Curse of Strahd "Edits"

[Aiden_Keller_]

After reading

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...Jekyll-amp-Mr-Hyde-(5E)&p=7515516#post7515516

-Added an alchemist shop in Village of Barovia where Dr. Ulbrek Jekzinkle works as an alchemist. When Strahd came to power the Doctor was working on several alchemical processes that Strahd became interested in. After winning the Doctor over, Strahd took him to the Amber Temple to learn of dark alchemical processes. One such potion backfired and allowed for an evil and massively powerful split personality, Mr. Kebrel Harkus to assume control of the Doctor. If the party is interested, Dr. Jekzinkle asks them to collect any alchemical items that they find and he will gladly pay them. He also offers to travel with the party.

(Names straight from Vistani Name List...except for Kebrel with is Ulbrek backwards minus a U)

 

[GlassJaw]

Great thread! I've been hoping to run CoS for the past year or so now and have been doing a lot of thinking about tweaks myself. Anyway, I started a thread a while back that had some of my overarching thoughts:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...conomy-of-Ravenloft-Barovia&highlight=barovia

Anyway, I'm definitely going the "simulation" route. When you start thinking about Barovia as a dark & twisted simulation, it really brings up a lot of opportunity.

 

[MostlyHarmless42]

I want to have the corruption and despair overcome each character in a different manner. To do this I utilize a personal fear as well as a personal goal that they believe they will never achieve.

Rictavio/Rudolph van Richten will say he has killed Strahd (which is true) and now is hiding because Strahd has returned. Rictavio/Rudolph van Richten truly wishes to escape from Barovia and will assist the players in fighting Strahd (I plan to have a character who has the monster hunter background really be attached to Rictavio/Rudolph van Richten and thus his death when fighting Strahd will affect them greatly.)

I absolutely HATE The Abbot....I rewrote it so that it is an Incubus that is attempting to rescue Shami-Amourae from The Amber Temple.
She attempted to escape the Well of Darkness and instead ended up being summoned to Barovia (sorry if that messes with Cannon) she was used by the Lich as a catalyst for dark magic.

I plan to run Tiamat right after Strahd and by having succubus and incubus around my players will be introduced to them early on.
(Players will enter into Hell to kill Tiamat once and for all)

To each their own. For our game the Abbot was an absolutely indespensbile character and was nearly as important to the story as Strahd himself. He made it clear that the only two ways this could end happy for the souls lost to Barovia was either a) Strahd gets Ireena and basically beats the "monkey's paw" sort of game I implied the dark powers contracts to be and thus the prison ceases fo be, or b) I gave the players the opportunity to destroy the Amber Temple and to basically end the cycle. The latter of which the Abbot was unable to even attempt as I had the whole temple desecrated and warded against celestials from entering. He made it clear the temple would offer them dark gifts in some way and that they should turn them down...something which every party member except one (including the group's Paladin) failed to heed, and so they basically "locked" themselves out of that happy ending. It really did reinforce the whole "barovia corrupts everyone theme" better than I could have hoped. The Abbot also helped serve as a second example of a warning to the party's paladin of what he couple become of not careful, and in the end he did actually become essentially another variation of Strahd.

...that all said, I can understand why the Abbot might not work as well for your game, and if you are in fact going to use him to introduce future plot by making him a friend, go nuts. I just enjoyed the concept of him showing the players that even truly good actions could have disastrous results in barovia if not being self-reflected.

For VanRichtem, I have a slight suggestion you may consider. If a player is heavily involved with him, consider making it less than he has been trapped the whole time and maybe that he trained the player character outside of Barovia if possible. If you've issue with him escaping, remember up until recently he had a Vistani apprentice Ezmerelda, who herself or her people could have facilitated an "escape" in the past if he really did kill Strahd, or alternatively he could have left after that and have now come back. The story really does work well with the characters being fish out of water to barovia, especially if you are having them back in Faerun after. I personally also just like that as an idea because I feel VanRichten works better narratively as a mortal who is obsessed with the concept of him fearing that he is too old to succeed this time but doesnt like trusting anyone else to do it right, and by default it is implied that a) he is foreign to barovia and b) hundreds of years pass before strahd returns (i.e. like how it depicts Berez as a few centuries before), and even as a half-elf VanRichten should be dead without some magical shenanigans afoot. It could also subtly let the players know that time passes differently across different planes, something which could be welded to delicious effect if they are eventually returning home to the sword coast and then headed into the hells. Ending a la "Army of Darkness" perhaps (the world ending one)?

Related amusing tangent regarding the wonky flow of time with my game: I make Rahadin and Kassimir twin brothers, and their sister lady Petrova the half-elven ranger's mother. I also made Rahadin a mentor who taught the above paladin how to fight before killing his entire family and then returning to Barovia to eventually kill Kassimir and impersonate him as of the time the game took place. In my game the facial scar was self-inflicted to be part of this disguise, show just how deep his loyalty to Strahd goes. It led to a darkly humorous moment when ranger and paladin learned their connection to rahadin and each other and that the ranger's mother had been dead for over 150 years even though the ranger was only about 23 and smuggled out as a baby. Vistani time shenanigans.

 

[epithet]

Some folks might be hesitant to mess with the Strahd backstory, since it goes all the way back to I6. I thought one change would be very significant in the characterisation of Strahd, though--to provide an actual betrayal for him to remain bitter about. In the revised history, Strahd decides to settle down and sends for his family, making Sergei the captain of his guards. He looks for a bride, and finds Ireena, who is "the fairest of them all." He makes arrangements with her father to marry her, and takes her to Ravenloft to become his princess. Before the wedding, he sends her on a little progress through the land of Barovia so that she can see her subjects and whatnot, guarded by (of course) Sergei. They are predictably naughty and get married at the gazebo in Krezk. Ireena wants to flee, but Sergei has to do honorable thing and confront his brother, insisting that Strahd will be moved to forgiveness by the power of their "true love." Strahd forgives nothing, and in the affair of honor strikes down Sergei. As he is poised to deliver the death blow, many of the guards betray their lord to defend their captain, and Strahd is himself mortally wounded. This is when the Dark Powers see their opportunity, and the offer is made and accepted. The dying Strahd administers the death blow to Sergei and drinks his blood.

This puts Strahd in the position of being morally vile but legally justified, truly Lawful Evil. From his point of view, Ireena is actually his property, stolen by his brother in an act of treachery. As an added bonus you can put the ghost of the father that sold Ireena to Strahd somewhere like the dungeon, unforgiven by Ireena for selling her off and unforgiven by Strahd because it didn't work out.

 

[epithet]

Another change to CoS that I feel is necessary is making some sense of the Mad Mage of Mt Baratok. The Archwizard in question would not be likely to engage Strahd, and if he did he would have beaten him, in part because he would have arrived at the head of an army from the Citadel. What Barovia offers is a place no one but the Vistani can leave, and the Amber Temple has secrets the Archmage might want to access. The solution for me was that the Archmage entered Barovia and either left something he wanted to trap here or collected something (from the Temple) that he wanted to remove. To escape, he gained an unwitting vistani ally with geas and modify memory, then used imprisonment on himself to take a vacation in a hedged prison tower for a couple of days to catch up on his research. The vistani delivered him back to Oerth, which was the trigger for release. If you want to get super technical about how demiplanes are said to work and so forth, you could use the minimus containment version instead and have the vistani carry the jewel out beyond the mists.

Meanwhile, the simulacrum he created of himself engaged Strahd. The point was never to defeat Strahd, just to make sure that anyone looking for him would find him, so that the jade anchor for the hedged prison could be safely removed from Barovia. The Mad Mage, then, is a simulacrum of a level 20 archmage with a few epic boons, but no spell slots. He can cast the mansion and perhaps a couple of other spells once per day, he can cast shield and mage armor without using a spell slot, and he can cast cantrips. He knows what he is, and what his purpose is, but he has problems remembering things since the diversionary encounter with Strahd. Simulacra are not designed to last that long.

The whole mind blank thing was a load of crap, in my opinion, and there's no way that particular archmage could just go missing for a year without someone (of demigod power levels, at least) going to look for him. The Mage of the Vale, for example. Replacing him with a worn-out simulacrum solves all those issues and tones him down enough to be an ally of the party without being an "I Win" button.

 

[Aiden_Keller_]

To each their own. For our game the Abbot was an absolutely indespensbile character and was nearly as important to the story as Strahd himself. He made it clear that the only two ways this could end happy for the souls lost to Barovia was either a) Strahd gets Ireena and basically beats the "monkey's paw" sort of game I implied the dark powers contracts to be and thus the prison ceases fo be, or b) I gave the players the opportunity to destroy the Amber Temple and to basically end the cycle. The latter of which the Abbot was unable to even attempt as I had the whole temple desecrated and warded against celestials from entering. He made it clear the temple would offer them dark gifts in some way and that they should turn them down...something which every party member except one (including the group's Paladin) failed to heed, and so they basically "locked" themselves out of that happy ending. It really did reinforce the whole "barovia corrupts everyone theme" better than I could have hoped. The Abbot also helped serve as a second example of a warning to the party's paladin of what he couple become of not careful, and in the end he did actually become essentially another variation of Strahd.

...that all said, I can understand why the Abbot might not work as well for your game, and if you are in fact going to use him to introduce future plot by making him a friend, go nuts. I just enjoyed the concept of him showing the players that even truly good actions could have disastrous results in barovia if not being self-reflected.

For VanRichtem, I have a slight suggestion you may consider. If a player is heavily involved with him, consider making it less than he has been trapped the whole time and maybe that he trained the player character outside of Barovia if possible. If you've issue with him escaping, remember up until recently he had a Vistani apprentice Ezmerelda, who herself or her people could have facilitated an "escape" in the past if he really did kill Strahd, or alternatively he could have left after that and have now come back. The story really does work well with the characters being fish out of water to barovia, especially if you are having them back in Faerun after. I personally also just like that as an idea because I feel VanRichten works better narratively as a mortal who is obsessed with the concept of him fearing that he is too old to succeed this time but doesnt like trusting anyone else to do it right, and by default it is implied that a) he is foreign to barovia and b) hundreds of years pass before strahd returns (i.e. like how it depicts Berez as a few centuries before), and even as a half-elf VanRichten should be dead without some magical shenanigans afoot. It could also subtly let the players know that time passes differently across different planes, something which could be welded to delicious effect if they are eventually returning home to the sword coast and then headed into the hells. Ending a la "Army of Darkness" perhaps (the world ending one)?

Related amusing tangent regarding the wonky flow of time with my game: I make Rahadin and Kassimir twin brothers, and their sister lady Petrova the half-elven ranger's mother. I also made Rahadin a mentor who taught the above paladin how to fight before killing his entire family and then returning to Barovia to eventually kill Kassimir and impersonate him as of the time the game took place. In my game the facial scar was self-inflicted to be part of this disguise, show just how deep his loyalty to Strahd goes. It led to a darkly humorous moment when ranger and paladin learned their connection to rahadin and each other and that the ranger's mother had been dead for over 150 years even though the ranger was only about 23 and smuggled out as a baby. Vistani time shenanigans.

I offered up the backstory of being trained by a "master" to the player so that they did not know how it would affect them and they declined and wanted to be self-taught...Otherwise I was actually going down that road.

I will rethink about the Abbot because the only "holy" good character in the party is an aasimir...

Thanks

 

[Aiden_Keller_]

Yeah...I have changed the "original" Mad Mage...felt like it was just thrown in to include Mordikadian...

 

[Aiden_Keller_]

Some folks might be hesitant to mess with the Strahd backstory, since it goes all the way back to I6. I thought one change would be very significant in the characterisation of Strahd, though--to provide an actual betrayal for him to remain bitter about. In the revised history, Strahd decides to settle down and sends for his family, making Sergei the captain of his guards. He looks for a bride, and finds Ireena, who is "the fairest of them all." He makes arrangements with her father to marry her, and takes her to Ravenloft to become his princess. Before the wedding, he sends her on a little progress through the land of Barovia so that she can see her subjects and whatnot, guarded by (of course) Sergei. They are predictably naughty and get married at the gazebo in Krezk. Ireena wants to flee, but Sergei has to do honorable thing and confront his brother, insisting that Strahd will be moved to forgiveness by the power of their "true love." Strahd forgives nothing, and in the affair of honor strikes down Sergei. As he is poised to deliver the death blow, many of the guards betray their lord to defend their captain, and Strahd is himself mortally wounded. This is when the Dark Powers see their opportunity, and the offer is made and accepted. The dying Strahd administers the death blow to Sergei and drinks his blood.

This puts Strahd in the position of being morally vile but legally justified, truly Lawful Evil. From his point of view, Ireena is actually his property, stolen by his brother in an act of treachery. As an added bonus you can put the ghost of the father that sold Ireena to Strahd somewhere like the dungeon, unforgiven by Ireena for selling her off and unforgiven by Strahd because it didn't work out.

I really wanted to mess with the ENTIRE background of Strahd...but I have a single player who has played/read all other versions of Strahd and didn't want to stray too far....

After this play through I want to explore something I found in another version where Barovia is part of a larger dark land and eventually characters will be faced with either teaming up with Strahd or killing him and possibly never exiting the dark land.

 

[toucanbuzz]

As to the Abbott, seriously, keep him as-is. He's one of the creepiest guys if you script a few tag-lines and mannerisms for him (as in my last post). You should do this for all the major NPCs, BTW, as this is a very NPC and story-driven campaign. For example, the Baron in Vallaki might "ahem" and clear his throat each time he's making a point, and I followed a suggestion to turn the Wachter brothers into a pair of "yo bra, let's get a beer" guys who latched on to one of the players. Later, when things get rough and the party finds out a dark secret and inadvertently has their scheming mother assassinated (long story), they get more morose, turning into angry drunks.

When the Abbott sent his minions into town (because the townfolk failed to follow thru with a promise to him) and the burgomaster hung himself in shame, the party began to see the true scope of his righteous insanity. The Abbott is a perfect complement to Strahd because he sees one perspective and in that perspective, he is always right.

As to the Mad Mage, not a fan of it after having run him. While there's a story about this possible ally wandering the woods, he's scripted to attack the party, and if done at the wrong time in their adventuring career (and you play him aggressively), he'll mop the floor. He's scripted to be uncurable by any means the party would have at their disposal, so in retrospect, I might have turned him into an insane hermit, not the might MK, with a fraction of his magic left (enough to scare away the wolves). You could instead script him with cryptic ramblings (everything is a metaphor, for example) that a patient party could wade through to glean a piece of lore you want them to have.

 

[MNblockhead]

So many other good tips in this thread. I just finished CoS. Some changes / tips:

Baba Lysaga ("BL") is too cool and has too cool of a back story to remain a side character in the swamp. My party never went to the Ruins of Berez, but through luck and smart game play they assembled a powerful group of followers to help them storm the castle. Now, remember, BL thinks of Strahd as her son. She has been working to counter the work of the Were Ravens. She has spies and scrying and the druids on her side. Her influence reaches FAR beyond Berez. The party saved the Wizard of Wines and they defeated the Druids and destroyed the Gulthias tree on Yester Hill. So she KNOWS about them even though they didn't know about her. So when the party was ready to storm the castle, I had her ambush them and managed to at least kill a few of their followers and thin their ranks. In hind-sight, I would have made it even more of a challenge by having her appear with a good number of scare crows and druids. As powerful as she it, once characters get to tier two, they can take her on.

I increased Strahd's Power using the version in Elven Tower's Curse of Strahd DM's Guide as a base with some modification. First, Strahd was a great warrior in life, why wouldn't he be able to swing a sword and wear armor. The animated armor that travels around the roofs? Well I had is so that Strahd could summon the armor and a blade as a lair action. The blade is a corrupted moon blade. Basically, the back story is that the blade was relic of the dusk elves and that it was corrupted by Strahd, who used it to kill the dusk elf women. This greatly increased his power to make him more of a challenge for 9th level characters played by experienced players.

Changing some of his spells is another way to increase the challenge. Giving him telekinesis is particularly useful. Srahd successfully used the spell to rip the Sun Blade from a characters hand and throw it out a window and 1000' down the mountain.

For the Night Hags in Bone Grinder - I gave them the full coven treatment with all the abilities from Volo's Guide to Monsters. The party's first run in with them was almost a TPK but instead of killing all of them, I had the hags take Irena to deliver to Strahd. I also had them forcefeed their pastries to all the party members to get them addicted to them. Finally, their night mare powers continued to weaken the party requiring protective measures until they were able to get the Abbot to help release them from being preyed on by the night hags.

I made the Exethanter (Ch. 13, X27) the architect (Ch. 13, X20), and Khazan (Ch 11) the same person and changed the background a bit. Not only does it make more sense this way that the architects room is in the Amber temple, but it also give more opportunities to get hints about the Lich and his background. In particular it gives opportunities for the party to learn his name and perhaps use it to get by the arcane lock to his phylactery.

One thing I would do differnetly. Only one member of the party should be able to claim any dark gift. Two players accepted the dark gift of Zhudun, the Corpse Star (Ch. 13, X42). Now one would think that this just means that the party can resurrect dead party members twice. But instead:

* After they killed the Death Slaad in X33e, they took the control gem from slaad corpse brain and then resurrected it, creating a Death Slaad minion.

* The second resurrection was used on the skull of Argyn­vost in K65. Giving them a Silver Dragon ally.

I could have easily prevented either -- but it was fun, so I went with it.

Another thing I would have done differently, is had Strahd invite them earlier. So they would have to fight for their lives to get out of the castle. They keep avoiding the Castle and were 9th level with followers and the sun Blade. Most of the dangers in the castle, other than Strahd himself, were not much of a threat to them.