It also keeps the characters from going nova in every encounter because they know they will have to save some of their resources for healing or else risk running out of hit dice. I apply this rule whenever the characters camp out in the wilderness, and it makes staying in town a lot more desirable. Instead, a character can spend Hit Dice to heal at the end of a long rest, just as with a short rest. The DMG includes a rule variant for slow natural healing:Ĭharacters don't regain hit points at the end of a long rest. I did make one other change that forces my players to manage their resources carefully. I extended the encounter checks to once every hour, so I'm still rolling twice as often-when I decide to roll at all. But I've found that increasing the scale doesn't really spread the encounters too thin-the book already caps the characters at two every 12 hours anyway, and they spend four times as much time on the road at province scale. Shorter distances pack the random encounters closer together, whereas overnight journeys give characters a chance to rest and replenish their resources (assuming they can find a safe place to rest, which shouldn't be easy). That should give players a taste of the dangers of Barovia without reducing every trip to a series of repetitive travel encounters.Īny scale will bring trade-offs.
At those distances, most destinations are still within a day's travel of Vallaki, but some of the longer trips will force characters to camp overnight in the wilderness. I'm using a standard province scale (1 hex=1 mile) for the map. Other scales such as Fleshing out Curse of Strahd (1 hex=4 miles) swing to the other extreme, turning even simple jaunts like van Richten's tower into multi-day journeys. Your party could leave the village of Barovia in the morning and walk into Krezk before nightfall. At that size, Barovia is barely 20 miles wide. Personally, I find the official map scale (1 hex=1/4 mile) to be far too cozy. How you handle it will determine how they approach travel for the rest of the game.īut before you begin your campaign, you'll need to make a few basic decisions about how you'll run travel in Barovia-including just how big you want Barovia to be. This will most likely be their first extended look at the countryside it will also be one of their longest trips and, given their level, one of the most difficult ones.
Your party will be doing a lot of traveling in Curse of Strahd, but no trip is more important than their first journey from the village of Barovia to Vallaki. For more chapter guides and campaign resources, see the full table of contents. This guide is part of The Doom of Ravenloft.
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