In college, around 1983/84, we found a bunch of boxed sets of DragonQuest in the bargain bin at one of the local textbook stores. We all picked up a copy. After we played it a couple of times, I thought that a good adventure could be written using a “low experience” villain and heavy use of rituals. The rituals meant that special things (such as kidnapping people for sacrifice) were necessary to perform the rituals; it also meant that a mage could set up more powerful spells by waiting until just the right time (in this case, the new moon) to ritualize spells that they couldn’t normally perform reliably. This adventure was a way of playing with that idea.
Later, when we started playing AD&D again (and, presumably, after second edition came out, see the text) I thought it was a decent enough adventure to convert, but discovered that the conversion required lots of special cases, such as giving the villain the magic items instead of letting him have created them, and so on. It lost a lot in translation.
In DragonQuest, the fact that these were rituals provided clues as to how to deal with the villain, since there were strict rules on rituals. In AD&D even what remains of rituals doesn’t really tell the players anything, since they don’t know anything about them, as rituals don’t exist in AD&D.
There is no written connection between the dungeon portion and the ghost portion. There’s a lot of stuff that’s expected to be made up on the fly, and the PCs are expected to talk to people and figure out where the murders and disappearances have been centered—the graveyard—and go there. Or, they could wait until someone is kidnapped and try to track them. But there is no physical clue to find; they’re expected to figure out how to figure it out on their own.
