Design Progress - One Night Strahd in Mörkbörg (part 1)
I got the idea to run Castle Ravenloft as a 1-shot a few years ago from Sly Flourish. We had a fairly large gaming group back then (my how things have changed) and I wanted to reward anyone who stepped into the DM/GM role to get a chance to play as a reward for their efforts. Also, I was hoping that since they were able to GM a game, they would be able to get up to speed with a high level character fairly quickly. Since I had access to the 5e version of Curse of Strahd, we used D&D 5e as our system.
I collected a few donations and had the maps printed on 3/4” scale and cut into tiles to reveal the castle as we played. A few other props here and there as well as using my work’s printer to make tokens from the Darkest Dungeon sprites and we had a proper game set up.
The objective was simple, rescue the “princess” by collecting three powerful artifacts before Strahd shows up, 45 minutes before the session ends.
In practice, level 7 characters are still very complex and combats would eat into our limited 4 hour session so after 3:15 hours, they had managed to get 0 artifacts and were slaughtered (although they never really recovered from the lucky opening critical hit against the paladin). The players had fun but I didn’t; the session was missing some sort of meaningful player agency. It was pretty apparent to me that they would never come close to “beating” the scenario unless we extended it over several more hours which wasn’t really a possibility for our group.
I ran it again a year later with level 5 characters (and adjusted monsters) to much of the same effect. It just wasn’t working as I had hoped but I could see the potential in the framework.
The first rewrite design principles
While preparing for the third year I considered a swap to a simpler systems and had recently been experimenting with Mörkbörg. I had to change the theme from Gothic Horror to WTF?!? but they were close enough to make it feasible. The Mörkbörg aesthetic resonated with my players and they were excited to try it. I dove into all the 3rd party materials to find good matches for the feeling I wanted to build.
In addition to the theme and motif rewrites, I decided on a few mechanical changes to the scenario to match our timeline constraint:
Get three powerful artifacts to open the gate and escape. Instead of having to face Strahd, they just had to collect the three artifacts and escape out the front gate. I hoped to encourage the OSR mindset of combat as war not sport and enabled them to theoretically be able to run from every fight.
Faction play. I organized the monsters into different factions and gave them simple motivations and goals for the scenario. I actually had a lot of fun with this one. I had the heroic NPCs (Ireena, van Richten, and a resurrected Sergei von Zarovich) from Curse of Strahd succeed in defeating the vampire lord but then eventually corrupted by their own sins and become the monsters of the castle.
Overloaded Encounter Die. Instead of the simple d20 encounter table from 5e Curse of Strahd, I elected for Necropraxis’s Overloaded Encounter Die to mix it up. I even took it a bit further by incorporating Prismatic Wasteland’s Overloaded Encounter Table to make a seemingly infinite cast of creatures to kill the characters.
In addition, I spent the time to rework the 100+ rooms into about a dozen discrete areas on each floor of the castle and to print the descriptions it in spiral bound notebook to play it completely analog.
The first playtest
I allocated 6 hours for this session (with about an hour for food) and gave the players some pre-reading. The end result was a great success! Gameplay flowed from obstacle to obstacle with combats being swift and deadly; in general, the combats took less time then the puzzles did. My players loved the theme and how much more of the castle they were able to explore. The big takeaways were:
The Mörkbörg Feel. I asked the players to fill out a survey after we finished and all respondents said they enjoyed the theme and feel of the session but wanted MORE Mörkbörg. Extra mutant arms, weird beasts with shears for hands, blood pouring from their eyes after reading a tome. They also weren’t turned off by the deadliness of the system, particularly when one player used an Unclean Scroll to wipe out all the monsters and then carry over into 2 PCs. I think it helped that I introduced Mörkbörg as a black comedy RPG, where the deck is so stacked against you, there isn’t much option except to laugh when you open a door and explode in a shower of gore.
Overloaded Encounter Die and Table were too complicated. We weren’t having fun tracking food and torches for the 1 shot so the only portions of the rolls we really cared about were the encounters. The Overloaded Encounter table was a bit cumbersome but generally worked. Even with more play time and faster obstacle resolution, we still only had a handful of random encounters and this system of combining faction, # of monsters, reaction and encounter distance added complexity without much table benefit.
Wasted Monster Variety. While I had planned for multiple variations of bandits and skeletons and cultists, they didn’t come in play and I’m not sure my players would have noticed a repeat anyway. Spending the time to flesh out a robust bestiary for the scenario didn’t really payoff. Also having to flip to the back of my booklet for combat then back to the room descriptions wasn’t great.
Backtracking in the Castle is not going to happen. Across all previous plays through Ravenloft, the players never visited a room again. I had puzzles spread throughout the castle with clues that make you go “Aha! so this should open that door we saw.” My players did say that and then followed it with, “yeah but we’re not going back through all that so forget it.” I also found that the different methods of malicious teleporting around the castle (like the colorful orbs in the dungeon) could also inadvertently kill the session if they were close to achieving their goal but then lost 2 hours of progress as we’re running out of real-life time.
The Mörkbörg “leveling up” system killed the pacing. We had a beautiful flow going with players fully immersed in the fiction, eyes on the map tiles and generally only referring to their character sheets for inventory. Then they earned a level up about 2/3 through and we stopped for 15 minutes to look at mechanics that ultimately didn’t matter. We never got back into that flow state, not helped by the player fatigue that was also setting in.
With these lessons, I have started preparations for the 4th annual Curse of Strahd 1-shot, or as it’s called now, Return to Castle Ravenbörg. Part 2 will cover my design principles for this iteration and depending on when I post it, a summary of the play test. If you’re interested in any of the materials I have used, shoot me an email at TonightsSession@gmail.com and I’ll share what I can or at least point you to my sources.