D&D 5E Curse of Strahd in 24 hours?

[koga305]

Hi all,

My college group has a tradition of, on breaks, getting together and playing through one of the published D&D games in 24 hours straight. We were actually able to make it through Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat each in 24 hours (if you're curious, here's an account of our RoT run), but we were not able to complete Princes or OotA in 24 hours. The longer module format makes it impossible to finish (even with the recent addition of a night's sleep break) and if we can't get through in 24 hours it's hard to pick back up after that.

That said, I understand that the new Curse of Strahd is a bit different. Given that it's levels 1-10 I seriously doubt we would be able to do the whole thing in 24 hours, but I understand that it adds on quite a bit of supplementary material to the original Ravenloft, which seemed more amiable to a 1-sitting playthough. For those that have the adventure, is there a clear point in which Curse of Strahd could be adapted into a 24-hour adventure?

 

[Guest 6801328]

Oh to be in college....

 

[evilbob]

For those that have the adventure, is there a clear point in which Curse of Strahd could be adapted into a 24-hour adventure?

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 someone from the first town your bonus NPC. Very simple.

 

[koga305]

@Elfcrusher: Yeah, I try to make the most of it when I can!

@evilbob: Thanks, that's exactly what I was working for. I figured there was a way to cut Curse of Strahd down to the original Ravenloft, but I haven't read either so your suggestion really helps. What levels would the cut version cover?

 

[evilbob]

What levels would the cut version cover?

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 start the party at level 7 and then instead of tracking XP just have the party level up each time they found one of the artifacts from the card reading (there are 3); that should work out nicely.

 

[GainVanquish]

Jealous of having 24 hours straight to play D&D. 4 hours every 2 weeks is my limit

 

[GX.Sigma]

The following post is intended for the DM.

[sblock]I've run I6 in 5e a few times. There are about 3 sessions worth of content in it (about 2 sessions of good content--skip the crypt crawl if at all possible). A highball estimate would be about 12 hours if you're just running the village and the castle. I guess it depends on how quick your group is, but my group was pretty slow.

So, for 24 hours, I'd start the characters at level 5, and just run it normally. The extra content is optional anyway; there's no reason for the PCs to go to any of the new places unless a mcguffin is there. In other words, there are at most 5 sub-adventures here:

The PCs do a quest to get the Ally.
The PCs do a quest to get the Tome.
The PCs do a quest to get the Holy Symbol.
The PCs do a quest to get the Sun Sword.
The PCs go to the castle to kill Strahd.

It could even be less than that, since some of those things might be in the castle anyway.

You should probably be very direct in telling them where these things are, so they don't just go around exploring everything. You also might want to remove one or two of those steps (like the Tome, it doesn't do anything anyway).

Levels for artifacts sounds like a nice simple way to do XP. I haven't inspected the conversion too closely, but IMXP 8th-level characters can clear the castle just fine.

One neat trick is to tell the players (ahead of time) when (in real life) Strahd will attack. Like, at 7:30, just flat-out tell them "Strahd is going to attack at 10:00." This motivates them to find the artifacts as quickly as possible, and also gives them a chance to set up an ambush.

Remember that the first encounter with Strahd should be completely humiliating, and the penultimate one should be a narrow victory.

Also, if you're not afraid to alter Strahd's spell list: I found cloudkill, dimension door, and wall of fire pretty essential, but that's just me.[/sblock]

 

[Olaf the Stout]

My group gets sidetracked so much with either analysis paralysis or non-game stuff that I couldn't see us completing any of the 5E WotC adventures in a 24 hour span.

That and the fact that, other than 1 person, we're all aged mid-30's to mid-50's, so most of us couldn't last the 24 hours!