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Van Richten's Guides: Ravenloft Campaign Accessories: (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition) #1
Van Richten's Guide to Vampires: Ravenloft Accessory RR3:
For All Character Levels:
At last some means of combatting the ultimate undead, vampires, have found their way into print.
Within these pages, Dr. Rudolph Van Richten shares his vast background as one of Ravenloft's most formidable lore masters and vampire hunters.
Decades of research and experience have been compiled into discussions which define the very nature of those "kings of the undead," and help put them at a disadvantage to mortals, whom they consider to be "mere cattle."
Dr. Van Richten has detailed vampiric powers, weaknesses, feeding and sleeping habits, even their varied relationships with others of their own kind.
Old myths are dispelled, new facts are uncovered, and the experiences of both vampires and those you hunt them are recorded for your safety and enlightenment.
Quickly! Soon the sun sets and the dead will rise! The vampires of Ravenloft know no mercy, and you must be prepared before the darkness engulfs you.
Summary of content:
Introduction
Background of vampirism (origins, biology notes, etc.)
Vampiric powers (age categories, powers)
Creating new vampires (traditional, saliva, curses)
Vampire weaknesses (keeping at bay, sanctified places)
Destroying a vampire (wooden stake, blessed weapons, running water, sunlight)
Magic and vampires (effect of magic on vampires)
Life-blood: vampire feeding habits (mechanics of it)
The sleep of the dead (depth of sleep, soil from homeland, etc.)
Hibernation
Relationship between vampires (combat, progenitor and offspring)
The mind of the vampire (psychology, ego, etc.)
The facade (in human societies)
Retained skills (when the vampire was of a class ex: priest, wizard, etc.)
At last some means of combatting the ultimate undead, vampires, have found their way into print.
Within these pages, Dr. Rudolph Van Richten shares his vast background as one of Ravenloft's most formidable lore masters and vampire hunters.
Decades of research and experience have been compiled into discussions which define the very nature of those "kings of the undead," and help put them at a disadvantage to mortals, whom they consider to be "mere cattle."
Dr. Van Richten has detailed vampiric powers, weaknesses, feeding and sleeping habits, even their varied relationships with others of their own kind.
Old myths are dispelled, new facts are uncovered, and the experiences of both vampires and those you hunt them are recorded for your safety and enlightenment.
Quickly! Soon the sun sets and the dead will rise! The vampires of Ravenloft know no mercy, and you must be prepared before the darkness engulfs you.
Summary of content:
Introduction
Background of vampirism (origins, biology notes, etc.)
Vampiric powers (age categories, powers)
Creating new vampires (traditional, saliva, curses)
Vampire weaknesses (keeping at bay, sanctified places)
Destroying a vampire (wooden stake, blessed weapons, running water, sunlight)
Magic and vampires (effect of magic on vampires)
Life-blood: vampire feeding habits (mechanics of it)
The sleep of the dead (depth of sleep, soil from homeland, etc.)
Hibernation
Relationship between vampires (combat, progenitor and offspring)
The mind of the vampire (psychology, ego, etc.)
The facade (in human societies)
Retained skills (when the vampire was of a class ex: priest, wizard, etc.)
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
64 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 20, 2020
Vampires are amongst the most iconic of villains and this book provides a wealth of information on using these foes in any horror-themed role-playing game. I still remember when I first purchased this book at the store when it was released. It was a collection of vampire lore (some traditional, some not) that touched upon a variety of aspects of how these creatures lived- their strengths, their weaknesses, their powers, their feeding habits, their life-cycles and more. You want to make a vampire that will throw a twist into what your Player Characters (PCs) think the standard vampire is, this book offers options to do just that. What powers do vampires gain if they live long enough, this book offers that information as well. Using the material in this book, you can create that memorable vampire villain, like Strahd Von Zarovich, one that will take a decent amount of investigation, power, and luck to vanquish.
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August 5, 2022#2
I am still engaged in a twisted version of Marie Kondo’ing my RPG books — remember, she says not to read books as you process them, whereas I am reading the hell out of them — and now next up is my Ravenloft books.
Again, as with my Dark Sun reread project, I am going through both physical books (to see if I want to keep or sell them) and digital books (to see if they are worth acquiring — which is always a hard question since I’m a completist, or at least struggling against that tendency). Unlike the Dark Sun reread, I’m not going strictly chronological, but chunking some books together.
Or rather, I already did that recently with the Children of the Night series, so why not keep going? And next up are the Van Richten’s guide to monsters series.
First though, a tiny primer: Ravenloft was a well-loved 1st edition AD&D module that asked the question: “why is this vampire in a dungeon?” It made a whole story about that vampire, giving a tragic horror backstory. Then in the 90s, TSR decided to make a whole campaign of gothic horror fantasy adventure, which was an odd mix thematically (‘you’re heavily armored fantasy medieval warriors — invited to a Renaissance-era poisoner’s ball”), but which I loved for the narrative potential.
(There’s so many more fun incoherencies to discuss in Ravenloft, but I said this would be a tiny primer, so.)
The Van Richten's Guides sub-collection is a series of ~9 books (there were 8 originally, but then they got repackaged in collected editions, and the final book in that set had an additional book). Their remit is basically to cover some monster that is suitable to the gothic horror realm of Ravenloft; and their format is dictated by the fact that they are the notes from the famous and reluctant monster hunter, Van Richten — the academic who turned to monster hunting after his son was tragically killed by a vampire, etc. (So the format is: here’s some notes about a monster he faced, and then here, in a little sidebar, is the game rules for that monster.)
The other general comments I want to make are:
* The interior art is largely done by Stephen Fabian, whose heavy blacks and crisp lines really work for me in a classic horror mold.
* The covers are done by diverse hands, and show an interesting mix of subject matter and form. Like, the ghost floating with a ghost knife outside a crooked house feels very paperback gothic, while the lich raising the dead looks just plain fantasy/heavy metal, while the guide to the Vistani has a color palette that seems both muted and colorful, and an almost impressionistic sense of the world.
Now, my non-general comments about the individual 9 books in this line:
#1 VAMPIRES
The first book is a success for me, and sets the template for the product line.
As I noted in general, the remit of this book is essentially to make vampires more unique and individual, both to surprise players (“this dwarf vampire is immune to silver, but vulnerable to mithril!”); as well as to bring them more in line with the fictional depiction of vampires. In other words, taking a cue from the original Ravenloft adventure (1983), this book is all about asking “why is this vampire here?”
Or another way to think about this book is that it’s like the Monstrous Arcana line TSR published in ’96-98: an expanded view of one particular monster type. In the case of vampires, that means discussions of strengths and weaknesses; how they feed and sleep; what it’s like to be immortal and what that does to your personality, etc.
As I said, this is a solid book that hits the remit: a DM with this book could easily surprise players with a unique vampire, both in terms of game stats and in terms of back story and characterization.
One slight negative here is that the form seems to be straining against itself. That is, so much of the book is supposed to be an actual book or notes that Van Richten has written in-game; and yet, VR almost seems to be pretty cognizant of a lot of game terms. So either he mentions something and I thought “is that what people in this world call that spell?” or the language has to twist to admit some distance between the game terms and the world VR lives in.
***
#2 GHOSTS
For all their fictional variety, the vampire in the 90s was a pretty singular thing: everyone kind of knew the vampire was an often tragic serial murderer/sociopath. (See even the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula.)
By contrast, ghosts in fiction are a little more variable, so this book has to start off with a lot of different axes for defining what sort of ghost your PCs might face: how powerful, what it comes from (human, animal), how corporeal, what it looks like, origins, anchors, triggers. There are so many categories but it’s all really inspiring to me, especially since each part of this book is VR saying “some ghosts are like this, for example, I once fought a ghost who…” — and then there’s a little story which is perfect for an adventure or just a rumor.
Again, following the template, there’s the usual chapters on strengths and weaknesses (including a 16pp chapter on unusual abilities that a ghost might have, like the ability to possess the living). One thing stands out here: whereas vampires have a set of fictionally accepted weaknesses (by the 90s at least), ghosts don’t, so this book sets up the idea of the “allergen” — something that the specific ghost is hurt by, usually connected to its history. Which means that a ghost adventure isn’t just “I hit the ghost” but set up to be an investigatory adventure, where you figure out what the (horror) story is.
The one thing that sticks out here as specific to ghosts — and also a little weird — is a 22pp chapter devoted to mediums who speak to the dead. Now, in a modern-day non-magic game, that might be interesting, but in D&D, clerics are pretty common as a way to contact spirits, so I’m not sure about this. Certainly it would add some atmosphere to have to recruit a medium, but would the PCs have to?
And it is still funny to me to hear VR talk about how a ghost rules a domain, like that’s a normal thing that people talk about, and not game-specific stuff.
***
#3 LICH
It is objectively weird that the product line about gothic monsters has an entry for the lich, a magic user who made themselves immortal so they could continue their magic research forever. The lich is not what you would consider a traditional gothic monster — there is no Universal horror movie with a lich, is there? The only reason I can think of for why they put this book together is that one of the major NPCs in Ravenloft — and a big figure in the meta plot adventures that they have — is a lich.
Same format as the other books: some info on where liches come from, what powers they usually have, what special powers they might have, etc.
(One other note: the art is the same format as the other books, mostly b&w, but this book adds some red to those illustrations sometimes, almost always as red points of light in the lich’s skull. Which is fun the first time and a little repetitive after.)
Now, in D&D, there’s a notion that there’s a clerical lich, too, which doesn’t quite make sense to me from a thematic level; this book adds info about a psionic lich, which is fine, but still doesn’t quite feel like the same gothic horror. (The art here doesn’t help, with an illo of a skeletal lich with waves of brain power coming out.)
The book does talk about lairs and minions, and the DM’s appendix notes that liches should be used as masterminds, all of which I agree with, but again — is this gothic horror?
***
#4 WEREBEASTS
I don’t want to harp on how weird it is that they have a book for liches, but I will point out that for their Children of the Night series, where each book gave 13 examples of a particular type of monster, they had vampires, ghosts, werebeasts, and the created — which is to say, the first 5 of the Van Richter’s Guide books without the lich entry.
So in a way, this books feels a lot more in line with the Ravenloft thematics. It also follows the same template: from the pen of Van Richten, with notes on variations — is your lycanthrope hereditary, infected, cursed?
This book also goes big for the idea that there are not just werewolves, but all types of shape changers. It’s fun, though as usual with a series like this, I’m starting to get a little weary of the form. That said, the book goes into the horror aspect of the beast: not just that you could get killed, but you could get turned into a monster. But that said, most of the book still sort of feels more D&D than gothic or Hollywood gothic.
A few minor critiques: Since I’ve dinged other product lines for this, I might as well note that the Ravenloft product line reuses art; and also note that they give a page or so to different paw prints — but like, I could get that from any nature book if I wanted them for some reason.
***
#5 CREATED
I guess “golem” is too ethnic? I kid, I kid, and yet it’s funny: “golem” is the accepted name in D&D for this type of monster, with all different types: flesh golem (i.e., Frankenstein monsters), traditional Jewish clay golems, metal golems, etc. So why “the created” now?
Anyway, this is like the other books in form and I want to be explicit on something they add here: there’s the discussion of golems (their traditional strengths and weaknesses); there’s the elaboration on where they come from and what their psychology is. (I kind of love the five stages from love of the creator to hatred for the creator, but it also feels a little “one size fits all.”)
But what this book adds is the notion of an allergen for golems, just as we had allergens for ghosts; which means that dealing with golems is also an investigation and dealing with an individual tale of horror. Which again, feels like the trademark for this product line and aligns with Ravenloft.
The mix of story-telling and examples becomes a big part of the format here, and I think it’s a useful alternate to game fiction. Game fiction often used to take the form of a short story or snippet of a story as a lead in to a chapter; but here the game fiction is a diary of someone creating a golem; or little examples of golems that people have faced. It feels somehow both more useful (“oh, here’s a golem,” “oh, here’s literally something I could hand out or modify for the players to find”).
There’s also additional rules for personality dissolution if a PC ends up transplanted into a golem and maybe how to reverse that — which feels like both an exciting adventure and… well, horrific, but not quite gothic in the way that a werebeast story can be.
***
#6 ANCIENT DEAD
What is “ancient dead”? I mean, with “the created,” I can figure out what they mean, but here?
Apparently, here, the “ancient dead” means “mummies,” but for some reason they don’t want to say mummies; and the cover isn’t really a help since it’s just a wizened, skeletal dude on a throne. I guess they want to avoid “mummy” because they don’t want us to imagine the traditional Egyptian bandaged dead.
But that also means that this book is trying to discuss mummies without leaning too hard on the most obvious symbols. (Which I guess is why some of the art is pretty generic or disconnected from the topic, like a Viking funeral or a mask with smoke coming out of it.)
So what makes mummies interesting/special? Or what makes them good for fantasy gothic horror?
(Removed a whole paragraph about mummies in fiction and movies, but the short version is: mummies are often presented as being related to love — often ancient love revived.)
So what makes mummies interesting in Ravenloft? Well, they… uh, well, mummies are interesting because they are often intentionally created. And they are often bound to something — a person, place, etc. I guess that could be interesting, but I still don’t quite see it. Like, mummies are often portrayed as tomb guardians, and when you trespass, they attack. OK, great, and in standard D&D, they have disease touch which is a slow wasting away of the PC’s power, and if there’s one thing players fear, it’s losing power. That makes them a fun monster to throw at a PC in a tomb. But how can you use it here, how make it gothic? How make it different from any other horror monster?
In addition, I am always unreasonably displeased when people misspell Edgar Allan Poe’s name.
***
#7 FIENDS
OK, I really feel something of a slide here in focus in this product line. In D&D, devils are one thing (horrible killing machines locked in war), and in fiction, they are another (mostly tempters, with a side of torture), and there’s some overlap sure, but if I was asked to name a bunch of gothic monsters, I’d probably hit “Southern woman sleeping with corpse of dead man she killed” before I got to “devils.” I don’t know, I just feel like part of the draw of the gothic is that the monster is ambiguously human and the humans are ambiguously monstrous, and there’s not a lot of ambiguity around devils.
As a point in my argument, I really can’t name any fiends in the previous Ravenloft material. Probably for this very reason, this is the only book that breaks format and introduces a chapter on notable fiends in Ravenloft. (One of whom -- Inajira — sounds familiar to me.)
Anyway, there’s some fun ideas here, like: since Ravenloft is a prison separated from other realms, one way a fiend could come in is by tempting someone to evil, slowly granting them power as they become more fiendish, and then switching places when the transformation to evil is complete. Another fun idea is that the lands of Ravenloft are so evil, and fiends are so evil, that they can attune to each other, with fiends gaining new powers from the land or sometimes changing the land around them to fit their own notion of reality. Again, fun, and I can sort of imagine a horror scenario where characters go into a nightmare world, but… it would probably be more gory than gothic.
Also, there’s only 3pp on bargaining with fiends, which seems to me like the most interesting horror: not that fiends are evil, but that humans will do fiendish things to get what they want.
There’s also a material on cults and corruption, both of which are good topics to bring up (again: more on the evil of humans), but I thought those sections could really stand to be beefed up.
***
#8 THE VISTANI
I like the Scott burdick cover for this and for the fiend book — both topics seem appropriately represented by only semi-realist works.
Now, that out of the way: what is this book? Actually, no, bigger question: what are the Vistani?
I mean, I know what they are — thinly veiled representations of Romani people, very in keeping with gothic literature and movies. That is, they are mystical — able to tell your fortune and travel through the mists of Ravenloft — and they are untrustworthy — always kidnapping kids and selling them to vampires.
I’ll be honest, when I was 11 and first fell in love with the original Ravenloft box set, I probably thought “of course, you need your creepy nomadic clans of mystics, just like in the movies.”
But even so, maybe someone should have said, “hey, the people the Vistani are based on are historically and even today in danger due to the prejudices from others, so maybe we shouldn’t make them an entry in our series of books on monsters!”
I mean, that’s not the remit of this book, which is a typical (in some ways) D&D book that focuses on a particular culture or species. (Like “Elves of Athas” for Dark Sun or all the Gazetteer books for D&D.) But it seems like a bad idea to put that book in this context of the monster-fighting Van Richten.
At this point, I find it very hard to engage with this material in any other way than a general sense that a lot of people in power (even the minor power of RPG publishing at the time) were not as sensitive as they are rightly now.
***
#9 WITCHES (as printed in Van Richten’s Monster Hunter Compendium 3)
This is my first time looking at this book and while it doesn’t inspire the moral horror of the Vistani book, it did leave me sort of scratching my head.
And that’s largely due to the fact that it isn’t as focused as the other books: we get about half a book on hags, following the usual format of what are they, what can they do. There’s some coverage of what I think makes hags interesting, like their covens. There’s a little less on the other thing that makes them interesting to me, their deal-making with people. (I mean, who is the best hag in cinema? Clearly Ursula, the deal-making sea-witch, right?)
But instead of saying “the villagers make a deal with a hag who is truly a monster (rather than a misunderstood wise woman)”, this book makes the decision to spend half the time talking about regular human witches and warlocks. It even goes so far as to create a witch/warlock kit that allows non-spell casting classes to cast spells, and adds some spells, which is… not what I would imagine in a monster book.
(I mean, while the books in this series were largely written as if a PC could find it, they also had DM-only rules sprinkled throughout. Same here, so: why put player info in a book that isn’t meant for them? The mercenary answer is always: player books sell better, since every game group has one DM and many players.)
This book also includes rules for… Redheads. As in, because there are many folk superstitions around redheads and magic, let’s just write that up as if it were true. Which… like, guys, you know you’re writing a fantasy game, right?
I am still engaged in a twisted version of Marie Kondo’ing my RPG books — remember, she says not to read books as you process them, whereas I am reading the hell out of them — and now next up is my Ravenloft books.
Again, as with my Dark Sun reread project, I am going through both physical books (to see if I want to keep or sell them) and digital books (to see if they are worth acquiring — which is always a hard question since I’m a completist, or at least struggling against that tendency). Unlike the Dark Sun reread, I’m not going strictly chronological, but chunking some books together.
Or rather, I already did that recently with the Children of the Night series, so why not keep going? And next up are the Van Richten’s guide to monsters series.
First though, a tiny primer: Ravenloft was a well-loved 1st edition AD&D module that asked the question: “why is this vampire in a dungeon?” It made a whole story about that vampire, giving a tragic horror backstory. Then in the 90s, TSR decided to make a whole campaign of gothic horror fantasy adventure, which was an odd mix thematically (‘you’re heavily armored fantasy medieval warriors — invited to a Renaissance-era poisoner’s ball”), but which I loved for the narrative potential.
(There’s so many more fun incoherencies to discuss in Ravenloft, but I said this would be a tiny primer, so.)
The Van Richten's Guides sub-collection is a series of ~9 books (there were 8 originally, but then they got repackaged in collected editions, and the final book in that set had an additional book). Their remit is basically to cover some monster that is suitable to the gothic horror realm of Ravenloft; and their format is dictated by the fact that they are the notes from the famous and reluctant monster hunter, Van Richten — the academic who turned to monster hunting after his son was tragically killed by a vampire, etc. (So the format is: here’s some notes about a monster he faced, and then here, in a little sidebar, is the game rules for that monster.)
The other general comments I want to make are:
* The interior art is largely done by Stephen Fabian, whose heavy blacks and crisp lines really work for me in a classic horror mold.
* The covers are done by diverse hands, and show an interesting mix of subject matter and form. Like, the ghost floating with a ghost knife outside a crooked house feels very paperback gothic, while the lich raising the dead looks just plain fantasy/heavy metal, while the guide to the Vistani has a color palette that seems both muted and colorful, and an almost impressionistic sense of the world.
Now, my non-general comments about the individual 9 books in this line:
#1 VAMPIRES
The first book is a success for me, and sets the template for the product line.
As I noted in general, the remit of this book is essentially to make vampires more unique and individual, both to surprise players (“this dwarf vampire is immune to silver, but vulnerable to mithril!”); as well as to bring them more in line with the fictional depiction of vampires. In other words, taking a cue from the original Ravenloft adventure (1983), this book is all about asking “why is this vampire here?”
Or another way to think about this book is that it’s like the Monstrous Arcana line TSR published in ’96-98: an expanded view of one particular monster type. In the case of vampires, that means discussions of strengths and weaknesses; how they feed and sleep; what it’s like to be immortal and what that does to your personality, etc.
As I said, this is a solid book that hits the remit: a DM with this book could easily surprise players with a unique vampire, both in terms of game stats and in terms of back story and characterization.
One slight negative here is that the form seems to be straining against itself. That is, so much of the book is supposed to be an actual book or notes that Van Richten has written in-game; and yet, VR almost seems to be pretty cognizant of a lot of game terms. So either he mentions something and I thought “is that what people in this world call that spell?” or the language has to twist to admit some distance between the game terms and the world VR lives in.
***
#2 GHOSTS
For all their fictional variety, the vampire in the 90s was a pretty singular thing: everyone kind of knew the vampire was an often tragic serial murderer/sociopath. (See even the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula.)
By contrast, ghosts in fiction are a little more variable, so this book has to start off with a lot of different axes for defining what sort of ghost your PCs might face: how powerful, what it comes from (human, animal), how corporeal, what it looks like, origins, anchors, triggers. There are so many categories but it’s all really inspiring to me, especially since each part of this book is VR saying “some ghosts are like this, for example, I once fought a ghost who…” — and then there’s a little story which is perfect for an adventure or just a rumor.
Again, following the template, there’s the usual chapters on strengths and weaknesses (including a 16pp chapter on unusual abilities that a ghost might have, like the ability to possess the living). One thing stands out here: whereas vampires have a set of fictionally accepted weaknesses (by the 90s at least), ghosts don’t, so this book sets up the idea of the “allergen” — something that the specific ghost is hurt by, usually connected to its history. Which means that a ghost adventure isn’t just “I hit the ghost” but set up to be an investigatory adventure, where you figure out what the (horror) story is.
The one thing that sticks out here as specific to ghosts — and also a little weird — is a 22pp chapter devoted to mediums who speak to the dead. Now, in a modern-day non-magic game, that might be interesting, but in D&D, clerics are pretty common as a way to contact spirits, so I’m not sure about this. Certainly it would add some atmosphere to have to recruit a medium, but would the PCs have to?
And it is still funny to me to hear VR talk about how a ghost rules a domain, like that’s a normal thing that people talk about, and not game-specific stuff.
***
#3 LICH
It is objectively weird that the product line about gothic monsters has an entry for the lich, a magic user who made themselves immortal so they could continue their magic research forever. The lich is not what you would consider a traditional gothic monster — there is no Universal horror movie with a lich, is there? The only reason I can think of for why they put this book together is that one of the major NPCs in Ravenloft — and a big figure in the meta plot adventures that they have — is a lich.
Same format as the other books: some info on where liches come from, what powers they usually have, what special powers they might have, etc.
(One other note: the art is the same format as the other books, mostly b&w, but this book adds some red to those illustrations sometimes, almost always as red points of light in the lich’s skull. Which is fun the first time and a little repetitive after.)
Now, in D&D, there’s a notion that there’s a clerical lich, too, which doesn’t quite make sense to me from a thematic level; this book adds info about a psionic lich, which is fine, but still doesn’t quite feel like the same gothic horror. (The art here doesn’t help, with an illo of a skeletal lich with waves of brain power coming out.)
The book does talk about lairs and minions, and the DM’s appendix notes that liches should be used as masterminds, all of which I agree with, but again — is this gothic horror?
***
#4 WEREBEASTS
I don’t want to harp on how weird it is that they have a book for liches, but I will point out that for their Children of the Night series, where each book gave 13 examples of a particular type of monster, they had vampires, ghosts, werebeasts, and the created — which is to say, the first 5 of the Van Richter’s Guide books without the lich entry.
So in a way, this books feels a lot more in line with the Ravenloft thematics. It also follows the same template: from the pen of Van Richten, with notes on variations — is your lycanthrope hereditary, infected, cursed?
This book also goes big for the idea that there are not just werewolves, but all types of shape changers. It’s fun, though as usual with a series like this, I’m starting to get a little weary of the form. That said, the book goes into the horror aspect of the beast: not just that you could get killed, but you could get turned into a monster. But that said, most of the book still sort of feels more D&D than gothic or Hollywood gothic.
A few minor critiques: Since I’ve dinged other product lines for this, I might as well note that the Ravenloft product line reuses art; and also note that they give a page or so to different paw prints — but like, I could get that from any nature book if I wanted them for some reason.
***
#5 CREATED
I guess “golem” is too ethnic? I kid, I kid, and yet it’s funny: “golem” is the accepted name in D&D for this type of monster, with all different types: flesh golem (i.e., Frankenstein monsters), traditional Jewish clay golems, metal golems, etc. So why “the created” now?
Anyway, this is like the other books in form and I want to be explicit on something they add here: there’s the discussion of golems (their traditional strengths and weaknesses); there’s the elaboration on where they come from and what their psychology is. (I kind of love the five stages from love of the creator to hatred for the creator, but it also feels a little “one size fits all.”)
But what this book adds is the notion of an allergen for golems, just as we had allergens for ghosts; which means that dealing with golems is also an investigation and dealing with an individual tale of horror. Which again, feels like the trademark for this product line and aligns with Ravenloft.
The mix of story-telling and examples becomes a big part of the format here, and I think it’s a useful alternate to game fiction. Game fiction often used to take the form of a short story or snippet of a story as a lead in to a chapter; but here the game fiction is a diary of someone creating a golem; or little examples of golems that people have faced. It feels somehow both more useful (“oh, here’s a golem,” “oh, here’s literally something I could hand out or modify for the players to find”).
There’s also additional rules for personality dissolution if a PC ends up transplanted into a golem and maybe how to reverse that — which feels like both an exciting adventure and… well, horrific, but not quite gothic in the way that a werebeast story can be.
***
#6 ANCIENT DEAD
What is “ancient dead”? I mean, with “the created,” I can figure out what they mean, but here?
Apparently, here, the “ancient dead” means “mummies,” but for some reason they don’t want to say mummies; and the cover isn’t really a help since it’s just a wizened, skeletal dude on a throne. I guess they want to avoid “mummy” because they don’t want us to imagine the traditional Egyptian bandaged dead.
But that also means that this book is trying to discuss mummies without leaning too hard on the most obvious symbols. (Which I guess is why some of the art is pretty generic or disconnected from the topic, like a Viking funeral or a mask with smoke coming out of it.)
So what makes mummies interesting/special? Or what makes them good for fantasy gothic horror?
(Removed a whole paragraph about mummies in fiction and movies, but the short version is: mummies are often presented as being related to love — often ancient love revived.)
So what makes mummies interesting in Ravenloft? Well, they… uh, well, mummies are interesting because they are often intentionally created. And they are often bound to something — a person, place, etc. I guess that could be interesting, but I still don’t quite see it. Like, mummies are often portrayed as tomb guardians, and when you trespass, they attack. OK, great, and in standard D&D, they have disease touch which is a slow wasting away of the PC’s power, and if there’s one thing players fear, it’s losing power. That makes them a fun monster to throw at a PC in a tomb. But how can you use it here, how make it gothic? How make it different from any other horror monster?
In addition, I am always unreasonably displeased when people misspell Edgar Allan Poe’s name.
***
#7 FIENDS
OK, I really feel something of a slide here in focus in this product line. In D&D, devils are one thing (horrible killing machines locked in war), and in fiction, they are another (mostly tempters, with a side of torture), and there’s some overlap sure, but if I was asked to name a bunch of gothic monsters, I’d probably hit “Southern woman sleeping with corpse of dead man she killed” before I got to “devils.” I don’t know, I just feel like part of the draw of the gothic is that the monster is ambiguously human and the humans are ambiguously monstrous, and there’s not a lot of ambiguity around devils.
As a point in my argument, I really can’t name any fiends in the previous Ravenloft material. Probably for this very reason, this is the only book that breaks format and introduces a chapter on notable fiends in Ravenloft. (One of whom -- Inajira — sounds familiar to me.)
Anyway, there’s some fun ideas here, like: since Ravenloft is a prison separated from other realms, one way a fiend could come in is by tempting someone to evil, slowly granting them power as they become more fiendish, and then switching places when the transformation to evil is complete. Another fun idea is that the lands of Ravenloft are so evil, and fiends are so evil, that they can attune to each other, with fiends gaining new powers from the land or sometimes changing the land around them to fit their own notion of reality. Again, fun, and I can sort of imagine a horror scenario where characters go into a nightmare world, but… it would probably be more gory than gothic.
Also, there’s only 3pp on bargaining with fiends, which seems to me like the most interesting horror: not that fiends are evil, but that humans will do fiendish things to get what they want.
There’s also a material on cults and corruption, both of which are good topics to bring up (again: more on the evil of humans), but I thought those sections could really stand to be beefed up.
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#8 THE VISTANI
I like the Scott burdick cover for this and for the fiend book — both topics seem appropriately represented by only semi-realist works.
Now, that out of the way: what is this book? Actually, no, bigger question: what are the Vistani?
I mean, I know what they are — thinly veiled representations of Romani people, very in keeping with gothic literature and movies. That is, they are mystical — able to tell your fortune and travel through the mists of Ravenloft — and they are untrustworthy — always kidnapping kids and selling them to vampires.
I’ll be honest, when I was 11 and first fell in love with the original Ravenloft box set, I probably thought “of course, you need your creepy nomadic clans of mystics, just like in the movies.”
But even so, maybe someone should have said, “hey, the people the Vistani are based on are historically and even today in danger due to the prejudices from others, so maybe we shouldn’t make them an entry in our series of books on monsters!”
I mean, that’s not the remit of this book, which is a typical (in some ways) D&D book that focuses on a particular culture or species. (Like “Elves of Athas” for Dark Sun or all the Gazetteer books for D&D.) But it seems like a bad idea to put that book in this context of the monster-fighting Van Richten.
At this point, I find it very hard to engage with this material in any other way than a general sense that a lot of people in power (even the minor power of RPG publishing at the time) were not as sensitive as they are rightly now.
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#9 WITCHES (as printed in Van Richten’s Monster Hunter Compendium 3)
This is my first time looking at this book and while it doesn’t inspire the moral horror of the Vistani book, it did leave me sort of scratching my head.
And that’s largely due to the fact that it isn’t as focused as the other books: we get about half a book on hags, following the usual format of what are they, what can they do. There’s some coverage of what I think makes hags interesting, like their covens. There’s a little less on the other thing that makes them interesting to me, their deal-making with people. (I mean, who is the best hag in cinema? Clearly Ursula, the deal-making sea-witch, right?)
But instead of saying “the villagers make a deal with a hag who is truly a monster (rather than a misunderstood wise woman)”, this book makes the decision to spend half the time talking about regular human witches and warlocks. It even goes so far as to create a witch/warlock kit that allows non-spell casting classes to cast spells, and adds some spells, which is… not what I would imagine in a monster book.
(I mean, while the books in this series were largely written as if a PC could find it, they also had DM-only rules sprinkled throughout. Same here, so: why put player info in a book that isn’t meant for them? The mercenary answer is always: player books sell better, since every game group has one DM and many players.)
This book also includes rules for… Redheads. As in, because there are many folk superstitions around redheads and magic, let’s just write that up as if it were true. Which… like, guys, you know you’re writing a fantasy game, right?
July 11, 2023
The opening salvo of the Van Richten's guide. It's a little fluff and a little crunch with the goal of giving you plenty of ways to flesh out your big bad evil guy vampire. You get a slew of powers for 2nd Edition AD&D but they should be adaptable to any fantasy game. You get some V:tM-esque age categories to better define the threat level of your vampire BBEG. And these are all fine. The book is trying to walk a line that serves both.
But I really like the vampire psychology sections near the end and wish they had been the lionshare of the book. WHY are vampires is a much more interesting question than the myriad ways they can kill your PCs. It's a guide in how to play your vampire bad guy. How do they think? What motivates them to commit the evil they do?
One of the downsides on this is that it is transcribed in the first-person prose of Dr. Van Richten so it's all speculation on the part of a monster hunter. This is contrasted with chapter heading of snippets from an interview conducted by Van Richten with a vampire. And I kind of wish they done a full transcription of that interview. The vampire mind in their own words would give a GM a much firmer framework to go from. It would be a well-disguised guide to getting into character.
But, as it is, it's not bad. I just think it could be presented in a better way.
The interior art is okay. There's a couple of pieces that I think work well but, for the most part, it's nothing special. The high contrast black and white would benefit from some more shadow and obfuscation. I think full white should have been used sparingly but I wasn't the art director.
But I really like the vampire psychology sections near the end and wish they had been the lionshare of the book. WHY are vampires is a much more interesting question than the myriad ways they can kill your PCs. It's a guide in how to play your vampire bad guy. How do they think? What motivates them to commit the evil they do?
One of the downsides on this is that it is transcribed in the first-person prose of Dr. Van Richten so it's all speculation on the part of a monster hunter. This is contrasted with chapter heading of snippets from an interview conducted by Van Richten with a vampire. And I kind of wish they done a full transcription of that interview. The vampire mind in their own words would give a GM a much firmer framework to go from. It would be a well-disguised guide to getting into character.
But, as it is, it's not bad. I just think it could be presented in a better way.
The interior art is okay. There's a couple of pieces that I think work well but, for the most part, it's nothing special. The high contrast black and white would benefit from some more shadow and obfuscation. I think full white should have been used sparingly but I wasn't the art director.
November 27, 2022
Groundbreaking treatment of vampires in D&D, setting the model for later supplements providing deep dives into the possibilities of the creatures in question. Why constantly cast about for new monsters when you can more fully explore the repertoire that exists? And why shouldn't intelligent creatures be every bit as detailed as any other NPC? Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
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