curse of strahd

dooley's picture

Off to a start

With two sessions of Strahd under my belt, I can honestly say I'm loving it.

I was a bit stumbly with the first session, and much smoother the second time, even managing to get a dramatic chase sequence fit into play.

I was very nervous last Friday, being it my first session with a complete work to reference, and I messed up a lot of things by my count.

Moving forward I hope to grow more and more comfortable with referencing the book and knowing where to go.

My second session I was a bit more practiced.

I tend to over act a lot. I imagine these characters, and the pain of their personal circumstances, and the drab and hopeless world they're victimized by. I'm confronted with a demanding emotional state to portray and I choose to act it out for the players 'benefit'. I provide the role in the play.

Of course that's just me and my choice to portray to the players that this character is dead inside, or wracked with loss, or what have you.

Each character is hopeless, first and foremost. So much so that some of the characters have been driven mad in some fashion.

Mad Mary, is mad with loss. Donovich, is dead inside, and his portraiture is perfect.

Needless to say, the characters are the reason I wanted to operate this adventure. I read Out of the Abyss and while it was an ..exciting adventure (I bought it for the stats), it lacked the heart of Curse of Strahd.

CoS is about a villain. OotA is about the players and the world around them.

Conversely, CoS is about saving the world while OotA is about saving your hide, and taking out some demons along the way.

CoS just has more character in my humble opinion and more over the sorts of characters that I want to portray; that I have an interest in portraying.

Tune in on Mondays and Fridays at 7pm to catch the next episode.

dooley's picture

End of a campaign.

It's over.

One could argue it was over when three players left the group, but last night, we wrapped up what was left of the campaign I had been operating for years.

A hundred or so NPCs, a robust setting, multiple paths of adventure, all culminating in a quick and final set of battles that saw the campaign wrapped up. Some have said I should publish my world as a supplement and perhaps in due course I will.

With a brief after math description, along with the insinuation that Eddard has some bent motivations surrounding the Mythil, the campaign comes to a close that I can revisit it later on the way I intended before I was gifted a copy of the Curse of Strahd.

For those wondering, the next step of my campaign world was to explore a sort of 'Hell on Earth' scenario where the players filled the role of 'Hunters' who sought and destroyed evil machinations that were consuming the world and its people.

I have been looking forward to operating the Curse of Strahd for some time now.

As a merry band of four, I'm excited to operate the adventure but disappointed that I won't have the chance to include everyone as I'd hoped.

Curse of Strahd is a robust setting (as it ought to be) that I have never experienced before. While Paul has the Ravenloft boxed set, my reading of Curse of Strahd is my first foray into Barovia and its secrets.

Conversely, Castle Ravenloft, the original D&D board game from 2010, was the original reason I fell back into the hobby. It is what pulled me to try pencil and paper again, and start buying 4th edition books. While I had 3rd edition books, I had no idea what 4th edition offered, but a bit of searching around showed me a few tools that helped get me and my victims, I mean, friends onboard efficiently.

I still have Castle Ravenloft (along with several others) although it sits derelict with no miniatures in the box; the game used a lot of 4th edition miniatures, but included them unpainted to cut costs. Back in 2010, Wheezehards were still trying to make everything D&D commercially similar to Magic the Gathering.

I'm surprised they didn't try to sell the core books in blind boxes (oh shit, another Dungeon Masters Guide).

So memory lane and my viscera aside, we're starting anew, and for the first time in ever I'm using a published adventure for my main game.

This ought to be good <3

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