The Vampire Tyrants of the Darklands aka All About Creatures of the Night by John Josten is a role playing game supplement published by Board Enterprises. This is largely a generic supplement, although there are some references to the publisher’s Legend Quest system, and is part of the Small Bites series. This is the “World Walker” abbreviated edition of the supplement; the full version is nearly three times as long but is only available to Patreon supporters.
This is a 22 page PDF that is available for free from RPGNow. One page is the front cover and around two thirds of a page are various links and an ad for the Patreon campaign.
It starts with the Introduction, which is longer than normal and gives an overview of the supplement’s contents, followed by the Table of Contents.
Next are a number of articles from the Fletnern Wiki. These cover groups, regions (the Darklands are not dark, or underground; they are simply controlled by vampires), sites and races.
The Sounding Board is a selection of reproduced blog posts.
The Bright Side of the Undead gives a couple of examples where such as zombies might have a good purpose.
How Do You Kill a Werewolf? considers the problems when werewolves can only be harmed by magic or silver weapons – but not something like a catapult rock being dropped on them. The way it is handled in Legend Quest is gone into.
How do the eternal “live”? considers how immortal creatures deal with the potential of boredom.
Most powerful NPCs – the really old! goes into why a creature that lives a really long time (“lives” in this instance meaning liches and vampires) can become really powerful.
Punishing the party for not role-playing gives instances where, if players don’t have their characters examine what treasure they find before selling it, they can pay the price by not learning important information.
Lifestyles of the Magical and Mundane considers how vampires, and their “cattle,” live in the Darklands.
News of Fletnern starts with Boran O’Langdaler, Vampire Slayer, an ordinary soldier who, through a bunch of accidents, killed a vampire. Milo Bendish, Vampire? is how a nightwatchman went on the run because his neighbours believed he was a vampire. Threat from the Past has a revived vampire cult in Myork.
The Dark Life considers vampires, including the Noble Vampires, the rulers of the Darklands. The Holy Water Conundrum examines holy water, and why if it was effective, people would be carrying it around by the barrel-load. Vampires and Your Religion goes into holy symbols, and why they might not work if the symbol’s god is weaker than that of the vampire it is used against.
Small Towns and City Neighbourhoods describes one of the vampire realms of the Darklands.
Finally, What’s Missing lists the articles in the full version.
The PDF is bookmarked, but it only covers the major sections. The Table of Contents is to a similar level of detail. Navigation could be better. The text maintains a two column format and appeared largely error-free. There are a number of stock black and white illustrations, generally to do with the dead, undead and vampires. Presentation is okay.
As always in this series, this is a collection of generally related articles based around a subject rather than a coherent whole. In this case the article focus in vampires, but there are mentions of werewolves, some other undead – and kobolds (the last because there is unlikely to ever be a supplement on kobolds).
The supplement raises some interesting issues – often related to how D&D handles things, although the system is never explicitly named – and ways in which the author solves them. There is other interesting material as well, and much of it can be used in any system.
The Vampire Tyrants of the Darklands aka All About Creatures of the Night is an interesting collection of articles and it can be downloaded for free by clicking here.
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