Five Things You Should Do To Run A Great Curse Of Strahd Campaign

Today on the 15th Of March 2026, Dungeons And Dragons’ Curse Of Strahd turns ten years old. It’s both my favourite module for 5e, and the m...

Today on the 15th Of March 2026, Dungeons And Dragons’ Curse Of Strahd turns ten years old. It’s both my favourite module for 5e, and the most popular to date. (Despite openly promising a terrible time for all the PCs.) I’ve played four campaigns of Curse Of Strahd from different DMs. I’ve run one campaign, and I’m gearing up to run a second. Together with a dozen or so others I’ve experienced the highs and lows of Barovia. If you want to ring in the date by kicking off a gothic horror everyone remembers for years afterwards, here are my recommendations for five things you should do to run a great Curse Of Strahd campaign.

5 Things You Should Do To Run A Great Curse Of Strahd Campaign

Spoiler Warning! This contains some details of the Curse Of Strahd module. If you don’t want to see some of the story details you’re best to avoid this.

1 – Understand The It Is Not Perfect

Curse Of Strahd is a great module. It’s atmospheric, compelling, and it is a great backdrop for characters’ stories. However, some specific parts of it, aren’t very fun to play. There are a few encounters that are flat out unfair in their difficulty. The Death House spectre alone has been the death of many level one PCs, and there’s really no way to avoid having to deal with an incorporeal ghost that can one-shot most classes at the level they run into it. Now, some DMs might argue that the unfairness is part of CoS’s horror theming, which is fine if you have a table to people wanting a death-filled experience, but more often than not I just saw players looking disappointed and frustrated making a character to have them one-tapped thirty minutes into session one.

There are also some choices that have caught some flak over the years since its release. The characterization of the travelling Vistani people as mostly unscrupulous is one of the more common critiques of the module, though subsequent material has tried to redress this a bit more.

As a DM, you shouldn’t feel bound to stick to certain things in the module if you know your players won’t respond well to them. Change things, make things up, don’t feel pressure to stick too close to everything.

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2 – Use The Community Content

Related to the point above, if you want to change or add something to the existing material, but aren’t sure where to start, you are already covered several times over. Curse Of Strahd benefits from a great community, and great creators within it who have done a ton of work building on the original module. Dragnacarta’s Curse Of Strahd Reloaded takes the campaign and does a huge overhaul while keeping it pretty canon friendly. There’s also MandyMod’s Fleshing Out Curse Of Strahd, which extends on each area and gives suggestions to build on it. Both are excellent. You don’t have to use them in their entirity. (Reloaded scolds you for it, but you can get away with picking and choosing as long as you read the whole thing.)

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3 – Make It Scary

Curse Of Strahd is supposed to be scary. And by ‘scary’ I don’t mean ‘kills the PCs every session’. Players will be numb to threats if PCs become just more meat for the grinder. Instead you need to find threats that are more sophisticated. Get players attached to NPCs then have Strahd come after them, show dreadful situations the PCs can’t easily fix, present encounters where the odds are overwhelming and the PCs have to choose between permitting evil to take place, or potentially throwing their lives away to a futile end. Have Strahd try to corrupt characters. Have power come at some dreadful cost to a PC’s integrity, or even their soul. Don’t be afraid to introduce the Dark Gifts from Van Richten’s Guide To Ravenloft, and have dead PCs resurrected with some dread influence pulling their strings.

You don’t want your PCs feeling too safe, but you don’t want them feeling so permanently harassed that there’s no time to process The Horrors™. Some of the best interactions that have come up between party members in games I’ve played have been less about danger, and more about the psychological terror of PCs feeling their idealism slipping, and becoming less themselves than before.

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4 – Allow Strahd To Be The Worst

Strahd is one of D&D’s most iconic villains for good reason. Played well, he’s someone PCs will genuinely loathe. That said, it can be a balancing act to keep everyone engaged. If Strahd immediately cancels the life subscription of any PC who looks at him funny, there’s no tension. Everyone’s just lining up the next character sheet. If he’s too permissive of the party’s nonsense, he becomes a joke all the heroes try to sass every time he appears. The gap between these, when players aren’t sure what action the Vampire Lord will dismiss as a charming quirk, and what will get them fed to zombies in the Ravenloft oubliette, is where the horror is.

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5 – Let Each Of The PCs Shine With Content Tailored To Them

Something I hear a lot when it comes to Curse Of Strahd is ‘Well, Barovia is a different plane, so you can’t make anything personal to the PCs.’ Now I’ve seen plenty of DMs do otherwise, but even if nothing in Barovia relates directly to the characters, it doesn’t mean that you can’t set up situations that will resonate with your PCs and give each of them a good chance to feel important. It’s too easy for the campaign to start feeling like a haunted house attraction where the party just rock up to a new location and start blasting anything that looks at them funny. Taking a bit of time to tie each PC into something happening in Barovia so they all get a little bit of spotlight can make everything feel more interactive.

A few examples:

• If you have a cleric, monk, or paladin with an obvious faith the priest characters like Father Donovich, or Father Lucian, may immediately trust them more. The Abbot might also take interest in them, and maybe even attempt to manipulate them into one of his schemes.
• Elves of any stripe might attract odd looks or comments around Barovia, and the Dusk Elves are likely to take immediate interest in them.
• Characters of noble background may be pulled into the Vallaki political strife, with both the Vallakoviches and Wachters eager to get another of ‘their own social standing’ onside.
• A bard might be asked (or told) to perform at the Festival Of The Blazing Sun.
• Druid or ranger PCs might encounter the feral, filthy druids of Barovia. Are the Barovian wildfolk more forgiving towards other users of nature magic? Or do they view them as a traitor?
• Victor Vallakovich immediately takes to a party wizard, eager to find someone he would consider an ‘intellectual equal’.

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So those are my five things you should do to run a great Curse Of Strahd campaign. I hope these tips will come in handy and that they’ll let you learn from my experiments and mistakes over my many campaigns. If you’ve already run Barovia into the ground, might I suggest taking a look at the sister article to this one, the five best Domains Of Dread.

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