Confession: mostly pulled this one off the shelf for the sake of the Robh Ruppel cover. I dig his take on werewolves. Arnie Swekel is on the interiors, but he doesn’t deliver anything real noteworthy. This one feels like a tight deadline artwise.

The module itself embodies Ravenloft in a lot of ways. The set-up is novel — cold, starvation and supernatural danger conspire to create a ticking clock the players must race against. They’ll only survive if they can destroy the domain’s Dark Lord, who is a werewolf and vastly more powerful, thanks to his position and his pack. That’s a good set-up! But this is the 90s, so something obnoxious has to happen in order to justify the module being 64 pages. Here, the villain captures the players in that railroady, no matter what way. He gives them a choice between joining him and becoming werewolves. If the players go for it, they are removed from play. BOOOOOO. If they turn him down, he inexplicably gives them a running start chance to escape. Which they do. Then they find NPCs with the macguffin that allows them to get rid of the dark lord once and for all, undoing all of the wonderful tension in the first part. What a miss.