Date: August 9, 2026
Attendance: Brielle, Randoah of Oak, Enki, Ivek the Seer
It’s been roughly five years since the party’s home village was destroyed by the cultists of Mugdulbulb, the slime god — an ordeal only Brielle and Randoah survived. This session picked back up in Marin’s Hold, the last real bastion of civilization in a demon-haunted region called the Gloaming, where the two veterans are joined by two new faces: Ivek, a former cultist turned wandering Seer, and Enki, a circus-raised wanderer searching for a way to free his brother’s soul, which he believes is trapped inside his sword.
All four received black, wax-sealed invitations from a mysterious courier, summoning them to a lavish party thrown by the reclusive Count Demetrius, along with 15 gold each to buy something suitably noble to wear. Before setting off, the party ran their errands around Marin’s Hold — Enki struck a deal with the local warlord, Reeve Tarly Winters, to uncover the Count’s true identity (and kill him if he’s a fraud), while Randoah paid a visit to Mathilda, the local hedge-witch, for tea, gossip about the fey, and a free healing potion slipped into her pocket on the way out.
At dusk, the party met the Count’s carriage at a crossroads, escorted by an unnervingly tall coachman named Gunther and the Count’s charming, unsettlingly familiar concubine, Christine. The ride revealed the true scope of the problem: the Count’s entire domain is under a wasting curse — sickly crops, masked and pustule-covered farmers, and a village full of plague victims. At the manor, the party mingled with masked nobility and noticed a clearly disturbed holy woman, Sister Geraldine, muttering in a corner. When Ivek tried to bless a glass of champagne to help her, she recoiled in horror and fled the room.
Enki cornered the Count to press him on his true identity — and got an answer. The Count revealed himself as Strahd von Zarovich, ancient lord of the castle of Ravenloft, claiming he’d lived countless lifetimes and now brings in “heroes” like the party to relieve him of his curse out of little more than boredom. Shortly after, Strahd raised a toast, a gong sounded, and a cold wind snuffed every torch at once — the whole party blacked out on the spot.
They woke chained to the wall of a flooded dungeon, hanging over knee-deep water lit only by a single floating black candle. Sharing the cell was a caged old woman, Esmeralda, 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.
From there it became a dungeon crawl beneath the castle. The party lost their gear early on, found a gargoyle that opened a hidden passage in exchange for a blood sacrifice, and pushed through the flooded torture chamber, where sunken corpses kept surfacing — one clutching Enki’s stolen belongings, another handing out childhood keepsakes for bonus hit points, before a third rose up as a full zombie and had to be fought off. Unbeknownst to the others 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 group also raided an alchemy lab for vials and glowing “chair-leg glow sticks,” resisted a tempting cursed drink, and finally kicked open a kitchen door into a shrink-ray nightmare: a giant witch’s kitchen where they’d all been reduced to mouse-size, complete with a barn-sized cauldron holding a trapped, screaming priest and a swarm of oversized spiders.
The climactic fight was chaotic — Brielle got pulled into the boiling cauldron and started dying, while Ivek and Randoah worked to save her and the imprisoned priest. Enki screamed down one of the giant spiders (one good Charisma roll splattered it against the wall), Randoah — drawing on her own witchcraft — pulled off a levitating frog trick to fish the priest out, and Ivek blessed a stolen healing potion, which Randoah then used to stabilize and fully heal Brielle. The session ended there, with the party bruised, resourceful, and still very much in over their heads — trapped in Strahd’s dungeon with three artifacts to find and midnight closing in.