(Audio version at the bottom!)
Preface
I came to the 5th Edition of Dungeons and
Dragons because I wanted to play Curse of Strahd. My previous
experience of D&D had been with Old School systems based on early
versions of the game, with scrappy aesthetics and hacked-together
rules. In contrast, Curse of Strahd, with its blue and purple
cover and its Gothic, bored-looking villain seemed so luxurious I
couldn’t resist.
The adventure is an expansion of the
much-loved Ravenloft module from 1983. It was published by
Wizards of the Coast in 2016, with Chris Perkins leading the design.
Running it for my friends has been a joy. Pre-written adventures give
us something to lean on; the would-be dungeon master can draw support
not only from the text, but from its existing fan base. This is
especially true of Curse of Strahd, which has a wonderfully
creative and generous community. My game wouldn’t have been nearly
as thoughtful or as fun without the guidance freely provided by
designers, artists, and writers such as Mandy Mod, Dragna Carta, and
No Fun Allowed.
I offer this essay in the same spirit.
If you are a Game Master who is running or who plans to run Curse
of Strahd I hope this essay provides a coherent frame for thinking about about the villain on the cover and the plight of his Kingdom. And even if you’re not planning such an endeavour, maybe you will find this to be an interesting exploration of some of the specific horrors lurking beneath the glossy cover of this hugely popular tabletop adventure. Here's the warning up front though; spoilers abound. Players should probably stay away.
Welcome to Barovia
A curse is a problem that follows you
around.
Tabletop role-playing games are not like
novels, or films, or any other form of entertainment that finds you
with its conclusion in place. Any prospective Game Master will be
told early on that their job is to create problems. The solution will
be up to the players. Curse of Strahd is a case in point; the
module is named after its Big Problem, the snare that entraps its
players from their very first session. But the nature of the problem
is never fully detailed. What is the Curse of Strahd?
Here's how it might begin.
You and your friends are passing the
evening at an inn. The lights are bright, the room is warm, the ale
flows freely as does the conversation. Then a man enters. His
footsteps echo through the sudden silence of the room. He walks up to
your party, and hands you a letter.
It is addressed to you, to all of you,
from a man named Kolyan Indirovich. Kolyan Indirovich is the leader
of a village named Barovia which is located in a country of the same
name. He begs your aid. His daughter, Irena, is dying, and his land
is full of treasure. Save the one, and you can have the other. Never
ones to turn down treasure you and your companions leave the firelit
room for the chill of the road.
You don’t walk long before you find
yourselves surrounded by mist. Thick and cold, it creeps through the
trees and onto the road, spreading out behind you until you can’t
see the way you’ve come. And then you’re at a gate; a vast gate
set into cliffs, flanked by massive, headless statues. The gate is
open. At this point you'd be wise to turn back. But the mist is like
a wall behind you, and any time you step into it you grow distressed,
and tired, and disoriented, and you’re turned around until you are
back at that gate. So you walk through, and it shuts behind you. The
road continues, through deep pine woods that swirl with that
ever-present mist. Soon you smell something bad, in the trees.
The body of a man lies dead near the
roadside, possibly surrounded by wolves that you will have to deal
with before you can search him and find a letter. This letter, like
the one you were handed in the inn, also claims to be written by a
man named Kolyan Indirovich. But the tone, the message, and the
handwriting of this letter are quite different. The author isn’t
sending an invitation, he’s sending a warning. His daughter Irena
is dying, he says, and there's no saving her, or any of the people of
doomed Barovia. He begs the recipient of the letter to see that the
gates to the kingdom are shut and barred and that Holy men encircle
the land with symbols of faith so that the horror that has beset
Barovia is contained. Do not come, he begs, leave us all to
die.
This warning letter, you realise, must
be genuine. The other was a forgery, a lure to bring you here. The
matter of the letters is a wonderfully effective introduction this
world, a sinking feeling rendered in pen and ink. Coming to Barovia
was a mistake. But between the mists and the gate there is no going
back. So you follow the road for cold, dark miles until you come to a
miserable village; its shuttered, run down buildings and empty,
pockmarked roads. Faces appear briefly at windows and then disappear.
Everywhere the mist swirls and, carrying through it, the sound of
weeping.
You have come to a broken, spiritless
place. What on earth happened here?
The Wedding
He was an outsider once, too. Strahd Von
Zarovich, a merciless warlord whose armies tore through land after
land and eventually conquered the pretty valley kingdom that he would
name Barovia. Strahd wasn’t the first evil thing that made its home
there. High up in the mountains of Barovia, Strahd learned, were the
ruins of an old site of learning, the Amber Temple, which was filled
with terrible magic. Strahd travelled to the Amber Temple and
encountered the Dark Powers, ancient spirits that offered him a deal
- he could be immortal, if he would bind himself to them. Strahd
accepted the invitation.
And then he settled in to his new
kingdom. He raised Castle Ravenloft on a towering spire of rock, and
moved his family to live with him. He met the beautiful Tatyana, the
daughter of one of the houses that ruled Barovia in the happier times
before Strahd, and she became his obsession. Unsurprisingly, his ardour
was not returned; Tatyana feared the warlord. Instead she fell in
love with his brother, gentle Sergei. The two planned to marry.
The wedding did not go well. On the
morning of the ceremony Strahd killed his brother and drank his
blood. Then he chased Tatyana around Ravenloft, cornering the sobbing
woman in a garden near the Chapel. In his in-game memoir, Strahd
records what happened next:
Finally, in despair, she flung herself
from the walls of Ravenloft, and I watched everything I ever wanted
fall from my grasp forever.
It was a thousand feet through the
mists. No trace of her was ever found.
The accumulated horror was too much for
the guards of Ravenloft, who chased Strahd down and shot him full of
crossbow bolts. But it was too late. When Strahd drank his brother’s
blood the Dark Powers of the land snapped into place around
him. The pact was sealed. Strahd did not die, but rose to kill the
men who killed him, and countless more after.
Such is the birth of a vampire.
The events of that day transformed
Barovia from a picturesque little Kingdom into something wretched.
The mists thickened, and formed a border, and the land became a trap.
Now nobody can pass into Barovia without Strahd’s say-so, and
nobody can leave. At the start of the adventure Strahd has ruled for
four hundred years but nobody in the rest of the world is counting.
Barovia is a place outside of history, it’s as though the whole
country was plucked from the world and dropped into an ocean of mist.
And actually, that's exactly what's happened.
The Prison
The miserable condition of Barovia can
be understood with reference to the wider cosmology of the Forgotten
Realms, the fantasy setting in which most official Dungeons
and Dragons adventures take place. The Dark Powers, those
forces Strahd met at the Amber Temple, with whom he dealt for
immortality, are the vestiges of ancient, evil gods. They exist for
the sole purpose of torturing the wicked. Monstrous humans such as
Strahd von Zarovich are tempted by the Dark Powers into forming pacts
that will transform them from mere villains into “Darklords”. A
Darklord rules a Domain of Dread, a territory that comprises their
fief and their prison. The Domain of a particular Darklord reflects
their own twisted psyche in some way and they cannot escape.
Others are trapped here too, in life and
sometimes in death as well. Certain individuals in these domains,
perhaps because of their importance to the Darklord and their story,
keep on coming back, being reincarnated as a string of identical
unfortunates. They will die and return, and die and return, their
face a constant reminder to the Darklord of what has been lost.
Back to our adventurers in the village
of Barovia, who have met a young woman named Irena Kolyana. Irena is
the daughter of Kolyan Indirovich, whose letter was lost on the road,
she is the girl you thought you were here to rescue. Her father was
right to be worried, she is in terrible danger. For some reason Irena
has drawn the eye of the monster who rules Barovia, who by now has
everyone refers to as “The Devil Strahd.” She has been visited
twice by the fiend already, and bears the wounds on her neck to prove
it. She does not know why he is so fixated on her, and neither does
her family, but you might have guessed by now. Irena is Tatyana come
again.
She isn’t the first. Tatyana haunts
Barovia, her face scattered here and there across the landscape. In
Krezk, a mad Abbot attempts to cure Strahd’s longing by
constructing a facsimile of his lost love out of corpses. In Vallaki
a toymaker has made doll after doll with that same form. And here in
Barovia village, in the shadow of Castle Ravenloft, Irena Kolyana
bears an uncanny resemblance to the bride who plunged from its walls
centuries ago. Our players won’t know about this likeness when they
first meet Irena of course, they probably won’t even have heard of
Tatyana yet, but eventually they will learn of the doomed bride, and
clues scattered throughout the world should forge a connection
between the two. And if they still don’t get it by the time they
reach Castle Ravenloft there is a huge portrait of Tatyana in the
study on the second floor to drive the point home; the women are
identical.
The stubborn presence of a dead woman is
a standard trope of Gothic fiction. Classic texts like Daphne Du
Maurier’s Rebecca and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven
feature dead love interests who will not quit the stage. This idea
has become a standard trope of vampire fiction too. Although she does
not appear in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, the repeating woman
features in a made-for-tv adaptation of that book from 1974, and
after that in the original Ravenloft module of 1983, and in
Francis Ford Coppola’s beautiful 1992 feature film.
So it’s a well-established feature of
the genre, but I find it hard to swallow in this case. Because
really, it seems unfair to Irena, who has to suffer so much, to have
her entire selfhood reduced to an echo. At a few points in Ravenloft,
and in Curse of Strahd, there is the possibility that Tatyana
will surface within Irena and float off happily into the mists with
Sergei, our friend from Barovia village erased as though she were an
unfortunate spin-off. I’m not the only one who struggles with this.
In their own guides to the adventure various GM’s have offered
suggestions of ways to make Irena more than a vessel for Tatyana’s
soul, to give her her own fight and her own character.
I think it might help to shift our
perspective slightly. Looked at mechanically, Irena is just another
chorus of the same song, one of the sad souls fated to rise over and
again in Barovia. But if we look beyond this, to what these women
mean to Strahd, they give us a way of unpicking his curse.
The Women
“Long before Irena Kolyana,”
the book says, “There was a peasant from Berez named Marina.”
Marina died a long time ago, and we know
less about her than the others. From the sparse description of her
encounters with Strahd I wonder if his desire for her was less
one-sided than it was with Tatyana or Irena. We are told that Strahd
"seduced her in the dead of night, and feasted on her
blood.” When the local leaders caught wind of what was
happening they murdered Marina to save her soul. In revenge Strahd
used his powers over the geography of Barovia to swell the river that
ran alongside Berez, drowning it.
Our party will probably travel to Berez
around the middle part of their adventure. They will find it in the
same condition as much of the rest of the world; abandoned, empty,
full of monsters. It is a sad swamp, devoid of warmth or beauty apart
from one peculiar thing. At the edge of this marshy ruin of a village
stands a statue, its pale stone carved in the form of a woman holding
a rose. And carved into the base of the statue, an epitaph:
Marina, Taken by the Mists.
This struck such a chord when I first
read it. This monument was erected by Strahd, who spends nearly all
of his time destroying places and people. But here he has raised a
rather beautiful tribute. Not only that, but he's blamed the loss of
Marina not on the flesh and blood men of Berez who killed her.
Instead, he blames the mists. Here, I think, Strahd demonstrates an
awareness of his predicament that we can learn from.
Where we seek to understand a story of
unreachable women, we can look to the work of David Lynch,
particularly Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. These
films are renowned for being obscure and difficult. But while Lynch
avoids explaining his work and it tends to resist any full
explanation there is widespread consensus by now about their basic structure and the stories they tell.
At the heart of each story is a crime;
our hero has done something dreadful to someone they love. In horror
of their transgression they have built a fantasy around the event,
like a pearl around a piece of grit, and we the viewers are watching
this fantasy. One half of each film follows the protagonist through a
glamourous world in which they are caught up in a mystery alongside
a beautiful woman. In the other part of the film we see glimpses of
the reality below, where the hero is wretched and the woman is dead.
So the story we see is not just fiction in the way that most films
are fiction. It is unreliable even on its own terms, a fantasy
constructed on top of a sinister truth.
Lynch returns to the idea in the most recent series of Twin Peaks,
in which we are told: “We are like the dreamer who dreams and
then lives inside the dream.” As I read the description of the
Darklords and their Domains I was struck by how closely they echo
this notion. As the writers of Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft
would have it, the world that springs up around a Darklord “is
essentially a vast nightmare.”
Within this tangled dream, the women
represent a return of the repressed, that tiny flicker of guilt that
Strahd can never fully own, or ever fully escape. Time and again, the
face of Tatyana floats to the surface of Barovia and time and again
she falls back down, swallowed up in grey, taken by the mists.
And Tatyana isn’t the only one Strahd
cannot see clearly. Throughout the text of the adventure, mirrors are
described as objects of dread. Two great mirrors flank the organ in
the dining room of Castle Ravenloft but these are the only ones left
in place. Every other looking glass in the Castle has been removed
and taken to area K11, the South Archer’s post. I can’t imagine
many parties find themselves in this rather out of the way room but
if they did they would see mirrors stacked in piles, leaning against
the walls, some as tall as men and some small enough to slip into a
pocket. At some point, the book tells us, Strahd had them all taken
from their former locations and placed here.
It implies a horror of reflection that
extends outside Strahd's castle to the rest of his domain. The still
water of Lake Zarovich is described as a “monstrous mirror”. The
black pools that scar the Svalich road are “dark mirrors”
bordered by looming trees. The Burgomaster’s mansion in Vallaki
hides a mirror that can be used to summon a shadowy assassin, and
deep in the ruins of the Amber Temple is a polished wall that
reflects images of the players that wave their arms and scream.
Absent reflections are another classic
feature of vampire stories, but here we see the idea taken further.
Mirrors are not only redundant to Strahd, their overwhelming
malevolence in the kingdom that is an extension of his psyche
suggests that he finds them disturbing. The fearful nature of these
mirrors fits in the wider geography of Barovia, a land of repression
and guilt. They suggest the panic of a man who has completely lost
sight of his humanity, a monster wearing the clothes of a gentleman.
The Mist
So that’s what the women are doing
here, and the specific nature of the torture they represent. If
Strahd manages to capture Irena, as he is trying to do, he plans to
marry her, turn her into a vampire, and then lock her up in the
crypts below Ravenloft. She will be repressed, quite literally,
within in the vast substratum of his castle. Another fearful reminder
neatly stowed away, only to pop up again in a generation or two. But,
if you recall, I didn’t want to make Irena a simple rerun,
reducible to the girl who came before, and the ones who will come
after. To address this, I would like to pour in more mist. Perhaps
Irena is Tatyana, Strahd certainly claims that she is. But perhaps
she is not.
Let me be clear, I think there is great
intrigue and dramatic potential in keeping the straightforward
reincarnation mechanic of the adventure as written; where Irena is
the haunted echo of Tatyana, and the perfect likeness of the two is a
thrilling twist. I also think you could take another interesting
route by simply removing the idea of any spiritual connection between
the women altogether, portraying Strahd not as a pining romantic but
a dangerous maniac ruling a kingdom where anyone’s daughter could
be next.
But I love the uncertain middle ground,
where nobody really knows the fate of Tatyana’s soul, or where she
landed when she fell through the mists, or even what she looked like.
Because really, how can we say that those straw-stuffed dolls in
Vallaki, or a statue carved out of stone, looks exactly like
anyone? How could the corpse bride at Krezk be stitched together out
of parts of dead bodies that are not Irena, or Tatyana for that
matter, and nevertheless be their double? Instead, when my players
find these oddities, I say the face reminds you of someone,
there is a resemblance, she looks a bit like Irena.
There’s only one place where we have
to completely refashion the text to make this work - that painting in
Castle Ravenloft. I’ve known how I was going to play this, from
before my group even started our adventure. The basic idea was given
to me by my nephew Theo, during a long conversation we had over pizza
as I was preparing to run Curse of Strahd, and we’ve just
got to it in my game.
My party were in Castle Ravenloft for
the first time, on an invitation from Strahd. The beast had asked
them to dinner, and given them a long enough leash that they could
explore a little. When they came to that study on the second floor
they didn’t find that portrait of Tatyana that's in the adventure
as written. Instead, they found the vampire Escher, Strahd’s lover
and artist-in-residence, who was listlessly drawing at an eisel, a
pile of discarded canvases behind him. He was working on an image of
a woman. The picture lacked detail. Though the hair and chin and
mouth were fairly established, the nose was a vague gesture, and the
eyes had not even been started. Between glasses of port mixed with
blood, Escher explained gloomily that he had been ordered to abandon
the composition and begin again many times. “My Lord bids
me capture the likeness of a woman,” he said,
“Between you and me, I’m not sure he recalls the original.”
In my game, there are no paintings of
Tatyana. Strahd is the only current resident of Barovia who knew her,
and he can barely remember her face. So maybe her soul is being
endlessly recycled, returning every generation or two in order to
torment the Vampire lord, or maybe Strahd is just an mad man who,
once in a while, fixates on some young beauty and destroys her life.
Even Strahd doesn't know which is true; no wonder he is afraid to
look at himself.
This, I think, is a fitting torment. By
refusing to offer a final word on the nature of Irena and the girls
who came before her, we bewilder the monster. Even if Strahd has
Irena married and vampired and safely buried beneath Castle Ravenloft
he doesn’t really have her, does he?
Does he?
Don’t ask me. Game Masters don’t
write solutions.
Some Solutions
This is my understanding of the curse in
Curse of Strahd. By way of a conclusion let's consider how it
might end.
The path of the players will probably
lead them, sooner or later, to a climactic battle at Castle Ravenloft
where Strahd will hopefully be killed. But in the adventure as
written, it’s not enough to stop him. “Strahd’s destruction
is temporary," the book
says, "for
his curse can’t so easily be ended. The ancient Dark Powers with
which Strahd forged his pact cause the vampire to re-form […] When
Strahd is reborn, the mists surround the land of Barovia once more,
and the Barovians’ hope turns to horrible despair."
There’s that sinking feeling again,
it’s not over.
But I think curses are made to be
broken, so here are a few ways we could try.
Firstly, let’s find Tatyana. The real
Tatyana, who fell into the terrible chasm beneath Castle Ravenloft.
Presumably her bones are still down there, waiting to be discovered.
Maybe the place where she landed has grown beautiful. Some
unconscious impulse of Strahd's imagination might have created a
little grotto of colourful lichen and mushrooms down in that ravine.
Perhaps there is even a beam of sunlight. It would be quite a feat to
get to it. But if you could, and if you could get Strahd down there
too maybe this would bring about some kind of crisis in his deathless
dream. Actually seeing the remains of Tatyana may shock Strahd into
some kind of awareness. If a dead heart can change, maybe this would
do the job.
If that all seems a bit soppy, how about
those Dark Powers? They're the ones holding Strahd in nightmare
stasis, could you convince them to choose someone else instead? I’m
sure there’s at least one character in the party with a hint of the
night about them. Get them to the Amber Temple, and make the offer
explicit; The Dark Powers can make them the ruler of this land if
they're willing to do something dreadful. They will ask the character
to kill an innocent, and drink their blood. After the deed is done
the party would still have to kill Strahd, but his defeat would be
final. We could then pick up the action for one more scene, as our
new player-tyrant comes to their throne, and the beleaguered people
of Barovia turn out to meet their new ruler. As the Darklord is
crowned they look out across their gathered subjects and notice a
face that shouldn't be there, some guard or noble or peasant who
looks just like the innocent NPC they killed.
Either of the options would be a fun way
to make the curse the central problem of the module. But for most of
us, Strahd is the star of the show. I think our initial instincts
here are sound, let's try to kill the fucker.
In 1983’s Ravenloft
the authors describe the dead Strahd as “destroyed
forever” and this is the way I'm running it. It's less gloomy and
less Gothic, but it feels fitting, perhaps even to Strahd himself.
Remember how it all began. At the beginning of this story, our
players were given a letter that claimed to be from Kolyan
Indirovich, but was really from Strahd. I didn't really think
anything of this detail but it might have struck more observant souls
as odd. In their review of Ravenloft the hosts of the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast raise the excellent question;
why? Why would Strahd send a letter at all? At the start of the
adventure Strahd's goal, his one desire, is to capture Irena Kolyana
and turn her into a vampire, and he’s well on his way. Why invite a
pack of meddlesome adventurers into his land, and direct them to the
door of his obsession?
We can finesse the motivation behind the
letter in a thousand ways or leave it a mystery. But since I've spent
4000 words psychoanalysing Strahd von Zarovich, I might as well
suggest a psychological explanation. Because it's really not so
strange to think that this devil might seek his own annihilation.
The
Curse of Strahd works both ways. The vampire afflicts Barovia,
and Barovia afflicts the vampire.
Kill him and have done with it.
