Hey all, I found a review I wrote of the 2nd edition Ravenloft adventure, Touch of Death. Warning, it's pretty long
First, the cover. A Boris Karloff-looking mummy looms in front of a backdrop of cracked and aged hieroglyphics, superimposed in front is a swooning woman scantily-clad in a style evocative of the Rom, except she’s blond and blue-eyed.
This cover grabs the eye, but is really old-fashioned. It also doesn’t really evoke the plot. Not that I think that’s necessary. A cover-artist’s job is to get your attention. In this case, I think it succeeded… but also that this cover has really gone out of style. Still, it’s a reminder that the story is the story, but it’s the cover that puts the butts in the proverbial seats.
The story begins with your PCs helping a group of Vistani (Rom-analogues, who have recently returned to D&D with much revision because the old depictions of them were spectacularly racist) whose wagon threw a wheel. The group’s young matriarch, a Vistani girl named Dulcimae, asks the players for their help. This is unusual for the older Ravenloft stuff in that the Vistani, while suspicious of the party, aren’t malevolent or sinister - they just need help sorting out their wagon. The opening of the adventure is contingent on the PCs helping the Vistani and doesn’t offer alternative paths, but then again D&D isn’t the game of not helping people who are in a tight spot. In exchange for the players’ help, Dulcimae offers to lead them out of the Domains of Dread.
Needless to say this adventure isn’t about leaving the Domains of Dread with a group of Vistani after you help them fix their wagon. Though I think that there’d be a sort of poetry to that especially if players had been there for awhile. There’d probably be some indignant sputtering. Someone would say “That’s it? That’s all we had to do?”
After that your friends wouldn’t talk to you anymore, but you’d have won a moral victory.
The Mists of Ravenloft have other plans, and they divert your fly Vistani ride into the sandy hellhole of Har’Akir. No, really, 2nd Edition Har’Akir sucked. You’d be happier in one of the domains full of vampires. You pass into Har’Akir bounded on one side by a sheer cliff with a searing wall of heat to your back and a crappy little mud-brick village up ahead. The description of Har’Akir given by the module reads: “The domain is a very simple place. There are two roads, a village with a spring, a canyon ridden cliff, and a lot of sun and sand.”
It specifically says that if you yell at Dulcimae about this, she’ll cry.
It goes on to describe how miserable life in Har’Akir is, and how there’s almost no food to be had and that the people of Mudar don’t die because the waters of the oasis sustain them. Life must be awful if you have Water Plus and everything still sucks. Presumably if they try to dig an irrigation ditch and grow a garden the Darklord loses his cookies and smashes it.
Also is the name of the village Mudar or Muhar? Even the adventure can’t keep track - in the text it’s Mudar, on the map it’s Muhar.
There’s more here, mostly to drive home the point of how hard-up the people of Mudar/Muhar are and how at the mercy they are of… well, everything. The desert, monsters, you name it. They even provide you with an NPC, an orphan boy named Abu who’s so desperate to leave the desert hellhole that he attaches himself to the party as a hireling… are they still a hireling if you don’t need to pay for them? They also provide another hireling, one capable of reading the Akirran hieroglyphics, but honestly his prices are pretty ridiculous. 5 GP a day and a 100 GP rider to enter the final dungeon. If your PCs are a bunch of min-maxing fools then they best pay up because the Wizard never bothered to pick up Comprehend Languages and Har’Akirrans use a Hieroglyphic alphabet. “You can’t use that in a fight! It’s stupid!” Haha, guess you’re paying 5 gold a day so you’re not stuck in Hell’s Sandbox forever, shoulda thought of that, Fireballs McLightningbolt! Better not let this guy die!
Actually, progressing through Touch of Death doesn’t require you to bring either hireling along. The most they do is translate flavor text for the party. Which is another thing wrong with this module.
After this misery breakdown, the module introduces the plot, which starts with people going missing from Mudar/Muhar every few nights, with the villagers occasionally finding a withered corpse. It talks about the domain’s darklord and how the people view him (...not well, considering their circumstances). The only light in this forsaken place is Muhar/Mudar’s temple and its benevolent high priestess.
A slight digression here, the plot of Touch of Death kicks off with an introduction that in part says “This module is partially event driven which means that certain events take place regardless of where the PCs are or what they are doing.” This is a big red flag, because it means that the plot of the adventure is on rails, and isn’t reactive to what the player characters are doing. This means that they’re not integrated into the arc of the story, which can lead to disenfranchisement if the DM doesn’t fix it. A DM should have to make adjustments, but they shouldn’t have to fix anything in an adventure to make it work.
These fixed plot points occur night-by-night. Each one is assumed to happen as written, and isn’t reactive to the actions of the players in any meaningful way. As indicated, their presence isn’t even required for half of them. Great.
After this, there are spoilers. I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum, but you’ve been warned.
Day/Night 1: The cool part of Night 1 is the introduction of the Desert Zombie, a Fast Zombie variant on the ol’ shambler with the ability to erupt out of the sand and ambush the unwary. They also have the ability to rapidly burrow through sand as if swimming, but that’s stupid when they can just lie in wait. It’s not like they have anywhere else to be.
On the first night, the party is supposed to get their first look at the Big Bad and fight a pitched battle with a small horde of Desert Zombies, who kill and drag off as many of the Vistani as they can catch (but explicitly not Dulcimae, who hides).
Day/Night 2: This starts off with Dulcimae doing a Tarokka (that’s a fictional Tarot analogue used by the Vistani) reading for the party. It’s kind of cool that this is meant to be interactive, though the adventure is written as if you’ll just use a deck of Bicycle cards instead of the deck that came with the Red Box… yes, I remember. The downside of this is that there’s almost no flexibility to the reading, you just keep pulling cards until the ones indicated come up, all others are “false readings.”
Honestly you’re better off just narrating the fortune-telling, in my opinion.
The next night, the Big Bad comes back with more zombies, including any of the Vistani they managed to drag off on night one. This is once again a fight on rails, since no matter what the PCs do the zombies drag off Dulcimae and kill the rest of the Vistani.
This is by far the most frustrating part of this adventure, and also the part where it most shows its age. But I’ll elaborate on that in a little bit.
Day/Night Three: On day three, the Big Bad frames the PCs as being involved in the murders… even though they started before the party got to Mudar/Muhar and… this is just super frustrating. What is the point of Day Three? The party gets shut out by the village, which is annoying but to… what effect? There’s nothing they need there, Mudar/Muhar is a toilet that doesn’t even have a place to resupply. If you need water you have a whole oasis you can draw it from while glaring daggers at the Mudar/Muharites. If the PCs weren’t present for what happened to the Vistani on Night 2 they don’t get framed, they don’t get shut out by the villagers… and this has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the plot.
On night three, a Force Ghost of Dulcimae shows up, frantically pointing the PCs at the temple. Instead of slowly dropping hints to the party that all is not as it seems, sinister revelations and creeping fear, the party gets a ghost, frantically waving and pointing. K.
Inside, the benevolent high priestess is caught red-handed. Literally red-handed, since she just finished making a human sacrifice out of Dulcimae. There’s a fight (naturally) which can end a couple of different ways (and the way the priestess tries to outfox the PCs is actually quite clever and very Egyptian), but however it ends Day/Night 4 is pretty well fixed.
Day/Night Four: The villagers are angry that the PCs killed the Benevolent Priestess (even if they didn’t pull it off) and try to lynch the party. The text says they won’t disperse until the PCs kill at least three of them, and that the lynch mob will come after the party every day until the adventure concludes. This is incredibly frustrating, as it leaves no room for player cleverness or persuasiveness, and is basically just railroading the players into a Dark Powers Check because they did Something Bad. Bad PCs, bad! Don’t *bap* kill *bap* peasants! *bap* Even if the adventure makes you! *bap*
On Night Four, the Big Bad decides the PCs have to go, and sends Mummy Dulcimae after them at the head of a troop of Teriyaki-flavored Desert Zombies. Once again, the outcome of this encounter is largely on rails. There are some minor variables but the overall outcome is fixed.
Day/Night Five: There isn’t even an entry for Day Five, so just assume the PCs have to beat down the angry mob I guess.
On Night Five, the Big Bad comes to mess with the PCs himself, along with Mumcimae and every other NPC that got Railroaded to death in the course of the adventure. There isn’t really a point to this, and the encounter basically stipulates that the Big Bad beats the crap out of the party (knowing his 2E stats, it’s highly likely at the suggested PC level) until another NPC who has no further bearing on the adventure shows up, and the Big Bad runs off rather than confront them. PCs aren’t given the slightest clue who this NPC is or why the antagonist would retreat rather than fight them.
Day/Night Six: The PCs murder a horde of 30-40 Mudar/Muharites during their daily confrontation with the angry mob. Like you do. Everyone remembers that fun D&D battle they had with a horde of 40 angry level 0 townsfolk. So fun, right? ...Right?
On Night Six, it’s assumed that the players head out to the module-concluding dungeon, ifi they haven’t already. Despite the previous encounters offering no clue that the PCs should go there outside of the card reading.
So overall my review of these encounters is… not good. If you run these as written without disguising that they’re on rails really well I could easily see players getting frustrated and losing their investment in the adventure. Instead of slowly reeling them in with clues that all is not well in the land of Sand and Misery and Zombie Jerky, the adventure just drops a ‘GO HERE’ on the party… but there’s no payoff, because they can’t save the NPC in whom they’re presumably emotionally invested (even though all Dulcimae does in the adventure is cry if people are mean to her, give a card reading, hide, swoon, and faint).
What happens to Dulcimae is a legitimately bad example of Fridging, and if you want to run Touch of Death I’d strongly advise you to fix it - you should probably dramatically change the way she behaves, and give your players an opportunity to rescue her if they can figure out where she’s been taken in time.
There are other examples of fridging in this adventure, since other NPCs the party is supposed to get attached to like Abu the Orphan Boy are also supposed to be killed and thrown back at the PCs as monsters. I understand that character death generates horror for the PCs and your players, but I posit that there are better ways to do it than the options Touch of Death lays out for you.
If you don’t know what Fridging is (you probably do but I try not to assume), it’s when a character, almost always a woman (but I also extend it to children and animals. I do believe it’s possible to Fridge a male character, it’s just done to women in fiction much more often), exists as a character only to die horribly so that their death can give pathos and drama to someone else’s story.
After Six Days and Nights in sunny Har’Akir, the module goes into the layout of the dungeons the PCs will visit during the module, the Temple of Mudar/Muhar and Pharoah’s Rest. A lot of the things contained in these dungeons are interesting and add weight and mystery to the adventure, but the encounters as given don’t sync up with them as well as they should. The PCs are pointed toward the Temple by a proverbial blinking sign and toward Pharoah’s Rest by dint of having no place else to go.
The way the adventure ultimately resolves… to be frank, the module doesn’t do a good job of playing up the drama of it, but it’s the best part of the adventure IF you pad it out and dress it up right. If you played the old SSI computer game The Stone Prophet, they used a version of Touch of Death’s ending to wrap up the game, but made you sweat for it.
Final Review:
Touch of Death is one of the adventures that’s part of Hyskosa’s Hexad, AKA the Grand Conjunction adventure series, which is one of D&D’s classic adventure lines… except Touch of Death is quite frankly not very good. If there’s one thing that’s absolutely true about running an RPG, it’s that you keep the sitting around waiting for something to happen to a minimum and even if you have a path the story should broadly follow, you create options for variability of outcome or unorthodox solutions to encounters.
Those don’t exist in this adventure. There’s no dawning dread and very little mystery. The villains’ motivations aren’t well-defined even in the narrative (they have a plan, but the method for achieving their goal is… highly dubious) and the Darklord of Har’Akir, the looming presence of whom should overshadow the whole adventure even for the villains, building up to when the PCs finally meet them… is barely touched on. Even an important point of order between the two principal villains is there in their DM-facing write ups but isn’t made relevant in the adventure itself. PCs aren’t given a way to find out about it, let alone capitalize on it.
If I had to summarize this adventure in one word, that word would be frustrating. This is a frustrating adventure module not because it’s difficult, but because it’s completely on rails and the scenery facing the players isn’t even that compelling. There’s a story here though - and that story is The Stone Prophet, which is built out from this adventure and is canonically a sequel to it. It assumes that the adventurers from Touch of Death lose.
1995’s The Stone Prophet computer game took the basic premise of Touch of Death, expanded it out and built it into a real campaign, one with vibrant NPCs (by early-mid 90s D&D computer game standards), a fun plot, a lot of mystery and satisfying resolutions. And with no fridging in it.
Edit to add: While it’s not explicitly detailed in Stone Prophet’s story, if you play or read this adventure and then play that game, the circumstances of some of the characters allude to it being set after Touch of Death. But that doesn’t change the fact that the computer game realized the potential of the best things about this adventure better than Touch of Death itself did.
If you’ve read the new description of Har’Akir in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, they spruced this domain up a lot. They made Mudar/Muhar (now officially called Muhar) ten times larger (it literally went from a sun-baked collection of hovels clinging to the edge of an oasis to a city of 3,000 on the edge of a lake) and just by filling out the map of the domain created a bunch of story seeds and adventuring hooks where before there were… not a lot.
But having said that, Touch of Death is not a good candidate to be reclaimed as an adventure for 5E, above and beyond compensating for the 5E rewrites to the Har’Akir domain.
I keep comparing Touch of Death to The Stone Prophet for a reason, and that reason is that Stone Prophet is the adventure Touch of Death should have been. If you’re interested in Har’Akir for your 5E adventures and want to explore an older version of the setting for ideas, you’re better off reading a plot synopsis of Stone Prophet or just getting your retro on and playing it, you can buy it as part of a bundle with Strahd’s Possession at gog.com for ten bucks. See what D&D computer games were like during the pre-Baldur’s Gate forgotten age!
The guy who wrote this adventure, Bruce Nesmith, wrote a lot of other stuff for TSR when he was their Creative Director, and a lot of his work is better than Touch of Death in concept and execution, though there are some common flaws in execution throughout his adventures that are really at their worst in this module. An adventure I’ll be reviewing soon, The Created, is arguably Nesmith at both his best and his worst at the exact same time.
Nesmith later moved on to work for Bethesda and was the lead designer for Skyrim, and honestly adventures like Touch of Death aren’t all that different from grubbing around for shit somebody dropped in the back of a cave full of monsters. Why’d they drop it there? Does my going after it have any effect on the outcome of events? Shrug.
Final Thought:
I decided not to do star ratings or thumbs-up/thumbs-down because I don’t usually find those ratings helpful, unless a Mark Millar or Zack Snyder joint pops up on Netflix and then you better believe I’m hammering that thumbs-down as hard as I can. In this case, my final thought is that when this adventure was published in 1991 it cost $6.95. That’d be $13.99 in 2021 dollars (when I wrote this review), rounding up to the nearest common US price point. I don’t think this is a fourteen-dollar adventure.