Lessons from the Mists: Session 30 - Return to the Tower

Welcome back to Lessons from the Mists! This week, the heroes return to van Richten's tower to regroup with the two monster hunters, and yours truly made some big goofs. Let's get started!

The Recap

After finishing up at Fidatov manor, the heroes went back to van Richten’s tower. Upon arriving inside the tower, they interrupt van Richten berating Ezmerelda for her foolishness in attempting to infiltrate Castle Ravenloft on her own, without any preparation. Van Richten stops and greets the heroes, asking what they learned.

The heroes fill him in on everything they did, but one part stands out as suspicious to him: the fact that Strahd offered them a deal to bring van Richten in. Ylenia declares that Strahd does not seem to see them as enemies, not yet. They have been noncommittal in their allegiances in order to pull the rug out from under him. She suggests that van Richten can act as bait for them to kill Strahd, but he adamantly declines. Too much risk involved in that, and he would need much more preparation to even attempt something like that. Van Richten is still suspicious of them, but Ezmerelda proclaims that they rescued her, they can be trusted.

Van Richten shares what he has been up to in the meantime: He reveals his alliance with the Keepers of the Feather and the fact that he went himself to Berez to scout it out. He discovered Baba Lysaga leads a coven of witches within the swamp, and ritually bathes in blood every night, but is unsure where she gets the blood for such practices. She also keeps a dragon’s skull outside of her hut. The swamps are very dangerous, filled with vicious wildlife and the witches. He also has heard through the Keepers of the Feather that Vallaki has come under the control of Fiona Wachter, an outward supporter of Strahd. Vallaki has turned into a den of vampire spawn. “Bloodlettings” have replaced the Baron’s old festivals, where vampire spawn publicly drink the blood of the populace.

And one other note: in his search for further information about the Amber Temple, he has heard from the Keepers of the Feather that the leader of the dusk elves, Kasimir Velikov, is interested in the Amber Temple. Why? No one knows.

Van Richten says that if Strahd has his and Ezmerelda’s trail, it is unsafe to remain in any one place for long, and especially not together. He suggests they assist the heroes in traveling to Berez and clearing Argynvostholt, but only one of them can accompany the party to each.

Next, led by Mary Sue Ann, the heroes open the Tome of Strahd and delve into its history once more. They see a vision where Strahd receives his brother to the court at Ravenloft. Sergei, a youthful, beautiful man resplendent in the robes of a supplicant of the Morninglord, embraces his older brother. Strahd proclaims to all the Barovian nobles that he is glad to finally have his family here, and they should celebrate. The heroes are transported to a vision of a melee exhibition in the castle courtyards. Sergei challenges Strahd to a duel, and they fight. A prolonged and fierce affair, Strahd is the victor. The crowd erupts in applause and while Strahd is exhausted, Sergei has barely broken a sweat. The heroes are returned to the present, but quickly dive into the next vision.

When the heroes arrive in this vision, they are seated at a lavishly filled dinner table, with six guests: Rahadin, Sergei, a priest of the Morninglord named Ilona, a dusk elf named Patrina, and a woman that is the spitting image of Ylenia: Tatyana. Though the guests are perfectly polite, the dinner is awkward and the guests verbally jab at one another. Strahd remarks on Sergei’s youthful foolishness. Patrina attempts to win Strahd’s affection from Tatyana back to herself. Sergei is oblivious of all the awkward tension. Tatyana feels out of place among the nobility, being a commoner. Eventually, the dinner comes to a close, and while Sergei offers to take her back home, Strahd insists she remains in the castle.

What follows is a series of vignettes from Strahd and Tatyana’s time together. They walk together in the gardens, and she refers to him as “Elder.” They sing together in a music hall, but when Sergei arrives, she jumps up and embraces him. Sergei and Tatyana dance together at a ball, and Strahd looks on in furious jealousy. He closes the chapter by writing that he hated Sergei’s youth, beauty, and liveliness.

The heroes return to Barovia proper and make a plan for their journey ahead: continue to search the depths of history for the truth on the vampire, then travel to Vallaki.

So How Did the Session Go?

This is one of the worst sessions I felt like I’ve run in my GMing career. I think I could have changed a lot about how this session worked, so let’s talk about it.

The primary thing that messed with this session was my errors in prepping. I had some vague ideas of what the heroes wanted to do - return to van Richten’s tower, go meet the Mad Mage, and go check out Berez and Vallaki. So here’s what I ended up prepping.

Long before I started this campaign, I found this clip from Critical Fayle’s Strahdcast on the Mad Mage. After the heroes pacified him, he was a pitiful shell of a man, stripped of memories and volition. Of course, the Mad Mage is also Mordenkainen. I loved this idea to show just how powerful Strahd is, to bring Mordenkainen of all people to his knees. So I went back and watched this video and the full podcast episode surrounding this event and just ripped all of Trevor’s excellent improvised dialogue as a script to use for when they might meet the Mad Mage. Before that, however, the heroes have to get through to the Mad Mage. So I prepared the brutal fight against the Mad Mage, and taking inspiration from the Negotiation system from Draw Steel, set up a meter of the Mad Mage’s interest. Heroes can make a Charisma check to attempt to get through to the man inside of the madness. His interest is rated from 0-5. For every successful check (which I will decide the DC of the check and whether it has advantage/disadvantage based on the hero’s roleplay), his interest increases by 1, and for every fail, his interest decreases by 1. At 5, the Mad Mage stands down. I wanted an alternative way to speak to him without using a high level spell that the heroes may not have access to, because as written, the only way to pacify his madness is with greater restoration. I also think that the idea of just casting greater restoration on him cures his madness and he realizes he is Mordenkainen is a silly idea. I’d much rather see the heroes attempt to talk their way past the paranoia and insanity to see the hollow man behind it.

There is one issue with the Mad Mage that the Strahdcast fixed and I have yet to figure out. That is, they give him a McGuffin that the heroes need to progress their story in some meaningful way. These heroes pursued the Mad Mage to get that McGuffin. However, in the module and in my game currently, there is no such solid reason for the heroes to meet the Mad Mage. He’s just sort of there. The heroes in my game still want to meet him, and I wrote that he allows them to take one randomly generated treasure from his Magnificent Mansion, but I think I could do better before they meet him for real.

The other aspect of my prep is van Richten’s reconnaissance since the heroes last met him. He and Ez were at the tower, he berates her for being so foolish, then is suspicious of the heroes when he hears that Strahd is making deals with them. If he is convinced they can still remain allies, he tells them about what he learned when he was scouting out Berez, then some other tidbits of information regarding current events in Vallaki. I decided that I wanted the heroes to roll for his checks, with different information given at the thresholds of DCs of 10, 15, 20, and 25. The heroes rolled poorly, so I rounded up their results if they were close to the DC: For example, I gave them the DC 10 information on a result of 8, and the 15 information on a result of 14, but no further than that. I gave them the topics of information, then they rolled, and decided where they wanted to place each of their die rolls.

That means a fair bit of my information was not used this session. No worries, I now know more about Berez when they arrive. Then van Richten and Ezmerelda volunteer to accompany them to Berez and Argynvostholt, but in order to keep away from Strahd’s spies, they will not stay in the same place. I gave the players a choice of who they want to accompany where.

So that was my prep. I expected they would return to the tower, speak to Ez and van Richten, get information, then go meet, fight, and then talk to the Mad Mage.

What actually happened was that they went to the tower, spoke to Ez and van Richten, got information and discussed a plan, then decided they would not immediately go to the Mad Mage, and instead used the Tome of Strahd to learn more about Strahd’s history.

I entirely forgot that the party wanted to spend more time with the Tome of Strahd. Weeks ago, I prepped the next two chapters of the Tome but did not review them while preparing for this session. I had to frantically make sure I knew what was going on in each chapter before or during the session, and as such, I thought my running of these chapters  was piss poor.

It wasn’t just my lack of preparation, though that was a large part of why another aspect of these two chapters didn’t work. Both of them were basically just cutscenes - predetermined events that the party watched rather than being directly involved in. In the dinner scene in the Tatyana chapter, there was an opportunity for interaction, but my poor understanding of the NPCs and the party being unsure of what they could learn and from who made that entire interaction, meant to be a foil to the dinner with Strahd that the heroes had already attended, fall completely flat. Lack of prep + cutscene was not a good combination.

I could also tell my players could tell I was unprepared, and so I felt an awkwardness during this entire session. Outside of the game, one of my players was feeling ill this session, and I was running 3 TTRPG games a week for a short time so my prep time is limited for each (making all of them worse unfortunately) so that did not help either.

At the end the heroes decided on what they wanted their journey to look like going forward, and told me they wanted to look further into the Tome of Strahd. I ended up cutting the session short an hour and a half early. I truly had done no prep on further chapters, and I wanted these next chapters to really sing because of how much I dropped the ball on these previous ones. I also got a better idea of the party’s next order of operations and which plot threads they wanted to pursue.

So, how could I do this again and make it better?

First of all, being familiar with the chapters, obviously. But they were both cutscenes in the way that I ran them so what can I change? In the “Brothers in Arms” chapter, the heroes could compete in this miniature tourney and I could set up a list of NPC statblocks that they could fight. The heroes would fight them not to the death, but a point value. Every hit being 1 point? Maybe every 10 points of damage is an additional point? Once a contestant has reached five points, they lose the bout.

With the Tatyana chapter, I only had a list of NPCs and their motivations. On one hand, I think there were too many NPCs in this scene to keep track of. Getting rid of Patrina, Rahadin, and Ilona so it would only be Strahd, Tatyana, and Sergei would have focused this scene a lot more. My idea for how the Tome of Strahd works is very influenced by how the visions of the Spiritual Realm work in the Stormlight Archive books by Brandon Sanderson. Essentially, a character appears to those in the vision of the past as someone that should belong, maybe a character referred to by these other visions by name. To the heroes, however, they appear as normal.

In this regard, I think Strahd, Sergei, and Tatyana could refer to the heroes as some of these characters that were written in this chapter. I expected the heroes to lead the conversation, but they wanted to keep their mouths shut lest they cause some disturbance in the vision. That left me having to improvise dialogue among too many characters I didn’t know that well. Reducing the number of characters present in this, then writing out their dialogue and questions to the heroes so they could respond to something would address some of these problems.

One side note: I really wish I began organizing this campaign with Obsidian when I started. It’s a fantastic note taking app, and everything is interlinked within that program. I have been using Google Docs for the most part, and the problem with docs is that it's not interconnected. Because I am taking inspirations from so many sources online whether it be community creations for CoS, old Ravenloft lore, the official module, or original ideas, some things are contradictory or repeated among my notes. Which means my players have a hard time keeping track of some details because I have several iterations of the same plot in my notes with different details. I think Obsidian is a fantastic tool for keeping track of purely homebrew adventures not set for publishing, but since at this point in my GMing career I enjoy running prewritten modules and making my own for publishing, the linear structure provided in standard word processing programs will work just fine for me going forward.

That’s it - a pretty poor session but almost all entirely due to me not being prepared and confident in my own improv skills. An important thing to remember for GMs of all skill levels and any number of hours behind the screen is that you will have bad sessions every now and again. There’s nothing you can do about the fact that you will have bad sessions. Sometimes the circumstances that led to that bad session are under your control, other times they are entirely outside of your control. All you can do is learn from it, move on, and make your next session sing. Most of the time, your players will not notice. Sometimes they will, but they also are likely your friends who you are building a story centered around. They’ll give you some grace!

Give yourself some grace, too. We’re all human.

Until next time!