Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales: Ravenloft Campaign Adventure:

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition

by William W. Connors, Shane Lacy Hensley

Masque of the Red Death is a new variant of the Ravenloft rules that allows players to explore the macabre world of the 1890's.

From the brave cavalryman with his trusty revolver to the mysterious spiritualist and her store of secret knowledge, no one is safe from the horrors of the night.

Masque of the Red Death contains everything you need to adventure in the fictional worlds of Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

CONTENTS: * A Guide to Gothic Earth: A 128-page book by the author of Van Richten's Guide to Ghosts and Forbidden Lore that gives you all the rules and information you'll need to run adventures on Gothic Earth.

Included are 16 character kits, a revised spellcasting system, complete rules for firearms and explosives, and a proficiency system especially designed to reflect life in the Victorian Era.

* Red Tide: A chilling 32-page adventure in which PCs must face one of mankind's oldest enemies while exploring the gloomy waterfront of San Francisco.

* Red Jack: The most frightening figure ever to stalk the streets of London is on the loose in this 32-page adventure. This time, Jack takes his unique brand of terror to Boston.

* Red Death: An isolated mansion hidden in the mountains of eastern Europe is the setting for this 32-page drama in which the PCs must face death itself.

* A full-color, poster-sized map of Gothic Earth. * A bonus full-color poster of the cover painting by renowned artist Robh Ruppel.

* A three-panel DM Screen that places all essential reference charts at your fingertips.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Dungeons and Dragons, Horror, Gaming, Fantasy

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1994

Reviews

[Benjamin]

Today I’m going to cover a weird little campaign expansion for Ravenloft: The Masque of the Red Death. There were just three products published for this sub-line, so let’s dive in.

MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH AND OTHER TALES

If Ravenloft was “let’s expand D&D fantasy with Gothic horror of the 19th century (Frankenstein to Dracula to Moreau),” Masque of the Red Death decides to make the move the other way: let’s make 19th-century Earth a playable setting for D&D.

Now there’s a whole thing here about how Earth used to be magical, but then an Ancient Egyptian priest accidentally tainted magic and/or let in some evil force called the Red Death — so there's a secret history angle here — but ultimately the game takes place in a Gothic horror-themed 1890s. (So there's a little bit of “this horrific force helped tip the world over into war,” but essentially it's our history.)

Now, because this is in the real world (kinda), they have to fiddle a bit with the characters and particularly the magic, to try to make this seem less fantastical. So, in plain words, wizards and clerics have much less magic than in other D&D games. As others have noted, it’s hard to marry horror to D&D since the power-fantasy of D&D runs counter to any feeling of helplessness that usually underpins a lot of horror. Is that why this lower-powered setting feels a little more open to horror? Or is it the relatability of the horror that takes place in the real world?

(Curiously, like Call of Cthulhu, this version of AD&D goes for more skills-based powers than class-associated powers, e.g., rather than have thieves know all the thief skills, here you can pick and choose if your character knows how to pick locks, etc.)

(As an aside, it’s also real nice that this setting is different, because that means all the art is new. And quite flavorful.)

Of course, this being D&D in the 1890s, there’s a lot about combat and firearms; but the part that always got my attention was the Atlas, an 18 pp survey of major points of interest in the world, with both a capsule summary of the history and some promising adventure seeds of Forbidden Lore. There is also 12 pp on villains (including the Frankenstein monster and Vlad Tepes), which are good for inspiring adventure ideas.

Now, one choice that was made (in 1994) that I think we could revise now is the inclusion of Ravenloft’s Vistani as magic Romani; I mean, I don’t know, it was a different time and you’re drawing from some works with that trope, but… Well, let’s put it this way: how would you want to do that today?

This box set also includes 3 intro adventures: the PCs are invited to a doomed masquerade ball and have to break the curse of the clock to escape (riffing on a Poe story); Dracula in San Francisco; and Jack the Ripper in America. They all seem fine to me, but again, I might be overly sold by the art work of reasonably dressed 19th-century Americans in suits investigating a rat-infested ship's hold/vampire den.

And while I see some utility to having a big evil force that the PCs can feel like they’re opposing, I wonder if they ever considered just ditching the whole “mastermind of evil” schtick that runs through Ravenloft (with the Mists, etc.). Like what if evil wasn’t ultimately kind of a monolith?

THE GOTHIC EARTH GAZETTEER

I was just discussing the 1988 movie Willow and the novelization which proudly proclaims that it has 8 pages of color pictures from the movie; which today would be a little silly — all those pics can be found online pretty easily — but back in the day, that’s what we had.

I have a similar feeling to the first chapter in this book, which is headlines of the 1890s, and that’s what it is: just important stuff that happened, including a two-page, month-by-month breakdown of the Spanish-American War. Maybe we needed this in the '90s, but it seems less interesting now.

But the rest of this book really hits my sweet spot, as it basically expands on the Atlas chapter from the core box set, with more historical events and happenings (the Ghost Dance movement, Arctic Exploration, railroad expansion, the Dreyfus Affair, Zionism, Spiritualism, African colonization); more people and their secret histories (Zeiss killed by holograms!, Cezanne warring with a mental parasite!, Fridtjof Nansen found something in the arctic!, etc.);

Two things to add about the who’s who section: (a) there are no stats, which I like a lot, just a little capsule review, BUT that also means that a lot of this is info we could pick up elsewhere, even in the '90s; and (b) continuing from the box set, the people here are both historical and fictional, which… I don’t love. In Castle Falkenstein, the collapse of fictional and real world history is part of how whimsical the setting is, but in a dark fantasy setting like this, it puts me at one remove — I’d rather play in a world where the characters are closer to me, which means they too know that the book Frankenstein exists, and rather than have the monster from the book run around, I’d prefer if the novel was based on a real secret history or was the inspiration for a mad scientist or we simply have a story close to that.

I guess what I want from an accessory like this is info I can use, which leans heavily towards the secret/fantasy stuff they make up, which is why I also like the chapter on secret organizations, from the good heirs of the Enlightenment to the evil white supremacists. This is the kind of stuff that we could make up, but we couldn't just get from our local library, and it’s nice to see models.

What’s also curious to me is that this book is 64 pages long, and it covers the whole world and 10 years, whereas the only other published accessory is the 96 page long…

A GUIDE TO TRANSYLVANIA

A running theme in my TSR reviews is “Who thought this was a good idea?” Like: “Who thought it was a good idea to make a historical sourcebook for 16-17th-century Europe?” or “Who thought it was a good idea, after the failure of Maztica, to produce another Spanish colonial fantasy in Savage Baronies?” Or maybe we could ask the question: “why this accessory now?”

So, if you got the core box for Masque and maybe the Gazetteer, what would you want? Maybe a guide to creating 19th-century characters? Maybe a rogues gallery? Maybe some monsters in the vein of Ravenloft’s MC2 (where each monster was also a personality)? Maybe even an adventure?

What we get instead is a super-narrow gazetteer that is also focused on one specific novel. (God, how great would it be if TSR said, “yes, we’re covering England, but we’re not doing Dracula’s England, we’re doing Middlemarch”?) In this 96-page book on a real place, we get

-16 pp of history, with a few Forbidden Lore sections, mostly of the form “The Red Death influenced this bad event”, and heavily focused on Dracula;
-21 pp of a little gazetteer, with Forbidden Lore sections for just about every city mentioned (which I like!);
-27 pp about the culture (and folklore) of Transylvania;
-21 pp about specific people (both good and bad, including Dracula and Van Helsing).

As I’ve pointed out before, if you start with Earth as your setting, then your DM could go look up Transylvanian history—or even read Dracula themselves—but I should say, there is some utility in covering that info in a small, digestible, and game-focused form. Still, it’s not the main draw of a book like this. Rather, this book should be focused on the horrific and Gothic—what adventures could be had there. And my bowler hat is off to the writer, there is a focus on that with those Forbidden Lore sections and the characters here.

And yet, no matter how good this book could have been, I’m still left wondering why this? It’s an OK book, with some boring parts and missteps (though that said, I love the author’s note pointing out that the book is slanted towards the Romanian side of history because Dracula was Romanian—it’s just a good example of owning the POV rather than pretending to some historical objectivity)—but it has such a limited utility that I’m sad it was the last product in this little sub-line.

[Francisco Becerra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous from beginning to end. The best of TSR's campaign expansions and one of the best historical settings. The rules expansion are great, and add marvelous realism. If you have Ravenloft, this is a must.

[Kelvin Green · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is a half-decent idea here.

Let's take Ravenloft...

Wait, what's a Ravenloft?

Right, so it's Dungeons & Dragons does Universal -- or if you have good taste, Hammer -- horror. It's a patchwork world in which each of the classic horror archetypes rules over a little fiefdom, terrorising the locals, and the players go around staking vampires and shoving silver up werewolves, while trying not to draw the attention of the evil Darklords. The twist is that the bad guys are trapped there too, for Reasons, so if you wanted to you could examine concepts of destiny, responsibility, and enforced roles, but it's D&D so of course you don't do that.

Anyway. Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales backports the Ravenloft mechanics and setup to Earth in the 1890s, so instead of Tesco Value Dracula, you can fight actual Dracula, which is nice. All of the classic bad guys -- and some good guys, like Sherlock Holmes -- are running about, and ruling over the whole lot is the Red Death. What the Red Death is or does is not defined, which as we will see, is a bit of a recurring problem.

(The Red Death is more or less Nyarlathotep, but is never named as such, probably because of licensing reasons.)

I like the basic idea, I even admire the attempt to use AD&D2 for a near-modern setting, but the whole thing is a mess, veering from cack-handed to half-hearted. It's a shame.

Some examples:

It's unwieldy from the start. To play you need the AD&D2 books, this boxed set, plus the Ravenloft boxed set, and the Ravenloft: Forbidden Lore boxed set. The latter two you need for a couple of rules mechanics that could have been reprinted here -- as we will see, it's not like the space was needed for anything else -- but ah, then you'd be buying only one box, not three and how then would TSR avoid going bust?

Oh.

Imagine playing this in 1994, before everyone had pdfs. Imagine you were the GM but you were running the game at someone else's house, and you'd need to lug three boxes plus rulebooks plus whatever else over there. Crikey.

The setting-specific rules -- the ones that you don't have to go and find in other boxes -- are a bit of a mess too. AD&D2 for the 1890s was always going to be a fudge but it feels like they just gave up after a first draft. Fighters/soldiers are the only viable character type; magic use has interesting drawbacks -- corruption, insanity, attracting the Red Death -- but they are also probably too punitive, although I love that sort of thing in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay so (shrugs).

Thieves become "tradesmen" and lose their thief skills, but get them back as Non-Weapon Proficiencies, the effectiveness of which are based on the character's -- random -- statistics, and must be bought from a pool of points of which the magic users will in most cases get more, AND the tradesman doesn't in fact get default access to the thief skills -- no one does -- so has to spend more of that pool of points to get them.

"You can play these other classes," TSR seems to say, "But they are crap, so don't bother." Soldiers for everyone! Which is fine, I suppose, if that was the intent, but if so why bother with the other classes -- the tradesman in particular, who is crippled by these rules -- at all? I can imagine that further development could fix the issues with the other classes, but that didn't happen.

There's an explosives table, because blowing monsters up is great! It has three entries, two of which are identical, and the last is different in only one place. Why does this table exist? I'm not picking on one table; it's all like this.

In fairness some parts work better than others. You could probably fix the rules, but once you've done that, what do you do in Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales? How are you supposed to play? Excellent question.

You can't use most D&D adventures because it's Earth in the 1890s. You could use Ravenloft adventures because they at least have the right mood, but for some odd reason that's never floated as a possibility. There are three adventures in the box, one of which isn't bad, one is an interesting idea executed as a linear series of fights, and one is dead in the water (literally) and wastes a major character.

Well, you don't need example adventures, not if the setting guide is full of evocative plot seeds and compelling adventure ideas.

(Spoiler: it is not.)

The setting is vague and underwritten in that annoying style that was everywhere in the 90s, all "rumours" this and "unconfirmed" that. It's all quite terrible, but this is perhaps the best/worst example, from the Australia section:

The arrival of the Europeans has resulted in the violation of old taboos and the disruption of countless traditions. The exact nature of these trespasses and their repercussions may not be known for decades to come. Interviews with the native population of Australia tend to be less than informative, for many of the taboos forbid even the discussion of them.

Whahuh? I can see words there, but I see no actual content. Someone was paid money to write that. This idiot paid money to read it.

Look, I know you can't cover everything in an introductory box, but this sort of non-committal nothingness is of no use to anyone. I would have put in some concrete examples, perhaps mentioning specific D&D monsters that could be used for the basis of an adventure, even mentioning published adventures that could be slotted in. Anything other than the "I dunno, you sort it out" we get.

(There is one weird exception. Singapore gets a few lines about a very specific incident involving tiny creatures that make people disappear. There's not much more than that, and no suggestion of what the things are, but it's something.)

The Red Death, the Big Bad of the setting, is left completely undefined, except that it might be living in Vienna, except that's probably just a rumour. Okay, fair enough, I understand not specifying what the Red Death is, but maybe offer three examples, Dracula Dossier style, of what it could be. That way the GM can take one and use as is, or use the three as examples to develop their own Red Death. This is not difficult, and my gosh, it's not as is the space is being used for anything important.

I'm not sure why this box exists. I can't imagine fans were clamouring for a Ravenloft-but-the-1890s product and it seems like an odd thing to release as a boxed set, although this was the era of TSR spaffing out as many boxed sets as they could. My guess is that it's an unfortunate confluence of someone making a joke pitch over lunch in the TSR canteen, and a sudden boxed set shaped gap in the production schedule; the pitch got commissioned and then everyone scrabbled to get the thing out. It feels like an initial idea shoved out the door before it was ready. Perhaps it was an attempt to compete with Call of Cthulhu, but if so it's the most lacklustre attempt imaginable.

Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales is a broken product that requires umpteen other products to use, it feels unfinished, and what is included is of little use, so I wouldn't recommend tracking this one down. All that said, there is still something compelling about the basic concept, something that got me to buy it in the first place.

(I think; I don't remember when I got my copy or even if I bought it at all. It may have been a gift.)

With quite a lot of further development -- which it is obvious never happened with the published box -- Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales could work. Maybe. Ish.

[Arthur B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting concept, fundamentally let down by some uninspired adventure material and the fact that it's trying to do something the D&D system is fundamentally unsuited to. Might work better as an alternate setting for Call of Cthulhu or something. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...

[Tiina Susanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

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