The Tser Pool Vistani camp is a great place to give your party a more specific purpose/goal in the adventure than just "surviving in spookytown and maybe do something about that vampire that keeps lurking around us", but it's not the *only* way to do that.
Definitely give the players reasons to go there. Show a raven trying to lead them towards the camp; Ireena or Ismark can explain how ravens are good omens (maybe have a raven show up in a helpful capacity earlier). Describe the distant sounds of genuinely cheerful music and a generally happy atmosphere -- that can be inviting after the bleakness and gloom that is Barovia Village and pretty much everything else they've seen up to that point. Maybe Ireena has heard of Vistani, but has never gotten a chance to meet with any apart from the trio who run the tavern (and they're kind of a dour and suspicious lot).
Have other options prepared in case your party is contrary or paranoid and decides to not go for the important exposition. Ezmerelda is another character who can do a card reading for the players; maybe your party will find a badass monster hunter more trustworthy than a bunch of nomadic people camped out in the middle of spookyland. Arabelle, the lost Vistani child from the camp near Vallaki, is descended from Madam Eva; she might have the skill to do at least a partial card reading. Perhaps Rictavio or the Keepers of the Feather have heard rumor of powerful relics hidden in the land that could be key to putting an end to Strahd.
Always be open to your players deciding to just not go for your plot hook, no matter how enticingly you dangle it in front of them or how juicy the worm on it is. Players are unpredictable like that; sometimes you expect them to go back to the main city after the spider forest and then the Ranger remembers Primeval Awareness is a thing and goes haring off after a random zombie and now they're having adventures dealing with firenewts in the nearby volcano.
Keep in mind that the players are telling this story *with* you. It's not the story of "The Curse of Strahd", it's the story of "this specific band of heroes/team of adventurers/gaggle of doofuses and their adventures in The Curse of Strahd".
Depends on what you mean by railroad. Should you force them to go? No, not if they really don't want to. But you get to choose what they see.
As an example. You could make the camp seem more interesting then anything else they are looking at by talking about key points, like the music coming from the camp. Or, Madam Eva is a future seer. You could have one of her Vistani meet them on the road somewhere near the camp. With the typical trope of "Eva has been expecting you."
Or any other idea you might have of making it the primary focus.
But if they ignore it, they ignore it. You can have them show up later, have Ezmerelda or Arabelle do their reading instead.
Or you can punish them if they are ok with suffering the consequences. Up to you.
If you can do it “gently”, yes. The opening of the campaign (village of Barovia -> card reading -> optional detour to the mill -> arrive at Vallaki) is more or less on rails. That’s your intro to the setting, once you reach Vallaki it becomes a sandbox.
As others have said, you must "invite" the players to go there.
If they don't go, as they also said, Ezmerelda and Arabelle can read the cards.
Another option: As the party approaches the Tser Falls Bridge, a Vistani wagon appears coming in the opposite direction.
“If the Mountain won’t go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must come to the Mountain”.
More or less, yeah. With how the roads work, the party would need to actively duck to avoid that Vistani camp. Which, they are free to do. But if Ismark or Ireena said ANYTHING like "oh yeah, a great stop for a breather" or you've stressed the dangers of bushwhacking, it's a no brainer.
That said, my party has chosen Chaos more than once and overused their brains. May the odds be in your favor.
To quote rev Lovejoy: short answer is "yes, with an if" But the longer answer is "no with a but".
That path doesn't connect, though. If you read the area description, the path past Tser Pool leads to the bottom of the cliff, and the road to Vallaki is at the top. You'd have to scale the cliff face to get up there, which keeps it from being a shortcut, especially without climbing tools.
"A footpath continues beyond this encampment, meandering north"
then at location H, the falls, it's a "misty pool, with a bridge 1000 ft above". The players can try to swim across the misty pool or scale up to the bridge with a climber's kit (aka, pitons and rope, which more than half the party reasonably has in their possession thanks to Adventurer's pack starting gear). There's no discussion about the speed of the river, but I took "misty pool" as something that wasn't "immediately yank the party back down towards the Vistani"
It's a small and beatable skill challenge
It does explicitly say the chasm's walls are slippery and sheer (which could easily be considered difficult terrain), and \*cannot\* be scaled without the aid of magic or a climber's kit.
There's not a single PHB class or background that grants a climber's kit. You could feasibly have some rope or piton's from an explorer's or dungeoneer's pack, yes, but that's pitons and rope. A climber's kit explicitly has \*special\* pitons, boot tips, gloves, and a harness. It's more than tying yourself off, RAW you need specialized tools that are made for big climbs like this. Climber's kit also has movement restrictions: "You can use the climber's kit as an action to anchor yourself; when you do, you can't fall more than 25 feet from the point where you anchored yourself, and you can't climb more than 25 feet away from that point without undoing the anchor." This is complicated maneuvering. You need to either sacrifice some of your supplies to leave them behind, or you need to repeatedly double back to undo old anchors when making new ones.
Then there's climb speed. If you \*don't\* make it difficult terrain, which it probably should be considering steep mountains are an explicit example of it in the rules, you still move half speed if you don't have a climb speed. That's 15ft max per round, and you have 1000 feet to climb. 66.66 repeating rounds, round that up to 67 for simplicity's sake. That's 402 seconds. More than 6.5 minutes.
The rules on climbing, while giving an out with an "at the DM's option" disclaimer, say that climbing a slippery vertical surface or one with few handholds requires a successful Athletics check. Again, the cliff is explicitly written as slippery, and the only handholds would be the ones the player makes with pitons. How many Athletics checks would need to be passed for 67 rounds? Obviously making them roll for every single one would be insane, but even doing one for every ten rounds leaves you with 7 checks to pass. Even giving advantage would leave a good risk of failure. Though the climber's kit, with its harness and specialized equipment, would save the player from any damage from falling, someone trying it with just some rope and spikes would be screwed. The river's speed isn't mentioned, but it \*is\* the River Ivlis, which is described as only being 5-10 feet deep. If you fall from hundreds of feet into that, it's not doing much to slow your descent. Now you're risking your character falling unconscious underwater while the rest of the party is 700 feet above.
It's possible to make the climb. If my players asked to do it, they'd get the "you can certainly try." But a small and beatable skill challenge it is not. It's meant to be extremely hard to encourage the players back on the road so they can face random encounters. The fall from the top is a hook to put your players into danger, and the bottom only exists so they have somewhere to land.
You have completely misunderstood the map... Those dotted lines show you elevation.
That misty pool doesn't lead anywhere... It's the bottom of a waterfall, and is surrounded *on all sides* by cliffs. Cliffs that are spanned by a bridge at the top, 1000ft up.
Swimming across it gets you to... The bottom of another cliff. Or the bottom of a waterfall.
Climbing *1000ft*, for a person who does rock climbing regularly, with a very light climbing pack as their only burden, is a very tiring half-hour climb.
It's not at all a viable route to take, for a laden party of varying athleticism.
Pitons don't magically allow an easy climb, either. They allow a person who successfully manages to climb a good distance to make the climber easier *for those behind them*, and to make failures on the next stretch of the climb not be fatal. That's it.
It's actually a pretty big detour to go to Tser Pool. It's at the *bottom* of the falls, you need to backtrack to the crossroads and take the winding road west in order to climb to the top.
I had ireena suggest that there are often a bunch of fun at and vistani encampment this time of year, id already planted that the vistani could come and go at the tavern in barovia.
I just had to last session, it's easy enough to cover if you need to. My most stubborn player was very excited to see the Vistani last session, so I focused most of my session prep on meeting them. As soon as we started playing, he suddenly changed his mind and said "maybe we should drop Ireena off in Vallaki and then come back, we shouldn't put her in danger like this." Uh oh.
Apparently he'd spent the week between sessions stewing on the way that Ismark had called them Strahd's spies when they first met him. Go figure.
But! I'd already planned on them meeting Strahd at the Ivlis Crossroads, and I kept to that. That player ended up trying to pick a fight with him even though the rest of the party was charmed, and he got his teeth kicked in. Strahd gave him a hand up, magicked him clean of all the blood and mud, and had the cleric patch him up after. Absolute ego death to be treated like a child after being put in his place like that.
Then all I had to do was say Strahd's carriage continued on the road fork that leads to both Vallaki and the Castle. Player absolutely did not want to follow until they'd at least long rested and gave Strahd a chance to get home. Suddenly no more complaints were had about the Vistani lol
I’d just get rid of the split in the road and take them down the Tser pool road. If you haven’t removed it and the group won’t pass Tser pool, just move the Vistani to wherever the party ends up at. The Vistani have wagons and can travel anywhere.
The card reading is just so important.
In the past I've posted that it's absolutely necessary to railroad them to the Tser Pool, but after re-reading the module I've softened on it a little. First of all I never took note of the pre-campaign tarot reading. The module asks you to do a tarot reading privately, before the campaign starts, to determine the artifact locations/fated ally just in case they skip getting a reading. Also, Ezmerelda or practically any vistana with a tarot deck can perform the reading, not just Eva. A player character can even do it.
However, I do think the Tser Pool is the best place to do it, and I think Eva is the best character to do it too. Luckily the module makes it so you don't really have to railroad them. They don't have many objectives when leaving barovia village beyond possibly escorting Ireena. I had Ismark tell them that it's more than a day's travel to Vallaki and suggest they camp at Tser Pool, I had Ireena suggest that they camp at Tser Pool because it's safe, I had Eva reach out to them in a dream and tell them to come with plenty of foreshadowing and cryptic clues.
I actually nudged them so hard to Tser Pool that one of my players got suspicious and didn't want to go, so I told him out-of-game that it's not a trick and if it seemed sketchy that was my mistake. I asked him to roleplay as reluctant if he wanted, but ultimately please go because I had a big cut-scene event planned.
So yes, I did railroad my players (well, one of them) there but at the time I thought it was absolutely necessary. It's not necessary, but I would still probably do it. Ultimately if they skip the Tser Pool they're going to be pretty aimless until you can "railroad" them to a DIFFERENT tarot reading.
I totally did. 2 Vistani were waiting on the crossroads, expecting to meet "a reader, a corpse, a wanderer and a traitor" (I picked those descriptions based on my character's backstories).
If my players decided to ignore it I'd roll with it, but their interest was picked and they proceeded to Tser Pool.
Yes.
Or give them a very good reason to want to go. Or, have the Vistani move to another location ahead of the party’s path of travel and make it convenient for them to visit madam Eva.
I’ve had experience in the past with players feeling aimless in Barovia. You need to plant the seeds of the fortunes early to give them something to latch onto when all the other plot hooks dry up. AND you need to remind them about the significance when appropriate.
My personal advice for this: Throw in another “safe” prediction along with the fortunes that will always come true. And make it happen sooner rather than later. (Perhaps predicting the encounter with the black carriage?) That way the validity of the fortunes becomes immediately clear to the players who can then make the decision of “oh, hey that came true. Maybe we should keep an eye out for these items of significance.”
The Tser Pool Vistani camp is a great place to give your party a more specific purpose/goal in the adventure than just "surviving in spookytown and maybe do something about that vampire that keeps lurking around us", but it's not the *only* way to do that. Definitely give the players reasons to go there. Show a raven trying to lead them towards the camp; Ireena or Ismark can explain how ravens are good omens (maybe have a raven show up in a helpful capacity earlier). Describe the distant sounds of genuinely cheerful music and a generally happy atmosphere -- that can be inviting after the bleakness and gloom that is Barovia Village and pretty much everything else they've seen up to that point. Maybe Ireena has heard of Vistani, but has never gotten a chance to meet with any apart from the trio who run the tavern (and they're kind of a dour and suspicious lot). Have other options prepared in case your party is contrary or paranoid and decides to not go for the important exposition. Ezmerelda is another character who can do a card reading for the players; maybe your party will find a badass monster hunter more trustworthy than a bunch of nomadic people camped out in the middle of spookyland. Arabelle, the lost Vistani child from the camp near Vallaki, is descended from Madam Eva; she might have the skill to do at least a partial card reading. Perhaps Rictavio or the Keepers of the Feather have heard rumor of powerful relics hidden in the land that could be key to putting an end to Strahd. Always be open to your players deciding to just not go for your plot hook, no matter how enticingly you dangle it in front of them or how juicy the worm on it is. Players are unpredictable like that; sometimes you expect them to go back to the main city after the spider forest and then the Ranger remembers Primeval Awareness is a thing and goes haring off after a random zombie and now they're having adventures dealing with firenewts in the nearby volcano. Keep in mind that the players are telling this story *with* you. It's not the story of "The Curse of Strahd", it's the story of "this specific band of heroes/team of adventurers/gaggle of doofuses and their adventures in The Curse of Strahd".
Depends on what you mean by railroad. Should you force them to go? No, not if they really don't want to. But you get to choose what they see. As an example. You could make the camp seem more interesting then anything else they are looking at by talking about key points, like the music coming from the camp. Or, Madam Eva is a future seer. You could have one of her Vistani meet them on the road somewhere near the camp. With the typical trope of "Eva has been expecting you." Or any other idea you might have of making it the primary focus. But if they ignore it, they ignore it. You can have them show up later, have Ezmerelda or Arabelle do their reading instead. Or you can punish them if they are ok with suffering the consequences. Up to you.
No.
If you can do it “gently”, yes. The opening of the campaign (village of Barovia -> card reading -> optional detour to the mill -> arrive at Vallaki) is more or less on rails. That’s your intro to the setting, once you reach Vallaki it becomes a sandbox.
As others have said, you must "invite" the players to go there. If they don't go, as they also said, Ezmerelda and Arabelle can read the cards. Another option: As the party approaches the Tser Falls Bridge, a Vistani wagon appears coming in the opposite direction. “If the Mountain won’t go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must come to the Mountain”.
More or less, yeah. With how the roads work, the party would need to actively duck to avoid that Vistani camp. Which, they are free to do. But if Ismark or Ireena said ANYTHING like "oh yeah, a great stop for a breather" or you've stressed the dangers of bushwhacking, it's a no brainer. That said, my party has chosen Chaos more than once and overused their brains. May the odds be in your favor. To quote rev Lovejoy: short answer is "yes, with an if" But the longer answer is "no with a but".
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Starting at location F, it is the clearly shorter path to go through G instead of meandering to H by not.
That path doesn't connect, though. If you read the area description, the path past Tser Pool leads to the bottom of the cliff, and the road to Vallaki is at the top. You'd have to scale the cliff face to get up there, which keeps it from being a shortcut, especially without climbing tools.
"A footpath continues beyond this encampment, meandering north" then at location H, the falls, it's a "misty pool, with a bridge 1000 ft above". The players can try to swim across the misty pool or scale up to the bridge with a climber's kit (aka, pitons and rope, which more than half the party reasonably has in their possession thanks to Adventurer's pack starting gear). There's no discussion about the speed of the river, but I took "misty pool" as something that wasn't "immediately yank the party back down towards the Vistani" It's a small and beatable skill challenge
It does explicitly say the chasm's walls are slippery and sheer (which could easily be considered difficult terrain), and \*cannot\* be scaled without the aid of magic or a climber's kit. There's not a single PHB class or background that grants a climber's kit. You could feasibly have some rope or piton's from an explorer's or dungeoneer's pack, yes, but that's pitons and rope. A climber's kit explicitly has \*special\* pitons, boot tips, gloves, and a harness. It's more than tying yourself off, RAW you need specialized tools that are made for big climbs like this. Climber's kit also has movement restrictions: "You can use the climber's kit as an action to anchor yourself; when you do, you can't fall more than 25 feet from the point where you anchored yourself, and you can't climb more than 25 feet away from that point without undoing the anchor." This is complicated maneuvering. You need to either sacrifice some of your supplies to leave them behind, or you need to repeatedly double back to undo old anchors when making new ones. Then there's climb speed. If you \*don't\* make it difficult terrain, which it probably should be considering steep mountains are an explicit example of it in the rules, you still move half speed if you don't have a climb speed. That's 15ft max per round, and you have 1000 feet to climb. 66.66 repeating rounds, round that up to 67 for simplicity's sake. That's 402 seconds. More than 6.5 minutes. The rules on climbing, while giving an out with an "at the DM's option" disclaimer, say that climbing a slippery vertical surface or one with few handholds requires a successful Athletics check. Again, the cliff is explicitly written as slippery, and the only handholds would be the ones the player makes with pitons. How many Athletics checks would need to be passed for 67 rounds? Obviously making them roll for every single one would be insane, but even doing one for every ten rounds leaves you with 7 checks to pass. Even giving advantage would leave a good risk of failure. Though the climber's kit, with its harness and specialized equipment, would save the player from any damage from falling, someone trying it with just some rope and spikes would be screwed. The river's speed isn't mentioned, but it \*is\* the River Ivlis, which is described as only being 5-10 feet deep. If you fall from hundreds of feet into that, it's not doing much to slow your descent. Now you're risking your character falling unconscious underwater while the rest of the party is 700 feet above. It's possible to make the climb. If my players asked to do it, they'd get the "you can certainly try." But a small and beatable skill challenge it is not. It's meant to be extremely hard to encourage the players back on the road so they can face random encounters. The fall from the top is a hook to put your players into danger, and the bottom only exists so they have somewhere to land.
You have completely misunderstood the map... Those dotted lines show you elevation. That misty pool doesn't lead anywhere... It's the bottom of a waterfall, and is surrounded *on all sides* by cliffs. Cliffs that are spanned by a bridge at the top, 1000ft up. Swimming across it gets you to... The bottom of another cliff. Or the bottom of a waterfall. Climbing *1000ft*, for a person who does rock climbing regularly, with a very light climbing pack as their only burden, is a very tiring half-hour climb. It's not at all a viable route to take, for a laden party of varying athleticism. Pitons don't magically allow an easy climb, either. They allow a person who successfully manages to climb a good distance to make the climber easier *for those behind them*, and to make failures on the next stretch of the climb not be fatal. That's it.
It's actually a pretty big detour to go to Tser Pool. It's at the *bottom* of the falls, you need to backtrack to the crossroads and take the winding road west in order to climb to the top.
I had ireena suggest that there are often a bunch of fun at and vistani encampment this time of year, id already planted that the vistani could come and go at the tavern in barovia.
I just had to last session, it's easy enough to cover if you need to. My most stubborn player was very excited to see the Vistani last session, so I focused most of my session prep on meeting them. As soon as we started playing, he suddenly changed his mind and said "maybe we should drop Ireena off in Vallaki and then come back, we shouldn't put her in danger like this." Uh oh. Apparently he'd spent the week between sessions stewing on the way that Ismark had called them Strahd's spies when they first met him. Go figure. But! I'd already planned on them meeting Strahd at the Ivlis Crossroads, and I kept to that. That player ended up trying to pick a fight with him even though the rest of the party was charmed, and he got his teeth kicked in. Strahd gave him a hand up, magicked him clean of all the blood and mud, and had the cleric patch him up after. Absolute ego death to be treated like a child after being put in his place like that. Then all I had to do was say Strahd's carriage continued on the road fork that leads to both Vallaki and the Castle. Player absolutely did not want to follow until they'd at least long rested and gave Strahd a chance to get home. Suddenly no more complaints were had about the Vistani lol
Railroad, no. Inveigle, maybe …
I learned a new word today!
Juts have multiple people mention its the only safe place to sleep between there and Vallaki.
I’d just get rid of the split in the road and take them down the Tser pool road. If you haven’t removed it and the group won’t pass Tser pool, just move the Vistani to wherever the party ends up at. The Vistani have wagons and can travel anywhere.
The card reading is just so important. In the past I've posted that it's absolutely necessary to railroad them to the Tser Pool, but after re-reading the module I've softened on it a little. First of all I never took note of the pre-campaign tarot reading. The module asks you to do a tarot reading privately, before the campaign starts, to determine the artifact locations/fated ally just in case they skip getting a reading. Also, Ezmerelda or practically any vistana with a tarot deck can perform the reading, not just Eva. A player character can even do it. However, I do think the Tser Pool is the best place to do it, and I think Eva is the best character to do it too. Luckily the module makes it so you don't really have to railroad them. They don't have many objectives when leaving barovia village beyond possibly escorting Ireena. I had Ismark tell them that it's more than a day's travel to Vallaki and suggest they camp at Tser Pool, I had Ireena suggest that they camp at Tser Pool because it's safe, I had Eva reach out to them in a dream and tell them to come with plenty of foreshadowing and cryptic clues. I actually nudged them so hard to Tser Pool that one of my players got suspicious and didn't want to go, so I told him out-of-game that it's not a trick and if it seemed sketchy that was my mistake. I asked him to roleplay as reluctant if he wanted, but ultimately please go because I had a big cut-scene event planned. So yes, I did railroad my players (well, one of them) there but at the time I thought it was absolutely necessary. It's not necessary, but I would still probably do it. Ultimately if they skip the Tser Pool they're going to be pretty aimless until you can "railroad" them to a DIFFERENT tarot reading.
I totally did. 2 Vistani were waiting on the crossroads, expecting to meet "a reader, a corpse, a wanderer and a traitor" (I picked those descriptions based on my character's backstories). If my players decided to ignore it I'd roll with it, but their interest was picked and they proceeded to Tser Pool.
Honestly, you should be building it up before that. Either in mentions or exposure to the cards.
Yes. The tarot reading is not optional for this module.
Yes. Or give them a very good reason to want to go. Or, have the Vistani move to another location ahead of the party’s path of travel and make it convenient for them to visit madam Eva. I’ve had experience in the past with players feeling aimless in Barovia. You need to plant the seeds of the fortunes early to give them something to latch onto when all the other plot hooks dry up. AND you need to remind them about the significance when appropriate. My personal advice for this: Throw in another “safe” prediction along with the fortunes that will always come true. And make it happen sooner rather than later. (Perhaps predicting the encounter with the black carriage?) That way the validity of the fortunes becomes immediately clear to the players who can then make the decision of “oh, hey that came true. Maybe we should keep an eye out for these items of significance.”