A recap for the party. Read this before we begin again.
It was a warm summer’s evening, and each of you was out alone on some small, forgettable errand.
Fëanor was trudging the streets of Waterdeep, sent by his family to find a blacksmith for the horses — the short straw, as ever. Sirius was strolling the same city toward his favourite wine bar after a hard day’s training. Far away in Daggerford, Lily was looking to earn a few coppers mending boots. In Goldenfields, the newly-knighted Sir Osric carried a message to the smith about a suit of armour. And in the village of Julkem, Drew was off to fix an old woman’s clock, tools rattling in her bag.
Then, for each of you, the same impossible thing.
A wall of mist rolled in out of nowhere and the air turned bitterly cold. And the keepsake each of you carries — Fëanor’s grandmother’s star-stone, Sirius’s raven feather, Osric’s old banner, Lily’s wolf’s tooth, Drew’s amber pendant — came alive: rolling, floating, pulling like a magnet. Each of you followed, half-chasing, half-dragged, through the blinding fog… until you fetched up at the foot of a staircase that had no business existing in your town. A faint light glowed at the top.
One by one you stumbled into one another at those stairs — strangers, save that Fëanor and Sirius already knew each other from Waterdeep society. Drew’s instruments spun uselessly; her readings insisted this was nowhere any of you had been. When Sirius and Fëanor tried to walk back into the mist toward home, they wandered for what felt like hours — yet for those who waited, only seconds passed. The fog stood around you like a wall. There was no way back.
So you went up.
Through an open iron gate stood a tall, narrow four-storey house on wide grounds, a stone cherub watching from the garden. The front door swung open at a touch.
Inside it was warm and lantern-lit, almost welcoming — a fine shield bearing a golden windmill on red hung in the hall. Then the moment you were all through the threshold, the door slammed, the fire died, candles flared to life, and words bled into being on the wall:
Beneath this dwelling lurks a beast / Who hungers for a bloody feast. / He sleeps until the midnight chime / Then wakes to feed his dark design. / If morsels seek to flee their doom, / Then bring toward his secret room / A gift to soothe his savage mood / But mind the servants of his brood.
A grandfather clock tolled six. Whatever this place wanted, you had until midnight.
You searched, room by room. The house looks opulent — but it’s a lie: the silver tarnishes to dust in your hands, the crystal crumbles, the wine is vinegar, the food is rotten, a painting fell to powder when lifted. Carved into the dining-room panelling, half-hidden, are twisted faces and lurking wolves. Yet the house also seems to be arming you — you turned up crossbows and bolts (some silver-tipped), a fine windmill-marked longsword, kitchen daggers, warm cloaks, spears and metal enough to forge armour, and the makings of torches. You learned the family’s name: Durst.
Upstairs, a family portrait: a proud man and woman, two smiling children — and a swaddled baby the mother eyes with open scorn. In the music room, cowering and half-starved beneath a harpsichord, you found a dog named Lancelot. Lily spoke with him: he’d been trapped here for days in a world gone grey and scentless, and he’d seen a tall figure he could see straight through. Lancelot is with you now, and you mean to keep him safe.
In the study, behind a bookshelf that swings aside (the trick was a book titled “The Opening of this Door”), you found a hidden room of necromantic tomes — fakes, as it turned out, props belonging to a cult called the Priests of Osybus. At the back, a heavy chest already sprung its poison trap on some poor soul long dead, their skeleton still slumped over it. Inside lay a smaller chest — and a letter.
The letter was cruel and strange: addressed to “my most pathetic servant,” signed by some self-styled dread lord “in darkness.” It spoke of a husband who “took solace in the bosom of another woman,” of monsters, of madness — and of a place called Barovia.
The smaller chest held more still: three blank books bound in black leather, three spell scrolls (Bless, Protection from Poison, and Spiritual Weapon), the deed to the house, and a signed will. The will — in the hands of Gustav and Elisabeth Durst — leaves the house and everything the family owns to their children, Rosavalda and Thornboldt Durst. Two children named and provided for.
About an hour has slipped by. The clock is still ticking toward midnight — and you have only just begun to understand whose house this was.