Sundering of Strahd

00Disclaimers

All character art in this document is AI generated and is a placeholder until real artists are paid to replace it. I do not condone AI art.

This guide holds only what a newcomer to Barovia could learn by walking its roads and asking around. Nothing in it is a secret, and not everything Barovians believe is true.

01What It Is

Sundering of Strahd is a grimdark campaign for levels 1 to 10, planned to run for twenty five to fifty sessions. It began as a rework of the published adventure Curse of Strahd and grew into a setting of its own, with its own history, politics, religions and rules.

Some of the bones are the same. Barovia is still sealed inside deadly Mists, a vampire king still rules it from his castle, the Vistani still travel its roads, and its map still carries names like Vallaki, Krezk and Lake Zarovich. Almost everything built on those bones is new. In the book, Barovia is a small, dying valley of a few frightened villages, inhabited mostly by soulless people and ruled by a lonely count with a handful of servants. Here it is a living nation of nearly two hundred thousand people, with provinces, an economy, guilds, courts and prisons, ruled by an entire society of vampires and shaped by fifty six thousand years of history. Everyone in it is a real person with a real life. Magic is ordinary, and even a farmer may know a few simple spells.

If you have read or played Curse of Strahd, set that knowledge aside. Much of what the book says is different here, and some of it is no longer true at all.

02The Map

A map of Barovia, drawn by the Faculty of Cartographers and Scriveners at Vallaki College.

The map is not available at the start of the campaign. In play, it is usually given to the players a few sessions in, once they have earned Van Richten's trust.

SpoilerSelect to reveal the map

03The Grey Country

The Mists

Barovia is cut off from the rest of the world by a wall of Mist, and whatever drifts into it is almost always swallowed whole. Over the ages it has pulled in ships, caravans, wandering armies, pirates who once sailed between the stars, and creatures that were never human at all. The rare few who survive the crossing find themselves in a land with no road back out.

In time, every one of them becomes Barovian without ever deciding to. They pick up the accent, the songs and the shared sense of enduring something together, until one day they realise they haven't thought about home in years. They haven't forgotten it. It has simply stopped mattering. Over the millennia, nearly every people the Mists have brought in has blurred into a single people, simply called Barovians.

The Sky

Above them hangs a sky that never clears. Day and night both pass beneath the same thick grey overcast, the sun has not been seen in tens of thousands of years, and it never rains. Most Barovians know the sun only from books and old stories, and if you ask one to describe rain, he will describe fog.

The King

For fifty six thousand years, one man has ruled this place: Strahd von Zarovich, a vampire who made himself a god. Most of his people do not worship him. They don't need to, because he is simply a fact, as certain as the overcast. Men have tried to kill him for centuries, and none of them have managed it.

04The Tithe

Strahd rules all of Barovia, and beneath him its provinces are governed by vampires. The living are his subjects, and what they owe him is blood. Every adult pays the tithe once a week. It never kills, and it never takes the last of anyone, but it leaves people drained and weak, sometimes for days. Any vampire may also demand the tithe on sight, whenever they please, which makes it less a tax than a leash.

One person may pay in another's place, so in poorer households families and friends quietly decide each week who bleeds and who is spared. Children are never touched, and any vampire caught feeding on a child does not live long. A Barovian's eighteenth birthday is celebrated with a week of feasting, and then their payments begin.

The Taste of Blood

Blood has a taste, and the taste follows the life. Someone who eats well and sleeps safely has sweet blood. Someone worn down by hunger and hardship tastes of ash. Because poor blood tastes bad, the poor are bled more often to make up the difference, which leaves them poorer and sicker and their blood worse still. The rich are bled least of all.

Strahd wants his kingdom to flourish, because a healthy people makes for a better fed court. That does not make him gentle. Some towns are grim and frightened, and others are surprisingly comfortable, with real festivals, full markets and people who genuinely love their rulers. The horror of Barovia is not that it is chaotic. It is that it works.

05The Vampires

The Ladder

Vampire society is a ladder. At the very top stands Strahd. Beneath him are the five Ascended, the greatest vampires in the land, made personally by him and answerable to no one else. Below them are the true vampires, the aristocracy. Below them are the common vampires, the working class of the undead, and on the lowest rung are the spawn.

One law sits above every other: no vampire can disobey an order from one who stands higher on the ladder. It is not a rule they choose to follow. It is in the blood, and it runs all the way up to Strahd, whose word is absolute.

Politics

In practice, most of what happens between vampires does not run on orders. It runs on favour, gossip, obligation and endless scheming. Immortals get bored, and they fill eternity with balls and banquets, rivalries and alliances, and games of intrigue that can last for centuries. One year a society of vampire merchants spent its entire effort, all its bribes, blackmail and seductions, on moving the country's wool trade from one town to another, simply because they could.

Some vampires belong to noble houses, with family names, crests and long, proud lineages. A noble title brings standing in society rather than any greater power. Most nobles are ordinary vampires who were never raised higher and built a world of their own beneath that ceiling. Vampires can even have children together, though rank is never inherited, so a child born to two ancient aristocrats is still only a common vampire.

Spawn

The spawn are the servants, guards, cooks and labourers of the undead. Being turned into one takes things away. It strips a person of their race and their name, takes part of their mind, and leaves them with broken wings that can never lift them off the ground. From across a street you can always tell a spawn, because every other vampire can fly.

A higher vampire can raise a spawn into a full vampire and give back everything that was taken, but it happens to fewer than one in twenty. Even so, the lowest spawn outranks every living person in the country.

Killing Them

The old stories about killing vampires are mostly true, but how true depends on how high the vampire stands. Sunlight, running water and a stake through the heart will destroy a spawn outright. A common vampire caught in them is stripped of its defences and burns until it dies or is freed. The true vampires suffer the same agony and survive it. The Ascended endure even that, their bodies knitting themselves back together as fast as they burn. And Strahd is beyond all of it. Nothing in the old stories so much as slows him down.

06The Ascended

The five greatest vampires in Barovia, and the most famous figures in the country.

Each of the Ascended carries a gift no lesser vampire has: a blood frenzy, a hunger that radiates outward and drains the life from everything nearby, feeding it back into their own body. They can pull it tight enough to kill, or let it out so faintly that a room merely feels them arrive. Each of the five uses it in their own way.

Selene MarkovaMayor of Vallaki

Selene is the country's most beloved celebrity, radiant and proud of it, with pale skin traced with faint white swirls like moving air and long pale hair that stirs in a wind nobody else can feel. She refuses to drink human blood and feeds openly on livestock instead, and she champions the enslaved elves in public.

She runs the largest and happiest city in the land, with real festivals, swept streets and full markets. If you insult the mayor in a Vallaki tavern, it is the other drinkers who will throw you out.

Vaast the DivineTreasurer of Ravenloft

Vaast governs the capital's treasury, and he is beautiful, vain and cruel. He holds court on the steps of his throne in a garden of marble columns and roses, expects constant praise, curses voices he dislikes into silence, and reshapes faces he finds ugly, whether their owners want it or not. He worships Strahd as a true god.

Unlike the others, Vaast has never learned to switch his frenzy off. It rises and falls with his temper, so when he grows angry the roses around his throne begin to wilt, and his court has learned to read his mood from the flowers. The only creatures he truly loves are his cats, which Strahd enchanted personally so they would be safe from him.

Malakai BlackwoodWarden of the lake

Malakai is an enormous, quiet giant of a man, scarred and heavily muscled, his skin painted with the markings of the giant folk he comes from. He guards the great lake, sailing it in a ship crewed by spawn and keeping its monsters away from the shore.

He is said to be the strongest being in Barovia, and his loyalty to Strahd is total. When he was a boy, a kraken rose from the lake and killed his family, and Strahd dove into the water after him, burning as he went, and brought him out alive.

Elzara VileheartThe Winery

Elzara is a demon who ran away from Hell and arrived in Barovia only four centuries ago. Strahd raised her to the highest rank almost at once, to the outrage of vampires twenty thousand years her senior, and nobody knows why.

She is cheerful, warm and almost always a little drunk, and she feeds on love rather than blood. She runs the Winery in the west, whose vineyards make the blood wine the whole court drinks.

Aethelgard VelvetCourt mage

Aethelgard began life as a beast, a chimera given a mind by a much younger Strahd. Now they are a lion faced figure in crimson robes, with mismatched horns and dragon scales creeping up their neck, and they are the greatest sorcerer in the land after Strahd himself.

For all that, the court still looks down on them for where they came from. They have stood at Strahd's side for longer than most of his court has been alive.

Sun EaterCaptain of the guard

Sun Eater is not one of the five, but every visitor to the castle meets him, because he stands at its door. He is the scarred captain of Strahd's guard, and a great scar runs from the top of his skull, through his ruined left eye and down his throat.

He has not spoken a word in fifty five thousand years. His wife, Baroness Astrid, married him to the scorn of the court, and the two of them talk only in looks and gestures.

07The Living

The living have a ladder of their own, and all of it sits beneath the undead.

Highborn

At the top are the Barovian nobility and the Vistani. The Vistani are not a human people but an elven race with a third eye on the forehead, and they are the most favoured of the living. They pay their tithe only once a month, vampires are ordered to treat them kindly, and no Vistani may ever be turned into a spawn. Everyone knows the stories of what happens to anyone who harms one.

The Vistani live for an extraordinarily long time and travel the country in caravans, settling in camps along the roads. They see beyond the Mists in visions, and they speak about the distant past and the future as though both happened this morning.

Lowborn

Below the Highborn are ordinary Barovians and the strays: the homeless, the street children and the paupers. Most people in the country are Lowborn.

Ashborn

Below them are the outcasts, those deemed unfit for city life and treated as less than human, and the dusk elves. The dusk elves descend from the elves who ruled Barovia before Strahd took it. They are property now, owned by the wealthy, who pay their own tithe through them. They are bought as infants, because blood only grows sweet after a long and comfortable life.

Kept elves wear enchanted collars that make them content, and an elf without a collar in a town is taken for unowned, which usually ends in violence. A collared elf in a rich house may well live more comfortably than a free Barovian who is bled every week, and much of the country's quiet resentment comes from that.

Insurgents

At the very bottom are rebels and the dhampirs. Dhampirs are children of vampire violence, half living and half something else, and they are hunted and killed on sight because of an old prophecy that one of them would lead to Strahd's death.

Monsters

Outside the ladder altogether sit the monsters, the things that go bump in the night. They are not counted as people at all, and everyone treats them with extreme prejudice.

08Faith

Faith is quiet in Barovia. Newcomers bring their own gods with them, but those gods feel distant here, like a voice at the bottom of a well, and talking about them openly is frowned upon. Only two gods truly matter.

The Night Mother

The goddess of the moon and stars stood beside Strahd when the Mists closed in, and hers is the one church that is openly respected. Nearly a quarter of Barovia follows her, essentially every healer in the country is one of her priests, and she is the only god whose existence anyone can point to, because the faint glow of the moon still shows through the overcast at night.

Her five churches each stand beside one of her miracles. At Krezk nothing ever rots, and at her church on Mount Baratok the dead return to life, which is why the roads up the mountain are full of families carrying their dead.

The Morninglord

The Morninglord is a god of the sun, and his worship is the one crime in Barovia punishable by death. His faith is officially described as an evil cult that worships fire, and casting magical sunlight is a capital offence.

Ezra

Alongside these two, a small native faith venerates Ezra, a gentle spirit said to have been a sinless woman who gave herself to the Mists so that Barovians could live safely inside them. Her followers and the Night Mother's do not get along.

09The Dead and the Dark

The Flood

The dead do not rest easily in Barovia. They rise in a slow, endless tide that Barovians call the Flood, and they walk the country roads as commonly as wolves, attacking villages and anyone caught alone after dark. Vampires destroy them on sight.

The Marks

Something else waits in the dark. When a person dies, a voice sometimes speaks to them and offers to bring them back. Those who accept wake up Marked, with a sign on the skin that carries a small dark gift and a permanent price, and everyone in Barovia knows what a Mark means.

The land wears on the mind as well. Horrors, Marks and too many things seen in the dark all take their toll, and a mind worn thin begins to notice things a steady one would not, and to be noticed by them in return.

Places to Avoid

Some places everyone simply avoids. Nobody fishes the great lake, whose water is darker than black and which even vampires will not fly over. Nobody goes to the valley in the far north that the maps mark with a skull, because nobody comes back from it. And nobody walks the forest in the east, where people disappear.

10Ravenloft and the Towns

Ravenloft

The capital is no lonely castle. It is a walled city of breathtaking beauty, built over centuries by immortals with nothing but time, with perfect lawns, clean air, and channels of flowing blood running through its streets like rivers of rubies. It rises in three rings: wealthy human families in the outer ring, the vampire gentry in the inner ring, and the castle above them all.

The Towns

Every town has its own character. Barovia Village is the poorest settlement in the land, ruled by Baroness Astrid, who makes her people miserable for her own amusement. Vallaki, on the shore of the great lake, is Selene's happy city of festivals and swept streets. Vern is a rough town that pays its tithe in brawls instead of bloodletting, its people fighting one another as a matter of pride. Krezk is a walled farming town ringed by fields, famous for the Night Mother's miracle within it.

11Law, Guilds and the Resistance

The Law

Ordinary crime is punished in prison mines scattered across the country, where sentences are served as labour: stealing a loaf costs weeks, and murder costs years. Treason is answered by the Butcher, the court's executioner, who also hunts, clears forests, repairs roads, and throws the finest dinner parties in the capital. The closest thing Barovia has to an army is the Night Guard, volunteers paid by the high courts and posted to towns across the country to hold back the Flood.

The Guilds

Much of daily life runs through the guilds. The mercantile guild sees every sale and shipment in the country and isn't shy about blackmail. The thieves' guild runs Vern. The healers' guild has houses in every city, because healing is honest, respected work, and healthy people mean more blood. The Legend's Guild in Vallaki, run by a heroic vampire paladin of the Night Mother, is the closest thing Barovia has to an adventurers' guild. Beyond the guilds, dozens of smaller factions chase money and status, and most of them have nothing to do with the throne.

The Resistance

Against all of it stands a resistance that is splintered and rough. It ranges from scattered cells passing rumours in the towns to an insurgent in the southern swamps who has buried more than a hundred people in her war on the blood trade, most of them ordinary Barovians who worked for the wrong office. The most famous vampire hunter in the country, Rudolph van Richten, has killed seven vampires in thirty three years, which is more than almost anyone alive.

12The Strangers

The players are not swallowed by the Mists like everyone else. They are sent. The Verdant Keeper, an ancient spirit of the fey, the wild magical folk of the green places beyond the ordinary world, has asked them to check on three guardian spirits, wardens of the land, that it hasn't heard from in some time. It gives them a spark of fey power for the road and a few vague warnings about a dark god and broken wardens, and that is everything it knows. It has no idea what Barovia has become, and nobody is coming to bring the strangers home.

Carrying the spark fills each of them with far more magic than any person should hold, so that even a swordsman finds spells at their fingertips. That makes them powerful in a country where few people are, and noticeable in a country where being noticed is dangerous. A king who has ruled for fifty six thousand years takes an interest in anything new in his kingdom, and a court of bored immortals takes an interest in anything that interests him.

What the strangers do from there is up to them. Barovia is full of people who could become allies, enemies or something more complicated, and the world keeps moving whether they act or not.

13Mechanics

The house rules every player needs before building a character.

The Fey Spark

The Verdant Keeper's boon is carried by the whole party, and nobody else in Barovia has one. Every player character gains the following, whatever their race or class.

• Fey Touched. You gain the Fey Touched feat for free at level 1. Its ability score increase must go to Intelligence.
• Gestalt casting. You gain the spellcasting progression of a full caster on top of your class. This is the spark's main gift, and it is covered in detail below.
• Hit points. Your maximum hit points increase by 20, from the start of the game.

Gestalt Casting

Every character progresses as a full caster in addition to their class, so a fighter gains spell slots and spells at the same rate a wizard would, while keeping everything the fighter class gives.

• Spellcasting ability. Intelligence is your spellcasting ability for spells gained through the spark.
• Any spell list. Spells gained through the spark may be chosen from any class's spell list.
• One pool of slots. If your class already casts spells, the spark's slots are added to your class's pool rather than kept separately. A gestalt fighter should never out cast a gestalt wizard.

High Magic

• Free action casting. Any spell that normally takes an action or a bonus action to cast may be cast as a free action on your turn.
• One leveled spell per turn. You still cannot cast two leveled spells in the same turn, unless you are Overchanneling. Reaction spells work normally.
• Rage. Barbarians can cast spells while raging, but still cannot cast or concentrate on concentration spells during a Rage.
• Action Surge. Action Surge cannot be used to cast spells or cantrips.

Overchanneling

Overchanneling is an optional stance for a character holding only an arcane focus, with no weapon, shield, spellbook, magic item or other object occupying their hands. Such a character may declare that they are Overchanneling and cast two leveled spells that turn.

• Declare first. The declaration is made before resolving the first spell of the turn. You cannot cast one spell normally, see how it goes, and then Overchannel for a second. Once declared, the penalties apply for the whole turn, even if the second spell is never cast.
• The cost. Every spell you cast that turn takes a −2 penalty to spell attack rolls and spell save DCs. Whenever one of those spells rolls dice for an effect such as damage or healing, each die result is reduced by 2, to a minimum of 1: a rolled 6 becomes 4, a rolled 3 becomes 1, and rolls of 1 or 2 stay at 1.
• No penalty otherwise. Holding only a focus and casting normally carries no penalty. The penalties belong to the declaration, not the focus.
• Switching styles. You are not locked into either style. You can spend actions in combat changing equipment and move between conventional casting and Overchanneling as circumstances change.

The People of Barovia

The high magic rules belong to the party alone, but the people of Barovia are not helpless. Every person has a minimum number of hit points for their level, and a level set by who they are rather than by their job, so a common villager is not ten hit points. Everyone has a baseline of two cantrips, five 1st level slots, three 3rd level slots and one 5th level slot, and those trained in magic have more. Slots are not spells, though. Having the capacity does not mean knowing anything to cast with it, and a commoner who knows Fireball is unheard of.

Sanity

Sanity is a seventh ability, alongside Strength and the rest. Every character starts at 20, and the maximum is 30. Resolve and Courage are skills under it, and Sanity itself is used for saving throws where neither skill fits, particularly under overwhelming supernatural dread.

• It moves slowly. Sanity is a long term resource, not something touched every session. It is not raised by Ability Score Improvements. Losing it is far easier than regaining it, though recovering from the thing that caused a loss can win some of it back.
• What it does. Low Sanity does not cause hallucinations, madness or panic. It changes your relationship with things that are genuinely supernatural. A steady mind may see sticks and crows where a fraying one draws the attention of something real.
• Losing control. At very low Sanity, the DM may take over what your character does when the party is not watching.
• Sanity 0. At 0 Sanity, your character can no longer refuse the voice in the dark. They rise into the Flood, and they are gone.

Death and the Marks

When your character dies after failing three death saving throws, something offers to bring them back. You may accept or refuse. Accepting is a full revival, and it leaves a visible Mark somewhere on the body.

• The price. Permanently lose 3 Sanity, and permanently lose 1 from Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma, your choice.
• The gift. Gain a minor boon chosen by the DM and tied to where the Mark appears. A Mark on the forehead might let you cast Dissonant Whispers at 1st level once per day, with no slot and no components.
• The social cost. Everyone in Barovia knows what a Mark means. A forearm can be covered. A forehead cannot.

There is no limit on how many Marks a character can take. The limit is the Sanity they cost. A character killed by the Flood joins it. Within the walls of the Night Mother's church on Mount Baratok, every valid target is subjected to Raise Dead, with all of the spell's usual limits. Undead cannot be raised there, and neither can anyone the Flood has taken.

The Tithe

Every adult pays the tithe, including the party. The standard is once a week for an ordinary adult, and any vampire may also demand it on sight.

• Damage. Paying the tithe deals 3d4 × your character level in typeless damage, which has no damage type.
• Exhaustion. Make a DC 10 Constitution saving throw. On a failure, gain 1 level of exhaustion.
• It never kills. The tithe cannot reduce you below 1 hit point, and exhaustion from it can never go past level 5.
• Substitution. Another character may pay in your place.
• Recovery. Exhaustion recovers at the normal rate, one level per long rest, so a party that keeps meeting vampires can be bled faster than it recovers.