Here’s the analysis of the catacombs.

Here’s the analysis of the stuff you see before you get to the castle.

Let’s go.

RAVENLOFT COURTYARD

K1. Front Courtyard

As you approach the castle, there’s a lot of atmosphere and not a lot of actionable information. Here, the editions all agree that there’s lightning and thunder above, and “a light drizzle begins to fall,” but we’ll see that the books’ descriptions of the weather diverge after we get inside.

The front door is open, but there are paths around the sides of the keep for contrarian adventurers to explore.

After the heroes enter the keep itself, the drawbridge will rise and the portcullis will fall, trapping the players inside. The mechanisms for manipulating the drawbridge and portcullis are under Strahd’s magic control.

The only real changes to the original description appear in Curse of Strahd: The read-aloud text is tightened up a bit, and the shattered window of location K25 gets mentioned. But otherwise it’s the same.

K2. Center Court Gate

There are portcullises on either side of the keep that require a strong character (or a team effort) to open. This is not appreciably different between editions, except that in Curse it emerges that Strahd and his servant Cyrus Belview (about whom more later) know a command word that opens the gates.

K3. Servants Court

There’s a door here that leads to the servants’ quarters.

K4. Carriage House

Ravenloft: “The double doors swing open to reveal a sleek, black carriage fitted with glass walls and a polished wood roof.”

House: I think players of Ravenloft may have thought this sleek carriage was the same one they left on the other side of the drawbridge, because House makes an uncharacteristic addition to point out that this carriage is “a twin to the one the PCs met on the road. Next to this one is an empty stall.”

Expedition: It has been decided that Strahd only needs one carriage: The location is renamed “Stables” and we see “Three spacious stalls are littered with moldering hay. Apparently nothing has lived in this stable for some time.”

Curse: “The double doors swing open to reveal a sleek, black carriage fitted with glass windows and brass lanterns.” When you read this revision, you start to realize how weird the original version was.

K5. Chapel Garden

There’s nothing really going on here; it’s just a scene of sad flowers as you make your way to the overlook.

K6. Overlook

Ravenloft: The read-aloud text explains to the characters that they look down on the village of Barovia a thousand feet below, and then they crane their heads to peer underneath the overlook so they can see that this balcony extends 20 feet out from the edge of the Pillarstone of Ravenloft. Also, 110 feet below them (and 20 feet in, so you’re now leaning waaaay over the railing to see something that’s technically behind you) a set of dirt-caked windows are built into the stone.

After the DM is finished reading this and the characters are under the players’ control again, it’s up to those players to figure out how to get down to that window safely. In the rain. And you don’t even know what the window is.

This is all very awkward and stupid, but I also love this detail, because that window is actually very important (as we will see in K88) and this provides an unconventional connection between locations, adding to the Sense of Place that Castle Ravenloft has in spades. Plus, some campaign out there actually got some use out of this window.

House: Unchanged.

Expedition: Now the overlook extends FIFTY feet out from the cliff—but the read-aloud text doesn’t mention anything about the windows below.

Curse: The protrusion of the overlook has been reduced to 20 feet, and the read-aloud text has been changed quite a bit. Characters only notice the windows 110 feet down if they have a passive Perception score of at least 15, which I think is fair.

MAIN FLOOR

K7. Entry

There are some dragon statues overlooking this antechamber, and they will come to life and attack—but only when you try to leave. In Ravenloft they have the statistics of dragons. In House they are actually golems. In Expedition they are “stone dragons,” and here they actually attack you when you arrive. In Curse they are bona fide (if child-sized) dragons.

K8. Great Entry

This is a kind of hub area connecting the entrance, the feast hall where Strahd is playing the organ, the passage to the chapel, and the stairs to the second floor. There are a bunch of gargoyles overlooking this chamber, and they will come to life and attack—but only when you come back to this room after passing through the first time. Sneaky. Except in Expedition, where they attack you the first time you come through. Not very sneaky.

In Curse, this is where the adventurers are greeted by Strahd’s chamberlain Rahadin, about whom more later.

K9. Guests’ Hall

This room has a spooky empty suit of armor. Its whole thing is that it’s lit up with torches when you first enter, but dark after you’ve encountered Strahd in K10. Except in Expedition, where it’s dark all the time.

K10. Dining Hall

Ravenloft: A feast is laid out for the adventurers. And that haunting music you’ve been hearing all along is coming from this hall, where a caped figure is playing the organ “in raptured ecstasy.” It is Strahd! No, it is an illusion of Strahd (visible in the mirrors all around the room), which welcomes you to his castle and then cackles and disappears. Then all the lights go out and the front door slams shut and the drawbridge rises and you are trapped!

Why does Strahd play the organ here? “Because Dracula plays the organ,” some may say—but here’s the thing: Dracula never played no organ. (If you can find some media where Dracula plays an organ, email me right away, because I sure can’t.) The Phantom of the Opera is the guy who plays the organ. Just like with Madam Eva/The Wolf Man‘s Maleva, we are mixing up several old movies.

House: Here it’s revealed that the illusory Strahd is a mannequin.

Expedition: There is no organ here anymore. Strahd is still waiting with a feast, but now it’s the real Strahd. He chats with the adventurers and then turns into gas and escapes.

The wine is laced with vampire blood, so someone who drinks it is more susceptible to vampiric domination.

Curse: The organ and its player’s raptured ecstasy return. Strahd is back to being an illusion—a purely magical illusion, not a puppet or mannequin or whatever. But the secret door remains, now hidden behind the organ.

And the DM’s text about the feast simply says “The food on the table is tasty, the wine delicious.” Which is a great joke by Strahd on those heroes who assume he would stoop to poisoning them.

K11. South Ground Archers’ Post

This is a mess. Ravenloft waits until this location’s description to explain that the illusory Strahd was a mannequin/marionette, worked by strings on this side of the wall. House waits until this point to mention the secret door in that wall.

In Curse, there’s a collection of mirrors in here. The text says that Strahd had them taken down from around the castle, but this appears to be a cute reference to the use of mirrors in the original dining hall scene.

K12. Turret Post

There are arrow slits in the walls of these turret posts. There are frescoes on the ceiling (the work of Artista DeSlop, one assumes) but their designs are too faded with age to make out. These boring rooms are the same in every edition.

K13. Turret Post Access Hall

Hallways choked with cobwebs thick enough to impede your vision. This skin-crawling tableau is the same in every edition.

K14. Hall of Faith

The passage to the chapel is lined with statues of knights. Their eyes seem to watch you as you pass. But this is merely an optical illusion. This eerie scene is the same in every edition.

K15. Chapel of Ravenloft

Ravenloft: A single shaft of light pierces the boarded-up stained-glass windows to bring to your attention the Icon of Ravenloft, a powerful holy artifact sitting on the altar. It is a “small carving of the purest silver. It is 12 inches tall and 6 inches across.” That is not small! Also, we have no idea what it looks like!

Also, where is that light coming from? It’s raining out!

A figure is draped over the altar: An evil cleric who tried to claim the Icon and was zapped by its holiness.

House: Everything is the same except now it’s explained that the Icon is shaped like a raven. And the read-aloud text specifically mentions that there’s lightning flashing outside, but it still mentions a piercing shaft of light falling on the altar.

Expedition: The read-aloud text has been rewritten to ignore the shaft of light (and the outside weather). The evil cleric’s body is now kitted out with a bunch of cool magic items for you to loot.

Curse: The shaft of light is back! Infuriating!

They could just say that the light is produced by the holiness of the statue. That would be a cool detail.

The Icon of Ravenloft now depicts a cleric kneeling in supplication. It has some fun backstory. It was a gift to Strahd for the consecration of the chapel and castle (before all this vampire stuff started).

The dead cleric now has a name. (5th Edition is aware that you might cast Speak with Dead on any corpse you run into.) He is Gustav Herrenghast, and he doesn’t have quite so many lootable magic items now. Just his mace.

K16. North Chapel Alcoves

There are some eight-foot-tall statues of muscular knights in this little room connecting the chapel to a staircase. Every edition points out that they are harmless.

K17. South Chapel Alcoves

There are more harmless statues here.

House of Strahd goes COMPLETELY OFF THE RAILS here by folding the north and south alcoves into location 16. For House, area 17 is the High Tower Staircase, area 18 is the Grand Landing, area 19 is the Tower Hall of Honor, and area 20 is the Tower Hall Stair. Then things sync back up.

K18. High Tower Staircase

The physical details here get kind of hairy, but all the editions agree on what’s going on here: There’s a huge spiral staircase with a hollow shaft in the middle. The way down from the chapel to the catacombs has been walled off, but there’s a chink in the masonry through which Strahd will travel in gaseous form if he needs to retreat to his coffin. (House makes this very clear, because in Ravenloft it was only implied.) A different masonry-chink allows gaseous access to K63, the wine cellar.

If you fall down the central shaft, you will take a bunch of damage and die.

There’s a fun detail about this whole setup that doesn’t get explicated here—it’s described along with Barovia Town—but I think it’s the same in all editions: Back in Barovia Town there’s a cemetery. Every night at midnight, a hundred ghosts of doomed adventurers rise up out of the cemetery. They march all the way to Castle Ravenloft. (I estimate this takes about 5 hours.) They march into the castle, they march up this staircase, and then they leap down the central shaft in a sort of pageant of doomedness.

K19. Grand Landing

We have jumped around a bit—this is the landing up the staircase from the Great Entry area. There are some suits of armor guarding the throne room ahead, and a pressure plate trap can cause them to bonk you on the head with a mace when you walk past. “This little joke is intended to spook more than damage.” And we know that Expedition to Castle Ravenloft hates jokes, so in that book these are just regular suits of armor.

K20. Tower Hall of Honor

Let’s jump around again. This location always trips me up because it’s not accessible from anywhere we’ve been in areas K1-K19. It’s the base of the other tower of Ravenloft, and to get here you either have to come down from the second floor or up from the basement.

Ravenloft: This tower is very dark and nondescript at first, but if you start to climb it, a giant glass heart at the top starts to glow and beat—and the tower comes to life! The “Guardian of Sorrow” (that’s what the tower is) pitches back and forth, trying to fling you off the stairs so you fall down the middle, and it attacks you with the halberds hanging on its walls. So cool.

House: All basically the same, except that when the Guardian of Sorrow activates, you just hear the thudding of a giant heart. You don’t see it until you get all the way to the top, and then you have to make a Horror check, because in this version it’s an actual giant heart, attached to the ceiling with giant pulsing veins, instead of a glass facsimile.

Expedition: The Guardian of Sorrow is now called the “Dayheart,” and now the heart itself is in location K60A. Here we just get some foreshadowing: “From somewhere above, a bluish, gooey substance slowly drips, spattering and staining the mosaic floor.” (The mosaic floor is mentioned in every edition.) Let’s skip ahead to K60A:

The Dayheart is a big crystalline heart-shaped object floating in midair. I would have guessed that Expedition would have gone with the huge flesh-and-blood heart, but maybe they thought that was too cartoony. Its magic grants Strahd and his vampires immunity to sunlight, so you’ll want to destroy it. But it’s guarded by a bunch of vampires.

Wait, so what’s the bluish gooey substance?

Curse: The “Heart of Sorrow” (the best name yet) is a giant glass heart, which in illustrations is implied to be much more anatomically correct than the Dayheart was. Curse takes pains to establish that you never get any actual sunlight in Barovia, so Strahd doesn’t need that kind of protection; instead, the Heart of Sorrow acts as an HP reserve for Strahd: It can take up to 49 points of damage for him, no matter where he is, and replenishes its own health every day at dawn. So, you’ll want to destroy it—and when you deal 50 points of damage to the Heart of Sorrow, its crystal shards transform into blood that rains down on the tower and staircase. But when Strahd detects that the Heart is under attack he dispatches some vampire spawn to defend it.

K21. South Tower Stair

This is the stairway off of K9, the Guests’ Hall. It’s a critical stairway because it’s right there when you leave the Dining Hall after you have your introductory meeting with (illusory) Strahd and the lights go out and the doors slam shut. The stairs go up to K30 (and then further up to K35 and K47) and down to K61 (and further down to the K73, the flooded dungeon). Are you lost yet? Yeah, me neither.

Fortunately none of this changes between editions.

K22. Archers’ Post

Nothing going on here. Nothing changes, because there’s nothing to change.

No, I tell a lie: Ravenloft says the arrow slits are 2 1/2 feet wide by 4 feet tall. House says they are only 2 feet wide. Expedition is uninterested in this minutiae. And then Curse restores them to 2 1/2 feet.

K23. Servants’ Entrance

Okay, so we go back outside, through the northern portcullis into the backyard by the carriage house/stable. We’re in location K3. There’s a door there. We bust through that door and we’re here in K23.

Ravenloft: There are a couple inanimate skeletons wearing armor and carrying halberds mounted here, just to spook intruders. And there is a giant ancient guestbook, in which each page is headed “Please register for your own convenience and that of your next of kin.” The ink in the inkwell is fresh. Strahd has a sense of humor, you see—but will it last through all four of these books?

House: Everything’s the same.

Expedition: The skeletons remain, but the guestbook is gone. NO JOKES ALLOWED.

Curse: The guestbook is back! We also get the detail that the skeletons were mounted by Cyrus Belview, about whom more later, but he doesn’t get credit for the book.

K24. Servants’ Quarters

All the editions agree: Broken furniture and torn cloth are strewn about this twenty-by-forty-foot room. The windows are caked in dirt. There’s a rickety, steep, narrow staircase with no railing that leads up to K34.

COURT OF THE COUNT

K25. Audience Hall

This is the room with the broken window that we could see from the front courtyard. It is Strahd’s throne room, filled with dusty cobwebs. The primary difference between versions of this room is the weather: In Ravenloft we get dim light from outside; in House we get wind and rain coming in the window; in Expedition there’s just lightning. In Curse, it’s back to dim light.

Strahd’s throne faces away from the room, which is such an amazing creepy detail, preserved in all versions. It feels like it might be a reference to something, but I don’t know what. In Curse, the throne room in the fortress of Argynvostholt has the same creepy quality, even though the person sitting in the throne is nominally a good guy. So I guess this is just how they do throne rooms in this fantasy society?

K26. Guards’ Post

This is basically just a hallway, but there are some creepy skeletons floating in the darkness! They are just stuck to the wall to make it look like they’re floating. Curse specifies that they were mounted by Cyrus Belview, A.W.M.L.

K27. Hall of Grace

“Shadows seem to dance across the distant ceiling,” says the read-aloud text. “A low moan rises and falls the length of the corridor, intoning sadness and despair.” But the shadows are a trick of the light, and the moaning is just the wind—it’s the same in all the books.

Except in Curse, first of all the room is renamed “King’s Hall,” and secondly there is an added moment of horror in which a mannequin that looks like Strahd flies down the hallway to “attack” the heroes! It is a very dumb trick, and very much in line with some of the other dumb tricks Strahd pulls in this book (in addition to other much smarter tricks).

Now, I would like to say “This apparently is where the mannequin that used to be used in the Dining Hall illusion ended up.” But this invites the notion that these modules are taking place one after the other. And in some weird ways maybe they are. But we can’t get into that right now.

K28. King’s Worship Place

Ravenloft: What a clunky title. There are two thrones on this balcony that overlooks the chapel. Sitting in the throne are a couple of zombies! Ambush!

House: Basically the same.

Expedition: Now it’s called “Chapel Balcony” and the zombies are gone.

Curse: Now it’s called “King’s Balcony” and the zombies are back.

K29. Creaking Landing

Just a landing on the stairs connecting the chapel to the balcony above. It creaks.

K30. Office of the King’s Accountant

Ravenloft: The king’s accountant is Lief Lipsiege, a grumpy man chained to a desk. “He is grumpy because the Count does not allow him to know about all of the treasures.” He is not interested in the adventurers at all. He is a helpless non-combatant. He just wants to do accounting. But he knows where the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind is (that’s an amulet that you really want to have if you’re planning to fight Strahd), and if you’re nice to him he’ll draw you a middlingly helpful map leading to it. If you’re not nice to him, he’ll pull a rope that activates a gong that summons a monster to defend him “within 1-10 minutes.” Treasure: A bunch of money (about 5,000 gp’s worth) and some accounting reference books are hidden under the papers that litter the room.

House: All the same information is printed, but a bunch of useful and humanizing details are added: We find out where Lief usually sleeps (area 49) and what parts of the castle he knows about. We learn that he is only lately chained to his desk because Strahd needs him to update the books for the most recent tax collection. And if you’re especially nice to him he might give you a scroll with a bunch of clerical(!) spells.

Expedition: The room is now called the “Steward’s Office,” and Lief Lipsiege—while still an accountant—is now a tainted raver, “constantly in a state of insane fury similar to a barbarian’s rage.” In other words, you are now going to fight this guy, and the three nameless undead spellcasters who are hanging around him.

You can try to parley with Lief (it helps if you offer him booze), but it takes an extremely high Diplomacy check to get him to help you at all. There’s no mention of him knowing where the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind is, or any of the Strahd-defeating artifacts, which makes sense since in this adventure those artifacts may lie outside the castle walls.

The amount of treasure in the office has been reduced to about 350 gp.

Curse: The room is now called “King’s Accountant,” and the text basically replicates the Ravenloft version, eliding the House of Strahd additions. Now Lief knows where the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind is even if it’s outside the castle!

The treasure that was just lying around in previous editions is now locked up in a bunch of treasure chests. Lief has the key hidden in a hollowed-out book. The amounts of coins in the chests neatly match the amounts specified in Ravenloft. It’s just organized better.

K31. Trapworks

This room, accessible via a secret door from K27, operates the elevator trap in K61. We’ll discuss the trap itself later. Let’s focus on what you can do here:

In Ravenloft, House, and Expedition, the chamber is full of inscrutable machinery. A character can try to activate the trap, but success is a matter of luck in Ravenloft, or mechanical know-how in later editions.

In Curse there’s a lot of inscrutable machinery but there’s also a big lever sticking out of the wall. Pulling the lever one way activates the trap. Pulling it the other way resets the trap. And any character can spend one minute messing with the mechanisms to disable the trap entirely. Curse makes a lot of things easier on us.

K32. Maid’s Hall

Ravenloft: “Stained, yellowed lace hangs neatly from eight canopied beds. The single lithe figure of a woman moves about the room, dusting the furniture.” The woman is Helga, a crafty vampire who pretends to be Strahd’s captive, pleads to the adventurers to take her with them, and then waits for the perfect opportunity to attack. She specifically is looking for a moment when she won’t have to fight the whole party.

“She is, in fact, the daughter of one of the townspeople but she chose a life of evil with Strahd.”

House: The only change is that Helga falling on her knees and begging for help is added to the read-aloud text.

Expedition: The room is tellingly renamed “Maids’ Hall.” (That is, it’s now the hall of plural maids.) The eight beds are here, but Helga is gone. Instead, seven of the beds contain unnaturally preserved dead bodies of pale young women. When touched, a corpse disintegrates, leaving behind a blackened skeleton. “The room reveals no indication as to what, if anything, ever occupied the eighth bed.”

Curse: Now the room is “Maid in Hell.” As usual, Curse reverts to the original ideas of Ravenloft and adds some extra color. Helga Ruvak, now humming while she dusts, “is, in fact, the bootmaker’s daughter she claims to be, but she chose a life of evil with Strahd.”

Helga also wears a gold necklace with a ruby pendant, mentioned in the read-aloud text. It is a gift from Strahd. A useful clue for players, maybe, or perhaps something you realize you should have picked up on earlier.

K33. King’s Apartment Stair

Just a staircase. It only gets read-aloud text in Curse. But it’s not very interesting.

K34. Servants’ Upper Floor

Here’s the room up the rickety staircase from K23. It is a sad, dirty room full of broken bedframes.

A ladder leads to a secret door connecting to K20, the magical heart-powered staircase. In Ravenloft, the tower activates as soon as you pass through the secret door. In House, it only activates if you continue halfway up to the next floor, which seems like a smart revision in pacing. In Expedition and Curse, it’s not totally clear when the tower activates if you access it from here.

Curse does supply more fun details: The ladder to the secret door is hidden behind another secret door behind a mirror.

Also there’s this wardrobe, “roughly shaped like a coffin, its black doors painted with fey creatures.” If someone opens the wardrobe, a yellowed old dress flies out and starts dancing around the room. It stops moving when someone touches it. “Otherwise, it dances forever.”

ROOMS OF WEEPING

K35. Facing Guardians

There’s a door here made of “delicately engraved steel” here flanked by two alcoves. There are figures in the alcoves. The figures are undead monsters, except in Curse where they are swarms of rats piled up in humanoid-ish shapes (and the room is renamed “Guardian Vermin”).

Curse is also the first book to bother explaining what’s are engraved on the door: A king on a horse, surrounded by mountains. And wolves.

K36. Dining Hall of the Count

I just noticed that some of these room names refer to a “King” and others refer to the “Count.”

There’s a very good scene here: The fine china and silverware are all covered with dust, and the wedding cake is all slumped over and green with age. A figurine of the bride is still on top. The groom’s figurine was thrown to the floor long ago—four hundred years ago, when Strahd’s brother Sergei married Strahd’s beloved Tatyana.

Expedition inexplicably removes the detail about the groom’s figurine, and adds a singing undead lady called a crypt chanter for you to fight.

Curse adds a novella’s worth of extra detail: An iron chandelier, and a lute, and a harp. And if you play the harp well enough then the ghost of the jester Pidlwick shows up to talk to you. And the lute is magical.

And if you find the groom figurine, and you take it out of the room, and you come back to the room later, then something has exploded out of the cake and busted through the window and escaped.

K37. Study

There’s a roaring fire, and a ton of books, and nice chairs. The fireplace conceals a secret passage to K38.

On the wall is a portrait of Tatyana. It looks exactly like Ireena Kolyana! This is how, in a Ravenloft-sized adventure, you find out that the woman Strahd is preying on today is the reincarnation of the woman he lusted after and lost four hundred years ago. House of Strahd includes some text on how shocked Ireena will be when she sees this.

In Expedition and especially in Curse, there’s a lot more adventure going on outside the castle, so you’re more likely to find out about this reincarnation angle before you get here. But an illustration choice in Curse sort of spoils the story beat: The text describes her as “a striking young woman with auburn hair.” The spot illustration of Ireena is of a striking young woman with dark skin and very dark hair. The illustration of Tatyana, which I think might even be by the same artist, has her with light skin and red hair. The two portraits are posed differently, so it’s hard to compare their noses or lips or bone structure. Their only commonality is that they depict striking young women.

Giving Ireena darker skin is a nice move: She doesn’t look like her brother, and this dovetails with the intriguing detail that the burgomaster adopted her when she appeared in the woods with amnesia. (This detail appears in all editions, and I’m not sure what it’s implying. Was Ireena spontaneously generated by the land of Barovia?) But if you’re going to change her appearance, you really ought to change the appearance of the woman who explicitly looks exactly like her.

Every edition mentions that if you try to go through the secret passage in the fireplace while the fire is still going, you will take damage. From the fire.

Curse adds some details about the books on the shelves: Their subject matter, their number, and their monetary value. The entire collection is worth 80,000 gp. “Transporting it would be a challenge.”

K38. False Treasury

There’s a measly amount of money here, and a trapped treasure chest that shoots out sleeping gas when you open it. If the entire adventuring party succumbs to the gas, they all wake up four hours later, “apparently unharmed,” in location K50. Curse explains that the heroes get dragged to K50 by the witches from K56.

But not in Expedition! Expedition finds this moment of creepiness to be unacceptably forgiving. In Expedition, if the whole party falls asleep here, then Strahd will either kill all of them or make them all his vampire slaves. Game over.

There are two sconces on the wall, and one has a torch missing. The torch is in the skeletal hand of a nearby adventurer-corpse. Returning the torch to the sconce opens a passage to K39.

K39. Hall of Riches

The hall is full of spiderwebs, but there’s a single-file path cut through the webbery toward “a pair of bronze doors of highly ornate design.” (Curse, uncharacteristically, does not expand on what that design might be.)

A secret door off this hallway leads to K31b, which is just a little platform with access to the shaft of the elevator trap.

K40. Belfry

We don’t see any bells here: Just spiderwebs, and a big rope hanging from high above. Pulling the rope rings a huge bell, but it also summons a bunch of giant spiders. In Expedition they are “cheliceras,” arachnid monsters that can mimic human voices. A secret door leads further on to the actual treasury.

K41. Treasury

Ravenloft: “50,000 cp; 10,000 sp; 10,000 gp; 1,000 pp; 15 100 gp gems; 10 1,000 gp jewels; a magical (glowing) sword (+2); and three maces (each +3).” That’s 33,000 gp in coins and gems. I don’t know exactly what the magic weapons are worth.

House: Ravenloft didn’t even bother to say how the treasure was arranged, but House explains that it’s “in various chests and sacks.” It’s the exact same amounts of coins and gems, and the glowing sword, but only one mace. And a clerical scroll with some healing spells.

Expedition: The treasure is back to being piled up haphazardly.

“5,000 gp, 4,000 sp, and 300 pp scattered on the floor. There is a +1 ghost touch bastard sword, and several large art objects (total value 6,000 gp). These art objects include a large silver urn (850 gp), a heavy (10 lb.) gold idol of some nameless squat demon-thing (700 gp), a decorative shield of steel inlaid with silver and lapis lazuli (300 gp), a golden circlet set with topaz (3,000 gp), a gold pendant set with a bloodstone on a heavy chain (150 gp), a fine lute with mother-of-pearl inlay (650 gp), and a fine wool tapestry depicting Strahd’s conquest of these lands (350 gp).”

The coins and the art objects all come to 20,400 gp. I wonder if this lute is the one that Curse put in K36’s dining hall. I think we might see that tapestry somewhere else…

Curse: Instead of piles or chests or even sacks of treasure, adventurers discover a tower that barely fits in the room, almost touching the ceiling. The domed ceiling is painted black with pitch and there are shards of glowing crystal that look like stars. Very pretty.

All the treasure is inside the tower, which is actually a Daern’s Instant fortress. It is very difficult to get inside.

The same amounts of coins from Ravenloft are preserved, but the ten 1,000-gp jewels have been replaced with ten 250-gp pieces of jewelry, which means we’re down to… 25,500 gp in generic treasure. The magic items are all-new, including a magic shield that whispers to its bearer, a helm of brilliance, an alchemy jug (a type of magical jug that can produce water or beer or honey or mayonnaise), a bunch of healing potions, and a rod of the pact keeper (a type of magical rod that is useful only to warlock characters).

K42. Bedchamber

Strahd’s bed has a big “Z” carved into the headboard. I’ve never seen an illustration of this and I struggle to imagine how it could look cool. All editions use basically the same text about how this room smells nice and there are candles and silken curtains etc. etc.

In the bed is a young woman. “One of her dainty slippers has fallen to the floor at the foot of the bed.” (Curse says “the bed’s foot” which might be a mistake.) This is Gertruda, the daughter of Mad Mary, whom adventurers may have met in Barovia Village.

Actually, let’s get into this: In all these editions, there’s a lady called Mad Mary in Barovia Village who is driven to distraction by the disappearance of her daughter. She begs the adventurers to go to the castle and rescue her. In Ravenloft and House of Strahd, the adventurers might end up at the castle that same night, or maybe within a couple of days. But in Expedition and Curse, there’s a lot (a LOT) of business to take care of around Barovia before you want to go to the castle.

But in all these editions, whenever you get around to entering the castle, whenever you reach this room, Gertruda is fine:

Ravenloft: “Fortunately, Strahd has not yet bitten her. He is intent on his current plot and is saving her for later.”

House: “Fortunately, Strahd has not yet bitten her. He is intent on his current plot and is saving her for later.”

Expedition: “…her mind and body are intact—Strahd’s attention has been elsewhere and he has not yet corrupted her body or soul.”

Curse: “Fortunately for her, Strahd has not yet bitten her, though he intends to. (If he can do so while the characters look on helplessly, so much the better.)”

The differences in this bit of text are all the more fascinating because so much of what comes before is repeated almost verbatim in every edition:

“Sheltered by her mother all of her life, Gertruda is innocent and believes only in a rather fairytale view of life. When faced with a decision, Gertruda almost always makes the most simplistic choice. She is naive to the point of being a danger to herself and others.” Emphasis mine; I love this character so much.

K43. Bath Chamber

Ravenloft: “In the center of this room stands a large, ornate iron tub.”

House: Now the tub is full of steaming, scented water. “Moldering curtains of black and gold brocade hang on either side of the tub.” Behind the curtains is the closet. But that’s location 44.

Expedition: “A large, ornate iron tub stands in the center of this room. Red velvet curtain [sic] hang on either side of a mirror-lined alcove.” I have to imagine that the authors of Expedition read the description in House and consciously decided to change the color of the curtains and remove the bath from the tub.

Curse: I said in the K84 post that I didn’t have any intention of evaluating these books. I just wanted to note the differences, and maybe possibly explain them.

But we keep finding these rooms that Curse of Strahd absolutely does better than any of the others. Curse is obsessed with finding fun stuff to do with every single nook and cranny.

You would expect me to like it the best, because I read it first and I studied it so intently before I looked at the other books. I am definitely biased. But in these posts, I’m looking at all these texts side by side, just reporting what is on the page—there isn’t much room for bias to make a difference. Curse is just better.

Unless you want to fight everything you see, in which case Expedition takes the cake.

ANYWAY: In Curse the bathtub is full of blood.

The blood is actually a manifestation of the tortured spirit of Varushka, a maid who took her own life rather than be transformed into a vampire by Strahd. If someone disturbs the blood, “a blood-drenched creature explodes out of the tub and attaches to the ceiling, cackling maniacally.” It isn’t a monster to fight; it just scuttles into the closet and disappears. This is the best version of Castle Ravenloft.

K44. Closet

Ravenloft: “Within this room hang 28 capes and an assortment of black formal wear.”

House: “Within this room hang 28 capes and an assortment of black formal wear.”

If you haven’t noticed, this is a joke about vampire fashion. Wait—did I say “joke”???

Expedition: “Racks of clothing and dressers dominate this large room. An enormous variety of elegant dresses in every imaginable color hangs in here, though most seem very old-fashioned.” It was a fairly subtle joke, but still unacceptable. It’s interesting, though, that Strahd has a bunch of dresses handy.

Curse: “The walls here are lined with iron hooks, upon which hang black capes and formal wear.” Then the DM-facing text explains that there’s 28 capes and 16 sets of fine clothes, because, how would the characters entering the room know at a glance how many capes are in here?

K45. Hall of Heroes

The ceiling has fallen, exposing this corridor to the elements. There are ten statues here, and when the lightning flashes their faces are revealed to be frozen in terror! But not in Expedition, where I guess this detail was determined to be too Disneyland. Curse explains to the DM that the faces of the statue are actually expressionless, and only turn horrified when lit up by lightning.

Spirits of ancestors inhabit the statues. In Ravenloft and House they “grieve at the loss of Ravenloft’s former glory.” In Curse they grieve the termination of their bloodline. Each of the ten statues will answer a single question posed by the adventurers; there is a 20% chance that an answer will be incorrect—even in Curse, which usually dispenses with the arbitrariness of previous editions.

In Expedition, one of the statues is possessed by a friendly spirit who can help you get a prestige class, but the other spirits are hostile for whatever reason and you get to fight them.

K46. Courtyard Overlook

The parapets around the castle are slick with rain. You can break through the windows into various rooms. (The only rooms with accessible windows I can see are K36 or 42. Or, wait, are those windows in K44, the closet? Yes. Huh.)

In Curse, Strahd’s animated armor patrols the parapets (the location is renamed “Parapets”) and will attack people who hang out here for too long.

SPIRES OF RAVENLOFT

K47. The Landing

An ancient portrait hangs here, where the K21 stairway meets the K48 stairway. In Ravenloft we don’t know whom the painting depicts, just that it stares at you and casts spells on you to try and hold you in place until Strahd can come grab you. In House we learn it depicts “a bearded man.”

In Expedition it’s a portrait of Tatyana, and instead of being a plain old spellcasting painting trap it’s part of a combat encounter with a chain golem and a gargoyle. A safe containing a bunch of antique women’s jewelry is hidden behind the portrait.

In Curse, the portrait depicts Strahd before he became a vampire. (The room is renamed “Portrait of Strahd.”) It attacks in concert with an ornate Rug of Smothering that lurks on the floor. Curse also explains that it’s impossible to get the painting off the wall without destroying it.

K48. Offstair

Just some stairs. Expedition has a lot of details here but they mostly relate to the contents of other rooms.

K49. Lounge

Expedition is going to hate this!

The overstuffed chairs and couches are all faded and sad. Against the east wall is a bookcase:

The books are of no real help to the party. Some of the titles found on the bookshelf are: “Embalming, The Lost Art,” “Life Among the Undead: Learning to Cope,” “Identifying Blood Types: A Beginners’ Handbook,” and “Masonry and Woodworking.”

House uses the same goofy book titles as Ravenloft; Curse replaces the last two with “Castle Building 101” and “Goats of the Balinok Mountains.” Expedition doesn’t say anything about what the books are, OBVIOUSLY. Instead, Expedition has a weird monster called a trilloch: an invisible extradimensional parasite that feeds on negative emotions.

In Curse, the vampire Escher is here. He’s one of Strahd’s consorts (I think the only male consort mentioned), but Strahd hasn’t been very nice to him lately. So Escher aims to lead the adventurers to Strahd to win back his lord’s favor.

K50. Guestroom

Ravenloft: There’s a huge fancy bed and a bunch of divans in here. (This is where you wake up if your entire party falls victim to the sleeping gas in K38.) If the adventurers try to rest here at night, witches from K56 will come in and try to carry a party member away.

House: Basically the same.

Expedition: The witches have been replaced with warlocks loyal to a devil named Khyristrix, about whom more later. The warlocks pop out of the closet (K51) and you get to fight them!

A journal is hidden between the mattresses! It belongs to Donavan Harp, a gentleman from a distant land who visited Ravenloft on business. Strahd was interested in purchasing some property in this distant land. But then he had nightmares about witches and creatures. We are describing here the first few chapters of the novel Dracula—which we could construe as a joke! Heavens!

But the journal ends on an expository note: A woman named Khyristrix appeared to Donavan in the night, and invited him to disobey Strahd’s warnings and go up to the parapet (K57) at night. Uh-oh…

Curse: It’s the same as in Ravenloft.

K51. Closet

It’s a closet. There are hooks and cloaks. There’s a trap door in the ceiling to connect this with K56.

Curse has just one cloak hanging from a hook, and the DM text explains that the witches put it there to help them remember which hook opens the trap door.

K52. Smokestack

This is the chimney over the fireplace in K37—in case that’s the way you want to sneak inside Castle Ravenloft. In all the books except House, it’s five feet wide at the top, and being inside of it will cause you to take damage because it’s full of smoke.

In House, it’s three feet wide at the top, and inhaling the smoke won’t cause you damage. But it might cause you to lose consciousness and fall down the chimney into the fire.

K53. Rooftop

The roof is slick and dangerous. It’s difficult to climb across, but if you really want to, you can try. This is the case in all the books.

K54. Familiar Room

Three black cats lair here, ruining the upholstery on heaps of abandoned couches. They are the familiars of the witches in K56, and if the cats see you, then the witches know you’re here.

In Expedition, the familiars are white cats (I guess they’re only explicitly black in Ravenloft) and in fact they are actually imps disguised as cats, gifted to the warlocks by the devil Khyristrix. Expedition puts scare quotes around “familiar” when describing these creatures, but I’m pretty sure imps were a fairly standard familiar option in 3rd Edition. They certainly are in 5th Edition.

The imps are accompanied by a murderous redcap that has been adopted/abducted by one of the warlocks, so you know you’ve got a good combat encounter here.

K55. Element Room

This is the witches’ potion-mixing room, and there are bottles on the tables containing Eye of Newt and Hair of Bat and so on.

In Expedition, this is the main place to fight the three warlocks who have replaced Strahd’s witches (we’ll get to those in K56). Some wizardly stuff has been moved into here from K56, specifically the cauldron. And the liquid in the cauldron is actually a gelatinous cube! Half of a very important silver key is in the bottom of the cauldron, so you’ll reach in there and the gelatinous monster will grab you and you’re in trouble.

Expedition does preserve most of the goofy magic ingredient names.

K56. Cauldron

Ravenloft: Seven witches are cackling around a giant cauldron. Each one knows two spells. If you defeat them, you can find their spellbook, which contains all those spells and a few more—but a non-evil hero who touches it will take a bunch of damage!

House: Seven witches are cackling around a giant cauldron. Each one knows THREE spells. Their spellbook is still here to be looted, as well as a healing potion and an amulet of life protection.

If one of your party was kidnapped by the witches, that adventurer has been dragged here and is now lying in a corner, bound, gagged, and invisible. The witches are brewing a mind control potion to make the unlucky invisible hero their slave.

Expedition: This is now the “Warlock Bedchamber” and it’s basically an apartment. You can find the journal of one of the warlocks, Afina, detailing her attachment to Khyristrix and Khyristrix’s deal with Strahd: He lets her hang out in the castle as long as she tends the Dayheart.

Curse: We’re back to having seven witches in here, although if they’re expecting intruders they will turn invisible and prepare an ambush. All the witches use the same statblock that stipulates their prepared spells, so you don’t have the cute and inconvenient dynamic of each witch being unique. Their spellbook is still here, and it contains a bunch of the spells that the Ravenloft witches used, but it’s not an exact replica. It still deals damage to non-evil people though.

In House the witches explicitly will not bargain with the adventurers, but in Curse they can be coerced into sharing information, including the secrets of their cauldron: The command word “Gorah” will magically heat any liquid placed inside, and keep it hot for three hours. This underwhelming ability can be activated only once a day.

K57. Parapet Pentagram

Ravenloft: “This is the top of the tower.” Black clouds roil above. I cannot figure out where the “pentagram” part comes in.

House: The room is renamed “Parapet.” Black clouds roil above and a chill rain soaks you to the bone.

Expedition: Now this is the “Devil’s Garden.” It is gross: “Bluish sludge covers the parapet, secreted by nearly a dozen white, wet, rat-sized slugs.” The sludge oozes past some humanoid plant things, then across a catwalk into the northern tower, and then it drips down to K20. So that explains that.

“The garden is a fiendishly simple ecosystem refined by Khyristrix over many decades. In its current state, the garden consists only of two components: garden larva and devil’s trees.” And actually the garden larva and devil’s trees are two stages in the development of the same hideous life form.

Khyristrix is actually here, lounging in a pool of blue goop. When the adventurers arrive, she emerges, revealing herself to be a barbed devil. Then you fight her and the slugs, and you can get her hellheart locket. Destroying the locket makes it easier to destroy the nearby Dayheart.

Curse: The location is back to being just cloudy and rainy, but now it’s called “Tower Roof.”

K58. Bridge

A narrow bridge connects two of the towers. All the books agree that its railings “rusted away years ago, leaving the bridge without handholds,” except Expedition. Here, the sludge flowing across the bridge makes things extra dangerous, so to compensate, “the remnants of rusted railings cling here and there to the sides of the catwalk.”

Also Expedition is the only book to call it a “catwalk.”

K59. Hightower Peak

Just to make things a little extra confusing, this is the top of a tower that we haven’t talked about in a while: It’s the top of K18, the one with the spiral staircase and then the hollow tube inside. The one that goes down to the catacomb level. Except the lower reaches are bricked off. That tower.

At its peak, we see the top of that hollow tube, the fastest route to the catacombs. We also see that the roof has fallen in partly, exposing this area to the elements. And then we have this sentence:

Ravenloft: “Cold air rushes up from the shaft sending a chill through your every bone.”

House: “Air rushes up from the shaft, sending the supernatural chill of the grave through your every bone.”

Expedition: “Cold air rushes up the shaft, carrying the odor of moldering graves.”

Curse: “Cold air rushes up out of the shaft, sending a chill through you.”

How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

Curse adds a character here: Pidlwick II, a child-sized clockwork jester. It is creepy but friendly, but it has a tendency to hold grudges, and push the objects of those grudges down the stairs. Which is what happened to the first Pidlwick.

K60. Northtower Peak

This is the room at the top of the tower with the giant heart in it. In Ravenloft and House, it’s just “a brightly lit room with manacles attached to the walls and a wooden frame bed.”

In Expedition, vampire spawn led by a vampire named Rafail lair here. They protect the Dayheart below. You can loot their coffins for some neat treasure.

In Curse, this is back to being a torture chamber, and it’s explained that the wooden frame bed has leather restraints. There’s a iron chest at the foot of the bed. It’s locked. Cyrus Belview has the key. Inside the chest is a bejeweled gold crown worth 2,500 gp. Why is this in the torture chamber?

Then Curse adds another fun bit of business: If you go outside on top of the tower, the thunderclouds FORM THEMSELVES INTO STRAHD’S FACE AND HE SCREAMS THOUSANDS OF BATS OUT OF HIS MOUTH AT YOU.

LARDERS OF ILL OMEN

K61. Hallway

Ravenloft: This is the elevator trap. The basic facts are the same in every edition: A section of the hallway has a pressure plate underneath it. When the plate is triggered, portcullises rise and stone walls fall on either side, sealing off whoever’s standing there. Then the chamber fills with sleeping gas. Then the whole hallway-section rises extremely fast up an elevator shaft to K47, the landing with the spellcasting portrait.

Ravenloft says that the compartment rises “through a trap door to K47.” It also says “The trapped and sleeping characters present an excellent opportunity for Strahd to attack.” I have trouble understanding the geometries implied here, but later editions are more specific.

House: Here, the compartment only goes so far up as “the secret room just outside room 39,” which other editions call room 31B. This is a very tight spot, because the way out of room 39 is the secret door that can only be opened from room 38 (the false treasury with the sconce puzzle). It all seems very inconvenient for everyone involved, including Strahd.

In Ravenloft, anyone who’s left outside of the compartment when it zooms up the shaft sees “a clear corridor” ahead of them. In House, they see “an empty corridor with fresh bloodstains on the floor.” Strahd had Cyrus Belview (more on him later) load some sheep’s blood into the trap as soon as the adventurers arrived to create this effect.

Expedition: The sleeping gas has been replaced with a generic sleep spell effect, a minor stylistic change. But there’s another more significant stylistic change here as well:

In Ravenloft and House, triggering the trap is a matter of chance. Maybe the first person to walk over the trap triggers it. Maybe the second person, or the fifth person. Maybe it doesn’t go off at all (although this is pretty unlikely).

In Expedition: “As soon as two player characters move into the central 10-foot section of the hallway, the elevator trap is triggered.” The adventuring party is probably at least four people. This book is deciding absolutely to split them up—so that we can do two combat encounters at once.

Expedition also says that the enemies in K47 will attack whoever shows up in the elevator trap compartment (this one goes up to K47), even if they’re asleep. So the compartment must open up somehow to let the monsters get at the adventurers. I don’t know how it works.

Meanwhile in the corridor, a troll stalker attacks! A troll stalker is a type of troll that is invisible—a cross between an invisible stalker and a troll. This troll stalker, Nicoramus, is in thrall to Lucian, about whom more later, and is compelled to attack intruders. But if you parley with him he will ask you to destroy the oathstone that Lucian holds, freeing Nicoramus, and then he’ll do a favor for you.

The book really wants the adventurers in the corridor to fight Nicoramus (and two giant ants that show up) (about whom more later) at the same time that the adventurers who triggered the elevator trap are fighting the portrait and the gargoyle and the chain golem upstairs. The two groups can possibly hear each other’s battles going on—but yelling to the other group may summon a monster from downstairs in K74.

Curse: There’s no combat encounter here anymore. The elevator trap now clearly goes up to just below K47, so that Strahd or somebody can open a trapdoor near the portrait and extract the sleeping occupants for whatever fell purposes he has in mind.

Curse notes that the moving elevator makes a sound that can be heard throughout the castle, in contrast to earlier books that make a big deal about how the mechanisms (distinct from the moving stone compartment?) are very quiet.

But also, the trigger for the trap has changed. It goes off when 400 pounds of pressure are applied to the floor of the compartment. “A party of adventurers moving in close formation down the hall is certainly heavy enough to trigger the trap.” Curse really does not want to split the party.

K62. Servants’ Hall

This is a critical location for anyone trying to learn their way around Castle Ravenloft. It connects the K21 stairway to the servants’ quarters in K23, and through K67 you can get to K20 (the tower with the heart in it) or the dungeon/catacomb level.

This is also where Strahd’s servant Cyrus Belview shows up. The books all agree: “Poor old Cyrus is obviously crazy.” But he is not aggressive (even in Expedition, where everything else tries to kill you). When he finds the adventurers, he tells them they should be up in their room in the tower (K49), but he won’t force them up there.

Another detail on which all the books agree: Cyrus “tends to giggle to himself from time to time for no apparent reason. He also likes to tell poor jokes at the most inopportune moments.” Expedition gives an example of a bad joke that is too dumb to reproduce here. I also will not write a paragraph about how to write intentionally bad jokes.

In these books, Cyrus is a human without much physical description. I am venturing a guess that he’s inspired by Doctor Frankenstein’s henchman Fritz; an illustration in House depicts him as a bug-eyed Igor type with wild hair and a chef’s hat.

But then we see him in Curse: He has fur on his arms, and a panther’s ears, and his left foot is webbed like a duck’s, and the text says his left side of his face is supposedly covered with lizard scales, although the illustration is too dark to tell. Here Cyrus is a “mongrelfolk,” as is the rest of the Belview clan, whom players have probably met way over on the other side of Barovia. (Cyrus has no family mentioned in other editions of the adventure.)

In earlier editions of D&D, “mongrelfolk” were a type of humanoid deriving from, I’m not making this up, the crossbreeding of elves and humans and goblins and dwarves etc. into freakish devolved forms. Turns out, if you mix the races too much, you end up with grotesque monsters—and somehow lobster claws and hooves get in there. I can kind of see how this could get printed in the first edition of D&D but I have no idea how it continued to be a thing into 3rd Edition.

In Curse of Strahd, mongrelfolk have a wildly different origin story that isn’t nearly as offensive, although it’s never hard to find something new to object to. It’s too convoluted to reproduce or effectively summarize, though, and we are straying from the scope of this analysis.

K63. Wine Cellar

In Ravenloft and House, the giant wine casks here are all rusted and empty.

In Expedition, there appears to be mostly bottles instead of casks. Most of the wine is spoiled but there are some valuable vintages to loot (including some with magical effects). Plus there’s a combat encounter involving a “glass shrapnyl” which is a monster made out of a whirlwind of broken wine bottles.

In Curse, the casks are mostly rotted and empty. The ones that aren’t rotted and empty contain some yellow mold and a black pudding to ruin your fun.

But since we were just talking about Cyrus Belview having family outside the castle, let’s talk about how Curse adds to Barovia by labeling these empty wine casks with the insignia of the Wizard of Wines winery, to be found way in the other corner of the fold-out map. As much as Curse wants to recreate and preserve the original Ravenloft, this book also wants to explain that book: Where did this henchman come from? Where did this wine come from? What does Patrina Velikovna want?

K64. Guards’ Stair

This stairway goes up from the guards’ quarters (K69) to the hallway/archer’s post behind the dining hall (K10), and then the hallway/archer’s post behind the throne room (K25), and finally comes out at the parapets (K46). It’s really difficult to keep track of this stuff when you’re just reading the text or even looking at the maps, but eventually you realize that this is a very practical way for the guards to get to places where they need to be without marching through the rest of the castle.

The only difference between editions is where Curse adds some read-aloud text about wind sighing its way down the stairs.

K65. Kitchen

A huge pot is bubbling over with something green and foul-smelling. Inside the pot are some zombies. They attack whoever looks in the pot, and “Cyrus explains that he just isn’t the cook he used to be and his meals tend to get out of hand these days.”

This dumb joke is remarkably preserved in Expedition, but the surrounding encounter is fleshed out (so to speak) with a wider variety of undead, and it triggers as soon as you open the door.

Curse recreates Ravenloft and then adds some more detail: The cooking implements hanging on the wall look sort of like instruments of torture.

K66. Butler’s Quarters

Cyrus lives here, although he isn’t otherwise referred to as the butler. His hoard of junk fills the chamber: It’s all equipment scavenged from dead adventurers (and here the heroes notice Cyrus eyeing their own equipment greedily), but it’s all said to be worthless.

This doesn’t make sense on its face—how can this many dead adventurers not have left behind anything of value?—but Expedition explains that Strahd and “Strahd’s saner servants” grab all the good stuff.

Expedition also deletes the detail of a faded tapestry of Castle Ravenloft hanging over Cyrus’s bed, which is odd. Curse restores this detail but doesn’ add anything new.

K67. Guards’ Hall

Ravenloft: “Darkness, cold as a winter sweat, wraps around you. Large oak tables, scarred and beaten, lay scattered like toys about this room, their wood crushed and splintered. Dark stains cover the floor and the wall.”

House: The same read-aloud text is supplemented with text for the DM explaining that a battle took place here between Strahd and the castle guards.

Expedition: The same read-aloud text, but the backstory is changed: A party of adventurers met their end here in a battle with Strahd just a few years ago. Cyrus wistfully reminisces on them and gives directions to the crypt downstairs where they were interred: #10, where they replace Ravenloft‘s “Sir Leanne Triksky (Sir Lee the Crusher).” This makes it sound like you’ll find some cool treasure if you head down there, and in fact among the adventurers’ bodies, bearing so many signs of horrific torture, there is a magical ring of the righteous.

Curse: One of my favorite rooms in the book. “HALL OF BONES.”

The dark stains are still here. The scarred tables still lay scattered like toys. Replacing them are furnishing made entirely of human bones.

There are bones all over the walls. There are garlands of skulls. There is a chandelier made of bones. There are chairs made of bones. On the big table made of bones, there is a bowl that is somehow made up of bones.

A dragon’s skull is mounted above the main doorway.

The DM-facing text says that the bone decorations are all Cyrus Belview’s handiwork, and restores the House backstory about the broken tables and stains dating to a battle between Strahd and his guards.

K68. Guards’ Run

This is just a hallway, but the description is slightly—so slightly—maddeningly—different between books:

Ravenloft: “This 10-foot-wide arched corridor starts at a heavy wooden door on the north. Cool, moist air blows out from an archway in the west wall.”

House: “This short, arched corridor starts at a heavy wooden door. Cool, moist air blows out from an archway in the side wall. Just around the corner, a spiral stair leads up into darkness.” (I guess compass directions aren’t a realistic inclusion when you’re in a castle basement, but I feel like players looking at or trying to draw a map would appreciate them.)

Expedition: “This arched corridor connects a heavy wooden door on the north with a passage to the south. Cool, moist air issues from an archway in the west wall.”

Curse: “This ten-foot-wide arched corridor is cold and moist. The cold seems to emanate from an open archway in the west wall.”

This cold- and moist-exuding archway leads to K69.

K69. Guards’ Quarters

Sickly yellow lichen covers the ceiling. But that’s just scenery; it doesn’t do anything. Resting in the alcoves where guards once slept are ten skeletons, which will get up and attack you!

In Expedition, the yellow lichen is not mentioned. And the skeletons are replaced with some big spiders, some ettercaps (spidery humanoid monsters), and a web golem, which is a monster made out of webs. But it has spider eyes and spider mandibles.

After defeating the monsters and clearing the webs, the adventurers can search the barracks and find half of a silver key. The other half is up in K55. The restored key unlocks the door in crypt 12 in K84, which contains the Portal to Anywhere, and also it helps you operate that portal.

In Curse everything is the same as in Ravenloft and House.

K70. Kingsman Hall

The signs of an intense battle are here: “Shields and swords jut from the walls as if driven there by some tremendous force.”

Curse corrects this to “driven into them by some tremendous force,” and gives some brief backstory on how Strahd slaughtered a bunch of guards in here.

K71. Kingsmen Quarters

There’s more yellow lichen here. In Ravenloft, there are two small rooms here for the kingsmen; later books have four apartments instead (without really changing the floor plan).

Expedition preserves the yellow lichen! Here but not in K69! And it also adds a fight with some bar-lgura demons. Curse takes this back to being a boring location, except…

One of the alcoves has a secret compartment under a flagstone. This ill-fated kingsman’s hidden stash consists of a moldy sack containing 150 electrum pieces. (That’s worth 75 gp. I think.) The coins have the profiled visage of Strahd von Zarovich stamped on them.

These Strahd-minted coins show up in several places around Curse of Strahd, and they’re such a fun detail. Imagine: Your half-elf barbarian, lucky enough to escape Barovia with her life, wants to hire some enterprising kobolds to take her across the Sea of Dragons. She tosses them a moldy sack. The kobolds inspect the coinage—What is this, electrum? Am I supposed to recognize this guy? Where the heck are you from, lady?

Curse works these coins in wherever it can, but here in Castle Ravenloft its first duty is to recreate the details of Ravenloft, and that’s why we’ve seen so many boring gold and copper pieces with nobody cool stamped on them.

K72. Office of Vengeance

Ravenloft: The office is in perfect order. There are lances and swords hanging from the walls. But there’s a shadow demon in here who will attack!

House: Basically the same, but one of the swords on the wall is magical, and there’s a scroll of protection from undead hidden inside a table leg.

Expedition: The room looks the same, but now it is Lucian’s office. Lucian looks like an angelic knight, but actually he is that shadow demon from before, inhabiting the form of an unlucky half-celestial named Fandromar. He is the one who commands Nicoramus in K61 and the demons in K70. First he tries to trick the heroes. But then, probably, you get to fight him!

It is not expected that poor Fandromar will survive the encounter. “If Lucian is somehow separated from the half-celestial Fandromar without killing Fandromar, the paladin is broken and mad from the years he has spent in thrall to an Abyssal demon. Fandromar loses any paladin abilities he once possessed and seeks to flee the castle as quickly as he can.”

Lucian’s desk contains a bunch of fancy documents, including an “indulgence” that might be used to quell Strahd’s rage in a diplomatic interaction, and a “lenience” that might be used to trick one of Strahd’s henchmen.

Curse: Now the room is called “Chamberlain’s Office.” And it occurs to me that, for as many years as it was called “Office of Vengeance,” no apparent vengeance took place there.

The chamberlain is Rahadin, Strahd’s right-hand man, a sociopathic dusk elf. He was exiled from the dusk elf community before Strahd was even born. He helped King Barov, Strahd’s father, conquer/almost wipe out the dusk elf community. Barov made Rahadin an honorary member of the von Zarovich clan, and Rahadin considers himself Barov’s son and Strahd’s brother.

There’s too much backstory here. Allow me to summarize with a crucial sentence: “Anyone who stands within 10 feet of him can hear the howling screams of the countless men and women he has killed in his lifetime.”

Anyway, when encountered here, he tries to kill the adventurers—and that shadow demon is still here to help out!

DUNGEON AND CATACOMB

K73. Dungeon Hall

So, let’s say you enter the castle through the front door. You follow the sounds of organ music to the dining hall, where you meet Strahd’s illusion. He mocks you for a while and then disappears. The lights go out. You walk across the hallway to a spiral staircase.

You take the stairs down. You pass a boring-looking hallway. You keep going down.

“The stairs descend into black, still water that fills an arched hallway before you. The water’s surface is like dark mirrored glass, disturbed only occasionally by the ‘thwick’ of a drop falling from the ceiling. Twenty feet down the hallway, arched doorways lead downward 2 feet from each side of the hallway. In each arched doorway, an iron door stands closed and partially submerged. All is still except for a weak cry for help coming through the south door.”

House hilariously changes “thwick” to “thwuck.” Expedition evades childish onomatopoeia with the phrase “falling condensation.” Curse restores the word “thwick.”

There are a bunch of teleport traps hidden beneath the water in the hallway, which whisk adventurers into the cells of the dungeons on the other sides of those iron doorways. Ravenloft has each trap lead to a specific cell. House says no, everybody who triggers a trap gets sent to a different cell. Expedition says the victim gets sent to “one of the cells in K75” so it’s not clear how badly they want to split the party here. Curse recreates the Ravenloft version almost exactly—but one of the traps has been moved 2.5 feet to the west. You probably think I’m making this up.

The one on the left.

K74. North Dungeon

Ravenloft: The water is five feet deep down here. The ceiling is three feet above; that’s important to know. There are eight cells, but we hear nothing about their contents, except that there’s a bunch of treasure beneath the water: Three cells contain 5,600, 6,100, AND 6,900 ELECTRUM PIECES EACH, and one cell contains 600 platinum pieces. Can you imagine 6,900 coins sitting in a prison cell? Anyway that all amounts to 15,300 gp. And there’s a glowing +2 sword.

I suddenly feel so stupid copying out all these ridiculous details. But watch this:

House: Everything’s the same, except the sword is replaced with an amulet of proof against detection and location.

Expedition: The DM-facing text says “This waterlogged cellblock was converted to a lab before the flood.” What flood? I really thought the dungeons were supposed to be like this. (I suspect that the torture chamber, K76, may support my position.) Anyway the lab is a necromancy lab, and there are two boneclaws here: Big scary skeleton monster guys.

Also, here the water is only four feet deep, and the ceiling is another four feet up. So they very carefully lowered the water one foot without changing the dimensions of the dungeon.

Curse: The water is five feet deep. It’s no longer a laboratory, and there aren’t nearly as many coins lying around. I mean, there’s still a lot: 3,000 electrum pieces in one cell, and 600 platinum pieces in another. The electrum pieces bear Strahd’s profile, and so do the platinum pieces, which I was expecting.

“A character can scoop up one hundred coins every minute.” I have an idea for a game show.

There’s some other treasure, and a gray ooze that attacks you, and then the glowing sword from Ravenloft reappears—but it’s extremely special now. It’s a sentient shortsword, with senses and feelings and limited powers of communication. I’m surprised it doesn’t have a name.

K75. South Dungeon

Ravenloft: One of the cells in here has a werewolf locked inside—the source of the “weak cry for help” heard in K73. He was imprisoned for disobeying Strahd and is eager to get back in the vampire’s good graces. So, in the form of a villager, he tries to join the party and then attack the adventurers when an opportunity arises.

Another cell has 650 platinum pieces in it.

House: The same as Ravenloft, but now the werewolf has a name: Ivan Koreshev. Actually he’s a “loup-garou” which might be more powerful than a normal werewolf.

Expedition: There are some zombies and wraiths in the cells to attack whoever gets teleported in. I think the 650 pp are missing.

The werewolf is now named Emil, no last name given, and he has a more complicated motivation in spying on the Necromancer whom we will meet later. “Emil appears to be a human male of average height and weight with black hair and dark brown eyes.” He tries to get the adventurers to help him take on the Necromancer, and then he runs back to report to Strahd. He only attacks the heroes if they attack him (and apparently this is the only circumstance where he’ll reveal his werewolf form).

Curse: This dungeon is somewhat more complicated now. First: The werewolf is now Emil Toranescu—a rare case of Curse running with an idea introduced in Expedition. His motivation is basically the story from Ravenloft/House, in that he will turn on the adventurers if he gets a chance, but the detail that he “disobeyed Strahd” is expanded into a whole subplot with a clan of werewolves somewhere else in Barovia.

Let me give you the broad strokes: If you hit up the distant werewolf den before Castle Ravenloft, you might meet Emil’s wife Zuleika. She isn’t especially loyal to Strahd, and she might come out on top of a schism between rival pack leaders. And she might tell you about her husband, and then when you find him here you might mention her name, and you might change his whole angle.

I mentioned Emil’s incredibly generic physical description in Expedition because here he’s portrayed as a bald man with very dark skin. (This is another case where an illustration is so dark that you lose a lot of detail—I just noticed Emil has a goatee, after owning this book for five years.)

There’s more stuff in other cells: One of them has 2,100 electrum pieces in it, I guess replacing the 650 platinum pieces from before, which comes to 5,450 fewer gp for the poor adventuring party. One has a skeletal dwarf and his lootable battleaxe. One has a still-rotting dead wizard. One has a not-yet-rotting dead bard.

K76. Torture Chamber

Ravenloft: You are wading through three-foot-deep brackish water. You are surrounded by “dark, low shapes.” You realize that they are instruments of torture. You realize that they are still occupied by their last victims, now long dead. Ravenloft calls them “skeletons” and then a couple sentences later it says that they’re “zombies.”

In fact they are Strahd zombies, a type of zombie whose limbs can keep trying to kill you even while disconnected from their body. I don’t know how I got all the way to K76 without mentioning this. (I’m not an expert at interpreting the combat stats of 2E and 3E but I think this attacking-limb feature gets forgotten about until we get to Curse of Strahd.)

The read-aloud text doesn’t mention the observation balcony on the north wall, but it’s there.

House: An apparent contradiction is resolved here, as the small army of torture victims who rise to attack you consists of both skeletons and zombies.

The read-aloud text now goes into more detail and mentions the balcony.

Expedition: The Strahd zombies in here are now accompanied by “rot reavers,” which are aberrations, not undead. They’re really gross, so gross that I don’t want to get into the details, but the upshot is that they work for the Necromancer sitting on the balcony.

The Necromancer is sitting on the balcony! We will get to her later. Sitting next to the Necromancer is a spectre named Stefania. When the adventurers arrive (assuming they arrive from the east), the Necromancer orders Stefania to swoop down and help the zombies and rot reaves destroy the heroes.

Stefania has an intriguing description: An ethereal lady in a beautiful gown, hauntingly beautiful, except one side of her face is all smashed up. But we don’t find out anything about her.

Curse: Things have quieted down somewhat: It’s just some Strahd zombies in here now.

The read-aloud text is separated into two parts: The general “you enter the room” text, which now adds “hanging chains that look like thick, black web strands,” and some text to read when characters approach the torture equipment. And actually it’s basically a copy of the DM-facing text from Ravenloft. Huh.

K77. Observation Balcony

Two wooden thrones sit on the balcony overlooking the torture chamber, which echoes the chapel in an incredibly cool way that only the original Ravenloft can take credit for. We have seen that Expedition adds the Necromancer and Stefania here.

Ravenloft tells us there’s a pouch containing 600 platinum pieces hidden behind the western throne. House preserves this detail, as does Expedition, which in other locations has tended to change amounts of treasure quite a bit. Expedition also explains the the pouch is the Necromancer’s; she needs to keep some money on hand because “Sometimes the Necromancer trades with free-willed creatures she hasn’t created (such as Strahd and his agents).”

Curse inexplicably removes the pouch!

K78. Brazier Room

Hoo boy.

Ravenloft: I’m still not sure I understand this.

There’s a puzzle trap here with a brazier and a floating hourglass and two iron golems, each of which has four arms. Their extra arms hold colored stones. There’s a dumb poem written on the hourglass. When you come in the room, the doors all lock and the hourglass starts running. You need to grab a stone from an iron golem’s hand and throw it into the burning brazier in order to unlock one of the doors. When the hourglass runs out, the golems start attacking you—but only for a while. Then they return to their original positions. Which might reset the puzzle. I think.

THEN, ALSO, there’s a trapped golden chest. Or trunk. If you open it from the front, it shoots sleeping gas at you and it looks empty. If you open it from the back (I’m not sure what this means), there’s a ton of magic items in there including a deck of many things. Which is bonkers. This room is bonkers.

House: Everything’s basically the same.

Expedition: This is now the “Necromancer’s Sanctum.” The brazier is replaced with a wicked cauldron, over which stands the Necromancer herself. The Necromancer gives her name as “Thredra Aranax,” but the text never calls her that. She’s the Necromancer.

She’s nominally aligned with Strahd, but their relationship is strained because of the various personal problems Strahd’s been having in this book. So she can be bargained with. She’ll give directions to Saint Markovia’s thighbone if the adventurers promise to bring her a living person’s tongue.

Yes, Thredra Aranax is very creepy. She wears “pale leather armor sewn from the skins of her victims, studded with sharp canine teeth.” She’s accompanied here by a couple bloodhulk giants (who replace the iron golems) and a deathreap ooze (which at first glance seems to be a potion or something brewing in her cauldron, which is a trick Expedition already used in K52 or around there).

She has a ton of magic items on her person, and her library is full of valuable, useful, or disturbing literature. On one shelf is her spellbook, which unlike certain other spellbooks will not deal damage to non-evil characters who try to learn spells from it.

“Another shelf contains a tattered tome entitled Liber Blaspheme. The tome is incomplete. One fragment of the tome found its way to the church in Barovia (area E7), and is partly responsible for the zombie infection that swept the village.” How about that!

Curse of Strahd: This is back to being the “Brazier Room,” but things are, I’m going to say, marginally less ridiculous than they were in the 80s and 90s.

The hourglass returns, but now it has a rather longer poem on it. The poem explains that if you throw any of these stones you see (set around the brazier, not in the iron golems’ hands), you can travel to various places around the castle and Barovia. Some of these locations are very far away, so this can be an incredibly useful tool for adventuring parties who have lots of sidequests to take care of.

The iron golems will only attack if you attack them or the brazier or the hourglass.

That’s it. It’s actually a very cool dungeon feature. I’m just exhausted after all that other stuff.

K79. Western Stair

This staircase connects K72 (the office) to K78 (the brazier room). There’s a landing where the stairs change direction.

Curse puts a little trick on this landing: If you walk over the glyph of warding, Strahd apparently appears out of nowhere and attacks! The first attack that hits “Strahd” reveals his illusory nature; he “chuckles and melts away like a wax doll in a bonfire.”

K80. Center Stair

This staircase connects K81 (a tunnel leading to the catacombs) to K78 (the brazier room).

Curse helpfully provides two read-aloud texts, since you might reach this staircase from either end.

K81. Tunnel

In all editions, there’s a trap door in this tunnel that has you fall down a marble slide (K82) into a cell in K74.

Ravenloft: “This is a long, low tunnel. Its rough damp walls are barely discernible through thick fog. This tunnel passes through the rock-pillar of Ravenloft itself.” Emphasis mine.

Dwarves can tell that this tunnel was constructed more recently than “what has been seen so far.” So, within the past four hundred years, I think is what this means.

House: “This is a long, low tunnel. The rough damp walls are barely discernible through thick fog. This tunnel passes through the natural rock foundation of Ravenloft itself.”

I know, right?

Expedition: “Fog flows like a river from the east, covering the floor of this long, low tunnel. The tunnel’s damp walls are rough and scored.”

The DM-facing text goes on: “Dwarves and those who succeed on a DC 15 Knowledge (dungeoneering) check can tell that the tunnel doesn’t resemble the standard architecture of the rest of the castle. In fact, the tunnel seems relatively new, and appears to bore through the very pillar-rock of Ravenloft.”

Curse: “This tunnel is cut into the Pillarstone of Ravenloft itself. Its surface is slick, and its ceiling is barely 6 feet high. A lingering fog limits visibility to a few feet.”

The DM-facing text: “Characters who have knowledge of stonecutting can tell that this passage is a relatively new construction compared to other areas of Ravenloft.” So, only dwarves who graduated from dwarf school.

K82. Marble Slide

All that’s going on in here is you fall down a slide. Ravenloft and House do mention the penalty that thieves take for trying to climb up the slide.

Ravenloft: “This is a smooth dark shaft of polished black marble.” That’s the read-aloud text for the slide you’re plummeting down.

House: Doesn’t have any read-aloud text.

Expedition: “A smooth shaft of polished black marble offers no purchase, no hope of stopping, as you slide through the darkness.”

Curse: “You fall into a chute of polished black marble and slide into the darkness.” The text explains that there’s no way to climb back up without using magic.

K83. Western Stair

Whoops! Ravenloft calls both K79 and K83 the “Western Stair.” From the perspective of K78, the door to K79 is on the west side of the room and the door to K83 is on the east side. So they probably meant to call this the “Eastern Stair.”

House repeats this mistake! But Expedition and Curse rename it the “Spiral Stair.” Which is not very specific. But it would be more confusing to call it the “Eastern Stair” since it’s way on the west side of the castle.

This spiral staircase connects K78, the brazier room, to K37, the study. It can’t go straight up and down, though, or it would pass through some other rooms. So 70 feet up from the brazier room, at the same level as the guards’ quarters and the elevator trap, this staircase is broken up with a 40-foot corridor. This corridor is called Location K83A, except in House of Strahd which just says there’s a landing here.

In Curse, there is a tapestry on the wall in the corridor. It depicts Strahd’s father King Barov leading knights into battle under a bloodred sky. He wears a “visored helm shaped like a wolf’s head. His sword glows with the light of the sun.” It’s all very first-five-minutes-of-Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

K84. Catacomb

I remember this!

Ravenloft introduces this area by saying “PLEASE READ THIS SECTION WITH CARE. MUCH ACTIVITY CAN TAKE PLACE HERE.” It also explains that three thousand bats live down here; at night, they fly up the hollow center of stairway K18 and out through the hole in the roof.

House has the same warning in bold text instead of all caps. The bats are not numbered or given stats, but they follow basically the same rules established in Ravenloft: They don’t attack unless provoked or ordered by Strahd; they don’t do damage but they hinder spellcasting.

In Expedition, the bats are treated even more vaguely (there are “thousands” of them), but something new is added: A creature from the Plane of Shadow called a “darkweaver” stalks the heroes as they explore the catacomb, and attacks as soon as the party gets involved in a fight with something else.

Curse says there are tens of thousands of bats! And these bats can deal damage! Not very much, but still.

K85. Tomb of Sergei von Zarovich

Sergei was Strahd’s brother, a nice, good, non-evil guy who made the mistake of marrying Tatyana, the woman Strahd was in love with. Strahd killed him, and Tatyana, and everybody nearby, and became a vampire—not necessarily in that order.

Ravenloft: Sergei’s tomb has an aura of calm. Three statues in excellent condition (it doesn’t say what they’re statues of) stand in alcoves to the north. The coffin, on a slab of white marble, opens easily to the touch of a lawful good creature. Sergei is interred in his magic +2 plate mail, and we have to assume he would be okay with it if you pulled it off of his remains and wore it yourself. The status of his body is not made explicit.

House: It still doesn’t say what the statues are. On one wall is a mural of Sergei playing a lute, surrounded by adoring woodland creatures. On the other wall is an epitaph: “Sergei von Zarovich, prince and beloved son of King Barov and Queen Ravenovia.”

The language about the coffin opening easily to the touch of a lawful good creature is made a little more clear: Non-lawful but still good creatures have to work together to open the coffin. Neutral characters just can’t open it; evil characters take damage if they try.

Sergei’s broken lute is in the coffin with him. He’s still wearing his +2 plate mail. It still doesn’t say what condition his body is in. But if you engage with his spirit (it’s not clear if you have to use a spell or you can just start talking to his body), he’ll tell you where the Sunsword is—that’s one of the artifacts that you really want if you’re trying to kill Strahd.

Expedition: The mural and epitaph are gone. One of the statues is a dormant stone giant(?!?!) that Strahd can activate if you fight him here.

The lute is gone. The coffin can be opened by anyone. Sergei’s body is explained to be mummified. His armor is specifically +2 spell resistance (13) full plate.

Curse: We finally explain that the statues are: a stunning young man, flanked by two angels. There is no mural or epitaph.

It takes a DC 15 Strength check to open the coffin, unless you’re lawful good, in which case it opens easily. Magic has preserved Sergei’s body: “at first glance it looks like he is sleeping in his casket.” You can take his +2 plate armor if you want.

K86. Strahd’s Tomb

Ravenloft: This room is evil and dark and smells of freshly turned earth. “Settled into the dirt on the floor, lies a shining black coffin of finely waxed wood. The coffin’s fittings are of brilliant brass. The lid is closed.” If you defeat Strahd in battle elsewhere, he turns into a cloud and retreats here to recover, in which case he is in that coffin.

The alcoves to the south, corresponding to the statues in Sergei’s tomb, are empty—but you remember of course that they contain teleportation magic that lets you travel from this room to crypt number 32.

House: Everything is the same, but the location information goes into a lot of detail about the all the teleportation magic going on in and around here.

Expedition: Now the center alcove has a statue in it. The illustration depicts it as a bearded hierophant type. It doesn’t come to life, as far as I can tell.

Curse: Everything is the same except lurking in the dirt are Strahd’s three brides! They are Ludmila Vilisevic, Anastrasya Karelova, and Volenta Popofsky. They all have unique outfits, including tons of jewelry to loot. The illustration matches the text perfectly. I love this so much.

K87. Guardians

Ravenloft: A staircase descends east from the catacombs, and on a landing in the middle of the stairs are two bronze statues holding spears. A curtain of blue light floats between them. Only lawful good creatures can pass through the curtain. Individuals of other alignments get teleported back to the top of the stairs.

It’s not clear what happens if a not-lawful-good creature tries to pass through the curtain going east to west—which can happen if, say, a chaotic neutral thief manages to enter K88 through the window by climbing down from the overlook at K6. Does it teleport you back to the bottom of the stairs? Is Kelvid the Silent stuck down there forever???

House: Lawful good characters can hold hands with other good characters to escort them through the barrier. But neutral and evil characters are out of luck. Teleportation spells only allow good-aligned creatures to enter the crypt beyond.

Expedition: Oh wait, teleportation spells will allow anyone to get past the barrier. And a Tiny-sized creature can just sneak around the back of one of the statues. Or you could laboriously destroy one of the statues to deactivate the barrier entirely.

And, we take back the part about escorting good creatures through.

Curse: ACTUALLY, a Small creature—like a halfling—could probably squeeze behind a statue. Sure.

Curse finally clarifies that the curtain doesn’t do anything if you’re walking up the stairs. Phew.

K88. Tomb of Barov and Ravenovia

Ravenloft: “This tomb rests in hushed silence. Great stained windows filling the eastern walls filter dim light into this room. A closed coffin stands on each side of this roughly 40-foot-square room.” THAT IS ALL, GOOD NIGHT.

House: More murals! Over one coffin is a mural of a warrior king and his army. Over the other is painted a beautiful woman standing on a balcony, accompanied by three young boys. She is observing a jousting contest.

The boys are the Von Zarovich brothers, Strahd, Sturm, and Sergei. Oh, you forgot about Sturm? ME TOO.

Expedition: House said Strahd has never set foot in here, even though he could bypass the alignment barrier by wafting in through the window, but in this book, “Furrows score the marble floor of the tomb’s center, as if some great beast has repeatedly clawed at the stone.” And in fact you might fight Strahd here!

Queen Ravenovia’s mummified remains are wrapped in Saint Ecaterina’s burial shroud, a magic item that you might want to remove from the mummified body of a tragic queen. King Barov’s mummified body wears a magic ring, a band of spell enhancement, which, go ahead and slip it off his finger, Kelvid the Silent. You earned it.

Curse: The coffins are marked “King Barov von Zarovich” and “Queen Ravenovia von Roeyen.” There’s a beautiful gold mosaic on the ceiling, and the book says it would be a waste of time to try to steal it.

King Barov’s coffin contains a wax effigy. His actual bones are in a compartment underneath.

Queen Ravenovia’s bones are wrapped in a tattered white shroud. “(The magic that was meant to preserve her earthly remains failed years ago.)”

Again, you might fight Strahd here.

And now I guess we’re done!

K89. Subcatacomb

What’s that you say???

Remember those giant ants we saw earlier? They showed up in K61, the elevator trap. They came out of a weird tunnel. The same tunnel runs through the wall of crypt 24, where the dog sled champion was interred. You can enter this tunnel from either location and follow it down beneath even the catacombs of Ravenloft.

The tunnel opens up thirty feet above a yawning chamber containing a megalith and a stone altar and a faceless statue. “The chamber is a long forgotten primitive temple were proto-humans worshiped progenitor deities in ages lost to history. No sentient creature in Ravenloft knows of its existence.”

This room does not appear in any other edition. I love it desperately.

“The proto-humans that worshiped in this secret natural cavern were a bloody people who loved a bloody god, a god whose name has been lost to the ages.”

It has nothing to do with your actual adventure, except to imply that all the vampirism going on in the castle above might have been nudged along by the influence of this ancient temple.

Many of Expedition’s additions are perpendicular to the world of the original Ravenloft. The quiet, monochrome castle is now populated by belligerent representatives of the Nine Hells and the Abyss and Mount Celestia or whatever. (The texts for Ravenloft, I posit, aren’t just Gothic fiction but a bunch of old movies; the text for new material in Expedition is Dungeons & Dragons.) This bloody temple comes out of nowhere as much as anything else Expedition comes up with, but there’s an air of mystery here that’s like nothing else in the book.

So about that altar: “Pictograms run around the visible lip of the slab. If magically translated (no living creature uses the ‘alphabet’ of the pictograms), they read, ‘Spill your life to the Blood God. The Blood God repays total sacrifice.'”

If you die/are sacrified on the slab, you gain magic healing powers that last 24 hours. Don’t try to do this twice.

CONCLUSIONS

Obviously Ravenloft is very good.

House of Strahd is really just a second draft of the same adventure. Almost nothing is modified, but plenty of stuff is added for clarification. There’s a definite sense of covering up various omissions. The book is very assiduous about what rooms each NPC is familiar with, but for the most part doesn’t think anybody needs any additional characterization.

In the Barovia post, I used the word “demystifying” in reference to Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, which is perhaps a dumb word to use in the context of D&D. But Expedition‘s sobriety extends beyond simply deleting all the jokes. It seems more concerned than its predecessors with the practicality of all the castle’s various tricks and traps. “Why would Strahd have any need for this? He’s supposed to be a serious vampire!”

Expedition is also very, VERY concerned with having a variety of combat encounters. Anywhere you can fight something, you will fight something. There’ll be demons, devils, aberrations, golems made out of whatever materials are nearby, mentally ill humans, and even celestials to battle—so don’t think the cleric you minmaxed with all those anti-undead feats is going to sail through with no problem.

Curse of Strahd, as we have seen, almost always ignores the contributions of Expedition. The goal is to recreate I6 very faithfully and then apply a 2016 sensibility: To add detail that adds to the atmosphere of dread, detail that facilitates roleplaying and storytelling. And worldbuilding. If Expedition has an idea that will help along those lines, maybe Curse will listen. But fighting bizarre new monsters at every turn doesn’t add to any atmosphere of dread!

I think there might be more to compare between these books. I want to say some things about depictions of Strahd. I want to bring up Boris Karloff in The Mummy. But right now I’m exhausted.