Search results

Thinking about it more, having nearly 40 milestones might work out as just "hard" encounter XP. You could make them encounter XP for the level they are intended, but since characters can go in any order I suppose that doesn't really matter much. Effectively, the plan is: make them level 3 by...

No, it's not. The original cover looks much more similar to the 3.5 version of Ravenloft; it's just Strahd, lonely, on a castle balcony, with gargoyles. Honestly? Her name is Marketing. She's designed to get the presumed straight male audience to buy the product. You could make a case for...

So far I've found what I would call 3 "errors" in the book, although they're open to interpretation. Certainly it's NOTHING like the poor 3.5 Ravenloft book, which was FULL of straight up errors - scores and scores - including typos and bad stat blocks along with all the other stuff that made...

Right now I'm thinking the party may just have one NPC each that they roll for; that's less for the DM to do and while the DM will still likely choose their major actions/decisions it doesn't matter as much in combat. Sure they could all run and hide but some of the NPCs are clearly there to...

Dang, forum ate my reply! You could start them at level 8 and gain XP normally; that's me being very conservative but the closer to 10 the better or else the castle will be pretty deadly, and I don't really know how much XP you can gain from just the castle. Another, easier way would be to...

I was thinking about this as well. Technically, if you followed the advice in the book, the characters could be WELL over-leveled by the time they met Strahd. The book gives three (non-exclusive) examples of where you could gain levels: when the party finds one of the three artifacts (like...

More random thoughts: Another thing that's a little irksome is how many times "and then they all went mad and killed each other" is used to explain why there's none of the original inhabitants of some place. I know it happens two or three times, and I want to say more than that. Honestly it...

Best bet is to mimic the original adventure from 1983: delete everything but the first town, the nearby vistani camp, and the castle. The adventure holds up just fine with only these three pieces. If you do the card reading, just pick locations in the castle for all the treasure, and make...

This dovetails with my post above as well; one of my friends recently pointed out that D&D tells you "what you are bad at," and people don't try to do things they are bad at. A low-dex, heavily armored character basically never tries to sneak because they're so bad at it, for example. But that...

Reading through the book more, there's a "deposit orphaned children here" sign in Krezk and a place you can legitimately dump most NPCs if you want in Vallaki and keep them relatively safe (assuming the party fixes it and it also doesn't get destroyed). So there are some places you can leave...

Looking through the book more, there's basically a neon sign in Krezk that says "deposit orphaned children here," so that actually takes care of some situations. Also, the only other stuff I could find were hints at dead children - like long abandoned nurseries and things. There are a...

Thinking about this question more, I guess it depends on when you consider something "dead." If a fighter was killed and turned into a zombie and two weeks go by and then you kill the zombie, can you cast Raise Dead on the corpse? Well, it depends on whether or not you consider the fighter...

I have been thinking about a related question as we are about to start CoS. The thing about D&D now that was different before is: since 3.0, D&D has been more about explicitly defining things. Vampires have X powers and this is how they work. Your character is a fighter. They can do X, Y...

Getting back to the OP, I just finished looking at the town of Vallaki, and that seems a little fraught. I mean, there's about a 75% chance the PCs are going to tick off the current burgomaster, making them pariahs in the town. And if they do get rid of him, the only one who is going to step...

Those are correct, except Strahd only has ONE goal - one of those five, or "no goal," determined randomly (or by the DM). Additionally, he wants Ireena, but that's a fixed goal - it's always his goal each time. I agree it's a bit weird. Importing one or more of the above goals would work as...

Well, I thought the back of the screen was useful enough that I started to order it. Couple things. Their website is awful. Completely changes to a "Flames of War" branding when you start to order. Usability is poor. Second, they don't mention it has $9 domestic shipping (likely more for...

Our group is generally very forgiving of heavy railroading at the very beginning of the adventure; starting can be tricky and once you get going things push themselves along. Honestly, just getting them to the point that they see those kids will likely be enough for many. Also, thanks for the...

Another concern, for me anyway: constant random encounters get really, really old. Even this time they limited it to effectively not more than 2 in 12 hours, but WOW that's a lot of encounters. The 3.5 version was even worse of course, which I quickly cut down and eventually just started...

Couple thoughts: Absolutely right about the module encouraging you to head straight to the castle. I figured I'd handle that by having Strahd show up on the road and beat the crap out of them and laugh and fly away. That should make them realize they need more stuff. Also, emphasize Madame...

I interpret it to mean: you use this ability and then for the next X minutes, you know whether or not each of the different types of creatures are within 1 mile of you. If there's a dragon around the corner and a hundred zombies 9/10ths of a mile down the road, your sense tells you: there are...