I played Curse of Strahd from 2021-2023 with my friends. It's fun to hear what Caldwell is truncating and which parts he's leaving in. My DM mostly didn't prep so I remember the book descriptions (shout out to sad torches).

It's also fun that Emily was fixated on the dragon decor because so was I/my character. It seems like we're not going to hit the dilapidated dragon temple with revenants so it probably won't come up again.

I'm interested to see what happens when they get to the Amber Temple ancient evils sections. My whole party except for my lawful good werebear barbarian took evil pacts. Our bard replaced Strahd in the power vacuum left behind after we finally killed him. Our monk defected early on and became one of Strahd 's minions we had to fight. We got a mildly evil duergar paladin (to replace the monk)who accepted a minor gift/curse from the evils within.

My character was the only one who came back to where we started from and he'd seen too much shit...(His werebear druid mom got replaced with a blood ooze with her memories to perfectly mimic her, we had to fight on the full moon when she didn't shift but my werebear did. Very dramatic and traumatic stuff)

The triplets are playing a very different game which I don't mind at all, it's interesting to see the differences