#no it wasn't | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

survivors-of-barovia · 1 year

Text

DM session recaps: year 2022

Oh boy, this year has been wild!

We haven't been playing as regularly as we'd like to, but the gang still managed to make significant progress. Currently they are level 11 and preparing for their expedition to the Amber Temple. Here's a brief summary of all the things that happened to them since the last time:

Dragon skull heist was A HUGE SUCCESS! The party had a really good plan and have been super careful to only discuss it inside the tiny hut so Strahd never suspected a thing. They scaled the cliff through Barov and Ravenovia's tomb, used their spells and familiars to stay hidden and scout ahead, avoided Rahadin by using divination spells and managed to dimension door to the hall of bones from the catacombs because they mapped out the familiar areas of the castle beforehand and triangulated the distance to it; they cast reduce on the skull and quickly dimension doored back, but not before Vincent left an insulting poem for Strahd in its place.

Needless to say, Strahd was SUPER PISSED - especially after they lit the beacon of Argynvostholt. Well, he can be mad all he wants, because now Argynvostholt is a hallowed ground warded against undead, and also revenants regained their memories and some of them stayed to help fight against Strahd. Lady Arisa became a head of the order and screamed at Vlad until he stopped being suicidal and agreed that he must atone for his wrongdoings by staying with the order and helping rebuild it, and maybe getting back with Godfrey as well.

Right after that, Strahd sent Sasha with a small army of wights to assault Argynvostholt and she got ABSOLUTELY DECIMATED. Rip to Sasha, my homebrew melee vampire knight who had no chance against a paladin with a sunsword. At least she died in battle against her crush instead of getting locked in the dungeons, I guess? Here's another art depicting this glorious scene. Afterwards, there was a really heartbreaking moment where Ferret tried to revivify Sasha while her bones crumbled into ashes, but to no avail. She always tries to save everyone, poor girl.

So now Argynvostholt is the party's home base, a place where they keep all their (numerous) friendly npcs and sort of a "rebuilding the keep" sidequest - because we all love those! They can send revenants on missions to gather resources and give them various tasks, and of course it will all pay off in the endgame.

Strahd, being Strahd and still pissed about the stolen dragon skull, started sending packages with other characters' body parts to Argynvostholt. He started small with disassembled Pidlwick II, and next day it was raven feathers from Blue Water Inn Martikovs he took as hostages. Party is super scared of Pidlwick and started burying his parts across Barovia so that he doesn't come to life again, and ended up selling his head to Jeny Greentheeth. This can only end well!

Claudia Belasco (the orphanage headmistress who got killed by Rahadin) was resurrected, since Lady Arisa kind of has a soft spot for her; they also got her to Argynvostholt, where she now helps with cooking and children, including reincarnated baby Abbot.

They finally had an epic battle with the aboleth of Lake Zarovich, reuniting Mordenkainen with his spellbook and staff and moving him to Argynvostholt. Now there is a mansion inside a mansion, and Victor has someone who can teach him more magic. Good for him!

The party had a spiritual seance with Patrina using a spirit board from VR's guide and it was super fun.

FINALLY after all this time and preparation they moved on to exploring Berez; they made arrangement for peace talks with Baba Lysaga but THEN just had to sneak around to the ruins of Berez and steal all her goats. WELL THEN. The "peace talks" happened? Kind of? They managed to talk to Lysaga at least, and also found out she revived Volenta, who is now a living witch (and has a crush on Vincent) - but then Lady Arisa just had to mention that they know about Lysaga being Strahd's former teacher, and it immediately got them thrown out. And as it turned out, while they were away, Stella Wachter got kidnapped - as a part of a devious plan to prepare a new young body for Lysaga during the following new moon.

Before fighting Lysaga, the party decided to hunt some werespiders - and it went pretty well, until Lysaga found them. Not that it went too badly, but she cast Feeblemind on Ferret, so it was time for tactical retreat. Since technically the Seeker occupied the same body as Ferret, she decided it was also time to resurface and talk to the party (specifically, Edena and Paelias) about how all that is not the best environment for a 10 year old child - and while maybe it’s too late to remove her from this situation physically, maybe she can make it so that Ferret’s mind remains dormant and unaware of all the horrors of Barovia, and she, the Seeker, will be the one to deal with them from now on. Edena and Paelias consider this for a bit, but ultimately decide that they don’t want to rob Ferret of her agency and that potentially losing her mother will break her heart; Seeker says that she understands, and that she wants to talk to others - but once she gets everyone in the room, she starts turning it into an ethereal forest, saying that if they don’t want to help her, she will trap Ferret’s friends in a dream with her and do everything herself. Well, now the party have to fight a dream version of the Seeker. They won, of course, and after Ferret got over her Feeblemind they had a very nice talk about what Ferret actually wants and how much she has grown; also, the Seeker told her the truth about her real parents, and eventually gave her back her memories about her childhood and her real name (Holly). It was a bittersweet moment, but for Ferret, it only solidified her belief that the Seeker is her real mother, and that she is no longer this halfling girl that was called by another name.

Eventually, the party caught up with Lysaga and her hut, fought her, and won - with another dramatic scene where Ferret was hugging her dying body and burning her to death. Only Stella was nowhere to be found. They went on to explore Lysaga's hut, which turned out to be a lot bigger on the inside. They found (and freed) captured wereravens - unfortunately, Muriel Vinshaw, despite being mentioned in Ferret's tarroka reading at the beginning of the campaign, was already killed, as well as many others, since the party took way too long to get to Berez. There was lots of other cool witchy stuff there, but ultimately they discovered that Stella got stolen by hags (yes, THOSE hags. they were still alive) and taken into their lair in the ethereal plane; after doing a quest to weave a fabric from the moonlight (thanks to Edena and her weaving skills!) they caught up to them, managed to save Stella, kill Bella and intimidate Offalia into surrendering but BIG SURPRISE Morgantha managed to get away AGAIN. She was THIS close to running away to Strahd and continuing with her evil schemes, but this party is absolutely relentless. They followed her without resting, rolled super high on all the tracking checks and finally caught and killed her - also in a super creative way, since she could always escape to the ethereal plane and they didn't have etherealness spell, they poisoned her with aboleth slime and she just. Suffocated to death. Fucking brutal. What a fitting end for such a horrible woman. For the record, this was their FIFTH encounter.

Also, Victor was with them for this mission. Their relationship with Stella is... complicated. She got kidnapped in the first place because they had a fight with Victor and she stormed off from the mansion; so Vincent decided to talk to Victor about what happened, figuring it was just a regular teenage fight, but he was like "well yeah she read my thoughts and I got upset and tried to use magic on her so that she wouldn't do that anymore". They kind of made up after Victor took part in saving her, but who knows for how long? Are they even good for each other? The party might have conflicting feelings about that.

After their triumphant return to Argynvostholt, Lady Arisa declared a grand party to celebrate the victory against Baba Lysaga. Also, Kasimir finally made it there! Among all the fun, drinking and dancing, there was plenty of drama as well. Ezmerelda attempted to gain Vincent's approval to hook up with his brother, but before it got to that she got way too drunk and started a fight with van Richten; he promptly left the party, lady Arisa followed him with a bottle of wine, and with a very nice heartfelt conversation and some high persuasion rolls she finally unlocked his tragic backstory! Meanwhile, Paelias, being insightful as always, discovered that Kasimir hasn't been quiet honest with him, and all this time he told him he's been hiding in the forest to avoid detection? He was actually captured by Strahd and only just managed to escape. Oops. Also, Vincent went to Mordenkainen and drank his Experimental Aboleth Brain Potion and Edena got mad at him because once again he's drinking risky liquids without warning his girlfriend. After midnight, everyone went to watch the party plant the bag of beans they got from Lysaga's hut. Two of them turned into statues of Paelias and Vincent that promptly started insulting them. A fitting end to this fun evening.

Also, remember how Strahd was occasionally sending dead body parts to Argynvostholt? Well, his last package ended up in one big mess. The party discovered it way too late - because the first one to discover it was Illyria. And the package was the coffin with the body of her brother, Dmitry Krezkov. And Illyria is... not known for her restraint, to put it mildly. She viciously mauled the vistana who delivered the coffin, and, unsurprisingly, got cursed. This might have been Strahd's plan. Or not, and he’s just stirring shit up. Regardless, this is super inconvenient, because she has to deal with being the avatar of the Huntress - and before heading to Mount Ghakis, the party was going to explore the source of strange howling from the mountains that Illyria was hearing recently. Well, they headed there and discovered a mountain folk shrine to the Huntress occupied by hostile winter wolves and some kind of an ice wolf-shaped spirit. In reality, the spirit was possessing the protectors of the shrine - but of course, Illyria, being Illyria, immediately attacked them, and only Paelias and Ferret prevented her from slaughtering them all and desecrating the shrine for good. After defeating the hostile spirit, she made peace with the wolves, and the party might come back to visit the mountain folk tribe when they head to mount Ghakis.

But first, there is one thing left for them - to consecrate the Swamp Fane. And one little problem - they don’t really know who is going to become an avatar of the Weaver. Maybe Paelias, because he is already has a strong connection to the goddesses? But he is not a woman (although maybe it won’t be a problem?), and also becoming his wife’s sister is going to be awkward. Maybe Edena, because she is good at weaving, promised Kavan to protect the Fanes and seemed like she was really connecting with the Berez witches? But she hates the gods, how you can ask her to become an avatar of the goddess? Choices, choices.

#curse of strahd #by: arrenkae #recaps #after reading some of this you may ask #wait #was it even in the module?#no #no it wasn't #what is even the module at this point #i might have forgotten some small stuff #a lot has happened

18 notes · View notes