The moon is upside down...curse of strahd

[HolyDraconus]

Right now we are running a homebrew strahd campaign and was looking for monsters to pad out to strahd, who has his cr increased to 17. Suggestions? We are staying on theme.

[Trask]

I'm fairly sure Strahd has vampire wives doesnt he? You could make more use of them, perhaps even give him a vampire family of sons and daughters to serve as a cabal of villains to harass the party. Perhaps one of them has ambitions to usurp Strahd...

Make a Strahd cult, people who worship Strahd and placate him with all kinds of strange and gruesome offerings left at his doorstep. Perhaps a fair young maiden is left tied to a tree near Ravenloft as tribute and the party comes across her.

The spirits of the land enslaved by Strahd's insane will want to rebel, but Strahd has servants with iron brands torturing the fairies and forcing them to serve. The party might hear about this from an old wizened druid, last survivor of his circle.

In the castle itself there could be a wing where the old wizard of Barovia is kept undead and in chains, endlessly toiling to make more scrolls and potions for Strahd. There could be all sorts of horrible stuff in a wizards laboratory. Slimes, animated objects, flesh golems, dragons constructed from the parts of dead creatures.

Basically create more factions and characters within Barovia and let the players interact between them freely, and as they get more involved you'll have a better idea of what areas of the adventure to develop further.

Sorry if any of these ideas are already present in the adventure, I never ran it, only played in it for a little while.

[J-H]

-A group of militarily-organized minotaurs acting as
a) prison guards
b) mercenary enforcers
c) treasure hunters
-A cabal of 3 Warlocks powered by pacts with Strahd. They use hit and run tactics and are built to be hard to pin down, as recurring villains
-One of the Mechanus machines that hunts people who are cheating death (high CR). Problem: It doesn't speak common, so the party might end up fighting it.
-A small horde of orcs that wandered into the mists and emerged in Ravenloft (1 Battlemaster 15-equivalent chief, 4 Battlemaster-10 equivalent subchiefs, 3 shamans (cast as Druid) of varying power, and 20d10 orcs ranging from the base model to up to twice as strong (higher HP, +2 to hit)
-A young Shadow Dragon who's hiding out along the periphery and slowly building a hoard of treasure up, and seeking minions to run errands for him.

[loki_ragnarock]

Maybe while Strahd has been devouring people's life essence, his pet Oblex has been devouring their minds. NPCs they thought they could trust were already eliminated and replaced by the oblex' simulacrum. Suddenly finding your key allies are actually enemies will lead to a tense moment. Even if they find out, even discovering it will hit the party right in the paranoia.

When I went through Curse of Strahd, we had a not insignificant number of characters die over the course of the adventure. Have everyone who ever died come back as an angry ghost that accuses their former comrades of letting them die before attacking them. That'll hit 'em right in the survivor's guilt.

[HolyDraconus]

Thank you all for the ideas. I did do the oblex, and even made its...goo into a sedative. The Frankenstein monster route I'm thinking of next..

[Master O'Laughs]

My DM had mentioned he added Vampiric Mists to the game.

[ImproperJustice]

Get a little Castelvania-ish and add Death, Frankenstein, Medusa, etc... to the roster of villains.

Brinh horror elements from various time and places, due to his more dimension hopping nature.