Castle Ravenloft Adventure # 4: "Daylight Assault"

The hardest part of this adventure is interpreting its rules. The premise of this adventure is that the heroes are going to sneak into Strahd's castle during the day and steal as many of his magical treasures as they can. After a certain number of tiles are turned over, the sun sets and the adventure becomes much harder. So far so good, but the difficulty lies in figuring out exactly what the Victory portion of the adventure rules mean when they say the heroes have to escape with 12 "Treasure Cards". At first blush this seems easy enough--treasure cards are what you draw every time you kill a monster. The difficult is in the fact that only about half of the cards in the treasure deck are actual items that heros can carry around; the other half are "fortunes" or "blessings" that are supposed to be played immediately and then discarded. So are heroes supposed to collect twelve cards of any type to when, or twelve items? The former seems to fit the language of the victory condition better, but is a little bit odd because normally many of those cards would be discarded; the latter makes more in-game "sense", as the heroes are trying to steal magical items, but it also makes the adventure much harder to beat as it basically means turning over at least twice as many tiles to find that many items. Another difficulty of interpretation is whether starting treasure cards count towards the limit (every hero is supposed to start with one); for an adventure that is designed for 2-5 players, a group with 5 players would start with 5 treasures, already halfway to the goal.

There's a lot of discussion online about how this adventure is supposed to be run (and good arguments on either side), but no guidance from Wizards of the Coast. The Wife and I decided to go with the twelve treasure cards interpretation (though we agreed that our heroes would receive not receive the special benefits of any fortunes or blessings put in the pool). Operating under this method, the adventure was fairly easy--we succeeded on our first try and had both healing surges left. I'm still not sure which way is the "correct" way, and it's definitely a sign that the adventure book needs some official errata and clarification.