i mean this sincerely and unironically i think riverdale is the height of television and if you’re not going to gradually built up from a small town murder mystery to angel-guided time travel over the course of six years you are wasting the television format
OK, this Dark Shadows board game (1968) has nothing to do with RPGs or wargames or anything, but it is straight cool looking. It looks exactly like I want a 1968 board game based on Dark Shadows to look like.
The “board” is actually a very large piece of folded, heavy-weight paper. When I took it out at a recent board game night, everyone stood back from it in hushed silence, not wanting to damage it, as if it were a holy relic. It was pretty funny. (That might have been after someone looked it up and saw a copy going for an astonishing amount on eBay, but I got my copy via @OrrinGrey for like $25, so I don’t think it actually belongs in a museum).
Anyway, that is all I really have to say about that! Soak up that delightful retro horror art!
There are four basic monster categories on Dark Shadows — the dead, magicians, transformations and miscellaneous.
The key member of the magicians class, obviously, is Angelique, and later on in the series we’ll see Bathia Mapes, Nicholas Blair, Magda, Julianka, Count Petofi and the Parallel Time Timothy Stokes. You can also make a case that Julia and Dr. Lang are alchemists, which is basically the same thing as a magician, but using science-y talk.
The transformations category is mostly werewolves, but we’ve also got Cyrus Longworth in 1970, and Joshua turning into a cat. And then miscellaneous is for the vague, shadowy figures like Diabolos and the Leviathans.
But the core monster type is “the dead”, and we see lots of variations over the course of the series. This includes ghosts, vampires, specters, zombies, Frankensteins, succubi and whatever the plural of “phoenix” is.
