Today we’re looking at The Tragedy of Ravenmere Manor, a Shadowdark adventure for levels 3-4 written by William Harshman. It is a gothic horror adventure through the titular 18-room manor designed to be run in a single 4ish hour session.
The setup is simple: a man named Victor hires the party to retrieve his brother Alistair Ravenmere’s signet ring from the family estate. This is complicated by the fact that the brother and his family are presumed dead, and the estate is now crawling with the undead. Of course there’s more to it than that – Alistair got into a spot of trouble when he tried to cure his wife’s disease with the Necronomicon and instead she turned into some kind of monster and killed everybody.
The adventure suggests using the following rule: “Bastion of the Living Dead. Until the curse is lifted (pg 27), the Priest spell Turn Undead (SD 72) only lasts 1 round and cannot destroy undead creatures outright.” Now, I’ve gone on record as saying that you shouldn’t nerf or remove PC abilities and spells just to make your dungeon work. I think this sort of adventure makes a case for the occasional exception. If the theme of your dungeon and its inhabitants is primarily undead, there’s better than even odds that the priest will nuke every encounter, which isn’t really fun after it happens the first couple of times.
HOWEVER my math may be a little wonky but I think if we assume the priest is rolling at a +3, they will get to cast the spell twice before failing, on average. Which isn’t all that bad, really. So I guess the answer is, use your best judgement. Useless advice, that is.
OK let’s hop in the dungeon. The style of keying is not my favorite, and the room description follows the OSE house style of keyword -> brief description for each feature in the room. I prefer to have a description written in the way I talk so my feeble brain doesn’t have to do the conversion. But besides that the layout is simple and easy to follow, if a bit uninventive. Stock art is used throughout, although the designer made custom maps rather than grabbing something from Dyson Logos. Mostly the format and presentation just get out of the way so you can run the adventure.
The gameplay will primarily involve going from room to room, dealing with whatever undead foes may be inside, and then piecing together information about the manor’s past and present inhabitants. The monsters are bespoke and well-designed. Every room has something for the PCs to poke at and secrets to uncover. Although it’s a relatively short dungeon, each room key is a full page and includes multiple things to interact with.
Thorough players are rewarded with hints that will help them advance through the dungeon and overcome obstacles. Little clues like the fact that corpses wearing holy symbols weren’t turned into zombies, that the staff enjoyed piano music or that the Lady Ravenmere didn’t like her own reflection are things that will make the players feel like geniuses when they figure out how to use them to their advantage.
These clues contribute to a nice amount of interconnectedness where both objects and knowledge are found in one place and used in another. And learning the lore of the location will also allow the players to make an informed decision about how to resolve the adventure – what they do with the signet ring and how they handle the manor’s deceased former residents will echo beyond the adventure itself. The best outcomes are reserved for parties that take their time to explore and take notes on what they find. Although blitzing through and stealing everything that isn’t bolted down is still a supported and viable strategy.
We also get some custom magic items including a cleaver that does extra damage versus “meat-based targets”. That is a wonderful phrase that manages to be funny, descriptive and concise. Reminds me of this: https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html. There are also some books that, when read, give the PC the option of changing their background. That’s something I’ve not seen before.
The final showdown with the undead Lady Ravenmere could be a pushover or a bloodbath depending on whether the party took the time to learn about her weakness and devise a strategy to exploit them. Which is just as it should be. One small nitpick is that we are told she may be aided by skeleton minions, but we aren’t given any guidance on how many are appropriate according to party level or anything like that. Simple enough to follow the guidelines from the core book but some numbers here would be nice.
The greatest weakness of the adventure is that there are probably few things that will surprise players with even a passing familiarity of the genre. The location is a manor house and it has all the things you would expect to find there. The armored statue will come alive and attack. There’s a rare and valuable vintage in the wine cellar. Skeletons are gonna climb out of the coffins. It’s a well trod path.
So The Tragedy of Ravenmere Manor isn’t really breaking new ground but it’s a very well-crafted adventure that would be easy to run and that will keep your players engaged. You can tell when the designer of an adventure cares. And that is obviously the case here. He even credits playtesters and proofreaders, and after reviewing about 50 adventures I can tell you that not everyone bothers with those two important steps. Drop this in the next town your PCs land in and you’ve got 1 or 2 sessions covered.
On a scale of 2-12, The Tragedy of Ravenmere Manor get 8 stingbats.
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