I have analyzed Location K84, the infamous Catacombs of Castle Ravenloft, in its several incarnations. It occurred to me that I would like to do a similar reading of the other parts of the castle. (Here that is.) But, as I started doing that, I started doing a similar reading of the whole adventure leading up to the castle. Which is probably not as exciting as the castle itself.
Outside Barovia
I don’t think I got around to noting in that first post how codified the world of Barovia is. The catacombs are always location K84—but that means that the designations K1 through K83 are always applied to basically the same locations inside the castle. This further implies that locations A through J remain consistent as well. Kind of. More or less.
But the adventure really starts before you get to location A. Something has to invite the adventurers into adventure.
Ravenloft. “To a party of seasoned adventurers such as yourselves, this is but another dull tavern in another dull town in some nameless province. It is but another passage of time between the challenges of true adventuring. Such is the doldrum of existence—waiting for another opportunity.” But a gypsy walks into the dull tavern, with a letter addressed to the adventurers from from “Kolyan Indrirovich,” burgomaster of Barovia.
The main thrust of the letter is this:
The love of my life, Ireena Kolyana, has been afflicted by an evil so deadly that even the good people of our town cannot protect her. She languishes from her wound and I would have her saved from this menace.
Eventually it will emerge that the letter is a forgery, planted by Strahd to replace a much more dire letter sent by the real Kolyan. This is foreshadowed in its delivery by a gypsy, a member of an ethnic group that in the universe of I6 Ravenloft is bound in service to an evil vampire. His name is Antonio, not that this will probably come up.
The sensitive reader may find the term “gypsy” offensive. I am sensitive to these sensitivities, but I can’t exactly sanitize the text in this analysis—the use of this word is one of the things I intend to analyze. But, not in exhaustive detail. ANYWAY.
House of Strahd: The tavern is given a name: the Weary Horse Inn. By the time the adventurers reach this establishment they are already trapped in the Mists of Ravenloft, which draw wayward heroes ever back to wherever the story needs them to be.
The read-aloud text for the scene is basically the same, but the background for the DM makes it clear that the letter is a fake and the messenger is working for Strahd. The made-up D&D term “Vistani” is used instead of “gypsy,” except in the read-aloud text. I thought at first this could be an error in editing, but I think what’s really going on is the word “gypsy” is being used as shorthand for a costume.
The letter is still from “Kolyan Indrirovich.” It is not addressed to the adventurers! The Vistani (still named Antonio) was ordered to give it to whatever band of mercenaries he could find.
Expedition to Castle Ravenloft: In Third Edition, it now is necessary that the authors of an adventure provide numerous Hooks that Dungeon Masters may choose from as they connect this book to whatever larger campaign. There are a bunch of hooks. There is an Eberron hook. But “one hook is always the letter purporting to be from the village’s burgomaster.”
Here the burgomaster’s name is “Kolyan Indirovich.” In the previous post we saw how Expedition likes to change names to be more authentic (or more authentic-looking, I dunno), but this is somewhat more subtle than any of those changes. From my perspective of first studying Curse of Strahd so closely, it feels like by spelling it “Indirovich” Expedition is just correcting a typo.
The messenger is referred to as a Vistani. He does not get a name. (The word “gypsy” doesn’t appear in Expedition except when describing the story of I6 Ravenloft.) The letter he carries is not addressed specifically to the adventurers, and actually he couldn’t care less who receives it: “‘The village of Barovia is in need of heroes,’ he says in a thick accent. ‘You’ll do as well as any.'”
Curse of Strahd: Again there are several hooks to choose from. The original introduction is only one of them. It uses the original “To a party of seasoned adventurers…” text, so it does describe the messenger as a “gypsy” (although I bet the Revamped edition doesn’t), BUT now the messenger is a fellow named Arrigal, who appears elsewhere in in the book.
The burgomaster is still Kolyan Indirovich. The letter has returned to being addressed to the adventurers. Curse leans heavily on the creepiness of Strahd knowing too much about the PCs, and this is an easy opportunity to introduce that uneasiness. It may also be part of Curse‘s tendency to retcon or rebuke certain demystifying details in Expedition.
A. Old Svalich Road
Ravenloft: “Black pools of water stand like dark mirrors about the muddy roadway.” There are mists. There are spooky trees. It takes five hours to get to the Gates of Barovia.
House: I lied! House does not use the same letter designations for these areas. The castle isn’t even area K! But House does refer to basically all the same locations.
Here for some reason it says that it takes nine to twelve hours to get to the gates. I don’t get it.
Expedition. The read-aloud text from Ravenloft is reproduced, and the DM’s text assures us that the road “seems threatening but is actually quite safe.”
Curse. The path is back to being five hours long. Also, well, now I need to show you both the original read-aloud text and Curse‘s:
Ravenloft: “Black pools of water stand like dark mirrors about the muddy roadway. Thick, cold mists spread a pallor over the road. Giant tree trunks stand on both sides of the road, their branches clawing into the mists. In every direction the mists grow thicker and the forest grows more oppressive.”
Curse: “Black pools of water stand like dark mirrors in and around the muddy roadway. Giant trees loom on both sides of the road, their branches clawing at the mist.”
As reverential to the Hickmans as Curse is, it’s not afraid to improve on their writing. Here’s what we learned between 1983 and 2016, apparently:
- You only need to mention a given detail, like this mist we’ve got going on, one time. (One time per location description, that is. You’ll be mentioning the mist many more times as the adventure continues.)
- If all you’re doing in a location is walking through it to the next location, you don’t need to spend four sentences describing it. Again, you’ll be doing a lot of description for the locations where stuff actually happens.
- Don’t use the word “about” like that. Nobody knows what you’re talking about.
B. Gates of Barovia
Ravenloft: “High stone buttresses” support a massive iron gate flanked by huge headless statues. The gate opens when the adventurers approach. After they enter, it closes behind them, and won’t open again. You are trapped in the giant haunted house that is Barovia!
House: Basically unchanged.
Expedition: The read-aloud text is changed slightly to add that the headless statues bear “wicked polearms.” When the gates slam shut behind the adventurers, they can be opened, but only with a DC 28 Strength check. That’s how crunchy Third Edition is.
Curse: The read-aloud text is restored to the original version, except now it also points out how foggy it is. The rules for the gate have changed a bit: It will reopen to allow Vistani to leave, and if Strahd is defeated, it swings open permanently (more or less).
C. Svalich Woods
Ravenloft: While describing how incredibly spooky these woods are, the read-aloud text notes that “the tree trunks almost touch.”
The adventurers find a corpse mauled by wolves. A letter is crumpled in the dead man’s hand. This is the real letter from the burgomaster, which Strahd has cunningly replaced. The two letters share a lot of the same language, but since I only quoted part of the fake I’ll only quote the corresponding section of the original:
My adopted daughter, the fair Ireena, has been these past nights bitten by a creature calling its race “vampyr.” For over 400 years he has drained this land of the life-blood of its people. Now, my dear Ireena languishes and dies from an unholy wound caused by this vile beast. Yet I fear, too, that the creature has some more cunning plan in mind. He has become too powerful to be fought any longer.
Soon after the adventurers find the letter, wolves start howling, and it’s time to get a move on. If you continue forward, only five wolves attack (and they leave you alone if you enter the village of Barovia); if you try to run away from the adventure, twenty-five wolves attack instead.
First off: The letter is signed “Kolyan Indirovich!” Is the extra R in the first letter a mistake by Strahd? That was then corrected in later books?
Anyway, Strahd has replaced “My adopted daughter, the fair Ireena” with “The love of my life, Ireena Kolyana,” apparently replacing a familial attachment with a romantic one. But then he added the patronymic “Kolyana” to a letter signed “Kolyan,” I guess as an oblique hint that he’s talking about his daughter.
Strahd’s version also removes a bunch of specifics about the fact that Ireena is being attacked by a vampire, but he doesn’t exactly go out of his way to say that it’s not a vampire. I’m forced to interpret this discrepancy from an out-of-universe perspective: The fake letter is vague just because the players will see it first. The real letter has more concrete information because the players will see it later and it will ramp up the tension.
If you like, you can trip out with me on how we are analyzing versions of a text within versions of a text.
One more thing: This original letter is explicitly sealed with a large “B.” Later versions of the adventure all include the detail that the letter is sealed. Plus, it’s obviously still on the messenger’s body after he was attacked by those wolves. So how was Strahd able to copy the letter?
House: Identical to the original as far as I can tell. “The trees almost touch.” But this edition introduces a really clever idea: Both letters are printed in the back of the book for player handout purposes, and they’re presented in two slightly different blackletter fonts. (Or maybe the fake version is in the same font but bold and italic.)
Expedition: Area C is not presented as a necessary step in the journey, and the railroading wolf attack is changed to an optional encounter with werewolves.
It is still possible to find the dead messenger with the burgomaster’s real letter. I forgot to tell you that Expedition has SEVEN DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE LETTER to match all the different adventure hooks. I don’t have time to get into all of them. Good grief.
Curse: We return to the original adventure in treating this as a set piece where you necessarily find the corpse before you go any further, and then either five or twenty-five wolves attack. The main difference I want to point out is that the read-aloud text now says “The tree trunks are unnaturally close to one another,” since it has been determined that tree trunks that “almost touch” are actually a bizarre or even cartoonish image.
D. River Ivlis
Ravenloft: “The river Ivlis flows as clear as a blue winter sky through the valley.” That’s it.
House: This location is not mentioned in the text. But it is named on the hex map.
Expedition: Whoops! Now location D is “Ivlis Marsh,” where the adventurers find ruins called the “Swamp Fane,” the site of Strahd’s empowering magical connection to the swamps of Barovia.
Curse: “This river flowers as clear as a blue winter sky through the valley.” Plus some details about how deep it is.
E. Village of Barovia
I can’t get into all the details of all the books. I’ll try to summarize things.
Ravenloft: About two pages of text describe a very spooky town that leads the adventurers to discover that Ireena Kolyana is being visited at night by Strahd the evil vampire. So you’d better go to that castle and kill that vampire.
The local priest is named Donavich and he is not very interesting. Yet.
House. The text is basically the same, but now the priest’s name is Donovan. I think this is the first instance I’ve noticed of House of Strahd changing a name, and it’s all the more strange since nothing else about the priest has been changed. He is still boring.
Expedition. Now when you reach the village it’s under attack by a bunch of zombies! So there’s a lot more text and a bunch of tactical encounters. The priest is now named Danovich, and now he is evil. He brought his son Doru back to life with unholy alchemy, which attracted all those zombies.
Curse. The zombie attack is gone. There’s about seven pages of text, but the material added on top of the original is more atmosphere and character stuff instead of combat.
The priest is back to being named Donavich, but his son returns from Expedition in a new form. Now Doru has been turned into a vampire spawn by Strahd, and Donavich is hiding/imprisoning him in the church basement. The situation has driven the priest insane.
There’s other stuff going on in the town besides this priest but I’d rather move on.
F. Crossroads
Ravenloft: Here the location is called “Road Junction.” It’s just a description to let you know that you can go uphill or downhill.
House: This location is not described in the text. But now I’m noticing that the compass rose on the hex map is pointing the wrong way. Does the text rotate all the directions 90º? I’ll check later.
Expedition: “The Crossroads.” Now there is a gallows here. And signage! Tser Pool is north, Barovia is east, and Castle Ravenloft is west. Also there’s a combat encounter where you help a Knight of the Raven fight a bunch of shadow-monsters.
Curse: “River Ivlis Crossroads.” For once, Curse basically copies Expedition by including the gallows and signpost. But instead of a combat encounter, there’s a moment of spookiness as a random party member inexplicably sees their own body hanging from the gallows!
G. Tser Pool Encampment
Ravenloft: A gypsy camp sits near a pond. It is here that the adventurers find Madam Eva.
Why are there all these gypsies in Ravenloft? They weren’t thrown in as generic Eastern European exoticism—at least, not by the Hickmans. They feature prominently in the 1897 novel Dracula, which apparently the Hickmans studied closely. (I think the novel supplies several other details that seem sort of arbitrary out of context, and I’ll point them out if I can.) In Chapter 4, Jonathan Harker writes:
These Szgany are gipsies; I have notes of them in my book. They are peculiar to this part of the world, though allied to the ordinary gipsies all the world over. There are thousands of them in Hungary and Transylvania, who are almost outside all law. They attach themselves as a rule to some great noble or boyar, and call themselves by his name. They are fearless and without religion, save superstition, and they talk only their own varieties of the Romany tongue.
Trapped in Dracula’s castle, Jonathan thinks these Szgany may be able to render some assistance—but he discovers too late that they have attached themselves to the villainous Count, acting as his daytime agents and excavators.
The Szgany of the novel are a bunch of nameless henchmen, and this is how the gypsies of Ravenloft appear, most of the time. The character of Madam Eva has no analogue in the book, or in any other Dracula media I know of. She appears to be a gloss of Maleva, the fortune-teller from the 1941 film The Wolf Man. Strahd himself combines qualities of numerous Dracula depictions, from the novel’s to Bela Lugosi’s to Christopher Lee’s. Was Ravenloft a mashup of these classic horror movies before the “Dark Universe,” before 2004’s Van Helsing, before the Castlevania games? I think there’s more to say about this, but in a different post.
Like Maleva, Madam Eva is a fortune teller who will basically explain the oncoming plot to the protagonists. She gets a fairly involved character outline: “This old woman may seem crazed and mad to the PCs but she is, in fact, quite cunning and sharp of mind. She is never fooled by adventurers (she has seen a good many in her time) and is very neutral. She serves Strahd as long as that benefits her and her troupe. She never gives aid and never needs any.”
Her fortune-telling method is extremely complicated and interesting and cool. I don’t think we can do justice to it here. A different post!
House: The same basic thing is going on here, but Eva (now “Madame Eva”) gets even more characterization. She “has her own, private reasons for performing the card reading for the PCs. It doesn’t bother her in the least that she might be aiding Strahd’s enemies.” (Sounds like this was brought up a few times as a plot hole in the original adventure.)
Expedition: Things are basically the same, but “Madam” Eva is now an annis hag, a huge ogre-shaped woman. There are a lot of drastic changes in Expedition but this has to be the weirdest. I guess she has to have some sort of monster stats because in this adventure you are expected to kill her—Tser Pool is the location of the Forest Fane, which we don’t have time to get into. Her original description (“quite cunning and sharp of mind”) does not appear.
Curse: Madam Eva is back to being a human Vistana (Curse introduces the distinction between singular “Vistana” and plural “Vistani”), and she gets her original description back, with a few changes. She has a specific motivation now: “She wants to free the land of Barovia from its curse, and her fate is interwoven with Strahd’s (see appendix D for details).” Appendix D explains, among other things, that “Eva” is not genetically Vistani—she is Strahd’s half-sister Katarina et cetera. There is some juicy stuff here, but the Dungeon Master will have to work really hard to get any of it to show up in the campaign.
Curse makes it clear that the Vistani are not inherently evil, that not all of them are allied with Strahd. They have a whole culture independent from and predating their involvement with this Barovian nonsense (a culture that consists entirely of Roma stereotypes). The vampire-aligned Vistani are explicitly “less lively and friendly than normal Vistani.” This is from the original version of the book.
I’m only pointing this out because I’ve noticed that the discourse around the depiction of the Vistani in Curse, among other more valid concerns, involves a lot of people saying that this book depicts the Vistani as an inherently evil group of people who are all allied with Strahd.
Anyway: Remind me to do a different post about the fortune telling mechanic.
H. Tser Falls
Ravenloft: “This is the bottom of the falls. There is nothing of any interest here. A stone bridge can be seen nearly a thousand feet overhead.”
House: “This is the bottom of the falls. There is nothing of any interest here. A stone bridge can be seen nearly 1,000 feet overhead.” There’s actually a major difference here: In House, this is not framed as read-aloud text.
Expedition: “Draped in a cloak of mist, a beautiful waterfall plummets over a high cliff carved from the shoulders of the mountains. Far above, a bridge crosses over the river at what seems to be a dizzying height.” The location is only as boring as you say it is, so why not describe it adoringly? (Although I’m pretty sure the phrase “what seems to be a dizzying height” is bad writing.) Also, we get some etymology lore: A guy named Tsertsimir Bobrishchev jumped over the falls and died; his body was found in the pool, so they’re both named after him. ALSO, there is a combat encounter with wolves. AND ALSO, there is a cave behind the waterfall, the lair of an insane dwarven taxidermist.
Curse: “You follow the river to the base of a canyon, at the far end of which a great waterfall spills into a pool, billowing forth clouds of cold mist. A great stone bridge spans the canyon nearly one thousand feet overhead.” It’s up for debate whether this description is better than Expedition‘s—I am almost positive that using the word “great” twice like that is bad writing.
But Curse finally has a description of this area from the perspective of adventurers who are actually crossing this bridge! “Gargoyles cloaked in black moss perch on the corners of the bridge, their frowns weatherworn,” says the read-aloud text. “The gargoyles on the bridge are harmless sculptures,” the DM-facing text reassures.
I. Carriage
Ravenloft: A carriage waits at a fork in the road. The two horses are black as pitch. The carriage door swings open silently. The conveyance will bear the adventurers directly to the Gates of Ravenloft.
This is the Hickmans’ version of the scene in Dracula where the Count sends a carriage to meet Jonathan Harker at the Borgo Pass. The main point of this scene, present in most adaptations I can think of, is that Jonathan (or the audience) eventually comes to realize the calèche’s mysterious driver is actually Dracula himself in disguise. Changing this into a carriage with no driver is a wise move, though, in a medium where protagonists have a reputation for randomly murdering innocent bystanders.
House: Some details are added: The horses only look black as pitch; actually they are horse skeletons wrapped in illusion magic. If the adventurers don’t get in the carriage, “an echoing, malignant laughter erupts from out of nowhere.” Then the horses take the empty carriage down to Barovia Town, and you have to walk to the castle.
Expedition: Location I is now Lysaga Hill, site of the Mountain Fane, way off to the southwest of all this other action. The carriage does not appear in this book.
Curse: The original Ravenloft carriage is back, and the horses are living horses (under Strahd’s control). It is pointed out that the carriage only appears if Strahd has invited the heroes or is trying to lure them toward him—the structure of Curse is such that many adventuring parties will want to take the other fork in the road, and not approach the castle until they’ve gained a few levels and scrounged up a few artifacts.
J. Gates of Ravenloft
Welcome to what was supposed to be the beginning of this post!
Ravenloft: The read-aloud text is a dramatic description of the harrowing carriage ride and your first view of the castle. The carriage stops before you reach the rickety bridge, which must be covered on foot. There are two death traps here:
First, whenever someone (other than Strahd) crosses the drawbridge, there is a 5% chance that a board will snap underfoot. The unlucky adventurer must make a Dexterity saving throw to avoid falling one thousand feet to the bottom of the Pillarstone of Ravenloft. I forgot to mention that Castle Ravenloft is built on top of a thousand-foot stone plateau. But we’re not there yet.
Second, a patch of green slime hangs over the entryway on this side of the bridge. “It turns living flesh into green slime in 1-4 melee rounds and eats through metal within 3 melee rounds.” You can scrape it off, or freeze or burn it, but it will kill you fast if you don’t handle it faster. But it only falls down on adventurers who are trying to leave the castle.
Everything in this book from A to J is trying to make sure you get inside that castle.
House: Exactly the same, except with updated green slime stats.
Expedition: You still have a 5% chance of breaking a plank of the drawbridge, but if you do, you only end up falling halfway through the bridge and getting stuck between the other planks. “When simply crossing the drawbridge, this is a minor inconvenience at worst, but in the middle of a battle on the bridge it can be a fatal interference.”
There are two patches of green slime here, and they explicitly fall on the first creatures who pass beneath—so instead of being punished for trying to leave, you’re just getting screwed around with before you even get inside the castle. But now the green slime deals 1d6 points of Constitution damage per round, and I don’t know how that relates to being turned entirely into slime in 1-4 rounds.
Curse: The 5% chance of breaking a board is back to being possibly deadly, but the DC on the Dexterity saving throw is only 10, and someone standing next to you can reach out and give you advantage on the save, so you’ll only die if you’re hilariously unlucky.
In 5th Edition, green slime is only super dangerous for low-level characters. Here there’s only one patch again, and it will only fall on the first character who tries to leave through the guardhouse.
Essentially Curse has recreated the scene from Ravenloft but made everything a lot less dangerous, in line with the modern preference against killing player characters arbitrarily.
And So On
I will get into locations K1-K83,K85-K88 in another post.
Ravenloft, House of Strahd, and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft all use basically the same “world map,” to which Expedition adds several details as we have seen. Curse of Strahd includes a whole western side of Barovia, constituting locations L through Z, including material from other Ravenloft books and the 4th Edition adventure “Fair Barovia” and probably some original stuff. But I don’t want to do a diachronic survey of all that. I want to do the castle!