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Message: <blockquote data-quote="evilbob" data-source="post: 6860954" data-attributes="member: 9789">I think that's more along the lines of what the module was suggesting, yeah.  I've run it that way before as well, and it works.Good point - the character that Strahd dresses up as to fool the angel is one that's been used in other media about Strahd.  Maybe that character approaches the party for a morally ambiguous quest or two.  I do think while the 3.5 version of Ravenloft seemed to be predicated on the idea that the party wouldn't exactly know who Strahd really was, unless your group is young I'm betting these days few groups haven't at least heard that Strahd is a vampire, and probably the main bad guy.  In this adventure even the village of Barovia gives out that information.This is sort of the thing I would avoid, actually - getting dangerously close to overplaying your hand.  Tension is an extremely hard thing to balance in a tabletop RPG campaign, which you can read about first hand in the stories posted online of people running CoS:  it's easy to build up in one session, but by the next it's completely gone, and it's hard to get it back while keeping the game fresh.  Plus, if Strahd appears too many times, the players no longer feel much agency - everything is just a trap set by Strahd, so why bother?  And you need the game to stay fun above all else.The animated objects idea is a good one, too.  Even if it's just an easy encounter, it could be spooky.There are several suggestions in the book of this sort of thing - mostly the characters seeing one of themselves dead (like one of them hanging from the gallows mentioned above, for example), but these are good additions!I think at level 4 they'll get torn up in the castle.  Level 4 is the suggested level for the villages, just fyi.</blockquote>

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