ArcAnjl Adventures

Fifteen minutes before midnight, under the Durst house, the party follows the sound of chains and finds Petra. The real one, ankle-chained in a cell, begging not to be left alone. They free her. Then they open the portcullis on the thing in the water.

Balasar cuts his own palm rather than put a child on the altar. The mound rolls forward, and when it bleeds its ribs open on a baby held up by tentacles lined with teeth. Walter. The amber necklace stops him once. Then he falls to the bottom of the water and grows into something much worse.

Balasar steps between the abomination and Genji twice. The first bite is for more than twice his hit points, and Genji spends the party's last inspiration to keep him alive. The second time there is nothing left to spend. He dies standing there, and Genji finishes the fight with a line the table will remember.

The survivors run past Gustav Durst's ghost, out the front door, and up a hill to dig two small graves and lay a wooden toy in with the bones.

THE PARTY

Balasar Amberflame — dragonborn paladin, Oath of Glory

Lucy — tiefling bard

Genji — bugbear monk

Remi — forest gnome artificer

Beowolfe Scornbow — human ranger

Curse of Strahd, D&D 2024 rules, run on Foundry VTT.

New episodes on Tuesdays.

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A stranger walks out of the ruins of Berez: Ghast, a soft-spoken apprentice exorcist whose family was paid by someone to send him to this party. He knows the local history, has never been in a fight, and ends his first one standing in his own bonfire. Berez is a drowned village and cursed ground, and everything living in it fears the same old woman. The bullywugs of the standing stones flee at the name Baba Lysaga and warn that the ones who cross into her territory never return, and that the ruined church at the heart of town is worse still, where a dead priest calls his flock up out of the mud. Then the party tries to pass through a myconid ceremony, the peace talk collapses on a natural one, and fifteen mushroom people try to eat a paladin alive. By morning the swamp has gone to war across the river, magical fire has scorched the shore, and the dead are missing from where they fell. The trail ends at a tree that moves, ravens caged in its branches, and a woman laughing inside it: you should have seen those adventurers. An actual-play Curse of Strahd campaign, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules.

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Episode two of the Rusted Fist's Draw Steel campaign, and the party gets a fifth member. Khanarch, a spear-wielding fury, joins the group in the tomb just in time to jump a scythe trap, pry open a coffin, and shove a statue out of the way to reveal the ritual chamber.

Inside: a glowing ward over the stairs to the lower tomb, a wall carving that says turn back or perish, five statues smeared with blood, and Ashley's daughter Violet tied to one of them while a seven-foot bugbear bleeds her to open the way. The fight that follows teaches the table three Draw Steel rules the hard way: minions share one health pool, dying doesn't mean dead, and the walls are destructible. Khanarch, surrounded and below zero, spends everything on To the Uttermost End and drops all four minions at once. Mia punches a goblin through the wall. Hank takes a blade in the kidney, a cut Achilles tendon, and the killing blow on the bugbear.

Then loot (a ring that is, in the GM's words, "always moist"), a title for Alecs (Violet's Savior, which he starts announcing immediately), a goblin-corpse solution to the trap on the way out, and a rescued teenager who is mostly annoyed it took so long.

An actual-play heroic fantasy recap. No dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

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The girl in the mirror has a name now. So does the thing in the crib.

She cannot speak, but she can point, and she leads the party through the top floor one nod at a time: past a bathtub with fingernail gouges in the wood, past a pot of clear liquid with a gold coin at the bottom that Genji really should not have reached into, to a crib with the name Walter on it, and to a mirror that turns out to be a door.

Behind a locked attic room, two children have been waiting a very long time for someone to bring them food. Rose and Thorn from the portrait downstairs. They tell the party what their mother did to them, and what she did to their baby brother, and why Petra was never going to be found. Genji promises to carry their bones out and bury them by flowers. In return, the children climb inside two of the party and come along.

Then Beowolfe touches a rocking chair, and Elizabeth Durst stands up out of it.

There is a nursemaid folded into a trunk. There is a painting with a mouth. There is a stair going down, a well full of hands, a floor that is not a floor, and a vault of urns that the family asked very politely for nobody to touch.

Lucy touches one.

Three of the five go down. The two left standing are a gnome and a monk with a dead girl inside him, and the clock is fifteen minutes from midnight.

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The doll made it into the house. The girl who owned it did not, or if she did, the house is not saying.

Upstairs, the suits of armor turn their heads to watch you pass. A harpsichord plays for no one, and stops when you open the door. There is sheet music jammed in the strings, written for a woman named Clara, and when Lucy plays it through, the house answers with dancers made of light: the master of the house in the arms of the nursemaid, and his wife watching from the wall.

The letters in the library tell the rest of that story. So does the corpse the secret door was hiding, a treasure-hunter who came here alone weeks ago, caught halfway inside a chest, wearing boots the party recognizes.

There are warnings in this house, written in dried blood by a man who became the thing in the closet: don't trust what you see. Be out before midnight.

Nobody follows either one.

A suit of black armor takes Genji over a railing and three stories down. A gnome invents a parachute on the way after him. Something breathes in a crib it is better not to look into, a woman trapped in a mirror answers questions one nod at a time, and then, at the balcony door, soaked and shivering and holding her wooden doll, Petra asks to be let in.

Lucy opens the door.

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The party finally reaches Madam Eva, the famed seer of the Vistani, and every answer costs more than the question. The fortune-teller serves the vampire. Strahd himself sat in her tent minutes before they arrived. Helliax learns his missing family walked into Castle Ravenloft years ago. Four cards hit the table — The Mists, The Tempter, The Marionette, The Executioner — and Eva promises a fuller reading of the five things they will need to face the devil of Barovia, if they return within a fortnight. But by morning the camp's young fiddler has vanished, her abductor leaving wolf tracks that turn human and then stop mid-stride. The party leaves three rescued children in the seer's keeping and pushes west after a stolen ritual scroll, into deforested ruins where a man-eating giant guards a well of horrors, and an old woman's laughter rolls through the dead trees. She knows they're here. An actual-play Curse of Strahd campaign, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules.

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They bury the burgomaster at midnight, and the graveyard objects.

What follows is the quietest, saddest hour this campaign has had. A fifteen-year-old priest gives away his own father's grave. A brother eulogises the man he is now expected to replace. And a woman who was found as a lost child in the woods explains why she will never stop taking people in.

Then the dead of Barovia rise in a green light and walk up the mountain to the castle. Last week's casualty is in the line. He stops, and he grins at them.

Over the wine afterwards, Doru finally says out loud what happened to him up at Castle Ravenloft. It is worse than anybody guessed, and the punchline is that the vampire lord thought it was funny.

Then it is back to a mansion where something is tapping on the windows, and out onto a road where a kind old woman with a horse and cart wants to give three freezing travellers something warm to eat. The whole village has been begging strangers for her pies for weeks.

And when they cut open her tarp, they find out what has been going into them, and how she has been getting it.

An actual-play Curse of Strahd recap. D&D 5e, 2024 rules, run on Foundry VTT.

ArcAnjl Adventures - Curse of Strahd, Monday campaign, Episode 8.

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The bell is ringing and the ground is shaking. The party breaks into the church cellar and finds not a cultist but a villager - Holloway, the town farrier - sitting in a trance with a giant maul across his lap and one hand on the bell. Aelion reads two lines of Draconic off it before the magic fades: "What sleeps must stay sleeping. My gold stays hidden," and "Forgive what you cannot know. Forget what you cannot bear."

Waking Holloway turns into an experiment nobody meant to run. Standing inside the ruined church he remembers that the town used to be called Morning Rise, that the ruin was a temple of Lathander, that he has two brothers named Grady and Dunnick - and that he is a farrier who is fairly sure he hates horses. Walking him home, the party watches every one of those memories drain back out of him. It isn't the bell holding him together. It's the church. Which raises a colder question: who taught this town that the church is evil, and that they must never go there?

Back at The Last Lantern the spell starts visibly cracking. The tavern keeper remembers a miner she shouldn't. La Maestra sings about Morning Rise and one man throws his cup into the fire - Easter Ashwell, one of the twelve, who lays out how the church took the mine after somebody found a vein of pure gold, how the paladins came, and how every other faith was turned away at the door. Lavius names a dead man out of the parish register, and a woman who has been a widow for thirty years finds out about it in front of a room full of strangers - and tells them her name is Violet.

Then Aelion raises the old toast. Everyone answers except three people, who look around the room startled at everybody else.

And then Easter leads them down into the mine, past rows of burned miners that La Maestra is certain were killed by dragonfire rather than any mine fire - to a door the foreman never came out of.

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.

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Rain, a harvest festival, and a house that only turns up when it wants something.

Five strangers arrive in Daggerford on the one night a year the town is worth visiting. There is music in the square, a widow playing flute in the downpour, a dollmaker giving away his best work, and a stablemaster who has burned thirty-two marks into his stable wall and will tell you exactly what they count.

There is also a house on the hill. It appears once or twice a year, usually around the festival. The people who walk up to it do not walk back down — or they do, and they do not last long afterward. Ask five townsfolk and you will get two stories: one about everyone who vanished, and one about the man who came back rich. Both are told with total confidence.

Balasar Amberflame is looking for his father. Genji is looking for the man who burned down his monastery. Lucy is looking for a cure, and for the woman she believes caused the sickness. Remi is looking for honest work and alchemical supplies. Beowolfe Scornbow is mostly trying not to fall asleep.

None of them came to Daggerford looking for a missing child.

That happens anyway — and by the time they reach the top of the hill, every window in the house is lit, and someone is watching them from an upper floor.

THE PARTY

Balasar Amberflame — dragonborn paladin, Oath of Glory

Lucy — tiefling bard

Genji — bugbear monk

Remi — forest gnome artificer

Beowolfe Scornbow — human ranger

Curse of Strahd, D&D 2024 rules, run on Foundry VTT.

New episodes on Tuesdays.

arcanjl.com

The blood test in the cellar ends the only way it could: with a father paying for it. Donavich gives his life to buy his son back, and Doru walks up out of the dark human again — orphaned, filthy, and suddenly the priest of Barovia at twenty years old.

Then the sun goes down, and the village finds out what a miracle costs.

The nightly siege comes early and comes worse: thinking ghouls that eat while you're still standing, and something riding its own cloud of rot that kills the grass where it drifts. The east barricade holds. Parriwimple — the armorer's enormous, delighted nephew, who calls the party's kobold paladin "baby dragon" and means it as the highest compliment — does not.

And into the aftermath rides a man named Rahadin, who speaks for the master of this realm, and who explains, politely, that a god reached into Barovia last night and Strahd noticed. The party is marked. But there's a way to make all of it stop: hand over Ismark's sister Ireena. She'll live as a queen. His word on it.

Then he looks at a portrait of an orc cleric's missing son and says the boy's name out loud.

The episode ends in a house with a broken window, a burgomaster in pieces on the floor, two puncture wounds behind a young woman's ear, and howling somewhere out in the dark.

An actual-play Curse of Strahd recap — no dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

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