Almost Two Years and 65 Sessions Later, the Curse Outlives the Party
I'm not a particularly experienced DM, only having run some Pathfinder games way back when. Curse of Strahd made me dust off my DM screen and come back after a long hiatus - I really enjoyed the tremendous amounts of extra lore available in the broader Ravenloft context. Combine that with the rather tight focus of the campaign which physically confines your party to Barovia and encourages them to really delve into the mysteries and plot lines of each of its landmarks and you got what I consider to be one of the most interesting campaigns out there (both to run and to play in).
But now, my favourite campaign of all times has come to an unfortunate & premature end due to my players' IRL commitments and I wanted to use this opportunity to share what I learned from running CoS for the first time.
After the party managed to defeat the Abbot and the druids' Wicker Man, the final stretch of the campaign rapidly approached, with the Amber Temple beckoning and the Machinations of Ravenloft reaching their peak – the party hadn't actually directly antagonised Strahd, even at this point, but their confrontation was all but inevitable due to their meddling and covert support of Ravenloft's enemies.
Alas, most of the players had to bow out at the same time and might be unavailable for more than a year, so we made the decision to call it and have one final debriefing session where I outlined the rest of the story for them. I felt that replacing most of the core player group with new players for the final stretch of the campaign wouldn't have been rewarding for anyone.
Some key points for context:
- I ran the game through FoundryVTT (v11) using the 5e 2014 rules
- We played weekly (but skipped quite a few), for 4-6 hrs per sesh
- Overall I'd say the sessions were 70% RP and 30% combat
- The main campaign supplement I used was Pyram King's Legends of Barovia
- Various bits from other 3rd party additions like LBH were used where suitable
- The party started with 5 players, then ran with 4 for remainder of the campaign
- A few players switched in and out earlier on
- Surprisingly, no non-scripted player character deaths occurred (extremely close fights though, especially with the hags, the first Baba encounter and the Coffin Maker ambush)
My personal recommendations for running CoS (what worked well):
- Treat each of the major locations as set pieces, add distinct NPCs and events to them, give the players a reason to come back & investigate further.
- Make use of the Consorts!! Having the brides do stuff around the valley can be pretty interesting and they can each serve as a mini boss in their own right, or even an unlikely ally (enemy of my enemy..). I used slightly altered versions of LBH's stat blocks to enhance the brides and make them stand out from regular vamp spawns.
- Have Strahd be an active villain - I introduced him in person as early as Kolyan's funeral, which seems to be pretty common. It's hard to build up your BBEG as actually being scary when you don't see or hear anything from him (looking at you, Eve or Ruin). My players were pretty damn scared of him from the get-go which helped with the story telling.
- Make NPCs you want your PCs to care about likeable! Forcing someone like Ireena on the party without giving them any reasons to care about her is a bad idea, I tried to portray her as genuinely friendly, supportive and helpful in combat (can forgo her action to grant advantage, decent medicine skill to stabilize etc)
- Work with your players to incorporate their backstories into the setting. CoS is a super tight narrative experience, but I still found it super rewarding for the players to have their own personal hooks that played out all throughout the story.
- Music matters, having a solid playlist can really do a lot to enhance your scenes. I used Travis Savoie's OST and had additional "boss themes" for each of the major enemies, including all the brides. For combat, Darkest Dungeon's OST was really fitting, too.
- Last but not least - Establish what kind of campaign your players are looking for. I made it clear that I would focus on story telling and RP and found a group that was on board for this. Also, I set the tone for the adventure and made players aware that there was going to be really messed up situations, relationships and quite possibly a lot of death (even though they were able to stave this off in the end).
As per PK's campaign supplement, I added the Fey Quest to offer the players a bit more agency in how to tackle the big baddie, and as an alternative to the "he can't ever really be defeated" trope. That worked pretty well, especially because one of the PCs wanted deep ties to the Fey.
Roleplaying the Court was an absolute joy, I gave each of the consorts their own agenda to pursue which caused them to clash with the party on a few occasions. I think it's interesting to have one or two of them be potential allies to the players, with the obvious limitation of not being able to oppose Strahd directly due to being spawns.
Another fairly big departure from the as-written stuff was not having the full Tarokka reading happening early in the campaign. I wanted to let the party explore and come to their own conclusions before seeking out ways to combat Ravenloft (which the reading would then help with). Also, no ONE fated ally, rather I alluded to multiple that made narrative sense. Gathering allies and building a little rebel army through their actions was pretty cool to experience for me.
I'll stop rambling here, if you have any questions I'd be more than happy to answer them. I hope that more people run this campaign because it truly is an experience - even first-time DMs should not be discouraged to sink their fangs into Barovia!