Sessions 2-5

And so our brave party found themselves in the Durst Manor, more widely known as Death House.

I’ll start this off by saying that I really didn’t love Death House. It took almost 5 entire sessions to run over almost 4 months – biweekly sessions, broken up by a tonsillectomy preventing me from being able to talk for more than a few minutes let alone run an entire session, were the culprit there – and I made a lot of little mistakes that just wound up making it more stressful than fun to run. Don’t get me wrong, the players all had a great time – at worst, it was a 6 or 7/10 experience, but I was really hoping for a solid 10/10.

The biggest contributor to my little mistakes were trying to experiment when I barely had the confidence to run it as written, or at least as written in at most one guide. I bit off a bit more than I could chew with it, trying to piece together bits of Mandy’s, Pyram’s, and Dragna’s guides – and not just one of Dragna’s, but I started pulling from Rereloaded as soon as there was a sneak peek of it available. Not a good call by any stretch.

I’ll keep the synopsis on the briefer side (yeah, right). I quickly learned that Tallet!Player had a bit of a reputation in her other games as being a tad excitable when it came to opening every single door she could find – which immediately meant that the door mimic in the basement was back in. Unfortunately, she had bee-lined straight ahead to the dining room door, and Fang – who is apparently always hungry – absolutely had to sample the feast. Fortunately, that got me this wonderful audio clip:

The party from then on decided to be overly cautious about touching anything in the house – avoiding anything that could be used as a weapon, aside from the longsword and shield. Fireplace pokers? Nope. Kitchen knives? No good. The crossbows locked away in the den? Didn’t even look.

They did make their way up to the second floor quickly enough, getting there during the first session and scoping out the study first. Hoid landed a fantastic investigation check poking through the bookshelves for anything of note, which it made sense to reward him with the hidden lever for the secret room as well as “The Life and Death of Hoid”. Unfortunately part of his backstory involves him being a runaway noble who’s worked hard to keep that a secret, so rather than reading it he immediately stashed it away – which kinda killed that little tidbit. To top it off he had done that before the desk was investigated during session 2, so the note that would typically clue them in to the book was now extremely confusing. They had no idea who Bulwarton was, what words were his, or which way they would lead, but had already found the secret chamber. Not a big problem of course. The first session ended after Luther found his new bestest best friend Lancelot who the party initially refused to trust (“I swear the dog is a vampire!”), but quickly turned into a mascot of sorts. They then moved back downstairs and Fang – leaning wholeheartedly into his whole “I’m an experienced adventurer, just not a very good one” shtick – tried to smash a window for an escape route, failing his CON save and taking a level of exhaustion.

The next session found them exploring the first two floors quite a bit more after some subtle hints from me that certain objects may have uses as weaponry, and they did finally find the crossbows and a few kitchen knives to use as daggers. Hoid, wanting to bard as much as a bard can, took the bait once the sheet music was found and I had a lot of fun describing the ghostly dancers, with Mr and Mrs Durst staring daggers at him throughout, although I did discover that running pure Theater of the Mind doesn’t do any favours for players that already aren’t great at spatial reasoning. Took a bit more explaining than it should have to get them to understand where the grinding noise and the click had come from after he finished playing. I do definitely regret letting Fang and Luther take some time to salvage two sets of scale mail from the suits of armor on the second floor as per Mandy’s guide, especially after nixing Hickory (a 14-year-old girl) using the leather armor from the hidden chamber in the study (made for a full-grown man), but fortunately Hickory!Player isn’t actually upset about it – he just enjoys pretending to be salty over it.

Session 2 ended with the Animated Armor encounter which went really well, in all honesty – it got some solid hits in, and the party didn’t burn it down too quickly. Hoid’s Vicious Mockery insulting the armor to death was a particularly entertaining end.

The third session finished off the house proper as they continued to explore the third floor and the attic. I was still using the original Reloaded at this point and they found Mr Durst’s ghastly body hanging in the room which was suitably morbid, and Luther got to be the holy man he meant to be, performing his last rites. Hickory snatched up the jewelry box and its contents which meant I got to remind her that she was dragging along her spellbook, the three books from the hidden chamber, the three spell scrolls, plus the jewelry box and her weapons without any sort of bag to carry it in. All in jest, of course – I didn’t enforce any mechanical impact from it because as I touched on previously, that’s just not very fun.

Meeting Margaret was great – I’m really glad the overwhelming consensus is to turn that into a social encounter, not a combat one, as it adds a lot of flavour to the house overall. I did leave the option for combat open but they didn’t go for it, sadly. It was a bit of a head-scratcher describing the mirror that hides the attic stairs hanging open and the party moving up, and then immediately hearing “hey did we ever find out what that grinding noise was?” Yes. Yes you did, I told you a few times, even explicitly once you found the mirror. My party’s true nemesis is information retention, it seems. Which popped up again after Hickory used the key from the study to unlock the children’s room, yet later started wondering if they would find the lock it went with…

Running the actual Rose and Thorn was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed completely changing Rose’s personality from the scared little girl outside to the much sassier and confident ghost indoors. As soon as one of the players started poking around at the doll house she popped out with a “Don’t touch our stuff without asking, that’s very rude!”

Rose made them promise to lay their bodies to rest down in the basement crypts, which was very quickly forgotten (in no small part due to the long break between sessions, unfortunately) and they moved off to find the hidden button for the basement stairs, running across Margaret’s body and another encounter with her in the process. They also got very sidetracked trying to figure out what was up with the two creepy dolls in the spare bedrooms – I had put identical ones in each, with the implication that it was the same doll – as well as getting fixated on looking for any clues of guests that may have been staying over in said rooms. “Hickory wants to look around for any sign of an active guest when this all went down.” “The beds are made, there’s no belongings of any sort besides the furniture and the dolls, everything is pretty evenly covered in dust.” “So there’s no, like, luggage or anything, then?” “Correct, no personal belongings, just a creepy doll.” “You’re sure?” “Well, you rolled an 18 on your investigation, so I’d say that Hickory’s pretty sure, yeah.” They did finally move on, ending the session as they descended into the basement and leveling up to level 2.

Fang took the lead in the basement, immediately declaring he was going to follow the left wall to not get lost, and completely missing that the first rooms he looked into – the crypts – each contained a seemingly empty child-sized coffin that the two tiny skeletons he was lugging around would likely fit perfectly in. While they wound up skipping the lower right section of the map entirely due to sticking to the left, they did thoroughly investigate the cultist quarters, finding all the available loot there, much to Fang’s chagrin (and of course, Hickory further filled her little arms with loot).

The ghoul encounter went well and was handled pretty easily, with the party retreating down to the second level mid-combat (although they were able to finish them off before actually heading down). A few more fantastic investigation rolls later and they had bypassed the portcullis via the hidden door in the prison and entered into the ritual chamber. This is where probably my biggest misstep was – I described the dagger being on the dais before they moved onto it, and Tallet grabbed it with her Mage Hand. Fortunately Fang being Fang grabbed her and jumped over to the altar to put the dagger back, triggering the encounter, but due to time we ended the session then – leaving it on a big ol’ month-and-a-bit-long cliffhanger as I soon had to go for my tonsil removal and spend a few weeks recovering.

During those weeks Dragna dropped the first draft of Rereloaded, at which point I switched over to using it almost exclusively for content. That meant I got to use his new Walter the Flesh Mound stat blocks which was a lot of fun.

Session 5 was entirely the combat encounter with Walter and the escape from the house. Top marks for the stat block – given the size of the party and some of the buffs I had given them (the scale mail, the first-level feats, etc.) I dropped the Heavy Sleeper feature from it, and also tossed in Mrs Durst as a ghast plus a couple of ghoul buddies to add a speed bump, and it worked great. Fang tried to buy them time to get the portcullis open (I slammed the secret door shut as Walter woke up, and the investigation check to find it again went very poorly) by going toe-to-toe with Walter, almost immediately getting engulfed by him. Luther and Nomuri hung back in the entry to take potshots while the rest made their escape running headlong into Mrs Durst and friends. To his credit, Fang almost single-handedly dropped Walter down to his second phase before Mrs Durst was slain and the party was able to escape – I did skip one Engulf action just to not entirely kill him (yet), but other than that no punches were pulled.

The skill challenge on the way out did not go well on my end. Hickory was up front the whole time, and fairly easily passed each one, so I wound up just giving it to them rather than belabouring an already long section and wanting them to move onto the real meat of the campaign. They soon found themselves outside, a gift basket with a bottle of wine and a note reading “Welcome to Barovia” and signed with an ornate “S” waiting for them, and we ended the session there as they went up to level 3.

Lessons Learned

Oof, tons of learning on my part here.

Number one is the biggest thing I’ve struggled with, and I feel a lot of DMs do in general.

Players aren’t stupid – at least, I know mine aren’t. But they’re far from perfect, and they’re nowhere near as aware of their surroundings and environment from purely verbal descriptions (plus the odd reference art image) as they would be if they were there. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that whatever cleverness you’ve come up with as a DM that normally they would have no problem with solving will be extremely difficult to figure out.

They’ve each got their own preconceptions about where they are, what’s around them, what you’re trying to describe, so on and so forth that aren’t necessarily remotely close to what you actually said or described, let alone what you meant to describe – because not only are the players imperfect and distracted and running on their own imaginations, so are you.

Just because something should be obvious doesn’t mean that the requisite information they’d need to let it be obvious has actually made it to them – so don’t be coy or vague about information they should justifiably have and need.

Hoid found the lever to the secret chamber that was disguised as a book by Bulwarton. Hickory later found the note saying “Bulwarton’s words will lead the way”. It’s easy to assume that Hickory should have been able to put two and two together and say “Oh, the book/lever had that name on it, so that’s what it’s referencing”… but Hickory!PC didn’t hear me say “Hoid, as you investigate every book on the shelf quite closely, you pull one labeled ‘Bulwarton’s Guide to Barovian Architecture Vol 3: Secret Passages’ and a secret passage opens up”, because why would he? I never told him I was talking to him or his character, he just heard ‘blah blah blah SECRET PASSAGE OPEN blah blah blah’. And that’s assuming I had actually remembered to say it was a book written by Bulwarton given that I was in the middle of trying to herd half a dozen cats.

What I should have done when Hickory found the note was describe it as such:
“Hickory, you find a note on top of the desk that says ‘Bulwarton’s words will lead the way’. Hoid, you overhear Hickory reading that aloud and recognize the name from the book you pulled to open the secret passage – that would likely have been what it was referencing”. Problem solved. They’d already solved the puzzle so they haven’t gained anything from that knowledge, and I get to avoid having to explain it.

Similarly, the makeshift weapons very much could have been explicitly mentioned – something I did correct once the players decided to return to the first floor and go over it once more. Now, I love MandyMod’s guide in theory, but in practice I’ve found it’s not the exact type of CoS I really enjoy running – I’m going to continue to draw on it for inspiration in general but Dragna’s is working out to be the one that works. This was one of her additions to it.

My players have played very typical D&D before – at least, those who have a good bit of experience. And I don’t know if it’s true at every table, but for theirs if it’s not called a “longsword” or a “club” it isn’t a longsword or a club or what have you. So when my players, despite being largely weaponless, heard me describe the fireplace on the main floor as having a set of fireplace pokers that looked like they could be used as weapons, their immediate thoughts were “well, improvised weapons suck, so… that’s cool I guess?” because that, at least for them, is generally the case.

Had I explicitly said “The fireplace has a poker leaned up against it, which looks like it could be used similarly to a sickle or a club” they very well may have grabbed it – and this was even after I had told them “hey, you’ll have to be creative, there’s things in the house that can be used as weapons”.

Like I said, when they came back downstairs and started looking around in the kitchen, I did just that – “There’s a pair of kitchen knives that look like they would work as daggers”. Shock and surprise, Hickory and Hoid each grabbed one.

Then there was the biggest one. I made a big deal out of Rose and Thorn asking the party to lay them to rest in their coffins downstairs, and the party took it to heart… that session. Two weeks later, when they got down to the crypts, all of them completely forgot they even had the bodies with them. I described the empty child-sized coffins, assuming they’d remembered, and was delighted when a player asked “…and you said they’re empty, right?” and assumed the wheels were turning. Turned out, nope – they just wanted confirmation that there was nothing in there that was interesting and moved on. I figured they’d remember by the time they got to the stairs down… and nothing. And by that point I had completely forgotten about it myself, what with having to actually run the game and all. I did remember afterwards and said something about the kids bodies in our Discord, to which I got a resounding “…bodies? what bodies? …oh. Well, we’re still here, we have time.”

This session had, as a reminder, ended right when they woke up Walter from his nap. They did not have time.

I did throw them a bone, though, and let them drop the kids off in their coffins (luckily, right across from the stairs leading back up) during the escape – they got a nice pat on the back from the kiddos ascending into the afterlife (lol not, welcome to barovia) after they exited. Once again, all’s well that ends well. “Don’t metagame” runs both ways, and needs a lot more nuance – players shouldn’t use information from out-of-game that their characters wouldn’t have, but they also shouldn’t be punished for not remembering things out of game that their characters would. Maybe this is a controversial stance but I firmly consider doing so to be the definition of “antagonistic DMing” and not fun. At the end of the day, this is a game, and games should be fun.

It’s still a work in progress, but reminding myself to just say the things they should feasibly know, and not assume they remember them.

The next lesson was one that should have been obvious. If you’re going to try out a new thing, make sure you know what the hell you’re doing. I’ve never run a skill challenge before, and I’ve only seen them run a couple times – mostly on Critical Role and the like. I was way overconfident that I had all the information on how to run it… but I didn’t. All the reference info I had on hand was Dragna’s draft for Rereloaded, which fortunately has been updated, but wasn’t exactly exhaustive at the time. To be clear I don’t fault Dragna for this at all, it’s firmly on me for not making sure I knew what I was doing. I skipped the portcullis, as I wanted them to try fighting Walter for some reason and had thrown in Mrs Durst as an enemy (I definitely prefer Dragna’s idea of her being a force rather than a physical enemy). Hickory was already up front, and being a rogue nailed the DEX save for the pit. I missed the whole “pick a different active player” part (and the ghoul bones and the hands coming out of the walls), so she got the next one too – the wave of insects flooding out from a crypt. Of course, I had no idea where the insects would go after a successful save (and I assume this is why Dragna removed it) so they just swarmed out across the hall into the crypt opposite and into the wall there. I got the whole group to do a save moving up the stairs as the blood rushed down, and I don’t think a single one of them rolled below an 18. Then, once in the attic, roots began to attack the from the windows, with Fang being the one to nearly get caught (and succeed on a save for one of the first times so far this campaign). Lastly as they moved back down through the house, they came across the whispering darkness of the balcony – Fang had Devil’s Sight, so he was able to tell the party confidently that he couldn’t see anything there, but you can’t really see whispers. He did pass the save though. That made 5 saves overall which was enough for me to say “fuck it, you guys are able to make it out of the house before this stops being fun”. Of course, I had phrased it a bit more flavourfully, but still.

Third, Theater of the Mind in a relatively complex 3D map where the layout matters is hard. It doesn’t help that the map is “sideways” with North on the left-hand side which got confusing pretty quick. Six players that are all easily distracted in their own ways only adds to the problem.

For sessions 1 and 2 I went onto Dungeon Scrawl and drew out what they had explored up to that point, which looked great but wasn’t overly useful while they were in-game:

I wound up installing the Dungeon Draw application and drawing out the house levels live with that:

As you can pretty easily tell, not the prettiest. That would be the 3rd floor and the attic – I had also loaded a handful of custom tiles for stairs that didn’t quite make it into my Foundry 11 install (I might have to do a post about that on its own) which helped, but there were issues trying to get adjacent rooms to stay adjacent rooms and not become a single large one. Probably user issues, but issues nonetheless which distracted from the game.

For the basement I essentially said “screw it” and found a map (I’ll have to find the source to properly attribute it):

As you can see, I opted to not give each player their own token – with 6 players, some of whom get real excited as far as maps and tokens and the “video-gamey-ness” of it go, that just seemed like a recipe for a bad time. Instead, I had a single group token (with li’l ol’ Lancelot in the middle) that I controlled – I had the players describe where they were going and moved it around as a “camera” of sorts. That way they had a visual reference for the layout but it was still effectively TotM. That worked really well, even for the combat – I’d ad hoc toss in some “X”s on the map to indicate where the enemies were standing (and used actual tokens for the Walter/Mrs Durst encounter) but they were still able to describe narratively where they were in relation to the enemies and each other without getting hung up on the grid.

That said… I’m probably switching to combat maps from here on out for the most part. They recently encountered the Strix outside Tser Pool which was fine as purely theater of the mind (it was airborne, they killed it before it got to the ground) but otherwise, tokens are a bit easier for combat in my experience. Exploration in dungeon maps I’ll still likely do as above, adding extra “observer” tokens if and when the party splits up, but for actual combat I’ll just throw everybody down. Chances are I’ll switch over to exploration with individual tokens but I’m not sure that I’ll give players full control over them – we’ll have to see how it goes.

There were a few other lessons as well that don’t require quite as lengthy of writeups. Like, as a DM, try shutting the fuck up. Prompt the players, and then just let them go for a bit, and once it feels like it would be the most impactful (or, more likely, once they run out of steam) then pipe up. Another good one is to make sure you players understand the basic mechanics of combat and don’t be afraid to say “no, but…”. Hoid!Player is new to 5e and the Action/Bonus Action/Reaction/Movement system isn’t something he’s completely grokked, but he’s very inventive and creative as far as coming up with things to try… unfortunately, sometimes they tend to be things that either would be a waste of a turn or way too much in one turn. He was in the group fighting Mrs Durst while they were escaping from the basement, and on one of his turns he said that he wanted to try to use his Actor feat to mimic the voices of the children to distract her. I figured, sure, that’s basically using the Help action, and had him roll Performance. He rolled a 21, so I ruled that the next attack against her was with Advantage, and on top of that her next attack would be with Disadvantage. Then, however, he said “While she’s distracted, can I try to pick her pockets?” I blanked for a second – I had described her as wearing tattered robes, but more specifically I was picturing something very basic – nothing that would have any visible pockets let alone any other visible belongings, and all decayed at that. I clarified it, but made the mistake of saying “Sure, but you don’t see anything on her, or any pockets to dig through.” He insisted that he’d like to try, so I asked for a Sleight of Hand check, and he rolled a dirty 20… and I realized I hadn’t considered what would happen on a success, let alone a high roll like that, especially that I had clarified that there wouldn’t be anything to find. Saying so wound up feeling pretty disappointing, as if rather than rewarding his creativity I was pulling the rug out from under him. In retrospect, I should have been firmer – distracting her by throwing his voice was using his Action for the turn, and to try and pick her pockets even if she had any would require a second action – allowing him to even try to do both shouldn’t have even have been on the table.