Curse of Strahd Custom Dungeon: Tomb of the Sleeping Soldier

I've run the D&D 5e module "Curse of Strahd" three different times. Each time, I had found the base text of the module to be a fine base, but there was a lot that I wanted to change. This dungeon that I made is a small snippet of these changes.

I had wanted the player party to encounter an NPC who could give greater depth to not just Strahd as a character, but the whole of Barovia as well. One who could be an interesting and different ally, who could reinforce the Gothic Horror themes of the module. In my research of the entire Ravenloft setting, I eventually found the character Lyssa von Zarovich. I enjoyed her broad concept, but reworked much of her role and lore to fit my setting and campaigns better. In this case, she ended up becoming the Alucard to Strahd's Dracula.

This dungeon is where the party first meets Lyssa. It is located underneath the town of Vallaki, the entrance hidden beneath the statue of a nameless legendary soldier in the center of the town. Upon solving the puzzle of the secret password the statue needs, it opens to reveal the dungeon.

This map went through several different iterations, with different campaigns playing through different versions as I refined and altered the design in response to player feedback. The goal for each version was the same: To create a dungeon that doubled as both a secret base of operations for Lyssa, and a puzzle challenge to prevent agents of Strahd from finding her.

In it's first iteration, it succeeded in being a secret base, but made little sense as one and did not succeed much on being a puzzle challenge. This map was handmade by me, using a randomly generated dungeon map as a base. As a result, it had many long hallways and strange layout choices that would make more sense in a typical generic D&D dungeon, as opposed to somewhere designed with intent. That said, many of the specific areas within did succeed in their goal of characterizing Lyssa and her interests, and foreshadowing plot points later in the module. With this in mind, I had made two further edits to the dungeon.

The second iteration attempted to compress the winding hallways of the first iteration, while adding more layers to the overall dungeon to allow for traps or puzzles to further push the feeling of a defensive, secretive layer. In this aspect, I had actually overdone it. The dungeon went from one layer to three, with a lot more rooms that weren't really needed or encounters that ate up time. Some of the puzzles added here did succeed in adding depth and interest in the same way as the previous rooms, but not all of them did. A brief iteration after this was drafted, but never tested.

The final iteration of the dungeon has been the most successful. It compressed the dungeon to two layers, the first containing the puzzles and traps, and the second containing the secret base. This was the magic combination that made the dungeon hit what was needed. The puzzles were designed to feel like Lyssa herself made them, drawing from in-universe lore and information to both reward player exploration and give them clues to later revelations.

This dungeon and the Lyssa who would aid my various player parties has been viewed as one of the campaign highlights by these players, and they loved following her plotline through the module. From this dungeon, where she reveals herself to be Strahd's daughter, wounded in a failed confrontation with him, to the choice at the end to allow her to slay Strahd and usurp his rule of Barovia.

It was one of my favorite parts of the campaign to run, and I loved thinking through each room, how players could approach each encounter and even brainstorming different outcomes for their encounters with Lyssa. They could fight her, choose to speak to her, or even just choose to not explore fully and not meet her at all. Even within those, there were options. Fighting Lyssa did not lock the parties into killing her, instead, it was used by Lyssa to judge them as worthy or not. From there, parties could choose to work with her, not trust her, question her further, whatever they decided. If players had decided to kill her, though this had never happened in any of the campaigns I had run, she would have just died and that thread of plot would have been severed. I'm glad that no one chose this option, but I had to keep it in mind because I valued making the actions of my players have consequences and repercussions that they could feel and see constantly. If Lyssa was invulnerable, or just reappeared later, it would diminish the choice that they had in their initial meeting. And though none of the parties chose this option, the existence of it helped to add weight to their choice to journey with her instead.

If I were to run another Curse of Strahd campaign, I'm sure that I would make another revision to this dungeon. Though I am pleased with Version 4, as with all design, there is always more that can be tweaked and changed. But at some point, you've just gotta ship the thing.