D&D 5E Curse of Strahd 'Revamped' Boxed Collector's Edition

If you're in the market for a revamped (geddit?) edition of Curse of Strahd (which is my favourite of all the D&D adventures so far) in a coffin-shaped box with additional material, you're in luck!

This boxed set is coming out in October and costs $99.99.

There's a whole bunch of stuff included:

• Updated softcover of the adventure itself, including errata and presumably some of the other adjustments to Vistani talked about recently.
• A short 20-book of monsters called Creatures of Horror.
• Double sided poster map of Barovia and Castle Ravenloft.
• A Tarokka deck and 8-page booklet.
• Handouts for players.
• A dozen 'postcards' from Barovia.
• A DMs Screen.

Updates to the original adventure include errata, minor tweaks, and sections of text which have been identified as problematic regarding the Vistani.

IGN has a video looking inside the box.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Fugazi is also a really great band from the 1980s and '90s.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yes, the same changes are in the new hardcover printing, and Dan Dillon confirmed on Twitter that the Errata document will be on the website soon.

When they announce the new printing is available, I'll switch it out and sell my old copy to Noble Knight. The changes are minor, but they're a start.

 

[Charlaquin]

I check my hardcover of Strahd. I think it is a third printing. The 10 and 1 are missing on the credits page.
Vistani Bandits Changed. Page 32 COS. Drop “evil” & “Smoking”. Basically edited first line in paragraph.

Page 231 under Ezmerelda’s secret. Put a period after appendage and dropped the rest of the sentence.
That is all I could find comparing to D&D beyond version of Strahd.
Oh does anyone have links to legal pdfs of the pull out. Generally if I dm a hardcover, I send a pdf to Office Depot and get a 2 by 3 foot poster printed up.

There’s a bit more than that. Here’s a twitter thread going over all of the changes.

 

[MNblockhead]

Speaking as someone who likes mega dungeons (and also probably spoiled by running Rappan Athuk), Dungeon of the Mad Mage is a bad mega dungeon and bad adventure overall. It's boring monsters in boring environments and a bunch of blank space. There is - overall - no character, charm, or wit about the place. You would be better served using a random dungeon creator with a wandering monster chart.
I have tried to run it for my group. When we found it utterly lacking in challenge, theme, or intelligence, I just had a corridor teleport them into The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan.

That's unfortunate. I briefly paged through it and liked some of what I read, but I've not actually tried to run it yet.

 

[MNblockhead]

Based on the first three hardcovers, Goodman Games has been printing multiple iterations of the original Modules, so I would expect multiple iterations of T1 and T1-4 seperately, to show every major version their entirety. Actually pretty cool to have the 5E material seperate from the historical preservation portion...

Yes, I like that a lot, but it also makes these more "coffee table" books and research references. This are HEFTY books. I mean Into the Borderlands, which I could put into my trapper keeper in the 80s along with pads of paper, my DM screen and other stuff, in the Goodman Games version balloons to a tome that is about the same size as my Frog God Games Lost Lands Source Book. Part of this is that they include ALL versions of the modules. So even if there is only small change in artwork or some text, they reproduce an entire copy in the book. It isn't very convenient to actually RUN at the table, but they are not allow to provide a PDF or DND Beyond version. So I lover reading and referencing these but not sure I'll actually run games from them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yes, I like that a lot, but it also makes these more "coffee table" books and research references. This are HEFTY books. I mean Into the Borderlands, which I could put into my trapper keeper in the 80s along with pads of paper, my DM screen and other stuff, in the Goodman Games version balloons to a tome that is about the same size as my Frog God Games Lost Lands Source Book. Part of this is that they include ALL versions of the modules. So even if there is only small change in artwork or some text, they reproduce an entire copy in the book. It isn't very convenient to actually RUN at the table, but they are not allow to provide a PDF or DND Beyond version. So I lover reading and referencing these but not sure I'll actually run games from them.

I'm using Into the Borderlands to run B2 for my kids. I am increasingly making notes in Google Docs and running it from there. The end result will be pretty good -- and it's encouraging me to flesh it out more to my own tastes, starting with naming everyone (of all the Gygaxian conventions to keep in the update, they chose keeping a lot of NPCs unnamed) -- but yeah, this is a not-ideal presentation, even with bound-in bookmarks.

 

[stadi]

I understand the need for some of the changes with the Vistani. I don't understand why living outside of civilization was bad. That's not the same as uncivilized.

Also the drunken part / scense. These are not all the Vistani, but one group who are stuck in the mists and living in that dreadful world probably had an effect on them. That's why they started to drink. Some of those scenses must have been really funny, a shame they changed them. Maybe a better change would have been to change them to non-vistani bandits and they could have left the drunkenness in.

By the way, ist the Roma being drunkards a real stereotype? I can't imagine that they drink more than the average European.

 

[Parmandur]

I understand the need for some of the changes with the Vistani. I don't understand why living outside of civilization was bad. That's not the same as uncivilized.

Also the drunken part / scense. These are not all the Vistani, but one group who are stuck in the mists and living in that dreadful world probably had an effect on them. That's why they started to drink. Some of those scenses must have been really funny, a shame they changed them. Maybe a better change would have been to change them to non-vistani bandits and they could have left the drunkenness in.

By the way, ist the Roma being drunkards a real stereotype? I can't imagine that they drink more than the average European.

Those are all standard European stereotypes for Roma people: lazy, drunk, living outside of settled society.

Whether Roma actually drink more isn't the point, that's how they are depicted in Gypsy slurs and racist propeganda.

 

[Parmandur]

I understand the need for some of the changes with the Vistani. I don't understand why living outside of civilization was bad. That's not the same as uncivilized.

Also the drunken part / scense. These are not all the Vistani, but one group who are stuck in the mists and living in that dreadful world probably had an effect on them. That's why they started to drink. Some of those scenses must have been really funny, a shame they changed them. Maybe a better change would have been to change them to non-vistani bandits and they could have left the drunkenness in.

By the way, ist the Roma being drunkards a real stereotype? I can't imagine that they drink more than the average European.

Those are all standard European stereotypes for Roma people: lazy, drunk, living outside of settled society.

Whether Roma actually drink more isn't the point, that's how they are depicted in Gypsy slurs and racist propeganda.

 

[Charlaquin]

I understand the need for some of the changes with the Vistani. I don't understand why living outside of civilization was bad. That's not the same as uncivilized.

6 of one, half a dozen of the other, if you ask me. It implies that their own culture doesn’t count as part of civilization.

Also the drunken part / scense. These are not all the Vistani, but one group who are stuck in the mists and living in that dreadful world probably had an effect on them. That's why they started to drink. Some of those scenses must have been really funny, a shame they changed them. Maybe a better change would have been to change them to non-vistani bandits and they could have left the drunkenness in.

In isolation it might not seem like there’s anything wrong with depicting a group of bandits being drunk (which is probably why it made it to print in the first place), but the text doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The drunken g***y is a very prevalent stereotype, which the Vistani camp implicitly validates. There’s also good narrative reason for the group to be Vistani, but no good narrative reason for them all to be drunk (on the contrary, unless the PCs went to the Wizard of Wines first for some reason, there should be a wine shortage going on, so one would expect them to be conserving it.)

By the way, ist the Roma being drunkards a real stereotype? I can't imagine that they drink more than the average European.

It very much is. And, no, they probably don’t actually drink more on average, but the stereotype still exists.