The previous session ended with the players in the dungeon of Castle Ravenloft looking at a room that appears to be trapped, and hoping to block that trap by using the doors of the mausoleums in the crypt they passed by. That caused some discussion, because some of the players had a vision of themselves as righteous heroes, and not grave robbers. So the first mausoleum they opened was the last one, whose epitaph was dedicated to three faithful dogs. Who turned out to be faithful beyond their deaths, and the players found themselves in a fight with three death dogs.

As the dogs were cornered in their small 2x2 mausoleum, at first they were a good target for area effects and couldn't even attack all. So I had them spend one round to scatter, after which they posed a much bigger threat. These were elite monsters with a lot of hit points and strong attacks, the main one of which knocked players prone, with a triggered effect allowing another attack if a player tried to stand up next to a dog. So the rogue tried that twice, being knocked down every time, until the knocked down players decided that it would be better to just fight while prone.

The fight took longer than expected due to pure chance: The players rolled low, while the dogs had better luck, with one of them rolling three criticals in a row on the dwarven fighter, who only survived because he had used some self-healing powers and items between those attacks. In the end the players were forced to use most of their daily powers to win.

At that point something happened for the first time in this campaign: The players leveled up in the middle of a dungeon. Different role-playing systems handle that in different ways, some requiring training back in town, some not. In 4E you can level up by just taking a long rest, and with their daily powers gone anyway, the players did just that. Fortunately they had previously identified the only safe spot in the vampire castle to rest in. Normally I like the adventure to end with a level gain, but my Castle Ravenloft version is true to the original insofar as there is a lot of optional content, it isn't a linear adventure where you can predict all the fights the players will do. If they hadn't had the idea to take the doors, they would have left the mausoleums alone, and never gotten the xp from this fight, for example. As the adventure was designed to give enough xp to gain a level if the optional content was skipped, and the players hadn't skipped anything yet, they ended up leveling before the adventure is over. Well, that should help them against the vampire lord Count Strahd von Zarovich.

The last part of this session consisted of the players opening up all the other mausoleum doors. There was one more minor fight against a Poltergeist, they triggered two minor traps, and got some loot in the form of one magical Horned Helmet and a bunch of gold. Then it was getting late, and the players decided to tackle the big trap room in the next session.