Cursed Strahd

Cursed Strahd is a complete rewrite of the Dungens & Dragons 5th Edition adventure “Curse of Strahd”. The rewrite was entirely done to make my friends laugh, turning the dark gothic horror into comedy largely inspired by the writing of South Park.

WARNING

THE FOLLOWING PAGES WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR BOTH THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF “CURSE OF STRAHD” AS WELL AS MY EDITED VERSION. IF YOU’RE ONE OF MY PLAYERS, KINDLY PRESS THE “BACK” BUTTON ON YOUR BROWSER.

The scene in South Park’s “Marjorine” where the boys prepare the fake suicide of Butters.

Premise

As a player, I first got in touch with Dungeons & Dragons thanks to the Youtube series “High Rollers”, hosted by the Yogscast. This also introduced me to the more famous “Critical Role”, which sparked my desire to give the tabletop RPG a try.

Thanks to my background as a Game Designer, I quickly fell in love with the idea of being a Dungeon Master, entertaining players with encounters and worldbuilding. While pre-written modules were a good starting point, there was an itch to try and create something unique.

After my friends completed their “Lost Mine of Phandelver” campaign, I started preparing my own version of “Curse of Strahd”.

South Park’s Influence

The idea for a full-fledged rewritten campaign came from a single spark. In Curse of Strahd, one of the first encounters involved a mad priest grieving over his son who was transformed into a Vampire Spawn as punishment for leading a rebellion. Players have to deal with the moral dilemma of killing a Vampiric child knowing there’s no potential cure, while also requiring he aid of the mad priest for a quest.

I drew parallels of this situation with an episode of South Park called “Marjorine”, where the boys try to infiltrate a girl’s slumber party. To do so, they first have a boy named “Butters” fake a suicide by pretending to jump off of a building. That way, the girls won’t suspect it’s him as they have him dress up as the new girl in class.

During the fake scene, they throw a dead pig down which explodes on impact right in front of the witnesses. Believing their son to be dead, the parents of Butters are struck with grief. As they cry, a farmer rings the doorbell warning the father not to take the body to the nearby Cursed Indian Burial Grounds in order to try and revive his son.

Naturally, the father does exactly that. After infiltrating the slumber party, Butters finally goes home to tell his parents he is not actually dead. His father now believes the cursed ritual has worked, and that his son in an undead spawn even though he looks completely normal.

This level of absurdity set the baseline tone for the entire rewrite.

Subversion as Comedy

In “Cursed Strahd’, when the players find the mad priest in the church, he is deep in prayer, but will try to trick them into going into the under-croft.

Upon entering, the priest will close the door behind them and lock them in complete darkness, urging his son to “feast on the flesh of the living.”

Players will find the son chained to a pillar, casually mentioning he’s been here for a while and is getting hungry. Despite the clear fangs in his mouth he claims he is not a vampire.

Already, his causes huge suspicions for the players, but the kid insists that he was simply kidnapped by Strahd, and that the teeth are actually fake and glued into his mouth. He then invites the players to come closer and look for themselves.

This setup had caused severe paranoia in my players, who were fully expecting the child to strike as soon as they got within reach. Only when it was revealed that he was actually telling the truth, did the players wonder what the point of this was. After freeing the child, the mad priest lamented how the adventurers had not only survived, but released this dreaded monstrosity that was once his son upon the world. Quickly, a battle with the deranged priest would ensue.

In the original, the battle was entirely set up to be with an actual Vampire Spawn. Flipping the original narrative to a subversive situation became the core of “Cursed Strahd”.

Original Artwork for Doru, the son of the priest turned into a Vampire Spawn by Strahd. In the original campaign, Doru is chained in the under-croft of the church, yelling about his ravenous hunger.

The scene from South Park where Butters is chained up in the basement by his father, who (wrongfully) believes his son is now an undead monster.

The video that inspired the idea of Strahd blasting music from his castle to annoy the citizens, rather than using his “servants of the night” to attack and kill.

Transformative Writing

Keeping the dark, gothic essence of the original works and replacing the story beats with subversion was my core goal. Since it is too much to list, what follows are a few highlights of the rewrite. Each beat is a description of the original, and below it is the theme of the rewrite.

Strahd is a Vampiric overlord that terrorizes the lands of Barovia under his oppressive rule.
- Strahd is a Vampiric overlord that blasts loud party music every night, keeping the entire realm awake. He does this to drown out his sadness over the rejection of his first love, Tatyana, though he’s always denied it.
Ireena Kolyana is a noble woman from the village of Barovia. As long as she can remember, Strahd has been interested in her. The players are tasked by her brother to take her somewhere safe.
- Ireena and her brother are in an incestuous relationship. While Ireena holds the soul of Strahd’s original love interest, her brother actually holds the soul of Strahd’s brother, who was killed on the day of marrying Tatyana. Once Strahd learns of this, it is no longer a matter of a damsel in distress. Rather, the players have to keep the brother safe.
The Town of Vallaki has a mayor obsessed with throwing festivals to keep the vampire overlord at bay.
- The Mayor of Vallaki has been told that Vampires are weak against “crosses”. As such, he forced the entire population to place the letter ‘X’ everywhere. The mayor is a clear parody of Elon Musk, and his gross incompetence and narcissism.
The Village of Krezk has a cursed abbey filled with monstrous creatures in the care of strange man only known as “the abbot”.
- The Abbot runs a wrestlemania type of event where monstrous creations fight each other. Once the strongest has been selected, he plans to send it to Strahd as the insane man believes that Strahd’s Curse can be broken if he gets to have another good fight.
The Legendary Vampire hunter Van Richten is rumoured to be in Barovia, hoping to free the land.
- Van Richten is only here because his bicycle has been stolen, which the thieves then gifted to Strahd.

Cohesion

During a talk at a convention, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators and writers of South Park, explained why they were so successful with their storytelling. A key takeaway was the idea that plot points should never be connected with the words “and then”.

I took this statement and applied it everywhere in the campaign. No matter how stupid or seemingly random, there’s always an important reason for every situation to be the way it is.

As for comedy, I learned about subversion from more classic sources like the cartoons of Looney Tunes. Keeping the viewer on their toes by never being able to guess what could come next was important to writing the full campaign.

Combining these two elements formed the core of “Cursed Strahd”.

Obsidian can show clearly how each page in the database is connected to other pages. Large nodes show greater importance and frequency.

The Right Tools - Obsidian

To make the rewrite easier and keeping things nice and organized, I searched for a tool that would facilitate this.

I quickly stumbled upon the Obsidian app, which has been a life-changer not just for this custom campaign, but many personal projects.

Obsidian is a completely free note-taking app that essentially lets you create your own Wiki page for anything you like. Connecting links makes it possible to create a tight, interlinked database of everything you need to know about your project.

Communities have submitted custom plugins, even for things like Dungeons & Dragons stat sheets, which were excellent for all the homebrew creatures or adaptations.

It also comes with a view showing how each topic is linked to another, making it very easy to sustain the writing concept described by Matt and Trey in the previous section. The node representing Strahd, the most important character in the campaign, was basically linked to 99% of every other page.

Since the app works entirely with files, everything can be synched through Google Drive, though I’ve since shifted to self-hosting, which also works great.

Upon completing the campaign rewrite, I opted to share the files with the community through the Curse of Strahd Subreddit for free.