In Which I Have Psychic Powers

My game for tomorrow night has been cancelled again, due to the lack of a quorum. I kind of had an inkling that that might happen - I just had a feeling.

I'm actually not sure that's the worst thing. During my prep work for the game last night I was finding it hard coming up with any sort of a coherent structure, and ended up with something that was basically headed to a TPK. Which may well be the thing that happens, but probably shouldn't be the plan. So having a couple more weeks to think this through is probably a good thing.

I'm also now leaning increasingly strongly towards bringing this campaign to an end sooner rather than later. I think I now have the core of a story arc that will allow me to bring it to a sensible resolution and thus put it aside. And given how badly I've screwed up the campaign as a whole, that's probably about as satisfactory as I'm likely to get. But we'll see - maybe the campaign will suddenly spin off in another new direction, or maybe we'll get that TPK after all...

The Next Campaign (I'll Probably Never Run)

A couple of weeks ago I was grabbed by an idea that's now busily fizzing away, and may make up the basis of my next campaign, if indeed there is such a thing. (That said, that's looking increasingly unlikely. My interest in D&D has been waning fairly dramatically for some time, and with the potential house move in the offing my involvement may be coming to an end. At the very least, it's likely to be a while, by which time I may favour something else.)

Anyway, the premise of the campaign can be described as follows: One part "The Night Manager", one part "Nineteen Eighty-Four", and one part "The Demolished Man", all set in the continent of Sarlona on Eberron. The PCs are agents of the rebellion against the repressive thought-police state of that continent. Fairly grim, very paranoid, with lots of sneaking around and skullduggery.

The biggest problem with the concept as it stands is that it depends pretty heavily on psionics, which 5e doesn't currently support (and the ideas WotC have floated for psionics in this edition seem to take it in a very different direction). That means the campaign would probably have to be 3e-based, and I'm not entirely keen on stepping back into that morass...

But it's a cool concept, no?

Curse of Strahd

I have a theory that when doing a cover version, reboot, remake, or retelling, it's best to choose something that had good potential but which was significantly flawed in the implementation. If you remake a classic, you have the problem that even if you do everything right, you'll almost certainly end up with something that is as good, but without the originality.

"I6: Ravenloft" is a classic D&D adventure. It is one of, if not the, greatest D&D adventures of all time. Heck, it's one of the best RPG adventures of all time. So the team at WotC were really up against it when trying to remake this. (On the other hand, they practically had to - Ravenloft is one of very few D&D adventures to exist in some form in all the 'main' editions, assuming you count the boardgame as the 4e version. So there's tradition to consider...)

The result is a fine, fine adventure. But it's just not as good as the original, on two counts. The first is simply lack of originality - Ravenloft already had a lot of Dracula about it, and this version cleaves much closer to the original than some of the ones in other editions. That may not be a bad thing for people who haven't seen the original, but for those of us who have...

The second weakness (for me) was one of sheer length. The original module is a densely-packed 32 pages. This version is a slightly less dense 256 pages. Of this, the biggest chapter is Castle Ravenloft itself, which is very close to the contents of the original module. That leaves a hundred pages of extra material that, while good, feels significantly bloated. Quite a bit of it feels like it exists to pad things out and, in particular, to let the PCs build up levels before they start the 'real' adventure. (Of course, part of that is inherent in using a level-based game to tell a story like this. 3rd level PCs can't stand against the BBEG, so there's a need to get them to a point where they can. But, honestly, I think I'd be inclined just to start them a bit higher in level and cut the padding.)

Don't get me wrong - there's an awful lot of good material here. But there's too much that feels extraneous. (Though, ironically, in the past I've complained about 4e adventures having no extra material, leaving only the critical path and thus being a railroad. Hopefully, there's a happy medium there somewhere.)

All in all, I'll recommend this one quite highly - especially to anyone who hasn't experienced the original. In my opinion it's the second-best 5e storyline to date, behind only "Out of the Abyss" (and it doesn't have the big weaknesses of that storyline's climax, which is good). It's just not as good as the original. On the other hand, I'm very much looking forward to WotC's next effort, because the trend definitely seems to be upwards.

One last thing: the binding on my copy has already started to weaken after only a single read-through and no at-table use at all. That's really very poor.