A good narrative campaign, built around character development, starts with good characters to develop. I had a lot of fun working with my players to build their characters. Initially I was pulling from Dragna’s (plus additional inspiration here and there from his Twice Bitten campaign, taking into account his party of experienced DMs in comparison to mine) and MandyMod’s work primarily, with Pyram King’s and Lunch Break Heroes’ for additional inspiration.

For this phase Mandy’s was absolutely key. I gave my players Mandy’s Player Primer and some small limitations on player options (no races specific to other settings and a discouragement on monstrous species primarily, and DM approval required) and set them free, and they came back with a bunch of cool ideas, most of which tied in quite well.

Now, you may read this section and for one reason or another start thinking to yourself, “Oh no… you might be making a mistake…”, and you would likely be right. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this myself until quite a few sessions later, as I started poring over Dragna’s drafts and notes in a lot more detail. That said, at the moment of writing this – the party has just left Barovia and had their first encounter with Strahd – I think I’ve come up with solutions to the bigger issues, but in order to keep the drama of the scenario intact I’ll tell you more about that later.

[Steve from the future popping by to say I did figure it out and I think it’s gonna go fantastic – I did spill some beans with one of my most trustworthy players to get some real insight and we came up with something that fixes most if not all the plot holes that were left wide open in a way that, to me, feels not overly forced and doesn’t take any player agency or anything away – but it’s a secret for now! Actually I’ll probably just write the next post about it, before moving onto the game proper]

At the time though, this was my approach. Each player got a “token” item of sorts to work as a breadcrumb trail, plus the Mysterious Secret half-feat from Mandy’s guide. I also for some reason decided to give them each a first level feat, which may not have been a great call, but overall, not the biggest mistake. We had a bit of time before everyone’s schedules cleared up enough to start, so I worked with my players to come up with some fun ideas.

So allow me to present, in order of creation, the party in question (as they’ve hit level 3, I’ll include their current subclasses as well):

Hickory – Aasimar Arcane Trickster Rogue

Hickory is a young girl, early teenage years. She has no memory before being found wandering through the forest outside Waterdeep, covered in blood, holding a letter from her parents, telling her they didn’t make it out but hopefully she had, and so did “Izzy” who would protect her. It mentions that the Devil knows of her “cursed blood” and that he will punish her for “the sins of [their] ancestors [they] did not know [they] had”, that she would be safe with Izzy, and to stay away from Vallaki and Barovia. It’s written on the back of a mostly illegible invoice or ledger from the Blue Water Inn, with the Barovian raven crest watermarked on it.

The player had come to me very early in the campaign setup, saying he had had a vivid dream that inspired him to create a character. He wanted to play an orphan girl who was raised by a wizard after she tried to steal his spellbook, had dreams of some kind of protective silvery Coatl spirit, and had some (non-mechanical) elvish features, mostly the ears, but was still effectively human, although he did wind up opting for Aasimar in the end. For all intents and purposes she’s a human girl, but touched by a divine source that gave her the Aasimar traits.

Unbeknownst to either PC or player, she is the younger sister of Izek Strazni, who I’ve made part Dusk Elf, albeit distantly – Strahd became aware of their ancestral lineage when Hickory, the first female born in their genetic line since the Dusk Elf genocide, came into existance, and did what he does best and tried to kill her (and her family) as an infant. Her parents tried to get her and Izek out of Barovia but perished doing so, leaving Izek for dead, but somehow she made it out. Izek was protected by some kind of dark power which gave him his demonic arm, and she was instead protected by a divine power. I changed it from a Coatl, which made no sense in the setting, to a silver dragon – in part a reference to Argynvostholt to give a bit of incentive to want to head there at some point, but mostly as my replacement for Mother Night, Sehanine Moonbow (an elven goddess of death, dreams, and the moon who sometimes appears as a silver dragon).

I’m having fun with this one already, as they just met Ismark – who Ireena jokingly refers to as “Izzy”, just as a red herring. This player and I have a lot of trust in each other and can get away with a lot of well-meaning misdirection so lots to play with there. Her Mysterious Secret half-feat is a once-per-long-rest Divine Sense, and took the Ritual Caster feat – which worked out well, the adoptive wizard daddy let her keep the spellbook for it, which also records her dreams (and absolutely will be affected by Barovia in terms of what it tells her). She’s also got a pseudo-pseudodragon familiar – using the standard pseudodragon statblock, as opposed to the somewhat more powerful Pseudodragon Familiar variant, which I understand to be less a summoned familiar, and moreso an actual pseudodragon that has entered into service as one. This way she gets her little dragon buddy, but not the flat adantage on saves against spells and magical effects, and rather than a true physical being it’s still a magical, spiritual entity.

Slight spoilers – her backstory, at least the part that’s yet unknown to the player, has changed fairly significantly for a number of reasons that may or may not be obvious, but I’m a sucker for suspense so I’ll come back to that at the appropriate part of the timeline!

Fang – Dragonborn Hexblade Warlock

Fang has an interesting lineage as a character concept. Originally, he was Sofia Belmont in my Grendleroot campaign – literally just Castlevania’s Simon Belmont as a 5e character with a genderswap. Fang’s player mashed that up with an old dragonborn bard he played, which he then turned into first a Monster Slayer Ranger, then a Gloom Stalker, and finally back to its origins as a Hexblade Warlock. Like me, Fang!Player likes to be a bit of a conniving bastard, and publically he’s playing Fang as a Ranger still – I found the parallels to Twice Bitten’s Aerthrandir pretty entertaining – but we’re not trying overly hard to keep his true Warlock nature a secret. But we’re having fun with it.

So what he had given to me for a backstory was that his tribe was attacked by a Lich, which mind controlled him into fighting for it, and now struggles with having witnessed himself execute his own kin. He exiled himself and became a monster hunter to try and prevent things like that from happening again, and is now searching for Van Richten to continue his studies, after his mentor told him he had nothing left to teach. The Lich is going to end up being an echo or something like that (this wound up being the key to making everything make sense later on!) of Exethanter, which will be fun when he comes across the Lich itself in the Amber Temple, who has no idea what the hell this weird angry lizard talking about. I’m letting him roll privately for any monster-related knowledge checks which will be useful for more “common” things, like hags or werewolves, but won’t help much with the Barovian-specific stuff. His half-feat/token item was a silvered sword, which was one of the few weapons they were actually left with when I took almost everything away after entering Barovia. This character is super fun to play with. Fang!Player as I mentioned has a lot of D&D experience on both sides of the table, so in order to manage any potential metagaming he’s instead subverting it – Fang!Player knows the gist of what monsters do, but Fang himself is overconfident – meaning Fang!Player can use a little of what he knows is correct (or should be, given that a lot of the stat blocks are being twisted) along with what he knows *isn’t* correct to really lean into it. He’s more than willing to play ball and only use his metaknowledge to improve the game, and it’s been really fun to play with.

Luther – Variant Human Life Cleric

Both Luther and Tallet are characters that come from another campaign the two played in. They wanted to see how these characters they already know quite well would develop in entirely different circumstances, so while they started off as effectively the same concepts in either campaign, they’re more alternate universe versions.

Luther is a follower of Ilmater, the Broken God of compassion and martyrdom. He’s having a deep crisis of faith, as the church he had belonged to and was raised by was run by a very cruel man that, instead of helping the less fortunate, used them to prop himself up in a life of luxury. He had basically brainwashed Luther from a yougn age into being a dedicated follower of him first and foremost and Ilmater second, but things had begun to not add up, leading to conflict in Luther’s heart. He received a prophetic dream from the Morninglord sending him to Barovia to deal with a “fallen angel” (the Abbot), leaving him with a Barovian gold coin bearing the symbol of the Morninglord in place of Strahd’s face – I wanted to make sure at least a few players had seen the symbol of the Morninglord going into Barovia. Luther is familiar with the Morninglord as the two gods are connected in the overall FR lore as well. I also gave him the Sacred Flame cantrip without taking up one of his spell choices as his Mysterious Secret half-feat. I’m gonna have fun with this one as well, but differently from the other two – his backstory doesn’t tie him to Barovia at all or to what they’ll find, but that inner conflict is something he’s hoping to have me play with. I’m going to make full use of the Dark Vestiges trying to corrupt him. He sees himself as a leader figure which will conflict with stubborn Hickory and experienced Fang which will be great to hook some dark influence onto.

Tallet – Human Wild Magic Sorceror

Tallet is another younger girl, also an orphan – her player and Hickory’s came up with theirs completely individually, just to show how common that cliche can be – but went in a very different direction. Originally, she had been saved from stillbirth by a demon, who will come to collect on that at some point, but she’s been able to tap into some infernal abilities it had left behind, manifested as some latent psychokinetic powers. Rather than a demon, I turned it into one of the Dark Powers who had bargained with her spirit, leaving her with a small piece of amber that will draw her to the temple. The amber, her “token”, has always seemed to just be an inert stone, but with the interesting property of no matter where she leaves it, it reappears nearby her almost as soon as she looks away. She’s convinced it’s got something “alive” inside it despite the lack of evidence – which is actually correct, as it’s a small sliver of the vestige’s consciousness. I’ll also corrupt her, but a bit differently from Luther, using the Vestige to more openly offer her control over her powers to do its bidding, rather than manipulating her subtly.

She had originally used a homebrew “Psychic” background, which was… not great, but I tweaked to make it a little more congruent and balanced, and it gives her some basic psychic-type abilities through free Prestidigitation and Mage Hand. She’s playing a Wild Magic Sorcerer to futher lean into the unpredictable magical abilities. Her half-feat is a little weak in comparison – once per long rest she can add 1 to a death saving roll as the Dark Power tries to keep her alive, but think it all balances out.

Nomuri – Drow Samurai Fighter

Both Nomuri and Hoid had a little less to draw on. Hickory!Player is an absolute knowledge sponge and reads everything he can, so he familiarized himelf with the FR setting almost immediately, but Nomuri and Hoid had a bit more trouble coming up with ideas.

Nomuri!Player is very much a pothead party boy in real life, so I drew on that in helping him come up with something. Nomuri is previously a denizen of the Underdark who left for the surface world to work as a mercenary before settling down in a rural town as a guard. In LMoP, we had a running joke about the party trying to find some “Dragongrass” to get high, so I figured why not throw him a bone – I whipped up a homebrew mechanic for every Faerunian’s favorite herbal medicine and gave him a bag of it. Effectively, it would bump up some stereotypical skills – Advantage on Performance, Animal Handling, Nature, and Persuasion checks – and debuff a few others – Disadvantage on Perception, Intimidation, Insight, and Dexterity. Oh, and safety first, so while under its effects, one can’t operate Land Vehicles. Of course that was all fluff, as when he woke up in Barovia the bag was empty, but the important part is he had to actually wake up from sleep, and not from a trance, as the effects would end after sleeping for 4 or more uninterrupted hours. It wasn’t overly necessary for him to sleep as the mists took them, but I figured why not? It’s also opened the door for him needing to find more of the drug in Barovia, which he won’t, although I’m not sure if leaning into it would work well for the player in question as he needs a bit of a smoother ride.

The bigger concept I ran with was who he’d partake in the herbal sacrament with – an old lady who’d visit the village somewhat regularly, by the name of Jeny Greenteeth. Now, you might be saying “uh, Steve, how the hell did she get there?” Well… not a fucking clue. I didn’t realize that until way later, but I think I’ve figured something out, but I’ll withhold that for now as this has been the information I’ve been working with up until the end of the most recent session.

Anyways, Jeny disappeared for longer than usual in recent weeks, and Nomuri woke up one morning to find her signature smoking pipe on his doorstep with a note simply reading “Barovia”, a common thread in all their backstories which I’ll go into detail on a bit further in this post. His half-feat was that she had taught him the Druidcraft cantrip.

Hoid – Deep Gnome College of Spirits Bard

Hoid!Player was also more than a little unfamiliar with the generall FR setting, but has a bit more literary depth to draw on. We worked together for a bit, looking at a few different ideas, and he settled on playing a runaway noble, disillusioned with the aristocratic life, masquerading as a Bard in the surface world. A Ward of his from the court – a best friend and lover of sorts – had followed him not long after, and wound up finding him, and they had an on-again, off-again romance where she’d show up and disappear almost at random – heavily inspired in a lot of ways by Kvothe and Denna from the Kingkiller Chronicles. I took that and gave him a few options, and he came back with something I thought had a lot of potential.

The idea would be she returned once again after what was intended to be a final breakup and their passion reignites, with her suggest one last romp in the bedroom. In the middle of their throes of passion, she pulls a dagger from nowhere and stabs him with it, leaving him for dead, and he loses consciousness and dreams of Barovia. He manages to wake up still alive, but in a reference to another franchise or two, is cursed with a wound that never quite heals, so he’s searching for a cure in Barovia as well as answers as to why she’d do such a thing. We established she was likely a vampire or similar, and I took it and ran.

In my super duper secret notes she had found herself in Barovia and was taken as a consort by Strahd – I haven’t decided if she’d be a fourth bride or replace one of the three, but I’m leaning towards the former. Strahd tasked her with proving her commitment by killing Hoid, but with a small fragment of her past consciousness managed to subvert it, and rather than outright killing him only left him assumed dead, and caused a wound that would ache whenever he was near a vampire, unbeknownst to him. I’ve been dropping the hints for that but I don’t know that he’s fully clued in yet. They did just meet Strahd last session who knew a bit more about Hoid than the others – especially the noble background he’s been hiding – as they shared that mutual acquaintance. He expressed disappointment that the job wasn’t done as promised, but was very impressed that Hoid had survived, and alluded to punishing their shared friend for the lie in the near future, after he gets some entertainment by seeing them reunite.

So his half-feat then is a limited ability to detect a vampire in close vicinity – I haven’t ironed out the details, but 30-60 feet at furthest away, or too close to be really useful. His “token”, unlike the others with physical items, is the wound itself.

All in all though, I’m less worried about any story implications from his backstory than the rest, as Hoid!Player recently told me he was struggling to find the energy to play at the end of what have been very long and stressful weeks, due to various real-life situations, so there’s a real chance his character might be quietly retconned out or given a gruesome death – up to him, depending on what he wants to do.

Session 0

So that was the characters put together, and all I had to do was get them into Barovia. Hickory was the first to be ready by a long shot and I was already taking a “dream” thematic approach with her, so I decided to lean into that. They would each have dreams drawing them into Barovia, and I opted to lean on Pyram’s work with some tweaks. I described some vague dreams they had been having before even Session 0, from which they each independently hunted down rumors of Barovia and found a remote inn, The Nightmare’s Stable. The inn served wines from the country, brought to them by Vistani traders. I gave them a general rundown of that as well as how they got to the inn, met the trader, and negotiatied to be brought into the country by him the next day at session 0, as well as – privately – a dream they’d each have that night to act as some very vague hints for their expected “roles” and stories and to foreshadow some of the twists for their characters. Just enough to make sure their ears were perked. I framed the dreams as coming from who they’d learn to be Madame Eva, doing a Tarokka reading (separate from the full group reading they’ll get later). I left them each with a Tarokka card held in their hands in the morning. This went really well, they each got to absorb their personalized dreams on their own time, and we got to open the first session in media res, already in a Vistani wagon enroute.

Lessons Learned

I want to close each post with what I learned from the relevant sessions, and in this case the prep leading up to it as well. And there was quite a bit. Mostly, it was general DMing lessons.

Number one is leverage what your players will give you, but be prepared to have some prompts for the ones that aren’t able to come up with things. Hickory’s backstory, with only a little tweaking, worked perfectly for me. Luther’s and Tallet’s did the same, albeit in a different way – Hickory’s backstory is more plot relevant and her character development will come from how she responds to learning about her past, while the other two have a less “important” backstory but provide more of a blank slate to poke and prod and twist their development. External development vs internal development, I suppose. Fang’s was also pretty easy to work in, both the “monster hunter” aspect and the “forced servitude and betrayal” aspect, but he kind of straddles the line – some of his development will be reacting to learning more of his backstory and who or what this Lich was, but most will be drawing on the character development that’s to come from it. Nomuri and Hoid were very much the cases where I had to give them some prompts, let them think about it, and then come back and see what I could do with it. Overall though, I’d probably substantially lower the backstory importance, and just toss them into Barovia for the more classic “we’re trapped here, we don’t know where here is, and we don’t know how to get out” story.

Number two was to probably not give first level feats. Luther is Variant Human. He already had a free feat, plus the second, so he took Skill Expert and Observant. He started at level 1 with 24 passive perception – the same as the current stat block for Strahd in Dragna’s Rereloaded. He will always be the one to hear or notice things first. In this game, I can leverage that, especially as he starts to get corrupted and may want to hold back the things he’s noticed, but it kinda has a tendency to make things not that fun and a bit immersion breaking when it’s always him. We have chatted about it, and what we found works best was his passive perception would alert him that there’s something to notice, but he’d still have to roll to figure out what it is.

On the flip side, my least-experienced 5E player, Hoid, took Actor. He’s a very creative player and dying to find fun narrative things to do, and rather than just giving him a bigger toolset to work with he now has one that he picked because it seemed flavourful, which is fine, but without really understanding how it works mechanically, leading to him trying to make use of it blindly because, well, it’s a free feat, it’s a new tool he *should* use. It’s not a horrible thing by any means, but it just means more work for me to find ways to let him use it so that it’s not always “there’s not really anyone you can throw your voice to”, especially within Death House. I did throw him a few bones but it always felt forced and like he was only able to use it as flavour for things he could do without it. A good example was during the escape from Death House, after summoning the Fleshy Mound of Walter – given the available action economy and to prompt them to pick flight over fight, I threw Elisabeth Durst as a Ghast plus a few Ghouls. He wanted to throw his voice to distract her in combat as he tried to pickpocket her, and I kinda blanked out. Wound up letting him effectively use Help as a bonus action, but since I couldn’t think of anything that he could pickpocket off her (I read Dragna’s notes about her carrying an amber shard after the session), bumped it up by giving her Disadvantage on her next attack as well. It seemed somewhat balanced but… hollow? Overall a disappointment in my eyes.

The more savvy players – the Hexblade Warlock with a silvered greatsword that took Great Weapon Master, for instance – can definitely throw off the already precarious balance from having six players when it comes to combat. Luckily his dice are on my side and he rolls like shit, and being a DM himself he’s more than willing to work with me to make the game fun rather than trying to break it, but in all honesty I’d much rather have just not given them Mandy’s half-feats plus the first-level free feat.

Number two, somewhat related, is rolling stats. I’m completely sold on point buy going forward. Hickory!Player was rolling stats regularly in the weeks leading up – fully knowing that it wasn’t going to count for anything – hoping he’d get a good one. And as fun as that was, it just sucks that when he did, he wouldn’t be able to use it, and when we finally got to rolling them for real there was a lot of anticipation that this roll would be the best roll – which it wasn’t. I felt obligated to make it a bit easier by letting them each roll twice and picking the one they preferred. That wound up only being a bandage solution as I just should have let them point buy right off the bat, especially when it ended up with Luther rolling amazingly (17/12/17/15/13/14); Tallet, Hickory and Fang all rolling fairly well (nothing below a 10, and at least one or two 17s or 18s each); and Hoid rolling two 9s and a max of 16, while Nomuri got two 10s but nothing above 15. It just isn’t fun for one player to have a huge roll, and two to have relative crap. Point buy cuts that buildup to potential disappointment and lets the players know what stats they have to work with right from the get-go. I’ve brought this up with the group and their general opinion is that while they’ll keep what they got, point buy is definitely more fun in the end.

Number three is limiting the party size. Six is a lot. My first campaign was 3 (four for the first two sessions) and while that felt a little light, 4 or 5 would be perfect. There’s just not enough room for everyone to talk, and I have to keep track of six characters that are each trying to do their own thing, and either having to disregard what they wanted to do because another player did something that conflicts with it more loudly, or disregard what the other players are doing in the first place. My group especially, not only because we’re playing online, has a tendency to accidentally talk over each otherEspecially with my group there’s a few players that get cut off by others pretty often and as much as I do try to keep a handle on it, it’s tough in the moment. Fortunately they’re great people and the few times any of them have been bothered we’ve worked things out easily, but I’d rather I’d have limited it from the get-go.

On the flip side, I learned a few things that really did work. Players – mine, at least – appreciate having some secret knowledge, especially in a campaign like this. While I may have gone overboard, the individual content I gave them went over really well and worked to stoke the excitement to find out more. Care about your player’s characters, just remember to restrain yourself and not care more than they care about them themselves.

Lastly, I found that Notion is a massively useful tool for organizing a campaign, especially one as complex as this. Massive props to Sly Flourish and his templates. I’ve used a bunch of his tools throughout, including his One-Page Campaign Guides and Safety Tools. I’m considering linking my Notion workspace for the campaign, although it’s very much in constant evolution and may make absolutely zero sense to anyone but me.

Anyways, that’s enough of the work before the campaign proper – next post I’ll dive into gameplay, with get into getting them into Barovia in the first part of Session 1, followed by their exploits inside the Durst Manor from there to the end of Session 5. After that, I’ll cover the village of Little Barovia, as I nicknamed it, which covers Sessions 6, 7, and the beginning of 8, and if I haven’t run the next session by the time I’m there, their first encounter with Strahd for the rest of Session 8. Up next for them is Tser Pool and a Tarokka reading, and we’ll see how much more Session 9 covers!