“The question is," said the doctor, pursing his lips as he scanned the array of scalpels and surgical instruments, "What is a man?"
The captive struggled against its bonds, sensing the madness in the air. Yet they held secure. Across the room, the doctor's assistant licked his chops like a cat wailing for table scraps.
"Is it the mind?" continued the doctor, stroking the surgical steel,
“Is it the hand? The opposable thumb? The upright manner? Perhaps it’s the spine, or forward-facing, predatory eyes. Something as simple as a communal nature or as mysterious and unknowable as the mythical soul. ”
He plucked a scalpel from the tray and held it up, the edge of the blade glittering in the light, highlighting the rust eating into the scalpel’s handle. “This one will do, ” he said calmly. “There is an art to all of this. It is the First Art, this creation of new flesh, being the art the gods used to call life into being.”
The doctor turned to his experiment, the creature’s eyes white with terror, “What is a man?’’ said the doctor, “That is precisely what we’re about to find out.”
The screams from the hut pealed out across the jungle like church bells, causing flights of brightly colored birds to take wing in panic and animals to head for their burrows. Former experiments of the doctor nodded their head in fear and respect-the Giver of Pain was performing his grisly work.
Yet was the fear they felt in empathy for the poor brute who was the Doctor’s subject, or was it in the growing horror that the screams seemed to form words, and that the voice of the doctor’s victim was neither man nor beast?
The Realm of Dread is home to many men that can claim an astonishing understanding of medicine and natural philosophy. However, in one field no sage or physician—whether renowned and respected or obscure and disreputable—is the equal of the madman Frantisek Markov: the anatomy and physiology of animals. Through decades of observation, dissection, vivisection and arduous experimentation, Frantisek Markov has nearly perfected an abominable procedure for the transformation of an animal into an appalling creature with a suggestion of humanity. This procedure involves no arcane or divine magic, but the agonizing reconstruction of an entire organism’s morphology through surgical and alchemical techniques. It demands the technical genius of a craftsman, the diligence and patience of a physician, and the cold detachment of a hog slaughterer. Unfortunately, Markov possesses all of these traits in spades.
Neither Man Nor Beast is set in the Ravenloft® campaign setting, on the island of Markovia. ft recounts a tale in which the heroes encounter all manner of beasts—some wearing human form, some animal, and many somewhere in-between. The adventure begins at a seaport. For adventurers already trapped in Ravenloft, any of the ports along the Sea of Sorrows—Leudendorf, Port-a-Lucine, or Mordentshire—will do. For adventurers who are just arriving in Ravenloft from other lands, such ports as Waterdeep and Marsember in the Forgotten Realms or the Imperial City of Anuire in Cerilia would be suitable. Neither Man Nor Beast is designed to function both for long-time denizens of the Mists and for newcomers who suddenly find themselves in a world beyond their ken.
The heroes book passage on the good ship Sunset Empires, a solid vessel with a harsh drunken master. Several days out of port, they run afoul of the weather and are driven by a titanic storm into the Mists of Ravenloft. Here, the Sunset Empires is attacked by a ghostly monster of huge dimensions and then runs aground on an unmarked island. The island was until recently the land-locked nation of Markovia, now translated into a island retreat.