Over a year ago I analyzed how Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince Roleplaying Game is the perfect game system for Curse of Strahd. This modern-classic Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition adventure reimagines the old-school classic I6: Ravenloft as a big sandbox gothic horror campaign. Now I’m turning my theory-crafting into conversion work, because I’ve got a group of players that have no allegiance to campaign or system, and clearly err on the roleplay-heavy side of the spectrum.

This article’s going to cover the initial prep work and cover some game mechanics retooling necessary for the conversion. It assumes passing familiarity with either or both of Tales of Xadia and the Cortex RPG. It definitely presumes you know a lot about Curse of Strahd, since I assume the audience is going to be Dungoen/Game Masters. You’ve been warned, spoilers abound.

Oh yeah! I’ll refer to the DM as “GM” or “Game Moderator”, which is how Cortex Prime handles it. That’s always been my preference, anyway. (Want to get more familiar with Tales of Xadia? Here’s the Rules Primer.) The one major change to the game’s mechanics I’ll be using is the Doom Pool from the Cortex Prime Game Handbook; if you’re not familiar, I’ll explain it a little in a future article. For everything else, refer to Curse of Strahd; I’ll be using the cool Legendary Edition by Beadle & Grimm, but any version will do, since I won’t be referencing anything but the Chapters by number; no specific page numbers will be called out.

Curse of Strahd Resources

Early on, I was considering doing the whole Curse of Strahd → Shadowdark conversion that’s been popularized by Sly Flourish in articles and YouTube videos, as well as LichHouse on YouTube, among other places. I abandoned that because the group didn’t sound particularly interested in old-school style survival horror. Even then, I decided to keep the Shadowdark-style hex map because it’s easier to track movement on 1-mile hexes. Not only that, but it makes my notes easier to organize thanks to numbering the hexes. All that Shadowdark info won’t go to waste!

Bath Imaginable’s Shadowdark-style hex map of Barovia

I use Google Drawings as a sort of “play mat” when we play virtually. The right hand side has a place for me to track the Doom Pool (more on this later), as well as areas to track the current status of each of the Player Characters (current Plot Points and Stress). I also have little templated displays for any notes or GMCs currently in play. (GMCs are Game Moderator Characters; that’s what Cortex calls NPCs.) The blank space on the left is for me to drop in images as needed, like artwork for the current adventure site or for the GMCs currently in the scene.

Curse of Strahd Google Drawings “Playmat”

I’ll be using the following comprehensive Pinterest boards for environment and character art that I drop into that left-hand side. Shout out to arrenkae for compiling and organizing these boards with some really flavorful art.

• Curse of Strahd Environment Art
• Curse of Strahd Character Art

Last but not least, I use a player-friendly map by Melissa Dalton on Shmeppy for when they finally get a map of the region. I’d also use Shmeppy for “battle maps”, but notably that’s less for tactical considerations and more for just illustrating interior scenes, since we won’t be terribly focused on combat. Here’s a screenshot of that:

Barovia Player map in Shmeppy VTT by Melisa Dalton (Mellifera38)

Conversion Guidelines

I already covered all the reasons Tales of Xadia is great as-is, but here’s a very brief summary for people that don’t want to click through:

• The Attributes (Agility, Awareness, Influence, Intellect, Spirit, Strength) and Values (Devotion, Glory, Justice, Liberty, Mastery, Truth) really do a good job of spotlighting the sorts of conflicts and challenges the PCs will face. They answer the questions “What do you do?” and “Why do you do it (that way)?”. Values heavily guide how your character acts through their associated statements, and show how characters grow and change over the course of the campaign through questioning and rewriting those statements at dramatic points.
• In a similar vein, Stress highlights how Tales of Xadia focuses on more than just damage, unlike D&D. Arguably both have exhaustion, too, but Tales also has afraid, angry, insecure, and corruption stress as well. This variety gives a lot of avenues to reveal how your character reacts to the dramatic situation in every scene.
• Contests, Challenges, and Tests offer three different ways to resolve conflict and drama, putting the spotlight on a specific procedure to handle stuff like a one-on-one duel, an argument about beliefs or strategy, sneaking past guards, or fighting mobs of animated skeletons.
• Magic is handled elegantly in Tales of Xadia, and it applies just as easily for D&D-style magic: a spellcaster just needs a Distinction that “unlocks” magic, a Signature Asset, and a few spells that fit nicely under that Signature Asset.
• Corruption as a form of special stress that can be easily tailored to several possible uses in a Curse of Strahd campaign, such as afflictions like lycanthropy or vampirism, Vistani curses, and so on.

That all said, after a little bit more analysis, I figured there’s a few areas worth putting in some real elbow grease. A true one-to-one conversion would be missing some nuance one way or another. As it turned out, these topics were still pretty easy, and I think that shows why this is such a great match up of campaign and game mechanics. Those areas are:

Kin: Tales of Xadia only has a few types of elves and a few country-specific templates for humans. I’ll need to translate some D&D species, but to keep it from getting out of hand, I’m sticking to a shortlist of the classics that fit the Ravenloft tone: humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, aasimar, and tieflings.

Equipment & Magic Items: Several GMs on Reddit and elsewhere talk about how a wine shortage or a larger trade shortage can be a big narrative hook for the PCs. Therefore, while I’m not going to go nuts with gear like D&D normally does, I think there’s a place for some simple equipment and economics that’ll pull those ideas into the game a bit more than you’d see in Tales of Xadia or most Cortex RPG games, and thus will add some mechanical impact to such shortages.

Magic: I’m throwing out Vancian spellcasting entirely and just going to re-skin TOX’s existing magic to D&D’s spell schools and various magical traditions. That’ll capture the differences between wizards, clerics, druids, and so on perfectly well without having to change the mechanics. I’m shooting for minimal work here, but there’s a lot of D&D spells in the module, so it’ll be an interesting needle to thread.

Corrupted Stress: I really want to use Corrupted stress as a sort of “doom spiral” that gets worse as you get closer to being afflicted by something — usually supernatural — that’ll be hard to find a cure for. I’m certainly thinking lycanthropy and vampirism, plus Vistani curses here. Perhaps other things like the powers of the vestiges in the Amber Temple will operate on this notion, too.

Doom Pool: Tales of Xadia uses difficulty dice for tests and a special challenge pool for more “turn-based conflict”, but I don’t see anything in there that impedes my ability to use Cortex‘s Doom Pool mod. It’s sort of like a global indication of danger/threat level, and I think that is a great way to showcase how Strahd’s attention on the PCs waxes and wanes, slowly but surely growing and making everything feel more dire. I do need to pay attention to particulars like challenges and how stress is inflicted on activated hitches, though, so I’ll need to do a little prep-work here to get it right.

Next Time

We’ll dive deeper into each of those categories in the next article. We’ll follow that with how I’m handling wilderness encounters and events, specific adventure sites, and finally Catalysts, where you’ll see Strahd von Zarovich himself!

After that, I’ll cover the PCs and specific session reports. So stay tuned.