Short Adventures in Ravenloft: Har'Akir

 The Mummy is in the real pantheon of Universal Monster movies from the 1930s, up there with Frankenstein (also played by Boris Karlov,) Bela Lugosi's Dracula, and Lon Chaney's Wolf Man. It's for this reason that we have Mummies and Mummy Lords in the Monster Manual - while being undead monsters that function well in horror, they also kind of bridge the gap with the broader adventure genre that plays quite well in D&D. Consider the 1999 remake of The Mummy that has only become more beloved over time, which really pushes the '30s pulp adventure side of the story.

But we're going to try to push more toward the side of horror here. Another thing that Mummies work pretty well with is cosmic horror - it's arguably colonialist to focus on this aspect of it, but I think part of what makes Mummies compelling as horror monsters is the fact that they're from an ancient and mysterious culture. Even the direct descendants of the cultures that engaged in these burial practices (obviously the most famous being the Egyptians) no longer worship the same gods or engage in those practices anymore, and so there's kind of shared DNA with elements of Cosmic Horror - that forgotten deities or other supernatural forces that have existed long before anything we're familiar with are still there and about to take over once again, sweeping aside the flimsy world we've built for ourselves in modern time.

But there's a simpler horror we can also engage with: Dark tombs with frightening things in them.

Har'Akir has plenty going on above the surface, but it's also an element of the domain that there is a massive labyrinth of tombs beneath the desert, connecting disparate areas of the domain, but also filled with deadly monsters.

Thus, to me, the most obvious adventure in Har'Akir is actually a dungeon crawl - and one in which the party never even glimpses the sky.

Here's how I see it working:

The party passes through the Mist, either escaping a different domain or maybe intentionally coming to Har'Akir with a Mist Talisman. When they arrive, they're in total darkness. Those who can see with Darkvision or the like will realize they're in a stone chamber with a number of sarcophagi.

Depending on the level of the party, they'll face a few minor or just reasonable threats, maybe swarms of scarabs (using either the Swarm of Insect stat block or I think Van Richten's has a specific Beetle one) or, if they're a lot tougher, some Mummies will also attack them.

Gradually, the party will find evidence that the complex they are in was an oubliette prison for a priestly executioner known as Anu's Blade. Sealed away, it's hard to tell precisely how long ago the Blade's punishment was, because the lack of exposure to the elements has kept the tomb intact.

In order to escape the tomb, the party needs to solve some puzzles at various chambers within the tomb, and also fight or avoid some of the monsters within.

However, The Blade herself also stalks the tomb.

We basically make The Blade work a bit like Mr. X in Resident Evil 2's remake. Using a stat block like a Relentless Stalker or Juggernaut (depending on the party's level,) The Blade stalks through the tomb with an intent to kill anything in its path (we might even have it attack the Mummies or giant scorpions or what-have-you the party is fighting to let them see how hard it hits before they come under direct attack). At any given time, as DM, you know where The Blade is, and if it's within two rooms away from the party, unless they are actively trying to sneak around and be quiet, she will pursue them.

Like Ankhtepot, The Blade has been cursed with unending life, forced to remain in this pitch-dark tomb for all eternity. If the party reduces her to zero hit points, she merely falls to her knees and can't stand up or move until an hour has passed, at which point she catches her breath and begins the pursuit again.

The puzzles can thematically tell her story: She served as an executioner under the high priest of Anu (one of the false gods that Ankhtepot created,) but grew jealous of the wealth and treasure that the priest took from the dead. Caught stealing from the temple coffers, the priest, Hemsuret, confronted her, and she cut him down. Hemsuret had been working on a project to recover Ankhtepot's lost Ka, and as punishment for this devastating setback, the Darklord trapped her in this tomb. I think, notably, while there are murals and carved sarcophagi, there is no gold, no jewels, or other fine things here.

Each puzzle would require collecting various key items around the tomb (we could literally use the RE2 approach and have a pseduo-Metroidvania thing where the party gains access to more and more of the tomb as they gain more keys, with The Blade only showing up after the initial exploration,) forcing the party to backtrack through previously-explored areas and risk more confrontations with the Blade.

Solving the puzzles in the tomb would eventually open a chamber that releases not into the open desert, but merely into another wall of mist that the party can then use to travel elsewhere.

Sticking to the Hs, we're on to Hazlan next! Prepare to get some FromSoft-style weirdness.

Short Adventures in Ravenloft: Falkovnia

 Falkovnia got, as I understand it, a bit of a revamp in Van Richten's. In earlier editions, the male Vlad Drakov was a bit more similar to the historical Vlad the Impaler while Strahd was more similar to Bram Stoker's Dracula, who was loosely (loosely) based on the historical Wallachian nobleman (indeed, I believe that "Dracula" - meaning "Son of the Dragon," was not exclusively used by Vlad and that Stoker's vampiric creation might have only coincidentally been connected to the historical figure).

Anyway, Vladeska Drakov is still a tyrannical ruler over her domain of dread, but the threat here is not vampiric but instead the undead: Falkovnia is the zombie apocalypse (or "zombocalypse," as I like to call it) domain.

The zombie genre has been around since the 1960s, and you could argue that there are antecedents that might also count. But I think there's been an interesting move in the last few decades in which the zombies are more background pressures that then reveal more direct villains in humans who allow themselves to sink to new levels of brutality in the face of this pressure. 28 Days Later and its various sequels and The Walking Dead are some examples of this: zombies don't really grow and evolve as threats, and once you've got a good fortified system for keeping them at bay, they're largely taken care of.

Instead, the horror of these stories is how the safety of a society that has broken down erodes - it's not just that there are flesh-hungry ghouls in the streets (interestingly, George Romero, establishing the trope for the genre, never calls the zombies in Night of the Living Dead zombies, and indeed preferred the term "ghoul") but that the structures of authority and security have broken down.

Now, there's plenty of social commentary you can make about how even without zombies, those systems have already been a threat, but I think there's something to be said about how the fear of terrorists in the early part of this century (aren't suicide bombers kind of "zombie-like?" in their disregard for their own lives?) led to a militarization of police forces across the US. The vague threat, whether that be terrorists, foreign gangs, or zombies, starts to feel far less urgent than the growing tyranny and brutality of people who are ostensibly here for our protection.

There's a pretty obvious route for an adventure in Falkovnia, where the party gets press-ganged into defending the capital, Lekar. Every month, the zombies swarm the place and things feel doomed, that this is a last stand and the only possible outcome is annihilation, only for the survivors to just barely make it through the night after heavy losses.

But what happens the rest of the month? There's a whole wide region to explore here.

As I see it, an interesting narrative here would be for the party to encounter a group of deserters. Commanded by a former Talon (Drakov's elite kind of state-security forces who are there to capture deserters and punish them with impalement) whom we'll call Svorich, a group of perhaps fifty soldiers were sent out on patrol by Drakov and came to Zamirara Ranch (a location on the map that doesn't have a description in Van Richten's).

The soldiers found that the Zamiara family had built an underground granary to store food, and were planning on offering it as a hiding place for their neighbors, rather than giving their grains to the army to be taken back to Lekar. This "hoarding" of critical supplies was considered criminal, and so the entire family was impaled and put on display at the front of the ranch as punishment.

However, upon realizing that the Zamiaras had, in fact, built a highly defensible position, Svorich decided that he thought his chances of survival there were better than back in Lekar, and so ordered his men to seize the underground bunker and take up residence there. While they still use the authority of the Blood Falcon, the symbol of Vladeska Drakov, the truth is that they're actually deserters, and will stop at nothing to remain in control and prevent anyone from reporting on their crime.

All this happens before the party arrives.

We find the party crossing the Tithelands, extremely exposed out in the rural fields and having numerous draining encounters with zombies and other appropriate undead. They see lights at the ranch, and would naturally conclude that this is probably going to be at least a temporary respite from the undead.

Svorich and his people initially seem like allies, and the party might get their first uninterrupted long rest in a while under their protection. Svorich offers them shelter if they'll help out organizing and distributing the supplies that had been stored at the ranch, and to aid in keeping guard. There might be small side quests where the party, accompanied by some of his soldiers, go out on excursions to recover supplies from some of the nearby abandoned farms - the party might develop an attachment to some of the soldiers who go out on patrol with them.

However, Svorich's paranoia grows and grows the longer they stay there - he becomes convinced that the party was sent here by Drakov, and eventually tries to have them locked up and even executed. While Svorich's mind begins to unravel, the party might also start to find evidence of what actually happened here, maybe a letter from a nearby farmer thanking the Zamiaras for their offer of shelter, and announcing a plan to arrive there on a date that has already passed (these farmers were already killed by Svorich's people).

Svorich's forces are probably primarily Warriors of various kinds, perhaps with some Scouts. Depending on the level of the party, Svorich might be a Warrior Veteran or a Warrior Commander (the latter if we're talking late tier 2 or even tier 3).

But I think that, as paranoid as Svorich is, he's hesitant to make the first move - instead, if he begins to suspect that the party suspects him, he'll contrive to lock them out of the ranch's fortifications at night, when the undead are more active, even sacrificing some of his men if they'd gone out with the party.

Thus, the tension comes to a boil when the party has to fend off the undead, and then has to face down Svorich and his most loyal soldiers. The commotion might draw additional undead, and so the adventure might end not with the party taking Svorich down, but perhaps just fleeing while he's overwhelmed by zombies.

Next, we'll take a look at the black desert of Har'Akir, and the enormous network of tombs beneath the sands.

Short Adventures in Ravenloft: Dementlieu

 Dementlieu is a domain of twisted fairy tales. A truly urban domain, it's focused on social horror - rather than being threatened by isolation, you're threatened by the many people around you. Saidra D'Honarie, the Darklord, has a story that is a strange mix of Cinderella and Masque of the Red Death.

There's an element of psychological horror to it - Dementlieu is all about people lying about their identities and being terrified of being found out.

I don't know that there's any real specific mention of them in the setting, but I feel like a reasonable monster to use in Dementlieu is Doppelgangers.

Doppelgangers are a classic trope of horror, and I think often work quite well in gothic and psychological horror. Personally, I've always had an ambition to make them - if not the literal stat block then the broad concept of them - central to a lengthy Ravenloft campaign.

But how do we build an adventure that focuses on them as the main monsters? I will note that it's a little limiting that there's only a single Doppelganger stat block at CR 3, though it wouldn't be too hard to re-skin various humanoid stat blocks to offer alternative versions of them.

For a single Doppelganger to be a major threat, the party needs to be quite low-level, though I think we could also have a group of them working together. That being said, this is a monster that thrives arguably more in non-combat situations.

Let's come up with a fun story:

The Doppelganger wants something: maybe there's a Mist Talisman that allows them to travel back to their home domain, which isn't Dementlieu. Let's say they're actually from Hazlan, a product of bizarre magical experiments. They've been trapped in Dementlieu for decades.

The talisman is an Eye of Hazlik amulet that is owned by a Francois DeMer, who is our party's main questgiver.

Francois talks about how his older brother, Guillame, was a powerful and wealthy arcanist, and provided the family with a degree of comfort and financial security by offering his services to the city. However, ten years ago, Guillame vanished, and the DeMer family has been hemorrhaging money ever since, forced to scrimp and save while trying to maintain their wealthy appearances.

Francois was sure that Guillame had died in the line of duty, but a few days ago, he glimpsed his brother in the marketplace. But when he ran to approach him, his brother seemed to vanish into the crowd.

Then, a day later, Antoinette, one of the scullery maids at the DeMer estate was found with her neck broken behind the manor house.

Francois fears that it is his brother's ghost, coming back to ruin the house. Francois is initially reluctant to admit it, but his brother was a bully and a brute, and prone to violent outbursts. Before he left the last time, he and Francois had gotten into a terrible fight, and Francois revealed that he had drawn up papers to have Guillame taken to an asylum and had the manor's deed transferred to himself. Francois fears that his brother died and now, still angry over their dispute, was now a vengeful ghost.

In fact, the Doppelganger is trying to gain access to Guillame's old arcane laboratory. The Doppelganger, whom we'll call Slate (as in Blank Slate,) came to Dementlieu to deal with the local arcanists who were spying on the magical developments of Hazlan and stealing the powers developed there. Slate was essentially there on a counterintelligence mission, and did kill Guillame as part of this mission, but not before Guillame had destroyed the arcane device that Slate would use to return to Hazlan.

Now, Slate primarily just wants to take the Mist Talisman locked away in the DeMer estate, but each attempt to infiltrate has led to discovery, forcing him to kill so he can cover his tracks.

The party can try to scour Port-A-Lucine in an attempt to find the guy, or they might choose to stake out the house and guard it from infiltration. the DeMer estate has, I think, a number of household staff, including kitchen maids, a butler, perhaps a couple of footmen and maybe a valet who travels with Francois, and then perhaps Francois' wife and two children. With this many people, it's impossible to just fully lock down the house, and doing so will only delay the eventual confrontation with the "ghost."

To amp up the unease, Slate will likely clock that the party has come under Francois' employ, and will attempt to interact with them under the guise of various other people of the city. Using their no-component Detect Thoughts, Slate will be able to potentially delve into the PCs' memories and begin trying to isolate them by appearing as figures from their past.

Slate's strategy is twofold: he wants to draw defenders away from the house so that he can secure the amulet, and he wants to peel off members of the party and ambush them individually.

Thus, it might actually be best to weave this adventure in with other things the party might be doing in Dementlieu - perhaps Francois has become something of an ally to them, and the strange goings-on taking place here cannot be resolved immediately. Give your players enough time to let their guard down a little and have some downtime to go to the city markets where the party might not all be there together.

Slate is not limited to appearing as Guillame - he might appear as members of the DeMer family or the staff. If your players are game for it, you might consider having him secretly replace one of the party members and just having your player actually play as Slate for a bit, until they're discovered (or perhaps once the PC who is being impersonated is free of whatever confinement allowed Slate to replace them, they show up to reveal that he's an imposter.

On a certain level, Slate isn't necessarily wrong to just want to get home, but you want to play him as a spy and assassin - he might just be on a mission, but he's willing to do monstrous things to achieve his objectives. To him, it's nothing personal, but that doesn't make him any less of a murderer.

I think there's a lot of potential in Unsettling Visage, the Doppelganger ability to frighten a target. Especially if this is early on in a campaign (given that they're CR 3, we're still probably in tier 1) you could tease an element of a player's backstory by having him use the face of a figure from their past. While in theory the Doppelganger would need to have successfully delved with Detect Thoughts to learn about this figure, this is Ravenloft, baby! Sometimes things being creepy and disturbing is just the will of the Dark Powers.

Moving on, next we'll be covering a zombaclypse adventure in Falkovnia, and see if we can get a different take on it.

Elements Monk vs Death Knight

 When the new Player's Handbook came out about a year and a half ago, I think the class that got the biggest glow-up was the Monk - many of its issues were solved, and in many cases the class was simply empowered. That being said, I've also seen a number of theory-crafters argue that, while improved, it's still around the bottom rung of the class power.

Now, one thing I think these optimizers often ignore is defensive capabilities: by changing Deflect Missiles to simply Deflect Attacks, the Monk now has one of the most powerful defensive abilities in the game, probably only second to the Barbarian's rage (even with significantly lower AC than a Fighter or Paladin in full plate with a shield, I found that a Monk wound up taking less damage even from a Marilith, whose many attacks per action dilute the single-attack damage reduction of the Monk's Deflect Attacks).

However, this series has focused on damage output, and so we shall continue to.

The Warrior of Elements is, ostensibly, the update to the Way of Four Elements subclass from 2014, but in truth, it's a totally different subclass, merely replacing the old one by sharing its elemental theme while rebuilding everything from the ground up in terms of mechanics.

The subclass is built around Elemental Attunement, which you can activate to grant you various benefits, not the least of which is that your attacks gain a much longer reach.

Now, there's a weird nuance here, and I don't know if there's been any official ruling on it, but the reach affects all of your Unarmed Strikes, which now includes both grappling and shoving a target.

If we then assume that this reach is not in any way interrupted by, well, just not being currently in the act of attacking, it should allow us to grapple targets up to 15 feet away from us, which could be a huge defensive boon, as it could effectively shut down a foe that doesn't have ranged attacks.

Assuming this interpretation is correct - that we could hold a foe and continue to strike at them while they can't hit back - we can build a character around grappling.

Notably, this might not be amazing against our boss monster, the Death Knight, because they are A: very strong and B: have legendary resistances. Still, it'd be a decent gameplan for a whole campaign, and could still wind up having an effect on the boss fight. Let's get into the build:

    Feats:

I always run into this problem: I know that feats are powerful enough that it's often fine to leave a score uncapped in favor of getting the functionality of a feat. But it bugs my OCD tendencies. And Monks, in particular, really want high Dex, high Wisdom, and high Stamina.

Now, the thing with Monks, though, is that a lot of martial feats don't really do anything for us. Great Weapon Master doesn't work with any Simple weapons, and Polearm Master's biggest boon, the Pole Strike attack, is kind of redundant with our martial arts. We don't natively get Weapon Masteries, so Dual Wielder isn't really going to help us. Crusher can be ok for us, but we already get the ability to push targets with our elemental strikes.

But Grappler is pretty great: as Monks, we can use our Dexterity to set the DCs for our grappling attempts, and we're already making plenty of Unarmed Strikes anyway. Finally, the Fast Wrestler aspect of the feat lets us drag grappled targets quite far given how fast we move (and with Slow Fall, we can even drag foes off of ledges to potentially give them fall damage while we can just absorb it).

So, we'll assume we get 17 Dex at level 1 and then bump it to 18 with Grappler at 4. And then... I think we just cap it with an ASI at level 8.

It's probably "optimal" to just take 15s in Con and Wisdom at level 1 as well and dump the other three stats, though I never really like to do that (I hate having more than one negative modifier). Instead, I'll assume we do try to get Wisdom up to 16 at the start, and have at least a 14 in Con, but we might not have utter garbage scores otherwise.

I've generally avoided talking about origin feats here - Tavern Brawler actually has a lot of redundancy with being a Monk, but it does still boost our damage a little, letting us reroll 1s. This gives d6s an average roll of 3.9ish, a d8 an average of 4.9ish, a d10 an average of 5.95, and a d12 an average of 6.96ish, so essentially giving you .4 damage per hit, and thus, with a level 10 Flurry of Blows, about 2 damage overall if everything hits. It's not nothing, but it's not huge either.

Still, the Sailor background will cover you for this feat and your preferred ability scores. I'm not going to take Tavern Brawler into account for my calculations - grabbing Tough or Alert, Lucky, what-have-you, might be more ideal depending on your campaign.

    Grappling a Death Knight:

Now, the big thing: grappling in 5.5 has the target make a saving throw - their choice of Strength or Dexterity. Normally, this is set by your Strength modifier, but Monks have special dispensation to instead base it on their Dexterity (I think there's a world in which Monks should be a Strength-based class, but overall they're probably better-off being Dex-based. I need to take a look at the Pugilist class).

At level 10, we should have a Dex of 20, which means that the saving throw DC for our grapples will be 17.

Now, a Death Knight is strong, but like Paladins, they don't actually have proficiency in Strength saving throws. Thus, they merely add their Strength to the roll. Also, while they have Magic Resistance and they also have Marshal Undead, they are explicitly not personally affected by the latter feature (which grants other undead creatures of the Death Knight's choice within 60 feet of themselves advantage on attack rolls and saving throws).

Thus, the Death Knight is actually more likely than not going to fail the save against our attempts to grapple them. On a roll of an 11 or lower, they fail, meaning we have a 55% chance to grapple them.

That's actually great news. But I also don't think that means it's likely we actually will grapple them: this is something the Death Knight will probably use their legendary resistances to get out of.

Because we have the grappler feat, there's no actual cost to trying to grapple them once per turn, and we reap a great reward if we succeed - we get advantage on our attacks against them (which is pretty great given how high a Death Knight's AC is.)

So, how do we account for this?

Well, I think I'm going to go the simplest route: the DK is always going to LR out of being grappled by us - while they do have some ranged options, like Hellfire Orb, the Fell Word legendary action, or their spells, being grappled by us and allowing us to just pelt them with elemental strikes from afar is just not acceptable.

But that's great, because if we can burn through their legendary resistances, it opens up our allies to get them with various spells and such that might be even worse for them.

    Gameplan:

We're assuming this is a major boss and we're pulling out all the stops, and that means using Flurry of Blows every turn. I think we're also going to be using our action to attack, but I will check the average damage of Elemental Burst to ensure that that's actually correct. Still, we'll be burning a Focus Point each turn to get what are now three additional attacks as a bonus action (once we hit level 10, which we are).

At this level, unless we have a magic weapon, our unarmed strikes will hit just as hard as a spear or quarterstaff or greatclub anyway, and we get the extra range for them from Elemental Attunement, so we'll just stick to them. (Also, DMs, if you're handing out magic items, give the Monk some Wraps of Unarmed Prowess. Honestly, I'd have liked to see Very Rare wraps that add damage dice as well, like a Vicious Weapon).

We have 10 Focus Points at this level. We need to spend 1 to get Elemental Attunement going, but then we have 9 left to spend on other features. We're assuming one each turn for Flurry of Blows. Our Focus saving throw - which is based on Wisdom - is only 15 at this level, but that does mean that a Death Knight has to land a 10 or higher to save against Stunning Strike, as they only have a +5 to Con saves.

Thus, I think it's actually worth it for us to spend a point on Stunning Strike each turn as well (assuming we hit) to burn through Legendary Resistances that much quicker. If we can land a grapple and a stun on turn 1, we could burn through all 3 LRs on turn 2 (though we'd have to be fairly lucky. Given that we're making 5 attacks per turn - assuming we aren't Elemental Bursting - there's a strong chance we'll land at least one attack per turn, but there's only about a half chance that the DK fails the save on any of these).

Thus, we're spending 3 FP our first turn and then 2 more for each subsequent turn, meaning we can sustain this for four turns, which is actually pretty good - few combats go longer than that. Now, we might need to use FP on other things - naturally if we get into a situation where we need to do something like Patient Defense or Step of the Wind, this "blank room" simulation no longer really applies.

    Damage Per Attack:

All of our attacks do the same damage and have the same hit chance, so this will be a pretty simple thing to calculate: We have a +9 to hit at this level, so we hit 50% of the time. Our attacks do 1d8+5 damage, or 9.5 on average, with an additional 4.5 damage on a crit. Thus:

50%x9.5 is 4.75 and then 5%x4.5 is .225, so we're looking at 4.975 damage per attack.

If we were to just leave it at that, with 5 attacks, that's a total of 24.875 damage.

That's not terribly impressive, but let's consider some other options.

    Elemental Bursting:

Because our various bonus action attacks are no longer tied to having to first take the Attack Action, we can actually replace our attacks with Elemental Burst. This costs 2 Focus Points, but lets us drop a Fireball-sized sphere of elemental energy that does, well, a Shatter's worth of damage. It deals, at level 10, 3d8 damage (we'll say Thunder as a default as that's pretty reliable, though all should work on a Death Knight). On a successful save, creatures take half damage.

Now, our Focus save DC is only 15. A Death Knight has a +6 to Dex saves (they get proficiency in Dex saves rather than Charisma, compared to a Paladin) but on top of that, they have Magic Resistance, so they'll have advantage on this save.

Thus, if they succeed on a 9 or higher and have advantage, we're looking at only a 40% chance squared, or 16% chance to actually fail the saving throw.

On a failure, they take 3d8, or 13.5 average damage, but they still take half, or 6.75 damage on a success.

Thus, this will do 13.5x16%, or 2.16 plus 6.75x84%, or 5.67, giving us a total damage of 7.83. Not only are we spending 2 FP on this, but we're also sacrificing our two regular attacks, which each do 4.975 damage on average, meaning we're about 2 damage behind.

Yeah, Elemental Burst is not bad for big groups of foes, but it's not worth it in this case for a single-target encounter.

    Burning Through Legendary Resistances:

Now, we need to talk about the nuance of advantage. In an ideal world, we can grapple the Death Knight, or stun them, and thus get advantage on our attacks against them.

Now, there's an interesting nuance at play here: a stunned target automatically fails Strength and Dexterity saving throws. While Stunning Strike is not as powerful as it used to be because it ends before our next turn (and we can only use it once per turn,) we can still use it both to give our subsequent attacks on our turn advantage as well as to automatically get our grapple off. However, we also do automatically get advantage on our next attack even if they succeed on their save, so there's some utility to trying it even if we can't get a failed save. The stun is somewhat ephemeral - it only lasts until the start of our next turn (though that's fantastic for our allies) but if we can stun them, we should then be able to automatically grapple them, and they'll notably not have an action on their next turn to break the grapple, so we will have advantage on our attacks thanks to the Grappler feat.

Stunning Strike is maybe the number one thing that a Death Knight would spend Legendary Resistances on.

So, how quickly can we burn through them?

Again, our Grapple DC is 17 while our Stunning Strike DC is 15. We'll assume we're burning both every turn. Both require us to land an attack on the target. With 5 attacks every turn and a 50% chance to miss, we have around a 97% chance to hit with at least one attack each turn, so I think we're talking really extraordinary bad luck if we don't.

If we have the opportunity to make a Stunning Strike, the Death Knight will make the save on a roll of 10 or higher - a 55% chance to succeed.

Against our one free grapple attempt per turn, the DC is higher, though they can choose to make a Dex save instead, which is actually higher for them. With a +6 against our DC of 17, they succeed on an 11 or higher, so a 50% chance.

So... what if we did something else?

What if we sacrificed our own damage to try to lock down this Death Knight on our first turn?

If we chose to, rather than attack, just try to grapple over and over on our first turn, how likely is it that they'd fail their saves?

(I'll concede here that as someone who hasn't taken a math class in about 21 years, I'm not sure if I have the tools to figure this out).

Now, we do need to land an attack to try Stunning Strike, and we also get a free grapple attempt if we hit with an unarmed strike, but only if we hit.

Ok, screw it, let's say that we just want to try to grapple the Death Knight at least to start with - to lock them down as soon as we can. In this case, we're going to make 5 grapple attempts.

With a 50% chance to fail or succeed, the chance that they don't fail on at least one of those attempts is a little over 3%. Thus, it's a little less than 97% that the Death Knight has to burn a legendary resistance.

But how likely is it that we can burn through all 3 on turn one?

Again, my early-2000s high school math skills are very fuzzy in the back of my memory, but let me imagine how to approach this:

With 5 attacks, we figure that there's a 97% chance that we get at least one failure. But if we set that failure aside, we now have 4 attacks that we'll need to have at least one failure in. Over four attacks, we've got a 93.75% chance for one to fail. Then, if we had those two failures, there are three remaining attacks on that turn, so there's an 87.5% chance that there was one failure among those.

So... uh... What does that actually tell us?

Ok, I think I've got it:

Basically, we have a 97% chance to burn through one LR. Within that 97% chance, there's a 94% chance (we're going to round) that we burn another one, so that's about a 91% chance. Then, within that 91% chance to burn two legendary resistances, we have an 87.5% chance to burn one on the other three attempts, giving us around an 80% chance to burn three.

That doesn't seem right, does it? Is the flaw here that we're accounting for the earlier saving throws multiple times? Given that we need a majority of the saving throws to fail, I'd assume that with even odds, that'd be less likely to happen than not. Or is this just a place where intuition is misleading me?

Again, let me think about this:

We figured out the chance for any one of the saving throws in a set of 5 is to fail was 97%, because every single one failing would be 50% to the fifth power, which is about 3%.

Is the next move to multiply that by the chance that we get a failure on the four remaining dice?

Ah, this is driving me nuts and it's late at night. I'm sure someone who understands basic statistics would figure this out for me in moments. But, let's just figure out one more thing:

    Damage with Advantage:

There are a lot of ways to get advantage on our attacks in 5.5, and while we don't have the Vex property to work with, if we do succeed in grappling and/or stunning the Death Knight, how will that affect our damage output?

Well, thankfully, with a clean 50% hit chance, it's pretty easy to figure out what our hit chance is with advantage: 75% to hit, and the usual 9.75% to crit. Once again, our hit damage is 1d8+5, or 9.5, and our extra d8 of damage on a crit is 4.5. So, 9.5x75% is 7.125 and 4.5x9.75% is .43875, so our average damage per attack when we have advantage is roughly 7.6.

Thus, if and when we do get advantage on all our attacks, our damage jumps up to 37.8 per turn, which is a pretty enormous jump, and I think pretty respectable.

I'm sort of giving up on how long it will take us to burn through a Death Knight's legendary resistances to accomplish this state. (I really don't feel like there's an 80% chance we get 3 failures on turn one, but I can't figure out where the logic in my math falls apart.) But not only will it greatly benefit us, it will also potentially really help protect our party. Other combatants won't get the advantage we gain from grappling the target, sure, but we can ensure the Death Knight isn't able to attack the squishier members of the party, and we can drag them through dangerous terrain (I will say, there's a bit of a rules blind spot when it comes to dragging a foe around us rather than just pulling them after us) - like pulling the Death Knight through a Spike Growth or something of the sort.

Short Adventures in Ravenloft: Darkon

 Darkon is a tough nut to crack.

Possibly the largest of the Domains of Dread (other than crazy cosmic ones like Klorr,) Darkon is also gradually wasting away because Azalin (seemingly) accomplished what Strahd could not - escaping his position as a Darklord and leaving his domain.

The problem for the people who live there is that, having failed as a domain, it's now starting to fall apart. While some would-be Darklords (unaware of the cost of taking on such a role) vie to succeed Azalin, I don't know that any of them are likely to do so.

In theory, eventually, Darkon will just vanish, its people evaporating and becoming one with the Mists (perhaps those with souls will go on to be reincarnated elsewhere in the Domains).

Darkon is so vast that you could do an entire campaign set there, but we're here for a short, 1-4 session adventure. The challenge here is that we have an embarrassment of options in front of us.

I think for our adventure, we're going to try to look at the destruction of Darkon in microcosm. I think, to let the horror really land, we're going to go bleak.

I've recently (as detailed in this blog) been re-playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The game begins with a stark and painful scene, in which the people of the city of Lumiere gather for the Gommage, where everyone above an ever-shrinking age limit dissolve away, nothing remaining but red rose petals. Each time the age limit goes down (once a year,) anyone of that age or higher is lost. The horror is both this moment of approaching death, but also the way that the culture has just had to sort of adapt to this and normalize it.

I don't know that we're going to crib this word-for-word, but I think that the party comes to a town where people are spontaneously dissolving away. I don't think this is one of the major cities - it's a somewhat remote town in the Mistlands, maybe north of Maykle. Our village, we'll call it Vadrikar, was once one of a series of farming hubs in the region, connected to similar villages by a network of roads.

One by one, as the Mists encroached, the other villages were swallowed up, and nothing but eery silence and the consuming Shroud to be seen.

But Vadrikar was saved - a mendicant priest from the church of Ezra in Il Aluk, Father Gregor Talbot, arrived and set up a number of blessed runestones that would hold the Shroud (as the now-ravenous Mists in Darkon are known) at bay. And for years, the stones, blessed daily by the elderly priest, have kept the Shroud from approaching at all.

However, a month ago, something bizarre and terrifying began to happen: villagers, in the midst of their daily routine, would suddenly begin to dissolve, their bodies collapsing into heaps of black ash. And it seems to be accelerating - only one person "departed," (as the villagers euphemistically describe it) the first week. Two did on the second and third week. But this past week, there were three, and as the party gets to town, they see a fourth.

The general opinion, espoused especially by the village tavernkeeper, a burly human woman named Tabitha, is that Father Talbot's wards are failing. Talbot himself is sequestered at the rectory of the local church. He was already an old man when he arrived at the village, and his health seems to be failing.

The party can investigate the runestones, most of which are placed in barrows out around the village where the ashes of the dead are interred (they favor cremation in Darkon because bodies rise in undeath).

In each barrow, incorporeal undead can be found - specters, shadows, poltergeists, maybe wraiths if the party's a bit higher-level. The undead are maddened and incoherent in their ramblings, and visually, they look bizarre - great big holes where their faces should be (here I'm taking some inspiration from the appearance of the Curator in Expedition 33.)

It becomes clear to the party that these beacons seem to be drawing the undead here, the souls rooted to them, but as the spirits are defeated, they seem to fall horizontally toward the village itself, as if gravity turned 90 degrees for them (and, you know, they suddenly were affected by gravity).

Triangulating the spirits' bearings will be one way the party can discover that all of them are going toward the Rectory.

Going to see Father Talbot, they find him lying in bed with deadly poison dripping from his lips. He shows all signs of being dead, but using something like Divine Sense or Detect Evil and Good will show that he, very faintly, is actually undead.

Searching his belongings, they'll find some mad writings - Father Talbot writes, with a regretful tone, that he has been able to find only one longterm solution to the Shroud: That he must gather the people of these villages into his "ark," and when it is full, cast it through the Mists to arrive in some happier place, where their souls will live on within him.

In fact, Talbot is in the process of becoming a Lich, and his efforts to "save" the people of Vadrikar have actually been to feed their souls into his phylactery, which now sits hidden in the basement of the church rectory. The party can make their way into the hidden chamber in the basement that holds it, a reliquary holding some of Talbot's bones (we'll say maybe he was always missing a finger). It's guarded by some challenging undead creature - depending on the level of the party, maybe a Wight or a Revenant.

The downer ending we get here is that while the party is fighting the guardian, Talbot completes his transformation. He steps down into the basement, and offers forgiveness to the party, who he thinks simply do not understand the "sacrifice" he has made for these people. He takes his soul jar and teleports away, not taking any offensive action against the party. When the party emerges from the rectory, Vadrikar has been wiped out, every person in it reduced to ash.

    Now, ok, a proscribed ending - and one in which the players lose - might not sit well with your players. I honestly think this would be a very solid kick-off for a campaign. Maybe Talbot becomes the big bad that the party is chasing, or at least a major antagonist. But lest we feel like this is too rail-roady, we might give the players some opportunities to save the village.

Perhaps, for example, we have Talbot's lichy ambitions revealed earlier. He surrounds the Rectory with a Wall of Force or similar magic, but the party can disrupt his soul-siphoning runestones by destroying them at the Barrows, forcing a confrontation with the old priest while he's still mortal.

The Priest stat block is CR 2, so you could use that if the party was just level 1 or 2. You might still want to use that for him, but make sure that there are a lot of undead monsters between the party and him, because he won't last super long. I could also imagine giving him the Mage stat block, but understand that that's going to be a really serious fight before tier 2 - which might be fine. In fact, I'd be tempted to make him an Archmage given that he's about to become a Lich, but in that case, he's going to obliterate a low-level party. As such, I might play up the idea that he truly holds no ill will toward the party: the Archmage stat block mostly has offensive spells, but using Counterspell and maybe giving them an upcast Hold Person (say 7th level, which would almost certainly hit the entire party) could let him overwhelm the party without slaughtering them.

Next up, we'll figure something out for the deadly masquerades of Dementlieu.

Short Adventures for Ravenloft: The Carnival

 Now, this one's a bit of a challenge. The Carnival, as a domain, is very small, and I honestly think that its role in a larger campaign could be primarily to act as a periodic respite for the players - not quite a home base, but a way to briefly escape whatever domain they're in.

Still, it is a domain of dread, which means that it's not a good place to be, and operates on a certain nightmare logic. But it is a little different: its borders don't work the same way, and it's Isolde, not its actual Darklord, the sentient sword Nepenthe, that suffers from the domain's torments.

Thus, I think we're going to focus less on theme than on aesthetic here: the creepy, deadly carnival is a classic horror trope, with things like calliope music and clowns, which are intended to be fun and entertaining for all ages, taking on a much more sinister air (though I do think part of the appeal of these things is the vague sense of danger - there's a thrill to it).

Isolde isn't really evil at heart, so she can easily act as a friendly NPC sending people out on quests.

So, here's my pitch:

Since the release of the 2025 Monster Manual, I've been obsessed with the Haunting Revenant stat block, a vengeful spirit that possesses an entire building. Nepenthe, the actual Darklord of The Carnival, is an instrument of vengeance, so we actually do have this thematic connection.

The thing is, I don't think you should ever have a Haunting Revenant show up as just a normal monster, like a Hell House from Final Fantasy VII in that one stretch of broken freeway in Midgar. Instead, I think that you need an entire mystery built around it, and it should not be apparent that the building is a creature immediately.

So: Isolde contacts the party and tells them that something unnerving has happened: a new Funhouse has appeared on the Carnival Grounds that none of her employees recall actually putting there. This being Ravenloft, that's not entirely unprecedented, but she's seen customers enter it and no one seems to see them ever come out.

She wants the party to investigate.

Upon arriving, the Funhouse - actually a Haunting Revenant, the spirit of a clown who had worked at the Carnival back when it was under the management of Mr. Witch and Mr. Light (Van Richten's plays coy, but we find out in Wild Beyond the Witchlight that Isolde traded the Witchlight Carnival to them for this one). Bonko the Clown (I was almost going to call him Bonko the Bozo and then remembered that Bozo was just literally the name of a famous clown) had long complained about the shoddy carpentry of the stage that he performed at, but Witch and Light refused to pay to have it fixed up, and mid-performance, the proscenium arch collapsed, and a shard of wood impaled Bonko in front of a horrified audience. Bonko performed primarily for children, and his spirit was enraged by the fact that he was now a source of trauma rather than joy, and vowed with his dying thoughts to destroy the management of the carnival.

When the party arrives to see the funhouse, called "Bonko's House of Mirrors" (the name Bonko is unknown - Isolde never met the guy, so it's not a dead giveaway,) he uses the Invitation ability to draw as many members of the party in as he can.

Here, then, we actually treat the building more like a mini-dungeon. I think murderous clowns, manifestations of Bonko's rage, assault the party. We could use Performer stat blocks - probably some mix of standard Performers and Maestros, as the party will want to be at least mid-tier 2 in order to survive a fight against the revenant. I would also take a look at Space Clowns from Spelljammer as a very fitting stat block to use here. At CR 3, they can probably work quite well for a party that would ultimately be taking on a CR 10 boss monster.

Note, though, that the Haunted Zone trait is going to potentially make any combat in here harder for anyone relying on spells - it's basically a universal Counterspell that also wastes the spell slot, so encounters with the Performers/Clowns should be tuned as low-difficulty encounters, possibly even going significantly lower than the suggested XP budget.

Now, one of the challenges of using a Haunting Revenant as a dungeon is that, theoretically, the party ought to be able to attack it as soon as they realize that it's a creature. Theoretically, if no one fails the Charisma saving throw from Invitation, we might not actually get them to go inside.

That said, if they do start to attack it from the outside, it can use its Invitation ability as often as it wants.

I might even fudge it and say that they have to make it through the maze of mirrors in order to actually find a vulnerable part of the revenant (though I'd also limits its ability to attack them until they do to be fair).

I think as they make their way through the house of mirrors, the party starts to get the story of Bonko, with old black-and-white photos of his performances, and then, maybe, bizarre photos that actually depict his demise.

I think the murder-clowns might also show signs of what killed him - maybe they walk around with giant splinters of wood protruding through their heads (we could even make them undead).

How sympathetic Bonko is can be adjusted, largely by who he picks as victims. Maybe no one has actually gone in there yet if he's trying to focus his vengeance only on management and whatever goons (the party) they're employing. Indeed, the mystery might not be missing customers, but just the fact that no one seems to be able to get inside.

Either way, it should be a fun creature-as-dungeon kind of adventure, with just maybe a single combat encounter in the midst of the broader encounter with the revenant.

Next, we're going big with the vast, crumbling domain of Darkon, with its absent Darklord.

Short Adventures for Ravenloft: Borca

 Ok, confession: this is one of the settings I'm least inspired by. An oddity of a domain, Borca is dominated by two Darklords who exist in an eternal rivalry but also have different schticks. Ivana Boristi is a ruthless noblewoman who is also a master poisoner, using the gardens and greenhouses of her estate to generate toxins, while Ivan Dilisnya is a crazed man-child with an army of clockwork toys.

While they reflect opposite expressions of it - Ivana an ambitious woman underestimated because of her eternal youth and Ivan a creepy man-child who's actually quite old in appearance - both embody the weirdness and myopia of the ultra-wealthy.

And, frankly, not to get too real-world on everyone, we're sort of in an era where out-of-touch plutocrats with bizarre worldviews built on a constant feedback loop of yes-men have become real deadly menaces. Borca might not be all that fantastical when such people are calling the shots in the real world.

The ultra-wealthy, whether they be landed aristocrats or billionaire tech bros, always seem to forget that common people are actually, you know, people. They see those below their socio-economic class as "NPCs" who serve more of a statistical purpose for their own enrichment and ego than being individuals with their own dreams and desires.

I think that's what we lean into with this adventure.

These adventures are not meant to be the definitive one for each domain - I'd have used vampires in the Barovia one if that were the case. Thus, I'll focus in on a particular aesthetic and theme:

Ivan Dilisnya is a man-child obsessed with toys. He hides in his estate, affecting the identity of a little boy (I imagine that people aren't generally aware that he's really an old man). But he also makes clockwork toys to entertain him.

I think that we have the action start in a place like Lechberg, a town near the Dilisnya estate (with no real description in Van Richten's, at least). The party arrives to find the town is covered in banners and advertisements about the upcoming Clockwork Parade, a festival to bring some cheer and frivolity to the town.

The party perhaps knows an NPC from Lechberg, and is going to meet them there on the day of the parade. We'll say this is a friendly child named Sasha - maybe the party is better-acquainted with one or both of Sasha's parents.

Heralded by a clockwork jester, as well as clockwork automaton of Ivan, the parade seems pretty whimsical, but there are so many marching toys that it's had to see through them to others in the gathered crowds. In the commotion, someone who makes a good perception check sees that some of the toy soldiers are actually grabbing people from the street. Perhaps a big clockwork owlbear or something actually swallows some members of the crowd whole, but in that truly nightmarish way, no one seems to notice with all the music and entertainment.

By the time the parade has left town, dozens of townsfolk have been abducted, but many are reluctant to even mention it because they fear criticizing the entertainment that their kind lord has provided for them.

However, the party finds that Sasha was among the people taken, and they track the clockwork parade (which has notably picked up the pace significantly once out of town) back to the Dilisnya Estate.

(Alternatively, maybe the Clockwork Parade actually takes either some or all of the party members.)

There, they find that the abducted people are being forced to serve as game pieces in Ivan's games - for example, he has a chess game where the pieces are played by townsfolk who are dressed up for their role, but when a piece is taken, the person playing them is killed.

The party must fight their way through Ivan's constructs, trying to free the captured people. I think as they delve deeper, they find as well that the clockwork soldiers in the parade, who had very convincingly realistic faces, are made by grafting the faces of Ivan's victims onto the constructs.

If done at low levels, one can use things like Animated Armor to represent the Clockwork soldiers. Some might also use simple beast or monstrosity stat blocks, but with a few adjustment to make them work as constructs.

At higher levels, again, you have a lot of leeway by just taking various humanoid (or other) stat blocks and turning them into constructs (giving things like poison immunity and immunity to charm and fear effects).

Logically, this adventure probably does lead to a confrontation with Ivan, but I think that the key to making Ivan work is to start off with a sense of innocence: Ivan speaks throughout his estate through some kind of speaker system, and affects a little boy's voice - play up the idea that Ivan is actually an innocent victim in all of this whose toys have run amok. The party doesn't see Ivan until they start to realize that he isn't what he says he is (I think he becomes very possessive of Sasha, trying to turn them into his "best friend" by converting them into a special toy).

Once the party actually finds Ivan, he's not going to be much of a physical threat, but he ought to be protected by powerful construct minions - maybe even give him a Shield Guardian. If you do so, and the party is still low level, probably build the adventure with an expectation that the party doesn't defeat him, but merely has to flee the estate with Sasha and anyone else they can rescue.

Just on an aesthetic level, I think you could look to the puppets from the game Lies of P for inspiration on how to describe the "toys" that Ivan has turned his victims into.

I do see this probably as being one of the lower-level adventures in the series if you choose to string these all together as an anthology. Next, the fun and games don't stop: we're heading to The Carnival.