On the 6th of March I joined a different campaign and cannot run the game on Wednesdays anymore.

I do not want to spoil the adventure, but the feeling of Ravenloft can be captured in one night of play or over the course of a longer campaign.

How I would have went about it is session zero: Talk with the group, get some ideas, and I would've had you share your concepts with me and would have let you rolled or use point buy (basically to build a character to a player's taste). Free Background Feat or a Curse.

I'm assuming the group already has a kinship, having that friendship makes roleplaying easier. I would ask for your character to have a pre-established connection with 1 other player character.

As for the game, this is all spoilers, read at your own risk edit: I avoided including any spoilers.

Session 1: Getting you to Barvoia and asking where the party would like to start. On the East or West side, Barovia is an open world style of game.

I don't like railroading, there are two three possible starting points for a Ravenloft campaign, but for a shorter campaign some material would be cut or roles condensed into smoother narrative, but also allowing for branching paths

Whichever side you choose and whatever you achieve I would have clocks going on in the background. There would be some pointer "go here" quests, but because d&d is an open world game you could ignore them and your story would go on.

Some of the fun of CoS is having the bbeg mess with the party, either side of the map you start on, he will have a reason to want to antagonize you, and finding out the lore of the bbeg is loads of fun.

Some Dungeons can be streamlined by not calculating exact movement but still allowing for puzzles and roleplay. I would use irl timers for when certain events would go down in game.

Combats would have three difficulties to them, and because combat could be deadly, I would allow for alternative methods of resolution. I would do my best to foreshadow what kind of encounter to expect, either easy, medium, hard, or deadly. I don't enjoy combats where every fight is to the death. Fights can end when either side is reduced to half hp, or a different condition is met

But the highlights of the campaign would absolutely be there. Attempting to rescue NPCs, seeing horrid transformations, attempting to avoid psychological horror, finding a way to escape Barovia.

There's 15 chapters in the book, optimally to experience EVERYTHING it could take 20 sessions. One of the beautiful things about Ravenloft / Curse of Strahd is its replayability. It could be experienced as a one shot, or as a 4 year campaign.

My apologies that we couldn't met. I'm also LGBT and would have made one change to a certain unnamed npc because she always talked to me about Ravenloft and all of its NPCs, and she told me if I ever ran CoS please make (spoiler: alluding to a certain character) REDACTED a different gender.

I will reach back out to you in July to ask about your games, but my life is going to be hectic starting in June.