The Curse of Strahd campaign had a break in February, but we’re back into it now! The fates conspired to ensure I also didn’t have very much prep time for this session. Let’s get into how that prep turned out!

The things I did to prepare are:

  • The recap returns!

I’ve found this recap to be particularly helpful when preparing these sessions. Scheduling is a bit weird for this campaign, we try to meet once a month but sometimes that doesn’t happen, so we can get long gaps in between sessions. Recaps help me and the players get back into the action. I can also pick and choose what I want to highlight about the past sessions.

Here’s the recap I wrote for this session!

Four and a half paragraphs that describe what happened last session. It's a screenshot of an Evernote note.

It isn’t that short, but I’m used to keeping session notes for the campaigns I play in. At the same time, getting everyone settled in by reading the recap out loud has gone pretty well—players chime in with their takes on what’s happened and start to plan what to do next afterwards.

  • Review of Krezk and “Something Blue” event

The players planned to travel up to Krezk, and they still have Ireena Kolyana with them, so I reviewed the town layout and the special event they would find. I’ve read over these sections of the Curse of Strahd adventure several times, so I have a pretty good memory of the characters here.

  • Wrote PC dreams that were scrapped

I’ve written a few original sequences that would be presented to the PCs as dreams they have during their stay in Barovia. I used one of those previously, but in this case, I decided to move ahead with the plot rather than throw something else at them before they could act.

  • Modifying the Abbey of St. Markovia

This is something I’ve planned for a while—the mongrelfolk element in CoS makes me uncomfortable and overall I don’t like the “madhouse as horror” trope. At the same time, I wanted to keep the Abbot character and the location intact. I meant to do a more thorough modification of the area, but I ended up just omitting the mongrelfolk and not changing much else. The bell still rings at odd times, seemingly on its own, and the abbey seems strangely empty. The Abbot and Vasilka remain, but there is little other living activity in the area.

The player characters are sure this place is haunted and are appropriately suspicious of the Abbot, so I think the modifications went over smoothly enough!

As this campaign has continued, I’m less afraid of having to look stuff up in the book, but I’ve also gotten to where I don’t really need to look up a ton (other than consulting maps).

I was able to do a few things on the fly, preceding the party’s entrance into Krezk, I had Strahd use sending to give them a cryptic warning. After the events of “Something Blue,” Strahd sent them their invitation to Castle Ravenloft, and he used dream to have a conversation with Kara, the half-elf bard. I hadn’t prepped these events out exactly, but I’ve used sending and dream before in other campaigns, so that experience helped me improv and make a fun scene out of it.

I pulled out the Random Encounter section of the book this session as well. I’m not as big a fan of random encounters as I used to be, especially in a mood-heavy scenario like CoS. After the party rolled an encounter with four barbarians, I opted to have the players roll to see when and if the party would have an encounter. But instead of rolling to see what the encounter was, I just picked one from the list that I felt was appropriate.

Overall, I’m pretty proud of this session, and I’m looking forward to see what happens next!