Feature image from James Webster
This is part of my Revised Guide to Curse of Strahd. For the list of articles, and the order to read them, see my Intro to My Revised Guide. If you find this interesting, feel free to use as much or as little as you want.
We bounced back and forth across the valley a lot, but I won’t assume what order you’ll tackle it in. For anything that I ran as it’s presented in the WotC Curse of Strahd book, I’ll put in Italics, for anything that I ran from one of the 3rd Party Sources, I’ll put in underline.
Vallaki can be defined in three states, separated by two major events. There is Vallaki in the Status Quo (the way it’s been for years), which ends with the Festival of the Blazing Sun. Then, you are dealing with the consequences of that, until you have the Feast of St. Andral, and it’s consequences.
The major changes I make in Vallaki include the following:
- Added the Orphanage of St. Andral and Reformation Center
- Added Jeny Greenteeth from the Adventurer’s League expansion
- I removed entirely the Tyger, Tyger Special Event
- Changed the timeline so everything takes much longer
The Status Quo
One of the first things that happens when you enter the town, is you learn about the upcoming Festival of the Blazing Sun. I put the festival a full week away, because I want the party to get a chance to understand the Status Quo before everything falls apart. During that time the party is trying to figure out the wedding dress for The Doctor, and learning/gathering information on this complex town. There are a lot of people to meet, and everyone has an opinion on everyone else.
One of the ways for the party to get a wedding dress is from Lady Wachter. Both her and the Baroness have one, but the Baron gets angry at the idea that the Baroness would give away her dress to Outsiders. Lady Wachter is much more reasonable, and says that if they help her at the Festival of the Blazing Sun, they can have her dress. Help her with what? Oh, you’ll see.
I really had fun with Vallaki, if you have seen Avatar: The Last Airbender then you’ll know the phrase “There is No War in Ba Sing Se.” That is the level of denial in Vallaki, and I just replaced Lake Laogai with the Reformation Center. If not, go watch at least Avatar Season 2, Episodes 13-15, and 17-18. Then, go back and watch the whole show.
The Festival of the Blazing Sun
Then, the Festival comes. The Baron’s torch sputters out, someone in the crowd laughs, and the Baron begins to bind him and drag him behind a horse. However, Lady Wachter uses this brutal response to publicly denounce the Baron for his brutal ways. Quickly, a riot starts. Your party need to decide quickly, are we helping the abusive Baron restore order, are we helping cultist Lady Wachter with her coup, do we just protect innocent civilians, or are we running away before we get involved? As they are making their decision, they see that someone did set the wicker sun on fire, but it broke off during the commotion, and now buildings are catching on fire!
This is chaos, and can be run as a skill challenge, straight combat, or any number of things. In the end, though, have the players roll a total of 5d20, minus one for each player that helped stop the fire (i.e. if 2 people tried to stop the fire, only 3d20 is rolled). The number you get is what percentage of the town caught on fire. The fire lasts one day per 20%, so if 41% of the town caught fire, then the fire lasts about three days. Then you roll a percentile dice for every building of note, if you roll the Fire Number or lower, then the building is gone, burned to ashes. The only building that I save outright is the Church of St. Andral, which you can explain is due to it’s consecration.
From here on out, the event is referred to by locals as the Festival of the Blaze.
Up top, I want to apologize, as my party sided with Lady Wachter, and so I never really dug into what happens if they side with the Baron Vallakovich. I might come back and expand this, but at the moment I only have one path to this particular part of the story.
If the players helped Lady Wachter, then during the riot, people come for Victor Vallakovich, the Baronet. He is about to be captured when he attempts to Teleport himself. It is not clear if it’s successful due to the failure with the butler and the lady-in-waiting lately. Secretly, he did succeed in teleportation, but now he is somewhere else in the valley. I had him land right in the middle of Castle Ravenloft, in the Brazier Room, where he is found and eventually mentored by Ludmilla, the Vampire Spawn Consort. This is a near endgame reveal, and so seems like an unknown mystery for most of the campaign.
If the party proves loyal to Lady Wachter, or if she is killed in the Festival of the Blaze, then one way or another the party will have the chance to find and read the Tome of Strahd in Wachterhaus. I used the Interactive Tome of Strahd on DMs Guild, which was the coolest thing. My favorite part of this supplement, is that it adds a lot of history for the players to see firsthand, but if you want to change anything, you can say that Strahd is an unreliable narrator, and only showed you the version he wanted you to see. I liked that it feels like Tom Riddle’s Diary in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, so I added that at the end, a line appears that reads “Hello?” and then disappears. You can write in the back of the book, and the ink will disappear and respond to you. My party was familiar with Tom Riddle’s Diary, and so for one more twist, I made the responses coming from Sergei’s lost soul, instead of Strahd which is what they assumed. A fun joke I used is that because you have to decipher new sections of the book, I said it was due to the bizarre handwriting, which Lady Wachter refers to as Cursive Strahd. That’s my kind of humor. Last note on Lady Wachter, is she absolutely knows Vasili von Holtz’s true identity as Strahd.
St. Andral’s Feast
This is the other large scale event in Vallaki, where everything goes wrong. It is hard to know exactly how this is going to go down, so instead I focused on what exactly the plan was by the NPCs, so it was easier to adapt to the party.
The Plan
After the Festival of the Blaze, Anastrasya, one of Strahd’s Consorts, realizes that the town is weakened, and now is a good time to take control of one of the last parts of the valley that Strahd still can’t enter. For a brief background on Anastrasya, she is the militaristic of the consorts, and is like a General for Strahd’s forces. So Anastrasya asks Strahd who is a pushover in the town, and using his Vasili von Holtz identity, decides that the coffin maker, Henrik van der Voort, is both well connected, and also isolated. The perfect target. So Anastrasya goes to him, and demands that he tells her what makes the church so special.
Lucky for her, Henrik knows. You see, during the Festival of the Blaze, Father Lucian was comforting the Alter Boy Yeska, who was worried the church would burn down. Father Lucian promised him that the church was protected by the Morninglord, but that wasn’t enough for the young Yeska, so Father Lucian told him a secret, that the church is actually protected by St Andral, whose bones are buried beneath their feet, under the altar itself. This calmed Yeska through following events. Yeska, not having many friends, told this secret to only one person, the groundskeeper of the Church, Milivoj. Milivoj, not having many friends, told this secret to only one person, the coffin maker Henrik van der Voort. Loose Lips Sink Ships.
So Henrik tells Anastrasya about the Bones of St Andral, and she forces him to host six vampire spawn in his second floor storage room, and places a modified Glyph of Warding on the staircase. If anyone besides Henrik goes up the stairs, Anastrasya will be alerted (she’s not much of a spellcaster, so she had Ludmilla make her a Spell Scroll). Henrik doesn’t know what the glyph is, as he doesn’t know much about magic, but he sees her do something to his door.
So when you are ready to add more drama to Vallaki/Wachterheim, Father Lucian opens up, and tells the party that someone has stolen the bones. Like in the book, Lucian suspects Milivoj is the culprit. Then you run The Cursed Orphanage from DragnaCarta or MandyMod’s version.
Then, as you leave the Orphanage to the Coffin Maker’s, you see Vasili von Holtz go visit the Church. The attack isn’t supposed to happen yet, but very shortly. Everything is in place for Anastrasya to take over the town, but you make her jump the gun a bit.
When she does arrive, I had only her come in on a black horse, no other reinforcements, because she believes that the six vampire spawn hiding in Henrik’s storage room will be enough. It would be very easy for her to bring more, if you feel it’s needed.
So to recap:
- Festival of the Blaze
- Father Lucian tells Yeshka about St Andral’s bones to comfort him
- Yeshka tells Milivoj, because they are friends
- Milivoj tells Henrik, as coworkers
- Anastrasya wants to take fuller control of Vallaki/Wachterheim
- Anastrasya learns that the church is protected by secret bones she can’t access from Henrik van der Voort via Vasili von Holtz.
- Anastrasya forces Henrik to host six vampire spawn
- Henrik pays Milivoj to get the bones
- Vasili will test the safety, then allow Anastrasya to take control of the town, destroying the bones, and allowing no safe haven within the town.
- Vasili will watch the whole thing, and not intervene. This is Anastrasya’s mission.
Then, there are the consequences of this. If Anastrasya succeeds in her mission, then there is no place in the valley that Strahd cannot enter. If Lady Wachter is in charge, then perhaps Strahd does make an appearance in the town, as she honors him. If the Baron is still in charge and Anastrasya wins, perhaps he goes even more strict, more secret police. If the party is able to save the bones before Anastrasya can destroy them, then now Anastrasya has a personal vendetta against them. The Baron would definitely see this as a massive win, and trust the party more, but Lady Wachter would defend the actions of Anastrasya, though she would not force the Father to do anything, as she knows her control on this town is tenuous at best.
More
Now, in my game, the party sided with Lady Wachter during the Festival of the Blaze, so she succeeded in the coup, and takes over as Baroness, though she keeps going by Lady Wachter. She rebuilds the town, complete with a statue of Strahd right in the middle of the square. Lastly, she has a Grand Reopening Ceremony, where she renames the town Wachterheim. She then welcomes the Vistani into town, but kicks out the remaining Dusk Elf. Not only that, she also says that other enemies of the Baron, such as Jeny Greenteeth, are welcome as well.
Jeny Greenteeth is a fun character to mess with the party. Play her as if she’s a standard Hag, that’s not part of the hags at the Ol’ Bonegrinder Mill, but still asks for creepy deals in exchange for powerful magic. She can do almost anything, magically speaking, for the right price. She is a more powerful magic user than Strahd even. I let my party believe that this is Baba Yaga in disguise. However, the truth is much more interesting. This is actually the Mother, the Weaver, one of the Ladies Three, specifically of the Swamp, where Baba Yaga has defiled her Fane. So as a Chaotic Good Archfey, she can do pretty much anything the party might need, magically, but will definitely want some weird things in return. The more uncomfortable you can make it, the better. Jeny Greenteeth was used for Adventurers League for spellcasting services, so I just modified her to fit, but the character actually comes from English folklore, so there is a lot to pull from if you want to explore the character more.
The Nerdd 
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