I loved Stephen Fabian’s gloomy, atmospheric illustrations. I’m also a very visually-oriented person, so illustrations tend to figure heavily into my initial take on a game. This collection of villains leapt off the page and totally engrossed me. I love Ravenloft for one reason above all others: the characters. Instead I got a campaign setting which, quite frankly, blew me away. Chock it up to mild interest and a lot of nostalgia. Then I picked up this boxed set, mainly because I thought it was some sort of revamped version of the original Ravenloft module. To me, most fantasy RPGs felt like the same old cardboard characters hacking away at that particular world’s version of orcs, and it all felt like the world was being made up as you went along. I’d moved on to sci-fi games, avoiding fantasy RPGs as a whole because, basically, it all seemed very shallow. No problem, right? No problem at all, except the line above tells us that Cain and Elizabeth both died in 579.' Kargatane Review Page īy the time the Realm of Terror set was released, I hadn’t played more than a few sessions of AD&D in years. Eowin, Sean, and Ester Timothy were born to Cain and Elizabeth Timothy in 660. Who’s Doomed tells us that Jacqueline Renier was a small child when her family entered Ravenloft, but according to her family tree she was born seven years after the creation of Richemulot.

But on a closer look, they contradict themselves, and they contradict information presented elsewhere in the book. The Bloodlines section highlights this problem- at first glance, these family trees are a wonderful tool for fleshing out your NPCs.

To put it bluntly, Ravenloft just can’t keep it’s dates straight. Mangrum observes that the 'Realm of Terror started Ravenloft’s long-standing tradition of incoherence, a problem it’s still straining to escape today.

Maps of ravenloft