One of the weaknesses of my current campaign, and indeed Ravenloft as a whole, is that the setting is very much a set of gothic novels and other source materials with the serial numbers filed off - and not all that well. So there is a near-Dracula, a near-Frankenstein, a near-Wolfman, and so on and so forth. This week I came to a point where the PCs are due to get a major data dump, in the form of a journal by that near-Frankenstein.
I have done, I think, a reasonable job of clearing out some of the more obvious, er, homages in the source material, have re-jigged a few things, changed a few others, and arrived at something that is a bit less obviously just Frankenstein repackaged... but it's still pretty obviously Frankenstein repackaged.
Oh well. I try to remind myself that originality is over-rated - it's delivery that counts. And thus far the campaign has been going well, so really who cares if they end up going against Frankenstein and/or his monster at the end of the campaign. There's still plenty of other material between now and then.
All that said, part of me does wonder if Ravenloft wouldn't have been better had they just outright used Dracula, Frankenstein et al, without bothering to file the serial numbers at all?
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