Although the Hickmans’ name is at the top of the module and they are credited as authors, in the inner cover you get a better credit when it tells you that the module is “based on an outline by” the Hickmans. In fact, the real authors, loosely basing themselves on the Hickmans’ ideas, are David “Zeb” Cook, Jeff Grubb, Harold Johnson and Douglas Niles. This is the case because, as we saw when Tracy Hickman gave his farewells at the end of the Dragonlance Legends series, the Hickmans have by now left TSR and started following their own careers in fantasy fiction.

Well, with a title like Ravenloft II, you would presume that this would be a straight sequel to the original Ravenloft… you’d be wrong. Firstly the module feels the need to bring back the most iconic thing of the first module: Strahd. But, if you played the first module, Strahd is dead… so how do you do that? Well, you throw away everything that happened in Ravenloft and make it into a dream. Feels a bit cheap, and it is a bit cheap.

However, the sheer fun of returning to Ravenloft and facing Strahd once again might be enough to make this attractive to a DM and their player, if that is so then you could do worse that this… but really there is enough replayability in the original Ravenloft, with the randomized Tarokka system, that you’d probably have more fun running the original again, then settling for an inferior sequel.