5 Ways to Make Curse of Strahd Better

foreign in this episode since we're getting into the month of October I thought it would make a lot of sense to do a video talking about the one of the spookier uh campaigns of fifth edition curse of strad cursive strad is a campaign that's pretty near and dear to my heart it's the first campaign I ever ran as a DM um and it was kind of my first taste of of getting to sort of play around in in a world and and mess with fantasy and and create a story um and so I I just love it and I made a lot of changes to uh curse of strad when I ran the game and I I thought I'd make a video talking about that so these are uh five ways that I changed uh curse of strad to make it better I asked my group um a little bit about this because I wanted I wanted their take on things and I wanted them to tell me what they thought um were their favorite changes that we made and um what they thought weren't their favorite um so this is my my top five uh that I thought I'd share with you guys today and if you don't know uh about us we're Misfit adventurers I'm Amanda I'm the DM of our group and uh we mostly play around in our um own Homebrew world of irelia and you can check out uh some of our games on our channel here uh we've got uh our old campaign uh that's Audio Only um and only here on YouTube and then we have our new campaign that we've been working on right now which is nautical themed um and that one there is a video with it and that would be campaign two on on the channel here so without further Ado here are my five ways that I changed curse of strad for the better so number one and and this is one that a lot of people do um but maybe not to this extent so in cursive strad if you don't know there's a pretty uh iconic moment where you meet Madame Ava and you have a card reading a taraka card reading and she draws the cards and that ends up um sort of setting up where you're gonna need to go to find these things to defeat straw who's gonna help you where he's gonna be all of those lovely things I think when you're running the game especially for the first time you should not only do the card reading by yourself ahead of time so you're not surprised I think you should just flat out choose the cards that are going to be pulled for the reading um so basically you are deciding ahead of time which locations that uh you want the party to hit and go to during the campaign I think this is a better idea than a random drawing because because there are a lot of locations in cursive strad that if you don't have a reason to go there like a real reason to go there there's really just no point to to make the risk some groups might you know want to explore every corner of borovia a lot of groups my party being one of them want to get the out of this horrible place they want to get home they've been pulled away from from their their Homeworld and thrust into this horrible place where everything wants to kill them and everybody is sad so they didn't really want to kind of dilly dally and wander around so I picked places that I thought were the most interesting that I wanted them to go to without a shadow of a doubt because they were cool like the amber Temple um Argan vashtolt um where else did I I pick um but those were some of the big ones um or you could make sure that they hit um um where babalizaga is those kinds of things you want to make sure that they they go to so I would pick those and I would put um like strides um um book uh or the um it's the I think it's the icon of of ravenloft maybe is in one of those there's the sword things like that and so that they had to go to these places um and that was a really good change for us um and and made a lot of sense and then they gonna they kind of had to touch on the best locations in the campaign book and I knew that they wouldn't miss them which was important to me because I didn't want them to to miss out on on some of these great places all right number two uh introducing strawd early and introducing him in Disguise there's um a little bit of information kind of buried in the book where um it says that sometimes strad has has pretended to be a lord Vasily Von Holtz um I think there might be some letters that are written under that pen name and it it's revealed to be strawd but you don't necessarily run into a lord Vasily Von Holtz in the book as it's written and I decided to change that I like it when the villains are a persistent threat throughout the campaign and I like it when it's somebody that the party really gets to know um they were there at the beginning and they'll be there at the end and it makes that final showdown whenever it happens wherever it happens way more impactful so one of the first people the party met in my run-through of curse of straw was a lord Vasily Von Holt it's a traveling Merchant on this follic road and he sat down with them at their campfire and got to know them he gave them a few tips uh um warned them about a few things and told them that if they ever made it up to volaki that they should hit him up and he'd help them out and and things like that and it really made Strada a more interesting character and it showed that he really loves to play with his food and I kind of took that even further where um they were invited up to ravenloft way sooner than the book would have you do it um and he would show up periodically and um he was just a very persistent threat and I think the party ended up loving him as a villain even more because they felt like on on certain levels they they really got to know him which which is exactly what I wanted this next change um when I pulled my group this next change was their absolute favorite um and it was what I did with the sun sword I really um I really made the sun sword it's its own character or rather I made Sergey and the sun sword far more connected than they would be um there's a lot of descriptions about the sun sword it's it's missing um it's missing its blade it's been part of it has been lost um it belonged to Sergey it's a sentient sword with emotion that can communicate to its wielder on a certain level um and and there's a lot of talk about Sergey and and who he was um he's strawd's brother and and he was a really good guy and and his his brother killed him because he got jealousy wanted Irina I decided to it's my dog uh I decided to kind of make them one and the same so in my campaign when Sergey was struck down by strod his soul got sucked into the sun sword and um he kind of got stuck in there and he's a part of the sun sword so when the sun sword communicates with the party it's really Sergey communicating with the party and so he um anytime they ran into Irena they would get intense feelings of care and and love and worry and and he would also warn them about other threats um and send them feelings of anger or betrayal when they would encounter other people like strawd um and I also sort of nerfed the sun sword a little bit um I took away some of its abilities and added a component where um part of the sun sword is missing and in order to restore it it i i in the description I described it as tarnished and in order to store it they have to find the missing component and put it back together and once they do that the sword gets stronger they actually can communicate with Sergey much more freely his um soul is free to pass on if he wishes and the sun sword gets its full stats as described in the campaign book I also added things where the wielder would occasionally have dreams where they could sort of communicate with Sergey but it would take time to figure out who he was and they would get Clues along the way and that connection would get stronger as the campaign progressed um and in the end the party really um really fell in love with sergey's character and really felt for him and um they ended up when they went to the Amber Temple and they gained the ability to to resurrect someone regardless of how long they had been dead they used that ability to bring back Sergey so in our run-through of the game of the game Sergey gets resurrected and him and Irina are reunited and they get a happily ever after um so that was one of my my favorite changes for sure number four and this is a change that I think a lot of people do but it's making Irina a lot more useful um Irena has this great um portrait in the campaign book she's got a sword she's wearing armor she looks badass but if you look at her stat block she really can't do anything and so curse of straw ends up turning into this like you know those your favorite you gotta take the NPC and just sort of protect them as you travel throughout this horrible environment and you have to protect them and it it just wouldn't be fun that way in in my opinion so I made Irina a much stronger character I mean she's somebody that that uh vampires werewolves straws minions have been hunting um for a while um so in in our game Irina is someone who her father trained to use a sword her brother has trained to fight as well uh in my version she was a fighter and I'm rolled stats for her well I I decided her stats but um she was a fighter and she was a dual wielder and and she could hold her own and so she would contribute to um the fighting and she was able to protect herself and it gave the party a little bit more freedom in what they felt like they could do safely um which was pretty important for them the last change that I made that I really enjoyed is um kind of a tweak to the end of the sort of valaki section the Lockheed Arc of the book there's a couple of different uh events of further development in the velaki sort of Arc and I decided to add a pretty big change to the Festival of the Blazing Sun so in our version of the Festival of the Blazing Sun the guy starts laughing as as is written um and instead of uh the Burgermaster like putting him in Chains and stuff he threatens to execute him and is about to do so um like literally puts a noose around his neck the party goes to intervene and Lord vasilivonholtz emerges from the crowd but his form shifts and starts to change revealing that he is none other than strawd van zarovich he snaps his fingers and the platform underneath the man that was caught laughing uh releases and he is hung instantly and dies and at that time uh alarms start going off uh fire is started and lady walkeders cultists and some of Straw's vampires emerge huge fight ensues and um it ended up being this huge event um they the party had met rictavio in town and he had been helping him and in the end he ended up having to sacrifice himself to buy the party time to run away because they really weren't strong enough to handle what was happening so they're trying to run away Rick tavio has killed some of the were Ravens are are slain um strawd is gunning for them because he wants the sun sword um it it was a whole mess and in the town of Lockheed ended up basically being destroyed um and and you know later we kind of worked in other aspects of that story of rebuilding the town choosing a new burger Master things like that but it was a huge Showdown and it turned into a really memorable moment that had lasting consequences um the were Ravens were forced out of velaki and kind of had to team up with their relatives at the wizard of the wines um Rick tavio ended up being raised as a vampire that the party had to fight again later um moving back through the lucky later um became more of a stressful event um it it was really a cool moment and and provided the huge impact that I wanted where it felt like at that moment the story really really shifted to where strawd wasn't somebody that was just playing with them and watching them a bit from afar he was more actively chasing them in that moment and actively chasing Irena from then on out and and it was a a big turning point for us so that's five ways that I changed curse of straw to improve it and kind of make the story My Own uh I hope you enjoyed it and I hope some of this was useful or at least inspires you to make your own changes and feel free to check us out listen to some of our games um you can find us here on YouTube uh or you can check us out on Spotify or apple music our new campaign is is being posted there as well and of course feel free to like And subscribe we would be happy to have you uh as a fellow Misfit so um catch you later and hope that was all useful to you thank you okay uh it's way too early in the day for a glass of wine but a video a thumbnail is important all right how does he how does he hold this like what you doing straw maybe I should back up I'm gonna hit my dog hopefully not oh geez hang on oh do you think I've read my book my tabs oh geez it's a map

Channel: Misfit Adventurers

Views: 41,029

Keywords: dnd, dungeons and dragons, curse of strahd, 5 tips, tips, advice, ttrpg, podcast, gaming, fantasy, dungeon master, DM, fifth edition, homebrew

Id: fATUv1E0BaI

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2022