How To Survive Running The Shadows Of Sithicus

To celebrate the first Dungeons & Dragons season, the Season Of Horror, Wizards Of The Coast has pulled out all the stops to celebrate and promote their newest book, Ravenloft: The Horrors Within: a new Actual Play series called Dungeon Masters, new products for Ravenloft such as a new Tarokka deck and Map packs (both physical and digital), and holding a State Of The Game livestream with Dicecream Sandwich. Additionally, they also announced bringing back the D&D Encounters program, an organized play designed to support local gaming stores to celebrate these Seasons.

My game store was one of the stores that received early access to the new Ravenloft book as well as holding the Celebration Event for D&D Encounters, and I served as the organizer for this event. We received an adventure book called “Shadows of Sithicus” with the celebration event adventure that we ran called “Grave Awakenings”. We had a blast running it, with three Dungeon Masters and 14 players. Everyone was having fun and couldn’t stop talking about it!

That said, there were some things I and other event coordinators noticed about the materials we received and if you are planning to run Shadows of Sithicus for your game store or for your own table, here are some things that you may want to be aware of and plan for.

SPOILER WARNING. This article does contain spoilers for the first adventure in the Shadows Of Sithicus book that is used in the Season Of Horror Celebration Event. If you plan to be a player for this, please do not read further!

VIDEO VERSION COMING SOON!

Quick Summary

Here are the highlights of the tips provided in this article:

Review and update the premade character sheets. There is incorrect information on each sheet. Some are not detrimental at all – others are pretty significant.
The physical kit is missing some promised features like 25 character sheets (they only provide 5-10). It also lacks components that Wizards of the Coast did not promise to provide but does make a difference in the game experience such as spell cards, monster stat blocks from the Monster Manual, Magic Item descriptions, and tokens for player characters and monsters (Tip: Use Spellcards.app to make custom sheets for spells, monsters, and magic items, and use candy to represent the monsters on your map!)
There is not a lot of guidance on what to do if a character dies during the major multitable celebration event. My suggestions would be to have back-up pregen character sheets, allow immediate resurrection with a level of Exhaustion, give everyone a Potion Of Healing to begin with, and allow a Short Rest half way through the event.
A reminder that Darkvision still works in magical darkness unless the description text says otherwise. This does come into play in “Grave Awakenings”.

Review & Update The Pregen Character Sheets

If you receive the Physical Kit for your local game store or if you download one of the Ravenloft premade character sheets inspired by the characters in the Actual Play series, Dungeon Masters, at first glance it seems like a good character sheet to give to your players. It has a nice Ravenloft design, it has a lot of helpful information about abilities, etc. However, one of the biggest issues and oversight from Wizards of the Coast is that there is a lot of incorrect information on these premade character sheets. It seems rather odd that the company that is solely responsible for the game, the property, and the YouTube series would have their own product incorrect – but it’s also not the first time something like this has happened, either.

It really feels like someone at Wizards Of The Coast was tasked to take the character sheets of the Dungeon Masters characters, which started out at Level 3, and was tasked to reverse engineer them to make premade character sheets at Level 3 with all material from the new Ravenloft: The Horrors Within book. But they clearly were rushed or failed to check their work because the issues range from complete oversight of sources (such as the Ruined Background for Crem being from The Book Of Many Things) or just flat out wrong information about character abilities (such as Lividity having the wrong Origin Feat for Wayfarer background from the Player’s Handbook). At this point in time, there hasn’t been an explanation given for this.

Now to be fair, some of these decisions may be intentional and does deviate from normal character creation rules to help correspond with the characters from the game. For example, Zora being able to speak Sylvan was something she could do in the show, and it shows up on her character sheet even though this is not usually an option for characters to select. This may have been left in place to keep that cohesiveness about the character rather than being more accurate with character creation rules. But again, this is an assumption and has not been confirmed.

Discord user Sirius Indalo has given a comprehensive list of the issues with the premade character sheets and continues to update them in the official D&D Discord server, inside the #dnd-encounters channel. Because (sadly) the list is pretty long, I’ll post it at the end of this article with a date and timestamp on when this was updated by the time this post was published.

There are two important things to note about this. First, not all of the issues and oversights of the character sheets will derail the fun from the event. When we ran this at my game store at the beginning of June, we did not catch these issues, and everyone still had a great time. In fact, we had a lot of players saying they want to come back for the Encounters Weekly Play and buying the new Ravenloft: The Horrors Within book from the store. That’s not to say that there were a couple of potential issues from the inaccuracies of the character sheets, but I think that it really depends on who is at your table who it is going to bother. Others who have ran this event did share that it did impact their table’s fun, so it is reasonable to be cautious about this. Second, it’s not a bad idea to review the character sheets after looking at the noted issues (again, check the list at the end of the article) and update the character sheets ahead of time for the major issues. For example, you probably won’t need to update it for correct amount of gold pieces that the character starts off with, but the Sorcerer not having Mage Armor and the Cleric’s Searing Dead ability (which is a Level 5 ability, and these premade characters are level 3) is probably one you need to fix.

Print & Plan For Missing Components

The Physical Kit comes with great material. But it is missing a few things that you may want to be aware of, or if you want to run this for an in-person game, here’s what you may want to have ready.

First, check to make sure you have 25 character sheets. The handout that you receive says that you should have 5 packs of 5 character sheets, but our box only came with one pack so we had to print our own (others have also reported this issue as well).

NOTE: After doing an indirect search, apparently there was a note stating that there was a production issue and that only 10 printed character sheets would be provided. As I mentioned, our store only got 5 character sheets and it is not clear if or how the Wizards Play Network communicated this to stores.

Second, the physical kit will not include important assets like spell cards, monster cards, magic item cards, or tokens to use as minis for your game (it does come with maps for each Dungeon Master to use). Wizards of the Coast seem to think that it is fine to expect each player or table to bring a copy of Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual to have at your table to share and refer to constantly during gameplay. I think anyone that has ran a game knows that this can get in the way and that a better experience is to have these things given to you for an adventure that is written out ahead of time. I’m hoping that in the future they will provide these things in the physical kit so that those participating in it will have a better experience.

Luckily, I used Spellcards.app to print off the spell descriptions and monster stat blocks for my tables, but you’ll still have to manually write in spells that are not in the Standard Reference Document (SRD). But having these available to my players and Dungeon Masters proved to improve the experience for them. We also used candy pieces for the player characters and monsters so that way when a player kills a monster, they can savor the deliciousness of it by eating it!

Balancing The Deadliness For Maximizing Fun

Look, they don’t call this “The Season Of Horror” because you’re going to experience bunnies and rainbows. This is a horrific, deadly adventure. There is a good chance that a character may get killed (we had this happened at our event), especially given some of the premade character sheet issues that was discussed earlier. However, you don’t want your players to get their characters killed off in the first encounter or two and have nothing to do after that (and the Shadows Of Sithicus book doesn’t provide any guidance on how to accommodate for this). So here are a few tips on how you can run this adventure and give your players as much opportunity as possible to continue the event without them leaving halfway through the adventure:

Resurrect the character with a level of Exhaustion. If a player’s character gets killed, allow them to resurrect immediately with their full Hit Points (as well as resetting their Ability Scores or Max HP if it was reduced), but they gain a level of Exhaustion. 5.5 rules made this a lot easier, stating that each level of Exhaustion gives the character a -2 to their d20 rolls and losing 5 feet of Speed. It’s a pretty good trade off given the circumstances.
Create more premade characters. If you are someone that enjoys making D&D characters, go ahead and make a Bard College of Spirits and Warlock Undead Patron, both subclasses in the new Ravenloft: The Horrors Within book. This way, a player can jump back in the game with no penalty and they can try out a new character class as well. (This is actually a pretty common experience for an organized play event called EPICS, which is a multftable D&D game experience that this adventure is based off of).
Have each character start off with a Potion of Healing. As mentioned earlier, this is something that the characters should start off with anyways given the Character Creation Guidelines (again, who knows why it wasn’t included), so having one of these at the beginning that they can use during an encounter as a Bonus Action will help their character stay in the game longer. Hell, you could give them a Potion of Greater Healing and that would work well without breaking the game!
Bake in a Short Rest. The adventure does not provide explicit text to say when the players can take a Short Rest to recover Hit Points or resources for their character. If after the second encounter with the Wereravens it’s clear that the characters need a Short Rest to continue the rest of the adventure, go ahead and let them! In fact, before the adventure starts, tell your Dungeon Masters and players that they will get only one Short Rest at some point and no Long Rest to help them plan their decisions accordingly. Nothing is worse than when a player uses up all of their spell slots thinking they may get a Long Rest to recover them and it doesn’t happen!

Brush Up On Darkness & Darkvision

There is an Encounter in the “Grave Awakenings” adventure where the players go up against a band of Wereravens and they are in complete magical darkness. In order to remove the darkness, the players have to figure out that they need to light a few of the lamps in the graveyard to be able to see. Until then, the players are operating in darkness with a few mechanical effects in place.

However, there have been reports that some tables have ruled that Darkvision does not work in magical darkness, which is technically not true. In fact, the Sage Advice Compendium explicitly states that unless the description text says otherwise, Darkvision works in magical darkness. This was also confirmed by the adventure designer, Shawn Merwin, in the D&D Discord server as well when this topic was brought up in the dnd-encounters channel. This is probably a common confusion point for many Dungeon Masters for many reasons, most notably because there is a spell called Darkness that specifically says Darkvision does not work in it. So it makes sense why people may easily overlook this rule accidentally.

Wrap Up

Before you run the “Grave Awakenings” Encounter for your table or game store, you want to make sure you review the premade character sheets, plan for missing materials, come up with a backup plan if a character dies, give ways for the characters to recover Hit Points, and make sure you understand how Darkvision works with magical darkness. Doing these things will increase the changes of reducing the amount of issues you may have at your game. As I mentioned, we didn’t discover some of these issues when we played and our store still had a great and positive experience, but other stores have reported it being an issue for them – so plan accordingly.

Premade Character Sheet Review

As of Wednesday, June 10th, here are the issues with the premade character sheets that have been observed and noted by the D&D Community, thanks to the work of Sirius Indalo, who posted this on the D&D Discord server:

All Characters

Missing Common Magic Item or Potion of Healing that is given as part of the Character Creation guidelines for the event
Equipment doesn’t match the starting options for the chosen Class and Background
Starting gold is wrong

Crem – Reanimator Artificer

His repeating shot light crossbow’s damage die should be a d8, not a d6
His Ruined background is from The Book of Many Things, not from the Player’s Handbook or Ravenloft: The Horrors Within.
It’s not clear which feat was selected for his background. Skilled would explain the 5th skill proficiency, but he’s either missing a 6th skill or 7th tool proficiency
~~Only has 1 of 2 replicated magic items currently created~~ UPDATE: It’s been pointed out that Crem does have both replicated magic items on his character sheet: the Bag of Holding and +1 Repeating Crossbow
Some of his replicated magic item options will require the DMG for details
Reanimated Companion’s Max HP should be 20. Its Dreadful Swipe damage should be 1d4+3
Starting gold should be 29 GP

Eloin – Hollow Warden Ranger

Missing Darkvision from Dhampir
Missing 35 feet of movement from Dhampir (lists 30 feet of movement)
Missing starting gold (23 GP)
Missing a Fighting Style

Lividity – Phantom Rogue

Has the wrong feat for the Wayfarer background (Alert vs. Lucky)
Starting gold should be 24 GP
Base stats aren’t possible with the Wayfarer background
Missing a standard language

Wesley – Grave Domain Cleric

Has Sear Undead, which it shouldn’t have that until level 5 from the base Cleric class features. (This makes many of the encounters a lot easier)
Starting gold should be 21 GP
Base stats aren’t possible (too high)

Zora – Shadow Sorcerer

Does not have Mage Armor as a prepared spell. The initial AC 10 will be rough for this character
Many of her prepared spells will be resisted or worse by the undead in these adventures
Max HP should be 23 with the given stats
Should not have Sorcerous restoration (a level 5 feature)
Staring gold should be 43 GP
Sylvan is not a valid starting language option