Day off in Vallaki

The day was spent in Vallaki, making plans and gathering supplies. In the (very) early morning, Xuza was cooking breakfast when Rictavio, the town half-elf bard who the party had briefly met during the day before, showed up in the kitchen. He prepared an apple and a steak and claimed he would eat them with Gadof Blinsky, the town toymaker. Even if this was a bit odd, Xuza decided to not investigate and let Rictavio go on his way. Later in the morning, more customers arrived at the Inn, including the Watcher brothers Nikolai and Karl, who- against everyone’s wishes- had once again decided to patronize the tavern and deplete its wine supplies.

After breakfast, the Lost Travelers headed out to explore Vallaki. They learned about an upcoming festival of the blazing sun organized by the town Burgomaster to keep the vampires at bay and ensure that “all would be well” in Vallaki. The festival will be held in three days. It will include a tournament with a 1000 gold prize pot. The party decided to enter the tournament. They even secured a few sponsorships from the local stables and smithy. To finish their day of errands, Darren left his swords to be silvered and agreed with Lucian that Geoff would stay for a few days at the church and offer his labor in exchange for shelter. He also learned that the orphan Freek they had rescued would help Lucian at the church.

During the last part of their outing, the party visited the Stockyard, the closest thing to a general store. While there, they noticed that Rictavios carnival wagon seemed to house a tiger. The party spent one more night at the Blue Water Inn, planning to head off to the Wizard of Wines the next day in order to finally figure out what was going on there and help Bart get his business up and running. On the way back from the vineyard, the party would stop by “the house of the dragon” to investigate leads on more information on Strahd since both Urvin and Madam Eva had suggested that there might be something interesting to find. Urvin had also promised the loyalty of the keepers of the feather in exchange for any potential information.