Patreon DevBlog #6: Musings of Madness

This week, I did a bit of work on my homebrew campaign, made some tweaks to Re-Reloaded, and had a minor mental breakdown over Curse of Strahd adventure hooks. Let’s take a look!

Problem #1: How do I make a good entrance puzzle for my dungeon?

Last week, I mentioned that I was working on a new dungeon for my IRL group of ten beginner D&D players. The goal of this adventure was to continue my efforts to teach them about D&D basics—in this case, navigating unfamiliar environments, dealing with NPC factions, and (most relevant to this post), solving puzzles.

Anyone who’s talked to me about this topic knows that I have very polarizing feelings on puzzles in D&D. I hate riddles. I hate math problems. I hate word problems. Most importantly, I hate puzzles that could be reasonably expected to be solved by anyone other than the one who created them.

Now, in very few cases, it is reasonable to protect, say, the Holy Sword of Divine Goodness behind a puzzle that only a Very Good person would be able to solve. Similarly, it is reasonable to protect the Intelligent Wand of Smartness behind a puzzle that only a Very Smart person would be able to solve.

But in all other scenarios, it makes absolutely no sense for, say, the Evil Necromancer to protect the Evil Amulet of Destruction behind the equivalent of a 6th-grade logic puzzle.

(I blame Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for inspiring this whole trend. Of course, what most people miss is that the puzzles in Harry Potter were meant to be defeated—the whole point was to bait the villain out into a final, unsolvable challenge at the Mirror of Erised by luring him in with a bunch of easy puzzles. But I digress.)

So, in general, my strong philosophy is that, except when the creator intended for the puzzle to be solvable as a Secret Test of Character, “puzzles” should be the equivalent of fancy password protection—something that only the person who created the puzzle (and those they share the solution with) would be able to solve.

For example, in the original version of Van Richten’s Tower in Curse of Strahd: Reloaded, I replaced the Dance Dance Revolution “puzzle” with a new concept. Basically, since the entire tower is wrapped in an anti-magic field that only its original owner could ignore, the “puzzle” demands that the door be exposed to both fire and ice in order to open. The owner, a powerful archmage, assumed that the only way to do that would be through cantrips like fire bolt and ray of frost, and never even considered the possibility of a low-tech solution like “shoving a torch against the door” or “splashing some very cold water on it.”

(I have now reached semantic satiation regarding the word “puzzle.” “Puzzle” now seems like a strange, silly made-up word from a particularly eccentric Roald Dahl novel.)

Let’s get back to my original goal: building a puzzle for my homebrew dungeon adventure. As I mentioned last time, this dungeon was built by an evil necromancer who did all of your usual bog-standard evil necromancer things—flayed his enemies, animated skeletal servants, severed and dominated living shadows, yadda yadda yadda. The conceit of the adventure is that this dungeon was his Evil Lair, and the PCs want to delve into its depths to retrieve some kind of treasure.

Now, the context: my PCs are the members/founders of an adventuring guild, and they’re always looking for clients. As such, I knew that this adventure hook would come from a new client, which meant that there had to be a reason why this client hadn’t yet been able to go inside and do the job themselves. I could go for the easy “it’s too dangerous for me!” concern, but that felt lame. Instead, I decided to lock the entrance with a puzzle—something that the client hadn’t been able to solve.

I started by asking ChatGPT for a description of what the entrance (which included a pair of big stone doors with no visible handle) should look like, and it suggested adding carvings depicting legions of undead fighting humans. This caught my eye, and I started to wonder—what if the key to the puzzle is hidden in the carvings?

Well, what would only a necromancer think to do to open a door? Probably something gross and gothic, like smearing blood on it—absolutely classic. So I figured I’d add a carving of the necromancer dripping his blood into a bowl or something. But that made me think—if I put an actual bowl into the doors, it’ll be incredibly obvious to the players what to do. As much as I appreciate the meme about D&D players being toddlers when it comes to puzzles, I wanted something a bit more complex.

Then, I randomly remembered the existence of the skeleton keys from Tomb of Annihilation—literal, normal skeletons whose heads are also keys to unlock a big ol’ door. And then I remembered I’d had an idea about having some skeletons guard the entrance to the tomb inside the doors.

So, I thought, why not move them outside the doors, where placing actual guards would make sense?

Here’s what I settled on: the mechanism to unlock the door is to drip blood onto the earth in front of the door, which will cause the six skeleton keyss buried there to animate and rise up. If it was the necromancer’s blood, they’ll submit and allow the right key to be used to open the door. If it wasn’t the necromancer’s blood, the skeletons will start fighting, forcing intruders to keep guessing which key is the right one while—presumably—the necromancer comes out to see what the heck is going on.

(Of course, in this case, the necromancer is long-dead…or at least mostly dead. So it’ll just be a straight-up normal fight.)

And there we have it! A puzzle that actually might have made sense as a protective measure at the time it was created, but which the PCs can still meaningfully overcome through their own creativity and tactics.

Problem #2: How do I revise Re-Reloaded to incorporate optional connections to player backstories?

Last Wednesday, I officially announced the revision of Curse of Strahd: Reloaded on the /r/CurseOfStrahd subreddit—but didn’t release the full guide quite yet.

Instead, I queried the community for their thoughts on Reloaded’s former campaign hook, “Secrets of the Tarokka,” and the community’s general opinion on connecting player backstories to the Curse of Strahd campaign. I presented an argument for my belief that connecting player backstories explicitly was in fact a bad thing to do, and suggested the concept of connecting player backstories thematically—e.g., “Like Ireena, I have also dealt with an unscrupulous suitor,” and not, “I am literally Ireena’s half-sibling.”

I got a flood of responses, and wound up sorting most of them into three camps:

• Group A (around 40%) believed that Curse of Strahd should be an isolating, alienating experience that focuses solely on the players’ relationship with Strahd, Barovia, and the Barovians, and that connecting player backstories to the campaign is therefore a Bad Idea.
• Group B (around 20%) agreed with Group A, but felt frustrated that their players often ignored “optional” areas, or else lacked direction and momentum at the beginning of the adventure, and so used backstory connections as a way to encourage players to explore things like, e.g., the Werewolf Den.
• Group C (around 40%) believed strongly that players need to feel a sense of investment and ownership within the campaign’s story in order to stay engaged with the world and its NPCs, and used backstory connections to create those feelings.

Group A was the easiest to deal with—I, basically, already agreed with them! Group B was a bit tougher, but most of them were reassured when I told them that I’d added new hooks to make most of the “optional” locations highly encouraged.

Group C was…tough.

I tried to rationalize it. I tried to argue back. I tried to explain my reasoning. I tried to interrogate their reasoning. But every time, without fail, it came down to this simple, irrefutable line of logic:

“My players play D&D because they want to feel special, unique, and personally engaged. They don’t want to play ‘the DM’s story’; they want to play their story.”

Try as I might, I couldn’t really argue with that—especially once one of my former players (whose opinions I trust greatly on matters of narrative and game design) agreed with them. On top of that, this whole exchange reminded me of what I hated the most about Descent Into Avernus—the fact that it’s just a campaign about five random adventurers that cares more about its own Grand Backstory than about the players themselves.

Even putting all that aside—it became very clear very quickly that I could not dissuade Group C from linking player backstories to the campaign. No matter how good of an argument I made about how Curse of Strahd was “meant to be played,” they kindly, gently, and politely said that they would take everything else that Re-Reloaded offered, but rip out the hook and add their own.

I briefly pondered adding a disclaimer explicitly telling Group C, in big, flashing, neon letters: THIS GUIDE IS NOT FOR YOU. THIS MODULE IS NOT FOR YOU. GO MAKE A HOMEBREW CAMPAIGN OR SOMETHING. But not only did that stink of “giving up”—something I hate doing—but it also ignored the inevitable fact that Curse of Strahd is THE most popular 5e module, and people are going to play it regardless of how much I scold them about it.

Hell, the whole reason why I made Reloaded in the first place was to dramatically restructure this cold, unforgiving gothic horror adventure into a more traditional action-adventure fantasy with gothic horror elements—turning Amnesia into Castlevania, if you will—in order to appeal to more traditional players and DMs. That was one of the big reasons why I’d started connecting player backstories in the first place! To turn my back on that audience would be equivalent to turning my back on the entire reason I’d start writing these guides originally!

So I did the only thing I could—I went back to the drawing board.

And I proceeded to have a minor mental breakdown.

Because here’s the deal: If, like me, you are a slightly neurotic perfectionist who’s narcissistically obsessed with his own visions of game design, you are not willing to accept a “solution” that satisfices—something that, in the words of one commenter, “weasels in those essays that players keep sending us.” If I was going to add in backstories for the kind of player who needs them to remain invested, that meant (1) they were going to be meaningful, dammit, and (2) I was going to reshape the rest of the campaign to fit those players’ needs.

Here’s where the mental breakdown starts: Time and time again, comments from Group C indicated that their players didn’t care about Ismark, didn’t care about Ireena, didn’t care about the Martikovs, didn’t care about Father Lucian, and just didn’t give a shit about anything other than their own personal backstories and goals. (Multiple DMs explicitly told me that they’d turned one of their own PCs into Ireena solely because they didn’t think their players would care about her otherwise.)

However, those DMs also often refused to turn their PCs into native Barovians, an approach that I personally disfavor, but others have endorsed. Those DMs refuse to do it for the same reasons as me—they want Barovia to remain a strange, unfamiliar land, preserving the feel of Curse of Strahd as a “fish-out-of-water” story.

Plus, most of Group C also said that they wanted the hook to the campaign to be agnostic to the players’ backstories—they wanted the players to have wound up their unintentionally, but for their backstory connections to naturally emerge over the course of the campaign.

The end result was a situation in which Group C DMs simultaneously wanted their players to have deep, meaningful connections to Barovia while also wanting their players to be completely ignorant of the land itself and having no reason to want to be there.

(Those who have seen The Simpsons might be reminded of a certain clip, which—while uncharitable—accurately described how I was feeling at the time.)

To make this work, I briefly entertained the idea of trashing the entire low-level Curse of Strahd experience by jettisoning the entirety of Barovia and Vallaki and instead making this an adventure about a bunch of Van Richten’s students trying to save their mentor from Castle Ravenloft before Strahd killed him and pulled off an Evil Ritual of Nefarious Intent. (Call it “Strahdlevania.”)

This got positive reviews from some commenters, but was politely declined by others. Paraphrasing one Group C commenter: “Oh, but Ireena’s story is so emblematic of the module itself; I’d hate to lose it.” Paraphrasing another, “That sounds like a great sequel adventure, but it’s not Curse of Strahd.” Plus, when I considered it, the thought of writing a whole second guide to this module sounded absolutely exhausting and made me want to throw something.

Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

I took an hour or three to chat with a friend about my dilemma, vent a bit about my frustrations, and let my brain cool down. (It’s genuinely okay and important to step away from these problems sometimes!) When I’d chilled out a bit, I took a step back and tried to look back at the problem with a more critical eye. Here’s what I knew:

1. In order to satisfy all groups, I needed Barovia to be an alienating, unfamiliar land that the players neither wanted nor expected to be in.
2. In order to satisfy Group C, I needed an optional way to let players have backstories connected to Barovia. However, in order to sastisfy Group A, I needed these backstories to be easily ignorable.
3. In order to satisfy Group B, I needed these optional backstory connections to give players actual goals within Barovia—an actual external character arc that they could pursue.
4. In order to satisfy players who don’t care about backstory who are playing with players who do care about backstory, I needed to make sure that my optional backstory addition would be optional within the same campaign—such that a player who rolled up to a table with zero backstory could easily play with a player who rolled up with ten pages.
5. In order to avoid overwhelming myself with work, I needed to ensure that this optional backstory addition wouldn’t require me to make broad, sweeping changes to my original vision for Re-Reloaded, which focused largely on Ireena, the Martikovs, the Tarokka treasures, etc.
6. In order to keep the adventure’s core dramatic question (kill Strahd before he kills you) strong, I needed to ensure that these optional backstory connections wouldn’t distract the players from their desire to kill Strahd, or allow them to happily settle down in Barovia without killing Strahd first.
7. In order to satisfy my own need for verisimilitude and to preserve Barovia’s feeling of isolation, I needed to keep convenient coincidences to a minimum—which meant that these backstory connections couldn’t take the form of, say, “Vistani smuggled me out of Barovia when I was a child,” or “My mentor went to Barovia to save it,” or “The man who killed me family fled to Barovia to hide.”

After deliberating on these requirements for a little while, I decided to seek out sources of inspiration—starting with the Neverwinter: Ravenloft trailer, which includes this wonderfully evocative script:

“What is it that calls you to such a place? Duty? Knowledge? Revenge? Or merely fate? Your journey will take you into the dark itself. To a land that preys upon its people. You clutch onto steel and faith. But you are far from the sight of your gods. Lost in the mist. Where only the dead will find you. Seek those cursed halls if you will. But know this. You cannot make demands of the devil. For he is the ancient. He is the land. And you are trespassers.”

Aha! I realized. This was the solution I was looking for. The players were traveling to Barovia seeking something, but didn’t really know anything about Barovia or what to expect when they got there. They weren’t there because Madam Eva had told them to go, but because they were seeking it out of their own volition.

This was a step forward, but I was still dissatisfied—this still presented too much of a distraction from the main plot, and would require too much work on my part to finagle. Still, it was a start.

I was then abruptly reminded of a criticism I’d received about the new hook I was using for Re-Reloaded. (In this hook, Death House itself is a portal to Barovia—the players are walking along the Triboar Trail or other forest road, are driven into Death House by a storm and Rose and Thorn’s pleas, and emerge into Barovia after defeating the cult.)

The criticism went like this: This is great and all, but what happens if the players don’t go into Death House? What if they go in and they mistrust the real Rose and Thorn because the illusions lied to them earlier?

(This echoed a critique I’d had of Death House myself earlier—in game design, every encounter teaches the players something. The RAW Death House experience is very good at teaching players not to trust NPCs who need your help, which is the exact opposite lesson that they need to learn if they want to do well in the actual module.)

The criticism continued with a suggestion: Why not put Death House in a town or city somewhere and give the players a reason to want to go inside? That way, they can still be trapped and spirited away into Barovia, but you don’t have to railroad them to do it.

This gave me an idea.

In The Chronicles of Narnia, the reason why Lucy and the other Pevensie children are able to pass through the wardrobe into Narnia is because the wardrobe was carved from the wood of a tree that originally came from Narnia. The wood remembered where it had come from, and so could lead others to that place. The children had not made the wardrobe, nor had they inherited it, but they had a connection to that wardrobe—and, so, a connection to Narnia.

And then I remembered the Death House reliquary.

In the original version of the Reloaded guide, Death House’s relics have been swapped out for a bunch of relics that foreshadow stuff in Barovia—an angel’s feather, a silver dragon egg, etcetera. Why not steal that idea, make a bunch of relics that are the equivalents of the Narnia wardrobe and tie these relics to the players’ core motivations, as in the Neverwinter: Ravenloft trailer?

What if, in other words, the players had:

1. obtained or inherited relics that originally came from Barovia,
2. which had strong sentimental value or personal meaning to those players,
3. which symbolized the players’ abstract personal motivations (e.g., knowledge, duty, or revenge), and
4. upon Death House’s appearance nearby, activated in a magical way and began leading the players’ through this portal in order to reach Barovia?

This aesthetic concept—of a disparate group of people are unwittingly led by magical guidance to a dangerous land in which their journey will both serve as their salvation and its own—has a strong resonance with the trapped-in-another-world “Isekai” genre that Curse of Strahd lives in. Best of all, I could make a strong argument as for why those relics wanted to get back into Barovia—the Abbot’s feather wanted to see him purified and redeemed, Argynvost’s scale wanted to see his spirit laid to rest, and so on.

What about parties or players who didn’t want backstories tied to Barovia? That part was easy—I took inspiration from Mandorcai’s Mansion from the Baldur’s Gate Gazetteer in Descent into Avernus: a mansion that “appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the night,” caused a “handful of disappearances,” and inspired a squad of the Flaming Fist to smash its way into the building to rescue them.

In this case, Death House took the role of the Mansion, and the PCs took the role of the Flaming Fist—mercenaries who had been hired by the town to investigate recent disappearances in a house that had only recently and mysteriously appeared atop a vacant lot.

Why would those mercenary PCs allow the other PCs to come inside? Well, those mysteriously glowing relics seem like they’d be reasonably relevant to an investigation—and it seems reasonable that those mercenary PCs would want to keep potential witnesses/suspects/clues close at-hand during the search.

And then the door slams shut, trapping the PCs inside, and they have to delve into the depths of Death House before eventually emerging into the strange and alien mists of Barovia.

I could go on, but instead, I’ll just let you read the product of my madness, the new hook Barovian Relics, in the draft guide itself. Hope you enjoy!