Thanks for the feedback, Ron!
S55: nice spooky battles with the ghosts. good use of their incorporeal nature.
I added the swarm to the Lopper encounter. I’ve found that many adventure have the flaw of presenting the BBEG alone. In this situation, it is much easier for the PCs to give everything they have and kill the BBEG. From now on, I often add a secondary battle going on at the same time. In this case, a swarm.
For the Splatter Man battle, the terrain was difficult after the room partial collapse (so the incorporeal Splatter Man was easily eluding the PC’s close combat), and this guy was very tough, so I didn’t need to add that much to it.
S56: Darkon to Mordent is a long way to go for a Raise dead! Did Tora's player have a backup character or something to do? Did he or she take over Kendra, perhaps?
Well there are six PCs and six players. But sometimes a player can’t show up, and in this case a player has two PCs to play. IIRC, Yvon played another PC until Tora was raised.
"We are getting back to Mordent to have him raised from the dead" Lucky this is Darkon. Say that in Barovia or Tepest and see what happens.
Indeed!
I love the frequent checks on the stored body. Good practice in Ravenloft!
Yep, as they suspected a hidden beast was on board, they didn’t want Tora to become a snack for the beast
Wow! Super-thorough list of passengers! I'm always wary of stuff like that, since it can be information overload to provide it all, but it's not realistic to limit suspicion to a small section of a large group (i.e. the ones with names).
That’s the goal. My players are not able to guess which NPC is more important than another just because one has a name, and the other’s name is clearly made on the spot by the DM.
IIRC, it didn’t take a long time to do this, perhaps an hour and a half. Found a name generator and added some ideas to each names.
The players didn’t speak to as many NPC as I had planned, but I was ready
Great cliffhanger...
On each gaming Sunday, we finish our games around 8 pm. I often try to stop on a cliffhanger, or just after they got an important clue. That keeps them discussing this new clue by emails until the next game!
S57: nice link to the Vorishkova bloodline!
Another story arc opened there! Antoinette might eventually get into trouble when NPCs try to get to her mother, Natalia.
"they bury Yvonne at sea, in a private ceremony where Petrak blesses her soul. Yvonne doesn’t say much." I should hope not! I guess you meant Antionette...
Ooops! Corrected!
Is this the first time they are hearing Van Richten's backstory?
Yep! After ten years, now is the time they get more info on this NPC. I read in your journal you are preparing to play the
Bleakhouse adventure, same here!
heheh... regular reports to Ivana. Love that.
I have to idea what to do with this for the moment, but since the location of Borca is very central, they have to cooperate otherwise their travel will get extremely complicated.
And who knows? It might eventually become a story seed.
S58: "running headless" LOL seems like you had a lot of fun with Ms Montarri.
They hate her guts and hate the fact she was clearly using them as flour, eggs and all in her own cake.
It isn’t excluded that they eventually go back at her to try to assassinate her.
Or that the Vardo show up later, and they
need something the heroes have
Joël