The real Curse of Strahd

I've been thinking about playing D&D again in large part due to podcasts I enjoy. I listen to a few... I mentioned Carrots and Suffering last time (great podcast) and I'm a big fan of the more widely known Dungeons & Daddies. I'm a year behind on that last one, so don't spoil it for me. I've also been listening to Godsfall, The Dungeoncast and The Dungeon Master's Block. I'm very behind on most of them, and in the case of the last one, I've started at the beginning which hails from a time before 5e was even released.

I was listening to one of those early DM's Block episodes and discovered their forum. Once there, I read about people engaged in play-by-post D&D games, a concept I was familiar with but had never experienced. I read further and discovered The Gamer's Plane, a site dedicated entirely to RPGs played by post. I went and took a look. 

It's a small community. If I go by the list of registered users, there are less than 400 people with accounts. I took a look around the forums and scanned some of the public games. (I believe the majority of games are private.) The people seemed nice enough, and many of them were older. The games go at a snail's pace compared to a traditional tabletop session or an Avrae/Roll20 setup. I decided to introduce myself and inquire about 5e games. 

I received a warm welcome, and within hours I had an invitation to a game that is just starting. However, it was a 3.5e game set in Ravenloft. I accepted, because with such a small community and such a large menu of gaming systems, it could be awhile before a space opens up in a 5e game. So... strangely enough, after a 17 year hiatus, the first character I've rolled up to play is for the 3.5e system after spending the last year + learning 5e. I'm not complaining. I just find it amusing. Life is strange.

So, I've never used the Ravenloft setting. And the DM (oh I am so glad I am not the DM, at last!) is not permitting any Forgotten Realms material. It seems like nearly everyone else is quite familiar with Ravenloft, so I decided to pick up a used copy of the 3.5e campaign setting book off eBay so I could catch up. It arrived today. 

The first thing I did was look at the map and read the tale that precedes the first chapter. It's the tale of Count Strahd von Zarovich. I realize that in starting with the 3.5e campaign setting of Ravenloft, I am starting midway through the development of the entire Ravenloft oeuvre. Anyway, I read the tale. It's only a page. It sets the tone, and unlike many of the other larger campaigns I've seen and read, it gives you the feel for a major character who will seemingly dominate the landscape we are about to inhabit - Count Strahd. 

The tale is very effective in a very short space. Whenever I see something like that, I think of it's brevity as the signature of cultural shorthand. In other words, tropes. Tropes aren't inherently bad, in part for this very reason. Certain types of tales pack an emotional punch, so it's not surprising that we tell those tales over and over to ourselves in various guises. But sometimes that shorthand draws on a lot of cultural biases, and it can be interesting to examine them by turning them on their head.

If I strip the tale of Count Strahd (as told in the 3.5e campaign setting) down to its bare bones, it goes like this: A nobleman spent the majority of his life defending his people and his power in the service of good. This effort took so much time and energy that he did not have the opportunity to establish a secure stronghold until late midlife, and it was only then that he could afford the chance at love and family. He invited his family members to join him and simultaneously fell in love with a local woman. But she was considerably younger than he, and fell mutually in love with his younger brother, Sergei. Enraged and frustrated, Count Strahd makes a deal with Death - he gives Death his brother's life in exchange for the eternal youth he thought the woman found attractive. He kills his younger brother on his wedding day and pursues the woman, driving her to leap to her doom rather than suffer his unwanted attention. The emphatic finality of her rebuff drives Count Strahd mad. 

Lust. Betrayal. Death. Fratricide. Suicide. May-December relations. Unholy pacts. They really pack it in. The initial impression of Count Strahd is that of a dynamic soul who transitions from good to evil due to unrestrained passion of a monumental nature. He is a dangerous force who knows no boundaries, and a man who valued lust over fraternal bonds, willing to breach all mores of society in order to pursue the woman he desires. It seems pretty clear that if he had succeeded in capturing his object (I won't call her his love), he would have likely raped her and imprisoned her indefinitely. Since fratricide was on the menu this isn't much of a stretch. 

That's a lot of information to convey in a single page of large typeface text. So we know there's shorthand going on. Let's have a little fun, and see what happens when we turn the tale on its head.

The easiest way to do this is to switch genders. Let's change the Count to Countess, the brother Sergei to a sister Sarah, and the object of desire from Tatyana to Tomas. Let's retell the tale with this cast.

Countess Strahd spends a lifetime of hard-fought conflict to establish her domain, but by the time she does, she's in late middle age and showing her years. She invites her family to join her in her newly acquired stronghold and promptly falls in love with a much younger man, Tomas, who is actually repulsed by her interest. Tomas falls for the Countess's much younger sister, Sarah, and they plan their nuptials. In a jealous rage, the Countess makes a pact with Death for eternal youth in exchange for the soul of her sister. The Countess kills Sarah on her wedding day, and pursues Tomas relentlessly, much to his horror. In the end he leaps over a cliff to his death rather than suffer her advances. Countess Strahd descends further into madness with the loss of her object of desire.

Do we get the same impressions from Tale Number 2. I'd say, not really. I mean yes, the Countess is definitely the epitome of evil, and she clearly wields tremendous power. But even though I used very similar language in the two versions of the tale, there's an element of humor that is interjected into this flipped version, due to certain pervasive cultural tropes that are invoked by this inversion. In a nutshell, you've got the guts of a "cougar" joke in there minus the punchline, combined with this girl:

I am not really up for doing a full-on assessment of what is good and what is bad, here. I do find it fascinating that the woman in the first tale is doomed to repeat her suicide-instead-of-rape choice ever after in multiple reincarnations, and in the second version, is doomed to be a subject of derision on some level (or in the case of the sister, a murder victim). Basically, it kinda sucks to be female, and not because of anything those women actually do, good or bad. Not that the original Count has it easy. But at least he has the flavor of "worthy adversary, and you dare not laugh" stamped upon him, which is not just a consolation, it's the entire point of the story. 

I don't impute any harmful intent behind the lore. And I'd love to discover that in 50 years the cultural subtext of version 2 has disappeared. But I think that for now, that subtext is here and well established.

I wonder if it were possible to write a Strahd backstory that is as equally compelling and potent as the original, but that could be gender flipped without materially changing the overall impression? What, if anything, would be lost? And why would it not be possible/what steps need to be taken to make it possible in today's culture? 

I don't know the answers to those questions. But I do think they're worth asking.

Wizards of the Coast just released a revamped version of the The Curse of Strahd, today, October 20, 2020. I'm tempted to get it in order to compare. I wonder if it's worth the expense, especially given that I'm unlikely to run the campaign any time soon.  It sure looks nice, though. Tempted.