Lessons from the Mist: Session 41 - Mount Ghakis

Welcome back to Lessons from the Mists! This week, the heroes make a brief stop in Vallaki before collecting Pidlwick and Kasimir. Then, they ascend Mount Ghakis and begin to plunge into the Amber Temple. Let's get started!

The Recap

We began this session at the top of the gleaming silver beacon of Argynvostholt. Ez asks the heroes what their next plans are, and Mary Sue Ann and Ylenia tell her that they plan to return to Vallaki first, then go to the Amber Temple. They believe there are some answers within that will allow them to kill Strahd.

Ez tells them that she will go back to the Wizard of Wines and check on the Martikovs, and if they need to contact her, do it through the Keepers of the Feather. They travel together back to the Raven River Crossroads, then part ways.

After the heroes arrive at Vallaki, their first order of business is to check in with Edelia and Jeny Greenteeth. They go to the herbalist’s shack, and the old crone lets them in. Ylenia leads this conversation, and asks how they are doing. Jeny tells them that Edelia is resting. They both are still recovering from the wounds that Baba Lysaga gave them. Mary Sue Ann tells the crone that they will be heading for the Amber Temple soon, and Jeny tells them to be very careful. She is aware of the Order of Guardians, which imprisoned the Dark Powers long ago. They are tricky, terrifying, eldritch entities. She warns them to be careful.

Ylenia also asks if she has another sister, and Jeny tells her that their third sister travels with the Vistani, and they haven’t seen her in quite a while. The heroes suspect they now have met all three of the Ladies Three in their current guises. They take their leave of Jeny Greenteeth and speak to Blinsky, who they left the frame of Pidlwick II with the last time they were in Vallaki. He is excited to show them that he has improved the clockwork jester and made an improvement: the construct can now speak! He speaks with the tinny voice of a clown, loud and obnoxious. Mary Sue Ann hates this new development. Nevertheless, the heroes collect Pidlwick and go shopping for their trek up to Mount Ghakis.

With their shopping done, Mary Sue Ann suggests they find and speak to Kasimir Velikov, who can serve as their guide to the Amber Temple. He is ready to leave as soon as they find him, but Mary Sue Ann warns him of the dangers they might face, including gods that might whisper in his ear to do terrible things. He tells them he is prepared and understands the dangers. Mary Sue Ann suspects that he may have a Dark Power whispering in his mind too.

The heroes leave Vallaki and climb Mount Ghakis. The journey takes them 4 days to reach the Tsolenka Pass. Mary Sue Ann sends Guinevere to scout ahead, and she finds some structures including a gatehouse with demonic statues atop it, a guard tower behind, and a stone bridge with a rider in black atop Beaucephalus. Mary Sue Ann approaches the gate house, whose portcullis opens at her approach and casts detect magic. A curtain of green flame radiating evocation magic blocks further advancement up the road, and she detects transmutation magic coming from the statues above the gatehouse. She tells the others the statues may not be statues after all. Angvar throws a grappling hook over the top of the gatehouse which Ylenia begins to climb to avoid the green flame.

When she reaches the top, the statues animate and attack! It’s initiative! The first vrock grapples Ylenia and flies her out above the cliffside. Ylenia throws a rope down to her allies so she can be hoisted up if she falls, which Angvar grabs and prevents the vrock from flying any further. When the vrock drops her, Mary Sue Ann casts feather fall on her and stops her from falling so far down. Kasimir Velikov blasts one vrock with a cone of cold as well.

Angvar engages the second vrock in melee after hoisting Ylenia up over the cliffside and Kane calls upon Kelemvor’s sacred flames to burn the demons. In a few rounds, the heroes destroy the vrocks and make their way over the gatehouse, avoiding the green flame.

As they approach the stone bridge, a bloodied giant mountain goat charges down the side of the mountain to try to gore the heroes, all of whom dodge out of the way. Mary Sue Ann blasts it with a fire bolt and the giant goat runs away. Approaching the stone bridge, the rider in black doffs their hood to reveal Strahd von Zarovich. He tells them to turn back, but Mary Sue Ann detects some strangeness about the way he speaks. She sends Guinevere into the form of Strahd, which dissipates like black smoke: the illusion dispelled.

Two days later, the heroes reach the end of the snowy road and find the edifice of the Amber Temple built into the side of the mountain itself. They also find a fissure to the west of the entrance, a narrow path between the rocks that leads to a chamber with firelight and gruff human voices beyond. Mary Sue Ann sends Guinevere inside, and sees six humans clad in animal furs in a room with amber doors and sleeping mats on the ground. Kane casts tongues on Ylenia and the heroes agree to send her inside to speak to these humans. She meets Helwa, the leader of this group of mountain folk who tells her that they are taking shelter in this area. Ylenia says they are looking for secrets to kill Strahd here, but Helwa warns her that dangers and spirits lie within the temple. Helwa, against her better judgment, likes Ylenia and says that if they need shelter, they can find it here. Ylenia lets it slip that she is a paladin of the Morninglord, and the mountain folk are suspicious and terrified of sorcery. Helwa tells her that if she or her friends want to use this place, dark magic has no place among them.

Ylenia returns to the group and relays all this information to them. They plunge into the main entrance of the temple. Immediately, the darkness is oppressive. No magical light sources work within this area, and Angvar’s darkvision is limited. They go east, find a room with a hole in the ground, then descend down the stairs of the main temple. A beam of fire shoots from the head of a statue, briefly illuminated by the flame, at the far end of the room. Angvar blocks it with his shield, and a voice rings out, warning them to come no further. Mary Sue Ann speaks up and says they are looking for secrets to defeat Strahd, and the voice tells them to approach the statue and meet the speaker in the head via a secret staircase at the statue’s base.

When the heroes arrive in the statue’s head, they find an elderly wizard with a pair of pink glasses in gold frames in a homely abode. He sits on a plush chair and drinks tea, introducing himself as Heinrich Stolt. He says he was a member of the Order of Guardians before it fell. It is up to him to defend this temple and prevent its secrets from falling into the wrong hands. Mary Sue Ann leads the conversation, eventually half convincing him that they need to gather knowledge in this place that will lead to Strahd’s downfall. They seek to imprison or destroy Vampyr once more. This peaks Heinrich’s interest, who tells them he will not assist them, and he will be watching them closely, but he will allow them to pass further into the temple. If they are truly here to seek knowledge that will destroy the devil and they succeed, he will have no issue. But if they plunder the terrible secrets or die by the temple guardian’s hands, they will no longer be his problem.

The heroes descend from the statue and begin looking in some of the other rooms, finding a haunted, looted treasury. Angvar finds a pair of locked doors behind the statue and bashes them down with a portable ram, finding beyond an intact treasury, guarded by an amber golem, which activates. At that same time, screaming sounds behind them and a pack of nothics come charging down a hallway to meet the heroes.

And that’s where we left it!

So How Did the Session Go?

Pretty decent, I think! Some hiccups here and there, but overall a solid B tier session.

So I knew the heroes wanted to go and meet their friends back in Vallaki, and as we near the end of this campaign, I think it's fair to drop the very obvious hints about the true identities of the Ladies Three. The players now are sure that Edelia, Jeny Greenteeth, and Madam Eva are the Ladies Three, but the crones will not say it aloud.

My players have a love/hate relationship with Pidlwick II, and I knew that when Blinksy repaired him, he would reach new levels of ridiculousness with being able to talk. This went over really well with the players, I think. Almost all of the NPCs voices I am not sure of until they open their mouths, and this one was particularly fun to do because he basically talks like a loud mouthed clown.

Tsolenka Pass was sort of a waste of time, in my opinion. I don’t think this area offers much to the campaign as an interlude up to the Amber Temple. There are no big story revelations here, no interesting loot, the fight with the vrock is uninteresting because the heroes don’t have to preserve resources given how much further it is to the Amber Temple (I am using 1hex=1mile, which expands Barovia significantly). There are certainly ways to change this, like making the illusory guardian one of his brides (which my players thought it was!) or telegraphing the encounter with Sangzor by meeting some mountain folk before arriving at Tsolenka Pass. Nevertheless, I think I am going to cut out the roc encounter (which I was planning on using as the heroes descend from the Amber Temple) and just go to the next story beats: restoring the Fanes of Barovia.

I rewrote a couple things in the Amber Temple’s NPCs, the primary one being that Neferon (the arcanaloth who lairs in the statue’s head) is an old member of the Order of Guardians whose best friend was Exethanter. He left before the Order of Guardians fell, and when he returned, his friend was a lich. They did battle, and in that battle he shattered Exethanter’s mind. Not able to bring himself to kill his friend but needing to keep guard over the temple, he swore himself to be the sole guardian of this place. It was interesting to roleplay him because his primary drive now is to ensure the Dark Powers do not escape. As the players roleplayed with him, they said the exact right thing to allow them to pass: They want to seal Vampyr away once more. They rolled low on a check to persuade him, so while he would not help them, he would not impede them either. They will either die (no longer his problem), they will become corrupted (where he’ll attempt to kill them), or they will succeed (and he gets what he wants). It seemed fair enough to him, so he told them he’d watch their progress.

I told my players that we’d play through the Amber Temple and Castle Ravenloft as a significantly different sort of game. I’ve gotten more and more interested in the “dungeon crawling” rules of previous D&D editions, and Mystic Arts made a really interesting homebrew ruleset to put this time pressure back into 5E.

Time is measured in 10 minute increments, called “stretches.” Random encounters can be called for at the end of however many stretches you decide (I decided 30 minutes for the Amber Temple). Several activities take 10 minutes to perform. This process of slowing down play significantly puts a lot more time pressure on the PCs to make best use of their resources and abilities, because it also makes it so they must think about resting significantly more.

I think I could have done a little better describing rooms as they came up, because I recommended mapping this dungeon out with graph paper. Two out of my four players engaged with it, and I could have given them some more guidance regarding map scale because this is a new way of playing for them. I was worried that some of my players were not having fun with this dungeon crawling ruleset. The way I learned how to engage with D&D as a game and the genre of stories it can tell was significantly impacted by Critical Role. I like big set piece battles, heroic stories, tactical combat, and a disregard for the minutiae of realism in favor of abstraction; all reasons why I gel with Draw Steel. However, the way that D&D dungeon crawls used to be played was a terrifying slow trek through unknown dungeons, mapping out areas and counting resources. These things are not tedious, they are where the game is. Of course we can argue about how well 5E accomplishes that sort of gameplay, but that’s besides the point. I wanted to try that sort of gameplay.

I think some of my players also think the dungeon crawl is tedious, but it requires a mind set shift, and you must engage with the game in a new way. In the same way that you shift gears when going from narrative roleplaying to combat, you also must shift gears when going from combat to dungeon exploration. I think it’s a fascinating way of playing, and I want to get better at it. I highly recommend checking out Mystic Arts’ rules as well as this video by Questing Beast on how dungeon crawling procedures are handled in Old School Essentials.

Until next time!