a group of heroes gets trapped in the web as well....
Witness the final stand of Rudolph van Richten!
Inside this box is a grand-scale RAVENLOFT adventure that pushes heroes to the brink of madness, and draws them into the terrifying scheme to annihilate Rudolph van Richten.
Sea of Madness, a 96-page book detailing the island of Dominia and relating the events that start the cycle of doom.
Homecoming, a 64-page book describing the Van Richten family estate and the large haunted mansion known as Bleak House.
Suitable for use with the Bleak House campaign or the Masque of the Red Death setting, this adventure is designed so that it can be played several times, and no two experiences will be the same
Heroes, Monsters, and Settings, a 32-page book containing game statistics for some of Ravenloft's best known, yet never detailed, villains; a new type of vampire; information on Martira Bay in Darkon; and maps intended for use with the Bleak House campaign.
A color map revealing the layout and secrets of Bleak House itself.
Format: 96-page book, 64-page book, 32-page book, fold-out map.
192 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1996
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October 6, 2022Today is going to be one big clump of adventures — and my penultimate review in this “Let’s Look at Ravenloft” project. Am I sad to see this project end? Well, let’s look at BLEAK HOUSE, SERVANTS OF DARKNESS, THE SHADOW RIFT, and VECNA REBORN/DIE, VECNA, DIE! to see how I feel about this campaign setting.
BLEAK HOUSE
This adventure is subtitled “The Death of van Richten”, so, like, don’t let your PCs try too hard, because the end is ordained. Now, there’s maybe some wiggle room about _how_ the old Van Helsing-clone is going to die, but it really feels like just cosmetic changes. The overarching story here is: when van Richten killed some Vistani (who kidnapped his son and sold him to a vampire), one of them nurtured a grudge against him, and now her plan is coming to fruition.
That plan involves basically two parts: in the first part, she resurrected that vampire from Van Richten’s past and now that vampire is using a captured psychic to torment Van Richten’s dreams, and to save him, the PCs will have to help him break out of an evil sanitarium (fun) and then track down the vampire’s lair and stop the psychic (less fun). In the second part, van Richten goes home to recuperate and discovers it just full of ghosts who are compelled to attack him.
Here’s my big question: besides the business decision to goose this adventure as historically important, why does van Richten have to die? Like: what interesting adventures does that open up for the players (or the writers)? It feels very much like an editorial decision and it comes across that way to me in the adventure.
And then I have a bunch of other, smaller questions, like: I dig the evil sanitarium run by cerebral vampires, I like the irony of van Richten checking himself in to help himself and then being more tortured. But the way the adventure has the PCs get to this sanitarium is by having them shipwrecked and rescued by a boat of vampires pretending to be normal. And if the PCs pick up on the clues, they get overwhelmed (the DM advice is “don’t let them escape”), and if they don’t pick up on the clues, they get transported anyway. What purpose does this scene serve? I feel like you could more easily replace it with “van Richten has snuck out a message to you, you sneak in to see him, he tells you that things are weird, but are these just the paranoid ravings of a madman? Of course not, you get caught on the way out and now y’all have to escape or go mad.”
(Like, there’s very little use, I think, to saying “this might just be a nice sanitarium” and trying to stretch out the dread there. Make it creepy and capture-y from the beginning. Hmmm, maybe they wrote the PCs as shipwreck survivors to emphasize the “there’s no way off this island” angle.)
As for the “find the vampire and his psychic and stop them,” I found that to be a little uninteresting. My complaint about so many of these adventures are (a) “why should I care?” (like when it’s one evil vs another) and (b) “what really makes this Ravenloft?” And that second problem is what the vampire hunt falls into.
But the second part, with the haunted house — well first, let’s just note that the two adventures here are only slightly related. They’re related by plot (the evil Vistani woman is behind both) and they’re maybe a little related by theme (things from Van Richten’s past come to get him), but the second part with the haunted house would play just as well totally separate. Which is probably why they open that part of the adventure by noting that you could play this not in Ravenloft, but in Masque of the Red Death. (That is, not in the fantasy world, but in a Gothic version of Earth.)
But that weirdness aside — and also let’s put aside the givenness of the ending — this haunted house adventure is… fine. There’s the ghosts of the house itself (which, again, sigh, sigh sigh sigh, relies on a love triangle/jilted/unrequited love), whose tragedy you have to unravel in the day; then there’s all the good people who followed van Richten into battle against monsters and fell, whose spirits are caught and compelled to attack at night. PCs will need to unravel the the daytime house ghost story to get their assistance in fighting the reluctant night ghosts, because of course this has to be a battle and not a big scene of reconciliation or something. (No mechanics for that in D&D 2e.)
So as a whole, a mixed bag, leaning towards let-down, but it does offer this one great line about one of the servants, who “is a naturally talented strangler.”
***
SERVANTS OF DARKNESS
Speaking of good lines, let’s hear it for this line about the superstitious folks of Tepest, some of whom have turned righteously anti-fairy recently:
“Despite its good intentions, however, the Inquisition has developed a darker side.”
Well, shit, yeah, I bet it has. Despite that somewhat odd lead-in — and again, a villain motivated by love triangle! — this adventure has a lot to recommend it: the PCs stumble into town in the middle of a witch-hunt against a girl who is clearly innocent. They could kill everyone in town, but the people here aren’t evil, just misguided. So instead the PCs can travel around and talk to people, doing little side quests to gain magical items, all to reveal the evil fairy who is manipulating the hurt, left-out member of the love triangle. (As aggravating as it is that they keep going back to romantic love as a motivation, I understand that Gothic and Romantic often seem synonymous. Still, I’d probably play up the sad and tragic angle here of friends torn apart.)
(Also: because this investigation is a little freeform, each section includes a little “Moving on” note about where the PCs are likely to go next. It reminds me of the Gumshoe games system of thinking about which scene leads to which other scene.)
That would be a good end to an adventure — except the adventure goes on, with a shadow elf stealing a magic item from the grand inquisitor and using it to get back the thing he wants most, a magic sword. This is aggravating because it’s unnecessary… except as a lead in to the next adventure.
***
THE SHADOW RIFT
So during the Grand Conjunction, a bunch of domains moved around (or were dissolved) and we got a big hole in the map, which was named the Shadow Rift. This ~160 page book is all about that, with an adventure that leads the PCs from a cursed town (where everyone lost their shadows) down into the Shadow Rift, where two shadow elves are fighting over the legacy of their father, and one of them wants to let in a shadow demon. Which is a bad idea, and I guess why the PCs get involved?
I’ll just jump ahead and note: I enjoyed the scene where the shadow demon tries to fit through a small door, with a different body part coming through to attack the PCs since his whole body can’t come through at one time. It feels a little video-gamey, but I like it.
As for the rest of the adventure, well, I like the cursed town with the shadowless people. That’s nicely creepy.
But the rest of the adventure feels less Ravenloft than… I don’t know, essentially it’s mostly a fairy story: these people were imprisoned by a shadow-demon, but they escaped to Ravenloft, but also they’re all shadow fairy now, with a bad Unseelie and a good Seelie court, and there’s very little reason for me to care about this if it takes place in Ravenloft. In fact, if the PCs fail and this shadow-demon breaks into Ravenloft, wouldn’t it get caught there, and wouldn’t that ultimately be a better thing for the multiverse?
***
VECNA REBORN and DIE, VECNA, DIE!
Vecna is an old D&D character, an evil lich/near-god with a cult who I think was invented by Gary Gygax himself, and whose Hand and Eye are notable magical artifacts you’ll find in lots of D&D books. Anyway, at some point he and his evil lieutenant got captured by Ravenloft, and they also hate each other now, so you have two side-by-side realms that are constantly fighting.
Now the PCs wander into this bad place where Vecna’s cult wants to use them for doing evil and freeing their master. Which leads into an adventure about finding out what the cult wants and stopping them. Which feels pretty straightforward and not really Ravenlofty.
Now, VECNA REBORN is from 1998, when TSR was dying and bought by Wizards of the Coast, who published DIE, VECNA, DIE! in 2000. (This adventure also references the adventure VECNA LIVES!, which is not a Ravenloft adventure, so I’m not including it here, and also because I don't care about Vecna, though the marketing copy on these books is big into the idea that old D&D grognards would love to tangle with history.)
This adventure doesn’t interest me as something to be run, but I admire the scope: the PCs get involved in trying to stop some evil Greyhawk figure, Iuz; Iuz wants to drain Vecna, so he goes into Ravenloft, not realizing that Vecna has been planning this and drains Iuz. Then with that power, Vecna escapes Ravenloft and goes to Sigil, in the Planescape universe.
Is there anything in here worth stealing? Are there interesting scenes or characters or problems? I don’t think so, but I still admire the scope.
BLEAK HOUSE
This adventure is subtitled “The Death of van Richten”, so, like, don’t let your PCs try too hard, because the end is ordained. Now, there’s maybe some wiggle room about _how_ the old Van Helsing-clone is going to die, but it really feels like just cosmetic changes. The overarching story here is: when van Richten killed some Vistani (who kidnapped his son and sold him to a vampire), one of them nurtured a grudge against him, and now her plan is coming to fruition.
That plan involves basically two parts: in the first part, she resurrected that vampire from Van Richten’s past and now that vampire is using a captured psychic to torment Van Richten’s dreams, and to save him, the PCs will have to help him break out of an evil sanitarium (fun) and then track down the vampire’s lair and stop the psychic (less fun). In the second part, van Richten goes home to recuperate and discovers it just full of ghosts who are compelled to attack him.
Here’s my big question: besides the business decision to goose this adventure as historically important, why does van Richten have to die? Like: what interesting adventures does that open up for the players (or the writers)? It feels very much like an editorial decision and it comes across that way to me in the adventure.
And then I have a bunch of other, smaller questions, like: I dig the evil sanitarium run by cerebral vampires, I like the irony of van Richten checking himself in to help himself and then being more tortured. But the way the adventure has the PCs get to this sanitarium is by having them shipwrecked and rescued by a boat of vampires pretending to be normal. And if the PCs pick up on the clues, they get overwhelmed (the DM advice is “don’t let them escape”), and if they don’t pick up on the clues, they get transported anyway. What purpose does this scene serve? I feel like you could more easily replace it with “van Richten has snuck out a message to you, you sneak in to see him, he tells you that things are weird, but are these just the paranoid ravings of a madman? Of course not, you get caught on the way out and now y’all have to escape or go mad.”
(Like, there’s very little use, I think, to saying “this might just be a nice sanitarium” and trying to stretch out the dread there. Make it creepy and capture-y from the beginning. Hmmm, maybe they wrote the PCs as shipwreck survivors to emphasize the “there’s no way off this island” angle.)
As for the “find the vampire and his psychic and stop them,” I found that to be a little uninteresting. My complaint about so many of these adventures are (a) “why should I care?” (like when it’s one evil vs another) and (b) “what really makes this Ravenloft?” And that second problem is what the vampire hunt falls into.
But the second part, with the haunted house — well first, let’s just note that the two adventures here are only slightly related. They’re related by plot (the evil Vistani woman is behind both) and they’re maybe a little related by theme (things from Van Richten’s past come to get him), but the second part with the haunted house would play just as well totally separate. Which is probably why they open that part of the adventure by noting that you could play this not in Ravenloft, but in Masque of the Red Death. (That is, not in the fantasy world, but in a Gothic version of Earth.)
But that weirdness aside — and also let’s put aside the givenness of the ending — this haunted house adventure is… fine. There’s the ghosts of the house itself (which, again, sigh, sigh sigh sigh, relies on a love triangle/jilted/unrequited love), whose tragedy you have to unravel in the day; then there’s all the good people who followed van Richten into battle against monsters and fell, whose spirits are caught and compelled to attack at night. PCs will need to unravel the the daytime house ghost story to get their assistance in fighting the reluctant night ghosts, because of course this has to be a battle and not a big scene of reconciliation or something. (No mechanics for that in D&D 2e.)
So as a whole, a mixed bag, leaning towards let-down, but it does offer this one great line about one of the servants, who “is a naturally talented strangler.”
***
SERVANTS OF DARKNESS
Speaking of good lines, let’s hear it for this line about the superstitious folks of Tepest, some of whom have turned righteously anti-fairy recently:
“Despite its good intentions, however, the Inquisition has developed a darker side.”
Well, shit, yeah, I bet it has. Despite that somewhat odd lead-in — and again, a villain motivated by love triangle! — this adventure has a lot to recommend it: the PCs stumble into town in the middle of a witch-hunt against a girl who is clearly innocent. They could kill everyone in town, but the people here aren’t evil, just misguided. So instead the PCs can travel around and talk to people, doing little side quests to gain magical items, all to reveal the evil fairy who is manipulating the hurt, left-out member of the love triangle. (As aggravating as it is that they keep going back to romantic love as a motivation, I understand that Gothic and Romantic often seem synonymous. Still, I’d probably play up the sad and tragic angle here of friends torn apart.)
(Also: because this investigation is a little freeform, each section includes a little “Moving on” note about where the PCs are likely to go next. It reminds me of the Gumshoe games system of thinking about which scene leads to which other scene.)
That would be a good end to an adventure — except the adventure goes on, with a shadow elf stealing a magic item from the grand inquisitor and using it to get back the thing he wants most, a magic sword. This is aggravating because it’s unnecessary… except as a lead in to the next adventure.
***
THE SHADOW RIFT
So during the Grand Conjunction, a bunch of domains moved around (or were dissolved) and we got a big hole in the map, which was named the Shadow Rift. This ~160 page book is all about that, with an adventure that leads the PCs from a cursed town (where everyone lost their shadows) down into the Shadow Rift, where two shadow elves are fighting over the legacy of their father, and one of them wants to let in a shadow demon. Which is a bad idea, and I guess why the PCs get involved?
I’ll just jump ahead and note: I enjoyed the scene where the shadow demon tries to fit through a small door, with a different body part coming through to attack the PCs since his whole body can’t come through at one time. It feels a little video-gamey, but I like it.
As for the rest of the adventure, well, I like the cursed town with the shadowless people. That’s nicely creepy.
But the rest of the adventure feels less Ravenloft than… I don’t know, essentially it’s mostly a fairy story: these people were imprisoned by a shadow-demon, but they escaped to Ravenloft, but also they’re all shadow fairy now, with a bad Unseelie and a good Seelie court, and there’s very little reason for me to care about this if it takes place in Ravenloft. In fact, if the PCs fail and this shadow-demon breaks into Ravenloft, wouldn’t it get caught there, and wouldn’t that ultimately be a better thing for the multiverse?
***
VECNA REBORN and DIE, VECNA, DIE!
Vecna is an old D&D character, an evil lich/near-god with a cult who I think was invented by Gary Gygax himself, and whose Hand and Eye are notable magical artifacts you’ll find in lots of D&D books. Anyway, at some point he and his evil lieutenant got captured by Ravenloft, and they also hate each other now, so you have two side-by-side realms that are constantly fighting.
Now the PCs wander into this bad place where Vecna’s cult wants to use them for doing evil and freeing their master. Which leads into an adventure about finding out what the cult wants and stopping them. Which feels pretty straightforward and not really Ravenlofty.
Now, VECNA REBORN is from 1998, when TSR was dying and bought by Wizards of the Coast, who published DIE, VECNA, DIE! in 2000. (This adventure also references the adventure VECNA LIVES!, which is not a Ravenloft adventure, so I’m not including it here, and also because I don't care about Vecna, though the marketing copy on these books is big into the idea that old D&D grognards would love to tangle with history.)
This adventure doesn’t interest me as something to be run, but I admire the scope: the PCs get involved in trying to stop some evil Greyhawk figure, Iuz; Iuz wants to drain Vecna, so he goes into Ravenloft, not realizing that Vecna has been planning this and drains Iuz. Then with that power, Vecna escapes Ravenloft and goes to Sigil, in the Planescape universe.
Is there anything in here worth stealing? Are there interesting scenes or characters or problems? I don’t think so, but I still admire the scope.
February 29, 2012
Recommended only to DMs who want to kill off their party AFTER torturing them for so long that they don't want to play any more. The second part of the adventure (that can be played on its own) though is not that bad, that's why I gave this rating to the module.
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