#atsbb

I've talked before about how I think that Strahd works best when his desire to possess Tatyana, and the metaphor for his vampirism, is a desperate attempt to cling to his bygone youth, something he was fiercely jealous of Sergei about. I think this is an interesting and humanizing angle to take any Strahd, but I think that this is particularly compelling with a trans Strahd. It shifts his desire away from vanity and entitlement, and highlights his struggle to live up to the standards of masculinity set by his neglectful father in wartime. Like, if you're trans and are in the community, you know or know of a trans guy just like that: a guy who does misogynistic, even homophobic and transphobic things in the name of being 'macho', things that he feels will earn him conditional respect in the eyes of cis male society. In doing so, he may or may not earn that conditional respect, but he does lose the respect and companionship of people who would have otherwise supported him and shared in his experiences. Strahd read so easily and so clearly to me as That Guy, and of 3/4 of my players being trans, I thought it'd be fun to interpret Strahd as trans.

In "I, Strahd," we learn that the oldest son of a family is destined for military greatness, and the youngest to be a healer. Of course, this is a lot of pressure to put on any young man, but imagine the pressure that put on baby transmasc Strahd! In transitioning, he is not just becoming a man, but the Oldest Son, a role that requires skill and violence and training. His parents are relying on him to protect their country and conquer new lands. The internalized message he learns is that for him, masculinity and respect is equal to conquest. He makes his entire identity being a war general for his parents' kingdom, and spends his entire young adult life battling for and conquering Barovia. He throws away any chance he had to make friends or find love in his formative years because it was too dangerous for a military man to let himself be swayed by emotion. By the time his young brother Sergei comes by, with all his youth and all the gentleness and charm of a cleric, Strahd is a battleworn man well into his 40s. When Tatyana chooses Sergei over Strahd, Strahd perceives it as being not necessarily because Sergei is cisgender, but specifically because of the youth, the gentleness, the humanity that Sergei posesses-- qualities that Strahd surrendered in lieu of earning respect and masculinity.

In Strahd's warped vision, everything is about conquest. He is incapable of valuing people beyond the concept of loss and victory. Having love, having a wife, is a marker of masculinity that he believes he "earned." He believes he should have "won" Tatyana because he worked so hard to be a man. This sense of conquest is also seen with his coterie of brides. They're a bunch of people he took on romantically to emulate his desire To Have a Wife without having any true attachment to them beyond being the trophies of masculinity that he believes he is entitled to. He continues to pursue Tatyana (regardless of whether you play Strahd as actually romantically interested in her) because to him, she is a prize that is always just beyond his grasp. If he had played the game a little bit better, if he had been a bit more the man his father wanted him to be, maybe he could have her. So he keeps playing the game, cursed to lose her forever, because the game was never real. His goal of being a 'real man' would never be attainable in his own eyes. Strahd cannot win.

I don't know if any of this is immediately apparent when I play him. But it gives him a bit of depth when you're considering his reactions to the party. In ATSBB, his pursuit of Vanya (an explicitly trans character) is made richer when you consider Strahd's own relationship to gender. In @runekept's word's. their relationship has "an agonizingly tragic edge of you're like me, you understand me, we understand each other in a way no one else can because we're both different and that means I cannot let you go." It is this desperate pursuit to cling onto something he feels only missed because of his dedication to Winning Masculinity. Strahd is the portrait of a man who led himself to ruin because of how badly he craved approval that he would never get where he sought it, but he could have gotten easily if he'd looked anywhere else. He lost his chance to be a human in his pursuit of being his father's son. This makes him no less evil, but makes him pitiful--a picture perfect gothic villain.

Casual Ableism A.K.A. The Real Curse Of Strahd Is Mental Illness

There are questionable story beats about mental illness from really early on. Mad Mary is the first NPC I can think of that really explicitly exemplifies this, but Stella Wachter in Vallaki and Luca Barbu in Kresk both also fit the bill of being random NPCs who got painted with the ableism brush. Treating these characters with empathy I think is the best way to fix a lot of them.

In ATSBB, I chose to keep the name "Mad Mary" as a pejorative title from the other villagers, because my game includes an amount of real-world ableism that is portrayed negatively. The party heard her cries and went to her house to find a lonely woman grieving the loss of her daughter. They spent a snall fortune at the mercantile to make her a big pot of soup she could simmer for days over her stove and helped her clean up her house a bit, before giving her hours of company over dinner. Mary was kind and appreciative and treated them terribly well. They did eventually sneak upstairs to find evidence of the circumstances of her daughter's disappearance (I just turned her into a werewolf to avoid the Yikes factor there). We see that Mary is unwell because upon seeing that her beloved daughter was cursed with Lycanthropy, she did everything (even too much) to ensure her safety, and then Gertruda still got out. Mary is more than "mad," she's heartbroken. She's devastated of grief and feels like a failed mother because she couldn't protect her baby. That amount of empathy gives her more depth and makes her portrayed as not ableist, but as a victim of vilified in-world ableism because nobody will give her the time of day.

In Stella's case, I did have a hard time. I wanted the party to have a clear reason to fight Victor (I don't know how some parties make him an ally, that guy is such a tool) and I did like the idea fleshed out in MandyMod's guide of Victor trying to leave Barovia through self-taught wizardry. Instead of changing much about Stella's cat curse, I just gave it privacy. They saw Stella very, very briefly--just enough to note the condition she was in and see that interrogating her would do very little for them, and then her siblings came in to tell them Stella needed her rest and it was time for them to go. Stella was not a spectacle to them, and it was portrayed as bizarre, but ultimately a product of Victor's abuse and Fiona's neglect to fix it. The party kicked Victor's ass and made a plan to sneak Stella out and get her to the house of a particularly nurturing NPC.

Luca Barbu was a little easier for me to fix because they tried to write him with sympathy but the module still certainly isn't nice to him, and it felt really gross a lot of the time. Luca is an adult man "with the intelligence of a 3 year old" who was "hit in the head with a rock" as an explanation for it, whose father and presumably full-time carer passed away, leaving him no support. If you didn't catch on yet, yikes. My Luca Barbu is autistic and had a farming accident that gave him a head injury that causes him to have a hard time processing information quickly, particularly numbers and the passage of time, and that can make him vulnerable to manipulation because he's a good hearted guy who has a hard time discerning if people are being genuine or not. He's very smart about farming, and good with the sheep like nobody's business, but he sometimes will forget to take care of himself when nobody's around because his dad isn't around to remind him. The townsfolk are not suspicious of him at all, and only have the chance to become so inclined if the party truly fails the encounter with Ilya. In fact, in my campaign, the situation with Anna Kreskov and the broken fence can only happen because she brings him dinner and bread every night since his fathers passing so she can make sure he eats every day. Anna's betrayal is then portrayed as desperate, not malicious, and it's a lot more tragic than it is evil.

Ez d'Avenir

Weird move of CoS to make an explicitly disabled character in a blink-and-you-miss-it passage who uses the coolest prosthetic ever and then just hide it from shame (???) They did add in a passage that changes this in the errata and in the revamped, as well as fleshing out Ez a lot more in Van Richten's Guide, so I'm giving them half a pass for this, because at least they admitted and fixed how they fucked up. That said, I think it's weird to do that with someone who is apparently the only disabled person in Barovia. This can be helped by letting Ez play a more active role in your campaign, as well as by having other disabled characters. You don't need to be ablebodied to be important to the world, so why should it be in fantasy? You don't really need a reason for a character to be disabled either, because disability doesn't happen because of a Reason in the real world. Not giving Ez the burden of being the only disabled rep in Barovia lets you have more fun with her and with other NPCs.

Finally, The Abbey of St. Markovia

The Abbey is infamous in ATSBB for me having planned out my alterations in advance and still finding places in the text I missed in which I said, "Oh, god, well, we're not doing that," and had to improv in several areas. To preface this, for my campaign, I did give my players a red/yellow/green light consent list in advance in which I included "asylum horror" as one of the potential triggers, and it was greenlit by my party, so we all went in knowing that there would be some ableist medical type horror. I explained that I wanted the vibe to feel less like Arkham Asylum and more like the way people treat asylums and old hospitals on ghost hunting TV shows--with the knowledge that something is deeply, deeply wrong here, but the fault never lies with the patients. Now, a lot of my edits are additions to MandyMod's "Fleshing Out CoS" on Reddit rather than on the official text, so if you're not familiar with it, I highly reccommend you check that out and then return here.

First off, I didn't call the people here Mongrelfolk, because... who thought that was a good idea in the first place, much less one that wss good enough not to fix in Revamped?? Anyway, I simply referred to the people residing at the Abbey as "patients" and it worked just fine. Inspired by MandyMod's guide, I wanted the Abbot to be an angel who lost his way in his desperation to help people in the absence of the Morning Lord, an angel who doesn't really understand the intricacies of sustaining life in humanoids, and treats sick and injured people with the same curiosity and naivety as a child "fixing" their broken toys by sticking together parts that only kind of fit with duct tape and glue. My abbot tried to heal the people as best he could with his limited magic, without understanding the differences between people and animals, or why a person with a broken hand might not be able to return to his every day life when that hand has been replaced with a turkey's claw. He's not trying to be evil, he just doesn't realize what he's doing isn't helping, because he's distracted by his own goal of building Vasilka. Now, I know Vasilka is sort of controversial in the CoS scene, but I think the concept is So Fucking Cool. I also think that building a little Frankenstein's monster that should be able to stop Strahd from hurting people is a suitible gothic, but ultimately noble goal for the Abbott to have. Does it justify the Abbot "borrowing" pieces from people who asked him for healing? Well, no. But it certainly makes sense for an angel desperate to escape Barovia to lose his shit a little bit and use unethical means to a supposedly moral end.

I also wanted to give agency back to the patients at the Abbey. Rather than the hallway of rooms of "laughing mongrels" and "violent mongrels," I just filled the rooms with families of patients. They were trying to start their own little civilization at the Abbey, far from their old lives, that they felt they couldn't return to for a variety of reasons. Some patients were too in shock and horrified by the results of their 'surgery' to return home alone, as the Barovian mountains are dangerous. Others had sought out the Abbot because they had already lost everything they had at home. Some people needed continuous upkeep on their replacement bits, just like Vasilka does, and don't want to stray too far from the Abbey. The Belviews and Clovin exist, but more as middlemen between the Abbott and the patients, who often understandably do not with to communicate with the Abbott. The Belviews will go hunting in the local woods and bring back stew meat for everyone at the Abbey (a plot point that makes them an easy suspect in Ilya's plotline). In short, the patients aren't 'insane,' they're disabled and/or chronically ill, and were failed by the Abbott. Again, this only works if you lean into the tragic, gothic horror tilt and lean away from the more modern "freakshow" type horror that was written in the text.

If you're trying to de-racist the dusk elves, your options are to either not make it a racial thing or cut the violence out together. Of course, I personally think the mass femicide and the vow of chastity the male dusk elves take as a result Super Mega Weird and I did not want it. Like I wrote in my other post, I chose to just make the dusk elves drow and make them part of the cultural landscape of my multi-racial Barovian Valley. Some of the people Strahd conquered were these drow, some were not. It was a regional military conflict, not a racialized one. I did this to tie in the pre-existing military conflict of my world though. In all honesty, I think this plotline is largely unnecessary. Plotwise, it's really just a vessel to show Rahadin is evil and traitorous while giving Strahd another notch on his belt to show the same. I think it is not remotely hard to show Strahd and Rahadin being evil without making them Do A Genocide, and showing them being evil in other ways makes them much more interesting anyway. I had Rahadin be in charge of the armies that stormed Argynvostholt instead of committing genocide, and the party is no less scared of his potential to betray him. That's all I have to say about that at the moment, but feel free to send another question if there's anything specific you'd like me to talk more about.

Now onto the Vistani. So the Vistani are really, really racist. Racist to the point that WotC had to release a whole errata removing the G-slur from several pages and changing Rudolph Van Richten's Racist Tiger TM. They did not do this well, though. Especially the tiger part. Good lord.

Anyway, I felt the need to keep a "mysterious" group of people in the campaign that could function as allies or enemies to the players depending on if they decided to listen to what people in Barovia said about them. I also wanted them to be able to pass through the mist the way the Vistani do, and I wanted them to do curses. I also have a character in the party who is a changeling, and it was important to the player that his character was immediately unsettling to people. I decided to combine these and create the Hexbloods (I did this before WotC released Van Richten's guide and made their own hexbloods. Yes, I am a little salty about it.) In my homebrew world lore, hexbloods are the distant descendants of the old gods of my world, who fraternized heavily with mortals and largely fucked off to live in the woods as nomads when people started building cities and worshipping the Faerun pantheon. They have innate magic, sorcerer style, and the more intense ones harness their innate magic to become bloodhunters. Their ties to the old gods allow them to pass through the mist unharmed, as their claim to magic is older than Strahd's mist. They're ostracized by Barovians for not being subject to Strahd's fickle ruling the way that they are, and fear that between their freedom and their magic, the only explanation is that they work for Strahd.

In reality... they're just Some Guys who live in the woods. Some of them are nomadic, and some aren't. There are a lot of aging elves who live amongst them, like Kasimir, survivors of Strahd's initial conquest of the Valley. They treat everyone as family, and culturally prefer to find reason to celebrate the small things in life, believing that joy is what will keep them safe from Strahd's misery. Unfortunately, without any real allies beyond themselves, they are very vulnerable to Strahd's manipulation. This is why Strahd can take advantage of characters like Arrigal. Strahd knows that Arrigal won't be able to say no if he threatens to harm his family, but Arrigal isn't about to go out of his way to help Strahd more than he has to.

This dynamic has made for some excellent conflict. The party found themselves loyally allied with the Hexblood encampment at Lake Zarovich, but felt betrayed upon finding out Strahd had information on them that only Arrigal could have known. Now they have to consider the risk of trusting people more seriously, and it also led to some A+ roleplaying between Arrigal and the party.