lordsothofsithicus

[lordsothofsithicus]

*follows him around playing a tuba*

Azalin Reviews: Darklord Lyron Evensong

Domain: Liffe Domain Formation: 750 BC Power Level: 💀 ⚫⚫⚫⚫ Sources: Domain of Dread (2e), Book of Crypts (2e), Ravenloft 3.0

Baron Lyron Evensong is the Darklord of Liffe, a large island within the Nocturnal Sea. Liffe contains three decently sized settlements and enough farmlands so its people are self sufficient. That is, if they did not have a insatiable greed for the finery of other lands.

Lyron originated from Krynn where he performed as a bard on his beloved harpsichord. He often referred to himself as a ‘musical genius’ and his utter self-absorption could put even Narcissus to shame. His self-love accompanied by his disdain for all others developed into delusions of righteousness he felt compelled to force upon others.

Having no true means to enforce his will upon another and his songs and poems failing to inspire anything beyond polite applause, Lyron hired a wizard to enchant his harpsichord. Either he did not pay this wizard well or the wizard in question was inept and as such a spell that was meant to enthrall his listeners resulted in drawing Lyron’s essence into the instrument.

Still able to interact with the world as long as he was within reach of his instrument, Lyron attempted to sway audiences into what he believed was a morally decent life. When his poetry and music still did nothing, he turned to violence. Any act Evensong viewed as amoral, from divorcées to crying babies, resulted in Lyron’s swift correction with dagger and club.

After countless murders, Lyron and his harpsichord were pulled into the Mists and he was made the Baron of Claviera on the island of Liffe. Here he is contained to his mansion and for every day he spends in Claviera, he must spent a century in the dark confines of his study.

He now spends what time he can luring travelers to his study so he does not have to spend those 100 years alone. Of course, his guests age while he does not and most rarely last a few years before Lyron deems them unworthy and disposes of them. I recommend offending him as quickly as you can, otherwise you will be doomed for countless years of listening to his ‘art’.

[lordsothofsithicus]

I have been known to be respond with "why you didn't kill him" and variations thereof, as a little dark humor to lighten my mood

Don't try to take that from me

Either people need to learn how to tell the difference between an “I’m sorry” that takes direct responsibility and an “I’m sorry” that signifies sympathy, or I’m gonna start responding to unfortunate information with a solemn nod and a “Sympies,” because I am tired of receiving a “Why? It wasn’t your fault” every time I try to vocalize compassion.

[lordsothofsithicus]

There are three wolves

The third wolf is Robert E. Howard, telling you to make it weird and spooky and that your main character should trust nothing about your world building, only their wits and their steel

when writing a fantasy story, you'll find that inside of you are two wolves.

one is tolkien, telling you to piece out every bit of world-building minutiae into a cohesive and plausible setting, working together linguistic histories and alternative laws of physics into a grand tapestry of history

the other is c s lewis, telling you to just write something fun and figure out the rest later

[lordsothofsithicus]

Some notes on the above- 1: Roaming monsters getting killed by traps would happen in Strahd's Possession as well, but not as often. 2: "Turn Undead" will make undead flee in Strahd's Possession, but the monsters' programmed navigation isn't as good; instead of going left or right at a wall they will just kind of spin around. I believe the range of the ability was also extended in Stone Prophet. In Strahd's Possession it doesn't seem to work except when monsters get close enough to melee attack you. 3: Gnomes cannot be Illusionists in these games. My bad. I was misremembering something from a different game I think.

Lord Soth Reviews: The Stone Prophet, Pt. Two

The spellcasting system in the game was surprisingly robust, with a large number of utility, defensive, and offensive spells for the priest and wizard classes. Available spells for both classes capped at 6th level, though by the end of the game you would almost certainly be at or near 20th level. The issue Strahd's Possession had with level-draining undead and the lack of any effective means of restoring lost levels was resolved by simply not including any level-draining monsters in the game. In addition, unlike Strahd's Possession and more in line with Menzoberranzan, there were no monster spawns in Stone Prophet. Instead, dungeons included a large number of traps and a greater number of roaming monsters. During dungeon instances, these roaming monsters would travel up and down the corridors and attack your party if they happened upon you. This, combined with the large number of floor plate traps had a humorous interaction where in many dungeons the roaming monsters would repeatedly set off traps that would then proceed to kill them. This meant that as you navigated these dungeons you would get messages about a monster being slain - and you would get the experience for killing that monster, since the game's engine gives you the XP when a monster dies whether they died thanks to you or at the hands of a dungeon hazard. I'm sure the playtesters who ran through the game once upon a time said "lol" at this phenomenon and left it in. Unlike in Strahd's Possession, a cleric's Turn Undead power now caused undead to flee from the party if it didn't destroy them outright, instead of making them spin in circles. Less funny, more correct.

The game's unique mechanic is a thirst meter; this meter is drained slowly as you travel (I believe the rate is dependent on a character's Constitution score) and replenished by consumption of water skins, or by use of the cleric spell "Create Water". This makes Thirst a largely ignorable mechanic if you have a Cleric in your party and something you need to seriously keep an eye on if you don't, because if your thirst meter runs out... you die pretty quick.

The character options in the game were a slightly simplified version of the Player's Handbook standard; Human, Dwarf, Elf, Halfling and Gnome, with character class choices of Fighter, Mage (Wizard), Cleric, and Thief. I believe Gnomes could be Illusionists, which in 2E were a wizard with more potent illusion spells and the ability to spot illusions (in this case, illusionary walls) - however they also had some restrictions, in this case being shut out from most of the game's damaging wizard spells. They were, in essence, a more challenging choice.

You also have the option of taking multi-class characters. For you young'ns, if not playing a human in AD&D 2E you had the option of playing a character that advanced in two or more classes at once, with the caveat that XP earned was split between your classes, so overall you advanced slower. But you could for instance play an Elf who was a Fighter/Mage or a Dwarf who was a Fighter/Cleric.

You can also import characters from Strahd's Possession, thus rewarding you for completing the first game in part or in full with more powerful characters with a significantly higher level, and many of their magic items retained (not all, but most).

Otherwise, your characters begin around 5th level, give or take. Character generation in the Stone Prophet may be the most stylish of any D&D computer game ever - like Strahd's Posession, character gen takes the form of a Vistani seeress casting Tarokka cards, but is more atmospheric with the seeress making comments at the selection of each card. Menzoberranzan replaced this with Matron Malice getting a vision of her enemies from Lolth, but it was clumsy with a lot of primitive CGI, which Stone Prophet chose to use in a more sparing manner.

The game introduces you as Hellriders of Elturel (much as you were in the Stone Prophet). When the city is confronted with yet another weird reality flux, the city's lord sends you to investigate. Unfortunately you are once more caught and pulled into another realm; the sandy wastes of Har'Akir, as walls of searing heat well up, trapping you within the domain.

...Then you come face-to-face with the Vistani seeress who guided you through character generation lying in the sand, about to expire from a horrible plague. She directs you to the village of Muhar, before dying horribly. This is a very effective, very horrific way to start the game.

Since this is a review and not a walkthrough, I will wrap up this portion of things by summing up thus - the character generation? Stylish and fun. The beginning of the game, atmospheric and horrifying.

What you'll quickly realize? While you're pointed in a specific direction, you can wander off in whatever direction you want. Stone Prophet is a proto open-world game, less linear and more open than Elder Scrolls: Arena, which came out a year before it. Daggerfall would come out the same year as stone Prophet, in 1995.

Next time: Sand, sand, SAAAAAND! *musical flourish*

[lordsothofsithicus]

Forgiveness isn't something that can be earned, not really It's either given or it's withheld If you put a price on it, it's worthless And someone who forces you to jump through hoops to earn their forgiveness is being vindictive, whether they know it or not. They will either forgive you or they won't Redemption is something you do for yourself, it's changing your ways and trying to right your wrongs because you KNOW you did wrong And you want to be better.

“some people don’t deserve redemption” redemption isn’t something that’s deserved, it’s something someone does. it’s making the choice to change the way you live your life, to be better, to do good things instead of bad things and try to make up for the bad things. and everyone can and should do that, at any time, no matter what they’ve done. we can’t change the past, but we can choose what kind of person to be now and in the future. we have the responsibility to do so. it is so completely not about “deserving.”

[lordsothofsithicus]

You are FACTUALLY INCORRECT This book is an object lesson in "all my problems 'bout to have a big problem with me" I am entirely too much for Strahd to handle and he doesn't get it until I KILL ALL HIS FOOD, just empty out that pantry all over his floor Also I throw a quasit into a Vistani's face when she has the temerity to threaten me, HOW IS THAT NOT AWESOME

KNIGHT OF THE BLACK ROSE by James Lowder

[intro post]

oh god. oh lord. they coulda crashed and burned so hard on this one, it’s book two (2) and it has to follow Christie Golden’s debut and it. uh. sucks. 

its not bad, necessarily! it’s just boring. the author’s decent, he knows his stuff, he just had the misfortune to get handed Lord Soth, the most boring man alive to work with

Keep reading

[lordsothofsithicus]

Bet he wishes he hadn't gone to sleep with me in his house >:( *Kills everyone in his pantry, slays his pet dragon, leaves*

What have I learned about Strahd from Knight of the Black Rose?

Strahd Von Zarovich is very tired. He has has a very long night of terrorizing Barovians and would like to take a small sleep. Big bad vampire count is eepy and neebies to sleeby. Strahd is facing critical levels of being a sleepy lil guy

[lordsothofsithicus]

As I recall at one point the very frustrated police chief of Cabot cove hung a lampshade on that. And as the shows budget improved jb traveled abroad very often in part for just that reason

currently obsessed with british murder mystery tv shows where all the murders happen in the same town in every episode and everyone's just like oh yep there goes another one, just another day in shirefordtonstead

[lordsothofsithicus]

Lord Soth Reviews: The Stone Prophet, Pt. Two

The spellcasting system in the game was surprisingly robust, with a large number of utility, defensive, and offensive spells for the priest and wizard classes. Available spells for both classes capped at 6th level, though by the end of the game you would almost certainly be at or near 20th level. The issue Strahd's Possession had with level-draining undead and the lack of any effective means of restoring lost levels was resolved by simply not including any level-draining monsters in the game. In addition, unlike Strahd's Possession and more in line with Menzoberranzan, there were no monster spawns in Stone Prophet. Instead, dungeons included a large number of traps and a greater number of roaming monsters. During dungeon instances, these roaming monsters would travel up and down the corridors and attack your party if they happened upon you. This, combined with the large number of floor plate traps had a humorous interaction where in many dungeons the roaming monsters would repeatedly set off traps that would then proceed to kill them. This meant that as you navigated these dungeons you would get messages about a monster being slain - and you would get the experience for killing that monster, since the game's engine gives you the XP when a monster dies whether they died thanks to you or at the hands of a dungeon hazard. I'm sure the playtesters who ran through the game once upon a time said "lol" at this phenomenon and left it in. Unlike in Strahd's Possession, a cleric's Turn Undead power now caused undead to flee from the party if it didn't destroy them outright, instead of making them spin in circles. Less funny, more correct.

The game's unique mechanic is a thirst meter; this meter is drained slowly as you travel (I believe the rate is dependent on a character's Constitution score) and replenished by consumption of water skins, or by use of the cleric spell "Create Water". This makes Thirst a largely ignorable mechanic if you have a Cleric in your party and something you need to seriously keep an eye on if you don't, because if your thirst meter runs out... you die pretty quick.

The character options in the game were a slightly simplified version of the Player's Handbook standard; Human, Dwarf, Elf, Halfling and Gnome, with character class choices of Fighter, Mage (Wizard), Cleric, and Thief. I believe Gnomes could be Illusionists, which in 2E were a wizard with more potent illusion spells and the ability to spot illusions (in this case, illusionary walls) - however they also had some restrictions, in this case being shut out from most of the game's damaging wizard spells. They were, in essence, a more challenging choice.

You also have the option of taking multi-class characters. For you young'ns, if not playing a human in AD&D 2E you had the option of playing a character that advanced in two or more classes at once, with the caveat that XP earned was split between your classes, so overall you advanced slower. But you could for instance play an Elf who was a Fighter/Mage or a Dwarf who was a Fighter/Cleric.

You can also import characters from Strahd's Possession, thus rewarding you for completing the first game in part or in full with more powerful characters with a significantly higher level, and many of their magic items retained (not all, but most).

Otherwise, your characters begin around 5th level, give or take. Character generation in the Stone Prophet may be the most stylish of any D&D computer game ever - like Strahd's Posession, character gen takes the form of a Vistani seeress casting Tarokka cards, but is more atmospheric with the seeress making comments at the selection of each card. Menzoberranzan replaced this with Matron Malice getting a vision of her enemies from Lolth, but it was clumsy with a lot of primitive CGI, which Stone Prophet chose to use in a more sparing manner.

The game introduces you as Hellriders of Elturel (much as you were in the Stone Prophet). When the city is confronted with yet another weird reality flux, the city's lord sends you to investigate. Unfortunately you are once more caught and pulled into another realm; the sandy wastes of Har'Akir, as walls of searing heat well up, trapping you within the domain.

...Then you come face-to-face with the Vistani seeress who guided you through character generation lying in the sand, about to expire from a horrible plague. She directs you to the village of Muhar, before dying horribly. This is a very effective, very horrific way to start the game.

Since this is a review and not a walkthrough, I will wrap up this portion of things by summing up thus - the character generation? Stylish and fun. The beginning of the game, atmospheric and horrifying.

What you'll quickly realize? While you're pointed in a specific direction, you can wander off in whatever direction you want. Stone Prophet is a proto open-world game, less linear and more open than Elder Scrolls: Arena, which came out a year before it. Daggerfall would come out the same year as stone Prophet, in 1995.

Next time: Sand, sand, SAAAAAND! *musical flourish*

[lordsothofsithicus]

Lord Soth Reviews: The Stone Prophet, Pt. One

Good evening ghosts and goblins, I have decided to follow up on the revew of the AD&D adventure Touch of Death that I posted some time ago with its de facto sequel, Ravenloft computer game The Stone Prophet.

The Stone Prophet is a computer game that came out at the end of what I call the forgotten age of Dungeons & Dragons computer games - the games that debuted before the original Baldur's Gate.

Now, for you youngsters out there, Baldur's Gate was one of the games that marked the big computer graphics revolution; its intricate backgrounds, isometric 3D views and detailed sprites were a MASSIVE leap forward from the games that preceded it, and from Baldur's Gate onward all of the D&D games that came before it just kind of... faded into obscurity.

This is a shame, because many of them were quite good.

The Stone Prophet was the second of the first-person Ravenloft computer games, the first being Strahd's Possession. Menzoberranzan came out between the two and used the same engine, but was set in the Forgotten Realms. These games were marked by having a party of four adventurers in a first-person view using a heavily modified version of the Doom 2 engine. Access to menus and movement were controlled by a point-and-click interface. This combined with the narrow field of view actually contributed to the game's spooky atmosphere - you had no peripheral vision and when in wide open rooms monsters could come at you from any direction; a monster's signature noise and a sudden shift to the combat music were your indicators that you were being attacked. While not immediately obvious, the arrangement of your party affected how they operated in combat. The leftmost and rightmost party member slots were effectively in the rear; they were vulnerable to attack if you were attacked from the sides or behind, until you turned to face whatever was attacking you. They were also limited in combat; the characters in these two slots could only make ranged attacks or use spells, unless you equipped them with a "long" weapon, those being a two-handed sword or a staff. The general combat order was tanky warriors and clerics in the front, squishy thieves and wizards in the back.

Many of the game's weapons were made challenging to use by design decisions and quirks of the engine. Ranged weapons such as arrows could be retrieved, but you had to do so manually by picking them up and putting them back in a character's quiver. This made bows time-consuming to use, and some weapons, like spears, all but worthless. During the game it was possible to find an enchanted throwing dagger, but this wasn't the almost game-busting weapon it was in Strahd's Possession; a tweak they made to the ranged weapon physics in Stone Prophet meant that if the throwing dagger hit a wall corner or really any other object the game engine construed as physically present between the dagger's return arc and you, it would stop and hit the floor, making you retrieve it. Eventually you would almost certainly give up on ranged weapons and just stick to melee weapons and spells.

An attempt was made to faithfully import as many of the old-school AD&D rules into the engine as possible, to mixed results. For instance, bringing a dwarf with you to spot illusionary walls is a great idea. Elves can point you toward secret doors but don't reveal illusionary walls on your mini-map. It's also possible to find a magic item that makes these abilities moot but if you were to miss it... Many of the abilities of the Thief class were clumsily implemented and effectively non-functional, leading most people to simply say "Don't take a Thief" HOWEVER what most reviewers of and after the time failed to catch was twofold - unlike the more linear dungeons of Strahd's possession, almost every locked door in The Stone Prophet can be picked, and the Thief had one ability people tended to overlook - they can use every magical item in the game, including magical wands and scrolls. There was no NPC wizard in The Stone Prophet available to join your party. So if you didn't know better and rolled in with no wizard, the only character who could use a bunch of the most useful magic items in the game was the Thief.

Honestly, having a Thief along just to not have to engage in the brain-numbing activity of hunting for keys was kind of a boon. Also, they gain levels fast and having one along gave you an extra set of hands for magic items. Always a plus.

More later. Time for sleep.

[lordsothofsithicus]

Touch of Death Review

Hey all, I found a review I wrote of the 2nd edition Ravenloft adventure, Touch of Death. Warning, it's pretty long

First, the cover.  A Boris Karloff-looking mummy looms in front of a backdrop of cracked and aged hieroglyphics, superimposed in front is a swooning woman scantily-clad in a style evocative of the Rom, except she’s blond and blue-eyed.

This cover grabs the eye, but is really old-fashioned.  It also doesn’t really evoke the plot.  Not that I think that’s necessary.  A cover-artist’s job is to get your attention.  In this case, I think it succeeded… but also that this cover has really gone out of style.  Still, it’s a reminder that the story is the story, but it’s the cover that puts the butts in the proverbial seats.

The story begins with your PCs helping a group of Vistani (Rom-analogues, who have recently returned to D&D with much revision because the old depictions of them were spectacularly racist) whose wagon threw a wheel.  The group’s young matriarch, a Vistani girl named Dulcimae, asks the players for their help.  This is unusual for the older Ravenloft stuff in that the Vistani, while suspicious of the party, aren’t malevolent or sinister - they just need help sorting out their wagon.  The opening of the adventure is contingent on the PCs helping the Vistani and doesn’t offer alternative paths, but then again D&D isn’t the game of not helping people who are in a tight spot.  In exchange for the players’ help, Dulcimae offers to lead them out of the Domains of Dread.

Needless to say this adventure isn’t about leaving the Domains of Dread with a group of Vistani after you help them fix their wagon.  Though I think that there’d be a sort of poetry to that especially if players had been there for awhile.  There’d probably be some indignant sputtering.  Someone would say “That’s it?  That’s all we had to do?” 

After that your friends wouldn’t talk to you anymore, but you’d have won a moral victory.

The Mists of Ravenloft have other plans, and they divert your fly Vistani ride into the sandy hellhole of Har’Akir.  No, really, 2nd Edition Har’Akir sucked.  You’d be happier in one of the domains full of vampires.  You pass into Har’Akir bounded on one side by a sheer cliff with a searing wall of heat to your back and a crappy little mud-brick village up ahead.  The description of Har’Akir given by the module reads:  “The domain is a very simple place. There are two roads, a village with a spring, a canyon ridden cliff, and a lot of sun and sand.”

It specifically says that if you yell at Dulcimae about this, she’ll cry.

It goes on to describe how miserable life in Har’Akir is, and how there’s almost no food to be had and that the people of Mudar don’t die because the waters of the oasis sustain them.  Life must be awful if you have Water Plus and everything still sucks.  Presumably if they try to dig an irrigation ditch and grow a garden the Darklord loses his cookies and smashes it.

Also is the name of the village Mudar or Muhar?  Even the adventure can’t keep track - in the text it’s Mudar, on the map it’s Muhar.  

There’s more here, mostly to drive home the point of how hard-up the people of Mudar/Muhar are and how at the mercy they are of… well, everything.  The desert, monsters, you name it.  They even provide you with an NPC, an orphan boy named Abu who’s so desperate to leave the desert hellhole that he attaches himself to the party as a hireling… are they still a hireling if you don’t need to pay for them?  They also provide another hireling, one capable of reading the Akirran hieroglyphics, but honestly his prices are pretty ridiculous.  5 GP a day and a 100 GP rider to enter the final dungeon.  If your PCs are a bunch of min-maxing fools then they best pay up because the Wizard never bothered to pick up Comprehend Languages and Har’Akirrans use a Hieroglyphic alphabet.  “You can’t use that in a fight!  It’s stupid!”  Haha, guess you’re paying 5 gold a day so you’re not stuck in Hell’s Sandbox forever, shoulda thought of that, Fireballs McLightningbolt!  Better not let this guy die!

Actually, progressing through Touch of Death doesn’t require you to bring either hireling along.  The most they do is translate flavor text for the party.  Which is another thing wrong with this module.

After this misery breakdown, the module introduces the plot, which starts with people going missing from Mudar/Muhar every few nights, with the villagers occasionally finding a withered corpse.  It talks about the domain’s darklord and how the people view him (...not well, considering their circumstances).  The only light in this forsaken place is Muhar/Mudar’s temple and its benevolent high priestess.

A slight digression here, the plot of Touch of Death kicks off with an introduction that in part says “This module is partially event driven which means that certain events take place regardless of where the PCs are or what they are doing.”  This is a big red flag, because it means that the plot of the adventure is on rails, and isn’t reactive to what the player characters are doing.  This means that they’re not integrated into the arc of the story, which can lead to disenfranchisement if the DM doesn’t fix it.  A DM should have to make adjustments, but they shouldn’t have to fix anything in an adventure to make it work.

These fixed plot points occur night-by-night.  Each one is assumed to happen as written, and isn’t reactive to the actions of the players in any meaningful way.  As indicated, their presence isn’t even required for half of them.  Great.

After this, there are spoilers.  I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum, but you’ve been warned.

Day/Night 1:  The cool part of Night 1 is the introduction of the Desert Zombie, a Fast Zombie variant on the ol’ shambler with the ability to erupt out of the sand and ambush the unwary.  They also have the ability to rapidly burrow through sand as if swimming, but that’s stupid when they can just lie in wait.  It’s not like they have anywhere else to be.

On the first night, the party is supposed to get their first look at the Big Bad and fight a pitched battle with a small horde of Desert Zombies, who kill and drag off as many of the Vistani as they can catch (but explicitly not Dulcimae, who hides).  

Day/Night 2: This starts off with Dulcimae doing a Tarokka (that’s a fictional Tarot analogue used by the Vistani) reading for the party.  It’s kind of cool that this is meant to be interactive, though the adventure is written as if you’ll just use a deck of Bicycle cards instead of the deck that came with the Red Box… yes, I remember.  The downside of this is that there’s almost no flexibility to the reading, you just keep pulling cards until the ones indicated come up, all others are “false readings.”

Honestly you’re better off just narrating the fortune-telling, in my opinion.

The next night, the Big Bad comes back with more zombies, including any of the Vistani they managed to drag off on night one.  This is once again a fight on rails, since no matter what the PCs do the zombies drag off Dulcimae and kill the rest of the Vistani.

This is by far the most frustrating part of this adventure, and also the part where it most shows its age.  But I’ll elaborate on that in a little bit.

Day/Night Three: On day three, the Big Bad frames the PCs as being involved in the murders… even though they started before the party got to Mudar/Muhar and… this is just super frustrating.  What is the point of Day Three?  The party gets shut out by the village, which is annoying but to… what effect?  There’s nothing they need there, Mudar/Muhar is a toilet that doesn’t even have a place to resupply.  If you need water you have a whole oasis you can draw it from while glaring daggers at the Mudar/Muharites.  If the PCs weren’t present for what happened to the Vistani on Night 2 they don’t get framed, they don’t get shut out by the villagers… and this has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the plot.

On night three, a Force Ghost of Dulcimae shows up, frantically pointing the PCs at the temple.  Instead of slowly dropping hints to the party that all is not as it seems, sinister revelations and creeping fear, the party gets a ghost, frantically waving and pointing.  K.

Inside, the benevolent high priestess is caught red-handed.  Literally red-handed, since she just finished making a human sacrifice out of Dulcimae.  There’s a fight (naturally) which can end a couple of different ways (and the way the priestess tries to outfox the PCs is actually quite clever and very Egyptian), but however it ends Day/Night 4 is pretty well fixed.

Day/Night Four: The villagers are angry that the PCs killed the Benevolent Priestess (even if they didn’t pull it off) and try to lynch the party.  The text says they won’t disperse until the PCs kill at least three of them, and that the lynch mob will come after the party every day until the adventure concludes.  This is incredibly frustrating, as it leaves no room for player cleverness or persuasiveness, and is basically just railroading the players into a Dark Powers Check because they did Something Bad.  Bad PCs, bad!  Don’t *bap* kill *bap* peasants! *bap*  Even if the adventure makes you!  *bap*

On Night Four, the Big Bad decides the PCs have to go, and sends Mummy Dulcimae after them at the head of a troop of Teriyaki-flavored Desert Zombies.  Once again, the outcome of this encounter is largely on rails.  There are some minor variables but the overall outcome is fixed.

Day/Night Five: There isn’t even an entry for Day Five, so just assume the PCs have to beat down the angry mob I guess.

On Night Five, the Big Bad comes to mess with the PCs himself, along with Mumcimae and every other NPC that got Railroaded to death in the course of the adventure.  There isn’t really a point to this, and the encounter basically stipulates that the Big Bad beats the crap out of the party (knowing his 2E stats, it’s highly likely at the suggested PC level) until another NPC who has no further bearing on the adventure shows up, and the Big Bad runs off rather than confront them.  PCs aren’t given the slightest clue who this NPC is or why the antagonist would retreat rather than fight them.

Day/Night Six: The PCs murder a horde of 30-40 Mudar/Muharites during their daily confrontation with the angry mob.  Like you do.  Everyone remembers that fun D&D battle they had with a horde of 40 angry level 0 townsfolk.  So fun, right?  ...Right?

On Night Six, it’s assumed that the players head out to the module-concluding dungeon, ifi they haven’t already.  Despite the previous encounters offering no clue that the PCs should go there outside of the card reading.

So overall my review of these encounters is… not good.  If you run these as written without disguising that they’re on rails really well I could easily see players getting frustrated and losing their investment in the adventure.  Instead of slowly reeling them in with clues that all is not well in the land of Sand and Misery and Zombie Jerky, the adventure just drops a ‘GO HERE’ on the party… but there’s no payoff, because they can’t save the NPC in whom they’re presumably emotionally invested (even though all Dulcimae does in the adventure is cry if people are mean to her, give a card reading, hide, swoon, and faint).  

What happens to Dulcimae is a legitimately bad example of Fridging, and if you want to run Touch of Death I’d strongly advise you to fix it - you should probably dramatically change the way she behaves, and give your players an opportunity to rescue her if they can figure out where she’s been taken in time.

There are other examples of fridging in this adventure, since other NPCs the party is supposed to get attached to like Abu the Orphan Boy are also supposed to be killed and thrown back at the PCs as monsters.  I understand that character death generates horror for the PCs and your players, but I posit that there are better ways to do it than the options Touch of Death lays out for you.

If you don’t know what Fridging is (you probably do but I try not to assume), it’s when a character, almost always a woman (but I also extend it to children and animals. I do believe it’s possible to Fridge a male character, it’s just done to women in fiction much more often), exists as a character only to die horribly so that their death can give pathos and drama to someone else’s story.

After Six Days and Nights in sunny Har’Akir, the module goes into the layout of the dungeons the PCs will visit during the module, the Temple of Mudar/Muhar and Pharoah’s Rest.  A lot of the things contained in these dungeons are interesting and add weight and mystery to the adventure, but the encounters as given don’t sync up with them as well as they should.  The PCs are pointed toward the Temple by a proverbial blinking sign and toward Pharoah’s Rest by dint of having no place else to go.

The way the adventure ultimately resolves… to be frank, the module doesn’t do a good job of playing up the drama of it, but it’s the best part of the adventure IF you pad it out and dress it up right.  If you played the old SSI computer game The Stone Prophet, they used a version of Touch of Death’s ending to wrap up the game, but made you sweat for it.

Final Review: Touch of Death is one of the adventures that’s part of Hyskosa’s Hexad, AKA the Grand Conjunction adventure series, which is one of D&D’s classic adventure lines… except Touch of Death is quite frankly not very good.  If there’s one thing that’s absolutely true about running an RPG, it’s that you keep the sitting around waiting for something to happen to a minimum and even if you have a path the story should broadly follow, you create options for variability of outcome or unorthodox solutions to encounters.

Those don’t exist in this adventure.  There’s no dawning dread and very little mystery.  The villains’ motivations aren’t well-defined even in the narrative (they have a plan, but the method for achieving their goal is… highly dubious) and the Darklord of Har’Akir, the looming presence of whom should overshadow the whole adventure even for the villains, building up to when the PCs finally meet them… is barely touched on.  Even an important point of order between the two principal villains is there in their DM-facing write ups but isn’t made relevant in the adventure itself.  PCs aren’t given a way to find out about it, let alone capitalize on it.

If I had to summarize this adventure in one word, that word would be frustrating.  This is a frustrating adventure module not because it’s difficult, but because it’s completely on rails and the scenery facing the players isn’t even that compelling.  There’s a story here though - and that story is The Stone Prophet, which is built out from this adventure and is canonically a sequel to it.  It assumes that the adventurers from Touch of Death lose.

1995’s The Stone Prophet computer game took the basic premise of Touch of Death, expanded it out and built it into a real campaign, one with vibrant NPCs (by early-mid 90s D&D computer game standards), a fun plot, a lot of mystery and satisfying resolutions.  And with no fridging in it.

Edit to add: While it’s not explicitly detailed in Stone Prophet’s story, if you play or read this adventure and then play that game, the circumstances of some of the characters allude to it being set after Touch of Death.  But that doesn’t change the fact that the computer game realized the potential of the best things about this adventure better than Touch of Death itself did.

If you’ve read the new description of Har’Akir in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, they spruced this domain up a lot.  They made Mudar/Muhar (now officially called Muhar) ten times larger (it literally went from a sun-baked collection of hovels clinging to the edge of an oasis to a city of 3,000 on the edge of a lake) and just by filling out the map of the domain created a bunch of story seeds and adventuring hooks where before there were… not a lot.

But having said that, Touch of Death is not a good candidate to be reclaimed as an adventure for 5E, above and beyond compensating for the 5E rewrites to the Har’Akir domain.

I keep comparing Touch of Death to The Stone Prophet for a reason, and that reason is that Stone Prophet is the adventure Touch of Death should have been.  If you’re interested in Har’Akir for your 5E adventures and want to explore an older version of the setting for ideas, you’re better off reading a plot synopsis of Stone Prophet or just getting your retro on and playing it, you can buy it as part of a bundle with Strahd’s Possession at gog.com for ten bucks.  See what D&D computer games were like during the pre-Baldur’s Gate forgotten age!

The guy who wrote this adventure, Bruce Nesmith, wrote a lot of other stuff for TSR when he was their Creative Director, and a lot of his work is better than Touch of Death in concept and execution, though there are some common flaws in execution throughout his adventures that are really at their worst in this module.  An adventure I’ll be reviewing soon, The Created, is arguably Nesmith at both his best and his worst at the exact same time.  

Nesmith later moved on to work for Bethesda and was the lead designer for Skyrim, and honestly adventures like Touch of Death aren’t all that different from grubbing around for shit somebody dropped in the back of a cave full of monsters.  Why’d they drop it there?  Does my going after it have any effect on the outcome of events?  Shrug. Final Thought:

I decided not to do star ratings or thumbs-up/thumbs-down because I don’t usually find those ratings helpful, unless a Mark Millar or Zack Snyder joint pops up on Netflix and then you better believe I’m hammering that thumbs-down as hard as I can.  In this case, my final thought is that when this adventure was published in 1991 it cost $6.95.  That’d be $13.99 in 2021 dollars (when I wrote this review), rounding up to the nearest common US price point.  I don’t think this is a fourteen-dollar adventure.

[lordsothofsithicus]

This is called surge pricing, it's a form of price gouging when it occurs beyond a reasonable supply and demand standard - you know, like ratcheting up the price of hand sanitizer during a pandemic or ratcheting up the cost of water during a heat wave - AND IT IS A CRIME

Know your state's price gouging laws and if you catch stores doing something like this red handed contact journalists and the authorities- Get people in your community mad. Piss them off. Find gossips and troublemakers and enlist them to your cause "Can you believe this, look at what Wally World is doing, they're ROBBING US" And when contacting journalists, start local, then work your way up If they want to get clever, get mean. Hold them to the fire, be armed with evidence, because price gouging is absolutely one hundred percent their plan, and they'll get away with it until

[lordsothofsithicus]

Hillbilly Elegy sucked

If you live in Ohio, today is a good day to check your voter registration, and to consider booting JD Vance into the sun.

[lordsothofsithicus]

I am seriously despondent about generative bots because other than canvasing and aggregating listicles so I can begin to learn about something - note I said begin to learn about it, because it's useless for more than collecting introductory ideas about concepts which I then need to study in my own - or generating a template for a rote document which I then correct/ customize to suit my needs... It's useless. It does nothing valuable, its answers are vapid and can't be trusted.

And yet

AND YET

People I respect, people I otherwise admire

Immediately get a rictus grin and say "this will be so useful for workplace efficiency"

Or "this is going to be so useful for students"

How

Fucking HOW

No one has explained to me the actual academic use case for these bots

It remains an educational questing beast, a monster they'll never seem to catch

Meanwhile I have more students every class using it to try to cheat

People say it's hard to detect but you can especially in early college or high school

Here's some tips

A student who's struggling to master comp and has a hard time meeting assignment goals suddenly posts a long error free paragraph, usually more

That paragraph is v-a-g-u-e. It will only address the topic in the most general sense. This is because the bot is skimming multiple sources and tends to do so in the shallowest way. No personal references, no odd asides, nothing super detailed but ALSO nothing not relevant. It will be a dull smile of an assignment.

Then and here's a fun one, run the assignment through Zero GPT and, AND a couple of good plagiarism checkers. ZeroGPT isn't foolproof but it will confirm your assessment.

The plagiarism checkers will sometimes come back hot with multiple sites. A sentence here, a sentence there

Because it's picking up the sites the bot sampled to puke up its answer. Original content my aunt alzina

Seriously this nonsense, these lazy nerds, these pseudo intelligent boors and their thighmaster of a program

I'm normally a marshmallow to students but they need to be cured of chatgpt early and ruthlessly

Also guess what's making a comeback as teachers fight back against this nonsense

The hand written essay

Pick up your #2 pencils kids

[lordsothofsithicus]

Azraels diet is awful so I have to make sure he eats his vegetables

i mean this in the gentlest way possible: you need to eat vegetables. you need to become comfortable with doing so. i do not care if you are a picky eater because of autism (hi, i used to be this person!), you need to find at least some vegetables you can eat. find a different way to prepare them. chances are you would like a vegetable you hate if you prepared it in a stew or roasted it with seasoning or included it as an ingredient in a recipe. just. please start eating better. potatoes and corn are not sufficient vegetables for a healthy diet.

[lordsothofsithicus]

Addendum - winter mix - broccoli, cauliflower. Or either alone.

Toss with a little olive oil, salt, pepper, parsley. Add whatever other seasonings you want. Roast at 350/ medium oven for 10 to 15 minutes. Delicious. If you have a toaster oven or an air fryer with a bake setting this is even easier. Often the key to veg is just a BIT of fat. It brings out the flavor and helps seasoning stick to the vegetables.

i mean this in the gentlest way possible: you need to eat vegetables. you need to become comfortable with doing so. i do not care if you are a picky eater because of autism (hi, i used to be this person!), you need to find at least some vegetables you can eat. find a different way to prepare them. chances are you would like a vegetable you hate if you prepared it in a stew or roasted it with seasoning or included it as an ingredient in a recipe. just. please start eating better. potatoes and corn are not sufficient vegetables for a healthy diet.

[lordsothofsithicus]

I always felt like D&D had the opposite problem - OK I get gods like Umberlee where if you live by the ocean the sea is both omnipresent and capricious, you probably depend on it for your family's livelihood and also it's pretty epic so please Bitch Queen don't sink my son's ship or wash my city away in a tidal wave, here's an offering

But you really gotta be fucked in the head to preach the word of gods like Talona or Nerull or Incabulos or Bhaal or Wastri, where are these cults getting so many freakin' people

"Hi have you heard the word of the Lord of Murder"

"If I convert to worshipping him will I not get murdered?" "Lol no we kill each other all the time" *stabs guy in the face* I mean seriously WTF. Loviatar I get, jaded rich people build themselves pain palaces all the freakin' time (also Loviatar was an actual Earth religion... Finns, man) But Talona? I could see tossing off a prayer to Disease Grandma when the plague comes calling but actually becoming a priest of that seems like a niche calling

When inventing a fantasy religion a lot of people a) make the mistake of assuming that everyone in fantasy world would worship the same gods and b) assume that polytheistic religions see all of their gods as morally good