Night of the Walking Dead

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.

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.