Hello fellow adventurers and dungeon masters.  I wanted to share with you my latest session of curse of strahd. We have been playing it for a long time now but because of resposnibilites and work we dragged it out more than we inteded. Anyway my players are now going to the castle and various things have happened. I have a cleric of kelemvor in my group who has lets say a beef with the vampire hehe. The cleric after krezk had a pvp with strahd and lost his spiritual weapon spell (strahd stole it).  Strahd is w8ing for them disguised as a jugde of kelevor and wants to judge them for their actions in barovia ( trust me a lot of good and evil deeds have occured, usually evil). A jury of ghosts spirits is there to pass judgment and the whole setup looks like the judging of eren yeager in season 2 i think? of attack on titan. After a lot of roleplaying, the rogue realizes that something is wrong with this and decides to not play along with this fiasko. He goes and attacks the judge. Instantly the jury becomes spirit guardians spell lvl 5 and a fight errupts. Between all these the cleric casts his own guardians but lvl 3 so the party still takes dmg and the fight is epic. Strahd raised from the dead 2 previus adventurers who had lost their lives trying to save the party and were looking for revenge. Because my players are overpowerd i added some runes to make it balance . 3 runes. 1 for counterspell which triggered once per turn on a level 3 spell or higher, 1 lighting bolt which triggered if the players were trying to use teleport or try to leave the room. The mage did not cast something to recognize the runes but i told him that they trigger when something spesific happens. They got the point that is futile to try and leave since they will waste time. Lastly one counterspell spesificly for when dispel magic was used. I really enjoyed the encounter especially when the jury became spirit guardians everyone was like wooow. Strahd revealed himself and took what he wanted form the group and they ended up killing their dead comrades. The mood was dark and the cleric got a new debuff. He lost his ability to renew his spells except for when he goes to a church or altar. Next session i have prepared the old bonegrinder but with a twist. they are lvl 9 so i had to buff the encounter a bit.  I will keep posting and really looking forward for feedback. Whoever wishes to use this idea please do. just dont forget to give credit :)

i love this session! i don't know curse of strad that well so i cant really critique you but this sounds awesome. 10/10. would have been fun if there was rune to counter-spell whenever someone casts counter-spell but that might be mean. maybe replace the once a turn counter-spell with that? idk. 

Fun story, and now I can't stop thinking about a new adventure called Cruise of Strahd...