Quests & Threads

The party’s ledger. If we owe it, worry about it, or can’t stop thinking about it, it’s on this page.

🕯️ Right now

• MID-FESTIVAL: the entire town is looking at us, and the rain is not helping. Midday, the square, attendance mandatory for every soul in Vallaki. A ten-foot wicker sun on a scaffold — the ball, quote, “currently” empty. The Baron has declared death meaningless and named us his five fine examples of heroism: “They will attest.” Lady Wachter has answered from the fountain’s lip — the vampires were real, the sunlight is fake, the Baron’s son abused Stella — “They will attest. They will back me up.” The evidence we can still produce damns her. The letter that complicates everything is in the Baron’s coat. The hanging is scheduled on our word. Every soaked, bereaved, furious soul in Vallaki is turning to look at us. There are no good choices. Session 14 opens our mouths.

⚔️ Active

• ⚖️ Decide whom we attest for. The town is waiting. Damning Lady Wachter hangs a woman on evidence we can no longer produce — and feeds a tyrant. Damning the Baron is our word against a family that edits minds — and hands her the square for free. Damning both starts the riot with us in the middle. Saying nothing is also an answer, and the crowd will hear it. “There are no good choices.” / “Thanks.” / “My pleasure.”
• Find Ireena. She flipped for us — Drew told her everything, and she answered with the bones — and then, in the chaos of the escape, nobody can state with confidence where she ended up. We are aware of how that sentence reads. It is at the top of the list. Attendance today is mandatory for every soul — which means she is probably somewhere in this crowd.
• Guard the bones we just un-stole. They are home on the sub-altar, the sanctuary held a wave of holy warmth — and right now nobody is guarding them, because everyone is at this festival by law. We asked the Ravens to watch. We keep doing the arithmetic anyway.
• Get the letter back — or decide it’s gone. Strahd’s own hand, our one piece of real evidence, confiscated by Izek and delivered to the man it happens to flatter. Does the Baron even understand what he’s holding? Do we tell the town what it said? We read it; we remember it; “read carefully, it favors his continued rule.”
• Get Henrik out of the Reformation Center. Arrested for “harboring seditious elements” — our witness, in the building that eats minds, in our place. On the list of people we are somehow responsible for: bold, underlined, twice now.
• Proof of what Victor did — now everyone’s case. His mother’s enemy said it to the whole town: the Baron’s son abused Stella. Our evidence walks among us: Sirius’s missing half hour, and now Fëanor’s missing two days (“a nice boy… boy height”). Enough of us have been upstairs in that house to have a rule about it. (Victor Vallakovich)
• Prove ourselves to the Ravens. We think the exam was the bones. We think we passed. Muriel resigned anyway — amicably, several of our lives in her ledger — so the next grade comes from the flock itself.
• Find Bluto. “Is he inside the sea monster yet?” We keep meaning to get to the lake. Choices were made. Still personal: Bluto is a friend of the Wachter sons — and whatever today does to their mother, that kindness will still count. 70–80 gold from Mama.
• Carry the locket to the abbot above Krezk. The demon stays sealed (Mostly Felix has the rules). Lid shut; nobody talks about the locket.
• Read the unreadable. A Druid Priestess’ Tome in a language none of us know, and five scrolls (Ireena guessed one is Gentle Repose — the spell somebody has been casting on Lord Wachter every ten days for ten years). We carried a dead man’s maintenance schedule out of that house and we don’t know what else is in the bag.
• Find Lazlo, Hans, and Franz. Three orphan boys, missing ~two weeks now. The two hunters searching for them went west and have not come back either. Lady Wachter’s dot still connects: the werewolves west capture children.
• Look in on the winery. The Wizards of Wine — the Ravens’ clan seat. The wine is dregs, the inn serves one meal a week, Falkon never came back, Danika and the boys flew into the silence, and the all-clear raven that was due has not arrived. Urwin’s face is doing the arithmetic in the crowd right now. The road west is no longer assembling its reasons — it has them.
• Go back for Radu. Finish the hags. Our word, given to Vasha at the fire. She’s watching the mill until we return — and the moon is coming back around. See The Windmill · Granny the Pie-Seller.
• A toy for Araba. Aragal pays 20 gold over cost for a Blinsky original. Still unbought; still the one Barovian errand with nothing obviously wrong with it.
• Keep an eye out for Gertruda. Mary’s missing daughter. A half-promise, honestly made.

🗺️ The Reading — our map now

Madam Eva read our fates at Tser Pool. The complete record — every card, every verse, and the cards themselves — is on The Reading. The short form:

Fate	Card	Where it points
Knowledge of our enemy	the Healer	”High water aglow with the light of the sun, hidden behind the walls of man” — now confirmed: KREZK. Roger’s band traced their identical card to the glowing pool behind Krezk’s walls. Our best lead, corroborated forty-five years apart
Protection	the Paladin	”The house of a dragon”, a heart once pure, corrupted by hatred — bring light and peace
Power	the Avenger	”The shrine of murdered gods” — start in an amber palace of darkness
An ally	the Executioner	”A hunter of hunters” — stalking the mightiest prey of all. Not Aragal; we checked. And now we know what happens to a band that fails to recognize its ally: see Roger
The devil himself	the Broken One	”The tomb of the only man he ever envied” — pursue him into the depths of darkness

And five personal threads: Osric must carry his banner to the house of the fallen dragon and kneel; Fëanor must stand in sun-glowing water at dawn and choose; Lily must starve the sweet thing — done; she starved it — and carry her tooth to a den of beasts far west; Drew’s amber holds a secret her blood has carried for generations, sealed deep in the mountains where knowledge is bought dearly; and Sirius — Sirius got a card that is blank to everyone but him, because his fate has already been read — and the lady of ravens he sees on it has spoken.

👁️ Watch-list

Not quests. Worries.

• Who re-casts Gentle Repose on Lord Wachter every ten days — and why? Ten years. Three hundred and sixty-five castings, give or take. One bed, slept in on both sides. Is he waiting to be raised — and is that what the deal with the devil is actually for? We have seen a fake pentagram, a skeleton ward, and a fiend on a shoulder, and we are prepared to state that bedroom is the creepiest thing in that house.
• What does the Baron do with Strahd’s letter? The one that — read carefully — favors his continued rule. Does he even understand what he’s holding? He built a hanging on the half he liked and buried the rest.
• Whose sunlight is the wicker sun? The Baron is the only one in this town invoking the Morninglord’s light. It is a very burnable symbol, and the ball is, quote, “currently” empty. We notice that word doing a lot of work.
• “Not now, Karl.” The Wachter sons have seen what sleeps in their mother’s room, because we aimed them at it to buy a door. We are not proud of it. Where do two lovely, dim, betrayed young men land when the whole town is choosing sides around their mother’s scaffold?
• Never harm a raven. Upgraded from Roger’s law to family policy: the Ravens are wereravens, our barman is one, and the one the last party killed was his great-uncle. Standing order absolute.
• What is Lady Wachter? Not a fiend, not undead — her hand was warm. But she went away grieving for two weeks and came home with a demon on a perch and peace in her heart — and the demon that fled our divine sense is back on her shoulder like nothing happened. What reached for Lily twice with sleep — the lady, or the bird? (The House of Wachter)
• Who is the man with the nice shoes? Henrik’s boots ruled him out. Ernst is “a bit of a bloke.” The Baron’s own staff are vanishing. And now: a whole closet of fancy footwear in a dead man’s bedroom — which either solves the mystery in the strangest possible way, or means we are about to spend a week being gloriously wrong about a dead man’s shoe collection.
• What did Victor take? Thirty minutes of Sirius; two entire days of Fëanor (“I met a nice boy… boy height. Very boy-like”). Is the proof of what he does currently missing from inside two of our own heads — and can anything bring it back? (Victor Vallakovich)
• The twins. They run the Reformation Center. They are “experts at this sort of encouragement.” The Baron is lucky to have them. We know nothing else, and the nothing is loud. And the Baroness’s grin — we have a theory about where smiles like that are manufactured.
• Can we do this without the Baron? And if we can’t — is handing Lady Wachter to the Reformation Center a rescue of the town, or just feeding the other monster?
• Ireena’s song. Two brothers, morning-gold and night-blue; a whisper in the stone; a stolen sun; a girl beneath the lake remade over and over — “and I’ll wake another girl.” Why is that song in her head? (Ireena Kolyana)
• The abbot heals minds and raises the dead, in a land where the dead should stay down. What is he, and what will he want for the locket? (The Abbot)
• What wrong was Bluto trying to right at a lake that drowns men — and is he still alive to be rescued?
• The Martikovs and the ravens. Concluded, spectacularly, in our own bedroom. See Urwin Martikov.
• Who was Felix before the demon — and who stabbed his parents?
• What is The Bard? He mocks the name-law, knows usurped fey powers by their stories, spotted our fate-blessing on sight, and watches us with great interest. His advice: prove yourselves a bit more. Ally, examiner, or something worse?
• Ireena and the church. Resolved — by Drew, in the enemy’s house, better late than never. We told her everything. Her only question was why we hadn’t told her before, and we did not have a good answer. And then she gave us the bones. The new worry has its own entry in Active: where is she now?
• Who was the fake pentagram FOR? Somebody built a satanic tableau in Lady Wachter’s cellar — scratched decoration, zero magic — wired the room with a real and lethal ward, and seated a devoted, harmless witness inside it. Proof designed to be found, and to collapse under competent inspection, taking whoever presented it down with it. Our current theory: it was built for us. Which raises the follow-up we like even less: did she know we were coming before we did?
• The man we got killed. He chuckled at a festival once, and the Reformation Center ate years of him, and the lady saved him, and he would have done anything for her — and he died in the dark of her cellar because we asked him to walk out of a room. We never learned his name. His body is lying next to our picked lock. What do we owe him, and what do we do about it?
• Can a spawn’s bite turn the wounded? The kitchen ward holds people with vampire wounds — and upstairs we found a man comatose with two neat holes in his neck. If bites make more of them, the hospital is a nursery. Nobody at this table knows the rule. We should have asked the bard.
• The war map. Still nailed over Lady Wachter’s stairhead, glassed and framed like an heirloom — we never got it out. What Drew memorized (wolves, the moon, the goat hill) is what we own of the whole annotated valley. The contingency plan — smash it on the way down — remains on the books for a house we can presumably never enter again.
• What does Izek’s report become? Answered, and it is worse than blame: it became nothing happened. Seditious agitators in very obvious masks. There are no vampires in Vallaki; there have never been vampires in Vallaki. Recited to our faces by the man who grabbed one by the skull and burned it alive. The new worry: what does it do to a man to repeat that?
• Who barricaded the road to the church? A toppled wagon, deliberately weighted with bricks, squarely across the route — placed before the vampires were loose. Somebody prepared that morning. We would very much like to know who, and for which morning.
• Whose “master’s design”? “You will not pluck us from the master’s design,” said the spawn. “The master cares not for us.” Not “the mistress.” Was the coffin plot Lady Wachter’s plan — or the devil’s, with her as the courier? The answer changes everything about what we do next.
• The story war, day three: two speeches, one crowd, us in the middle. Her hospital vs his festival; her dead-honored vs his dead-meaningless; her accusation vs his rewrite. The crowd mutters darkly at both. Whoever we attest for inherits our credibility — and the angel’s.
• Ernst, update: during our escape he looked directly at a small child in a commoner’s cloak, twice, saw a small child, and shoved her roughly aside on his way to the crime. The child was Lily. We are recording this as the first fight Ernst Larnak has ever lost, and he doesn’t know it happened.
• The letter’s mechanism — half-solved. Speak his name thrice and he comes… except one of us said it five times at a dinner table and nothing came. The name alone summons nothing; it matters who speaks it. The volcano proposal has been quietly retired.
• Sirius’s new devotee. Ireena believes an angel of the Morninglord walks with us. In a town about to hold a mandatory sun festival, word of an “angel” could travel in ways we can’t steer.
• Sirius, post-bite. The bacon test remains negative; the watch continues. Noted: the demon’s possession bounced off him. We are choosing to find that reassuring.
• Sirius and the lady of ravens. Her one line — “what was stolen is not fully owned, and the land can be reclaimed” — made The Bard look up very sharply when paraphrased in his hearing. “A very astute thing to say, sir.” Interesting.
• The henge behind the windmill — still unexamined. When we go back for Radu, we look.
• Kiril’s pack, far west. The den of beasts where Lily’s tooth is needed — and now, perhaps, where three orphan boys’ trail leads. The passphrase “Radu and Vasha need help” might buy an audience.
• “One of my pups managed to grab you.” Still unexplained.
• The lights on the road. Our half-promise to look on the way back is still on the books.
• Who is the only man Strahd ever envied? Seven hundred years, nobody remembers, and the answer is written down somewhere. The Bard tells old stories; the Wachters keep a library; the Baron’s son keeps books. One of these will pay out.

🧩 The mystery of the heirlooms — FIVE FOR FIVE

Five keepsakes dragged five strangers through the mists. The cards have now named all of them — and Roger’s tale added a grim footnote: his band carried trinkets too. He burned his the day his destiny died.

Keepsake	Bearer	What Barovia has said about it
Tattered banner, bird-like sigil	Osric	The sigil crowns the Gates; the cards: “your blood marched beneath that banner… carry it to the house of the fallen dragon. Kneel, and answer for your blood.”
Raven feather	Sirius	His fate “already read”; his card blank to all but him — and the lady of ravens on it (her ravens “are our friends”) is, he suspects, tied to the feather itself. Roger, on hearing of it, said only: don’t kill the ravens.
Flat stone, three-pointed star	Fëanor	Carved into the roadside menhir; glows at the new moon. The cards: “the stone in your pocket remembers a fire you have never felt.”
Lacquered dire-wolf tooth	Lily	The cards: “the tooth you carry mends what otherwise cannot be healed — far to the west there is a den of beasts; one who howls there will need it.”
Amber-resin pendant, shifting runes	Drew	”A secret sealed in amber… your blood has carried the question for generations. The message is sealed in amber deep in the mountains — knowledge there is bought dearly.”

✅ Kept & done

• 🦴 THE BONES OF ST. ANDRAL: HOME. Found on a tarpaulin in a secret room off Lady Wachter’s library — revealed to us by Ireena, because Drew finally told her the truth and the truth turned out to be the key to everything. Carried out through a window in a bag of holding, laid on the sub-altar with Father Lucian’s hands on them — and the ground answered. A wave of holy warmth rolled out through the roofless wreck like the building exhaling, and for the first time since the fire, that place is a sanctuary. “I’m not gonna say it’s a bit late. But thank you regardless. We needed this.” We won one. Write it down: we actually won one.
• Fëanor, mostly returned. “A token of friendship — you can have most of him back.” Two days short and one nice boy the richer, but walking, casting, and managing his envy of a celestial horse. The armband is off.
• Level five. Barovia paid more attention to us in the night. Drew gets a gun. Lily dodges what should hit her. Fëanor’s god finally answers in area-of-effect. Osric swings twice. And Sirius has a horse named Clancy.
• The beets, distributed. Lady Wachter’s finest root vegetables, liberated on principle and donated to a taproom serving one meal a week. You get a beet. You get a beet. It wasn’t much. It was something, and something is the whole economy now.
• THE VAMPIRES OF VALLAKI: ALL SIX, ACCOUNTED FOR. Six crates came out of that coffin shop. Muriel killed two. Father Lucian one. Sirius one. Izek one. Osric one. The last of them died in a burning church with the Baron’s enforcer fighting on our side of it, which nobody had on their card. We wish we believed the sentence “there are no more vampires in Vallaki” as hard as we wrote it — see the kitchen ward, above.
• Father Lucian, alive. The devil himself ordered him dead — a spawn said so, out loud — and the answer of the entire room was no. He killed one of them with a word of the Morninglord and bopped another with a mace he keeps under the altar. The church could not be saved; the priest was. Sirius carried the sunburst statuette out of the collapse blind: “Lathander lives in our hearts, not in our places.”
• Five skeletons, avenged. Two natural twenties from Osric and one wereraven, finally free of witnesses. “Action: beak.” It did not bring the man back. It was something.
• Urwin, talked back up. “What’s the point? Half the city’s gone.” We pointed out it had been exactly six vampires, imagine it worse, and he is entirely unprotected. He answered like a spymaster: cloaks from the Ravens’ own stock, and the last honest flask in Vallaki (ten percent wine, ninety percent regret).
• The massacre that never happened. Six vampire spawn were being saved for the day the whole town stood in the streets by law. We opened the crates four days early, on our terms, with the town awake and the streets not full of children. Two are dust. People died this morning who were alive last night — and the arithmetic still says the festival would have been a massacre. We are recording this under done because we believe it, and re-reading it because we need to.
• Lily, back from the door. Fangs in her throat, the floorboards, a knock at death’s door — and then Osric’s furious bottle-feeding, Sirius’s glowing hands, and Lily fine, sprinting into a burning church twenty minutes later. The party’s official position is that she is fine. The party’s unofficial position is unprintable.
• The confession, extracted. No hands were removed. Milivoj told us everything — the 300 gold, the crypt, the man with the nice shoes — and the trail that was cold a week is now warm enough to knock on. Left confined on his word, sentence deferred, kids adoring him as ever.
• The pie affair, officially closed. One final voluntary tied-down night (her idea), one quiet morning — Lily is untied for good. The rope is retired. The era is over.
• Lily is free. Six days of iron will, one rope, one tree, one bed, two fake-pie tests — and on the sixth morning, nothing. The hags’ hook broke before she did. Exhaustion remains; the craving is gone; recovery proceeded. Best news in the ledger.
• The orphanage stands. Demon fought, sealed, and pocketed; twenty children safe in the garden; Milivoj’s curse broken; Clover’s rebuild and combat debut on the same morning. Also: we promised the kids we’d come back for Felix. That one counts double.
• Talk to Roger — done, and worth every copper of the wine. The whole tale is on Roger. We are taking the syllabus seriously.
• Rebuild Clover — done. Rebuilt, beeping, and pulsing shielding energy over everyone in reach. First build destroyed by a hag; second build debuted against a demon. Drew abides.
• Escort Ireena to Vallaki — done. Four days, as promised. The promise as meant — see the watch-list.
• Free the woman in the silver net — done, half. The other half is named Radu, and it’s in the Active column where it belongs.
• Sit for the reading — done, freely given. “I have read what may be, not what must be. You could still fail.”
• Bury Rose, Thorn, and the maid — done, beyond the mists of Death House.
• Refuse the altar — the house demanded one death; it got a broken altar and a shattered crystal heart instead.
• Bury the old burgomaster — carried, dug, witnessed. For Ismark and Ireena.
• Free Doru — mercy, given as gently as this land allows.
• Return Lancelot to Mary — one purely good deed in a bad country.