Night of the Walking Dead in Averoigne Part 1

I cast raise dead on Night of the Walking Dead in Averoigne for the second time! This is my third attempt at adapting this Ravenloft module for the Neverwinter Nights videogame. Back in 1994, I ran this module for my AD&D 2nd Edition post-Crusades pseudo-historical setting using the Historical Reference Campaign Sourcebook of the same name.

RQ1 is set in the Ravenloft domain of Souragne, in the village of Marais de Tarascon. Sounds French, right? Since Grymwurld is not Ravenloft, I set this adventure in the Averoigne province of Occitania. Here is where it all ties together geographically: Marais de Tarascon is set on the edge of a swamp and everyone speaks French. The description in the module makes it sound very much like a Ravenloft version of 19th century Louisiana without the gunpowder (more on this later). On the southern coast of France is the Camargue (Carmaga in Occitanian) region which is a huge delta where the Rhône river meets the Mediterrean sea. Aha! Now I can set the module in historical France. Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) a friend of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as well as a founding member of the Lovecraft Circle was a prolific writer and poet. For D&D fans, he is know as the author of what came to be known as the Averoigne Cycle. A set of weird fiction/sword & sorcery short stories set in the South of France during the High Middle Ages. List most of us, I was first introduced to CAS in the Expert D&D module X2 Castle Amber (which I ran using the AD&D rules). Tom Moldvay is a huge CAS fan, and incorporated many of the elements from Smith's Averoigne stories in the module as well as Averoinge itself.

So now we have a pseudo-historical weird fiction/sword & sorcery setting of Averoigne taking place in Medieval Southern France, equating the southern tip of Averoigne with the Camarque region of France, combined with Night of the Walking Dead. So far so good, right? (In a future post, I will go into details as to why I believe Averoigne fits well in the Southern Rhône river valley.) Technically speaking, the people of Southern France do not speak French, they speak Occitanian. This was especially true during the late Middle Ages but for now I am going to gloss over that detail considering that the Night of the Walking Dead module itself has numerous non-French NPC names.

So back in 1994, I ran a group of three players through the module and the result was … underwhelming. Overall the group and I found the imagery in the module evocative but the actual adventure to be a railroad with a lot of 'What the heck?!?' moments. I am going to run this adventure for my son over the Christmas break since thanks to the pandemic, he is a captive audience… and I am also developing a Neverwinter Nights version of this. So in preparation for the tabletop and videogame versions, I am going to do the following: Analyse this module to ensure I understand it the way the author Bill Slavicsek intended, figure out how to reduce the “railroadness” of the experience, and how to better incorporate the Averoigne and Historical Southern France setting. If this all works out well, I will develop an entire Mediæval Sword & Sorcery campaign. Next up is the analysis of RQ1 Night of the Walking Dead.

Click here for Part II.