Curse of Strahd 2017 – Week 20

Hi all,

Over the last few weeks I’ve been posting some warts-and-all email summaries of the Curse of Strahd campaign I ran in 2017. This is the first campaign I started sending summaries to players by email after each game (I was a bit lazy prior to that).

Some of the summaries may be dull, some may be amusing; some are written in present tense, some in past tense – these are unedited emails, so please forgive their somewhat chaotic nature and poor sentence structure/grammar.

If you’re a D&D fan you may enjoy them, but I warn you: I’m not Mathew Mercer and this is not Twitch.

Game on!

Steve 🙂

Week 20

Mark’s Gnome Bard re-joined the party after a very, very long rest. After a quick discussion, Natasha’s Gnome Druid cast water walk so the party could cross the river and get to the swamp on the other side (“Why’d the party cross the river? To get to the…” – okay, never mind). Everybody decided to sneak down the road past the ruined houses to the goat pen, where a number of skulls were mounted along the fence.

Having learned earlier that skulls are a warning sign, the Druid decided to talk to the goats and tried to open the gate to let them out. The skulls immediately started screaming in alarm. In a moment of pure inspiration, the Bard decided to polymorph into a goat to persuade his goaty brethren to rise in revolt against their obviously evil witch overlord (who might, for all the party knew, love goats). 

William’s Dragonborn Paladin (with his spectral horse) hunkered down in a nearby ruined building. The Dusk Elf Wizard NPC and Natasha’s Druid hid in an overgrown and thorny garden behind a mansion, while Dan’s Halfling Monk hid in another ruin. Seven Scarecrows wandered up to investigate the alarm. The Bard gave an inspiring goat speech to his fellow goats and charged the gate, doing a teeny-tiny bit of damage. The other goats decided to rise up against their oppressive overlord with him.

The wizard and druid were attacked by poisonous snakes while hiding. The druid conjured constrictor snakes and the wizard and druid high-tailed it out of the bushes to hide in the ruin next door. The monk leapt out to fight the Scarecrows, was frightened by their glare, surrounded and soundly thrashed.

Baba Lysaga appeared overhead in her flying skull.  She noticed the paladin and cast a lightning bolt at him. Both he and the spectral horse were frazzled and the horse didn’t make it. The bard decided being a goat wasn’t so great, changed back, ran underneath the flying skull and misty stepped up into the back of it. Baba Lysaga cast finger of death on him, killing him outright.

The wizard fireballed several of the scarecrows (and, unfortunately, half the newly socialist goats in the pen). The druid cast healing word for the monk to recover. The monk hid and added poison to her weapons. The paladin threw a few javelins at the skull, then misty stepped up to the skull, attacked Baba Lysaga from behind and sent her flying out of the skull to the ground.

The bard rose from the dead as a zombie. The druid zapped him with a moonbeam.  Bye, bye, bardie. Time for a new character, Mark!

The paladin misty stepped down to fight the witch. The monk ran across and flanked her. Their combined attacks knocked Baba Lysaga unconscious.

Then Baba Lysaga’s Creeping Hut appeared.

The druid polymorphed the paladin into a tyrannosaurus rex, and the battle was on. The wizard flew onto the roof of the hut. The monk dragged and bound the witch. The paladin changed back to dragonborn form as his polymorphed form sustained full damage. The druid polymorphed him into a T-rex again, but the creeping hut creamed him, finally knocking the paladin unconscious. The house then put down the monk and the druid in short succession. Only the wizard was left. Inside the creeping hut, he cast magic missile onto the floorboards, broke through and removed the green stone powering it. The creeping hut collapsed, defeated. Unfortunately, the paladin failed his death saves and was dead. The wizard managed to stabilize all the other unconscious bodies.

Tied up on the back of the creeping hut was Mark’s Goliath Barbarian, his new character ready to conveniently replace his dead bard.

Meanwhile, a mysterious figure in a ghostly light appeared at the mansion ruins across the way…

Next week: Recovering artifacts and on to the Amber Temple!

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