From the moment he crept out of his crypt in 1983, Count Strahd von Zarovich has proven to be one of the most enduring characters to spring from the pages of Dungeons & Dragons.  

He was born in 1978, created by Tracy and Laura Hickman to serve as the villain of a homebrew adventure they wrote. They playtested the scenario every Halloween for five years before TSR published it as an official module: I6: Ravenloft. It was an unusual, groundbreaking module for the time.

Ravenloft embraced the aesthetics of gothic horror stories, which immediately put it at odds with the Frazetta-influenced visuals of most D&D modules – Strahd is clearly depicted in a tuxedo while the generic adventurers in Clyde Caldwell’s illustrations look like, well, generic adventurers clad in armor, an unusual juxtaposition. It somehow works, though, anticipating the slipstream mix of historical periods that fantasy art would come to embrace in the years since.

In addition to the trappings, Ravenloft also used a gothic framing for its narrative. Long ago, in the realm of Barovia, Strahd loved a woman named Tatyana, who in turn loved his younger brother Sergei. Blaming her rejection on his age, Strahd resorted to necromancy to restore his youth and, on the day of the wedding between his brother and Tatyana, he murdered Sergei. Tatyana, horrified, took her own life and Strahd, now a vampire, retreated to his castle to brood after killing some traitorous guards who attempted to assassinate their corrupt lord, riddling him with arrows. It doesn’t get more gothic than that.

While that history remains true, the staging of the module changes with each play, as several key factors are determined by the draw of tarot cards. Four of the cards determine locations – of Strahd himself, of his diary (which details the above) and of two powerful magic items that can be his undoing. The fifth card determines one of four potential motivations for the count. The most interesting of these is his desire to use the presence of the players as a way to seduce the burgomaster’s adopted daughter Ireena, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Tatyana.

While these things were innovative, Ravenloft’s reputation as a classic sits squarely on the shoulders of Strahd himself. In many ways, he’s the first genuine Dungeons & Dragons villain. The lich at the heart of Tomb of Horrors, Acererak, is really more of a trap than a character, while the trio of chieftains from the Giants-series of modules – Nosnra, Grugnur and Snurre – are merely big piles of hit points with names. These and others have grown in stature and detail over time and the release of new products, but Strahd is different. He is a fully fleshed out character from the start. He has an agenda. And, perhaps most importantly, he is present throughout the module, taunting the players and testing their mettle in skirmishes and feints, rather than waiting for them in the final room of a dungeon.

Part of Strahd’s character is conveyed in an unlikely way: mechanically. Up to this point, player characters and monsters were built out of similar but distinct systems. Strahd marks the first time in Dungeons & Dragons when the two systems are merged. He is a monster, with the vampire’s full suite of powers, but he is also a 10th level magic-user with the accompanying selection of spells. The combination makes him a formidable opponent, but it also imbues him with a sense of history and personality that raw stats confer to player characters.

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Ravenloft proved so popular that TSR commissioned a sequel, module I10: Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill, in 1986. Though attributed to the Hickmans, it was actually completed after Tracy left TSR, with the writing done in sections by Zeb Cook, Jeff Grubb, Harold Johnson and Douglas Niles. Unlike the elegant straightforwardness of Ravenloft, Gryphon Hill is a confusing mess, with parallel realities, a machine that swaps people’s personalities and two Strahd’s (one being a sort of heroic, Frankenstein-esque alchemist and not a vampire at all?). I’ve never quite grasped the module on its own terms, let alone the option to muddy the waters further by running it in conjunction with the original (three Strahds?).

Despite its failings, Gryphon Hill expands the gothic world surrounding Strahd, introduces a certain lich named Azalin and provides the rough outline of what would eventually become the Ravenloft campaign setting.

The Ravenloft campaign setting (1990) is outside the scope of this essay, but suffice it to say that there are Dark Powers who, using magical mists, spirit away evil people and their lands to add them to a cursed collection of interconnected domains of dread. These evil souls become Darklords and, though powerful, they suffer curses that reflect their evil deeds back at them forever. Strahd was the first Darklord, with the mists claiming him and Barovia shortly after Tatyana’s suicide. The Dark Powers gifted him with complete dominion over Barovia, but once a generation, Strahd meets a woman who appears to be the reincarnation of Tatyana and history repeats. He languishes there still.

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In practical terms, Strahd is both central to the Ravenloft campaign setting, but also removed from it. He is the subject of several Ravenloft novels and his presence is felt all over the support materials, but he is far too powerful and important to the setting to be challenged by a party of adventurers that might have once bested him in the original module.

That didn’t stop TSR from reprinting the original module as House of Strahd in 1993, updating the source material to take into account Ravenloft’s unique rules while adjusting it to be in line with Strahd’s new power level as a Darklord. The result is strange. The once cutting edge module now felt strangely old fashioned among the more narrative and exploration-focused Ravenloft material. Strahd had grown too large for his once mesmerizing and mysterious castle.    

In 1999, TSR issued a Silver Anniversary version of I6, which was a straight update of the module to 2E rules without the additions of the Ravenloft campaign setting. In 2006, Wizards of the Coast updated the original module again, this time to the 3E rules, as Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, by Bruce Cordell and James Wyatt. This version distinguishes itself by expanding the source material, fleshing out Barovia and providing additional adventure material outside the castle. For these books, Strahd remains largely the same.

A decade later, Wizards once again returned to Castle Ravenloft with Curse of Strahd, updating the module for D&D 5E. This version keeps the basic approach of expanding Barovia introduced by Cordell and Wyatt, but jettisons the details. Instead, the Hickmans were brought back in to brainstorm new ideas. This Strahd feels different somehow, colder. His dark romanticism has been drained out and his ambition is largely replaced by boredom. He kills and terrorizes and corrupts because it is the only way he can divert his attention from an unending existence.  

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In many ways, Strahd is a vessel for our perception of the ever-changing and evolving vampire legend. While a character in his own right, he is broadly drawn so every group of players can make him their own. There are many Strahds, each defined by the tastes of the people at the table.   

Strahd has surprisingly little in common with the Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel – most obviously, he lacks the mustache, but also the feral impulsiveness, the mad dream of creating an undead kingdom and much of the psycho-sexual subtext. Stoker’s biggest influence on Strahd is actually found in the one facet of his character that popular culture has most often ignored: the implication that in life, Dracula was a practitioner of the black arts and an avid devil worshiper. From this comes Strahd’s status in D&D as a magic-user, his obscene necromantic experiments and his compact with the Dark Powers.

The two original modules, when combined, also mirror the settings of the novel, with Ravenloft depicting a version of Castle Dracula in Transylvania and Gryphon Hill standing in for the English countryside.    

In terms of fashion sense and temperament, Strahd has more in common with Lugosi’s debonair, calculating Dracula, as well as the refractions of that interpretation of the character that have bounced through popular culture since 1931 (so much so that the box art for the original NES Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest [1987], itself a conglomeration of Dracula tropes, lifts Clyde Caldwell’s iconic cover painting for Ravenloft).

Curse of Strahd, meanwhile, gives a nod to Anne Rice’s vampire novels. Here, Strahd’s previous consorts are women, and he still has a minor obsession with Tatyana, but the current object of his affections, Escher, is a man – a clear parallel to the bisexuality of Rice’s Lestat.

The clearest antecedent of Strahd, though, is Barnabas Collins, the vampire that dominated the soap opera Dark Shadows from 1967 to 1971. Like Strahd, Collins is cut from the same cloth as popular conceptions of Dracula, but it is in Collins we first see the synthesis of the vampire legend and the reincarnation romance of Boris Karloff’s The Mummy (1932). Like Tatyana, the object of Collins’ affection leaps off a cliff to her death rather than become his lover and, a century later, the vampire is obsessed with a woman who resembles her. This idea captured the popular imagination so thoroughly that it has been included in many subsequent adaptations of Dracula (beginning in 1972 with Blacula and, in my view, forever cemented in 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula), to the point that most people assume it was part of the original novel.

More than anything, it is the Collins-esque cycle of reincarnation that defines Strahd, beyond the confines of any one adventure module and into the realms of the meta. In the Ravenloft campaign setting, the Dark Powers force Strahd to relive his darkest moment, reintroducing him to the woman who he can’t help but drive to her death, again and again. Even if a group of adventurers should triumph in House of Strahd, those Dark Powers will bring him back to unlife and start the cycle again.

Thanks to Ravenloft’s status as a classic, and its numerous reprints, this is true in the real world as well. I myself have killed Strahd three times and even though the most recent time was the likely the last for me, he will live again, and be killed again, for other groups around other tables, for as long as people gather together to play Dungeons & Dragons.

The Dark Powers are truly cruel.

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A strange thing happened when we sat down to play Dungeons & Dragons 5E two weekends ago.

Our regular game, using the Basic and Expert rules from the mid-80s, had collapsed under the weight of busy schedules and a crummy module, so I had at a month of D&D-free living. Meanwhile, I’ve aggressively scheduled my Call of Cthulhu game. We ramped up from every other week to weekly, even if that meant playing shorter session on work nights. It is a brisk pace.

We’re five sessions into the famed Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, after six sessions of unconnected scenarios. It took a while to get used to the rules, but when we did, the quality of roleplaying was high. The characters are all quirky and interesting; the players are engaged with the mystery. Much of a session is given over to conversation, both within the party and with NPCs. There hasn’t been a serious combat in four games. I think last week we rolled dice maybe half a dozen times. If that.

I’ve been in roleplaying focused groups before, but this is something different. In those older games, the plot was central to play in. Here, the plot (though engaging) feels secondary. These folks seem to actually want to just sit around and chat about things in-character. That is essentially what they did in our last session. And they loved it.

I don’t want to call that weird, because it is fun and weird seems to denote a sort of negativity, but it is kind of weird in the uncharted territory sense.

Anyway. Fifth Edition D&D.

Hambone is running the Curse of Strahd for us. The idea is that we’re starting at level one, as kids. Like Monster Squad. To that end, my druid is a weird orphan living on the outskirts of town who enjoys collecting worms in jars. We’ve got a paladin, who is kind of a jock, a gnome barbarian, who is kind of a bully, and we have a bard who…I guess is the D&D equivalent of a band nerd.

It is a funny shtick and while we were just farting around town, it wasn’t too different from the Call of Cthulhu game. We made it up as we went, improvising our way through the school day in our spooky little town. When the game slipped into combat, however, it was D&D like any other edition. Everyone took their turn, dice were rolled and encounters were resolved in an orderly fashion. Math happened. Rules were consulted.

It all felt…constrictive.

Which is not to say bad. It was still fun, but having been out of the D&D world for a brief time, playing another system, I realized for the first time just how rigid and orderly the game is. No wonder chaotic evil always seemed like the worst of the worst – this is a game that fetishizes charts and rules indexes. Perhaps most importantly, there is no other way the game can be – the meat of the rules concern tactical combat and the vast majority of your character’s statistics concern combat. They are literally defined by battle. Characters fight in a D&D game because there is nothing else for them to do. Their other skills aren’t defined and so those facets of the world are left murky and unexplored.

In contrast, the characters in Call of Cthulhu are normal people in a recognizable world (currently New York of the 1920s). Because they are frail (most have less than 15 hit points) and combat often results in serious injury and death, violence is avoided. The result is a very fluid, improvisational open world game that uses rules only when necessary.

I am not saying one or the other is better. I have great love for both. Rather, I can’t help but wonder how other games work. I don’t have strong memories of how GURPs, Pendragon, Paranoia, Star Wars, Stormbringer, Tales from the Floating Vagabond and other games we played in the past felt; how the gears of their systems fit together with their narratives. I want to revisit all of them. And play more besides. What are the multi-dimensional worlds of Rifts and Torg like? Why do people always rave about RuneQuest and Thieves’ World? Is Vampire: The Masquerade as silly as I always assumed?

I often fret about how many books I will be able to read before I die.

Now I have to worry about how many roleplaying games I will be able to play.

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