Sessions 9 – 11

I’ll start this off with a very brief apology – I did misremember slightly, not that it makes much of a difference, in the previous post, as the PCs did get to bed for a long rest quickly after the Tarokka reading – the stories I had mentioned in the last post, briefly, occurred the following morning. I had a few absent players during the reading, which prompted the production of it I had put together in the last post, but didn’t want to carry on too much further without them.

Of course, before that I decided to put my good ol’ retcon plan into motion, starting with Fang. Fang is a Dragonborn, and in his youth his clan was attacked by a lich. The lich, being dastardly and evil as liches tend to be, had corrupted Fang – instead of seeing his family and friends on the battlefield, saw enemies instead, slaying them. The lich released him when it had considered itself victory, leaving Fang to deal with the crushing guilt of having slaughtered his own family and driving him to hunt monsters, in order to prevent anything like that from happening again. There’s definitely some parallels to van Richten’s own story in there, unbeknownst to Fang!Player, which is really nice for me.

Fang found a mentor who taught him to hunt and slay monsters, and eventually became capable enough that the mentor had nothing else to teach – and recommended that Fang look for famed monster hunter Rudolph van Richten, who was said to have been searching for the mythical country of Barovia, for further training.

After the Tarokka reading – in which the party was made aware that aspects of their past were falsified – I decided to make that a bit more concrete. The session opened with Fang dreaming, reliving the memory of attacking the shadowy creatures that had been revealed as his family after he was through. I worked his Warlock patron into it, speaking to him through his sword – telling him things that made little sense at the time, but clearly intended for him to hear now, as he relived the experience. He remembered hunting a creature in the tunnels leading to his clan’s home, slaying it, and seeing his own brother’s face before falling unconscious from a blow to the back of the head, but the dream revealed that he had only injured his brother before being knocked out by another clanmate.

The clanmate – in a somewhat meta reference to Fang’s own favorite turn of phrase – commanded Fang’s brother to not touch him but for the two of them to fetch a healer, in fear that whatever caused Fang to become caught in the spell could carry over to them, leaving him in the caves. What Fang remembered was that when he had woken up, alone, he saw the corpses of his family and fled, wracked by guilt, but from the new perspective of the dream realized that what he had seen was an illusion – he hadn’t actually killed them, and chances are they were still alive.
My ultimate goal was to turn the factors that drove them to Barovia into factors to make them want to leave: Fang’s family actually lived, as did Hickory’s – she had been lost in the woods, but only after wandering off, not after they were attacked; Hoid’s lover returning to him and attacking him was entirely a fabrication (he’ll likely find reason to believe that she is waiting for him with a note from his family, assuring him that he no longer has to hide from them); Tallet is not, in fact, possessed by a demon that she was forced to make a deal with but merely has latent sorcerous abilities; Luther’s paranoia was unfounded and the leader of his church was not corrupted; and Nomuri’s smoking buddy did not disappear, but was actually just a local. Some of that needs some refinement, of course, but in the more tenuous cases it’s a lot less necessary.

Once the rest of the party awoke I laid a few other seeds of doubt, particularly Hoid’s wound healing itself (or rather, disappearing as it had never existed in reality) and Hickory’s letter from her parents turning blank. The party then got to hear a couple stories from the Vistani, which went largely unappreciated and forgotten (but eh, what can you do? There’s a Lessons Learned for this I’ll touch on later) – one about a healer whose son was sold to a vampire, causing him to seek vengeance and become cursed (ie. the origin of van Richten) as well as the history of Lugdana and the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind. I’ve provided my players with the text of both stories to reference, at least. They also picked up the minor quest to purchase a gift for Arabelle, which at the present moment has lead them to Victor, but that’s a future blog post.

The rest of the session covered the bulk of their journey to Vallaki. Despite their attempts to follow the path from Tser Pool to the base of the falls – which felt more railroad-y than it should have (“Can we just go this way?” “I’m telling you, out of character, that there is nothing to find there and you will not be able to climb 1,000 feet straight up a rock wall, nor is there any value in trying to do so.” “…are you sure…?” “YES, DAMMIT.”) they decided to stick to the script and take the road.

Upon returning to the crossroads to resume their trek they came across the skeletal horseman, which Fang’s caution prevented them from engaging (a smart choice). They continued on to the watchtower overlooking the valley, where Hickory – whose backstory also includes elements of a silver dragon appearing to her in her dreams – was enthralled to find a broken pendant of a silver dragon. I am not going to have any problems getting them to check out Argynvostholt, that’s for sure.

Continuing on, they crossed the bridge over the falls, meeting one of Argynvost’s knights. This is one of the encounters that made me worry a little about my players, or more importantly how I’m presenting information to them, as there were some pretty good questions I would have expected them to ask, but didn’t. Unfortunately I don’t recall what all they did or didn’t ask, but I do remember thinking to myself “…that seemed like a perfect place to find out more about something you were literally just wondering about”. It likely wasn’t anything overly important or impactful, though, so I’m not concerned about them, but I am definitely trying to figure out the best ways to indicate “this person may know something about x and y”. That’ll likely come down to flat out saying so.

They then passed the road to Ravenloft, somehow keeping Tallet from running off to hang out with a vampire – I think I’m going to have to take steps to show her that it will be just a little less fun than she anticipates. Fortunately Tallet!Player is savvier than Tallet and is just playing into it so, again, not a concern.

I was a little worried how the interaction with Morgantha would play out. The party tends to do exactly the opposite of what I hope they will, but this one worked out perfectly – rather than trusting her outright, or worse yet drawing their weapons and straight-up attacking her, they took her largely at her word, even if they didn’t trust her, and accepted a pair of Dream Pastries to sample.

The session ended as they drew close to Vallaki and were ambushed by wolves, with Session 11 beginning with initiative as the combat started. They had had a few fairly laid-back sessions with no real combat so I wanted this one to start off with some energy, especially since we had to take an extra week off between sessions.

Turns out that 7 wolves even with a werewolf is pretty trivial for a party of 5 PCs (Hoid had to miss the session unfortunately), Ireena, Muriel (in raven form), and two flocks of ravens – especially when the party has a silvered shortsword and a silvered greatsword. From here on out I’ve definitely started buffing my monsters – no rolling for HP or taking the listed average, they go straight to maximum possible. The poor werewolf didn’t even have a chance to escape before he was absolutely slaughtered.

They arrived at the gates of Vallaki soon after, their egos running high thinking they had ended the threat of wolves against the town permanently – and not taking it well when the guards asked, in response to the players getting offended by the toll, if in that case they’d prefer to stay outside the walls when more came. Only a single pack of wolves? Come on guys, you know there’s more where they came from. It wasn’t long after, however, that the party found themselves within the walls just as night was about to fall. Technically the arc runs up until the party retires for the night at the Blue Water Inn, but for the purposes of this post I’ll end it here and launch into what I’ve learned from Arc I as a DM.

Lessons Learned

So I did touch on this for the first bit of the campaign, up to and including Death House, but decided to focus on getting through the rest of the arc summary first – this will cover what I’ve learned from their departure from Death House up until Vallaki.

As mentioned in the first post-Death House blog post, the biggest problem I’ve had to deal with is character backstories that – at my own prompting – did not make sense with the narrative of the campaign I was trying to run. This was entirely not my players’ faults, but my own. I began preparing this campaign from multiple different sources that each had their own distinct takes on the narrative – many of them were quite similar in a lot of ways, and most were not massively different from the RAW campaign – but each had different narrative focuses, different goals in what sort of story they wanted to tell, and different concrete story beats that conflicted with each other. I quickly found that trying to pull from so many diverse sources was going to give me problems, but it took too long for me to also realize that the choices I had already made were incompatible with some of the sources I had already invested too much player-facing narrative to easily change.

The biggest aspect, of course, was the driving factor for each PC’s search for Barovia – why they were looking for it, what they were hoping to find, and what roles in the narrative they were intended to fill. Hickory was the most obvious one – I was still pulling heavily from MandyMod’s work when the PCs were creating characters, particularly her Player’s Primer with its Mysterious Secrets, so when her player had described as an orphan I immediately jumped to drawing comparisons to Ireena and the Crimson Beginnings Mysterious Secret:

H!P fleshed out the character with some additional prompting, and it eventually evolved into a PC Ireena stand-in – not necessarily a bad thing, in and of itself, but what I didn’t realize at the time was that it would be incompatible with most guides as written. Dragna Carta makes some solid points in the Design Notes for RRL regarding this – while his stance on diminishing the “fish-out-of-water” experience stands, it doesn’t overly apply to my situation, but having to redirect Strahd’s advances onto this PC definitely can make the campaign much less enjoyable for the player.

Additionally, my logic involved characters from within Barovia making their way out purely to entice the PCs in, something that the narrative demands is impossible. Hickory herself would have had to have escaped; as would some element of Exethanter (who was to be the lich that corrupted Fang), Jeny Greenteeth for Nomuri, Hoid’s love interest, and an actual Dark Power itself in the case of Tallet. This just did not jive at all with the narrative and I had some major struggles trying to correct it, largely detailed in a previous post. Ultimately, with the initial release of RRL, I decided to lean into Dragna’s use of the Grand Conjunction as a plot device – a day where the boundary between Barovia and the outside world thins, which Strahd hopes to use as an escape. I’ve taken liberties with the story just to get the pieces in place, but the overall gist is that the Dark Powers are aware of this, and with what little ability to reach the Material Plane they possess were able to find a number of individuals who stood a chance to prevent it. Using what effectively were Modify Memory spells they cause these individuals (the PCs, naturally) to be set upon paths that would eventually lead them to Barovia at the right time. Once they were securely stuck within Barovia and had received their reading from Madame Eva I was able to pull a reversal, revealing (in an abstract, implied way) that whatever had caused them to leave for Barovia was now a reason for them to want to go back – once they finished their work within the mists, of course.

Overly convoluted? Absolutely, but I had to make it make sense somehow, and from here on out it’s a non-issue. No having to worry about Hickory and Ireena clashing, or how Jeny Greenteeth will be able to explain why she was outside the Mists (but the players can’t leave the same way she did!), etc.

The other big lesson I learned was in regards to combat. I’ve got a reasonably large party of 6 players, which range from “first time playing 5e” to “very experienced” to “autistically driven to maximize output” – the last of those is absolutely not intended as a slight, as the player in question would wholeheartedly agree. What this means is there’s a fairly wide gap in skill and potency between the players and the PCs respectively – Tallet and Hoid are absolutely not big damage dealers, while Hickory, Luther, and Fang are. This leads to me trying to run combat with kid gloves on, and as I found in the pack of wolves encounter, the more capable party members are more than able to make up for the rest of the party. The fact that I had given the party first level feats in exchange for taking their gear away (both mistakes, IMO) and was overly generous with loot in parts of Death House (in part, due to conflicting intents with the guides I used) makes them a force to be reckoned with.

What I’ve been trying to do is to run my monsters much more lethally, using the upper end (if not the maximum) of their HP levels and trying to keep NPC assistance to a minimum. I’m not trying to absolutely kill my PCs, but I do want them to feel the danger in Barovia. The wolf pack encounter is written to be a “brutal” encounter using Dragna’s ingenious Challenge Ratings 2.0 system, with 7 wolves and a Werewolf up against 5 Level 3 players, Ireena at CR1, two CR 1/4 swarms of ravens, and CR 0 Muriel in Raven form. This translates to, ideally, the party being left with 1/3rd of their HP remaining. I neglected to add enough wolves to make up for a 6th player and a familiar (for which Dragna recommends 9 with 2 werewolves), and used the average HP totals from the Monster Manual – but even still, this should result in a “bruising” encounter, causing the players to lose 35% of their HP. Instead they came out of it largely untouched, with the werewolf getting summarily slaughtered. Had I used the extra monsters as recommended it would have come out to a hypothetical “oppressive” encounter, with an 84% HP loss, but with the general level of skill and boons granted to the players, a tough yet very winnable fight.

The Vampire Spawn fight in the coffinmaker’s shop, which I haven’t covered yet here, went much closer to ideal – with one player nearly being knocked out. I ran the Spawn with their max HP and pulled fewer punches, and Volenta barely escaped with her (un)life. I did neglect the additional balancing Dragna recommended, using only two Spawn instead of three.

This Friday the players likely will be running across the scarecrows and twig blights at the Luna River Crossroads, which will have them face 3 scarecrows (up from the two as originally written by Dragna, as per his balancing guide) along with 4 twig blights. We’ll see if actually sticking to the script helps!

I’m sure there were some other things I had intended to mention, but this has gotten stupidly long as it is – I can always come back to them.

Next time, the party find themselves in Vallaki, and fight their first vampires!