We're playing every two weeks so next Saturday will be session 1. I'm having fun planning stuff. Figured out a way to combine three of the hooks into Barovia. Also going to take all their items when they wake up on Old Svalich Road.
Then following this guys advice for tweaking Death House.
we ran curse of strahd for our first campaign with my weekly group about 7 years ago, so i'm a bit fuzzy on a lot of the details. our dm also almost always runs his own story, but he really liked the curse of strahd campaign so he ended up mixing his own stuff into it. some of the sessions he'd change like 90% of it all, other sessions it was 90% by the book. i've never gone and looked through the campaign to see what he changed and what he didn't so it's real hard to know how different our experience was from a normal run through.
anyway with that said, that's how we started the campaign, with all of our stuff gone. we woke up in cages being carted through the mists by a group of like... knight cultists? i can't quite remember what they all looked like, with the exception of 2 of them because they ended up being mid-bosses that kind of harried us through our lower levels. one of them ended up being revealed as the antagonist in our vengeance paladin's backstory.
anyway, point is we went through all the time to properly gear ourselves in character creation, then boom! you were all made unconscious through varying ways and as you wake up your range of motion is limited from the shackles around your nearly naked body.
it made those first few sessions really tense. and to answer one of your earlier questions about keeping track of food and inventory, moments like that are really the only time i think worrying about eating and resting is fun. it's part of the story, none of us had the skills, equipment or spells to just make food through a spell or skill check. resting was a big deal because we had nothing and had to seriously prepare our camp to survive the night from some wandering creature.
the death house was also pretty intense. again, i don't know how it's supposed to go, but if i remember correctly we only had 1 combat at the end, the shambling mound i think is what it was? our dm was like, i really should have changed that. i changed a lot of the death house, except that thing and i feel like it was really the only thing that SHOULD have been changed because it's too high a CR for what the book assumes the party level is.
anyway, our death house was a lot of skill checks and a bit of a psychological horror. my character had some elder god stuff happen in his background, so the dm catered the death house to that, so it was a lot of lovecraft type horror where you never SEE anything, really. stuff started kind of normal with sort of an odd after taste and then just gradually (and then more and more quickly) started getting more and more odd and weird where we really just wanted to get out of that place.
TL;DR...
i just sort of mentioned it, but you should absolutely think of tweaking that shambling mound encounter somehow. it's like a cr5 creature for a party that is most likely lvl 2. i know a lot of newcomers who were just completely turned off of dnd altogether because of that fight.
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