04/01/2026: Three Situations Escalate (A Curse of Strahd campaign log)

Curse of Strahd campaign log

The afternoon passes slowly at the Martikov camp. The family is damp and tired, displaced from their own home by something none of them are equipped to fight alone. Davian Martikov, the family patriarch, carries himself with the settled authority of a man accustomed to being obeyed, and when he summons Krelldutt to speak with him privately, the rest of the family gives them the privacy without being obvious. This is simply how things work with Martikovs.

Davian tells Krelldutt what he knows. “Count Strahd, I believe, is aware that we Martikovs are working against him in the Order of the Feather.” The older man gestures south, squinting into the misty distance, “Strahd is working with the druids of Yester Hill, who may be responsible for sending the blights.This is a pressure they apply to keep the Order too occupied to cause trouble.” 

“Tell me about the druids,” presses Krelldutt.

Martikov sighs, “They live underneath Yester Hill, two miles to the south. My family has had a long and uneasy truce with the druids. Twenty years ago, I met with the Keeper of the Hill, their leader. We settled on boundary — each side would stay to its own territory, and the road would be shared.”

“The Keeper insisted on safe passage for monthly rider atop a nightmare. The rider would be permitted free passage on whatever business the druids conduct with Strahd. I do not know what that business is.” 

The two men sit quietly for a while, until Krelldutt thinks to ask, “Do you think they have sent the blights?” 

“The blights come from the south. I believe they come up through the forest at night. They are here in the morning. Now, there are too many for my sons and I to keep up with. Our truce, if it is the druids who send the blights, no longer appears to be holding.”

“I can take my people with me,” Krelldutt volunteers, “to see if they can be reasoned with.” The tortle gestures to where Feesh and Torgan watch Blinksy entertaining Davian’s grandchildren.

The old man’s eyes meet the rangers.

“Urwin told me you were a good man, brave and forthright. He is correct. But I would hate to send you somewhere on our behalf that was so very dangerous.” 

He advises against approaching the druids directly. “They are in league with Strahd,” Davian sighs. “Anyone who goes to Yester Hill goes there at their own risk. But if you must go, take Urwin or Danika, not both. One of them must stay safe to be there for their children.”

 After a brief conference between the family, it is decided that it is Danika who will go. Urwin will stay behind.

Torgan, meanwhile, stands at the edge of the camp, watching the children who have decided he is the most interesting thing they have seen in some time. One of them spots the diadem under his hood, eyes going wide. “Are you a king?” 

Torgan, taken aback tells the child no, that it is merely decoration, and firmly declines to take it off for a closer look. A second child arrives. Then a third. They roll their homemade ball to him. He rolls it back. They are perfectly happy with this arrangement and absolutely fascinated by the glint of platinum at the edge of his hood, which he is careful not to let them see more of. They toss the ball in such a way that Torgan might dislodge his cloak, giving the children a better view of it. He is careful not to let this happen. The gift from the diadem reigns in his impulsivity, and Torgan smiles grimly to himself, recognizing this.

The group sets a watch rotation for the night: Krelldutt first, then Torgen, then Feesh. The camp is cold and wet. The driest sleeping is in the wagon.

On Krelldutt's watch, a rider passes on the main road — dark cloak, large horse, moving south at pace. At each footfall, the horse's hooves strike the road and send up a gout of fire. Flame spills from its nostrils. The rider does not look toward the vineyard. He does not slow. He is heading at speed for Yester Hill.

Torgen takes the midnight watch. To the south, a fire is building on the hill — small at first, then climbing until it is visible even through the fog, a blaze high enough to see by from two miles away. He can see movement at the top but cannot make out detail. He does not wake anyone until his shift is done.

Feesh wakes Krelldutt around two in the morning. By then the fog has cleared and the fire is fully visible. Beside it, at the base of the great dead tree that crowns Yester Hill, stands something that is not a druid. It is large. It moves — one arm lifting and dropping, one leg rising and settling — with the slow, deliberate quality of something that has just learned how to move. It is shaped like a person.

Krelldutt wakes Davian. The old man squints into the dark, studies the shape on the hill, and says he has never seen anything like it. He does not know what it is. The rider has not come back.

The party rouses and moves south on foot — two miles, taking Danika, Friedrich the dog, and the Headband of Intellect-wearing barbarian who is now processing all of this with a great deal more clarity than he is used to. The nightmare's passage has left scorch marks on the road stones.

Yester Hill resolves out of the dark as something larger than its name suggests — less a hill than a mesa, rising in stages, with a shelf of planted growth midway up and a flat summit reached by a stone staircase. From the base, they can hear chanting, drums, and bone whistles. The fire at the top casts the whole hillside in shifting orange light.

The group slowly, stealthily, make their way to the top of the stairs. Hiding in the shadows, they behold a terrifying sight.

The creature is visible now in full. Seventy feet tall, without its horns. It stands at the summit beside the great dead-looking tree, its bark-covered arms moving with slow intention. Behind it, the skeletal tree drops fruit — a large, irregular mass that falls like an enormous acorn. 

When it hits the ground, it stands up. A vine blight unfolds itself the largest of the common blight forms, and moves off into the dark, out of their view. The dead tree is not simply standing there. It is producing blights. 

But this enormous blight does not seem to have come from such a pod. It looks constructed, maybe by the druids. Great lengths of timber are lashed together with what seem to be ropes made from vines. Its face, as crude as it is, seems to be made from the knotted bark of some fantastically wide tree trunk.

Torgen's new-found intelligence tells him what he already suspected: this enormous blight is somehow kin to the needle blights they saw in the vineyard rows. But this blight has been taken to extremes that should not be possible, boughs and branches held together by magic and vines. 

The party’s thoughts must remain unspoken. For now.

⚔

Fekre has a task. The amulet that Bayleaf threw over the balcony last session is down on the lower level, and she needs it. Rakthe's body is the vehicle. The goddess makes her priorities clear to the barbarian — they are going to get the amulet, and then they are going to Vallaki, where they will share its gift with everyone they meet. Rakthe can feel the goddess’s excitement, her pleasant anticipation, her need to get going, now.

Bayleaf has been watching Rakthe since the goddess disappeared from the shelf below. The look in Rakthe's eyes is wrong — subtle, but wrong. His insight, despite not knowing Rakthe for very long, gives him enough to work with. He draws his sword and puts it to Rakthe's throat, asking where Fekre went.

Rakthe points toward the door to the main hall and lies “I felt a pull in that direction. Maybe the goddess went that way.” 

Bayleaf casts Zone of Truth and asks the question again. Fekre exerts herself, overriding the spell. Bayleaf’s magic does not take hold, and he knows it. The elf grips the hilt of his sword tightly enough to whiten his already pale knuckles.

It is not Rakthe’s eyes that detect the subtle change in Bayleaf’s hand, but maybe their training as a barbarian warrior. Or, maybe it is some sharpening of the senses granted by the newly ensconced plague goddess. Either way, Fekre in full control, teleports from beneath Bayleaf’s blade sixty feet out into the hallway, where they run. Past newly dead knight, a shattered flame skull, and a greatsword with a burned blade, they sprint across the slick marble floor. Rakthe catches from Fekre the twinge of – something – as they pass the dead knight, his face incinerated. 

Bayleaf gives chase. Komzin follows. Neither of them catches up before Fekre commands Rakthe to scoop the amulet off the floor and dart up the stairs.

Rakthe moves stealthily up the stairs with Fekre's help — and both Bayleaf and Komzin need a moment to locate them. 

But by then, Rakthe has reached the upper level.

At the top of the stairs, Vilnius's remains are where they left him — dry and crumbling on the floor. Fekre stops Rakthe, compelling them to stare at the ruin, examining what is left of her last follower.

“Was that also my servant?”

Rakthe, not entirely truthfully, says they had assumed Vilnius's condition was Fekre's own doing. Fekre, disturbed, denies this. Rakthe again feels —what? – from Fekre. Not quite sadness. But a grief that is more selfish. 

The barbarian also senses that Fekre is distracted as studies Vilnius. Then, suddenly, a flash of concern. “Do you know if Vilnius was carrying the amulet when he tried to leave the temple?”she demands of Rakthe. “A curse on the amulet killed him. If we try to walk out of the Amber Temple with it, you will join him.” Fekre communicates this in graphic and disturbing images that flash through Rakthe’s mind. The message is that Fekre, being a goddess, would simply be bounced from Rakthe’s dead, crumbling body.This outcome does not suit her.

“I need you alive as my vehicle, to bring my gifts back to the world, and we will start with your companions. Then Vallaki. Then-” Fekre pauses in this warm reverie, before continuing, “First, we must break the curse. The lich and the hound will have something in the library that can do this.”

She turns Rakthe's body toward the north end of the temple. She has sensed that Rakthe knows there is a passage behind the great statue, leading up to the library. 

⚔

The skeletal rider is aware of Duster, following him as the kenku moves first back toward the trees, then forward toward the road. Its cloaked head tracks him as it approaches from the south, the horse's bleached bone feet clattering on the road stones with every step. When they arrive, the rider extends one gauntleted hand — not threatening, or not obviously so. An offer of transport.

Duster accepts. The rider hoists Duster up and places the kenku in front rather than behind itself— tucked in like a child, the rider's arms on either side, which makes any attempt to leap from the horse considerably more difficult. The rider turns the horse south.

The smell begins before long and worsens steadily — rot and standing water and mud, the particular smell of a place that has never fully drained. Tiny biting flies find their way beneath Duster’s cloak and feathers, biting him miserably. 

At a roadside marker made of two crossed ancient spears, a skull hangs suspended, and from the skull depends something like a necklace or amulet: an eye, the pupil moving, contracting and expanding as Duster passes, finding him. The rider does not acknowledge it. They move on.

The road becomes mud. The fog is dense here, thick enough to muffle the sound of the horse's hooves in the sucking ground. Then, ahead, a structure resolves from the murk — a shack, ramshackle and listing, raised on a set of scaly legs. As the rider approaches, the shack turns, its legs planted in the mud. The door opens on its own. An enormous figure clambers out.

She is very old and very large, and she knows exactly who her visitor is before he says a word.

“The name is Duster, is it not? My daughters have told me about you. They should be here shortly.”

She is Baba Lysaga, the mother of the coven, and the coven is now reconstituted. She is the grandmother of Morgantha's line, the source from which the hag sisters came. Bella is dead, and her daughters have told her who is responsible. She is not angry in any way that reads as anger. She is matter-of-fact about it. Duster is going to help her avenge Bella. 

Duster agrees that this sounds like a fine arrangement.