Old Svalich Road

The Night Before Vallaki

I'm always a fan of prophetic dreams, and the night before the PCs leave for Vallaki is a great time to insert some. If you want to plant some plot hints for Vallaki, read the following to one or more of the players (credit to here): (reddit)

A character has a prophetic dream: They see a mansion, a woman lying in bed with what looks like a mannequin, a door with what sounds like a cat scratching on the other side, and a distinctive wedding dress on a display. For a moment, the dress is being worn by a woman with white powdered skin and she looks pleased. This dream gives clues about the Wachters (page 110) and that the wedding gown should be taken and brought to The Abbot (page 155). (reddit)

Encounters on the Road

With all the travel your players will be doing, random encounters should have a heavy presence in your campaign. The road from Barovia to Vallaki especially is long enough that you're quite likely to max out your random encounters for the day (the 12 hours of daytime travel, that is). Remember that the trip itself is only five hours or so (seven if you include the detour to Tser Pool), so they'll likely reach Vallaki before nightfall. (reddit)

The random tables are always fun to roll on, but don't be afraid to just pick an encounter from the list if you think it'd be more interesting. I rolled (and stuck with) the wolf and druid encounters, which I thought nicely set up the (1) Vallaki fear of wolves, and (2) the invasion of the Wizard of Wines winery. (reddit)

At the conclusion of my campaign, I'll likely make a compilation post where I discuss all of the ways I presented the various random encounters in the book. The as-written encounters are fairly barebones, and I tend to prefer giving my encounters some solidity in the world. In the druid encounter, the players encountered the druid and his blights in an abandoned crabapple orchard that had overgrown the road, and which they had decided to investigate during a lunch break. In the wolf encounter, I showed the players a map of the winding road, and gave them thirty seconds to decide which part of the map they wanted to choose to make their stand. These environmentally-based choices make up for a big part of the exploration and strategy of these random encounters, so I'd recommend putting in the work to make them fit the world. (reddit)

To give the journey more depth, I'd also recommend exempting the Ivlis Crossroads location from counting toward your encounters-per-day limit. I took another DM's advice and chose to place the skeletal warrior encounter here. It added a nice bit of atmosphere and really played up the historic and horrific environment of Barovia in the players' minds without really needing any kind of combat. (reddit)