Strahd is all kinds of evil and comes up with the idea of playing on the greed of the group for them to steal the Tome, the Holy Symbol and the Sunsword and take them out of Barovia. The group plunders and survives Black House but in the process they attract the attention of Strahd. The house turns out to be the Black House and truly there is a lot of loot to be plundered. They see on The Map this mysterious house that has a lot of loot just ripe for the plundering. OMG that’s an idea! We have a group of adventurers (criminals, let’s face it) that have stolen The Map again. all small people) with the idea that “the Lollipop Guild” are going to save the day would be a good idea but then I realized that the group of guys that play together are going to be more like “Time Bandits”. I thought running a party for dwarves, gnomes and halflings (i.e. Separate questions – I have been working on the story hook aspect and kinda want to deviate from what the book options are. Also, sticking to what I laid out above if the party needed to gain levels (say Level 4 thru 7) what side quests would you recommend to fill in that gap? For the most part am I on the right track to set up this adventure? Suggestions and corrections if I am on the wrong path. Ideally the party would want to do some side quests and gain some levels before they set out for the Tome if that Chapter/Location is geared more for Level 8 characters. Based on the cards drawn example earlier the party could do Black House then go on to do Card 4 – Strahd’s Enemy (Donavich) since that location is more for characters 1-3 and then later on revisit Donavich before moving on to card 5 – Strahd. I assume as DM and storyteller we do not have to do the cards in 1-5 order. More than likely we will start off with the Black House minigame and that is designed to get characters up to about Level 3. If most of the characters are starting off at Level 1 and they decide to go looking for the Tome in Chapter 9 then ideally their character levels should be close to Level 8. I cross-referenced the Chapter/Locations with the suggested Character Level chart and came up with Level 8, 9, 9, 1-3, and 9 for that card order. I drew the 3 of Spades/Swords ‘The Soldier’ C9T6 for the Tome of Strahd, 9 of Diamonds/Coins ‘The Miser’ C4K41for the Holy Symbol, the 5 of Clubs/Stars ‘The Elementalist’ C13K41 for the Sunsword, the King od Diamonds/Coins ‘The Broken One’ for Strahd’s Enemy and the Queen of Clubs/Stars ‘The Raven’ C4K88 for Strahd’s location. I’ve used the Tarokka Cards and drew 5 cards just to set up a story line example. I have been reading through the book Curse of Strahd in preparation for being the DM to the module in a few months.