after a bit of a break we are heading into Argynvostholt, and the joy that a spooky mansion brings. so far my PCs are outside of the mansion and just about to go in....
I was wondering how others have played this, did you add anything extra? did you hand wave the empty rooms?
One of my groups had Sir Godfrey as their 'Ally', so I really wanted to make the location one to mess with their heads. So I turned Argynvostholt into a deathtrap for the revenants, as though Strahd was like Jigsaw and locked them all in this house of death. So I filled it with every sort of magically animated object or deceptive masked creature I had available, all ready to snap and trap any creature that wandered through the house. Rugs of Smothering, Animated Armor, Flying Swords, Bags of Devouring, Helmed Horror statues, Brooms of Animated Attack, Grey Oozes, Mimics, so on and so forth.
The theory being that Strahd was playing and torturing the revenants by locking them in this building (I also had a magical ley-line cage surrounding the house that zapped any non-living thing that passed through it) and filling it with things that the undead couldn't tell were real or not. As a result, the revenants basically have remained stationary in their respective locations because if they moved anywhere they were liable to trip up an item/creature and have their corporeal body destroyed (and would then have to wait a certain amount of time before they could inhabit a new body eventually.)
The group were experienced D&D players so as soon as they entered through the front door of Argynvostholt and saw a large carpet in the center of the front hall with a body-sized lump underneath it, they kind of expected it to come alive (which it did, and which they dealt with)... but they just didn't expect
every else to come alive as well as they explored. Yeah, most of the items/creatures were more speedbumps than actual threats (based upon the party level), but it was just that it happened so many times to them that they were royally pissed off when they finally got to Horngarde and Sir Godfrey, which then made the roleplay with them even more fun. Trying to negotiate when you are tired and angry makes for some enjoyable repartee.
Now granted... doing what I did is in some ways a duplicate of what is written in the Castle Ravenloft section so if you were going to have brooms and rugs and swords there too then doing it in Argynvostholt might be a repetitive slog. But for me personally, I use the Castle for more NPC interaction and combat than using the animated objects, so I had no issue moving all of it to the manor house instead.