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5E D&D: Curse of Strahd

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5E D&D: Curse of Strahd

Unread postby icycalm » 19 Jun 2021 02:02

There’s an entire subreddit for just this adventure.

It goes without saying that my players shouldn’t look there, but I’ll share with you stuff that you can look at.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CurseofStrahd/ ... ioned_art/

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My Players Commissioned Art!

I posted last year about the CoS campaign I finished. It's still probably the best game I've ever run and apparently the players agreed. They've been working in secret ever since to commission something to commemorate it. Between the pandemic and their perfectionism, it took a year but this came in the mail out of the blue.

Stained Glass

It's very specific to our campaign, but I was just blown away that it meant so much to them.
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Unread postby icycalm » 19 Jun 2021 02:07

When I post links, it is for reference. You aren’t supposed to visit them as there may be spoilers in the comments. Everything that you can look at will be quoted by me in this forum.
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Unread postby icycalm » 12 Jul 2021 05:23

This stuff has to be seen to be believed.

Check Out These Amazing Ravenloft 3D Animated Battlemaps
https://www.enworld.org/threads/check-o ... ps.681235/

Morrus wrote:Beneos Battlemaps has created a bunch of these, 3D animated battle maps which feature various locations in Ravenloft like Castle Ravenloft, Death House, Barovia Village, Blue Water Inn, and more. They’re intended for use with VTTs (particularly Foundry, but there's also a video on how to use them with Roll20).

https://www.patreon.com/BeneosBattlemaps

"The Beneos P&P Universe provides high quality animated assets for your Tabletop Roleplaying Game! Beneos Battlemaps creates next-gen animated Battlemaps and Beneos Tokens provides you with animated Tokens (Top-Down/Isometric with different animations) every week!"


Beneos Battlemaps: Curse of Strahd - Castle Ravenloft 1F
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fiHRHIqCiI

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Beneos Battlemaps - Curse Of Strahd: Barovia Village (Animated Map Pack)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wNFXfq_i08

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The actual battlemaps are towards the end of the videos. But they are made of the same assets as the cinematics at the start of the videos. It's the same scenes from first-person and top-down perspectives. They are at near current-gen level of fidelity. It's unbelievable.

I have no idea how he is selling these assets legally. He even says you can stream them and even profit from them legally. All these are derivative works from Wizards-owned content.

Anyway, we are playing Curse of Strahd from these maps on Foundry. I updated the Curse of Strahd entry to show that it unlocks Foundry. If any of the four groups rolls a 1/10 at the end of their current adventure, we're playing this in a couple of months' time.

There are really no spoilers in these videos, so you can watch them no problem.
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Kingmaker-Curse of Strahd megacampaign

Unread postby icycalm » 11 Dec 2021 16:36

First off, let me link here a number of CoD-related Patreon posts I've made recently:

State of Battlegrounds October '21 and the Future of Videogames
https://www.patreon.com/posts/58126033

Curse of Strahd Is Now A Videogame
https://www.patreon.com/posts/58870997

GOTY 2022 Early Access
https://www.patreon.com/posts/59347914

The Insomnia 2021 Game of the Year Awards
https://www.patreon.com/posts/59635398

All of these contain info and my views on Beneos's take on Curse of Strahd, and how I intend to integrate it into Battlegrounds. As I say multiple times in there, it's my 2022 GOTY so far.

Moving on, I have some more details on precisely how we will run it. Once the current campaigns are over, the players will be able to sign up for the Kingmaker campaign. Any number of players can sign up from any number of groups. I am doing it this way so that even if some players from your group aren't interested in Kingmaker, or have played the Kingmaker videogame, you won't be constrained by their choices. And then the Curse of Strahd campaign will be activated via Kingmaker. I.e. the two of them go together. I won't tell you exactly what the conditions will be for remaining in Kingmaker or for splitting off from it into Curse of Strahd, so that we can maintain at least some suspense about Ravenloft. I would have rather no one knew about Curse of Strahd and I just sprang it onto people, but since this is a criticism site and since I've had of necessity to talk a lot about Curse of Strahd, you know a few more things about it than I would have liked. That's okay. Once Ravenloft is fully unlocked, all future adventures there will start entirely unexpectedly according to the rules in this essay:

Ravenloft and the Fine Line Between Choice versus Destiny
https://www.patreon.com/posts/52863351

Everyone who doesn't want to play Kingmaker, or who's played the videogame, will be put into one group and will play something else in the world. They'll basically choose a new campaign, or two if there's many of them.

What if there's less than four of them?

I might have a solution to that. Remember that TaleSpire-only part of Golarion that I am preparing? I recently said that it will be playable from 1 to 15+ people. So if there's fewer than four, they can play that. I will also of course make an announcement at the time to see if we can get any newcomers to jump in and bring the group up to four. We should be able to work it out no matter what happens. Worst case scenario I keep them playing one-shots in other systems/worlds until players from Curse of Strahd die and can join them to complete their group. Or they can just take a break from Battlegrounds until they have enough players for a group.

Note also that Kingmaker goes up to 17th-level but Curse of Strahd only to about 10th, so if the Ravenloft group manages to get back, they could potentially crash the Kingmaker group's campaign in the middle, and all sorts of cool things might happen. So there might be PVP at the start AND at the middle of the megacampaign.
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Re: 5E D&D: Curse of Strahd

Unread postby icycalm » 31 Dec 2021 15:04

I just found out that on top of the official Curse of Strahd locations, Beneos is also rendering the best homebrewed scenes, creating the ultimate megacampaign version of CoS. “But icy I thought you hated homebrew?” Yes but that applies to the unpublished stuff. The stuff that GMs have taken the trouble to publish isn’t really homebrew at that point, it’s published third-party material (3PP), some of which is good (maybe 1/10th of it as opposed to Paizo’s, Wizards’ and old TSR’s 10/10 hit rate) and Beneos acts as a further filter for us because obviously the guy has great taste. Plus I will of course filter everything further when we start playing.
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Re: 5E D&D: Curse of Strahd

Unread postby icycalm » 22 Mar 2022 16:49

GOTY 2022 Progress Report
https://www.patreon.com/posts/64122189

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icycalm wrote:So it would not be an exaggeration to say that this game is the work of about 100 people, and has been a whopping 39 years in the making. Do you see now why it smashes Elden Ring?
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Re: 5E D&D: Curse of Strahd

Unread postby icycalm » 23 Aug 2022 19:21

v3 Barovia 735 BC (in line with earlier editions, with AL locations, etc)
https://www.reddit.com/r/CurseofStrahd/ ... r_editions

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8K map of Barovia. It's actually almost twice larger than 8K because 8K is 7,680x4,320 and this is 8,192x7,744.

I have a huge archive of fan-made maps, and they're all going on the overworld at the right time.
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