Thoughts about the end of Curse of Strahd

That is, the end of the mass of text I have produced, not about the various endings of the campaign, which I might talk about after I have posted the ending.

So I finished the Curse of Strahd with Iron & Gold, and in the end, I wrote over 100,000 words, which is more than I’ve ever written for a novel. (My novel attempts end in the 20K-30K mark.) Part of the reason is that this had a structure, even if it was largely a peripatetic one. At that, I skipped chunks of the campaign I didn't care about: I never ended up getting involved with the hags, and never saw the werewolf den, never dealt with Izek or the mad mage.

Is it great fiction? No, of course not. It’s a journal of a role-playing campaign. Different forms.

So partly I was thinking, Could I turn it into a novel, even if I never intended to publish it? (If I wanted to publish it, I’d have to change a lot of D&D-isms to avoid Hasbro’s wrath.) Could it be a kind of practice in that way?

Maybe. I mean, I have been going back and fixing what my friend Jim has called infelicitous phrases, and adding character reactions before I post. (When playing, I gloss over them, but before I post it, I go, oh, hey, shouldn’t you see how they respond to that? I mean, I know how they respond, but I should indicate it in the text.)

And there are things I like about it — I like the Tsolenka Pass, especially the sequence on the roof; I like the fact that Ireena has been around the land a bit, even if she hasn't been to Krezk yet (necessary because of the trap that is the pool). I like giving Ninefingers the agency of being the guy who knows about trapped structures.

But structurally, it would need changes. Here’s what I think I’d have to do, at first blush and in no particular order.

• Largest, what’s the point? Yes, it’s an adventure but about what? There are a couple of hints as to things that might be important to the characters, but they either don’t get followed up or show up full-bore without foreshadowing. I’d want to play up the possible Felewin-Ireena romance. That would probably add an extra layer for Strahd to come in, jealous. Uthrilir’s cursed relic is spoken of, even in the very beginning, but it doesn’t have much of an effect. Adding a scene where someone other than the snow maidens tries to take it, and Uthrilir becomes a dervish of madness. There are also hints of a deeper feeling between Hrelgi and Uthrilir, and I’d want to create scenes that would reflect that.
• Heck, the big four need arcs of some kind. Ezmerelda, who exists largely to be fill-in for skills the PCs don't have, would need to be a realer character.
• It’s kind of peripatetic, a series of adventures and not until the second half does it seem to have a single focus (looking back on it).
• If I decided on a point, I’d probably have to change how they get to Barovia (or whatever I’d call it). Walking through the mists is the easiest way but it also has the least effect on the rest of the story. (Of the hooks, faking an invitation from Kolyan is probably the most directly connected to the characters, but that didn’t fit with where I had left the characters in a previous adventure.)
• “Death House” is a fine adventure, but how does it reflect whatever I decide the point is? I was groping toward a change in the Felewin-Ninefingers relationship, and I could emphasize that (and Ninefingers’ comments during Death House get brought back during the Amber Temple and in Ravenloft. Also, there are some monsters that show up in Death House and nowhere else — I’d want to think whether some of those should be eliminated or brought back later on. It’s also a sixth of the adventure; is that the right amount? I feel like it’s too much if it’s not connected to everything else. If the story were about, say, overcoming Strahd, then it should be connected to Strahd, rather than being an example of evil acts uncondoned by the main baddie. (Such things can exist, of course, but do we want them to be the first sixth of the book?)
• The section with Doru and Father Donavitch seems a little free-floating, but it does introduce us to Strahd, so I think that’s okay. Maybe play up the business of “Do we kill Doru or don’t we?” a bit more. In fact, I skim over an awful lot of stuff in the first part for all that it feels slow in retrospect. I ended up using some of it with the returns to Vallaki and Barovia, but not everything. There are things hinted at that make no sense if you don’t know the campaign. What happened to the maidservant in Viktor’s household? What is going on with this cult? And we just skipped the business of Izek because it wasn’t interesting to me, but it might be a way of bringing out feelings about Ireena, and giving her a bit more action.
• If the loss of Ireena is to mean something more, it should be played up a bit more. There should be reactions, is what I’m saying.
• The winery and Berez seem tacked on. I mean, they follow logically from the events, but they don’t seem integral to any story we’re picking.
• Since I’ve only posted to the Tsolenka Pass, I shan’t comment on anything after that, but the narrative does gather speed. I would need to examine that and see if it’s the kind of speed I need.

Anyway: those are a few thoughts.

(And I couldn't publish because I've wasted the first rights on the Internet. Oh, well.)

Addendum, months later

Okay, I’m about to post the last chapter and then the epilogue, so I’m going to expand this.

First, as a campaign. Hanging out on Reddit in r/CurseOfStrahd was helpful; I see why it’s so popular, and see the passion that players and DMs bring.

I think I would have been too much a slave to the module if I hadn’t converted it to another system, though there is the possibility that I converted monsters to be too easily defeated. More on that later.

I didn’t play Strahd as lethally as I could have. I think I could have presented him as a much more dangerous foe.

The campaign world doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s too small for the population: the land doesn’t have enough area to feed everyone; there doesn’t seem to be farmland, butchers, blacksmiths, chandlers, and so on. As written, the population is ninety percent soulless, and those people offer no sustenance to Strahd. (“Strahd periodically feeds on the blood of Barovians who have souls, but he can't draw nourishment from the blood of the soulless. He can tell at a glance whether a Barovian has a soul or is merely a shell.”) Presumably one can befriend a Vistani group and place an order for an import (subject to Strahd knowing you have it), but this can’t be an organized thing. Assuming that the castle has about ten encounters when you’re in it, using average numbers for dice rolls, there are at least 41 vampire spawn in Barovia. What do they eat? Six are in the Amber Temple, where there’s darn little blood to drink, although there’s an interesting story where the defenses in the Temple are bad because the vampire spawn have been laying waste to the other monsers…or going to the room where the mountain people hide because, yay! Possible food.

>Also, unfair thing I just thought of: I didn’t start the campaign with beginners or even the equivalent of level 3.

I certainly slanted the campaign to avoid things I didn’t care about. I didn’t really care about Izek, so he never showed up. Argynvostholt got scant attention, and I never figured out a way to fit in the werewolf lair. I could probably have done more with Van Richten and with Lady Wachter’s house and cult, but I didn’t see a way to fit them in as things unfolded. Heck, even Mad Mary or the hags might have got a mention.

Didn’t happen. I shrug. I don’t much regret that.

The ending was rather anticlimactic. Given that I had set up that Strahd was in his coffin, perhaps it couldn’t be otherwise, but I suppose I could have had something other than undead attack — perhaps a group of Vistani who had some connection to Ezmerelda and possibly had Van Richten as prisoner. If I were to do it as a novel, maybe.

The epilogue is meant to address a couple of loose threads and then get out.

The change in systems meant that teleportation was much easier, and part of the in-universe reason they evaded Strahd for the entire time was travelling by rend. However, while it made the monsters that much more fragile (only five injury levels, except for Strahd, connected to the Heart of Sorrow), the PCs never got much less fragile. I’ve discussed this before — that a swarm of rats is a nuisance by the time you get to fifth level and can be ignored by tenth — but in Iron & Gold, a swarm of rats can kill you regardless of your experience. Some wins, some losses.

I feel like Felewin & co. are now powerful enough that they would need either an extraordinary foe or one that specifically aims for their weak spots, so I might be retiring them…or hauling out a D&D adventure for levels 10+ to convert. (I dislike levels generally but they do have that advantage: you can certainly scale your adventures to your adventurers.)