#church's ravenloft reviews

[churchyardgrim]

THE ENEMY WITHIN by Christie Golden

oh god it’s been so long BUT WE’RE BACK FOLKS 

u know who is also back? Christie Golden!  and she follows me on twitter oh god run

so this one's not the most fun book of the bunch, a bit serious and plodding, but Golden's writing has improved much since her last two Ravenloft books, and it kept me interested til the end

so we open with government. Most Noble Goodboy Sir Tristan Hiregaard is handed a royal brat of a teenager to supervise, on account of the king having died of plot disease. his own son, Ivaar, is one of those rich kid revolutionaries who care just so much about the plight of the downtrodden, and who haven't quite figured out that a purging of the bourgeoisie would take their own heads off too. his best friend is captain of the guard, and he is by all accounts a tirelessly fair statesman.

the book actually makes me like the guy, which. that's not fair, Ms. Golden. i've seen the cover art, you and i both know what's coming!

anyway what's coming is through a series of realistically stupid events, our boy Triscuit gets Vistani Cursed for something that wasn't his fault, and, totally coincidentally, some strange horrible murders start happening!

we've got a bit of Jack the Ripper here, a killer targeting sex workers and lower class women in gory ways and leaving badly-spelled messages on walls, that sort of thing

Tristan, being the protagonist, shows his Goodboy nature by being horrified and vowing to Find The Killer At All Costs

meanwhile, his kid has an unexpected visitor at this week's meeting of the Nova Vaasan Young Gentleman's Revolutionary Club, which goes something like this:

"hello young sirs, have you heard the good word of our lord and savior Generic Cat God?"

"why no, mysterious masked stranger, we have not."

"you have now! here have some kittens"

cats are a running theme, apparently; our mysterious masked stranger is Malken, supernaturally charismatic and promising to help better the downtrodden of the country through temple-sponsored orphanages and soup kitchens and a free cat to every new convert, and boy howdy is Ivaar wrapped around this guy's finger

but Tristan doesn't have time to talk to his son, or to worry about the new scientologists in town; he's got a MURDER to SOLVE

he does some boring detective work, investigates a Horse Racket, blah blahhhhh blah can we move on now

i'm just saying, Sam Vimes would have had this shit wrapped up within 72 sleepless hours, and he would have been funny about it

anyway Malken, shockingly, is not as benevolent as his silver tongue might suggest to impressionable young noblemen, and the cat god temple is literally the biggest front for organized crime the world's ever seen. dude's been alive for like a month at this point and he's already tied himself up in every single business in Nova Vaasa. he's like if Two Face was an actual italian mobster, it's kinda impressive. Tristan is rapidly running out of allies as his sexy other half steals all his friends with his sexy sexy crimes and murders.

at about the two-thirds mark, Triscuit finally cottons on to the same thing the reader knew from the cover art; which is, Tristan me boy look in a goddamn mirror

yes, that fun Vistani curse got u possessed! sort of. it's not quite a Jeckyl n Hyde situation, Malken isn't literally Tristan's secret inner desires manifesting themselves. he's literally a different person who occasionally gains occupancy over Tristan's body, physically changing it in the process

which is inconvenient! how are u supposed to fight a guy who shares ur own body?

Tristan, being also a wizard of some minor skill, does the dumbass protagonist thing of isolating himself further and not telling anyone ever about this revelation or what he plans to do about it. i can foresee no repercussions for this whatsoever.

i will say that it's a testament to Golden's writing skill that even in the home stretch here the book still manages to give you hope that this might have a happy ending

but god, nope, it is 100% a tragedy. the good kind, where you can see the way the bad decisions snowball from a mile off and it still hurts like fuck when Consequences happen. it's cathartic.

Tristan does some graverobbing for spell components, as one does, and when his best friend guard captain guy tries to stage an intervention like "hey dude you've been working a lot of late nights, and the murders keep piling up, and i've kinda noticed that the killer's handwriting kinda looks exactly like yours just with worse spelling and written with the left hand, are u good?" Tristan does the totally sane thing of accusing him of working with Malken and cracking his skull like an egg

which ow, god, i liked that guy actually

our climax is a tasty tasty mirrorverse boss fight! with Tristan having lost or sacrificed pretty much everything for a chance to end Malken's reign of terror, and Malken taunting him from reflections with philosophical inevitabilities

like goddamn, "I am all that keeps you good" what a line huh

in the end, they settle into equilibrium; batman and joker in one. Malken insists that they need each other, that without the necessary evil personified in another discrete entity, Tristan himself will slide into depravity. there's something to be said here about how heroes necessitate villains; a villain without a hero is successful, but a hero without a villain is merely useless

so they balance each other, though the real loser here is Nova Vaasa itself, being now entirely under the thumb of a sadistic crime lord. in other books (and game modules) it's a wasteland of grassy plains, haunted by beast-men, so perhaps that is the place's ultimate future within the mists. there are some continuity errors regarding Tristan's backstory between this book and the other materials though, so it might be worth treating as just a standalone story.

it's worth a read if you're after a supernatural mystery thriller! the writing is very good, if a bit plodding at times, and if you let yourself feel for the characters it does hurt so good when the genre-required bad things happen to them. i'm almost sad we won't see more of Golden's work in this series, but apparently she's done a metric fuckton of warcraft and star wars novels, so if you're so inclined there's plenty more where these came from

#church's ravenloft reviews #good lord its been a while huh #I GOT DISTRACTED AGAIN and Tapestry of Dark Souls was so depressing and joyless that i had to stop for a while hghdf #not gonna review that one bc it just wouldn't be funny #but next up is a fun one! #ur gonna like it :)

[jeeperso]

D&D Quotes Without Context

Ravenloft Edition, Dementlieu Arc part 9

GM: Ultimately though, our heroes gave the film 0/5 stars, and put their two thumbs down on the Hanged King. “I run through naked and on fire as a distraction.” "So first thing we need to decide, do we take the risky option of trying to snatch that key from the duchess or wait until Calix puts the box on display?" “I still say threesome is the perfect cover.” "Asshole Squad will almost certainly be waiting to try and snatch the box from us after we do the dangerous work. It's just how those scumbags seem to operate." “Yet they are very flammable.” “Find out where they sleep and pre-fireball it.” "Marshal, are you hearing creepy singing? It is like la la lalalalala but really slow and seems to be coming from foot level." "All the time," Marshal replies, before glaring at his watcher spirits. "Knock it off. You can torment me; Nyx isn't a customer." OOC: I wonder.. are any of Marshalls watchers little cyclopses on wheels.... Marshal OOC: Creepy beanie baby ghost muppets. "I serve He Who Has Many Guests. I am familiar with that level of parchmentwork." And with rules in hand, that's our cue to leave as fast as possible without breaking into a proper run. For in all things we must be elegant in the house of D'honaire. OOC: Elegant Speed Walking. "Well we can check out the other places they've been seen, but what I was wondering is where they could have stashed that... going-under-water-safely device thing they had when we first encountered them and Jonni set them on fire. What did Marshal call it?" "Apperture of Squashiness." "When this is all over...I'm going to go with you guys." “I mean, you don’t wanna be anywhere we’ve just left.” Gorbash, being underwater, is unable to call the ship a Mother-F_cker. Gorbash looks soggy and exhausted by the way. He's got a happy little crab on his shoulder. “Okay, I say we drop something heavy on it. Like a stand. Or an anchor. Or Marsh[al].” "On the plus side, we got a copy of the rules, and Nyx got cookies." Nyx: "Trust me, Irost, staying calm and not saying the wrong thing was all I could do in her presence. She is that scary." Irost: "Congratulations! You mastered Dementlieu Etiquette!" GM: Anyway, Vesh also gives you guys a crash course in waltzing and other stuff. Jonni: Jonni somehow makes waltzing seem dirty. GM OOC: Gorbash roll athletics or straight dex. OOC1: Athletics Gorbash can do. Unless you mean Arcobatics. OOC2: That's for the afterparty break dancing. Marshal: Tis rote and mechanical, but Marshal's time as an anamatronic pays off. GM: And Marshal invents the robot. Vesh: "Me and Jonni's dancing is so hot, it makes sex look like a church." Jonni: “To be fair, sex is my church.” Gorbash: "If they play a tango or anything that gives Jonni an excuse to seduce the female half of the room at a glance I'm sure she'll nail it." Vesh: "Unfortunately the only Imixian holiday is the festival of burning down the edifices of man and raining fire upon the mortal fools." Irost: "Is the food any good?" Vesh: "If you like fried stuff. Also you get to bring back souvenirs. Although its mostly charred skulls." Jonni: “It’s on my birthday.” Vesh: "Its actually how we met." Irost: "You've got to love traditional celebrations." “So, how much collateral damage is acceptable?” ".... I'll just review the rules again. To find out the minimum destruction allowed." GM: Lets just say it was a good thing Nyx decided to skip checking the fire exits. Nyx OOC: After seeing the Weeping Angel style angel statue guards, the ghoul greeter, and then the woman herself let's just say this. Nyx's brain had an appropriate response to all this: "Abort plan, abort plan! You would have a greater chance of surviving facing Linxia and her whole crew solo than if you tick this woman off even once. Be polite as possible and get out of here as soon as possible, do nothing to upset her!" OOC2: On the plus side Nyx got cookies out of it. OOC: Damn. The Pottsyvlanian time reversing microchips. OOC2: I was not expecting today to include Gorbash being thwarted by a Robo-time boat. OOC: It was underwater and maybe full of assholes.

#dungeons and dragons #dnd 5e #quotes without context #ravenloft

[doycetopia]

Ravenloft Ironsworn, part 5, The Burgomaster's Home

Ismark leads us down the street, past Mad Mary’s to E4, which is the Burgomaster’s home.

A weary-looking mansion squats behind a rusting fence. The gates are twisted and torn. The right gate lies cast aside while the left swings crazily in the wind. The stuttering squeal and clang of the gate repeats over and over and over…

Weeds choke the grounds and press in on the house itself, but against the walls the growth has been trodden under to form a path all about the place. Heavy claw marks have stripped the finish. Great black blotches tell of the fires that have assailed the walls. Not a pane nor shard of glass stands in any window. All the windows are barred with heavy planking, each plank marked with stains and gouges.

It’s obvious Ireena only lets me in because Ismark is with me, and vouches for me, and even then only because I apparently came at their father’s request.

The interior of the house is well furnished, although the fixtures show signs of considerable wear. Obvious oddities are the boarded-up windows and the overuse of holy symbols in every room. The Burgomaster’s body is in one of the sitting rooms — on display as if for a wake that never happened. His body has not been preserved in any way, and it’s been 10 days, so despite the candles burning in his honor, the smell in the house is quite horrible.

Ireena and Ismark barely seem to notice, so I don’t comment on it.

A bit of time passes….

It’s already the third time I’ve assured Ireena I’m here to help, but her reluctance or outright disbelief is starting to get to me.

“Sister, this farwarden tapped iron and swore to free Barovia!” Ismark exclaims. “Let her help us!”

[I’m trying to Secure an Advantage and build up some momentum.]

Ugh. Okay, that’s… not great. Either a miss, or I have to burn all my momentum for a weak hit. Basically the opposite of what I’m looking for. If I burn momentum to get a weak hit, I’ll be down from 6 momentum to 3. Bleh. Otherwise, I either fail or “your assumptions betray you”, and in either case I pay the price. Hmm. Give me a second so I can think about what my assumptions are.

My assumptions are:

There are vampires.

This “Strahd” is in some way obsessed with Ireena, and may be hundreds of years old, so… vampire.

Lot’s of women I’ve encountered so far have been victimized in some way by either vampires or the Baron (or maybe both).

Members of the farwardens have come here or been lured here before, and none have come back.

The villagers are on my side now (this one is new, and FAIR, since I just swore an Epic vow and forged a bond with them. sheesh.)

Hmm. So either I fail (to secure an advantage – getting Ireena on my side like Ismark is) or my assumptions betray me, and in either case, Pay the Price. Or… kill my Momentum to get a weak hit, but still a hit.

Pay the Price, if I go that route, would be…

Hmm. Okay, for that I’d go to the “Oracle” of the module and check the random encounter table for “Barovia Daytime”, in order to complicate things.

1d8 gets me a 3, which is…

Okayyyy… One. Angry. Villager.

You know what? Fine. Let’s see where this goes. There’s an angry hammering on the front door of house. Ismark and Ireena tense. I keep my hand free from my weapons, but the hand holding my shield tightens where no one can see, and I move to the door.

Who is it? Oracle says…

That’s… a lot to unpack.

“Come out of there, Ismark!” shouts a deep but somehow reedy voice. “Bring that foreign bitch with -”

I open the door fast enough that he cuts off what he’s saying. His eyes widen, he takes a step back, but then his expression pinches down and the grip on a nasty little fisherman’s knife tightens.

“Chenda?” Ismark says, stepping up on my right. “What in four hells are you doing here?”

“I heard about that blasphemy and treason at the tavern – you and your little -” he shoots a look me sidelong and chooses better words. “foreigner, too far in your cups, saying things you ought not, and her making promises she can’t keep, and be hanged if she tries.”

“Hanged? Treason?” Ismark snorts. “Wishing the monster Strahd dead isn’t treason, Chenda, and blasphemy? Are you entirely out of your mind?”

“The Baron is the Land, the Land is the People, the People are the Blood,” says Chenda, and it has the rhythm of a prayer to it. Something memorized. Something believed without thinking about it.

I step forward, through the door, and man takes another step back, scowling. “Your ‘baron’ is sucking the blood out of this land, fisherman. Literally, I think. How much can you lose before dying?”

[I’m looking to Compel this guy to back down, but while it might be nice for me to go in with +heart, I don’t think that’s how it’s going down. I’ve been binging the Witcher too much…]

Okay, weak hit on a threaten, but that’s fine because I’m not being especially threatening. (And maybe this was a heart-based convince, but whatever – the result would have been the same either way. So.)

The move says they ask for something in return. I already rolled “Collect a Debt” on character goals, but I’m really not sure what that is.

[Meanwhile, I’m scrolling through the oracles idly, while thinking, and I spot “your actions benefit the enemy’, and the first batch of oracles on old Chendra says something about ‘in league with the enemy.’ Okaaaay. Yes.]

The man’s eyes narrow. “You speak like one who knows and fights evil. And you claim to be a farwarden, but I don’t know from a scarecrow, and the last farwarden that came through here promised much and then ran off. Tell me who you are, girl. Who exactly – by what right do you interfere?”

[Basically he’s demanding my bonafides, which we know from the oracles he’s going to jog off and report to who’s knows who. It’ll eventually get to Strahd, who’ll know that much more about me. Awesome.]

Brigitte glares at him, then lets out a sound that’s somewhere between a sigh and a grunt.

“I am Brigitte Lindholm, youngest daughter of Torbjörn and Ingrid Lindholm. I’ve been a farwarden proper for three years, and before that I squired under Reinhardt Wilhelm, one of the greatest knights of the order, and my godfather. Traveling alongside him was the greatest honor of my life.”

She sighs, and it’s a proper sigh this time. “I craft armor in my spare time, horse hair makes me sneeze sometimes, and my favorite food is semla. Is that quite enough?”

Before the man can answer, Ireena steps forward, her arms wrapped tightly around her waist. “It is enough, farwarden. Thank you. Chenda…” Her said eyes come up to meet the angry fisherman’s, and he looks away first. “Your behavior embarasses this village. Go away.”

He opens his mouth to reply, but she is already walking back into the house, and I and Ismark follow, closing the door in the man’s face.

So, that’s a pretty big scene from my poor Secure Advantage. Fates forfend I try a Gather Information anytime soon. Anyway.

Strictly reading the text of the move, I still secure an advantage, I think, because of the choices I picked. Let’s review:

“On a miss, you fail or your assumptions betray you. Pay the Price.”

Okay, cool. My assumptions betrayed me and I pay the price. My betrayed assumption is “the villagers are all on my side, and the Pay the price is

… which is Chenda reporting back on everything he learned about me. Sweet.

However, I don’t get the momentum I’d get from either a strong or weak hit. I just secure an advantage in the narrative, which I’m fine with: that result is why I had Ireena come to my aid at the end of the exchange with Chenda – she’s on my side now. Not enough to form a bond with, but enough to be “NPC generally on my side.” Cool.

Also, since I have a bit of Oracle-level knowledge about what Strahd is generally up to, I’m going to say “getting Ireena a bit on my side” counts as a single tick in a single box on my epic quest to kick Strahd in his pointy teeth.

Given that, I actually will Gather Information.

“Thanks for the help out there,” I say, trying a smile. “I feel like I’m swimming in dark water with very, very large fish bumping my ankles. Can you help me understand what’s going on here?”

Well okay! I’m going to infodump on Brig (and mark +2 momentum!), because I don’t feel like writing everything out as dialogue. Here we go.

Ireena seems nice enough, but troubled.

She’s very scared, but no helpless victim.

She can’t remember anything about her early childhood before the burgomaster found her and adopted her.

“My father only ever told me that he couldn’t bear to see a child alone and helpless, and I seemed immediately to be a daughter to him. I remember no time before that, so to me he has always been my father.”

“He found me at the base of the waterfall that drops from the Ravenloft peak.”

Each night, wolves and other creatures came and attacked the house – eventually, her father’s heart couldn’t take it – he died a ‘natural’ death – his heart simply failed under the strain.

“The wolves stopped attacking 10 days ago. They come from the forests, though they are – ultimately – Strahd’s creatures, I believe, and follow his command.”

No one in the town has the guts to help them bury their father.

Strangely, the wolves haven’t attacked since their father died, but Ireena believes it’s only a matter of time, and not much time.

With the greatest of the holy symbols – an ancient holy artifact – stolen from the house – both siblings fear the house is now defenseless.

They MIGHT be safe in the church for a time – the priest seems to be able to keep the place protected – but they don’t know how long that will last, either.

“The holy symbol was a great golden thing – ” Ismark marks the distance with his hands, like a small dinner plate – “a sort of Sun symbol.”

Ireena: “It was stolen during one of the attacks – so… very likely it lies in Strahd’s cursed castle.”

“The priest might be able to tell you more about it, though it had been in my family’s home for several generations.”

Ireena looks at me. “What do YOU think? What should be done?”

“If you’re going to the castle,” Ismark says. “I’m going with you. We’re doomed here, but I’d spit in that monster’s face and try to drive a stake in his heart, if I can.”

“And leave me here?!?” Ireena says. “I’m coming with you!”

I frown, still thinking. “Are you sure?”

Irena thinks, and nods, her mouth a firm line. “if it’s what you decide to do, after talking to the priest, then yes.”

“All right,” I say, “grab what you need.” I turn to Ismark as Ireena leaves. “Help me with your father.”

Ismark looks confused.

“I want to talk with your priest,” I say, “and the Burgomaster needs a proper burial.”

original post

#Actual Play #ironsworn #pbta #ravenloft #randomaverage

[churchyardgrim]

I, STRAHD, by P.N. Elrod

[intro post]

rubs my horrible little goblin hands together hello yes it is time

IT IS HALLOWEEN AND IT IS TIME

this book is, unironically, the best thing i've ever read. almost nothing in it was new information to me, bc i was halfway through a CoS campaign at the time, and also Vampire of the Mists gives a pretty comprehensive cliffnotes version

but the important thing is, imo, knowing whats going to happen did not decrease my enjoyment of it one bit. this aint Game of Thrones dear reader! mind-bending twists are not what this book leans on!

there are some significant differences from the (much shorter) account in Vampire of the Mists, but honestly those i can chalk up to Strahd straight up lying in his diary

because yes, this entire book is Strahd's fuckign diary, and its beautiful

we begin our sordid tale with Strahd taking formal possession of Castle Ravenloft, and thus Barovia, with his best friend i mean lover i mean right hand man Alek Gwilym and a handful of other nobles sworn to his service

this is pre-vampire Strahd, but you wouldn't know it from looking at him! the man's an obligate goth and dresses like a depressed raven while everyone else in his family wears colors, for shame, he drinks beef gravy in the mornings instead of coffee, and fuckign bleeds on the foundations of the castle to claim it as his

i shit u not, there's a line that is verbatim "but i like wearing black!" i cannot make this shit up

they've also given him this sliver of dry humor that i fuckign love actually, these tiny little jokes that you don't notice till they're already half out of sight, it's delightful

anyway the book continues on with Strahd complaining about the minutiae of running this country what he worked so hard to get, ferreting out an assassin in his cohort, and starting his charming lil collection of magic spellbooks

three years later and guess who's coming to live with him! baby brother Sergei! baby brother whomst Strahd has never met, bc he left home for The War before Sergei was born lmao

there's also Your Middlest Brother Sturm, who avoided the entire ensuing cockup cascade by virtue of staying home and becoming an accountant. in this house we love and respect Sturm. 

but yeah Sergei is this chipper lil golden child, 20ish and slated for priesthood as is tradition, bouncing around Castle Ravenloft being all optimistic and pretty and good at swordfighting and it makes Strahd sick

this man is so jealous of his kid brother you guys. he devotes whole paragraphs of his diary talking about how he's gonna have to start dyeing his hair soon, about how depressed he is by the weight of years wasted by war, about how Sergei is everything he never got the chance to be

just god. christ. get a grip i'm begging you.

and then of course comes the last straw. Sergei, precious lil vanilla bean Sergei, brings home a girl. not just any girl either, no, but the prettiest most empty void of personality that ever had the name Tatyana. Strahd takes one fuckign look at her and is Immediately Obsessed.

this, imo, is the weakest part of the whole story by a country mile. point the first, Tatyana just…. isn't a person. she has barely any lines, takes literally no action anywhere in this mess, and even her physical description is vague and unhelpful. in my brain she looks like Keira Knightly. 

and i'm willing to let it slide, by virtue of i'm almost positive this is on purpose. P. N. Elrod is, in fact, a woman (with a very butch author portrait i might add), and she definitely knows what she's doing here. Strahd is a selfish and myopic person, and while he shows no overt misogyny and sure appears to respect the women in his army, all that goes out the window as soon as the woman in question becomes a potential romantic object to him. and given this is his diary we're reading here, unreliable narrator is the name of the game. we only get his perception of Tatyana to go on.

point the second, however, is one i have less tolerance for; Strahd's infatuation with Tatyana is not foreshadowed at all. he bemoans his youth lost to war, and the ever-closer advent of his death, and broody brood goth brood, but at no point does he express any desire for a family. prior to this moment, romance or companionship just do not seem to matter to him. and now they're all he cares about? i think not.

if i were rewriting this for my own nefarious purposes, i'd make the Tatyana thing a side-dish to the main course of his jealousy of Sergei. that's what's foreshadowed and given ample narrative support, i think that's what the clusterfuck that happens next should be leaning on.

but you know, at the end of the day i can forgive this book for a lot. the above is nothing so egregious that i can't put my quibbles aside for a generous helping of what i like best, and what i like best is overdramatic goth men messily murdering ppl in order to become vampires.

which leads us into the meat of the story, Strahd's Big Oopsie! 

the day before Sergei and Tatyana's wedding comes, and Strahd has, of course, devolved into scouring spellbooks for something, anything to break the two of them up. this is a completely sane and rational thing to do, he promises.

the hour grows late, the candles burn down, and Strahd has… a bit of a moment. Death comes to speak to him! at least, something that Strahd identifies as Death, and which doesn't seem interested in disabusing him of the notion.

the bargain offered here is simple; his heart's desire, in exchange for just a few eensie murders, and a smidge of arcane ritual. naturally, Strahd accepts.

what happens next kills me, always and completely, because Alek overheard this. Strahd sees his friend on the walkway outside and practices the famous Barovian sport of longjumping to conclusions, assuming that Alek intends to sound the alarm on him; Alek is forced on the defensive, the two of them swordfighting in beautiful dramatic fashion on a parapet in the rain, before Alek gets lucky and mortally wounds Strahd.

Strahd, now having even less to lose, returns the favor, and we get a scene to rival every wartime "bro dying in ur arms" moment in film history

Alek would have helped you you idiot! you could have had an accomplice! but noooo you had to be a suspicious motherfucker and rush to kill the witness and now look where we are. stupid.

but it's fine, everything's fine, bc Strahd's deal with Death requires blood. so Strahd cuts his friend's throat and drinks the man whole, ascending to lyctorhood i mean kickstarting the whole vampire process

it's extremely sexy and extremely emotional i'm not compromised you're compromised

anyway. Strahd then panics bc oh shit i gotta hide this body and stashes Alek's corpse in his closet. conqueror of nations, everybody, still a fucken chump at not getting caught at murders.

Strahd manages to pass out and has to go through the whole next day pretending he doesn't feel like shit, paranoid and twitchy and waiting for his chance. bc of course one dead friend isn't gonna be enough, no no. he's gotta axe the source.

so he waits, and the hour before the nuptials, he goes to give his babiest brother Sergei a wedding gift of stabby stabby murder. 

shock! horror! everyone saw this coming! Sergei's blood finishes what Alek's had started, and Strahd watches his own reflection vanish in the mirror as the mists start to close in on the castle

Strahd goes to claim his prize i mean Tatyana but uh, Strahd, buddy, idk how to tell u this, but she's just not that into you. the absence of her fiance, what you blamed on a mysterious assassin, is not gonna just make her go "oh well i guess i'll settle for the next best thing" it doesn't work like that my dude.

a lot of things happen at once here; people start yelling, Tatyana goes into grief conniptions, more ppl have died? apparently?? this is news to Strahd and distracts him long enough for Tatyana to make Rash Womanly Decisions and literally sprint off a cliff about it

istg someday i'm gonna write something that does this woman justice bc none of the established lore has, ever

anyway this is the point where Barovia as a whole lands with a lurch squarely in the dread domains; the first dread domain, actually, cemented in place and sealed off from the outside world by Strahd's Terrible Awful Very Bad No Good Day

it turns out that someone else picked this night to spring a trap, too! Leo Dilisnya, one of Strahd's lieutenants and a man whose name compels me to picture him with cat ears, had initiated a coup at pretty much the exact moment Strahd was busy murdering his brother. what a coincidence!

the good (?) news is, they haven't yet figured out that Strahd's not exactly human anymore, so they're proceeding with the coup as planned while their primary target is in fact recovering from all the arrow holes they put in him, and is also realizing exactly how tasty everyone around him suddenly looks

long story short, Strahd gets what little of his crew is both still loyal and still alive out of Castle Ravenloft, and slaughters literally everyone else

thus ends the cockup cascade of the century, leaving Strahd lording over an empty and now extremely haunted castle, with no brother, no girlfriend, and maybe five people in the whole world who he can still expect to rely upon in the future, cue five year broodfest

seriously, he spends the next however many years sulking, only sticking his head out the door to collect taxes and maybe eat an outlaw or three, and boy, if you thought he was bad before his ultimate goth makeover…

i shit you not, he spends an entire page complaining about how his coffin, what he pre-ordered two years prior to All That, has brass fittings instead of gold. and then he complains about how his custom made black marble plinth is HELD UP IN SHIPPING

i love this man so fuckign much. i want to trap him in a locker and steal his lunch money.

he also disguises the fact that he's got no fuckign staff left by pretending to be his own chamberlain whenever he has to deal with People, Ugh, and you can just tell how much he loves talking about himself in the third person

anyway Ol' Leo got away after his coup hit a vampire-shaped snag, and Strahd's been too depressed to track him down for like… thirty years at this point

the entirety of your universe is now twenty miles across, Strahd, i think you could have found him before now if you put your back into it

but he finally gets around to it and we get a frankly hilarious bit where Strahd waltzes into the abbey where Leo's been hiding out, confident as anything, and Immediately walks into a fuckign faraday cage of holy symbols and nearly gets his ass staked

but it's cool, it's fine, he gets his man, and then has to clamber over the abbey wall while carrying a corpse and it's a comedy of errors from start to finish istg

it's ok Strahd bb, you'll get the hang of this vampire thing sooner or later

anyway in a stroke of cruel genius he buries the dude in a cement tomb, lets him revive as a vampire spawn, and then fuckign leaves him there to starve

real mansplain manipulate malewife moment right there, 10/10

and such is life for our resident tortured goth overlord, until, until! guess who he runs into

fuckign Tatyana! again! fifty-plus years after her impromptu basejumping attempt!

yes we're dancing that old chestnut, the object of obsession reincarnating every few decades only to tragically die inches from Strahd's grasp, again and again and again ok we get it can we pack it in now

this lady really gets a raw deal here! she's not being punished for anything, she's just kept in her own bespoke loop of suffering for the sake of making the guy who murdered her fiance even more sad

(there is an argument to be made that the Tatyana that Strahd keeps finding and losing in the world's worst game of Where's Waldo, might not be the real Tatyana. the Dark Powers have set president for replacing the real people best suited for twisting the knife in given Darklords with constructed facsimiles, so it's not impossible that Tatyana's soul isn't trapped in an unending nightmare of death and resurrection through literally no fault of her own. not impossible, but also not likely. yes i am mad about this.)

anyway that's our lot with this one, and hoo boy did this one get long. sorry to the four of you who made it this far, but also not sorry bc this is my favorite book of all time

and i know that's a weird thing to say immediately after bitching about how it treats The Sexy Lamp Named Tatyana, but hear me out. i did say i could forgive this book for a lot of things, and Tatyana's whole deal is one of them. make of that what you will.

but aside from its bugbears, this book is fuckign fantastic. it's what i wanted when i read Dracula for the first time and spent the whole read confused and annoyed about who the hell are all these english twats. the writing is delightfully dry when it's not heartwrenchingly gothic, Strahd as a character is absolutely written tongue-in-cheek by someone who knows what she's doing, and it's just [chef kiss] delicious all around. i can't wait to reread it next year once it's faded somewhat and i can reexperience it all fresh and tasty again

if you can spring for the price tag of $40-$60, depending on where you look, i absolutely recommend it. there's also an audiobook, but i can't vouch for the narration quality there. but if you can, read it! consume this book whole like a ravenous python! that's what i'm doing as we speak!

#church's ravenloft reviews #i strahd #GUYS THIS IS UR HALLOWEEN GIFT #JOIN ME IN THE SPLENDOR OF THIS BOOK

[churchyardgrim]

I, STRAHD: THE WAR AGAINST AZALIN by P.N. Elrod

[intro post]

OH GLORY OF GLORIES, SOMEONE COMPETENT 

going from the embarrassment that was Tower of Doom directly to this is a hell of an experience lemme tell you, one i can only describe as overwhelming relief

what makes matters even better is that, well, you remember that bit i complained about in King of the Dead? where they just kinda glossed over Azalin's whole half-century of cohabitation with everyone's favorite dracula? buckle up kiddies bc this whole book is about that

it's beautiful, it had me howling with laughter in a goddamn subaru dealership while my winter tires were getting changed over, everyone needs to read this immediately

so we open with Strahd being the most dramatic motherfucker in the grocery store, literally flinging himself off a mountain while howling his rage at the sky itself, bc Whoops, Tatyana's Dead Again

and then a week later he gets up off the ground like “ok i’m normal now”, and the book goes on to explain how he's gotten used to Barovia's still relatively new position in the mists. people do not leave. sometimes people enter! no one, not even the travelers, understand how this is done, and it pisses Strahd off. he is rattling the bars of his cage to be let out.

he has also made his famous deal with the Vistani, the only people who do have any degree of mobility between Barovia and the rest of the world; they enjoy a measure of safety from him and his agents, and in return act as his spies and limited servitors. he is also warned via a card reading that a powerful opposing figure approaches, and brings inevitable war

in any other story, this would be Our Designated Hero, Who Will Surely Triumph

i think by now you all can guess that this is not the case

and of course, a few years later, Strahd gets wind of Someone New harassing his nobles and making off with a rare magical book, to which he responds "excuse me, no, only i'm allowed to do that" and tracks the interloper to an abandoned manner house in the south of the country

it's at this point that i'd like to thank the author for the glorious image of Strahd getting just fuckign bug-zapped out of the air by the wards around this place so hard he hits a tree and straight up falls out of bat form. istg for all the work the game modules do to make Strahd into the ultimate big bad of the setting, unkillable and invincible, the man sure does spend a lot of time in these novels just getting the shit kicked out of him. it's beautiful and i want every minute of it framed on my wall. i wanna shove him in a locker and steal his lunch money.

anyway, as if the title of the goddamn book didn't give this away, this is where our buddy and pal Azalin Rex enters the scene! recently landed in Barovia, annoyed by literally everything but especially how he can't seem to memorize whatever spell's in that book he stole, damn thing must be broken i swear, and caked in so many illusions that it takes Strahd ten minutes to figure out there's Something going on under all that instagram contouring.

these two hit it off, well… less like a house on fire and more like a house being crushed by a glacier; icy and immovable and probably very worrisome to the neighbors down the street. they're instant bitchy exes, strangers to kismesises speedrun, they hate each other so much because they are so, so similar

Azalin is a king without a kingdom, prickly and a lil bit insecure and unsure of where he's landed and who this weird goth is and whether or not he should apply fireball directly to the problem yet. Strahd is 500% on edge, knowing full well that this is the fated necromancer he was warned about, and is in the process of sussing out exactly how worried he should be. the answer: very!

correctly surmising that this guy can turn him inside-out if he wanted to, and that Azalin is also a fellow Royal Personality and thus might feel motivated to cover his insecurities by yoinking rule of Barovia out from under Strahd's dainty lil goth boy boots, Strahd thinks very fast and manages to trap his new houseguest in a nonaggression pact of hospitality. Azalin is his guest, however unwillingly, and there are rules a guest and a host must observe with each other dammit.

and thus did two undead bastards become study buddies. neither of them like being stuck here, and Azalin doesn't have the distraction of hunting down the reincarnations of a girl he knew in high school. he's a better wizard than Strahd is at this point, too, of which Strahd is keenly aware, and between the two of them they're confident they can blow this popsicle stand within six months

they're there for forty years

to summarize a lot of slow-moving plot, Strahd does his new roomie the favor of restoring that old manner house he'd found him in into a proper wizard's lab, and by the time the renovations are finished Strahd wants Azalin out of he got damn house so fuckign badly, i love it

Azalin knows Strahd's nature well enough, but has managed to keep his own a secret in addition to his fun new curse of being unable to learn any new magic from this point forward. this manifests in the infuriating habit of having Strahd do a lot of the magical gruntwork with testing new escape spells, and good god it's like they're tenured professors arguing over whose turn it is to supervise the interns, it's delightful

eventually they make their first proper attempt, something something summer solstice, combining a translocation with a summoning, it's not important. what is important is it blows up spectacularly and is genuinely one of the funniest points in the book i shit you not

Strahd barely avoids getting atomized, employing the age-old tactic of Hiding Behind Something While The Fireworks Go Off, and when he finally picks himself back up and stops being crosseyed, he just looks at Azalin's desiccated husk of a body splatted across a wall and says "well fuck, that killed him extra dead didn't it"

and then when Azzie starts moving again Strahd briefly remembers what having a functioning lower intestine feels like bc "oh shit oh fuck he was like that the whole time, abort, ABORT, HE'S A FUCKMOTHERING LICH" and then just. plays dead.

he lies down on the goddamn floor and prays Azalin didn't notice that he saw him with his pants i mean illusions off.

i swear to you, dear reader, i had to put the book down and try to remember how to breathe for a solid twenty minutes

anyway Strahd's fakeout somehow works, and they immediately start bickering over whose fault this shitshow was, which provides more than enough cover for Strahd to Fuckign Book It and go triple his own magical defenses, and also have a delightful lil panic attack

i maintain that P.N. Elrod is butch as all hell, by virtue of no one but butches understand masculinity well enough to satirize it this beautifully. she manages to convey Strahd's "i'm not panicking, you're panicking" with this delightfully wry tone that i can't get enough of, and i fully intend to track down her other non-Ravenloft vampire novels once my brain loosens its vicegrip on this setting, bc by god i need more of her voice in my life

we're about halfway through now, and it's at this point that things start Happening in the wider world. namely, that there is suddenly a wider world for things to be Happening in. for about two hundred years at this point, Barovia has been totally isolated by the mists, and most ppl have just gotten used to this, barring a pair of geriatric wizards who keep trying to give spacetime what-for.

but now! all of a sudden! there's another country just. attached to the southwest end of Barovia like a malignant growth.

what's a local vampire lord to do? apparently commandeer a few of the refugees fleeing said new country to go show him where the fuck they came from, is what.

tragically Strahd still can't physically leave the bounds of his own country, mists or no mists, but he can mindcontrol a dude to go back in and have a look around for him. long story short, this new place is Forlorn and it is uhhhhh largely empty! just a bunch of weird magical mutants, and some hermits who aren't too jazzed about said weird magical mutants, and who all move into Barovia within a few months of the two nations sharing a border. 

this provides our two best buddies plenty of new study material, as do the next seven or so new countries that appear periodically like weird geographic parasites grafting themselves onto Barovia's decreasingly misty borders. Azalin can actually leave Barovia, which he's extremely smug about for the twelve minutes before Forlorn physically flings him back over the line in a pinwheel of stuffy robes and flailing knobbly legs, and boy i hope Strahd got a good knee-slapping laugh out of that bc god knows i sure did

the appearances of new lands culminates in Azalin's disappearance from Strahd's radar, and the emergence of his largest neighbor yet: Darkon. using his favorite remote-viewing magical scrying drone trick, Strahd starts sniffing around and is immediately yanked by the collar on a flash tour of the place, ending in the throne room of Castle Avernus, because if anyone knows how to cultivate an impression, it's Azalin Fucking Rex

yes after forty years of bumming around Strahd's backyard, Azalin has a shiny new gilded cage of his very own! congrats buddy, ur still stuck here like the rest of us. but at least ur not rubbing shoulders with that guy anymore.

unfortunately for Azalin's dramatic sense, Strahd is a) not physically there to intimidate, and b) an expert in the art of Not Being Impressed With Your Shit, so the dramatic tension lasts about five minutes before they're back to jabbing at each others' insecurities in the best long-distance shouting match i've ever seen

seriously they should televise this shit, sell tickets, they'd make a fortune

so far the titular War Against Azalin is less of a war and more of an Ongoing Domestic Dispute With Azalin, but the instant their bargain of hospitality is no longer required, that's when that forty year cold war goes real fucken hot

it's a bit of an anticlimax really. you'd think, being undead archmages, these two would fight like wizards and just hurl lightning and rocks and Spell Of Fuck You at each other over the borders, but instead they just… chuck some zombies at some dudes in armor and call it a day

military commander habits die hard i suppose

Strahd's in a bit of a genuine pickle actually, his noble caste have had two hundred years to get lazy and indolent, and he has to do a whole "I'll Make A Man Out Of You" montage to get them into fighting shape. but Azalin keeps handicapping himself by executing half his most effective lieutenants bc they don't agree with his pizza topping preferences or whatever, so Strahd gets to feel smug about being able to actually retain the loyalty of his people on his own

granted, it's not hard to be more charismatic than a bog mummy that got lost on a tour through the beef jerky factory, but still

we end on a narrow battle victory for Strahd, leaving Azalin to spend a few years rebuilding his forces out of corpses and whatever new talent he can scrape up, and having set the stage very effectively for the hundreds of years of conflict between Barovia and Darkon to come. the resentful roommates have become the viciously estranged exes, and nowhere in the dread domains will know peace ever again. 

tragically they will never really come to physical blows in the spectacular wizard fight way i really want them to, bc neither of them can leave their respective houses here, but u know what i think i can live with the kind of needlessly convoluted machinations guys like that come up with in order to fight proxy wars via soldiers and agents and all the tools of statecraft at their disposal. 

it's just. god i love this book. i love watching bitchy old men be bitchy at each other, i love how deep the world feels despite experiencing it through the viewpoints of two guys who have to share Ebeneezer Scrooge's allotment of goodwill, i love the tiny sprinklings of vampire horniness and lich avarice, i love it i love it i love it

absolutely track this book down if you can, or listen to the audiobook as it'll likely be a lot cheaper. if you need me i’ll be rereading Vampire of the Mists for old time’s sake, and also wallpapering my house in pdfs of the Ravenloft Gazetteers bc did u know there’s fuckign travelogues published for these places? with sneaky metaplot about Azalin and his many many kids i mean clones? holy shit yall.

#church's ravenloft reviews #longest yea boi ever #guys im just #i love this setting so fuckign much #i love this AUTHOR so fuckign much #someone hold me im emotional

[churchyardgrim]

KING OF THE DEAD by Gene DeWeese

[intro post]

oh boy, oh happy day, i get to talk about Azalin Rex

this book does some fun stuff with mild fakeouts and starting at the end and then jumping back to the beginning in a way where it's not immediately clear how one connects to the other, but it's not done in such a way that it's meant to pull the wool over the reader's eyes, which is good bc i already knew the end twist going in and lemme tell u it is very satisfying watching our charming protag charge headlong and heedlessly towards his own doom

Firan Zal'Honen is a wizard! he's the very best wizard who ever wizarded, and currently he has no idea where he came from or why he's not there anymore or what the fuck just happened

all he knows is, he was tortured with visions for a bit, as one does, and then the mist spat him out in a place called Darkon, and the guy in charge of Darkon, helpfully named Darcalus, is the object of Firan's utter and all consuming loathing, and also killed his son probably

so Firan does what any reasonable wizard would do and enlists the help of some local coup-organizers to weasel his way into the upcoming Met Gala for all the governors in this place. he sneaks out of the approved areas, argues with the ghost of his son for a bit, barges in some places he's not supposed to be, and finally finds what he's been after: the object containing the soul of his nemesis, without which Darcalus, an undead wretch, is mortal and vulnerable

smashy smashy!

unfortunately this is Ravenloft, where the universe can and will bend over backwards to fuck you over, and Firan has some conspicuous gaps in his memory. gaps that are helpfully filled when the punchup with Darcalus turns into a merging of souls and minds and oh shit, thats you Firan buddy! the thing you were hellbent on revenge for? you did all that!

and now the book takes 150 pages to explain itself, going down the laundry list of Firan's life up to this point. this is less interesting to me than what just happened, so suffice to say he was a stubborn and prideful magical prodigy that ended up the wizard-king ruler of a country called Knurl out in the prime material plane

the man's lawful evil all the way down, having some uhhhhhhh lets say draconian ideas about how to maintain peace and order, and yes it does involve a lot of beheadings how did u guess. eventually he figures out that magic can't, in fact, keep him kicking forever, and puts some effort into getting himself an heir. 

there's a frankly hilarious bit where he has a crisis of confidence upon realizing that a decade of trying has produced no viable results, and despite having mastery of the unquenchable fire of the stars he apparently never learned the Scan Ur Dick spell, so the problem might just be you, Firan, did u ever think of that before blaming ur wife

anyway turns out his wife did in fact curse his dick so once he got that taken care of he gets himself a lovely lil scion to raise in his perfect mirror image

shockingly, this goes as follows: 

Firan: "my son! i will teach you to rule as i do, with a fair and just iron fist!"

Irik: "hm. consider, tyranny bad? oh cool ur not listening immmmm just gonna go join the rebels real quick"

Firan: "........."

Firan: "anyway i need to execute you now"

Irik: "cool. i forgive you btw."

Firan, an hour later: [great sobbing wizard tantrum about how his son's dead now]

me: [also great sobbing wizard tantrum about how his son's dead now]

seriously, despite being the world's stupidest smart person, and also objectively evil, this guy has a lot of pathos! i feel for this idiot! i wanna shake him by the lapels and make him acknowledge how much he actually cares for his son!

the big thing here is he's baked Lawfulness into his own nature to the point where any emotion that doesn't follow what his idea of a Proper Ruler should be gets ruthlessly cauterized. except it doesn't work like that, you prick, so he ends up eating his own tail about how he did exactly the right thing, his only fault was not raising irik to be a "stronger" prince, and thats why he feels like his heart is breaking from grief and guilt.

except it can't be guilt bc he did nothing wrong. do u see the problem here.

anyway this is where the quote unquote Dark Powers get involved. they coerce Firan into taking the next step on his Foolproof Live Forever Through Positive Thinking And Magic plan, and one really bad baja blast later the man's a fullblown lich

lich powers! necromancy! shame the only form he's capable of bringing his son back to life in is a wretched rotting shadow of true life, in constant agony and despair, and not even Firan is gonna settle for that

so back to the drawing board! he spends the next few decades scouring the continent for magical secrets and tales of resurrection, trying to find a way to bring his son back properly and gain atonement for both of them

eventually the mists take him and drop him into Barovia, bc Strahd's the fuckign welcome wagon for new arrivals i guess, and Firan, by now called Azalin, sets up shop in Castle Ravenloft for forty fuckign years

they were tombmates

oh my god, they were tombmates

to my unending outrage, the book spends barely a chapter on this period. give me more damn you! show me the petty squabbles, the arguments over who keeps leaving corpses in the hallway, the lingering sexual tension on movie nights! i deserve to know who tops goddammit!

but no, we just skip to Azalin chasing after a mirage into the mists four decades later, and then uhhhhhh getting split in two? like when a cartoon character gets zapped with a science laser and splits into Good Half and Evil Half? except it's Human Half and Lich Half, which hate each other on instinct

and we're back at the beginning! with human Firan acting on his loathing for the lich Darcalus, only to fuse together again and force him to confront the fact that the person he holds such hatred and anger for is himself

thus, Azalin Rex settles into his final form. a wretched, undead genius, locked in his own prison domain and given a country to rule the way one gives a highly maladjusted macaw a rubix cube with a peanut hidden inside

in conclusion, i am now in the stage of grief labeled "memes"

#church's ravenloft reviews #king of the dead #guys i love this book so much #i love this IDIOT so much #he's an awful awful person and he's my poor little meow meow no i will not be taking questions at this time

[churchyardgrim]

VAMPIRE OF THE MISTS, by Christie Golden

[intro post here]

featuring the world's best depressed prep Jander Sunstar, vampire elf, light of my life, a darling and also an idiot, ignore the first ehhhh thirty pages i promise it'll make life easier

this is Christie Golden's first book? and it's great??

seriously her writing has this warmth to it, it's slow and tender and she's very good at protagonists who are genuinely good people, and she also Gets vampires to a degree Anne Rice fuckign wishes she did

anyway we begin our tale with The Vampire That Walks Like An Elf getting dropped into the first of our favorite dark domains, Barovia, after screaming his angst at the sky as one does

our boy's on a mission! to find out what happened to his crush before she ended up immortal and also insane i said we weren't going to pay attention to the first chapter

Jander bumbles around for a bit, has a good cry at the sight of some people having fun, and gets a bespoke invitation from the local landlord, the delightful goth dracula to Jander's sweater-wearing alucard, Strahd Von Zarovich

yes his name is literally Strahd From Prince. don't think about it too hard, by the time the writers realized their mistake the name had stuck and he wouldn't answer to anything else

so these two circle each other like wary cats for a bit, agree to not bother each other providing neither of them does anything worth bothering over, and Jander gets set up in Strahd's guest room with a snack and a toothbrush

see what's hard to talk about in this book is that the plot crawls. if you're looking for nonstop vampire action and drama, this ain't it. Jander just kinda Exists for a while, starts doing renovations without permission on Castle Ravenloft like the one guy in the frat house who cares about not stepping on eighteen red solo cups while trying to get breakfast, tries making friends with the most untrusting and suspicious peasants in the world, for twenty five years

what does carry the lion's share of the book, is that Christie golden is very good at character writing. Jander is a sensitive, emotional, genuinely good-hearted person, who has enough angst and regret for what he has to do to survive that you feel for him, but not so much that he becomes a tiresome sadness lump. 

the plot also concerns a handful of other characters; the daughters of the village's mayor, a few of the nomadic Vistani, the biracial child of two of the above, a werewolf spy, and a thief with the world's shortest redemption arc. more than half of these people are women, and Golden sets the bar remarkably high for the series by writing them with the utmost faith in their humanity. you can easily believe that each of these people has a rich and varied inner life, and its just nice to watch their lives develop over the twenty five years of the plot

but this is a horror story, so terrible things do happen, people do die, and the half-Vistani kid enters adulthood parentless and never fully accepted into the town he's lived in his whole life. he joins the local church, takes up vampire hunting as a side hobby, and eventually comes to know and distrust Jander, who's been trying and failing to do as little damage as possible while hanging out with Strahd "i drink people for breakfast" Von Zarovich, and is getting pretty torn up about it

there's some juicy conflict here between Jander and the vampire hunter Sasha, with Sasha ready to kill Jander on sight, and Jander feeling more threatened emotionally than physically by this 20-something with a stake. i think Jander cries at one point. it's great.

eventually Jander's snooping turns up something useful; Strahd's diary! in a secret room, on a display table, under a portrait of his parents. because he's a ponce.

now reading ur landlord-slash-roommate's diary isn't strictly a good-aligned decision, but Jander does learn some very important facts! namely, that Strahd is even more evil than we already knew he was

i'm not gonna go down the entire course of events that comprise Strahd's Big Oopsie, bc we'll get to a much juicier rendition of such later on, but suffice to say it includes breaking at least six of the ten commandments, plus the bonus, implied commandment of "thou shalt not make a bargain with Death, kill ur brother, and drive his fiance off a cliff as she flees from ur lustful grabby hands"

Jander, understandably, is rather upset by this! it's a bit more serious than failing to properly dispose of leftovers and making offputting comments about Jander's sweater choice for the day! and, remember that quest our boy's on vis a vis his crush and her tragic backstory? yeah.

it's finally enough to propel our boy to action, seeking out Sasha's help in one of my favorite scenes in the book. it's a monologue that could have very easily gone pretentious and too depressing to be tolerable, but somehow manages to be touching and poignant and Christie Golden really fuckign gets vampires ok

this may just be Me, and someone with less tolerance for prep-y moping might have already thrown the book away by this point, but god. god. it hits me right where i live in Gothic Vampire Land

anyway Jander's impassioned lament about his unholy state moves Sasha to help him take down his landlord, and the two begin Schemes

Schemes boils down to "lets just Get His Ass while he sleeps" which uh. almost works?

almost

Strahd's a bit cleverer than they bargain for, and also they brought a rogue instead of the wizard they really needed, so at the end of it all Strahd escapes with merely crippling injuries and Jander, also pretty beat to hell, has the realization that Ravenloft itself will never let Strahd die. likewise, unless he does something about it, Ravenloft won't let him die either; he's the perfect playmate for Strahd, a counterpart and rival and oh it was pitch romance at first sight wasn't it

but Jander, being a prep, rejects this and decides to fuckign lay there until the sun shows up to finish him off. pathetic! ungrateful! i hate this!

(fortunately for me, Jander's death here has been sssorta retconned? there's no official word on what quote unquote "really" happened, but multiverse canon is soft enough to spread on toast and the dude shows up in two 5e modules, one of which takes place outside of Ravenloft in the prime material plane, so i don't think we need to get too fussed about it)

(he's also in three short stories published in collections around the same time as the Ravenloft books were, all of which are pre-Barovia Jander and are delightful and also hit me right in the feelings, but they're not Ravenloft proper so i won't go into them here)

anyway that's our lot, Jander gone to his death all crispy but not really, the rest of our surviving human cast gone back to their lives a little less menaced by the forces of the night, and Strahd taking a nice long recovery nap from all the stabbings

it's a lovely slowburn of a book with many tender feelings and i adore Jander Sunstar so much he's such a good-hearted lil prep and i wish there was more material for him

he is in VRGR though! and he's got a kid now! god only knows how that happened, the book is vague and i have theories but that's an infodump for another time GOODNIGHT EVERYBODY

#church's ravenloft reviews #vampire of the mists #im telling you if you like vampire fiction this is in the top 10 of all time #cover art notwithstanding #im so sorry it looks like a halloween themed toothpaste ad #i cant do anything about that

[churchyardgrim]

TOWER OF DOOM by Mark Anthony

[intro post]

so i was actually warned away from this book, by ppl who'd read the series and who, at the time, did not know me terribly well

bc of course it went straight to the top of my to-read list

and now, having read it, hoooooo boy dear readers let me tell you, that tower sure can doom

we've got a classic hunchback of notre dame here folks; shitty baron in a shitty provincial town, with a disabled half-brother in a tower ringing bells, etc etc etc, and also some business with a lady doctor of genuinely supernatural goodness, and something about a werecat secret agent of Azalin Rex sniffing around bc the baron's plotting against the king and whathaveyou

now i need to take a moment, right here at the top, to talk about this werecat

Jadis is.... well she wouldn't be out of place in a C-grade James Bond novelization. she's The Sexiest Sexy Lady Who Ever Breasted Boobily Down The Stairs, and also she can turn into a giant fuckoff panther bc what's sexier than that. she's a strong independent career-minded woman, and oh yeah she fucks her boss

the boss who is a lich

yeah that boss

now it's not that i object to lichfucking in principal! far from it! anyone who knows me can attest that this is in fact my brand! 

what i do object to is the fact that it's written about as well as baby's first straightguy fanfiction! and also that IT'S IN CHAPTER TWO. THEY LEAD WITH THIS. RIGHT OUT THE GATE HERE.

it's just. it's so badly written guys. it's barely five paragraphs and i am scarred by how clumsy and amateurish the writing is.

like fuck, i can do better than this! i should do better than this! hold my beer, i'm going to take a hammer and FIX the canon

ahem. anyway.

so Jadis has her necro moment and we move on, thank god, and get the rest of what passes for plot moving

to summarize a lot of faffing about and establishing the tone as Needlessly Bleak, the local baron found a magic rock that absorbs souls and makes zombies, and he's running a transparently fake inquisition to find ""traitors"" to execute in order to charge this thing up like a battery

meanwhile our resident Tower Hunchback gets tricked by someone else into carting home a really really cursed bell for the belltower

a cursed bell that kills ppl! fantastic

it's… honestly really boring to talk about lmao. our friend Wort starts doing his "you want a monster? i'll show you a monster" revenge plot, killing off the baron's inner circle one by one and being all tortured about his station in life, and it's fine, i guess. 

there's also a fancy doctorlady whose name i've already forgotten here to see the goodness in all life or whatever, ministering to the poor idiot townspeople who don't know what deafness is (i wish i was kidding)

naturally there's some hamfisted romance between them, and naturally it made me gag more than the lichfucking did. these aren't people, they're caricatures from an author with no goddamn idea what he's doing, and i can feel the pain of his editor as if it were my own

it's trying to tell a story about social rejection, and relative monstrosity, and how being ostracized should drive ppl together against their oppressors but instead only builds divisions between them, as victims tend to be myopic and very attached to their own suffering, to the exclusion of solidarity with their peers

it's trying to tell that story, but it. is not succeeding. it's so hamfisted in its writing, and so full of awkward straight dude horniness, and it's just… so bad you guys.

anyway there's even more faffing, half the cast is dead of Bell Ghosts Disorder by now, and the most interesting thing that happens is Jadis starts to realize that uhhhhh maybe not using protection when getting with a powerful arcane undead is gonna have some longterm consequences my dude

altho i don't think condoms help with magical necrosis so uh. not really sure what she was meant to do differently here. not fuck the lich? not a chance

the good news is she's mostly spared those consequences by dying in a firetrap the baron left her in! so sad, rip catgirl. it's at this point the baron's Big Evil Scheme is revealed, and he's planning to… use the soulstone to animate a big fuckoff war tower, drive the thing directly to Castle Avernus, and i guess bash Azalin to death with it?

no idea why Azzy even needed to get Jadis involved in this, given she does practically nothing to stop it and it collapses anyway under the weight of its own stupidity. Wort's mad with power by now, there's zombies everywhere, this author clearly has a Thing for lovingly described corpses and decay and i don't even know what to do with that

the eventual resolution involves something about the inherent goodness of the human spirit breaking the bell's curse, and also a very disney villain death for the baron. it's very strange, given all the needless cruelty and lurid gore that lead up to it. Wort accidentally drives the walking tower off a cliff, the doctor lady survives to haunt the moors as a ghost? angel? angelghost? maimed and ugly now by her injuries but healing ppl in mysterious silence, something something morality tale

ultimately you can give this one a pass. the quality of the writing is just too bad to put up with, and the plot is largely unremarkable except for the bizarre decision to have a catgirl fuck a lich

now if you'll excuse me, i have some free, uncompensated rewriting to do.

#church's ravenloft reviews #im just #oh lord folks its a bad one #easily the worst of the lot i've read so far #knight of the black rose was just BORING this is ACTIVELY HAZARDOUS TO HUMAN LIFE #its worth noting that this was published BEFORE king of the dead #i think it was azalin's first actual appearance? #im reading them all out of order tho so dont quote me on that #BUT it's worth noting that the guy who wrote this one #was NOT invited back to write azalin's standalone origin story #AND I FUCKIGN WONDER WHY

[churchyardgrim]

DANCE OF THE DEAD by Christie Golden

[intro post]

oh thank god, Christie Golden is back

tragically, this book largely concerns people i don't care about. Larissa Snowmane is a dancer on a boat that is also a theater, which is pretty rad, but also she's as milquetoast as Jander was and without the benefit of being an elf or a vampire, so

this one is heavily Louisianna themed, its got swamps, its got zombies, its got themes of nature/druidry vs necromancy, and of course it's got dancing

honestly this one didn't stick in my brain very much, but at least it's better than Knight of the Black Rose, so

the tldr is this: a necromancer weasels his way into the boat captain's good graces, people start going missing, turns out the captain's a collector of magical creatures in a very un-kosher way, our protag Larissa goes out into the swamp to learn what the fuck she can do about it

what she can do about it, apparently, is dance like fuck until the earth and the dead alike obey her. she learns this from a wishywashy druid, and also this realm's darklord! who is actually pretty cool ngl, i like him. posh Lousianna elite style necromancer, bit of a dickhead, 7/10 on the darklord scale, would fuck.

anyway Larissa goes back to clean house with an army of swamp fae, and the final fight here is pretty impressive. lots of things happen, a betrayal or two is revealed, we get some reasonably satisfying deaths from our villains, and at the end of it all Larissa takes over as captain of the showboat with new friends and new powers and all will be well and all manner of thing will be well.

so yeah, not much to write home about but honestly Golden's writing is nice enough to carry it for me. apparently she's a big name in the Star Wars and Warcraft novelization series, and i've no idea what her more recent work is like, but her old stuff holds up imo. she's got one more book to her name in the Ravenloft series, and i expect the gentleness to carry through in that one too.

#church's ravenloft reviews #dance of the dead #sorry this one's so short there just.... really is Not much to talk about with this one #its Nice thats about all i can say :p

[churchyardgrim]

HEART OF MIDNIGHT by J. Robert King

[intro post]

oh boy that is a cover innit. god.

Spirit Halloween wolfman in tights aside, this one gives me some mixed feelings. bit of good, bit of bad, averages out into something i enjoyed but that left a weird taste in my mouth

our tale begins in fair Kartakass. do you like wolves? is your ideal political system American Idol? do you like, really like wolves? then boy howdy have i got the dread domain for you!

yes this place appears to be 50% bards and 50% werewolves. or wolfweres. or other, wolf-shaped things, it's just all wolves all the time ok

also you become mayor by winning a singing contest. that's literally the first thing that happens, is our uhhhhhh sure let's call him a hero for now, Casimir, charisma-rolls his way into ousting the current reigning mayor, who is also his estranged dad, whomst he hates.

and who is also a werewolf! shocking, i know.

if you've got two brain cells to rub together here you can figure out the next twist; Casimir, as the child of a werewolf, is also a fuckmothering werewolf. so, naturally, he lures his ex-mayor dad out of the public eye and kills him in a nasty lil dogfight

the downside to all this, is that in order to pull it off Casimir had claimed to be the bardic protégé of Harkon Lukas, the meistersinger of the next largest city in Kartakass. Lukas tolerates this for unknown reasons, and isn't shy about using that leverage over his new pupil.

shame the kid turns out to be shit at governing! he wants to Fix Problems, which manifests in bandaid solutions that piss off the guild leaders and hereditary nobility, and also he bullies his friends :( it's very sad.

there's also a bizarre cousin romance played remarkably straight? not even a token "oh she's adopted" excuse, just full on "my estranged father's sister's grandkid is the hottest person i've ever seen actually" and it goes on for most of the book. granted, several US states have looser consanguinity laws than that, so i guess it's a matter of personal taste, but even putting that aside the romance is lackluster and typical of the genre, and also the plot physically recoils from the mere possibility that this lady might catch werwolfism from her beau, which obligates us to give it a failing grade

let women be great hairy beasts dammit! half the guys in this plot get to rampage around as furries, i think we deserve some feral wolfwomen! give us the monstrous feminine, the redditor's worst nightmare, hairy and bloodthirsty and all beast no maiden!

my consolation prize for this travesty is that the entry for Kartakass in the Doomsday Gazetteers (a campaign supplement published at around the same time, composed of in-character travelogs through each domain) delivers in full on my lady werewolf cravings with a handful of delightful npcs. the entry also references the events of the novel, through the perspective of the traveling scholar conscripted to research each domain, which is very interesting to read lemme tell u

but i digress; we have werewolf fuckery to get on with

so Lukas, to our considerable surprise, is not a werewolf! no, dear reader, he is a wolfwere. what the fuck is a wolfwere? why it's a werewolf in reverse, because of course it is. a trickster wolf that takes a human shape to fuck with ppl, untethered to moon phases and other such pedestrian things. silver does nothing to them, but they're really not fans of iron. some fae ancestry in there? maybe.

anyway Lukas says to our friend Casimir he says, "kid you're a shit politician and you're an even worse predator. maybe stop trying to be nice and start hunting your constituents for sport?"

Casimir, who is an asshole but is at least trying, says "fuck that actually" and spends a few chapters trying to be a human person while his teenage hormones lycanthropy continually throws wrenches in the works

eventually Casimir's human friends identify Lukas as a persistent saboteur, and Casimir himself as someone who is both a supernatural predator and also a selfish jerk, and there's some confused escape and/or assassination attempts, and this is where the plot goes in circles for a bit. there's betrayals, and double-crossings, and un-betrayals, and a lot of ppl acting on conflicting information, and it honestly goes on a bit long for me

the final climax is very fun though, with Casimir attempting to out Lukas as a monster without realizing that uh…. buddy his pack is everywhere. u are so outnumbered.

so it's a big fun wolfbrawl, and Casimir's clever enough not to get cornered, and also to poison Lukas so he can't actually change shape, so for a while you're not sure who's gonna come out on top here

but spoilers, it's Lukas. dude's just too wiley, and also too lucky; Casimir's the one what gets outed as a monster, and tho Lukas barely survives the mauling, he does survive while Casimir's ladyfriend tearfully puts him down

very tragic, very sad, but damn if it isn't a fun show to watch

overall i'm torn on this book. on the one hand it scratches my chronic itch for werewolves, not just Wolf Shifters; they're actual monsters here, wild animals, and the book does not shy away from the brutality of it. 

it's also something that one of my horror discussion podcasts touches on, which is that werewolves are different from possession or haunting stories, bc it's not some outside force taking control of you or invading your body; The Werewolf Is You. that's the core of the conflict here, is that as much as you are this human person with goals and family and a desire to accomplish good things in the world, you are also a base and feral animal that just wants to hunt and consume the things that attract you. and this book does that very well i think, even though i suspect it doesn't know that's what it's doing.

the downside is, well, the prose just doesn't live up to its subject matter. something's missing in a way that's hard to articulate, it comes across very bland. there's some very nice gory descriptions, and it makes a valiant effort to get the feral vibe right, but it falls short of what i really want it to be with the visceral focus and drive that i like best

the other downside is hoo boy is there a lot of suicidal ideation in this book. most of our characters die in genuinely tragic ways, it starts with a suicide and ends with a suicide, and in my opinion it crosses the line from Horror to Depressing. there's fun twisting the knife and then there's twisting the knife in a way that just leaves you unhappy about it, and this is the latter

so yeah, it's a mixed bag! worth a shot for the fun hairy bits, but be warned it doesn't pull punches in the mental health department

#church's ravenloft reviews #god this has been sitting in my drafts for two weeks hghdf i have Not been on top of the ball here #u know how it is shit gets in the way its all good

[churchyardgrim]

KNIGHT OF THE BLACK ROSE by James Lowder

[intro post]

oh god. oh lord. they coulda crashed and burned so hard on this one, it's book two (2) and it has to follow Christie Golden's debut and it. uh. sucks. 

its not bad, necessarily! it's just boring. the author's decent, he knows his stuff, he just had the misfortune to get handed Lord Soth, the most boring man alive to work with

listen. listen to me. this man's entire Cosmic Crime, What Got Him Sentenced To Fog Prison, is that he didn't bother divorcing his wife before getting with some elf he met while crusading

like okay there were some murders, i'll grant you that one, but like. no one here seems to care about that. the murders and whatnot are footnotes both textually and narratively. what's important here is he cheated on his wife. 

so he's Big Evil now, fall from grace, etc etc i don't care about that and neither does the book. also he dies in a fire and is now extremely undead, as one does. again, not important.

and then Soth gets abducted by fog, gets dropped in Strahd's backyard, and shouts at everyone he meets until Strahd points him in a direction, says "look there Might be a portal back home that way, go figure it out" and watches as this very grumpy man in a burned coffee can for a helmet stomps off through the hedges like he's not the one the gardening bill gets sent to

spoiler alert, there isn't a portal to anywhere, and Soth goes back and yells at Strahd some more about it

Strahd, naturally, says get the fuck out of my country and ejects Soth from the premises

The Mists, having nothing better to do apparently, then decide to give this man his own enclosure full of depressing enrichment; banshees wailing his failures at him, "friends" to boss around and also murder, a castle of tortured battlements and the walking skeletons of his former knightly comrades, etc etc

and thats it! thats the book! nothing much happens!!

suppose it's just as well that Soth doesn't seem to be in VRGR, he's an extremely boring man whose only redeeming quality is at least he can *admit* that everything that's gone wrong in his life is his own damn fault, and doesn't get all mopey about it like some people

#church's ravenloft reviews #knight of the black rose #honestly these books are Very hit or miss overall #they're either fuckign incredible or just ehhhhh #all or nothin

[churchyardgrim]

TALES OF RAVENLOFT by various authors

[intro post]

hi! hello! it's been a while! the holidays happened, i lost most of my reading time for a bit, u know how it goes

but we got a short story collection this round! isn't that fun

there's uhhhhhh eighteen of em in here, only three of which are really worth reading. it's about par for the series honestly, a bell curve of mostly inoffensive and mildly interesting, with a few at the extremes of Very Fuckign Good and Don't Even Bother

in the middle of that bell curve we've got Three Good Reasons Not To Gamble In Sithicus, a rather sad story about a dude rescuing a baby from a banshee, and noted vampire hunter Rudolph van Richten's origin story, of all things. decent stuff, worth a read if you're in a forgiving mood.

on the Don't Even Bother side there's the usual dose of ableism and poor writing endemic to the series, with a disfigured hermit getting hunted by a headless horseman, something about a panther that got polymorphed into a man and then into a vampire? and some morality tale about how excessive judiciousness leads to a law system that revolves around amputations or some shit, idk

but, BUT, in a perfect microcosm of the Ravenloft series as a whole, there are a few gems that make the slog worth it.

the first of my two favorites is by Roger E. Moore, and concerns Lord Wilfred Godefroy, an utter bastard! i gotta say Mr Moore understood the assignment, this vignette is all about cycles on cycles on cycles, wheels of thought and action and the environment and its inhabitants forever returning to previous states

in short, the essence of a ghost story

the true horror here is an abusive, powerful man, and lemme tell you it is satisfying to watch the control he thinks he has slip away as he realizes just how trapped he is by his crimes. for once i won't spoil it, bc i think it's best if you see the shadow of the twist emerge in its own time, and trust me when i say it's worth it.

and i was all set to declare Godefroy's my favorite, but then i saw my good good friend P.N. Elrod listed down the line and knew in my bones that there'd be no contest

and because the publisher at the very least know what they have, the joy that is Ms Elrod is saved for the very back of the book, like your grandma's world-famous dessert pie that's the only reason half the family sat through the criminally dry turkey and Acceptable green bean casserole 

one of the many things i can never get enough of with Elrod's Strahd is how animals just fucken love the guy. bats swarm him like bluebirds to a disney princess! he's the favorite person of every wolf in twenty miles! it's adorable and precious and i want a full novel of nothing but this.

also it's never not hilarious watching him pretend to be his own lieutenant at people. i wonder if he disguises himself at all or if he just doesn't bother and relies on ppl not looking too closely at his own face stamped on the coins?

anyway in this delightful little tale The Devil Strahd, The Ancient, The Land, saves a little girl from a well in a burning town, complains about how hard it is for honest tyrants to run a country without bandit interference, and genuinely frolicks with some wolves

and, also… did you know that in older editions of dnd, the fireball spell had specific rules for how it behaved in space, expanding to fill enclosed spaces volumetrically instead of stopping short at a 20ft radius? you know, like real world explosions do?

and did you know what the fatality rate was for wizards who neglected to do the math on that particular property?

that fatality rate almost includes One (1) Strahd, in case you were wondering

if anyone feels inclined to track this one down with the intent of only reading the good ones, i'd be happy to give more detailed ratings/content warnings of the whole roster. but honestly, i'd recommend this collection even if the only thing you read is the last vignette, bc everyone needs to read about Strahd nearly blowing himself up on accident. it's good for the soul.

#church's ravenloft reviews #yes im going to talk about strahd the entire time again no i will not apologize for this #elrod just! does shit so fuckign well!!! #ms elrod pls are u single #more importantly is strahd single #i can fix him #and by fix him i mean give his brain a factory reset

[churchyardgrim]

LORD OF THE NECROPOLIS by Gene DeWeese

[intro post]

The Five Times Azalin Rex Nearly Escaped Darkon, And The One Time He… Nope, Fucked Up Again

this is a weird one lads i'm not gonna lie

i'll say upfront the pacing is all over the place, and i definitely think it should have been a series of vignettes rather than one long story, bc it does nooooot work if ur expecting a standard three-act structure

but i think i can forgive it that, it's an interesting ride all the same

so! Azalin Rex is sad. he's sad for all the reasons described in King of the Dead; dead son, trapped in Darkon, hideous rotting lich body, etc etc

so what's a bastard with an unreasonable amount of wizard power to do? channel that Tim Curry clip that's been going around and say "i'm going to face Strahd in the one arena he can't best me in….. TIME TRAVEL."

for the record i had this idea first u can ask my DM

why does he hate Strahd with the firey burning passion of a thousand suns? i don't know, the book does not adequately explain it, but that's ok bc i'm taking it upon myself to explore the possibilities in my private fanfiction folder

what the book does explain is that Azalin's got it in his head that Strahd is the reason for all of this. Strahd was the first darklord after all, the first being pulled into the mists, and Barovia now acts like a magnet for other stolen lands to attach to in the weird misty void, so if Azalin can… kill Strahd before that happens.... he'll be freed? maybe?

world's smartest wizard everybody

so Azalin does the extremely sane thing of folding his phylactery, the thing that contains his entire soul, into a quantum metapoint and implanting that into the chest of Some Random Guy, and then using said Random Guy as an anchor point with which to travel back in fuckign time, to the night of Strahd's Big Oopsie

this? works?? somehow?? don't question it it just does.

at this point the book says to you "hey did you like I, Strahd? would you like to read it again, with Azalin Rex involved this time?" and i said "yes please, a double scoop of that for me" because of course i did

what follows is the Dark Souls of time travel combined with the Hitman of time travel. Azalin can have his con score back when he's proved he doesn't need it, being weak as a ghostly kitten outside of Darkon and without his own physical body to inhabit, and it is truly, genuinely hilarious watching him try to Weekend at Bernie's his way to getting the drop on an unaware, mortal Strahd by piloting like three successive corpses around with an ineptitude you wouldn't expect from Darkon's Most Special Wizard Boy

i cannot emphasize enough how much Strahd has no idea this is happening. no idea! he is completely unaware! doesn't even know there's corpses walking around out of the crypts and making the guards shit themselves!

and Azalin still can't manage to shank the bastard

eventually he resorts to nudging the mind of our old friend Alek Gwilym, hoping to make him catch his beloved lord in the act of plotting fratricide, and uhhhh he sort of succeeds there?

what follows is exactly what happened in I, Strahd, with Strahd leaping to the offensive and the both of them mortally wounding each other, and oof, ouch, i did not think Alek's death would hit me this hard the second time around but it diiiiiid, it did and now im crying again

it is extremely fun getting this whole sequence from Azalin's perspective too, especially given he knows what's more or less going to happen here, what he's trying to prevent. 

spoiler alert, he doesn't prevent shit (and may or may not have ensured that shit happened as intended? it's ambiguous, but i think we're definitely dealing with an unbreakable paradox situation here)

anyway this is the point at which the timeline identifies the irritant taking various corpses for a joyride and summarily ejects Azalin from the picture, along with the dude he brought with him to house his phylactery. the bad news is, Azalin accomplished fuck all for his trouble. the good news is, he has a body again!

the medium news is that body is Alek Gwilym's.

yeah he was inside the dude's corpse when the mists yanked him out of Strahd's past, which explains why, in I, Strahd, his body just disappears after Strahd hides it in a closet to conceal his crimes. go figure, huh.

this is where the pacing gets uhhhhhh weird. what follows is a few decades of Azalin trying ever more unhinged methods of getting the fuck out of dodge, all while still piloting Alek's corpse. i guess one body is the same as another, to an immortal lich wizard king?

the plot meanders a bit, going largely nowhere. Azalin makes a few clones, trying to see if the curses limiting his power could be circumvented by growing a new body somehow? that doesn't pan out, so he just. lets the clones free-roam i guess. irresponsible, but whatever. he also sends his sheriff's secret police to every other domain he can find, collecting magic items and books and scraps of rumor, trying to find any possible way to escape the cage that is Darkon.

i'd like to know why he's so obsessed with it, personally. what's out there for you, Azzie me boy? what the hell do you think you're gonna find outside the mists that you can't have inside them? what are you trying to escape to? there's nothing waiting for you out there. you don't have anyone left. the one thing you care about is empty.

but he wouldn't be a darklord if he wasn't obsessed with things he can't have for reasons he can't explain, so we go through the next third of the book like this until he finds A Device that supposedly will elevate him to near-godlike power, possibly enough to blow this popsicle stand for good

but "aha!" he thinks, "what if this Device doesn't work? or simply kills me? i know, i'll make an exact duplicate in Travel Size, in order to test it first! i am very clever."

so he does just that, magically photocopying the thing and picking Another Random Guy to be his test subject, reasoning that if it fails that’s useful data, and if it succeeds the result will still be weaker than he is probably, and thus not a threat

unfortunately for everyone involved, one of his clones is also there! and is piiiiissed Azalin picked, again, Some Random Guy for this honor instead of him, Lowellyn Dachine, who is surely Azalin's long-lost son bc his mother told him so

he is actually an Azalin clone though so like. he's half right.

anyway he does an extremely well-adjusted thing and leaps into the machine too, and, well… have you ever seen The Fly? yeah it was kind of like that, except with souls, and the mingled power of untold ancient sorceries

Azalin sees this, thinks "well, it worked," and dives headfirst at his own quest bed i mean the full sized Device

and it…. actually does work for him! Alek's body, which he'd been wearing like a blonde, handsome person suit for like fifty years, is obliterated utterly, and Azalin actually goes god tier? bodiless, near-omnipotent, powerful enough to rip through the mists and resurrect Irik, his son what he executed in a fit of hurt feelings back in his home plane

ah, but where is dear Irik's soul you ask? apparently it's in nega-hell, the hell beneath hell from whence all evil comes

this clearly won't do, so Azalin gets busy ripping a hole through realities to retrieve his boy, except, except--! oh no! it was a cunningly disguised hand puppet instead of the real thing!

and uh. hm. Azzie. just checking, but how big did you make that doorway into the nadir of the multiverse? big enough to swallow a city you say? hm! thats a problem.

especially since it turns out that the cosmic horrorterrors that inhabit the place that Satan warns his kids about at bedtime were in fact the Dark Powers that led Azalin down this whole sordid path in the first place

oh yes, these fuckers play the long game don't they, sticking their greasy lil tentacles into the world and manipulating young Firan Zal'Honan into becoming a wizard powerful enough, and desperate enough, to rip a hole through realities big enough to free them

and just like that, all of Darkon's gone to shit. smh, there go the property values. 

Azalin, duly horrified by what he's been tricked into doing, tries an old standby again and flees backwards in time to his own childhood, on the night of the first event that put his life on the path that led him here

he's unable to actually do anything to affect that event, though, as it seems that being outside Darkon still makes him pathetically weak, to the point of being nearly a harmless specter. 

time is a flat circle, fixed points will always happen the way they want to, and Azalin Rex, specifically, is always doomed.

pretty depressing way to end a book right!

fortunately for us, the readers, this is not actually the end of Darkon and Azalin as we know them. multiverse canon is flexible, and this isn't even the only time Azalin's fucked up catastrophically and ruined everything for everyone. approximately 70% of all apocalypses in the mists are Azalin-based. hell, this isn’t even the one true canon as far as the nature of the Dark Powers is concerned! so feel free to set aside as much of the canon of this book as you like, salt to taste, and reheat on high if need be.

overall this book isn't bad, it's just weird. it's got a lot of interesting lore, and some really excellent high points, it's just that it's mixed in with some fairly boring and inexplicable stretches of Nothing Much In Particular, and also Azalin continues to be the world's dumbest smart person. again, it really should have been a series of short stories or vignettes instead of one big novel, bc the pacing choices really threw me for a loop.

but if you feel like tracking it down it's worth it to read i think, if only as a weird companion book to King of the Dead

#church's ravenloft reviews #i give this one a solid 6/10 #the high points are really fun but the rest of it drags the score down to Just Average im afraid #ur gonna spend the whole book wondering where the fuck this titular Necropolis comes in #and then ur gonna finish it and go ''well what the fuck was that''

[churchyardgrim]

friends, comrades, villainfuckers. i come to you on this day to talk about something near and dear to my heart.

Ravenloft novels.

for those of you who aren't aware, Ravenloft is a DnD setting that fills the gothic horror fantasy niche in its media properties, much as a stoplight fish fills the niche of Things That Make You Piss Yourself in the deep dark ocean. really not all that dangerous, but looks fuckign terrifying and is an efficient predator for the environment it's in.

in the 1990s, the company that owned DnD at the time, TSR, put out a series of novels set in Ravenloft. in 2021, the current owner, WotC, hooked the setting up to a car battery and shocked it back to life with the release of Van Richten's Guide To Ravenloft, which updated a big chunk of the established setting lore for 5e, and also made me aware of the setting's existence. this has proved a boon for used book sellers ever since, as i realized there were real books about these people, and promptly spent all my pocket money for the year on tracking down a bunch of fantasy paperbacks more or less as old as i am.

and now i'm here to bring these wonderful disasters of fiction to you, because if i don't talk about them i'm going to physically explode and we don't have the money for a carpet cleaning service, because i spent it all on these fuckign books. there Will be spoilers, bc the series is thirty goddamn years old, and also i sincerely doubt many of u are going to do what i did and track the bastards down to read them.

welcome to the domains of dread, and their associated problems!

the nuts n bolts of the setting is this: Ravenloft is a section of the demiplane of dread, or the shadowfell, or both, that functions as a sort of prison-slash-misery-farm for certain Very Evil Individuals. basically, you do a big enough Evil and you might get abducted by mist and end up in your very own miniature hellplane, complete with bespoke torments. it's hard to make generalizations about how it works, bc its been forty fuckign years and sources contradict each other a lot, but such is the nature of the beast. suffice to say that all the best Darklords are a) just the evilest motherfuckers, b) physically unable to leave the boundaries of their own dark domains, c) burdened with a thematically appropriate curse, and d) in this mess entirely by their own actions and decisions.

also, i have to preface this project with an acknowledgement that there are some significant racist bugbears in this setting that have been there since its inception, and don't seem to be going away any time soon. most notably are the Vistani, a cultural group of traveling mages, traders, and grifters untrusted by practically everyone, and you can see where this is going. almost everything about their depiction here is bad in one way or another, and i'm not going to sugarcoat it or pretend it's better than it is. i'm also not going to dwell on it terribly much, because i feel it would be a token effort on my part. you know that corrupting Rromani culture down to "greedy fortune tellers and witches" is bad, you know i know it's bad, repeating the point every time it comes up in the books becomes virtue signaling white noise. there is also the expected amount of sexism and heterosexual cissexist bullshit, because this is 90s fantasy and of course there is. progressivism does not live at this address. if anyone's actually interested in tracking these books down and reading them -- and i do recommend them, in spite of their many flaws --  i'm happy to provide trigger warnings for each and answer other questions about content, as these review posts aren't meant to be comprehensive and are mostly focusing on what i personally find most entertaining.

that said, on to the entertainment!

Vampire of the Mists review

#church's ravenloft reviews #under a cut for the sake of ur dashboards #BUT YES this is the intro post to my reviews series for these beautiful beautiful books #i will update it with links to the new ones as i post them

[churchyardgrim]

BARONESS OF BLOOD by Elaine Bergstrom

[intro post]

so this one isssss alright. solid 7/10, a decent palate cleanser between more high-octane books

it's lots of political machinations, scheming and manipulating and just so much poison you guys, just a frankly irresponsible amount of poison.

we open with some vaguely european country undergoing a bloody civil war, the current baron handling it about as badly as anyone can expect. point of advice, maybe don't knuckle down into brutal despotism when ppl are understandably unhappy about all the executions you keep ordering. Azalin can get away with it bc he can vaporize ppl from three miles away; you, my dude, cannot.

having finally murdered anyone willing to admit to disagreeing with him, the baron then decides the best course of action going forward is to immediately invade his wealthy neighbor in order to pay for all the damage he did to his own lands. brilliant, right! why has no one ever thought of this before!

so he ends up conquered and beheaded, naturally. i could see this one coming my guy, and i've only been here for thirty pages. 

the conqueror, a responsible-looking guy called Peto, feels obligated to stick around and try to fix this place instead of handing the governorship off to an underling, or just annexing the place into his own country. two out of three of the old baron's kids are willing to work with him on the Fixing Shit front, being more or less happy to see open warfare end.

the third kid… well. Ilsabet is a fantastic protag in my humble onion, bc she's like what you'd get if Ianthe Tridentarius was about 60% subtlety by volume; vicious, ambitious, and very fuckign interested in her father's best friend's poison collection.

the first chunk of this book is mostly establishing almost everyone else in the plot as Largely Well Adjusted And Willing To Work Together, and Ilsabet as the outlier who shouldn't have been counted and who is seething with vengeance and feminine rage for her father's death

Ilsabet starts learning herblore and how to handle toxic substances from her dad's advisor, a guy called Jorani, and boy howdy the whole plot coulda been a lot shorter if this guy had just seen the writing on the wall a liiiiittle bit sooner, before he got attached

bc he does get attached! and by the time he realizes that Ilsabet is a vicious lil sadist he's too much in his feelings to do anything about it. i have some amount of sympathy for the guy, bc he's not totally useless, but also like. dude. come on. a little bit of arsenic goes a long way here.

our protag starts experimenting on her own time without lab instructor supervision, and honestly the horror in this one is actually quite well done! it lingers on the gruesome details of death by poison or infection, and in the confused obliviousness of good-hearted ppl who just don't get why terrible sickness keeps happening for no reason

i suppose in a setting where Shit Yourself To Death Soup is just what happens when you don't boil your drinking water well enough, instead of something advertised on instagram as a hot new diet fad, it's a lot easier to get away with poisoning ppl

and Ilsabet, just for fun, is apparently a fuckign psychopomp? every time she kills or causes suffering, or even witnesses it, the book describes bystanders noticing that she seems mysteriously more beautiful and radiant, as if she's literally absorbing the suffering of those around her as life energy

she's not doing this intentionally! it takes her till the last third of the book to even make the connection! she's just a natural sadist and i'm kind of into it

like damn woman just find a bdsm club that'll work with your specialties and have a career

anyway she offs her siblings for cooperating with the enemy, offs her maid for maybe being within spitting distance of making a connection here, offs just so many prisoners in the course of scientific inquiry, its bad yall, its baaaaaaad

she also seduces lingering conqueror Peto by way of poisonous aphrodisiacs, for political machinations! the plan is apparently, use him to get an heir that's got title to both their kingdoms, and then poison him slowly and horrifically over a period of years

talk about a toxic relationship, smh

she also manages to dig up a tasty forbidden text about even worse poisons, and also fucken…. Potion of Makes Vampires?

legit, she can raise corpses into vampiric servants now. what *can't* this woman do.

escape from her sins, apparently

bc yes, this wouldn't be a Ravenloft book without horrible comeuppance, so Ilsabet is plagued with ghosts in the mists that are mysteriously growing ever thicker over this wretched year, seeping in through the windows and open doors and seeming to disorientate and confuse those lost within them, i wonder why that could be....

anyway Ilsabet's reign of terror slowly gains momentum until her son is born and she decides it's time to do her husband in finally and avenge her father's death. she intends the poison to be of the slow, intermittent variety to slowly sicken him over a period of months -- a genuinely horrifying prospect, actually! anyone who's dealt with environmental toxins or sudden onset food sensitivities knows how bad shit can get before you isolate the cause, and this is on purpose, with malicious intent

buuuut she misjudges the dose just a wee bit and ends up paralyzing the man instead. it's at this point Jorani decides enough is enough, and starts trying to reverse the paralysis in between Ilsabet's gloating sessions

too little too late my dude

things eventually come to a head as Peto's personal guards decide the place is mega cursed and try to get their king the fuck out of there, Ilsabet kills just so many ppl by contact poison, including Jorani, and the mists finally take the castle in the chaos.

so now her country is part of the dread domains, and Ilsabet is trapped in something of a personal time loop; every night she kills her husband in rage, and every morning he's alive again in his sickbed. no one seems to notice this, save Ilsabet, and she certainly doesn't appreciate the opportunity to have her revenge a hundred times over. guess she really got attached to making it stick.

overall its a hard book to make fun of! it's not as exciting as goth vampires and wizard kings, but honestly it's really well done for what it is, and it leans very satisfyingly into the horror of poisonings. if you're after more dramatic plots with magic n wars n shit this one might be a bit dull for you, but i find its paced really well to keep my interest, and i have a soft spot for vicious lil sadists

#church's ravenloft reviews #yea this one's pretty good actually #ya girl ilsabet is definitely an avatar of the web hghdf its manipulation and toxic influence all the way down

[churchyardgrim]

hey church, do you have a specific tag for your ravenloft book reviews?

i do! it is, hilariously, just Church's Ravenloft Reviews, bc i blanked entirely on being creative there lmao

i haven't done a new one in a bit, bc i read Tapestry of Dark Souls and it was so joyless and unfun that i genuinely couldn't think of anything funny to say about it, and took that as a sign that my brain needed a palate cleanser, so now i'm taking a break with some queer apocalyptic horror instead

#BUT i have two more ravenloft books in the mail and as soon as i finish Manhunt we're back on the 90s gothic pulp! #sidenote Manhunt by gretchen felker-martin is WILD and EXTREMELY GOOD #just mind the CWs hghfdg it doesnt pull punches