Castle Ravenloft Adventure # 5: "The Final Transformation"

The Final Transformation was an interesting and challenging adventure. The goal is to escort a villager named Kavan through Castle Ravenloft in order to find the lad a cure for the vampirism he is infected with. In game terms, if Kavan is left alone on a tile or is on a tile with a monster, he transforms into a deadly monster. Once the heroes find the Dark Fountain tile, they have to keep Kavan on it for five turns before he's cured, but uncovering that tile also means that additional monsters will appear nearby, placing the heroes in a difficult position.

It took us three tries to get through this one. The first two times we attempted it with three heroes, and the third try we went with a fourth. The advantage of more heroes is that you can move through the five turns on the tile quickly, but the downside is it means even more monsters appear. Our strategy was to always keep one hero on "Kavan duty", staying adjacent to Kavan the whole time and turning over no new tiles so no monsters would appear on his tile (overall, this worked quite well--once in a while an Encounter card would screw stuff up). We had the other heroes turn over tiles but stay within a tile or so of Kavan and his escort, in the hopes that when the Dark Fountain appeared, all the heroes would be able to move quickly to it. Of course, on all of these scenarios you never know how much of success/defeat is due to clever strategy and how much is due to dumb luck--on our second try, we thought we were doing quite well and then drew a bunch of the hardest monsters after uncovering the Dark Fountain and got massacred, while on our third and successful try we were hurting early on but drew easier monsters near the end and, even better, rolled two natural 20s to level characters up and give them extra hit points.