The whole tale in one sitting, for new arrivals and the pleasantly forgetful. For the detailed record, each chapter links its session’s recap and field notes.
I. Five strangers and a staircase
It began on a warm summer evening, with five people on five small errands who had never met: a tinkerer off to fix a clock, a rich family’s black-sheep priest sent to find a blacksmith, a cobbler-gnome mending boots for coppers, a drunken young paladin bound for his wine bar, and a farmer two weeks into his knighthood carrying a message. The mist took each of them alone — an unnatural cold, a family keepsake suddenly alive and pulling like a magnet — and set them all down at the foot of a flight of stairs that had no business existing, before a tall narrow house with its lights burning.
The door opened itself. The fire died. A verse bled onto the wall about a beast below that wakes at midnight, and the grandfather clock struck six. The house lied to them — rotten feasts dressed as banquets, prop-book libraries — and, more unsettling, the house armed them: a shield, a longsword, crossbows, silvered bolts. In a hidden study they found a will naming two children, and a cruel letter that spoke of a place called Barovia, signed “In darkness I endure.” Under a harpsichord they found a starving dog named Lancelot, and fed him, and that at least was simple. (S1 recap · notes · listen)
II. The children in the attic
The house fought and haunted by turns: an empty suit of armour threw Sirius over a banister and was dismantled by grease, holy force, and two natural twenties; a maid stepped out of a mirror not knowing she was dead; a shrouded crib held only centuries-old swaddling. Behind an attic door locked with an iron key waited two small skeletons in two small beds — Rose and Thorn Durst, who knew exactly what they were. “We were locked in here. It got very hungry. And then we were no longer hungry.” Their mother had brought a cult into the house; their baby half-brother had been carried down to the basement for something about innocence and sacrifice.
Rose asked one thing: “Bury our bones. Set us free.” Three bundles went onto Drew’s belt — the children and, later, the maid. The children’s dollhouse gave up the house’s secret: a hidden spiral stair running top to bottom. Down it, in the dark, something was crying like a baby. (S2 recap · notes · listen)
III. One must die — the house’s price
The crypts below held empty coffins for the whole family. Gustav Durst hung from the rafters of an underground bedroom; a black-hearted dead woman burst from the wall mid-discovery and went to dust with a firebolt through the heart. Deeper, past a painted statue of a gaunt pale man with his hand on a wolf’s head, past shackled skeletons and ghouls that broke before Fëanor’s raised symbol, a chant rose out of the dark: “He is ancient. He is the land.”
At the bottom: an altar over black water, a bundle of tiny bones upon it, and thirteen faceless apparitions chanting “One must die.” Any living thing would do. Lancelot was standing right there. The party said no — Osric’s sword came down on the altar itself — and when midnight raised a mound of corpse-flesh from the refuse, they hacked through to the glittering crystal heart at its core and shattered it. The mists parted. Outside, the freed spirits of Rose, Thorn, and the maid said thank you, warned that a greater evil stays here, and gave the devil his name at last: Strahd. Behind the party, the house was simply gone. (S3 recap · notes · listen)
IV. The crown jewel of the Strahd empire
The road led to a stone gate flanked by headless statues — “Welcome to Barovia, the crown jewel in the Strahd empire” — crowned with the very sigil on Osric’s family banner. Below it, a sorrowful village where curtains twitch and the first friendly voice belonged to an old woman selling suspiciously wonderful pies. At the silent tavern, Ismark — burgomaster for exactly one day — laid it out plainly: Strahd is a real vampire; the mists are the bars of the cell; there is no leaving. His father was dead because Strahd wanted his sister Ireena and the old man refused. Two favours asked: bury the father, and take Ireena west to walled Vallaki.
They buried the burgomaster with their own hands. And then Father Donavich begged them to help his son — swearing them, over and over, not to kill him — and led them down beneath the church to Doru: eighteen years old, clinging to the ceiling, undead, and begging in a boy’s voice for blood. A crowning holy smite barely staggered him. The session ended there — the boy pinned and pleading, his father watching from the trapdoor, and no good way left to turn. (S4 recap · notes · listen)
V. The rightful lord
It ended with a kindness. Lily bound Doru gently; the party brought his father down to hear the truth from his son’s own mouth — Strahd had drunk from him, made him drink in return, and every command since sat on his mind like a fetter. Donavich turned away: “Do what you must.” Doru wanted to die and had been forbidden to allow it; they ended it as quickly as mercy allowed, and the boy crumbled to dust — no rot, no body, nothing natural. Outside, Ismark confessed the crypt had been a test of whether they could protect Ireena, and handed over a hand-drawn map. “You will learn not to trust people in Barovia.”
That night came a knock. What followed, the party mostly knows from Fëanor, because everyone else spent it charmed to the marrow: a visitor whom every one of them simply knew to be a friend. Strahd. “I am this land, and this land is me.” He required a token of fealty from his hosts’ guests, drank — not deeply — from a smiling, willing Sirius, and left them with a courtesy: “I own this place. You may have your fun — but I get what I want.”
Morning brought the horror home, and the road west with it: ghost-lights crying help me from the trees; a standing stone ringed with the exact symbol on Fëanor’s heirloom; seven wolves and two dire wolves meeting CLOVER, the small cheerful flamethrower Drew had been dreaming of for days. By evening — firelight, fiddles, and Vistani hospitality bought with the true story of Sirius’s misspent youth. For one hour, Barovia was kind.
Then a large man stepped out of the great tent and looked at each of them in turn: “What took you, Drusilla, Fëanor, Lili-grai, Osric, Sirius? You are expected.” (S5 recap · notes · listen)
And that is where we stand: at the Vistani fires, one day out of four on the road to Vallaki, with Ireena in our care and a stranger’s invitation hanging in the air. Session 6 opens the tent flap.