D&D General Can you run Ravenloft as a one-shot?

[Clint_L]

This sounds super fun!

I would tie the game into the seasonal event. Have the characters be on their way to a festival celebrating the changing of the year when the forces of the New Year pull them into an icy mist, transporting them to Ravenloft so that they can try to free a cursed land that has become stuck in time. If they succeed, they usher in that realm's first New Year in ages before returning to their own timeline's celebration.

 

[Li Shenron]

Found my old thread...

When I asked this three years ago, I watched the suggested videos and started planning Ravenloft as a single-day game, but as I only had one month to prepare so I chose something simpler, and kept the Ravenloft idea for the future.

A year and a half later, we finally got around to try it but we largely failed to fit it in one day... We already started with a huge delay of 2-3 hours for various reasons, and then the players were immediately interested in doing serious investigations in Barovia, so it became quickly very obvious to me that if I had pushed them forward just to speed the game up, it would not have been satisfying. At the end of the first session they hadn't even finished visiting all locations they wanted within the village...

For work and family reasons, we had to wait another year and a half to continue the adventure, but we finally did during this Christmas holidays. By now however, I had abandoned the idea of keeping it short, it will take whatever it takes! With the second session, they reached the castle and started exploring it. I have removed all random or minor encounters but also added new ones (inspired by Curse of Strahd but not exactly like in that book). I expect 2 or 3 more sessions to complete it.