Yeah so, not much to say after that LONG post on the first entry, going minimalist on this one. Ima just leave these here, because, umm... yeah. :-) (mind scrubbing commence in 3...2...1...) EDIT: Just a quick aside, that was a bit of a slower session than what I normally go for, but there are 2 reasons for that. 1) Stranger in a strange land. There was some setup / exposition that needed to happen and couldn't be avoided. Now after seeing these sort of pitiful souls throughout town, the utterly odd behaviour / personalities of the NPCs you met, and -- especially -- after "the kids" your characters have a better understanding that this is a very jacked up place you are in. And 2) Curse of Strahd, by design, is extremely open-ended / free form. You are given latitude to sort of do whatever you want in any order. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. I don't want to put the module on rails, but I will bake in some 'safeguards' from next week on to just make sure we stay at least somewhat on script / message if too much meandering occurs. :-) P.S. In the plus column, you've gone 2 gaming sessions with basically almost no-combat and it hasn't been horrible. That says a lot IMHO about not only the DM but the players as well. Normally a non-combat game can REALLY suck badly. I have wanted to claw my eyes out on more than one occasion in games that become storytelling sessions w/ no combat but that is a pacing issue most of the time. It is again, not my preferred game style to be sure. As I said, I roll with a 50/50 split most of the time but there are times when it will swing heavily one way or another. Me jumping the rail on the entire setting required lots of new story, background, setup. Now you are 'in the zone' so it will swing back towards the middle. Get into a big crypt or a dungeon? It will likely be several sessions of "no talk, more kill". Just kinda the way things roll sometimes.
