Need Advice for Expedition to Castle Ravenloft *spoilers*

[FnordBear]

Hello,

I will be soon starting up an expedition to Castle Ravenloft campaign and am looking for some plot/encounter advice. I am going to be running the campaign in a more or less modified version of Greyhawk. The secondary goal/subplot from the adventure I will be using the Strahd creating an undead army. I am planning on this campaign lasting many sessions so length of plot is important.


Spoiler space








To "stretch" the plot and to dump a few story elements I dislike I am focusing on the scenarios involving the Mountain, Forest, and Swamp fanes. I have decided to stretch each of these in to a full blow side quest. For the Swamp fane I will have the PCs find that Strahd has dominated and enslaved the leaders of a tribe of Lizardfolk who now reveare him as a god. Strahd is further training some of thier better fighters to eventually be ready to be his elite vampire guard. The PCs will, if they think and talk before fight, find that not all the tribe is under his sway and they can gain several allies to help eliminate those who willingly follow Strahd and free those that dont.

For the Mountain fane I am going to bring in a clan of duegar who have taken over an old dwarven silver mine. The spirits of the Dwarves who one lived thier (and died when an earthquake suddenly collapsed many of thier tunnels) entreat the PCs to remove the Duegar who are defiling the shrines to Moradin. This will be more a strait up dungeon crawl/fight that the PCs must endure as Strahd has made a deal with thier thane to ensure the Mountain Fane is guarded.

The Forest Fane is where I am drawing blank, the module calls for werewolves however the whole vampires + werewolves thing has been done to death for me so I want to find something more "interesting" to put there. I have Call of Cthulhu d20 and am considering cultists and evil boogey men but even then am drawing a blank.

Anyone have any ideas what to do with the Forest Fane in the same flavor as what I have done with the other 2?

 

[SteelDraco]

I'd consider a cult of the hunt - a group of cultists of a "Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw" kind of god, who casually hunt humans and destroy anyone who trespasses in their forest. If you want to center a whole adventure around it, you can put a town under siege out there in the wilderness. You can even throw in werewolf tropes - a peasant warning them not to go out into the forest at night, because the fangs will get you, will make them think werewolves. Heck, with shapeshifting druids, there might even be sightings of that kind of thing - maybe something the cult is doing to distract people from what's really going on.

Depending on how you want to go about it, the cult could be at war with the town, or a part of it, with a kind of lottery or punishment system to determine who gets hunted.

For some reason, I have the image of a group of townsfolk dragging one of their own to the town gate at dusk, throwing them out, and barring the door behind it. The whole town can hear the exiled person beating on the gates, and then the sound of growls closing in. The poor human runs, and the whole town can hear their screams, not too far off in the forest.

 

[FnordBear]

Thats not a bad idea acctually. Possibly could even throw in a side story where the druids (perhaps of a less cultured race like orcs or goblins) mistakingly believe Strahd to be a powerful one of thier own kind (since he can turn in to wolves and bats and such) Could be interesting having Strahd manipulate them through trickery. After all, Strahd is supposed to be a master stratagist, and misdirection, trickery, and misinformation are powerful strategys.

To make it more appropriate, the Bourgermister(sp?) of Barovia was initially request aid in taking care of the "Werewolf" problem only to have Strahds zombie plauge strike them at the same time.

This has possibilities.