D&D 5E Sanitizing Curse of Strahd (+)

[Helldritch]

@Helldritch, I appreciate your point of view, but not your advice, and especially not your veiled insults regarding me and my friends' "sensitivity problems" or relative maturity. I can understand if insult was not intended, but it was nevertheless insulting, and that is on you.

The (+) in the thread title is there for a reason, the reason being I do not want this thread to degenerate over what content is or is not offensive in CoS. CoS is, overall, a fantastic adventure with a particularly solid skeleton. I feel that wanting to make changes to a published adventure to better suit me and my friends' sensibilities, and asking for advice from like-minded players, is a completely reasonable request, and one that you have seemingly only objected to because of the nature of those sensibilities. I'm neither interested nor willing to respond to such objections.

I am declaring now as the OP that such arguments are to be considered off-topic for the purpose of this thread. The (+) assumes that if you are posting in this thread you agree with the premise of it. You not only do not, but have insulted me and my friends for stating them.

Further off-topic posts will warrant getting a moderator's attention. Let this be the last post in the thread discussing objections to premise of this thread.

Now, there are other great comments in this thread that I'd love to catch up to, especially for the folks of the Abbey. Along with the Dusk Elves this has been my biggest sticking point.

I am trully sorry if you felt offended where no insult was intented. I offer you my excuses and beg forgiveness.

I will remove my self from your thread. But my advice would be to stick to the castle.

 

[Gradine]

So I guess this is where I spill the beans on my full intentions here. Canonically, the best the PCs can accomplish is getting themselves free. In the long run, nothing they do in Barovia solves anything, really. No one is saved, perhaps Ileena ages out of looking like Tatyana (or otherwise dies before Strahd re-forms), but that's it, really. It's bleak and depressing and I absolutely love that as a story.... but not at all as an adventure. Not even a horror one.

The point is, I want the PCs to be to save Barovia. I'll take just a moment to say goodbye to all the people leaving the thread over this heresy. I want what the PCs accomplish to matter. That means freeing Barovia from the Demiplane of Dread, and possibly killing Strahd forever. They could fail in this endeavor, or make things worse by freeing Barovia AND Strahd. This was all discussed in the old "Enhancing Curse of Strahd" thread, but the idea is that the greatest weapon that the PCs can bring to bear against Strahd is hope. In this

So, yes, I want things to be scary, horrifying even. I want to force the players to make tough decisions, and watch them make mistakes. I want them to feel sympathy and anger and despair and hope in equal measures. CoS absolutely has the skeleton to make that work, and it will absolutely make it a better adventure for me an my friends.

So, advice that I am looking for is along the lines "here's how you can make the hags appropriately despicable without dead babies". Meanwhile, advice along the lines "You shouldn't change it at all! It's essential to their role!" is worse than useless to me, because I already know that if I did that many of my friends* would shut down and disengage. It would actively ruin the experience for them.

*I say friends instead of players because I want to emphasize that these are some of my closest friends. They would never have started paying D&D if not for me. They do not engage with D&D discourse, at all (except for sharing silly memes), and if I don't tell them I'm running a published adventure they would probably never know. I will be setting up their expectations, as far as tone, from the word go. But they'll have no expectations as far as content.

 

[Gradine]

Okay, so the Abbey! This is partially a CoS problem but also partially a D&D problem. I will not be referring to the folk of the Abbey by their canonical name. I understand this might seem a bit too silly, even for folks who share many of my same sensibilities, but the etymology of the word, before its use a derogatory term for mixed breed dogs, was as derogatory slur for mixed race humans. I don't really think co-opting a slur for humans into an insult for dogs improves the standing of the word; in fact I rather believe it makes it worse. I'm not going to object if others use it though.

I'm also not going to involve all the madness/insane asylum nonsense (another unfortunate trope of classic horror). The folk (I've yet to come up with an appropriate name, but I've got a few ideas) will be perfectly sane, but rather appropriately hostile towards the humans of Krezk. This location is the site of what I hope to be one of the hardest moral dilemmas for the party, because the Abbess is very definitely afflicted with a variety of mental illnesses, and may or may not be corrupted/fallen even beyond that. Krezk is probably going to be the most difficult "point of hope" for the players to solve.

 

[Gradine]

As for the folk themselves (I'm leaning towards Alloyan, as a name), we luckily now have a very good model for sapient humanoids splicing their bodies about on purpose in the Simic Hybrids.

 

[Scribe]

So I guess this is where I spill the beans on my full intentions here. Canonically, the best the PCs can accomplish is getting themselves free. In the long run, nothing they do in Barovia solves anything, really. No one is saved, perhaps Ileena ages out of looking like Tatyana (or otherwise dies before Strahd re-forms), but that's it, really. It's bleak and depressing and I absolutely love that as a story.... but not at all as an adventure. Not even a horror one.

The point is, I want the PCs to be to save Barovia. I'll take just a moment to say goodbye to all the people leaving the thread over this heresy. I want what the PCs accomplish to matter.

This may have been good to put out in your initial outline, as this (to me) speaks to a disconnect with the genre. Horror to me is similar to a grimdark setting, you dont just win. A desire to change that, is fundamentally changing the adventure all together, to me.

And again, I dont like Horror, so I dont choose to participate in it or watch it.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I think a thematically appropriate ending would be to choose between saving themselves, or saving Barovia by means of some huge, terrible sacrifice. Like, giving up your soul and becoming undead.

EDIT: You can save this particular Barovia, with all of its unique denizens, but only by agreeing to become the Strahd figure of a new Barovia....

 

[Gradine]

This may have been good to put out in your initial outline, as this (to me) speaks to a disconnect with the genre. Horror to me is similar to a grimdark setting, you dont just win. A desire to change that, is fundamentally changing the adventure all together, to me.

And again, I dont like Horror, so I dont choose to participate in it or watch it.

Horror and Grimdark are not synonymous; I know this because I love one and generally hate the other. Horror also doesn't mean "evil always wins". Horror can have happy endings, they just usually come at a cost. Horror can have hope and triumph. They just usually have to be earned

 

[Gradine]

I think a thematically appropriate ending would be to choose between saving themselves, or saving Barovia by means of some huge, terrible sacrifice. Like, giving up your soul and becoming undead.

This is the advice I needed. Thank you! It also connects very nicely with my plans for making Death House more relevant and bookend the campaign.

 

[TheSword]

I’m DMing it but we’re still at Death House. I’m definitely not going to cut any element outright but I agree OP that it aspects bear a bit of thinking about. I also completely agree with your point that how I handle the material as DM will make all the difference; apart from the Vistani I want to make any changes as small as possible and mainly address things through tone and detail rather than massive rewrites.

There’s a lines and veils questionnaire I gave to the players beforehand and none of them had particular issues with child mortality, as I too have fond memories of Grimm’s tale goulishness as a kid, so I’m leaving that as is for my group but I need to keep aware of issues around race and disability which do directly affect my players.

Of course. Know your players is so important.

I quite enjoyed alluding to the kiddie pies without making it obvious. I kept describing how delicious they smelled, and how the Hags may be hideous but they’re clearly excellent cooks. I made it clear there was no meat around... just the children in cages and the rest was up to the players imaginations.

 

[Scribe]

Horror and Grimdark are not synonymous; I know this because I love one and generally hate the other. Horror also doesn't mean "evil always wins". Horror can have happy endings, they just usually come at a cost. Horror can have hope and triumph. They just usually have to be earned

Funny because if I had to guess I love the other one, and generally avoid the other.

I'll bow out as I do not generally engage with horror, so I cant really speak to it deeply, while grimdark and I are very old friends.