Lessons from the Mists: Session 2 - Into the Mists

Welcome back to Lessons from the Mists! This week, our heroes battle the wolves that ambushed them in the Misty Forest, meet some mysterious travelers, and wake up in a wood they do not recognize…

We begin, and it’s initiative! The heroes fight 1 dire wolf and 3 wolves. Mary Sue Ann avoids a dangerous blow but later, the dire wolf takes down Angvar with a bite that dealt maximum damage before Kane revived him with his Grave Cleric feature.

Two hunters arrive from the forest, and join the heroes in attacking the wolves. They do not seem to be as skilled adventurers as the heroes, though. The dire wolf dies at the hands of the heroes, and the rest of the wolves flee.

The hunters introduce themselves as Ephraim and Marik. Marik does the majority of the talking, and invites the party to their camp to be safer, but the party is quite wary of these “bandits”. They declined the offer, and the Vistani returned to their camp after giving directions to theirs in case the party changed their mind.

The heroes discuss at length whether or not to follow Ephraim and Marik back to their camp to determine if they are the bandits Morwen sent them to the forest to drive out. They decided to scout it out under cover of night and found colorful barrel topped wagons, horses in bangles and tassels, and loud, boisterous revelry. They also see that this group of travelers was made up of men, women, and children - old and young alike. Not warriors, but families.

They retreat, and debate further on how they would proceed, and decide that if this group was to come and find their camp again to rob them, they would be ready. Oonagh camouflaged Angvar and Kane, then she and Mary Sue Ann hid in the trees. There, they wait out the night.

But the bandits never came to rob them. Hours of waiting and the mists growing thicker make them all tired, and slowly they all drift off to sleep, unable to keep their eyes open any longer.

As they awaken, they are somewhere else entirely. A new forest, no evidence of comings and goings of humans or wagons. Not an ordinary robbery. They also notice that most of their gear is gone. I asked my players to erase everything in their character sheets’ inventory but two items and a trinket.

The party began searching the nearby area. It is obvious this was not the work of thieves but something supernatural. The woods are quiet of animal noises and sound travels far. Oonagh suggests they pick a direction and just start walking, which they do. They eventually come across a road they begin to follow.

As they are walking, they notice a stark wall of mist is keeping pace with them, swallowing up the road behind them. They follow the road to a huge stone buttress with an open, rusting iron gate beckoning them forward. Above the gates are a crest depicting a raven with outstretched wings before a castle on a pillar of stone. Besides the gates are two huge stone statues of warriors, their heads removed and in the nearby grass. They begin to debate whether to go forward. Mary Sue Ann wants to continue - suggesting that where there is civilization, there might be answers. Angvar goes backwards to investigate the mists.

Angvar plunges into the wall of mist, and it becomes so thick he could not see. The ground gives way to stone, and he receives a point of exhaustion for exploring the strange fog. He walks for an hour, and sees something large, dark, and ominous in the fog. He does not turn around, and slowly the ground gives way again to mud and he begins to see trees, and ends up right where he started. To the rest of the party, he had not been gone 15 minutes.

Angvar is shaken by the experience, and agrees to continue. Through the gates they go, and eventually came to a cul-de-sac containing a dilapidated townhouse. They hear the crying of a child and follow the noise to meet a pair of children, Rosavalda and Thornboldt Durst. Mary Sue Ann’s motherly nature comes out as she leads the conversations with the children, discovering their parents are down in the basement dealing with a monster, and they are worried about their baby brother, Walter, who the children say is still in the house.

Into the house the heroes go. They ignore all of the first floor and make a beeline to the third floor. Angvar did not trust the suits of armor on the second floor landing and decided to stay there. The rest continue up, and open a door to the nursemaid’s suite. At that point, the animated armor on the third floor comes to life, and chucks Oonagh off of the landing down to the bottom of the stairs. Afterwards, it returns to its post, as no one else is on the landing.

Mary Sue Ann dashes into the nursemaid’s suite, while Angvar and Kane wail on the animated armor. Working together, they throw it down the stairs where it shatters on the ground floor. Meanwhile, Mary Sue Ann discovers the ghost of Margaret, the Durst’s nursemaid. Mary Sue Ann asks Margaret about where Walter is, and the ghost of Margaret told her he is in the crib, but he is sleeping, then she disappears. Mary Sue Ann finds the crib, unravels the blanket, but finds nothing.

The heroes explore the rest of the house, and find no other threats. Oonagh discovers an old dog in the conservatory with a tag on it that reads, “Lancelot”. Angvar decides they should try to find the children’s room, and when he turns to leave, the door remains shut to him. When he throws his full dwarven might into the door, it would not budge, and he hears a ringing sound, like the flipping of a coin in his head. He tells the rest of the heroes he believes they are trapped.

They return to the nursemaid’s suite and find Margaret there again, and she reveals that the children love having a secret bedroom and showed them the secret door up to the attic, but shortly thereafter remembers her death, bloodstains appearing on her ethereal dress, horrified and screaming, “What did she do to me?” Then, the ghost vanishes.

Climbing up the stairs, the heroes search the attic. Oonagh discovers the body of Margaret in a trunk covered with a sheet. Finally, they discover the children’s bedroom. When they enter, they discover the bodies of Rose and Thorn, and the ghosts of the children reappear to tell them a fuller story of what they remember, about how they were left up here until they starved, then all went cold and they fell asleep, never to wake up again.

Rose shows the party the secret doors throughout the house and how to get into the basement to take care of the monster. The heroes still don’t know where Walter or the parents are, but believe that the monster is Walter. Seeing where the rest of the secret doors lead, the heroes search the house for supplies and access the hidden room in the library, where an old dead adventurer lies. Finally, they descend down to the basement where they hear the distant wailing of a baby.

So, firstly, the fight in the woods. Ephraim and Marik (the Vistani!) were basically useless, but I think that made the heroes feel better about them being the ones to kill the wolves. They did not trust the two hunters at all. Fine by me! They were right to be suspicious, but I did want to throw them for a loop by introducing two friendly Vistani when they had heard they were robbers.

Getting to Barovia went great, I liked pulling the rug out from beneath my players when they waited to set a trap for the Vistani, but the heroes fell into the trap of Barovia instead! Angvar seeing the strange entities in the mists also properly freaked them out.

Kane used Eyes of Grave on the children when they first encountered them, and I said that they did not register as undead. This was basically a lie on my part in order to get the heroes to trust the children, but as I look back on it, I think the explanation that the first Rose and Thorn the heroes encounter are ILLUSIONS projected by the house makes better sense to explain this.

The animated armor fight felt awful. I did not draw a battlemap and ran the fight in the theater of the mind, which I don’t think feels great for my table. I usually like to prepare my initiative trackers ahead of time and I completely forgot about that fight during my prep, so I had to grind the session to a halt while I prepared that. Also, Mary Sue Ann was searching the nursemaid’s suite while Oonagh stayed out of the fight, so it was left up to Angvar to attack the armor (which he had a hard time with given the AC is 18) and Kane’s Sacred Flame which worked only once. It was at this point that I fudged some rolls to be a fail on a sacred flame. I did not roll for damage when they had the idea to push the armor down the stairs as I thought that was a clever solution to prevent the fight from dragging on too much.

How would I fix this? Firstly, get the initiative prepped and have everyone play in proper combat rules, at the very least to get their heads in the space of combat so they would engage. Given that only half the party was fighting this creature with high AC, it would have been a long, grueling fight instead of something that could be over very shortly with more attack rolls going towards the armor. I also really liked a mechanic I saw in a Pathfinder podcast where a construct’s high AC is reduced when they receive a critical hit. The animated armor does not have high HP or saving throws, but an AC of 18 for a 2nd level party is way too high. Giving them an opportunity to reduce the AC on a successful attack roll will allow them to snowball their progress. Could it happen multiple times? Maybe! Is that too powerful? Also maybe! Try it out at your table and see what works. Still, I think the main problem with the slog was only having two players involved in the combat.

I also dragged the session out way too long. We went an hour over schedule, which the players assured me was not a problem, but I could tell they were burning out and so was I. I desperately wanted them to find some of the cool loot (I played it slightly easy on them and had Rose point out the secret room in the Library that Mary Sue Ann missed earlier) and to meet the ghosts to leave on a good ending note for the session. However, they did not really have a gauge on how much progress they were making given because I was doing all my descriptions theater of the mind, which leads me onto the thing I think would have made this session a whole lot better:

THE PROBLEM WITH THEATER OF THE MIND IN A DUNGEON CRAWL. Prior to the beginning of this campaign, I asked my players if they were interested in playing in a VTT but still at the same table. That way we could have a lot of cool combat automation, dynamic lighting in dungeon crawls, sharing illustrations, all while still seeing each other in person and not dealing with the tech issues of video calls, but they said it wasn’t their thing. That’s just fine by me, but I am not experienced with doing dungeon crawl descriptions and my players are not experienced mapping out the dungeon on a piece of graph paper. One of the other things I really dislike playing 100% analogue is grinding the pacing to a halt when combat begins to get initiative set up and to draw a map for the battle. The way I’ve fixed the initiative problem is to get a really good automated Excel sheet to track hit points and order, pre roll my monsters’ initiatives so all I need is the players information, and prep the stat blocks ahead of time. I did not crack the problem of revealing a map as the players explored UNTIL I saw Matt Colville do it in the Chain of Acheron stream when the party was exploring Ringwell. In that stream, he had a GM map for himself, then a player map that he was drawing out on graph paper as they explored. When the party entered a new room, he could draw it out on their map, but leave everything they haven’t explored off the player’s copy. That way, you could have the experience that dynamic lighting gives you in a VTT of “discovering” the dungeon and seeing where you’ve already been without relying on very specific descriptions about room dimensions and locations of doors.

I think that would have worked really well if I didn’t forget my graph paper. Instead, my players were left with my vague descriptions of the layout. They had a good idea of what each room contained, but didn’t really understand each one’s location in relation to the others. We’ll try the graph paper dungeon crawl method next week with the exploration of Death House’s basement and see how it works.

On a more general note, something that is vitally important to Curse of Strahd, and really any horror TTRPG, is setting the correct tone. I found some great horror playlists on Spotify that I was playing throughout the session, and I made liberal use of James RPG Art’s Curse of Strahd illustrations in this session and will be doing so for the rest of the campaign to visually show my players what the world is like, and using the horror ambience to let them hear what the mood is.

For Next Session

Next session I hope the PC’s will finish off Death House’s basement. There is a secret that myself and one of my players have been cooking up that I think we’ll get to next session. Prep the encounters ahead of time, bring some graph paper, and I think we’ll be all set for a really fun dungeon crawl in the final part of Death House!

Until next time!