This is part game report and part walkthrough of how I set up the campaign. I've previously said background prep for the campaign (before the first session) involved converted all the monsters from 5E to Shadowdark; next I broke down all the plot hooks by location to understand how the whole campaign would hang together as a sandbox; I also tallied up the experience points available in the campaign (to make sure the players would reach an appropriate level if I ran it under the Shadowdark XP rules-as-written). The answer was yes; sandbox-style XP for treasure would work fine, and the plot hooks would drive an interesting sandbox style in the valley of Barovia.
The players wanted to do a "gauntlet" to start, which is the Shadowdark equivalent of DCC's zero-level funnel. Each player brings 4 zero-level characters to the gauntlet, and the survivors get to be first level characters.
I've been on a Karameikos kick (from 1980's Basic D&D's "Known World", Mystara), and the Grand Duchy of Karameikos is a vampire-haunted, misty land reminiscent of Eastern Europe, replete with lost valleys in the towering northern mountains. It's a perfect for hiding the supernaturally shrouded valley of Barovia and Castle Ravenloft.
The player characters were Karameikan peasants in the capital city of Specularum. Local legend spoke of an abandoned house in the city, boarded up and home only to rats and spiders, but as the story goes, one night per year there are lights in the house and it looks the way it back in a bygone era, full of warmth and wealth. As happens in these kinds of tales, this was that self-same night of the year, the Devil's Night, the night before Halloween, when the house supposedly changes and welcomes visitors. One of the drunks in the bar dared his fellow revelers to go prove the legend wrong, and before you could say "I'll wager a gold Krona you're wrong", a crowd of rowdy merrymakers set off through the streets of the city, singing bawdy tunes and ready to collect.
The house was as the tale-teller described; the wrought iron gate was open, warm oil lamps stood lit in the portico, and more light cascaded from the windows. Fine crystal decanters and expensive bottles beckoned from the parlor visible in the window. Fog and mist curled around the street and licked the base of the wrought iron fence.
Many of the men passed this boarded up, ruined place every day... they couldn't believe what they were now seeing here in the dead of night. Fortified by a few too many ales, they went in. In this way, our gauntlet goers found themselves trapped inside "Death House", a one-way portal to Barovia. Death House is an appendix in Curse of Strahd, an entry-level dungeon for the campaign, and I'm a fan of the motif of entering a supernatural house and finding oneself transported to a different time or place. It was also used to great effect in TSR module X2 Castle Amber, also set in Mystara.
DM tip: The players all voted to do Curse of Strahd among alternatives, so we discussed out-of-game how it involved first getting lured to the vampire's realm of Barovia; I explained my mechanism for getting them there started with exploring a simple haunted house in their home city. In this way they happily went along with the merry revelers theme in the first session, knowing the game would become an open-world sandbox once they got to Barovia.
Death House is a 4-story affair, with a hidden staircase spiraling from the attic down to a small, two-level dungeon. It's too big for a "gauntlet", so I ruled any peasants that made it to the attic (the halfway point) would complete the gauntlet portion and be able to advance to level 1 characters. (The 5E version also suggested leveling up the PC's at this halfway point). I didn't love this choice but it seemed pragmatic; I personally like the in-game fiction that after surviving a gauntlet, some weeks or months pass, the zero-level characters go off and learn an adventurer's trade and return as level 1 adventurers. However, I felt the haunted house was dangerous enough for zero-level characters, and the players would need level 1 characters to survive the dungeon, so I got over it.
Death House is linear but works well as a haunted house; the first two floors are warm and well-appointed and lull the explorers; floors 3 and 4 are cold, aged, grey, and full of cobwebs, decay, and baleful spirits. There was a shocking moment on the 3rd floor when the characters went out on a balcony, and no longer saw the crowded streets of the capital city. They looked out at a somber mountain village, with an imposing gothic castle perched high above them, and the mournful sound of howling wolves wafting from the nearby forest.
Many of the peasants died in Death House; there's a haunted suit of platemail on the 3rd floor stairs (animated armor), and it was tossing characters over the stairs like sacks of flour. If you're running a gauntlet or funnel, one thing you need to decide is what the "extra characters" are doing. For instance, I had 5 players in the gauntlet, with 4 zero-level characters each to start. They only played one active character. What were the other 15 doing?
In Dungeon Crawl Classics, the funnels seem deadlier and the players actually use all 4 characters at once, so combats can be sprawling affairs with tons of casualties. My players had their "extras" choose to stay downstairs, enjoying the comfort of the first floor, while 5 of the braver zero-level characters explored (at least until a replacement was needed). It worked fine.
However, at the end of Death House, after the player characters defeat the spirit of the house deep in the cellars, the entire house goes haywire and tries to kill everyone in it with chopping blades, poisonous smoke, rat swarms. At this point, the level 1 adventurers were able to fight their way out of the house. The remaining ordinary townsfolk, waiting in the downstairs dining room and parlor, endured a gauntlet of horrors trying to escape. It was great fun as the referee.
Our Curse of Strahd game officially began as the newly minted level 1 characters (with a few surviving zero-levels with them) stepped out of the fenced yard and onto a cobblestone street in the village of Barovia. Death House collapsed in on itself behind them, it's animating force destroyed. Around them, the night-shrouded streets were dismal and abandoned; most of the homes were boarded up and abandoned.
We ended this first phase of the campaign with the clop clop of horse hooves on the cobblestones, a nightmare pulling a black carriage. Count Strahd von Zarovitch, the walking corpse, welcomed the characters to Barovia - where new blood is always welcome, and may they leave behind some of the happiness they brought with them, too. He pointed out it was his castle overlooking the village, the doors would always be open to them, and he intended to invite them to a formal feast after some of his other affairs were resolved. He expressed regret at the demise of Death House; while he was no friend to the foolish cultists that once lived there, he found that the haunted house was a useful vector to bring willing victims into Barovia from the outside world, and now his Vistani allies would need to work harder to lure outsiders through the mists. He left the players with an admonishment... after decades, he was again in the mood for love, and had set his eyes on a girl right there in the village. She was off-limits to them, and he would be displeased if they meddled. Strahd's carriage again rode off into the night.
Of course, the surest way to get players to engage with something is to tell them not to engage with it, as we'll see next game report. This is the way.
The Death House gauntlet and dungeon took 3-4 sessions of game play, so this is long enough for an initial report... I'll introduce the player characters and their first moves in Barovia next time out. Hope this one provides some useful ideas on how to launch a COS campaign and leverage a gauntlet approach for level 0. Until next time.
