I love the Ravenloft setting. I wasn't really a goth as a teenager, but having grown up in a century-old Victorian house in New England, having loved Halloween as my favorite holiday, and honestly, probably because of the Orange and Purple Ed Emberley drawing books, I've just had a lifelong affection for the trappings of spookiness.
The setting can work for an ongoing campaign, but I think it's also a setting that's uniquely useful for short-form adventures and one-shots. Each domain is a pocket-dimension floating in the Mists, and as realms of horror, you can quite easily motivate a party to simply try to escape it.
Each domain has its Darklord, an evil character, often of a monstrous nature, who is both its prisoner and its tyrant (though not always obviously in charge of the domain). The domain is a reflection of the Darklord.
The module that spun out into the full setting was the original Ravenloft adventure, in which the party had to delve into the deadly Castle Ravenloft and face the vampire Strahd von Zarovich. As the setting developed, it became canonical that his realm, Barovia, was the first of the Domains of Dread, and he is the first vampire in the D&D cosmos.
Barovia is also the most famous domain because it is the setting of arguably 5th Edition's best adventure book, Curse of Strahd, itself a kind of modernized update of the original Ravenloft module (taking into account the later expansion of Barovia to include sites such as Vallaki, Krezk, and the Amber Temple).
And what that means, then, is that if we want to do a short adventure or one-shot set there, we should probably try to go about it in a different manner than just "go fight Strahd."
Darklords are villains, but they need not be antagonists. Travelers in the Mists might be well-advised to get on a Darklord's good side. The nature of the Domains means this won't work out so well in the long run, but they are powerful.
Also, the nature of the Domains is that they are both always reverting to their miserable state but also always shifting, unbound by any sense of "continuity." They run on nightmare logic. That means that we can use familiar locations from Barovia and do something very different with them.
So, first off, I think that we probably have this adventure involve Strahd as our quest-giver, inverting his usual role. Strahd is sinister, but also charming, and can play a sense of Byronic tragedy to elicit sympathy even though it's pure manipulation. Still, he is in a position of power: the party finds themselves trapped in Barovia, and Strahd has the ability to open the Mists and allow them out (though only to another Domain).
Strahd's primary torment is his inability to claim the woman over whom he obsesses, Tatyana, who is cursed as well to reincarnate in Barovia over and over, never able to fully escape the vampire. But that's not his only interest: for countless years, he collaborated with best frenemy Azalin Rex (the disappeared lich Darklord of Darkon) to try to understand the nature of the Mists and escape from them. The two had a falling out (as tends to happen with powerful narcissists) and I think this is a good hook for what he might want:
Our MacGuffin will be a tome of secrets written by Azalin. We'll say it has insights into the Goddess Ezra, seemingly a real divinity that exists within the Mists, but also has very different natures depending on the domain (I think sometimes kind and protecting, other times evil and deathly). For the sake of keeping it vague, we'll say that Azalin wrote it in a cipher that only he and Strahd shared.
Ok, so we've got a MacGuffin - success in the adventure means delivering this tome (we'll call it "The Tome of the Silver Shield," after one of Ezra's holy symbols) to Strahd. Now, where might they find it, and who might guard it?
Barovia reflects Strahd, and I think at his core, he's an avaricious being - he slew his brother over his obsession with the woman his brother was going to marry, and it wasn't like she had expressed any interest in him. The monsters of Barovia are hungry, ravenous, and obsessive.
Naturally, vampires are the most iconic monsters of Ravenloft, and probably most of them can trace their lineage back to Strahd. (While Strahd is canonically the first vampire in the D&D multiverse, I don't know that we can be sure that every vampire is the direct "descendant" of his, as others might have been created by the Dark Powers or other entities - though those in Barovia are probably from his bloodline.) I also love that we get a bit of a variety of vampires, like the Vampire Nightbringers, which are more beastly, inhuman versions, or the Nosferatu from Van Richten's, which honestly kind of fill a similar role.
But if we want to deviate slightly from the obvious route while still living in that undead, devouring mode, I think we should use Ghouls.
Ghouls and Ghasts are an interesting form of undead. While zombies are mindless, ghouls retain a bit more humanoid intelligence. Your standard ghoul is still pretty dumb - they only have a 7 intelligence - but they're still capable of speech. Ghasts are basically smarter, more powerful ghouls - personally, I treat them as part of the same "monster family" much as vampires are grouped together.
One of the defining traits of Ghouls is that they eat corpses (necrophage? Would that be the term?) They're also violent and evil, and may very well make people into corpses - and there, I think, we have our hook.
In Van Richten's, domains are often associated with different horror subgenres. Barovia is hardcore Gothic Horror to be sure - a genre that can mean many things, but on an emotional level, it's about the fear of the dark urges that lurk within, either within ourselves or within others. Strahd is someone who has been completely overtaken and redefined by his dark urges, and so the horror is that for all of his pretense as a noble lord, he's a vicious beast that will kill you.
Still, while places like Tepest are more classically associated with Folk Horror, I think there's a bit of an element of this in Barovia, such as the bizarre festivals in Vallaki or the evil druids of Yester Hill.
So, let's pitch this:
The party is trapped in Barovia, the misty borders closed to them. They receive a letter from Strahd, inviting them to Castle Ravenloft for a proposal of "mutually beneficial cooperation." Strahd greets them at the castle and presents them with the quest: their reward will be a "magical trinket" that will see them through the Mists (in fact, it's not magical, just a mundane object with Nystul's Magic Aura on it to make it look like it has divination magic on it).
He says that he wishes for the party to retrieve the Tome of the Silver Shield from a ruined chapel in the Svalich Woods that he will not enter because of "ancient sworn pacts and oaths." He presents the party with a map and perhaps even some funds and/or gear.
The party follows the path presented by the map, perhaps encountering some spooky monsters along the way (depending on the level, this might be giant spiders or bats or blights - not wolves, though, because I think Strahd directly commands all the wolves in Barovia).
When they come across the chapel, though, they see that it has been recently broken into, and the tome is missing, but a path of bent and broken bushes and undergrowth, which seems like it was created by a cart being pulled through the woods, leads off in another direction.
The party finds that the track leads to a tiny hamlet - basically just a couple of buildings, all of which are decrepit and run down, and look abandoned. However, there are some villagers there, dressed in thick clothing and all with high collars pulled up over their mouths (think like the poster for Brotherhood of the Wolf, or if you prefer, Bloodborne, whose look was inspired by that movie) and with very pale skin.
If they ask the villagers about the book, an individual named Luko will tell them that they took it from the chapel out of fear that it would be damaged by the elements, and that it is being stored in the Elder's house.
There would be signs that something's amiss - for one thing, a Divine Sense or similar magic would make it clear they're all undead. But the state of the hamlet would also raise some questions, and the inhabitants would not be very good at explaining away the sorry state of things.
If and when they enter the Elder's house, you could either play it quick and simple - just having them go in and find that there's a feast hall with a table covered with rotting meat, and then the ghouls swarm in on them, or you could play it slower, and have the party walk in to a room with a trapped floor that collapses, trapping them in a pit to be held for later.
Naturally, the party would need to fight their way out, but a search of the Elder's house would yield the tome.
Now, depending on the level of the party, we'd use different types of ghouls and ghasts. For tier 1 characters, we might just stick entirely with Ghouls, which are CR 1 - meaning that we probably don't want to even attempt this adventure until level 3 or so.
More likely, I think a party probably wants to be level 5 or so before they're traveling across Barovia. In that case, we could still just use Ghouls, though we start to really have to outnumber the party. Note, though, that Ghouls have an attack that paralyzes, so bumping the numbers up might wind up making the fight not super fun. At this stage, I'd probably swap in some Ghasts.
If we're at the higher end of tier 2, like level 8ish, we could consider throwing in a Ghast Gravecaller, perhaps playing the role of the Elder whose house this is. These guys are a big jump in CR, and thus XP, so you really want to use them a boss monster supported by ghast or ghoul minions.
Now, I think to make this adventure memorable, you should really play up the deviousness of the ghouls. They are not charismatic monsters (even the Gravecaller has a negative to Charisma) and so the party will very likely sense something is wrong - though you don't need to reveal the full truth simply on a good insight check, instead you can simply say that these beings seem to have another agenda.
Ultimately, this is going to lead to a big combat encounter in the hamlet - either in the streets or the elder's house. I don't know that I'd put too much energy into fleshing out the entire ghoulish community here - probably just make Luko and perhaps the Elder into fleshed-out NPCs.
One question to consider is why the ghouls took the Tome of the Silver Shield. The simplest answer is that they knew that it was the kind of thing that people would seek out, and would thus be a good lure for potential victims.
But I think it might be more interesting if we have something tragic about it: everything in Barovia leads back to Strahd, and so I think it would make sense that the ghouls were cursed into their current state by the vampire lord himself. Perhaps they are, or are the descendants of, the original inhabitants of the valley whom Strahd conquered back when he was human. Most capitulated and swore fealty to him, but these were those who remained defiant.
This would mean that, true to Ravenloft's Darklords, the terror is fundamentally the fault of the domain's lord. Maybe the ghouls are trying to find the wisdom in the tome to reverse their state.
If you have players who are sympathetic to this cause, you probably want a horror rug-pull - maybe if the players are convinced by the ghouls to at least let them try to use the tome to reverse the curse, they then discover some historical texts or clues that, well, actually, the people of this hamlet were always murderous cannibals, and that Strahd's curse was simply to force them to manifest physically their inner evil, and the ghouls always intended to eat the party one way or another.
There's a good chance that this will wind up largely boiling down to one big combat encounter. Thus, we'd want to make the arena for said encounter interesting. If it takes place in the Elder's house, see if you can put together a multi-level building. The building is in a state of rot and decay, so parts of the stairs or landings, or even just floors on the second floor might break through to the floor below. Walls might also be weak enough to be easily destroyed, so ghouls and intrepid party members might smash through them.
If the fight breaks out in the village square, you might be a little more challenged in making the area dynamic, but I think having the buildings weirdly close to one another, with tiny alleys for ghouls to hide in out of line of sight could help.
If I have the creative juices, I'm going to try to do one of these for each of the primary domains listed in Van Richten's, which means we're going to far weirder places with Bluetspur next.
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