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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition
Book of Crypts: Ravenloft RR2 Adventures:
For characters Levels 3 & Up:
Book of Crypts is 96 pages of the finest in twisted horror.
Nine short adventures await you, promising new, hideous villains and spine-chilling stories of dark minds and lost souls.
Be warned - these tales are not for the weak of heart!
Book of Crypts is 96 pages of the finest in twisted horror.
Nine short adventures await you, promising new, hideous villains and spine-chilling stories of dark minds and lost souls.
Be warned - these tales are not for the weak of heart!
64 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1991
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September 1, 2022Here are two adventure anthologies, the 96p Book of Crypts (1991) and the Van Richten-themed 68p Chilling Tales (1995).
Both of which really raise the question: what is an adventure anthology for? You would think that adventure anthologies are for shorter adventures, maybe things you can run in one night. Some adventure anthologies are themed in one way or another — take Treasure Maps (1992), for instance, where each adventure has a map component — but that’s not strictly necessary. All that’s really necessary for an adventure anthology is a bunch of shorter adventures.
OK, fine, let’s say that there’s no need for any connections between the adventures, that any adventure could be swapped with another adventure with no real loss, i.e., there’s no formal reason why an adventure is here or not, say, in Dungeon Magazine.
So what makes a good short adventure? I have no idea, but I have certain ideas about what a good short adventure isn’t.
Take, for instance, “Bride of Mordenheim”, an adventure which is basically: a lovely woman asks you to escort her to her aunt’s house, where we discover that the mad scientist husband is trying to revive the dead aunt. Are there any meaningful decisions or actions for the PCs to make? Barely — you escort the woman (or there’s no encounter) and then there’s practically no mystery to solve, no combat to dazzle, and no roleplaying. All there is is a “save the woman” quest with a lot of long description. (Luckily the adventure is only 6 pages long.)
Or take for example, “Corrupted Innocents,” in which a lost little girl leads the PCs into a bunch of traps, and maybe is eventually revealed as a monster. Now, she has a crazy backstory — she was a beautiful mage who, jealous of the evil lord of the domain, shape changed into a little girl, and who was then tortured so that she forgot her past — but that’s probably only going to come out after the adventure, when the DM says, “oh, you want to hear her story?” — which is a time-honored part of game night, but doesn’t actually make the game more fun. So what are we left with? A bunch of semi-random encounters. (10 pages here)
Similarly, an adventure isn’t just an encounter with a new monster, like the living wall in the adventure “The Living Crypt” (8 pages). (Or in the case of “Family Feud” from Chilling Tales — and all the Chilling Tales adventures have tremendously generic titles like that — an encounter with an old monster in a slightly new context: werewolves pretending not to be so the PCs will kill their weretiger enemy. (Luckily only 2 pages.)
Now, to be fair, all of the villains here have some backstory so that the PCs might, I don’t know, feel bad for the tragic twists that brought them to this fate, but also: if that’s what they wanted, they could read a book. What makes a good adventure is meaningful choice on the part of the players, even if that choice is just “when should I cast fireball?”
Now, another way an adventure can be bad is to be more-or-less without stakes. For instance, in “The Man with Three Faces,” there’s a madman who controls reality, but he has multiple personalities so the PCs keep finding themselves in different versions of the same town. Nice enough set pieces there, in a reality horror sort of way — except when the PCs kill him, they discover the town wasn’t real at all. So, what happens if they don’t come to this town? I suppose the madman just sort of keeps going in his hermetic bubble of madness, hurting no one. The author throws in a portal out of Ravenloft, as if sensing that there’s not enough stakes here as it is. (11 pages)
Somewhat similarly, in the Chilling Tale “Gazing into the Abyss” (and I did tell you the titles were all pretty bad there), a monster is trying to discredit monster-hunter Van Richten by having him kill innocent people who just happen to have a lot of vampire-like abilities thanks to magic. So there’s some stakes there — Van Richten’s good name, I guess — but the way the adventure is written, it almost seems like the PCs can’t actually stop VR from killing people, but since he was tricked, it doesn’t actually drive him to madness, the way the villain hoped. I guess that’s supposed to be thanks to the PCs, but it’s written a bit oddly, and I would start with the possibility that the PCs can prevent the bad thing.
“The Surgeon’s Blade” in Chilling Tales is — well, I don’t rightly know what it is. It’s about someone who hates golems so much that he creates golems to fight golems. It’s a story that we’ll see again in Children of the Night: The Created, so someone must like it, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what this adventure entails. You stop a bad man from doing a bad thing, probably.
So that’s about 7 adventures that I more-or-less rolled my eyes at; but there’s 10 more adventures in these two books, and most of them have something that kept my eyes firmly in place.
For instance, “Blood in Moondale” feels like a pretty standard “werewolf attacking a town in a snowstorm” adventure, complete with red herring — and really, this is one of the bog-standard werewolf setups. But it’s fine and you need some of the standards now and again. The only reason why I think this is a middling adventure (and this is the middling section of my review) is that D&D isn’t the best system for mysteries and D&D authors in the 90s aren’t really great about thinking through clues: what if a character misses a clue, what if they pick something up too early, etc.? (11 pages)
Similarly, when one of the PCs is possessed by a serial killer ghost in “The Cedar Chest” (10 pages), that’s a fine setup, but it requires a bit of handwaving: “oh, you met this person, but then your memory was wiped, and that’s when they planted the seed that would allow them to take you over.” It feels real sweaty.
Again, another sweaty lead is necessary in “Through Darkened Eyes”: an evil Vistani has to trick the PCs into attacking some good Vistani, at which point the evil is unmasked and attacked. I’m not a fan of “you have to do this bad thing for the adventure to begin and then you have to undo it.” But I like the classic nature of the final set piece: fighting giant spiders and a grave-dirt golem in a cemetery.
(Also, the adventures in Chilling Tales are meant to involve Van Richten, whom the PCs keep meeting and helping out, which is fine, I guess, but runs the danger of the NPC arc being more interesting than the PCs. Also, while each adventure includes Terror Tips — how to make this adventure spooky — some of those tips are essentially unusable, like “wear a mask, intone that the PCs will all die, then leave and come back and never mention it again.”)
“Undying Justice” is another classic: someone died in a fire and now the new house keeps having mysterious fires, what a coinkidink! Slightly weird in that it seems like the person who hired you to stop the haunting also doesn’t want the haunting to be solved, but that’s an easy fix. Also it seems like the ghost only wants an apology and not actually retribution, so it lacks the danger of a typical ghost story adventure.
Now stakes don’t have to be world-shaking, but I want to point out how nice “Death’s Cold Laughter” ends: if the PCs successfully kill the evil jester (with his “laugh so hard you hurt” jokes and trial by illusionary combat, ho-hum), the people of the town are free and celebrate with real mirth. Which is a little thing, but could have a big impact on how players feel about the night’s events: you did a thing! People are happy! That goes a long way. (9 pages)
So 7 bad adventures, 6 redeemable or steerable, which leaves about 5 that I like pretty much all the way through:
In “Dark Minstrel,” the PCs are invited to dine with the duke, only every night in his house lasts 100 years and there’s no escape unless the PCs destroy the cursed musical instrument. I’m kind of a sucker for “trapped in a house” psychodrama, and I might play up the loneliness and weirdness of a guy who keeps trying to make friends, but can never keep them around for a 100 years.
In “Rite of Terror,” an evil beast cult ritually sacrifices wild animals, but when there aren’t any, they start kidnapping townsfolk and polymorphing them into animals. I like town crawls and cult fights, and my one note here is “why the heck is the leader of the cult an illithid?” I might also ask how big this town is that they keep losing people to this cult, but again, that’s fixable.
“The Scarlet Kiss” has nice stakes: Van Richten has been poisoned and will turn into a vampire, his worst nightmare — unless the PCs can find the fledgeling vampire who is disguised as a nurse at the hospital. Also, quite possibly the best or second-best title in Chilling Tales.
“Ancient Dead” is not the other best title — and here I should note that each adventure in Chilling Tales has some connection not just to Van Richten, but to the Guides that they want you to buy. So the golem story makes use of some terminology in the Van Richten’s Guide to the Created, etc. So here, they use the term “Ancient Dead” which is what they went with instead of mummy, for some reason. Anyway, it’s just a typical “stop someone from waking the undead” but I like that the person who is killing people and so giving power to this one mummy is doing so for a logical reason: they think they’re going to make the desert livable by sacrificing to Sobek, and so bringing rains. The setup here is hokey — Van Richten is being feted by the nobles of the Egyptian themed land for some service he did in the past — but the short adventure is nice enough: first, find out who is killing people; then, do a little dungeon delve into the tomb to stop the mummy.
And the best title in Chilling Tales is the tongue twistery “The Taskmaster’s Leash,” which involves fiends corrupting a town by impersonating the mayor and militia chief. Now there’s handwaveyness here — no one notices because these two fiends happened to drug the water supply with a powerful hallucinogen that just covers up their appearance — and there’s hokeyness — oh, here’s a little street urchin who hasn’t drank the water — but here’s what I like: these two fiends aren’t trying to kill everyone directly, they’re just slowly instituting a fascist, authoritarian state, with special police and informants.
So, what makes a good short adventure: the players’ actions and decisions have to matter to the clear, short story that you’re telling, with stakes if they fail, and — at its best — some sense of tone, theme, or even spectacle.
Both of which really raise the question: what is an adventure anthology for? You would think that adventure anthologies are for shorter adventures, maybe things you can run in one night. Some adventure anthologies are themed in one way or another — take Treasure Maps (1992), for instance, where each adventure has a map component — but that’s not strictly necessary. All that’s really necessary for an adventure anthology is a bunch of shorter adventures.
OK, fine, let’s say that there’s no need for any connections between the adventures, that any adventure could be swapped with another adventure with no real loss, i.e., there’s no formal reason why an adventure is here or not, say, in Dungeon Magazine.
So what makes a good short adventure? I have no idea, but I have certain ideas about what a good short adventure isn’t.
Take, for instance, “Bride of Mordenheim”, an adventure which is basically: a lovely woman asks you to escort her to her aunt’s house, where we discover that the mad scientist husband is trying to revive the dead aunt. Are there any meaningful decisions or actions for the PCs to make? Barely — you escort the woman (or there’s no encounter) and then there’s practically no mystery to solve, no combat to dazzle, and no roleplaying. All there is is a “save the woman” quest with a lot of long description. (Luckily the adventure is only 6 pages long.)
Or take for example, “Corrupted Innocents,” in which a lost little girl leads the PCs into a bunch of traps, and maybe is eventually revealed as a monster. Now, she has a crazy backstory — she was a beautiful mage who, jealous of the evil lord of the domain, shape changed into a little girl, and who was then tortured so that she forgot her past — but that’s probably only going to come out after the adventure, when the DM says, “oh, you want to hear her story?” — which is a time-honored part of game night, but doesn’t actually make the game more fun. So what are we left with? A bunch of semi-random encounters. (10 pages here)
Similarly, an adventure isn’t just an encounter with a new monster, like the living wall in the adventure “The Living Crypt” (8 pages). (Or in the case of “Family Feud” from Chilling Tales — and all the Chilling Tales adventures have tremendously generic titles like that — an encounter with an old monster in a slightly new context: werewolves pretending not to be so the PCs will kill their weretiger enemy. (Luckily only 2 pages.)
Now, to be fair, all of the villains here have some backstory so that the PCs might, I don’t know, feel bad for the tragic twists that brought them to this fate, but also: if that’s what they wanted, they could read a book. What makes a good adventure is meaningful choice on the part of the players, even if that choice is just “when should I cast fireball?”
Now, another way an adventure can be bad is to be more-or-less without stakes. For instance, in “The Man with Three Faces,” there’s a madman who controls reality, but he has multiple personalities so the PCs keep finding themselves in different versions of the same town. Nice enough set pieces there, in a reality horror sort of way — except when the PCs kill him, they discover the town wasn’t real at all. So, what happens if they don’t come to this town? I suppose the madman just sort of keeps going in his hermetic bubble of madness, hurting no one. The author throws in a portal out of Ravenloft, as if sensing that there’s not enough stakes here as it is. (11 pages)
Somewhat similarly, in the Chilling Tale “Gazing into the Abyss” (and I did tell you the titles were all pretty bad there), a monster is trying to discredit monster-hunter Van Richten by having him kill innocent people who just happen to have a lot of vampire-like abilities thanks to magic. So there’s some stakes there — Van Richten’s good name, I guess — but the way the adventure is written, it almost seems like the PCs can’t actually stop VR from killing people, but since he was tricked, it doesn’t actually drive him to madness, the way the villain hoped. I guess that’s supposed to be thanks to the PCs, but it’s written a bit oddly, and I would start with the possibility that the PCs can prevent the bad thing.
“The Surgeon’s Blade” in Chilling Tales is — well, I don’t rightly know what it is. It’s about someone who hates golems so much that he creates golems to fight golems. It’s a story that we’ll see again in Children of the Night: The Created, so someone must like it, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what this adventure entails. You stop a bad man from doing a bad thing, probably.
So that’s about 7 adventures that I more-or-less rolled my eyes at; but there’s 10 more adventures in these two books, and most of them have something that kept my eyes firmly in place.
For instance, “Blood in Moondale” feels like a pretty standard “werewolf attacking a town in a snowstorm” adventure, complete with red herring — and really, this is one of the bog-standard werewolf setups. But it’s fine and you need some of the standards now and again. The only reason why I think this is a middling adventure (and this is the middling section of my review) is that D&D isn’t the best system for mysteries and D&D authors in the 90s aren’t really great about thinking through clues: what if a character misses a clue, what if they pick something up too early, etc.? (11 pages)
Similarly, when one of the PCs is possessed by a serial killer ghost in “The Cedar Chest” (10 pages), that’s a fine setup, but it requires a bit of handwaving: “oh, you met this person, but then your memory was wiped, and that’s when they planted the seed that would allow them to take you over.” It feels real sweaty.
Again, another sweaty lead is necessary in “Through Darkened Eyes”: an evil Vistani has to trick the PCs into attacking some good Vistani, at which point the evil is unmasked and attacked. I’m not a fan of “you have to do this bad thing for the adventure to begin and then you have to undo it.” But I like the classic nature of the final set piece: fighting giant spiders and a grave-dirt golem in a cemetery.
(Also, the adventures in Chilling Tales are meant to involve Van Richten, whom the PCs keep meeting and helping out, which is fine, I guess, but runs the danger of the NPC arc being more interesting than the PCs. Also, while each adventure includes Terror Tips — how to make this adventure spooky — some of those tips are essentially unusable, like “wear a mask, intone that the PCs will all die, then leave and come back and never mention it again.”)
“Undying Justice” is another classic: someone died in a fire and now the new house keeps having mysterious fires, what a coinkidink! Slightly weird in that it seems like the person who hired you to stop the haunting also doesn’t want the haunting to be solved, but that’s an easy fix. Also it seems like the ghost only wants an apology and not actually retribution, so it lacks the danger of a typical ghost story adventure.
Now stakes don’t have to be world-shaking, but I want to point out how nice “Death’s Cold Laughter” ends: if the PCs successfully kill the evil jester (with his “laugh so hard you hurt” jokes and trial by illusionary combat, ho-hum), the people of the town are free and celebrate with real mirth. Which is a little thing, but could have a big impact on how players feel about the night’s events: you did a thing! People are happy! That goes a long way. (9 pages)
So 7 bad adventures, 6 redeemable or steerable, which leaves about 5 that I like pretty much all the way through:
In “Dark Minstrel,” the PCs are invited to dine with the duke, only every night in his house lasts 100 years and there’s no escape unless the PCs destroy the cursed musical instrument. I’m kind of a sucker for “trapped in a house” psychodrama, and I might play up the loneliness and weirdness of a guy who keeps trying to make friends, but can never keep them around for a 100 years.
In “Rite of Terror,” an evil beast cult ritually sacrifices wild animals, but when there aren’t any, they start kidnapping townsfolk and polymorphing them into animals. I like town crawls and cult fights, and my one note here is “why the heck is the leader of the cult an illithid?” I might also ask how big this town is that they keep losing people to this cult, but again, that’s fixable.
“The Scarlet Kiss” has nice stakes: Van Richten has been poisoned and will turn into a vampire, his worst nightmare — unless the PCs can find the fledgeling vampire who is disguised as a nurse at the hospital. Also, quite possibly the best or second-best title in Chilling Tales.
“Ancient Dead” is not the other best title — and here I should note that each adventure in Chilling Tales has some connection not just to Van Richten, but to the Guides that they want you to buy. So the golem story makes use of some terminology in the Van Richten’s Guide to the Created, etc. So here, they use the term “Ancient Dead” which is what they went with instead of mummy, for some reason. Anyway, it’s just a typical “stop someone from waking the undead” but I like that the person who is killing people and so giving power to this one mummy is doing so for a logical reason: they think they’re going to make the desert livable by sacrificing to Sobek, and so bringing rains. The setup here is hokey — Van Richten is being feted by the nobles of the Egyptian themed land for some service he did in the past — but the short adventure is nice enough: first, find out who is killing people; then, do a little dungeon delve into the tomb to stop the mummy.
And the best title in Chilling Tales is the tongue twistery “The Taskmaster’s Leash,” which involves fiends corrupting a town by impersonating the mayor and militia chief. Now there’s handwaveyness here — no one notices because these two fiends happened to drug the water supply with a powerful hallucinogen that just covers up their appearance — and there’s hokeyness — oh, here’s a little street urchin who hasn’t drank the water — but here’s what I like: these two fiends aren’t trying to kill everyone directly, they’re just slowly instituting a fascist, authoritarian state, with special police and informants.
So, what makes a good short adventure: the players’ actions and decisions have to matter to the clear, short story that you’re telling, with stakes if they fail, and — at its best — some sense of tone, theme, or even spectacle.
August 6, 2017
Good little source of one shots to use between adventures or just to spice things up when other adventures are all rather too linear
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews