Date: August 9, 2026
Attendance: Brielle, Randoah of Oak, Enki, Ivek the Seer
Five years had passed since the cult of Mugdulbulb, the slime god, tore through the players’ home village and dragged its children into the Trial of the Slime Lord. Many who went in never came out. Of those who survived, only two returned to the life of adventuring: Brielle, a woman who kept her surname to herself, and Randoah of Oak, a witch who had spent her years since wandering the woods with her dead brother’s skull before falling in with a coven. Now both had settled — or tried to — in Marin’s Hold, the last real point of light in a region swallowed by demon-haunted forest called the Gloaming.
Marin’s Hold was no grand city. A motte-and-bailey village of some three hundred souls, ringed by a wooden palisade, it survived on subsistence farming and river fishing, watched over by its warlord-ruler, Reeve Tarly Winters, and his twenty or thirty men-at-arms. Magic was outlawed here — the Reeve believed it drew the demons — and travelers on the road in had passed crucified witches and priests as a warning. Into this uneasy peace came two newcomers: Ivek, a Seer who had once run with the very cult that destroyed the party’s village before slipping away in guilt, now searching for purpose; and Enki, a circus-raised wanderer who believed his younger brother’s soul had been sealed inside his own sword, and who had come to Marin’s Hold hunting any magic that might set him free.
All four were bound together by the same strange event: a hooded courier on a black stallion had delivered each of them a black, wax-sealed invitation, signed in fine calligraphy by one Count Demetrius. Tucked inside was fifteen gold and a note instructing them to buy something fit for a nobleman’s party. They were to meet at a crossroads two miles outside the village at dusk.
With a few hours before the meeting, each of them tended to business.
Enki learned that Reeve Tarly Winters had heard of the invitations and summoned him to the keep. Sitting a cold, sparse throne room draped in animal skins, the aging Reeve — no heir, and still visibly trying for one — confessed he’d never heard of a “Count Demetrius” in any record of the local nobility. He tasked Enki with a mission: discover the Count’s true name. If the man was a legitimate lord, the Reeve would recognize him. If he was a pretender, Enki was to kill him and strip him of his stolen title.
Randoah, drawn by curiosity and a nagging invitation of her own, visited Mathilda, the herbalist witch who lived just outside the palisade in a hut strung with dreamcatchers and wicker charms. Mathilda brewed her a calming tea of jasmine and cinnamon and warned her, in the roundabout way of her kind, that the fey of these woods had never forgiven humanity for stealing magic from them — and that whatever haunted the Gloaming had not always been there; the forest was once a place of harmony before humanity ruined it. As Randoah left, satisfied but unnerved, Mathilda slipped a healing potion into her pocket with a wink.
Brielle called on Finch Three-Fingers, the barter-house owner who ran less a shop than a legalized fence operation out of the back of the village — a man missing half a hand to what he swore was a river monster, though most assumed a duel gone wrong. Finch had an old, undated shipping manifest listing a rare ruby amulet, the Heart of the Raven, delivered years ago to a “Lord Demetrius.” He asked Brielle, with her light fingers, to recover it for a rich reward if the opportunity arose.
Ivek, still wracked with guilt over his cult days, sought out the Church of St. Terragnis and its stern, schoolmarm-ish priestess, Egrid. She told him of Brother Kristoff, the priest she’d taken over for, who had vanished a week earlier after muttering about “an ancient duty” and chasing after the courier who delivered the invitations. Given permission to search the missing man’s cell, Ivek found a holy book scrawled over and over in the margins with the same three words — he has returned — and a hidden brooch depicting a sword through a heart, which he pinned inside his robe.
The party also learned of a missing farmer’s daughter, also named Matilda, who had read her invitation before her father could burn it and vanished the next day — the same fate the villagers feared had befallen others the Count had “invited” before.
At dusk, dressed in their best borrowed finery, the four gathered at the crossroads as an ominous wall of mist rolled through, chilling them to the bone and somehow righting a fallen, illegible road sign — which now clearly read Barrens, this way. A massive black carriage arrived, drawn by four unnervingly fine horses and driven by Gunther, a silent, seven-foot coachman with a scarred, expressionless face. Inside waited Christine, the Count’s charming and forceful concubine, who plied them with champagne none of them had ever tasted and warned them, half-joking, not to let Gunther’s size intimidate them — “old servants get kept around long after their prime.”
As the carriage rolled toward the Count’s domain, the party watched the farmland shift — crops sickly and pale, farmers laboring in masks with pustules on their skin. Christine explained, almost casually, that a curse had fallen over all the Count’s lands and people, and handed out perfumed handkerchiefs before they entered a plague-stricken village choked with rot, flies, and piled bodies. Night had fully fallen by the time they crossed it, rain turning the streets to mud and filth.
A sneering, gaunt doorman — treated with open contempt by everyone, guests and staff alike — grudgingly let them in, disgusted by the mud on their boots. He handed them off to Dorothy, a shy, platinum-haired maid with lace like spiderwebs on her dress, who led them up through the castle. Along the way, she spoke fondly of the Count — his loneliness, his “ennui,” his talent on the great organ in the hall — and warned them of Sister Geraldine, the sole survivor of a convent slaughtered by wolf-like beasts, who now wandered the halls muttering in half-madness about eyes watching, thirst quenched, and arms that shadowed and protected. They passed her once in the corridor, candle in hand, before Dorothy gently steered her back to bed.
Dorothy delivered them to the audience hall: a grand chamber of raven-motif furnishings, masked nobility murmuring over wine and hors d’oeuvres, and, at its head, Count Demetrius himself — black hair swept back, crimson waistcoat, wine goblet in hand, seated on a throne carved with raven heads. He rose theatrically to greet his “guests of honor,” welcoming them with mock warmth and admitting, when pressed, that the curse had touched even his own castle and people, and that he hoped his newest guests might help lift it.
The party mingled cautiously. They noted Sister Geraldine rocking in a corner, muttering to herself, fidgeting with something in her hands. When Ivek attempted to bless a glass of champagne with the power of his patron St. Terragnis and offer it to her as comfort, she recoiled in terror, smashed the glass against the wall, and fled — the Count brushing it off with practiced ease, apologizing for “poor Geraldine.”
Enki, remembering his charge from the Reeve, cornered the Count to press him — gently at first — for his true name. The Count toyed with him, offering titles and aliases, before finally settling on the truth: he was known in this land as Strahd von Zarovich, the “Son of the Dragon,” ancient lord of a domain called Ravenloft. He spoke of conquering these lands centuries ago, of having experienced everything there was to experience across countless lifetimes, of throwing occasional parties like this one — bringing in “heroes” like the party — simply to relieve the tedium of his cursed, undying existence, and perhaps, if they were capable and willing, to lift the curse itself.
Before anyone could press further, Strahd raised his glass, struck a gong, and declared the evening’s true entertainment about to begin. A cold wind swept through the hall, extinguishing every torch at once. Plunged into total darkness, the entire party lost consciousness.
They woke chained to the wall of a flooded dungeon, hanging over knee-deep water lit only by a single floating black candle. In a cage nearby sat Esmeralda, an old woman rocking and cackling to herself. Once freed from their manacles, the group questioned her, and she read each of their fortunes with a tarot deck — warning of several possible paths out of the castle: a beast guarding the front door, a heartbroken ghost who could be restored, a priest whose prayers might open a forgotten escape route, a raven demanding gold for a lofty exit, an enchanter’s recipe for retreat, and — the most dangerous but most decisive path — a trio of artifacts (a tome of the Count’s power, an ancient symbol of hope, and a vengeful sword) that could end Strahd’s power for good if the party survived finding them. Esmeralda warned midnight was coming and Strahd would follow. Moments later she crumbled into an old skeleton clutching the tarot deck, which the party looted along with a rib bone and the cards themselves.
Unbeknownst to any of them in the moment, each of them had already been marked with the vampire’s curse from Strahd’s bite, and Enki was the first to feel its pull — he licked blood off the gargoyle’s statue and felt a surge of dark power, coming away with sticky, spider-like hands as the curse began to take hold in him. The gargoyle itself demanded payment in blood: Randoah cut her hand and fed it to the statue’s mouth, and a section of wall ground open to reveal a hidden passage beyond. Down the other corridor, the party discovered a flooded torture chamber, watched over by a silent, cloaked figure on a balcony who vanished the moment they were noticed. Wading among rusted devices and skeletal remains still strapped into place, they salvaged what they could — a dagger from a skull’s eye socket, a light hammer, a spell component pouch, rope, and grappling hooks — before the room’s dark water began to bubble.
One by one, sunken corpses surfaced from the murk. The first wore Enki’s own stolen gear, ripped away from him earlier that night. The second clutched a battered copy of a childhood storybook, restoring a flicker of hope and a handful of temporary hit points to whoever claimed it. The third rose fully reanimated — a shrieking zombie that lunged for Randoah before the party cut it down, Ivek pulling her clear of its grasp at the last second and passing his one Luck token to Brielle for a decisive, timely strike.
With Enki’s new spider-climbing gift, he scaled the wall to the balcony above, tied off a rope, and helped the others up and past the chamber. Beyond lay a mess hall — or so it first appeared — where eight young, drunk castle guards celebrated some unnamed battle and jovially invited the party to sit and eat. When Brielle crept over and pinched out the room’s black candle, every light in the chamber died at once, plunging them into total silence and darkness. When Ivek managed to strike a spark and relight a torch, the illusion collapsed: the “guards” were nothing but bone-fused furniture, skeletal remains twisted into the shape of chairs and tables, the room itself built from the castle’s dead.
Further on, they found an alchemist’s larder stocked with empty vials — which they claimed by the handful — a bubbling cauldron of unidentified green goo, and a tempting glass of blood-red liquid left out with a taunting, tongue-in-cheek apology note signed by the Count himself. Unable to resist, Enki drank it down. The bottle read Virgin’s Blood. Power surged through him — more hit points, the sudden ability to shift into a small bat, and, more unsettling, a shadow that began moving with a mind of its own, sprouting claws and fangs whenever he wasn’t looking. His curse was deepening.
Eventually the party kicked open a door and found themselves not simply in a kitchen, but transformed — shrunk to the size of mice inside a giant witch’s domain. A cauldron the size of a barn dominated the room, and from somewhere within it came the muffled cries of a trapped priest. Around them scuttled oversized, hungry spiders and frogs, and looming over all of it was the witch herself: hunched, warty-nosed, delighted at the sight of “pesky little mice” come to visit her kitchen.
The fight that followed was chaotic. The witch snatched Brielle bodily and hurled her straight into the boiling cauldron, where she found herself clinging to floating potatoes alongside the imprisoned priest — and quickly began to die from the heat. Enki, mid-fight, transformed into his bat form and flitted overhead to scout, while Randoah — drawing on her own witch-blood — cast a charm to stupefy one of the giant frogs and then clambered up the cauldron’s spoon to pull the drowning priest free by main strength, tearing him loose just before the potato beneath him spun away into the broth. Ivek crushed a spider against the giant spoon with his warhammer, sending gore flying, while his own strikes and a well-timed dagger from Brielle finished off the rest of the vermin — Enki even managing to scream one spider clean off its feet and splatter it against the far wall with nothing but the force of his voice.
But Brielle, still trapped in the cauldron and now bleeding out, was fading fast. Ivek prayed to St. Terragnis for one final blessing of luck, drank down the last of it, and used his one remaining spell to bless the healing potion Mathilda had slipped Randoah back in the village. Randoah fished Brielle from the soup and fed it to her — and Brielle, tasting the herby, forest-scented potion, felt her strength surge back, waking at full health just as the witch finally lay dead and the last of the giant vermin were cleared from the room.
As the dust settled, the party found themselves bruised, resourceful, and still trapped deep within Strahd’s castle — chained no longer, but far from free. They carried stolen supplies, a looted tarot deck, and the fresh, unspoken knowledge that something dark had already taken root in them from the moment they’d fallen unconscious at that fateful toast. Somewhere above them, midnight was closing in, and three artifacts — a cursed tome, a symbol of hope, and a sword of vengeance — waited to be found, if they hoped to ever see Strahd’s power broken and the sun again.