Copied by hand · pass it on · do not sign your name to it

A Guide for New Souls

R. van Richten

You are reading this because you came through the Mists and someone judged you worth the paper. That judgement was probably hasty. Read it anyway, and read it once, and then put it somewhere a search would not find. People have died for less than owning this.

I am going to tell you what keeps people breathing. I am not going to tell you everything I know. Some of it would get you killed faster than ignorance will, and some of it is not mine to hand out to strangers. If that offends you, consider that I am still alive and most of the men I have explained myself to are not.

Where you are

Barovia is a country with a border you cannot cross. The Mists are that border. Almost everything that goes into them is simply swallowed. You came through, which makes you rare, and it is not a trick you should expect to manage twice. Do not test this. Everyone wants to test this. Most of the ones who do are never seen again.

There is no sun. Do not argue with the locals about this. They have no word for what you mean and they will think you are simple, or lying, or dangerous. Ask a Barovian farmer about rain and he will describe fog to you with great confidence. Tens of thousands of years is a long time, and the sun has been forgotten properly.

The country is ruled by a man called Strahd von Zarovich, and has been for longer than any record holds. Under him are vampires, and they hold the towns and the roads the way lords hold anything. This is not a wilderness with monsters in it. It is a kingdom, with taxes, guilds, courts and prisons, and nearly two hundred thousand people living in it who were mostly born here and cannot imagine anything else.

The tithe

The tax is blood. Everyone pays. You will pay.

Once a week is the floor, not the ceiling. Any vampire may demand it of you on sight, for any reason or none, and refusing is not a thing that happens twice. It will not kill you. They are careful about that, in the way a man is careful with a well.

What it will do is leave you emptied out and slow for a day or more, and if you are asked often enough you will not recover between askings. I have watched capable people ground down to nothing this way without a blade ever being drawn on them. It is the most effective weapon they have and it is entirely legal.

Children are never bled. They get a week of feasting when they turn eighteen, and then they pay like everyone else.

You may pay in someone else's place. Think very hard about how often you intend to do that, and think about it now, at a table, in the light, rather than in the moment with a vampire waiting.

What they are, in order

Learn the ranks. Misjudging which kind of thing you are speaking to is the most common way outsiders die in their first month.

• Spawn. The bottom rung, and the most of them. Guards, servants, cooks, muscle. Still vampires, still stronger than you, and still above any living person in this country. They are also disposable and they know it, which makes them unpredictable in a way their betters are not. A spawn with something to prove is more dangerous than a lord with nothing to. You can tell them across a street, because they are the only ones that cannot fly.
• The common sort. Merchants, craftsmen, clerks. Leagues above any spawn. Many of them will trade with you, host you, and be perfectly pleasant. This means nothing. Pleasantness is not a temperament here, it is a technique.
• The noble houses. Names, crests and lineages. Most of them are the common sort with a family tree, and the title buys them standing, not strength. Do not let the crest frighten you, and do not let it flatter you either.
• The high ones. The true vampires, the aristocracy. They govern. They are old and they are personally powerful and they have politics with each other, which is occasionally useful to a clever outsider and more often fatal to a clumsy one.
• The Ascended. Five of them, and you will hear their names in every tavern. If you find yourself in a room with one and you did not plan to be, the plan is now leaving.
• Strahd. Separate. See below.

What actually kills them

The old stories are correct, which surprised me as much as it will surprise you. How correct depends on what you are facing. What ends a spawn outright only cripples the common sort, and holds them in agony until they die of it or someone frees them. The high ones suffer the same and live through it. The Ascended heal faster than they burn.

• Sunlight. Which does not exist here, so understand what that sentence is really worth. There is light that behaves like sunlight and can be made by those with the training. Making it is a crime punished by death. Not the magic itself, but the using of it. Bear the distinction in mind, because it tells you what kind of country this is.
• Running water. They cannot cross it, and they will not even fly over the great lake. They send spawn to handle anything that involves it, which tells you what they think spawn are worth.
• A stake, properly placed. Yes. Really. It is much harder than the stories suggest and the difficulty is entirely in the getting there.

I have killed seven, none of them above the common sort. I mention this not to boast but because you will otherwise assume it cannot be done, and that assumption kills more outsiders than the vampires do. They can be ended. Seven is a small number against how many of them there are, and it took me a lifetime, and I would do it again.

Strahd

He is not simply the strongest of them. He is a different problem entirely, and I want you to understand that I have spent my whole life on that problem and have not solved it.

Steel does not finish him. Fire does not finish him. Everything that works on the others fails on him, and it fails in a way that suggests something is holding him up rather than that he is merely tough. I know that much. What holds him up I will not put in writing.

He may take an interest in you. Newcomers are rare and he finds rare things entertaining. If he does, you will find him gracious, curious, generous, and genuinely good company, and every hour of it will be him deciding what you are for. He does not test whether you are strong. He tests what you will agree to. The tasks start small and they do not stay small, and the trap is never the task. It is that by the fourth one you will have a reason ready for the third.

Towns

You will spend most of your time in five or six places. Know them before you walk into them.

• Barovia Village. Small, poor, and close enough to the castle that everyone in it behaves as though they are being watched, because they are. It is where most newcomers surface. Nothing happens there that is not reported.
• Ravenloft. The capital, and a real city with walls and gates and a heraldry of its own. Money moves here, and so does law, and so does everything worth buying. It is also the most dangerous place in the country to be interesting, because the highest of them live in it.
• Vallaki. Prosperous, clean, and happy, and I do not say that as a warning. The people are genuinely content and the lady who governs them is genuinely beloved. Draw your conclusions carefully and draw them quietly, because the citizens will defend her against you and not the other way round.
• Krezk. Walled, northern, and ringed with farmland. Nothing rots inside its walls, which is the Night Mother's doing, and the reason that whole corner of the country eats well. Not much friendlier once you are inside. They keep their troubles to themselves until the troubles are too large to keep, and then they will ask a stranger, because asking anyone else costs more.
• Vern. Will sell you anything, including things that should not be sold. They pay their tithe in fistfights rather than bloodletting, and they are proud of it. Lawless, and not brave with it. Do not mistake criminals for allies. They know exactly what the king is and have no intention of testing him on your behalf.
• Berez. Ruined once, centuries ago, and never properly rebuilt. What stands there now is a shanty grown into its own wreckage. Poor, stubborn, and better at keeping a secret than anywhere else I have been.
• Argynvostholt. Still inhabited, whatever you may hear. Some of the people there carry something on them, and they will not discuss it, and you should not press.

There are safer places than any of these. Some of them are very good indeed. I am not going to write down where they are, and if you find one, neither will you. That is the price of them existing.

As for the rest of the map: there are stretches of this country I will not put on paper except to say stay out of them. The deep east past the woods. The far northern shore. The water itself. If a Barovian tells you not to go somewhere, he is not being superstitious, he is being brief.

The dead, and the offer

Two things you need to know and I would rather not explain either.

The first is that the dead here do not stay down. They get up and walk, with mist trailing off them, and whatever they were is still in there somewhere. The locals call them the Flood, and you will meet them on the roads as often as wolves. A single one loose in a crowded street can kill dozens, which is a good part of why towns here stay small and keep their walls.

The second is worse, and it is the reason I am writing to you at all rather than letting you learn it the usual way.

If one of you dies here, something will offer to give you back. It will be a real offer. It will work. It will not ask for payment in anything you have on you, and it will not lie to you about the terms, which is somehow the worst part of it.

It leaves a mark. The mark can be seen. People will treat the one who carries it differently: traders, innkeepers, the vampires most of all, and not in the way you would expect. Take enough and you will begin doing things you did not choose to do, and waking somewhere you did not lie down, and there is an end state to that road that I will not describe.

I am not telling you to refuse. I have seen parties come apart over that decision and I have seen parties survive because someone took it. I am telling you to make it deliberately, out loud, with the others present, and to count them.

How to conduct yourselves

• Do not speak of your own gods where you can be heard. It is frowned on rather than forbidden, and a priest of some foreign faith draws looks, not guards. The sun god is another matter. His worship is a capital crime, and so is making his light. Idiom is safe: a man may say “gods above” in a tavern and nothing happens. Learn the line before you test it.
• Never harm one of the Vistani, the travellers with the third eye. Everyone knows what happens to those who do, and nobody will help you.
• If you hear of the Queen's curse, and you will, keep out of it. Every woman in this country knows what it means to carry her. That is not your business until it is, and when it is, it will cost you.
• Do not be interesting. Whatever you can do that a Barovian cannot, do it out of sight.
• Do not assume kindness is safety. The cruellest things in this country have excellent manners, and one or two of them have excellent reputations.
• Do not assume cruelty is strength either. Half of what the spawn do is fear wearing a uniform.
• Do not let anyone see the whole of your plans, including whoever handed you this.
• Keep track of who you owe. Debt is how they get you, and it is almost never money.

---

Now the part I have been avoiding.

I have told you Strahd cannot be killed by the means that kill the others, and I have told you I do not know how to do it. Both of those are true. Here is the third thing, and it is the only encouragement in this document, so make it last.

Cannot yet is not the same as cannot. I have found things. Not answers, but the shapes of them. There are objects in this country that matter more than they appear to, and there are places that were here before he was, and there is at least one arrangement holding this whole rotten kingdom together that could in principle be taken apart. I know that much because I have watched him take care to protect certain things, and a man who cannot be hurt does not take care.

I will not name them here. If this book is read by the wrong eyes I want it to be a survival guide and nothing else, and I would rather you learn the rest from my mouth in a locked room.

Find me if you can. Ask in the places where people are afraid to answer.

And if you cannot find me, then someone has finally managed it, and you should assume everything in here is still correct except the part where I said I was still alive.