Café de Nuit

Making it a straight-up werebear is probably the best way to go. Just describe it as having a distinctive coat pattern, and a bit on the small side (assuming the witnesses have ever seen a regular werebear to compare it to). Hit points on the low end of the range, and maybe dock its Strength a littl...

Frantisek Markov is probably immortal, given his power to shapeshift into a fresh new (animal) body any time he wants. Certainly he doesn't seem to have suffered any age-related frailties by the time of ''Neither Man Nor Beast''. We described Meredoth as unaging in the NS Gaz, and the Lady of the Ra...

He was a low-level generalist mage before his fall, actually; it's the DPs who converted him from mage to necromancer. Before Azalin started training him, Strahd mostly learned his magic on his own, from old books he'd found or bought. (Arcane magic seems to have been fairly rare on the von Zarovich...

"Rare sights" doesn't have to mean they don't exist, just that they're not seen out in public all the time. With so many vacant homes to squat in, it's possible that the poorest residents only come out in the open when the streets are empty of better-off folks, or when a servant of the wel...

Vampyres can pass for normal humans, but their fingernails are useable as weapons,their bite drains blood (Con damage), and their saliva contains a drug that allows them to Dominate Person . If Tristan apBlanc is any example, they have about ten times the lifespan of humans; their type is Monstrous ...

There are so many masked cults, secret power-mongers, occult-themed murder rings and the like in Ravenloft already, it might be more interesting to make this one a bit more mundane. Perhaps, under the spooky owl get-ups, they're a bunch of sly merchants plotting for economic gain, or bigots out to t...

What if Van Richten is wrong (or said to be)? Like Einstein, whose theories have so far been proven true only by virtue of not having been able to be proven wrong, could Van Richten be mistaken in some of his observations? The original VRGs already have him being wrong about the origin of fiends, d...

A logical form of payback would be to have the werewolves leave a note on the carcass of a villager's slaughtered cow, demanding that one human from every family in the village be sent out of town, without weapons, on consecutive nights to be hunted down and eaten by the pack. If the villagers fail ...

One thing you might consider doing, if you're uncomfortable with the idea that a person starts out with paladin abilities, is to hold a one-on-one session with your would-be paladin-player, before the campaign actually starts. This is a 'prequel' solo scenario, in which the PC is not yet a paladin, ...

Personally, I think the "nature vs civilization" motif is badly overplayed in many D&D games, mostly because of players' and DMs' preconceptions about how severely civilization is capable of harming the natural world. People in a D&D game don't have bulldozers, can't strip-mine mou...

An alternative that better fits the setting might be to give paladins a "Detect Curse" ability, in which they can sense when a being is under a contagious or Curse check- or spell-imposed curse. That doesn't necessarily give the game away about who the bad guys are -- plenty of innocent fo...

One possible motive I could see for a Jigsaw-inspired villain, unique to the Ravenloft setting, would be if an occult scholar were to puzzle out (or think he's puzzled out) what the Dark Powers are up to. If he concludes that they're testing evil-doers' capacity to reform, then punishing the ones wh...

Knowing what sorts of domains it contains would be a help, if we're to suggest something that fits the flavor of the place rather than just being an historical in-joke. :-/

Each of the characters has his or her own reason to come to a gathering, expecting to find something -- a job offer, a contact, the best apple pies in the county, an old friend they haven't seen in years, or maybe just a date for the weekend -- but when they get there, the NPCs they'd expected to me...

Some aspects of the city's architecture will need to be dictated by geography and resources, such as the local availability of stone, brick, and lumber for construction. If bricks are cheap and stone is expensive, that right there is a way to distinguish working-class neighborhoods from upscale ones...