Lessons from the Mists: Session 27 - Fidatov Manor

Welcome back to Lessons from the Mists! This session, the heroes face an impossible question, and enter a ball where all is not as it seems… Let’s get started!

The Recap

The heroes are taken by Strahd’s carriage, driven by Rahadin, back to the Werewolf Den. The heroes are joined by Ezmerelda d’Avenir and Emil Toranescu, both voluntarily released by Strahd as a gesture of good faith. Ezmerelda wakes from her enchantment, having lost much of the time she was trapped in Castle Ravenloft. Angvar tries to get a sense of how long Ezmerelda has been a captive of Strahd, but her memories are fragmented. It seems she was there for close to a week.

The heroes mention that they are taking Emil back to his mate, Zuleika, at the Werewolf Den. Ez is aghast that they allied with the werewolves, calling them monsters. She believes they should all be eradicated. Ylenia insists that she keep a more open mind, but Ez is not convinced.

When they arrive, Emil and Zuleika are reunited. Zuleika tells the heroes that they fulfilled their part of the arrangement, and will release the captive children. However, Emil disagrees. He tells them that he should rip them apart where they stand, as they killed most of his pack and now take away the future generation. Angvar steps up and intimidates Emil into standing down, and tells him if he hears that the werewolves are capturing children in the wilderness again, he will hunt Emil and Zuleika down. Emil scoffs and lets the children go.

The whispering voice of Shaelan-Thel sounds in Mary Sue Ann’s head, telling her that one of the children is “unclean.” Mary Sue Ann speaks to the child, a 10 year old boy named Kellen. She asks if he was injured, and what they did to him. He tells her he was a victim of one of Kiril’s brutal combats to the death, and was bitten by a werewolf as a reward for his ferocity. He pleads with her to not give him back to the werewolves. The heroes discuss at length what to do with the child. Mary Sue Ann puts a few options in front of them: 

1. Bring Kellen with the other children and put anyone around him at risk of death or being cursed.
2. Bring Kellen to be cured by the Abbot, who might ask for Kellen’s body parts in return.
3. Kill Kellen.
4. Give Kellen back to the werewolves.

Ez votes to kill Kellen, believing him to be a monster. No hero wants to give Kellen to the Abbot to be cured, and they think it is too risky to bring Kellen with the other children. Each of the heroes are torn, but Mary Sue Ann is finally the one to make the decision to send Kellen back to the werewolves, even though he is terrified. Shaelan-Thel tells Mary Sue Ann she did well, and awards her by adding Arcane Eye to her spell list. 

With that, the heroes escort the other children back to Krezk to be temporarily housed until they return from the Fidatov Manor, hopefully with food stores for Krezk. The Krezkites that were given leadership of Krezk tell the heroes they cannot support these extra mouths to feed without refilling their food stores, and the heroes tell them they are working on it. They travel to the nearby Fidatov Manor while Ez stays in Krezk.

Night has fallen by the time the heroes arrive at a manor isolated in the Balinok Mountains. They discuss how to approach the ball, and decide to tell the truth about Ylenia being the burgomaster of Barovia’s daughter. Ylenia knocks on the door and the head servant Taltos, a short, rotund man with a distrust for the heroes, greets them. After a brief negotiation where Ylenia tells Taltos that Lady Fidatov is expecting her, he lets them in and announces them to the ball. He takes all of their weapons, all while Angvar verbally snipes at him.

While Mary Sue Ann and Angvar move off to investigate other parts of the house, Ylenia and Kane stay in the ball, dancing and gathering information on the guests. Ylenia ends up speaking to a noblewoman named Viora Novoy, a tall middle aged woman with greying hair that fills her in on the gossip surrounding the guests of the ball. A scion of the Siroky family, Divan Siroky, is attempting to marry Marilena and very interested in her family’s treasury, and steals small trinkets from her manor whenever he is in the ball. Iva Vesely, a friend of Marilena’s since they were girls, is also present. Ylenia also learns that there was an engagement between Dmitri Krezkov and Marilena that she broke off recently, and as Viora speaks, Ylenia begins to suspect that everything in this party is displaced in time by a decade or more.

Marilena eventually enters the ball and speaks to Ylenia about why she is there. Ylenia lies about the reason for her attendance, saying that she has been sent by her father to meet and learn from other noble families in Barovia. Marilena sees through her ruse, and asks to speak with her in private. Marilena tells her she knows Ylenia is lying, and to tell her the truth. Ylenia tells Marilena she believes there is some spell upon her and this party, and they are stuck in a time loop, living out the same day over and over again. Marilena tells her she thinks Ylenia has had a long day of travel and invites her to stay the night, and they will discuss further in the morning. In the meantime, enjoy the party.

Meanwhile, Angvar and Mary Sue Ann exit the mansion and explore the gardens, and plunge into the complex hedge maze. They spend about half an hour within the maze, unable to get to the center, and emerge from the entrance. As they exit, they hear a blood curdling scream from the mansion.

After a few more minutes of mingling in the ball room, Ylenia and Kane hear a glass crash to the floor. Lady Marilena Fidatov is swaying on her feet, and Taltos helps her to a private room and shuts the door. After a moment, a blood curdling scream cuts through the harpsichord music in the ballroom. Taltos stumbles out of the room and says that Marilena has been poisoned! Guests begin to retch, coughing up blood and choking on their wine. Servants rush out the doors, and the entire mansion rapidly ages before the heroes’ eyes. A scene of horror and decay is all that remains by the time Angvar and Mary Sue Ann re enter the ball room. Determined to solve the mystery of the Fidatov manor, the heroes explore the decrepit mansion.

They enter the library, retrieve their weapons, and then explore the dining room and kitchen. The dining room has nothing of note. In the kitchen, however, Angvar finds a discolored bottle hidden among the kitchen shelves that has the initials “D.K.” scratched into the bottom of the bottle. Mary Sue Ann believes this was poison that Dmitri Krezkov snuck into the party.

Angvar finds another door leading from the ballroom locked, and bashes it down. It leads to Marilena’s private study, where old banking and tax records lie strewn across a desk. Inside the desk is Marilena’s journal, which details her breaking off the engagement with Dmitri Krezkov, and her family’s treasury being located in the crypt, hidden in the hedge maze. The crypt is locked by two crests of Valetian Fidatov, one of the best locksmiths in her lineage.

Moving on, the heroes enter an art gallery with a wide variety of portraits of Fidatov ancestors, landscape paintings, gilded mirrors, and crests. Kane finds a portrait of Valetian Fidatov and he wears his crest as a lapel pin in the portrait. He also discovers an empty space on the wall that should hold a crest of Valetian Fidatov. In the reflection of one of the gilded mirrors, however, he sees the crest hanging on the wall. He reaches his hand towards the mirror reflection. His reflection smiles back at him, and pulls him through the glass as the mirror shatters.

And that’s where we left it!

So How Did the Session Go?

This session went really well, but while some sessions seemed to just run themselves, smooth as butter, this one required a lot of finesse and focus on my side of the screen to make sure things kept moving at all times, so let’s talk about it.

First off, I wanted to illustrate Ez’s character by not trusting Emil and Zuleika and insisting they should be killed. Because the heroes are the protagonists of the story, I did not want her to make a stupid decision that would cause the heroes to hate her, but the heroes are starting to understand that she (and van Richten) are complex people with very strong opinions, and cannot be blindly followed.

The question of what to do with the werewolf child has got to be one of my favorite moments in the campaign for a few reasons. I think it showed the brutality and horror of Barovia, and forced the heroes to make an impossible choice. I am so glad Mary Sue Ann really took the reins on making the final decision. The player was considering taking Arcane Eye in her most recent level up, so I had a perfect reward for Shaelan-Thel to give her for taking drastic action. Shaelan-Thel probably would have given her something more if Mary Sue Ann had made the decision to kill the child, which I did not have prepared and I would have had to make up on the spot. I also think there was also a certain discomfort for the players, not the characters, having to deal with this dilemma, which I will speak to them about at the top of next session. I need to see if this was something they were okay with having in the story.

Fidatov Manor is a custom adventure made by MandyMod that you can find detailed in her Reddit post here. It combines elements of some Adventure League modules. The idea is that the ghost of Marilena Fidatov is vengeful against Dmitri Krezkov for poisoning her, asked for more time, and a Dark Power answered and locked her, all the guests of the party, and anyone who might come to her party into a time loop where they are forced to live through that day over and over again. This has been going on for roughly 15 years. When the poisoning occurs every night, the mansion is twisted into a scene of horror, decaying to the present day.

I recently watched this video by Corkboards and Curiosities on session pacing, and those lessons were at the front of my mind throughout this whole session. I felt like every scene in this session could have gone long and gotten boring for the players, so it required me to always have my hand on the throttle, moving on from scenes just as they started to flag. I don’t think I did it perfectly, some of the conversations in the party got long and I could have done better. I spent long stretches as the party guests roleplaying with Kane and Ylenia while Angvar and Mary Sue Ann searched the manor, which got comparatively little time. After talking to Mary Sue Ann’s player after the session, however, she said it felt fine to her because she had the spotlight for a long time at the start of the session with the werewolves. Actively paying attention to the tempo of a scene and trying to determine if my players ever got bored is a really valuable skill I feel I am just now consciously trying to get better at, and I think getting a good sense of what your players find fun and are bored by in any given scene is a fantastic skill for running any any RPG.

I wish I did a little bit more work on each of the party guests. I created five guests and one servant outside of the major NPCs Marilena and Taltos for the heroes to interact with. When the heroes entered the party, I described each of the guests. My inspiration was this video by Mystic Arts, where Dadi describes the technique of highlighting things in a scene that the characters can interact with. I sensed however that the heroes wanted the NPCs to approach them, which I did by using Viora, who was the only NPC the players spent any significant time interacting with. Divan and Kane had a short conversation, which I don’t think I was able to roleplay well, because I did not know Divan (or any of the guests) that intimately. Viora was easy to roleplay because she was basically just informing Ylenia about the guests of the party. Each NPC only got a sentence or two of personality, but if I spent a little more time on them, AND gave them each a unique piece of information they could give the heroes if they interacted with that guest specifically, that would have been better. On the topic of passive heroes, that may just be something that I outright tell my players “this is what I am doing, this is the response I expect”. Not in a sense of railroading, but I don’t feel like we communicated effectively on what was expected from either of us. Like I wrote above, I had to keep a careful eye on boredom and flagging attention, so in this case the shallow NPCs were not an issue, because I moved on from the opportunities to mingle to the action of the horrific poisoning fairly quickly.

If I were to run Fidatov Manor again I would:

1. Telegraph to my players more clearly that I expect them to lead the conversations and pry for information.
2. Give each party guest a more solid personality and unique piece of information the heroes can gain only if they talk to each guest.
3. Provide opportunities for the heroes to learn things if they go out of the ballroom and start snooping around.

And the heroes are only about halfway through solving the mystery of the poisoning. We’ll see what they do next week.

Until next time!