How to fix Curse of Strahd

"Good evening. Come in. I am so glad you could make it. Dinner is ready. Right this way."

"Oh, careful there, don't trip over the ableism."

"Now...... Oh! Rahadin! Didn't I tell you to pick up that racism there? Fantasy Jesus..."

"Right."

"Here we are."

"Have a seat."

I love Curse of Strahd.

I’ve played it once, and then I ran it twice, and I lowkey want to be a player in it again sometime soon.

But it also kinda sucks in a lot of ways.

I will focus on these topics here:

Racism
Van Richten
Ableism
Mad Mary
Bluto
Stella Wachter
The Abbey
Mongrelfolk
The Angel
Mordenkainen

But it actually sucks in more ways than just these.
Also, haha, vampires and sucking.

Racism

We’re gonna have to talk about the racism.

Your players can run into the Vistani as early as session one, with the Vistani being one of the plot hooks that bring the players into Barovia in the first place.

The way the Vistani are depicted in the book is deeply troubling, and Wizards of the Coast have acknowledged this in Curse of Strahd: Revamped… by changing four lines.

(Those four lines are not enough.)

So, what’s the issue anyway?
Well, the Vistani are very clearly a representation of real life Romani people, with some of the Stahd novels and the old Ravenloft module using the word “Vistani” and the slur “Gypsy” interchangeably.

The Romani of the real world are an oppressed minority.
I’m not gonna get into the real world issues, because this is not the place for it, but at any rate, the Romani people have enough trouble already, and it is highly inappropriate to use them and reinforce harmful stereotypes against them in your game.

One stereotype that I will bring up again later when we talk about Van Richten is the myth that the Vistani steal and sell children.

Simply don’t have them do that.
It doesn’t add much to the story anyway.

The part where Vistani can bestow curses on people is also taken directly from real life superstitions.
Simply don’t let Vistani characters have that power.

Then there is the thing about the Vistani seers.

This one is a bit tricky, because the Vistani seer Madame Eva is where the party is supposed to learn where they can find some important magic items.

You can circumvent this by giving the information to literally any other character.
Maybe the barkeeper in the Bluewater Inn heard some rumours about it, or maybe Ezmeralda d’Avenir found some clues about the item’s whereabouts while looking for Van Richten.

I am also not the biggest fan of almost all of the Vistani being evil and working directly for Strahd.

It is simply not necessary. They can just be people who exist and pass through sometimes.
In fact the book itself already gives us an out?

Back when Strahd was still human, he was wounded in battle, but was saved by some Vistana, which is why the Vistani still receive special privileges from him.
There we go. It explains why the Vistani are free to come and go from Barovia, without having to make them be explicitly on board with Strahd’s evil machinations.

The one stereotype that Wizards of the Coast has already tried to fix is the alcoholism.
If you don’t have the Revamped version of the module, simply remove the Vistani who are passed out drunk.

I think that’s most of it covered.
But maybe do some research about the Roma people for yourself, and if you find any other instances of shitty stereotypes while going through the module for yourself, try to write them out of the story.

Okay, I said I was done, but there is one more thing.

We gotta talk about Rudolf van Richten, and his backstory.

His entire deal is that, according to the module, his 14-year-old son was kidnapped by a group of Vistani, sold to a vampire lord, and turned into a vampire.

Van Richten set a horde of zombies loose on the Vistani, got cursed for his troubles, and went to find his son, who was already turned into a vampire by the time Van Richten got there.

His son begged him to kill him and end his misery, which Van Richten did, and then he swore to destroy every vampire and Vistani he can find in revenge.

You see how this is kind of bullshit?

Yeah, we already said we are not doing the whole thing with the Vistani kidnapping children.

So, what are we gonna do here?

One option would be to remove Van Richten entirely. He doesn’t really add anything to the story.

If you want to keep him, you should change his backstory.

Maybe have a vampire kidnap his son without the help of the Vistani.

The route that I personally went for is that Van Richten is just kinda racist, so he believes the story that I just recounted.

What really happened was that his son (who was actually 18 years old at the time) was in love with the vampire lord and asked for the Vistani’s help to go see him.

The son went willingly and was happy to be turned into a vampire to be with his lover forever.

But Van Richten tracked them down and killed them because he would rather have a dead son that a gay vampire son.

The story about the Vistani stealing his son is just what he tells himself, and what he tells people who he thinks might be willing to help with his genocide.

My players killed him minutes after meeting him…
So maybe only use my version if you don’t have any more use for that character.

Okay, now I think I’m actually done with the racism.

Ableism

Time for the ableism.

Spooky scary mentally ill people are a longstanding tradition in horror, and it needs to die.

There are a bunch of NPCs who will just be kinda generically “insane”, and I suggest you do away with as many of them as you can.

Okay, you don’t have to throw them all out directly, but… yes, actually there are a lot that I just threw away completely.

The first one you meet is “Mad Mary”, who went insane with grief from losing her daughter.

There is literally no reason to call her insane.

Her daughter went missing like two weeks ago and she is grieving.

Just leave her as she is, but don’t call her insane.

There is a guy called Bluto who the party encounters as he is about to drown a little Vistani girl, because he is insane and thinks that it will make the lake give him fish again.

Step one: Clear up with your party ahead of time how they feel about child endangerment and maybe skip the scene entirely if people might have extremely strong negative reactions towards it.

If you’re good to go with the child endangerment… There is literally no reason to make Bluto insane. Just make him very superstitious and kind of racist. He just believes that the lake is cursed, and that the curse can be broken with a human sacrifice. And he’s just racist and believes that a Vistani girl is an acceptable sacrifice.

Next up there is Stella Wachter, a possible fated companion who the party must heal of her insanity for her to be useful.

Her deal is that she was supposed to marry Victor Vallakovich, who was so mean to her that she went insane from it and now she thinks she’s a cat.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. It’s so fucking stupid.

Victor is literally dabbling in fucked up magic that tends to backfire. Literally just make it so he tried to use a spell on her, it went wrong, and now she is cursed into behaving like a cat.

Stella can still be a little cat girl, and it can still take the same level of spell to heal her, but it actually makes sense, and doesn’t rely on someone going insane because someone was mean to her.

There will be more instances of characters like that. You can fix most of the issue by just simply not saying that the characters are insane, and giving them an actual reason why they act the way they do.

The Abbey of Saint Markovia

And then there is the abbey.

I was honestly at a completely loss as to what to do about the abbey.

As written, the abbey is populated by insane mongrelfolk, who are all people with some animal parts replacing their limbs or in addition to their limbs, some of whom are locked in animal pens.

Everything about the phrase “insane mongrelfolk” sounds wrong to me.

Also, like, putting mentally ill people on the same level as animals is fucked up.

Step One: “Mongrel”, when applied to people, is a racist slur. Don’t do that.

Step Two: Don’t put mentally ill people into animal pens.

Step Three: Idk, man. the inhabitants of the abbey kinda went insane with their transformation, they all have their own ticks that can’t really be explained with anything other than “they are insane, i guess”, and there is at least one of them whose insanity manifests in him murdering people for fun, which like, okay, why, stop.

And then there is the insane angel, who was sent down to stop Strahd, failed, went insane because he failed, and in his insanity is now building a flesh golem for Strahd to marry.

There is a lot to unpack there, and I honestly have no idea where to start, so I just threw away the whole suitcase.

If you have any suggestions on how to fix this, I am all ears.
Because I personally just removed any people who are supposed to live in the abbey and replaced them with a pair of vampires who are stationed there by Strahd to keep humans out to prevent the abbey from becoming a holy place again.

Mordenkainen

And in our last notable entry for spooky scary mentally ill people, we have Mordenkainen.

In the module, Mordenkainen fought Strahd a year ago, lost the fight, and fell down a waterfall, losing his wand and spellbook in the process. He retreated into the mountains to gather his strength and try to fight again. But then he realised that it would be impossible for him to win against Strahd, which drove him insane.

He’s been spending a lot of time as an elk on the mountain side and he will fireball any humanoid he comes across.

The whole point with Mordenkainen is that the party must cast Greater Restoration on him for him to be any use to them.

Personally I circumvented this by having him mess with a magic item he found and accidentally permanently locking himself in his Magnificent Mansion.

The party will have to be able to dispel the mansion for him to be able to help them.

I honestly don’t care if there was another point to making Mordenkainen insane. Other than getting to use the alliteration “Mad Mage of Mount Baratok”, and then they messed up on calling it Mount Baratok instead of Mount Maratok.

Just stop with the quirky insane characters. Find a reason for them to be like that other than just calling them insane.

I’m done with this now. Just. Ugh, do better than the Wizards of the Coast. It isn’t hard. They set the bar real low.