Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 7353435" data-attributes="member: 17607">I have to agree -- for a team of creatives who are lauded for their ability to craft a good story, there's not a whole lot of actual story going on here. It's not just Tomb, either; if you boil down 'Curse of Strahd' to its story elements, you basically just get a bunch of adventurers who get thrown into Barovia and have to wander around encountering nostalgia ("hey, isn't that Mordenkainen?") until they figure out how to leave. There's no real sense that the NPCs have any independent motivation or goals; it's not as if Rictavio, for example, is going to befall a horrific fate unless the PCs intervene, he's just sitting there waiting to be discovered (and maybe have his secret revealed).Good point in general, but mechanically, there's no reason why speak with dead wouldn't work on someone affected by the Death Curse -- the spell doesn't let you speak with a soul, but a corpse, and its description explicitly notes that "[t]his spell doesn't return the creature's soul to its body..." It's not really clear what spell, if any, you'd use to contact a specific mortal soul in the afterworld -- contact other plane specifies that the contacted entity is "a demigod, the spirit of a long-dead sage, or some other mysterious entity", and while you could probably do it with a wish, the wording of wish suggests both that such a casting is very likely to go wrong ("the greater the wish, the greater the likelihood that something goes wrong"), as well as be very rarely used for such a purpose (not only do you take stress for casting wish in this manner, but there's a 1-in-3 chance that anyone casting wish will never be able to do so again).This is a great idea for a stand-alone campaign that splits off from the kinds of episodic gaming represented by Adventurers League and the various streaming games. The actual adventure, I suspect, was driven more by a desire to shoehorn in a bunch more nostalgia references to things that WotC owns the IP for, and every time the players get bored or confused, have some dinosaurs attack.One option -- Dungeon #153 published a stand-alone adventure called "<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?218901-Prisoner-of-the-Castle-Perilous" target="_blank">Prisoner of the Castle Perilous</a>", in which one of Acererak's simulacra attempts to gain individual personhood by manipulating a pair of adventuring parties (one PCs, one NPCs); this adventure's narrative weirdness can be effectively short-circuited with the idea that, instead of the true Acererak, this Acererak is yet another simulacrum and that reviving the atropal is just a side-effect of the purpose of achieving full personhood.Hope that helps!--Pauper</blockquote>

Verification