27th January 2024
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week: vampire lords, Idris Elba, and playing with time.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.
Dungeons & Dragons, Curse of Strahd
Curse of Strahd is a really famous campaign in Dungeons & Dragons, but until the other day, I didn’t really understand why. I knew the campaign had existed before, in an older edition of the game, and that people liked it, but I thought that was because it was dark and gothic and had vampires in. Namely, a vampire lord called Count Strahd von Zarovich, who tyrannically rules the land.
So far so predictable, right? Well, here’s where the special part comes in, because what the Strahd campaign does that other campaigns don’t – or at least didn’t, before it – was exactly that: unpredictability. The campaign didn’t lock a final boss encounter to a time and place – say at the end of the campaign at the top of a tower – but instead unshackled them and encouraged dungeon masters to play with them instead. Strahd, in other words, could – and indeed should – go walkabout, and it completely threw parties of adventurers off when he did.
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This happened to us the other night. It’s not the first time we’ve come across Strahd, by the way: we had a hairy moment once before, when he nearly killed us, before dramatically galloping off through the sky on the back of his magical flying – and flaming – horse. This time, though, he came in disguise.