Lessons from the Mists: Session 8 - The Vallaki Shopping Extravaganza!

Welcome back to Lessons from the Mists! This session, the heroes explore the town of Vallaki, and learn that all is very much not well in this "safe" town. Let's get started!

The heroes enter the town of Vallaki and quickly make their way to the inn to find lodging for the night. When they reach the town square, they are surprised to see some malefactors in the stocks with donkey heads. Angvar pulls a man grabbing water from the nearby fountain aside to ask what they did, and the man replies “malicious unhappiness.” He explains despair is not tolerated in the town with a smile. 

The heroes enter the inn and meet Danika and Urwin, the owners of the Blue Water Inn. They grab a cheap, large room for the night even though Danika insists that she can make a deal for folks traveling with children like they are. Mary Sue Ann would rather everyone stay safe and close together. They eat and make a plan for tomorrow - to go grab some toys for the children from Blinsky, then do more shopping for travel supplies and finally go meet the Vistani outside of town to attempt to give them the children to take care of. Danika also lets them know that there is another guest staying at the Blue Water Inn, another traveler from the mists called Rictavio, a carnival ringmaster.

After a long rest in which Kane was plagued with nightmares due to his dream pastry withdrawals, they set out to explore the town. Their first stop is Blinsky’s toys, where they meet the odd toymaker Gadof Blinsky and his monkey Piccolo. The heroes buy toys for each of the children they are protecting in addition to one more for Arabelle. His toys are morbidly cute, and Ylenia asks him where he gets his ideas from, and he simply replies, “They come to me in my dreams!” While searching the shop, Mary Sue Ann discovers that a toy he is currently working on looks exactly like Angvar. Ylenia swipes it off his desk and they move on. Angvar is not sure what to make of the toy, wondering why he appears in Blinsky’s dreams. Kane suggests it might be like the vision of his own dead body he saw on the road, but they can all see that the doll is of Angvar.

They move on to the general store, the Dusklight Supply Shop and gather supplies from the strangely smiling Leena Telinova, then to the smith called Thraegar’s Armaments where they meet an old grizzled man named Piersym Rowley. Angvar asks him to look at the mechanism where his stump wrist affixes to his shield, and when Piersym looks up at Angvar, he asks “Thraegar? Is that you?” Angvar assures him he is not Thraegar, but asks why he called him that. Piersym explains he looks just like his master, a dwarf traveler from the mists who disappeared 40 years ago when he left for Kresk. Piersym was his apprentice, and carried on his trade and named the shop after his master. The heroes sell some armor and negotiate for the use of the forge to silver their weapons, then leave the smith.

The heroes confront Angvar about why he is known in this town, and he explains the timeline about when his brother went missing after being sold by his commander to an unknown extraplanar force. He killed his commander when he found him again, but the fight cost him his hand. That is all he knows, he is learning new information about his brother at the same time they all are. 

They press on to the apothecary, Third Eye Potions and Sundries where they meet Anya Trevali, a Vistana potion maker. They buy potions from her, and Ylenia asks her if it is difficult living in the walls of Vallaki as a Vistana. Anya says she does not suffer fools, but she gets by. Their need for her expertise outweighs their prejudice. Ylenia asks if she knows Arrigal, and that they have children that need a better home. They are suspicious of the orphanage which has had children go missing recently. Anya says they might be able to help but cannot guarantee anything. It is better to ask Luvash for help as he is the leader, not Arrigal.

While Anya doesn’t have any incense or holy water, she directs the heroes to St. Andral’s church for the holy water and Jeny Greenteeth for the incense. They first visit Jeny Greenteeth, an old crone who trades herbs from her vine shrouded cottage. In a word, she seems crazy, and Mary Sue Ann buys her incense and leaves quickly, off to the church. Mary Sue Ann asks the priest, Father Lucian, about purchasing holy water but he says he only has two vials, and they’re at a steep upcharge. She asks why this is the case, and he quietly tells her that he is unable to make any more. The church has lost its consecration because the bones of Saint Andral which conveys its holy protections have gone missing. He tells the rest of the heroes and says that he would be deeply in their debt if they were to solve this mystery, but to be discreet. Only he and Yeska, an altar boy, know about the missing bones. If this information were to get out, it would cause a panic. Ylenia assures him they will do what they can.

The heroes trek through the woods south of town to find the Vistani camp. Arriving, they notice that the vibes about the camp are more somber than they usually expect with the Vistani. A woman fetches Arrigal for them to speak to, and when he arrives they present him with his niece Arabelle’s birthday gift. He solemnly says that Arabelle has gone missing. Most of the Vistani camp is out in the woods looking for her. Mary Sue Ann asks if the girl is allowed in the woods by herself, and Arrigal says she is fiercely independent. Angvar asks if the woods are safe, and Arrigal responds adamantly that they are. A hunting party returns including Vistani and Dusk Elves, and the heroes are introduced to Luvash, the leader of the Vistani camp and Arabelle’s father. Mary Sue Ann asks Luvash if someone in their camp is able to accept custody of the Barovian children they had rescued from the hags at the windmill. She tells him that she heard children have gone missing from the orphanage in Vallaki and thinks it is not safe. Luvash says they are spread thin, and he cannot accept any more children that could go missing. Rescue Arabelle though, he says, and he will consider accepting these children. Arrigal suggests that they search Vallaki and the northern parts of the woods, where the Vistani are not allowed. Luvash likes this plan, and Ylenia swears that they will find Arabelle. The heroes trudge back to Vallaki as the sun sets.

When they return to the inn, they meet a flamboyant half-elf storyteller, the other guest of the Blue Water Inn, Rictavio. He tells them outrageous stories about all the wonders he has seen in his travels. The heroes ask him where he’s from, and he says it is a realm much like Barovia called Darkon. Angvar tells him about the fortunes they received from Madam Eva to see if he knows anything about them, being as well traveled as he is, and Rictavio tells them about an old manor that was the home of an order of knights called the Order of the Silver Dragon. The manor is called Argynvostholt and is located south of Vallaki among the foothills of Mount Ghakis. That is all the information he has, and retires for the night. Exhausted and left with more questions than answers, the heroes sleep for the night, keeping watch over their rescued children, their first relatively safe rest since arriving in Barovia.

It’s funny, however much you think you can make an adventure easier to run and more streamlined for the players, they will always find ways of making it more complicated. :P

As usual, I am primarily using MandyMod’s Fleshing Out Curse of Strahd series to add new content and streamline the extraneous storylines. Her fantastic additions include new shops which was the primary focus of the party’s explorations this session, which allowed me WAY more time to prep the central conflict of Vallaki (Wachter vs Vallakovich), which they DIDN’T EVEN LOOK INTO. They said so at the end of the session: “We didn’t even look into the Baron!”

Ultimately, this was a shopping episode. What’s funniest to me is that the additions to Vallaki assume that players will pick up a plot thread and unravel it before moving onto another mystery. That didn’t happen for my party. Instead, they ran around town collecting all the big yellow exclamation marks of quest hooks without following through on any of them. My party accidentally stumbled their way into making Vallaki as complicated and overwhelming as the official adventure makes it without changes.

And you know what? That’s just fine. I told them at the top of the session that the linear sections of the campaign are over. With their arrival in Vallaki, they are now driving the car of this campaign. They tell me where they want to go, and I will make it happen. So if that means they are overwhelmed with the amount of plot threads they picked up on the first day of arriving in Vallaki, so be it.

I have no idea in what order they will tackle the various plots that are going on in Vallaki, but the great thing about having the entire town prepared ahead of time is that it doesn’t matter the order. Curse of Strahd is the first proper sandbox campaign I’ve run, my previous campaigns have been pretty linear, with clear objectives for the party about what to do next. The only advice I can offer for running something like a sandbox campaign is just to have everything ready ahead of time. It’s a lot, I know, but it does give a very real sense of verisimilitude when there are several different things going on simultaneously that they can stumble upon and then solve in any order they want without friction. Even though Vallaki is a relatively small town compared to some massive cities in other D&D campaign settings, this is teaching me a lot about how to run an urban sandbox adventure. I have mostly used sprawling cities as resource hubs to check in with NPCs and gather supplies before heading out into the wilderness for another linear adventure, which I felt was pretty weak but I had no other example about how to do it. Vallaki is probably the most labor intensive example I’ve seen of how to run a sandbox city adventure, but it’s an example.

My players were extraordinarily entertained by Jeny Greenteeth. She was a character I put no thought ahead of time into roleplaying, and so in the moment I defaulted to the loud mouthed old crone Valerie (Miracle Max’s Wife) from the Princess Bride, which seemed to work wonders. Angvar’s player immediately assumed she was a hag (spoilers: kind of) and she was not to be trusted, but her strangeness had him and all the other players laughing their asses off, so the threat was dispelled.

Blinsky was a delight to roleplay, especially how proud he was of his twisted toys. My players missed the hook into Izek Strazni (who, SPOILERS: is the reincarnation of Angvar’s long lost twin brother) by not asking Blinsky about the Angvar doll, instead just stealing it. This will DEFINITELY have repercussions, and my main two ideas are: They are hunted down and arrested for stealing after Blinsky reports them OR they find Blinsky’s shop half destroyed when they return to it because Izek came to check on his work, and the doll went missing. I’ll wait to see what my party does and what will be a more dramatic reveal, but I don’t think Blinsky is quite put together to report newcomers to the town guard even if they stick out from the normal Vallakian populace. Rather, I think Blinsky is scatterbrained enough to believe he misplaced it himself, and couldn’t find it.

I had rewritten Thimdul’s Armaments from Fleshing Out Curse of Strahd to be Thraegar’s Armaments to hook Angvar into going there, which worked like a charm. The only hiccup I ran into was that Angvar’s player said that Thraegar was never a smith. Whoopsie. I knew that Angvar had proficiency in smith’s tools and assumed it was something he and his brother picked up in their soldiering days, but it’s a small plot hole that can be easily fixed.

The heroes have a lot of mystery solving to do, and all the while still need to find a home for the children. I think the kids need to put the pressure on the heroes a little bit more because adventuring is dangerous work. They can’t just go around with rescued children and a dog wherever they please!

For Next Session

I’m not sure where my players are going next session! I’ll have all the major adventure sites prepared, and so they can smoothly interact with the town in whichever order they choose.

Until next time!