Once again, we only had three players: Kyla, Pete, and Will. Generally, three players is the minimum for a good RPG party. This allows the players to cover three "specialty" areas and most systems have three to six. D&D has four combat roles: tank, healer, striker (single target DPS), and controller (AoE DPS and general battlefield changer). It generally assumes that outside of combat the party will have one brute (someone to smash and break stuff), a face (the high Charisma character doing all the talking), a sneak (stealth and skill to overcome traps), and a scholar (the one that just knows stuff). This is why five to six is generally considered the sweet spot for party size. It allows each player a variety of options when choosing roles and ensures that at least some will be doubled up to account for absenteeism or for those nights when one player is just unlucky or off. With three players, however, the players need to be more conscious of choices in class and specialties. They'll need to pick more flexible classes that cover at least two roles (most can) and build to cover both. Of course that has to mean that the players created their characters together fully aware of the fact that there would only be three players (or at least three regular players).
Kyla, Pete, and Will did not do that. Tathora is a nuke heal cleric, Lop is a wizard with a spell selection geared towards altering the battlefield and knowing stuff rather than blasting large groups of monsters to smithereens, and Hoek is another nuke heal cleric. Fortunately, nuke heal clerics can use spells and native features to do some off-tanking and monster blasting. Clerics of the Life Domain are proficient in heavy armor, so they can have fighter quality ACs. Spiritual Weapon is a handy spell for dishing out single target damage at range. And spirit guardians turns a cleric into a mobile damage over time fireball. In other words, in 5e if you're going to have only three players at least one of them should be playing a cleric. Ideally of the Life Domain or War Domain (both grant proficiency in heavy armor, and the War Domain has the added bonus of proficiency in martial weapons).
The game started with the werewolf pack attack. The party had a short time before the werewolves arrived, do Van Richten gave them some of the treasure from his wagon: a silvered short sword and 20 silvered crossbow bolts. Lop took the short sword, and Hoek took the bolts. They then took shelter in the tower as the pack arrived.
Once again, I reduced the count of monsters to account for a smaller party. This is where the milestone system is helpful. I don't have to account for experience point totals when figuring party level, so it's easier to adjust the difficulty of encounters on the fly by just dropping a few monsters from the total. In this case, the event called for the pack leader, Kiril Stoyanovich, to arrive with six regular werewolves and nine normal wolves. Part of the tension in the encounter was meant to be the werewolves in wolf form moving among the normal wolves. My miniature collection is not robust enough to allow for this and also give me a quick way to differentiate between the two myself without giving the game away to the players. So I opted for my usual transparency, with different miniatures for Kiril, the werewolves, and the normal wolves. I dropped three werewolves and four normal wolves from the final count.
The pack prowled outside the tower among the wagons. Van Richten told the party that the pack knew the basics of the magical defenses on the tower and would not approach. But he was eager to take out the werewolves as servants of Strahd. I actually unconsciously removed one of those defenses, though in retrospect, it was better that I did with a party so heavy on spell casters and so light on physically capable ones. The tower has an effect that prevents anyone but the original builder from casting spells inside or within five feet of it. This would force spellcasters to take riskier positions outside the safety of the tower to be fully effective, forcing more physically able characters to choose between protecting the spellcasters or taking safety in the tower. In this case, the whole party was spellcasters. While I simply forgot about it at the time, as a DM I'm generally against anything that completely shuts down the whole party.
Since they were fighting from the tower door, they were able to bottle-neck the pack pretty well, eliminating some of the threat due to numbers. Of course this meant someone had to take up the role of front-line tank, and this ended up being Hoek (despite the fact that Tathora actually has an AC one higher). This was unfortunate, since Van Richten also had a silvered sword (specifically his sword cane) and could have contributed. Instead, he cast some of the clerical support spells he had prepared. Specifically, he used death ward. This handy little spell lasts eight hours, requires no concentration, and returns the recipient to 1 hit point the first time they are ever reduced to 0 hit points by damage during the duration. Or, if the target would be subjected to an effect that would kill it without damage, that effect is negated. In either case, the spell ends. It is a 4th level spell, and deservedly so. Van Richten was eventually able to cast this on all three of the PCs.
Lop used web in the space between the wagons. It failed to significantly trap anything, but the difficult terrain did force the werewolves to take a round about route, slowing them down. In the meantime, Tathora used spiritual weapon to assist Hoek with the front line of the werewolves, in this case the pack alpha himself. In the meantime, Hoek took advantage of the bottleneck to cast spirit guardians. The only weakness to that spell is that it requires concentration. This mostly matters in two cases: one, the cleric wants to use a buff spell that requires concentration. And two, the cleric paints a target on his back, since concentration can be broken by damage. The werewolves, starting with Kiril Stoyanovich, all focused their attacks on Hoek and tried to break his concentration.
Unfortunately, they failed. Werewolves are Challenge 3, but they aren't really that high for offensive capability. Unlike classic World of Darkness werewolves they don't have uberclaws that do aggravated damage. Instead they are immune to nonmagical weapon attacks that aren't silver. Their bites can inflict lycanthropy, but their attack bonus is only +4 and the attacks only do a base of d8 damage. They can gain a multiattack, but only in hybrid form. The encounter calls for them to mostly remain in wolf form.
After his initial round of web, Lop switched to his favorite standby: Melf's minute meteors. Between those and Tathora and Hoek's attacks, Kiril Stoyanovich opted to flee and fight another day, the way all good named NPCs faced with death would. However, he wasn't quite fast enough to get away. Lop dropped him with a 3rd level magic missile. At this point, the rest of werewolves were pretty badly damaged and fled, but the party managed to drop at least one more. The normal wolves had been decimated, too, and the remainder fled.
At this point, the party had earned another milestone, putting them at level 7. Significant because the spellcasters earned a new spell level: 4th. Once everyone had finished with leveling, we resumed.
Van Richten reiterated his fears for his apprentice. He did advise the PCs to leave her wagon alone. She likes to set traps, and her last trap was explosive. He mentioned her having to regrow her eyebrows. The party opted to investigate the werewolf lair, especially since rumors pointed to the missing children Hoek had been sent to find lead there.
The party traveled to the bridge across the Luna River, then trail blazed through the forest to reach the werewolf lair. Along the way, they came upon a party of 17 Krekzkite peasants out to retrieve their children from the werewolf lair. Tathora managed to convince them to remain behind.
On their way to the lair, Hoek asked Damian Martikov about the histories of the wereravens and werewolves in the region. Damian answered that the wereravens came sometime before Strahd and have always lived in Barovia and quietly opposed Strahd's evil. He said he knows there's nothing mystical about Strahd and the werewolves; the serve the Count because they fear him. This of course got Hoek to concocting zany schemes to get the werewolves on their side when opposing Strahd. Lop and Tathora weren't quite sure about the wisdom of that plan. As werewolves are chaotic evil (generally) and vampires are lawful evil (generally), it would be a little like getting the Joker to fight Lex Luthor. Sure they might kill each other, but the amount of damage they'd cause to everyone else in the mean time would totally outweigh the benefit.
The entrance to werewolf lair was a cave that looked, fittingly enough, like a wolf's maw. The party opted to forego stealth and walked right in, challenging the guards. The guards, of course, weren't terribly intimidated. They raised an alarm, attracting threats from other nearby rooms.
This was going to lead to a long drawn out battle. We had started a little late, to give later players the benefit of the doubt. And leveling up had taken some time. Mainly because of spell selections. So it was late enough that I didn't want to start another long a drawn out battle. So we ended on the cliff hanger of the approaching enemies.
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