SESSION ONE INTRO
Deep within a land long forsaken, in a castle long avoided, within in a chamber
long hidden, stands a creature long feared. The room we are in is simple, almost
spartan. The walls, floors, and ceiling are made of work stone, but no hangings,
tapestries, or paintings adorn them. No furniture or chairs are laid out for guests. There
is merely a door, a window, and a single shaft of light from the window illuminating a
curved stone basin, atop a single stone column, and within that basin is a still pool of
clear water.
A figure stands above this basin, hands like talons gripping the rim. In the
darkness all that is illuminated is the lower half of their face, of which we can see a grin
affixed to. With a movement of their hand through the still water ripples spread out. The
water becomes dark and murky and within the pool a moving image begins to appear.
We see a city bathed in moonlight. The image pans across several rooftops and streets
before coming to rest facing a large square shaped two-story building with a peaked
roof. A rolling thick fog begins to slowly encapsulate the building.
The figure hovering over the basin takes out an ornamental dagger, the jewels in
the hilt catch the single shaft of light and cast the room in a red glow. Proffering their
wrist above the water, the figures grin stretches into a grotesque parody of delight, the
blade slowly slicing through the ghostly skin allowing the blood, so dark it is nearly
black, to drip into the basin.
Strahd: “And so it begins”
The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts. The most
obvious part was a hollow echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had
been a wind it would have set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks. If there had been a
crowd inside, they would have filled the silence with the clatter and clamor one expects
from a drinking house during the dark hours of the night. If there had been music, but
no, of course there was no music. In fact, there were none of these things, and the
silence remained.
The second silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour,
you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough splintering
barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone hearth. It was inside the
minds of the 4 travelers sleeping in their rooms. Their slumber filled with the silence of
absent dreams. A hollow silence.
The final and most daunting of silences was in the fog whose tendrils climbed
along the walls, that seeped in from beneath the doors, that slithered through window
cracks. The fog, thick and cloying, held the Inn in a suffocating embrace.
Then it receded. Not with the swift retreat of startled mist, but a slow, unnatural
ebb, as if drawn back into an unseen maw. Within its wake, a disquieting absence: the
curve of a shoulder beneath a blanket is gone, replaced by smooth undisturbed linen. In
another room, only the faint scent of sweat lingers where a man once lay. One by one,
the forms stolen by the fog, each chilling disappearance cloaked in impossible quiet.
You all awake lying on the cold damp ground of a path. Confusion and trepidation
courses through each of your bodies as your minds try and understand what happened
and where you now are. As you take in your surroundings you see black pools of water
standing like dark mirrors in and around the muddy roadway. Giant trees loom on both
sides of the road, their branches clawing at a mist. The fog spills out of the forest to
swallow up the road behind you. Ahead, jutting from the impenetrable woods on both
sides of the road, are high stone buttresses looming gray in the fog. Huge iron gates
hang on the stonework. Dew clings with the cold tenacity to the rusted bars. Two
headless statues of armed guardians flank the gate, their heads now lying among the
weeds at their feet.
