Session 1

I’m going to divide these posts up roughly by narrative arcs, rather than sessions – this post will cover the first part of Session 1 as the party enters Barovia, and the next will cover the rest of the session up to the end of Session 5 when they exited. Makes a little more sense to me to do it that way.

So, Session 1. I’ve already gone on a bit about the Session 0 “pre-campaign” events that led them to the Nightmare’s Stable Inn near Daggerford, on the edge of the Misty Forest, so I won’t dwell on that further. The session started with the party already on the road in the Vistani trader Stanimir’s wagon, about an hour out from sundown, and I had them each take a moment to describe what might have happened the previous night as they all sampled some imported Barovian wine, as well as how they were currently handling their hangovers.

Once they all got their introductory descriptions out of the way the sun was setting and they pulled up to a camp with a few other Vistani and got their first taste of Vistani hospitality – food, wine, and stories – before going to sleep. Nomuri, as expected, snuck off to get his final (unknown to him) hit of Dragongrass before bed, and the ever-paranoid monster hunter Fang set up an Alarm spell around the area just in case of threats – Stanimir did politely let him know it was unnecessary, but no harm, no foul.

Then the fun happened as the fog set in.

They woke up in the morning exposed to the elements with only minimal gear. As two of the characters were young girls, I opted to let everyone keep their clothes rather than taking literally everything they weren’t wearing to bed, but not much else – their token items, a coinpurse or waterskin, their trinket I had made them roll for off the list (or let them come up with), a class-dependent item if there was one, and of course the Tarokka cards Madame Eva had left them with after the previous night’s dreams. Here’s the full list of what they were left with:

Hickory – traveler’s clothes, spellbook (from Ritual Caster feat) with the letter from “her parents” tucked into it (her “story token” item), silver necklace (trinket), coinpurse with 10GP
Fang – common clothes, Silvered greatsword (token item), arcane focus (a necklace), silver coin keepsake (trinket), waterskin
Tallet – common clothes, amber shard (token item that doubles as her focus), waterskin
Luther – common clothes, vestments, shield/holy symbol, prayer book, incense (I let Luther keep his religious items because I figured that would make some sense), gold coin w/Morninglord’s emblem (token item), waterskin
Nomuri – traveler’s clothes, pipe (token item), sibling’s necklace (trinket), bag of dragongrass (empty – because I just had to)
Hoid – lute, fine clothes, signet ring (honestly, more of a liability as he tries to keep his nobility a secret), coinpurse with 18g (Hoid didn’t have a token “item”, but his wound counted instead)

All in all they were suitably disappointed with the new contents of their inventories, as expected!

I gave them a few minutes to attempt to get their bearings and then they started to hear wolves behind them, to the east – being largely unarmed (and understanding out of game that they should get a move on towards Actual Content) they pretty quickly headed off towards the gates.

The Gates of Barovia weren’t overly interesting – definitely some mistrust around them, and it may have just been how I described them or how the party understood me but they didn’t quite grasp the scale of them. “Well, can we walk around instead of through the gate?” “No, the walls stretch as far as you can see into the woods until they disappear in the fog. You can try looking, but the fog is really dense, and you’re still hearing wolves…”

They finally went through and caught a whiff of poor old Dalvan Olensky, who they patted down for anything he might be carrying, as one normally does with a corpse. I planted a dagger and a shortsword on him to give them something to fight with but that still only gave them 3 weapons between 2 fully martial characters, 1 pretending to be martial, and two half-casters. I think there was some misunderstanding about the language in the version of the letter I used – they very much took “languishes” to mean “is literally seconds from death”. Either way, they promptly forgot about him and the letter (this is a recurring theme) and moved on, finding themselves looking out into a very misty valley with a thunderstorm starting to pour down.

They hadn’t been heading down the road very long when Mr 28 Passive Perception AKA Luther noticed a light off to the side of the road – and despite Fang immediately throwing out an anglerfish comparison they did opt to head towards it. It soon turned out to be good ol’ Durst Manor – the light itself being a lone lantern hanging in the portcullis over the kids.

Honestly, they quickly fell in love with the kids, despite being fully convinced they were vampires (and I didn’t even show them the official art!). Fang made a great show of producing a magical flower to win over Rose, who returned it with a “…that’s nice, but we’re pretty sure that a monster ate our parents and our baby brother, think you could, you know, help us out?”

And with that, they entered Death House, known to them only as Durst Manor (which made for a fun conversation when Hickory!Player mentioned “Death House” later on, haha – he’s cool though, he hadn’t actually read much about it and didn’t meta even if he had).

Lessons Learned

A bunch, here. I had a little chat with Dragna earlier today and mentioned that I really preferred how he had done the whole lead up to Death House – stick it in Daggerford, outside of Barovia, for the players to enter there and exit out into Barovia from it. That would have expedited the first half of the session substantially and eliminated all of the railroading I had felt necessary.

On top of that, I didn’t love taking their gear. The party didn’t quite feel as desperate and scared as I had hoped, and struggled to come up with ways to use things from the environment as weapons – it fostered more resentment, at least towards the Vistani, than anything and lead to a lot of trying to bargain with Bildrath (which I had so much fun shooting down in character as him) to get basic exploration gear and armor. It just wasn’t fun.

I also learned something about my party in particular – things have to be pretty obvious for it to click. A few of my players are quite ADHD (literally diagnosed as, I should clarify), as am I, so picking up on the little details being described in the flowery language I tend to use doesn’t work super well. Plus a few of the other members tend to be a little inebriated during sessions, which is fine, but definitely leads to issues with retention. I’d much rather they have fun than bring the hammer down so my preferred option is to do things in a way that works for them, rather than attempting to try to enforce certain behaviours that might make my way work. Path of least resistance, plus fun is the priority.

The other huge lesson I learned in a very painful manner was that if you want to include specific content – like, say, a Vistani story – triple check that you have it ready for when you need it. I wanted to give them a chance to tell campfire stories but wasn’t expecting them to really have much prepared, so Stanimir told them one instead… but I lost the story and wound up telling a very butchered version of Strahd killing his brother, realizing midway through that was not something the Vistani would know, let alone tell. Luckily I butchered it so badly that it didn’t make a difference, but still. It felt rough.

Just for evidence of how great my players are at notes, this was some of Fang’s from the session:

To be clear, the word was “fratricide”. Ah well.

Next time, Death House!