TSR, $6.99, ISBN 0-7869-1333-9
Fantasy Horror, 1999

Sequels are generally not good news for fans of the original, and Spectre of the Black Rose is exactly that: the unwanted sequel to Knight of the Black Rose. The biggest problem is that it exists solely to explain why Lord Soth would be leaving Ravenloft. Of course, they can’t say that the real Dark Powers, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, insisted on getting Soth back for their then-upcoming new Dragonlance trilogy, for them to kill Soth off so that nobody can ever touch him again if they couldn’t, muahahaha.

Instead, what TSR came up with some convoluted, character-assassinating plot development involving Soth using some magic mirrors to lose himself in his own dreams and memories, exploring what could have been if he had succeeded in stopping the Kingpriest back on Krynn and preventing the Cataclysm, et cetera. In doing so, he neglects his domain, thus allowing a plague as well as forces of a mysterious knight known as White Rose to create trouble. His excursions into his personal fantasy land also fractured his own memories.

Now all this is so poorly explained in this story, one has to look up tabletop source materials to fully understand what is happening here. Well, that’s one big strike against this baby. The other strike is the whole thing turning Soth into basically a junkie, one that gets his fix from dreams and fantasies instead of drugs. Is making Soth this pathetic a way of TSR to give the original creators of the death knight their middle finger? Oh, poor Soth—a victim of two factions giving middle fingers at one another without any care for that character.

Spectre of the Black Rose, incidentally, isn’t about Soth. It’s about the plans by TSR to replace Soth with a new darklord for Sithicus, so that the domain continues despite losing the very identity of the domain itself. Seriously, this is like having to pull the plug on a dying relative but claiming that the relative still lives because you have amputated the foot for display in the living room.

Hence, in this story, Azrael Dak discovers some shadowy lake in the bottom of a mine, and realizes that the voices of the shadows allow him eavesdrop on what other people are saying regardless of where these people are. Well, the shadows can’t tell him what the White Rose and the knight’s minions say, still, what Azrael learns is enough, that werebadger dwarf believes, to position himself to usurp Soth and become the new boss of the land. He falls into an alliance with Inza, the daughter of Magda Kulchevich. Magda survived the events in the previous book, and has since started her own tribe, called the Wanderers, and she has secured Soth’s protection against Malocchio Aderre… you know what, it’s a long story, and to fully understand what is happening here, one has to read up the tabletop sources on what is happening in Invidia, et cetera. So once again, we’re back to this story being reliant on the reader being familiar with information contained outside of this story to get a good grasp of what is happening.

At any rate, Inza is a cartoon one-dimensional evil, evil, evil wretch that betrays her mother and her tribe because… of the lulz, apparently. Seriously, the future new darklord of Sithicus has so little character development other than “Evil, LOLOLOL!” and zero interesting background, that having her replace Soth is like having a drawing of a stick figure take over the place of a Picasso. Then again, this is TSR at its last legs, and really, these folks have never really recovered their initial brilliant flashes of creativity, not even in its incarnation today as Wizards of the Coast.

Also in this messy story is a whiny, useless half-elf called Ganelon, that exists only to serve as a plot device to be shoved from one point to another. He has this supposedly tragic love affair with Helain, who has since gone mad, but the grand love is never at all developed in any way. I’m just told it was grand, even when these two behave like they can barely stand one another even during Helain’s lucid moments. Given how Ganelon’s actions and motivations are supposedly motivated by this grand love of his for his cuckoo girlfriend, trying to care for this waste of time and page is like trying to squeeze blood out of stone.

This leads to another big problem with this story: there are way too many characters that exist just to take up space and to be set up as NPCs in future tabletop campaigns. Aside from Ganelon, there is Helain, Helain’s father, the White Rose’s two henchmen, that stupid giant, the four idiots that would make up the surviving Wanderers after Inza’s betrayal—seriously, these characters either take up space only to have minimal role in the overall scheme of things, or to be set up as subjects in future Ravenloft splatbooks. Indeed, the personalities and motivations of Ganelon and Wanderers would only be developed to a more acceptable degree in these splatbooks, and they exist here only to pad up the pages with their angst, relationship woes, and other soap operatic elements that fall under the “Oh my god, who cares?” charter. By the time I finish this story, I can say that the only characters that truly matter here are Inza, Azrael, Soth, and the White Rose. All the other characters could have been cut out or have their presence minimized, so that the key characters could have their presence and roles developed to a more satisfying degree.

Finally, let me touch on the biggest problem of this story. It’s fractured, incoherent at places, and has a bizarrely misplaced priority in the sense that key plot developments are often skipped or glazed over in order to focus on pointless angst-twaddle of ultimately inconsequential characters. I’ve already mentioned that a reader has to look up information found outside of this story to have a good understanding and appreciation of it. Well, given also how emphasis is often placed on useless twats instead of important key characters, when the key characters do show up, what they have done up to that point and why they did what they do are ill-explained, and in some cases, no explanation is ever given in any official Ravenloft materials. It is one thing if the authors did this to let readers make their own interpretation, but no, here, what they do is to leave large gaping holes in the arcs of key characters while pontificating way too much on the pointless angst of rubbish characters that have no consequence to the main story arc at all.

Also, so much time and so many pages are spent on these wastes of time that, when the key characters finally have their showdown late in the story, events start to take place in a rushed, often jumbled manner. Aderre’s army invades Sithicus, Azrael gets betrayed, Inza gets hers, and Soth and the White Rose have a showdown and shocking secrets are exposed… oh, who cares, the authors have only a dozen pages to wrap things up, so let’s just drag everything out quickly like a bullet train flying off the trains down a ravine because Ms Weis and Mr Hickman are shouting that they want Soth back now and the authors of this thing just want their money and move on with their lives.

So, goodbye Soth. At least he got a better send off in Krynn, for what it’s worth, and in hindsight, he’s way too good for the Demiplane of Dread anyway.