Curse of Strahd, Amber Temple

[JungleChicken]

Possible spoiler material if that's important to anyone


Ok, I'm currently playing Curse of Strahd and it's me and 5 others in the party. We just explored the Amber Temple and well, lets just say that every person besides myself decided to go whole hog with making deals for dark gifts and now I'm the only good aligned non horrible kill on sight monstrosity with enormous power. We are making a hasty attempt to take out Strahd before some of the powers fade.

My question is this, we've all kind of agreed that the temple should be nerfed or removed or something. Has anyone attempted this or had a way to approach this. After I play the campaign through I intend to run it for a different group.

[lianightdemon]

I think the temple is fine, if your party was foolish enough to make deals than that is their consequence. Yeah they may have cool powers and you may take down Strahd with much more ease, but now they are horrible abominations and assuming your party returns to their former plane, what will happen than?

They will seriously struggle being allowed in civilized places again, they might be attacked on site and hunted down. In fact your char should question if they are still in fact good aligned they allowed themselves to be tempted by the darkness.

The temple's dark gifts are meant to be offers of power that draw you in but have long term consciences. The dark powers want to turn others to the darkness. When you finish the campaign you should read the ending of the campaign so you can see the effects of defeating Strahd. This campaign is intended to make you feel hopeless, and dark and driven to make terrible deals if it means success, even for horrible consequences.

[Temperjoke]

I think the concept with the temple is okay, the problem comes from looking at the CoS campaign in a vacuum, so to speak. For example, as you mentioned, the Dark Powers gifts come with the price of twisting and corrupting the receiver's body and soul. Now, if you can successfully handle the Temple, then you are likely heading for the end game of that campaign anyways. This means that within the campaign, you likely won't need to interact with regular folks in any sort of social manner, and if you make new characters at the start of a new campaign, well, you got evil powers with no consequences. If you keep the same characters moving into the next campaign, then it's important to remember that they are all now evil monsters (except for the person who took the high road), which should result in every civilized and rational person running screaming in terror, and being hunted by guards and adventurers.

[JungleChicken]

I like both of these insights.
This group is indeed intending to drop characters after the campaign. I think if I run the campaign I may take note of important decisions and if any deals are made form a narrative of what happened to the character after the campaign if they choose to start a new character (possible putting him in the evil bad guy pile for later) or making the horrible maladies and vices at times hard to ignore if they choose pretty much any social interaction with any but the hardiest Borovian

[StoicLeaf]

It really depends on how the DM wants to play it out. I would try to make it as bleak and despairing as possible.

When I ran Strahd, anyone that accepted a dark bargain was, similarly to Strahd, tied to Barovia.
After the party (closely, lost 2) defeated Strahd, they tried leaving Barovia, the two that didn't accept a bargain could pass through the valley gates without a problem.
The last PC, one of the three that accepted a bargain, became restrained by chains of mist. They couldn't free her, only by her moving back towards Barovia did the chains dissipate.
Ultimately they had to leave her there, ranting and cursing; a plaything for Strahd, forever.

[NecroDancer]

The Amber Temple contains one of the strongest treasures in the game, a signed copy of "Snow Dwarf and the Seven Wights"! Luckily my warlock managed to snag a copy.

[Zene]

You could always run it AL-style --max 1 gift per character.

[ruy343]

When you run it, feel free to change it as you see fit. However, remember, that Strahd delights in twisting others towards evil, and exulting in the madness and hopelessness that results from a truly good-hearted person doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons (look at the abbot for a good example of this).

When the players show up at Strahd's home, he might offer those of them that made such pacts (and who would be therefore more likely to accept) a deal: immortality and power such as they have never known. In exchange, they allow him to go free by accepting Strahd's burden upon themselves. Strahd might point out that they could really do the people of these lands some good, and that they'd be allowed to rule it as they saw fit once he leaves Barovia for good. But there's a catch: he can only bestow this power upon one of them. Who should it be?

It's the twistings of character like that which make Strahd such a powerful character in the minds of the players. Anything you could do to encourage that mentality is important.

Also, those dark bargains should have a real price, such as was mentioned above (they can never leave the realm themselves, or they die when Strahd's power dies).

[Madfellow]

The Amber Temple was one of the best sessions I've ever run. I set it up so that in each of the six chambers, the entities there called out to a specific PC to offer their gifts. Just before the session, I sent a PM to the party cleric in which his god commanded him to destroy the evils trapped inside the temple. First chamber they found called to the party wizard, a necromancer. He found the whole prospect suspicious as hell and refused all three offers, letting the cleric destroy them.

He was the only PC to do so. The NECROMANCER.

Next few chambers, the cleric started destroying sarcophagi while his teammates were still contemplating their offers. But when they finally got to his chamber, he had a very tough choice. The fighter aimed his crossbows at one sarcophagus. "If we're on a clock, so are you." The cleric prayed to his deity for guidance. "DESTROY THEM!" Finally, the cleric chose to accept all three offers and renounce his deity. Jaws. Dropped.

[Temperjoke]

The Amber Temple was one of the best sessions I've ever run. I set it up so that in each of the six chambers, the entities there called out to a specific PC to offer their gifts. Just before the session, I sent a PM to Tue party cleric in which his god commanded him to destroy the evils trapped inside the temple. First chamber they found called to the party wizard, a necromancer. He found the whole prospect suspicious as hell and refused all three offers, letting the cleric destroy them.

He was the only PC to do so. The NECROMANCER.

It's because Evil doesn't trust other Evil, while Good underestimates what Evil can/will do.

[thorr-kan]

This is fascinating. Did anything similar to the Amber Temple exist in the 1ED, 2ED, or 3ED versions?

We played the 3ED version, and I don't recall anything like it.

[Madfellow]

This is fascinating. Did anything similar to the Amber Temple exist in the 1ED, 2ED, or 3ED versions?

We played the 3ED version, and I don't recall anything like it.

The 5e version was expanded from a short adventure to more of a fleshed-out campaign, going from level 1 to level 10 or so.