Ravenloft: Town Without Pity

Summer is a bit slow on the uptake.

       

Last session, the servants of Lord Dhelt of Elturel chased a burglar into a forest to retrieve a holy symbol that he stole. They killed him, but shortly after they retrieved the symbol, they were transported through a mist to the Svalich Woods in an alternate dimension. There, they started to hear about the enigmatic ruler of the place, Count Strahd von Zarovich. They found a couple of companions, but the ranger Quill was poisoned in a fight, prompting the adventurers to cut short their exploration of the Old Svalich Road South and head directly to the village of Barovia, hoping to find a cleric, temple, or potion that would cure the condition.

      

It becomes clear quite quickly that this isn't the kind of friendly "service town" of many RPGs. It is depressed and deserted. Most of the buildings are deserted; some are boarded up; the few people on the street refuse to talk with us. Sound effects include shrieking cats, crying babies, and howling beasts. Summer compares it to towns in the Forgotten Realms that had been ravaged by war.

       

This man has nothing to say to us.

        

We explore in east-west strips (despite Summer's suggestion below). Encounters:

   

• As we enter, the paladin Summer suggests we try to find "its first citizen, a mayor, burgomaster, or such," maybe in a large, prominent building near the edge of town.

• There are four "Strahd skeletons" (skeletons on poles with notes pinned to their chests advising the reader to follow Strahd's laws) clustered right at the entrance. Jeez, man, we get it. And how did you duplicate the same exact handwriting on so many notes? 

     

The desolate streets of Barovia.

         

• A house with a skeleton. It has a broadsword, shield, and two throwing daggers.

• Some warehouses in the southwest are empty except for barrels and boxes that I can't interact with. Fhalken explains: "Trade has become a forgotten art in Barovia. Few travel, and fewer still can afford to transport valuables from place to place."

    

What could possibly be after "contact manager at"? A phone number?

        

• Three broken ones attack as we enter a deserted building. I try a few times, but I can't kill them without losing someone. We leave it for later.

• Several houses have people sitting in chairs, but they refuse to say anything to us.

• One old woman does speak with us, but only to make mad rantings.  

      

Someone's off her medication.

        

Summer notes that we're committing burglary when we enter some of the buildings. I wonder if these comments are tied to her class (paladin) or alignment. 

      

Summer rationalizes our trespasses.

        

• We're attacked by a brigand as we enter one house. We kill him and find a stairway down to a lower level behind him. The map shows us in the "Lesser Catacombs Beneath Barovia." However, we soon run into a locked door and cannot continue. 

• Items found in miscellaneous houses: battle axe, spear, Potion of Speed, Scroll of Raise Dead, broadsword, Potions of Extra Healing, Scroll of Negative Plane Protection, Scroll of Fortify, Scroll of Fireball, Scroll of Neutralize Poison, dagger, Oil of Fiery Burning, Keoghtom's Ointment, chain coif, chainmail, Wand of Fireballs, white robe, bow and a bunch of arrows, shield, warhammer, footman's pick, lots of stones. I slowly identify them with "Improved Identify"; when finished, I have several swords +1 and a warhammer +2.

• There are a lot of cats curled up in the vacant houses.

• An attractive, noble-looking woman in a vacant house offers to join the party. Her name is Tatian. She's a Level 4 neutral good half-elf fighter. As we don't really need another fighter, we leave her there.

      

An unnecessary fighter.

         

• The party members frequently comment on how bleak everything is.

        

I want to know what evil party members have to say.

           

Brigands and darklings attack as soon as night falls. They're not hard to kill, but their sheer number threatens to overwhelm us. It becomes clear that we're going to need to rest at night. We can't sleep while Quill is poisoned, but a commenter alerts me that Keoghtom's Ointment cures poison. I waste it on that purposes, continue on, and then Quill gets poisoned again by a broken one. Of course, I accidentally save while he's poisoned, forcing me to reload from almost the beginning of this session. 

      

Bandits roam the night.

        

True to what the manual promised, Fhalken and Velika cannot attack the moment we enter an indoor area. That limits Fhalken's utility considerably. I hope I'll meet a cleric or another mage soon.

   

Velika can at least cast her spells. The game freezes during spellcasting, allowing accurate targeting. "Magic Missile" is as useful as always.

   

Continuing on:

      

• A large house crawling with broken ones has something I can't quite identify in one of the squares. It looks like wriggling green vines descending from the ceiling.

 

What the hell is this?

        

• An old man with an eyepatch sitting in front of his fire. In poetic language, he introduces himself as a fallen paladin facing an impending death. We ask what we can do to help, and he asks us to find a holy symbol he abandoned in chambers beneath the village—presumably the Lesser Catacombs we found earlier. He tells us to take the footman's pick (which we've already found) and use it to dig west of a stump to find the key. He promises us multiple magical items if we return with the symbol. We later find the stump and the key.

     

I think if I were a paladin trapped in a pocket dimension, ruled by an immortal vampire, I'd lose faith, too.

      

• A tavern seems to be open. It offers several NPCs. The first is a woman with a masked face and an unmasked chest. She rebuffs our attempts to get to know her, saying only that she wants to get out of Ravenloft.

    

So that's why this town is so desolate: COVID.

        

• A Vistani—presumably the one we met earlier—offers to sell a potion that will allow us to escape the fog for 15 coins. Since I don't have a single coin, I have to decline. He suggests he'll take us to his camp if we allow ourselves to be blindfolded. I leave this for later.

• The innkeeper is named Bray Martikova. He welcomes us to the tavern and has quite a lot to say. Strahd's laws are to pay taxes and anything else Strahd wants; Strahd's castle is to the north, but hardly anyone sees him; we should talk to the burgomaster. We do not, curiously, have any options to order a drink or a room.

     

Wait. Helm is a deity in this setting, too?

         

• There are rooms where we can rest, though since we can rest anywhere, that's not much of a boon. The inn has an entire second floor with nothing of value that we can find. 

• A resident is mourning his dead son. I think he might be the same guy we already encountered in the forest. 

• The buildings have a fun set of decorations, like statutes and paintings. The image below gives some examples of this environmental art. On the negative side, hardly anything is interactive. 

         

Some of the game's environmental graphics.

       

Summer feels a dark premonition before we enter a house. We're confronted by the ghost of a jeweler named Strobel. A gang of thieves entered his house one night looking for jewels. Although he handed them over, the leader of the gang, Grymig, killed Strobel and his family. Later, Grymig somehow escaped death and lives in the cemetery as the Lord of Ghouls. He demands that we avenge him and possesses Summer to ensure that we do so.

     

The once-humble jeweler possesses Summer.

        

This seems like something we'd better resolve, so we discontinue our explorations of the town and try to figure out where this cemetery is.

   

We leave town via the north gate and find ourselves in the Old Church Grounds, which seems to be promising. The large map has a large church on it and one exit, maybe to the cemetery, but it seems to be locked. Seeking the key, we enter the church. Strobel warns us that if we dally too long, he'll tear Summer apart. 

      

Note how the game depicts possession.

        

"Cherish and obey the land but defy it not," reads a message on the wall of the church entrance. Unfortunately, that's as far as we can go. The door beyond is locked. We don't have the key. We look around the area a bit, trusting that the automap will show us if we've missed something, but we don't find anything.

      

That doesn't seem like a "but."

       

I generally like to deal with what happens to me, but I don't want to be another three hours into the game and suddenly have Strobel lose his patience, so I reluctantly reload from before his possession and skip his house.

   

With the paladin's key, we open the door in the Lesser Catacombs. Immediately on the other side of the door, we run into a living wall: a grotesque, undulating assemblage of faces and limbs. (Summer: "By Helm and Lathander both! What is this thing?") Fortunately, it's static. After it wallops us in melee range, we stand back and use the old "throw the dagger and pick it up again" trick to kill it slowly, but with no damage to us. A fireball roars down the corridor towards us from a distance source on the other side, but we manage to dodge it.

     

The old "picking up the same knife and throwing it repeatedly" trick works on this living wall.

       

It takes me a couple of hours to clear the dungeon, which is swarming with wererats and plenty more of those living walls, blocking access to rooms until I destroy them. Fireballs shoot down corridors frequently, requiring me to dodge or suck up the damage. 

     

Wererats attack as I enter this room.

        

Fhalken is useless in the rear rank, so I reluctantly give Quill a composite longbow and quiver, then have him switch places with Fhalken. This allows everyone to participate in battle (Velika has throwing daggers), but picking up all the items afterwards is no fun. 

 

I ultimately have to find two keys, which open the way to a central chamber where the holy symbol resides.

     

What do you suppose a "winged" holy symbol depicts?

        

Back on the surface, the old paladin is grateful for the artifact. True to his word, he opens an adjacent room, in which I find a paladin's sword +3, a paladin's dagger +2, an adamantite chain helm, and an Arrow of Slay Undead. I'm glad I took a paladin. 

      

The reward room. Note how everything in the game is on the floor. Although the buildings have shelves and tables, it does not appear they're capable of holding objects the player can pick up.

    

I have to wrap up this session early. I had meant to talk to the burgomaster. I guess that will wait for next time. Ravenloft  is growing on me, certainly more so than Pagan. I still don't like the controls, but it has a solid atmosphere, with a Dantean sense of talking to people who are already dead but perhaps don't know it. I look forward to seeing where the plot goes.

   

Time so far: 7 hours
   

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series

  09/05/2026 

 

Pagan: Rite of Passage

 

I don't like the look of this.

         

The Avatar has been dumped by the evil Guardian on the alien world of Pagan. He has managed to outfit himself, but the only clue he has that might lead to a way home is to consult the hermit Mythran on the Plateau. The only thing stopping me from getting there is my tendency to stop and investigate everything along the way.

  

Hence, this entry opens with the Avatar in a cave whose entrance he has just finished clearing by painstakingly removing about 20 boards. It leads to a short dungeon with something that looks like a bedchamber, but the experience ends in a couple of locked doors. I return to the Valley.

          

As far as I can get in this cave.

       

Elsewhere on this map, I find:

   

• A large torax ranch with multiple toraxes in stables and an adjacent field.

• A dilapidated house with a dead kith (a spider-like creature) and a copy of Devenoming the Kith. 

• The house of Gwillim, the rancher I met last time. He's not in it, but I meet his wife, Corinth. She's proud of her son, Cyrrus, who has gone to study with the Theurgists to increase his natural talent for healing. Her second child, a girl, was devoured by a kith as a baby.

   

While I'm talking with Corinth, I notice that a lot of conversation options disappear if you don't click on them the first time. The weird thing is that they don't seem like mutually exclusive options. For instance, if I ask Corinth, "What do you do?," she tells me that she does a lot of things and that her son moved away. On the next screen, I can ask about "many things" or "your son?" Whichever I choose, the other disappears. Now this particular dialogue tree is repeatable, so that's not a problem, but I don't think they all are. It makes me wonder how many topics I missed with other NPCs.  

        

A rare role-playing choice appears in dialogue with Corinth.

        

I find none of the enemies who gave me trouble the last time I was here, including the kith and the troll. I also don't find an exit that will take me to the Plateau—at least not at first. It takes me a couple of circuits before I see a cave entrance that I missed the first time.

         

You see how it might be easy to miss.

        

The cave leads me to a large underground lake. I have to jump from stone to stone to cross it. This is no trouble at all; I just click with both mouse buttons on the stone I want to end up on.

       

Action shot!

       

I thought this would be a good place to try the unpatched version of the game, since I thought I could get here, running, without having to fight any enemies. Unfortunately, the Internet Archive—my only lead on a potential unpatched version—was down when I was playing this. I'm about to head off on a trip for a couple of weeks, and I don't know whether I'll have time to try again before this entry posts. Just in case, I watched a video of a player attempting this puzzle with the original version. Wow. I get the problem. In the original version, clicking both mouse buttons does cause the Avatar to jump, but not to where the cursor is. Instead, he jumps a fixed distance, making it remarkably easy to overshoot the target or to fall short. Running jumps seem even harder to time. Watch that video. It's hilarious if you're not the one playing. It takes the player 18 minutes and about ten reloads to get across the lake. I did it in one minute on my first try.  

   

On the other side, I face the occasional ghoul. There are a lot of corpses strewn about; many of them have potions. Sometimes, when you click on a corpse, a voice says something like, "Do not disturb my bones." I think this is random and not a sign that any particular pile of bones is taboo.

        

Which game had more random piles of skeletons? This or Ultima VII?

        

Upon a plateau, I'm enticed by a glowing object under a skull, but it turns out to be a trap that damages me. On the other side of that is a puzzle involving two closed gates and a nearby inoperable lever. A bridge takes me to a crumbled building with seven levers and no indication which ones to push into which positions. ("There is no escape from this prison," the Guardian intones as I enter.) I try all of them and note that the winch against the far wall only turns when some of them are activated. I push all of those and the screen rumbles and shakes. Back across the bridge, the inoperable lever is now operable, and it raises the two gates. A short jog later, and I'm out of the dungeon and in an area that turns out to be the Plateau, although despite its name, it has stone walls rising on all sides of it. Maybe "Plateau" is meant ironically. 

           

"Those kids seem to really love that Dungeon Master." - Someone at Origin.

       

I follow my usual exploration plan of exploring the perimeter and then filling in the middle. I encounter:

   

• Some hostile toraxes.

• A bunch of "fire 'shrooms" that I can't pick up but that explode if I walk over them. A patch of them actually manages to kill me. They're surprisingly hard to avoid.

• More changelings.

     

I don't remember which one is me.

      

• A cave that I decide to save for later. 

• It takes two reloads and almost all my health to kill a seeker. The problem is that his reach is longer than mine. He's guarding a shack with no valuables, but it's surrounded by mushrooms that I can eat to restore my health. 

        

"Yes, Avatar. Eating mushrooms directly off the ground in a strange world is always a good idea." - The Guardian.

        

Mythran's "house" is in the northeastern quadrant of the Plateau, not far from the cave exit. I put "house" in quotes, because the front door seems to transport me to a void, and the foyer is full of traps. Two spiked balls roll back and forth on either side of a pair of pillars. Lightning crackles between the pillars. I have to carefully time my passage through them. This basic setup is repeated for four consecutive rooms. The final room has a couple of healing potions on a table.

       

Passing through the gauntlet.

          

The exit leads me to a two-story wooden house. The first floor has a backpack with 137 obsidian coins and something called Korghin's Fang.

   

I find Mythran upstairs. Our conversation is long, particularly since I reload a couple of times to make sure I go through all the options. Highlights:

    

• The house is indeed in another dimension, although he doesn't provide details.

• For 50 obsidian coins, he sells scrolls that open magical barriers. 

• He tells me a lot about the history of Pagan, replicating what's in the game documents.

• He suggests I read the books in his house, of which there are many.

• He doesn't like Mordea or the Pyromancers.

      

"Or it would be a tragedy, if the city had more than six people."

       

• He practices Thaumaturgy, a fifth form of magic that is not tied to one of the elemental titans.

Most importantly, when I ask about leaving Pagan, he says that something about the titans' magic blocks travel to other worlds. He thinks the solution is to become a master of all forms of magic. He suggests I start with the Necromancers by asking Vividos to be his apprentice. They live in the cemetery.

        

Mythran has his own private fishing hole in his little pocket plane.

         

His house has a lot of books that bulk up my "Books of Pagan" entry. My intelligence increases by 2 points from reading them all. While I'm reading, I get a rumble from the Guardian that "Nyustl sends his regards."

   

Mythran also gives me a "recall item." When I double-click on it, I can choose to visit any teleportation platform that I've already visited, which in this case is the one in Mythran's house and the one on the roof of the palace. That's handy. I warp back there.

         

Does someone sit in that chair just waiting for people to teleport in?

       

On the way to the Cemetery, on the east side of Tenebrae, I find a house unlocked that was locked before. It turns out to be the residence of Rhian, widow of Toran, the man beheaded at the beginning of the game. She says he expressed his opinions one too many times in the tavern. Their son, Torwin, has gone off to be a Theurgist, something that confuses Rhian because he never expressed any interest in becoming a healer when he was growing up. Toran was a gemcutter, and Rhian is now running his shop. She sells both clothing (her own trade is as a weaver) and gems. I don't buy either for now.

        

I might stop by to sell you a dozen pieces of jewelry tomorrow.

        

The house is enormous; I guess gemcutting is lucrative. The loom in Rhian's workshop moves up and down if I double-click on it, but there's no way to feed yarn into it the way you could in Ultima VII. 

    

I leave Rhian and head for the cemetery. "I do so enjoy the cries of torment," the Guardian gloats as I pass through the gate. As usual, I explore the edges and then the interior. Encounters:

 

• There are lots of battles with ghouls and skeletons. I thought my mace was killing skeletons before, but now they're getting up. The toss-them-in-the-water trick doesn't seem to work for me. But running off the screen solves the problem.

• I take note of all the gravestones and report their inscriptions on the "Books of Pagan" entry. It's cute that they made references to most of the developers, but I think that gravestones are an excellent epistolary way to convey lore, and I wish more games took them seriously. There are only a few in-game references in the long list. 

      

One of many football references in the cemetery.

         

• A specter guarding a north exit kills me. I reload, but he keeps killing me before I can kill him. I leave it for now. Another one keeps killing me in front of a grave that reads: "Get off my grave." Curiously, many of my blows against these ghosts trigger the thunderclap, but they don't die. Yet I killed a ghost with the same mace the last session. I'm wondering if I'm mixing up ghosts and aerial servants; the manual doesn't supply an image of the latter.

     

A specter seems invincible as a zombie rises from the ground nearby.

       

In the center of the area is a two-story structure that turns out to be the Tomb of Moriens, the first Necromancer, who arranged the deal with Lithos by which the titan would stop the earthquakes if the people of Pagan would serve him in death. The first floor has an altar in the central area and what looks like a stone chair behind an unopenable gate. 

       

That looks uncomfortable.

        

The second floor has living quarters. The head necromancer, Lothian, is sick in bed. Her assistant, Vividos, is wandering around. (I'm pretty sure Vividos never tells me his name. It doesn't come up in my initial conversations, but when I speak to him again, I somehow already know it.) Vividos tells me that Lothian is dying. Vividos wants to perform the ritual (rituals are very important to the necromancers) that will let Lothian transition to the afterlife, but the "evil and power hungry" Mordea has confiscated the necromancers' ceremonial dagger and will only lend it back to them if they beg. If Lothian dies without the ritual, Lithos might destroy the world in his anger.

   

I offer to retrieve the dagger; it's clear I'll have to solve this issue if I want to learn necromancy. I teleport back to the palace and find Mordea in her throne room. She's shouting things every few seconds: "Feed them all to the lurker!"; "More work, less pay!"; "Flog the peasants!"; "Double the taxes!"; "No more days of rest!" Her seneschal responds to each rant with "pure genius!" or "you are correct!"

       

I'm guessing there's no romance option here.

         

I find the key to her bedchamber under a folded piece of cloth with a skull on it, but Mordea gets upset that I'm moving things around. I have to rest for a while for the throne room to clear out. I toss her bedroom and find a dagger in her wardrobe, but it doesn't look like what Vividos described. There is a locked closet with a chest in it, but I can't find the key to open it.

    

This seems too easy.

      

Remembering Aramina's (Mordea's handmaiden) offer to speak to me at her home during BloodWatch, I wait until the appropriate hour and then visit. She gives me the key to the closet as long as I promise not to tell anyone that I got it from her.

      

Unless there's more than one, they'll probably be able to figure it out.

       

I return to Mordea's chambers, but I'm stupid enough to barge in while she's in bed. She wakes up and destroys me with a fireball.

     

That's the best you could come up with?

       

On a reload, I wait until Mordea is in her throne room, then openly enter her bedroom, shut the door behind me, open her closet, and steal the dagger from the chest. A lot of what I'm doing relies on Tenebrae having no investigators, just patrol officers.

   

Back at the Tomb of Moriens, I find that Lothian is breathing her last. Vividos has laid her body on the first-floor altar. He gratefully takes the dagger and instructs the Avatar how to help with the ritual that will send Lothian's soul to Lithos. Lothian says he's ready to go. The ground shakes. Vividos incants a spell, and three zombies rise. Vividos plunges the dagger into Lothian's chest. (This is all handled without the player's input, but it's still a fun sequence. It might be worth watching online. I mean to capture a GIF, but I fail.) He later explains that he has completed the Ceremony of Eternity, which will allow Lothian passage into Lithos's halls. I expect that the zombies will somehow carry Lothian away, but they just sort of hang out.

       

What role do the zombies serve?

       

Vividos explains that with Lothian's death, he is now the Necromancer. Moreover, he has no apprentices. I volunteer for the role, and he says my first task will be to gather reagents: Executioner's Hood "from a place of danger," and "fallen sticks from a place where the spirits roam." I already have the first, but to find the second, I'll have to go to Western Tenebrae. This seems like a good place to wrap up.

      

Miscellaneous notes:

  

• Some experimentation suggests that the Avatar can indeed climb up onto any roof. I feel like I need to explore the entire town again now that I have a better sense of a) how to climb and jump, and b) how to search for keys by moving things around. 

• Drinking potions leaves empty bottles behind. Are they good for anything? I'd love an excuse to clear out the damned backpack. 

• I contributed a few more books to "The Books of Pagan." One, called Earthen Magic, gives the reagents and syllables for two necromancy spells: "Open Ground" and "Death Speak." A scroll in Lothian's room gives the recipe for "Quake."

• The dialogue options too often just repeat the last thing the NPC said with a question mark.

          

Don't let the door hit me in the ass?

        

I end this session with my attributes in the mid-20s, about halfway between the starting values (15) and the maximum values (30). Apparently, if I wanted to stand still and swing away with my sword, or to open and read the same book over and over, I could grind them all the way to the maximum before continuing on.

  

As I wrap up, it occurs to me that Pagan feels a bit like a simple console RPG of the period, with its limited NPCs, limited character development, rather linear plot, and simple action combat. There's nothing that makes me feel like I'm role-playing or otherwise playing in a unique or personal way. I feel as if I could get the same experience, and have about as much fun, just watching a video of someone else playing. Maybe I should watch a speedrun. I think I'd short-cut this one if I could.

   

Time so far: 14 hours

   

****

  

Previous entry in this series

  

Next entry in this series

   09/02/2026  

Game 589: Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession (1994)

           

Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession

United States

DreamForge Intertainment (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released in 1994 for DOS, 1995 for FM Towns and PC-98

Date Started: 14 August 2026

     

Strahd's Possession adapts one of the most popular tabletop RPG modules of all time—so popular that even I read it, although I wasn't much of a tabletop RPG player. I loved it. Decades before pop culture decided to reformulate vampires as angsty teenagers (or, I suppose, years before, if you think it all started with The Lost Boys), the module presented an atmospheric, gothic, suspense-filled adventure with a compelling and complex villain inspired by the original "vampyr." More on him in a bit.

       

The CRPG begins with a reasonably well-animated and voiced cinematic, the narrator using a Bela Lugosi-style Hungarian accent. The PCs (as we'll discover, there are two of them) are given as knights of the benevolent Lord Dhelt of Elturel. This is in the Forgotten Realms, just up the river from Baldur's Gate. Some unspecified evil has been threatening the land, and the companions have just returned from patrol. They arrive at Lord Dhelt's chambers in the wake of an assassin's attack that has left Dhelt and his mage, Baranta Chansil, wounded. Dhelt tells the PCs that the assassin stole a holy symbol of Helm and fled to the forest. The PCs follow him to a dark forest. End of intro.

         

The aftermath of the attack.

       

The player creates two characters from the usual AD&D races, classes, and alignments, and with the usual attributes. This might be the first game in which character creation has consisted of two characters. It's a weird number. Thanks to commenters on my "Upcoming Games" posting (thanks in particular to SB and Man of Stone), I understand that up to two hirelings will be able to join the party later, that clerics and mages are particularly important, and that there are no mage hirelings in the sequel. Thus, a player who wants to bring his characters into the sequel should probably create a cleric and mage. I decided not to worry about the sequel (I'll likely create new characters). I created:

   

• Summer, a lawful good female human paladin. 
• Quill, a chaotic good male half-elf ranger.

      

The unusual character creation process is in keeping with the spirit of the module.

      

The whole character creation process is presented as a Vistani fortune teller with tarot cards "foretelling" the characters. ("Vistani" are the gypsies of the setting. The term does not appear in the original module, which used "gypsy" exclusively. The game goes back and forth.) The player chooses sex, race, etc. by picking the appropriate cards. There are 18 portrait choices for both men and women. They offer a decent selection, but some of them are clearly at odds with the 18-21 age range rolled for each character.

           

These guys are supposed to be 19?

        

The game lets you just manually set the attributes for the characters, with no pretense that you're doing it to match a favorite tabletop character. But there's hardly any reason to resort to such cheating, as random attribute rolls are generous. I only got single digits a couple of times, and I only had to roll a few times before I had all attributes but one at 15 or above. Characters start at a reasonably high level, too. They come with 35,000 experience points, enough to put both my characters at Level 5 and on the cusp of Level 6. Most other classes would start at Level 6. The experience tables in the manual suggest that characters can go up to Level 20.

    

After character creation, the game begins with the two characters in the forest. Quill makes some ranger-y tracking observations, concluding that the assassin is "a bad woodsman." After his comment, I'm able to take control.

     

The characters frequently speak up in ways consistent with their classes.

       

The interface has the same basic elements from the Eye of the Beholder series—character portraits, hand items, a GTFO cluster, a compass—though rearranged. Mercifully, it appears that divine spellcasters don't have to sacrifice a shield hand to hold their holy symbols anymore. As for the main exploration window, the game lets the player toggle between freeform, continuous movement and tile-based "step movement," which is coincidentally the same term that Realms of Arkania: Star Trail used. Is there a precursor to both games that coined this term?

     

The player can move the party with the GTFO cluster, by clicking in the exploration window itself, by using the numberpad, and by using the arrow keys. (Well, he can't turn with the arrow keys, I guess; just move forward, backwards, and side to side.) Alas, the same spirit of redundancy does not apply to anything else on the interface. Attacking is only accomplished by clicking on the weapons, casting only by clicking on the spell symbols, other options only by moving the cursor to the top of the screen to access the buttons. Clicking on the portrait accesses the inventory screen. The keyboard is only useful for moving, checking the (T)ime, and (P)ausing. [Edit: And a quick (S)ave and SHIFT-(R)estore.] Wankers.

                

Moving the cursor to top of the screen brings up the game options. Any reason ESC couldn't have done the same thing? Any reason we couldn't have avoided this entirely with (M)ap, (Q)uit, etc.?

         

My paladin starts with a broadsword, a shield, chainmail (torso armor includes boots), a plate helm, and an empty sack. My ranger comes with a longsword, leather armor and helm, wooden shield, short sword, three throwing knives, and a smaller sack. It appears there's an encumbrance limit, but I'm in no danger of meeting it yet. The manual says that the character doll can accommodate amulets, cloaks, gloves, and rings in addition to the obvious slots. None of the screens say anything about money, making me wonder if the game even has an economy.

       

The inventory screens.

       

The automap, of which I'll have more to say later, shows us in the "Forgotten Realms Forest." We're limited to a narrow lane of trees, ending in a cul-de-sac, where we meet the cornered assassin.

     

I get my first taste of combat, which has the typical real-time attacking and cooling-down of other Dungeon Master-inspired games. The assassin does a reasonable amount of damage, nearly killing Summer, before we kill him, but we simply rest and heal afterwards. I don't see any signs that there's a hunger/thirst mechanic, so resting between battles doesn't have any downside.

         

Our first battle.

         

The assassin drops Lord Dhelt's holy symbol, a parchment, something called a "withered heart of mortal ardor," and a fourth object that looks like a weapon. Summer opines that: "The stench of necromancy hangs about these foul bits," but she suggests that we gather them for study. The assassin's parchment indicates that he came from the world of Ravenloft, and that he somehow figured out that Lord Dhelt's holy symbol was in fact the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind, an artifact that could destroy Strahd. He resolved to steal it ("even if it means the death of that good lord"), return to Ravenloft, destroy Strahd, and "free my people from their eternal fate." Well, now I feel bad about killing him. I guess he was more of a burglar than an assassin. But he should have asked.

      

The assassin's note.

       

I don't know what the fourth item is because the moment I pick it up, a thick fog rolls in. Weird shapes move through the fog. Three figures stand in front of us, and one reaches out his hand. Suddenly, we're in a different place and three of the four items are gone. (The parchment remains.) The automap now shows us in the "Svalich Woods" in the realm of Barovia.

     

Spooky.

        

Let's save the game at this point and learn a bit more about the land and its most famous denizen. The CRPG player first encounters Count Strahd von Zarovich, Lord of Barovia, as a triptych in the game manual—a debonair, thick-eyebrowed, slightly sinister figure. An elegant note offers "cordial greetings" and invites the party to explore the "misty, twilight dangers" of "this brutal paradise." He is speaking of Barovia specifically but also the Ravenloft campaign setting in general. Its first appearance was in 1983, in the module created by Tracy and Laura Hickman, a married couple who were looking for more story and atmosphere in their tabletop roleplaying sessions. They created it (along with several other modules) for their own roleplaying system, but Tracy ended up getting hired by TSR and brought his modules with him.

          

From my admittedly inexperienced perspective, Ravenloft is a high-quality bit of literature. I question how well it works as a D&D module specifically, but it's delightful to read. Barovia is a classic Transylvanian (fictional Transylvania, of course) region, shrouded in fog and gloom, existing in its own isolated plane of existence. Castle Ravenloft looms over the Svalich Woods, moorlands, and a pathetic town where residents huddle in terror at night, clutching holy symbols. Gypsies travel the land, dance amid giant bonfires in the evening, and tell fortunes. Wolves roam the forests, and at night the cemetery disgorges the spirits of slain adventurers, who trudge to the castle and re-enact their failure to destroy the vampire in charge of it all.

    

The 1983 module cover. Strahd sure does like standing and looking proudly at things.

         

Count Strahd has brought the party to his world, for one of four potential motives chosen at random at the beginning of the game. (There are several aspects of the session that are chosen at random using a regular deck of cards, so it was fun to see that mimicked with the gypsy at the beginning of Strahd's Possession.) Strahd isn't just some generic vampire "NPC." The module advises the dungeon master: "Strahd is supposed to be a genius; play him as one." He keeps track of the PCs' locations and acts accordingly. He charms, confuses, spies, summons allies, raises undead, drains, hides, and, if necessary, flees. His death ends the adventure, so the dungeon master "must use every power available to the vampire to keep him (and the game) going." Still, he is killable as per normal Monster Manual rules, and I have to wonder if any party ever rolled a 20 on a stake to the heart the first time they met Strahd and wrapped up the module in 15 minutes.

       

The game manual's depiction of Strahd.

       

I honestly don't know whether Strahd's Possession is an adaptation of the module, a sequel to it, or an unrelated game that uses the same characters and themes. I thus forced myself not to re-read too far into the module. I have a hard time believing that this particular interface will be able to evoke the unique environments and experiences that the tabletop party finds in Castle Ravenloft, but perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised.

   

Back in the game, I start exploring the woods. Its borders are surrounded by poisonous vapors. We're attacked by a worg wolf almost immediately. Its constant dancing back and forth makes it hard to hit (or so I think at the time), but we kill it. Then we walk a few steps more and we're swarmed by more wolves and goblins (weirdly spelled "goblyn"). They seem to come out of nowhere. We suffer our first party death.

            

With an appropriately gruesome screen.

      

On a reload, we decide to head for a nearby building, killing a couple more wolves on the way but fleeing from others. The building is a roofless, abandoned hut. As we enter, Summer remarks on a poorly-concealed trap door heading down to some kind of basement. A skeleton sits slumped in a chair; a nearby note curses Strahd for the ruin he's inflicted on the land. A button on the wall opens the trap door.

  

The basement has a number of items clearly meant to help new adventurers: three Potions of Healing, a Potion of Extra Healing, a composite bow, a quiver with eight arrows, a suit of chainmail, a cleric scroll of "Raise Dead," and something called a Ba'al Verzi Dagger. (The note suggests the Ba'al Verzi are some kind of assassin's guild.) The basement also offers a safe place to rest.

       

Despite offering shelves and barrels, I'm not sure the game engine is capable of putting items in either.

           

As you might imagine from past experience with my entries, the first thing I did upon gaining control of the game was to turn off the music. At this point, I'm also considering turning off the sound. It is beyond horrible. The problem, if I understand it correctly, is that we're at the dawn of digitized recorded audio, which was ultimately a good replacement for synthesized sound, but only after developers learned how to blend it better with the environment. Here, when a monster becomes active, the game simply calls up the appropriate .wav file and blasts the player with it at full volume. There is no accounting for distance or direction, no subtlety at all. This is also true of what's supposed to be ambient sound. Every minute or so, the game decides, "Time for some chirping birds!" and WHAM, there they are in your ear. It's positively assaultive. I wish developers had just stuck with synthesized sound until they figured out how to modulate recorded audio for a 3D environment. Having said all of that, I feel I should mention that I rarely know what I'm talking about when it comes to graphics and sound, and it's entirely possible that some overlooked setting eliminates all of my criticisms.

     

The automap shows items, enemies, and NPCs. For once, I can differentiate the colors, but the size of the dots still makes it hard to interpret.

         

As we explore in east-west strips, heading south, the automap helps a bit. It fills in fast. Basically, looking in any direction is enough to fill in about 20 squares in that direction. The map shows the locations of items to pick up, creatures, and NPCs, among other things, although as you might imagine, my colorblindness makes it difficult to differentiate some of the objects. Still, the map does help lead me to a couple of piles of treasure and my first NPC. The items include stones, which the player can pick up and throw at enemies from a distance; I manage to kill a wolf trapped between two trees this way. 

        

A worg wolf attacks.

        

The first NPC is a timid-looking man cuddling a tree. The game offers full-sentence dialogue options—or, at least, full sentences. With this particular NPC, we're able to go through all of them, so they're not really "options." We ask if he needs any help, and he suggests that his son was killed. We ask where there might be a town, and he directs us to a road "a way off," which isn't much in the way of directions. When we ask who "Strahd" is, he says that he "freed the land from Old Dorian." He warns us that Strahd "applies justice with an iron hand." The voice is reasonably well-acted with an English accent, although the audio quality is poor and sounds very much like a .wav being called up from a CD rather than anything integrated with the environment.

     

These seem like "options," but we're able to ask all of them.

        

Slowly, retreating frequently to the basement to heal, we clear out most of the goblins and worg wolves on the map. Creatures seem to respawn, which is a little annoying but also relieves the burden of feeling like you have to clear all of them. I find another NPC tied up by a campfire in the southeast corner of the map. His voice acting is notably poorer than the first one. He introduces himself as Fhalken, a merchant, although the goblins have apparently stolen and eaten all of his wares.

     

Fhalken agrees to join the party. His statistics reveal him as a Level 5 chaotic good human fighter with high strength but middling everything else. His poor dexterity means a high armor class. Scattered around the fire, I find some armor and weapons, including a two-handed sword. I guess I'll keep him until someone better comes along.

     

Neither of these options feels very paladin-y.

       

Two western exits lead to the Old Svalich Road South. It's not so much a "road" as a "corridor" that extends pretty far to both the north and the south. I don't know whether the vine-covered walls on either side are really supposed to be walls or whether they're supposed to suggest that the foliage is too dense in that direction. Either way, here are the encounters we face:

 

• As we arrive, we see a skeleton tied to a post. A note pinned to it reads: "If you walk my land, then heed my laws. A WARNING to those who defy my will!" It is signed by Strahd von Zarovich. This is repeated multiple times on multiple skeletons in this area.

       

Is there some place where we can find out what those laws are?

      

• As we come to a narrowing in the corridor, Quill suggests it would be a good place for an ambush by bandits. "Remember who warned you when some ignorant thief comes screaming at us from the trees," he says. We thus remember when, a few seconds later, three ignorant thieves come screaming at us from the trees. We kill two of them, and as we're about to kill the third, he surrenders and begs for mercy, promising to never undertake thievery again. He says that further up the road, a stone with an arrow will point the way to the bandit camp.

• We meet a Vistani traveler who tells us that the nearest town is the Village of Barovia to the north. He claims that although Strahd rules from the shadows, "he is the lord, the land, and the law, a friend to the Vistani and a just ruler." He says that the Vistani have a potion that will allow passage through the poisonous mist, but we have no gold to buy it. He says that when we do have the gold, we can find him at the Blood o' the Vine tavern in Barovia.

     

I don't know, man. Just rulers don't usually leave notes on skeletons.

        

• We find the bandit's stone marker but can't figure out how to get into the camp at first. We figure it out after we enlist Velika (below). Clicking around on a wall causes a secret door to open into a grove with multiple bandits and skeletal bats. There are a lot of weapons and armor in this area. Quill gets poisoned, which I don't notice until I've already saved. I should have made that cleric.

      

Have you never played a CRPG before?

    

• We run into a cheerful woman named Velika. She's out for adventure and happily joins our party. She's a Level 4/4/5 chaotic good half-elf fighter/mage/thief. She wears robes and carries a longsword. Her spellbook has "Magic Missile," "Shield," "Agannazer's Scorcher" (the first time I've seen this spell), "Improved Identify," and "Ice Knife." 

       

The spell memorization screen.

        

• Those annoying bursts of sound I told you about include, in this area, peals of laughter that come out of nowhere. I realize the developers are trying for a spooky horror setting, but this is just like someone constantly sticking a wet finger in your ear.

• A northern gate leads, as the Vistani promised, to the Village of Barovia. 

   

Some miscellaneous observations:

    

• A lot of the items marked as treasures on the automap turn out to be rocks. I get all excited for nothing.

       

Well, that's disappointing.

        

• Repeatedly throwing the same missile weapon at an enemy hung up on a tree seems to be a consistently useful strategy in this game.

      

His attack range is shorter than my "reach and pick up the dagger I just threw" range.

        

• At first, I was annoyed at enemies constantly moving in combat, but it doesn't seem to matter. My attacks hit enemies even when they're not on the visible screen. However:

• The attack buttons are annoyingly far apart. Luckily, the player can also attack by clicking on the enemy (if he can keep the enemy on the visible screen), which cycles attacks by the four characters. How hard would it have been to just map this to the "A" key? 

• Time is given as "R.S.T.," which I assume is "Ravenloft Standard Time." An hour passes in about a minute real-time. Ambient light peaks at 13:00, then starts dimming, reaching its darkest at around 01:00. Even at its darkest, it isn't really "dark," and yet I still prefer it lighter.

• The manual says that the order of the characters doesn't matter unless they're indoors, at which point the two leftmost characters become the front rank and the two rightmost characters are the rear. No enemies seemed to attack the two new characters, though, even when we were outdoors. Their rank position didn't seem to stop the characters from being able to attack. I don't know whether that will change when we move indoors.

        

Coming up next.

          

I don't finish exploring the Old Svalich Road this session. Quill's poison keeps sapping his hit points, and I'm wasting healing potions bumping his health back up. So we head to the gate to Barovia, hoping to find healing (or a cleric party member) there. The game's a mixed bag so far, about as fun as one of the first two Eye of the Beholder games, perhaps—but a bit too early to judge.

  

Time so far: 3 hours 

    

****

      

Next entry in this series 

   

Further reading:    

• My "Index of Games by Lineage" has both all licensed Dungeons & Dragons games and all Dungeon Master clones. 
• The original Ravenloft module. 

09/06/2026