The newest adventure for Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons
Shame on me. I made a mental note to write about Curse of Strahd the day it came out last week, but GDC’s chaos complicated my plans. I read about half of the new adventure book for Dungeons & Dragons while on Steven’s futon between appointments, but still forgot to write a post about it.
So here it is! Curse of Strahd marks the first foray into the Ravenloft setting for Fifth Edition. It’s all about Count Dracula Strahd Von Zarovich, a vampire lord residing in the gloomy land of Barovia. I’m particularly excited to run this book because it’s horror-themed, replete with hags, werewolves, and spooky fortune-telling. Said divination also brings a unique mechanic to D&D: by using either a regular deck of playing cards (or the fancy set made by Gale Force Nine), you can do a tarokka reading that determines certain parts of your campaign. This can lead to different artifact and enemy locations, or decide which NPCs players should seek out to join forces with.
Curse of Strahd also comes with a huge, perforated map that you can easily fold up and hide in the book. One side of it shows the whole of Barovia, and the other shows cutaway views of Castle Ravenloft, which seems huge. The map has already been a convenient reference for all of the plans I’m formulating prior to this Friday’s game. Since this adventure is for players level 1-10, my regular group will be rolling new characters.
I’m still trying to figure out how I want to cover this. Huge allotments of time are required for D&D in general, and providing on-going coverage is another challenge in and of itself. So I ask you lovely folks: what do you want to know about the book? Do you have questions about the bestiary, the general content of the storyline, whether it’s too rail-roady? Would you like me to do quick summaries of each game, whenever I wrangle my friends all together in the same place for long enough? Let me know how you want to see this play out.
Curse of Strahd released on March 15 for $49.95.
[This coverage is based on a retail copy provided by the publisher.]
