I’m currently in a Curse of Strahd campaign that meets every other Thursday. For those unfamiliar, Curse of Strahd is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure where players come to Barovia to confront Strahd, the ruler of Barovia. When I first started the campaign, I debated writing weekly posts about our sessions, but decided against it. Instead, I wanted to write an occasional post where something big happens in our campaign. In this post, I wanted to recap how our group killed our first vampire.

Our group finished defeating a few black tentacle creatures before reaching this church. As a side note, my character, Levenia, nearly got mauled to death, so I was not looking too well. Our group arrived at this church to lay to rest an NPC’s father. As we arrive, the priest is acting like a creep, and we hear screaming from the floorboards. Our group determines that there is someone underneath and through investigation checks, this screaming is from the priest’s son who was turned into a vampire.

Our group debated for a long time as to what we wanted to do. There were two options that we went back and forth on:

1. Do nothing. Let the vampire trapped underground stay there and hope he doesn’t escape.
2. Kill the vampire and put it out of its misery.

After a long conversation, it was decided to kill the vampire. One member of the party stayed above the floor, while the rest of us went downstairs to confront the vampire with our stakes. The vampire, instead of attacking us, attacked the member of our party who stayed upstairs. She was pulled underneath and bitten by the vampire, which was really bad. If our group didn’t do something, she would have become a vampire that we would have had to kill. Our clerics, fortunately, were able to remove her vampirism. It took five of us to hold on to the stake, and I used a cantrip called Eldritch Blast to magically shove the stake further into the vampire, which dealt the killing blow. Levenia got the killing blow on the vampire, which is easily one of the coolest moments I have ever had playing D&D.

This was easily one of my favorite role-playing sessions I have ever been a part of. The stakes were high (no pun intended), and my character got to do some badass stuff. I’m enjoying Curse of Strahd so far, and I hope that my character gets to live through the adventure, although it’s all up to the roll of the die.