Hi, I'm a newbie DM wanting to run CoS for my group after we're finished with Death House and I was just wondering if you've found a good way to write out/homebrew some of the more questionable stuff yet, like the antiziganism? Also, while I'm already here, thank you for the talks machina write ups, they're very very useful!
Oh man, yeah, getting rid of the awful stuff in that module is pretty tricky. I wound up abandoning my own efforts at fixing it (for now) because I had some flashes of inspiration for my own homebrew campaign stuff and wound up veering away from Strahd altogether.
The simplest suggestion I’ve seen thus far is to change the alignment of the Vistani so that they’re working to oppose Strahd instead of falling into the “untrustworthy liars” stereotype... and while you’re at it, avoid the sea of super-gross stereotypes the module associates with them (drunkards, cheats, mystical powers). It’s like when they updated the module, they realized that some words were not okay to say but resolved it by just doing a find-and-replace with a made-up name. It’s still real bad. Removing them altogether is also an option.
Shifting genders in several places is a simple way to help rectify the wave o’ fridging and gross gender dynamics stuff.Â
There’s also a lot of “lol, made ya feel terrible, there’s no way for this go well!” moments that can easily be averted with a bit of DM empathy to avoid pointlessly bleak levels of edgy/grimdark without sacrificing atmosphere or mood or the ability to shock your players.
There’s a couple good articles about these and other problems with this module (as well as some suggested solutions) here and here.
