Strahd Dies Tonight: A Ravenloft Matinee

Good Evening... again and again

As my Curse of Strahd campaign wraps up, I realized that I was really happy with the version of Castle Ravenloft that I'd put together. It's one of the most iconic Dungeons across all of D&D after all, and a lot of work went into configuring, linking and populating the maps. In the time working on it I learned the ins and outs of the castle the way one learns the layout of a video game. And so, I figured, why not repackage it as a re-playable adventure?

Turns out, D&D Beyond has some ideas for how to speed-run the castle as a one-shot, and so I pulled from that and now have my own twist on it ready to go. "Strahd Dies Tonight!" is now live with sessions available all through June, and then continuing further as long as I can help it.

Strahd Dies Tonight! on startplaying.games

The Rules

To make the game run quick and smooth, there's a few tweaks.

Madam Eva's Reading: The Tarokka cards are used to determine the random location of key items in the campaign, as well as where Strahd can be found in the castle. Since this adventure is contained within the castle, several cards are omitted to ensure the treasures are always present somewhere.

No random encounters: Just traps and monsters that already exist. If the party decides to camp out to wait for or hide from Strahd, then we'd be rolling something to get them moving.

Strahd's Boons: After each hour of real time play, the players are offered a boon in exchange for being bitten. This gives them some extra firepower for the final battle.

 

My Tweaks

NPC Cast: The twenty possible "fated enemies" in the campaign are available for the players to choose and play as. With their stat blocks exactly as described in the book, they range from a ten year old girl with commoner stats, to one of the most powerful mages in the multiverse, and a bunch of Barovian born and bred monsters in between. I filled out their biographies with text out of Lunch Break Heroes' "Lights in the Darkness" supplement so that players can quickly get a feel for the character with some roleplay directon.

Roguelike Progression: There's a bigger story going on here. Although the castle and  characters reset each playthrough, I'll be keeping track of what happened where and key in some clues as we go.

 

My Setup

I've moved my Foundry instance to the cloud, improving performance for everyone compared to when I ran it right off my desktop PC. Thanks to this, I'm able to make a heavy duty, high production value game. Here's a little bit of what you'll see and hear:

• Animated Battlemaps: High quality video maps by Dynamic Dungeons
• Scenery: Theatre of the Mind scenes by JamesRPGArt
  
• Ambient Audio: Official integrated soundscapes, provided by Syrinscape
• Music: Incidential music by Travis Savoie
  
• Character Models: custom tokens for every character created by the community at Heroforge
• Portraits: High Quality character art for several characters by Ernesto Irawan commissioned and crowdfunded by the r/CurseOfStrahd community
  

 

Sound like fun? "Strahd Dies Tonight!" is live now at startplaying.games. Come play with me!