How I Stole 24 Months of Gameplay in 60 Seconds of Bad Decisions

About this episode

The episode discusses a disastrous decision made during the Curse of Strahd campaign that ended the game prematurely.

This episode is about the end of our Curse of Strahd campaign, and more specifically, about how I ended it. Not Sean Scanlon, our excellent Dungeon Master. Not Strahd. Not just the dice. Me. In what I can only describe as a perfect storm of stupid, I managed to take a campaign that probably still had another 18 to 24 months of life in it and drive it straight into a wall in about sixty seconds. That sounds melodramatic until you hear the story. Then it starts sounding annoyingly accurate. We were deep inside Castle Ravenloft, already battered, exhausted, and inside that special kind of late-session Barovian dread where every room feels like it was built by a sadist with a theology degree. Perlan Goodshadow was dead. Urihorn Tenpenny was down. Radley Fullthorn, my character, was somehow still alive, mostly because the dice briefly took pity on me and handed me a natural 20 on a death save. I came back with one hit point. One. Not “wounded.” Not “in rough shape.” One hit point, which in D&D is the difference between “technically alive” and oblivion. That should have been the moment I got wise. That should have been the moment I took the hint, used one of the teleport stones in…

People in this episode

Host: Chris Abraham

Topics covered

• tabletop gaming
• Dungeons and Dragons
• campaign endings
• storytelling
• gameplay decisions

Keywords

• Curse of Strahd
• Dungeons and Dragons
• gameplay
• campaign
• decisions

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Curse of Strahd

Places: Castle Ravenloft

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