Session -1: Curse of Strahd Case Study · Game Master's Laboratory

Session -1: Curse of Strahd Case Study

For anyone who is interested in using prewritten adventures or modules, but have trouble making them work for your table (or get bored by how railroady they can feel) this might be useful.

Another session report for you all! At some point, I'll get around to making more videos in the classroom tab for these, but I think they'll be more useful with at least a rough outline of a script. For now, this might be useful, and I took the liberty of highlighting everything that was added in session by myself or players. I removed the PC information, goals, etc at the end---Jonah and I have talked about that a ton, and I want to provide what I think is useful information on adapting content for a home game. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OgB_YURizvLk5gmaUbfHziKklVGJOsPg4y9_ko8TOnM/edit?usp=sharing

Everything that isn't highlighted was stuff I prepped before the session. I did a quick once-over of the adventure (carefully reading the beginning and end, then flipping through the rest to check for important plot points. Took 30--40 minutes) and wrote down everything I thought was important for this to work. NPCs, factions, locations, and important information.

I have a specific challenge for this: my players really, really wanted to play Curse of Strahd, but we've got to do it in about five sessions, for a ten level adventure that could easily take a year. That challenge influenced a lot of Session -1, where we decided we would start at Level 9 and spend the mini-campaign in the final, massive dungeon, Castle Ravenloft. This comes with a few challenges, but they're a little technical for one little post and isn't really what I'm hoping is valuable about this. Long story short, I'll improvise when needed and remove a few elements of the adventure (mostly items you would usually want to gather before facing Strahd. I'll probably use the vampire stat block with a few changes from MCDM's Flee Mortals book, since it's more interesting and I can balance it for this party more easily).

So what did we change? Everything highlighted was added in-session, and it's actually far less than these Session -1s usually have. In part, this is because we're adapting the very fleshed out Strahd content, but it's also because we threw out a ton of ideas and deleted some later to streamline the concept. I was going to skip the genre statement (see the table---just sharing what we like and why. You can find more info about it in the Classroom tab) because the theming of Curse of Strahd is so strong, but I decided to use it last minute, and thank god I did; it was invaluable to set the mood, get players talking, and setting some shared ideas of what's cool. I think it's most useful as a warm up tool, if nothing else. I did skip a genre name, since Strahd is pretty solidly Gothic horror and everyone at the table liked that.

Some themes took shape, and you can see them pop up in the facts the players provided about the setting, NPCs, etc. The group decided to hone in on Strahd and his castle, and played up elements that emphasized that: Strahd is almost unbeatable, and they need to use information as much as combat prowess to succeed. They liked the idea of him resurrecting them each time he died, so part of my job will be finding meaningful, devastating consequences outside of death. They started that job for me with Strahd's goal of resurrecting PCs to corrupt them for his castle.

This is a long post already, so I won't elaborate too much more for now. Hopefully this gives a decent idea of what a Session -1 looks like for a large campaign book like Curse of Strahd, and how to shrink something like that down a bit for players short on time!

1 comment