Featured Image by Tim Shepherd Art
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.
Castle Ravenloft is a beast of a location within this book, and it was impossible for me to properly prepare it for my players. So as I went through, I read each section, each room, but I only made notes for changes I wanted to make. Here are some changes, and notes about those areas.
The castle is intentionally mazelike. On the map of the Main Floor, there are 10 staircases shown, but only one of them is inaccessible, three don’t connect to the Foyer without going to anohter floor first, one of them has a barrier blocking your path down, and one is behind a secret door. Forming a straight line from Point A to Point B is impossible, without a guide. If you do have a guide, you can use this site to represent their knowledge of the castle, including their knowledge of each individual secret door.
At first I was unsure how to have the players go through the castle without Strahd interfering. After all, how do you enter someone’s home without them even knowing, and getting into places they shouldn’t be? Well, I recently rewatched Pride and Prejudice, which is a great movie that you should make sure you’ve seen anyway. If you haven’t, this clip below, from 1:43-6:40, is relevant.
Back in the days of manors and castles, it was common for the homes of the wealthy to be seen as spaces open to the public, where you could enter for a tour. In the clip below, main character Elizabeth is touring the home of the man she has a love/hate relationship with, while she believes he is not at home. She then manages to break away from the tour, and is seen by Mr. Darcy. If you do go rewatch this movie, I’m not sure if this was intentional, but Mr. Darcy is filmed during the first half of this movie like a villain, and many shots with him are reminiscent of horror movies.
Now that we have some visual context of going through the castle, I’ll go through each sub-chapter, and make notes.
Random Encounters
There are 19 Random Encounters on this table, but I can’t think of a single instance when I would want all of those to be equally likely to occur. Random Encounters should never feel random, they should instead be used to support the tone of the moment. If the characters are sneaking around when they shouldn’t be, having Strahd, Rahadin, or some Vampire Spawn makes sense, but the party shouldn’t run into a group of Barovian Commoners here to kill Strahd without knowing about it beforehand. If they are here during a rush on the castle by the commoners, then coming to a random cat, or a trinket would feel very benign during a very intense sequence.
Areas of the Caslte
Walls of Ravenloft
This is the first, and last area your players interact with for every time they get to the castle, so the biggest priority here is to establish scale. The first time you go to New York, or an equivalent major city, you might stand at the base of a skyscraper, look straight up, and get dizzy, while still on the ground. This is the effect the party might get standing at the base of this major castle.
Also, the Overlook is the spot where not only Tatyana fell to her death, but so too did the Mad Mage of Mount Baratok. Just keep that in mind if you ever want some dramatic symmetry.
Main Floor
The purpose of the defenses near the entrance isn’t to keep people out, it’s to keep people in. If someone wants to enter Strahd’s castle with ill intent, he will enjoy killing them, trapped in his maze of a castle.
The Dining Hall is the centerpiece for the Dinner with Strahd, which has it’s own article. The illusory Strahd there should really only be there for the Dinner with Strahd. If he isn’t expecting company, the hall should be empty, like your own dining room would be.
The Heart of Sorrow is Strahd’s first line of defense, though that is a closely kept secret. Because I rigged my Tarokka Reading, my party’s final fight with Strahd starts at the Heart of Sorrow, but I’ll go over that below. Only one other party managed to discover and destroy the Heart of Sorrow before (Escher), and when they did, Strahd stole the first gem from the Martikovs, though very few, if any, know this. So if the party also destroys the Heart of Sorrow, they can go amongst it’s wreckage at the bottom of the staircase and find the gemstone, and return it to the Martikovs, so they can make the Champagne du le Stomp once more. After the Heart was previously destroyed, that is when Strahd added the animated halberds to the area, to ensure it doesn’t happen again, at least not as easily.
Court of the Count
The King’s Accountant, Lief Lipsiege, was Escher’s travelling partner, and helped him destroy the Heart of Sorrow. Unfortunately, he has completely given up on any hope of changing his fate. If the party does learn of his role, he is very willing to give them any information that he has learned over the decade working for Strahd. He has no loyalty to Strahd, but he also believes the party’s attempts will be futile, so why not give them the information they request? What punishment could he receive that he hasn’t already?
The Maid in Hell, Helga Ruvak, is a Barovian woman who wished to be a consort for Strahd, but she failed to keep his attention. If she can betray the party at just the right moment, then perhaps she will gain Strahd’s attention once more. This is her goal.
Rooms of Weeping
One thing I really wanted to include was a popular Strahd’s Animated Armor trap. Strahd’s wartime armor has been animated to fight for him, however, Strahd might place it in a place where the party can see it as loot from some fight or adventure throughout the valley. They claim the armor, but then when the time comes to fight Strahd, the armor turns on them. Unfortunately, none of my PCs wore heavy armor. I had a druid, a monk, and a rogue. All light to no armor.
Spires of Ravenloft
The Witches of Ravenloft! Why are there witches? First, there are already Hags, which are Fey witches. What is the purpose of the witches that cannot be accomplished with the Hags? Also, it says these witches are sworn to Strahd’s service in exchange for arcane power. Is Strahd merely supplying them with magical tomes, or is he a Patron of sorts? What service are they providing for him? They aren’t even loyal, as it says “they will trade information in exchange for their lives and freedom”. If you can think of anything interesting for them to do, I believe that it can be replaced by either 1) the Hags of the Ol’ Mill, 2) Ludmilla, the Arcane Consort, or 3) Jeny Greenteeth in Vallaki. This only seems to muddle the vision. I’m a fan of combining similar characters that accomplish the same goal.
My party never found Pidlwick II, so I never got a chance to experiment with him, but it’s literally just the Chucky Doll.
Larders of Ill Omen
I think this Elevator Trap is one of the coolest traps in the whole castle, if not the whole campaign. It is a simple contraption, and it splits the party long enough for danger to ensue. I would make sure that the trap is only triggered if only half the party is on it, or they are trying to leave the Castle quickly. Then, once the trap springs, enemies appear at both landings.
Cyrus Belview, the Abbeyfolk, is not Strahd’s faithful servant. He is loyal to The Doctor, and is a spy for her. The Doctor is not interested in fighting Strahd, she wants to make his Tatyana clone, and get out. However, she is also no fool, and so will at least want to know more about Strahd. Unfortunately, Cyrus is not as clever. Not only have the Hags given Cyrus a gift of a hag eye (actually from Baba Yaga), so that Cyrus is also an unwilling spy for the Hags, but also Strahd knows that Cyrus is a spy, which is why he’s been given pointless projects to fill his time, like the Hall of Bones.
Speaking of the Hall of Bones, this is where the Skull of Argynvost is. My party used their rocky alliance with Escher to retrieve the Skull, which made for a very fun heist session. I wish I had run this more like a classic 3-act One Shot, with Escher being a guide, and Volenta being the primary villain, as opposed to Strahd. Volenta is all about setting the traps throughout the Castle, and has Rogue features. Getting in the Castle and to the Hall of Bones is only half the problem, because the other half is getting a 250 lbs skull out without dropping it, while potentially being chased. If you are being chased, the chase doesn’t stop at the Castle doors (which again have things in place to stop you from leaving) but you have to be able to get it all the way to Argynvostholt, where you might still have to fight Vlad.
Dungeon and Catacombs
The Lost Sword in K74h I cut out, and I can’t think of a reason to use it unless someone in your party still doesn’t have a magical weapon. For me, this campaign works best when it is low-magic, so each person really only has one or two magical items to help them. Between low-magic, and being low level (no more than Level 10 usually), the campaign is really about being clever and resourceful.
The Prisoner, Emil Toranescu, the werewolf was moved to Tsolenka Pass, where Ludmilla is conducting tests on him. He was betrayed by Kiril so that Kiril would be the new leader of the pack, but otherwise Emil’s story is the same.
The Torture Chamber, with six zombies coming out from the water, was a fantastically creepy fight, and was very difficult, because they were chasing someone when they went through it.
The Brazier Room is very important, because when Viktor Vallakovich flees the Festival of the Blaze with his imperfect Teleportation spell, this is where he ended up, and was eventually captured by Ludmilla, turned into a spawn, and has been studying the arcane. How innocent or cruel he was before, and how scared or cruel he is now leaves a lot of options for making him either someone you’re characters will love to kill, or a kid that they feel pity for. If you do go the pity route, then the decision of whether or not to kill him becomes a big one.
While the crypts themselves have a lot of great information, I really see them as exposition for the DM to understand some background. I don’t imagine any party will find interest in reading and opening 40 crypts, not counting Sergei’s, King Barov’s, Queen Ravenias, or Strahd’s. This would be incredibly boring, but if your party does want to, I would just montage them through the highlights, either of names that come up, or any Treasure inside.
Final Confrontation
So the final fight of the campaign is here, and there are a lot of ways you could run it. For me, I like the idea of starting at the highest peak, at the Heart of Sorrow, and ending at the Balcony where Tatyana died. So below was my plan that I started with, and how I intended the fight to go.
There is a lot of chasing Strahd through his castle during this fight, and every time you do, that is when any traps that are set will slow down the party, as well as random encounters, such as wights, vampire spawn, crawling claws, flying swords, zombies, swarms of bats/rats, giant spiders, etc.
- Start at top of the stairs, next to K20 the Heart of Sorrow.
- Strahd makes some monologue about how good the party is, but they must now die.
- 10 animated swords fly off the wall
- Strahd uses Charm on the lowest Wisdom character to kill any ally they brought with them.
- If Ireena is there, Strahd avoids anything hurting her, and tries to woo her here.
- In 3 rounds, or when the swords are defeated, 4 vampire spawn arrive.
- Once Strahd takes 50 points of damage, the Heart of Sorrow powers down.
- Strahd realizes he might as well kill Ireena too, and just wait for her next reincarnation.
- He drops through the floor, and you see his body morph from handsome man to hideous monster.
- 2d4 swarms of bats arrive from the rafters above
- Go across the bridge to K57 the Tower Roof for more fighting.
- Strahd uses Gust to blow lowest Strength character off the roof.
- From now on, anytime Strahd takes 20 points of damage in a single round, he flees, as he cannot heal faster than he takes damage.
- Chase Strahd down the stairs to K8 the Great Entry
- When the party gets off the stairs, Strahd casts Fireball
- Anastrasya is waiting to help fight, unless she’s already been killed, in which case Rahadin takes her place.
- Chase to K25 the Audience Hall
- When the party gets off the stairs, Strahd casts Fireball
- Ludmilla is waiting to help fight, unless she’s already been killed, in which case Rahadin takes her place.
- Chase to K15 the Chapel
- When the party gets through the door, Strahd casts Fireball
- Volenta is waiting to help fight, unless she’s already been killed, in which case Rahadin takes her place.
- Chase to K6 the Overlook
- Strahd uses whatever spells he has left, but this is where he will fight to the death, in the place where Tatyana died. If Rahadin hasn’t been seen, this is where he is.
There is a lot of ways the fight can go, but this attack, retreat, reinforcement routine I think is very accurate to how Strahd would fight in his Castle. This also means that if they kill the consorts/Rahadin before the final fight, they are rewarded for their efforts here.
The Nerdd 
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