Ship of Horror

Rereading old adventures is a trip. You start to ask yourself questions. Questions like...

Have gamers always been concerned with dumb crap? Was it just the writers at TSR that were concerned with dumb crap and ended up creating an environment for accepting it? Is there something about gaming that just attracts people obsessed with dumb crap?

Which came first I guess? The dumb crap or the desire for the dumb crap?

Ship of Horror is one of those products filled with the dumb crap. So much of it is useless D&D claptrap that just fills pages. The entire ship is described room by room for no reason. There is a section on sea sickness. A whole bunch of nonsense on coercing the players into the adventure in the first place.

All of that before even getting into the actual adventure.

The adventure itself is basically split in two. The first half is a bit of a light who done it mixed with my least favorite parts of D&D; underwater nonsense. The second half is basically a hunt and a fight with a family of necromancers and their undead.

On the Boat

The grand mystery of the boat is that the captain has been taking money to deliver corpses to the island but instead has been dumping bodies in the ocean. Now he is being haunted by the spirits of those folks. The only way to put those spirits to rest is to find their bodies and do the dance.

Meaning, you have to dive into 80 feet of water for a corpse and fight a giant starfish. Peak gothic horror if you ask me. Peak...

On the Island

All that detail about the boat and the island is basically a set up for two confrontations. One is with normal folks, the family of the big bad who are a bunch of grave robbers. The other is with the necromancer himself, the domain lord.

That is about it.

The whole adventure is 64 pages. So many words for so little that needed to be said. It is really one of those super small 12 page adventures they released in the 90s for Basic D&D. It barely even has any of the traditional Ravenloft trappings to give it the veneer of being different from a bog standard adventure.

What is wild is that this adventure is a part of the Grand Conjunction series of linked adventures. It doesn’t make sense why it would be other than it had already been released and they retconned it into the prophecy after the fact.

If you are looking for something interesting to convert to a different system or to pick up for a nostalgic night of gaming, give this one a pass. There is barely anything interesting here. Even the necromancer himself is pretty boring.