Sunny Barovia

 2/21/23 Abe was kind enough to send me notes from the first encounter.   Rather than me paraphrasing, I’m going to take the lazy route and just post them (with some minor formatting changes) here.   Thanks Abe! Three men and a woman meet the party on the causeway. Additional men and women remain back at the forest and scattered along the lake shore. Lead Male Druid - “We are the People of Baratok” “You stand in the presence of Seer-Sha, Daughter of Baratok” “I am Quade, first of the Lodge of the Crag Cat. I will speak with you.” Seer-Shaw - Perhaps in her late forties, if the years were particularly hard. Pale, blond hair, beginning to transition to white.   She carries what looks like a thin stone rod, approximately the length a walking stick.   She is also wearing furs over some sort of extraordinarily thick hide armor. She is medium height with a lean, athletic build and attentive to her surroundings. When anyone looks at her, she seems to ...

 2/14/23 So the tower itself was maybe 80 feet tall, and it looked like it had 4 floors. I turned to one of the golems, (for that’s what they were) and asked it to lower the platform.   The four of them immediately began pulling the chains to lower it. Creating a golem is beyond my abilities, without a doubt, but I do know they are incredibly expensive and difficult to make.   To make four of them just to act as an elevator suggests a wizard who is incredibly powerful, or incredibly vain, or both.   It is ostentatious display of power to say the least.   The platform was only large enough to hold two at a time, so Oloch and I went up first.   Given that there were four golems pulling it, the platform progress up was surprisingly slow.   Painstakingly so.   Maybe that’s why he had to have four of them. The second and third floors were rotting through.   We saw nothing as we passed through, and I don’t think the flooring would have su...

 (It should be noted Abe contributed significantly to this post, by outlining exactly what the Chamberlain relayed to us.  Thanks Abe!) 2/7/23 We traveled east on the Old Svalich Road until we came to the bridge.   There, waiting for us was that Elf Chamberlain to Strahd. Wolfram sighed, and called out, “Are you going to kill us?   Because we’ve had a day…” This actually elicited a hit of a smile from the Elf.   He said he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He explained that he was sent to recover the Icon of Ravenloft, which he believed was in our possession.   Recently, he (the chamberlain) discovered the Icon was missing. He informed Strahd of the item’s disappearance which led to some discussion regarding how his lordship’s general invitation to explore his home while he spoke with the baroness...may have been ‘misinterpreted.’ Apparently, several of “Lady Ludmilla’s leftovers” (whoever she is) overheard the conversation and took it upon themselves...

  1/31/2023 The next morning, I told the others I felt we should postpone further activities here around Krezk and find Ireena. I explained about my dream. Dasco had an interesting take on it.   He suggested that perhaps the dream was intentionally put in my head to get us to leave the village.   I don’t think it would be beyond the Abbotts power to do something like that, but I didn’t get that feeling.   I reasoned even if it was a ruse to get us to leave, it had been several days since we’d seen Ireena and she was more protected with us than without. We decided we would visit the Abbot about Alana’s grave, learn what we could then head to Vallaki to try and find Ireena. We made the trek up the hill to the Abbey.   This time, there were at least a dozen of those robed monks about, and a mist in the courtyard that became suspiciously thicker the closer it got to the Abbey proper.   The monks told us that we could not enter as the Abbot was busy with...