Playing Curse of Strahd online

Curse of Strahd is the gothic horror campaign for D&D 5th edition: the party is pulled into Barovia, a valley sealed off from the world and ruled by a vampire who's aware of them almost immediately. It's one of the most played campaigns in the game, and it's one of the games running at our tables.

What makes it different from a normal campaign

• It's horror, and it means it. The tone is oppressive by design. Characters are outmatched for a long stretch, and running away is a normal, correct decision.
• It's not a straight line. Barovia is open. The party decides where to go, and some of those places will kill them at the level they arrive.
• The villain watches. Strahd shows up early, repeatedly, and usually while you can do nothing about it. That's the point of him.
• Your choices set the ending. Several major elements are shuffled at the start of each run, so two tables playing it have different campaigns.

Why it works well online

More than most campaigns, this one runs on atmosphere, and a virtual tabletop is unusually good at that. On Foundry VTT the fog of war shows only what your character can actually see, dynamic lighting means a torch has a real radius and the dark past it's really dark, and the ambient sound sits under the whole session. A gothic campaign about not being able to see what's coming benefits from a table where that's literally true.

How long it takes

Expect somewhere around forty to sixty sessions at three to four hours a week, roughly a year of weeknights, sometimes longer. How long a campaign really lasts has the fuller picture, but treat it as a long commitment rather than a try-before-you-buy.

What to check before joining a table running it

Because of what it's about, the session zero matters more here than in most campaigns. Ask what the table has agreed about content, ask how death is handled, and be honest about what you don't want in the story. A good Dungeon Master will ask you first.

Whether one of our tables is currently running it, and on which night, is listed on the campaigns page, along with the homebrew campaigns for anyone who would rather not spend a year in Barovia.