Monster Party Book 1 Adventure Commentary: Author Commentary Neither Man Nor Beast.
Okay lets talk about this adventure in full and how it affected my writing of it, not to mention possibly a few hints if you were ever going to run it.
For one thing someone once said online that if you were going to run it don't tell your players its name and don't even let them see the book cover. That's perfectly reasonable advice given how much of this adventure is played around misdirection.
To truly follow along 100% with what I'm talking about, try finding your own copy of the Ravenloft adventure called "Neither Man nor Beast" but I'll try and not have my comments be dependent upon someone having already read the book.
You start out, in basically any port side town with a simple mission to return some faux cursed bauble which will require a boat trip that leads you to the Sunset Empires.
In the book Captain Stewart is supposed to be a lot kinder, and more fun loving as long as he's on land and only then turn into a major hard ass once he gets out to sea. Since it doesn't talk about him being cursed I can only assume that this is the result of him taking some sort of perverse delight (well okay he obviously needs to do it for the money also) when he lures passengers onto his ship and then starts bossing them around once they're out at sea and they can't do anything about it.
That might work in theory but still I have to think that even in Ravenloft word would get around of what a bitch in sheep's clothing you are. So instead I had him be tough and gruff throughout, our group knew he wasn't going to be very nice from the get go, but he was more or less the only game in town, while at the same time our protagonists were the only passengers in town who needed to travel by ship at the moment so it behooved both sides to come to some kind of agreement.
Right off the bat Alexander showed that being Chaotic Good he has no hesitation to resort to half truths or even outright lies even when dealing with people who aren't mustache curling baby impaling evil. (Florence by comparison being Neutral Good will only lie to villains not to bog standard NPCs)
James of course takes pity on the black leopard because he feels a kinship with all thing feline, and Cal manages to cover for him, by pointing out that the leopard is worth a lot more alive than dead so Captain Stewart should keep his men from physically harming it for their amusement. Captain Stewart and his crew really are a pretty unlikeable bunch in a lot of ways, and to avoid driving the point home overmuch (if they got too villainous an outright confrontation would have broken out and that wouldn't have ended well for anyone unless Alexander waited till they had reached their destination to start the fight) I left out some of the worst stuff they do like trying to harpoon dolphins which even bI/b know to be a major no no for sailors up there with shooting down albatrosses.
The attack of the Soul Kraken (that beast with the translucent tentacles) worked fine, though I skimped a little on the fight topside I'll admit.
After that, our heroes get washed ashore, I decided to drop the part of the adventure which says that Delphi and her friends (seal based broken ones) were responsible for our protagonists survival (it involves seeing flashes of Delphi's face as the characters are about to pass out from drowning) because I wanted her to be completely surprised when they met our protagonists.
In fact, though I might be skipping ahead a little lets talk about how I wrote Delphi for this adventure.
She's a little more villainous in the book, where she knows that her father will dissect people (it is unclear if she knows that he' Frantisek Markov or not) and accepts that as part of his nature and there being nothing wrong with being true to your nature.
I decided to step up Markov's duplicity in regards to her (yes that book she's talking about is missing half of its pages because Markov tore out anything that could implicate him then made it look like weather/time related damage) and get rid of the possibility that she would follow Markov's orders to help subdue the group should he order it.
Because this is a story and not an adventure, I have greater control over the lens through which one perceives the events taking place. When running an adventure, the story is almost always perceived solely through the lens of the PCs and what their characters end up seeing, the idea of doing scenes from Delphi or Felix's point of view just wouldn't really be possible in a more traditional RPG set up. As an author telling a story it very much is.
But, to avoid giving the game away (it wouldn't do to have Delphi thinking about how these people are so nice, she hopes her father doesn't end up vivisecting them like he did their last group of guests) it was necessary to obscure the truth from Delphi so that in turn she could unintentionally obscure the truth from the reader.
Anyway, getting back to approaching things in chronological order, our protagonists wake up and start to try to take stock of their surroundings. In the adventure book there are no rat based broken ones, however, I deduced that given that Markov was keeping some giant rats in his menagerie and what would yield the most drama/suspense /make for the best story, yes there should be rat broken ones, lots of them.
That allowed me to play up what a weakness James' diet could be (I'm still not sorry for the "but the rats, why are the rats gone?" line) and in general follow some advice from Kurt Vonnegut. "Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of." Well James ends up going without food for at least 48 hours and it's clearly not the least bit of a fun experience for him.
It was also very important for another reason; if it was not for the rat broken ones, the climax of this story would seem a little out of left field. After all, Alexander was the one Markov was going to operate on first, Alexander was the one who talked with him the most during the meals, why is it that James is the one who fights Markov in the last chapter?
Because while Markov was GOING to do horrible things to Alexander, he already HAS DONE horrible things to James.
He's transformed Markovia into a land where the sentient eat the sentient (in the book it's pretty clear that broken ones routinely hunt/eat each other) and that's a principle/way of life that horrifies and repulses James Firecat to his very core.
Remember, Ravenloft wants to make werecreatures become chaotic evil and eat sentient flesh, or at the very least that's the end affect the domain drives them towards, so if the Dark Powers expressly want it to happen or not it doesn't really matter. James thus fights an uphill battle every day to keep his alignment where it is and his stomach full, being in a land where there are more sentient animals than non sentient animals really does not agree with him.
If the group ever visited the Wildlands (a domain which is basically the Ravenloft equivalent of the Jungle Book gone bad) he'd be pretty much reduced to eating piles of flies since they're the only animal in the entire domain that doesn't talk.
Granted the way the Ravenloft rules are written I think you're allowed to kill someone in self defense, and then eat them even if they were sentient without power check/alignment adjustment check, it's only hunting someone down and killing them with the purpose of eating them in mind that makes you turn CE, but that might just be rules layering so James will never do it.
Getting back on topic, Markov was going to operate on Alexander's brain, but having to eat sentient flesh (and starvation along with the need to be strong for Mirri would have driven James to it sooner or later if he wasn't able to find some non-sentient prey) would be a black mark upon James' very soul.
I'm not being overly dramatic there, James is an "Innocent" in Ravenloft mechanics terms, not only has never failed a dark powers check, he's never done anything evil enough to warrant one. He'll be a very different character if he ever looses that particular trait.
Thus, James comments on finally catching a rat are not just about his prior hunting difficulties, they are him taking pride in the fact that he has finally tracked down the one who made Markovia into such a twisted mess and brought them to justice.
The suffering that Markov caused James was not intended, it was not personal, but to quote Captain Carrot of Discworld, "Personal is not the same as important." So that is why why cinematicaly speaking, I wanted to arrange for it to be James who took down Markov.
Moving on, after a day of putzing about doing this and that "Doctor Fran"/Markov shows up. It's at this point that I have another simple but important quibble with the book.
I'm pretty sure that it's only in Tepest where people don't have last names. Doctor Fran, Orson and Felix are all presented without last names (so is Delphi but if Doctor Fran had a last name she would have adopted it obviously) and should have last names in my opinion. Heck, "Doctor Fran" doesn't even have a proper first name!
So I decided that Fran should be short for Francis and then despite Alexander's comments about not using an anagram later on, I did indeed throw Frantisek Markov into an anagram generator and "Vaster" was one of the words that ended up being among the results, I liked the way it looked so I went with it.
As for Felix and Orson their last names are in theory huge red flags, but I doubted any of you noticed them. Both of them have last names which are the same as the second half of the species name they are derived from, (well they don't say what kind of bear Orson is so I went with Brown or Ursus Arctos, but Unica is very much the second half of Panthera Unica or Snow Leopard) which I felt was not too obvious but a nice hint that something might be going on behind the scenes.
The next problem I have is that as Markov is explaining the situation he calls his broken ones, well broken ones.
If they used to be called that before the Grand Conjunction (I'm not sure but I think they were) when Markovia was part of Ravenloft's Core then just by using the same name for them he's giving away a huge hint that he really shouldn't.
Granted this adventure was originally written as a "weekend in hell" style adventure where the heroes would not have originally been from Ravenloft, but there were touches here and there about how it might be adapted for a team starting out in Ravenloft, this is another area where such a touch should have been noted.
Have him call them Beastmen, (I know that is the name of another monster completely which you primarily meet in G'Henna I don't care) or Monstermen, Beastlings, Homo-Beastalis, Devolved, Plague Cursed, Misshapen... any of the above should work just fine and if the heroes don't know the monsters are directly called broken ones (there are a lot of monsters out there that look like half human half animal creatures after all) they won't have a red flag go up warning them that they are in Markovia, because once they know that they're probably gonna start looking for a guy with green eyes who has a human face, but nothing about the rest of him is human, and then the games is given away before it can even start.
Florence of course being a Dryad spots that the tree set up is wrong (Markovia has suffered some major geographic shock being taken from a temperate highland in the Core to becoming a tropical island and the plants are adapting as best they can) but sadly unaware of what possible context to put this information in the heroes can't do anything with it.
Then they reach the estate itself and meet Delphi. I decided to have Delphi fall for James because they're the closest together in ages (I think nobody's age is really stated all that clearly but I decided to say Delphi is very late teens/very early twenties or at least that's how old she looks to be human wise, it's not very clear how old she used to be as a dolphin before Markov got to her, and how old she looked to be as a human girl afterward. For all I know she went from being less than a year old Dolphin calf to a fifteen year "old" human girl with amnesia about her life before the island) and because James is easily the most romantic of the three heroes.
Sadly for Delphi while James is very much a romantic at heart, he's also quite taken with (and by) Mirri, so while he's always polite, cheerful, helpful, and good natured to her he has no romantic interest in her at all.
Also Delphi helps me establish what is going to be one of the running themes of Monster Party... what people see is less important than what context they see it in. Both Delphi and then Felix at first (and Felix only sorts it out because so long as he has food in his belly James will always be ready to shoot his mouth off and then refuses to let good meat go to waste, so he brought the deer Felix saw him kill in hybrid form back to the estate) are certain that James' hybrid form has to be a feline broken one of some sort.
That's entirely reasonable, following the old principle of if you hear hoof beats think horse not zebra. In Markovia if you see a creature that is a mix of man and beast, think Broken One not lycanthrope. This reliance upon "context" to fully comprehend what you see, is one of those reasons why Mirri gets away with walking around with pale skin and bright red eyes.
If she was on her own and at night context would say vampire. As part of a group of adventurers, well context says adventurer.
It doesn't help that the rules are frustratingly vague about how "in character" someone either succeeding or failing against her charm gaze should be of what just happened. Even Van Richten's Guide to Vampires doesn't clarify this particular issue sadly and honestly it really should given that 90% of it is written in universe.
So to keep things internally consistent I'm going to say that all such charm, dominate, suggestion and what not mental attacks are only known to be mental attacks if the defender rolls a critical success against them.
Otherwise they either fall under the affect without realizing it in character or they don't fall under the affect but in character also don't realize someone was trying to control their minds. If there's a precedent for a different interpretation please let me know.
So moving on, next we have the meal scene.
This is a very well written (okay well designed it's more like two and a half pages of bullet points to come up as the meal goes on) scene and I tried to touch on as many of the ones listed as possible.
Delphi shows herself to be nearly as extroverted as James, and our werecat is of course happy to focus on memories of better days rather than dwelling on his own still effectively empty stomach. In the process he reveals that in point of fact James Firecat is no different from any other hero in Ravenloft, he must suffers from the vices of his virtues.
Given that wisdom is James' semi-obviously his dump stat (being a lycanthrope helps some but just not enough) who has a penalty to sense motive due to being an Innocent, he is a notoriously soft sell. James' continued adoration of and loyalty toward Jacqueline Renier is an important defining aspect of his character (I'm not saying James is destined to spend his life in the service of chaotic evil women of noble bearing who look younger than they really are and have bichromatic hair and the power to control rats, but in all honestly, yeah he has a type) as it marks him as just about the only member of the group who is a patriot in regard to their homeland.
Once the meal is finished, we get to see Doctor Fran's library and the Book Of Insufferable Darkness. It's a cheap laugh, but I've never afraid to include a few cheap laughs here or there, after all you need to let the tension get a chance to dissipate before you can start building it up again.
Beyond that we have the contents of Markov's Menagerie which as I said is taken straight from the book. It is in no way my fault that he was keeping giant rats in there, which happened to be exactly what James needed.
So then we get to Markov's painting session with Mirri.
I loved writing this scene, because we got to see two evil characters who were both trying to pass themselves off as normal people to interact. Such scenes typically go one of two ways icy hostility or unspoken unexplained connection. I went with the later.
So with that said, it's entirely possible to argue that Mirri "lost" this scene, in so far as she "blinked" first and was not able to keep herself from revealing her true nature while Markov kept up his Doctor Fran persona throughout the entire scene and didn't clue Mirri into in as to what was going on.
Frantisek was of course delighted with Mirri's ability to turn into a lioness because it let him draw her as such. Unsurprisingly given that he's had a lot more experience "working" with animals than people Markov knows animal anatomy better than he does human anatomy so he can draw Mirri much better as a lioness than he could as a person.
Sadly I'm not quite so sure if this scene works well in the adventure book, because what makes it interesting in the story is that Mirri has just as much to reveal and or hide as Markov does. So the scene gets to escalate playfully with both Mirri and Markov hiding daggers behind their smiles (not necessarily aimed at each other of course) rather than just a picture being painted.
If you do this scene, make sure that the heroine in question has a thing or two to hide, or is very much in love with herself and will be willing to chat up Markov just for the joy of talking about herself as part of getting her picture painted.
After that, James gets his food and Delphi gets to have a great deal of stress and trauma dumped on her shoulders (remember my earlier Kurt Vonnegut quote? That applies twice over to Delphi as much as it applies to James in this story. Hell I even got some perverse pleasure from it at times...)
The Felix hunting scene is good, since it gets to hint at something being slightly off with him, but at the same time it is a long way from being irrefutable proof that Doctor Fran is Frantisek Markov. If you are really stealthy and speak cat, it can also reveal that Felix is really in Akanga's corner (sadly James was too busy hunting deer when Felix was doing his initial report and only caught up with him afterwards) which will play a very big part in the end of the game.
I omitted the scene of Doctor Fran going out to talk with his broken ones, because that reveals a bit too much of his true identity, he calls himself Diosamblet, he proves that he doesn't just have a pact with the broken ones to get them to leave him alone, he actively has control of them, it's impossible to take him at face value or trust him from that point on. Our heroes are more than smart enough to have figured it out from that clue, so I didn't give it in order to maintain suspense.
After that, they head out for the monk temple. I ignored the scene of Akanga having some of his broken ones attack the group, because really it doesn't make sense for Akanga to sour relations with those he eventually wants to recruit and at the same time get some of his own followers killed off.
I get that maybe the book needed a way to get some cold iron weapons into the heroes hands to give them a chance against the undead monks they are about to encounter. There has to be a better way to do it then Akanga throwing broken ones at the heroes though, if you want a suggestion have your heroes encounter two groups of broken ones that are currently fighting, and whatever the heroes do the winners of the fight will vanish back into the jungle leaving behind their weapons to flee faster. That will give the heroes cold iron weapons, raise the question of why are broken ones fighting one another and put the heroes on edge without being explicit about anything else.
Then we get to the monastery, our heroes take the most direct and simple path in order to get there thanks to James, they try and knock. The basket that is lowered can only hold 800 pounds or around 4 people, but luckily once James reduces himself to his cat form and Mirri turns into a cloud of mist/smoke/air that floats up on her own taking them up under the weight limit.
That takes us to the undead monks. I have a lot to say here.
Okay, I like the idea that they're undead and don't know it, it's interesting when characters have abilities they may not be fully aware of and come to the fore in interesting ways.
To pick one example, I'm sorely tempted to say that James has the Lichloved feat (lets ignore the normal perquisite feat that involves getting an evil symbol tattooed on your body) which you can only acquire via... look the feat is called "Lichloved" lets just say that applies to any form of intelligent undead and move on from there. James is of course unaware of this fact, and has no idea why mindless undead aren't even going to notice him, and often doesn't even notice that they aren't paying attention to him since they'll pay plenty of attention to the group as a whole.
It's something you can do in a story a lot easier than you can do in an rpg, but it's an interesting concept to play around with that there may be information on the character sheet that the character himself is unaware of. Though of course pulling it off requires you to have good role-players who can separate in an out of of character knowledge.
I also don't have an issue with the fact that Father Milhouse and the others have no last names here unlike with Doctor Fran and company, because spooky religious order members are allowed to just be known as Brother, Father, Sister... It's in the rules for that kind of thing.
What I don't like can be boiled down into three salient bullet points.
1: The monks end up ruining the promise of the premise of this adventure.
What do I mean by that phrase? Well it's something I heard during the commentaries for Leverage (great show, heck "sometimes bad guys make the best good guys" could be Monster Party's tag line) and it works like this. "The promise of the premise" is when you hear an outline of a particular adventure/movie/book/other form of media, from that outline alone you can imagine one scene which will be key and must take place to get all the good that can possibly be had from the idea.
The promise of the premise of Return of the Jedi is seeing Luke Skywalker match lightsabers again with Dark Vader after having gained a bunch of xp, some levels and upped his wisdom score.
The promise of the premise of Bioshock 2 is that moment when you finally get to be reunited with your little sister, no matter how many splicers and other big daddies you need to fight your way through first.
The promise of the premise of Phoenix Wright is that you'll get to shout OBJECTION!, cause the prosecuting Attorney to undergo character development, and watch the real culprit break down in front of an entire courtroom before being dragged off to jail while the judge declares "NOT GUILTY" and confetti gets thrown every which way.
The promise of the premise of any Arkham Game is getting to glide out of the shadows and punch out several dozen mooks while declaring I'm BATMAN and listen to Kevin Conroy be Batman while Mark Hamill does the Joker (if Joker is in the game if he isn't well I'll settle for just Mr. Conroy as Bruce Wayne/Batman), and honestly I am not ashamed to say I can recognize Mark Hamill's joker better than I can his Luke Skywalker.
When I was reading the adventure book introduction for Neither Man Nor Beast, I immediately had a pair of scenes materialize in my mind.
One of them was the heroes doing that "alone with the villain" scene you see in so many movies but I'm not quite sure what the trope name for is. You'll know what I mean once I describe it though. In Iron Man 1 Pepper Pots has just discovered that Obadiah is responsible for Tony Stark being kidnapped by hacking his computer when he walks into the room.
She has to hide the fact that she's got a hacking device hooked up to his machine, and hold a polite conversation with him, while all she wants to do is run screaming from the room. Everything they say to one another ends up being deeply layered with double meaning and she just barely manages to get out of there by the skin of her teeth before he realizes how much she knows.
In this adventure that would be the equivalent of having a dinner with Markov while you know he's Markov but at the same time can't leave before dinner because that would be much too impolite and so you have to sit there and smile as Markov talks about his work researching animals, his experiences with vivisection and so and so forth with every passing moment making the heroes wonder if Markov knows they are onto him but can't risk giving the game away by starting the fight.
There's NOTHING like this scene in Neither Man Nor Beast.
The other scene is to have the villain reveal his true identity /motive and gloat over the captured heroes in a "No Mr. Bond I expect you to die!" (possibly a bad example Goldfinger doesn't give away any of his plot in that scene but you know what I mean) kind of way as the heroes are subjected to all the rage and malice he has pent up for so long by pretending to be a normal person. There is a scene like that, but the problem is that the only way to get it is to refuse to try and go to the monastery (why wouldn't the heroes go, breaking into the fortresses of evil cults and making off with their maguffins is what they do) and it is also way too likely to lead to the heroes getting turned into broken ones/dieing.
If the heroes learn that Doctor Fran is really Frantisek Markov from the monks by reading a History of Markovia then there is horror at the realization, but there's no fear. They are shocked at what they have done, but they are not in any immediate danger from Doctor Fran's reprisals
If you want to get the most out of a Ravenloft adventure or story you need to mix together the existential soul deep effects of horror ("I can't believe I ate a meal with and agreed to help a mass murdering psychopath who likes to vivisect people, I'm a horrible person!") with the immediate animal like effects of fear ("Oh crap that mass murdering vivisectionist is right outside the door, how long can I keep him from realizing that I know his secret?") and the adventure as written honestly in my opinion fails to do that.
If you're going to run this adventure my suggestion is make sure the heroes end up finding Doctor Fran's journals with time to read them before the meal where he makes the offer for them to go to the monastery. They'll of course agree all to readily just to get out of the house and away from him, but at the same time that entire meal they should have the hair on the back of their neck pricking straight up (Doctor Fran may even comment on it kindly telling them that he's sure adventures of their skill have nothing to truly fear so they should relax at least a little) waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Okay lets move onto my other two problems.
The smaller problem is that the following line "The larges building in the monastery is a great Temple where the Table of Life is stored, protected, and venerated."
WHAT?!
Why is the Table of Life "venerated" by these monks? They know it's an evil artifact, the thing basically only "useful" purpose is for helping sadists be more sadistic by making it so their captives don't die.
Okay yes it could be used as an emergency ambulance kind of bed where you get someone onto it to keep them alive until they can be taken to someone with the magic to cure them, but clearly the Table of Life is an evil artifact and any life saving applications are secondary to the entire torture prolonging applications. Father Milhouse is described as having personally been among the monks who first recovered the Table, he should know that it is bad mojo just waiting to happen.
So yeah, in my adventure the monks very much do NOT venerate the Table of Life, they're treating it like an armed but not activated (as in a flip of a switch will start the countdown but its not actively about to go off any second) nuclear bomb. This is a terrible dangerous thing, and since we can't fight any safe way to disarm /destroy it best we keep it close because if some evil person got their hands on it then the damage they could do with it would be nightmarish.
The even bigger problem I have is that there's NOTHING in the book about what to do if the adventurer's can prove to Father Milhouse and the others that they are undead.
Yeah that's not incredibly likely to happen, but there are enough clues for the heroes that they should have a chance at it. Mirri made it easy because she can hear heart beats (or the lack there of) but even normal adventurers should raise a stink over the entire "not needing to eat" thing and from there it could go any number of ways from the heartbeat test Cal gave, to a cure/inflict spell being used on them to show how they are currently powered by negative energy.
So what I did was assume that the intact monks were still themselves but the withered monks had degenerated to zombie level intelligence, upped the number of withered of monks so that they vastly outnumbered the intact ones, and let things unfold from there.
The sledding down the mountain while riding the Table of Life scenes was one that I really enjoyed the mental image of, and it gave Cal a chance to really shine by both taking a very difficult shot which cut off the quickest avenue of pursuit, and then handing out lots of healing potions.
If your heroes attempt to escape by sledding down the side of the mountain of the table of Life let them. Play the scene to the hilt and have fun with it, remember a good D&D game even one in Ravenloft should leave the heroes with some memories they can feel warm and happy about and the escape on the Table of Life scene to me is a wonderful D&D version of the sledding across the boarder on a chello case scene in the James Bond film Living Daylights.
After that we don't have the scene with the half man half leopard or running into Akanga because once again don't want to give away the game before we can reach the apex of fear of horror.
Our heroes get back catch their breath, think they've seen the worst, and then sure enough things promptly get much much worse for them.
That brings us to the Alexander bound to the Table of Life scene.
His misquoting of a certain adage was very much intentional, Alexander considers the situation from his dream much more dangerous/desperate than the one he is currently in (Alex also has the "Dead Man Walking feat, he's stared what should have been certain death in the face, doing it again holds nothing new for him.
If you can't tell, I had fun, a lot of fun writing the scene with Alexander and Markov bantering back and forth while Alex was strapped to the table. Markov was finally letting his mask down (as our silver haired protagonist noted he finally got Alex's last name right, though of course even more tellingly afterwards Markov starts calling him by his first name while Doctor Fran always called him "Mr. DiamondXXXX".
The two get to play off each other wonderfully and when it becomes clear that you can't poke logical holes in the plans of a crazy surgeon (okay you can, he just won't care) by that point Alex has gained enough insight into Markov's personality that he manages to use his own overinflated ego against him, as Markov all too readily agrees to remove Alexander's eyepatch, and then is so drawn in by what he sees that he doesn't even think to worry about why Alexander might have wanted him to remove that eyepatch so badly.
I am especially proud of managing to work in the line "You could say I'm symptomatic" and give it honestly an even bigger "Wham" factor than it did when a different Alexander said it to a different Doctor. (It's a Prototype reference if you didn't know)
After that, he escape and since Markov planned to spring his trap in the morning he doesn't have a bunch of broken ones waiting to pounce just yet.
So yes, Delphi got character development out of it, so it didn't matter if Alexander was perfectly capable of rescuing himself, in letting his mask down to Alexander Markov also let it down to his daughter (even in the book he doesn't know about Delphi's habit of going swimming at night) and Delphi is loyal to Francis Vaster not Frantisek Markov in this version of the story.
Also we can see a mni-character arc with Delphi between this chapter and the epilogue. From chapter 12 until the epilogue having had her perceptions of James being the perfect heroic knight shattered, she's constantly thinking the worst possible of him. It's intended to show Delphi's somewhat childish outlook on life, James is either prefect hero or the worst villain possible, and it's not till the epilouge that she realizes that even James Firecat can have layers to him.
It also doesn't help that she clearly fails her horror check upon seeing him transform in chapter 13 with an "aversion" result though the fact that there's nowhere safe to run to keeps her from fleeing like normal.
Speaking of chapter 13, now we get to meet Akanga.
I've made him a slightly nicer person in the the story than he was in the book. In the book he's said to be Neutral Evil (I'm not on your side, our sides just happen to be side by side at the moment) but that didn't really click for me.
If Akanga was a purely self serving neutral evil type wouldn't he have been willing to do what Felix did, and stay in Markov's estate while planning to back-stab him at the most opportune moment? Instead I decided to make it clear (it's hinted at in the book as I read it) that he felt such revulsion at the things Markov did that he could not bear to live in the same house as him, even if it meant giving up the modern conveniences of the estate for the wildness of the jungle.
That he wasn't willing to compromise his morals/standards/principles/whatever you want to call them to even show Markov a fake smile while he planned how to kill him, that's not the behavior of someone who is neutral evil in my book.
The principle of Akanga and Delphi hooking up together is lifted directly from the book (it's what happens to Delphi is the heroes don't take her with them when they leave the island) so I decided to expand on the idea. Akanga wants Delphi (to start with at least) because she's a symbol of how he's supplanted Markov. In turn Delphi starts to become at least somewhat open to the prospect as she realizes that whatever else he may be, at least Akanga wears his nature on his sleeve unlike most of the people she's met/gotten to know.
So then we have the big fight at the end.
I really wish that they could have given us some visual aids for what the terrain outside Markov's estate is like. We get a visual over head look at it and its buildings, but I would have felt much more confidence about how this was all playing out if I could have seen some "before" and "after" pictures of what Markov's surroundings look like in regards to the fires that Akanga sets.
I think that sadly the book rushes a little too quickly to resolve the battle to get into Markov's lab just having the heroes fight three broken ones each. If you're running this adventure don't be afraid to let the spell casters run wild if they have the right spells for the situation. (The fact that Akanga had everyone rest for the night let Florence pick and choose exactly the arsenal she wanted for curb stomping a bunch of people in a jungle environment who didn't have any magic of their own, that or she's an alternate version of a druid who gets her spells in the sorcerer style, I'll stand by the later interpretation for the rest of these stories/compose a mock spell list for her to prove it).
Huge battles between good and evil tend not to happen in D&D or at least they're restricted to the focus on one individual group of characters rather than having huge rolling battlefields with lots of extras.
The reason for this of course is that unlike in Lord of the Rings, D&D characters have much stronger magic, and Gandalf with his burning pine cones is nothing compared to level D6 damage acorns or 8D8 + Level Holly Berries.
Huge wars in D&D are probably going to be decided by magic, this can be a fun time to remind the characters of why this is. On the other hand this adventure is set for early level characters when wizards are the guys who pings a monster to death with magic missile, but hey if you adapt the adventure out of second edition you might also change what level characters are so basically if you want a chance to let your Druidzilla go to town, you'll never find a better one in my opinion.
Also I enjoyed letting Florence go all "HOW DARE YOU" Fluttershy, at this point. I was especially proud of her comments near the end. I was originally going to have her work "I am the reaperman/reaperwoman" in there somehow because I like Discworld but decided against it and the end result is all the better for it in my opinion.
Felix's betrayal needed to be more heavily foreshadowed in my opinion, heck if I know how, maybe if for whatever reason the heroes have any kind of secret that Felix can figure out Akanga should know it but not Markov.
So then we get to Markov who unleashes a horde of... ugghh icky stuff on our heroes.
I honestly love Markov's final attack on the heroes were he somehow commands disembodied viscera.
Heroes will expect to get attacked by zombies in Ravenloft, what they won't expect is to get attacked by disembodied flesh. It's shocking, it makes the final fight something more than beating down a guy with stats no better than your average gorilla, it'll stick in the heroes mind for a good long while afterwards, what is not to love?
Markov just fight tills he goes down in the book but I gave him the best attempt at escape that he could probably have in that situation given his abilities (turn into some kind of small animal flee through bolt hole) because if Markov was smart enough to set up this entire Doctor Fran persona he should have been smart enough to try and set up a backup plan just in case things went south.
Sadly for him, if there's one thing James Firecat excels at, it's catching rats.
Also it should be a facet of Ravenloft that a villain's fall should reflect their sins and their weaknesses, and oh but does Markov's fate ever do that so long as the heroes managed to make off with the Table of Life.
Strapped down to his own evil artifact and then left at the "mercy" of his own creations, sweet sweet painful irony, once again his fate is not likely to be quickly forgotten.
It's one thing to be able to simply kill the evil overlord, it's something else to leave him trapped completely powerless to harm others in a hell that was more or less completely of his own making. It makes his defeat feel all the more complete and total in my opinion.
By the way have Akanga give the heroes some time to search the mansion for loot, I know Ravenloft is a hard setting/low magic but if they don't get a chance to raid Markov's private stores they aren't walking away form this adventure with any money to show for it and that's not fair to the PCs.
Delphi helps the heroes escape most likely and that's just about it.
Also If the heroes bring her with them as they leave the boarders of Markovia Delphi turns back into a dolphin.
What?
Okay, yes this is the only way that the book manages to give us a non-info dump way to let the heroes know that Delphi is a dolphin broken one, but it doesn't make sense in light of the larger adventure!
It's laid out in the back story to this adventure that Markov sent broken ones to Nova Vaasa to retrieve the Table of Life before the grand conjunction. Those broken ones didn't turn back into animals or loose their loyalty to Markov because they got the Table before it was stolen from them and a complicated series of events later Father Milhouse winds up with it. So why does Delphi turn back into a dolphin if she leaves Markovia? Does the rule only apply to the "greater" of Markov's broken ones who look more human? If so, once again why?
I can't find a rational explanation in setting for her to turn into a dolphin at the boarder.
So yeah in my opinion if the heroes leave with Delphi, have her stay with them and be an NPC hanger-on or whatever. Heck, Daughter of a Darklord is an interesting character concept/back story if you want to have another character join up with the group shortly after you run this adventure!
Well, those were my thoughts on Neither Man Nor Beast, and how this story ended up being the way it was. Hope you enjoyed it and don't forget to vote for which adventure to see next! The votes have been counted among all the places I've posted this story and it looks like we're going with option one, so bundle up because book two of Monster Party will take our protagonists on quite the chilling journey!
Before that though there will be another side story going up showing how James and Mirri met for the first time!