Everything practical we’ve learned the hard way, in one place. Read before travelling.
Surviving Barovia
- You must eat and drink here, or you suffer for it. A person needs about eight pints of water a day; our skins hold four. Carry two, or befriend an artificer.
- Drew can conjure ten gallons of water a day, plus a bedroll, candle, tinderbox, or simple tools — they vanish after a rest, but so does thirst.
- Do not forage. The plants and mushrooms are alien — nothing we recognise as food. Exactly one mushroom is known safe, and Granny taught it to us.
- Rations:
Granny’s pies— all cremated (Session 7; once you know what they’re made of, see Vasha and Radu, “cremated” is the only word). Bildrath sells honest rations at dishonest prices; The Blue Water Inn in Vallaki feeds you properly for coppers. - No healing potions for sale in this land. For love nor gold. Guard the ones you have.
- Wolves: drop one and the rest run. Dire wolves come with them. Pelts sell in Vallaki.
- The lights that cry “help me” are not people. Do not follow.
- Indoors by twilight. The whole village does it. The village is right.
- Ravens are good luck. NEVER harm one. Upgraded from folk wisdom to hard fact (Session 10): some ravens are wereravens — ravenkin, one of the valley’s two cursed kindreds (the wolves are the other) — and the ones watching us are friends. The last party to kill a raven learned, decades too late, that it was their destined ally. (The lady on Sirius’s card agrees: her ravens are our friends.)
- Holy relics are load-bearing. A saint’s bones, resting in a hallowed place, can shield an entire city from the lesser dead — and their removal can quietly unlock it. If a town’s safety looks like a natural law, ask what it’s actually resting on. (St. Andral’s Church)
- Strangers will be charmed. If a companion suddenly declares a total stranger to be the best of men — believe the one who cast the spell that says otherwise, not your own warm feelings. This has happened to us. To all of us at once.
- Do not try to leave in a Vistani wagon. The Vistani pass the mists by an ancient agreement with Strahd. They once carried a passenger through. The wagon came out the other side; the passenger did not.
- The wider world exists. The Vistani call lands like this the Domains of Dread; beyond them the ordinary sunny places carry on — the Coast of Faerûn, Waterdeep. Nobody here can name the month in any calendar we know, but the seasons still turn, and it is getting colder.
- Silver stops a werewolf turning — from the mouth of a bitten woman who begged us to leave her in the silver net. Continuous contact, apparently. Worth remembering; worth carrying.
- Werewolves regrow any wound not dealt by silver or magic — Vasha’s exact words: “If we are not damaged by magic or silver, we grow back any damage, any wound.” Plan every werewolf fight around this. (The shambling dead, by contrast, shrugged at silver entirely and disliked plain steel most — undead and lycanthropes are different problems needing different toolkits.)
- The devil’s name is a summons. By his own written promise, spoken three times it brings him — see the letter in Handouts. Whatever you think of the tactical possibilities (the volcano survey continues), treat the name as loaded at all times. In Vallaki it’s also illegal.
- Vallaki admits no Vistani, and the gate is a bureaucratic event: attestations, every weapon registered (broom handles count), the laws read aloud. Full survival guide on Vallaki’s page. The Vistani’s “paranoid and distasteful” was, if anything, understatement — but people do walk safe after dark there.
- “Mistwalkers” is what Barovia calls people like us — those the mists carry in — and folk hold our arrival to be an ill omen, a sign of challenge coming to the land. There was a previous set, once, in what everyone calls the bad times. One of them is still alive.
- Vampires are real, and daylight here does not save you from them — the grey lid over Barovia is not the sun; the spawn that burst from the Coffin Works ran the morning streets without so much as smoking. What did work, tested in anger (Session 11): radiant light, fire, and a wereraven’s beak. What our benefactor’s kit implies also works: holy water, and a wooden stake for something asleep in its box. “Hunt well those who hunt.”
- A vampire’s bite is a door you do not want opened. Lily has been on the far side of it and back. Carry the healing potions where you can reach them.
- Open question, and it matters urgently: can a spawn’s bite turn the bitten? The kitchen ward of a certain hospital holds vampire-bitten patients, and a couple of them did not look like they were merely wounded (Session 12). Nobody at this table knows the rule. Until someone who does tells us, treat every untreated bite as a candle burning toward something.
- A building can fight you. Burning St. Andral’s rolled better initiative than most of us: blinding smoke, backdrafts, falling rubble, poisoned air. In a structure fire, the fire is a combatant — plan like it.
- A corpse can be kept “minutes fresh” indefinitely. Gentle Repose — a modest little spell — stops the clock on a body for ten days per casting. Re-cast faithfully, it will hold a decade. If you find a suspiciously recent corpse, ask when it actually died, and then ask who has been visiting it every ten days (Session 13; see The House of Wachter).
- Barovia notices you. Levels arrive overnight here, when the land pays attention — no ceremony, no trainer, just the morning and the new weight of yourself. Whether being noticed by this land is good news is a question we’ve stopped asking out loud.
- Search the chest for traps before your rogue opens it. In loving memory of the order of operations, Session 13. She lived. The needle was poisoned. The guidance was plentiful.
- Hallowing can be raised over a ruin. The building is not the sanctuary; the saint is. We watched a roofless wreck exhale a wave of holy warmth the moment the bones touched the sub-altar. Stone burns; sanctity, apparently, does not. (St. Andral’s Church)
Table rules (the campaign’s house rulings)
- Daylight (the spell) produces light, not sunlight — no effect on creatures that fear the sun.
- Remove Curse is weaker here than you’d expect. It still does something, but may not lift what you hope.
- Ammunition is tracked. Count your bolts and arrows.
- NPCs matter, and some will lie or hold things back. Foreshadowing is fair; you won’t be cheaply tricked.
Prices we’ve seen
Blood on the Vine tavern (Village of Barovia):
Bildrath’s Mercantile — marked prices below; the “outsider special” is ×4 unless someone with a honeyed tongue negotiates (Sirius got us to a quarter of marked):
The Blue Water Inn (Vallaki): hot beet soup, potato pottage, potato bread — coppers each · wolf steak — silver · wine cheap and plentiful rationing (Session 13): one meal per week per soul; the wine is dregs · six-bed room, 2 gp/night. Still the best people in Barovia by a country mile — the kitchen just has nothing left to sell.
Coin: the currency bears Strahd’s face. A gold piece is a lot of money here — a pie at 1 gp is “dear,” and we rather overpaid for our first one, since the tavern feeds dogs free.