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Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (4E), Part 2

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Note: In case there’s any confusion, this 4E conversion of Expedition to Castle Ravenloft isn’t intended to allow you to forgo the book entirely (because I might get in trouble doing so). Rather, it’s designed to be more like a conversion supplement.

Hmm…there’s a lot more going on here than I thought…

Once the players destroy all the zombies in the town square and fix the barricades, they can take a breather and try to figure out exactly what the hell is going on. Ashlyn is looking for her companions (who disappeared in the church several days ago) and the Sunsword. Finding out the fate of her companions is going to be worth a minor quest reward, while the Sunsword itself is a major quest (what with it being an artifact and all).

There’s also a couple of businesses worth mentioning: Bildrath’s Mercantile and the Blood of the Vine tavern. Bildreth’s Mercantile is only really useful insofar as it gives the players a place to buy gear and pawn their loot, though it’s possible that either the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind or Sunsword can be found there. The Blood of the Vine Tavern, on the other hand, is mostly a place for them to get some information. Specifically that the plague began in the church (in case the players need more direction), the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind, and Madam Eva.

Ideally after everything is said and done, the players should have two primary directions: go to the church, or visit Madam Eva out in the Tser Woods. This part of the conversion assumes that they head to the church first to, you know, tackle the whole zombie-plague-thing.

E6: Ghoul Foray
This encounter can happen at any intersection while the players are heading to the church. At this point the players might be tired of encounters happening at intersections, but this one has a dead horse! The encounter has some zombies milling about, with ghouls waiting in ambush. Since zombies don’t really eat however, I think a better idea is to have ghouls lurking in the buildings, having just recently fed on unfortunate “survivors”. They could see shattered doors, with streaks of blood running over the threshold.


Setup

  • 3 ghouls
  • 2 ravenous ghouls

E7: Church 

Here the players confront Danovich, the man responsible for all the shit currently hitting the fan in Barovia. His son was killed, and in a lapse of judgement decided to re-animate him as an undead monstrosity using a book filled with terrible rituals, which is the reason all the zombies are up and about. I mean, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Anywho, this is one of the first “boss fights”, and so I want it to be tough and memorable.
First, the church is filled with bodies of former citizens, sitting on the pews. I like to think that they came here hoping for divine protection, and died from a combination of necrotic taint and zombie intervention. Danovich was formerly a cleric, so I guess in this scenario he’d be an artillery (leader) that can animate some of the corpses as zombie minions, boost his undead allies, and do some other evil-cleric stuff like weaken, deal necrotic damage, drain healing surges, and perhaps redirecting healing magic (or dampening it). The zombies, on the other hand, will just be run of the mill level 5 zombies.
In the original adventure when Danovich is pressed in melee, he tries to flee using the hole in the floor. I figure that when he’s bloodied, he dives/teleports into the hole, where he gains additional support from his former son and other zombies. Also, the area underground is mostly dark, making it difficult to see for characters without darkvision or low-light vision. On the plus side, there’s plenty of cover from the corruption corpse’s ranged attacks.

Setup

  • Danovich, fallen priest
  • 4 infected zombies
  • 1+ zombie shamblers

Features of the Area
Alter: Creatures adjacent to the aura gain vulnerable 5 necrotic.
Pews: These act as difficult terrain. Characters can hide behind them to gain cover from ranged attacks.
Treasure: Danovich has a pretty good stash of loot; there’s some pages from the Liber Blaspheme (which details an Undead Servitor ritual), a gold chalice worth 150 gp, a pair of silver bells worth 50 gp each, three potions of healing, and 300 gp worth of residuum.

E7A: Church Understory 
This is where Danovich’s son is being kept, along with some zombies that managed to get in the church. Since blasphemes are typically paragon-tier monsters, I have to scale him down to make him a more suitable challenge. Also to mix things up a bit, I figured I’d add some ranged zombies to the mix.

Setup

  • Doru, blaspheme
  • 2 chillborn zombies
  • 2 corruption corpse

Features of the Area
Difficult Terrain: The planks underneath the hole in the floor are difficult terrain.
Pillars: These provide cover from ranged attacks. They can also be knocked over (or burnt up) with a Medium DC Strength check, which could cause more parts of the floor to collapse.
Table of Alchemical Components: This is the stuff in the upper-left hand corner of the map. It acts as a table of combustibles (DMG2, page 63).

That’s it for part two. Hopefully next time I can wrap up Barovia…

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Ravenloft Play Report

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Late last night we cracked open Ravenloft to give it a shot. By “we”, I mean two people that have played a lot of D&D (Liz and myself), and two people who either had a long time ago or only once. I decided to start us out with the scenario where we had to find and kill Gravestorm, a blue dragon dracolich. As the only person that read the Rulebook I had to explain how things worked to the players, which at first was confusing but after a few turns they started to pick up on the routine.

There was also some *ahem* issues at the start of the game as everyone frantically ran into differing edges in order to avoid drawing Encounter cards, which backfired when they invariably dropped tiles with black triangles in addition to when everyone was in a separate corner fighting off hordes of monsters on their own. By about the fourth or fifth turn we’d regrouped and started sucking up Encounter cards since we were more likely to survive taking a random point of damage or getting a random shot at free treasure than tackling a 2 hit  point wraith or blazing skeleton. In the end we succeeded against the dragon, partially because I kept forgetting to remind the players that it activated on everyone’s villain phase, but also because we unloaded dailies on it while Liz ran around and broke the phylactery.

Having finally played it I can say that I really, really like this game. It’s a lot like D&D if it were abstracted. Hit points are reduced to around 6-10 (most attacks deal like, 1 damage), the only defense value is Armor Class, and monsters don’t have speeds, instead moving in “tiles” in order to close the distance and fuck your shit up. In a similar vein, powers with ranges also work the same way, allowing you to target enemies on another tile, or sometimes two tiles away. Many effects get changed as well, such as healing strike actually healing damage, or healing word working only once. I think this will be our new game of choice when someone can’t show or no one wants to run, instead of doing a delve.
There aren’t a lot of character options, and as I said before I’m hoping that Wizards releases an expansion in order to broaden the scope in terms of scenarios, characters, monsters, etc. Failing that, it looks like it would be relatively simple to create your own monsters and character cards. Hell, if you’ve got a massive minis library (or tokens)  you can directly use them since the game uses D&D Minis anyway.
The monsters are all pretty diverse: some of them are more dangerous when they are far away, such as skeletons with their slice attack or burning skeletons with their ability to nail everyone on a tile. Wolves are also nasty if they get a running start. Gargoyles are brutal in close quarters, able to hit everyone on the tile. Actually aside from villains the only thing we didn’t get to fight was rat swarms and howling hags. I’m not fond of the kobolds at all. They seem very out of place and I’d have been happier with having vampire minions or even devoted cult fanatics. Hell, dire rats would have made more sense and been about as scary. They could have replaced the kobold sorcerer with a wererat of some kind and BAM, instant theme.
Liz absolutely hates the leveling mechanic. As I said in my review, you have to roll a natural 20 on an attack or trap disarm attempt and have 5 XP worth of monsters in the bank. I didn’t mind so much as three of us managed to level before the game was over (only Devin’s ranger didn’t make the flip) and it was a fucking life saver. When you level your hit points and defense goes up and you get another daily attack. Not only is that a very potent boost, but it seemed to happened when we needed it the most: Devin was getting fucked up by three monsters, and thanks to my level-up was able to use an attack that hit all the monsters, dealing damage on a miss. That basically took care of two automatically and since I hit the last one, I was able to clear out all the monsters and save his ass.
A lot of fun. I was surprised that we’d managed to succeed, especially since my past experience with coop games like this almost universally ended in disaster. It wasn’t easy (and might have gone differently if we’d had the dragon go every time it was supposed to, but hey, first time and all). We’re going to play again today with a new scenario, so we’ll see how we fare this time around (and I’ll try to get pics this time).
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Ravenloft Board Game Review

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It’s late, but I finally managed to snag it a day before its new release date.



Ravenloft in its board game incarnation seems to be a rules-lite D&D-ized variant on Descent/Arkham Horror: you tour around a randomized dungeon layout killing monsters while trying to achieve one of many objectives, such as killing a specific monster (the “villain”) or trying to lift as much shit from Strahd’s castle as you can before he shows up. You can get the rules online for free, and I recommend checking them out before committing yourself to the $65 price tag.

(Don’t forget to look underneath the black plastic container; there’s another four sheets of tiles and tokens hidden there. I only noticed because I was trying to find the “start” tile and failed.)


As an overview of the components, all of the minis are unpainted reprints with the possible exception of four of the hero minis (so if you hate D&D Minis, you’ll hate these, too) and the tiles are as sturdy as your typical Dungeon Tile. The tiles have jigsaw-type edges so you can clip them together as you drop them to help fasten them into place. The tokens are made of the same shit and are legion: there’s tokens for hit points, tracking healing surges, recharging monster abilities (like breath weapons), items, monsters, etc. It reminds me a lot of Arkham Horror, except I don’t think it’ll take a weekend to setup and a year and a day to play.

I haven’t played the game yet and I won’t tell you in-depth (that’s what the freely available rules are for), but basically turns play out like this: you get to move your hero about and attack monsters, if you’re at the edge of a tile and not head-butting a wall you get to expand the dungeon by drawing a tile at random (or draw an Encounter card if you are busy head butting the wall), and then the monsters try to get their comeuppance by running at you like lemmings and frantically trying to pry off your hit point tokens like jawas snatching parts at a droid mosh. I joke, but having preprogrammed actions is probably good because monsters only have to take down one player in order to do the job proper.

The game handles somewhat similarly to actual D&D, but some things get changed to better accommodate the differing presentation. For example, attack rolls handle the same, but hit points are greatly reduced (the dwarf cleric has eight) and healing surges act more like a universal pool of extra lives: if a player goes down, you burn one and they get back up, but everyone has to share. Other mechanics are made even more abstract than before, such as the dragonborn fighter’s breath weapon being able to target every creature on the same tile regardless of position or being able to spend XP in order to automatically avoid traps and special events.

Some of the objectives are pretty lame if you attempt to append a story to them. One involves a hag isolating everyone in different parts of the castle so that she can complete a ritual, because placing the characters in locations that they can just walk out of never bites you in the ass. Another has Strahd for some reason kidnapping everyone and putting them directly outside his coffin. Oddly, the goal here is to try and escape the castle instead of dragging his slumbering corpse outside and tossing it into the sun. Why he didn’t just kill everyone or put them in an actual dungeon is beyond me. Some are more straight forward, such as barging into the castle to stake Strahd or prevent a specific number of monsters from escaping.

Like both Descent and Arkham Horror, you can also find treasures on the pre-rotted corpses of your enemies that help even the odds, in addition to leveling up if you have 5 XP in the bank and roll a nat 20. You can only do this once (since the hero cards only have two sides), but that’s okay because I think it’s humorous that 2nd-level characters can ruin Strahd’s day. At a cursory glance it looks like it’ll be a lot of fun. I’ve enjoyed other fantasy board games that have a similar play style and feel, so I’ve got high hopes for this. Personally I’m hoping for expansions that will add more heroes, monsters/villains, objectives, and environments (again, similar to how Descent did it).

Next up, an actual play report.