Lessons from the Mists: Session 34 - The Cellar

Welcome back to Lessons from the Mists! This week, the heroes investigate the cult headquarters underneath Wachterhouse. Let's get started!

The Recap

We begin this session with our heroes deciding that their next course of action should be to infiltrate the Wachterhouse before nightfall and rescue Yeska. They believe they can get the drop on anyone within if they strike before the cult’s meeting.

When they arrive, they find a door on the east side of the house leading into a cellar, which Ylenia deftly unlocks for everyone else. Descending the stairs, the heroes find a room at the bottom with a dirt floor and footprints leading across the dirt to a door on the opposite side. Unsure of what to do, Mary Sue Ann casts detect magic to find any magical traps. Sure enough, eleven necromantic magic signatures ping in her awareness underneath the dirt floor. Mary Sue Ann sends her familiar Guinevere (in the form of a spider) to scout the next room, and finds a room with beds set against the west and south walls, a dining table in the center of the room, and a small kitchen against the north wall where an elderly woman is currently cooking food.

Mary Sue Ann recognizes this woman. On an early visit to the church of St. Andral’s, Father Lucian stepped out of a confessional with a woman he called “Willemina”. This is that same woman. The heroes decide to charge headfirst into danger and step onto the dirt floor. The undead rise and its initiative!

Kane makes short work of these undead by using Turn Undead. Many of the creatures die and Angvar and Ylenia finish off the wights that remain. The heroes enter the cult’s living quarters, and Willemina is surprised to see new visitors. She tells them she was not expecting more, she believed “all the supplicants had already arrived.” She tells them she’ll see what she can do about feeding them, and Ylenia attempts to get more information about where this ritual that is happening tonight is taking place. Willemina gives her some vague directions, and she remains gullible to the heroes’ deceptions. However, when the conversations begin to make Willemina suspicious, Angvar punches her in the back of the head, knocking her unconscious. Afterwards, they loot some potions from the cultists’ belongings in the footlockers.

Mary Sue Ann searches the footlockers at the end of each of the cultist’s beds, and finds some minor treasures and potions. The heroes move on through the north door and find a room with no obvious exit and three coffins. Mary Sue Ann still detects necromantic magic in each of the coffins. The heroes discuss whether or not this is the vampire nest, but think that there must be many more than just these. They prepare to open and strike at whatever may be inside each of the coffins.

Ylenia, Angvar, and Kane each take a coffin of their own and Mary Sue Ann stands by the door, ready to blast whatever emerges with magic. They open the coffins and find within not the hauntingly beautiful vampires they have been used to, but horrid looking creatures of the night, more bestial. Nosferatu. Ylenia makes short work of the nosferatu within her coffin with Divine Smites, and Angvar stabs his with the blood spear. Kane casts spirit guardians and locks the nosferatu in its coffin, but it eventually breaks out. The nosferatu spew blood out of their mouths and cover all of the heroes within melee range, but with the gods on the side of the heroes, they make short work of these undead. Kane suffers a bite from one of the nosferatu.

Ylenia searches the room and finds a hidden keyhole in a wall, which she unlocks to open a secret door. The passageway beyond extends to the south, ending in another door. Mary Sue Ann sends Guinevere forward underneath the door and sees a ritual chamber being prepared - a half dozen cultists mill about the room, preparing for a ceremony, watched over by a cult leader and a vampire spawn. Several tables with ritualistic implements are set against the walls, and a ritual circle of necromantic magic has been drawn on the ground. The heroes prepare to enter…

And that’s where we left it!

So How Did the Session Go?

This session was shorter than usual, due to real life scheduling circumstances. Things went well this session! I wish we were able to complete the full dungeon underneath Wachterhouse this week, and I think we would have if we did not have a shorter session. Let me walk you through my prep for this dungeon.

My goal here was to lure the heroes into making enemies of Fiona Wachter to tie up the loose ends of Vallaki. Some of my players did not seem to like getting involved with the Vallakian politics, but my thinking is that if they let the villains continue their schemes, bad shit is going to happen to people they care about. Off screen, Ernst Larnak secures a sacrificial victim of the Wachter cult to tithe to Strahd. If the heroes do nothing, Yeska dies. They know when the ritual is taking place, and were invited to take part in it in the last session, which gives them great information they acted upon. If the heroes go before the ritual, they will be able to save Yeska and interrupt the cult’s plans.

Which is exactly what they did! Preparations for the sacrificial ritual are still underway. The cellar of Wacterhouse is a really small location that I don’t love, and so I expanded it into a five room dungeon.

If you don’t know what a five room dungeon is, here is a fantastic article on the subject at Roleplaying Tips. It essentially breaks down a dungeon into five core concepts to have a reliable story structure that in most cases can be completed in a single session of play. Broken down into the rooms, here’s the general structure:

1. Room 1 contains a guardian of some sort.
2. Room 2 contains a roleplaying encounter or puzzle.
3. Room 3 contains some kind of trick or setback.
4. Room 4 contains a climactic fight.
5. Room 5 contains your reward.

You can arrange these rooms however you want. It can be a linear dungeon or passageways might connect room 1 to room 4. The rooms don’t have to appear necessarily in that order, either. I’m not going to go into detail on the 5 room dungeon structure, you can read it at the link above if you want. Here’s what I did converting Wachterhouse’s cellar into a five room dungeon.

Room 1 as a guardian I kept mostly as is in the book. The undead rise up from the floor unless the passphrase “Let the dead remain at rest” is spoken aloud. My players completely forgot about the passphrase they were given by Fiona Wachter that all new cult members get (that was in the rolled up parchments they kept finding around Wachterhouse!), and so they had to fight the undead. Utilizing the undead statblocks found in Flee, Mortals! this encounter contained 5 ghouls, 4 skeletons, and 2 wights.

For room 2, I utilized Willemina, a woman who is the mother of Udo Lukovich, the man that Vargas Vallkovich was torturing in his home. She and her son joined the Wachter cult after she took over. I wanted some call back to an NPC at least one player would recognize and would have believably joined Wachter’s cult. She is a defenseless old woman, and can be deceived, but she would get suspicious if the players do anything she thinks cult members might not do, like looting the area. However, the heroes could also just knock her out, which is what Angvar did! Ylenia was able to keep Willemina occupied just long enough so that Angvar could prepare to remove this obstacle from their path.

Of the five rooms, I always have trouble thinking about what to do in room 3. Traps in D&D are often not very fun or exciting. This page has some great ideas on what to do with room 2 and 3 in a five room dungeon structure. An old standby here is a combat encounter to drain the heroes resources a bit. This encounter could have been avoided if the heroes found the secret door and then unlocked it successfully. Otherwise the vampires attack! I used three Nosferatu from Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, which have a really cool vampiric rendition of a breath weapon where they vomit blood in a cone that deals necrotic damage and reduces healing.

Room 4 should contain the “boss” of the five room dungeon. Some kind of climactic combat encounter where the heroes can face off against the main villain. This combat encounter contains 5 death cult acolytes, 1 death cultist, 2 human raiders, and a vampire spawn, all from Flee, Mortals! There are also some minor treasures here as well as an environmental feature: the ritual circle deals 1d6 necrotic damage to anyone that steps in it. However, if a hero attuned to a Dark Power (Mary Sue Ann and Angvar) touch it, they also get advantage on their next attack roll.

Room 5 is a prison that holds Yeska and another man the Wachters have captured to feed to the vampires at the next bloodletting, a criminal that was let loose when the Reformation Center burned down. A secret door leads from the prison to Room 1.

Now, we did not get to play through rooms 4 and 5 this session because of our time limitations, but I hope you can see how useful the five room dungeon structure is for a single session of play. When I am dreading prepping something that I think might be complex, I can go back to this structure if I believe this story beat can/should be completed in a single session. The “dungeon” here also doesn’t have to be an underground stone structure in a fantasy game. It can be anything, in any game! The five room dungeon structure is more about a story outline that gives some nice narrative beats that feel satisfying and come to a nice conclusion by the end of a single session.

Really happy with how this session went. Five room dungeons are great! Read those articles I linked above and find some 5 room dungeons, run them at your table and start making them! They are a fantastic tool in your GM toolbox and I highly recommend getting comfortable with them. Here’s the map I created using Dungeonscrawl for this five room dungeon.

Until next time!