Kiss And A Slap: Curse of Strahd

TL;DR

This is one of the best adventures for 5th edition D&D. It is a resurrection of a classic and, though a little stiff if you play it straight as written, it only takes a little massaging of the content to make this adventure into a beloved long-term campaign. Worth every penny.

10 Flaws With Curse of Strahd

1. Where do the Barovians get their food? Aside from 1 winery, there are no farms. The vast majority of the land is untame wilderness and ruins claimed by monsters. Additionally, the rivers do not connect, so there is no trade between towns via water trade, and the major bodies of water are either too dangerous for fishing or too far away from a settlement to be a viable fishing site. Hunting is blatant suicide. Does everyone just own a dozen goats? Where do they keep these animals?
2. Why are there still forests standing at all? There are very finite forests in the boundaries of Barovia. Barovia experiences a winter season. Structures in the towns are maintained and rebuilt on occasion. With a theoretically inifnite population with a higher reproductive rate and lumber demand than the forests could ever match... Over a hundred years running in a  vacuum...
3. Where is the iron mine, and how do the miners get there without getting eaten by wolves? Iron rusts. Most tools are made of iron ores. Most tools are ruined by use long before they rust. Nails and screws are disposable iron tools. All of these things are necessary to have any kind of civilization at all. You need iron to have armed guards. You need iron to have wooden houses. You need iron to have anything more advanced than stone age primitivism. 
4. Why do the Vistani stay or keep coming back? Leaving town boundaries is essentially suicide in Barovia. The roads are dense with salivating monstrous threats. The Vistani are disliked by the locals out of jealousy and superstition. The Vistani can leave at any time. Why stay?
5. Why are there so many hags in the shadowfell? It has since of late been decided that the Domains of Dread, Ravenloft among them, are locations in the Shadowfell. Hags are fey creatures, which means they are natives to the feywild. While it is possible to walk from the material plane to either of these other planes, you can't really walk directly between the two. I can see maybe one hag making the trip, but...
6. The horror is hokey. Ok. Now we're down to real complaints. The problem with running horror in D&D is that of power dynamics. Horror stories depend on the subject of the narrative being disempowered. They lack crucial knowledge, equipment, skills, and time to deal with the threats and challenges they are facing. This feeling of disempowered weakness IS fear. In D&D the player characters are granted great powers and resources by their class features as they gain levels. D&D player characters are walking, talking murder machines. The players, thus, are enabled and empowered to achieve great things, even against overwhelming threats. (Keep in mind, this is a game where people have slain ancient dragons at 1st level) This shift in power dynamic makes all of the threats in the setting seem less like threats and more like arbitrary barriers where the numbers are just too big to deal with for now. It isn't scary being attacked by 20 wolves when you can kill 10 on your own, it's just annoying. It isn't a threat, it's extra work. Add on top of this the fact that the players are well removed from the diegetic action, and the fact that the horror themes in this adventure are hopelessly anachronistic, and you'll have a hard time selling the scares as a DM. The few things in the book that lean towards the more mature elements of horror actually wind up coming across as hopelessly depressing, rather than actually scary. (A desperate man trying to sacrifice an ethnic minority to a river god for food is not horror. It's just really sad.)
7. It's the most railroaded sandbox in existence. The book explicitly endorses iron curtain, DM fiat based tactics to force the players to walk the straight and narrow. Any time they wander off the beaten paths, they run into invisible walls of monsters or choking fog. Overwhelming force keeps the players restricted to the adventure scenarios, and prevents them from interacting with the apparent sandbox too much. Why? Because the sandbox is mostly empty! In actuality, the setting is little more than a thin facade meant as a backdrop for a series of small adventures. Here's some examples: * In the town of Vallaki, if the players decide to do anything outside of the narrative adventure set in that location, they will find themselves talking to droll soulless NPCs, attacked by rat swarms, or thrown in jail. * If the players don't see the adventure hook for death house, fog closes in around them and literally forces them in through the door. * The off-road encounter chart is MURDER. Few players are dumb enough to fall for this kind of illusionism, and almost everyone will see it for what it is: The setting is too thin for off-track adventuring, so deadly barriers are erected to prevent players from accidentally walking off the stage. What the developers failed to consider is what these invisible walls imply for the local population of the setting. Under such inhospitable conditions, how does anyone get anything done at all? How do these people survive here?
8. Count Strahd is a dick head. Now, every DM will play this character a little differently, but if you play him as described in the adventure, he's kind of just an obstinate jerk with too much power. There is no reason to truly fear him, so much as there is reason to be wary of him as a hazard. He lacks the manipulative finesse it takes to fill the shoes he's meant to fill. He lacks the charm and finesse of the romantic vampire trope. And furthermore, he lacks the sensibilities of a ruler. Here's some insight: being in charge of a large region with multiple settlements full of people, even if you don't really care for their well being, is a lot of damn work. Most leaders find ways to make that work easier for themselves. The easiest way to make your job easier, is to make sure the people you're in charge of like you. The easiest way to maintain a position of power, is to make sure your enemies like you enough that they don't want you removed. Count Strahd is just a giant zit the players need to pop to escape his realm. I don't know about you, but my Von Zarovich is going to do everything in his power to be the most lovable zit in the multiverse. The original vampire was not an in-your-face blood-drinking monstrosity; it was a creeping, manipulative sort of evil. The vampire symbolizes spousal abuse in its most destructive form. The vampire is a seducer and abuser, a charismatic sociopath, a being that willingly drains the life from everyone who gets too close just to sustain its own sorry existence beyond its time. Strahd should be cold and calculating, and at the same time warm and relatable. He needs to be the kind of person who makes himself necessary to others, then takes advantage of that relationship to its most extreme extent possible. Strahd von Zarovich the military conqueror is not that kind of monster.
9. The maps poster is a useless wall-hanger. Let's not beat around the bush here, the poster is a decorative freebie with the barest hints of being a game piece. These maps are not clear enough to be used for battle grids or for hex crawling. It's a lovely addition, and a nice thing for some teenager to hang in their bedroom, but otherwise rather superfluous, especially if you're an adult with a house who entertains friends and family in a non-D&D related setting.
10. The fog makes no sense. What about my horse? What about the birds that live in the region? Do they migrate? How? With a closed gene pool, how are the stock wildlife subsisting in an inhospitable environment arbitrary overpopulated by predators?

10 Great Features of Curse of Strahd

1. Better titled "Ravenloft's Greatest Hits". This book is a retelling of the classic Ravenloft adventure, but heavily expanded, including the best elements from other publications related to the setting, and also including additional details to expand the setting and update it for a modern audience. It is everything that has ever been good about Ravenloft as an adventure and as a setting, all lumped together into one product, with special features as a bonus. There are few D&D products that match this level of high quality synthesis.
2. The tarokka deck actually matters. In this game, the players have their fortune read via a mysterious pack of cards eerily resembling the tarot in its most occult of interpretations. This card reading actually has major impact on how the adventure will play out, where the players will go, who their friends and enemies will be, and more. While the actual changes are very specific, the way these changes impact play creates a cascading effect through the players, that transforms the experience. As a consequence, no two playthroughs will ever be the same, even if you have nearly identical party composition. Even better, this is a gaming prop that you can actually buy and use as a pack of cards! I have even gone so far as to make a game that you and your players can play using it! I'm a sucker for good game pieces.
3. The adventurers league expeditions match up. In the preceding adventure seasons, the adventurers league adventures were all sited very far away from the matching published adventure. As a consequence, it was a rather broad leap of the imagination to jump from the hardback to the AL and vice-versa. However, with Curse of Strahd, all of the adventures take place in the same contained setting. As a result, it is possible to use the AL expeditions modules as expansion packs for this adventure, making the setting richer and more detailed. Additionally, you can incorporate some of the houserules the AL made for things like madness and the like to bring a finer edge to the idea of horror in your presentation of the game.
4. It's a whole campaign in a book. This thing has content enough to keep players busy from 1st to 10th level. That is months worth of adventuring- and even then, that's only if the players are super keen to level up and kill Strahd ASAP. There's easily enough material here to keep players busy for a year or two, and there are some campaigns that are still going to this day since the adventure's publication date! And even if you did run out of content, there's always AL expeditions you can add, or you can homebrew your own material into the setiing, because...
5. ...There's room to breathe! While I've already complained that the setting is rather thin on details, there is one huge benefit to a sketchy adventure location: it takes very little effort to expand the setting yourself. And this is a lesson I believe they have taken from the development of Lost Mines of Phandelver. Often, with heavily detailed settings like The Forgotten Realms, it can be both overwhelming and stifling to try and fit anything new into the already over-stuffed mix. This place, though, is almost a blank slate! There's excess road that leads to empty space, unnamed hillocks and rivers, the only-mentioned and not represented mad catacombs beneath castle ravenloft, and plenty of empty wilderness. There's room enough to make whole cities full of adventure.
6. It comes bundled with new character options! In one of the appendices, the book lists two new types of material for characters starting out at level 1 for this adventure. First is a new background for a character who is haunted by something from their past, and the second is a whole d100 table of gothic trinkets! Now, even though these are the most minor elements the developers could design for the game, they still had to go to the trouble of playtesting this material before publishing it, and that is a lot of work on top of designing and testing a whole campaign book and its constituent adventures. Also, giving PCs an element that ties their characters directly to an adventure is an amazing way to get player buy-in for that adventure. Even better, this material is generic enough that you can use it in pretty much any campaign you like.
7. The Castle Ravenloft board game is almost entirely compatible with this adventure! If you remove the combat rules for the board game, and replace them with the combat rules for 5e, then use the monster cards to decide the tactics of the matching monster statblocks in the monster manual, you can essentially take any group of players into the eternally shifting catacombs under castle Ravenloft! This adds a whole bunch more content to the game, including all 10 of the catacombs-related adventures that board game was packaged with, the ability to easily construct new adventures in that framework, and the potential for generic dungeon crawling of the catacombs even during Strahd's (temporary) death!
8. The level 1-3 adventure, Death House, which comes in this book as an appendix, is completely modular. (And an instant classic) There's nothing that ties it to the setting of Barovia, and you could just as easily locate the death house in any medievalist setting. You could even handwave the choking fog as a creation of the death house used to entrap people! Personally, I used this as my way of getting the players into the setting. They went into the death house, did the adventure within, and came out in Barovia.
9. The book as art object is phenomenal. I mean, at this point it should just be a given that the production values in these books are unlike anything we've seen before 5th edition. For all their cynical corporate bullshit, the sheer power of the WotC publishing engine is impressive to say the least. Nothing in the garage hobby community could ever hope to compete with the kind of quality products they have been producing. Now, there's always something to be said for minimalism and elegance of design, but it's never quite as flashy as 256 full page bleed prints on gloss finish in hardback.
10. It managed to change my mind. I never liked Ravenloft. I always ignored it as a hokey children's setting for dopes who think count chocula is scary. To me it was like D&D in the Hilarious House of Count Frightenstein. Then I read this hardback just to see if there was any material worth absorbing into my home games, and my mind was blown.