Is it worth getting? It is it well designed? Does it have a good storyline? From what little I've heard of it it sounds like something that my players would enjoy and something I'd enjoy running for them but before I invest money into it I'd like to know if its worth getting.
Specifically, I'd like to know if it has a lot of fluff on Castle Greyhawk, Greyhawk City and the story behind the dungeon, as opposed to just a huge pile of Delve-format encounters.
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As a big Ravenloft fan I preordered this thing as soon as it was announced. What a let down!
The Castle Ravenloft site itself is quite good but I found the rest of the book quite bad.
As the first "delve" format book it's the first to be ridiculously redundant.
The Village of Barovia site is a joke compared to the original; it's essentually a hack-n-slash, beat your way through an army of undead village with no subtlety or atmosphere WHATESOEVER. Tracy and Laura Hickman must've vomited when they read what Bruce Cordell had done to their original masterpiece.
The main design feature of the book, like the original, is a random plot outline for the NPC, Strahd. There's about six goals for the vampire wizard and the PCs have their fortunes read which determines which of the six goals Strahd wants to achieve. A couple of them are just more dumb hack-n-slash piles of adventure offal: Strahd wants to build an army of super undead; Strahd wants to make vampires immune to sunlight (gee, what a great idea:[ ). Others have some potential: Strahd wants to ally with the PCs, manipulating them to destroy some hags, or, in another, to find a lost artifact -- then he'll betray them.
I'd recommend that you get yourself a copy of the original, 1983 Ravenloft. Believe it or not, with only a little modification you can run that adventure AS IS, even today. Certainly the best adventure ever written. Check out the 2nd edition material as well; it'll further give you an idea of how Ravenloft is meant to be run.
Now, if you and your gaming group like pure, kick-n-the-door slugfests and want to fight lots of undead -- this should be fun for you. BTW, the Feats, PrCs, and such are the weakest point. Two feats, both mentioned in Libris Mortis, one PrC that ain't that great, and a secret society of Undead hunters that is a farce, and the story line behind it is even stupider!
-W. E. Ray
No we're not really hackn'slashers so I think I'll pass on Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Thanks for the review.
Well, i have both Castle Ravenloft and Greyhawk castle (since you two are talking about differnt books, there is no greyhawk stuff in ravenloft and there is no ravenloft in greyhawk)
Ravenloft: the maps are fantastic, just like the original, there is plenty of fluff: there are 54 encounters, so about 108 pages of encounters, there are 19 pages of crunch (feats, spells, a prestige class, magic items, legendary itemes etc), the village and lands of barovia, there is a fortune telling bit, that can use three-dragon ante, a tarot deck, or a regular deck of playing cards (the fortunes told actually have an effect on what goes on in the game, pretty fun)
The book is 221 pages, i think it gives enough to run a great game, with enough detail to flesh it out even more, and if you tied this with libris mortis....then you got yourself some flesh eating fun!!
Greyhawk: This one is fantastic!! It has alot of old school dungeons and dragons goodness. Names from the 70s. There is a lot of fluff in the beggining, and it begins with the natural death of one of the greats!
it has 54 fleshed out encounters, with about half of those being one page encounters. a 7 page crunch appendix, and about 35 or so pages of introduction and city of greyhawk stuff. The book admits that it is not the end all be all of city greyhawk stuff, and mentions the couple of earlier edition sets for more information on the free city.
i havent seen the B-52 in this book (i havent read the whole thing yet either, so it may be mentioned), but once again, it is not just a updated copy of the original (like a cover song that sounds exactly like the original). It is its own adventure.
I like them both. i also have the expidition to undermountaian. havent opened it up yet. im considering the demonweb pits, maybe in a few months.
We are about to start a once a month game with Expedition to castle Ravenloft tomorrow.
I really don't mind a bunch of Hack and Slash encounters. The best RPing in my experience comes about naturally as character and DM needs arise in a campaign.
I will say the Delve format actually has me confused at times. There are a lot of options presented for the flow of the campaign. With typical Dungeon adventures I knew the story arc without having to read over a hundred+ pages. We will see how it goes.
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I'm currently a player in an Expedition to Castle Ravenloft game. We're not yet to the castle, but so far I'm unimpressed. Compared to the original module this new treatment is flavorless and combat heavy. It plays less like a horror novel and more like a side scroller video game, with its goofy trick-pony undead, pillars of power and two dimensional townsfolk. Even the tarot reading, which structures the course of the adventure, has all the subtlety of Madlibs.
It's the difference between Dracula the book and Van Helsing the movie.
I not sure how much of this is my DM's lack of panache, but it seems like a lot of work for any DM to make this thing dramatic.
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I have only read it, not played it. The stuff outside the "delve" sections is moderately interesting. But as the rest is in delve format, it does feel like a series of combats in the castle. (I hate delve format - makes the adventures really hard to read, as the non-combat stuff is on one page and the combat on another. No page flipping? It was a totally cretinous thing to adopt and makes me very unwilling to but WotC adventures.)
For any Greyhawk scholars, where would you place this Expedition to Ravenloft? (I don't remeber where the original was placed). Looking at the 4 part map I was thinking maybe the edge of the Vesve forest near Perrenland. Seems like the Dreadwood near the Hool Marshes would be good, but no mountains. Any thoughts?
I'm DMing Expedition to Castle Ravenloft right now. We are 9 sessions into it. The PCs just entered the castle for the first time last session and I have to say all 7 of us are enjoying the adventure quite a lot. While I agree that the fluff-as-written lacks a lot of atmosphere and the NPCs are indeed two-dimensional, these faults in the adventure actually allow the DM and the PCs to inject a lot of their own story into the plot. Maybe I just have an extraordinary group, but we have yet to play a single session that wasn't filled with creepy atmosphere and a genuine sense of uneasiness (and often downright scariness).
Of course, I'm not a regular poster on these boards, so no one will probably give my opinion much merit. ;-)
I played partway through Castle Ravenloft--our DM made it reasonably fun from a roleplaying perspective, but of course he was familiar with the original, so that made it easy for him to bring the setting to life. He ran the delve encounters more or less as written (I think), and in places it made the fighting side of the adventure seem kind of static.
Ravenloft is supposed to be its own demiplane, of course, but if you wanted to put it into Greyhawk without "the mists" and all that, it would fit pretty well in any mountainous marchland--or you could just put in a few mountains to set the castle on. Backstory-wise, Castle Dahlvier (near the edge of the Fellreev Forest, between the Horned Lands, Bandit Kingdoms, and the Empire of Iuz) is probably the best spot. But it would go pretty well in the Bone March, or in some isolated corner of the Glorioles (with Strahd as a depraved undead noble of the Great Kingdom who has kept his valley isolated from all the trouble and civil war that that nation has been through--the people hate him but acquiesce to his rule because he keeps them safe from Ivid's demons and whatnot). The mountains near the Duchy of Tenh, or the Yatils west of Perrenland, or the abandoned Duchy of Geoff might also work, with a similar set up.
As for the delve format--yes, it sucks as bad as everyone above says it does. Not sure what possessed the fine folks at WotC to think a convenient format for convention tourney play is suitable for home use. I just bought and read through Castle Greyhawk--I think it's a pretty cool adventure, and it has some interesting developments of canon NPCs that could lay the groundwork for a new era in Greyhawk history. (Maybe this is in the works--a 4e setting guide that advances the calendar another few years to circa CY 600). But having to flip backwards and forwards through the book to match encounters with room descriptions and such is maddening, and the actual delve encounter pages often have discrepancies with the dungeon description, or stuff that is either clearly erroneous (having to make a balance check to avoid falling into the gorge when you're fighting on a 30 foot wide bridge), or useless and redundant. I'm sure the book could have dropped about 50 pages if the encounter info was just included in the text.
On the whole, I think these books are worth getting if you are really interested in the setting and the adventure, as I was with Castle Greyhawk. But they will require quite a bit of work on the DM's part to make them run well--more work, I think, than the adventure arcs and APs published in Dungeon. And it is harder to figure out what the authors intended because of the fragmentation induced by the delve format.
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Of course, I'm not a regular poster on these boards, so no one will probably give my opinion much merit. ;-)
No one here will hold that against you -- it's inarticulate and uncouth posters we don't really like (or, at least, I don't like). In fact, it's good to read some new posters.
Anyway, I'm glad you and other groups are enjoying it. Gee, I think you may be on to something with the <published material has no atmosphere so we make up for it by making it good anyway> [ ;-) ]. Of course, like you say, it takes good gaming groups to do this.
I guess one of the things that bugs me about the new Ravenloft is that anyone who never played the original, or even the 2E stuff, would totally misinterpret what it's suppose to be all about. I wonder: if your group had no exposure to Ravenloft before would you have added the Fluff to make it "creepy" and full of "downright scariness"?
Ultimately, Strahd is the greatest villain in D&D; Ravenloft is the greatest adventure in D&D. Now, someone new to the game would pick up the new adventure, read it, and ask, "WTF!?"
-W. E. Ray
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I have only read it, not played it. The stuff outside the "delve" sections is moderately interesting. But as the rest is in delve format, it does feel like a series of combats in the castle. (I hate delve format - makes the adventures really hard to read, as the non-combat stuff is on one page and the combat on another. No page flipping? It was a totally cretinous thing to adopt and makes me very unwilling to but WotC adventures.)
I know. I tried to read one of the delve mod's and it felt like someone severed my corpus callosum.
Well, I actually like the thing - though it seems like I might be in the minority here - and my group seems to be having fun with it. I do have the original, though I never ran it, and it probably is better but the new one's not so bad. It certainly is combat heavy. No doubt about it. And it needs a lot of fleshing out - both in terms of the plot itself and in terms of glossed over and omitted items.
Our RP has been sort of tongue-in-cheek horror and it has actually been pretty fun. The warforged druid of the party, for instance, has taken and hidden away the face of Ashlyn - who was captured and skinned by a crazy dwarf taxidermist - because he wonders what it would be like to have real flesh. Sure the NPCs are cardboard - but I have left some of them that way: as interesting caricatures. Ismark (the Lesser) has been fun, as have Madam Eva, one of her goons named Tank (pronounced tahnk - a circus style halfling muscleman freak in leather with full-body tattoos), love-lorn Gertruda, crazy Cyrus, and a number of others.
Okay, not your standard Ravenloft-Demiplane of Dread fare, but not completely without merit either.
M
I'm running it in Pathfinder right now & I have to say it's been one of the best games I've ever DMed. I've been using the old 2nd edition module as kind of a "cheat sheet", and I think if you're looking for a real horror based campaign it's a good reference to have.
My group has been playing this one for about three months & our next game will be our first excursion into the actual castle. They've done a ton of stuff that's not in the book, but I think that's where the best parts of any D&D game come from.
I might be in the minority here, but I think the encounters from the book are awesome. They're challenging (with a little tweaking) and there always seems to be something that will give you a disease, drain your stats, or turn you into something unfortunate if it kills you; which I've noticed makes the PCs act more carefully than if they were fighting regular D&D monsters like orcs or trolls.
Essentially, if you want to run a game with a little railroading in the beginning followed by a completely non-linear style of play, I think you might enjoy running this game. I know my players love playing it. Not that many people remember Ravenloft anymore, and personally, I love taking my favorite settings and sharing them with new players. And there aren't that many settings I like more than Ravenloft.
With a little tweaking, I give this module a solid A. Give it a try, the pdf is free on the interwebs.
P.S. If you're running it in roll20, give yourself plenty of time to get the castle maps ready. that place is HUGE.
Of course, I'm not a regular poster on these boards, so no one will probably give my opinion much merit. ;-)No one here will hold that against you -- it's inarticulate and uncouth posters we don't really like (or, at least, I don't like). In fact, it's good to read some new posters.
Anyway, I'm glad you and other groups are enjoying it. Gee, I think you may be on to something with the <published material has no atmosphere so we make up for it by making it good anyway> [ ;-) ]. Of course, like you say, it takes good gaming groups to do this.
I guess one of the things that bugs me about the new Ravenloft is that anyone who never played the original, or even the 2E stuff, would totally misinterpret what it's suppose to be all about. I wonder: if your group had no exposure to Ravenloft before would you have added the Fluff to make it "creepy" and full of "downright scariness"?
Ultimately, Strahd is the greatest villain in D&D; Ravenloft is the greatest adventure in D&D. Now, someone new to the game would pick up the new adventure, read it, and ask, "WTF!?"
-W. E. Ray
I never played the original, but I did play the Expedition one. I found Expedition to Castle Ravenloft quite fun to tell the truth.
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For any Greyhawk scholars, where would you place this Expedition to Ravenloft? (I don't remeber where the original was placed). Looking at the 4 part map I was thinking maybe the edge of the Vesve forest near Perrenland. Seems like the Dreadwood near the Hool Marshes would be good, but no mountains. Any thoughts?
Ravenloft wasn't in Greyhawk. The original module was a setting-free module.
Ravenloft is supposed to be its own demiplane
The original module (as well as Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill and Expedition to Ravenloft) were not a part of the Ravenloft setting/demiplane.
For a couple of people in this thread, Expedition to Ravenloft and Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk are two different books. The only real link is that they were both done in the same format (which they also shared with Expedition to Undermountain).
For a couple of people in this thread, Expedition to Ravenloft and Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk are two different books. The only real link is that they were both done in the same format (which they also shared with Expedition to Undermountain).
Don't forget Expedition to the Demonweb Pits in that collection either!