Date: August 23, 2026
Attendance: Enki, Randoah of Oak, Brielle, Captain Gor, Morgoth, Cap
The session picked up immediately where the last one left off, in the wreckage of the witch’s kitchen. Hanging in a cage nearby were three more of the Count’s marked “guests,” each already bitten by the curse: Captain Gor, a blustering dwarf with a captain’s coat and no ship to speak of; Morgy (Morgoth), a halfling scavenger turning slowly and unmistakably into something more ooze than flesh; and a goblin newcomer the others immediately started calling “Cap” too, to the visible irritation of the other captain in the room. Brielle cut all three loose. With her own life on the table, Randoah struck a bargain with the witch for a potion that would let her swap two of her stats — she fed it a fistful of her own hair, torn out at the root, for Strength, and her off-hand glove for Intelligence, and came out the other side of the deal a good deal sharper and a good deal weaker in the arm.
The now six-strong party crossed back through the illusory mess hall, where a winged shape darted overhead and up a spiral stair. Enki gave chase in bat form and cornered it on the landing above: Strahd himself, gazing wistfully out a window into the storm. The two traded words before the Count laughed, dissolved into mist, and slipped away into the night, leaving the party to press on upstairs on their own.
From there, the session became a long climb through Castle Ravenloft in search of a way out before midnight. A blackened loft cost the party a holy symbol — burned to ash the instant it was raised near a demonic pentagram scorched into the wall — but bought them Brother Kristoff’s trust and the news that a second priest of his order had entered the castle alongside him and gone missing. Up in the foyer and the castle’s grand (and long-since ransacked) audience hall, the party fought off and looted an animated suit of armor, argued with a self-sweeping broom, and watched Brielle succumb to her first vampiric feeding at Strahd’s own throne, drinking from an ever-refilling goblet of blood and coming away with a shattering new scream. A trapped, glowing diary nearby — once its rune-trap was sprung and the book itself stabbed into submission — turned out to be Strahd’s own confession: the murder of his brother Sergei and his wife Tatiana, and the exact moment the vampire’s curse took root in him and everything he owns. It doubled as a spellbook of four spells anyone in the party could learn to cast.
In an old nursery, the party found a freshly born, blood-slicked infant rocking alone in a bassinet, and adopted her on the spot. Enki named her Clover; over the course of the night she aged with unsettling speed, from newborn to toddler to teenager, a detail no one has yet explained. A rope-and-bedsheet descent off an exterior balcony — saved at the last second by a newly acquired, misty-stepping silk cloak — got the party down to a ruined chapel outside the castle walls, where Kristoff’s missing brother turned up murdered atop a desecrated altar. Kristoff purified it anyway, and ringing the belfry bell above (reached by Enki in bat form) slid the altar open onto a hidden stairway. That same belfry hid a warm, out-of-place study, where Enki briefly met — and lost — an illusory Tatiana before a naked, cackling crone plunged the room into darkness and sent him fleeing back the way he came.
With time running short, the party doubled back through the castle to confront Strahd directly over a lavish, blood-soaked feast in his organ chamber. He toyed with them, revealed that one of their own had already been turned to his purposes, and proved — twice — that none of their new curses do them any good in his presence. Undeterred, the party pressed down into the castle’s crypts, looting a glowing holy amulet from the tomb of Strahd’s own mother, a crown from a baron buried under his own hoard of copper, and a lost childhood keepsake from an empty coffin already engraved with Brielle’s name. In the Weeping Tomb, Morgy met the ghost of Sergei himself, still grieving Tatiana and begging the party to reunite the two of them in death. The night ended with Randoah cornered in Strahd’s own bedchamber, politely declining an invitation to become his newest bride — and the party voting, unanimously, to hold to the clock rather than stretch it: whatever comes next, they have less than thirty minutes left before midnight.