Dragna's Devblog #16: Soap Operas & Content Mills

Welcome back to the devblog! This week’s another two-parter, since I owe ya one from last week. Moving ahead, though, I will be setting aside a full ninety minutes every Thursday night to write these, so hopefully I shouldn’t miss too many other blogs barring an emergency (or a very shiny object), and you’ll wake up with a nice new blog in your inbox every Friday morning.

This week: lots of Re-Reloaded! It’s an interesting mix of designer commentary/lessons learned, though there’s also some developmental stuff too. Have fun!

Problem #1: How do I redevelop Doru’s arc?

In the original Curse of Strahd, when the players arrive at the church in the village of Barovia, they learn that there’s a hungry vampire spawn imprisoned in the basement.

The problem: there’s not really anything for them to do about it, nor is there any source of actual tension. While some DMs have suggested “punishing” players for ignoring the vampire (the priest’s son, Doru), this isn’t really foreshadowed in any way, and there isn’t really a feasible way to actually notify the players that things have gone south after they leave without breaking verisimilitude. (There’s no good reason for Doru to break out within the first thirty minutes after the players leave—especially since his father, Donavich, has managed to keep him successfully imprisoned for at least a solid week already—and once the players leave Barovia for the distant town of Vallaki, there’s basically no reason for anything from Barovia to follow them there.)

There is, admittedly, a lot of exposition here—exposition about Strahd, about Doru’s fate, about the revolution against Ravenloft, and about how much life in Barovia sucks. But as I’ve discussed in a previous devblog, exposition should be woven into a dramatic question if we want to make the players care about it.

More importantly, there’s a massive Chekhov’s Gun here that’s not going off—there’s a vampire spawn in the basement and it’s not actually doing anything. This is THE first vampire that the players will meet all campaign! It should set the tone for everything that follows! Why on Earth isn’t it doing anything?

So I decided to make it do something.

Part A: Firing Chekhov’s Gun

Here’s the problem: in the RAW module, Donavich doesn’t want Doru to be killed. In fact, multiple community guides have gone out of their way to have him commit suicide if the players decide to kill Doru against his will. This creates an obvious issue for those of us trying to create tension: Donavich doesn’t want Doru dead, Doru doesn’t want Doru dead, and Ismark (the only other NPC present) also doesn’t want Doru dead.

The only option here is for the players to spontaneously decide to want Doru dead, and—since most players won’t want to approach, let alone fight him—this is very unreliable unless we create a clear and present danger that Donavich doesn’t notice or care about, and which Ismark explicitly warns the party about. Except this then puts us right back into our verisimilitude trap from above (no good reason why Doru is in danger of escaping right now; no way for the consequences to follow the PCs to Vallaki if they fail or refuse; etc.).

Let’s take a step back and look back at our dramatic questions reference sheet and view this thing holistically. What stakes are present in the church—specifically, stakes that the players will care about? Well, they’re here to get Kolyan Indirovich’s corpse buried so that they can take Ireena with them to Vallaki. That’s the big thing they care about.

How can we tie Doru into this? Well, maybe the PCs can’t get the burial done until they interact with Doru somehow. Why might that be?

…huh.

Two months ago, I wrote another devblog about questioning your assumptions—and, as I pondered this problem, it was blinking rapidly in the back of my mind. In RAW, Donavich really doesn’t want Doru to be killed. But in RAW, there’s also no actual way to resolve Doru’s arc—there’s no way to cure Doru short of finding the super-secret easter-egg luck blade in the castle crypts.

Which led me to ask: What is Doru’s arc? Or, rather, what should it be?

Simultaneous with this arc, I’d also been wrestling with a parallel issue: what Dr. Rudolph van Richten’s arc should be—and, specifically, how it should conclude. Given that Van Richten’s tragedy began with the transformation of his son, Erasmus, into a vampire spawn and Erasmus’s own death at Van Richten’s hands, I knew that I wanted his ending to be a kind of mirror of his beginning.

At first, I thought that Van Richten might recruit Ezmerelda, reconciling with his former student and gaining the strength and courage to put Doru to rest. But that felt wrong—almost perverse. Van Richten’s tragedy had begun with his decision to kill an innocent youth-turned-vampire; echoing his decision now would set it in stone. There was no growth, no redemption to such an arc.

What if, instead, Van Richten spared Doru and instead assisted him in controlling his vampiric urges? There’s certainly precedent in old Ravenloft lore—Jander Sunstar specifically is an excellent example of a vampire who struggled with his bloodthirst but learned to control it. It seems fitting, too, that, in retirement, a former monster hunter would become a monster rehabilitator. (As one patron in the Discord put it, “Oh, so Van Richten is Geralt of Rivia now?”)

So the end goal of Doru’s arc is now rehabilitation: He wants to be redeemed and to be free of (or at least able to control) his vampiric addictions. However, this seems to align with Donavich’s goals: Donavich just wants to get his son back. If the players showed up at the Barovian church with this status quo, there wouldn’t really be any tension—Donavich would be sad and Doru would be stressed, but there’d be no real issue, since Doru would have no problem submitting to the confines of the undercroft.

(Why do we need Doru himself to want to be rehabilitated, rather than needing to be forced into it? Good question. Throughout the adventure, the players will slaughter many vampire spawn—none of which have been able to resist their curse, and some of which even came to it willingly. For Doru’s arc to work, and for his rehabilitation to be morally consistent with the senseless slaughter of other vampires, Doru has to be special—a vampire uniquely capable of and interested in fighting against his own undead nature.)

Every arc or chapter needs a dramatic question—which meant we needed tension, which meant we needed an antagonist. We had sparse pickings, though: Doru was out, because he wants to be redeemed. Ismark was out, because he’s The Good Guy. That left Donavich.

Doru wants to be redeemed and show the world that he’s still himself inside—that his vampiric nature doesn’t define him. The natural antagonist to this goal is someone who believes that Doru is evil and corrupted and must be destroyed, both for the safety of others and to cease the desecration of his remains. This, then, is Donavich’s new role: a father who is blind to his son’s pain due to the monster that Doru has become.

Part B: Making Them Care

Bam! We’ve got tension—will the players help Donavich kill Doru, or will they help Doru persuade his father that his son is still alive? But all dramatic questions need an inciting goal that the players care about; otherwise, they won’t care about the stakes! Presented with this simple dilemma, many parties just won’t care and will decide to just skip Doru and ignore Donavich’s homicidal requests.

That means we need to hook it into something that they already care about—the reason that they’re at the church in the first place: the burial of Kolyan Indirovich.

As it turned out, I’d been rewatching a bunch of Castlevania clips at the time, and the first thought that came to mind was: What if Donavich has lost his faith (and therefore his holy power), but thinks that the true culprit is Doru’s possession (and corruption of) his holy symbol? Donavich can technically perform the burial without the holy symbol, but he can’t actually sanctify Kolyan’s corpse unless he gets his mojo back, which puts it in danger of reanimation or desecration. So, since Donavich can’t do it himself, he asks the players to go kill Doru in the undercroft and get his holy symbol back.

Part C: Building the Suspense

This is good! We’ve got a nice little narrative arc that the players need to go through to get what they want, and which will necessarily require them to deal with Doru in some way. There’s one lingering problem: There’s a lot of exposition that we want Doru to deliver (mostly about the revolt and Van Richten), and it’s not really particularly relevant to the conflict itself!

We could wind it into the dramatic question so that the players need or want to learn that information to solve the problem—but that seems a bit clumsy at this point. (Surely, Donavich is already largely aware of How Things Went Down.) Instead, we can create some tension and suspense by making it something that the players are already curious about, and let them direct the course of conversation by digging as much as they’d like to.

How might we do that? I asked ChatGPT, and it suggested that I place an NPC outside of the church—someone who could tell the PCs, as they approach with the coffin and knock on the door, that Donavich has shut himself inside and hasn’t seen any visitors in over a week. I settled on Parriwimple for this—he’s a fun NPC who also ties into the tragedy of Barovia and can have a nice resonant impact on the players.

This has an added benefit: It gives us an excellent segue into the actual scene inside the church, since Donavich will assume that the players have come seeking blessings and tries to turn them away before realizing who they are and what they’re looking for. This lets us get a nice, active start on the scene and keep that momentum moving as things develop.

Part D: Barovia is a Soap Opera

Great stuff. While tossing around ideas with other members of the Discord, I also had (or stole; I can’t remember which) two more ideas:

1. Escher, Strahd’s latest vampiric consort, was Barovia’s village bard and one of Doru’s best friends (plus maybe had an unrequited crush on him?). He betrayed the mob to Strahd and willingly asked to become a vampire in order to obtain immortality.

2. Gertruda, Strahd’s current prisoner in Castle Ravenloft, is Doru’s betrothed. Since Donavich hasn’t told anyone about Doru’s vampirism or reappearance at the church, all Gertruda knows is that Doru went to Ravenloft and vanished there. Since she hasn’t seen the body, she believes that Strahd might be holding Doru as a prisoner, and decided to venture to the castle herself to bargain for his release (like Beauty and the Beast, but with much less romance).

This has some really great benefits—it immediately sets up the players to take an interest in Escher when he appears (which also makes him a much more memorable character), makes Doru a much more memorable character (since he’s suddenly got a life outside of The Plot), and encourages the players to seek out Gertruda when they heist the castle (which encourages them to do more exploration, period, and allows them to discover the Heart of Sorrow, which is where the finale will take place—and oh god I’ve just recreated the enchanted rose; this is literally just Beauty and the Beast but spookier and with way, way less romance).

Overall, however, I think there’s a much bigger, broadly applicable lesson to be learned here: Every NPC the players meet should either have an emotional connection to an NPC that the players have already met, a connection to an NPC that the players have yet to meet, or (preferably) both. Or, to put it in more blunt terms, build your campaigns like a soap opera.

When I was a kid, I liked to read stories with lots of action and cool stuff in them; whenever someone tried to get me to read a story with a more emotional core, I’d say, “yeugh; where’s the time travel and explosions?”

To be clear, I still prefer stories with time travel and explosions today—but I also recognize that those genre elements are, when properly used, mere aesthetic vehicles for the exploration of deeply human themes and ideas. And, since humans are primarily social creatures, that means building campaigns like soap operas: narratives in which everybody has a dramatic connection with (some fraction of) everybody else, and everybody’s got positive or negative feelings about (some fraction of) everybody else.

To put it another way, an NPC should never be an emotional dead end—while you can make players care about an NPC through sheer force of resonance alone, that resonance is multiplied tenfold if you can magnify it with real, emotional, social stakes that connect that NPC to other NPCs that the players care about. Like a bunch of kids playing with Ninja Turtle toys or Barbie dolls, it’s the relationships between the NPCs that make them memorable, not the plot-related things that they do or care about.

Problem #2: How do I rebuild Death House to convey the household’s lore?

You might have heard that I’ve recently released a public “final” draft of the first segment of Curse of Strahd: Re-Reloaded—including, of course, Death House. However, this release has always been less of a “final” draft than a “public playtesting” draft—and, thankfully, I’ve been getting playtesting feedback in spades.

One such piece of feedback was shared in the Patreon Discord, but a member who ran it for their campaign and who found that, unfortunately, their players failed to pick up on any of the major beats of the house’s backstory. The players got through the house alright, but they didn’t really have any idea of who these people were or while they should care. It was a haunted house, but a hollow one, bereft of real history or emotional stakes. This had been exacerbated by my decision to remove the narrative “on-ramp” provided by the illusory Rose and Thorn at the start of the dungeon, but the source of the problem went much deeper.

I realized, in fact, that I’d violated one of my Ten Commandments of DMing: Thou shalt not create content for the sake of creating content! In other words, every single thing that you put in your game—from entire towns to individual dungeon rooms and even the objects that the players find within those dungeon rooms—should either develop the narrative (i.e., introduce, develop, or resolve a dramatic question) or provide (or assist with, or lead up to) engaging gameplay. Preferably, content should always do both.

From the rooms to the objects to the special events, I hadn’t created most of the Stuff in Death House—I’d either curated it or taken it from the original module—but I hadn’t introduced it with deliberate intent. A solid eighty percent of Death House still either had (1) no meaningful content (e.g., the spare bedroom in the attic), (2) content that existed only because I thought it was cool or scary (e.g., the moving wolves in the Den of Wolves, the feast in the Dining Room, or the ghost dance in the Conservatory), or (3) content that provided gameplay but was utterly divorced from everything around it (e.g., the animated armor on the third floor). That had to change.

Instead, I realized I had to rebuild the house from the ground-up, crafting each room to provide a deeper, richer, and more engaging narrative and gameplay experience. Every single room had to have a narrative purpose—and, wherever possible, those rooms should provide a gameplay “challenge” for the players to overcome.

I began by going through my list of rooms in Death House, and picking out any that didn’t currently relay any meaningful narrative information: the Dining Hall, the Cloakroom, the Kitchen & Pantry, the Den of Wolves, the Library, and the Conservatory.

I then took note of all of the backstory information that I needed to convey to the players by the time they met Rose and Thorn’s ghosts:

1. the family’s origins;
2. the relationship between the parents, their children, and the nursemaid;
3. the affair between Gustav Durst and the nursemaid;
4. the nursemaid’s pregnancy;
5. Elisabeth Durst’s discovery of the amber shard;
6. Elisabeth’s murder of Gustav and Walter, plus her torture of the nursemaid;
7. Elisabeth’s ritual creating the flesh mound;
8. Elisabeth’s creation of the cult; and
9. Elisabeth’s decision to lock Rose and Thorn in their room and leave them to starve to death.

Then, I assigned each one of these elements to one or more of the rooms in Death House (including some of the rooms that already had narrative information in them), and intentionally structured it so that exploring the house from bottom-to-top naturally told the story of the Dursy family’s tragedy.

When it comes to gameplay, however, it’s important to remember the five kinds of gameplay challenges: combat encounters, social encounters, puzzle encounters, obstacle courses, and skill challenges. I ultimately rejected most of these:

• Combat encounters and skill challenges defuse tension completely, and I wanted to continue building tension for as long as possible.
• Social encounters provide social context and comfort, and I wanted the players to feel as lost and alienated for as long as possible.
• Obstacle courses require lots of space, and Death House just doesn’t have that. (You could technically view the whole house as a single obstacle course—with the ritual chamber at the end—but that doesn’t really help me when it comes to creating room-level challenges for the players to overcome.)

That left puzzle encounters—groups of small clues that the players could put together to uncover a deeper secret. I wanted to ensure the highest levels of immersion that I could, though, so I set myself a limitation: all puzzles must be realistic (i.e., the players could actually expect to find and solve such things in real life), and all puzzles must be deductive (i.e., the players must do real investigative work to put the pieces together; reading a journal entry or letter was insufficient—especially because the “journal entry that reveals a character’s backstory” trope is a tired and incredibly unrealistic trope).

That meant that I needed to try to convey exposition as much as possible via environmental puzzles—portions of the house that the players needed to “solve” in order to “defeat” them. This had the additional upside of ensuring that the exposition was itself tied to a source of tension—because the players were curious about the puzzle and wanted to resolve its underlying tension, they would naturally be engaged with the information they uncovered as a result of their investigation.

You can see how this looked in practice by checking out the #project-updates channel on the Discord, though I’ll be updating the Re-Reloaded Drafting Document as soon as I shift gears to begin preparing the next public release. Hopefully I’ve managed to hit the mark!

Campaign Advice Roundup | June 12, 2023

• Not every campaign needs a villain. The sole defining feature of a narrative is tension—tension that can come from any source. (Think “Man vs. Man,” “Man vs. Self,” “Man vs. World,” and “Man vs. Nature.”) Many narratives, of course—and especially D&D, which is, at its core, a combat simulator—are better off with antagonists. But an antagonist is not a villain; where a villain is proactive and has a Plan, an antagonist is reactive and merely opposes what the players are trying to do, either because they oppose the players’ goals, they oppose the players’ methods, they personally dislike the players, they fear the consequences of the players’ actions, or some other reason.