I secretly love it when the players fail to recover St. Andral's bones.
I don't mean I "want" them to fail. But if they do, Vallaki gets to have a very bad night, and the Feast is the best chance in the whole campaign to show what Strahd looks like when he stops playing with his food. It is also, if you build it right, the night the party learns that doing the heroic thing is exactly how they lose.
I run it like \30 Days of Night\.
The mist comes first. It rolls in around Vallaki and makes it look like something outside the walls is getting ready to come through. People can't see down the road. Bells start ringing in parts of town where nobody can tell what is happening. By this point the players know what the mist means, so you don't explain any of it. Let them worry.
The first things through are rats, bats, wolves. These are not real threats to the party and that isn't their job. They get into homes, chase civilians into the street, pull guards off useful posts, and make everybody look in six directions at once. Every swarm the party stops to kill is time they are not spending on the thing that matters. They just don't know what that thing is yet.
Then the undead start coming, and here is where I cheat a little, except it isn't cheating.
You already have vampire spawn in the coffin maker's shop. BUT - The brazier in Ravenloft can also drop creatures into that same shop, and I have never once left that on the page. Green stone into the fire, it burns green for about five rounds, anything touching it comes out in the coffin shop, then the stone pops back into the rim and he does it again. All night if he likes. It only runs one direction, and nothing he feeds into that fire is planning on coming home. It gives Strahd a faucet in the middle of town. Everyone thinks Vallaki is being hit from outside the walls, right up until things start walking out of a building in the middle of it.
Now the important part, and the part I changed the 2nd time, I stopped running this as a big messy brawl.
Strahd comes down on Beucephalus once the place is properly coming apart. A few spells from above if the mood takes him, but I don't leave him in the air. Pick a spot, land him, and have him walk to the church. On foot. That walk is the whole scene. Decide the route before the session and decide what is on it. Shops the party knows. A guard post they liked. Somebody's house. He is not sprinting for Father Lucian. He has all night, and every minute he spends strolling is a minute the whole town packs itself tighter into the one building they "think" is safe.
Because that is where everyone runs. St. Andral's is the last safe place in Vallaki, "holy ground", no undead can cross the line. Everybody knows it. Get to the church and you live. So they do, all of them, right into the pews, doors barred, the priest out front.
Small problem. The bones are gone. The ground stopped being holy days ago and only one man in that building knows it.
When Strahd reaches the grounds, I stop every minion at the edge. Wolves, rats, spawn, all of it. And here is the trick: they act like the line still works. They pace it, they snarl at it, they don't cross. The whole town watches the monsters fail to step onto the church grounds and they believe, hard, that the walls are holding. That belief is the trap. He isn't keeping them out. He is selling them the idea that they're safe so they'll stop running and stand still.
Then the coffins open.
Henrik makes coffins for a living, and there was a delivery to the church that afternoon, before the Feast. Nobody looked twice at coffins arriving at a church. They have been sitting inside the whole time, past the doors, past the wards, ten feet from the altar. On Strahd's signal, not before, they open. The spawn come up inside a packed room, behind the crowd, on the wrong side of every wall the town was counting on.
You know what a room full of people does when the killing starts behind them in the dark. They run. And the only way out is the front doors. And the front doors are the one place Strahd left completely clear, because he pulled his beasts off it on purpose. It's a driven hunt. The spawn inside are the beaters, the town is the birds, and he is standing in the plaza where the guns go. They flush themselves out to him.
Father Lucian is the first one to understand, and I make sure the table sees it happen on his face before it happens to anyone else. He knows there is nothing under that altar. So when the spawn rise inside consecrated stone, he doesn't just see vampires, he sees the whole shape of it at once. The safe place was never safe. Everyone he told to run here ran into a box. He tries to shout it and the stampede eats the words.
And then Strahd walks in.
Not steps to the line and stops. Walks in. Onto the floor of the church, under the roof, across ground that should burn him to do it. That is the reveal, and it isn't a line of dialogue, it's a vampire standing calmly inside a church while a priest watches and understands exactly what it means. The wards are gone. The children of the night are already inside. Nobody is coming to help.
From there it is chaos, and it should be. He goes for Lucian. If a character puts themselves between them, he hurts that character and keeps moving. Blight works. So does whatever you set aside for the night Strahd decided to make an example of a town. This usually is not a fight the party wins. They can hit him, they can drag people out the doors past the spawn, they can buy somebody time and earn a hell of a story, but if they decide tonight is the night they kill Strahd in a church aisle, they are about to learn something. Most groups work out that leaving with whoever they can carry is the win, and he is glad to let them. He came for the priest. He gets the priest, or Lucian dies on the floor and gets up the next night as one of his, either way Strahd keeps his piece. I run \The Wedding at Ravenloft\ by Wyatt Trull later, which is a brilliant capstone, and Father Lucian officiating Strahd and Tatyana's wedding, living or dead or somewhere in between (this one preferably), is worth every bit of setup. Then he brings the roof down and leaves Vallaki to remember who owns the valley.
Here is the part that makes the whole night land, and it is happening the entire time the party is at the church.
While every guard and every hero in Vallaki is pulled to St. Andral's, Lady Wachter's people are across town, and they are not fighting anybody. They walk into the burgomaster's mansion, because who's left to stop them. The Feast wasn't just Strahd's finale, it was her cover. She never bet on the church. She bet on the one night the whole town would be looking somewhere else, and she is right, because the party is standing in exactly the somewhere else she was counting on. That is the ugly math of it. The players can be one place. The church is the louder fire. Their being there, doing the right thing, is the reason nobody is at the mansion.
Some clever players might figure this out if they had any interactions with Watcher House or just were trying to figure out what that weird building was. You have two options. You can move Strahd slower so that they still might make it to the church before Strahd. OR and which is my personal choice is to have Strahd finish up the scene at St. Andrews off screen because he was in fact planning on seeing the party and he didn't. He would head over to find them. If they decided to take out Lady Watcher then Strahd shows up to take the Baron off the board anyway.
Baron Vallakovich spent your whole Vallaki arc forcing festivals and hanging up painted signs about a peace that was never real. So when they're done with him, they leave him up. Strung under his own banner in the square, arms out, that same cheerful board over his head that it has always said. ALL WILL BE WELL. They don't change a word of it. They don't have to. He wanted a festival, and he finally got to be the centerpiece of one. The town wakes up to their burgomaster grinning down at them under his own slogan and every single one of them understands, without anybody writing a new sign, that it is not.
This is usually the first time my players see Strahd stop being the Cheshire Cat. Up to now he has been charming, turning up when he pleases, leaving welcome baskets, acting like everyone is in on the joke. Vallaki is where the joke stops being friendly, and the worst of it isn't even the church. It's walking out of the wreckage at dawn, carrying who they saved, and finding out the rest of the town changed hands while their backs were turned, and there is a dead man smiling over the square telling them everything is fine.
If that doesn't get them looking for the Sunsword, nothing will. Something that I learned over the years and has gotten more acute the longer I've DM'd is you'll find equally as long-time players and they're sometimes hard to surprise, hard to shake, and have seen most of it already. One thing that you can do at the table, even if they've seen "vampires" before, is bring the emotional damage to the table.
Happy Hunting!
\-LIDM
I dictated this from my own campaigns and used Whisperflow for the transcription. Then edited with my human fingers. The encounter, the stories and the opinions are mine. This sub asks that I disclose that. I love this sub so I do.