Delving into D&D Supplementary Materials

While my D&D game is navigating the difficult scheduling terrain of a bunch of players who are actors and thus have highly unpredictable schedules, I decided to indulge myself and got my first D&D book outside of the three core books. This is The Curse of Strahd, a pre-fab adventure set in the Gothic Horror demiplane of Ravenloft (well, Barovia.)

As a neophyte player and DM, I figured it might be good to get a bit of inspiration for gameplay that goes outside of standard travel and combat. I've tried to keep things interesting by varying up the landscape and the selection of enemies (other than Gelatinous Cubes, which I adore and think are hilarious, we haven't had a repeat monster,) but I'll confess that my game has devolved into straight-up combat more often than not.

So I figured I'd check out some of the pre-made adventures for inspiration.

I'm very proud of my own setting, which makes me hesitant to simply start over with this adventure (which apparently has content that will take you from 1-10 - which is a pretty big deal, as after like seven sessions, my players are still only level 3 - though I think they'll be hitting 4 next time) but given that there's definitely some vampire stuff going on in my world, it wouldn't be difficult to work a lot of stuff from this module into my own homebrew.

If nothing else, there's a lot more gothic horror monsters here than what you find in the Monster Manual, and it might be nice to, at some point, start up a new game that follows this module to the letter (making my DM duties a bit simpler.)

Anyway, I love Gothic Horror stuff (it's a shame that I stopped playing Magic the Gathering before Innistrad came out - and I noticed that they might be amping the Gothic into Cosmic in the upcoming block, which I'll keep an eye on even if I don't wind up playing it) and so this module naturally leapt out at me.