Curse of Strahd D&D DM Screen Review
/The Dungeon master screen for the 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons Campaign book Curse of Strahd is a nice to have piece to the campaign bundle. If you are looking for the review on the campaign book that can be found here!
So what does this screen all contain? The screen is a 4 panel fold out screen made of some thick board that is laminated like the cover of a dungeons and dragons hard cover book. The art on the outside is nothing fantastic and after looking at a couple other designs for the DM screens seems like a lack luster job.
The inside of the 4 panels contain 3 sections. The first being a map of Barovia that goes with the handout map from the campaign book. If you read my review on that map, I said that it would not last very long and break after probably 2 campaign runs through the game. The map on the screen is a nice addition and has a lot of what a DM would need on it. Ironically, 2/3 of the whole screen can be found on that handout, just in a shrunken down form.
The other side is a bunch of the castle Ravenloft maps. This is good cause a general layout makes using dungeon tiles to reveal rooms of the castle very effective. There is a random encounters table for the castle on the side as well.
The final portion is day and night random encounters tables for monsters and events that players will encounter in the campaign. There is also a random encounter name bank for Barovian themed names. Which I didn’t use so much but is nice to have.
Overall the screen is a nice to have but is not really needed as I would expect most of these screens to be. I was happy with it though and would recommend it to newer Dungeon Masters, that are trying to run this campaign as their first.
Final Review Scores:
Entertainment: 3 (Nice to have but is only utilized by the DM)
Theme: 4 (This screen is mapped to the Curse of Strahd campaign)
Replay-ability: 3 (Good for Curse of Strahd, it will last awhile, but rather useless for other campaigns.)
Quality: 4 (Front facing side is rather boring but inside images are sharp and easy to look at)
learn-ability: 2 (Not much reading)
Price: 3 (On the pricey side for what it is but is still affordable)
Total Score 19 - Skip It
I would recommend this if you are running CoS as your first time being a dungeon master, otherwise I would recommend the base DM screen. If you are ok with owning multiple screens the price is affordable enough to get it when the campaign book is on sale.
