A Red & Pleasant Land: A Meaningless, Modern RPG

From what I can tell, A Red & Pleasant Land is supposed to be a setting book loosely influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as well as its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. But, instead of it being the bizarre dream-adventures of a girl, it’s the dull dream realm of a vampire.

As with other things I’ve reviewed recently, this concept has merit, but the execution is horribly flawed: there’s barely any setting, the maps and art are postmodern trash, the monsters are a gallery of uninspired, wasted opportunities, and there’s nothing to do that you couldn’t do elsewhere, and with less of a headache.

You'd be better served by just reading the books yourself (they’re quite short, and I’m pretty sure are legally available online, for free), taking notes as you go, and coming up with your own setting. Though, personally, I think it’d fare much better as just an adventure, or perhaps a short campaign.

But, before I get to that, before I go into more detail about the lack of details, the lackluster execution, what I would do to make it more interesting, useful, and just plain usable, let’s get the visuals out of the way.

First up, the map is comically crude. Atrociously amateur. My 10 year old has made more genuine attempts at maps, with far more meritorious and productive results. This? This is absolutely pathetic, and to charge money for it is frankly insulting:

Without context, it’s just an arrangement of sloppy shapes. While you might be able to intuit that the green masses are supposed to be forests (or, perhaps swamps), threaded with rivers flowing in utterly nonsensical ways, the only way you could possibly know that all the crap scribbled across the top and side are mountains, is because it is literally spelled out for you. 

Not only did you get more engaging maps with Nintendo games, the actual 8-bit graphics were superior in quality.

Over 30 years old, way more content.

And it’s not merely the maps that are awful. When it comes to what could generously be categorized as art the book is nothing special. Almost everything looks like sloppy, unfinished sketch work, or wannabe abstract. For example, what is this supposed to be:

There are these tiny illustrations scattered about, which only serve to accentuate the mediocrity:

Which are oddly absent on pages with far more white space:

Seriously, why not cram some of those scribbles deliberately mischaracterized as art here:

Even in areas where there’s an illustration:

Why not have simply made it larger (besides revealing just how bad it is)? This is a book by a guy that claims to be an artist. An artist with a degree, of at least some renown. So...why is there so much blank canvas? Why is what we get of such poor technique? I’m reminded of this video about post-modern art, and in watching it a lot of what I’ve observed about the substandard quality of virtually all indie roleplaying games makes sense (as well as, to be fair, recent games in general).

Some of it is vaguely reminiscent of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which is an art style that I think would have meshed perfectly with what I think the overall theme and tone of the book might have been:

If only. If only the art were better. And the rest of the content.

The only reason I think it’s supposed to be a setting is because of the godawful map and this bit near the start, where the author has the gall to suggest that you even could use this as a guide for "making your own game setting":

This isn't the sort of book you would want to use as a guide for anything, certainly not a campaign setting. And it's not just because there's barely anything to work with, though that's definitely one reason.

Go back to the map and take a look at it. Curious what’s in the Garden of Pests? The Burned Towers? Spires of Zombor? It was only while doing a CTRL+F for these names that I discovered that the book literally states on page 25 “this book contains no information on any of them”. Them being every place on the map that isn’t one of the two castles.

So really, this book is largely a collection of amateur art, a pair of poorly designed dungeons, and a boring bestiary with some thirteen pages of shallow worldbuilding tucked in there almost as an afterthought.

The land might be the dream of a vampire, or it might be transformed by the vampire’s dream. It’s not clear, but at the start it explains that Vlad “dreams of ruin and of distortion”, of an “Antiland, reversed and red”. Now, is the land supposed to look red, or mostly red? That would be something. Kind of, anyway. It wouldn’t really affect anything, and just be something you tell the players and maybe they’ll remember it.

But then we get this:

Not very good, but the sky is white and there’s a lot of green. And the very next page starts with “In green Voivodja…”, but then ends with “...in the bleak red night”. Huh. Maybe by day it looks normal, and at night everything goes red. Who knows? If there was more bad art we could perhaps get a more accurate picture...but, then, there would be more bad art.

Which you can get here.

Despite dreaming of “ruin and distortion”, Vlad dreams up a castle to cover the entire land. Not a ruined castle, but possibly a distorted one. Whatever that means in this particular context. It’s to shield him from the sun, keep away goblins, and “move his plants closer to the rain”. I guess he’s into gardening. Like, really into it. This entire kingdom-covering-castle is also filled with stuff, and allegedly features numerous music rooms, observatories, zoos, prisons, kitchens, etc.

I say allegedly because none of these places are depicted in the art, and there's no written examples for any of them. Not that I think the author could do any of it illustrative justice, but having at least one description for each of these rooms? That would have been nice. It would have also been nice to have a table for what players find when they go into one of the random square towers. And a random treasure table specific for this setting.

Oh, sure, there are "instant" tables at the end of the book, but it's just names: oh, this interior has a hall, bedroom, library, and game room? Okay, but what's in any of those rooms? What should be in any of those rooms? What's the general state? Does anyone live here? It's a dream, right? So, what might the furnishings look like? The rooms? Something in the vein of early Tim Burton? American McGee's Alice?

The results on the "instant" forest template include a vinechoked ruin, and various abandoned locales such as a library, prison, and tower. All well and good, except when the players go, huh, let's explore the ruin that we just found: did you prepare a map for this? Encounters? Treasure? What about the library? What's in the books? These would have been actually useful tables to include! 

Back to the backstory: at some point this kingdom-spanning-castle “fell”.

Was the entire kingdom-spanning-castle destroyed? Just part of it (it is quite large, after all)? Things seem to be more or less intact, so who knows? It also only mentions one theory, that it “fell” to the Heart Queen, before stating that, ultimately, “we don’t know”. Well, given the lack of description of everything else, I suppose I should be thankful that we even get all of one possibility. But the Heart Queen doesn’t own or command this vast-yet-sparsely described castle in this vast-yet-sparsely described land, which is now wracked by war.

It’s called the “slow war” because the vampiric armies cannot cross the rivers that supposedly criss-cross the land but aren’t depicted on the map, and they’re for some reason mostly relying on stealth, subterfuge, and sabotage to somehow win...even though they can just go underground, bypassing the rivers and fighting each other that way. Or fill in the rivers. Why not? They got the time. Topple a few buildings that supposedly maybe dominate the landscape.

Realistically, or as realistic as you can be in a fantasy game, what you’d have is two armies that would have long developed extensive maps and methods to best navigate the world (you can get instructions from A to B, after all), who could just duke it out that way, but...aren’t. Not that I’m clear as to why they are even fighting. I don’t know what resources they could possibly need from each other, if any, and both castles are located on opposite sides of the largely undefined region, anyway.

Also, it’s not even both sides of the chessboard duking it out: it’s the Red King versus the Queen of Hearts. The white chess vampires are only recent additions, with the Pale King unsure as to who to team up with.

Seems like the obvious thing to do is have the White and Red pieces fighting, as they did in Through the Looking Glass but...nope. Apparently the Red King dreamed up a castle that covered the entire land, it somehow “fell”, and now he’s fighting with the Red Queen. Where did the Pale King come from, anyway? Coincidentally a vampiric faction that also just so happens to transform into chess pieces, solely because chess was a theme in the source material, of course.

Or, based on the theory that some believe them—them being the Red King and Heart Queen—to have been “bitter, dying demons who awoke already foes in the early hours of the very first morning,” perhaps the Red King was always fighting the Red Queen, but then they took a break so he could dream of a kingdom castle. Maybe. Maybe not. It’s all very vague and noncommittal. 

Initially I questioned whether or not the Heart Queen could dream up anything, especially if she's just as old as Vlad (neither of which are said to have any ability to conjure anything via dreams, by the by), and then I found out on page seven it states that she "...dreams into being a world unending, unbeginning, with wonder and murder, disruption and unreason. And melancholy green gardens. And it is there now. And hers."

What? Where is this? Vlad dreams up a castle that covered the entire land, and it even states that one of the reason was to "move his plants closer to the rain", and that it includes "gardens with great wrought gates athwart each other in stacked profusion". So who dreamed up the gardens? Is the Heart Queen's dream actually influencing anything?

The entire land is described as square regions of ruined buildings of varying sizes, all capped with gardens and connected by bridges, separated by hedges and rivers. Conceptually I'd envision it like what you see in BLAME!, but the only real visuals we get are the full page postmodern mess on page 10 (above), and a few other equally terrible renditions that don't do much in giving you a solid idea as to what it's supposed to look like.

Everything can be divided into interiors, gardens, and forests. The interiors are, again, “generally furnished”, and the rooms are said to “often behave unlike ordinary architecture”. What does this mean? Again, there's no visual or literary examples, so that’s up to you to figure out. Also how the Slow War caused "extensive reality damage". If you can be bothered to remember, that is. I guess, do our own research to figure out what might belong in a dreamed-up, medieval-esque music room, zoo, observatory, etc.

Or make your own setting. Might as well, if you're going to put that much work into it, anyway.

Now, there is a single premade interior, but this is what it looks like:

So, I guess the floors are universally seamless, white stone, and despite it saying "generally furnished" looks like there are plenty of completely empty rooms. The whole mess looks like it was rolled up using a random room generator, with no attempt at anything resembling logic or purpose, with some "lolsorandom" bullshittery thrown in, like having everyone's brain being switched from playing the glockenspiel, and the doormouse causing a 3-point Wisdom loss if killed.

Why? Why do either of these things happen? Just because, apparently. Curious why the colorless knight and red pawn don't just kill themselves, so they can reform elsewhere. Sounds like a pretty easy way to escape.

The gardens are much of the surface, and for no particular reason “most open battles are fought here”. It would make more sense for the vampires to stay underground, where neither the sun nor canals will hinder or kill them. It would also make sense for the vampires to not bother fighting in the first place, because they have no real motivation to do so.

There's also an example garden, and it's somehow worse than the interior:

Forests are where the gardens have “grown wild”, an odd statement because, unless someone—maybe Vlad himself?—is tending to the rest of the region, why isn’t it all overgrown forest by now? Here's the sample forest, which lacks all the square towers that may or may not be ubiquitous to the environment:

For some reason, I was envisioning "forests" as being massive skyscraper-like buildings, threaded with even larger trees and such. Kind of like what you can see near the start of Nier: Automata. Instead, forests just look like normal forests.

Anyway, humans live within the forests, having formed villages, even cities it is said, but there are no examples. So, how do they generally dress? How do they get by? What do they eat? Do they communicate or trade with each other? Are they just part of Vlad's dream? The architecture is vaguely described, as well as how they are protected: by “old and complex rituals”.

How does the ritual work? What does it require? Does it need to be renewed? Can vampires literally not see the village, even if brought there? Can they be brought there by someone else? What if they burned the forest down? Why just forests? Do the rituals not work underground? Near water?

Did you honestly think you were going to get any answers? This would be a prime adventure hook, for the PCs to show up at a village and need to help out, keep the ritual going. Or, they couldn’t renew the ritual, and the villagers need help dealing with vampires. Or finding a way out of Voivodja. Or finding someone specific that got stranded here.

Actually, why don’t the people just leave? Makes more sense then trying to eke out a fearful, uncertain existence in a bizarre land infested with slow-warring vampires.

The entire section concerning the War and Quiet Sides of mirrors is very confusing. In the section "Where Are We & How Did We Get Here?", it implies that Voivodja both exists in the real/normal world, and also within an alternate mirror dimension. There's a bit where you can make it an "alternate universe Transyvania, reachable through mirrors", but then a few paragraphs later talks about just walking there.

The Quiet Side is I think supposed to be a reflection of the normal world, just...more mellow, I suppose. You can only cross over for short periods of time, though this isn’t explained for a few pages: you can only remain on the opposite side for a number of seconds equal to 10 times their Wisdom before going permanently insane.

Ultimately, I don't know where it is. Fortunately this would only be an issue were I to have any intention of using this book.

Anyway, humans have something called “quiet twins”, which are really your reflection. They are described as spending their time reading books and attending schools when you aren’t in front of a mirror. Somehow. Imagine that, trying to get anything done, knowing that at any moment you could have to zip to wherever your double is so you can start mimicking their actions.

How does your twin know where you are? When you’re about to move in front of a mirror? What you’re even going to do? None of this is explained. Like most things in this pseudo-setting—such as the kids in wells—it feels like a half-assed idea that was thrown in without any consideration beyond, yeah, sounds neat I guess.

The only real use for the Quiet side seems to be a way for players to quickly navigate through short sections in order to avoid vampires, as they don’t have reflections. I think. I’m just assuming you can jump through a mirror (the book describes this as difficult for some reason, but you can just crawl through), and hopefully jump back out of another before you go insane.

Otherwise there’s no real reason to bother with it at all. 

The book states that vampires can somehow compel quiet twins to cross over to be eaten, which is good because even though they consumed nearly all of the native humans “in ages past”, they for some reason haven’t gotten around to drinking all the quiet twins dry. Maybe they learned moderation?

The vampires could of course just leave and go somewhere else. There’s no reason for them to stay. You think the Pale King would look around, realize there’s no real benefit to conquering anything, or even dealing with anyone, and just leave. If he’s here for the treasure, just have his vampires go steal stuff. Or hire the PCs to do it. There’s yet another adventure hook.

Or send out vampires to retrieve fresh blood, which could even be an easy way to get characters here (and making escape an easy motivation) but...nah. Make the players come here so they can get bog-standard loot, if that, to sell for pointless cash. Mind you, I’m not saying treasure isn’t a fine enough motivation, there just isn’t anything here that you couldn’t loot somewhere else, and with less hassle.

But, assuming you find any treasure, what can you do with it? Well, besides leaving and selling it somewhere else (and never returning), you can use it to buy stuff from merchants. Merchants that, and the book literally says this, “persist for reasons unknown”. I’m not sure whether this is one of the laziest, stupidest excuses I’ve ever heard, or it’s just blatant honesty. As in, try as he might, the author couldn’t even figure out a semi-plausible reason why they’re here.

I’m not surprised at this point, as flimsy excuses—when you get one at all—are a recurring theme in this book: things are just the way they are, because if they weren’t it would all unravel.

That isn’t to say that random merchants—or so much else in this book—couldn’t work, it just needs an explanation. Something so that when the players ask questions—and I know mine would, if for no other reason than to be reasonably suspicious of their irrational presence—there’s an at least somewhat satisfactory answer, so that it doesn't feel like a complete charade. 

But then, it might be hard buying and selling given the default behaviors of Voivodja’s denizens, namely that how offended they are by what you say and do is inversely proportional to what you intended, and they are generally difficult to interact with. While this is certainly keeping in theme from what I recall from the source material, I wonder why they behave this way. As previously inquired: are they just dreams? Are they crazy because they live here? Something in the water?

I'm guessing it's another "because", and after awhile I’d fully expect and understand it when my players just say fuck it and start killing people. Not that I’d ever run this. Not an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland inspired adventure in general, mind you. That I think I could do, but not this particular...rendition. But what if you did want to bother using this? Because of laziness, stupidity, desperation, or perhaps you’re a glutton for punishment: what are you supposed to do with it?

The front of the book claims there are “a lot of ways to use this book”, but then provides only four, two of which aren’t really using it at all (unless you legitimately want to use it to club animals to death). The first option is to “use it more-or-less as it was written”, which was allegedly a “guide to all of the ideas, creatures, and things unique to a certain imaginary place and a set of tools useful for making and running adventures characteristic of that place”.

Okay, but what sort of adventures does that entail? Standard Dungeons & Dragons fare? Exploring tombs and ruins, just packed with Wonderland fauna and findings? Not even that, judging from the uninspired adventure hook table tucked in the back, which includes entries that amount to kill or capture something, transport something, find or destroy something. The results give you other tables to roll on, so you might need to kill a lizard, capture an octopus, or seduce a sentient plant.

It’s pretty much do something for someone, the kind of tedious NPC fetch-quests you’d find in MMOs. Someone that might get randomly offended, try to tax or kill you. Avoid rewarding you (not that you have any idea what the reward should be), change the reward, not even be there when you get back, etc. This is assuming you can even get a straight goal out of them in the first place.

Imagine that: you’re playing, I dunno, World of WarCraft (why?) and a guy wants ten murlock scrotums.

You get them all, come back, and he pretends to not know who you are. Or claims you didn’t get the right scrotums (or the "left" ones). Or that he doesn’t want them anymore. Or talks to you for like half an hour about completely unrelated crap. Or gets mad at you, pays you, but then refuses to give you any more quests. Or tries to charge you money because you brought them back without hopping on one foot. Or you brought back eleven instead of ten. Or took too long. Or didn't take long enough. Or just tries to kill you.

Mind you, you can obviously come up with your own adventures, but why not have a list of actual examples handy? Not even complete adventures (though a complete one would have been nice), but just a sentence or two detailing an adventure seed that a GM could actually work with. Something to help understand what sort of adventures would be "characteristic" of this place.

Like, rescue a vampire from the opposing army, or escort a pawn to the other side so that it gets promoted. They don't actually do this, oddly, but it's something I would have done. Or you drain blood from an opposing vampire, feed it to a pawn, and they become an upgraded vampire. If promotion were a thing, what would happen were a player to get to the other side? Drink a bunch of vampire blood?

You could also have a dodo-race, find a way to get into a specific mirror (either to go someplace else or escape), find a special chess game box that can permanently contain vampires in chess piece form (or a card box for the card vampires), and other various things that players might want to just do for themselves.

Things for them to learn and discover, on their own, as opposed to a string of largely pointless errands and fetch-quests. Maybe provide some sort of description of all those other places on the map, give GMs a springboard.

Of course, you could just default to the first bullshit excuse given, way back on page 11:

“For not only has every kind of creation and creature been abused by the blasphemies and sorceries of the unfathomable war, but every force, law, lesson and explanation ever decreed by those above and those beneath. Meaning is meaningless and there are never any reasons. There are, however, monsters you can kill, some of whom have stuff. So your players may want to go there.”

There are monsters to kill, and some might have stuff to loot.

So the fuck what? Every setting and adventure has monsters to kill and treasure to find. This isn’t new, and it’s certainly not sufficient, unless you’re the type of player that can be content with a mind-numbing loot-grind routine, the sort that can be entertained by post-game Diablo 3 and Borderlands, killing shit just to get bigger numbers purely for its own sake, any pretense of plot or purpose having long since been aborted.

If that’s what passes for entertainment for you, if it sounds like your proverbial cup of tea, then...I’d still recommend playing bog-standard Dungeons & Dragons. Just do completely random dungeons (there are online generators just for this purpose), monsters, loot, everything. Same enjoyment, less hassle from crazed denizens, more interesting stuff to find, and it’s not like you’ll miss out on what little setting information there actually is.

But, if for some reason you gotta murder a menagerie of monsters, some of which have at least Wonderland name recognition, and you’re too damn lazy to do the homework yourself of statting up a card soldier, walrus, giant caterpillar and the like, what can you expect to run into in this maybe red, maybe green, maybe distorted “Antiland”? What awaits you in the shadowed recesses of rotting towers that I think are supposed to be a dominating feature?

Hopping over to the anticlimactic array of adversaries, let’s start with the Cheshire Cat. Both because it's very iconic and the second entry (right after Animals, Ordinary): it’s got 20 hit points, deals 1d4+1 damage if it claws you, can float and cause specific parts of its body to vanish, and can “trace” one creature, allowing it to teleport to the target an arbitrary three times per day.

What the lore behind him? Well, he’s the familiar of The Duchess, and is concerned about the Colorless Queen and Red Brides because they can transform into kittens. Or rather, he’s suspicious of “the kittens” for no given reason (it’s not clear if he’s even aware that they’re the Red Brides and/or Colorless Queen), and wants you to spy on them...even though with his ability to dematerialize and teleport he could easily do the job himself.

He could just find a random red vampire, trace them, follow them around, trace another one, so on and so forth, until he finds the brides. And then he can spy on them for...whatever reason. I’m not sure how this would go down. Does he not know they are the red brides and colorless queen? And if you tell him this, what will he do? If he already knows, why does he want you to spy on them? Is it really just because of their kitten forms?

Really, he should be a (somewhat frustrating) guide. Someone to provide characters with information, directions. Warn them about dangers, tell them where they can find a person or place, etc, even if in a roundabout way.

Then there’s the March Hare, who just looks like a rabbit with a horn. He has a whopping 15 Hit Dice, but only 20 hit points (really, really bad rolls, I suppose), and for some reason can make you bleed an arbitrary five times per day, no save, with the damage scaling up and down constantly from d4 to d20 damage until you can’t see the Hare.

What’s the link between the hare and bleeding? Who knows but, you know, just close your eyes and you’re good. He’ll try to collect a random tax if he can’t think of anything better to do, but since he’s only got 20 hit points and can’t attack...you can ignore him. Or kill him pretty easily.

Let’s talk about the vampires. The very dangerous but very boring vampires.

Their universal qualities aren’t mentioned until the end of the bestiary. It should be at the front. Actually, the entire bestiary should have been divided into unaligned monsters, and then the factions, instead of using the gimmicky symbols and listing them in alphabetic order. That way you could more easily comb through a single faction at a time. And then put the vampire traits at the start, so that when you get to a vampire entry, you’ll have already read about their traits.

Anyway, if they bite you they drain a level or HD, and add your levels and hit points to their own. Despite this, each type is uniform in statistics (ie, all red knights have 5 HD and 20 HP), and the Red King only has 23 HD and 105 HP. Guess he hasn't bitten too many people over however long he's been a vampire.

But it's something they can do, so imagine facing down entire groups of vampires, especially if you manage to get into one of the castles? Granted, it’s no level-drain-by-touch, but if a bunch of vampires get the drop on you, charming/grappling one or more characters, and laying on the bites? That’s a death spiral waiting to happen. At the least, even more time wasted than you already did wandering around, doing menial tasks and stealing couches.

Vampires can only be permanently slain by a stake through the heart or sunlight: if reduced to 0 hit points by any other method, they transform, move an undefined distance, and transform into a card or chess piece—because the stories featured playing cards and chess pieces, not for any in-game logic—and begin regenerating hit points. As a card or chess piece they are invulnerable to everything, and once they heal up to a set amount, or get a drop of blood from a vampire of equal or higher rank, they revert to their normal form.

Only female vampires can go out during the day so long as they have parasols “marinated in unholy water” (no, it isn’t explained how only they can benefit from this), and they take a bunch of damage if you put the severed tongue of a virgin in their mouth. Sure, why not? Doesn’t mention if it’s every round or what. Running water "paralyzes them", though I don't know whether it's just by sight or proximity or what. Or even how much: could you just pour water out of a flask and paralyze them that way?

They apparently fear wells, even if there’s nothing inside of it, even though only running water has any adverse effect on them. Even though some contain children.

And I'd almost forgotten about this, but on page 17 it mentions that some wells contain children. This is solely because of a story the Dormouse tells Alice about three sisters that lived in a well. So, the author decided for some reason to make this an actual, regular feature of the world. They live in wells to hide from vampires, somehow accumulate items, and these items always begin with a single letter (because in the story, the sisters would draw "all manner of things—everything that begins with M").

They'll give you these items for a week's supply of food, even though they could have gotten some other sort of food while out and about getting other stuff. Or going to the bathroom. Or bathing. Or finding water. Or they could have just left to find one of the villages magically hidden from vampires. There's really no reason for them to be there at all, and most would have long since died due to some combination of malnourishment or dehydration. And I'm sure the unsanitary conditions wouldn't help.

Where was I? Ah, yes: most vampires can change their shape into someone else, usually unrelated to what it is or does. For example, Pale Pawns can turn into foxes, while Colorless Knights can turn into “small creatures resembling a cross between a manta ray and lionfish”. Red Knights and Vlad can turn into bats.

Most also carry a misericorde (a kind of stiletto), which is described in detail every single time. To save on space and repetition, it should have been cited in each entry, along with to-hit and damage, but defined elsewhere. Like in the vampire traits.

I won’t go into detail about all the vampires, but here are some examples from the red batch:

Despite being ridiculously impractical and pretty stupid looking based on the crude doodles, red pawns for have long needles instead of legs, and can move quite quickly despite pawns only moving one space at a time in chess. They can stab you with their legs, charm you, or somehow bite you without falling over, and transform into scorpions. Why scorpions? Who knows.

Red knights don’t have any particular gimmick. They’re basically vampiric fighters, art reminds me of Dracula from Bram Stoker's Dracula, and can turn into bats. I am honestly astonished by the restraint here. 

Red rooks look like Humpty Dumpty. Personally, I would have gone the route of an ogre or giant, perhaps with an oversized head, definitely with some sort of massive crown-like helmet. You know, to fit the whole castle turret motif.

What do they do? Protect anything? Have a powerful charge attack, or even ability to trample through enemies (reflecting the rook’s ability to move any distance in a straight line)? Nope. It sits in a kind of palanquin carried by pawns and asks riddles. That, or it throws dirt or bites you (no idea how it could possibly do either without falling off the palanquin). Only sometimes (no chance is given) 1d10 red pawns are hiding in the rook’s head.

How did they get in there? Why are they in there? No reason. The rook isn’t described as needing them. They don’t pilot it, or provide it with sustenance or sentience. They just are. Sometimes. Waiting for the rook to die so they can jump out. But only sometimes. Whenever the GM wants them to be. In other words, a stupid gimmick.

The Red Brides turn into queens if reduced to 0 hit points, but for some reason move only at human Speed. You’d think that, being queens, a piece that can move as many spaces as it wants, so long as it isn’t blocked by anything (or runs into an enemy piece), they should be able to move incredibly fast, but...nope. Normal human.

So, what can they do? After all, these are queens. Just one step below the king. Prepare to be amazed at their ability to...turn into a black kitten, try and Charm you, and deal 1d4+2 damage with their mundane daggers. No special, unique ability for each. No noteworthy equipment or magic items. No nothing. Just 50 hit point sponges for you to beat up.

Contrast with the Colorless Queen which, while still quite boring, at least has access to several seemingly randomly determined magical abilities: twice per day she can put you to sleep, trap you in a web spell that inflicts damage, dispel magic, putrefy food and water, and use Tasha’s Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter (or vomiting).

She’s the queen of the “eversinking isle of seafrost and rime”, so you’d think she could freeze you, flood your lungs with water, cause flooding, create walls of ice, freezing mist, transform into water, turn you into a fish, cause you to become emotionally numb. She could have also transformed into a massive octopus (or just have tentacles erupt from her mouth). Her bite could inflict massive damage, having numerous rows of shark-like teeth.

But, nah, a 1d4+2 damage wavy dagger is just as good as all that.

Sigh. 

Last and maybe least are the two dungeons, of which I will only comment on the so-called Card Castle.

First off, it's just plopped on a forested mountain. Why not have it perched atop very high, square towers? Square towers that I think are supposed to be everywhere? Like a bloated spider (could even have tendrils of dried blood reaching between the towers, or frayed strands billowing in the wind). The way there could have been on a winding, narrow bridge supported by other square towers of varying heights (some could make it go up and down). Just imagine that.

You could even have it by almost like a maze, with players needing to take a specific route, and if you cheat? Go off the path? Try to invade? They could always roll giant croquet balls down at you. Or they just do this anyway, and have ways of activating rails to change its course, so you need to fight your way up, but avoid being squished. Damn, I should note that if I ever get around to doing something like this...

But, nah, forested mountain is just as good. Very evocative. Really sells the idea of being in a distorted antiland, you know?

Here's the map:

Yeah, it's about what I expected, too. At least the area/room descriptions are very...succinct, let’s say:

I can understand not wanting to have lots of readaloud/boxed text, or bog players down largely unnecessary details, but come on, this is just lazy.

What’s in the Duchess Tower Lower Level? The Cheshire Cat. Anything else? Who knows, as there’s no description beyond that. Unlike the Duchess Tower Mid Level, which apparently has eight sofas. The pseudoturtle is in a corpse, which is in one of sofas, but you’ll only find that out by slicing open a couch. Who stuck a corpse in a couch? Why? Were they going to get into trouble? Saving a snack for later?

What do the sofas look like? How much does each sofa weigh? Are they worth their unknown weight in gold? Not that it matters, because you don't know what they weigh (but a quick DuckDuckGo search shows estimates ranging from 200-700 or so pounds, so there you go).

From a relative perspective, the Duchess Tower Upper Level absolutely spoils us with details: there’s a bed, books, and gourds. Of course, we have no idea as to what’s in the books (or their value). Or the gourds. You can find three random potions, as well as utterly useless junk, such as a pie, some black birds, and candy. No pepper, though I'm not sure whether that should be odd or expected.

To be fair, sometimes these bullet lists are...technically adequate. Like the moat. Sure, it could say “the water in the moat is stagnant”. You know, put a little extra effort into it. Or a little effort, period. Maybe bold key fragments so they are easier to pick out. But what about the color? Is it clear? Too dark to see? Green and overgrown with algae? Dark red, with an odor of rot. Is anything growing out of it?

Sure, you don’t need to know these details, though players might ask, forcing you to come up with description on the fly, but for the most part it comes across as lazy. As if we’re looking at a first draft, but then the author didn’t care to go back and flesh anything out. Or was simply unable to.

Like the books in the Duchess’s tower. I get that specifying the precise number, titles, and contents would be too much work with two little payoff (especially if they aren’t related to something else, such as someone wanting to know one of the recipes, a cooking puzzle, etc), but even a general summary of the contents (such as recipes and birds) would give the GM something to work with. Also the value, in case players just wanted to pawn them off.

Also, where did the Duchess get the child-shaped candy? What do the runes signify? It doesn’t even say, “the Duchess gets these from [place], and the runes are like messages on those Valentine heart candies”. Or, if you want to be edgy about it, the candies are made from actual children, and the runes are their names.

Keeping with many other parts of this book, many things don’t make sense and seem to be half-formed ideas placed at random. Like the duck, which contains the Duchess’s soul: she’ll do a “lot to keep it safe”, except, I suppose, lock the door. Put in place some traps. Put other stuff in the room, like treasure and the like, so the well isn’t the only obvious feature in the room, invariably drawing attention to it.

What happens if you get her soul? Can you just destroy it? Will she die right away, or do you still have to kill her? What happens if you kill her? Can she even be killed while her soul is intact? Does she come back to life after a period of time? Right away? This would have been another prime adventure hook, finding her soul to control or blackmail her. Also, how did the Duchess do this? This could have been a ritual in one of her books. Something someone else would want. But, nope: her soul is in a duck and there’s no explanation of how or what can be done with it.

If you’re curious as to what the Duchess can do, she’s effectively a 10th-level magic user with access to a pitiful five spells (randomly determined), and can turn people into animals an arbitrary three times per day. If you talk to her for more than 30 seconds you need to make a save or lose 1 point of Wisdom. No clarification as to whether it’s every 30 seconds, or each conversation gets its own timer.

There’s a trophy room that contains twenty suits of armor, all of the same type despite being taken from “all the conquered peoples of Northern Voivodja”. I guess that’s all the Heart Queen felt was worth keeping as a trophy. No weapons, shields, crowns (or other jewelry), relics, nadda. Not even their heads and/or hearts, which she could preserve in jars or crystal or something like that. 

Nope, just very specific types of armor that they all conveniently had.

There’s also a cabinet which contains hands that try to grab anyone who opens it. They’re connected to infinitely stretching strands—said to be unbreakable by any means, but then later the text states that teleporting breaks them—the purpose I guess being that anyone who comes here and finds the cabinet opened can follow the strands and figure out who did it.

Assuming anyone cares to. Or can. After all, you could just swim across one of the many rivers/channels and then there’s really nothing anyone could do about it.

You’d think these hands would be better served elsewhere, used in some other fashion. In a location that you aren’t supposed to go into. A door or chest you aren’t supposed to open, with something actually worth protecting inside. Hell, affix them to crossbow bolts, so you fire them at someone, the hands grab the target, and then you can track them down. Or reel them in, like a fishing rod.

As it stands, you have to follow the strand and hope you find the person within a week—and in the case of likely vampiric trackers, hope they didn’t go across any water—because after that the hand dies and falls off, anyway.

The only thing in the Saucery is a mustached saucier. No name, appearance, or personality given. I’m guessing a Saucery is a place where sauces are made, but I have no idea what should be in a saucery. Especially one for vampires. If I go to Wikipedia I see that a saucery is an office responsible for sauces and, sure enough, the room where they are prepared.

Okay, good start, but what goes in there? Well, if I then go to the Wikipedia article on sauces I can get lists of various types, along with some basic ingredients, which could have been used as a sort of treasure. Or just food for the characters to eat. Along with the Cheesery, this is precisely the sort of room that needs some elaboration.

Just saying, whelp, it’s a Saucery and there’s an unnamed, nondescript guy in there? That would only suffice for the bare minimum if the room is an empty 10 ft. x 10 ft. room, with an orc inside. Actually, not even then, because I’d still need to know what the orc was equipped with. A name would also be nice in case the characters talk to it.

Want to know the entire description of the Family Crypt? Here it is:

Dead royalty from long ago.

That’s it. No names. No number of people. No relations. No grave goods. No traps or secrets. Nothing. Just that. Dead people are here. 

Well nooo shit.

And that’s a lot of the rooms. Occasionally you get a room with some meat to it, like the Throne Room, which has virgins hanging from the ceiling, impaled by stakes and swords, bleeding into the floor (must got a routine supply from...somewhere, somehow). You can take the swords, but they’re unholy, and what that means isn’t explained.

Speaking of stuff to take, what’s the point in coming to this castle? What can you find? That’s worth taking, at any rate. After all, the opening text states that at “high-levels”, 9-13, that players could plan out an all out assault in search of the “immense wealth” deep within, and to be fair there might just be immense wealth...depending on how you interpret how the money works, here.

In the section on currency it is said to operate on a "silver standard", with the vampires using tiny gold coins that are effectively worth 1 sp each. So, if you take all the treasure that I could find—gold stars, cash in a pillow, whatever gyorslan rot eagles are—you'd end up with about 35,000 gp, which might translate to only 3,500 gp if you're going by Dungeons & Dragons standards.

Now, if you manage to get all the way to the end and defeat the Heart Queen, you can raid her shoe closet. I just assume they're in a closet: her room description literally just says that she is usually here, there are d4 demons and 8 little crocodiles also here, and then mentions the shoes. Anyway, each shoe is worth 1d4 x 1,000 (it doesn't say gp, unlike elsewhere) and that there are 500 pairs.

So, you might get, on average, either 125,000 gp, or 1,250,000 gp, depends on if you the GM want to count gp as gp, or "tiny gp worth 1/10th a gp".

If you want to go with the former amount, even in something like 2nd Edition this would be a pretty pathetic haul: I went through the original Ravenloft adventure, intended for levels 5-7, and found around 120,000 gp worth of coins and jewelry, I don't know how many magic scrolls, and several +1 to +3 weapons. Note that you didn't have to get all the way to the end to find the overwhelming majority of it, either, and it's more interesting than shoes.

This castle is apparently intended for characters somewhere around the level 13 range, and if you compare that to 3rd Edition, each individual character is "supposed" to have around 110,000 gp worth of crap, and gain around another 40,000 by 14th-level. So, still quite bad.

Now if you go with the latter, characters would be walking around with over five times the expected amount. Again, depends on if you go with tiny gold coins, or just let gp be gp. Or meet in the middle and just halve the value of everything. It would still be an impressive amount, assuming they even get that far. Kind of stupid and disappointing that that's all there is though. Bunch of shoes. Doesn't sound like what you'd get after slaying the big-bad of an entire pseudo-setting.

I'd say it would have been nice to find some sort of badass magic item, but given the handful of magic items in the book it's probably for the best.

Alternatively, players can just strip the palace of its furnishings. I alluded to this in the Duchess's tower, and it's mentioned somewhere that each bit is "worth it's weight in gp". Not that any of it is described or given a weight. Yet another table that would have been more immediately useful. Or just a list, so when the players ask "what's in here", the GM can give some varied and accurate answers. 

Could have also had random price modifiers to account for whether they are standard fare, worn down (or stained), even elaborately crafted, or made from exotic materials (such as a solid gold, jewel encrusted toilet).

There are some parts where the gravity is altered for creatures and objects, and while these would technically make it more interesting, it's not by much. At least, not the way it was employed. It also raises obvious questions with no clear answer, as if it was randomly added here and there to try and shake things up, to distract from the description, and interesting things to find and interact with.

For example, there's a hall with blood on the ceiling. If you bother to play around in it you might find a trap door. This causes the blood to flow through a narrow, twisted shaft, filling a hidden chamber that colorless vampires are hiding in. It would have been great if the draining blood revealed another section of the castle. A place with a valid reason to be concealed. This is just a random room with no purpose, other than to contain golden stars you can loot.

Why blood on the ceiling? Why rig it up so that it fills a random room with no purpose other than to conveniently hide golden stars?

Because, of course.

This gimmick is more meaningfully employed in a part of the castle where it all tilts up at 90 degrees, if only because it forces the PCs to climb in order to proceed (furniture isn't affected by the gravity change, and NPCs can freely walk on the wall-floor normally). This can largely be ignored it the PCs have pitons, ropes, and take their time. Otherwise they are virtually guaranteed to fall.

I'm curious what would happen if you tried jumping and grabbing onto a chair or something that is oriented towards a wall or ceiling. Would it fall with you, assuming you were heavier? It tells you to assume there are plenty of wall fixtures for ropes, even though I doubt something like a lamp could support the weight of one or more characters, so this is yet another "who knows".

There is a room that you can walk through, and by going through different doors adjust your relative gravity, but it's near the end and that's a lot of dungeon to get through (assuming you find it). Good thing most rooms don't have anything of interest: players can push open a door, marvel at the Parlor which apparently only contains a pseudoturtle in a candy dish and a suit of armor, and just keep on climbing.

Just thought of this, but it would have been neat to deal with gravity-based puzzles. Something to do with pumping blood into various parts of the castle, switching pumps on and off, mucking with gravity, having it flow through canals in the walls and ceiling. Power gates or something. Or go through a blood-drenched sewer network. So, sooo many missed opportunities.

Of the more detailed rooms (a term I use loosely), the war room has a 3d map made of cards depicting Voivodja, which reveals the position of everyone in the "garden zones". So, have fun when your players start asking who or what is where. You can also try peeking inside the cards to scope out the interior, so again: have fun when your players start checking nearby spots to see what's there, and what loot can be found.

You have to make a check to do lift a card and see into the interior, and if you screw up the entire thing collapses: there's no explanation for how it works, how it was created, or whether it can be re-created (and, if so, who can rebuild it).

There’s another castle, but at this point I don’t care. If the first one was this...superficial, after that plus everything else I've observed, I have no reason to believe the second one wouldn’t be, too.

Beyond the very high concept idea of adding vampires to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, there's really nothing I can point to as admirable or even useful: there isn't a single monster, table, or room I would lift for something else, at least not without heavy modification (and I don't think I'd ever bother trying to shoehorn vampires into Wonderland).

It did, however, give me ideas on how to create something better. Something that I think results in a far more enjoyable experience. So, there's that.

As already mentioned, I'd do it as an adventure. Something along the lines of 3rd Edition's Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, where you have a village or some sort of "home base" for the players to return to in order to rest (even if it means hopping back through a mirror), sell loot, get information, possible quests and side quests, conveniently replace slain party members, and then at least one well designed dungeon.

It could also be a hexcrawl, if you wanted players to actually try and explore the world on their own terms. You'd just need to make sure the locations are interesting and actually described. Having worthwhile treasure is also a plus. Something more than undefined furniture, art, and shoes. Something they can keep and use elsewhere, and not feel like it was a frustrating waste of time.

Content-wise, if you really wanted to use Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a foundation, I’d do it with the Heart Kingdom at the center of the land, now being invaded from both sides by the Red and White chess armies (could also swap out the games referenced). Unless you wanted to do a war campaign though, this would just be more of a backdrop. I’d imagine the characters either stumbled into this world and are trying to escape, or came here in search of something, or even someone that they need to rescue.

They could help out one of the armies, such as by escorting a pawn from one side to the other so that it can be promoted. Or, to escape they need to assassinate the Queen of Hearts, or the Red Queen. Perhaps Alice, or someone like Alice is the new White Queen and seeks revenge against the Queen of Hearts and/or the Red Queen. The dream could end if you finish the game, or maybe you have to kill Alice or the Red King (since the dream could be either of theirs).

If you also wanted to stick with vampires, you keep the Red King sleeping: if he dies or wakes up, the dream ends. That could be the way to kill him: he's far too powerful in the real world, so kill him in the dream world instead. The question is: does his dream influence reality, or is it a dream realm that you have to somehow travel to? If the latter, can you just get sucked in by sleeping too close to him? After all, at the end of Through the Looking Glass Alice wonders whether it was her dream or the Red King's.

I suppose it doesn't really matter if you slightly reskin Alice's Wonderland. That might be the point, wanting to just run Dungeons & Dragons with obvious Wonderland overtones, but the vampires turning into chess pieces and cards is pretty stupid and arbitrary, and you'd need some sort of reason to copy all the material. Otherwise it feels like a lazy Silent Hill imitation, where you throw in Pyramid Head and the nurses for no other reason than it was in the second one.

For example, why would Vlad want to divide everything with hedges and rivers (or make an entire kingdom-sized castle that he couldn't possibly oversee)? Especially since rivers can impede him? I get that it's how it went in the Through the Looking Glass, and I get why it occurred in Alice's Wonderland—she was messing with chess pieces before falling asleep—but there's no internal logic for why the Red King consciously did what he did.

I think one of the 3rd Edition books made mention of a dream demiplane, so if I wanted to just do that, without fretting about vampires., I'd have the characters stumble across Wonderland this way, abandoned, rotting, and otherwise changing due to Alice more or less forgetting about it. But if I had to include vampires, I think I'd just come up with new stuff, and center it around an actual castle being warped by Vlad's dreams.

Could certainly help explain things if you wanted to do something as crazy as Castlevania, with ridiculous architecture like overly massive clock towers with too many oversized gears, rotating horizontal towers (I remember something like this in Castlevania IV), an entire coliseum stuffed inside, underground, an upside down castle (from Symphony of the Night), and just utterly bizarre monsters (like this guy, that guy, and definitely not Cthulhu).

Even better would be to use a ghost’s “dream”, with everything generated by psychic energy and/or ectoplasm. It could be the ghost of a queen or king, so powerful that their hauntings span the breadth of their kingdom. Creatures encountered here could be undead, mere memories, or a combination. So, for example, you kill something. Like a dragon. Doesn't matter, but its flesh dissipates, revealing just moldering bones.

Same for treasure. You might find an actual magic sword, or just the memory of one. Perhaps you found a heavily damaged version elsewhere, and with the memory you can properly restore it. And that would be a reason to come here: restore something to its former glory. Doesn't have all the Wonderland craziness, but would be more readily usable in pretty much any D&D campaign.

Could even setup puzzles where you bring spirits to specific areas, or otherwise interact with them, change their emotional state, and their haunting transforms it, revealing clues, bypassing obstacles, showing memories, etc.

The world could also be the imagination of a fledgling god, or powerful psychic. The work of a mind flayer, who has harvested powerful minds for this purpose? In A Sundered World, I could see you climbing into the head of a slain god and discovering an entire world inside. Either memories or the dreams, presuming the god “isn’t quite dead”.

It could also be the dream of a Great Old One, now infecting reality. Or infecting someone else's dream world, so there's an idea if you want to mash up Alice and Lovecraftian horror, which makes more sense than vampires. I like that idea, as it also plays in with the theme of madness. Might give that a shot.