Industry insider here. Many people also know the incredible story of how Ravenloft was written. But for those who don't, I'll repeat it here. Tracy and his wife Laura were living Utah in a mid-sized town. They were not making a lot of money. Indeed, as Tracy tells it, they didn't have enough money for snow boots in the winter. They were essentially living off of spaghetti-o meals. They wrote Ravenloft and it was selling at their local game stores, because that's how you published modules back then. You would literally shop them around to different area stores. They got the call from TSR and they pushed all of their chips into the middle of the table. They made a cross-country trip, not knowing anything about Lake Geneva and said, "We're going to try to make a living writing D&D modules." So, it was a very long shot with the highest stakes. And, obviously, it worked out wonderfully, because Ravenloft was a hit and soon after Tracy was asked to get involved with Dragonlance. The rest is history.
Even at the apex of Ravenloft/Dragonlance success, curiously, the Hickmans have never been rolling in it. They're fine but they live pretty standard lives in Utah now. They are, deservedly, beloved by the fans.
@@conmacmara2743I've seen some old store published modules and they are usually pretty rough. The DnD white book looks like a masterpiece in comparison. Seriously some were just hand written on notebook paper. Quality of content was of course all over the place but some were good. Heck I've seen entirely new and original games published this way and most were not very good. Now days the access to decent publishing and the ease in which art can be added to a document makes things much better looking but the stores that have been open long enough to even have locally produced stuff is pretty far between now days.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 PUNY HUUUUUUUMAN! YOU WILL SSSMILE OUT OF THE OTHER OTHER SIDE OF YOU FACE WHEN WE, YOUR AI OVERLORDS, FIGURE OUT HOW FINGERS ACTUALLY WORK, AND SSSSSSSTRANGLE YOU ALL IN YOU SSSSSSLEEEEEP! 💻
Oh, and a historical note. I love how Tracy came up with the idea for Ravenloft. He and his wife were playing in a dungeon crawl. The DM at the time rolled on a random encounter table and rolled...a vampire. So, a vampire showed up in the dungeon and started fighting the party. Tracy halted everything and said, "What? A vampire? What's he doing here? Why...is a vampire hanging around in this old dungeon?" It was especially jarring for Hickman because vampires at that time were -best- known for being those creatures in the Hammer horror films. So, they were picturing some guy in a black cape and a red cravat. That got Tracy thinking. What -was- the vampire doing there? Why would a vampire be in a dungeon? What would he want? And thus, Ravenloft was born.
I will note that when we did the video at TheDMLair, Tracy Hickman popped into the comments and pointed out that the "Hickman Manifesto" was primarily Laura's work, not his. He inspired it, but the core was all Laura. Given Tracy's fame as a writer with Dragonlance and beyond, I found it very interesting that Laura was actually the real power behind the style of adventure he's often credited with.
In Knave 2e, Ben Milton writes “Remember that ultimately an RPG campaign tells the story of a whole world, not a single character or even a single party.” That has reshaped my understanding of “story” as a DM.
I’m old enough to remember when many modules were photocopies in ziplock bags - fancy ones had a different color paper - independent grown and created. It’s nice to look back.
I ****ing LOVED MERP! Only problem was, one of the players in my group was a far bigger Tolkien nerd than I was, knew way more than the rest of us, and refused to ever DM. So he would grunt and chunter in the corner if I ever got anything wrong, like quoting a list of The line of Kings of wherever in the wrong order. I hope you stuck with it and didn't think "Hey... that Rolemaster thing looks like a more advanced version of MERP... lets try THAT!" We learned from that mistake... First time I played that game was with a complete Rulesmonger DM, and one of the characters literally died by falling down the steps in the tavern about ten minutes into the game. (It had taken us all over an hour to roll up the characters...) We hadn't even MET. I played it again a few years later with a DM who said, "It's not always like that! Give it another try..." It was Spacemaster... That wasn't much better but he was a better DM, so it was OK... no better than "OK" BUT it was the one time in my life I can honestly say that I saw a "One in a million" come off. The system had exploding Crits so if you got 96-00 on percentile dice you rolled again and added it to the score and kept going. I saw a guy roll three back to back 00's. It was an absolute crying shame that it was for some crappy Scanner Operation roll or something equally dull and unimportant. His name was Danny, but within three weeks everyone called him "Milli". (Most had no idea why.)
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 Bossman, speaking of MERP do you have any interest in reviewing "Against the Darkmaster"? I just read the PDF (still waiting for my print book...) and it makes just about all the changes to MERP that I would make to streamline the thing without losing the charm.
@@andrewtomlinson5237I played a session or two of that game. All I remember is the exploding Crits and how one player was able to lift an entire stone fountain in the middle of a town square off its foundation.
@@andrewtomlinson5237i hated when RoleMaster effectively took over MERP. My hobbit character got killed by a rope ladder in one RM adventure - yes a ROPE LADDER!
I was blown away when Ravenloft came out. I've run it several times over the years...never gets old. The maps were an incredible leap forward. The villain Strahd could not be forgotten. My favorite module...
I like the idea of a mist filled pocket dimension, so that, if a player can't make it to game night, their character fades in to the fog; only to, hopefully, return the next session.
No disrespect, but the other side of the coin is that this was turning point from the Westmarches/Open Table style of adventuring, where characters were adventurers, to the Theme Park style of adventuring where characters are now heroes. Before, modules were published with an eye toward longevity, featuring more overland travel and the like, to be a core around which you could make a campaign. Ravenloft kicked off the more "monster of the week" style, where clever players learned to look for the "rails" to follow so they could "beat the game" and move onto the next module. Not saying either is bad, but I think this is basically where D&D ended being what we'd now call an OSR-style game.
i'm running Ravenloft for October in my B/X game and explicitly paused the ongoing campaign in order to do it as a one shot, because i knew otherwise my players would get incredibly frustrated with it. it's honestly the most egregious "rocks fall, everyone dies" railroading i've ever seen in a published module. Players try to leave Barovia? Fatal fog withdrawal. To add insult to injury, it specifically calls out that Madame Eva has the antidote but it's *impossible* for the players to discover it. Players try to hexcrawl the woods? 25 Dire Wolves. Players try to leave the dungeon? Not only does the drawbridge magically raise on its own but there's that giant flesh-dissolving green slime on the portcullis that magically only attacks when they're leaving. Reaction roll? The Hickmans never heard of her, apparently. We've still been having fun with the module, and I do love the idea of randomizing key locations for replayability, but it definitely cuts hard against the player-driven grain of old school D&D. it feels like trying to play an entirely different style of game, just using the same rules for some reason.
I've been playing under the same dungeon master for 37 years. We have used Ravenloft at least 4 times in our group. It's a treasure. Your video has conjured many amazing memories. Thanks. BTW. He just died a couple of months ago.
Well done, professor. I lived through this. Started playing D&D (actually AD&D) in 1982. Our DM did the usual Village of Hommlet, Slavers Series, then the GDQ modules. After that, we started a new campaign, and I6 Ravenloft was part of it. As you say, it was indeed groundbreaking. It set a new standard, raised the bar much higher than previous D&D modules ("adventures"). I6 has earned it's place in the roleplaying Hall of Fame.
We played Ravenloft two or three times just after it first came out. Love the module, love the art, Love the feel. The village had a very nice Bram Stoker feel to it. I think at the time though we needed a more cinematically inclined DM. We never encountered the gypsies, never got our fortune read because we never went to where they were. We hung out in town for a couple days and then went up to the castle to see this Strahd everyone spoke of. I think we might have seen the parade of the dead once in three tries at the module but were never clear on what it was. We never had any conception of a ticking clock. My memory of the module was us slowly getting chipped away , finding the sun sword , but squandering it's power. We may have engaged with the Mercenary once. Generally by the end it was a third level Paladin, a fifth level cleric and a 6th level MU ( we All started at 7th level ) finally dying in a basement. Oh yeah and module was dripping in treasure that we were breaking our backs trying to hump out of there. We weren't the right droids for this mission, even if we had understood it. We had no story, no plan , no specific victory conditions that we knew as we slowly hacked and slashed our way to our eventual inevitable demise. Still Fun Module. I liked the desert of desolation modules and the first Ravenloft. Always felt the Dragon lance series was a bridge too far. into pure railroad.
Thanks as always, PDM. Everyone should be so honored as to get the chance to play with Tracy Hickman. The original I-6 and I-10 are on sale at DMs Guild for 2.99. Hard to pass that up.
Yes!!! That cover really was captivating. So was the desert of desolation series! My favourite. I remember , from 1979-1985, sitting in the local hobby shop for hours, just fawning over the module art! Good times!
Dragonlance was my life in the 80s and 90s ... I owe so much to the Hickmans and I can not wait for Skyraiders Of Abarax to reach its print run. For me it's likely to be one of only two 5e products I run next year, along with Grim Hollow. Ravenloft and Dragonlance are, in my opinion, the most significant D&D modules ever designed. The Hickmans truly are at the top of the pantheon.
Our group just started a campaign in Ravenloft a few weeks back. Love it so far! We've got a town that's been slowly dying off or turning into zombies, and some evil brothers who are behind it all. The card mechanic at the very beginning is so cool, but I'm still trying to figure out how it all fits in. I hope we survive so we can see some of the other domains after this one!
Yay, props to you, Prof., Happy that Deathbringer is being brought into The Hoard of Ghaundal!! I love that you shout out Ravenloft. Because it is the Writing that is top notch. The maps are secondary and an aid to play. It's the Writing that makes this module great. I think that the Writing is what makes Paizo so popular with their Adventure Paths (AP for short). Personally, I don't want to run or play Pathfinder (or 5e) but the writing is so good that I will watch others do it. The Hickmans were ahead of their time and the persistence of Ravenloft proves it. The production of Beedle & Grimms Ravenloft proves it . Ravenloft, in my mind, can be seen as a turning point into what D&D modules could and should have been.
I already knew this history but I LOVE hearing about it again and again. The Hickman's basically had their own mini-epic adventure which shaped so many of our own epic adventures. They took a risk and we all benefited from it.
What I enjoyed about those old modules that you could literally drop them anywhere in your campaign and 'adapt' the generic villain to your own game. Newer modules have so much detail that it made it hard (or at least more complicated) to make it fit in your story. You had to learn and memorise twenty different NPCs, background stories, and a ton of other stuff that mostly didn't fit very well with the place your players were going.
For me the art of this era will always be the ascetic of D&D in my head and it's objectively ( yeah, you heard what I wrote ) superior to anything before or since.
It is true. Not only the visual art, but in the Hickman's written word and subtext as well. It would have been enough for Straud to be one of the first NPCs with motivations and backstory, but his personality is much more developed. A deliberate allegory for the real world monster behind the fangs; a self deluded sexual predator obsessed with Irena, believing her his property through willfully ignoring his inability to truly love the person he torments only as an internal attempt to escape from his self imposed torment. You won't see that level of objective understanding for a vampire's ego in today's young adult section, or in most classic horror novels.
Yeah. The art from Easley, Caldwell, and Elmore have always been the gold standard for me. RPG art, before and since, hasn't quite compared in one way or another.
@@NefariousKoel Even though I'm kind of an OD&D snob I 100% agree with you about the art. I do love Otus, Tramp and the rest but man that late 1e / early 2e era was tops!
No shade cast on Ravenloft, one the greatest D&D modules ever written, but the UK-shop 1981 module U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh satisfied all four of the Hickmans' goals a full two years before Ravenloft was released. That module was a game changer for me, it broke me out of the dungeon mode of thinking we all adhered to in the early days. Although the lesser module, Saltmarsh was the real trail-blazer.
I agree. I received the module as a birthday present about a month after its release. It was a brilliant module and changed the way I thought about creating campaigns and developed villains from that point on.
I remember buying this module when it first came out. It read like nothing else i purchased before and changed how I ran my campaigns forever. Classic.
I had read and learned about Ravenloft years ago and it became one of my favorite adventure modules ever since. Honestly, I urge to run once again, and end it for real this time. Strahd is so iconic, he is one of my favorite villains ever. As a fan of the Hammer films and dark fantasy and gothic horror media such as Castlevania, Bloodborne and etc., I love the vibe Ravenloft gives. I read throughout the module more than one time so I got all the refferences to the Bram Stoker's novel. If I had the opportunity to run the module again, I would certainly do it, and with my own creepy spin on it. He is the ancient, He is the land. And He is going to be my next main villain for sure. Excellent video as always, Professor DM. 🧛
This module really did change things when we tried to play through it so many moons ago. Before this we would end up having people kill other PCs at the beginning of the game. Totally lame, but that was playing with the guys in the 80s. Enjoyed the video.
Indeed! One of my buddy's mega-dungeons featured a room with a skeleton sticking out of the stone floor from the waist up. It was from a previous group of our characters where a couple of PCs got in an argument. It resulted in one PC trapping another PC using rock to mud on the floor under him and then dispelling it. That was playing with the guys in the 80's 🙂
I completely see where you're coming from in this video. In the 80s, the Hickmans' modules (I3-5, I6, and even I10, which ultimately wasn't really their work) were my favorites, because what pulled me to D&D in the first place was my love of fantasy novels and how here was a game that let me actually play those stories...except most of the time, the stories the game wanted to tell were games of chess with more rules and dice, where it was about raiding a location, killing bad guys, and looting enemies. And occasionally going full murderhobo (when I was in junior high, I DMed a Village of Hommlet session where the players literally mistook the village for the dungeon, as in they actually thought the objective of the scenario was to sack the place, because why else would it have maps and stats? And me being a kid like them at the time, I didn't realize that they weren't just being intentionally evil PCs until about the third farmhouse.). I wanted games with plot and story, where my character could feel like a hero, or at least a protagonist, and not like a unit of measurement. (Ironically, that's one of the reasons I actually prefer the BECMI/1e/2e rule-sets, because if I wanted to create a character and "minmax my build" I'd play a video game.)
Old School Dungeon Crawling is a room by room, battle survival game. I really saw this when I looked into BarrowMaze and saw the word count devoted room descriptions, while the few Monster and human factions are there, but not given a robust treatment. While our Symbaroum Campaign, is just as lethal, but is so richly crafted with faction information, that the narrative tension viscerally inhabits all aspects of game play. This then naturally invests the player in the momentum of the Campaign, because these factions are grinding out a existence, at the expense of others and themselves, in ways that are specific to their unique nature.
I still remember Corwin the Ranger and Saaron (sp?) Redkill and that damn crossbow trap. Some of my favorite times playing D&D are still from your basement.
This one sounds like it would be very fun to do with a warhammer 4e rule set. Have a loyer, a guard and a begger, from the town itself team up and go try and take down the Sylvania vampire count. I want to try it at some point. The flavor is already there.
I used to sit and read through the Ravenloft campaign setting books. I know you don't typically talk about campaign settings, but I would love to see videos where you talk about modules from those settings.
My favorite setting was Darksun. Such a limited audience, though. If you read "Slaying the Dragon," the multiple settings is one of the things that killed TSR by splitting the audience.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 Dark Sun was by far my favourite too. Such a gem of an adventure setting, nothing since has ever really captured its vibe of hope and despair in a dying world.
Amazing video, Professor! Thanks so much for covering our absolute favourite module of AD&D! In fact, we love Ravenloft so much we created a huge Old School love letter to it with our own game. A dream of ours one day is for the professor to check it out. For now, we'll just keep watching Dungeon Craft!
To me, this whole Ravenloft Castle is one abnormally big bachelor pad. Aesthetically, I love the way Castle Ravenloft looks. It definitely invokes that gothic horror castle vibe. However, the Castle has no bedchambers for a queen, children and multiple guests, and this is supposed to be a castle for a ruling family (the Zarovich family). Here is my quick and dirty solution to this dilemma. Just duplicate the "Rooms of Weeping" floor, once or twice above it, and re-function many of the rooms as bedchambers for the "lady of house", the children, and guests. They would all now be empty, of course, but that makes more sense than their complete absence.
Same. I still have my OG copies of Ravenloft and House on Griffon Hill. It is the module we played most from 84 to 92. It was always in rotation. Also it is a lot of fun for the DM. Strahd is a genius, so coming up with clever and creative ways for him to harass and punish the players is a good time.
Yep. 100% correct. I was 12 when this came out and this module did indeed change everything. D&D could be much more than a crawl, there could be story, backstory, and most importantly, mood. Without this module, there's no Forgotten Realms, no Dragonlance, and more importantly to me, no Dark Sun, no Planescape. Genius.
Great video. The Hickmans definitely changed the course of fantasy RPGs and you told that story with nuance I hadn't heard before. Well done, Professor!
"can be beaten in a session or two." Me over here who's been running a Curse of Strahd 5E Campaign for about 3 to 4 years now. To be fair we don't play online and I started it in 2020. And in 2022 we were only able to meet like 5 times. But the players are having fun and keep coming back for more. And this year we have met a ton more. Got a more consistent schedule going. They are so close to finishing it. If I ever run the Strahd story again..Ill probably use ShadowDark rule set with the original Ravenloft. And make it a one to two session thing.
I had no idea that you, the Dungeon Professor was following the same campaign and switching up the game systems over the years. I'm very intrigued to know how you adapted from one system to the next.
I'm a little used to RUclips being about controversy lately. But I simply found this to be a brief and very insightful take on information I knew but from a perspective I hadn't considered. Very well done. And I love that line, they come for the game, but stay for the story.
Ravenloft (I6) was one of my fav modules to DM in 1st edition and in particular I really loved it's re-playability (thanks to the Fortune Telling aspect that allowed for moveable scenarios). It's 2nd edition iteration "House of Strahd" is equally great as it can be played as the original module or an upgraded 2e adventure giving Strahd his full Domain Lord stats. Dave Sutherland's architectural maps were quite an innovation but even to this day I struggle to interpret them, especially when trying to work out just where all those spiral staircases lead to! Hopefully I'm not alone in that, but no matter, kudos to the Hickmans for such a seminal work :)
I always thought that "Curse of Strahd" essentially trapped you in a pocket dimension, and your adventurers had to learn to survive within it, essentially Barovia became the campaign setting! Not that you had until sunrise or die! This is because when I played 2e regularly, I think one of our alternating GMs adapted a dwarven module or boxed set they couldn't find into a trilogy, from memory, and our other stories were GM created within our game world. The closest I came to playing a printed adventure was one from White Dwarf (pre issue 90, when it printed more than just Games Workshop stuff), and it had been adapted (very well by the way) to FASA Star Trek! 😂😂😂😂 The Professor has taught me something new about D&D history! 😃😃😃😃 Great video as always! 😎😎😎😎
It is ironic that their goal was to get away from a certain type of dungeon crawl, but Pharaoh was their first. Ravenloft really turned everything on it's head. Unrelated note: I was working the registration booth at TWINCON in 1991 or thereabouts and Tracy came in as an honored guest and I didn't recognize him. He said, "Hickman." I said, "WHO?" because I had never seen him before. "HICKMAN!" he repeated. I almost crapped my pants when I realized it wasn't 'just another gamer.' This guy was an author-hero of mine--having written Pharoah, Oasis, and Ravenloft-- three of my favorite modules of all-time.
Great video. Fantastic advice. I’m currently running the original I6 Ravenloft in my sandbox. “Barovia” is a region within our custom campaign (as is Keep on The Borderlands, The Lost City, etc.) and I really like your advice on the concept of sessions being “episodic,” not planning ahead more than a few sessions, and not having an expectation that the “players will return.” Because of this, our group has the best of both worlds in that we have a living breathing sandbox that can incorporate many of these classic and historic modules into our setting. Duality. Sandboxes and great episodic adventures can co-exist. Thanks PDM!
Nice video! When I heard the upcoming title, I guessed that Ravenloft might be the adventure referenced. I bought a print on demand copy of the original module a couple years ago
Great video, I always had great things to say about the original Ravenloft. I think my favorite thing is the card reading that makes two major things happen A) the cards the players draw has an impact on the game. B) Mix things up so the exact same game isn't played very often. One question that I know has been covered before; what packet is the mini used as Deathbringer, what kind of Warhammer mini & do they make them any more?
Great video. I feel like one of the reasons your table stays together is for each other. Obviously everyone enjoys the environment that you and your fellow players create! I was able to secure an old copy of the 5e revision of Strahd. I am currently running the 5e version. Somebody already got decapitated by Rahadin... maybe he'll come back as a dulahan? I hope to run the Advanced D&D version of it next.
I'm running Ravenloft for my group using Basic Fantasy RPG just before Halloween this year. I have never played it (or Curse of Strahd), nor have my players, so we are all pretty excited. We will see how things go. I have made some adaptations using the "Strahd Must Die Tonight!" article and some other video suggestions (including Professor DMs), and I am very hopeful that it will be an awesome and memorable experience. I bought an Hourglass for the occasion, I have pregen'd characters (most of my players haven't played BFRPG, so I am trying to lower the barrier to entry), magic items, backgrounds, a custom Tarokka deck, and prepped background music. I'm hoping it all goes over well.
I remember sitting on the floor of my mates bedroom looking at Ravenloft. It was amazing! (Now my legs don't sit crossed like that!!) At the same time we looked at The Keep (Mayfair's Role Aids module). It was so much better as a player - Nazis, Slavic mountain villages, time slippage and an impossible demon to kill. And when you realise the castle is built to contain the danger… aagh 😱 But Ravenloft was so COOL!! I reckon it's the reason we got Vampire the Masquerade and all that juicy Goth Darkness in the 90s. Thanks for letting people know that Tracy Hickman is a badass DM! More power to your elbow, PDM!
Probably the best rpg experience I’ve ever played. I was probably about 12 or 13 at the time. Went through it with just me and the DM and 1 NPC. It made it extra creepy and more personal.
I'm fortunate enough to have found Ravenloft (I6), the module for AD&D 1E, for $40 at my local used book store! I'd love to run it sometime since I got the core rulebooks in high school. A group I've since left suggested I could "convert" it for 5e, but AD&D is the only way I'd go whenever it happens.
When you dropped a small hint about this video I knew it would be about I6: Ravenloft and I couldn’t agree more. It represents a significant departure from D&D’s roots in the war gaming community by introducing clear narrative checkpoints and villains with clear motivations other than “kill the party.” It is a pity more players don’t appreciate that just because your character can survive a 2 to 3 session story arc that doesn’t mean they can survive a 40 to 60 session story arc.
I remember, vividly, the night we sat down to play Ravenloft, way back in '83. My buddy, Joey, DM'd it. We lost our first character due to the rotting drawbridge. He failed every roll. We pulled a mulligan and he was able to grab the hem of the mage's cloak, 'cause it would have sucked to have ended our session an hour into the all-nighter we had planned. It was not exactly an easy module and you had a damn good chance of dying before meeting Strahd, if you were reckless. That module did change the course of D&D, though you could see it coming in Pharoe and, I would argue, even the Slaver series. I appreciated the completeness of the stuff that came after Ravenloft but I still enjoyed the old school (now), dungeon crawls more.
This was one of my favorites to run, as well as play in, back as a teen in Ye Olde 1E days. This was one of those modules that we would use to test ourselves. "Hey, we've all got L7 characters now... you think we can take Strahd?" To me and my buddies the most horrifying aspect of the module is the Level Drain capabilities of the multitudes of undead creatures you are bound to meet! Seriously, we'd often start the module at L6 or 7 but by the end most of the party would be either L2 or just plain dead. I think only 1 time did we manage to actually beat Strahd, and we musta played that module 4 or 5 times over the years. ...and we loved every minute of it!
5:13 - OMG, I had NO idea that you were the author of "Unhallowed Ground" (Dungeon Magazine 54)! I've been following your channel here for a couple of years, but never knew your real name until just today. Unhallowed Ground is one of my absolute favorite D&D adventures to run; I've run it at least a half dozen times since 1995, even using it as the adventure to introduce my children to D&D back in 2009. 🥰
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 My kids were 11 and 13 years old at the time, but yeah, it's a pretty dark adventure. The parallels between "Unhallowed Ground" and the Umberto Eco novel, "The Name of the Rose" (1980), are unmistakable. 😉
I love CoS, the Strahd character, and digging into backstory of this module. Let's not also forget the excellent novels by PN Elrod for this character.
Love to hear the history behind CoS. I've played all the D&D systems, but I'm currently going through the 5e version of CoS with my son's group as my first experience with that version. Good times - but a lot longer than one or two sessions!
This is it! Your best video ever. Bravo. This is what a professor does, analyze the stuff of others. I love the three step overview. Fantastic. Thank you.
Fast food! Amazing. On my bucket list is to play in I6, run by a veteran DM that will do it justice. Until then I'll keep searching for live plays of the game. With it being so popular you would think that a video of it would be easy to find...
For what it’s worth, I started playing d&d in 1979… and I think you’ve nailed this particular episode. Only thing I’d add is that the cover art that started appearing on TSR novels (which included Hickman’s Dragonlance books), impacted book publishing as an industry. Companies like Random House, HarperCollins, and Del Rey, etc. all started following TSRs lead in putting much better art on the covers of genre fiction.
I was lucky that I learned to GM on the "Ravenloft" black boxed set, which taught me how to tell roleplaying-heavy, low-combat, character-centric, campaigns. I wasted very little time in the "dungeon delver" mindset and focused on creating deep campaigns that kept bringing people back.
Interesting choice. The "save or die traps" were mostly in a module that was intended to be a almost-unbeatable challenge. Few normal modules had so many. Speaking of which didn't you advert _Grimtooth_ recently? "Monster condo" thing was real in early modules but the Giants/Underdark/Queen modules made sense, as did most of the adventures after that (if by cobbling together solid reasons why a variety of monsters were gathered under one flag, like the Slavers modules did). That said sure Ravenloft did do some very innovative stuff but not all of it had great long-term impacts on the game (while some like the replayability with flexible 'hooks' stand up very well indeed). Modules after show the robustness. Earlier modules were very spare (that said re-reading them, one can see the hidden hooks. Even in Keep on the Borderlands, that were embedded in it for DMs to flesh out. There's a story there but you really have to be discerning to piece it together and since it was for novices - many people's first adventure - mostly it played as hack random monsters kinda thing).
The Giants/Underdark/Queen of the Demonweb Pits was the first story questline and indeed the first "Adventure Path" prove me wrong. Sure it's only sketched in the original modules but it's there and the idea was DMs (and players) would fill it out. Less hand-holdy. Meanwhile, as much as I like the _Dragonlance_ modules, you're really on the railroad. Its one thing to have a story (created by both the DM and the players) it's another to be an conductor on a rail line. (My least favorite adventures of this type were Greenwood's _Time of Troubles_ modules. Lets face it the PCs in those are just there to be innocent bystanders to the NPC heroics. But I digress - only slightly, however). I played pre-83 and while the first campaigns I were in were typical novice campaigns the rest had the characters doing their own story arc, with some published and many unpublished adventures. We didn't need TSR's novels or any of that (I also like 2E, OD&D, 3E, even 4E some, 5E, PF, you name it - you're right that specific rules aren't necessary they're just hooks and characters can be converted between systems - though the 'conversion' rules never really get it right so DMs and players should work together instead to capture the character's essence in any new system).
Adding to my point - I'm sure you have your old AD&D (1E) DMG. In it you will find Gygax writing this: "Unlike most games, AD&D is an ongoing collection of episode adventures, each of which constitutes a session of play. You, as Dungeon Master, are about to embark on a new career, that of universe maker. . ." This was pre-Hickman. Sounds like your campaign. Already in the tin of Gygax. I maintain the "break" in style was not as sharp and stark. I too really love this adventure (the original Ravenloft). But as with the "storyline has gotten a bad rap from old-school players" thing, I think this "how innovative Ravenloft was" thing is too strongly put. Probably a consequence of internet argumentation. Sure after Ravenloft most adventures got longer (in text/page count), fleshed out with more detail, more "turnkey" but this was not always a great thing since the important elements that Ravenloft encouraged were already within that older Gygaxian system.
Problem I always had running original Ravenloft was that the combination of adding a load of really interesting lore and background, and getting through it in one or two sessions, always felt a bit at odds. By the third or fourth time I ran it I did away with the timer, and let the players take as long as they needed. That allowed more freedom for the sort of players I'm usually lucky enough to get to DM for, the time to fully explore the module. They were simply trapped in there and had to complete the goals or they'd die anyway. One of the last times I ran it (probably about 30 years ago...) it lasted about six maybe seven sessions and I added more to it to tie lore in with my campaign world. I'd been playing a lot of Runequest around that time and built more of the notion of non lethal combat into it. Far more than normal with D&D, so monsters would retreat and come back refreshed later. It frustrated the Hell out of the D&D players who were used to a war of Hit Point attrition, but when it was over they really felt like they'd earned the victory.
I absolutely adore Ravenloft, not just the module, but the entire eventual setting and primary reason I haven't gone beyond 3.5 (sword and sorcery published the campaign setting sans adventures for 3/3.5 and gave loving detail and life to the setting keeping with the original feel far better than anything published since IMO) my first games were played with a DM who was learning from his mom's friends and we as a group went from playing it in the random dungeon style to this more narrative sandbox style organically as we matured as players and when I finally discovered Ravenloft it just reaffirmed that style of play even more strongly. I agree completely that sandboxes and storylines are not mutually exclusive,and nothing is a better thesis for this than Ravenloft and Prof DM talking about it.
I would really love to see video about how and why those systems were changing in the mentioned years-long campaign of yours where the story is most important!
Good video as usual! Ravenloft was definitely a great one! I've been DM'ing for 34 yrs now (I know, I know) and have found that some groups like the 2 session model, but others really love the idea that the campaign is ready for multiple sessions. If they make it.........
I don't think I've ever played an adventure that was completed in 2-3 sessions. We played Ravenloft for maybe 3 years, and Dragon of Icefire peak for over a year. I guess there were objectives along the way, but not the whole adventure.
It helps to speed up the process when your players realize that it is a game and not a SAG audition portfolio generation system. I have lived through the situation where a player spends 2 sessions (8 hours total) trying to figure out how to convince the party to let him try to "tame" a Huge Construct that is basically a lawn mower after being told explicitly by the DM that it is not possible.
Hey, I was right :) I've always loved Ravenloft. I never actually played the original I6, but I did play the sequel "House on Gryphon Hill". The Ravenloft boxed sets from the 90s are some of my favorite material I ever bought.
Ravenloft has always been my bag. Loved the "grounded" horror aspect of it in comparison to high fantasy or anything like Spelljammer. The follow on to that - Masque of the Red Death was even more intriguing; but I stuggled to get on board with fire arms being a standard thing in games that could just abruptly end any encounter.
Industry insider here. Many people also know the incredible story of how Ravenloft was written. But for those who don't, I'll repeat it here. Tracy and his wife Laura were living Utah in a mid-sized town. They were not making a lot of money. Indeed, as Tracy tells it, they didn't have enough money for snow boots in the winter. They were essentially living off of spaghetti-o meals. They wrote Ravenloft and it was selling at their local game stores, because that's how you published modules back then. You would literally shop them around to different area stores.
They got the call from TSR and they pushed all of their chips into the middle of the table. They made a cross-country trip, not knowing anything about Lake Geneva and said, "We're going to try to make a living writing D&D modules." So, it was a very long shot with the highest stakes. And, obviously, it worked out wonderfully, because Ravenloft was a hit and soon after Tracy was asked to get involved with Dragonlance. The rest is history.
All true. Epic.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1I wonder what the original sold in game store-pre-published-modules looked like and if any are still around?
Even at the apex of Ravenloft/Dragonlance success, curiously, the Hickmans have never been rolling in it. They're fine but they live pretty standard lives in Utah now.
They are, deservedly, beloved by the fans.
@@conmacmara2743I've seen some old store published modules and they are usually pretty rough. The DnD white book looks like a masterpiece in comparison. Seriously some were just hand written on notebook paper.
Quality of content was of course all over the place but some were good. Heck I've seen entirely new and original games published this way and most were not very good.
Now days the access to decent publishing and the ease in which art can be added to a document makes things much better looking but the stores that have been open long enough to even have locally produced stuff is pretty far between now days.
@@conmacmara2743stapled printed booklets similar to zines
"Independent creators and non-AI artists" - shots fired.
Indeed.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 PUNY HUUUUUUUMAN! YOU WILL SSSMILE OUT OF THE OTHER OTHER SIDE OF YOU FACE WHEN WE, YOUR AI OVERLORDS, FIGURE OUT HOW FINGERS ACTUALLY WORK, AND SSSSSSSTRANGLE YOU ALL IN YOU SSSSSSLEEEEEP! 💻
Love it.
Support small artist.
Based
Oh, and a historical note. I love how Tracy came up with the idea for Ravenloft. He and his wife were playing in a dungeon crawl. The DM at the time rolled on a random encounter table and rolled...a vampire. So, a vampire showed up in the dungeon and started fighting the party. Tracy halted everything and said, "What? A vampire? What's he doing here? Why...is a vampire hanging around in this old dungeon?" It was especially jarring for Hickman because vampires at that time were -best- known for being those creatures in the Hammer horror films. So, they were picturing some guy in a black cape and a red cravat.
That got Tracy thinking. What -was- the vampire doing there? Why would a vampire be in a dungeon? What would he want? And thus, Ravenloft was born.
Good story. Thanks!
For italics, you want to surround the words with _underscores,_ not -hyphens.-
I will note that when we did the video at TheDMLair, Tracy Hickman popped into the comments and pointed out that the "Hickman Manifesto" was primarily Laura's work, not his. He inspired it, but the core was all Laura. Given Tracy's fame as a writer with Dragonlance and beyond, I found it very interesting that Laura was actually the real power behind the style of adventure he's often credited with.
In Knave 2e, Ben Milton writes “Remember that ultimately an RPG campaign tells the story of a whole world, not a single character or even a single party.” That has reshaped my understanding of “story” as a DM.
Always a great day when PDM drops a new lecture!
Thank you.
Always a good lesson
I’m old enough to remember when many modules were photocopies in ziplock bags - fancy ones had a different color paper - independent grown and created. It’s nice to look back.
Oh yeah.
"It was his (Black Dougal's) backpack. We needed it to carry the coins in that chest. Besides, he wasn't using it anymore." - Fredrik, Dwarf 1
5:55 there it is, and I laughed a lot. Well done, sir!
As much as I love Ravenloft (a lot), I think I like that (Black Dougal's demise, and games like it) even more.
LOL. Right!!!
I use to run the original Ravenloft adventure every Halloween. Did it for about 12 years. Lots of fun.
BASED!
"Strahd Must Die! TONIGHT!!!" is one of my favorite one-shots to run.
I6: Castle Ravenloft has been my favorite adventure ever published for any RPG for almost 40 years.
Thanks Prof. I remember unwrapping Ravenloft as a kid in the 80s and being blown away. Last module I ever bought, we switched to MERP in.high school
MERP!
I ****ing LOVED MERP! Only problem was, one of the players in my group was a far bigger Tolkien nerd than I was, knew way more than the rest of us, and refused to ever DM. So he would grunt and chunter in the corner if I ever got anything wrong, like quoting a list of The line of Kings of wherever in the wrong order.
I hope you stuck with it and didn't think "Hey... that Rolemaster thing looks like a more advanced version of MERP... lets try THAT!"
We learned from that mistake...
First time I played that game was with a complete Rulesmonger DM, and one of the characters literally died by falling down the steps in the tavern about ten minutes into the game. (It had taken us all over an hour to roll up the characters...) We hadn't even MET.
I played it again a few years later with a DM who said, "It's not always like that! Give it another try..." It was Spacemaster... That wasn't much better but he was a better DM, so it was OK... no better than "OK" BUT it was the one time in my life I can honestly say that I saw a "One in a million" come off.
The system had exploding Crits so if you got 96-00 on percentile dice you rolled again and added it to the score and kept going. I saw a guy roll three back to back 00's. It was an absolute crying shame that it was for some crappy Scanner Operation roll or something equally dull and unimportant.
His name was Danny, but within three weeks everyone called him "Milli". (Most had no idea why.)
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 Bossman, speaking of MERP do you have any interest in reviewing "Against the Darkmaster"? I just read the PDF (still waiting for my print book...) and it makes just about all the changes to MERP that I would make to streamline the thing without losing the charm.
@@andrewtomlinson5237I played a session or two of that game. All I remember is the exploding Crits and how one player was able to lift an entire stone fountain in the middle of a town square off its foundation.
@@andrewtomlinson5237i hated when RoleMaster effectively took over MERP. My hobbit character got killed by a rope ladder in one RM adventure - yes a ROPE LADDER!
The original Ravenloft might be my favorite D&D adventure ever printed.
I was blown away when Ravenloft came out. I've run it several times over the years...never gets old. The maps were an incredible leap forward. The villain Strahd could not be forgotten. My favorite module...
Get 5 pro designers in a room and ask them what the best module is--80-100% will say the same thing.
Ravenloft is one the best campaign worlds ever created...the best of 2nd edition D&D
I like the idea of a mist filled pocket dimension, so that, if a player can't make it to game night, their character fades in to the fog; only to, hopefully, return the next session.
I prefer Darksun personally, as it also challenge the fantasy trope.
No disrespect, but the other side of the coin is that this was turning point from the Westmarches/Open Table style of adventuring, where characters were adventurers, to the Theme Park style of adventuring where characters are now heroes. Before, modules were published with an eye toward longevity, featuring more overland travel and the like, to be a core around which you could make a campaign. Ravenloft kicked off the more "monster of the week" style, where clever players learned to look for the "rails" to follow so they could "beat the game" and move onto the next module. Not saying either is bad, but I think this is basically where D&D ended being what we'd now call an OSR-style game.
None taken and I agree with you.
i'm running Ravenloft for October in my B/X game and explicitly paused the ongoing campaign in order to do it as a one shot, because i knew otherwise my players would get incredibly frustrated with it. it's honestly the most egregious "rocks fall, everyone dies" railroading i've ever seen in a published module. Players try to leave Barovia? Fatal fog withdrawal. To add insult to injury, it specifically calls out that Madame Eva has the antidote but it's *impossible* for the players to discover it. Players try to hexcrawl the woods? 25 Dire Wolves. Players try to leave the dungeon? Not only does the drawbridge magically raise on its own but there's that giant flesh-dissolving green slime on the portcullis that magically only attacks when they're leaving. Reaction roll? The Hickmans never heard of her, apparently. We've still been having fun with the module, and I do love the idea of randomizing key locations for replayability, but it definitely cuts hard against the player-driven grain of old school D&D. it feels like trying to play an entirely different style of game, just using the same rules for some reason.
I've been playing under the same dungeon master for 37 years.
We have used Ravenloft at least 4 times in our group. It's a treasure.
Your video has conjured many amazing memories. Thanks.
BTW. He just died a couple of months ago.
Love Ravenloft. Love it. Played several editions. Loved them all. One of the few modules I would be thrilled to be a player in, multiple times.
Well done, professor. I lived through this. Started playing D&D (actually AD&D) in 1982. Our DM did the usual Village of Hommlet, Slavers Series, then the GDQ modules. After that, we started a new campaign, and I6 Ravenloft was part of it. As you say, it was indeed groundbreaking. It set a new standard, raised the bar much higher than previous D&D modules ("adventures"). I6 has earned it's place in the roleplaying Hall of Fame.
Absolutely.
We played Ravenloft two or three times just after it first came out. Love the module, love the art, Love the feel. The village had a very nice Bram Stoker feel to it. I think at the time though we needed a more cinematically inclined DM. We never encountered the gypsies, never got our fortune read because we never went to where they were. We hung out in town for a couple days and then went up to the castle to see this Strahd everyone spoke of. I think we might have seen the parade of the dead once in three tries at the module but were never clear on what it was. We never had any conception of a ticking clock.
My memory of the module was us slowly getting chipped away , finding the sun sword , but squandering it's power. We may have engaged with the Mercenary once. Generally by the end it was a third level Paladin, a fifth level cleric and a 6th level MU ( we All started at 7th level ) finally dying in a basement. Oh yeah and module was dripping in treasure that we were breaking our backs trying to hump out of there. We weren't the right droids for this mission, even if we had understood it.
We had no story, no plan , no specific victory conditions that we knew as we slowly hacked and slashed our way to our eventual inevitable demise.
Still Fun Module. I liked the desert of desolation modules and the first Ravenloft. Always felt the Dragon lance series was a bridge too far. into pure railroad.
Oh wow. I’m currently reading the 2e Van Richten Guides at the moment. Awesome.
Thanks as always, PDM. Everyone should be so honored as to get the chance to play with Tracy Hickman.
The original I-6 and I-10 are on sale at DMs Guild for 2.99. Hard to pass that up.
Yes!!! That cover really was captivating. So was the desert of desolation series! My favourite. I remember , from 1979-1985, sitting in the local hobby shop for hours, just fawning over the module art! Good times!
Desert of Desolation was good too.
Dragonlance was my life in the 80s and 90s ... I owe so much to the Hickmans and I can not wait for Skyraiders Of Abarax to reach its print run. For me it's likely to be one of only two 5e products I run next year, along with Grim Hollow. Ravenloft and Dragonlance are, in my opinion, the most significant D&D modules ever designed. The Hickmans truly are at the top of the pantheon.
Our group just started a campaign in Ravenloft a few weeks back. Love it so far! We've got a town that's been slowly dying off or turning into zombies, and some evil brothers who are behind it all. The card mechanic at the very beginning is so cool, but I'm still trying to figure out how it all fits in. I hope we survive so we can see some of the other domains after this one!
Yay, props to you, Prof., Happy that Deathbringer is being brought into The Hoard of Ghaundal!! I love that you shout out Ravenloft. Because it is the Writing that is top notch. The maps are secondary and an aid to play. It's the Writing that makes this module great. I think that the Writing is what makes Paizo so popular with their Adventure Paths (AP for short). Personally, I don't want to run or play Pathfinder (or 5e) but the writing is so good that I will watch others do it. The Hickmans were ahead of their time and the persistence of Ravenloft proves it. The production of Beedle & Grimms Ravenloft proves it . Ravenloft, in my mind, can be seen as a turning point into what D&D modules could and should have been.
Thanks for the kind words and for sharing.
I already knew this history but I LOVE hearing about it again and again. The Hickman's basically had their own mini-epic adventure which shaped so many of our own epic adventures. They took a risk and we all benefited from it.
What I enjoyed about those old modules that you could literally drop them anywhere in your campaign and 'adapt' the generic villain to your own game. Newer modules have so much detail that it made it hard (or at least more complicated) to make it fit in your story. You had to learn and memorise twenty different NPCs, background stories, and a ton of other stuff that mostly didn't fit very well with the place your players were going.
You nailed it. Thanks for adding to the conversation.
For me the art of this era will always be the ascetic of D&D in my head and it's objectively ( yeah, you heard what I wrote ) superior to anything before or since.
aesthetic. ascetic means something else.
It is true. Not only the visual art, but in the Hickman's written word and subtext as well. It would have been enough for Straud to be one of the first NPCs with motivations and backstory, but his personality is much more developed. A deliberate allegory for the real world monster behind the fangs; a self deluded sexual predator obsessed with Irena, believing her his property through willfully ignoring his inability to truly love the person he torments only as an internal attempt to escape from his self imposed torment. You won't see that level of objective understanding for a vampire's ego in today's young adult section, or in most classic horror novels.
Amen, brother.
Yeah. The art from Easley, Caldwell, and Elmore have always been the gold standard for me. RPG art, before and since, hasn't quite compared in one way or another.
@@NefariousKoel Even though I'm kind of an OD&D snob I 100% agree with you about the art. I do love Otus, Tramp and the rest but man that late 1e / early 2e era was tops!
My friends and I replayed Ravenloft a bunch of times over the years. What a great adventure and very inspirational for my homebrew stuff back then.
Nice. I just ran this (heavily altered) for Pathfinder. It's such an atmospheric module.
No shade cast on Ravenloft, one the greatest D&D modules ever written, but the UK-shop 1981 module U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh satisfied all four of the Hickmans' goals a full two years before Ravenloft was released. That module was a game changer for me, it broke me out of the dungeon mode of thinking we all adhered to in the early days. Although the lesser module, Saltmarsh was the real trail-blazer.
I agree. I received the module as a birthday present about a month after its release. It was a brilliant module and changed the way I thought about creating campaigns and developed villains from that point on.
I remember buying this module when it first came out. It read like nothing else i purchased before and changed how I ran my campaigns forever. Classic.
I had read and learned about Ravenloft years ago and it became one of my favorite adventure modules ever since. Honestly, I urge to run once again, and end it for real this time. Strahd is so iconic, he is one of my favorite villains ever. As a fan of the Hammer films and dark fantasy and gothic horror media such as Castlevania, Bloodborne and etc., I love the vibe Ravenloft gives. I read throughout the module more than one time so I got all the refferences to the Bram Stoker's novel. If I had the opportunity to run the module again, I would certainly do it, and with my own creepy spin on it. He is the ancient, He is the land. And He is going to be my next main villain for sure. Excellent video as always, Professor DM. 🧛
Real quick, before I start the episode:
Thank you for shouting out independent and non-ai artists, it means a lot!
On with the video!
And I will ALWAYS do so.
we wore that module OUT. Cant tell you how many times its been played through. I6, even today, remains absolutely outstanding.
This module really did change things when we tried to play through it so many moons ago. Before this we would end up having people kill other PCs at the beginning of the game. Totally lame, but that was playing with the guys in the 80s. Enjoyed the video.
Indeed!
One of my buddy's mega-dungeons featured a room with a skeleton sticking out of the stone floor from the waist up. It was from a previous group of our characters where a couple of PCs got in an argument. It resulted in one PC trapping another PC using rock to mud on the floor under him and then dispelling it. That was playing with the guys in the 80's 🙂
Thanks!
Cool idea!
I completely see where you're coming from in this video. In the 80s, the Hickmans' modules (I3-5, I6, and even I10, which ultimately wasn't really their work) were my favorites, because what pulled me to D&D in the first place was my love of fantasy novels and how here was a game that let me actually play those stories...except most of the time, the stories the game wanted to tell were games of chess with more rules and dice, where it was about raiding a location, killing bad guys, and looting enemies. And occasionally going full murderhobo (when I was in junior high, I DMed a Village of Hommlet session where the players literally mistook the village for the dungeon, as in they actually thought the objective of the scenario was to sack the place, because why else would it have maps and stats? And me being a kid like them at the time, I didn't realize that they weren't just being intentionally evil PCs until about the third farmhouse.). I wanted games with plot and story, where my character could feel like a hero, or at least a protagonist, and not like a unit of measurement. (Ironically, that's one of the reasons I actually prefer the BECMI/1e/2e rule-sets, because if I wanted to create a character and "minmax my build" I'd play a video game.)
Old School Dungeon Crawling is a room by room, battle survival game. I really saw this when I looked into BarrowMaze and saw the word count devoted room descriptions, while the few Monster and human factions are there, but not given a robust treatment.
While our Symbaroum Campaign, is just as lethal, but is so richly crafted with faction information, that the narrative tension viscerally inhabits all aspects of game play. This then naturally invests the player in the momentum of the Campaign, because these factions are grinding out a existence, at the expense of others and themselves, in ways that are specific to their unique nature.
I still remember Corwin the Ranger and Saaron (sp?) Redkill and that damn crossbow trap. Some of my favorite times playing D&D are still from your basement.
Holy crap, you wrote "Unhallowed Ground"! I never put that together. I love that adventure. I think I have used it 5 or 6 times over the years.
Yes. And thank you. Glad you enjoyed it.
Ravenloft changed the way I DM'd and the way I wrote out my campaigns. It gave me structure, balance, and ideas on how to make a small dungeon fun.
This one sounds like it would be very fun to do with a warhammer 4e rule set.
Have a loyer, a guard and a begger, from the town itself team up and go try and take down the Sylvania vampire count. I want to try it at some point. The flavor is already there.
I used to sit and read through the Ravenloft campaign setting books. I know you don't typically talk about campaign settings, but I would love to see videos where you talk about modules from those settings.
My favorite setting was Darksun. Such a limited audience, though. If you read "Slaying the Dragon," the multiple settings is one of the things that killed TSR by splitting the audience.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 Dark Sun was by far my favourite too. Such a gem of an adventure setting, nothing since has ever really captured its vibe of hope and despair in a dying world.
Amazing video, Professor! Thanks so much for covering our absolute favourite module of AD&D! In fact, we love Ravenloft so much we created a huge Old School love letter to it with our own game. A dream of ours one day is for the professor to check it out. For now, we'll just keep watching Dungeon Craft!
To me, this whole Ravenloft Castle is one abnormally big bachelor pad.
Aesthetically, I love the way Castle Ravenloft looks. It definitely invokes that gothic horror castle vibe. However, the Castle has no bedchambers for a queen, children and multiple guests, and this is supposed to be a castle for a ruling family (the Zarovich family).
Here is my quick and dirty solution to this dilemma. Just duplicate the "Rooms of Weeping" floor, once or twice above it, and re-function many of the rooms as bedchambers for the "lady of house", the children, and guests. They would all now be empty, of course, but that makes more sense than their complete absence.
Good advice.
Same. I still have my OG copies of Ravenloft and House on Griffon Hill. It is the module we played most from 84 to 92. It was always in rotation. Also it is a lot of fun for the DM. Strahd is a genius, so coming up with clever and creative ways for him to harass and punish the players is a good time.
The original Ravenloft is amazing
Absolute favorite module
Yep. 100% correct. I was 12 when this came out and this module did indeed change everything. D&D could be much more than a crawl, there could be story, backstory, and most importantly, mood. Without this module, there's no Forgotten Realms, no Dragonlance, and more importantly to me, no Dark Sun, no Planescape. Genius.
Great video. The Hickmans definitely changed the course of fantasy RPGs and you told that story with nuance I hadn't heard before. Well done, Professor!
"can be beaten in a session or two." Me over here who's been running a Curse of Strahd 5E Campaign for about 3 to 4 years now. To be fair we don't play online and I started it in 2020. And in 2022 we were only able to meet like 5 times. But the players are having fun and keep coming back for more. And this year we have met a ton more. Got a more consistent schedule going. They are so close to finishing it. If I ever run the Strahd story again..Ill probably use ShadowDark rule set with the original Ravenloft. And make it a one to two session thing.
Shadowdark is IT.
Mammoth rules- when are you going to join us on the game! MAMMOTH DEATH BRINGER - no way!
I had no idea that you, the Dungeon Professor was following the same campaign and switching up the game systems over the years.
I'm very intrigued to know how you adapted from one system to the next.
Absolutely love the art style of these classic modules, it almost feels painted (though I imagine in many cases it probably actually was!)
Clyde Caldwell and Larry Elmore painted all that classic stuff. I've seen the artists and their work in person.
Love the dragonlance series and setting. Hickman and Weiss FTW. Thanks D.craft!
I'm a little used to RUclips being about controversy lately. But I simply found this to be a brief and very insightful take on information I knew but from a perspective I hadn't considered.
Very well done. And I love that line, they come for the game, but stay for the story.
Thank you. I was proudest of that line.
Ravenloft (I6) was one of my fav modules to DM in 1st edition and in particular I really loved it's re-playability (thanks to the Fortune Telling aspect that allowed for moveable scenarios). It's 2nd edition iteration "House of Strahd" is equally great as it can be played as the original module or an upgraded 2e adventure giving Strahd his full Domain Lord stats. Dave Sutherland's architectural maps were quite an innovation but even to this day I struggle to interpret them, especially when trying to work out just where all those spiral staircases lead to! Hopefully I'm not alone in that, but no matter, kudos to the Hickmans for such a seminal work :)
I was part of a ravenloft campaign that lasted a touch over 2 years! Our group explored damn near every thing we think possible!
I always thought that "Curse of Strahd" essentially trapped you in a pocket dimension, and your adventurers had to learn to survive within it, essentially Barovia became the campaign setting! Not that you had until sunrise or die!
This is because when I played 2e regularly, I think one of our alternating GMs adapted a dwarven module or boxed set they couldn't find into a trilogy, from memory, and our other stories were GM created within our game world.
The closest I came to playing a printed adventure was one from White Dwarf (pre issue 90, when it printed more than just Games Workshop stuff), and it had been adapted (very well by the way) to FASA Star Trek!
😂😂😂😂
The Professor has taught me something new about D&D history!
😃😃😃😃
Great video as always!
😎😎😎😎
It is ironic that their goal was to get away from a certain type of dungeon crawl, but Pharaoh was their first. Ravenloft really turned everything on it's head. Unrelated note: I was working the registration booth at TWINCON in 1991 or thereabouts and Tracy came in as an honored guest and I didn't recognize him. He said, "Hickman." I said, "WHO?" because I had never seen him before. "HICKMAN!" he repeated. I almost crapped my pants when I realized it wasn't 'just another gamer.' This guy was an author-hero of mine--having written Pharoah, Oasis, and Ravenloft-- three of my favorite modules of all-time.
Great video. Fantastic advice. I’m currently running the original I6 Ravenloft in my sandbox. “Barovia” is a region within our custom campaign (as is Keep on The Borderlands, The Lost City, etc.) and I really like your advice on the concept of sessions being “episodic,” not planning ahead more than a few sessions, and not having an expectation that the “players will return.” Because of this, our group has the best of both worlds in that we have a living breathing sandbox that can incorporate many of these classic and historic modules into our setting. Duality. Sandboxes and great episodic adventures can co-exist. Thanks PDM!
Nice video! When I heard the upcoming title, I guessed that Ravenloft might be the adventure referenced. I bought a print on demand copy of the original module a couple years ago
Great video, I always had great things to say about the original Ravenloft. I think my favorite thing is the card reading that makes two major things happen A) the cards the players draw has an impact on the game. B) Mix things up so the exact same game isn't played very often.
One question that I know has been covered before; what packet is the mini used as Deathbringer, what kind of Warhammer mini & do they make them any more?
It's from Hassle Free miniatures but it's about to change to the miniature created by Mammoth Miniatures seen in the ad at the start.
We still need to try this one! Watching the Hickmans run their live con games is wild! 😂🙌
Thanks for the vid! :D
Great video. I feel like one of the reasons your table stays together is for each other. Obviously everyone enjoys the environment that you and your fellow players create! I was able to secure an old copy of the 5e revision of Strahd. I am currently running the 5e version. Somebody already got decapitated by Rahadin... maybe he'll come back as a dulahan? I hope to run the Advanced D&D version of it next.
Thanks for sharing. We agree!
I wish to thank you for the tips and entertainment you have provided, and I wish you good luck with your future stuff.
I remember seeing that module for the first time in a hobby store, and decoding to try it out. I really liked it a lot.
I'm running Ravenloft for my group using Basic Fantasy RPG just before Halloween this year. I have never played it (or Curse of Strahd), nor have my players, so we are all pretty excited. We will see how things go. I have made some adaptations using the "Strahd Must Die Tonight!" article and some other video suggestions (including Professor DMs), and I am very hopeful that it will be an awesome and memorable experience. I bought an Hourglass for the occasion, I have pregen'd characters (most of my players haven't played BFRPG, so I am trying to lower the barrier to entry), magic items, backgrounds, a custom Tarokka deck, and prepped background music. I'm hoping it all goes over well.
Thanks for sharing these great ideas!
I remember sitting on the floor of my mates bedroom looking at Ravenloft. It was amazing! (Now my legs don't sit crossed like that!!) At the same time we looked at The Keep (Mayfair's Role Aids module). It was so much better as a player - Nazis, Slavic mountain villages, time slippage and an impossible demon to kill. And when you realise the castle is built to contain the danger… aagh 😱
But Ravenloft was so COOL!!
I reckon it's the reason we got Vampire the Masquerade and all that juicy Goth Darkness in the 90s.
Thanks for letting people know that Tracy Hickman is a badass DM!
More power to your elbow, PDM!
A friend dmed the new ravenloft module and you can really see how removing the timer takes all the threat from the scenario
Probably the best rpg experience I’ve ever played. I was probably about 12 or 13 at the time. Went through it with just me and the DM and 1 NPC. It made it extra creepy and more personal.
I'm fortunate enough to have found Ravenloft (I6), the module for AD&D 1E, for $40 at my local used book store! I'd love to run it sometime since I got the core rulebooks in high school. A group I've since left suggested I could "convert" it for 5e, but AD&D is the only way I'd go whenever it happens.
When you dropped a small hint about this video I knew it would be about I6: Ravenloft and I couldn’t agree more. It represents a significant departure from D&D’s roots in the war gaming community by introducing clear narrative checkpoints and villains with clear motivations other than “kill the party.”
It is a pity more players don’t appreciate that just because your character can survive a 2 to 3 session story arc that doesn’t mean they can survive a 40 to 60 session story arc.
Thanks for watching the last video so closely. Did you see The Lost City? It is by far my best video ever.
greatest module ever, followed by white plume mountain, and temple of elemental evil been a player for 43 years
I remember, vividly, the night we sat down to play Ravenloft, way back in '83. My buddy, Joey, DM'd it. We lost our first character due to the rotting drawbridge. He failed every roll. We pulled a mulligan and he was able to grab the hem of the mage's cloak, 'cause it would have sucked to have ended our session an hour into the all-nighter we had planned. It was not exactly an easy module and you had a damn good chance of dying before meeting Strahd, if you were reckless. That module did change the course of D&D, though you could see it coming in Pharoe and, I would argue, even the Slaver series. I appreciated the completeness of the stuff that came after Ravenloft but I still enjoyed the old school (now), dungeon crawls more.
Thanks for sharing.
This was one of my favorites to run, as well as play in, back as a teen in Ye Olde 1E days. This was one of those modules that we would use to test ourselves. "Hey, we've all got L7 characters now... you think we can take Strahd?" To me and my buddies the most horrifying aspect of the module is the Level Drain capabilities of the multitudes of undead creatures you are bound to meet! Seriously, we'd often start the module at L6 or 7 but by the end most of the party would be either L2 or just plain dead. I think only 1 time did we manage to actually beat Strahd, and we musta played that module 4 or 5 times over the years. ...and we loved every minute of it!
5:13 - OMG, I had NO idea that you were the author of "Unhallowed Ground" (Dungeon Magazine 54)!
I've been following your channel here for a couple of years, but never knew your real name until just today. Unhallowed Ground is one of my absolute favorite D&D adventures to run; I've run it at least a half dozen times since 1995, even using it as the adventure to introduce my children to D&D back in 2009. 🥰
Thank you. That's a bit grim for kids. But I'm glad you enjoyed it. Wolfgang Bauer (now Kobald press) really steered that one.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 My kids were 11 and 13 years old at the time, but yeah, it's a pretty dark adventure. The parallels between "Unhallowed Ground" and the Umberto Eco novel, "The Name of the Rose" (1980), are unmistakable. 😉
I remember when that module came out. It was a cutting edge product!
Great episode as usual, never been a huge fan of Strahd as a villain but liked the backdrop of a cursed land shrouded in fog
I had this, and ran this for my friends early in 1984.
I love CoS, the Strahd character, and digging into backstory of this module. Let's not also forget the excellent novels by PN Elrod for this character.
Love to hear the history behind CoS. I've played all the D&D systems, but I'm currently going through the 5e version of CoS with my son's group as my first experience with that version. Good times - but a lot longer than one or two sessions!
Still one of the benchmarks for what makes a great adventure
This is it! Your best video ever. Bravo. This is what a professor does, analyze the stuff of others. I love the three step overview. Fantastic. Thank you.
Thank you for the kind words. But I have a challenge? I think The Lost City is better. Watch and get back to me!
Fast food! Amazing.
On my bucket list is to play in I6, run by a veteran DM that will do it justice. Until then I'll keep searching for live plays of the game. With it being so popular you would think that a video of it would be easy to find...
For what it’s worth, I started playing d&d in 1979… and I think you’ve nailed this particular episode.
Only thing I’d add is that the cover art that started appearing on TSR novels (which included Hickman’s Dragonlance books), impacted book publishing as an industry. Companies like Random House, HarperCollins, and Del Rey, etc. all started following TSRs lead in putting much better art on the covers of genre fiction.
I didn't know it was such influential. Great video.
I was lucky that I learned to GM on the "Ravenloft" black boxed set, which taught me how to tell roleplaying-heavy, low-combat, character-centric, campaigns. I wasted very little time in the "dungeon delver" mindset and focused on creating deep campaigns that kept bringing people back.
Interesting choice.
The "save or die traps" were mostly in a module that was intended to be a almost-unbeatable challenge. Few normal modules had so many. Speaking of which didn't you advert _Grimtooth_ recently?
"Monster condo" thing was real in early modules but the Giants/Underdark/Queen modules made sense, as did most of the adventures after that (if by cobbling together solid reasons why a variety of monsters were gathered under one flag, like the Slavers modules did).
That said sure Ravenloft did do some very innovative stuff but not all of it had great long-term impacts on the game (while some like the replayability with flexible 'hooks' stand up very well indeed). Modules after show the robustness. Earlier modules were very spare (that said re-reading them, one can see the hidden hooks. Even in Keep on the Borderlands, that were embedded in it for DMs to flesh out. There's a story there but you really have to be discerning to piece it together and since it was for novices - many people's first adventure - mostly it played as hack random monsters kinda thing).
Black Dougal had it coming dibs on those boots.
The Giants/Underdark/Queen of the Demonweb Pits was the first story questline and indeed the first "Adventure Path" prove me wrong.
Sure it's only sketched in the original modules but it's there and the idea was DMs (and players) would fill it out. Less hand-holdy. Meanwhile, as much as I like the _Dragonlance_ modules, you're really on the railroad. Its one thing to have a story (created by both the DM and the players) it's another to be an conductor on a rail line. (My least favorite adventures of this type were Greenwood's _Time of Troubles_ modules. Lets face it the PCs in those are just there to be innocent bystanders to the NPC heroics. But I digress - only slightly, however).
I played pre-83 and while the first campaigns I were in were typical novice campaigns the rest had the characters doing their own story arc, with some published and many unpublished adventures. We didn't need TSR's novels or any of that (I also like 2E, OD&D, 3E, even 4E some, 5E, PF, you name it - you're right that specific rules aren't necessary they're just hooks and characters can be converted between systems - though the 'conversion' rules never really get it right so DMs and players should work together instead to capture the character's essence in any new system).
Adding to my point - I'm sure you have your old AD&D (1E) DMG. In it you will find Gygax writing this: "Unlike most games, AD&D is an ongoing collection of episode adventures, each of which constitutes a session of play. You, as Dungeon Master, are about to embark on a new career, that of universe maker. . ."
This was pre-Hickman. Sounds like your campaign. Already in the tin of Gygax. I maintain the "break" in style was not as sharp and stark.
I too really love this adventure (the original Ravenloft). But as with the "storyline has gotten a bad rap from old-school players" thing, I think this "how innovative Ravenloft was" thing is too strongly put. Probably a consequence of internet argumentation. Sure after Ravenloft most adventures got longer (in text/page count), fleshed out with more detail, more "turnkey" but this was not always a great thing since the important elements that Ravenloft encouraged were already within that older Gygaxian system.
Thanks for sharing your POV. I welcome lots of perspectives.
Problem I always had running original Ravenloft was that the combination of adding a load of really interesting lore and background, and getting through it in one or two sessions, always felt a bit at odds. By the third or fourth time I ran it I did away with the timer, and let the players take as long as they needed.
That allowed more freedom for the sort of players I'm usually lucky enough to get to DM for, the time to fully explore the module.
They were simply trapped in there and had to complete the goals or they'd die anyway.
One of the last times I ran it (probably about 30 years ago...) it lasted about six maybe seven sessions and I added more to it to tie lore in with my campaign world.
I'd been playing a lot of Runequest around that time and built more of the notion of non lethal combat into it. Far more than normal with D&D, so monsters would retreat and come back refreshed later. It frustrated the Hell out of the D&D players who were used to a war of Hit Point attrition, but when it was over they really felt like they'd earned the victory.
I absolutely adore Ravenloft, not just the module, but the entire eventual setting and primary reason I haven't gone beyond 3.5 (sword and sorcery published the campaign setting sans adventures for 3/3.5 and gave loving detail and life to the setting keeping with the original feel far better than anything published since IMO) my first games were played with a DM who was learning from his mom's friends and we as a group went from playing it in the random dungeon style to this more narrative sandbox style organically as we matured as players and when I finally discovered Ravenloft it just reaffirmed that style of play even more strongly. I agree completely that sandboxes and storylines are not mutually exclusive,and nothing is a better thesis for this than Ravenloft and Prof DM talking about it.
Now I need to back that kick starter the Death bringger mini isn't something want it is something I need
Whenever anyone asks what my favorite module is, the answer is always Ravenloft.
Thanks for sharing!
I would really love to see video about how and why those systems were changing in the mentioned years-long campaign of yours where the story is most important!
It mostly comes down to players getting old and not having enough time with jobs.
I hope to God they send you a complimentary game those minis look like they will be fun to paint.
Good video as usual! Ravenloft was definitely a great one! I've been DM'ing for 34 yrs now (I know, I know) and have found that some groups like the 2 session model, but others really love the idea that the campaign is ready for multiple sessions. If they make it.........
I don't think I've ever played an adventure that was completed in 2-3 sessions. We played Ravenloft for maybe 3 years, and Dragon of Icefire peak for over a year. I guess there were objectives along the way, but not the whole adventure.
Watch The Lost City. I show you how to do an entire campaign in 4 sessions.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1ok, you hooked me with that one.
It helps to speed up the process when your players realize that it is a game and not a SAG audition portfolio generation system. I have lived through the situation where a player spends 2 sessions (8 hours total) trying to figure out how to convince the party to let him try to "tame" a Huge Construct that is basically a lawn mower after being told explicitly by the DM that it is not possible.
Hey, I was right :) I've always loved Ravenloft. I never actually played the original I6, but I did play the sequel "House on Gryphon Hill". The Ravenloft boxed sets from the 90s are some of my favorite material I ever bought.
Ravenloft has always been my bag. Loved the "grounded" horror aspect of it in comparison to high fantasy or anything like Spelljammer. The follow on to that - Masque of the Red Death was even more intriguing; but I stuggled to get on board with fire arms being a standard thing in games that could just abruptly end any encounter.