To arm a new generation against the creatures of the night, Van Richten has compiled his correspondence and case files into this tome of eerie tales and chilling truths. No one knows this better than monster scholar Rudolph Van Richten. Just thought you should know.Terror stalks the nightmare realms of Ravenloft. If you follow the link and buy the product, I make some money. The link to the product in this review is probably an affiliate link. And is one of the more comprehensible sections of text. That big text blob at the bottom? That’s an example of what the ENTIRE adventure is like. Open it up and scroll to the last page of it. The preview is eight pages and shows you nothing of the adventure, which a preview should actually do. While some investigation and NPC talking to is a great idea, you first have to make the adventure legible, and this ain’t that. Yeah, I’ve said almost nothing about the adventure. I mean, you could not point to a better example of the issues of legibility in adventures. It’s just impossible to find ANYTHING in this text.īut, at its core, it’s just walking around a village talking to some NPC”s and a few wilderness encounters and a small lair map. It’s all laid out in a if you ask about this then they say that format, with an emphasis on minute, light how far someones’s tunic comes down to the ground. Did I mention the large block of red front on a beige background? THis thing is ROUGH to wade through.Ĭombined with this are LONG sections of traditional paragraph text. I’ve tried to wade through it twice and while I think I’ve done a decent job, I can’t help but think I’m not getting the full picture. ![]() So much so that I feel guilty with this review, because I don’t think I’ve given it a fair shake with the content. You’re fighting the actual legibility of the text the entire way. Like, the biggest problem I’ve ever seen in all of my D&D reviews. Dense with color and thick with (more) weird font choices, they are, almost all of them, not going to be possible to figure out without a lot of work. On top of all of this are the maps, which looks like they came from an EGA/VGA computer game. It’s seriously almost impossible to read. Scanning would be impossible for mortal man. You have to work, work very hard indeed, to just engage in the act of reading the text. Basically, it’s a kind of gothic font with cap letter oversized, lots of little flourishes and stroke marks on lowercase letters, and it’s all in a heavy bold. On top of this, and perhaps more importantly for this adventure, it’s using a funky font. In formats like digest sized adventures then this isn’t such an issue, your eyes don’t have as far to travel. It makes the physical act of reading text quite fatiguing. ![]() ![]() Your eyes have a long way to travel across the page, causing you to lose track of where you are. If I had to point to one adventure to illustrate my point then it would be this one. I harp on legibility issues from time to time. There might be ten or so pages of intro/table of contents also, leaving about sixty or so pages of actual content. Of the 176 pages about a hundred of them belong to an appendix, character sheets, and so on. I THINK it’s just a simple linear plot thing. Like “You can’t actually read it in order to run it’ rough. A killer stalks the night and must be caught before he kills again!
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