Hi there! I love your guides for Curse of Strahd! 💞 If it's not too much, could you give some tips for running the abbey of St. Markovia? Or really just how you dealt with the module's ableism in general, since it's a lot to tackle and I'm not sure where to begin. Thank you! 💋
Hello! Sorry this took me a while to work on, like you said, it's a lot to tackle. Curse of Strahd suffers from being both a product of its genre and a product of the typical carelessness D&D likes to serve its marginalized fans. As much as I adore the genre, (modern) gothic horror does often rely on ableist tropes to create fear and suspense in what I'd call a misguided attempt to recreate the scenarios present in the literature that formed the basis of the genre in the early 19th century. Ableism is rife in early gothic novels, in part because of the rampant ableism of the time and in part because a lot of these works were critiques of ableism written by both disabled and abled but progressive authors. Then there's just WotC, who isn't exactly known for always making good moves in their settings. Sometimes they at least realize they fucked up, like with the Hadozee (😬), but as evident with their CoS "Revamped" edition, they thought making a meager attempt to Remove the Slurs was... more or less enough work for it. Lol.
So, here's some of my notes of what I've needed to fix up and how I did it. Abbey of St. Markovia will be at the end because... yikes. Major spoilers for CoS and CW for ableism below!
Casual Ableism A.K.A. The Real Curse Of Strahd Is Mental Illness
There are questionable story beats about mental illness from really early on. Mad Mary is the first NPC I can think of that really explicitly exemplifies this, but Stella Wachter in Vallaki and Luca Barbu in Kresk both also fit the bill of being random NPCs who got painted with the ableism brush. Treating these characters with empathy I think is the best way to fix a lot of them.
In ATSBB, I chose to keep the name "Mad Mary" as a pejorative title from the other villagers, because my game includes an amount of real-world ableism that is portrayed negatively. The party heard her cries and went to her house to find a lonely woman grieving the loss of her daughter. They spent a snall fortune at the mercantile to make her a big pot of soup she could simmer for days over her stove and helped her clean up her house a bit, before giving her hours of company over dinner. Mary was kind and appreciative and treated them terribly well. They did eventually sneak upstairs to find evidence of the circumstances of her daughter's disappearance (I just turned her into a werewolf to avoid the Yikes factor there). We see that Mary is unwell because upon seeing that her beloved daughter was cursed with Lycanthropy, she did everything (even too much) to ensure her safety, and then Gertruda still got out. Mary is more than "mad," she's heartbroken. She's devastated of grief and feels like a failed mother because she couldn't protect her baby. That amount of empathy gives her more depth and makes her portrayed as not ableist, but as a victim of vilified in-world ableism because nobody will give her the time of day.
In Stella's case, I did have a hard time. I wanted the party to have a clear reason to fight Victor (I don't know how some parties make him an ally, that guy is such a tool) and I did like the idea fleshed out in MandyMod's guide of Victor trying to leave Barovia through self-taught wizardry. Instead of changing much about Stella's cat curse, I just gave it privacy. They saw Stella very, very briefly--just enough to note the condition she was in and see that interrogating her would do very little for them, and then her siblings came in to tell them Stella needed her rest and it was time for them to go. Stella was not a spectacle to them, and it was portrayed as bizarre, but ultimately a product of Victor's abuse and Fiona's neglect to fix it. The party kicked Victor's ass and made a plan to sneak Stella out and get her to the house of a particularly nurturing NPC.
Luca Barbu was a little easier for me to fix because they tried to write him with sympathy but the module still certainly isn't nice to him, and it felt really gross a lot of the time. Luca is an adult man "with the intelligence of a 3 year old" who was "hit in the head with a rock" as an explanation for it, whose father and presumably full-time carer passed away, leaving him no support. If you didn't catch on yet, yikes. My Luca Barbu is autistic and had a farming accident that gave him a head injury that causes him to have a hard time processing information quickly, particularly numbers and the passage of time, and that can make him vulnerable to manipulation because he's a good hearted guy who has a hard time discerning if people are being genuine or not. He's very smart about farming, and good with the sheep like nobody's business, but he sometimes will forget to take care of himself when nobody's around because his dad isn't around to remind him. The townsfolk are not suspicious of him at all, and only have the chance to become so inclined if the party truly fails the encounter with Ilya. In fact, in my campaign, the situation with Anna Kreskov and the broken fence can only happen because she brings him dinner and bread every night since his fathers passing so she can make sure he eats every day. Anna's betrayal is then portrayed as desperate, not malicious, and it's a lot more tragic than it is evil.
Ez d'Avenir
Weird move of CoS to make an explicitly disabled character in a blink-and-you-miss-it passage who uses the coolest prosthetic ever and then just hide it from shame (???) They did add in a passage that changes this in the errata and in the revamped, as well as fleshing out Ez a lot more in Van Richten's Guide, so I'm giving them half a pass for this, because at least they admitted and fixed how they fucked up. That said, I think it's weird to do that with someone who is apparently the only disabled person in Barovia. This can be helped by letting Ez play a more active role in your campaign, as well as by having other disabled characters. You don't need to be ablebodied to be important to the world, so why should it be in fantasy? You don't really need a reason for a character to be disabled either, because disability doesn't happen because of a Reason in the real world. Not giving Ez the burden of being the only disabled rep in Barovia lets you have more fun with her and with other NPCs.
Finally, The Abbey of St. Markovia
The Abbey is infamous in ATSBB for me having planned out my alterations in advance and still finding places in the text I missed in which I said, "Oh, god, well, we're not doing that," and had to improv in several areas. To preface this, for my campaign, I did give my players a red/yellow/green light consent list in advance in which I included "asylum horror" as one of the potential triggers, and it was greenlit by my party, so we all went in knowing that there would be some ableist medical type horror. I explained that I wanted the vibe to feel less like Arkham Asylum and more like the way people treat asylums and old hospitals on ghost hunting TV shows--with the knowledge that something is deeply, deeply wrong here, but the fault never lies with the patients. Now, a lot of my edits are additions to MandyMod's "Fleshing Out CoS" on Reddit rather than on the official text, so if you're not familiar with it, I highly reccommend you check that out and then return here.
First off, I didn't call the people here Mongrelfolk, because... who thought that was a good idea in the first place, much less one that wss good enough not to fix in Revamped?? Anyway, I simply referred to the people residing at the Abbey as "patients" and it worked just fine. Inspired by MandyMod's guide, I wanted the Abbot to be an angel who lost his way in his desperation to help people in the absence of the Morning Lord, an angel who doesn't really understand the intricacies of sustaining life in humanoids, and treats sick and injured people with the same curiosity and naivety as a child "fixing" their broken toys by sticking together parts that only kind of fit with duct tape and glue. My abbot tried to heal the people as best he could with his limited magic, without understanding the differences between people and animals, or why a person with a broken hand might not be able to return to his every day life when that hand has been replaced with a turkey's claw. He's not trying to be evil, he just doesn't realize what he's doing isn't helping, because he's distracted by his own goal of building Vasilka. Now, I know Vasilka is sort of controversial in the CoS scene, but I think the concept is So Fucking Cool. I also think that building a little Frankenstein's monster that should be able to stop Strahd from hurting people is a suitible gothic, but ultimately noble goal for the Abbott to have. Does it justify the Abbot "borrowing" pieces from people who asked him for healing? Well, no. But it certainly makes sense for an angel desperate to escape Barovia to lose his shit a little bit and use unethical means to a supposedly moral end.
I also wanted to give agency back to the patients at the Abbey. Rather than the hallway of rooms of "laughing mongrels" and "violent mongrels," I just filled the rooms with families of patients. They were trying to start their own little civilization at the Abbey, far from their old lives, that they felt they couldn't return to for a variety of reasons. Some patients were too in shock and horrified by the results of their 'surgery' to return home alone, as the Barovian mountains are dangerous. Others had sought out the Abbot because they had already lost everything they had at home. Some people needed continuous upkeep on their replacement bits, just like Vasilka does, and don't want to stray too far from the Abbey. The Belviews and Clovin exist, but more as middlemen between the Abbott and the patients, who often understandably do not with to communicate with the Abbott. The Belviews will go hunting in the local woods and bring back stew meat for everyone at the Abbey (a plot point that makes them an easy suspect in Ilya's plotline). In short, the patients aren't 'insane,' they're disabled and/or chronically ill, and were failed by the Abbott. Again, this only works if you lean into the tragic, gothic horror tilt and lean away from the more modern "freakshow" type horror that was written in the text.
I think those are the main points I really wanted to make regarding the ableism in CoS, but if there's anything glaring I missed, please feel free to add on!!
