#I want to love it but GOODNESS WotC has some clunky stuff in their products

[uncleasriel]

Ah, how I wished to get to Krezk! My game fell apart once they got to Vallaki, and it never recovered.

Krezk should be so cool. But like so much of Curse of Strahd, it's overstuffed - and needs some delicate care to not be complete clownshoes. Spoilers below

The Something Blue plot feels like a shoutout to the I6 Ravenloft finale, but infinitely stupider and Deus Ex Machina bullshit. Nuilding up Ireena to be a person with agency constantly being undermined by the world, and then having the Choo-Choo Train of Plot come along and assure that this is TOTALLY a good ending, bro, is pants-on-head idiotic. I was prepared to ignore this SO hard, or - at most - have it be a place of respite where Strahd cannot see Ireena, and the PCs can set up camp here as a safe spot.

For me, Krezk should have been a climax - the Abbot was obviously going to be an angel of Lathander, and everything about this place was going to lead to a duel with fallen angel of the God. The inevitable conflict would be a worthy melodrama, complete with moralizing and fallen heroes made to realize their hubris as they go - a truely bittersweet redemptive moment that I would personally reward with an Angel's Feather as a plot device consumable plot device to get one free spell from the Abbot's spell-list as a final act of penance from the poor deluded fool

The mongelfolk and the Birde though....oh gods, this mess.

The Vasilka as The Bride was a fine shoutout to Bride of Frankenstein, but as-written just feels criminally underdeveloped.The idea of the Wedding Dress for the Abbot's Young Charge seems like a fine plot, and I do have a soft spot for a tragic, innocent monster slowly realizing things her raison d'etre is a cruel lie, but you'd think that such a prominent character in the Abbot's schemes would get at least a bit of a write-up in the Appendix D. Plus the Abbot's "what if I graft on ACTUAL Ireena parts onto the Flesh Golem - maybe Strahd will lvoe her THEN!" seems ridiculous. Give Vasilka some characterization! She seems like a prime candidate for the Player Characters to do good in these benighted lands- rescue her from her exploitative guardian, develop the artificial being into a fully fledged person, wrangle with the cruelties of life in Barovia with a being whose purpose for existence is a cruel joke... it feels like such a waste.

Seriously, who gives a fuck about the Mongrelfolk? They're grotesques and gribblies, thematically speaking, that is to say, horrible creatures created by the Abbot that reflect on just how fallenthis once pure agent of the Morninglord has become. Why dedicate so many pages to the page-count of these horrid little guys to show how Doctor Moreau The Abbot has become? I get the whole 'get the Abbot a sidekick to do his bidding' thing... but why not use the Bride instead? Hell, have the Abbot be dedicated to training her on Wifely Duties (tm) to reinforce the oppressive, sexist Gothic oppression the Abbot manifests?

My own preference is to just make the Bride Vasilka be a kind of parody of the Disney Princess, who's innocence and purity make a stark contrast to the grotesquery of the mongrlfolk. I think it feels fun to have them almost be partial to their strange and morbid princess, whose whipstitched nature they see in themselves, and whose gentle disposition even the weird little guys can love and respect. Plus, once Vasilka is able to communicate with the party, it leads to a funny bit of play - she find everyone with symmetrical faces ugly, since they look so unlike what she thinks 'proper people' like 'her little friends' should. (I also like how, in a happy ending, she 'with enough of her 'sdown to have learned enough that can run the Abbey without the Abbot, letting the PCs create another bastion of hope as they try - however fleetingly - to fix Barovia.

okay so I'm still figuring out some stuff for my mostly-safe-for-work CoS game and I just finished reading the Krezk chapter, and

it's like

it's like a clown car

except all of the clowns are horror tropes

and they're all fighting over each other to get your attention and prove that they're the nastiest boy, but you can barely see into the metaphorical car to begin with because it's absolutely packed

and then you read the "Something Blue" section and the metaphorical car is suddenly hit by a semi that ran off the road

GANG

I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M GONNA DO WITH THIS CHAPTER