Do We Look Like Monsters?

It started in Daggerford, a small river town most caravans go around, on the one night a year strangers come on purpose: the harvest festival. Six travelers were in town that night for their own reasons. A paladin looking for his missing father. A bard looking for a cure. A monk hunting the man who burned down his monastery. Everyone had heard the same story, told two ways depending on who was drinking: a house appears on the hill once or twice a year, and it either swallows you or makes you rich.

Then a little girl named Petra went up the hill to fetch a present for Lucy, and the party went after her. The front door locked behind them. Inside was the Durst house, where dinner was still steaming for eight, ghosts replayed an old affair on the dance floor, and two children had starved in the attic waiting for a mother who never came back. They found the treasure-hunter Khadba dead in a chest. They carried Rose and Thorn's bones down through the cellars on a promise to bury them by flowers. And under the house, in the black water, they met Walter.

Balasar Amberflame, the paladin who wouldn't walk away, died down there standing between the monster and his friend. Petra was taken into the creature's chest, and nobody knows what became of her. The survivors ran, buried the children on a hill outside, and looked up to find they weren't in Daggerford anymore.

This is Barovia. The dead come at six o'clock every night. The burgomaster is dying, the priest's son came home with a bite, and somebody keeps ringing a bell that has been broken for months.