Messy Review: Raven’s Loft
Rating:🐱🐱🐱🐱
Raven’s Loft is a 32-page adventure for Liminal Horror by J. Carter (Orthopraxy). It was made for the Twisted Classics Jam, which prompted participants to reinterpret classic adventure or other fiction in a modern setting. In this case, it reinterprets the classic Ravenloft adventure. For full disclosure, I also submitted vampire-themed adventure to the same jam, and my only experience with Ravenloft is an entirely unserious play through of the 5e version in 2018.
Raven’s Loft takes the themes of the original and moves them to the Pacific Northwest on a Canadian island where a charismatic wellness expert leads a group murdering people with vampiric leeches to gain eternal life.
In short, I love this adventure, and really just wish a few parts were fleshed out a bit better. The interpretation of the themes is spot on and manages to feel very original while also clearly harking back to the source material. The fact that it draws strongly from Midnight Mass as well is a major bonus for me personally. Interpreting Stradh as a wellness cult leader is genius, and overall all of it is very well described in a way that I know exactly how I’d run these people at the table.
My main criticism is wishing more was fleshed out to guide running the adventure between the start and the key event late in the day when investigators are invited to dinner with the wellness cult. While I have ideas from reading it, I think it could do more for the GM. It makes good use of the DOOM clock mechanic with events that will progress if not interrupted, and the implementation of a Ravenloft-style card reading to set up the key pieces is also very well done. But, the random encounters that are the main fodder for everything between arriving on the island and going to dinner are much more sparse. What I would like to have seen is integration of the Voidcrawl mechanic from Liminal Horror with a bigger variety of encounters, horrors, clues, and setbacks that could arise to keep the game moving up to the big event.
It is still eminently playable without that, and what’s provided is golden, I just think that extra step to provide a bit more would have made it shine that much more.
As for the presentation, it makes good use of the Classic Explorer’s Template, and the public domain art is well chosen and well used. I particularly like the cover and the use of the lighthouse illustration as a map. The one piece of original art is also phenomenal and provides an incredible visual for the major horror of the vampiric leeches erupting from their hosts.