Games Logs

"Titania, do you have any answers? Where exactly have you been? You've been gone for days. I do think I'm owed answers." The Votress stands in the doorway of the Hex, glaring at a gawping Titania. They regard one another for a moment. Then the Votress's attention finds Squid. "Ayan, come say hello to your other mother!" She gestures the child toward her. Squid, wide-eyed, shakes their head. "Ayan! Come here and say hello!" As Squid stands, eyes brimming, a small chi

Urwin and his family leave the companions in the taproom, bidding them a good night. Late at night, the Blue Water Inn has settled into its particular quiet — the kind that feels less like peace and more like held breath before bed. Candles gutter in their sconces. The fire in the cavernous room has burned low, casting everything into amber and shadow. The party lingers rather than retreating to their rooms, drawn together by some unspoken instinct that tonight is not a night

arvalis, Sir Billy the Cockatrice, Deviant Art, 2014. "Which door leads us to Maladomini?" demands Vali. leaving malbolge The first golem does not speak. It simply raises one iron hand and points — a slow, deliberate gesture toward the door on the right — and that is enough. After their twenty minutes of argument, the answer arrives without ceremony. In unpacking the guards' declarations, the party determines it is the first guard who has never lied. The second has: it claime

The tree blight lies broken across the road, branches still twitching faintly as if some sap-thick memory of life refuses to let go. The air reeks of crushed pine and the metallic tang of ichor, and steel rasps against wood as the party and a handful of borrowed guards hack their way down toward the two buried beneath it. Sawdust and splinters settle in their hair like snow. It’s in the middle of all this that Etuttelong makes its appearance — a small, curious creature tha

The Armen do not charge. They advance — measured, deliberate, wearing Arman’s face across every iteration, each one belted with the Giant’s Strength that makes even a clone of a changeling into something genuinely dangerous. The staffs they carry hum with the same force as the one Arman took from Lawrence. Arman himself stands apart from the fray, watching his own face multiply through the chamber, and does nothing. He cannot make himself raise a hand against them. They are h

The dungeon beneath Witherbloom Tower smells of damp stone and, now, brimstone. Orestes the horned devil has left his post — the room where he keeps this timeline's Hexmates — and is standing in the corridor. He was drawn there by the sound of Alistir murmuring to a shambling mound. This is his second student interloper of the evening, and somewhere behind a door that is almost certainly not thick enough, two nearly identical sets of Hexmates are listening to him fume.

The forest is very quiet when a man is dying in it. Torgan stands over the body of the first Vistani, the fallen leaves around him already gone dark with blood. The second one — his captain, a lean man with a crossbow slung across his back and a pair of scimitars still in his hands — circles to the left. Viktor watches from somewhere behind Torgan, breathing in shallow pulls. Arabella, round-eyed, does not make a sound. The captain is not going to fall easily. Torgan can

The Abbey of Saint Markovia clings to the hillside above Kresk, its bells casting a long, resonant toll across the valley. As the sound resonates, the creatures within the abbey yard answer with yipping, howls, growls and screams. Nikolai Wachter sits in the relative warmth of the abbey’s receiving room and tries, very hard, to understand what he is being told. A year. He lost a year. He had closed his eyes — he is almost certain he had merely closed his eyes — and the worl

Diro comes back alone. He is calm about it, which is its own kind of information. He reports what happened below in the even tone of someone who has already processed the worst of it and moved on to logistics: there is a devil down there. He met it. He told it he was a student doing research. The devil — Orestes — let him leave. He told Orestes he was guarding captives. Diro pauses here, letting that land. He believes those captives are the alternates. Their versions, from

Orbart is difficult to miss: a minotaur, seven feet and eight inches of dense muscle, sharpened horn and quiet reserve, wearing a chainmail shirt with a slight hood and boots that have given way at the toe. He carries an amulet bearing a strange symbol, which he uses to channel his magic, and he has his own moral code, arrived at independent of his god. He has been in Vallaki for two months, renting a room from a widow who would not have him if extreme old age had not dimmed

The wagon smells of old wine and worry. And it is making Shifty feel terribly unwell. The next chapter of their adventure has started unpleasantly for him. It is early morning when the party pulls away from the vineyard and the Barovian mist sits low and cold across the road. Shifty is in a deeply pitiable state. He sits hunched against the wagon's side rail, scales the grey-green of pitted copper, looking every inch like something a cat dragged in. The fresh air does not

The cavernous silence of the maze is punctuated by the echoing scuff of boots. The sounds bounce back to their ears, making it impossible to tell from which direction the noises come, despite the evidence of the listener's eyes. Then suddenly, from somewhere — perhaps around the next corner, perhaps from behind them, or perhaps in no place at all — there is maniacal laughter that belongs to no one present. There is also quiet weeping, a child's, high and inconsolable, cutt

The gate rolls open and Krelldutt’s company spills into Vallaki. Unlike the Order of the Feather members who arrived an hour earlier, Krelldutt’s group is road-worn rather than windblown. Their horses are lathered and they carry the particular silence of people who have a difficult task before them. Blinsky dismounts, swinging down to blink at the crowd of guards and knights inside the Sunset Gate. From a side street, Father Lucian and Dunlar emerge to greet them before they

The smoldering ruins of the tree-blight are still sending thin threads of smoke into the grey Barovian sky as the party descends Yester Hill. The ground is soft underfoot, churned by the night's violence, and the air smells of char and wet earth. Somewhere on the slope, Biblo whistles to himself. Nike spots them first — hoof prints pressed into the mud at the path's edge, the ground around each one singed dark. Four-legged, large, and burning. Crystal's eyes narrow. She know

The Maze simply continues — corridor by corridor, door by door, each turning in on what the traveler least wants to examine. This is, by design, the point. The party is scattered, exhausted, and negotiating with closed and frequently locked doors. Kiki’s movement through the maze is slow, her small clawed feet working harder than they should have to. She crouches before the next locked door and applies her thieves’ tools, but her hands tremble with fatigue. The door remains

The party wastes no time. With Exethanter’s library still humming at their backs, they turn their attention to the matter of reward — and reward, in Barovia, rarely arrives without complication. Neferon regards them with his unsettling golden eyes. “I do not know the stores contained within the Great Library as Exethanter does. And I may only gift you with items we have many of.” Soulfire selects a Feywild Shard from the pile — a resonant crystal that, when metamagic is app

The city wakes before dawn. Word moves through Vallaki the way bad news always does — in whispers first, then in the clatter of boots on cobblestone, then in torchlight multiplying along the walls. Komzin finds Dunlar in the building that used to be Krieger's, a table spread with rough maps and a candle burning low. Dunlar doesn't look up when he enters. "I heard you were back," he says. "I also heard other things. We'll discuss them when this is over." Komzin pulls ou

In a vault-ceilinged room, the shambling mound shuffles toward the Hexmates beneath Witherbloom Tower, smelling of wet soil and rot. Massive, its vines and branches are held together with some sort of mucus, and they appear just at the edge of decay, suspended by magic rather than nature. Fungi grow in clusters along the upper ridge of what might be called its head and shoulders, some of them faintly luminescent, throwing pale light across the room in uneven patches. Gaping m

The cave beneath the Gulthias Tree smells of wet stone and worse things. Two warrior druids are working through the party with methodical patience, spears leveled now rather than thrown. A druid at the back holds concentration on an Entangle spell, and the vines have made the tunnel floor nearly impassable. The second druid — the one Krelldutt has been trying to reason with — shows no sign of being moved by anything short of catastrophe. Catastrophe, as it happens, is clos

Wizards of the Coast. The Dark Gifts. Digital illustration. Curse of Strahd, WotC, 2016. Hall of the Amber Sarcophagi The East Hall of the Amber Sarcophagi smells of damp stone and something older, sharper underneath — caused, possibly by the divine things that have been imprisoned within for a very long time. Behind one of the chamber doors, the sounds are extraordinary: crashing, roaring, the shriek of something that might be female or might be the sound stone makes when it