Because I could not stop for Death

"You play Conan, I play Gandalf. We team up to fight Dracula." —Jeff Rients, describing D&D.

Strahd’s Black Carriage.

We played through the final session of our Curse of Strahd campaign last weekend. The game was a blast from first to last, and I really wasn’t sure we would survive, even after Strahd finally went down—I kept expecting him to have one last nasty trick to play on us.

Our group was unusual in composition but well balanced. There was Akelic, ”Witness to Uriel,” an Aasimar Paladin; Fidelis Altor, a Warforged Fighter; Wilfan Liadon, a Half-Elf Wizard; and my Human Cleric, Brother Powell. By the end, we had been joined by Kasimir Velikov, a Dusk Elf Wizard who was originally an NPC in the adventure but ended up being run by two different players.

It had been a long time since I had a chance to play in a full-blown campaign and I love being on the other side of the DM screen. I had owned the original TSR module I6 Ravenloft (1983) and ran it for a couple of different groups back in the heady days of High 1e. I have many fond memories of the adventure—I believe my first TPK was in the catacombs of the castle, as the PCs were ambushed by an invisible Strahd and wiped out.

The original Ravenloft contained several important innovations. The amazing isometric map of Castle Ravenloft was maybe the first published D&D castle to actually resemble a “real” gothic castle. An interesting fortune telling mechanism shuffled up the key elements of the adventure, making each run of the module a little different. But maybe its biggest innovation was the embrace of the gothic horror genre, as filtered through popular cinema.

D&D, with its zany eclecticism, had always borrowed heavily from the classic Universal and Hammer horror movies for monsters such as mummies, vampires, and werewolves. These creatures sometimes felt a little incongruous beside the classic pulp or high Tolkien fantasy monsters. But with Ravenloft, suddenly these monsters seemed very much at home in the game. 

And Ravenloft had a great villain in the form of Strahd. By turns cruel and tragic, pathetic and villainous, Strahd incorporates many different takes on Dracula and in some ways anticipates the semi-sympathetic portrayal that Francis Ford Coppola would use in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992).

Ravenloft would prove so popular that it spawned a sequel, Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill (1986) and would eventually be spun off into an entire D&D “world” in 2e. I never dove too deeply into the setting lore around the Domains of Dread, but I did have a few books from the line and they seemed generally well done.

Given my history with Ravenloft, I was looking forward to exploring a new setting with (mostly) fresh eyes. Our DM had played through the Curse of Strahd a couple of times, so he brought a solid understanding of the adventure as well as a lot of enthusiasm for the material. I’ve only had a chance to look at about half of the WotC hardback adventure books, but Curse seems to be one of the strongest. I think it greatly benefits from focusing on PC levels 1–10 rather than the full 15 levels of Out of the Abyss. It tooks us about eight months of weekly Roll20 sessions to play through the adventure, which is long enough to feel substantial, but not so long as to ever feel like a grind.

The nature of Strahd’s demiplane also helps create a “circumscribed sandbox.” You can wander all around the map in any order you like, but you are limited to locations on the map. This creates an open environment with lots of choices but also some hard constraints.

Knowing that we were doing Ravenloft and that I was expected to play a cleric, I was initially stumped as to how to approach my character. I wasn’t interested in a Van Helsing type and I didn’t want to create a character who was too goody-goody, given that he would be thrust into a dark world of gothic horror. (And as it turns out, such a character would have been much too similar to our party’s paladin.)

A couple of Kris Kristofferson songs, "Why Me Lord,” and “Sunday Morning Coming Down” really helped me figure out Brother Powell, a poor, itinerant preacher who was a bit of a con man, a drunk, and a coward, but also someone who was genuinely ashamed of himself and wanted to be a better man.

I was a little inspired by Father Callahan, the priest from Salem’s Lot who doesn’t quite make it through his encounter with a vampire, and I was also thinking about the Reverend Harry Powell, the villain from Night of the Hunter. (However, after re-watching Robert Mitchum in the great 1955 adaptation I realized that the Reverend was much, much darker than I remembered and far darker than I wanted to take my character.)

I also wanted Powell’s god to be a little distant and unknowable, maybe Lawful Neutral or Neutral Good in outlook. Looking through the Forgotten Realms pantheon, I really didn’t find a god that quite fit the bill. They all seemed a little too clearly good or too clearly evil. I finally settled on Ilmater, the Broken God, though at first I was unsatisfied with the choice, as Ilmater is a pretty wholly Lawful Good deity.

But as the game evolved Ilmater turned out to be a much better pick than I realized. In the Realms, the Broken God was the god of “those who suffered, the oppressed, and the persecuted, who offered them relief and support, encouraged them to endure, and who encouraged others to help them, to take their burdens or take their places.” The poor folk of Strahd’s realm were clearly suffering, and Brother Powell gradually came to believe that he had been chosen by the Broken God to ease their burden. 

Brother Powell was loads of fun. The cleric, like all the other 5e classes I’ve played, is pretty versatile without having so many abilities as to be a chore to run. The Brother would sometimes backslide if the pressure got too great, or the group suffered a failure. But by the end, he was all done with running and ready to stand his ground against Strahd.

I won’t say too much more about the campaign to avoid spoiling anything, but it’s got some great set pieces. The Amber Temple is one of the best dungeons I’ve seen in a long time, with some very… intriguing areas. And Castle Ravenloft was every bit as creepy and cool as I remembered.

Our final session began with our band hiking down the old forest road, bound for Castle Ravenloft. Strahd was kind enough to dispatch his own Black Carriage to fetch us to his home, which is a pretty damned boss move. We decided to ride the rest of the way and save our strength.

In the end, our group played smart and we were more than a little lucky. That final battle was a true bitch and had the dice gone cold for us we might have lost a couple of characters or been wiped out by the vampire. Brother Powell survived, even though he was convinced that he was fated to fall to Strahd. All-in-all, this was a great campaign, a worthy successor to the original module, and I’m more than a little sad to have it end.