#Strahd’s wedding

[astral-dragons]

I think every Ireena should be final girl (gn) coded and get to deal the killing blow to Strahd while wearing a blood-stained wedding gown. as a treat <3

#curse of strahd #ireena kolyana #strahd von zarovich #my tuesday group is approaching the end of cos and i'm. Very Tempted to go the “strahd kidnaps Ireena and holds a wedding” route

[a-cypress-tree-draws]

The candlelight within the chapel was more than sufficient to overflow the stained glass windows and spill out into the night. Tatyana was huddled in a pool of color from one of them, her white gown catching and holding gemlike shades of green, blue, gold ... red.

#digital drawing #digital art #ttrpg #character drawing #curse of strahd #Tatyana #the tatyana amalgamation #lovinia castillo #wedding dress #vampire

[vanhelsingapologist]

killing his dad went fine.

spoilers in tags!

#victor vallakovich #CoS PC: Emilia #curse of strahd #sketch #doodle #lady wachter (house arrest era) got one of her cultists to steal his spellbook at the reception #and then lured Emilia to her house by leaving little clues and was like “you’re a girlboss. I respect that.” #“unfortunately your pathetic husband probably had something to do with my daughter.” #“I will prove it with his book. Necromancy is so interesting.” #“so when you two do whatever it is you do I will be your advisor because you are so young. and I will give it back.” #then tried to get Emilia to sign a contract which she didn’t do #so Emilia promised to heal her daughter as an act of good faith between families #as well as agreed to the advisor gamble with the secret plan to take her tf out #then went home and got the full story on Stella which wasn’t as heinous as I was expecting. bad but not too bad. #anyway we got the spellbook back and killed vargas so Vallaki’s a fucking MESS #wedding AND a coup #Barovia have a normal Wedding challenge

[loafrolls]

I’m taking the week between sessions well and not obsessing at all

#they’re wives your honor #not to mention Ireena getting to HAVE a wedding that she actually WANTS #curse of strahd #dnd5e #cos

[zarovichs]

curse of strahd is literally like. every gothic trope in the weirdest way. it's gnc dracula. it's a frankenstein story with literal divine intervention. it's the sorrow of the masses conglomerated into a fathomable eldritch despair. it's desire across the oceans of time. it's obsession of the fleeting quality of the soul. it's the most powerful being rendered weak in the face of love. it's love being a curse. it's love being the thing that fells you. incherally horrible and also i hate it hope this helps

#🦌 #curse of strahd #LOVE WAS THE CURSE???? FUCK #sorry if i go batshit over cos again my players are like #literally so close to the wedding (that i wrote) where strahd marries irina and it's like #BRRRRRRRR #actual art and a piece of shit

[localghostgorl]

I wanted to draw an Eastern European re-interpretation of Tatyana. The outfit is inspired by those worn to the Romanov ball of 1903.

I do commissions!    

#tatyana federovna #curse of strahd #tatyana curse of strahd #dungeons & dragons #d&d 5e #idk if this is anything but i wanted to draw what i would have her look like in my campaign #this is supposed to be like a wedding look #the colouring is kinda sloppy but I didn't wanna spend too much time on it #also the outfits i was looking at had so much detail #i wish i had the patience to draw that #because this really does not give those dresses justice #they were covered in pearls and elaborate embroidery #ghostart

[mx-lamour]

Strahd handing Sergei the Ba'al Verzi dagger like a gift before taking it back and stabbing him with it has the same energy as the time my mom asked about my wedding ring and I used her sincerity against her in a petty little trickster prank.

So, here's what happened.

My partner and I picked out a ring, which he used to propose, and then I got him a ring for our wedding. I only ever had the one ring (no, not that one); none of this two-part wedding set nonsense.

My mom did not know this, and asked about it.

Seeing an opportunity for a brand of mischief I'd learned from my dad, I handed my ring over for Mom to inspect, saying, "This is my engagement ring..."

When she had looked it over some, I took it back, looked down at it briefly, and then handed it to her again, exactly as before, saying, "...and this is my wedding ring."

An odd look of confusion and disappointment came over her when she realized it, and--the difference between myself and Strahd being this--I immediately felt terrible for doing it, despite having thought I was clever right up until that point and having earned a chuckle from my dad, who knew what was up. It would have been a better trick on literally anyone else; my mom was an easy target and that just made it mean.

#bad form #strahd von zarovich #i strahd #wedding pranks #lamour dms cos #the lesson is be more paranoid #it could save your life one day #😬 #she probably doesn't even remember this #lamour stories

[thecatslug]

i love your blog and your posts on fleshing out strahd, they are quite interesting to read!

im currently playing CoS (5e) and ive managed to seduce strahd, betray my party and become a vampire. long story short, we're getting married and i was wondering if you had any wild ideas as to how we could do it. i feel the wedding is going to be a 'game of thrones red wedding' type of thing since my party are guests of honor.

First off, thank you so much! Always glad that my rambles are of service 🖤

Second off- you have my deepest condolences because a Von Zarovich wedding never ends well XD

As far as my ideas for the wedding…

(Sorry for the line break, putting this beneath the read more line to prevent “wall of text” syndrome)

So! As for ideas; I um- do not have ones that will likely apply to your situation. In every game I have DMed Strahd for he has always had an extreme aversion to weddings that had thoroughly set in by the time parties bumped into him.

What with Sergei’s wedding disaster, so many failed Tatyana reincarnation cycles, and a general propensity to either corrupt or inevitability kill any romantic interests? Weddings are a borderline irrational fear of his.

I’ve sprinkled in some lore headcannons into my games to both drive home why he’s so averse to the idea- and because it’s legitimately very funny to my warped sense of humor. Someone died choking on a spoon at Sturm’s, a dramatic and disastrous duel broke out at Barov’s, the list goes on in my games.

All in all? I have never run a Strahd that would have a formal wedding and would likely never truly “marry” someone in name with the possible exception of Alek Gwilym (depending on where Strahd is in his unlife) and even then- concrete ceremonies? No. No no no nothing good comes of weddings.

{Again, this is just my take both because I have an odd sense of humor, and because I tend to run an older (post war against Azalin) and near-exclusively 2e rooted Strahd. Cyclical trauma, abuse, and broken relationships are heavy themes in all my Ravenloft games which lend themselves more to leaning into this aspect of the muse.}

#good luck and godspeed #nothing good ever comes of weddings - sincerely: ToT’s slightly neurotic Strahd #I check my inbox; yes #I am the best inbox checker of all inbox checkers

[dykepuffs]

How Do I Make My Fictional Gypsies Not Racist?

(Or, "You can't, sorry, but…")

You want to include some Gypsies in your fantasy setting. Or, you need someone for your main characters to meet, who is an outsider in the eyes of the locals, but who already lives here. Or you need a culture in conflict with your settled people, or who have just arrived out of nowhere. Or, you just like the idea of campfires in the forest and voices raised in song. And you’re about to step straight into a muckpile of cliches and, accidentally, write something racist.

(In this, I am mostly using Gypsy as an endonym of Romany people, who are a subset of the Romani people, alongside Roma, Sinti, Gitano, Romanisael, Kale, etc, but also in the theory of "Gypsying" as proposed by Lex and Percy H, where Romani people are treated with a particular mix of orientalism, criminalisation, racialisation, and othering, that creates "The Gypsy" out of both nomadic peoples as a whole and people with Romani heritage and racialised physical features, languages, and cultural markers)

Enough of my friends play TTRPGs or write fantasy stories that this question comes up a lot - They mention Dungeons and Dragons’ Curse Of Strahd, World Of Darkness’s Gypsies, World Of Darkness’s Ravnos, World of Darkness’s Silent Striders… And they roll their eyes and say “These are all terrible! But how can I do it, you know, without it being racist?”

And their eyes are big and sad and ever so hopeful that I will tell them the secret of how to take the Roma of the real world and place them in a fictional one, whilst both appealing to gorjer stereotypes of Gypsies and not adding to the weight of stereotyping that already crushes us. So, disappointingly, there is no secret.

Gypsies, like every other real-world culture, exist as we do today because of interactions with cultures and geography around us: The living waggon, probably the archetypal thing which gorjer writers want to include in their portrayals of nomads, is a relatively modern invention - Most likely French, and adopted from French Showmen by Romanies, who brought it to Britain. So already, that’s a tradition that only spans a small amount of the time that Gypsies have existed, and only a small number of the full breadth of Romani ways of living. But the reasons that the waggon is what it is are based on the real world - The wheels are tall and iron-rimmed, because although you expect to travel on cobbled, tarmac, or packed-earth roads and for comparatively short distances, it wasn’t rare to have to ford a river in Britain in the late nineteenth century, on country roads. They were drawn by a single horse, and the shape of that horse was determined by a mixture of local breeds - Welsh cobs, fell ponies, various draft breeds - as well as by the aesthetic tastes of the breeders. The stove inside is on the left, so that as you move down a British road, the chimney sticks up into the part where there will be the least overhanging branches, to reduce the chance of hitting it.

So taking a fictional setting that looks like (for example) thirteenth century China (with dragons), and placing a nineteenth century Romanichal family in it will inevitably result in some racist assumptions being made, as the answer to “Why does this culture do this?” becomes “They just do it because I want them to” rather than having a consistent internal logic.

Some stereotypes will always follow nomads - They appear in different forms in different cultures, but they always arise from the settled people's same fears: That the nomads don't share their values, and are fundamentally strangers. Common ones are that we have a secret language to fool outsiders with, that we steal children and disguise them as our own, that our sexual morals are shocking (This one has flipped in the last half century - From the Gypsy Lore Society's talk of the lascivious Romni seductress who will lie with a strange man for a night after a 'gypsy wedding', to today's frenzied talk of 'grabbing' and sexually-conservative early marriages to ensure virginity), that we are supernatural in some way, and that we are more like animals than humans. These are tropes where if you want to address them, you will have to address them as libels - there is no way to casually write a baby-stealing, magical succubus nomad without it backfiring onto real life Roma. (The kind of person who has the skills to write these tropes well, is not the kind of person who is reading this guide.)

It’s too easy to say a list of prescriptive “Do nots”, which might stop you from making the most common pitfalls, but which can end up with your nomads being slightly flat as you dance around the topics that you’re trying to avoid, rather than being a rich culture that feels real in your world.

So, here are some questions to ask, to create your nomadic people, so that they will have a distinctive culture of their own that may (or may not) look anything like real-world Romani people: These aren't the only questions, but they're good starting points to think about before you make anything concrete, and they will hopefully inspire you to ask MORE questions.

First - Why are they nomadic? Nobody moves just to feel the wind in their hair and see a new horizon every morning, no matter what the inspirational poster says. Are they transhumant herders who pay a small rent to graze their flock on the local lord’s land? Are they following migratory herds across common land, being moved on by the cycle of the seasons and the movement of their animals? Are they seasonal workers who follow man-made cycles of labour: Harvests, fairs, religious festivals? Are they refugees fleeing a recent conflict, who will pass through this area and never return? Are they on a regular pilgrimage? Do they travel within the same area predictably, or is their movement governed by something that is hard to predict? How do they see their own movements - Do they think of themselves as being pushed along by some external force, or as choosing to travel? Will they work for and with outsiders, either as employees or as partners, or do they aim to be fully self-sufficient? What other jobs do they do - Their whole society won’t all be involved in one industry, what do their children, elderly, disabled people do with their time, and is it “work”?

If they are totally isolationist - How do they produce the things which need a complex supply chain or large facilities to make? How do they view artefacts from outsiders which come into their possession - Things which have been made with technology that they can’t produce for themselves? (This doesn’t need to be anything about quality of goods, only about complexity - A violin can be made by one artisan working with hand tools, wood, gut and shellac, but an accordion needs presses to make reeds, metal lathes to make screws, complex organic chemistry to make celluloid lacquer, vulcanised rubber, and a thousand other components)

How do they feel about outsiders? How do they buy and sell to outsiders? If it’s seen as taboo, do they do it anyway? Do they speak the same language as the nearby settled people (With what kind of fluency, or bilingualism, or dialect)? Do they intermarry, and how is that viewed when it happens? What stories does this culture tell about why they are a separate people to the nearby settled people? Are those stories true? Do they have a notional “homeland” and do they intend to go there? If so, is it a real place?

What gorjers think of as classic "Gipsy music" is a product of our real-world situation. Guitar from Spain, accordions from the Soviet Union (Which needed modern machining and factories to produce and make accessible to people who weren't rich- and which were in turn encouraged by Soviet authorities preferring the standardised and modern accordion to the folk traditions of the indigenous peoples within the bloc), brass from Western classical traditions, via Balkan folk music, influences from klezmer and jazz and bhangra and polka and our own music traditions (And we influence them too). What are your people's musical influences? Do they make their own instruments or buy them from settled people? How many musical traditions do they have, and what are they all for (Weddings, funerals, storytelling, campfire songs, entertainment...)? Do they have professional musicians, and if so, how do those musicians earn money? Are instrument makers professionals, or do they use improvised and easy-to-make instruments like willow whistles, spoons, washtubs, etc? (Of course the answer can be "A bit of both")

If you're thinking about jobs - How do they work? Are they employed by settled people (How do they feel about them?) Are they self employed but providing services/goods to the settled people? Are they mostly avoidant of settled people other than to buy things that they can't produce themselves? Are they totally isolationist? Is their work mostly subsistence, or do they create a surplus to sell to outsiders? How do they interact with other workers nearby? Who works, and how- Are there 'family businesses', apprentices, children with part time work? Is it considered 'a job' or just part of their way of life? How do they educate their children, and is that considered 'work'? How old are children when they are considered adult, and what markers confer adulthood? What is considered a rite of passage?

When they travel, how do they do it? Do they share ownership of beasts of burden, or each individually have "their horse"? Do families stick together or try to spread out? How does a child begin to live apart from their family, or start their own family? Are their dwellings something that they take with them, or do they find places to stay or build temporary shelter with disposable material? Who shares a dwelling and why? What do they do for privacy, and what do they think privacy is for?

If you're thinking about food - Do they hunt? Herd? Forage? Buy or trade from settled people? Do they travel between places where they've sown crops or managed wildstock in previous years, so that when they arrive there is food already seeded in the landscape? How do they feel about buying food from settled people, and is that common? If it's frowned upon - How much do people do it anyway? How do they preserve food for winter? How much food do they carry with them, compared to how much they plan to buy or forage at their destinations? How is food shared- Communal stores, personal ownership?

Why are they a "separate people" to the settled people? What is their creation myth? Why do they believe that they are nomadic and the other people are settled, and is it correct? Do they look different? Are there legal restrictions on them settling? Are there legal restrictions on them intermixing? Are there cultural reasons why they are a separate people? Where did those reasons come from? How long have they been travelling? How long do they think they've been travelling? Where did they come from? Do they travel mostly within one area and return to the same sites predictably, or are they going to move on again soon and never come back?

And then within that - What about the members of their society who are "unusual" in some way: How does their society treat disabled people? (are they considered disabled, do they have that distinction and how is it applied?) How does their society treat LGBT+ people? What happens to someone who doesn't get married and has no children? What happens to someone who 'leaves'? What happens to young widows and widowers? What happens if someone just 'can't fit in'? What happens to someone who is adopted or married in? What happens to people who are mixed race, and in a fantasy setting to people who are mixed species? What is taboo to them and what will they find shocking if they leave? What is society's attitude to 'difference' of various kinds?

Basically, if you build your nomads from the ground-up, rather than starting from the idea of "I want Gypsies/Buryats/Berbers/Minceiri but with the numbers filed off and not offensive" you can end up with a rich, unique nomadic culture who make sense in your world and don't end up making a rod for the back of real-world cultures.

#worldbuilding #world building #fantasy races #racism in fiction #nomads #romani stuff

[yourplayersaidwhat]

Context: We're playing Curse of Strahd and this happened the night before our assult on Castle Ravenloft. Our human fighter and paladin have joked the whole campaign about being future exes.

Human Fighter: *after yet another verbal jab at the paladin* She's going to punch me eventually.

Paladin: Fighter, come here!

Human Fighter: *sticks face out for punching* Make it quick then.

Paladin: Cleric! Marry us!

Human Fighter: WHAT?!

Paladin: You heard me!

Cue the whole party laughing like crazy as the Cleric scrambles through their spell list.

Cleric (OOC): I have Ceremony, you guys will get 2 AC for a week if you stay in 30 feet.

Human Fighter: I... You... Fine. Do it.

Elf Fighter (OOC): You're getting married for the tax benefits!

The wedding was quick-ish and interrupted by much laughter, but the players improvised really sweet vows for each other. Overall, 10/10 final fight prep would do again.

#shit my players say #rpg #submission #official module #dnd

[hot0sauce]

a little meme for our strahd, if youve seen the og hannibal one you know. also inspired by the goro akechi version saewokhrisz (on twitter and tumblr) made.

our strahd spent 30 years after the wedding with only vampyr in control of his body before coming out of his bloodsoaked haze like “oh”.

this part of his lifes been coming up recently in amber temple conversations so it felt more than fitting!

#cos #dnd #my cos campaign #hottoart #cos meme #curse of strahd #strahd von zarovich #strahd #strahdposting

[a-cypress-tree-draws]

This one's kinda complicated.

So, while we aren't playing Ravenloft right this second, me & Roland talk a lot about what we want to do for Curse of Strahd. Most of our conversations come back to Lovinia and how I want to play her. I've been throwing around the idea of having her start with some kind of trinket or memento from her time as Tatyana to hopefully help her in tying her life back together, or just to make the mania of harbouring like, upwards of ten different versions of yourself within her very fractured mind a bit more justified. I already settled on her having her wedding ring from her marriage to Sergei, but somewhere I decided it wasn't enough, so I designed a music box as well. The brooch next to it is actually the winding key for it: a mechanism on the back fits into a slot in the center of the sunflower on the box's front, and the loop at the top is so it can be worn as a necklace.

Roland helped me a bit with the wedding ring. I based it loosely on the one she got from Strahd that I designed awhile back, and tried to make it, just, absolutely tasteless while still being sincere, hence the heart cut (Sergei seems like the type of guy to both me & Roland that would find the biggest, prettiest thing he could for his wife. The phrase we've been using is "golden retriever boyfriend"). I took that idea into the design of the music box too, and triedto use bright colors and happy themes, like sunflowers, to utterly juxtapose Sergei's general aesthetic with Strahds whole spooky-vampire-in-his-big-haunted-mansion vibe. We even decided what song it plays: It's a pleasant melody, one that has an almost heroic twinge to it despite the solemnity of wider Barovia.

It's the Wintergatan Marble Machine music. It just.. really fucks, alright? It's like, perfectly sad and hopeful at the same time, and what is this huge contraption if not a giant, really cool music box?

#digital drawing #digital art #ttrpg #Expedition to Castle Ravenloft #Curse of Strahd #Tatyana #sergei von zarovich #sunflower #Music box #Wedding ring #ring #jewelry design #ring design #Heart cut #emerald #Youtube

[dwimepon]

me: just made my Curse of Strahd character! She's from Barovia, and her backstory is that her wife was kidnapped by Strahd right in the middle of the wedding. would that be good? my DM: sounds good to me! I have a character that could be your wife actually, interested? me: yeah, just give me her name my DM: Ireena Kolyana me, not realizing how utterly fucked I was about to be: sure!

#curse of strahd #dnd #dungeons and dragons

[teaweltzer]

Ive updated my PC height lineup with all my newbies!

As always, feel free to ask anything about them!

Nerin was my very first pc & was part of a discontinued wild west campaign. Marigold was part of a discontinued Strahd camapign. Finley was part of a short unexpected wedding invitation campaign. Sprout is in an ongoing Ravenloft campaign!

Lonan, Theo, & Wade are newest but I still love them very much

#myart #my dnd pcs #dnd #dungeons and dragons #oc_marigold #oc_sprout #oc_lonan #oc_jasmine #oc_theo #oc_wade #oc_nerin #oc_finley

[maeowl]

🦇a dead girl, a dress to be buried in and a stranger’s wedding band 🦇

aka my curse of strahd gal has been having a rough go of it lmao ;-; but it’s Barovia so who isn’t tbh 

#curse of strahd #sandrine belview #illustration #dnd #artists on tumblr #frankenstein's monster #tell me shes pretty and u love her or ill pass out on the floor and die #cos #she's from the abbey if you couldn't telll #maeowl

[zarovichs]

"but strahd/tatyana or strahd/any of her incarnations is abusive and bad" i am a fucked up individual and i enjoy the self destructive doomed toxic romantic aspect of their dynamic. i also have good taste

#🦌 #curse of strahd #also 'abusive' is not the correct word for this get outta here with your facts #also genuinely. such a good dynamic. love as violence. etc etc #i am becoming the thing that swallows you. be afraid i love you etc #hurls into the heart of sorrow #me w bloodied hands scrounging through the ao3 tag to find SOMETHING #my players attending their wedding is not enough i need them to crash it and throw the cake at the groom's face