Castles Forlorn

by Lisa Smedman

The Castles Forlorn boxed adventure set provides the DUNGEON MASTER with a rich and complex domain in which to set a campaign of any size and duration.

CONTENTS: 3 booklets (Weeping Land [96 pages]; Melancholy Meetings [32 pages]; Eve of Sorrows [32 pages]), 2 poster maps, 1 poster by Robh Ruppel.

Genres: Role Playing Games

Paperback

First published October 1, 1993

About the author

Lisa was very much the tomboy growing up in Vancouver, British Columbia--playing in the woods behind her house, building tree forts, damming the creek, playing army with GI Joe dolls, swinging on ropes, playing flashlight tag, building models and go-carts (which she later rode down the street). She also liked reading science fiction novels from the 1940s, the Doc Savage series, and the Harriet the Spy books.

In 1984, she began her professional writing career, first as a journalist then as a fiction writer. She counts science fiction authors Connie Willis, Robert J. Sawyer, and H.G. Wells, and classic books such as Treasure Island, as influences.

Several of Lisa's short science fiction and fantasy stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies, and in 1993 she was named a finalist in the Writers of the Future contest for science fiction and fantasy writers. She has also had three of her one-act plays produced by a Vancouver theater group.

Lisa is the author of Extinction, one of several novels set in the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game’s Forgotten Realms universe. Released in 2004, Extinction made the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction.

After authoring several science fiction and fantasy novels, Lisa recently turned her hand to children's books. From Boneshakers to Choppers (2007) explores the social history of motorcycles. Her interest in motorcycles goes way back--as a teenager, Lisa enjoyed trips up the British Columbia coast, riding pillion on friends' motorcycles. She later purchased her own bike, a 50cc machine, to get around town.

Lisa is one of the founders of Adventures Unlimited, a magazine providing scenarios and tips for role-playing games. She has written short fiction for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game's Ravenloft and Dark Sun lines. She has also designed a number of adventures and gaming products for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Cyberpunk, Immortal, Shatterzone, Millennium's End, and Deadlands. Her original games include Valhalla's Gate, a tabletop skirmish miniatures game drawn from Norse mythology and runic lore. An avid gamer, Lisa belongs to the Trumpeter Wargaming Club.

After working for more than 20 years as a journalist, Lisa now divides her time between writing fiction and contributing to the Vancouver Courier (she edits and writes the History's Lens column). Besides a diploma in journalism, she also has a degree in anthropology. She is fascinated by history and archaeology, particularly the Bronze Age. Her future plans include writing more historical fiction, alternative historical fantasy, and game tie-in novels. Lisa is also interested in building models and dioramas, and tabletop miniatures gaming.

She lives in Richmond, British Columbia, with her wife, their son, four cats, and two pugs.

Reviews

[Benjamin]

This is a real interesting box set adventure/accessory describing the domain of Forlorn in much more detail than we've gotten before: in the core box, it gets a quarter of a page -- there's a ghost in a castle and a lake and maybe you'll encounter wolves -- but here we get one 96p booklet on the place and two 32p booklets with encounters to run (one book for the land, one for the castle).

Though sort of billed as an adventure, it's a lot more sandbox than a lot of TSR's other 90's adventures; as the intro notes, there's "no order in which events must occur" and "no specific goals that the PCs must accomplish." In a way, it almost reminds me more of something like Sleep No More: you wander through a space, maybe putting together the story of what happened there by gathering snippets of information. And of course fighting goblyns and ghosts.

Now I don't want to get into the details of the story because they are overwrought, but boiled down: Tristen's parents were killed, one reasonably (he was a vampire), the other unreasonably (she was just a nice pregnant lady); and Tristen was raised by a druid as her son, but had a vampiric taint, and when she tried to cure him, he misunderstood, and they killed each other and Tristen was cursed: in the daytime, he's a living blood-drinker, at night he's a ghost. So now Tristen is immortal, hates the druids of this Scottish-inflected land and is cursed to not be able to get away, so he does the reasonable thing: he burns the sacred grove down, has a castle erected on the spot, disappears for a few years and comes back as his own descendent to expand the castle again, becomes a dark lord, and expands the castle again. (Just to make sure you got that, he built or expanded the castle three times, hence the title is "Castles Forlorn", not just "Castle Forlorn.")

Now, I want to put a little pressure on this because what the heck does the castle have to do with anything? Here's a guy, maybe he hates the common folk for killing his parents (I'm not sure if he knows that happened, hence "maybe"), and he surely hates the druids for (he thinks) cursing him. In the book it's a little odd because we hear a lot about castle A -- when he comes back, starts a family, and basically kills them all -- but then castle B and castle C are just "he expanded the castle." Why is he doing that? What does the castle mean to him? OK, fine, let's put a pin in that as something to come back to.

We also get to hear a bunch about the land, and if you were wondering how Scottish this is, the answer is: the goblyns here wear tartans and engage in deadly Highland games, while the lake (mentioned in the core box set) has its own Loch Ness monster -- here, "Aggie." Also there's a Wild Hunt, but it's not the real Wild Hunt but an evil Ravenloft version. So if you read "Web of Illusions" and thought "geez, this feels like a surface-level understanding of India," well, here they do it to Scotland too.

I don't want to be unreasonably critical here, I was absolutely guilty in the 90s of the same thing: taking the gloss of some culture or genre and thinking I was doing something interesting, even though I was leaving anything deeper. (See, for instance, the flood of "chrome and guns" cyberpunk after Gibson that didn't have anything about class or inequality.) But here I'm going to put another pin: what would it change this to make it, say, English or Welsh or Scottish or Yoruba or -- what about Scottishness is interesting here?

The adventures/encounters in the domain are fine, about what you'd expect: you have to fight the sea serpent, you stumble on the good druid hideout and have to protect it, you meet a young redhead who is magical (because the land is Scottish-y and "gingers are special" is a recurring trope there, I suppose).

The real magic here is the adventures in the castle, because there isn't one castle: there's three of them (at least) and as your PCs move through the castle, they might find themselves moving in time as well. Walk into a room, and meet a person -- come back in later and find their ghsost -- come back in again, and find the person again. The 32p booklet about the castle has some guidelines for dealing with time paradoxes, and includes a glimmer of possibility about stopping the horror from happening at all. Although the book kind of says that it will find a way to happen no matter what -- which is the third thing I want to put a pin in.

Because I really like the gimmick of this domain: the castle unstuck in time, where either you can or can't influence things. Personally, in the year 2022, I find horror in the notion that you can see where history is going and cannot stop it, so I would play the time paradoxes like that: either your actions can't derail history; or your actions are actually part of history; or your actions exist outside of history (i.e., you kill a person before they can do the evil thing, but then go back to discover that that person is alive anyway because you only killed them in one pocket universe. But also, let's recognize the audience: D&D is a power fantasy -- heck, that's why I always liked it -- so would it be possible to sell a product that said "whatever you do doesn't matter"? So, maybe if you write this, you have to keep both options mind: your actions are pointless vs. you can change history.

But whatever it is, your thematics should tie back into the gimmick and vice versa. So, the adventure story is "he keeps expanding the castle and you can travel to different times in it" but how does that tie in to the villain's story? Why, for that matter, do we need to have him work on the castle at all? Let's figure out a reason: he hates and blames druids, so that's why he first burns down the sacred grove and builds himself a manor; then his family dies and he's haunted and abandons it; so when he returns, he expands the castle to try to escape/confuse the ghosts (since he cannot actually escape it because of his curse). Ta-da, that's one reason why he would change the house. I might throw in something like "he learns that the common folk (who love druids) are responsible for his birth mother's death, so he oppresses them as the lord and they burn his castle down, so then he returns and builds it even bigger" and there we have some reason for why he built it a third time.

Or even simpler: he doesn't keep working on the castle, it's just unstuck in time and what matters isn't that he build new rooms or whatnot, but what happens to the people in them. (Though now that I've added a "the castle burns down," I'm real loath to let it go because it's fun to have the PCs walk into a room that's on fire and then walk into it again and it's fine.)

OK, so now we have the "three castles" a little more tied into the villain's story; we don't really have any explanation for why the castles are unstuck in time or why it's Scottish. We do have a reason why this domain isn't just the castle, though: because the lord hates druids and the druids keep trying to plant sacred trees.

Aha, so that makes me think about agricultural time: not progress, but recurrence (plant in spring, grow in summer, harvest in fall, survive in winter, repeat). I mean, the lord is already caught in this weird cycle where he dies every night and comes back as a ghost, so we already have something about recurrence here. I think maybe we just push it a little bit: maybe every day he forgets everything he learned the day before and each day of his new life is the same more-or-less: hate the druids, realize some crime he's been involved in is too much (sue me, I like the Oedipus angle of the detective who is himself the criminal), lash out at the people, die. I'd also change the land from just being inhabited by monsters -- every time they do that, they lose the motivation of helping people. (Maybe the people transform from people to monsters every day?) Maybe at night, the lord is dead, but the monsters are awake, which makes it dangerous in a totally different and undirected way? What if the world outside the castle kept getting reset to the last day of the lord's life and curse, but the time inside the castle had a different cycle?

That all works for me a little more, ties the theme and gimmick together -- but nothing actually explains why this has to be a Scottish-y land.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Castles Forlorn is a 2nd Edition AD&D Ravenloft module. It tossed around as one of the best 2nd Edition modules and it's easy to see why. It has one of the most interesting module gimmicks I've ever seen: The players traverse the same castle through time during 3 different periods of its existence.

The villain of the piece is Tristen ApBlanc and he has the interesting nuance of being both a vampyre and a ghost owing to his odd lineage and particular curse. He has assumed identities in all the time periods though and the book doesn't seem to have any definitive ways in which the PCs can unmask him. That's kind of excessive but it does make him interesting, at least. His backstory is full of pity and evil entirely his own fault. I think him playing up the pitiable aspects of his backstory to try and trick the PCs into helping him has a lot of potential.

The setting book is fantastic and detailed. The adventure books are largely just encounter ideas but it leaves the structure up to the GM as this is sort of a sandbox adventure.

[Arthur B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atmospheric, melancholic, and rather clever, this supplement really shows the potential of the Ravenloft setting. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...