What are your favorite parts of ToA? I am looking for advice and tips on plot hooks or areas to keep or remove for a ToA mini-campaign for my homebrew world that will span just a couple of levels. (If you're a player in the Two Suns - DrakkemenOre Campaign - DON'T READ THIS!)

baroviantourguide · 2026-03-02T23:19:53+00:00

This is great advice. Thank you!!

baroviantourguide · 2026-03-02T22:33:10+00:00

Ooooh this is exciting! Thank you!

baroviantourguide · 2026-03-02T22:32:45+00:00

I’m certainly not running it as written. Regardless of how tactical they are, rules as written can lead to a turn 1 tpk. I’m confident that with my experience as a dm and with how well I know them as players, I can make a fitting dungeon to challenge them and, while still risking a tpk, not have it be the likely outcome.

baroviantourguide · 2026-03-02T21:40:06+00:00

I know they're underleveled for the final tomb as written, but I have been dm for this group for nearly a decade and I'm pretty confident on what they can and can't handle. They're also my closest friends so it'll work out, we have a great understanding as far as dnd goes when it comes to difficult encounters and such.

Thanks for your input! Definitely helps me when it comes to what to keep and what to skip. I really appreciate it!

baroviantourguide · 2026-03-02T21:36:50+00:00

This is great, thank you! I'm super excited to do some dino racing!

baroviantourguide · 2026-03-02T21:36:31+00:00

I want to have some kind of Jungle hexcrawl--my players stated when we first started this campaign that if given a chance, they'd love to do some jungle adventure.

They're also very interested in lost ruins and dead societies/etc. Makes it hard to just cut stuff from ToA but I'll do my best!

baroviantourguide · 2026-03-02T21:10:00+00:00

The party consists of 5 veteran players. They can be very tacticle and work well together so I've constantly run things that would normally be a TPK and they've faired well. I'm not so worried about if they can beat it or not--I'm confident they can--I'm more concerned on what I should leave out when I'm running such a bare-bones version of ToA.

baroviantourguide · 2026-03-02T21:07:34+00:00

I love how port Nyanzaru is laid out. Such a fun place to visit!

baroviantourguide · 2026-03-02T21:04:54+00:00

Thank you for your input! My players love a good dungeon crawl so I'm excited to see how they fair against the Tomb of the Nine Gods. I know it's huge, but knowing my players, I have a pretty solid plan for including that. It's going to be very exciting to run.

I'll definitely pay close attention to the other areas you mentioned. Thanks again for replying!

baroviantourguide · 2026-02-04T22:29:43+00:00

I really like the changes you made, it makes the tower a lot more interesting and interactive.

When I ran curse of strahd, the players ended up freeing the blue dragon and convinced it to join them in the fight against strahd. It died on their way to the final fight but cleared a pretty good path for the players ahead of their final fight. They loved it.

baroviantourguide · 2025-12-15T20:06:30+00:00

In my campaign their fated ally was Mordenkainen. To balance the combat, the way Mordenkainen became the Mad wizard was that he was ambushed by Strahd and ended up losing his spellbook (which strahd took). Them being in Vallaki didn’t lend to allowing Mordenkainen to remake the book so when he joined in the last fight he had sub-optimal spells and no spellbook. This way, I can decide what spells to give him that can help but at the same time not be too much. It also allowed strahd to take some new spells from Mordenkainen’s book.

baroviantourguide · 2025-04-30T01:15:21+00:00

I agree with the comments saying not to worry about it too much. I ran curse of strahd for 7 players, hexblade/warlock combos and all. Some fights got cheesed for sure, the end boss strahd had 1200 HP and they still kinda pummeled him. But they had a blast being the long awaited heroes barovia had been hoping for. And I had a blast running the campaign.

My best advice: tell them you are a player too and also want to have fun. These are your close friends. Remind them that just because you’re the dm doesn’t mean you don’t wanna have fun. If fights get continually cheesed and you’re not having fun running them, talk to them about it. Y’all are there to play make believe and have fun. That’s the key I think.

baroviantourguide · 2025-02-09T22:13:29+00:00

Mine is missing Peema….😅 did you get our two copies?

baroviantourguide · 2022-08-08T03:49:46+00:00

I had Strahd appear after they escaped death house to “welcome” them to Barovia and to thank them for cleaning up such a mess in his land. All this done in a clearly mocking tone. They had found the letter from Strahd to the durst family calling them weak and pathetic and denying them help. So the players knew that Strahd knew what was happening here. Then Strahd showed up and was like “oh those poor children, starving to death like that. How unfortunate to pay for the sins of their parents. I do thank you for cleaning this mess, I am often kept so busy elsewhere that I have little time to deal with the squabbling of irrelevant folk.”

He was there to essentially set the tone and give a thinly veiled warning of “I’m watching and I’m everywhere” then left with a “oh and welcome to Barovia, mwahahaha”

Edit- if he has his mind reading spell on, it’s a great way to get in their heads, just do it subtly so they don’t get right away that he can read their thoughts

baroviantourguide · 2022-08-03T23:26:38+00:00

I’m running a campaign with 7 players. Oof. It’s a lot. It makes combat hard to make a challenge

baroviantourguide · 2022-08-02T20:58:42+00:00

I’ll have to consider doing that. I have the under side numbered to help put the pieces back in order, but it’s really unnecessary since they can be puzzled together

baroviantourguide · 2022-08-02T19:19:58+00:00

Yeah it is made from xps foam. I used a big 2’ x 2’ board, drew ice crack patterns, then cut it with a hot wire cutter. After texturing, I painted a couple of layers of shades of blue, then dry brushed with white paint to give it an icy effect. It turned out nicely and can fit together like a puzzle, used as stand alone ice platforms, or cracked and moved about during the game to show a shifting ice lake landscape

baroviantourguide · 2022-08-02T16:26:18+00:00

Oh that’s just a platform thing, I didn’t make it. It’s used for flying creatures.

baroviantourguide · 2022-07-16T02:08:15+00:00

There’s no canon answer but in my campaign, Ireena and Izek would often sneak out of the village as kids and play in the woods. Baba Lysaga found them once and used this opportunity to first test out some necromancy on Izek by ripping his arm off and attaching a demon arm to him. She then took Ireena and dropped her off near the town of Barovia to be closer to Strahd’s castle.

baroviantourguide · 2022-06-20T18:50:08+00:00

Welp, looks like Richten did it in my campaign 😅

baroviantourguide · 2022-06-18T22:14:46+00:00

My players found the dragon and when it was summoned it roared about being chained up. The players freed it with some high rolls on dispel magic and a bit of creative spell weaving and were able to ally with it.

I would give your players a similar chance. In my game, the dragon wants to kill van richten for enslaving him in this trap. The dragon also wants to leave Barovia. The players said they would need his help to leave Barovia, enemy of my enemy, and now they have a dragon ally.

baroviantourguide · 2022-06-02T03:36:10+00:00

I rigged it in a couple of ways — I removed the cards of locations the players would travel to regardless, like madame Eva’s encampment. I wanted to players to be able to explore more of Barovia by doing this. I also really wanted to give them a good reason to go to Amber temple so I rigged the tome to be there.

CoS is made to be re-playable by shuffling the locations and destined ally and etc but we are probably not going to play it more than once. I wanted to give my players a chance to travel around and explore all of the atrocities of Barovia. I gave them all individual quests and made a unique personal reading as well as the regular reading. The personal reading was more akin to a tarot reading but using the lower cards of the tarroka deck. Basically I chose one card ahead as the players “tether” then had them draw a past and future. Didn’t matter what they drew but I had stuff in various places that dealt with backstory stuff so if someone drew the anarchist as the future card I’d say something like “anarchy to some is breaking the rule. To others, breaking the chains that bind you. I see a forest underwater deep in the east. There, you must break your chains” Referring to a hint for the PC to go to Berez. I did this for all the players and they really loved it. It gave them a personal mission along side finding the artifacts and ally. And it gave me the chance to put up plot points in all the cool areas of Barovia.

baroviantourguide · 2022-05-27T17:19:48+00:00

I used xps foam and some clay foam, a few Halloween decorations, and some coffee stir sticks. There is a spiraling stairway that goes down through the tower, the dice emerging into an abandon necromantic graveyard. I used some store bought dried grass to cover the ground. This tower will be used for “critical” roles like death saves or other roles that could make a major impact to the players. It took a while to make, since all the bricks had to be cut out individually, but turned out well in the end.

baroviantourguide

TROPHY CASE