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[Let's Read] DM's Guild Ravenloft Sourcebooks
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<blockquote data-quote="Libertad" data-source="post: 9157733" data-attributes="member: 6750502"><p style="text-align: center"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/sXS7B56.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p><p></p><p><a href="https://www.dmsguild.com/product/279708/Barovian-Nights--101-Ravenloft-Encounters" target="_blank"><strong>Product Link</strong></a></p><p></p><p><strong>Product Type:</strong> DMing Tool</p><p></p><p><strong>CoS-Required?</strong> Yes</p><p></p><p>Another Oliver Clegg* product, Barovian Nights looks to spice up Curse of Strahd’s overland travel with a lot more random encounters. The default adventure has 25 different overland encounter types, but the only real variance is whether it’s day or night and most involve hostile monsters or NPCs. Barovian Nights replaces the default encounter table with its own 101 random encounters, plus supplemental material such as new and altered mage familiars and Dark Powers checks brought in from prior editions. For 33 pages, you get quite a bit of content!</p><p></p><p>*Oliver Darkshire is his other pen name.</p><p></p><p><strong>101 Random Barovian Encounters</strong> is the meat of this book, consisting of 2/3rds of content. The Encounters use 1d100 tables with 5 different terrain types (roads, woods, lake/river, mountain, and wetlands), meaning that some encounters only occur in certain places or more/less frequently depending on where the PCs are in Barovia. Quite a bit of the encounters don’t involve combat, or at least not as a first resort, sometimes setting the mood for Barovia’s creepy atmosphere or providing hints at its history and other locations.</p><p></p><p>Some of the interesting mood-setting encounters include a Shrine to Mother Night (perform a sacrifice to her to receive Inspiration, good-aligned clerics are attacked by a rot grub swarm, destroying the shrine curses the iconoclast), Feed the Birds (a druid feeding a flock of ravens the clothes of children killed by the hags of Old Bonegrinder), Full Moon (characters receive temporary immunity to hexes, curses, and Dark Gifts until sunrise, but all lycanthropes trigger their transformations), and Witch Hunter (archers from Vallaki who are hunting for occultists at the behest of Baron Vallakovich).</p><p></p><p>I like these kinds of encounters. Quite a few tie into other characters and quests, which is a pretty nice touch and makes Barovia feel like a more lived-in place. And to feel like something more than just speed bumps to chip away at party resources.</p><p></p><p>A few encounters are straightforward combat scenes involving monsters, and even the ones that aren’t typically Gothic are still given an appropriate mood-setting or have a kind of B-Movie horror vibe. Such encounters include Red Riding Hood (a redcap harvesting the organs of dead humans who looks like a child clutching a dead body in grief from a distance), Mist Tendrils (the Mists come to life as the extension of some great and terrible power, uses modified Roper statistics such as being Gargantuan, undead, is insubstantial, and deals necrotic damage), Woodbreaker Dryad (dryad corrupted by the druids of Yester Hill and uses her powers to create falling tree traps to attack the party), and Dripping Trees (a cluster of grey oozes slide off surrounding trees as it rains to attack the party).</p><p></p><p>Several of the encounters involve meeting Strahd personally, or one of his spies tailing or inconveniencing the party. In the former examples, Strahd is given a modified list of prepared spells to be used in line with said encounter. Some examples include His Master’s Voice (Rahadin appears to ambush a party member before retreating, Strahd is scrying upon him so he can see how the PCs perform in direct combat), Lost Cat (kitten left on its own in the wild by Strahd, hoping that a PC with a soft spot takes it so that Strahd can scry upon it), Death From Above or the Pack (Strahd takes the form of a mundane bat or wolf in a much larger Children of the Night Swarm as they attack the party), and Wolf Spy (normal wolf attempts to Stealth against the party’s Passive Perception, will report back to Strahd in 2d4 hours to stage an attack 24 hours later).</p><p></p><p>Personally speaking, the Strahd and spy encounters feel kind of uninspired. They mostly involve Strahd directly attacking the party or sneaky scouts tailing the party. I do understand they can’t be too involved given the brevity of the book, but I would’ve liked to see more non-combatant examples. There are two such examples, but they’re very vague, like Strahd appearing in an armchair to pretend to agree to a truce in order to manipulate the PCs.</p><p></p><p>There are a few encounters that I feel are real stinkers, or shouldn’t be deployed given they can have some unintended repercussions down the campaign line or can ruin how the party interacts with certain characters in a way the DM may not have intended. They include Devil on the Water (an airborne Strahd ignoring the Concentration limitation of the Fly spell musters a horde of Strahd zombies to attack the party near a body of water and will attempt to kidnap Ireena if she’s with the group), Arrigal (the PCs meet a nice old man who is then killed in boxed text by Arrigal for the fun of it), the Demon in the Wood (PCs come upon a a black stone with a devil face in the woods, evil voice offers a PC a Dark Gift if they reach into the face, destroying the stone summons a Balor who will attack everyone and everything “until Barovia is a smoldering cesspit of hubris”), and the Magic Cow (a hedge witch is having trouble getting her stubborn cow to move, PCs who help her out will be rewarded with a Bag of Beans magic item).</p><p></p><p>Devil on the Water not only makes Strahd outright ignore one of the rules of the game without any explanation as to how, his blatant kidnapping of Ireena can be an escalation that puts the PCs on a perpetual overtly hostile footing with him. Some campaigns have degrees where Strahd goes from toying with the PCs like an interesting diversion to treating them as an overt threat. Kidnapping Ireena isn’t something he does immediately, and many online guides for DMs advise against this. Additionally, while Arrigal is an evil man, him acting like a murderhobo as a potential first impression can color the PCs of encountering him later in the Vallaki Vistani Camp, and perhaps by extension Luvash and the others. That’s presuming he even gets away at all. Demon in the Wood can end up plopping an epic-level horror into Barovia that alters significant parts of the campaign if it starts running roughshod over locations and population centers. Finally, the Bag of Beans are a rather unpredictable magic item in and of itself.</p><p></p><p>There is one encounter I do like that is a throwback to the 3rd Edition Gazetteer series. The PCs come upon a traveling female scholar known as S who is working on a Gazetteer for a benefactor. She is curious about what the party thinks of Barovia and their experiences in the domain, taking notes before moving on. She otherwise has no time for heroics and typical adventuring stuff, but may be tempted at the prospect of solving an intricate puzzle or fun riddle. Another encounter has the party come upon a unicorn skeleton (unicorn stats but undead, no healing touch or legendary/lair actions) within a desiccated section of forest, who in spite of its undead nature hates Strahd for turning Barovia into such a dismal realm. The unicorn will accompany the party if they prove themselves to be enemies of Strahd, and will prioritize attacking Beucephalus should the two ever meet.</p><p></p><p>The following sections later are short 1 or 2 page articles providing new material beyond just the random encounters. <strong>Unfamiliar Familiars</strong> gives a short list of unique familiars and their names for PCs who cast Find Familiar in Barovia. We even get a new familiar type: the Wisp, a tiny good-aligned celestial who is basically a floating ball of light that provides illumination and can deal 1d4 lightning damage as an attack. <strong>Dusk Until Dawn</strong> expands on the Charms in the Dungeon Master’s Guide with 8 new ones corresponding to either the Morninglord or Mother Night for PCs who manage to please them. The Morninglord charms include various “white magic” and light-based stuff like casting Dispel Good and Evil or spending a charge to make a corpse permanently immune to becoming undead. Mother Night’s charms hew closer to “witchcraft” such as being able to cast Find Familiar as a ritual up to 3 times before the charm vanishes, spending a charge to cover Barovia in a moonless night for 24 hours, or summoning a swarm of rats who treat you as an ally.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/wSodJeJ.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p><p></p><p><strong>Vicious Circles</strong> brings a modified concept of the Honor system house rule from the Dungeon Master’s Guide into Ravenloft, where an Honor saving throw is renamed a Dark Powers check. Such checks are rolled whenever a PC does something in line with general evil stuff, with the DC based on the severity of the sins. Failing the save reduces a character’s Honor score, and the Honor score provides mechanical changes based on how morally pure or impure they are. There are three d6 tables of Dark Changes that are akin to Dark Gifts when Honor is lowered to certain thresholds, granting mechanical benefits but with some kind of drawback, such as growing claws that deal 1d4 damage but grant disadvantage on checks requiring fine manipulation. A PC whose Honor score falls to 0 becomes an NPC, enslaved to their evil passions and claimed by the Dark Powers.</p><p></p><p><strong>Death Wish</strong> grants new rules for PCs who come back from the dead. If a PC dies and they’re 4th level or lower, the Dark Powers can offer to resurrect them. This is a one-time offer, and when a PC comes back this way they aren’t exactly alive, gaining 2 traits in line with an undead type. They detect as evil undead to divination and they no longer need to eat, sleep, or breathe. Each pair of traits are positive and negative: for instance, the zombie gains the Undead Fortitude as the monster of the same name, but they appear and smell like a rotting corpse and reduce all movement speeds by 10 feet. A ghost can see into the Ethereal Plane and can attempt to possess a creature as the monster ability once per day, but they become effectively insubstantial and unable to affect or be affected by anything in the Material Plane.</p><p></p><p><strong>Jinxed</strong> gives us two new house rules. The first is Bad Luck, a new value that accrues during play when a character performs superstitious things such breaking a mirror or having a black cat crosses their path. A Bad Luck score causes an unfortunate consequence to occur on d20 rolls by 1 per point in the score. Such consequences happen on natural 1s no matter the character, but increase by 1 for every point in Bad Luck. For example, a character with a Bad Luck score of 5 automatically fails attack rolls on a natural die result of 1 to 6.</p><p></p><p>The other rule is for Curses that make suggested changes to the Remove Curse spell in Curse of Strahd to better fit the horror atmosphere. Honestly it’s nothing special, mostly suggesting against it: it’s a 3rd level spell slot and doesn’t remove curses from cursed objects and only breaks attunement, so even then it’s still limited. But DMs who wish to reduce its power are suggested to make it require specific material components for unique kinds of curses.</p><p></p><p><strong>Gifts Ungiven</strong> provides 10 new Dark Gifts for PCs to gain at the Amber Temple. While the Dark Gifts aren’t exactly meant to be balanced and are end-game level features, a lot of the new ones here feel quite broken, often in favor of the player. Some of the more interesting Gifts include the ability to cast Knock as an action at will but the caster becomes trapped in the Ethereal Plane from sunrise to sundown each day, another gift makes them become more like a rakshasha in granting immunity to the effects of all spells of 6th level or lower but their hands turn backwards, a third gift grants a climb speed equal to their walking speed but they sprout seven spider legs from their spine, and a fourth gift can let the user teleport up to 500 feet between mirrors by spending 5 feet of movement to enter and exit each but their skin becomes permanently reflective. There are some Gifts that provide personality-altering flaws, such as gaining immunity to cold damage as well as nonmagical piercing and slashing damage, but in exchange emotion of any kind causes them pain.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/2ZAK8BT.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p><p></p><p><strong>Dealing with the Devil</strong> is a short rundown of sample tactics for Strahd to use when fighting PCs near the end of the campaign. As it’s one page, they don’t go into detail, saying things like using Charm against classes without Wisdom save proficiencies, almost always using lair actions to phase through walls, using shadow monsters to drain a Barbarian’s strength, and staying out of melee range of high-damage classes like fighters and paladins.</p><p></p><p><strong>Strahd Magic Tricks</strong> has a sample list of prepared wizard spells based on particular tactics. For instance, a Strahd who wishes to prioritize defense will make use of Fog Cloud to block line of sight, cast Greater Invisibility on himself to avoid being counterspelled, and setting up a Leomund’s Tiny Hut to phase through the floor into when he needs to regenerate hit points. These include quite a number of clever tactics I’ve seen on the Curse of Strahd subreddit, such as using Polymorph to turn one of his minions into a T-rex, or using Scrying on the party while in Castle Ravenloft to combine this with the Summon Spectre lair action to harry the party with said monsters even while far away.</p><p></p><p><strong>Dinner with a Vampire</strong> provides an alternate CR 20 stat block for a more challenging Strahd than the one in the base CoS adventure. This stat block more than doubles his hit points to 346, increases his AC from 16 to 19, grants him increased bonuses in saves and skills in which he is proficient, immunity to necrotic and poison damage, is immune to the charmed, frightened, and poisoned conditions, has truesight up to 120 feet and a Passive Perception of 24, has 5 uses of Legendary Resistance instead of 3, is still a 9th-level wizard but has more combat-ready spells by default such as Counterspell, Danse Macabre, and Shield, can summon a greater number of animals via Children of the Night, can now cast a spell with 2 Legendary Actions or transform as per his Shapechanger ability with 1 Legendary Action, and the shadow he can summon with a Lair Action is now a shadow demon.</p><p></p><p>I’m of several minds when it comes to attempts at beefing up Strahd. When played well, he is more than capable of whittling down a 9th or 10th level party, but his hit points and Armor Class are very low for a CR 15 creature which has led to a few anti-climactic battles involving him. On the other side, DMs who use his stats and tactics to the fullest can make it all but impossible to win against him as the party’s resources are whittled down throughout the dungeon crawl. Being able to noclip with Lair Actions and regenerate lost hit points in places a party cannot easily reach is perhaps his most powerful ability.</p><p></p><p>This CR 20 stat block shores up several of Strahd’s larger weaknesses; this version more or less cannot be fooled or overcome by the vast majority of illusion and enchantment spells, and his poison immunity makes certain Fated Allies such as Arrigal far weaker in the final battle. The ability to Transform as a legendary action, combined with phasing through solid features of the castle as a lair action, expands his maneuverability considerably. He can still be confounded by the classic Wall of Force/Sunsword trick, however. Or using a Luck Blade’s Wish to entrap him in a Forcecage.</p><p></p><p><strong>Overall Thoughts:</strong> Overall I like Barovian Nights. While I’m not a fan of all of them, there’s enough interesting random encounters that I’m definitely going to use in my current Curse of Strahd campaign. The new house rules and materials are a mixed bag: Dark Powers checks work best with anti-hero parties and will be rare in campaigns with typical heroic adventurers bar the token dark mage/dark knight PC. The Bad Luck score is something that I can only see causing frustration in actual play. The Unfamiliar Familiars are a cool way to set the spell apart and give some flavor and motivation to what would otherwise be summonable afterthoughts for many players. I like the alternate magic spell lists for Strahd, and while the sample tactics are passable some online guides have far greater detail on how to use this vampire BBEG. At the price I got it for, I’d say this product is a worthy purchase.</p><p></p><p>Okay, I pretty much posted every draft that I have ready for my Ravenloft reviews. It may take some time for me to get the next one ready.</p><p></p><p><strong>Until then, join us next time as we meet other stranded adventurers in Orphans of the Multiverse: Lost in Barovia!</strong></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Libertad, post: 9157733, member: 6750502"] [center][img]https://i.imgur.com/sXS7B56.jpg[/img][/center] [url=https://www.dmsguild.com/product/279708/Barovian-Nights--101-Ravenloft-Encounters][b]Product Link[/b][/url] [b]Product Type:[/b] DMing Tool [b]CoS-Required?[/b] Yes Another Oliver Clegg* product, Barovian Nights looks to spice up Curse of Strahd’s overland travel with a lot more random encounters. The default adventure has 25 different overland encounter types, but the only real variance is whether it’s day or night and most involve hostile monsters or NPCs. Barovian Nights replaces the default encounter table with its own 101 random encounters, plus supplemental material such as new and altered mage familiars and Dark Powers checks brought in from prior editions. For 33 pages, you get quite a bit of content! *Oliver Darkshire is his other pen name. [b]101 Random Barovian Encounters[/b] is the meat of this book, consisting of 2/3rds of content. The Encounters use 1d100 tables with 5 different terrain types (roads, woods, lake/river, mountain, and wetlands), meaning that some encounters only occur in certain places or more/less frequently depending on where the PCs are in Barovia. Quite a bit of the encounters don’t involve combat, or at least not as a first resort, sometimes setting the mood for Barovia’s creepy atmosphere or providing hints at its history and other locations. Some of the interesting mood-setting encounters include a Shrine to Mother Night (perform a sacrifice to her to receive Inspiration, good-aligned clerics are attacked by a rot grub swarm, destroying the shrine curses the iconoclast), Feed the Birds (a druid feeding a flock of ravens the clothes of children killed by the hags of Old Bonegrinder), Full Moon (characters receive temporary immunity to hexes, curses, and Dark Gifts until sunrise, but all lycanthropes trigger their transformations), and Witch Hunter (archers from Vallaki who are hunting for occultists at the behest of Baron Vallakovich). I like these kinds of encounters. Quite a few tie into other characters and quests, which is a pretty nice touch and makes Barovia feel like a more lived-in place. And to feel like something more than just speed bumps to chip away at party resources. A few encounters are straightforward combat scenes involving monsters, and even the ones that aren’t typically Gothic are still given an appropriate mood-setting or have a kind of B-Movie horror vibe. Such encounters include Red Riding Hood (a redcap harvesting the organs of dead humans who looks like a child clutching a dead body in grief from a distance), Mist Tendrils (the Mists come to life as the extension of some great and terrible power, uses modified Roper statistics such as being Gargantuan, undead, is insubstantial, and deals necrotic damage), Woodbreaker Dryad (dryad corrupted by the druids of Yester Hill and uses her powers to create falling tree traps to attack the party), and Dripping Trees (a cluster of grey oozes slide off surrounding trees as it rains to attack the party). Several of the encounters involve meeting Strahd personally, or one of his spies tailing or inconveniencing the party. In the former examples, Strahd is given a modified list of prepared spells to be used in line with said encounter. Some examples include His Master’s Voice (Rahadin appears to ambush a party member before retreating, Strahd is scrying upon him so he can see how the PCs perform in direct combat), Lost Cat (kitten left on its own in the wild by Strahd, hoping that a PC with a soft spot takes it so that Strahd can scry upon it), Death From Above or the Pack (Strahd takes the form of a mundane bat or wolf in a much larger Children of the Night Swarm as they attack the party), and Wolf Spy (normal wolf attempts to Stealth against the party’s Passive Perception, will report back to Strahd in 2d4 hours to stage an attack 24 hours later). Personally speaking, the Strahd and spy encounters feel kind of uninspired. They mostly involve Strahd directly attacking the party or sneaky scouts tailing the party. I do understand they can’t be too involved given the brevity of the book, but I would’ve liked to see more non-combatant examples. There are two such examples, but they’re very vague, like Strahd appearing in an armchair to pretend to agree to a truce in order to manipulate the PCs. There are a few encounters that I feel are real stinkers, or shouldn’t be deployed given they can have some unintended repercussions down the campaign line or can ruin how the party interacts with certain characters in a way the DM may not have intended. They include Devil on the Water (an airborne Strahd ignoring the Concentration limitation of the Fly spell musters a horde of Strahd zombies to attack the party near a body of water and will attempt to kidnap Ireena if she’s with the group), Arrigal (the PCs meet a nice old man who is then killed in boxed text by Arrigal for the fun of it), the Demon in the Wood (PCs come upon a a black stone with a devil face in the woods, evil voice offers a PC a Dark Gift if they reach into the face, destroying the stone summons a Balor who will attack everyone and everything “until Barovia is a smoldering cesspit of hubris”), and the Magic Cow (a hedge witch is having trouble getting her stubborn cow to move, PCs who help her out will be rewarded with a Bag of Beans magic item). Devil on the Water not only makes Strahd outright ignore one of the rules of the game without any explanation as to how, his blatant kidnapping of Ireena can be an escalation that puts the PCs on a perpetual overtly hostile footing with him. Some campaigns have degrees where Strahd goes from toying with the PCs like an interesting diversion to treating them as an overt threat. Kidnapping Ireena isn’t something he does immediately, and many online guides for DMs advise against this. Additionally, while Arrigal is an evil man, him acting like a murderhobo as a potential first impression can color the PCs of encountering him later in the Vallaki Vistani Camp, and perhaps by extension Luvash and the others. That’s presuming he even gets away at all. Demon in the Wood can end up plopping an epic-level horror into Barovia that alters significant parts of the campaign if it starts running roughshod over locations and population centers. Finally, the Bag of Beans are a rather unpredictable magic item in and of itself. There is one encounter I do like that is a throwback to the 3rd Edition Gazetteer series. The PCs come upon a traveling female scholar known as S who is working on a Gazetteer for a benefactor. She is curious about what the party thinks of Barovia and their experiences in the domain, taking notes before moving on. She otherwise has no time for heroics and typical adventuring stuff, but may be tempted at the prospect of solving an intricate puzzle or fun riddle. Another encounter has the party come upon a unicorn skeleton (unicorn stats but undead, no healing touch or legendary/lair actions) within a desiccated section of forest, who in spite of its undead nature hates Strahd for turning Barovia into such a dismal realm. The unicorn will accompany the party if they prove themselves to be enemies of Strahd, and will prioritize attacking Beucephalus should the two ever meet. The following sections later are short 1 or 2 page articles providing new material beyond just the random encounters. [b]Unfamiliar Familiars[/b] gives a short list of unique familiars and their names for PCs who cast Find Familiar in Barovia. We even get a new familiar type: the Wisp, a tiny good-aligned celestial who is basically a floating ball of light that provides illumination and can deal 1d4 lightning damage as an attack. [b]Dusk Until Dawn[/b] expands on the Charms in the Dungeon Master’s Guide with 8 new ones corresponding to either the Morninglord or Mother Night for PCs who manage to please them. The Morninglord charms include various “white magic” and light-based stuff like casting Dispel Good and Evil or spending a charge to make a corpse permanently immune to becoming undead. Mother Night’s charms hew closer to “witchcraft” such as being able to cast Find Familiar as a ritual up to 3 times before the charm vanishes, spending a charge to cover Barovia in a moonless night for 24 hours, or summoning a swarm of rats who treat you as an ally. [center][img]https://i.imgur.com/wSodJeJ.png[/img][/center] [b]Vicious Circles[/b] brings a modified concept of the Honor system house rule from the Dungeon Master’s Guide into Ravenloft, where an Honor saving throw is renamed a Dark Powers check. Such checks are rolled whenever a PC does something in line with general evil stuff, with the DC based on the severity of the sins. Failing the save reduces a character’s Honor score, and the Honor score provides mechanical changes based on how morally pure or impure they are. There are three d6 tables of Dark Changes that are akin to Dark Gifts when Honor is lowered to certain thresholds, granting mechanical benefits but with some kind of drawback, such as growing claws that deal 1d4 damage but grant disadvantage on checks requiring fine manipulation. A PC whose Honor score falls to 0 becomes an NPC, enslaved to their evil passions and claimed by the Dark Powers. [b]Death Wish[/b] grants new rules for PCs who come back from the dead. If a PC dies and they’re 4th level or lower, the Dark Powers can offer to resurrect them. This is a one-time offer, and when a PC comes back this way they aren’t exactly alive, gaining 2 traits in line with an undead type. They detect as evil undead to divination and they no longer need to eat, sleep, or breathe. Each pair of traits are positive and negative: for instance, the zombie gains the Undead Fortitude as the monster of the same name, but they appear and smell like a rotting corpse and reduce all movement speeds by 10 feet. A ghost can see into the Ethereal Plane and can attempt to possess a creature as the monster ability once per day, but they become effectively insubstantial and unable to affect or be affected by anything in the Material Plane. [b]Jinxed[/b] gives us two new house rules. The first is Bad Luck, a new value that accrues during play when a character performs superstitious things such breaking a mirror or having a black cat crosses their path. A Bad Luck score causes an unfortunate consequence to occur on d20 rolls by 1 per point in the score. Such consequences happen on natural 1s no matter the character, but increase by 1 for every point in Bad Luck. For example, a character with a Bad Luck score of 5 automatically fails attack rolls on a natural die result of 1 to 6. The other rule is for Curses that make suggested changes to the Remove Curse spell in Curse of Strahd to better fit the horror atmosphere. Honestly it’s nothing special, mostly suggesting against it: it’s a 3rd level spell slot and doesn’t remove curses from cursed objects and only breaks attunement, so even then it’s still limited. But DMs who wish to reduce its power are suggested to make it require specific material components for unique kinds of curses. [b]Gifts Ungiven[/b] provides 10 new Dark Gifts for PCs to gain at the Amber Temple. While the Dark Gifts aren’t exactly meant to be balanced and are end-game level features, a lot of the new ones here feel quite broken, often in favor of the player. Some of the more interesting Gifts include the ability to cast Knock as an action at will but the caster becomes trapped in the Ethereal Plane from sunrise to sundown each day, another gift makes them become more like a rakshasha in granting immunity to the effects of all spells of 6th level or lower but their hands turn backwards, a third gift grants a climb speed equal to their walking speed but they sprout seven spider legs from their spine, and a fourth gift can let the user teleport up to 500 feet between mirrors by spending 5 feet of movement to enter and exit each but their skin becomes permanently reflective. There are some Gifts that provide personality-altering flaws, such as gaining immunity to cold damage as well as nonmagical piercing and slashing damage, but in exchange emotion of any kind causes them pain. [center][img]https://i.imgur.com/2ZAK8BT.png[/img][/center] [b]Dealing with the Devil[/b] is a short rundown of sample tactics for Strahd to use when fighting PCs near the end of the campaign. As it’s one page, they don’t go into detail, saying things like using Charm against classes without Wisdom save proficiencies, almost always using lair actions to phase through walls, using shadow monsters to drain a Barbarian’s strength, and staying out of melee range of high-damage classes like fighters and paladins. [b]Strahd Magic Tricks[/b] has a sample list of prepared wizard spells based on particular tactics. For instance, a Strahd who wishes to prioritize defense will make use of Fog Cloud to block line of sight, cast Greater Invisibility on himself to avoid being counterspelled, and setting up a Leomund’s Tiny Hut to phase through the floor into when he needs to regenerate hit points. These include quite a number of clever tactics I’ve seen on the Curse of Strahd subreddit, such as using Polymorph to turn one of his minions into a T-rex, or using Scrying on the party while in Castle Ravenloft to combine this with the Summon Spectre lair action to harry the party with said monsters even while far away. [b]Dinner with a Vampire[/b] provides an alternate CR 20 stat block for a more challenging Strahd than the one in the base CoS adventure. This stat block more than doubles his hit points to 346, increases his AC from 16 to 19, grants him increased bonuses in saves and skills in which he is proficient, immunity to necrotic and poison damage, is immune to the charmed, frightened, and poisoned conditions, has truesight up to 120 feet and a Passive Perception of 24, has 5 uses of Legendary Resistance instead of 3, is still a 9th-level wizard but has more combat-ready spells by default such as Counterspell, Danse Macabre, and Shield, can summon a greater number of animals via Children of the Night, can now cast a spell with 2 Legendary Actions or transform as per his Shapechanger ability with 1 Legendary Action, and the shadow he can summon with a Lair Action is now a shadow demon. I’m of several minds when it comes to attempts at beefing up Strahd. When played well, he is more than capable of whittling down a 9th or 10th level party, but his hit points and Armor Class are very low for a CR 15 creature which has led to a few anti-climactic battles involving him. On the other side, DMs who use his stats and tactics to the fullest can make it all but impossible to win against him as the party’s resources are whittled down throughout the dungeon crawl. Being able to noclip with Lair Actions and regenerate lost hit points in places a party cannot easily reach is perhaps his most powerful ability. This CR 20 stat block shores up several of Strahd’s larger weaknesses; this version more or less cannot be fooled or overcome by the vast majority of illusion and enchantment spells, and his poison immunity makes certain Fated Allies such as Arrigal far weaker in the final battle. The ability to Transform as a legendary action, combined with phasing through solid features of the castle as a lair action, expands his maneuverability considerably. He can still be confounded by the classic Wall of Force/Sunsword trick, however. Or using a Luck Blade’s Wish to entrap him in a Forcecage. [b]Overall Thoughts:[/b] Overall I like Barovian Nights. While I’m not a fan of all of them, there’s enough interesting random encounters that I’m definitely going to use in my current Curse of Strahd campaign. The new house rules and materials are a mixed bag: Dark Powers checks work best with anti-hero parties and will be rare in campaigns with typical heroic adventurers bar the token dark mage/dark knight PC. The Bad Luck score is something that I can only see causing frustration in actual play. The Unfamiliar Familiars are a cool way to set the spell apart and give some flavor and motivation to what would otherwise be summonable afterthoughts for many players. I like the alternate magic spell lists for Strahd, and while the sample tactics are passable some online guides have far greater detail on how to use this vampire BBEG. At the price I got it for, I’d say this product is a worthy purchase. Okay, I pretty much posted every draft that I have ready for my Ravenloft reviews. It may take some time for me to get the next one ready. [b]Until then, join us next time as we meet other stranded adventurers in Orphans of the Multiverse: Lost in Barovia![/b] [/QUOTE]
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