Quote from: SHARK on May 24, 2021, 03:44:09 AM


Greetings!

Outstanding, Rob! Yes, indeed I am Irish. I have some other nationalities too, but the Irish is prominent. My Irish branch of the family originally came from County Cork, in Southern Ireland.

What part of Ireland are you in, Rob?

It's especially sad with how the SJW's are corrupting our hobby, bringing in Marxist ideology, division, racism, and all the rest of their horrible nonsense. I'm also convinced that these jackasses--like Pundit has talked on so often--many of these slugs aren't even *gamers*. They are more like activists that like to gather around a "Gaming Coffeebook" and a few rulebooks and have "struggle sessions" where they search through every part of the book, looking for every idea or turn of phrase to be offended by, and then seek to start a Twitter mob to scream and cancel someone or otherwise harass them. Just like we can see with what these morons like Jessica Price and the rest of the rainbow hippo crew of writers that were assembled to create the Nu-Ravenloft book, few of these people have any actual experience in writing or game design, and demonstrate a hatred for traditional games, traditional gaming, and normal gamers. Especially reserving their most intense hatred and contempt for any gamers that are male, straight, and white.

It's all so disgusting and terrible. It makes me want to light up a cigar, get a strong drink, and rant with the boys.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Hey mate,

Ah, so your from the rebel county Cork! Would you believe myself and the missus have recently moved to West Cork (a year and a half ago). It's easily the best place to live in Ireland as far as I'm concerned. The people down here are absolutely lovely. I'm actually from Dublin myself. Half my other family all hail from Wexford.

The modern Irish are all very laid back these days... They are happy to let people do what they want, but don't like being told what to do. Plus, we can take a joke - unlike some of the crybaby sjws!

Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs when certain 'do-gooders' think they have the right to educate the populous through their mass media propaganda. If I wanted further education I'd go on a fucking course! Pundit really knows how to wind these fools up and tell the truth at the same time. Respect!

In all honesty I dropped D&D a good while back. The only thing that made any sense was the OSR. And as Pundit says some of the best and most innovative games have come through the movement.

The best way to punish these gimps, including corporate scum like hasbro is just to vote with your wallet, and tell other people not to listen to their BS. And that it's fine to play whatever you want. Just don't be bullied by sjw man-babies.

Yeah bruv, I hear that. it's pretty damn depressing... Makes me want to crack open the Jameson and watch the newest Inappropriate Characters vid.

Cheers,

Rob.

Quote from: SHARK on May 23, 2021, 06:49:00 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 23, 2021, 05:53:50 PM
Just because Strahd has some mercenaries of Vistani descent doesn't mean that all Vistani everywhere are evil. Van Richten wrote a whole book explaining that isn't true.

Greetings!

BoxCrayonTales, you do realise--I hope--that I know that? I don't need a Van Richten's Book to tell me that "Gee, not all Vistani are evil minions of Strahd or other dark monsters?"

BCT, in my campaigns, I have had *good* Gypsies since *before* Ravenloft ever saw the light of day.

It's a theatrical, fantasy trope for the *game.* It doesn't have a damned thing to do with real people. You seem to have a difficulty comprehending this salient point. EVERYTHING in the Ravenloft is fantasy. None of it has any direct connection with the real world. Are cartoons or Anime or Manga dealing with the real world? Are Coyote's actually buying bombs from ACME to blow people up?

Again, this whole absolute insistence that elements in *THE GAME* have, somehow, real world connections, influences, and directives. They don't. It's a fucking fantasy game.

All of these sobbing, cuck bitches sniveling and crying about being "offended". WHAAA! WHAAA!

Do you notice how they go through damn near everything in D&D and critique it? Everything is offensive, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, white supremacist--how about shut the fuck up and go and make their own rainbow fucking hippo game that is all sweetness and sugar?

NORMAL gamers reject these crying, rainbow cultists. They smoke cigars and laugh at them, mocking them endlessly about how stupid, pathetic, and cucked they are. Normal gamers DON'T AGREE with the Marxist critiques of D&D. Normal gamers DON'T CARE ABOUT THE SJW TEARS!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I care about SJW tears. They are the most thirst-quenching beverage...

Quote from: FingerRod on May 23, 2021, 07:53:18 AM

Quote from: Mistwell on May 22, 2021, 11:18:15 PM
Again, the book you guys are bitching about as the sign of a decline is selling fantastic. No book Paizo has ever published even at their height of sales (including their core books) has ever reached #4 in the nation for even an hour. And this is for a non-core side setting book 7 years into the edition. If this is "shitting the bed" then what would success look like?

How many total copies is selling fantastic in your mind? Certainly, your only evidence is not the sales rank?

It hit Amazon only five days ago. It is dropping fast now at #15. It is the second lowest reviewed product in the entire top 100.

You can show up with your tea, your pinky hanging out, and your "you guys" lecturing, but anyone with even a little intelligence can see what you are doing. Curious, what was the best thing you liked when you read your copy?

Dude anything in the top 100 best sellers on Amazon for a week is fantastic sales. For any book, of any kind. As for how many copies is fantastic? I guess maybe around 20K in the first month or so? A NYT Bestseller is around 5,000 copies in a week by the way. Amazon top 25 five days in is unquestionably fantastic sales. And of course it doesn't have that many reviews - it just came out! Reviews happen after people receive the book and read it.

As for what I liked when I looked at it at Barnes & Noble, I liked the many sub-domains. Like Bluetspur, the mind flayer realm which messes with your memory. I liked Falkovnia with the endless war against the zombie hordes. I liked Carnival, which wanders the mists with stranger performers and a living sword. I liked Har'Akir with it's mummies and ancient egypt vibe. I liked Darkon with a fortress is frozen mid-explosion and rooms trying to put themselves back together. I liked the haunted train. I thought the House of Lament adventure looked like a pretty good low level adventure. I liked the spirit-channeling bard, and I thought the undead warlock subclass was much better than the prior undying one from Sword Coast (or wherever that original was from). I liked the loup garou. I liked that this entire book is more DMs tools to build your own domain or flesh out one of those domains rather than a written-in-stone railroad type book.

Quote from: Omega on May 24, 2021, 03:25:45 AM

Quote from: Mistwell on May 22, 2021, 11:18:15 PM
Again, the book you guys are bitching about as the sign of a decline is selling fantastic.

Again, same thing happened with Tasha. Outrage marketing and scalpers combined. That is the diametric opposite of fantastic.

And, again, your theory is complete nonsense lacking even a shred of evidential support and in the realm of lunatic conspiracy theorist screaming about the end of the world on the street corner.

Tasha's DID do fantastic. All objective evidence of it's sales are that it sold through the roof. It's not outrage marketing - the huge overwhelming majority of people saw no outrage over it at all. Go look at Reddit or any other place with a huge number of views and comments about it, and you will see people loved that book. It's only tiny places like here, that you can get that theme of of "people dislike it" going.

Here are I think the main issues at play here:

1) People here believe "Get Woke Go Broke" is a universal truth; and
2) People here believe WOTC has "Gotten Woke"; therefore
3) People here think WOTC will "Go Broke" (whatever that term means in this context).

So when it seems like WOTC is just doing better and better every year (which they are) and it seems like their customers in general don't care about the "woke" issues here people are focused on (as in either way - they don't even notice those issues for the most part) it seems to cause some sort of cognitive dissonance in with a lot of people here.

WOTC's customer base is majority under 30. Their customer base is buying more and more WOTC material. And their customer base largely doesn't even focus on the issues people here focus on, either in a positive or negative way. MOST of their customers are just focusing on story and mechanical elements they think might be cool for their game. That's it. That's 90%+ of the feedback you can find online as a generalization. Which, frankly, was 90%+ of the feedback you could find for AD&D 1e and 2e when they were the current edition as well (though obviously not on the Internet for that era).

Tasha's and this Ravenloft book are not selling because of "woke" issues, either because of outrage or agreement with those issues. Those are not the things most people even notice about them. Most of the people buying those books just like fairly ordinary RPG content found in them, either story-based or mechanical-based or both.

But I know, that's not sexy it's just boring and normal. Which doesn't fly on the Internet - particularly here.

I think the surge in popularity can be attributed entirely to Stranger Things being free advertising. And also the internet blowing up in the last decade.

The hobby has changed dramatically since the old school period. Freakshow parties are normal now.

Most people don't actually care about the gender and race issues. I roll my eyes whenever somebody uses "cis" to refer to themselves and others, but I don't care much.

Ravenloft is a freakshow now. Every setting is a freakshow by default now. Planescape, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, etc have their work cut out for them when it comes to distinguishing themselves now.

You don't want every setting to be a freakshow? Well, fuck you. /sarcasm

Regarding preferred Ravenloft material -

I've run I6 and I10 (Ravenloft and Ravenloft II) multiple times - most recently with an update to 5E rules. They're probably my favorite D&D modules, along with Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, Forbidden City, and a few others.

I personally didn't get anything out of the Ravenloft boxed set, and I really didn't like the whole concept of "demi-plane of dread" and alternate rules - as opposed to just running gothic horror adventures. I played once in an abortive Ravenloft campaign, but it fell apart after just a few sessions, which didn't improve the concept.

I'm familiar with the original boxed set and a number of the 2E modules including Feast of Goblyns, Web of Illusion, and Roots of Evil. The modules had very linear plotting and to some degree metaplotting, encouraging fixed storylines where the PCs are pawns of Ravenloft masters. Feast of Goblyns had some useful material to mine for, but I thought they were terrible - and especially so compared to the excellent original modules that didn't involve the demi-plane.

I'm not familiar with the old Van Richten's guides, though. I was quite fond of some of the Chill material - notably it's Vampire module, which I thought had some great material for adventures - but that's in a different setting.

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on May 23, 2021, 12:58:22 PM

Quote from: Pat on May 23, 2021, 11:36:30 AM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on May 23, 2021, 07:48:30 AM

Quote from: Pat on May 22, 2021, 05:18:57 PM
For those who are interested, the 2e Van Richten's Guides are all pretty padded, with big margins, lots of wasted page, and lots of superfluous text. They tend to repeat all the abilities of the monster, just with many more words. But they do have some charm, with some interesting stories about hunters, and a greatly expanded list of options for further developing (and empowering) the monster. Best to worst:

My favorite is Ancient Dead. It's not perfect, but the flavor text is pretty good, and they take the basic idea of a mummy and make it an archetype that can cross cultural boundaries. Good list of powers.

Vampire is solid, but not terribly original.

Created has some good ideas, but its insistence that golems always and inevitably turn evil takes away from the moral ambiguity that makes Frankenstein great.

Liches and Fiends are pretty decent, but not as widely usable -- by their very nature, you'll typically only encounter one or maybe two in an entire campaign.

Ghosts is on the weak side, with a nice intro vignette that demonstrates powers that are never spelled out in the book, more excess verbiage than usual, a fairly predictable list of powers, and the section on mediums feels like an incomplete first draft.

Werebeasts is bad. It's the only book that doesn't really add much to the core monster. Want sires and bloodlines and nobles and corrupted spirits of nature? Nope.

I don't care that they turned Roma into monsters, but even without that the Vistani book is bad. They're boring, inconsistent, and treated far too much as a plot device.

These were some of the most useful books I ever used in a game. Lots of stuff in their to inspire adventures, lots of great optional stuff, and tons of ways to customize monsters, make them more interesting. Couldn't disagree more with this assessment

So you think they don't greatly expand the options for each monster, and don't have any interesting monster hunter stories?

No. I largely disagreed. On interesting monster hunt stories: yes, absolutely. These helped me understand how to create a functional, long term Ravenloft campaign. They were great. On option, yes, it greatly expanded options, which is part of what made Ravenloft work

Brendan, can you expand on what you thought made them good? Especially, how much is tied to the demi-plane of dread concept versus being useful for gothic horror game in an unrelated setting?

Quote from: jhkim on May 24, 2021, 03:01:58 PM
Regarding preferred Ravenloft material -

I've run I6 and I10 (Ravenloft and Ravenloft II) multiple times - most recently with an update to 5E rules. They're probably my favorite D&D modules, along with Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, Forbidden City, and a few others.

I personally didn't get anything out of the Ravenloft boxed set, and I really didn't like the whole concept of "demi-plane of dread" and alternate rules - as opposed to just running gothic horror adventures. I played once in an abortive Ravenloft campaign, but it fell apart after just a few sessions, which didn't improve the concept.

I'm familiar with the original boxed set and a number of the 2E modules including Feast of Goblyns, Web of Illusion, and Roots of Evil. The modules had very linear plotting and to some degree metaplotting, encouraging fixed storylines where the PCs are pawns of Ravenloft masters. Feast of Goblyns had some useful material to mine for, but I thought they were terrible - and especially so compared to the excellent original modules that didn't involve the demi-plane.

I'm not familiar with the old Van Richten's guides, though. I was quite fond of some of the Chill material - notably it's Vampire module, which I thought had some great material for adventures - but that's in a different setting.

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on May 23, 2021, 12:58:22 PM

Quote from: Pat on May 23, 2021, 11:36:30 AM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on May 23, 2021, 07:48:30 AM

Quote from: Pat on May 22, 2021, 05:18:57 PM
For those who are interested, the 2e Van Richten's Guides are all pretty padded, with big margins, lots of wasted page, and lots of superfluous text. They tend to repeat all the abilities of the monster, just with many more words. But they do have some charm, with some interesting stories about hunters, and a greatly expanded list of options for further developing (and empowering) the monster. Best to worst:

My favorite is Ancient Dead. It's not perfect, but the flavor text is pretty good, and they take the basic idea of a mummy and make it an archetype that can cross cultural boundaries. Good list of powers.

Vampire is solid, but not terribly original.

Created has some good ideas, but its insistence that golems always and inevitably turn evil takes away from the moral ambiguity that makes Frankenstein great.

Liches and Fiends are pretty decent, but not as widely usable -- by their very nature, you'll typically only encounter one or maybe two in an entire campaign.

Ghosts is on the weak side, with a nice intro vignette that demonstrates powers that are never spelled out in the book, more excess verbiage than usual, a fairly predictable list of powers, and the section on mediums feels like an incomplete first draft.

Werebeasts is bad. It's the only book that doesn't really add much to the core monster. Want sires and bloodlines and nobles and corrupted spirits of nature? Nope.

I don't care that they turned Roma into monsters, but even without that the Vistani book is bad. They're boring, inconsistent, and treated far too much as a plot device.

These were some of the most useful books I ever used in a game. Lots of stuff in their to inspire adventures, lots of great optional stuff, and tons of ways to customize monsters, make them more interesting. Couldn't disagree more with this assessment

So you think they don't greatly expand the options for each monster, and don't have any interesting monster hunter stories?

No. I largely disagreed. On interesting monster hunt stories: yes, absolutely. These helped me understand how to create a functional, long term Ravenloft campaign. They were great. On option, yes, it greatly expanded options, which is part of what made Ravenloft work

Brendan, can you expand on what you thought made them good? Especially, how much is tied to the demi-plane of dread concept versus being useful for gothic horror game in an unrelated setting?

I don't know how useful they are outside Ravenloft, I only used them for Ravenloft (I pretty much ran strictly Ravenloft Campaigns for the length I GM'd 2E). They did inform how I approach monsters and horror outside D&D, but I can't speak how useful they would be to a forgotten realms GM or Dragonlance Gm (or home-brew GM).

My mind is mush today so will try to give the basic things that appealed to me:

1) Evocative first hand accounts of Van Richten: These were incredibly important for showing what the setting was like at the ground level. I normally hate first person narration in this stuff, something about the Van Richten books (and Van Richten's personality) struck the right tone---felt very classic horror movie to me. I would liken it to how social history or micro history can help you understand history at the ground level, the books just take a finer lens to the setting and for me, they helped to expand it in an explosive way. More importantly the accounts in the book illustrate how to construct monster hunts and investigations (which I think are where Ravenloft shines). It helped shift me away from linear adventures towards adventures where there is some kind of evil threat or bad guy, and moving parts, but the players decide how they want to tackle it, and it can shift from the hunter becoming the hunted.

2) Customizable monsters: These books were about customization and making variations of different types of creature in a category. They made it possible to have liches who all felt different, and whose weaknesses or strengths might be unpredictable for example. This ties to point 1 as well, as the customization, and how it is often tied to backstory, very much impacted the investigative nature of these monster based adventures (having monsters with unique weaknesses for example worked really well for taking a monster players might know the stats from in the MM and making them a lot more challenging and interesting. A lot of this tied to the demi plane and how it impacted the nature of monsters, characters etc.

3) The humor. There was a humor to the books, often around the things Van Richten didn't know or thought he knew. Something about this really appealed to me

4) Art, borders, and overall layout. It was pointed out that there are thick margins. This is by design. The look of Ravenloft books went a long way towards selling them for me, and many of the Van Richten books had that classic rasvenloft look as well as some of the best fabian art in the line.

In terms of the demiplane's nature, not sure exactly what you are looking for regarding the Van Richten books. The customization was related I supposed (as I mentioned above). The individual accounts connected to the nature of the setting by way of Van Richten recounting his travels to different domains. Also monsters basically function like small scale domain lords (which is why you have so much customization----and you aren't limited to the options provided in the VR books, you can take a page from the powers check section of the rules and create unique monsters that way. Between the two you have a lot of power to make monsters that feel more like the monsters you see in movies or stories (they feel very individual, and they often vary).

All that said, if the line didn't grab you, it didn't grab you. A lot of people didn't like the weekend in hell thing (which is very black boxed set). Domains of Dread provided an approach that allowed for more steady campaigns with characters from Ravenloft (personally I liked the run the "Campaign in Hell", so I didn't use native characters as much. But DoD is pretty well regarded among many fans. Black Box for me is more about the tone, the mission statement, the way it just hit my like a shovel the first time I read it (and I kept wanting to re-read it). But its tone put some off. It's narrow focus didn't appeal to everyone. Its barebones approach seemed thin to some (for me I viewed entries as starting points, and felt it was a setting you had to grow yourslef). Its heavy use of classic horror tropes (basically pulling in all the classic monsters and giving them domains) didn't work for everyone: I grew up on universal and hammer film, I was a fan of Vincent Price as a kid, and so this stuff worked for me. I high school I was a fan of silent horror movies like Phantom of the Opera and Nosferatu. Speaking of price, the camp element also didn't appeal to everyone. I think for some people ravenloft both took itself too seriously and veered into camp, and that didn't hit the right tone. Again, for me, it worked.

Quote from: Mistwell on May 24, 2021, 02:32:19 PM

Quote from: FingerRod on May 23, 2021, 07:53:18 AM

Quote from: Mistwell on May 22, 2021, 11:18:15 PM
Again, the book you guys are bitching about as the sign of a decline is selling fantastic. No book Paizo has ever published even at their height of sales (including their core books) has ever reached #4 in the nation for even an hour. And this is for a non-core side setting book 7 years into the edition. If this is "shitting the bed" then what would success look like?

How many total copies is selling fantastic in your mind? Certainly, your only evidence is not the sales rank?

It hit Amazon only five days ago. It is dropping fast now at #15. It is the second lowest reviewed product in the entire top 100.

You can show up with your tea, your pinky hanging out, and your "you guys" lecturing, but anyone with even a little intelligence can see what you are doing. Curious, what was the best thing you liked when you read your copy?

Dude anything in the top 100 best sellers on Amazon for a week is fantastic sales. For any book, of any kind. As for how many copies is fantastic? I guess maybe around 20K in the first month or so? A NYT Bestseller is around 5,000 copies in a week by the way. Amazon top 25 five days in is unquestionably fantastic sales. And of course it doesn't have that many reviews - it just came out! Reviews happen after people receive the book and read it.

As for what I liked when I looked at it at Barnes & Noble, I liked the many sub-domains. Like Bluetspur, the mind flayer realm which messes with your memory. I liked Falkovnia with the endless war against the zombie hordes. I liked Carnival, which wanders the mists with stranger performers and a living sword. I liked Har'Akir with it's mummies and ancient egypt vibe. I liked Darkon with a fortress is frozen mid-explosion and rooms trying to put themselves back together. I liked the haunted train. I thought the House of Lament adventure looked like a pretty good low level adventure. I liked the spirit-channeling bard, and I thought the undead warlock subclass was much better than the prior undying one from Sword Coast (or wherever that original was from). I liked the loup garou. I liked that this entire book is more DMs tools to build your own domain or flesh out one of those domains rather than a written-in-stone railroad type book.

Thank you for the run down on what you liked. Sounds like it was good, and probably just fell short of earning your purchase.

I do think you are using Amazon sales rank to create a narrative that supports your view, and based your other comments, I question if any of this is in good faith. You said in another comment that this is essentially an echo chamber filled with people who have been kicked out and shunned elsewhere. I do not believe that.

The book has dropped down to #26 in their debut week. I have a hard time believing it will be more successful than any of the core books from Paizo, which you said when you suggested it never received this level of support. It is currently being outsold by a paperback of Rich Dad/Poor Dad and the Very Hungry Caterpillar. Other releases with similar dates are moving up the charts.

Second lowest rated was not referring to the total number of ratings, and there is no reason to talk down to me like I am an idiot. It has 3.7 stars right now, down from 3.9 two days ago, and it is now .1 from being the lowest rated product in the top 100. Originally it had 70 ratings, and now it has 84. It is not heading in a good direction. My guess is it stabilizes, and then creeps back up once more people who buy it know in advance what they are getting. And I don't mean this as a slight. There is obviously a market for this type of product. I differ from some of the others in that.

As a side note, the verified purchasers saying negative things about the book are likely NOT the same people you are disparaging here, so this is not just 25 people and their crazy beliefs.

D&D is the 800 lbs gorilla in the industry. I think of it like the entertainment industry movie releases. Blockbuster titles that flop still have big opening weekends compared to other films. But word of mouth brings the support to a grinding halt by the end of the weekend. That is a version of what is happening here.

3.7 is, by far, WOTC's lowest rated product on Amazon of any of their book releases. And while I completely agree with your assertion in your other post that Tasha's was well received (4.8 stars), you are incorrect on this one. The average consumer who is not active here, TBP, or on Reddit has been caught off-guard. They expected Gothic Horror and are getting something less. And yes, if WOTC continues to catch casuals off guard they will lose customers.

This will go down as the lowest rated main release when compared to anything that came before it.

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on May 24, 2021, 05:28:46 PM
All that said, if the line didn't grab you, it didn't grab you. A lot of people didn't like the weekend in hell thing (which is very black boxed set). Domains of Dread provided an approach that allowed for more steady campaigns with characters from Ravenloft (personally I liked the run the "Campaign in Hell", so I didn't use native characters as much. But DoD is pretty well regarded among many fans. Black Box for me is more about the tone, the mission statement, the way it just hit my like a shovel the first time I read it (and I kept wanting to re-read it). But its tone put some off.

Just to clarify, I loved the hell out of the first two modules - but I disliked the boxed set and the later modules. So I'd be mining the books for material to use in a game that doesn't have the Demi-plane of Dread. Looking at my collection, I've also got Darklords and the Gothic Earth Gazetteer. I found Darklords had some interesting ideas, but it was too tied into the Demi-plane of Dread concept to be very useful to me.

I've run Ravenloft and Ravenloft 2 multiple times - three or four times at least. I also ran a non-D&D based gothic horror campaign, using a variant of the Ars Magica system.

Quote from: jhkim on May 24, 2021, 03:01:58 PM


I'm familiar with the original boxed set and a number of the 2E modules including Feast of Goblyns, Web of Illusion, and Roots of Evil. The modules had very linear plotting and to some degree metaplotting, encouraging fixed storylines where the PCs are pawns of Ravenloft masters. Feast of Goblyns had some useful material to mine for, but I thought they were terrible - and especially so compared to the excellent original modules that didn't involve the demi-plane.

The Ravenloft modules were definitely products of their era (both the 2E era and the 90s trajectory towards increasing focus on story and a linear kind of plot). And one thing I have learned over the years is Ravenloft definitely didn't fit everyone's taste. Even people who might be its demographic, often rejected Ravenloft because they didn't like how it approached gothic and classic horror (they may have been on board with those things, but Ravenloft didn't land it right for them). With the modules, generally I grade them on how much content I was able to hack, how fun they were when you ran them as intended (even linear adventures can be fun if they are done well), what they added in terms of adventure concepts and ideas, and how much they shaped my overall GMing.

Feast of Goblyns is by far my favorite. It is a bit linear, but linear with a huge asterisk (there is a set of 'most likely to happen' events, but the adventure can go in any direction it needs to---and the GM is provided with enough locations and information on places to be flexible about that). I don't think it ever played out as a linear plot any time I ran it. Also it expands on the way Strahd was handled in the original module and uses that to introduce the idea of the wandering major encounter (which I have always called living adventure) where the NPCs are supposed to move freely and live. That greatly expands the adventure beyond its linear presentation (because Harkon Lukas, Ariel, Doctor Dominiani, etc all can plot in response to what the PCs do). I also liked the Created. It is some structure and a bit of railroading, but it is both fun when run as intended (provided the players are willing to buy in) and can be used more openly just taking the basic concepts. The carrionettes for example were really effective monsters. They inspired me when I approached how I handled Shadow Puppets in my ogre gate setting. However the module has one of the most egregious plot armor situations I've ever encountered. Night of the Walking Dead was a lot of fun as I recall. It has been a while but I always liked the domain of Souragne and loved the idea of a mystery that can culminate in a night of the living dead type situation. I am planning to run another 2E set of adventures in Ravenloft and this is one of the modules I am most looking forward to running again. Another cool adventure book was Book of Crypts. It was an adventure anthology. The adventures could be hit or miss. But I remember really liking the Dark Minstel, Blood in Moondale and Mordenheim Bride (very campy, even wonky but fun). There were some other good ones in there too (as well as a couple of stale ones). One that really stood out to me was Castles Forlorn. It was strange then and still remains pretty strange (I just repurchased it in PDF and have been skimming through it after not having run it in nearly 25 years----it is crazy and can be hard to track (the castle exists in different times, this produces a lot of strangeness). There is also a whole encounter book that is very cool (just a bunch of encounters you can throw at the party whenever----pretty nifty tool). The domain was presented pretty well too. It was always a bit hard to imagine Forlorn from the black box alone IMO, and this really opened it up in a way that worked at my table. There were some other good adventures too (often with Ravenloft module even if you didn't run the adventure as intended there was plenty of content to pilfer: for example Feast of Goblyns gives you two settlements in Kartakass, the Kartakan Inn, a castle, a bone cavern, and more.

For me with Ravenloft the black box, some of the key modules, and the van richten books really gave me what I was looking for. It was the first setting to click for me, and really the only published setting I liked running (I mostly like running my own settings, but Ravenloft has the right balance, especially in black box of giving me manageable starting points to build on and make it my own).

Quote from: jhkim on May 24, 2021, 06:11:51 PM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on May 24, 2021, 05:28:46 PM
All that said, if the line didn't grab you, it didn't grab you. A lot of people didn't like the weekend in hell thing (which is very black boxed set). Domains of Dread provided an approach that allowed for more steady campaigns with characters from Ravenloft (personally I liked the run the "Campaign in Hell", so I didn't use native characters as much. But DoD is pretty well regarded among many fans. Black Box for me is more about the tone, the mission statement, the way it just hit my like a shovel the first time I read it (and I kept wanting to re-read it). But its tone put some off.

Just to clarify, I loved the hell out of the first two modules - but I disliked the boxed set and the later modules. So I'd be mining the books for material to use in a game that doesn't have the Demi-plane of Dread. Looking at my collection, I've also got Darklords and the Gothic Earth Gazetteer. I found Darklords had some interesting ideas, but it was too tied into the Demi-plane of Dread concept to be very useful to me.

I've run Ravenloft and Ravenloft 2 multiple times - three or four times at least. I also ran a non-D&D based gothic horror campaign, using a variant of the Ars Magica system.

That may point to a difference in taste. I came to Ravenloft by way of Knight of the Black Rose and the black box (I read Knight of the black rose and immediately bought black box and feast of Goblyns, then worked my way back to the original module from there: so I started more as a fan of the setting. So I read the black box and was like "this is great: I want more of this".

You might check out the Masque of the Red Death boxed set if you haven't already. The gazetteers were quite dry in my opinion, but the boxed set was pretty interesting in its initial presentation (they were good in terms of content, i just found them oddly dry compared to the boxed set---but that might just be my memory). I had some fun running that one from time to time. Also the gothic earth concept worked really well from what I remember.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on May 20, 2021, 10:01:54 AM

What #SJWs don't seem to understand is that genres are built on tropes and clichés. And while they should be subverted from time to time, they can't be without an established norm to work off of.

Then again 'subverting clichés' was never their objective here, was it?

Quote from: Thornhammer on May 20, 2021, 05:40:05 PM
"Magical settings bear no resemblance to real-world history."

Waaaaait wait wait wait just a damn second...

Oh you noticed too.

#SJW ideology is completely incoherent and contradictory, which is why they come off as insufferable hypocrites and get so vicious when challenged. No such thing as reverse-racism, yet we should all be anti-racist. Treating Blacks as a monolithic group is racist, yet we should refer to all non-Whites as #POC. We should follow CDC guidelines, unless we need to ignore them to avoid being mistaken for a 'deplorable'. This sort of thing is ubiquitous, and sometimes they'll even undermine their thesis in the very same breath they present it in. In fact they even do this here by listing a trope which takes inspiration from characters in fiction and film right after telling you to avoid doing so.

That said, the book is nowhere near as bad as folks are making it out to be here, and nitpicking the woke elements makes it seem far less usable than it actually is.

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on May 24, 2021, 06:18:33 PM

You might check out the Masque of the Red Death boxed set if you haven't already. The gazetteers were quite dry in my opinion, but the boxed set was pretty interesting in its initial presentation (they were good in terms of content, i just found them oddly dry compared to the boxed set---but that might just be my memory). I had some fun running that one from time to time. Also the gothic earth concept worked really well from what I remember.

I really liked Masque of the Red Death, as well. The main problem is the mechanics aren't great, but the setting works really well.

I wasn't terribly impressed with I6 Ravenloft, so I ended up skipping the 2e campaign setting. As a result, I came to the setting relatively late. But at the turn of the millennium, the Kargatane started publishing netbooks, which they made available on the web for free. These weren't small books; they were massive tomes. And they were just dripping with style. They showed me the potential of Ravenloft, and to a lesser degree Gothic Earth. So I began picking up the Ravenloft books, starting with the Van Richten Guides, which I generally quite liked, though I recognize their flaws.

Netbooks here:
http://www.kargatane.com/

Quote from: Pat on May 24, 2021, 07:25:52 PM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on May 24, 2021, 06:18:33 PM

You might check out the Masque of the Red Death boxed set if you haven't already. The gazetteers were quite dry in my opinion, but the boxed set was pretty interesting in its initial presentation (they were good in terms of content, i just found them oddly dry compared to the boxed set---but that might just be my memory). I had some fun running that one from time to time. Also the gothic earth concept worked really well from what I remember.

I really liked Masque of the Red Death, as well. The main problem is the mechanics aren't great, but the setting works really well.

I wasn't terribly impressed with I6 Ravenloft, so I ended up skipping the 2e campaign setting. As a result, I came to the setting relatively late. But at the turn of the millennium, the Kargatane started publishing netbooks, which they made available on the web for free. These weren't small books; they were massive tomes. And they were just dripping with style. They showed me the potential of Ravenloft, and to a lesser degree Gothic Earth. So I began picking up the Ravenloft books, starting with the Van Richten Guides, which I generally quite liked, though I recognize their flaws.

Netbooks here:
http://www.kargatane.com/

I don't remember a whole lot about the Gothic Earth mechanics, but I do recall liking how they handled firearms for some reason (it just had a nice feel to me). Overall though I think it was more about setting than mechanics. I couldn't' honestly weigh in on them in terms of quality without reading and running it again (been a while).

I think with Ravenloft there are a few types of fans. I always liked the bare bones style of black box, which the Van Richten books helped illuminate in an interesting way. But mainly I liked to expand and create the bulk of the setting myself (my view is everyone's Ravenloft should be different---which I think fits the demiplane's nature). The kargatane stuff definitely is interesting and lots of people like it, for me that stuff developed the setting too much for my taste (the development wasn't itself bad, but it created too much lore for what I was looking for: I always looked at the entries in the box sets as the base and anything as as purely optional, with most of the blanks being filled in by me). DoD is probably a nice middle ground between those two extremes. The 3E books though really didn't fit my taste (and the WOTC 3E book was what got me to stop buying books just because WOTC released something new). A lot of people did like them. I found them a touch emo, and not as in touch with the classic horror charm (I think for me the moment I realized that line wasn't for me was when I saw a troupe of bards in the background in an image and I realized they were basically a 90s-00s band ported into ravenloft and given wooden instruments--complete with swooping bangs over one eye).

Quote from: Mistwell on May 24, 2021, 02:37:13 PM

Quote from: Omega on May 24, 2021, 03:25:45 AM

Quote from: Mistwell on May 22, 2021, 11:18:15 PM
Again, the book you guys are bitching about as the sign of a decline is selling fantastic.

Again, same thing happened with Tasha. Outrage marketing and scalpers combined. That is the diametric opposite of fantastic.

And, again, your theory is complete nonsense lacking even a shred of evidential support and in the realm of lunatic conspiracy theorist screaming about the end of the world on the street corner.

Tasha's DID do fantastic. All objective evidence of it's sales are that it sold through the roof. It's not outrage marketing - the huge overwhelming majority of people saw no outrage over it at all. Go look at Reddit or any other place with a huge number of views and comments about it, and you will see people loved that book. It's only tiny places like here, that you can get that theme of of "people dislike it" going.

Here are I think the main issues at play here:

1) People here believe "Get Woke Go Broke" is a universal truth; and
2) People here believe WOTC has "Gotten Woke"; therefore
3) People here think WOTC will "Go Broke" (whatever that term means in this context).

So when it seems like WOTC is just doing better and better every year (which they are) and it seems like their customers in general don't care about the "woke" issues here people are focused on (as in either way - they don't even notice those issues for the most part) it seems to cause some sort of cognitive dissonance in with a lot of people here.

WOTC's customer base is majority under 30. Their customer base is buying more and more WOTC material. And their customer base largely doesn't even focus on the issues people here focus on, either in a positive or negative way. MOST of their customers are just focusing on story and mechanical elements they think might be cool for their game. That's it. That's 90%+ of the feedback you can find online as a generalization. Which, frankly, was 90%+ of the feedback you could find for AD&D 1e and 2e when they were the current edition as well (though obviously not on the Internet for that era).

Tasha's and this Ravenloft book are not selling because of "woke" issues, either because of outrage or agreement with those issues. Those are not the things most people even notice about them. Most of the people buying those books just like fairly ordinary RPG content found in them, either story-based or mechanical-based or both.

But I know, that's not sexy it's just boring and normal. Which doesn't fly on the Internet - particularly here.

if you let the locals know we're all dying grognards they don't react real well