I would like to quantify them, and perhaps account for them. I am as fascinated by the changes made to Castle Ravenloft over the years as I am by the aspects that remain unchanged. I am excluding these versions from my analysis for the time being, mostly because I don’t think any differences therein are relevant to the subject.) (The original Ravenloft was rereleased/updated for 2nd Edition in 1999, and Curse of Strahd got a “Revamped” release in 2020. This is fascinating, but not surprising: Nerds, who are humans, naturally hate change.
And in all four books, the floor plan of Castle Ravenloft is presented in basically the same form. All four of these books tell basically the same story: “Go to this spooky castle and kill this evil vampire.” The vampire is always menacing the same young women the aged fortune-teller always helps you find the same artifacts that will help you slay him. I believe the paradigm example of this is Castle Ravenloft, depicted in the modules I6 Ravenloft (1983), RM4 House of Strahd (1993), Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (2006), and Curse of Strahd (2016). The most successful D&D settings and stories are reprinted decade after decade, edition after edition, so that new players can enjoy the same adventures so beloved by their forebears, and old players can whine about the things that got changed.
This practice of story-rehashing is especially salient in the stories of Dungeons & Dragons, many of which are embodied in physical locations with detailed maps. And this might be a good subject for analysis too. This is a rich subject for analysis-but the big money is in abandoning all but the merest pretense of originality and casting the same characters in the same conflicts in the same settings that the audience remembers from 30 or 10 years ago. In some contexts, the proposition refers to deep underlying structures to which storytellers inevitably return. Perhaps you have even heard the idea itself multiple times. Perhaps you have heard somewhere the idea that all stories-sitcoms, epic poems, video games, This American Life vignettes-are fundamentally retellings of older stories. Unnecessary Abstract Introduction (JUST SKIP THIS SECTION PLEASE) Here’s a third post about the castle itself. Here’s a different post about locations in Barovia outside the castle. In this post we will look at the crypts in Castle Ravenloft and see how they changed from edition to edition.
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