Plans

    So I've been thinking about my gothic setting Ardeal. As I'm going to eventually run a game in it for the wife. Its been a crazy couple weeks work, home, and health wise. So it hasn't taken off yet. But I've been pondering what to do, and what to use.

    I'm going to run a real simple scenario to begin with. Find a gypsy van that has been attacked by bandits. The wife and the survivors hunt down the bandits to their lair and deal with them. Its a bit more complicated than that. But that's the reader's digest version.

    Then on to a village that's being menaced by evil, coming down from the haunted mountain.

But after that I have not set anything in stone. I want to see what happens and make it fit together organically if you will.

    But I do have a list of thing I would like to weave together.

•  The Bone grinder scenario from Curse of Strahd
• The village of Vidra from my Ardeal setting. Lots going on there.
• Using factions and tracking where the players stand with them
• Gallows of the Crossroads from Ardeal.
• Weaving together of Strahd and Ardeal's Koschei the Immortal, King in Yellow
• I'm totally stealing the idea of Ravenloft creeping into the area (Jack Shears campaign idea) as opposed to being stuck in Ravenloft.

Curse of Strahd

   So I bit the bullet. I finally bought Curse of Strahd. Its pretty cool. Reading it I think to myself did I unconsciously crib a from Raven Loft in my Ardeal setting? Or did they rob mine? Probably we both copped a lot from gothic fiction.
   Anyways I really like it. It has lots of good points and well stuff. But there is bad as well. I think it was bryce from Ten Foot Pole blog that said it. There are a lot of lame descriptions. Example, "You find a corpse". Obviously I would play that out differently. But still, show some effort, seriously, please. My biggest problem is this, I just cant see myself using this at the table. Or at least it would seem unwieldy at best. Not the adventure, I will totally use it. The book though, just seems as I would really need to read multiple times the whole thing. Almost having to memorize the thing. It just seem like their should be a better way going about an adventure/mini-sandbox than a single hard cover book. Perhaps as I read it totally from cover to cover this will change. We shall see.