The Curse of Strahd Companion is your comprehensive guide to running 5th Edition's greatest and grimmest campaign. The Companion dives through every chapter of Curse of Strahd and incorporates Wyatt Trull's mithral-bestselling module, The Wedding at Ravenloft as the campaign's climax. This chapter overhauls the Amber Temple.
- Genius Loci. The Amber Temple is alive. It watches. It hungers. To step foot into these foul halls is to put one's soul at hazard, for the Amber Temple reaps from good- and neutral-aligned characters. Periodically throughout the chapter, these characters suffer nausea and agony. The spirit offers them a choice: change their alignment to evil or suffer a Death saving throw that cannot be erased by any means whilst in the Temple. These "tolls" become more and more severe and ultimately drive a good- or neutral-aligned character to question what is more important: their morals or their life? Those that stand their ground crumble into bloody viscera that then evaporates into fog—a fog that joins the Mists of Ravenloft forevermore.
- The Ecstasy of Amber. The Companion provides a loose storyline for this sandbox chapter, allowing you to heighten the drama of your campaign as the Amber Temple comes closer and closer to reaping the adventurers' souls. This storyline ends in a climactic Skill Challenge to escape the Amber Temple—much like the Companion's Escaping Death House Skill Challenge. If the adventurers succeed, they may teleport out from the Amber Temple just before the Genius Loci reaps their souls for the third and final time.
- Vestiges Revised. The Amber Temple houses twenty vestiges—far too many. A common complaint is how "noisy" the Temple is, as well as how lackluster or un-gothic the Dark Gifts are. The Companion reduces the vestiges down to nine and overhauls the Dark Gifts they offer into Covenants that provide more roleplaying requirements and better benefits. No longer does a DM have to gate a player from the Vampyr—for simply accepting the Dark Gift turns one into a dhampir who must kill Strahd to gain true vampirism.
- Enemies Revised. The Companion has deleted most enemies from the Amber Temple, which should not be a test of mettle but a test of the soul with its Genius Loci variant in play. Neferon, the flameskulls, the vampire spawn, and the out-of-place death slaad are all gone. The ghasts and spirits have been reduced in number. So late into the campaign, we do not want the adventurers dying to monsters but to each other or the Amber Temple itself. Will the adventurers become evil? Will they turn on those willing to accept a Dark Gift? The conflict should be internal, with the Amber Temple and its vestiges providing the spark.
- Dramatis Personae. A handy guide detailing all characters featured in this chapter of the campaign, with advice and variants.
- Areas of Note. A guide to swiftly running the chapter's areas.
- DM Notes. Notes including but not limited to spicing up the region with valuable roleplay with select NPCs.
- Magic Item Descriptions. Save yourself the time of digging through the Dungeon Master's Guide to determine how the magic items in this chapter work.
- Monster Stats. Time is precious, and matters all the more in combat. Appendix B has the statistics for the NPCs used in this chapter!
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