# Curse of Strahd and the Decline of Depicted Evil tags: #thoughts/youtube ![[Curse of Strahd (cover).jpg]] So what we've got here is another analysis, part 8, in CF's discussion of *Curse of Strahd*. It gets into something which is near and dear to my heart: the whole point of evil in play, and why a lot of mainstream art fails.  So let's get into it. If you haven't been following his breakdown of chaos, you definitely owe it to yourself to check it out. He breaks down the entire structure as well as philosophizes about it along the way. Perhaps shockingly, I am 99% on board with every point he makes, and considering our difference in gaming philosophy, that should terrify both all of you and him. But in this particular part, he puts his finger on something which I think undercuts the entire adventure space, and that's that there really is very little evil going on. *Curse of Strahd* is not about depicting a place where evil is being done to people. Bad things are being done to people, but not necessarily evil is being done to people. Corruption is not even rampant. The people in charge are making relatively good decisions when they aren't completely insane, and even when they are completely insane, they're making decisions which fit with the context in which they live. In an adventure which is specifically about horror, this would be a terrible choice of design. If we approach it as an adventure which is specifically about horror, it absolutely is a terrible choice of design. The problem for us as consumers and horror aficionados is that we have essentially misunderstood what it is they were trying to do with *Curse of Strahd*. We thought it was about horror. It's not. It's about the trappings of horror. It's about the pretense of horror. It's about horror without being horrifying. It's horror without being scary. It doesn't even want to be. It wants to be a little atmospherically creepy, but no more than that because it might offend someone. In so positioning itself, not only does it sell what it is with a lie, but it fails to deliver enough of anything to be flavorful enough to swallow. This is its greatest sin. I will differ from CF in one tiny respect. I would suggest that a fisherman sacrificing a child by drowning in the lake in order to improve his catch is definitely horrific. It's even evil, but it's a kind of banal evil, and not in the good way. It needs the volume turned up a little bit. While CF suggests that the way to do that would be to put a gigantic threat of undead in the lake, which is appeased by every fisherman taking along a child or other human sacrifice to drop in when the dead start coming after them. I would counter by saying it's more horrific to simply have it be that one guy, but everyone knows that he's doing it and simply shrugs and accepts that it is part of how things are done. Everyone in town is in on it. Everyone in town knows this is what's going on. In my mind, that is far more horrific. Suddenly, the evil is endemic. Everyone has a share. Everyone is part of it. Everyone you meet, including the nicest people who'll shake your hand and smile, knows that a child is being sacrificed once in a while for one guy's better fishing, and they're okay with it. That's a lot more evil. Not only that, it's far more creepy than the pseudo-Addams Family vibe that's going on elsewhere. Frankly, I don't understand why this entire adventure feels defanged, as if they had to go out of their way to try and make it less compelling and less potent than the original Ravenloft. It's about vampires, gypsies, cults, and evil druids. It's about a populace who is oppressed, terrified, and predated on, but half of whom is itself corrupt and predating on the other half. If you needed a subversion, I would be happy to provide one. We have a bunch of vampires who don't seem to need to feed on people, or when they do, they don't make a big deal of it, and yet their numbers just keep increasing in this limited area hemmed in by the mists. They should be starting to be worried about their food source running out. There's people out there killing kids. There are definitely not enough people being drawn into Barovia for them to be able to waste perfectly good food. If anything, they need to keep the people fattened up, happy enough to keep having kids themselves. Make sure those kids come to adulthood because that is literally their cash cow. Making the subversion that the vampires really do have the best interests of the common people at heart because it's their best interest would be a serious twist. You could even make that evil by playing up the fact that it is not out of a sense of altruism, but purely because of those with a longer view to their own survival. Okay, you couldn't make it evil. You could just make it perfectly reasonable. But when you make players who think that they're good people agree with characters that are painted as ostensibly evil by making an appeal to common sense, it makes them uncomfortable. And that is awesome in this environment, which I suppose is why we can't have it. I think that the really core problem here is that this is a Ravenloft which is redesigned to make no one uncomfortable, whether it be uncomfortable because of what's being depicted or uncomfortable because of how they are reacting to the arguments being put forward by the characters to justify themselves. And that's a shame. That is a terrible, horrific shame. Ravenloft deserves so much better. Hell, Strahd deserves so much better.