Dream Pastry¶
Description and use¶
Campaign source: Curse of Strahd, original fifth-edition rules. Campaign-specific mechanics below are separate from the revised core wiki.
Morgantha’s addictive pastries, made with children’s bones. 1 GP each. Their trance, duration, and saving throw are printed in chapter 6; eating one is not a normal food or healing-potion effect.
Eating a whole pastry: DC 16 Constitution save or enter a trance for 1d4 + 4 hours, Incapacitated with Speed 0. Taking damage or another creature using an action to shake the eater ends it. Vivid joyful dreams cause a longing to return; no extra addiction save or recovery mechanic is invented.
Campaign context¶
Selected passages from the searchable transcription. The linked PDF controls if OCR punctuation differs.
Morgantha, a night hag in the guise of an old woman, has come to the village from Old Bonegrinder to sell her dream pastries for 1 gp apiece (see chapter 6 for a description of the pastries). She goes from house to house, knocking on doors. Most of the time, no one answers. When someone does, Morgantha tries to peddle her wares, offering customers an escape from the misery and despair of everyday Barovian life. If the characters shadow her for a while, she collects payment from one household in the form of a seven-year-old boy named Lucian Jarov (LG male human noncombatant). Lucian's parents plead with Morgantha not to take their boy, but she snatches the crying child from their grasp, stuffs him in a sack, straps him down to her peddler's cart, and casually makes her way back to Old Bonegrinder. Morgantha recognizes that the characters are strangers and does her best to avoid them. If the characters demand the release of the child, she grudgingly complies, knowing that she can always come back for the boy later. She fights only in self-defense and offers the following information in exchange for her life:
PDF page 49 (printed 48) — source PDF is not included in this player reference.
Using their Change Shape action to look like Barovian women—a frumpy mother and her two homely daughters—the hags snatch children, devour them, and use the windmill's grindstone to crush their little bones into powder. This powder is a key ingredient in the hags' dream pastries, which they offer to Barovian adults who are desperate to escape Strahd's domain.
PDF page 126 (printed 125) — source PDF is not included in this player reference.
Baking in the oven are a dozen dream pastries. Morgantha checks on them every 10 minutes. The staircase curls up to area O2.
PDF page 127 (printed 126) — source PDF is not included in this player reference.
Source pages¶
PDF page 49 (printed 48) — source PDF is not included in this player reference. · PDF page 126 (printed 125) — source PDF is not included in this player reference. · PDF page 127 (printed 126) — source PDF is not included in this player reference. · PDF page 128 (printed 127) — source PDF is not included in this player reference.
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Referenced by campaign pages¶
Import provenance¶
Source: Curse of Strahd (2016, supplied printing). Retained original campaign rules and page references. Imported from the campaign item record.