Castle Ravir

By The Basic Expert
The Basic Expert
OSR
"Mid to High" Levels

The castle is named after the black dragon Ravir the Black who lives there. He has accrued followers who are helping him gain treasure (through violence), in order for him to use the treasure in a draconic ritual to achieve godhood. This is a great adventure for mid to higher-level characters that can be dropped into your campaign anywhere where you have a marsh.

This twenty page dungeon has about sixty rooms on six levels. It’s got a dragon on the last level, and is devoid of the life that makes a good product come alive, instead substituting padding and backstory in the rooms descriptions … when there are some.

So, ruined castle in a marsh. The dragon that lives there extort caravans passing by, enriching himself, blah blah blah, needs the cash to become a god. Vaguely Hoard of Tiamaty. He’s collected a following of humanoids that worships him. Which is just a pretext to shove in a bunch of different humanoid types for the party to fight. Lizardmen, orcs, goblins, kobolds, and evil men, among others. But, hey hey, don’t worry, while they don’t get along they put all of their differences aside when it comes to protecting the dragon, so, no faction play. Note how we are now up to two pretexts, before the dungeon even starts, to justify having a monster zoo to just stab and nothing else. No order of battle, just entering rooms and stabbing shit. No NPC play, just entering rooms and stabbing shit. You enjoy that. So much more could have been done if there were factions, or, even if ANY references were made to the cult-like behavior of the people inside. Instead we get “Cleric level 3.” You gotta imagine this shit first. What’s going on? How do people in the real world act? Then, after coming up with some good, solid shit you can go stat it out. Otherwise you just get “Cleric level 3” in a room for you to stab. what fun …

Let’s see, a wanderers table. Yup, they are doing nothing. Orcs, goblins, lizardmen, bandits, gnolls, kobolds, ogres, evil men. Perfectly boring with no flavour to the thing.

Our room descriptions almost always start with “Room 1 – This room is …” or some slight variation. This room appears to be. Sometimes the designer steps it up with “8 goblins are in this room” or some such. That’s why we don’t call things “room 1, instead we say “1 – Makeshift Guardroom” and then go on to describe the room. All of this is bad padding. 

There’s a lot of appears to be and seems to be thrown in.There’s a lot of backstory mixed in to the rooms, sometimes half or a third of a column of information that is completely useless. This isn’t a historical document, it’s a document meant to be used to run a game at the table. Monsters are just mixed in to the text with no formatting, so, good luck pulling out the information you need to run a game. “Generally there are no guards here.” Great, so there are no guards here. Are there generally gods here? Or elephants? “This is the kitchen for the caste (or what is currently being used as a kitchen …” and then describes a kitchen. 

Sometimes the descriptions get REALLY good. Like “An evil level 3 cleric is in this room along with five goblins.” 

Minimal statting, if it weren’t for the padded out backstory and text. There’s nothing to this adventure, beyond what you might get in Palace fo the Vampire Queen. Sure, more words, but to no other effect. Enjoy your land of imagination!

This is $4 at DriveThru, with one five star rating, of course. You’ll get a few pages of rooms in the preview, so, enough to figure things out on your own.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/413187/Castle-Ravir?1892600