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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.  

* * *

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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Sort of. The Leading Edge house system is hopelessly complicated and I have zero desire to learn it, not even for you, dear followers. That said, the core concept is interesting enough. The events of Dracula happened and the RPG takes place in the aftermath, when a whole host of vampire activity starts in the wake of the big guy’s death. The rules are meant to be usable for any historical era, from medieval to the present, so there is a lot of tech (helicopters, modern military materiel) statted out that you might not expect for a Victorian vampire sourcebook.

The approach to vampires is actually pretty interesting and worth tracking down the book for if you have the desire to run a game about vampire hunters (the vampire stuff is pretty system agnostic). They have a range of powers, not all of which your players will be expecting, and they are arranged in households, with a mix of young and old vamps and thralls of varying power levels. As vampire households are discreet, there are endless scenario possibilities for how they have insinuated themselves into society and for ferreting them out.

Like Lawnmower Man, the art is exclusively black and white reproductions of film stills accompanied by just about every line of dialog from the movie in pull quotes. That made the Lawnmower Man book ridiculous, but here it kind of works because Bram Stoker’s Dracula is actually a good movie.

Biggest mystery: of all the stills they could have used from the movie, why use that one for the cover? Like, why not use the one where he is at least standing straight up?

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1.

The first envelope arrived in the beginning of September.

The contents, a letter from a lawyer explained, had rested in a safety deposit box for many years and, for reasons unclear, had become attached to my wife Daisy’s name. With the liquidation of the bank, the items within were sent along to our current address and included a number of letters, foreclosure documents, unfinished blueprints, notes, a ledger page from an orphanage and a mourning card, all connected to a piece of property in London and bearing dates from the late 1870s. One item was more compelling than the rest: a lock of brown hair, carefully tied with a bit of yellowed lace.

2.

A horror story, whatever the medium, is the one most likely to use its structure in an attempt to trick you into believing its realness.

It is a kind of contest between the storyteller and the listener. To see this at its most basic, just listen to any kid trying to convince their friends that they had seen a ghost – there is the story at its purest, but also the sideshow act of assurances and knowing looks intended to sell it. This is why so much horror literature is written in first person: to leverage the judicial, the weight of personal testimony.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, of course, takes this to another level, presenting itself as a series of letters and journal entries written by its own characters and supplemented by the occasional newspaper clipping. Found footage attempts a similar conceit in cinema. Nor does horror have to resort to such direct attempts at verisimilitude: the way Lovecraft weaves together references to real-world authors and his own fictional tomes has left thousands of readers open to the possibility of discovering a copy of the Necronomicon on a dusty shelf in a rare bookstore.

3.

A second envelope arrived a few weeks later. More papers. This time, notes and correspondence from a doctor, dealing with his treatment of a young woman. His office seems to have been located in the house mentioned in the previous set of documents.

Something bad happened to him.

4.

In the 1980s, Infocom found great success as the publisher of text adventures, videogames that were essentially novels you interacted with by typing commands for the protagonist. A large part of the popularity of Infocom’s games came from the props they included in the box to support the fiction, which, handily, doubled as copy protection. The Zork games included lore books and maps written in an in-universe style that detailed the underground empire you would journey through. Inside The Lurking Horror, Infocom’s Lovecraftian horror game, you find a student ID card and student handbook for the setting’s college, as well as a nightmarish little rubber nightcrawler.

The company called these props “feelies.”

5.

At its heart, the Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying game is a game about piecing together mysteries. Like any good mystery, this requires clues. In the early days, player handouts were pages in the back of the book, suitable for photocopying, that reproduced newspaper clippings, excerpts from notebooks, scrawled drawings and even, in one notable case, a matchbox you could cut out and fold up.

In recent years, Call of Cthulhu handouts have become a bustling niche market, forever striving to create more realistic props to support the fiction. Just this year, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society produced a massive box of props for the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, including news clippings printed on newsprint, a matchbox containing real matches, passports, patient files, photographs, a Chinese scroll and MP3s of actors delivering key monologues from the game. A deluxe version includes reproductions of ancient artifacts like stone tablets and statues. There’s even a set of cultist’s robes.

6.

The contents of the third package included a poster for a stage magician’s act, a gardening notebook and a good deal of dried lavender buds; more detritus from the lives of the residents of this apparently haunted London house. They seem to fare about as poorly as the doctor.

7.

The packages are from the Mysterious Package Company, which specializes in narrative “experiences” delivered by mail. I have long heard intriguing things about the Weeping Book, a single mailing of a handwritten notebook that is so disturbing that the company claims it has inspired unwitting recipients to call the police about it.

The idea, of course, is to purchase an experience for a friend and have it arrive with no warning or explanation. When the Company got in touch about trying an experience, I had them send it to my wife so I could observe. I ordered Filigree in Shadow, a Victorian ghost story.

8.

I think the central idea of the Mysterious Package Company is genius. Plenty of other folks agree, apparently, as it has spawned several imitators, like the Hunt a Killer subscription box that haunts many an Instagram feed’s advertisements. I have no way to be sure if it is genius, though, because I know services like this exist. If secrecy and surprise are an intrinsic part of this kind of experience, then no matter what you send me, even if you were to make up a totally original story and props, the illusion can’t fool me. I am inoculated now.

Which begs the question: is the illusion the point?

On one hand, it seems the Mysterious Package Company thinks it is – even the process of buying an experience is shrouded in mystery, requiring a request for an invitation and dealings with a character referred to as the Curator. It is hard (but not impossible) to suss out the real people behind the company, which also indicates a certain delight in the smoke and mirrors game.

On the other hand, there are things within the experience that seem to hint that this is all for fun – the lawyer’s letter at the start of this experience makes for a fairly flimsy premise. Given the otherwise high quality of the story and the props, I can’t believe that this is anything other than intentional. Perhaps some unpleasant reactions to the Weeping Book prompted the Company to hedge away from providing experiences that too effectively blur the edge between fiction and reality.

9.

Daisy was almost immediately suspicious (you can blame that on the fact that she played my long-running Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, or read it as a telling indictment of what it is like to live with me). She got hung up on why she was receiving the packages in a way that overshadowed their stories.

Something else. In striving to tell stories in a forensic way, through ostensibly real objects, connection to the narrative is kept at a distance in way that is not true of more conventional storytelling. The events related in Filigree in Shadow are remote in time, the haunted house an ocean away. I could see myself perhaps believing that these events happened, but I do not think they have the power to scare me the way a short story might, despite a short story’s obvious artifice.

9a.

I desperately want to see a ghost, or have some other supernatural experience, which means I am paradoxically fortified with skepticism. No matter what the climax of Filigree in Shadow may be, if it doesn’t involve my reflection actually climbing through my vanity mirror to attempt to murder me, I am going to be disappointed. For someone like me, the surface realism of the Mysterious Package is always going to be a promise impossible to deliver on.

10.

The climax of Filigree in Shadow, and all the Mysterious Packages, is an artifact. It arrived in a small wooden box. The content of that box was at war with itself.

The narrative bits were wonderful. The story was wrapped up definitively with more documents, the plot threads neatly tied (mostly), the mystery solved in ghoulishly Penny Dreadful fashion. There were, in fact, two artifacts: a murder weapon crusted with century old blood and a dreadful mask, an object of unnatural power within the context of the story that, in hand, is actually suitably unpleasant.

The other occupant of the box was a jigsaw puzzle.

11.

I can not speak to the other Mysterious Packages, but this one is both a story and a game. Littered through all the documents are little dot-and-line characters, an obvious code, referred to by several characters in the story. The final documents give the key for its decryption, and the scrawls, which often are replying to the clearly written words, become a sort of spooky presence throughout the whole story, creating a vibe akin to watching The Sixth Sense a second time knowing Bruce Willis is a ghost. It seems a bit preposterous that all this coded writing would be on all these documents, but the overall effect is good, the decoding was quite fun and it adds a time value to the entire experience.

The jigsaw puzzle takes the game portion of the experience to an extreme. The puzzle is of architectural drawings of the house – recall earlier that the initial package contained incomplete blueprints? The jigsaw puzzle fills them in. It is a preposterous jettisoning of the illusion the rest of the packages so painstakingly create.

And it is great. And evil. It is actually five discrete puzzles, all made in a similar visual motif and cut into pieces that often slide next to each other rather than interlock. I’ve never hated a jigsaw puzzle so actively as when I was cursing my way through this one. Daisy and I spent delirious hours working on it, well into the night. It was a struggle, but a fun one that awoke a steely determination in both of us. It is hard to convey the sense of accomplishment I felt once it was done, even if the spookiest thing about it was the glaze in our eyes.

There is another coded message scrawled across the finished puzzles. It took me a couple weeks to get around to decoding it and, honestly, it didn’t matter. The real climax of the story was finishing the puzzle.

12.

When people ask me why I enjoy horror, I usually respond by saying I like the way it makes me feel, an answer the questioner inevitably finds unsatisfying. The look on their face usually says, Why on earth would I want to feel scared?

The best fiction provokes an emotional response. Yet, owing to it being fiction, most of those responses are distant echoes of the real thing, simulacra. There are aspects of the fear reactions inspired by horror, though, tied up as they are with evolutionary survival impulses, that retains a glimmer of the genuine. The grief I feel at the death of a character can never match the loss of a loved one. Likewise, I have never been chased by a madman with a machete, but I am sure that the real thing would pump my adrenal gland more than any given slasher movie. Yet an unexplained noise, in a movie or in my own darkened house, sparks identical unease. In those subtle, quiet moments, the boundary between horror fiction and reality is so thin as to not be there at all.

13.

Props, handouts, feelies, whole narratives constructed out of documents, they all represent an attempt by the story to manifest into the real world. As an aficionado of horror and a seeker after supernatural experience, I want the story to become incarnate, to darken the lens of perception, to reveal the secrets skeins lurking under the veil of everyday reality.

And yet, no matter how enchanting the fictive artifact may be at first glance, reality eventually, inevitably, renders it inert. Mundanity is inescapable. Human hands have fashioned it and, in doing so, rob it of infinite powers it may have possessed had it remained in the realm of conjecture.

14.

We have a finished attic in my house and use it as a second living room. There’s a mini-fridge up there and it is covered in magnets shaped like letters for our one-year-old son Jeremiah to play with. A few weeks ago, Daisy returned home from work and went up to unload her bag up there. A few moments later, she shouted down, “Are you fucking with me?”

The letter magnets usually spell out our names – Stu, Daisy and Jer (though my ‘U’ has long since gone missing). When I got upstairs, I saw most of the letters jumbled up. In the center, though, perfectly aligned: D-I-E. Seeing it, a chill ran down my spine, just the way a writer might describe in a horror story.

Obviously, Jer rearranged the letters and by chance spelled out a threatening word. Obviously, there is no supernatural force at work. And yet, and yet, and yet… in a movie or in my own darkened house, it sparks an identical unease.

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