Through interactive roleplaying and randomization of key elements of the module, “Curse of Strahd” involves the players in not only witnessing, but experiencing trauma.
Strahd plagues the land of Barovia, a demi-plane cast away from its original universe upon the completion of his fatal pact with the Dark Powers. “Curse of Strahd”, the latest in a long line of revisions of the Gothic horror setting, eschews the typical sword and sorcery fantasy and instead revolves around a powerful vampire, Strahd von Zarovich. In exploring how “Curse of Strahd” evokes elements of psychological abuse for the players to experience, it is important to establish: how the narrative elements reflect traumatic symptomatology how the thematic underpinnings of the game further concretize the abuse that is depicted and how the very mechanics of the game provide players with a space to experience the cycle of abuse and relive traumatic memory through repetition. Indeed, “abuse is about a dynamic of extremes, domination and submission,” 6 an experience that can imbed victims into a state of isolation and terror. Few would disagree that abuse, whether physical, psychological or sexual, is a kind of traumatic event, one that disturbs and distresses its victim in unspeakable ways.
Moreover, it is my contention that “Curse of Strahd” specifically posits players into experiencing a specific kind of trauma: abuse. Her detailed reading of how the narrative elements illustrate traumatic symptomatology provides a framework for my own exploration of “Curse of Strahd”, but whereas she focuses on the player’s emotional unsettlement while playing, my analysis focuses on the game components themselves. In her study on how video games virtually allow players to experience trauma, Tobi Smethurst focuses on the role of player agency as a key to involving the players emotionally in complicity and guilt of the traumatic experience. Literary trauma studies explores ways in which the narrative can evoke this feeling of repetitive traumatic memory through innovative uses of flashback, elision, or other rhetorical devices. In her foundational work on trauma studies, Cathy Caruth suggests that “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the very way that its unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on.” 5 Trauma then is a cycle, a repetition in which a victim not only experiences an initial stressful event, but then must re-experience it in new forms, echoes of the original event. I argue that “Curse of Strahd” is a site for witnessing and performing the psychology of trauma, and specifically the psychology of abuse. Unlike the typical hack and slash dungeon crawls from the 1980s, “Curse of Strahd” focuses on the psychological implications of physical violence. 3 While Dungeons and Dragons has previously been criticized for its lack of diversity and sensitivity to otherness, 4 “Curse of Strahd” works to present trauma and its effects in a meaningful way that allows players to critically engage with and reflect upon trauma. The setting, narrative elements, and unusual game mechanics combine in a rich tapestry of horror that allow the player to experience the manifestations of trauma through play. For the purposes of this study, I will be analyzing the 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons module “Curse of Strahd”, which was released in 2016, in terms of how the game mechanics and narrative theme of the module reiterate key characteristics of psychological abuse, which the players are able to witness and engage with throughout the campaign. 2 There have been few examinations of how tabletop RPGs use the unique features of their medium to work with trauma. While much has been looked at in terms of video games and their psychological effect on players, 1 little has been explored about the psychological implications of tabletop RPGs.
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