My name is Steve, and I’m a Dungeon Master with a lot of ideas, and sometimes not a lot of common sense. I’d like to formally invite you to witness the comedy of errors that is my ADHD-addled trainwreck of thought as I bite off way more than I can chew and jump into DMing Curse of Strahd.

Of the many official adventures published for D&D 5e, many agree that Curse of Strahd, a full-scale reimplimentaton of the original I6 Ravenloft module by Tracy and Laura Hickman, is one of the best, if not the very best. That’s not to say it’s perfect – I’ve rarely seen anyone recommend it without the caveat that maybe, just maybe, a new DM should get their feet wet with simpler adventures first. To my credit, I did try – my first foray into DMing was with the infamous Lost Mines of Phandelver, and I managed to beat the odds and run it to completeion in only a few months. My players enjoyed the hell out of it, and my ego couldn’t have grown any larger. After a brief attempt at running Sly Flourish’s Ruins of the Grendleroot – which went well enough for 3 sessions until the sheer amount of work I made for myself by having to convert a .PDF adventure to full-featured Foundry maps overwhelmed me – I wanted to do something big, and set my sights on Curse of Strahd.

Now, I’ve got a habit of exaggerating, so I’ll just be clear and say that so far things are going quite well. A few of my players have played quite a bit of D&D with an assortment of DMs, and I trust their feedback – the party as a whole has been enjoying the game so far quite substantially, so I can’t say it’s actually going poorly. But the critic within me needs to go back over everything I’ve done in analytical detail, so I’ve decided to do that in a blog here.

So if you care to join me, I’d love to wax poetic at length about what I’ve done, what I’ve learned, and what mistakes I’ve made, perceived and otherwise.