Wizards of the Coast has given us the free adventure Death House to play at home last week as a preview of the Curse of Strahd book coming out this month. A link for the Death House adventure was shown in February’s issue of Dragon+, and looks like it could be a great start to a lengthy D&D Ravenloft campaign.

Death House isn’t the first free adventure for 5th edition that has been shared by WotC, but it is much longer than the other ones. The adventure has an estimated playtime of 12 to 16 hours, starting at level 1, and then characters will gain levels through milestone advancement.

Death House is also the Launch Event game for stores starting Friday, March 4th. I will be volunteering to play for our FLGS (friendly local gaming store) that night, and so I’ve put together a lot of notes to help myself when running the game. I’ve shared with other Dungeon Masters running the game, and now I’m sharing with you:

Running Death House Notes

My notes for running Death House are evolving, and you can add comments. I really do appreciate all the critiques. The notes are geared toward Adventurers League play, but are relevant to anyone preparing to run the adventure. If you plan to play a character in the adventure just skip it until after you play and see what you’ve missed.

As a great benefit, Mike Schley has released the High Resolution (5454 x 7500 pixels) maps for Death House on his website and are free for download:

The adventure is AL Legal, meaning that Player’s characters can play in the adventure, and then the character can be brought in other Organized Play or Home Games (D&D Adventurers League). Death House is also the first AL adventure to allow milestone advancement. Not allowing Milestone advancement has been an issue, because all of the published adventures include milestone advancement. Hopefully this will continue and allow for milestones to be used in Adventurers League games.

There will be a AL player’s guide released this week that will have rules for players and instructions for DMs to run games in the official campaign. Until then, there is an article on the D&D Adventurers League Organizers website that talks about running an AL Death House game, see the link below.

Links

Death House Adventure

[http://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/DND/Curse%20of%20Strahd%20Introductory%20Adventure.pdf]

Running Death House Notes

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s5GIEc5qa9OoDeGQKr7mzOxoXyqlbe9rZ8z6jAv3vGA/edit?usp=sharing]

Mike Schley Death House Map

[http://mikeschley.zenfolio.com/p678546160/h61fadc4d#h61fadc4d]

D&D AL Article

[http://dndadventurersleague.org/death-house-and-the-dd-adventurers-league]

Haunted One Background

[http://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/DND/CharacterBackground_HauntedOne.pdf]