Date: August 23, 2026
Attendance: Enki, Randoah of Oak, Brielle, Captain Gor, Morgoth, Cap
The witch of the castle’s kitchen was dead, the giant vermin cleared out, and Brielle pulled alive from the boiling cauldron — but the party wasn’t alone in that ruined kitchen. A hanging cage nearby held three more of Strahd’s marked guests, each already bitten by the same curse working its way through the rest of the party. Brielle cut them loose. The first out was Captain Gor, a blustering, big-talking dwarf who claimed (falsely) to have once captained the dreaded ship Leviathan, and who had arrived at the castle the same way the others had — invited, fed, and bitten before he ever got a good look at his host. Beside him was Morgy, a halfling scavenger who’d followed the smell of a feast through a loose grate into the wrong kitchen at the wrong time, and who was turning slowly and unmistakably into something more ooze than flesh ever since a bad piece of bread back in Barovia. The third was a goblin the others immediately started calling “Cap” as well, much to the annoyance of the room’s other captain — one of forty-one goblin siblings, built like a tank and thinking like one too, with a greataxe he refused to be parted from even when everything else was stripped away.
With her own life the stake on the table, Randoah struck a bargain with the dying witch: a potion, in exchange for sparing her, that would let Randoah swap two of her own stats. She fed the brew a fistful of her own hair, torn out at the root, to stand in for Strength, and her off-hand glove to stand in for Intelligence — and walked away from the deal noticeably sharper-witted and noticeably weaker in the arm than she’d been an hour before.
The enlarged, six-strong party crossed back out through the illusory mess hall, its skeletal furniture already picked over once, when a winged shape crossed the room ahead of them and shot up a spiral stairwell. Enki gave chase in bat form and cornered it on the landing above — Strahd himself, standing at a window, watching the storm outside with what looked almost like longing. The two exchanged a few quiet words, too low for the rest of the party to catch. Strahd laughed, dissolved into mist, and slipped out through the window into the night, and the party pressed on up the stairs he’d left behind.
The stairs led up past that same window to a small, furnished landing tucked into the stairwell like an afterthought: a reading chair, an old cobwebbed bookcase, and — streaked across one wall in what might have been paint or might have been old blood — a black pentagram with a wooden holy symbol of St. Terragnis mounted dead center. The instant the party reached the top of the stairs, the symbol began to smoke, then caught fire outright, collapsing to the ground as ash and char. Nearby, on a table by the chair, sat a holy book of hymns and sermons, its pages raked through by claw marks thirty pages deep and stained with a bloody handprint — something powerful had torn it out of someone’s hands. Brielle examined it, being the party’s resident church-raised skeptic, and found nothing arcane about it beyond the obvious desecration; when Randoah picked it up anyway, sparks leapt from the symbol scorched into the floor and the book itself caught fire in her hands, burning down to nothing. Enki, recognizing the pentagram as demonic — if unaffiliated with his own order of Saint Ydris — noted only that it made grim sense a holy symbol of Terragnis would combust in its presence.
It was here that Brother Kristoff, the priest the party had rescued from the witch’s cauldron, found his nerve returning along with his fear. Watching the cross fall and burn, he warded himself and admitted he’d never expected to make it out of the castle alone — that he’d all but given up, in fact, until this moment. He told the party he’d entered Ravenloft with another brother of his order, met on the road, and that the two of them had snuck in together only to be separated and swept up by the Count’s agents the moment they crossed into the courtyard: a doorman, a charismatic red-dressed noblewoman he named Christine, and a maid with white hair and a spider-silk dress who had, in his words, “loose lips” and told them more about the Count than she probably should have. He’d heard rumors of a chapel somewhere in the castle that might offer a way out, though he didn’t know where.
The three newcomers had left everything else behind in the witch’s kitchen, carrying out only what mattered most: Captain Gor his bow and its arrows (his hat, apparently, was never in question), and Cap his greataxe, refusing to be parted from it despite having nothing else to his name. Captain Gor turned up a small coin pouch on the bookshelf — five gold, quietly claimed — and Cap clanked his way up the stairs after the group with all the subtlety of a dropped tray, his armor announcing every step. Randoah bottled the ashes of the burned book for later, and Brielle pocketed what was left of the holy symbol as charcoal.
The stairs let out into the foyer: a grand, dusty hall with vaulted ceilings, thick columns, grotesque carved faces, and angels with their arms raised to heaven — the same room Dorothy had led the original party through toward the masquerade, though the three newcomers were seeing it for the first time. It was worse for wear now. Half the sconces were dark, shadows pooled in the corners, and cobwebs stirred in drafts that shouldn’t have existed. From here, exits led back the way they’d come, south toward the distant sound of an organ, north up a grand stairway guarded by a standing suit of plate armor, east down a long stained-glass hallway, and west to the castle’s front entry.
Cap made straight for the suit of armor and found, wedged into its helm’s grille, an ornate pipe of bone or ivory — the very image of the pipe his own goblin father used to smoke outside their hovel while all forty-one of his children played nearby. Too unnerved by the coincidence to take it right away, he instead tried to pry a gauntlet loose — and the suit backhanded him, wrenched free, and bolted loudly for the stairs. Enki lunged for it and missed, sliding to the floor as the armor silently laughed at him through its visor; Brielle ran it down instead, tackling it hard enough to shatter it into scattered plate across the floor, the pipe rolling free. From the wreckage, Cap finally claimed the pipe — the moment of calm it brought him steadying something in him he hadn’t realized was frayed — along with a real greatsword (which Enki claimed in trade for his short sword) and enough salvaged plate to piece together a serviceable suit of armor for himself.
Deeper into the castle, heading up toward the audience hall, a gust of flowery perfume and pink mist brushed past the party, taking on a fleeting feminine shape near Captain Gor before a flirtatious voice purred “not long before you’re mine, my dear” and vanished back out a window into the storm. Closer to the hall’s doors, a velvet rope barred the way and a broom swept itself back and forth across the floor — until a witch’s cackle echoed through the halls and the broom collapsed lifeless. Enki took the broom as a souvenir after confirming, by the thick, undisturbed carpet, that nothing living had been sweeping it.
Enki kicked the doors open onto the audience hall itself — the same throne room where the masquerade had taken place, now moth-eaten and tattered, its raven-carved throne holding court over a room gone to ruin. A goblet and a book sat on the throne’s armrest, the goblet coated in old blood; a cloaked, faceless figure — glimpsed once before from the flooded torture chamber’s balcony — turned and fled down a side passage the instant it was noticed. Above a credenza hung a large portrait of two young noblemen: Strahd, black-haired, and beside him an unfamiliar man with similar features and blond hair, his painted face raked through with claw marks.
Brielle approached the throne to look for anything valuable, and the goblet filled with blood as if in answer. Before anyone could stop her, the goblet was at Brielle’s lips — the first vampiric feeding to properly take hold in the party. Brielle’s shadow grew horns and hunched over as if alive on its own, fangs came in, and a new, terrible scream took shape in the throat — an ultrasonic shriek capable of shattering glass and rattling the room like thunder. The goblet itself proved bottomless, refilling the instant it was emptied; carried back to the rest of the party, it set every one of them twitching with hunger before they managed, barely, to hold themselves together.
The book on the armrest bore a gold-embossed raven’s head and, Randoah could tell at a glance with her newly sharpened mind, a rune that would trigger Darkness the moment it was opened. She snatched it up to keep it safely shut while Morgy, nervous about the smell of blood in the room, took up the abandoned broom to sweep around the throne instead — and in doing so, knocked the book from Randoah’s grip. It fell open. A small brass key with a raven’s head tumbled out and rang against the floor, and the whole room plunged into absolute darkness as the trap discharged. A full thirty seconds of shrieking bats buffeted everyone in the dark before thinning out, and when Cap finally managed to strike a light — after fumbling badly enough to send furniture, china, and a serving tray crashing across the room — the book’s pages were glowing faintly on the floor where Morgy had kicked it aside. Cap grabbed the key; Morgy lunged in and stabbed the now-fluttering, hissing book clean through, discharging whatever animation was left in it for good.
What the party had was Strahd’s own diary: I, Strahd. Its early pages told of a landless seventh son who raised an army and carved out his own domain by conquest, married a beautiful woman named Tatiana (spelled Titania in his own early hand), and left her in the care of his older brother Sergei while off at war — only to grow first affectionate, then suspicious, then venomous as her letters mentioned Sergei more and more. He returned home early, found the affair he’d feared, and — in the diary’s own broken, spiraling language — dueled and killed his brother, then killed his wife. It was that double act of fratricide and murder, the diary made plain, that sealed the vampire’s curse on Strahd and his entire domain. It was also, unmistakably, one of the three prophesied artifacts: the tome infused with the Count’s own power, its words of power written in blood and usable by anyone with the nerve to try. Inside were four spells — Alter Self, Feather Fall, Invisibility, and Mage Armor — which Morgy, finding the book neither shiny nor useful to her, handed over to the rest of the party. The key, meanwhile, was confirmed to belong to some door deeper in the house, not a chest.
Down a side passage toward the servants’ quarters, Brielle heard phantom sounds of a woman in labor — pained groaning, a midwife’s urgent instructions, and finally a newborn’s cry — coming from behind a closed door among a row of otherwise ransacked, abandoned rooms. Opening it silenced the sounds at once. Inside, sheeted furniture surrounded a single bassinet rocking gently on its own, smeared in old and fresh blood, and cradling a freshly born, umbilical-corded baby girl wrapped in what turned out to be Enki’s own childhood blanket — a trinket whose familiar weight steadied something in him the moment he recognized it. Enki picked her up, sang her calm, and strapped her to his chest, naming her Clover on the spot. Rummaging through a nearby credenza, Randoah turned up a stolen childhood toy of her own — a guilty memory that lingered with her a moment before she set it aside — moments before a swarm of tiny spiders poured out of the dresser, cleaned a path across the floor, and vanished into a crack in the masonry, leaving nothing behind but a feather duster. Captain Gor fetched clean sheets from the room to wipe Clover down (whiskey standing in for holy water, courtesy of Kristoff’s flask), and Randoah, examining the portrait of the two brothers back in the audience hall, confirmed what everyone was already suspecting: Sergei and Strahd looked unmistakably related.
With most of the ground floor explored, the party pushed up the servants’ stairwell and out onto an exterior balcony, storm howling around them, overlooking a small, badly damaged chapel far below — bell tower broken, holy symbol snapped in two, a stairwell visible through its crumbling walls. An intrusive thought whispered “jump” the moment anyone looked over the edge; everyone held their footing. Two wooden thrones sat on the balcony, one occupied by a faceless, hooded figure that beckoned Brielle over with a fold of its own cloak. The moment Brielle sat beside it, the figure collapsed into nothing but a fine silk cloak, which Captain Gor claimed and put on — discovering, once worn, that it let its wearer step through mist itself to escape danger. Sitting there, Brielle also caught a brief vision of the ruined chapel below made whole again, its bell ringing and its altar sliding open onto a hidden stair — gone the instant they stood back up.
Kristoff, brought up to see the chapel from above, confirmed the rumor: a priest’s prayers, said there, might open a forgotten way out. Getting fifty feet down to it, though, took some doing. The party lashed together Enki’s rope and the velvet rope taken from the throne room earlier, forty feet combined, padded it out with bedsheets and curtains gathered from the nursery, and anchored the whole rig with a set of flesh hooks Enki drove into the balcony’s stonework. Morgy went down first, flawless and fast — but left the rope slick with ooze in her wake, making the rest of the descent that much harder for everyone behind her. Captain Gor went next and paid for it, losing his grip halfway down and falling before catching himself with his very first use of the new cloak’s Misty Step, teleporting the rest of the way to solid ground. Cap muscled his way down safely with an improvised carabiner made from looped rope and sheer strength; Brielle practically ran down the line; Randoah floated the distance with Feather Fall, borrowed from the new spellbook; and Enki, in bat form, carried Clover down last — only to discover, without any memory of when it happened, that the infant in his arms had somehow grown into a toddler holding his hand instead.
The courtyard delivered them to the chapel’s door, hanging ajar and graffitied by whatever guests had passed through before them, its pews shattered inside. Kristoff went first at the party’s urging and found his fellow priest’s body slumped over a blackened, desecrated altar — strangled with his own censer’s chain, his fingers bloodied from clawing at something before he died, and a message scrawled in his own blood on the altar’s edge: purify, ring the bell. Captain Gor pocketed the dead man’s golden censer as treasure. Despite the loss, and despite Enki briefly losing his temper and threatening him with bared fangs before a suddenly teenage Clover calmed him down with a hand on the shoulder and a plaintive “I don’t want what happened to Mama to happen again,” Kristoff spent the better part of fifteen minutes in prayer to St. Terragnis, scrubbing the altar clean of blood and grime until it shone white marble again. The way, he said, should be clear now — if someone could reach the bell. It wasn’t in the chapel; it hung somewhere above them, in the castle’s own belfry, visible from the balcony they’d just climbed down from.
Enki flew up as a bat to find it, discovering inside the belfry a secret door — operable from this side only — beside the bell’s thick rope. Kicking the door open with one hand while hauling the bell with the other, he rang it just as he stumbled through into a warm, impossibly cozy study: fireplace lit, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, plush reading chairs, utterly out of place in a castle otherwise rotting around it. A strikingly beautiful red-haired woman sat reading by the fire and introduced herself, unbothered, as Tatiana, Countess of the castle — lonely, kept from company by a husband who “never tells her these things.” When Enki, starving and furious, seized her and demanded answers, she dissolved into nothing in his hands. Muffled laughter and kissing sounded from a second door; through it came a naked, green-hued, enormously fat old woman, sweeping the floor and cackling about guests who leave stains, before shushing the room and plunging it into total darkness. Enki, steadying himself on the memory of his own childhood blanket, retreated back through the belfry and flew down to rejoin the others, relaying what he’d found: a hidden study that had to sit close to the Count’s true quarters, and, quite possibly, whatever “fair maiden” the castle’s doorman had been so eager to trade for.
Down in the chapel, the bell’s ringing had already slid the desecrated altar open onto the promised hidden stairway. With an hour or less left before midnight, though, the party chose to double back into the castle proper instead — through the chapel’s stained-glass doors, back to the foyer, and finally toward the sound of the organ that had been playing, on and off, all night. They found Strahd there in truth, seated at a massive pipe organ mid-performance, a full feast laid out behind him: a roasted goat with an apple in its jaws, goblets of thick red liquid standing in for wine, and fine silverware the party wasted no time stealing wholesale. Those who ate rose from the table feeling whole again, every ache and wound of the night forgotten. Strahd, finishing his song, welcomed them to “waste an hour or two” in conversation, needled them for taking so long to find him, and dropped the evening’s cruelest reveal without ceremony: one of the party, he said, had already been turned to his purposes — “it was not difficult to corrupt one of you to my ends” — without naming who. When Randoah tried to stare him down and force a harmless command through sheer force of will, Strahd shrugged off the attempt entirely and, to prove a point, drained every drop of vampiric power from the party and handed it right back a moment later: a demonstration, and a weakness noted for later, that none of their new curses mean anything in his presence.
Leaving the dining hall, the party found themselves face to face with a haggard, middle-aged woman in the corridor — Clover, impossibly, aged decades further in the time it took to eat a meal, exasperated that “Dad” hadn’t watched the kid. She handed Enki a plain, faceless doll wrapped in a blanket, asked for five minutes to herself, and thanked him before wandering off. Asked about her own mother, she said only that the woman had once worked at the castle and that she hadn’t seen her in some time — the Count, she said, kept her busy late at night. With the foyer’s two remaining unexplored paths in front of them — a servants’ stairwell up, or a secret passage down near the gargoyle they’d bled for earlier — the party chose to go down, gambling that treasure, like the gargoyle itself, tends to guard what matters most.
The stairs led into proper catacombs beneath the castle: squat ceilings, thick columns, bodies wrapped in silk and stuffed into wall niches, and a scattering of stone crypts larger and more elaborate than the rest, with a passage to the north carrying the sound of faint weeping and a second, grander stairway leading straight up through the roof. On the walk down, Randoah — testing her new spellbook — cursed Captain Gor with a waking vision of tripping on his own new cloak and breaking his neck, prompting him to tie the thing up out of the way for the rest of the night. The first crypt, opened by Captain Gor, belonged to Jessica Strahd, “Mother Raven” — and the moment the party stepped into her chamber, a haze seemed to lift from all of them, the dread of the castle briefly, measurably less. Inside lay the preserved body of a conservatively dressed holy woman wearing a silver raven amulet; the instant Captain Gor took it, the body crumbled to ash. The amulet, the Mother’s Icon, glows like a torch and carries a warding power against the undead — quite possibly the second of the three prophesied artifacts, the ancient symbol of hope. Captain Gor put it on, feeling, for the first time all night, like they’d found something that mattered.
Cap’s crypt belonged to a Baron Von Bobber, “still drowning in his riches” — a warning the party took literally too late, as prying the tomb open buried Cap up to his neck in a flash flood of copper coins. Morgy dug him out, pocketing a small fortune for herself in the process (roughly a hundred coins, stuffed into boots and bag alike), while the crypt’s actual occupant sat crowned in a bent golden circlet, which Cap claimed for himself. Morgy’s own crypt turned out to be a proper mausoleum — the Weeping Tomb, its iron-latticed windows looking out over the storm-lashed courtyard, a lone black coffin at its center carved all over with the castle’s raven motif. The sound of weeping resolved into a translucent, grieving young nobleman, the same face from the portrait downstairs: Sergei. Confused at first, mistaking Morgy for his lost love, he settled into lucidity long enough to recount his own death in full — a duel with his brother in the pouring rain, fought in confidence and lost only because Strahd carried a second, hidden dagger. He died, he said, never learning what became of Tatiana, and asked only that the party bring her to him so the two of them might finally rest together, since they never got the chance to live together. Enki’s own crypt held nothing but an armor stand, a vial of oil, and a rag. On a hunch, he offered Clover’s doll up to Sergei’s ghost, wondering if it might mean something to a man who’d lost his own love — and the doll vanished from his hands. He turned to find an old woman standing behind him: Clover again, aged now to the far end of a lifetime lived in one night, calling him “husband” before catching herself and saying he looked just like her father. Brought before Sergei, she called him “husband” too; Sergei, a stranger to her, could only offer a kindness anyway, telling her to go enjoy what time she had left. Confused, at peace, she agreed, and wandered off murmuring about a husband at her side.
The last crypt bore an inscription already engraved with Brielle’s own name — “getting the room ready for you,” as the rest of the party put it, not entirely joking. Empty but for a scroll bound in twine, the ornately carved coffin returned to Brielle one piece of lost equipment: a shortbow and its arrows. The scroll turned out to be a childhood drawing of an imaginary friend — a small, foot-wide ball of living shadow with tiny legs and watchful eyes, who used to keep Brielle company on nights too frightened for sleep — a trinket from home that left her feeling sturdier, harder to knock down than before.
That left one place unexplored: a large chamber straight ahead, its archway inscribed with the name Strahd Von Zarovich. Randoah went in alone and found exactly what the name promised — Strahd’s own tomb, his massive black coffin at the center of the room, three standing coffins in alcoves around it, and several more alcoves standing conspicuously empty. Strahd caught her by the shoulder before she could retreat, offering her a place among his brides — “I have room for more” — or, failing that, a much less glamorous alternative. Randoah demurred as gracefully as she could, claiming her soul already promised to a Will-o’-Wisp, and Strahd let the matter drop with a backhanded compliment about her height, remarking that escape generally runs upward, not down, and that he’d rather expected better of them by now.
With that, Strahd sneered, dissolved into mist, and vanished once more. In the quiet that followed, someone thought to check on Clover — and found no trace of her anywhere. Where she’d last stood was a single black rose, tied with a bow, and nothing else. No one had seen her go.
Shaken, the party weighed what came next: press on and explore what remained of Castle Ravenloft, or hold to the clock and see where roughly thirty minutes to midnight left them. Unanimous, they chose to keep the pressure on.