Dragna's Patreon DevBlog | The Road to Vallaki

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Patreon DevBlog #1: The Road to Vallaki

This week, I worked primarily on Curse of Strahd: Re-Reloaded, my massive overhaul of the original Curse of Strahd: Reloaded campaign guide. The current working draft, which you can read here (feedback welcome!), is intended to tighten up the core narrative of Curse of Strahd, create a more active and engaging gameplay experience, and make running this adventure as easy and efficient as possible.

My main project this week, in addition to transferring my work from the old working document (a Google Doc) to GMBinder, was completing Arc C: Into the Valley. (To simplify the DM’s work, Curse of Strahd Re-Reloaded is organized by narrative arc, rather than geographic location.)

During this arc, the players travel from the village of Barovia to Madam Eva’s camp, and then to the town of Vallaki. As such, I wanted to establish a strong sequence of “random” pre-planned encounters along the way.

Problem 1: Which random encounters should I pick?

My first challenge was settling on an actual list of random encounters for the players to encounter. Both the original module, as well as Reloaded’s random encounters and landmarks chapters, are filled with possible sources of inspiration—a veritable overload of ideas.

Ultimately, I returned to my usual philosophy for random encounters: they should either create a meaningful side-arc, foreshadow future adventures, or deliver meaningful exposition.

From my previous work on Re-Reloaded, I already knew that Morgantha was now serving a population of Barovian refugees camped outside of Vallaki, rather than the village of Barovia itself. I also knew that the revenants of the Order of the Silver Dragon weren’t hunting Strahd’s minions, but had instead taking up places around Barovia, keeping watch for those who would take up arms against the Devil.

As such, I immediately knew that I needed a social encounter with a revenant at the (suitably dramatic) bridge over Tser Falls, as well as an introductory encounter with Morgantha outside of Old Bonegrinder. The former encounter foreshadows a future adventure (the exploration of Argynvostholt), while the latter encounter notifies the players that Morgantha—an NPC that they’ll need to resolve Stella Wachter’s arc later on—can be found at Old Bonegrinder or outside of Vallaki’s gates.

I knew that I wanted to preserve some elements of Twice Bitten’s black carriage encounter as an introduction to Strahd von Zarovich. In order to make sure the players truly appreciated Strahd’s threat before receiving the Tarokka reading, I moved this encounter from the Castle Ravenloft crossroads in the north to the River Ivlis Crossroads in the south.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the ancient watchtower in my landmarks guide, and liked the idea of letting the players find the silver dragon pendant from the module’s “Gothic Trinkets” table to start foreshadowing the tragedy of Argnyovst. I decided to place that on the cliff overlooking the River Ivlis Crossroads—early enough to set up the revenant encounter at Tser Falls, and well-positioned in-world to hint the valley’s history of war to the players.

I love the RAW encounter with the skeletal rider to really set the tone of the adventure, so I knew I had to include that as well. I also wanted a combat encounter to close out the journey to Vallaki, so I included a combat encounter with some wolves—and, potentially, Vasili von Holtz—just outside of Vallaki.

Finally, I also wanted to lay down some foundations for the Keepers of the Feather storyline, and preemptively endear the players to Muriel and the ravens. As such, I introduced an encounter in which the players must rescue Muriel from a strix—a scarecrow-esque bird made by Baba Lysaga that fires volleys of silver barbs—in order to set up both the Keepers, the scarecrows, and the Winery simultaneously. (This also encourages the players to trust the ravens they meet later on—I’ve heard too many horror stories of players attacking ravens instead of appreciating them.)

I originally planned to place Muriel’s re-appearance just after Tser Pool (to set up a plotline in which Muriel had overheard Strahd receiving a Tarokka reading), but ultimately decided to put it just before Tser Pool—but after the Strahd encounter—in order to make the timeline work.

This might feel like a jam-packed adventuring day—and it is! I wanted the journey from Tser Pool to feel stretched-out and long, in order to really drive home the geographic and societal distance between Barovia and Vallaki. I tried to reach a good balance between “social” encounters with real people and “non-social” encounters with animals and geographic features; you want to avoid making the players feel like these supposedly dangerous roads are over-stuffed with travelers. All-in-all, I’m pretty happy with how things came out.

Problem 2: Who is the skeletal rider?

One of the problems that I’ve really struggled with in Re-Reloaded, and in Reloaded in general, is converting as many “atmospheric” encounters and areas into narratively important ones. (For example, as mentioned above, I’ve tied Morgantha and the night hag coven into Stella Wachter’s arc, and replaced any “random” encounters with deliberate ones.)

My biggest challenge in this regard was the skeletal rider. RAW, this is just a spooky encounter that isn’t really meant to signify anything. However, I really wanted to make the rider into someone important, even if only for my own edification.

My initial thought was Sergei, but I needed to keep his spirit in Krezk’s blessed pool for the restoration of the Sunsword and Ireena’s final temptation. (More on this later.) My second thought was Leo Dilisnya (the leader of the assassins that killed Strahd originally), but I couldn’t think of a reason why Strahd would have let his bones wander around Barovia this long, or how.

More importantly, I really wanted the skeletal rider to play some sort of meaningful role in opposing Strahd, even if just by a token effort. I used ChatGPT to try to generate a bunch of ideas, but none of them felt practical or fit the narrative I was going for. While I liked the thought that “the rider drops an item that helps the players or delivers a helpful hint or later,” I couldn’t think of any items distinctive enough, or any hints that it could actually deliver nonverbally that would help the players later on.

Eventually, as I was writing the revenant’s dialogue at Tser Falls, I thought up the line: “Old things are stirring.” While I was reluctant to relegate the skeletal rider to a non-narrative role, I realized that I could use this encounter to thematically echo the theme of “old things awakening”—such as, in this version, Strahd himself. Just as Strahd has stirred from his slumber, so have old and twisted things.

In a way, the skeletal rider is now just a quiet warning to the players: Undead, both malevolent and benign, walk the woods and Svalich Road, so be cautious.

Problem #3: Why would the players stop at the old watchtower?

Unlike a video game RPG, players in TTRPGs can’t really experience travel sequences organically. If you’re playing The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, you can just walk into a random cottage or graveyard while walking from Point A to Point B. In a game of D&D, though, the DM has to intentionally pause the game and waggle their eyebrows, all but explicitly saying: I prepared content for this; please go poke around.

The content itself might be good, but the prompt is narratively unsatisfying. (This is why my location stat blocks always have a prompt—something that spurs the players to investigate.) As such, if you want the players to actually check out the static content you have prepared, you need some kind of incentive for them to stop traveling to Point B, at least for a little while.

To encourage the players to stop at the old watchtower I’d introduced overlooking the River Ivlis Crossroads, I decided to introduce one of the random encounters in the original module: the corpse. Given that Barovian refugees had traveled this path a few days prior, I felt it reasonable that they might have had a clash with some wolves here—a clash that resulted in a few fresh graves (another RAW random encounter) and a discarded wolf corpse.

The corpse, I decided, was the key. So long as I didn’t mention what the corpse actually was in the travel montage descriptive text, the players would be naturally curious to fill in the gaps, and would interrupt the DM to go check it out. Once the travel montage’s flow had been broken, the players would then be free to go check out the nearby watchtower and the fresh graves I’d placed nearby to enjoy some brief ambience and narrative foreshadowing.

(Similarly, when I tossed in the Huntress's Monument as a "random encounter landmark" later on, I described it as "bearing strange carvings," but without telling the players what the carvings actually are. This is meant to encourage them to interrupt and go take a closer look.)

Problem #4: I hate writing flavor text.

I hate writing descriptive flavor text.

I am, I’m told, very good at it. I still hate it, though—especially when I need to generate lots and lots of original, non-repetitive descriptive text about the players’ journey through the woods and mountains as they travel down the Old Svalich Road from landmark to landmark.

Fortunately, ChatGPT is very very good at generating creative prose based on well-sculpted prompts. As such, after some basic trial and error, I was able to find the following prompt: “Narrate a D&D party's journey through ______. You should try to use the words to create an atmosphere suitable for gothic horror and dark fantasy. Importantly, this narration should not tell a story. Instead, your narration should only describe the beat-by-beat visuals that an audience would see if this journey were depicted on a screen.”

Use of this prompt, paired with basic travel text I wrote while looking at the beautiful 3D map of Barovia at Zootlocker, allowed me to very easily create some stunning and original narration for each leg of the journey. I then took this generated text as a foundation, edited and tweaked it to convey the exact feeling and image that I wanted, and plopped it into the draft.

(I was also able to do this for Madam Eva’s dream inviting the players to Tser Pool, and was quite pleased with the foundation it generated for me. Here’s the prompt I used: “Write an eerie, mystical monologue from the ancient Vistani seer Madam Eva welcoming a group of low-level adventurers to Barovia, warning them of the dangers they face from the vampire Strahd von Zarovich (who has set them in his sights), and inviting them to meet her at her tent at Tser Pool to learn their fortunes and escape the darkness that Fate has in store for them. The monologue should be shrouded and frustratingly opaque, but with a clear message of danger and salvation.”)

Problem #5: What do I do with Vasili von Holtz?

As I mentioned above, I really wanted to cap off the journey to Vallaki with a high-stakes combat encounter with a pack of wolves. At the same time, I wasn’t sure which narrative I wanted to use this scene to foreshadow. My options were:

1. Strahd (disguised as Vasili von Holtz), to set up future Vasili shenanigans,
2. Strahd (disguised as a wolf), to let Strahd spy on the PCs’s combat abilities and foreshadow his shapechanging abilities, or
3. A random werewolf from the Werewolf Den, to foreshadow the threat posed by the werewolves

I was sorely, sorely tempted to go with Option #1, Vasili von Holtz. He’s a community favorite, and Reloaded made him a centerpiece of one of the early Vallakian side-quests, leading up to a potentially climactic twist in the final battle.

At the same time, the more I thought about it, the more I struggled to actually justify his inclusion. Re-Reloaded is, at its core, not an adventure centered around “Strahd encounters” and Strahd personally screwing with or tormenting the players. Instead, while Strahd is obviously the Big Bad Villain in the background, the players’ day-to-day activities are mostly focused on dealing with his servants (such as the Brides or druids).

The only content that Reloaded actually uses Vasili for is to set up the gimmick/twist with Strahd's animated armor…and that’s not really a very invigorating narrative. If anything, it felt like a wasted opportunity. But, try as I might, I couldn’t actually think of a better way to use Vasili, especially considering that Re-Reloaded’s Strahd has zero interest in “wooing Ireena properly.” (To make matters worse, I couldn’t shake the feeling that maintaining an identity as Vasili was undignified for Strahd, as well as a waste of time considering that, in Re-Reloaded, he’d only just awoken from a century of hibernation and had spies to do Vasili’s work for him.)

Most importantly, Vasili von Holtz has a fundamental problem: His entire character concept exists only to manufacture a moment in which the players declare, curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal! It’s a very cinematic scene, but D&D is not a movie; it’s a game. And the concept of Vasili von Holtz makes for bad gameplay.

As such, I decided to strike Vasili entirely. My two remaining options for the encounter’s NPC were (2) Strahd-wolf or (3) random werewolf.

Strahd-wolf was intriguing, especially because my new introductory Strahd encounter has Strahd promising to meet the players again “very soon.” At the same time, given that Strahd can’t switch off the necrotic damage from his bites or unarmed strikes in his wolf form—and my own inclination to make his wolf form stand out—I felt it obvious that the players would easily figure out that one of the wolves was Strahd, which would undermine the entire introductory encounter. (Given that he was so diplomatic originally, why is he suddenly attacking them?)

Plus, again, the whole thing just felt manufactured and undignified.

So that left me with Door #3: random werewolf. Ultimately, I was still pretty happy with this. Level 3—the level at which the players travel to Vallaki—is a great time to make solo werewolves into a meaningful threat, since they lack both magic weapons and access to remove curse. Plus, it lets me set up the whole werewolf threat and plotline—which, given the density of scarecrow- and druid-related random encounters I had planned for the western Svalich Road, would have otherwise had to compete for some scarce real estate—in a way that made them feel genuinely dangerous and interesting.

And fortunately, I already had a Patreon homebrew encounter that, with some minor tweaking, involved this exact scenario.

I guess, sometimes, the stars just align!

Dragna’s Campaign Advice Roundup | January 8-14, 2023

• The easiest way to devise stakes for a combat encounter’s dramatic question is to tie them directly to the goal of the encounter or broader adventure. (For example, if the players don’t win the combat, they’ll be unable to achieve their goal forever.)
• If asked, Dr. Van Richten would likely be uninterested in having Madam Eva read his fortune. On top of his rocky history with Vistani, his curse has given him a kind of cynicism that makes him feel like he already knows what his future holds: death.
• My favored interpretation of the RAW conflicting stories of Van Richten and Ezmerelda’s history is that (because Ezmerelda’s side of the story is presented as fact, while Van Richten’s is conveyed only through the unreliable narration of a journal entry) Van Richten didn’t kill Ezmerelda’s family, who he met only before he learned of Erasmus’s death. Instead, he killed the Radanaviches in a rage as revenge after Erasmus died, as a twisted way of “punishing” the Vistani for the crimes against his family.
• The fog cloud spell does not block sunlight; it only negates disadvantage.
• The best way to make a solo boss encounter work in D&D 5e is to use a multi-phase boss, as with the Three-Phase Strahd. This allows you to slowly tax your players’ resources over multiple “waves” of dynamic solo encounters without boring them with a repetitive enemy.

If you enjoyed this blog and would like to see a weekly developer’s blog series replace the current monthly homebrew content packs, or if you would prefer to keep the monthly homebrew content packs and forego a blog series, please vote on the Google Form here.