ArcAnjl Adventures

In the graveyard behind the ruined church, the stones say strange things: names cut twice, a child's grave marked "mistake," and people Tüül remembers burying now marked "recovered." Then Lavius scrapes the moss off one more stone. "Here rests Tüül Oakencask. Keeper of the sun's office, faithful in the field."

Aelion tells Tüül he is not what he seems, and will not help dig. On the road into town, Tamsin steps out of the trees, puts Lavius to sleep, and warns Owlin: leave Mourningfall tonight, or wake something that has slept for thirty years. The party argues. Tüül picks up the shovel.

This is the episode where the party loses Tüül Oakencask, and the hill turns green where he goes. Then a blessing reveals the bell's hidden lines, and a golden shard flies home to the reliquary.

Mourningfall is a homebrew D&D 5e gothic mystery, played on Foundry VTT. An actual-play recap - no dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

https://arcanjl.com/

Two in the morning, and a vampire has Ireena in his arms. He isn't here on the master's orders. He thinks if he brings her to the castle himself, he'll be rewarded. Genji grabs him from ten feet away and holds on for the whole fight. Beowolfe runs upstairs in his underwear. Ireena charges in wearing her nightgown with her rapier and lands a critical hit. When the vampire tries to turn to mist, he can't, because Genji is still holding him. In the morning the party plans the road north to Madam Eva's camp. Beowolfe teaches the villagers to hunt, and Lucy teaches Genji Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on a lute. Then, on a bridge in the rain, an old woman's wagon is stuck in the mud. It's Morgantha, the pie lady. She pays them a gold piece each and hands Remi a pie. But something under the tarp is moving, and Hay-zel's detect magic lights up the pies, the wagon, and a horse that isn't a horse. An actual-play Curse of Strahd campaign, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules. https://arcanjl.com/

THE PARTY
Genji — bugbear monk
Beowolfe Scornbow — human ranger
Nashkan Silverwing — dragonborn barbarian
Lucy — tiefling bard
Hay-zel — drow cleric
Remi — forest gnome artificer, with Mayla

The girl the party saved from the lake wants a doll, so they walk into Blinsky's Toys, the best toy shop in Vallaki. On the top shelf sit four dolls with Ireena's face. They are already sold. A man comes for them every week, and the toymaker is afraid of what happens if they are late. The doll the girl picks instead is made with hair and bone from something undead. Two new companions join the party: Jordana Blinsky, the toymaker's daughter, a puppeteer whose mother was taken by Strahd, and Ash Notley, a three-foot living toy with a feathered hat, a pistol, and total confidence that he is the hero. Gesch is mistaken for a tiny dragonborn and handed a puppet. Ghast hides from the dolls, and then from two old women who will not stop staring at him. At the Blue Water Inn, the party hears about a girl who will not wake up, hags at the windmill, and a law that all silver must be melted into weapons. And at three in the morning, the Baron's enforcer Izek knocks on their door, asking for Ireena. An actual-play Curse of Strahd campaign, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules.

https://arcanjl.com/

Lavius wakes in a cold sweat, already running for the door, and Aelion holds on. Half awake, Lavius repeats what a voice he knew told him out of the fog: "You were here. Stop running." He did not stop.

Over breakfast, Tüül works out what has changed at the Last Lantern in thirty years, and the party has its longest argument yet about what the forgetting really is: a cage, or a tea to keep down the fever. Then the parish register, where two hundred and fourteen souls are crossed out and something kinder is written over them.

At the ruined church, the fallen stones of the bell tower point straight up the mountain to the mine. Owlin walks through the door and vanishes. Inside, the church is whole again, warm and candlelit, and the priestess at the altar knows Tüül on sight: "The bell should have taken you." Four false paladins in Lathander's colors stand in the way, and it is the first real fight in weeks.

Then the vision breaks, and the church is a ruin again: a sun symbol scratched through, an empty reliquary, a child's handprint in the ash, and something heavy moving in the cellar below.

Mourningfall is a homebrew D&D 5e gothic mystery, played on Foundry VTT. An actual-play recap - no dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

https://arcanjl.com/

The gate held, but Parriwimple didn't make it. The party carries him home in a cart, his uncle holding his hand the whole way. At the west gate it's worse. The two Vistani they hired turned on the defenders and threw the gate open to the dead, and Ismark lies face down in the mud. Then a rider comes out of the mist on a horse with no jaw. His name is Rahadin, the right hand of Strahd, and he has come for Ireena. His master wants to take care of her. And, in time, to marry her. So the party makes a counteroffer: they'll take Ireena themselves, and swear to keep her safe. Beowolfe shrugs. That shouldn't be too hard. A mob screams at the mansion door. In the kitchen, Hay-zel tells Ireena the truth. At midnight they bury the burgomaster and Parriwimple, the bell Remi fixed rings twelve times, and the dead of Barovia rise and march toward the castle. One of them waves. Then zombies come out of the march, and at two in the morning, something taps on Ireena's window. An actual-play Curse of Strahd campaign, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules. https://arcanjl.com/

THE PARTY

Genji — bugbear monk

Beowolfe Scornbow — human ranger

Nashkan Silverwing — dragonborn barbarian

Hay-zel — drow cleric

Remi — forest gnome artificer, with Mayla

Lucy — tiefling bard (not in this episode)

A little girl is missing, and her father is in a panic on the side of a muddy road. The party follows the glowing footprints to a dark lake, then chases a lantern through fog, wolves, bats, and floating debris. When they reach her, she is not the seven-year-old they were promised, and she does not want to go back to her uncle. Then the water starts to shake. Sea hags rise out of the lake, and the party fights for their lives on the boats, with Ireena diving in to pull a child out of the water. The walk to Vallaki is no better. The gate guards charge refugees two gold to enter. Inside the walls, everyone smiles, because someone with keys is always watching. Ireena finally gets a shield and a bow. An old man is dragged off a horse and taken to "the questioning." And nobody in town will say why the bells ring every night. An actual-play Curse of Strahd campaign, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules.

https://arcanjl.com/

A scream from inside the burgomaster's mansion. Behind the unlocked door, a young woman kneels over her father in a pool of his blood. She takes one look at a drow and a bugbear in her doorway and runs upstairs screaming.

Her name is Ireena, and she will only talk to Beowolfe, the one human in the party. She holds on to his cloak and strokes his owl feathers without noticing. When she asks whether the monsters have taken him prisoner too, he tells her: no, we are allied by trauma.

So they work the room like a crime scene. Claws, not a blade, a few hours old. A man's footprints that come from nowhere and go nowhere. A dark, wispy trail through the front door. A margin note about servants who vanish, and one word in a shaking hand: Locked. And Ireena, pale and stumbling, with something under her hair that her brother swears isn't there.

Then the sun goes down at the east gate. A big, sweet man with a tree trunk for a club. A flaming purple sword. A ranger who cannot stop rolling twenties. And something in the dark, drawing a bow made of smoke.

The gate holds. Not everyone gets back up.

An actual-play Curse of Strahd campaign, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules.

https://arcanjl.com/

Mira lives alone in a cottage with a table set for four. She does not remember her mother, but she remembers Lavius: the quiet one in the corner of the tavern, always writing. When Lavius asks her who she lives with, she collapses.

At the Last Lantern, La Maestra plays dragon chess with Roger and asks him what he knows. Lavius came to Mourningfall seven years ago with a caravan of two dozen people chasing gold in the mountains. Every trip up, fewer came back, and every one of them swore they had lost nobody. Then Mira and Nora meet again, and a daughter who does not know her mother recognizes the way she weeds, thumb tucked under.

Nora tells Lavius the rest: he came running, he stayed, and he forgot the most. "If it's your name to take back, you just have to remember." La Maestra asks one more question, and the answer is Zhentarim. What follows is the hardest conversation the party has had, a paladin with his hands pressed together so he will not reach for his hammer, and a man stripping off his robe in the middle of a tavern to look for a tattoo he cannot find.

Then the marks in Tamsin's wardrobe, four dreams that each point at something real, and a nightmare the party has promised to wake Lavius from.

Mourningfall is a homebrew D&D 5e gothic mystery, played on Foundry VTT. An actual-play recap - no dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

https://arcanjl.com/

For the first time in weeks, nothing attacked the village of Barovia. Strahd kept his word. So the party makes their rounds. Helliax heals Ismark, who learns his sister is safe and that the pies the whole village has been crying for were made of children. Ghast lifts the witch's curse off Gesch. Cassius finally gets his plate armor and gives his old chain mail to Ireena, whose armor class, it turns out, has been eleven this entire time. A starving mother opens her door and asks if they brought the pies. And in the church cellar, the party puts down the vampire young Doru has been feeding rats. Then they head north toward Vallaki, and the road turns red. Knights in armor made of mist ride out of the blood, and Cassius gets knocked flat and revived by Ireena's potions so many times the table starts calling it Whack-a-Cassius. Past the road, Fiadh finally finds the Vistani caravan that knew her mother. They welcome her home with wine and stew and a little girl shouting "she's back." Then an old woman feels how cold her hands are. A child asks about her eyes. Someone says "show us your teeth." The knives come out, and Cassius steps in front of them: "Even her." Fiadh tells her friends the truth about what she is, Helliax tests it with holy water, and the old woman tells her about her mother, Zorica, who could walk through the mists. In the morning, the caravan offers Fiadh a place in the family and a chance to find her father. This is Fiadh's final episode. Her player can't continue with the game, so the table gave her the send-off she deserved. An actual-play Curse of Strahd campaign, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules.

https://arcanjl.com/

Easter said he'd take them to the gold. Instead the mine opens into a chamber no miner ever dug: a live campfire, an altar to Laduguer - god-king of the duergar - with a glowing green gem set in its head like a third eye, and four invisible guards whose entire position is "leave now." In a side room, black necrotic tendrils are sewing two dead guards back into something undead - the same force that lives behind the ox skull at the tavern, now confirmed to reach the bottom of the mine.

La Maestra bluffs the duergar with a fake vision from their own god, listens politely to their warning that the statue is booby-trapped and that six of their people already died down here - and pries the gem out anyway. The chamber collapses. A duergar dies, Aelion is dug out of the rubble at one hit point, and Easter saves his life with a healing potion hidden in his sock. La Maestra kills the last guard with an insult.

Then the quiet reveals start landing. Aelion attunes to the maul he's carried since the church cellar - and it is a Holy Avenger. Behind the shattered statue, a mirror with no reflection leads one-way into a ruined wizard's lair: the hidden workshop of a mage who had been impersonating a high priest of Lathander, with broken warded jars built to harness and imprison something dug out of this mine. Easter even remembers a name - Alaric Vane, the "priest" who kept sending crews digging away from the gold.

Past a door bolted from the inside: a dead paladin whose sword was melted down to a dagger, living fireflies glowing with shifting magic, and a dozen drow in the dark. An illusory carrion crawler scatters them, and the party corners a straggler as the session ends - with no way back through the portal behind them.

Mourningfall is a homebrew D&D 5e gothic mystery, played on Foundry VTT. An actual-play recap - no dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

https://arcanjl.com/