Back in Session 0, things went a little bit off the rails (in a good way). As we were talking through character ideas, several players really wanted to be native Barovians, rather than adventurers arriving from outside. I can’t remember exactly what was said to inspire it, but I made them the pitch that ended up becoming the basis for our take on the campaign: what if you’re all reincarnations of key people from Strahd’s pre-curse life? As I had the fortune-teller Madam Eva tell them this session: ‘For a hundred lifetimes you have sought to defeat him, and for a hundred lifetimes, you have failed. But things can change.’
Immediately I knew I wanted a mechanic to track their past lives, to give them something more robust than just randomly triggered memories or a massive lore dump when they arrived at the area most relevant to their past life. I’d recently gotten the Monster of the Week Hunter’s Journal, which features a mechanic for, essentially, self-directed story arcs. I read it for inspiration, but I basically ended up using it wholesale to create these sheets:
The key features of the sheet (and again, loosely adapted/basically stolen from Monster of the Week) is tracker for ‘Story Beats’ and a list of actions, choices, or moments that allow you to mark the tracker. These range from small things like ‘confide in your companions’ to largely external story beats like ‘Find the Sunsword’ to character-defining moments. I wanted a mix of things that the players could control and things they’d have to wait for, with plenty of incentive to discuss or otherwise get involved in one another’s stories.
The tracker can be filled a maximum of three times, and when it fills, the player chooses if they want to learn their predecessor’s Hope, Power, or Fate. I’ll be totally honest that I haven’t decided exactly what each of these will be yet, but at least one of them will be a special ability, and another will be a key piece of information to use to defeat Strahd. I’m leaving it loose so I can adapt to what it seems like the players will most enjoy, and what the story calls for by the time we get there.
When the track fills, they can also rewrite some of the triggers in case there are some they’ve found uninteresting, or if they think their character is shifting direction in some way.
There are a few reasons I’m excited to try this. First, it gives the player agency over how and when to advance their own story. If someone’s feeling impatient or wants the cool abilities immediately, they can push the story as fast as they want. If someone wants to draw things out, that’s in their power, too. I’ve deliberately made many of the prompts quite vague because I want it to be fully in the players’ hands whether they mark the track or not.
If somebody’s spotlighted really heavily for a session or even a couple sessions as they work through a big story moment, naturally they’ll then have to step back a bit as either their pace of advancement slows, or because they’ve run out of advancements to take and their story is done. A player can also pay as much or as little attention to it as they want—the rest of the plot will function either way. (I’ve become really curious about how a sheet like this might work in an open, classic West Marches-style campaign, but that’s for another day…)
The players seemed excited to get these, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how or if they work. They might just prove annoying or distracting, but in that case, we’ll just get rid of them. That’s the beauty, after all, of just playing around.
PS: They did appear, I don’t have anything to say about the Vistani that hasn’t already been said. I was shocked when I actually read their description for the first time. I read up on some great resources from Roma writers, but mostly just focused on depicting them as individuals, not emblems of an entire culture.