Death House For 5th Level Characters

Tomorrow is the first session of an AL group I formed. I was worried no one would show, but now I'm worried that too many people will come. Anyway, a lot of the players are new to D&D, so I want to start off with Lost Mines of Phandelver. After that I was planning on running Curse of Strahd. I enjoyed Death House and want to run that for my new group, but all their characters will be level 5 by the time we get to Barovia. Any thoughts on how to modify Death House for 5th level characters would be appreciated.

If you're planning on running it as an AL adventure, you can't -- Death House is an intro mod, and is hard-capped. if you want to play them both, i'd start instead with Death House, then transition into Lost Mines. EDIT: Well, actually, I suppose that's Death House as the Launch Event offering, not necessarily as part of the hardcover Curse of Strahd. Not having said hardcover, i'm not sure how, if at all, that differs, but i would imagine it's also intended to be hard-capped.

Can't do that either. Death House = you're locked into the Demiplane.

I'd advise against running Death House for 5th level characters; as an AL DM, your ability to modify the encounters in that adventure is limited, to the point where you won't really be able to portray the appropriate level of horror required to showcase the module in the best light.

If you are planning to run the Curse of Strahd hard-cover as an AL-legal adventure, I'd advise skipping ahead to the village of Vallaki, which would be a more level-appropriate starting point for them, anyway. You can either move signficant encounters from the village of Barovia to Vallaki, or simply re-direct the PCs to the village of Barovia to collect any plot-relevant encounters or items.

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Pauper

Jumping into CoS at 5th level means that you're going to starting near the midpoint of the level range for the adventure. If it were up to me, these would be my best options:

1. Forget about running LMoP and go straight into CoS. Death House covers all three pillars of play (Combat/Exploration/Social) well enough for introductory purposes. Be prepared for players to die and take on Dark Gifts.

2. Run LMoP and transition to the DDAL modules of seasons 1-3 or one of the other hardcovers. This allows them to keep playing their characters without worrying about being trapped in Barovia.

3. Run LMoP and then start CoS with new characters. This teaches one of the unwritten inevitabilities of AL: you will have multiple characters at some point in your career. They could then pick up with their old characters afterwards by playing the DDAL modules of seasons 1-3 or jump into one of the other hardcovers.

Thanks for the helpful comments. I'm hoping that after LMoP they will want to try out new characters, but you never know.