The Lady and Tiger

This year I decided to pick up and run the original I6 Ravenloft adventure for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) with some friends as a sort of Halloween activity. I’ve been reading a lot of older material (mostly for adapting to my Worlds Without Number home game) and although I still find the general layout and structure of older modules a little harder to parse than the modern classics of the OSR, I’d heard good things Ravenloft and figured it would be a fun way to while away an evening with some friends over dinner.

There’s a number of resources out there for running Ravenloft (and it’s modern incarnation, Curse of Strahd for 5E) in a single night and the elephant in the room is Strahd Must Die Tonight! On top of that, I had also read some posts outlining how to run the original adventure with a more OSR mindset and with a rules light system. Those are available here: ‘The Ultimate Strahd’: Part 1 and ‘The Ultimate Strahd’: Part 2. These all got the mental juices flowing and I decided to try my hand at it.

I ended up using Swords and Wizardry Complete Revised due to one of my players mentioning that they’d like to play a druid. My original plan was to use Knave 1E, a system I use for many of my D&D related one-shots, but I figured since the original adventure was for AD&D anyway that it couldn’t make my life too much harder to use S&W.

Fair warning – the session report does kind of drag on a little bit so feel free to skip to the end where I bring up the issues I faced running the module and discuss my takeaways. I’m still working on writing engaging reports (since I mostly write them as GM aides for myself, in a stream of consciousness style to get them out of the way, so they probably don’t read very well) so don’t feel any obligation to suffer through it.

Party

Paladin L6.

Magic Items –> +2 Intelligent Longsword (Int 9). Can disguise wielder’s face and general body size. Communicates telepathically.

Assassin L6.

Magic Items–>+1 Flaming Weapon (Longsword), Ring of Invisibility.

Druid L6.

Magic Items –> Wand of Magic Detection, Decanter of Endless Water.

Fortune Results

Where is the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind? Jack –> Crypt of Sergei Von Zarovich (K85)

Where is the Tome of Strahd? Ace –> Crypt of Strahd (K86)

Where is Strahd von Zarovich? 5 –> Treasure Room (K41)

Sunsword Hilt. King –> Kings Audience Hall (K25)

What is Strahd’s Goal? Jack –> Strahd wants to win the love of Ireena Kolyana

What fortunes befall the player characters? Diamond –> bonus to all attack rolls, penalty to AC

Session Report

In the Courtyard

• The session began with the party already having Ireena in tow and just having finished their fortune reading with Madam Eva.
• They approached the castle and, after I described the courtyard, the assassin made to climb the ramparts in order to access a tower on the southeast side of the keep that contained flickering lights.

On the Rooftops

• After he had climbed to the top, he tied himself to a gargoyle adorning the roof and sent down the other end of the rope for his party members to join him. I decided that since he made sure they were tied securely to another object on the roof that he wouldn’t have to roll to stay on, as the key indicates there is a chance of falling from the rooftop.

Castle Ravenloft, 3rd Floor

• From the roof they climbed into the bedchamber. This was actually a mistake on my part, as they should have ended up in the belfry. I ended up just rolling with it and swapping the rooms, which isn’t a great solution but it kept things moving instead of having to retcon the past 20 minutes, and the party didn’t explore this floor much so the inconsistency never made an impact.
• Here they met Gertrude and, after a long period where one player inspected her for fangs, fang bites or just general vampire-ness, they concluded she was naive but not a threat, and certainly not an impediment in their search for Strahd.
• She let slip that Strahd would sometimes disappear after entering the room, and the Paladin checked the fireplace, finding a loose brick and passage to Strahd’s hidden treasure room.
• Here the party found Strahd hunched over his treasure and admiring his ill-gotten goods and with the assassin invisible the rest of the party engaged him in conversation in order to find out who he was (the characters weren’t familiar enough with him to identify him from the back of his cape after all) and why he was just hanging out in a secret room.
• Strahd chewed up the scenery and offered the party riches to hand over Ireena. When they didn’t bite he offered them a head start. The assassin struck at him as soon as he exited the room but after Strahd screamed with anger, they fled following the others down the hall.

The Catacombs

• The party found themselves in a cobweb filled dead end, but saw a crack in the wall leading to a spiral staircase that they took down into the catacombs. From here the party ignored the general crypts, only actively exploring the major crypts to the north, east and south.
• The paladin was able to enter the tomb of Barov and Ravenovia but because none of the major items were to be found there the room ended up a featureless curio.
• They made their way to Sergei’s tomb and after another sequence where the paladin got to be the special, being the only one who could interact with the coffin due to being lawful good, they found a +2 suit of armor (valuable but immediately prompted questions from the paladin if taking it counted as grave robbing) and the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind.
• The party also found Strahd’s tomb and collected the Tome of Strahd, prompting me to read his backstory. By the book, each paragraph of the (presumably abridged) tome only has a 30% chance to be legible to the party but that seems like a very odd choice to me. It adds to the roguelike nature of the adventure sure, but to what end? Players will miss out on information that doesn’t even seem hugely helpful to me. However if you do as I did and simply read it you’ll realize it is far too much text to read in one sitting and can easily lead to players simply checking out while you read glorified boxed text to them. I think a better way of using this would be to split each paragraph into it’s own discoverable item and allow each to act as a spell scroll so that they felt more valuable.
• Following this they had a silly sequence where they triggered the teleportation trap in the alcove and split up temporarily, but after experimentation revealed that each room had two alcoves that allowed two-way travel between them it ended up feeling like a small speedbump in the pace of play.
• They traveled to the tunnel in the basement, discovering the trap diegetically (and disappointing the druid somewhat who had a spell specifically to detect pit traps) and got around it by triggering it first and then using coffin lids to jam the pit so they could pass through.
• In the brazier room they had to deal with the locked doors and the brazier puzzle and I probably gave the party too much time before the trap triggered. I wasn’t in a hurry to have them fight golems that were immune to all of their magic weapons (although looking back I could have simply ignored this resistance). After a while they made the connection between the precious stones and the brazier’s flame and were able to open a door, exiting out into Strahd’s observation balcony. This was one of the PCs searched the treasure chest (triggering the trap but making their save). They didn’t see anything inside due to the illusion but they stuck their hand in and felt objects, which they grabbed before running out with the rest of the party.
• Here they quickly determined that the throne present was not the one in the reading but did discover a back of platinum coins that didn’t really interest any of them (understandably since this was a one-shot and not a campaign, where that would have mattered).
• They did however take a closer look at their treasure and discovered they held a Deck of Many Things. The assassin pulled from it, levelling up from 6 to 8 but also gaining a 9HD enemy to chase them.
• Leading them back into the brazier room, they climbed the walls and (as I decided the warrior held a sword as their +4 weapon) found themselves at a standstill. After a back of forth of the defending PC trying to determine what they could do about the situation, I just gave up and decided to declare that they would win the ensuing fight. I don’t recall what exactly made me come to this conclusion – it may have been due to the golems activating in the room and the PC being out of harm’s way while the warrior was not but in all honestly the motivating factor for skipping the entire sequence was that I had no interest in running a 1v1 for a single party member while the other two players got on their phones and I felt that I had already let the pacing fall apart enough.

Castle Ravenloft, Basement

• From here the party was resolved to go handle Strahd for good, as the castle seemed to be full of traps that could kill them without Strahd having to lift a finger. They entered the Office of Vengeance and called out to Strahd to fight them, taunting him the story in his tome as an example of his weakness.
• I figured this would probably draw him out of hiding before the time limit I had originally set for the party (4 hours before the final attack), and he showed up while the shadow demon in the room came to life, providing the party with two enemies to fight.
• They activated the Holy Symbol, immobilizing Strahd for 7 turns, and I ruled that the light from the symbol was bright enough to illuminate the room such that the shadow demon was weakened as well. Here the party had a pretty anticlimactic fight as they cut down Strahd while he couldn’t take any actions at all. Following this, I read the optional ending text in hopes of giving the adventure a little bit of gravitas and we wrapped things up.

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Deck of Many Things

Cards Drawn:

Joker (XP reward chosen – 25,000)

Ace of Hearts (50,000 XP)

King of Spades (9HD Warrior with +4 weapon, shield and armor attacks)

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Rooms Discovered

Total # of Rooms Discovered: 19.

Issues

The Deck of Many Things slowed down play, and with only one character benefitting from it (as per my reading of its function in S&W) it wasn’t as chaotically interesting as it could have been. The conjured warrior was also more of a frustration than a meaningful battle since it led to one player being centered while the others simply didn’t engage and I wrote it off because it felt like it was dragging on despite feeling addressed to some degree.

The fortune reading is an interesting element of the adventure but my lack of preparedness really shot the pacing and ultimately it is a lot of reading text at the players and my opinion on boxed text isn’t positive in the best of times. Maybe if I had better sold the eerie or foreboding nature of the adventure it may have worked and it didn’t help that only one player actually tried to remember what any of the reading results actually were (and none of them took notes). Ultimately it was a cool idea that I think didn’t work for the folks I ran the game for and, because of that, it didn’t matter much beyond the party chasing a half-remembered lead for a little while in the catacombs.

The map. I don’t think isometric maps are objectively bad and I’ve read other adventures where they at least didn’t hurt but here I found that the small size of the map along with how dense it could be and how poorly communicated certain links between areas were to be incredibly frustrating. For example, K3 is simply absent in the map and I still don’t know exactly where it is and K6’s connection to K88 is never made explicit on either the map or in the text. One of my main issues with the map was the mention of a flickering light within a short round tower on the SE side of the keep in the boxed text of K1, since my party immediately decided to scale the walls and access the lit tower that I could not cross-reference at all. The key doesn’t note vertical connections despite Climb being a skill and I had to just figure it out from the map (which, again, didn’t really help matters).

Combat, especially against Strahd himself. Honestly I’m just not sure about this – I let the players create their characters at Level 6 because that split the difference in the recommended level range but in general they felt too strong for many of the individual encounters they came across. Granted they only really got into two fights so it may be that they simply lucked out on not triggering the fight against 4 red dragons (a fight I don’t understand how any PCs are intended to survive, even just long enough to flee). Strahd fell anticlimactically as the party had discovered the Holy Symbol and were able to keep him from moving, fighting or fleeing for 7 rounds – more than enough time to beat him to a pulp and then stake him while still burning in the sun’s light. Using a different system or starting off the PC’s at a lower level may be the better choice if I intend to run this again.

Exploration. I had effectively given up on rolling for random encounters even before running the adventure in hopes of speeding up play, but I can’t deny the knock-on effect this had. The party effectively explored with little risk for the entirety of the adventure. On top of this, when they reached the catacombs they were unenthused with the thought of exploring the different tombs present and only made to explore the main three tombs. They did discover the teleport trap but I don’t really understand the virtue of its inclusion – it can be immediately escaped and no keyed encounters exist in either of the two locations linked together. Unless the party has the misfortune of triggering the trap the turn the DM rolls an encounter, I don’t understand the point.

My own lack of preparation. More than anything else, I think this was the cause of most issues. I have mixed feelings about the adventure after running it but if I had done more prep, maybe rewritten the dungeon key in my own words as well as preparing my own GM-facing map, I may have avoided many of the issues I had. Of course, some issues were caused more by my goal of having the entire adventure occur in a single session, but I think I6 requires more reading than other classic adventures and I would definitely not call it low-prep. You can run it with little prep but you’ll feel the tension of trying to make sense of the map while reacting to the freedom it offers players in traversal. In a sense, I think some of the issues were magnified by how open the adventure is – the party has a number of ways to get around the castle and can climb around and discover secret paths that really test your understanding of the dungeon spatially. I don’t think the adventure really does enough to help a DM actually understand the map and I consider it inferior in that regard to modern adventures as well as some classic ones as well but considering the scope of the castle maybe that’s too harsh of an outlook.

Magic items. I gave each party member the choice of one magic weapon or piece of armor and one miscellaneous magic item. Most didn’t cause problems (and the wand of magic detection helped make some dangers feel more foreshadowed) but the assassin had a ring of invisibility and handling that was frustrating. The player’s strategy was to have their character wear it constantly and try to backstab Strahd or other creatures and it was difficult for me to figure out how to adjudicate that without nerfing it completely because it just caused any tension to fall apart. I understand that may not be the OSR way (and I should have just let the player do their thing with it) but it let to the spotlight being on them most of the time and I failed to really involve the other players as much as I had hoped.

Overall Thoughts

Overall I think I6 is in interesting adventure that’s definitely worth your time but definitely requires prep to shine.

Strahd coming off as sinister and dangerous ultimately is very table-dependent and if you’re running anything analogous to OD&D then you may want to use this for PCs slightly below the recommended level since otherwise they’ll probably have amassed a number of spells and items that enable them to circumvent or brute force their way through parts of the castle that would otherwise feel frightening.

You can definitely do the fortune reading as part of your prep and just read it to the players instead of doing it all at the table, and if you’re running it as part of your campaign you could probably get by with only allowing additional readings to impact the bonus/malus to hit and to AC. That seems to make more sense to me than letting new readings determine Strahd has different goals (although incorporating all of his goals and just dropping that reading altogether may be the best idea).

The readings on their own are interesting but due to this the castle has a bit of a modular design in that multiple areas support the placement of an important MacGuffin but if those areas aren’t chosen as part of the reading then they just feel like conspicuous empty space, so just deciding where everything will go and then minimizing the actual key because a lot of the castle exists as interstitial space might be a good decision.

The adventure also has a lot of boxed text and I would instead extract the important information from each and try to present it more organically. I think removing or aggressively abridging the story related boxed text would also be the way to go.

All in all it was a fun time but I ran into a whole host of issues, many of which entirely my fault, and I’d certainly recommend it but only if you’re willing to do more than a little prep and potentially excise some elements, such as the boxed text or overly large catacombs which slow down the pace of the adventure, or the randomly placed magical items which leave some areas feeling empty and devoid of meaning.