Strahd von Zarovich’s castle, perched on cliffs overlooking Village of Barovia. The party enters once, for a dinner invitation, and never leaves again for the rest of the recorded campaign — all six subsequent sessions take place somewhere inside it.
Summary
Twin guardhouses and a 50-foot precipice guard a drawbridge; the massive main doors open on their own as organ music drifts out. Inside, the castle is riddled with illusions, traps, and the preserved history of Strahd’s family: a dining hall, a secret puppet room, a rotting cell corridor, a cauldron room, Strahd’s personal chamber, a flooded lower dungeon, a spire-top prison cell, catacombs full of family crypts, Strahd’s own coffin room, a golem-guarded puzzle chamber, and a tower topped with a pulsing red glass “heart” that is never reached in the recorded sessions.
History
- The party disembarks from a mysterious black carriage into the castle’s stormy courtyard; the doors open on their own as the session ends 2022-12-06 @ 04:16:54–04:34:13.
- Dinner with Strahd turns into a castle-wide lockdown after a thrown dinner roll; the party finds a decoy mannequin, fights skeletons, finds the Tome of Strahd, and falls into a flooded dungeon level 2022-12-18.
- A poison-gas trap in the flooded basement is set ablaze and burns for most of a session; the party meets Bartholomew and claims the Sun Sword’s blade (then unidentified) from the fire 2022-12-26.
- A ghost ambush carries the party to a spire-top prison; below, the catacombs yield the deaths of Sasha Ivliskova and Petrina Velikovna, and Donnie’s character is turned into a vampire thrall near Strahd’s coffin 2023-01-30.
- Strahd’s coffin is found empty, and the party is teleported into a brutal boss fight with Strahd himself in his audience chamber 2023-02-12.
- A riddle-trapped gargoyle room animates two iron golems, nearly killing Alumbra 2023-03-12.
- Donovan is revealed as a traitor, dropped to 0 HP and contained in a haversack, then accidentally flung into the Astral Plane when Todd destroys it; a servants’ dining hall ambush by ~400 ghosts nearly wipes the party 2023-03-18 @ 02:04:54, @ 02:30:46.
- The party’s exploration halts mid-dungeon, near a tower with a pulsing red glass “heart,” when the session’s battle map breaks — the last recorded session of the campaign 2023-03-18.
Unresolved
The castle is never fully mapped or cleared in the recorded sessions; the tower with the red glass heart remains unexplored.