What: The one road through Barovia. East: the gates we entered by. West: four days to Vallaki, past Tser Pool Encampment and a windmill we should not have poked our noses into.
Travelled: ✅ All four days (Sessions 5–7). We know this road now. It knows us back.
The Gates of Barovia
A stone gate between two high rocks, flanked by crumbling headless statues, long unguarded and standing open. The engraving: “Welcome to Barovia — the crown jewel in the Strahd empire.” Raised above it, the empire’s sigil — the same design as Osric’s family banner. That thread is pulled further in Quests & Threads.
Dangers of the road, learned the hard way
- The lights that cry for help. Voices from the trees — “Help! Help me!” — that prove to be floating, glowing lights. Ismark warned us of them; Aragal confirmed it with a professional’s shrug: kill wolves, ignore lights, travel fast. Do not follow. They trailed us a while and faded. (If someone real was ever behind that voice, may they forgive us. We said we’d look on the way back.)
- Wolves. Seven wolves and two dire wolves came out of the treeline at us in failing light. Ismark’s advice held: drop one and the rest run — especially if the one is burned to ash by a small cheerful machine (see CLOVER, on the party page). Wolf pelts sell in Vallaki; we have one.
- The land does not feed you. Nothing that grows here is anything we recognise. Carry rations. See the Traveller’s Almanac.
The menhir
A three-foot standing stone by the roadside, moss-grown and old, carved with a winged woman bearing three eyes — and around its base, ringed over and over, the exact symbol on Fëanor’s heirloom stone. He checked. Identical. Osric’s history is good enough to say it with confidence: that symbol and that winged figure are not from our world. They belong to Barovia. Fëanor took a rubbing for the records.
Met on the road (day two)
Hours west of Tser Pool: hoofbeats behind us, and Aragal — a Vistani rider of some influence from the camp outside Vallaki — friendly, useful, and in a hurry. Road warnings, the news that Vallaki admits no Vistani, and a paying errand: a Blinsky toy for his daughter Araba (Quests & Threads). Then he outpaced us and was gone.
And at dusk of that same day: the windmill. See that page. Bring silver.
The last two days (Session 7 — after the windmill)
- The dire wolf with the roses. Standing in the middle of the road, in broad daylight, a bunch of roses in its mouth — straining against itself like a thing on an invisible leash. It laid them down and fled. Around the stems: Strahd’s letter to Ireena (Handouts). The road belongs to him, and he uses it as a postal service.
- The raven, again. Watching our camp at night: the exact same raven from the village of Barovia — Lily swears to the tufty feathers — days and miles behind us. Her gift for speaking with beasts simply did not connect, the way it doesn’t when the thing you’re addressing is not an animal. It ignored our food, watched, and left. Sirius greeted it as a friend: her ravens are our friends.
- The farmstead. An abandoned farm at noon on the last day; three grey shambling dead things in the hay. Sirius’s wings froze all three with terror and steel did the rest — no scratches taken. Data for the file: plain steel outworked our magic on them, and silver made no difference at all. Five silver, sixteen coppers, and one jar of zombie guts (Drew insists) recovered.
Open questions
- Who is the winged woman with three eyes? (The henge behind the windmill may be about to answer this — or make it worse.)
- Why does a moon-stone glow in a land that has never once shown us a moon?