RM1: Roots of Evil wraps up the Grand Conjunction metaplot in 1993, ushering in the reshuffling of the Ravenloft campaign setting that would be reflected in the 1994 red box set.
The Conjunction happened in RQ3, when Azalin escaped his domain, but that adventure doesn’t explain what happened. All the realms taken by the mist are flowing back to the prime material plane where they came from. Unleashing all that evil back into reality seems like a thing that should be stopped (just don’t think about all the innocent people trapped in the Domains of Dread in the first place), so the players must find a way to undo the thing they done. Their hope might lie in the last couplet of the prophecy, which wasn’t fulfilled. Doing so might undo everything, or make it worse!
This one is pretty plot heavy. Perhaps the most plot heavy. The whole thing revolves around a fight between Azalin (who wants to remain free), Strahd (who sees this as an opportunity to stick it to Azalin and get with his reincarnated lover) and an arcanoloth (daemon) named Inajira (who Strahd screwed in a deal and now wants his revenge). The first half is an event driven railroad (with a literal stacked tarot deck) that rehashes the clever time travel of RQ3. This is followed by a decent crypt-crawl. It ends with the players trying to hit the reset button while the bad guys fight it out like comic book supervillains and everything returning to the status quo once the dust settles.
Except the status quo is different in the red box, but those looming changes were not conveyed in this module.
Lots of great Stephen Fabian art in here. I love his treatment of Azalin and Inajira. He’s got a Strahd with a very Barnabas Collins vibe, too. The cover is credited to Jeff Easley, but…that isn’t an Easley cover. I can’t decipher the artist’s signature, but my guess is this was done by John and Laura Lakey. Not high on my list of favorite Strahd interpretations — he’s looking rather Phantom of the Opera here, honestly — but I do love it as a generic, pig-nosed vampire illustration.
