So, I’d really briefly like to jump forward to the present time and talk a little more about PC Backgrounds, their plot implications, and the corner I had painted myself into due to them.

Long story short – I fucked up and got overambitious trying to tie the PCs into the existing narrative without putting enough care into make sure that how I did so actually made sense within said narrative, and in some ways that should have been pretty obvious.

A number of characters from the PCs backgrounds – whom they had met outside Barovia – should not have been able to leave Barovia, and worse yet, one character (Hickory) was replacing some aspects of an existing NPC (Ireena) in a way that didn’t make any sense.

So, here I was, 8 sessions in, and completely unsure of how to fix this without impacting things that had been established ingame while still keeping the story satisfying to myself and my players, but entirely sure I had to do something… but what?

After a ton of brainstorming, I had a bit of an idea – but it was more than a bit convoluted and confusing, and really didn’t feel great. The general essence was that each PC was actually an “echo” of an existing NPC in one way or another and their past events mirrored those of the source NPCs… but it didn’t work very well for all of them at all and I was really unhappy with it.

I wound up approaching Hickory!Player and gave him the cliff’s notes of what the problems I was worried about were (somehow without providing any major spoilers, although he’s a player I can trust to not meta), and told him what I was thinking as a solution. I was overjoyed when he said he was “leaning towards nothing at all was wrong in Hickory’s young life” as a twist, which was exactly what I needed to hear – what if the tragic events each PC was searching for a resolution to in Barovia never actually happened? Even better yet, this was super flexible – only two characters needed to be “adjusted” that dramatically.

Hickory had been orphaned and found lost in the woods. Fang was mind controlled by a lich and killed his family. But what if… neither of those things had actually happened, but they had been tricked into believing it by the Dark Powers in order to bring them into Barovia?

So this is what I wound up with.

For starters, as per Dragna’s current notes, Strahd himself is trying to escape Barovia and the Dark Powers by using the power of the Fanes via the Heart of Sorrow to “carve a hole”, but is trying to keep it secret from the Dark Powers to prevent interference – I don’t think he’d be able to pull that off necessarily, so I figured… let’s have the Powers interfere. Madame Eva’s aware of the Grand Conjunction, as she had told him about it to start with, so I added another premonition – she had divined that while he would try, a group of adventurers (ie. the party in question) would be the only chance of preventing that from happening. The Dark Powers would also have been aware of this foretelling, and exerted some small amount of influence on the outside world to make sure these adventurers actually entered Barovia.

The Dark Powers also want to use the party for their own purposes, but keeping Strahd locked in is a priority.

Maybe Hickory wasn’t orphaned, but was travelling to Waterdeep to visit family and got lost – but her family is alive and well. She just all of a sudden had a piece of paper implying they were dead from Barovia that didn’t exist before. She’d still have been adopted and thought she was an orphan, and tried to find her sibling “Izzy” in Barovia.

Maybe Fang hadn’t actually killed his family, but was subdued and woke up surrounded by their illusory corpses – and in his grief, exiled himself. He still would have taken up his path of vengeance and been directed to find Van Richten in Barovia.

Luther and Tallet needed no changing – Luther was brought to Barovia by a message from the Morninglord to search for a “fallen angel”, and he’s 100% a candidate for being corrupted by the Powers. Tallet was saved from stillbirth by a Dark Power that made a pact with her in the womb, so there’s corruption potential there.

Nomuri was easy – he didn’t have trauma, but he also had the more difficult to explain issue of being smoking buddies with a character that more than likely couldn’t even leave Barovia. It’s easy enough to say that his memory of said smoking buddy being Jeny Greenteeth was a deception in and of itself – she was just some old herbalist that wandered around the area he lived in. The note and the pipe he found? Conjured by the Powers.

Hoid was also pretty easy, but also might be a non-issue as Hoid!Player may be dropping out of the game due to time commitments – either way, there’s no reason Strahd couldn’t or wouldn’t send a new bride out of Barovia to murder her ex as a show of commitment. To bring everything into parity though, I landed on that while she was sent out, she didn’t go through with it – the stabbing that occured was fictitious, and Strahd is pissed at her after finding Hoid alive and well.

As far as how I solved this, it was pretty easy (and ongoing in-game). The party just had their Tarokka reading last session, and I added a second reading (actually, the first reading, with the traditional one happening immediately after) where Madame Eva revealed that (vaguely paraphrasing) “dark events of their pasts had risen up to haunt them”, but “the events were not truths but deceptions they had all believed whole-heartedly and though they were told for a benevolent purpose” (ie. defeating Strahd). She also said that “benevolent as they were, they still served an ulterior motive and came at a great cost to each of them that they did not know they had paid” (ie. they hadn’t actually “lost” their families, etc. until they actually entered Barovia and became locked in). She gave a little more detail about how they may be tempted by “the dark” as well as provided aid by allies but the two would be difficult to discern, and more importantly there was just as good a chance of success if they fell into the temptations as if they only took benevolent aid. Essentially, just emphasizing that avoiding the temptations of Dark Gifts isn’t necessarily the “right” choice (well, it is, but I still want to corrupt them, you know?).

And, well, yeah. That’s about the story so far.

They’ve just decided to bunk down for the night, and I’m opening up the next session with dream sequences that make things a bit clearer.

Up next: I actually get to the gameplay, starting with Death House and the lead-up to it!

If you’re interested, I do record my sessions (when I remember to), and took Madame Eva’s dialogue from the reading, cleaned it up a bit, tweaked the soundtrack, and recorded what the players would have seen (or should have seen if it all had gone perfect, but it still went well!):