ideas for gritty/darksouls feel for Curse of Strahd

[JungleChicken]

I'm a fairly seasoned player (been playing off and on since AD&D) I've run a few games but its never been my strongest suite but I'm playing Curse of Strahd with some friends and I want to run it for a separate group once I am finished. The campaign is reasonably hard but we have some novice players so I suspect that the DM is holding back. I am staying away from the campaign source for now but when I run it I know my group would appreciate an intense experience. They're acquainted with character death so I have no fear about that if that happens.

[Ellora]

I'm currently playing in a Curse of Stradh Adventurer's league game.. our GM does an amazing job.. music playlist, ect..


The "Dark Powers" Adventurer's league ressurection table for under 4th level is a blast. We've had 3 people die so far. They're met by a dark, skeletal figure, who offers them a return.. at a price (it usually features some hideous deformity.. they'res this table). So far we're got a paladin with boils , a warlock covered in dark oily fur, and a halfling rogue with big ape feet (that one I removed with remove curse, on a scroll).

The playthrough's been a blast. We've all witnessed horrors(the poor man strung up in "the marionette" comes to mind - bonus content) . Sometimes we've been able to save the day. Sometimes we havn't (Ireena is now in Stradh's castle, for example). Sometimes we're more concerned with not all running off to howl at the moon and finding the appropriate healer. We tried to clean up Valaki, but .. well.. the Burgomeister is just basically INSANE, so conversations with him to try and win his favour by revealing his enemies are rather pointless (and we all ended up exiled from the town). We've had to run for our lives a few times out there in the ravenloft wilds, too :)

[Draco4472]

If your players are more experienced, I'd first increase the difficulty to something closer to Dark Souls. Think of the Death House, intended for a level 1 party, filled with horrible traps and a BBEG they couldn't hope to beat in its depths, make that the difficulty for the party at all times. In dark souls, running away and coming back when stronger is a perfectly valid option, assuming you can run fast enough and far enough away.

I'd also recommend the options in the DMG to make healing and resting more difficult, and to make use of the sanity score whilst the players come across the many gruesome sights of Barovia, potentially gaining a permanent madness flaw that cannot be removed when they die, dissuading them from dying early on to make use of the Dark Gifts table.

[Ellora]

If your players are more experienced, I'd first increase the difficulty to something closer to Dark Souls. Think of the Death House, intended for a level 1 party, filled with horrible traps and a BBEG they couldn't hope to beat in its depths, make that the difficulty for the party at all times. In dark souls, running away and coming back when stronger is a perfectly valid option, assuming you can run fast enough and far enough away.

I'd also recommend the options in the DMG to make healing and resting more difficult, and to make use of the sanity score whilst the players come across the many gruesome sights of Barovia, potentially gaining a permanent madness flaw that cannot be removed when they die, dissuading them from dying early on to make use of the Dark Gifts table.

That's castle ravenloft , especially if Stradh is played anywhere near his true potential..

[rbstr]

Do you want to make it just punishingly hard or do you want it to be like a Souls game?

Dark Souls-like games aren't simply gritty and hard. There's a re-spawn mechanic. It's designed around your death and the consequences aren't that huge. You get a chance to go back and get your stuff and it doesn't snowball you into nothing if you fail repeatedly. You're, in fact, supposed to die in order to learn from it. You don't start over from scratch.
If you want Souls-like you need to make encounters hard but you need to account for it by dulling the consequences of failure:
It's actually not hard to heal or rest, but it makes the baddies behind you come back. You come right back to life at a previous checkpoint but you have to recover some aspect of your power.

[Zippdementia]

Do you want to make it just punishingly hard or do you want it to be like a Souls game?

Dark Souls-like games aren't simply gritty and hard. There's a re-spawn mechanic. It's designed around your death and the consequences aren't that huge. You get a chance to go back and get your stuff and it doesn't snowball you into nothing if you fail repeatedly. You're, in fact, supposed to die in order to learn from it. You don't start over from scratch.
If you want Souls-like you need to make encounters hard but you need to account for it by dulling the consequences of failure:
It's actually not hard to heal or rest, but it makes the baddies behind you come back. You come right back to life at a previous checkpoint but you have to recover some aspect of your power.

This.

You have to decide whether you want the atompshere of DS or the gameplay of DS (or both). The atmosphere is easily translatable, just use what's in the text and be sure to add lots of your own flavor text. Describe the smell of everything, the eery silences broken by a distant howl or the drip drip of blood nearby. Use the madness rules and remember to mess with their spells (things like they all hear eerie crying when they cast healing, or see a ghastly skeleton hand when they use mage hand).

If it's DS' gameplay you are looking to emulate, then you should use one of the "come back from death" options. A nice one is described above, where they have to make a pact with some minion of death in order to come back, at the slow cost of their humanity, becoming more and more beastial each time.

Heck, in such a campaign, death might not be the real threat but rather the loss of your humanity. Defeating Strahd as such a creature may just make you his next replacement and not be a victory per se. Such an adventure could turn into a hunt for a cure as much as a hunt for Strahd.

[JungleChicken]

I think I may try to make encounters punishing, resting hazardous as party planning and location dictate and sticking to the pact/interest with dark being (maybe Strahd just enjoying the show) but after a certain level when they are a threat telling them that it's all or nothing from that point and see how they feel perhaps

[EvilAnagram]

I'm going to go against the grain and recommend not using madness rules. Madness forces players to alter their role playing in arbitrary way that ends up leading to silly consequences more often than not. It breaks the mood and annoys people.

The key to Gothic horror - the genre that encompasses both CoS and Dark Souls, is atmosphere. Play creepy music, describe horrific events in detail, and ensure that every path leads to ruin. There's a quest to recover stones so a vineyard can grow its crops again. Screw that, the farmer murdered his wife, and when the party confronts him he blames it on the blights that attacked. The priest whose son is a vampire? Send the party to find someone to cure him, only to find the son escaped and the father killed. When what's her face is about to leave, Strahd tears her lover's soul apart. Despair is the key here. Make every step feel like a struggle, and eventual success will feel more meaningful.