Traveller's Almanac

Nobody gave us a guidebook. This is the one we would have wanted: what to eat, what to fear, what to carry, what things cost, and the rules of the table we play by.

Food, water and sleep

• You have to eat and drink here, or suffer for it. A person needs about eight pints of water a day, and a waterskin holds four. Carry two, or travel with an artificer: Drew can make ten gallons of water with a spell.
• Drew can conjure what we forget. Bedrolls, a candle, a tinderbox, a shovel, a jug, manacles, a barrel. They last until the end of her next long rest and then simply aren't there, so don't wake up hugging one.
• Don't forage. Nothing that grows here is anything we recognise, and even an expert's eye comes up blank. We know exactly one safe mushroom, and Granny taught it to us. Think about that.
• Don't eat Granny's pies. They taste better than anything you've had at home, they keep for a fortnight, one feeds two people, and they are enchanted. They are also made from the arms of two werewolves, cut off and left to grow back. Ours were cremated. See The Windmill.
• Barovia has very little. Ismark: there is precious little land, you can grow wheat and grain and raise a few animals, and spices come only when the Vistani are willing to trade. The only bacon we have had in this land was the Vistani's, from outside. If anywhere sells black pudding, it will be Vallaki, which matters because the black-pudding test on Sirius is still pending.
• Sleep somewhere safe. The safest night we have had was by the Vistani fires at Tser Pool Encampment. The safest room was ours at The Blue Water Inn, for reasons that became clear later. In the village of Barovia, everyone is indoors by twilight. Copy them.
• Wine is how Barovia lives, watered on working days. It comes from one winery, and it has stopped coming. In Vallaki it is down to one meal a week and the dregs of the wine. See The Winery.

On the road

• There is one road. Everything we have seen is strung along it. Leave it and, in Ireena's words, "everything dangerous wants to kill you."
• Wolves hunt in packs, even by day. Where there's a wolf, there are wolves. Ismark's advice held perfectly: drop one and the rest usually run. Dire wolves come with them. Ireena says that if you have seen a dire wolf up close, you're probably dead. Wolf pelts sell in Vallaki.
• The lights that cry "help me" are not people. They float in the trees and never come out of them. Don't follow. Aragal's whole road safety course: kill wolves, ignore the lights, travel fast.
• Abandoned farms are not always empty. Ours had three dead men sleeping in the hay.
• The devil uses the road as a postal service. A dire wolf standing in the road in broad daylight is probably holding his mail.
• The Vistani camps are the safe places to stop. The price of a seat at their fire is a story, a true one if you have it. Don't ask them to carry you out through the mists. They tried it once. The wagon came out the other side without the passenger, and then a wolf brought them a note: "Naughty, naughty. Don't try that again."

The dead, the cursed and the fiendish

• Vampires are real. The ones we have met were made by the devil: he drinks from someone and makes them drink from him. After that his orders sit in their heads like fetters, and they can be ordered never to allow their own destruction. Ismark says he turns people only occasionally, mostly the ones who are loved, to torment the rest. When they are destroyed they crumble to dust. See Doru.
• A vampire spawn grabs, then bites. Don't let them grab you. The bite drains the life out of you, and one put Lily on the floor. What worked on them: radiant light, fire, Izek's arm and a wereraven's beak. A silvered blade made no difference we could see. Holy water is thrown like a grenade, and our benefactor's kit came with stakes and a mallet for anything asleep in its box.
• Barovia's grey daylight is not sunlight. The spawn from the Coffin Works ran through the morning streets with no trouble at all.
• Can a spawn's bite turn the bitten? Nobody at this table knows. There were bitten people in the Wachter hospital, and some of them did not look merely wounded. Until someone who knows tells us, treat every untreated bite as a candle burning down towards something.
• The shambling dead are different. The grey dead at the farmstead shrugged off our magic, cared nothing for silver, and fell apart under plain steel.
• Werewolves grow back any wound not dealt by magic or silver. That is Vasha's rule, and it covers all of them. Some are born with the curse and can control it; the bitten usually can't. They change at the full moon, once a month, full moon hidden behind the cloud or not. Continuous silver keeps a bitten one from turning. The pack lives out west and is likely to tear strangers to pieces before they get within three hundred feet. "Radu and Vasha need help" might buy a hearing.
• Hags are much stronger in threes. Take one away and the coven weakens badly. They shrugged off fire and acid. Radiant light hurt, a bit. They can turn you into a frog, which lasts about an hour. They do not chase you; they laugh.
• Demons can possess people, and they mark what they mean to take: "Mine", scratched into bedposts in Infernal. Radiant light tears them apart where steel barely scratches them. A protection from evil spell kept one out of Sirius entirely.
• Not every raven is a raven. Some are wereravens: ravenkin, one of the two cursed kindreds of this valley (the wolves are the other), and the ones watching us are friends. The last party to kill one learned, decades too late, that he had been their ally. But Lady Wachter's raven was a fiend, and in the end an imp. The rule: never harm a raven, and Divine Sense before violence on anything with feathers.

The devil

• Don't say his name. His own letter says three times brings him. One of us said it five times at Lady Wachter's dinner table and nothing happened, so it seems to matter who says it. In Vallaki, saying it at all is against the law. See Strahd's Letter to Ireena.
• He can charm a whole house just by being seen. If a friend tells you the stranger at the door is the finest fellow you've ever met, and a detect-magic spell says you are all enchanted, believe the spell. It wears off by morning.
• His bite takes more than blood. It left Sirius with less life in him than before, until he had slept it off. Sirius maintains he was barely scratched.
• He watches. "A little bird told me." In Vallaki the bones of St. Andral have spoiled his view, which is why he came to look in person, and why he told us not to stay long.
• He flies, on a horse that is on fire.
• He hates to be bored, and he told us so himself. "Do not be boring."

Towns and their rules

• Mistwalkers is what Barovia calls people like us, brought in by the mists. The Vistani's definition: people who come in "with powers and ambition and wanting to change the status quo." Locals think our arrival is an ill omen, and that the devil gets more active when we come. The last set came about forty-five years ago. Roger is all that's left of them.
• The village of Barovia charges outsiders extra, locks up at twilight, and does not sell healing potions. Bildrath: "You will not find a potion of healing in this village for love nor money." Guard the ones you have.
• Vallaki's gate is an event. Swear you are not an agent of the devil, the Vistani, the dusk elves or the werewolves. Register every weapon you carry (every bolt is counted; broom handles count). Do it all again every time you come back in. No Vistani are let in at all. See Vallaki.
• Vallaki's laws: don't say the name, don't speak ill of the Baron, and attend every festival, "punishable by punishment." And don't get sent to The Reformation Center.
• Vallaki has no curfew. People walk about after dark there. It's the only place we've seen that does.
• A burgomaster can be replaced by a crowd and a priest. Vallaki changed rulers in an afternoon, on our proposal, with Father Lucian's blessing and Izek's consent. Whether it holds is another question.
• Never go upstairs in the Baron's house. Sirius lost half an hour up there and Fëanor lost two days, and both of them met "a nice boy."

Magic we learned the hard way

• Holy relics hold towns together. The bones of St. Andral, resting in their church, kept the lesser dead out of the whole of Vallaki. Take them away and six coffins arrive the next day. If a town's safety looks like a law of nature, ask what it is actually resting on. See St. Andral's Church.
• A hallowing can be raised over a ruin. The building is not the sanctuary; the saint is. The church burned, and the ground still answered when the bones went home.
• A corpse can be kept "minutes fresh" for years. The spell is Gentle Repose: it stops the clock on a body for ten days at a time. Cast faithfully, it will hold a decade. If you find a suspiciously fresh body, ask when it really died, and then ask who has been visiting it every ten days.
• Zone of Truth stops a lie, not a refusal. The Baron couldn't lie inside it, so he simply declined to read out the devil's letter. Ask questions that can't be dodged.
• A one-use teleportation circle leaves nothing to follow. Victor's was warm, spent and damaged, and there was no way to tell where it went.
• Rich houses have wards. A pristine alarm on the coffin maker's stairs. A wall in the Wachter cellar that raised skeletons when a man walked out past it. We lost the man.
• Check the chest for traps before your rogue opens it. In loving memory of the order of operations. She lived. The needle was poisoned.
• A building can fight you. The burning church had better initiative than most of us: blinding smoke, backdrafts, rubble, poison in the air. In a fire, the fire is a combatant.
• The land notices you. Barovia makes us stronger overnight, with no ceremony and no trainer, when it is paying attention. Whether being noticed by this land is good news is a question we've stopped asking out loud.

Table rules

• Daylight, the spell, makes light, not sunlight. It won't hurt things that fear the sun.
• Remove Curse is weaker here than you'd expect. It still does something, but maybe not what you hoped.
• Ammunition is tracked. Count your bolts.
• Critical hits: one set of damage dice counts as maximum, then roll the rest.
• Drinking a potion is a bonus action, and so is pouring one into a friend.
• You must eat and drink, or suffer the consequences. It isn't hardcore survival, but it counts.
• The DM won't trick us, and will foreshadow danger fairly. The people of Barovia, on the other hand, may lie, trick us and hold things back. Take notes; things said will matter.

Prices we've seen

Every coin in Barovia carries the devil's face.

Blood on the Vine, the village of Barovia

Much cheaper than Granny's pies, and a lot duller.

Bildrath's Mercantile, the village of Barovia

This is "the outsider special". Sirius got us down to a quarter of it.

Elsewhere

The Blue Water's kitchen is now down to one meal a week for anyone, at any price.