Zombies are weird now.
At one point, they used to be this slow but inevitable doom. A vast, endless mass of single minded cannibals coming for your flesh. They didn't move fast because they didn't have to. They were like the ocean, and humanity was the shore.
Rocks get worn down and consumed by the sea.
Now they are tweakers on angel dust with the inhuman speed and strength that comes with it. They are an endless jump scare and gore fest. There is no dread. There is no time to think.
There is just running and explosions and machine guns.
I read somewhere that zombies in movies reflect our zeitgeist, which would explain the change. We are really fucked up now and barely have time to think.
That might be why this particular Ravenloft adventure, Night of the Walking Dead, is so interesting to me. Arriving in 1992, it lands during an interesting transition period both for the game line and the genre. It is also an introductory adventure, which are really, really hard to do well.
Keith Senkowski Art
I now have a limited run of signed and numbered prints available at my online shop.
It may seem weird to say this now, when this adventure came out, the zombie genre was sort of nonexistent. At best, people remembered Romero's Night of the Living dead or had seen the unfortunate Savini remake.
As a marquee monster to hang an introductory adventure on, it is perhaps a risky choice.
This was also a point where they began to retcon their way into storyland with the adventures. This adventure in particular gives us the prophecy for the Grand Conjunction storyline, which they used to connect the dots between the very first Ravenloft adventure, Feast of Goblyns, with Ship of Horror and Touch of Death.
I can't leave this alone... This is so dumb...
So, when Ravenloft comes out in 1990, it sort of follows the standard D&D model of adventure structures. The problem is they are really competing for the mindshare of the Vampire the Masquerade kids. These kids want story...
I will not dive into the reality vs promise of Vampire here. I don't have the energy right now... I just don't...
When TSR realizes that they are competing with Vampire, the line quickly shifts towards the story-based adventures. What does story adventures need? You guess it...
Fucking metaplot
Thus was birthed the Grand Conjunction. A nonsense thing that was used to string together a bunch of unrelated adventures written by a bunch of different people. This is the adventure where it gets super explicit, but there is an annoying problem with it if you have been playing Ravenloft for a bit.
Let me break it down simply.
- Feast of Goblyns - Levels 4-7
- Ship of Horror - Levels 8-10
- Touch of Death - Levels 3-5
- Night of the Walking Dead - Levels 1-3
I mean, you are releasing these adventures for a game centered on continuous play and you just added a metaplot? How does that work if I can't use my same characters?
You know what would have been cool? Provide players with rules and guidance on how to play through the metaplot with multiple characters bringing it all together. That would have been cool...
Fucking TSR man... Fucking 90's game design...
All my complaining of where it sits in Ravenloft aside, it isn't a bad adventure. Honestly, it would have probably of been a better introductory adventure than Feast of Goblyns. It does a couple of things right, and the things it does wrong are relatively easy to adjust.
Good Bad Guys
The Zombie Lord and the Madman are both really good villains, and both are leveraged nicely in this adventure. The Zombie Lord doesn't really make sense, because he is kind of a ghoul, but that doesn't matter. He is a nice, gross threat.
He is also a lord of, well, slow ass zombies. D&D zombies at the time are the George Romero zombies. Slow, mindless, "brains" muttering, "they are coming to get you Barbara" zombies.
Couple those guys with the Madman, who is just a lunatic murdering people in the streets at night, and you get some nice tension. You get to have some bad things happen off camera that make the on camera confrontation that much juicier.
What also adds to the fun with these two monsters is that they are brothers. In fact, they are two of three brothers the party runs into. And, for once with Ravenloft, it isn't the party watching their story unfolding. Instead, their sick shit is happening, and the adventurers get to disrupt that mess.
You also have some nice normal threats peppered throughout. Crocodiles and giant frogs showing up in the swamps was a nice touch. Normalish and challenging for low level characters in D&D, they help keep stakes high without everything having to be about "oh, the horror" which these adventures sometimes fall into.
The Events
The events are the weakest part of the adventure, but only because they are keyed kind of weirdly. Instead of being something that you can leverage when you need them as a DM, they are tied to time slots. It leaves a lot of dead air, which when I ran this a billion years ago, left me floundering to fill with interesting bits for my friends to explore.
There could probably be a few more of them with less detail. Some could even be repeatable to heighten the tension when needed. If they were tied to the useful rumors and information the villages provide, all the better.
The Conclusion
The nice thing about this particular adventure is that it actually concludes. It is likely because the adventure isn't tied to a domain lord with all that baggage. In this case, once you wack the Zombie Lord and the Madman, things wrap up. The villagers rejoice, give the party food and supplies, and send them on their way.
I think that is why this one works so well. It isn't someone's novel. It gives you the connection to the metaplot, but in the way the X-Files used to do that. A sort of monster of the week episode with a little bit of the Smoking Man doing his thing in the background.
A Few Less Than Savory Things
It is hard to not be frustrated with some of the layout choices in the adventure. The "insert" doesn't actually look like an insert. It falls in a weird spot in the book, and ends up creating confusion. Suddenly, mid sentence, you are reading something else. It feels like a misprint, but really it is just bad graphical way finding.
There is also the combination of this being set on a plantation and the Vistani. I know some folks would give this a pass. Another time and another place and all that. I just can't.
The whole setting of the adventure is a thinly veiled Louisiana bayou plantation. It does nothing to address the very real horror of what those places were. The entire location could easily of been described as a farm or manor, eliminating the reference and the white washing.
All the plantations in the US should have been razed to the ground after the civil war.
Then there are the Vistani, which is going to be a thing for me for every one of these reviews. I remember people being racist about "gypsies" in our area when this stuff was written. It was fucked up then too.
I know it was a trope from the Universal movies. It doesn't mean that they couldn't have invented something more interesting that isn't a straight caricature of an entire maligned culture.
Despite all that, this is probably the strongest adventure they put out for the line. It gives the DM tools to play with, an interesting story that you don't have to force, and a challenge that is both threatening but manageable.
It could easily be adapted to any of a hundred other RPGs for those that are so inclined. I know I have used it for Torchbearer myself, sans plantation and Vistani...
