Dragna's Blog: A Mansion Full of Ghosts

Argynvostholt, in RAW, is impressively empty.

It has fifty-three rooms. Of these, five have combat encounters (giant spiders, chapel revenants, trapped hallway, beacon phantoms, and maybe Vladimir). An additional four have noncombat encounters (living fire, Savid, smoky dragonet, and Sir Godfrey). Another seven have minor “haunts” that don’t serve any purpose other than delivering exposition or making the players go “huh, that’s weird” (dragon statue cone of cold, shadow of Argynvost, kitchen bat, cemetery Argynvost sighting, illusory severed head, journal page/slashed picture, dragon gargoyle). A final lone room has loot in it (potions of invulnerability)

The remaining thirty-six rooms have nothing in them at all - no reason to enter, and no purpose for existing. Most of the players’ time spent in Argynvostholt is spent wandering around empty rooms, occasionally (and quite accidentally) intersecting with The Plot.

Now, I’ll be the first to say “no content for the sake of content.” But there’s a difference between padding out sessions with extraneous content and making sure that areas have any content at all (where “content” is described as “a satisfying narrative and gameplay arc with meaningful tension, development, agency, and stakes”).

To frame it in terms of food, you shouldn’t add an extra side dish just because you feel like it, or turn a hearty entree into a six-course meal just because you like the taste. But if all you have is a thin bowl of gruel, you need to bulk it up into something worthwhile. An area with too little content, after all, can waste your players’ time just as easily as an area with too much. On top of that, an empty arc can represent a missed opportunity to develop and explore the themes, concepts, and characters that make the narrative resonant.

Creating an Arc

So my first step was clear: figure out what the “content” for Argynvost Re-Reloaded would be.

I started at the end and worked my way backwards: by the time the players leave, they need to (1) know that Strahd has Argynvost’s skull, (2) know that restoring Argyngost’s skull will light the beacon, (3) know that lighting the beacon will potentially free the revenants’ souls, and (4) know that lighting the beacon will likely aid them against Strahd. (Ideally, the players will also (5) want to help free the revenants’ souls, because they like and/or feel bad for them.)

To figure out how to convey this exposition, I scanned through the RAW chapter to figure out how the module does it. It does so in a few distinctive ways

• There’s a flaming wyrmling in the Dragon’s Den that tells the players that the Order has “fallen into darkness” and asks them to show the knights “the light they have lost.”
• Sir Godfrey can tell the players that Strahd killed Argynvost and took his bones to Ravenloft, which was the impetus for Vladimir’s resurrection.
• Argynvost’s tomb (if the players read Draconic) indicates to the players that Argynvost’s bones should be there, but aren’t.
• The journal page in Argynvost’s Study tells the players that Strahd likely took Argynvost’s bones to Castle Ravenloft
• The slashed picture in Argynvost’s Study, if repaired with a mending spell (highly unlikely), directly tells the players to retrieve Argynvost’s skull from Castle Ravenloft and place it in its crypt so that his spirit may “shine here forever, bringing hope to this dark land.”
• The dragon gargoyle on the mansion rooftop tells the players: “When the dragon dreams its dream / within its rightful tomb / the light of Argynvost will beam / and rid this land of gloom.”

I decided to start with Godfrey - the key lorekeeper of the dungeon. Once discovered, he would be able to provide a massive loredump for the players, bringing them up to speed on about 90% of the historical and metaphysical condition of Argynvostholt. I decided to move him from the third floor to the chapel, replacing the combat with the revenants there (who by now had been banished from Argynvostholt anyway) and providing the players with immediate context and momentum/impetus for the dungeoncrawl to come.

But this presented a problem - where did the sense of exploration come from if Godfrey was just Right There, happy to provide the players with a friendly face (since he’d invited them there in the first place) and as much exposition as they could ever want (and more)? I briefly pondered having him demand that the players complete some kind of task in the Spiders’ Ballroom first to “prove themselves,” but discarded it because (1) it felt video game-y, (2) it removed a bunch of tension from the second floor’s southern chambers (since the spiders would no longer be creeping around underfoot); and (3) again, Godfrey was the one who invited them there in the first place.

So I took a step back. Argynvostholt’s whole schtick - its core concept, really - is that it’s a haunted mansion filled with ghosts. What do you do with ghosts? You bust/hunt them!

Okay, that was a place to start. I took another step back and asked myself: What are the players expecting, narratively, to happen here? Well, they’re presumably here because one of the revenants stationed in Barovia told them that Sir Godfrey Gwilym is seeking out would-be enemies of Strahd. They expect to find Godfrey here. They expect him to give them some kind of message or resource or mission.

So what message is Godfrey delivering the players? No, “hey guys, I need your help to re-light the beacon.” That’d deliver way too much exposition way too quickly and basically obviate the whole point of the exploration/revelation, removing a lot of player agency. (And how would he even know about it?) No.

But it was clear to me that Godfrey needed the players’ help with something. But what for? I pondered that, and realized that I could sidestep the “too-much-exposition” problem neatly - Godfrey knows that Argynvost’s spirit has been restless and whispering for stalwart enemies of Strahd von Zarovich, and Godfrey doesn’t know why.

But why doesn’t Godfrey know more? And, for that matter, assuming the players wind up exploring the mansion, why doesn’t Godfrey just, y’know, go with them? I’d previously pondered having the revenants be literally incapable of choosing to disobey Vladimir’s orders, but that felt tremendously weak.

Enter shameless plagiarism once again! It just so happened that, a week or two prior, while mindlessly browsing random YouTube movie clips, I’d stumbled upon an excerpt from one of the Fantastic Beast movies in which two characters were unable to even contemplate harming one another without magical golden wires manifesting around, binding, and painfully constricting their flesh.

While Godfrey hadn’t intended harm to Vladimir, I decided to happily steal the concept and remix it a bit - since the revenants were ultimately tied to Vladimir for their resurrection, the oaths they’d taken to him in life still bound them in undeath, manifesting as physical wires to bind their flesh if they contemplated disobeying him. To add that little bit of gothic flair, I decided to paint the wires black and make them spiked, and have them emerge from the revenant’s own heart. Then, channeling a bit of Agrippa from Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I decided to string Godfrey up between two pillars in the chapel to create a gruesome, but memorable setpiece for the players to encounter.

(Why was Godfrey still bound? Because even now, he could not quell his defiance and rage and desire to see justice done for Strahd’s crimes against the Barovians - and so his own oath bound his traitorous will and body. I figured that’d be a good-enough excuse to get any complaining players off his back.)

Back to the arc. After the players first meet Godfrey (which should happen almost immediately upon entering the mansion with the proper prompting), the dramatic question becomes: “Can the players explore the mansion and investigate its haunted corridors to uncover the secrets of Argynvost?”

My next step, then, was divvying up each part of the mansion into a different role in that dungeoncrawl. There are four floors - four sections - in Argynvostholt, which I informally called the “public quarters” (1F), “private quarters” (2F), “official quarters” (3F), and “rooftop” (4F). But what information to put where? How to segment the exposition of the quest they would ultimately receive? How to scatter the clues - the dragonet, the dragon gargoyle, the journal page, the ghostly dragon - that the players would find?

And then I realized two uncomfortable truths:

First, since Godfrey can immediately and easily tell the players that Strahd took Argynvost’s skull to Ravenloft, the only thing the players really need from this dungeon is the dragon gargoyle’s prophecy (“When the dragon dreams its dream / within its rightful tomb / the light of Argynvost will beam / and rid this land of gloom”), which tells them what to do and what they’ll get for doing it.

Second, as I learned from many tales of Death House in the Patreon Discord’s #campaign-stories channel, it is disturbingly common for some playgroups to immediately hightail it to the end of the dungeon because they think they’ll find more goodies there.

So I had a problem: Since the only thing the players really needed was the gargoyle’s prophecy, it was entirely reasonable for at least some tables to immediately run up to the roof, get the prophecy, then peace out without exploring any other rooms in the mansion. Even worse, if they did decide to explore the rest of the mansion after getting the prophecy, then there’d be basically nothing left to do - they already had all the information they needed!

As I was working on this, I was grappling with a similar problem involving Godfrey himself. Since his exposition and instructions were the “key” that made the rest of Argynvostholt make sense, I needed a way to lead the players to him as soon as they entered the mansion. As I discussed and debated the issue with members of the Discord, it became clear that I had, basically, three options for how the players’ exploration of the mansion could be structured:

1. The Empty Mansion. The players stumble through the mansion and find Godfrey when they find him. There’s otherwise nothing else in the mansion except a few traps, scarce loot, and some hints Argynvost.
2. The Flexilinear Dungeon. The players get led right to Godfrey, who gives them a quest that takes them through each part of the mansion sequentially, allowing flexilinear exploration along the way, that ultimately culminates in Receiving The Quest..
3. The Living Mansion. If the players find Godfrey, he gives them a bunch of information and tells them where to go to get Argynvost’s prophecy. Otherwise, the rest of the mansion is full of a bunch of unrelated fun little encounters and setpieces.

#1 was unacceptable for the same reasons RAW is - it’s a waste of player and DM time. I considered #3 also unacceptable because the “unrelated fun little encounters and setpieces” are the definition of “content for the sake of content” - Argynvostholt just doesn’t have that much going on, so I’d have to fabricate and cram in a bunch of little side stuff for the sole purpose of Giving The Players More Stuff To Do.

That left #2 - the flexilinear dungeon. The players meet Godfrey, he tells them to go figure out what’s going on with Argynvost, and they find one clue which leads to another clue which leads to another clue which leads to the Quest.

Okay, sure. But which clues are we picking up here? Are the players picking up pieces of the Quest itself (e.g., “skull is in Ravenloft” + “Argynvost is unhappy” + “skull should be in the crypt” + “putting the skull in the crypt will light the beacon” + “beacon will rid the land of gloom”), or are they picking up clues that lead to receiving the Quest?

After some reflection, I decided that Option A (clues = pieces of the quest) wasn’t really feasible. This kind of puzzle piece-based approach to questgiving only works if the final answer either makes no sense or isn’t feasible until all of the puzzle pieces are in place. Here, though, you don’t really need any puzzle pieces except “skull is in Ravenloft” and “skull should be in the crypt”; player metagaming will easily fill in the rest (whether that’s a good thing or not). And given that Godfrey already knows that the skull is in Ravenloft, the only clue that the players really care about uncovering is “skull should be in the crypt,” which isn’t’ flexilinear at all; it’s just a one-stop-shop for questgiving.

So that left me with Option B - the players are picking up a series of clues that will ultimately lead them to receiving the full quest.

I took out a map of Argynvostholt and checked for empty or undeveloped areas. I immediately hit on the kitchen/servants’ quarters/dragon’s den/parlor section on the first floor, which doesn’t really have anything going on aside from the fireplace dragonet that tells the players that the knights of the Order have fallen into darkness and to save them (which, duh). The rest of this area is just a bunch of empty rooms with a single brief “jumpscare” (the bat in the kitchen pot).

I decided to consolidate these rooms into a single “ghost meeting” area, which I decided to fill with a pseudodragon spirit that once served as Argynvost’s familiar. (Aiming for a lighthearted and endearing resonance plus some minor exploratory gameplay, I decided to have the spirit play hide-and-seek with the players before emerging from the flames in the Dragon’s Den as per RAW-ish.)

I then decided to place two other clues on the second and third floors - a ghost in the gallery on the third floor, and a ghost in the knights’ quarters on the second floor that could direct the players to the gallery ghost. To encourage further exploration, I had the knights’ quarters ghost tell the players that they’d need to summon the gallery ghost by reading aloud a prayer from a copy of The Oath Celestial (moved from Argynvost’s Study in RAW), which the players could find in one of the ruined bedrooms on the opposite side of the second floor. (The satchel containing the prayer book, of course, had been taken by one of the giant spiders in the ballroom below, requiring a brief encounter to get it back.)

That just left me to decide how I would actually deliver the final quest once the players reached the beacon at the top of the mansion. First, I checked the list of RAW clues again, and determined that only two - the slashed picture and the dragon gargoyle - explicitly deliver the quest’s central dramatic question to the players (“Can the players retrieve Argynvost’s skull from Castle Ravenloft and restore it to its crypt in order to restore hope to Barovia?). (The rest is just background information that helps them complete the quest and/or give them a reason to want to do so.)

But which to use - the dragon spirit or the dragon gargoyle? Given that Argynvost’s spirit was asleep and the whole point of the quest was waking him up, I decided to go with the gargoyle and place it in the tower beacon. (As an added bonus, this made the final quest delivery a bit more of a puzzle, since it delivers the dramatic question in the form of a riddle/poem, rather than as direct exposition.)

But I still faced the problem that the players could just skip up to the beacon and ignore the other ghosts below. I decided that the players would need to “stir” Argynvost’s spirit in his slumber, which would in turn allow the gargoyle to deliver its prophecy. Once the players learned from the gallery ghost that the gargoyle held the key, they would need to light the gargoyle’s brazier with silver fire (provided by the pseudodragon's ghost) and recite the oath of the Order of the Silver Dragon

From there, the remainder of the work was fleshing out the ghost rooms, designing encounters with Godfrey and Vlad, and filling in the rest of the mansion with assorted bits and bobs that further developed the dramatic questions underlying the overall arc.

One final note - I think it’s interesting that, taking the parlance of my immediately previous devblog, the vast majority of scenes in Argynvostholt are Adventure scenes (desirable nondeterministic), with only three scenes breaking that mold - the phantom warrior and Vladimir scenes (mandatory nondeterministic Challenge scenes) and the Godfrey encounter (desirable nondeterministic Gateway scene). In contrast to other scenes in other arcs - the Abbot’s visit in Arc L, Volenta’s ambush in Arc E, or several encounters with Strahd - Argynvostholt gives the players an almost unique amount of agency.

I think that really speaks to the unique role of the “dungeon” model in D&D and TTRPGs in general, and, more significantly, a “xandered” dungeon that the players can wander pretty much freely, with lots of nondeterministic paths. The Dungeon Master can and should push, pull, and manipulate the players, but the ability to “free roam” a well-defined “open world” area is pretty powerful for capturing the immersive, agentic fantasy many players are looking for.

That’s not to say that more linear approaches don’t have their place! Indeed, as I believe Re-Reloaded has shown, a flexilinear campaign composed of largely linear arcs can still give players a powerful feeling of agency and control. But I think it’s important for that sense of player independent that free-roam dungeons like Argynvostholt (or Castle Ravenloft, for that matter) provide Dungeon Masters with a unique ability to “turn off” and let their players guide and direct the experience.

What do you think?