# Castle Ravenloft: A Cleanup tags: #thoughts/youtube Well, [@ChubbyFunsterGC](https://x.com/ChubbyFunsterGC) has finally finished his cycle of analyses of *The Curse of Strahd* adventure module for *[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]*. If you followed any of my X commentary on it or caught a few references here and there on Grim Tokens, you know I've been largely in complete agreement with his breakdown. However, this episode is the first in which I have a significant difference of opinion with CF.  He's absolutely correct about his breakdown of how the module fails to engage with actual horrific content from part one onwards. Things don't tie together. There's no motivations or side effects of things happening. There's a focus on the creepy rather than the truly challengingly horrific. There are issues of stakes and their absence a lot of the time. All of this is absolutely true, and they continue to be true into this part of the analysis. In fact, when the original *Castle Ravenloft* map from the original *Ravenloft* module came up, I immediately had a surge of recognition and a nostalgic resonance. Because once upon a time, even I played through *Ravenloft*. Not because I particularly enjoyed *D&D*, but because horror is awesome, and I will embrace the tenets of narrative horror wherever it comes along, as well I should. I was also reminded that the original *Ravenloft* map was so condensed, and things were happening in such a relatively small area, that there wasn't room for slop. You had a very specific architecture of events that were going to happen, and you couldn't run away from it because the mists kept you tightly constrained. The lack of constraint in *Curse of Strahd* when it comes to the palette upon which the players are painting their response to the situations is so negatively impactful that it's hard to just get by that in the first place. It's extremely large, and yet there's so little going on in it comparatively that it works against itself. Yet simultaneously not large enough because you can ride across the entirety of the map in a day. Everything is pretty much eight hours from the furthest thing that you care about at any given moment. It's not far enough for the population to be uninformed about anything going on on the other side of the map. You've watched the video, you know his intentions. I just want to pick up here on the places where we differ, and where we differ largely comes from the difference in our inherent underlying playstyles. The rest of the digital garden tells every reader here that I don't particularly think much of the classic scenario, architecture, flow of play. As the current community parlance would have it, I'm one of those filthy story gamers. Except I don't have blue hair, I like guns and explosions, and I'm straight.[^1] I think that maximum player agency goes along with the dynamic distribution of power at the table, and that can lead to more intensity rather than reducing it through the loss of immersion as the more classic and traditionalist play would have it. We'll get back to this point soon, I promise. ## Argynvosholt The first point of analytical contention that we're going to deal with here is the force of revenants of an anti-Strahd nature, which are out in the fortress.[^2] There's a really good reason that the revenant knights can't be having frequent skirmishes with the forces of Strahd, and it's fairly straightforward. If there were an active group of undead militant knights fighting with the forces of Strahd on a regular basis and losing, a reasonable group of players would look at their character sheets, look at the heavily armed and armored group of undead, which are getting whittled down and may have been doing this same thing for hundreds of years with absolutely no success, and ask the most important question in the world: *"Why am I doing this if they can't succeed?"* Now this is a hugely important question no matter what. It's critical to have the players feel like their characters are in a place and doing something that could and will make a difference. Futility is a perfectly reasonable emotion to pull on when working with literary horror, but it's an engagement death knell in an RPG. Far better to have the Order of the Silver Dragon be a long-destroyed group with only a few remnants left kicking around the hold. You need the players to see the wreckage of their destruction but at least have the potential belief that they have a chance of making some headway. You certainly could turn this into a horrific display by making Strahd responsible for the fact that they are revenants and that they continue to rally once a year to make another attempt at a push, playing out the same failure over and over again because it amuses the vampire. This would hook really well into their Sunday outings as a special occasion. One week, they simply go to a good observation point where the revenants will clash with whatever Strahd's pet infantry are this week. Possibly some enslaved villagers or experimental constructs, you name it, and he'll have a good time doing commentary while the revenants get absolutely wrecked. You could even insert this as a one-off where you go full tactical wargame and give the players control of the revenant forces. Set it up such that the players know that they are inevitably going to lose, possibly simply due to wave attrition, but they should make a good show of it. ## My Dinner With Andre The question of why the players *and* the PCs are doing this if they can't succeed comes up again when we talk about what happens when Strahd gets miffed with them. I love this idea of him inviting the PCs to dinner every Sunday night and being a gracious host to put them up for the evening after a fine meal. He is, after all, an aristocratic noble who wants to flaunt his power over them. There's no need for him to be impolite or ungracious. It's also a good excuse to have the PCs talk about what's going on in Barovia that they've played out over the previous days, and perhaps even confront Strahd in a social context about what they've found. It provides an opportunity for a social challenge on a regular basis, and perhaps gives the more performance-minded of characters or players an opportunity to bring their abilities to bear in a way they might not otherwise get to. That part is fantastic. I even really like the use of the Ravenloft Tarot for inserting unexpected twists and turns. That's an old-school story gamer trick that always works, and it keeps the DM as well as the players on their toes. Here's a problem though: you can't just pull from the deck after giving it a good shuffle every time the players do something because that doesn't actually generate tension. Tension can only occur when the players know something. There has to be knowledge present for it to be meaningful. If Strahd can pop out of the deck the first pull and kill off one of the PCs, that's not tension. It's not even horror. It's just a reason not to go do something that could otherwise be cool. There's no mitigation. There's no way to get through it. It's just somebody is going to die when I pull this card, and we all know it. That's not horror, it's statistics.[^3] How could you change this to actually make it a tension ratcheting system? It's pretty simple, actually. You have to let the players see what's coming down the pipe. Make it explicitly clear that Strahd is located in the second half of the deck. Let them watch you put the card that represents him into it, then shuffle the top and shuffle the bottom separately. Now they know they've got a certain amount of space that they can operate in relatively safely, at least from the big bad. Everything they do brings him a step closer, though, and they don't know how close is too close. Now we have tension. The players can make choices which make a difference. They can make bad choices, or they can make good choices. As a side effect, now it becomes meaningful when you pull cards from the deck because of certain actions, choices, or things that have happened in the narrative. The players know that there are fewer cards between them and Strahd popping out of the woodwork. You can use the events happening in Barovia at large to adjust the size of that deck so that perhaps the players make different decisions during the week between dinner invitations, things become more integrated because they have more repercussions. Choices have consequences. Actions end up having consequences. This makes everything better. Of course, I wouldn't use the tarot deck to do this, because while it does provide excellent inspiration and interpretive sources, it's not as clear to the players as it could be. They have a pretty good idea that everything in there is a threat and none of it can be predicted. This leads to an insight that I had while thinking about Castle Ravenloft itself. This would make an excellent focus of a *[[Blades in the Dark]]* setup. Go with the usual *Blades* setup where you have a group who wants to make a big score from a location, and it is explicitly about exploring and trying to stay out of trouble while one of the best parts of modern story gaming mechanics ticks away: the clock. If you've never heard of a clock as a game mechanic, it's essentially a track which has a basic description, and when it's full, something changes in the setting. A clock generally ticks when players roll a complication or a failure—that is, as the characters screw up, one of the side effects can be that they get closer to what they don't want to happen. In this case, every time you go to dinner, you would set the clock called *"Discovery by Strahd"* and give it six or eight segments. You could even have the number of segments adjusted by the actions of the characters during the week out in wider Barovia. Make their choices matter as the characters go investigating around the castle, getting into various shenanigans. Give them the option to burn off failures and complications by ticking the clock. Let them stare at it. Let them see exactly how close it is to going off. Let them know that everything they do creates the possibility that they are going to get discovered, and the results will not be pleasant. After all, they are in violation of one of the few personal ethical choices that Strahd allows himself: the role of host and theirs as guests. To break that pact is truly insulting, and he will not take it well. But this takes us directly into the last major objection that I have to CF's analysis here, and perhaps the most telling. ## Death is Dull as Dishwater Here is what may be my most significant and strongly differentiated feeling about gameplay. It's really simply summed up: death is the most boring thing that can happen to a character, and one of the most boring things that can happen to a player. Death means you're done playing with a character that theoretically you cared about. It means that your investment of time is pretty much blown. Even if you have a backup character ready to be deployed, you have no experiences with them. You have no tie to them. You probably haven't even spent nearly as much time establishing who they are and what they want. You're probably done playing for the evening at best because the rest of the characters are in a situation where death could happen, and you can't really introduce a new character until that situation is dealt with. In short, death is bullshit and it's a terrible threat to have sitting over the players and makes for boring play. So when CF suggests that if Strahd catches them wandering around the castle, he will simply kill one of the characters, it fits with his thematic drive, but it's not horrific. It doesn't create an ominous feeling of threat. There's nothing you can do about it. The only choice that you can make that will impact it is simply not to engage with the content around you. Don't go exploring the castle. Don't push anything. There is no choice that will make it better, and you can't even control who it is. That's not horror. That's just a feeling of disappointment. That's generally not what I want at the table. So here's the thing. What should happen when Strahd catches you out? He should definitely be angry that you've insulted his hospitality. You're definitely not spending the rest of the night there. But killing you outright? That's something that you build up to. There's no feeling of dread if you just get killed off. The first time he catches you snooping around the castle when you're supposed to be confined to your rooms, he may even be understanding. A stern but disappointed talking to as he ejects you from his castle is certainly warranted. The second time, perhaps he sets his wolves on you as you head pell-mell through the courtyard. One of you might die, but it's not guaranteed, and he's probably mocking you with uproarious laughter as you beat feet. The third time, that's when you might think that you're about to be killed, but no, that is two or three weeks into your stay at Barovia. You've made contact with villagers and Vistani. You've probably had some positive interactions. You've seen some people. You've met some people. You've helped them out. It's easy to kill you, and that puts you out of your misery. Strahd is an aristocrat. He doesn't want you to be put out of your misery. He wants you to know that there is nothing that you can possess that he can't take, and he literally will mean take. Were you flirting with a girl? Okay, he's vampirized her and turned her into a feral thing, barely under control, and you're going to meet her at Sunday dinner, and possibly he'll give you the chance to put her out of her misery personally, if you care that much. Did you spend time giggling with the demonic construct? He'll show you that it has a far better purpose as a centerpiece decoration, fully dismantled, but the head can still speak, even though all it does is scream in inhuman pain the entire meal. I wouldn't comment on it, though. Killing characters is easy, and it's boring, because it's so easy. Strahd knows that souls are trapped in his domain. He's free and easy with killing because the people he kills don't matter to him, but the PCs are of particular interest. They can do things for him just as much as they can do things to him. He wants to break them or to subvert them. He wants to offer them things with one hand and threaten other things with the other. Let him. Don't kill the PCs. If the PCs die, it needs to be as a direct result of their own bad decisions, their mistakes sometimes, but more often their terrible plans. The PCs will find ways to kill themselves. You don't need to help them. This is true of all RPGs, but it's particularly important here because Ravenloft is usually written as a high-lethality environment. Dying isn't really the threat, though. Becoming something other than yourself, making choices that are repulsive but better than the other choices that you see in front of yourself, feeling corrupted—that's really where the threat is in Ravenloft. It's where the threat should be. Lean into that. ## Exunt Well, this turned out to be a little bit longer than I expected, but so it goes. I'm going to be sad to see the *Curse of Strahd* analysis go away at a certain level, but I think it has definitely been about as far dissected as it can be. There's not much left on the bone here. A bit of a shame, but that's how it plays out. I would love to see someone take on converting Ravenloft and Barovia to being the setting for *Blades in the Dark*. That would just be fantastic. There's plenty of opportunity for it, and I'm not even sure it would be that hard when you get down to it. After all, the default setting is in a city which you can never leave, and the mechanics are about getting involved with factions and working your way up. It would take very little to bring all of that to Ravenloft. I'd be shocked if someone hadn't done it already. But it won't be me! You hear me? I say it won't be me. At least not this month. [^1]: This has the amusing side effect of making me a pariah on that side of the house as well, which never ceases to be hilarious. [^2]: This is actually a reference to something from [Part 9](https://youtu.be/bkRzA7evVFo), the last episode, but since I never got around to writing a proper reply to that one, it's going to get folded in here. You'll just have to get over it. I know I'll have to get over it. [^3]: We'll get back to talking about why killing off characters isn't actually horrific and is not recommended here shortly. I promise.