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Ravenloft: Children of the Night: Accessory Series #1
Children of the Night: Vampires
For All Character Levels:
Behold the Many Faces of Mankind's Darkest Enemy
Twin puncture wounds mark the kiss of the nosferatu. Blood trickles with the slow crawl of despair. A shadow lingers, black against black. Chill mist clings damply to every surface, and the echo of an anguished shriek still hangs in the air.
Children of the Night: Vampires introduces 13 unique and terrifying villains of horrific proportion. Each one challenges vampire hunters to rethink common perceptions regarding these foes - for these are no ordinary undead. Every creature presented in this book is a unique individual with its own history, personality, and powers.
These lords of the night whom adventurers may meet include the following:
Jander Sunstar, one of the oldest vampires in the Land of Mists
Myxitzajal, a seagoing monster with a taste for fishermen
Lady Adeline, an elf vampire who seeks out the light rather than hiding from it
Lyssa von Zarovich, who covets the power of her great uncle Strahd
...and many more!
These Are the Children of the Night
Children of the Night: Vampires is the first book in a new series that brings to (un)life the creature types treated in the bestselling Van Richten's Guides. Each volume offers biographies of distinct and monstrous villains easily added to any game; short adventures featuring such nemeses, which can stand alone or be strung together to form a mini-campaign; unique ways to fight each foe; and adventure hooks for using the creatures as recurring villains.
Summary of content:
Jander Sunstar
Audun Beck
Lyssa Von Zarovich
Moosha (desert vampire)
Myxitizajal (greater vampirc ixitxachitl)
Lady Aveline (elf)
Don Pablo (Vorlog)
Alexi (vampire slave)
Jack Bequick (trickster vampire)
Lady Heather Shadowbrooke (druid vampiress)
Ezra (nosferatu of the sewers)
Mulger d'Ajust (vampire sage)
Marla (penanggalan)
Behold the Many Faces of Mankind's Darkest Enemy
Twin puncture wounds mark the kiss of the nosferatu. Blood trickles with the slow crawl of despair. A shadow lingers, black against black. Chill mist clings damply to every surface, and the echo of an anguished shriek still hangs in the air.
Children of the Night: Vampires introduces 13 unique and terrifying villains of horrific proportion. Each one challenges vampire hunters to rethink common perceptions regarding these foes - for these are no ordinary undead. Every creature presented in this book is a unique individual with its own history, personality, and powers.
These lords of the night whom adventurers may meet include the following:
Jander Sunstar, one of the oldest vampires in the Land of Mists
Myxitzajal, a seagoing monster with a taste for fishermen
Lady Adeline, an elf vampire who seeks out the light rather than hiding from it
Lyssa von Zarovich, who covets the power of her great uncle Strahd
...and many more!
These Are the Children of the Night
Children of the Night: Vampires is the first book in a new series that brings to (un)life the creature types treated in the bestselling Van Richten's Guides. Each volume offers biographies of distinct and monstrous villains easily added to any game; short adventures featuring such nemeses, which can stand alone or be strung together to form a mini-campaign; unique ways to fight each foe; and adventure hooks for using the creatures as recurring villains.
Summary of content:
Jander Sunstar
Audun Beck
Lyssa Von Zarovich
Moosha (desert vampire)
Myxitizajal (greater vampirc ixitxachitl)
Lady Aveline (elf)
Don Pablo (Vorlog)
Alexi (vampire slave)
Jack Bequick (trickster vampire)
Lady Heather Shadowbrooke (druid vampiress)
Ezra (nosferatu of the sewers)
Mulger d'Ajust (vampire sage)
Marla (penanggalan)
96 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1996
About the author
Steve Miller
34 books7 followersFrom 1995 to 1999, Steve worked on Dragonlance meta-story direction and specific print products, along with Doug Niles, Harold Johnson, Stan!, Sue Cook and Miranda Horner. When Wizards of the Coast aquired TSR, the influential Dragonlance authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman once again took charge of Dragonlance story direction, and Steve soon moved onto other things.
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February 28, 2022Ravenloft was the Gothic horror campaign setting for D&D, which is a real weird tonal mashup since horror is often about helplessness and tragedy and D&D is a primarily a power fantasy; but this setting actually goes back to the 1983 adventure module Ravenloft, ,only 10 years after the founding of TSR, and it grew out of something pretty intrinsic to early D&D: the random encounter table. Basically, if I remember correctly, the authors were running a dungeon-crawl adventure, and got “vampire” on the random encounter table and then asked themselves “what’s a vampire doing here?”
Trust me, I’m building to a point here.
Because unlike, say, a random orc, a vampire is usually thought of as a singular monster, with a story, often tragic, possibly romantic, but more likely creepy and icky. And a large part of the adventure is actually learning that story so that you understand enough about the vampire to kill him.
Fast forward 7 years from ’83, and TSR decides to release a whole campaign setting of Gothic horror: vampires, Frankenstein monsters, ghosts, werewolves, mummies — anything that Universal made a movie about. (Actually, no swamp monsters and lagoon people…) TSR published a lot of adventures and accessories for this line, including a whole line of guidebooks to some of those notable monster types.
In a way, the “Children of the Night” series is both a companion to those books, and a reminder that a monster in Ravenloft also is a person with a personality and story. In other words, it’s the same question the original authors asked when getting a vampire on a random table: who is this and why are they here?
There were four Children of the Night books published from 1996-1999, e.g., the death throes of TSR, each covering some class of monster: vampires, ghosts, werebeasts, and the created (i.e., golems, i.e., Frankenstein monsters); each has 13 examples of creatures, and each creature comes with a short adventure.
Here is a question that each book asks (to me): what is the point of this monster? Or put another way, what is an archetypal use of this monster? What is this monster a symbol for or what makes it scary? (This all reminds me of a argument I read a long time ago that said, for the middle class: vampires were our fear of an unstoppable aristocracy, werewolves were our fear that our position was unstable; and zombies were our fear of the mindless hordes of the lower classes. Which as a system, has problems, but hoo boy, do I love a system.)
And once you know what the archetype and symbolism are, are there some surprises you can pull off by interrogating that core?
Overall, in my 40s, I’m not crazy about these books and their examples because, frankly, I don’t think they really answer those questions or interrogate the core story. You could argue that I am dinging these books for not being what they never promised to be, but I think the failure to approach these topics leads these books into making the same mistakes.
For instance, here’s two moves common in all four books:
(1) it does X, so the PCs will think it’s a Y, but really it’s a Z
This is a fun idea the first time and a good way to take your players by surprise from a tactical perspective (they get holy water, but it turns out to be a werebat! Oh no, they need silver); and that tactical upset might lead to some of the helpless horror, but nothing deeper than that, and part of the promise of this series is that each of these examples is a little horror all to itself.
(2) a lot of backstory, with no way for the PCs to learn it and no need for them to.
The original Ravenloft made finding out the vampire’s story integral to defeating him. These, meanwhile, are just info dumps that no one needs to know, practically. If this were a screenplay, these would be the parts an actor would rightly claim are unplayable and so not helpful to know.
Now, I don’t want to go through all 13 monsters in all four books, though god knows I took the notes for that, I just want to hit on highs, lows, and commonalities.
***
VAMPIRES
Reading these monsters, you would be lead to believe that a vampire story is about someone evil or not who is ironically cursed to never get the thing they wanted in life.
So we get a good person turned into a vampire who wants to rid the world of vampires; or the half-vampire who constantly wants to find a lover to replace his dead vampire and will never feel truly human or truly vampire again; or a druid vampire who has to drink animal blood, oh no!
Here’s my three favorites:
-a Viking cursed to vampirism who leads an undead crew; he can turn into a giant octopus, which is just odd; and his ship rises at night from the ocean, which is a nice visual. The story of how he turned into a vampire is boring nonsense (attacked by a vampire octopus AND had a cursed gem) and effectively this is just going to be a monster attack at sea, but I like the visuals.
-a desert vampire cursed to this unlife until he can restore the divine pharaoh bloodline to the study of religion, and who doesn’t know that the wild children he feeds on are the descendants of the pharaohs he would need to help. Twist! Honestly, this backstory is also not great — he loved the pharaoh’s wife, so murdered the pharaoh and was cursed — so there’s no real upside to the PCs helping him. Like, where’s the tragedy that would lead them to wanting to help him rather than just destroy him? Now maybe make the wild children need him for something and then you have a reason to reform him.
-a vampire who runs a thieves guild and is too powerful for you to actually harm, so you have to prevent him from hurting people by disabling the thieves guild — that’s a solid setup and though there’s nothing _intrinsically_ vampiric about the villain, it feels like an extension of the Renfield character, and I would push it into that territory, maybe make the linchpin of the organization a terrifying and tragic figure — a once great person now fallen into madness and addiction. Then threaten the PCs with some of that same addiction…
I’m not going to enumerate my least favorites, but suffice it to say, I mostly wrote “but why?” In the margins over and over. (A druid vampire in a thorn maze — that’s fun, but why a vampire? A vampire who was cursed to be invisible and who has a carnival house of horror? That’s, well, no, that’s not fun, that’s just plain silly.)
***
GHOSTS
What makes a good ghost story? The answer mostly seems to be: unfinished business. Whatever killed them, these people have a reason to want to stick around. So far, pretty standard and fine for ghost stories, with the usual breakdown of “they were murdered so need justice done” and “they were evil and their evil lives on.” (Isn’t that sort of the genius of the movie ____ (name redacted for spoilers, but if you know, you know — and I’m sure there’s a few times where this trick gets pulled), where you think the ghost is good and just needs to be laid to rest, but then it turns out that they are the evil kind.)
This book points to something true that you might have missed before about most of the personalities in these books: they are largely tied to one adventure that, when finished, should finish them off. In other words, these are largely not recurring characters or NPCs to build a campaign around. As I noted above, these are mostly slightly-expanded random encounters.
My favorites include
-the bait-and-switch — a dumb kid thinks he’s a ghost because of a cursed amulet he tried to steal, meanwhile the mom who sent him to steal it is a remorseful ghost, so the PCs really just have to get these two reunited and talking. It’s really the closest this book comes to a happy ending and some notion of atonement beyond “living with regret forever.”
-the drowned woman murdered by a false lover who appears both in her beautiful and lake-rotten form — a very clear D&D-ification of a murder ballad, which is a nice change of pace
My least favorites include things like a black cat (that isn’t a ghost but just an evil force that wants the PC to do more evil); or the cowardly ex-hero ghost who spends his unlife reenacting his failure — which is fine, but which fails as an encounter since (a) how would the PCs learn his story and (b) they would just experience it as a sudden and meaningless betrayal.
There’s also a few cases here where, frankly, too much gets piled on to the story. For example, there’s a ghost who is the child victim of domestic violence who comes back to protect the innocent, but who has a mean streak; and the adventure for that ghost involves a necromancer turning laborers into zombies, which feels like a few stories mashed together. Maybe your game group would like that, but it seems odd to me. Like, so many of my complaints are “this doesn’t resolve neatly,” which would be a silly complaint of, say, a realist work where part of the point is that things aren’t neatly turned into stories. But this is D&D!
And there’s some cases that have some solid ideas — the bad warlord who reformed and the good protector turned bitter who have to share the same body — but again, what I think is really missing here is some thoughts as to what it all means.
***
WEREBEASTS
This book opens up with a few pages on how to use werebeasts for Gothic horror, even though the real horror the werebeast is that you might be one and so destroy the things you love. And pretty much, except for jump scares, that’s what they say to do.
And I think that’s about what you can say about the werebeast threat: it’s most interesting as a threat of your own unmanageable self. Which is probably why your classic horror stories about lycanthropy are about being cursed/catching it, whereas having lycanthropy run in the family can lead to more Teen Wolf-style hijinks. (I still love the beat when Michael J. Fox is trying to hide his affliction from his dad, who then comes In as a schlubby dad werewolf.)
So, sure, you can use a werewolf as a big scary monster (like the pirate who was forced into cannibalism and cursed to be a wererat, whose big adventure is “you go onto his boat, he pretends to be lost at sea, then attacks with all his rat friends”); or you can turn to other mythologies of animal-folk (like the werefox who wants to be the star of the opera and will use all her seductive fox maiden tricks to make it); or you can do that bait-and-switch that I complained about (he seems like a vampire but is really a werebat).
Again, over and over, I had to ask “what makes it necessary for this monster to be a lycanthrope?” and the closest I think we got was
-a bad painter uses a cursed palette to make good paintings, but it has made him into a werepig, which is funny only because he has bad taste — or at least, that’s the way I would take this, as an ironic note that this fancy painter is really a boar
-a good guy cursed to be a weregorilla when he gets angry (with a backstory involving an attempted assault that I feel like I would change), but who also travels around with a carnival of weird and dangerous folks that constantly get him into trouble
-a wereray who is slowly infecting the fishing town to make them help her with uncovering a drowned Cthulhu-esque temple, which gets to the contagion aspect of lycanthropy and even connects it to the underwater cosmic horror of Lovecraft. (I might make it a different werefish just to give them the Innsmouth look.)
***
CREATED
The “Created” was one in-universe term for golems, which covers any sort of construct created in a humanoid form. So in original D&D you get clay golems (which seem pretty close to the Judaic lore), flesh golems (straight up Frankenstein monster, stitched together from multiple bodies), and on and on and on. What all these constructs share in common in regular D&D is that they are created on purpose.
What they share in common in Ravenloft is that they probably are created by obsessed people and they all have some form of sentience that usually curdles in a very Frankenstein monster manner from innocence to rage over their creation.
So what, besides Frankenstein, makes a good golem story? What’s the symbolism here?
It seems like “created” stories here are largely pre-industrial robot stories, so you get some of the same tropes, like the rebellion (and close cousin: the robot who takes too seriously its job to defend) and the robot who thinks it’s a regular person.
But what does it mean? Theres “people pushing into matters they shouldn’t and getting punished for it”; and there’s “the revenge of the inanimate” (i.e., when your smart house turns against you), but unlike the ghost (unfinished business and creeping mortality) and the lycanthrope (the tension between civilization and animal urges), I’m not sure there’s something that really unites created stories. Maybe it’s “the child — who never asked to be born — growing up to displace the parent in a world that hates it”?
But ultimately, the narrowness of this focus leads the authors to repeat some of the same stories or to reach for other stories beyond the core concept of these being “created.” Like, the cover that I like so much features a self-made golem, a smart tree that got turned into a bunch of magic sticks which are trying to find their pieces, which is a fine story, but not really a “created” story; and there’s a mist monster here which the book assures is a golem because part of it is solid, but that’s in no way the promise of this book!
As for repeated stories, we get a few stories where someone is driven mad by love and so re-creates their lover. There’s some variety there — one is a doctor who failed to stop a plague from taking his beloved, the other is the same story except you first meet the golem who doesn’t know she’s a golem but is having nightmares about a man coming to kill her (since she’s made from parts of women that man killed), one is a woman who can’t decide between two lovers and so sews them together after they duel — but it’s almost the same story.
Here’s my favorites:
-a wax golem who runs a wax museum, and who is replacing people in town — which is bog standard, but which is improved by a long column on “giving players what they want,” i.e., of course they’ll expect the wax museum is full of real people, so let’s just play that straight — in fact, the monster here resembles Vincent Price
-a man who hates those who make golems decides to stop them all by… making a super golem out of doppelgänger pieces. So the monster turns into whoever it fights, which is a fun mirror since that’s the man’s situation as well. I don’t recall anything else about this other than that nice bit of thematic work.
-an intelligent sword melted down into gold coins to guard a hoard now guards it even from the miser, who has come to regret his miserliness and wants to give away his money, even as the golem is hiring thieves in order to murder them and steal more money. The miser turning good because he realizes the cost of his miserliness feels a little too hokey, but I like the idea of living gold coins.
-a scientist stitches together little helpers out of body parts, which is mostly interesting because there’s a notion that these little “handymen” might actually be a help to the town, and the adventure for them is really just a bunch of scenes as you watch the town evolve over time.
***
So overall, what do I take away from these books? There's some interesting imagery and some interesting characters, but I have to say, most of what I'm taking away are negative models, things not to do.
Trust me, I’m building to a point here.
Because unlike, say, a random orc, a vampire is usually thought of as a singular monster, with a story, often tragic, possibly romantic, but more likely creepy and icky. And a large part of the adventure is actually learning that story so that you understand enough about the vampire to kill him.
Fast forward 7 years from ’83, and TSR decides to release a whole campaign setting of Gothic horror: vampires, Frankenstein monsters, ghosts, werewolves, mummies — anything that Universal made a movie about. (Actually, no swamp monsters and lagoon people…) TSR published a lot of adventures and accessories for this line, including a whole line of guidebooks to some of those notable monster types.
In a way, the “Children of the Night” series is both a companion to those books, and a reminder that a monster in Ravenloft also is a person with a personality and story. In other words, it’s the same question the original authors asked when getting a vampire on a random table: who is this and why are they here?
There were four Children of the Night books published from 1996-1999, e.g., the death throes of TSR, each covering some class of monster: vampires, ghosts, werebeasts, and the created (i.e., golems, i.e., Frankenstein monsters); each has 13 examples of creatures, and each creature comes with a short adventure.
Here is a question that each book asks (to me): what is the point of this monster? Or put another way, what is an archetypal use of this monster? What is this monster a symbol for or what makes it scary? (This all reminds me of a argument I read a long time ago that said, for the middle class: vampires were our fear of an unstoppable aristocracy, werewolves were our fear that our position was unstable; and zombies were our fear of the mindless hordes of the lower classes. Which as a system, has problems, but hoo boy, do I love a system.)
And once you know what the archetype and symbolism are, are there some surprises you can pull off by interrogating that core?
Overall, in my 40s, I’m not crazy about these books and their examples because, frankly, I don’t think they really answer those questions or interrogate the core story. You could argue that I am dinging these books for not being what they never promised to be, but I think the failure to approach these topics leads these books into making the same mistakes.
For instance, here’s two moves common in all four books:
(1) it does X, so the PCs will think it’s a Y, but really it’s a Z
This is a fun idea the first time and a good way to take your players by surprise from a tactical perspective (they get holy water, but it turns out to be a werebat! Oh no, they need silver); and that tactical upset might lead to some of the helpless horror, but nothing deeper than that, and part of the promise of this series is that each of these examples is a little horror all to itself.
(2) a lot of backstory, with no way for the PCs to learn it and no need for them to.
The original Ravenloft made finding out the vampire’s story integral to defeating him. These, meanwhile, are just info dumps that no one needs to know, practically. If this were a screenplay, these would be the parts an actor would rightly claim are unplayable and so not helpful to know.
Now, I don’t want to go through all 13 monsters in all four books, though god knows I took the notes for that, I just want to hit on highs, lows, and commonalities.
***
VAMPIRES
Reading these monsters, you would be lead to believe that a vampire story is about someone evil or not who is ironically cursed to never get the thing they wanted in life.
So we get a good person turned into a vampire who wants to rid the world of vampires; or the half-vampire who constantly wants to find a lover to replace his dead vampire and will never feel truly human or truly vampire again; or a druid vampire who has to drink animal blood, oh no!
Here’s my three favorites:
-a Viking cursed to vampirism who leads an undead crew; he can turn into a giant octopus, which is just odd; and his ship rises at night from the ocean, which is a nice visual. The story of how he turned into a vampire is boring nonsense (attacked by a vampire octopus AND had a cursed gem) and effectively this is just going to be a monster attack at sea, but I like the visuals.
-a desert vampire cursed to this unlife until he can restore the divine pharaoh bloodline to the study of religion, and who doesn’t know that the wild children he feeds on are the descendants of the pharaohs he would need to help. Twist! Honestly, this backstory is also not great — he loved the pharaoh’s wife, so murdered the pharaoh and was cursed — so there’s no real upside to the PCs helping him. Like, where’s the tragedy that would lead them to wanting to help him rather than just destroy him? Now maybe make the wild children need him for something and then you have a reason to reform him.
-a vampire who runs a thieves guild and is too powerful for you to actually harm, so you have to prevent him from hurting people by disabling the thieves guild — that’s a solid setup and though there’s nothing _intrinsically_ vampiric about the villain, it feels like an extension of the Renfield character, and I would push it into that territory, maybe make the linchpin of the organization a terrifying and tragic figure — a once great person now fallen into madness and addiction. Then threaten the PCs with some of that same addiction…
I’m not going to enumerate my least favorites, but suffice it to say, I mostly wrote “but why?” In the margins over and over. (A druid vampire in a thorn maze — that’s fun, but why a vampire? A vampire who was cursed to be invisible and who has a carnival house of horror? That’s, well, no, that’s not fun, that’s just plain silly.)
***
GHOSTS
What makes a good ghost story? The answer mostly seems to be: unfinished business. Whatever killed them, these people have a reason to want to stick around. So far, pretty standard and fine for ghost stories, with the usual breakdown of “they were murdered so need justice done” and “they were evil and their evil lives on.” (Isn’t that sort of the genius of the movie ____ (name redacted for spoilers, but if you know, you know — and I’m sure there’s a few times where this trick gets pulled), where you think the ghost is good and just needs to be laid to rest, but then it turns out that they are the evil kind.)
This book points to something true that you might have missed before about most of the personalities in these books: they are largely tied to one adventure that, when finished, should finish them off. In other words, these are largely not recurring characters or NPCs to build a campaign around. As I noted above, these are mostly slightly-expanded random encounters.
My favorites include
-the bait-and-switch — a dumb kid thinks he’s a ghost because of a cursed amulet he tried to steal, meanwhile the mom who sent him to steal it is a remorseful ghost, so the PCs really just have to get these two reunited and talking. It’s really the closest this book comes to a happy ending and some notion of atonement beyond “living with regret forever.”
-the drowned woman murdered by a false lover who appears both in her beautiful and lake-rotten form — a very clear D&D-ification of a murder ballad, which is a nice change of pace
My least favorites include things like a black cat (that isn’t a ghost but just an evil force that wants the PC to do more evil); or the cowardly ex-hero ghost who spends his unlife reenacting his failure — which is fine, but which fails as an encounter since (a) how would the PCs learn his story and (b) they would just experience it as a sudden and meaningless betrayal.
There’s also a few cases here where, frankly, too much gets piled on to the story. For example, there’s a ghost who is the child victim of domestic violence who comes back to protect the innocent, but who has a mean streak; and the adventure for that ghost involves a necromancer turning laborers into zombies, which feels like a few stories mashed together. Maybe your game group would like that, but it seems odd to me. Like, so many of my complaints are “this doesn’t resolve neatly,” which would be a silly complaint of, say, a realist work where part of the point is that things aren’t neatly turned into stories. But this is D&D!
And there’s some cases that have some solid ideas — the bad warlord who reformed and the good protector turned bitter who have to share the same body — but again, what I think is really missing here is some thoughts as to what it all means.
***
WEREBEASTS
This book opens up with a few pages on how to use werebeasts for Gothic horror, even though the real horror the werebeast is that you might be one and so destroy the things you love. And pretty much, except for jump scares, that’s what they say to do.
And I think that’s about what you can say about the werebeast threat: it’s most interesting as a threat of your own unmanageable self. Which is probably why your classic horror stories about lycanthropy are about being cursed/catching it, whereas having lycanthropy run in the family can lead to more Teen Wolf-style hijinks. (I still love the beat when Michael J. Fox is trying to hide his affliction from his dad, who then comes In as a schlubby dad werewolf.)
So, sure, you can use a werewolf as a big scary monster (like the pirate who was forced into cannibalism and cursed to be a wererat, whose big adventure is “you go onto his boat, he pretends to be lost at sea, then attacks with all his rat friends”); or you can turn to other mythologies of animal-folk (like the werefox who wants to be the star of the opera and will use all her seductive fox maiden tricks to make it); or you can do that bait-and-switch that I complained about (he seems like a vampire but is really a werebat).
Again, over and over, I had to ask “what makes it necessary for this monster to be a lycanthrope?” and the closest I think we got was
-a bad painter uses a cursed palette to make good paintings, but it has made him into a werepig, which is funny only because he has bad taste — or at least, that’s the way I would take this, as an ironic note that this fancy painter is really a boar
-a good guy cursed to be a weregorilla when he gets angry (with a backstory involving an attempted assault that I feel like I would change), but who also travels around with a carnival of weird and dangerous folks that constantly get him into trouble
-a wereray who is slowly infecting the fishing town to make them help her with uncovering a drowned Cthulhu-esque temple, which gets to the contagion aspect of lycanthropy and even connects it to the underwater cosmic horror of Lovecraft. (I might make it a different werefish just to give them the Innsmouth look.)
***
CREATED
The “Created” was one in-universe term for golems, which covers any sort of construct created in a humanoid form. So in original D&D you get clay golems (which seem pretty close to the Judaic lore), flesh golems (straight up Frankenstein monster, stitched together from multiple bodies), and on and on and on. What all these constructs share in common in regular D&D is that they are created on purpose.
What they share in common in Ravenloft is that they probably are created by obsessed people and they all have some form of sentience that usually curdles in a very Frankenstein monster manner from innocence to rage over their creation.
So what, besides Frankenstein, makes a good golem story? What’s the symbolism here?
It seems like “created” stories here are largely pre-industrial robot stories, so you get some of the same tropes, like the rebellion (and close cousin: the robot who takes too seriously its job to defend) and the robot who thinks it’s a regular person.
But what does it mean? Theres “people pushing into matters they shouldn’t and getting punished for it”; and there’s “the revenge of the inanimate” (i.e., when your smart house turns against you), but unlike the ghost (unfinished business and creeping mortality) and the lycanthrope (the tension between civilization and animal urges), I’m not sure there’s something that really unites created stories. Maybe it’s “the child — who never asked to be born — growing up to displace the parent in a world that hates it”?
But ultimately, the narrowness of this focus leads the authors to repeat some of the same stories or to reach for other stories beyond the core concept of these being “created.” Like, the cover that I like so much features a self-made golem, a smart tree that got turned into a bunch of magic sticks which are trying to find their pieces, which is a fine story, but not really a “created” story; and there’s a mist monster here which the book assures is a golem because part of it is solid, but that’s in no way the promise of this book!
As for repeated stories, we get a few stories where someone is driven mad by love and so re-creates their lover. There’s some variety there — one is a doctor who failed to stop a plague from taking his beloved, the other is the same story except you first meet the golem who doesn’t know she’s a golem but is having nightmares about a man coming to kill her (since she’s made from parts of women that man killed), one is a woman who can’t decide between two lovers and so sews them together after they duel — but it’s almost the same story.
Here’s my favorites:
-a wax golem who runs a wax museum, and who is replacing people in town — which is bog standard, but which is improved by a long column on “giving players what they want,” i.e., of course they’ll expect the wax museum is full of real people, so let’s just play that straight — in fact, the monster here resembles Vincent Price
-a man who hates those who make golems decides to stop them all by… making a super golem out of doppelgänger pieces. So the monster turns into whoever it fights, which is a fun mirror since that’s the man’s situation as well. I don’t recall anything else about this other than that nice bit of thematic work.
-an intelligent sword melted down into gold coins to guard a hoard now guards it even from the miser, who has come to regret his miserliness and wants to give away his money, even as the golem is hiring thieves in order to murder them and steal more money. The miser turning good because he realizes the cost of his miserliness feels a little too hokey, but I like the idea of living gold coins.
-a scientist stitches together little helpers out of body parts, which is mostly interesting because there’s a notion that these little “handymen” might actually be a help to the town, and the adventure for them is really just a bunch of scenes as you watch the town evolve over time.
***
So overall, what do I take away from these books? There's some interesting imagery and some interesting characters, but I have to say, most of what I'm taking away are negative models, things not to do.
December 27, 2022
Companion piece to Van Richten's Guide to Vampires, presenting a set of "worked examples". Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
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