Your goal in The Curse of Strahd is to defeat Strahd von Zarovich.
That’s a good motivation, it’s good enough for an action movie.
We could cast The Rock in this film and you know it would be fun to watch.
There’d be cool explosions, he might even do the eyebrow thing.
I think Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a fantastic actor – I also don’t want him to beat me up… but his characters in movies are rarely more than two-dimensional.
For thinking about our player characters in the campaign, let’s look at adding a third dimension, or maybe a fourth.
Welcome to the Roleplayer’s Guide to Curse of Strahd.
This post is designed for people who want to play the Curse of Strahd campaign as players.
This is most definitely not a guide on how to win the campaign.
You won’t find the ideal Paladin build with armor class of 30 at level 10, and I won’t be sharing anything at all which could give you a mechanical advantage.
What we will look at is:
- things to consider when you’re creating a character within a campaign,
- how to roleplay your character once you’re in the thick of the mists of Barovia,
- the specific genre conventions that we can lean into for gothic horror,
- a character that I’ve created which you’re welcome to straight up steal if you like and use it for yourself.
And just to confirm, this is a spoiler-free zone.
The story that you’ll tell around the table of Curse of Strahd will be about defeating the vampire in “ze castle”, but it’s also the internal story of the characters.
Who are they as individuals?
Who are they as a group?
What do they want?
What do they need?
My answer to that last question is… redemption.
Creating a character to send into the mists…
Curse of Strahd, like a lot of pre-written modules, is designed so that any adventuring party can slot right into it.
This makes it easy for dungeon masters to bring their existing campaign to a new place.
But if your group has the luxury of creating characters specifically for this campaign, you can build something which will complement the main arc of the story, and feel like your character really belongs in the setting.
So who should you play?
Well, I’m sorry, but there’s no perfect answer.
You could go down a line of someone perfectly suited to the adventure, a paladin or a cleric that’s well suited to fighting the undead, or just be a weird little guy with no obvious applicable skills.
There are, of course, a whole world of options in between, but the most important thing is to find a character who is going to suit the tone of the adventure.
Genre awareness is key here.
Understanding you’re not in an action movie that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is not best suited to this game will really help you find a character that shines.
Curse of Strahd is straight slap bang in the middle of gothic horror.
To really get a feel of the tropes and conventions, I’d recommend doing a little reading or watching some movies.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and of course Dracula by Bram Stoker.
All of these you can read for completely free online, and there’s also some awesome film versions as well – 1950s black and white silent movies which are perfect to finding the dark, still beating heart of the genre.
If you read any versions of these, you’ll notice a lot of the characters are written to be very dry and joyless.
In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, at the very beginning of the story, the protagonist is described as…
“Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, was a man of rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile, cold, scanty, and embarrassed in discourse, backward in sentiment, lean, long, dusty, dreary, yet somehow lovable.”
This is very, very deliberate.
By having the protagonist be so sensible and sober, it makes the strange events in the book so much more unsettling because they are recounted by someone who you would not believe would make something up.
These protagonists aren’t the teller of tall tales in the pub: they’re lawyers, doctors, accountants.
In our game, it might feel odd to play someone who is stereotypically boring.
I play roleplaying games to be someone even cooler than my real-world self if such a thing were possible), but sensible and austere characters will fit the setting wonderfully.
And the thing is, there will still be moments of humour and nonsense, regardless of how (Edgar Allan) Poe-faced your character is.
If you choose to be a one-dimensional character, Orcy McOrcface, or Boblin the Goblin, you’ll get a laugh, but if your DM is anything like me, they’ll thank you for paying attention to the tone of the game.
The Land of Barovia is not the place for superheroes.
You can still very much play someone who is a force for good, but I want them to be broken.
I want to see someone who has tried their best to save the day.
Someone who, when the call to action came, stood there, frozen.
- The cleric whose faith in their god just wasn’t strong enough to heal everyone.
- The monk who said they left to seek wisdom, but they were actually running away.
- The rogue who stole from someone, who was already destitute.
I invented those class-based archetypes, but Curse of Strahd ships with a pre-made background, perfectly suited to the adventure:
The Haunted One background gives a ton of details, which allow you to get super specific with who your character was, is, and is maybe trying to become.
You might find some of the suggested traits and manifestations might not suit your character concept – I probably wouldn’t use things like nightmares for my own character, but I highly recommend using them as a jumping off point, to create someone much more interesting than the goody two-shoes paladin.
Having said that, Barovia is not the place for a brooding loner who does a Batman impression every time they open their mouth.
There’s already one lonely and aloof person up in “ze castle”.
When I’m running games, I really like to have the characters already knowing each other, at least a little bit. It’s good to say that even if your character has a dark and troubled past, that the people they’re with, the adventuring party, are already people they trust, and that they’ve already confided in the group, sharing at least some of their secrets.
In character, you need to trust your fellow adventurers with your life. So allude back to previous adventures the party’s been on. Work together to invent the story of how you met. And if you really, really want to play out that awkward scene in a tavern where you meet for the first time and say, “I don’t trust them,” then make it a flashback.
You’ll know you’ve got a solid character when their internal motivation, potentially that drive for redemption, lines up with the party’s goal of saving Barovia.
This isn’t a character who’d rather stay at home with a cup of tea, they’ve got some get-up-and-go about them.
But GREAT characters have conflicting drives:
The crux of so many good stories comes when a character finds themselves with two competing goals pitted against each other. These could be flaws or weaknesses.
My drive to keep myself safe puts me at odds with wanting to go out to adventure. Or I’m deathly afraid of werewolves, there’s no way I’m going into that forest.
These weaknesses are something a character could work on overcoming during the course of a campaign.
…but what about if you decide that your character maybe wants to stay in Barovia?
Or they fear that what replaces Strahd would be even worse?
Perhaps your character’s power-hungry wants to rule for themselves.
Maybe they knew that killing Strahd would break their personal moral code.
Or (the one that seems to come up a lot if you spend any time on Reddit) what if your character fancies Strahd? He’s a good-looking vampire dreadlord. Your character could do a lot worse.
When it comes to the decisive moment, what will your character do?
Will they plunge a stake through the vampire’s heart?
Will they hesitate?
These stories with protagonists who aren’t just purity and light are a lot of fun to me. But I know that I need to avoid deciding in advance the plot points, I think, SHOULD happen to this character.
As a player, you get to control what your character thinks, says, and does.
But by playing a collaborative game, we are giving up at least a little bit of control in order to gain the input of your super charismatic, intelligent, and attractive friends.
Many minds together will take the adventure in directions that none of you, not even a DM, can predict.
Roleplaying in Barovia
Whoever you’ve decided that you want to be in character creation, once you are roleplaying, once your character is out in the world, walking down that long and misty road, there is one thing that you can choose to do every moment of every session which will elevate your campaign massively.
Choosing for your character to be someone who is interested.
Much as I’ve been trash-talking Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, every single character that he plays in the film is interested in the story, is interested in the world and in the other characters.
What I see a lot in games are players who only make it to the first step of role-playing: they’re interested in the A-plot to defeat Strahd at all costs, but steps two and three are where you as a role-player can absolutely shine.
- Step one of being interested in the world and the story that the Dungeon Master is putting in front of you is a good start.
- Step two is being interested in your own character’s development. It’s choosing to play up their flaws and their virtues, choosing to dwell in your character’s psychology, and actually role-playing and being happy, sad, afraid, whatever it might be.
- The third step is something I encourage so much at my own tables, and you can see it all the time if you watch actual plays. The casts of Critical Role and Dimension are great at this. The players are so interested in each other’s characters. They’ll often choose for their own characters to delay their personal goal to help out their friend.
If everyone around a table does this, magic happens, regardless of the campaign you’re playing, but especially in Curse of Strahd, where being able to rely on your friends for them to help you through the dark is ultimately what will help the group achieve their goal of freeing Barovia.
Your DM will absolutely love you and buy you shiny dice at Christmas if you choose to be as interested in their NPCs as you are in the rest of the party. That doesn’t mean being best friends with them, but thinking about how your character would engage with each of them.
You might find your character has a similar outlook on life to one, or you might find that you just do not get along with this person. Either way, making a dramatic choice, choosing a big reaction to what someone says, be mad, glad, sad, or “afra(i)d”.
I’d also recommend choosing to be someone hopeful, however bad and dark your character’s backstory is. Being a nihilist for the whole campaign is going to make things very difficult for everyone.
You could totally do it as a one-off, if the group suffered a big defeat you could be “I hate this! Ahh! Oh screw everything! I’m going to sit down and cry.”
That’s great, that’s wonderful. But don’t dwell in that. Don’t live in that position, because this character after a while is very hard to be friends with.
Also, remember that story is change.
If your character gets through Curse of Strahd entirely unscathed, physically or emotionally, something’s gone wrong.
The A-plot of the campaign is for the characters to try and bring back light to this dark, spooky place.
But the B-plots and the C-plots, these smaller personal arcs that get woven through the big story, are my favourite things about roleplaying games.
So yes, your characters will hopefully change the world, but let the world change them.
Either for better or for worse.
Commercial Break
Now this might not be for everyone, but if you are looking to play Curse of Strahd and can’t find a group, I run games over on Start Playing Games.
I’ve currently got two Curse of Strahd campaigns, and you are very very welcome to sign up to either.
One is the full long-form 50 sessions in all of its glory Curse of Strahd.
The other is Curse of Strahd Compressed, where we hit all the key highlights of the game, get to all the good locations, and meet the best NPCs.
But we skip some combats and try and play super efficiently. That version takes about 15 sessions.
I put my money where my mouth is when I’m DMing. All the things I mention in my articles, I bring directly into my games. So if you like this style of play, come and join my campaigns.
Creating my own character for Curse of Strahd
My favourite one of the class archetypes from earlier is the cleric whose faith wasn’t strong enough to heal everyone.
I think as a starting point that character would be super interesting to play.
Unless the DM had a strong choice on where the party was before they entered Barovia, I’d say the character used to be the priest in a small town.
They were good at their sermons, they could inspire faith in others.
But when their own faith was tested, when the plague came and ravaged the village, they said their holy words, they did the incantations, but because they didn’t truly believe their Lay on Hands, didn’t do anything, and the villagers knew it.
Once the plague had passed through and the final bodies were burned or buried, the surviving village elders got together and ran the cleric out of town.
Since then they’ve lived on the road, performing rites for the faithful.
But the guilt, the memory of what they fail to do, weighs heavy on them.
At some point they’d meet up with the rest of the party, sometime later they’d find their way into Barovia.
For a background, the Haunted One, straight out of Curse of Strahd, would be perfect for this person.
Thinking how their guilt could manifest with the character traits would be really interesting. I like the idea of and the roleplaying opportunities that would come with number two on the personality traits: “I like to read and memorise poetry. It keeps me calm and brings me fleeting moments of happiness.”
The studious little player that I am would totally find some good gothic poetry to use, or more likely probably some song lyrics, highly recommend a band called Draconian if you want some gothic, symphonic metal. Which has so many good lyrics at steel.
For ideals, I like the idea of this person being still hopeful, still trying to do their best. So number one, “I try to help those in need, no matter the personal cost.”
For bonds, I’m absolutely spoiled for choice. Number six, “I have a child to protect. I must make the world safer for my offspring.” It’s so, so good, and we bring an extra dimension to the character, a reason why they want to get out of Barovia as soon as they possibly can to get back to see them.
Although number four on the list is what I’ve been saying for this entire article: “A terrible guilt consumes me. I hope I can find redemption through my actions.”
This character doesn’t need much more development. Choosing a species, choosing a name, pronouns, names of family members, and other folks in the village is a fairly quick job, and I’d look to do all of that in tandem with the dungeon master.
Now we shouldn’t be trying to think what will happen to this character.
As soon as you start saying what SHOULD happen, you’re probably better off writing a novel, but I would share with the DM that I would love for this character to have an opportunity to try and heal more people.
Maybe not a direct repeat of that plague in the past, but something where the faith of the cleric was tested. If they weren’t able to heal the people or drive out a corruption or a poison or undead, then I could imagine that character going down a dark path for the rest of the campaign, maybe even switching class entirely and no longer being a cleric.
If they succeeded, then the cleric would be on their first step to redemption, where maybe their final redemption could be saving the entire land of Barovia.
But remember, we’re playing horror.
We cannot guarantee a happy ending.
Okay, I really, really want to play this character now.
I am so curious to find out what happens to them, whether they really can find that redemption they seek, whether the party will help them along their way, or whether the darkness will consume all of them.