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Forbidden Lore: Ravenloft Accessory:
The Horror Continues...
A new era in horror role-playing began with the introduction of the RAVENLOFT boxed set. Combining the best elements of fantasy adventures with spine-tingling techniques of gothic horror, the RAVENLOFT game became an instant sensation. Now the time has come to learn about the secrets of the lands in the demiplane of dread.
Forbidden Lore brings you five books, each containing a wealth of material designed to make your RAVENLOFT game adventures more terrifying than ever before. Brush away the centuries-old dust, sweep aside the cobwebs, and look upon long-forgotten knowledge.
Forbidden Lore contains:
Dark Recesses: This book details psionics, the powers of the mind, and their place in the demiplane of dread.
Nova Arcanum: New spells and magical lore from the darkest of Ravenloft's lords - Strahd Von Zarovich.
Oaths of Evil: Expanded rules for curses and tips on how to make them an important part of any RAVENLOFT adventure.
The Walking Dream: For centuries, the Vistani have been the masters of prophecy and fortune telling. This book reveals their secrets and shows how to best use the Vistani techniques in RAVENLOFT adventures.
The Tarokka: A genuine deck of 54 Vistani fortune-telling cards and complete instructions for their use in the game.
The Dikesha: A set of runic dice used to predict the future, from the mysterious land of Har'Akir.
A new era in horror role-playing began with the introduction of the RAVENLOFT boxed set. Combining the best elements of fantasy adventures with spine-tingling techniques of gothic horror, the RAVENLOFT game became an instant sensation. Now the time has come to learn about the secrets of the lands in the demiplane of dread.
Forbidden Lore brings you five books, each containing a wealth of material designed to make your RAVENLOFT game adventures more terrifying than ever before. Brush away the centuries-old dust, sweep aside the cobwebs, and look upon long-forgotten knowledge.
Forbidden Lore contains:
Dark Recesses: This book details psionics, the powers of the mind, and their place in the demiplane of dread.
Nova Arcanum: New spells and magical lore from the darkest of Ravenloft's lords - Strahd Von Zarovich.
Oaths of Evil: Expanded rules for curses and tips on how to make them an important part of any RAVENLOFT adventure.
The Walking Dream: For centuries, the Vistani have been the masters of prophecy and fortune telling. This book reveals their secrets and shows how to best use the Vistani techniques in RAVENLOFT adventures.
The Tarokka: A genuine deck of 54 Vistani fortune-telling cards and complete instructions for their use in the game.
The Dikesha: A set of runic dice used to predict the future, from the mysterious land of Har'Akir.
160 pages, Boxed Set
First published October 1, 1992
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September 6, 2022My next chunk of Ravenloftiana (which is awkward, but I like it, just like Ravenloft) is the Forbidden Lore box set, which consists of ~5 small booklets, each themed around some rules or world expansion, and the second Monstrous Compendium, Children of the Night.
The first reason why I'm combining these two is the shallow and logistical: these are two non-adventure accessories from around the same time. The second reason is that both are, in a way, expansions of Ravenloft.
Forbidden Lore is more explicitly about that, and a pretty standard thing for D&D: you write book A, then someone writes book B, so then you write book C to try to bring some consistency and order back to your fantasy. So: the core Ravenloft set has some info on spells that aren't allowed, but a bunch of new spells have been released, so one of the Forbidden Lore books is about that; similarly, now there's psionic rules and Dark Sun, so there's also a booklet about psionics and also about the Dark Sun-derived domain of Kalidnay.
(Which... I mean, I love the idea of a great mixing pot, like Planescape, where people from different worlds can rub shoulders; and Ravenloft is similar in that people can be drawn from any world. And yet, the aesthetics of Ravenloft are so different from the aesthetics of Dark Sun. And any time someone says, "this was a uniquely evil event, which attracted the Mists of Ravenloft," I'm always left wondering why _this_ evil gets caught and not that one. Ravenloft has a real reversed theodicy problem. And that particularly comes up for me when I read about why this one mass-murderer from Dark Sun gets caught in Ravenloft and not the others.)
Also featured: a book about curses (and how to turn typical narrative-style curses into game mechanics) and a book about fortune-telling (and this set also included dice and "Tarokka" cards for atmospherics or for actually randomizing adventures). All of this is essentially expansions/elaborations on topics brought up in the original box.
Which is probably why my favorite booklet here is the one on secret societies, which discusses how to use them in play, and then gives a few of varying utility. Like, there's your classic good guys and classic bad guys (secret police), and then my favorite, the classic confused folks, like the people who believe that humans should live as animals and so venerate lycanthropes; or the people who believe that all magic power comes from a "hated mother" who lives underground and who they seek to unearth.
So a lot of the Forbidden Lore box is expansion on the topic; the Children of the Night is an expansion on the theme. In Ravenloft, the big bad monsters are supposed to be characters with their own tragic backstory, so rather than just give us 64 pages of new monsters, MC 2 gives us a bunch of individuals that are either instances of monsters (basically taking a monster, giving it a name and backstory, including motivation for why it might tangle with the PCs); or one-offs that fit in with the existing world.
For an example of that, the first monster here is the 4-page Living Brain, which is a creation of the Frankenstein-type doctor; for another example, there's a mechanical golem (essentially a robot) that uses the brain of someone who used to be a ranger (and so now is cursed because nothing living likes being around a robot). Now, this being TSR, they are not above raiding folklore (so here's a woman whose head is held on by a ribbon) or their own books (so here's the mummy villain from Touch of Death or the weretiger villain of Web of Illusion).
Now, as with all monster books, there's some hits and misses here, but what I really love about this book is how it takes very seriously the idea of "monster as personality" and gives a template for how to do that with your own adventures. (It also rightly notes that Ravenloft adventures have a tendency "to focus only on the lords of the various domains," and how limiting that is -- and while I think the author probably meant that in general, I like to imagine also that it's a little dig at so many of the adventures that got published.)
(Also of historical note: the intro points out that GE has a computer network -- called GEnie -- and they have set up a place called the Red Dragon Inn for people to discuss D&D. GEnie was sold off by GE in '96 and shuttered in '99, but it's interesting seeing the first forays of RPG companies into the web.)
The first reason why I'm combining these two is the shallow and logistical: these are two non-adventure accessories from around the same time. The second reason is that both are, in a way, expansions of Ravenloft.
Forbidden Lore is more explicitly about that, and a pretty standard thing for D&D: you write book A, then someone writes book B, so then you write book C to try to bring some consistency and order back to your fantasy. So: the core Ravenloft set has some info on spells that aren't allowed, but a bunch of new spells have been released, so one of the Forbidden Lore books is about that; similarly, now there's psionic rules and Dark Sun, so there's also a booklet about psionics and also about the Dark Sun-derived domain of Kalidnay.
(Which... I mean, I love the idea of a great mixing pot, like Planescape, where people from different worlds can rub shoulders; and Ravenloft is similar in that people can be drawn from any world. And yet, the aesthetics of Ravenloft are so different from the aesthetics of Dark Sun. And any time someone says, "this was a uniquely evil event, which attracted the Mists of Ravenloft," I'm always left wondering why _this_ evil gets caught and not that one. Ravenloft has a real reversed theodicy problem. And that particularly comes up for me when I read about why this one mass-murderer from Dark Sun gets caught in Ravenloft and not the others.)
Also featured: a book about curses (and how to turn typical narrative-style curses into game mechanics) and a book about fortune-telling (and this set also included dice and "Tarokka" cards for atmospherics or for actually randomizing adventures). All of this is essentially expansions/elaborations on topics brought up in the original box.
Which is probably why my favorite booklet here is the one on secret societies, which discusses how to use them in play, and then gives a few of varying utility. Like, there's your classic good guys and classic bad guys (secret police), and then my favorite, the classic confused folks, like the people who believe that humans should live as animals and so venerate lycanthropes; or the people who believe that all magic power comes from a "hated mother" who lives underground and who they seek to unearth.
So a lot of the Forbidden Lore box is expansion on the topic; the Children of the Night is an expansion on the theme. In Ravenloft, the big bad monsters are supposed to be characters with their own tragic backstory, so rather than just give us 64 pages of new monsters, MC 2 gives us a bunch of individuals that are either instances of monsters (basically taking a monster, giving it a name and backstory, including motivation for why it might tangle with the PCs); or one-offs that fit in with the existing world.
For an example of that, the first monster here is the 4-page Living Brain, which is a creation of the Frankenstein-type doctor; for another example, there's a mechanical golem (essentially a robot) that uses the brain of someone who used to be a ranger (and so now is cursed because nothing living likes being around a robot). Now, this being TSR, they are not above raiding folklore (so here's a woman whose head is held on by a ribbon) or their own books (so here's the mummy villain from Touch of Death or the weretiger villain of Web of Illusion).
Now, as with all monster books, there's some hits and misses here, but what I really love about this book is how it takes very seriously the idea of "monster as personality" and gives a template for how to do that with your own adventures. (It also rightly notes that Ravenloft adventures have a tendency "to focus only on the lords of the various domains," and how limiting that is -- and while I think the author probably meant that in general, I like to imagine also that it's a little dig at so many of the adventures that got published.)
(Also of historical note: the intro points out that GE has a computer network -- called GEnie -- and they have set up a place called the Red Dragon Inn for people to discuss D&D. GEnie was sold off by GE in '96 and shuttered in '99, but it's interesting seeing the first forays of RPG companies into the web.)
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