Lessons from the Mists: Session 38 - The Creeping Hut

Welcome back to Lessons from the Mists! This week, the heroes continue to explore Berez and meet the ghost of the old burgomaster and fight Baba Lysaga's creeping hut. Let's get started!

The Recap

We begin this session with rolling initiative for the fight against the witches at the southern cottages! As the heroes come out of hiding to support Ylenia, Mary Sue Ann casts haste on Ylenia who twirls around the battlefield, dealing death. One of the witches summons a cloud of shadows upon Kane and Mary Sue Ann, but they reposition so they are no longer blinded. Van Richten climbs atop the ruins of a nearby cottage and shoots the enemies from above. One of the witches places a hex on Angvar that forces him to the ground and does not allow him to get up for the entire fight.

The marsh hydra is in the center of the melee, grappling and poisoning the heroes. Kane gets the killing blow on it with a sacred flame and destroys it. When the battle is over, the heroes search the bodies and Mary Sue Ann finds a couple of valuable spell scrolls on the witches.

With so much commotion at the southern cottages, Baba Lysaga comes to investigate, but the heroes move on to the burgomaster’s mansion. It is almost nightfall when they arrive at the old husk on a small rise overlooking the rest of the village. Mary Sue Ann, due to her research into Barovian history, is reminded of two names that she has come across regarding the leadership of Berez at its fall: the burgomaster’s name was Lazlo Ulrich, and a priest in town was named Brother Grigor. Next to the house is an overgrown garden that is spilling over with weeds. As the heroes investigate the mansion, they see around a corner a blue-green glow. Ylenia uses Divine Sense which reveals an undead presence nearby. She peers around the corner stealthily and sees a ghost of a rotund man with long mustaches. The apparition’s entrails hang out of a wound in his belly.

She moves forward and makes her presence known, and the ghost tells her to leave, cringing away. Then he sees her, and calls her “Marina” and asks for her forgiveness. She asks him what happened here. The ghost apologizes profusely, saying that he and Brother Grigor only sought to “save her soul” and “it was the only way.” He begins to weep after looking at the ruins of the village, saying “It was all my fault. They all died because of me.”

Ylenia grasps the ghost’s incorporeal hand and tells him she forgives him. He asks her if she truly means it, and she affirms her forgiveness. Lazlo Ulrich kisses her hand, and says “thank you, daughter” and fades away. The heroes investigate the house and Mary Sue Ann finds some spell scribing components in a sealed chest and Kane finds some potions of greater healing. They push on to Baba Lysaga’s hut.

In the middle of a clearing of huge trees, the size of redwoods, the heroes find a ramshackle hut built atop the stump of a great tree whose roots extend out from it like spider legs. Outside, they find scores of ravens trapped in cages that hang from the eaves of the hut. Mary Sue Ann casts detect magic and walks around the hut, scanning for magic. She finds six magical signatures: a few spell scrolls, an illusion spell, an object inscribed with transmutation magic, and a magical presence she is unable to define. She sends Guinevere inside to investigate and finds the spell scrolls are locked in a cabinet. The illusion magic is coming from a crib with the Zarovich crest on it and a baby within, who looks at the bird with wide eyes. The transmutation aura is coming from an object underneath the floorboards, and the unknown magical presence comes from a nude elderly woman who is tied to the ceiling. She is covered in lacerations that slowly drip blood into a huge wrought iron tub.

At that moment, the hut begins to move. The huge roots of the stump the hut is built upon retract like legs and the entire structure pulls itself up out of the marsh. It’s initiative!

The hut opens the fight by sending out these huge sinuous roots from its underside and grappling Angvar, Ingrid, and Kane. Angvar and Kane attempt to hack at the roots and Mary Sue Ann begins to blast it with magic. The hut opens the earth, ripping open a huge chasm on the battlefield which Ylenia and van Richten fall into.

While van Richten is struggling to get out, Angvar and Ingrid are pulled into the hut’s maws - a huge mouth of splinters that lies on the stumps underside like the beak of a squid. Ylenia, hasted, springs up the side of the stump and into the hut itself. She searches the area frantically and attempts to tear up the floorboards. She sees in a knot of roots underneath the hut is a pinecone shaped glowing green gemstone: one of the Martikov’s gems.

Angvar drops his crowbar out of the hut’s maws and continues to struggle inside. Kane uses blight on the root that is grabbing him and it withers and dies around him. He sprints for the crowbar and tosses it inside to Ylenia. The hut grabs Ylenia with another root and throws her around the interior. She manages to grab the crowbar and wrench the gemstone free, after which the hut seizes up, and collapses into the marsh.

The heroes gather themselves before entering the hut. This was one of their most harrowing battles yet. Inside, the illusion of the baby is wailing, which Mary Sue Ann dispels as she searches for the spell scrolls. Ylenia goes inside and frees the nude crone, who collapses, unconscious. Van Richten and Kane heal Ingrid. Angvar pops open the cages of the ravens, who fly out excitedly. Four remain, and one of them transforms into Urwin Martikov. He thanks them once more, and says his family is deeply in the heroes’ debt. Angvar asks him what happened, and Urwin tells him that when they were flying south back to the Wizard of Wines, Baba Lysaga deployed some horrid constructs that captured them. He says they must go, but before they do, Ylenia brings the gem forward and offers it to them. He is astonished, and gives it to Danika (still in raven form) to carry. The Martikovs fly away, towards the Wizard of Wines.

Ylenia goes back to the old crone, Edelia. Her eyes flutter open and she grabs Ylenia’s clothing bringing her close and whispering “He is the Land.” The heroes begin to interrogate her, who she is, what she knows. She seems unaware of her sister’s name, of her own name. Mary Sue Ann detects some outright lies from her and what she might know about why she was captured. Above the table, the players wonder if Edelia is one of the Ladies Three, given her strange wounds that can’t be healed and her aura of indescribable magic. Van Richten questions Angvar if it is wise to bring her along, and he is adamant that they should protect her. Van Richten grunts noncommittally, and stalks off. The heroes make their way next to the churchyard while Baba Lysaga investigates other points of interest.

And that’s where we left it!

So How Did the Session Go?

This session went really well! I was well prepared, no longer under the weather, I was feeling good and energized during these encounters. 

So, let’s talk about the encounters first. For the southern cottages, I deployed a marsh hydra from FM! supported by seven witches, one of which was removed from the start of combat because of Ylenia’s actions at the end of last session. I was trying to find some statblocks that I could use that would signal that these were agile witches with strange magic, but could not find anything that I liked. However, I remembered I could of course reskin some creatures with abilities that I thought would be really flavorful, but I just needed to change some minor traits. So I looked at the encounter budget I had and began searching for monsters with fresh eyes, and came across two goblin statblocks in FM! - the assassin and the cursespitter.

The assassin deals some extra damage and applies bleeding when they have advantage on a hit, and can summon shadows that disappear when they are hit without any need for a concentration check, so that ability isn’t too strong. The cursespitters place hexes on the heroes so they are locked down. The marsh hydra is a high CR brute that can withstand a bunch of damage and attack multiple people, grapple them, poison them. In FM! there are a lot of different “monster bands” and each of them has a unique trait that has to do with their ancestry. For example, the goblins do not provoke opportunity attacks when moving. I really liked the goblin statblocks for the witches, and all I needed to do was remove the goblin trait and replace it with the human trait, which essentially allows each combatant to get advantage on attack rolls 3/day. With the expected lifespan of a D&D monster, it just means that these humans are really reliable to hit with on their attacks before they die after like three rounds.

This encounter went really well, I think all the players were thinking and acting really tactically. Angvar was locked down this entire fight but that required him to get really creative with his movement, positioning, and which targets he was prioritizing.

The burgomaster’s mansion was a really interesting location because its sort of a throwaway roleplaying encounter in the book. But I found this reddit thread about the character absolutely fascinating. Lazlo Ulrich is sort of a terrible person, and I stole the history of him trying to marry Marina, his adopted daughter. A large part of his motivation to kill Marina, an innocent girl, is to prevent Strahd from having her out of jealousy. If he can’t have her, no one can. And it doomed all of his people. However, I also think Marina was the closest Strahd got to turning the woman who bears Tatyana’s soul into a vampire. So in a way, he actually did save her soul by resetting the cycle and not allowing Strahd to get what he wants.

While I had all this in mind, he was pleading to be forgiven for a couple reasons. Forgiveness from Marina (or in this case, Ylenia) would release him from his torment. He is a selfish man that is just trying to get out of this hell. I wanted to provide an interesting moral question: This guy is terrible, did some terrible things, and has been eternally punished for his actions. Has he rotted in hell enough?

Of course, its a little difficult to get the context surrounding him. If they asked more questions, they could have pieced more of his and Marina’s past together. But that is not the only way to get this information - Ylenia could get some more backstory about Marina and Berez after visiting her monument. It just came down to which location the heroes visited first. If they visit the monument before the burgomaster’s mansion, they would have more context. Choices should matter in a TTRPG!

Ylenia ended up putting his soul at rest. I am really interested to see what her reaction to Marina and Lazlo Ulrich’s history is going to be once she gets a better picture of what was going on between them.

Now, the hut fight. Taking the lesson I learned when designing the encounter at the southern cottages to proxy monster statblocks, I was looking for a big solo creature that was more interesting than the big bag of hit points that is in the book. I wanted something that was big, lumbering, could grapple, could swallow heroes, and challenge a party of 9th level as a solo. I warned my players ahead of time that to fight Baba Lysaga at her hut is a death sentence. They thought she would have access to her lair actions there (surprise! She has them anywhere in Berez!), but in reality they are two solo creatures. As I was looking for statblocks, I did find the FM! version of a purple worm, a Kingfissure Worm. It had basically all I wanted, but was a little bit higher level than the heroes. No worries, I kept the alternate win condition of this scenario where a hero inside the hut could pry out the gemstone animating it and destroy it.

I played this statblock basically as written. It was a tough fight and required the heroes to pull out all the stops and think really tactically and creatively. I loved the gambit that Kane, Angvar, and Ylenia had to pull and work together to get a crowbar to Ylenia in order to get advantage on the strength check to pry out the gem. That was amazing to watch. Van Richten was essentially out of the fight once he was pulled into a rift in the ground, which is just one of the Kingfissure Worm’s villain actions.

The one thing I wish I did when I proxy’d these monster statblocks is made a copy of each and rename abilities and terms within the statblock so that I didn’t out myself that I was using something else. I dropped the ball on that and referred to the witches as “goblins” and the roots that the hut had as “tongues.” It didn’t matter that much, but I would have liked to maintain that sort of illusion throughout the fights.

The spell scrolls that the heroes were awarded throughout this session were all spells coming from various articles of MCDM’s 5E magazine ARCADIA which has a lot of really cool additional rules. I highly recommend checking that out.

After the hut is destroyed, as per my point crawl rules, Baba Lysaga’s movement is now random for which POI she will visit next. One of my players commented that “it's really funny that she doesn’t immediately come to her hut after it's destroyed.” This is one of those moments where I had to listen to what the player WASN’T saying. I could tell he thought that was a dumb design decision. And you know what? He’s right! He was offering feedback that he was unhappy with this part of the design which is entirely valid and I think it was bad design. My thinking is that she would “enrage” after her hut is destroyed which made her a lot more unpredictable. What that is going to mean in practice is that when the heroes want to confront her, they will have a really hard time chasing her down. What I probably should have done is have her actively hunt the heroes down and chase them after the hut is destroyed. How would I institute that? I’m not sure! But I think I will make that change before the beginning of the next session.

I had a really good time listening to the players theorize about Edelia and Jeny Greenteeth being two of the Ladies Three. They are right! They just don’t know it yet. They could not figure out who the third is, which I am really excited to reveal is Madam Eva at some point in the future.

That’s it! Really good session with fun encounters. The GM lessons this week were learning how to proxy monsters while keeping the illusion up, and reading your players’ feedback even when they aren’t spelling it out for you.

Until next time!