A Running Series
VillainCraft
How the opposition actually operates when the party isn't looking. Not lore. Not location prep. Operations — loadouts, rotations, tells, escalation ladders, and what the villain does with the hours between your sessions.
Your villain has a calendar. Use it.
Most villain advice tells you who the villain is. Almost none of it tells you what he does on a Tuesday. That gap is where campaigns go flat: the big bad sits in his castle until the finale, and the players work out he's a stationary hit-point total with good dialogue.
These are my notes from thirty years behind the screen and five full runs of Curse of Strahd. They're about the machinery — what he prepared before he knocked, what he was really doing while they ate, and why the courteous version is scarier than the raging one. Everything here is free, complete, and written to be stolen.
◆ Volume One · Barovia ◆
The foundation
The Omnipresent Strahd
What made him frightening at my table was never the stat block. It was that he is the land, and the land does what he says — the fog, the roads, the weather, the coins. He doesn't have to be in the room to be in the scene.
Failure as content
Let Them Fail in Vallaki
Vallaki is the best failure state in the module, and most tables treat it as a puzzle to be solved. Here's what happens when you let the town be lost instead, and why the party remembers that session longest.
The machinery
Loadouts, the Rotation, and the Longest Con
He doesn't have a spell list, he has loadouts — six of them, one chosen before he leaves the castle each day. Plus the five-phase predator rotation you can run a whole campaign off, the flip ladder, and the suit of plate armour that sat on my paladin for over a year before it turned.
The set piece · complete & uncut
Dinner at Castle Ravenloft
The whole night, start to finish. The invitation and how to make refusing expensive, Cyrus and the carriage, Rahadin's Deathly Choir as a seating chart, running the meal on popcorn initiative, the fourth bottle, the mistake smart parties make with Ireena, letting them roam, and the exact moment the safe passage runs out.
◆ In the works ◆
- The wedding at Ravenloft — the second visit, and what all that foreshadowing was for.
- Running the fight — the attrition math, the lair actions, and why an immobilised Strahd is a dead Strahd.
- Izek Strazni — building the bully your players hate and then hate killing.
- How I start a Strahd campaign — the missing-persons job that isn't, and the tree that pulls them in.
Free tools for your table
Everything on this page is free and always will be. So are the apps I built because I needed them at my own table.