Werewolf Den

Once again the team consisted of three players: Kyla, Pete, and Will. So the only characters present for the battle were Hoek, Lop, and Tathora. This time, however, I decided not to pull punches. The encounter called for five werewolves, arriving in waves, and a pack of nine normal wolves.

The werewolves in this encounter are all named but otherwise unremarkable. The two guards in the entry hall are Aziana and Davanka. Immediately past their room is an older werewolf with reduced hit points named Skennis. Beyond that room are caves the werewolves dwell in. There, Bianca, a white haired werewolf that happens to be the mate of Kiril Stoyanovich, is resting. Beyond that is another female werewolf named Wensencia.

The fight began with Aziana and Davanka, with Skennis and his wolf pack arriving almost immediately, and Bianca arriving after a couple of rounds, with Wensencia arriving after completing a task.

One of the more interesting opening moves was made by Tathora. She cast command at 2nd level to target the two initial guards. In the true spirit of fighting canines, she worded her command as "stay." However, unlike in previous editions, 5e provides guidelines for one-word commands, limiting the effects to "approach," "drop," "flee," "grovel," and "halt." Ultimately Kyla settled on having "stay" produce the "halt" effect. While one of the two werewolves made their save, it still produced enough of a delay to help in the early stages.

Both Tathora and Hoek used spirit guardians in this fight. Tathora used it first and killed most of the wolves in Skennis's pack. Damian Martikov actually contributed in this fight, dropping one of the wolves with an attack from his short sword. Still, the whole "painting a target on your back" from spirit guardians drew attacks on Tathora, costing her quite a few hit points, concentration on her spell, and cursing her with lycanthropy.

Hoek tried to use remove curse on a werewolf. The Monster Manual indicates that it can work on those cursed with werewolf lycnathropy, but not on natural born lycnathropes. The adventure hints that these werewolves have been cursed. But it doesn't spell out specifically whether they are or not. I decided that "save or die" effects, which generally are rare for PCs, should also be rare for NPCs and monsters, and ruled that the effect did not work. My ultimate reasoning is that even if these werewolves were cursed and not natural born, they had lived long enough with the curse and accepted it to the point where remove curse would be useless anyways.

Hoek's spirit guardians wasn't quite as effective; he lost concentration sooner. He also ended up contracting werewolf lycanthropy during a round of attacks. His primary source of damage was spiritual weapon, which got almost a full duration of attacks in before the pack was finally subdued.

Tathora also used bane in this battle. It can affect three foes, forcing them to subtract a d4 from attack rolls and saving throws. Unfortunately, against all odds, it only hit one of the three werewolves she targeted. This was towards the end of the battle and only resulted in a few missed attacks.

Still, the large amount of foes with a reduced party count did make it a marathon battle that used up most of our play time. Still, I wanted to further to plot, so after the group took a short rest to heal, they forged deeper into the lair. They eventually found a shrine to the Barovian goddess, Mother Night. There, they found imprisoned children, including one Faerunian boy, Kellen, who has already been cursed with lycanthropy. He was playing with another Blinsky toy: a zombie doll that looked eerily like Tathora--Lop got to hang, so I figured Tathora could do with some zombification in effigy. They also met Zuleika Toranescu.

She had been praying to Mother Night for the intervention of individuals like the party. She was glad that they has killed Kiril and most of his cronies. She agreed to release the children and break the werewolf pack's deal with Strahd if the PCs agreed to search for her mate, Emil, when they finally ventured into the castle. While Hoek tried to get a more aggressive alliance, but Zuleika was reluctant to risk her surviving packmates on an attack on Castle Ravenloft.

Hoek cast remove curse on himself and Kellen. Tathora declined it for the moment, opting to prepare and cast it on herself at the first opportunity.

Otherwise, the party had achieved it's goals at the werewolf lair. Now they need to find a safe place to keep the children, then explore Argynvostholt.