Family Vacation to Castle Ravenloft Pt 1: Welcome to Barovia, Here's A Dead Body

*blows dust off the blog*

Last spring, I tried an experiment on with my family. I'm an avid roleplaying gamer, having played D&D since I was in high school. I have kids that enjoy playing games with me and always want to play more. The games they play are often not particularly fun after the first few times (Beat the Parents being one example that springs to mind.) I should share my passion for roleplaying games with them, I thought. And so, inspired by this blog, I started my kids off on the hobby. I kit-bashed together an easy to run system that resembled 5th Edition D&D and Castles and Crusades' bastard love child, and we rolled up some characters.

I tried very hard to point them towards the simpler classes, and they of course ignored me. Lilly the at the time 10 year old picked out a bard, and I had to then scramble to make bards cool enough that she wouldn't get bored and quit. Sage the 8 year old made a druid, and I suddenly got a headache figuring out how to explain Vancian magic to someone who hasn't even gotten to fractions yet in math class (answer: spell points represented with glass beads!) My wife even slapped together a halfling rogue for when she was with us, and they were off for their first adventure. I've liked Skaven since I first encountered them in Blood Bowl, so there was a pack of ratmen burning down a farmhouse and generally being jerks to a kid and his dog. The party dispatched the rats, saved the day, acquired the dog, and that was the end of it for about 6 months. The kids leave to stay with their Bio-Dad over the summer and they started going to a local play club on the night when it worked best for us to play, so the campaign went into indefinite hold.

But then, a couple of weeks ago, Sage asked me when we would play "that game with the minis again" (Author's Note: insert image of Gary Gygax facepalming here.) I hadn't prompted her, though I had always kind of regretted that the game hadn't taken off. I told her "Well, depending on how you and your sister behave, maybe we can try Friday night." She seemed satisfied with this (she usually is) and I was left with trying to figure out what to run for them. I'm a busy guy, and I run other games, so I didn't want something that was going to require a ton of prep time for me. Additionally, it needed to be something I really enjoyed which I knew could grab their attention and hold it, because gaming for younger kids can have unique challenges (Pro-tip: keep your sessions short. Their attention spans are not going to stay for three-hour long marathons.) The solution was, of course, to throw my family into Ravenloft.

Because I am a loving and kind step-father.

Wait, wait, come back. Look, I know this setting is one of the most polarizing in all of RPG history. The people that like Ravenloft love it, and everybody else hates it. I am well aware of this fact. However, I am also aware that the REASON most people hate Ravenloft is because most DM's that ran campaigns in it just took it as an opportunity to be dicks to their players with the justification that "Well, the Dark Lord has absolute power here, so bad stuff happens. Deal with it." I am not that guy (anymore.) I love Ravenloft because I've loved the Gothic period since I read Frankenstein for Academic Decathlon in high school (god, this is a nerdy paragraph) and I especially love Gothic Horror. Fans of the Dread Realms have kind of always felt like a maniacal dedicated cult, and I count myself among their number. I've been in a Ravenloft game in one form or another for pretty-much the last decade and a half. Yes, it plagiarizes constantly from other literature.  Yes, one has to walk a very fine line to keep the players from falling into hopelessness because everything gets so dark. And yes, there are things I'll probably have to tone down for kids. But I6 is and always will be my favorite module, ever, bar none. The castle is amazing. The maps are amazing. And the villain is just that right combination of bully, monster, and tragic figure to continuously inspire me and infuriate players. But most of all, I KNOW Strahd. I never have to stop and think "What would he do in this situation," because I've run him so many times he's like a second skin to me. This, then, would be how I would keep myself from going crazy trying to be ready from week to week, and would hopefully be interesting to the kids and Jen as well. The fact that we were starting in October was just icing on the cake.

Sweet, pumpkin flavored cake. Possibly with pumpkin spice. And horror.

And so, on a dark and stormy (I guess it was just cloudy, but go with me) Friday night, my old vinyl gaming mat was unrolled and Acizia the Gnome Bard, Ariela the Human Druid, and Rascal the Farm Dog got lost in the mist while searching for kidnapped farmers. They soon stumbled upon the wrought iron gates that marked the border to Barovia, and felt the same chill as thousands of PCs before them as they screeched open on their own and swung closed behind them. And, yes, they promptly found a dead body with a message warning them not to go any further towards town, which they ignored because they are adventurers. They travelled down the road, finding a pumpkin farm being ransacked by Zombies while a halfling with an odd Germanic accent cursed them for it (Lilly has been shouting "Mein Poompkins!" every time I mention D&D since). The zombies seemed to be loading pumpkins of all things onto the wagon which THE HEROES HAD BEEN TRACKING ALL ALONG. They charged into the fight, being joined by the pumpkin-farming halfling's nephew Keill (my wife's character. She missed the first game so I thought I could introduce her here. Plus it will be useful to have a local in the party to "know things" later.) The fight got a little desperate, and Acizia's attempt to commander the wagon failed when she realized that the horse attached to the front was also among the ranks of the Living Dead and refused to move. Finally the last of the zombies and their ratman handler fell beneath the party's weapons, at which point Zombie Horse decided it was going to start bolting at top speed towards town. I gave Acizia a chance to roll an intelligence check before bailing out, which she failed, and she managed to jump clear to safety before being hauled off to who-knows-where in the cart. It was only afterward, when the party was greeting Otto the Farmer and learning that they were a long, LONG way from where they started, that the unfortunate gnome bard remembered that the farmers they were trying to rescue were tied up in the back of that cart, which was now sprinting away towards the village at top speed.

Welcome to Ravenloft.