#elrod just! does shit so fuckign well!!!

[churchyardgrim]

TALES OF RAVENLOFT by various authors

[intro post]

hi! hello! it's been a while! the holidays happened, i lost most of my reading time for a bit, u know how it goes

but we got a short story collection this round! isn't that fun

there's uhhhhhh eighteen of em in here, only three of which are really worth reading. it's about par for the series honestly, a bell curve of mostly inoffensive and mildly interesting, with a few at the extremes of Very Fuckign Good and Don't Even Bother

in the middle of that bell curve we've got Three Good Reasons Not To Gamble In Sithicus, a rather sad story about a dude rescuing a baby from a banshee, and noted vampire hunter Rudolph van Richten's origin story, of all things. decent stuff, worth a read if you're in a forgiving mood.

on the Don't Even Bother side there's the usual dose of ableism and poor writing endemic to the series, with a disfigured hermit getting hunted by a headless horseman, something about a panther that got polymorphed into a man and then into a vampire? and some morality tale about how excessive judiciousness leads to a law system that revolves around amputations or some shit, idk

but, BUT, in a perfect microcosm of the Ravenloft series as a whole, there are a few gems that make the slog worth it.

the first of my two favorites is by Roger E. Moore, and concerns Lord Wilfred Godefroy, an utter bastard! i gotta say Mr Moore understood the assignment, this vignette is all about cycles on cycles on cycles, wheels of thought and action and the environment and its inhabitants forever returning to previous states

in short, the essence of a ghost story

the true horror here is an abusive, powerful man, and lemme tell you it is satisfying to watch the control he thinks he has slip away as he realizes just how trapped he is by his crimes. for once i won't spoil it, bc i think it's best if you see the shadow of the twist emerge in its own time, and trust me when i say it's worth it.

and i was all set to declare Godefroy's my favorite, but then i saw my good good friend P.N. Elrod listed down the line and knew in my bones that there'd be no contest

and because the publisher at the very least know what they have, the joy that is Ms Elrod is saved for the very back of the book, like your grandma's world-famous dessert pie that's the only reason half the family sat through the criminally dry turkey and Acceptable green bean casserole 

one of the many things i can never get enough of with Elrod's Strahd is how animals just fucken love the guy. bats swarm him like bluebirds to a disney princess! he's the favorite person of every wolf in twenty miles! it's adorable and precious and i want a full novel of nothing but this.

also it's never not hilarious watching him pretend to be his own lieutenant at people. i wonder if he disguises himself at all or if he just doesn't bother and relies on ppl not looking too closely at his own face stamped on the coins?

anyway in this delightful little tale The Devil Strahd, The Ancient, The Land, saves a little girl from a well in a burning town, complains about how hard it is for honest tyrants to run a country without bandit interference, and genuinely frolicks with some wolves

and, also… did you know that in older editions of dnd, the fireball spell had specific rules for how it behaved in space, expanding to fill enclosed spaces volumetrically instead of stopping short at a 20ft radius? you know, like real world explosions do?

and did you know what the fatality rate was for wizards who neglected to do the math on that particular property?

that fatality rate almost includes One (1) Strahd, in case you were wondering

if anyone feels inclined to track this one down with the intent of only reading the good ones, i'd be happy to give more detailed ratings/content warnings of the whole roster. but honestly, i'd recommend this collection even if the only thing you read is the last vignette, bc everyone needs to read about Strahd nearly blowing himself up on accident. it's good for the soul.

#church's ravenloft reviews #yes im going to talk about strahd the entire time again no i will not apologize for this #elrod just! does shit so fuckign well!!! #ms elrod pls are u single #more importantly is strahd single #i can fix him #and by fix him i mean give his brain a factory reset

[churchyardgrim]

I, STRAHD: THE WAR AGAINST AZALIN by P.N. Elrod

[intro post]

OH GLORY OF GLORIES, SOMEONE COMPETENT 

going from the embarrassment that was Tower of Doom directly to this is a hell of an experience lemme tell you, one i can only describe as overwhelming relief

what makes matters even better is that, well, you remember that bit i complained about in King of the Dead? where they just kinda glossed over Azalin's whole half-century of cohabitation with everyone's favorite dracula? buckle up kiddies bc this whole book is about that

it's beautiful, it had me howling with laughter in a goddamn subaru dealership while my winter tires were getting changed over, everyone needs to read this immediately

so we open with Strahd being the most dramatic motherfucker in the grocery store, literally flinging himself off a mountain while howling his rage at the sky itself, bc Whoops, Tatyana's Dead Again

and then a week later he gets up off the ground like “ok i’m normal now”, and the book goes on to explain how he's gotten used to Barovia's still relatively new position in the mists. people do not leave. sometimes people enter! no one, not even the travelers, understand how this is done, and it pisses Strahd off. he is rattling the bars of his cage to be let out.

he has also made his famous deal with the Vistani, the only people who do have any degree of mobility between Barovia and the rest of the world; they enjoy a measure of safety from him and his agents, and in return act as his spies and limited servitors. he is also warned via a card reading that a powerful opposing figure approaches, and brings inevitable war

in any other story, this would be Our Designated Hero, Who Will Surely Triumph

i think by now you all can guess that this is not the case

and of course, a few years later, Strahd gets wind of Someone New harassing his nobles and making off with a rare magical book, to which he responds "excuse me, no, only i'm allowed to do that" and tracks the interloper to an abandoned manner house in the south of the country

it's at this point that i'd like to thank the author for the glorious image of Strahd getting just fuckign bug-zapped out of the air by the wards around this place so hard he hits a tree and straight up falls out of bat form. istg for all the work the game modules do to make Strahd into the ultimate big bad of the setting, unkillable and invincible, the man sure does spend a lot of time in these novels just getting the shit kicked out of him. it's beautiful and i want every minute of it framed on my wall. i wanna shove him in a locker and steal his lunch money.

anyway, as if the title of the goddamn book didn't give this away, this is where our buddy and pal Azalin Rex enters the scene! recently landed in Barovia, annoyed by literally everything but especially how he can't seem to memorize whatever spell's in that book he stole, damn thing must be broken i swear, and caked in so many illusions that it takes Strahd ten minutes to figure out there's Something going on under all that instagram contouring.

these two hit it off, well… less like a house on fire and more like a house being crushed by a glacier; icy and immovable and probably very worrisome to the neighbors down the street. they're instant bitchy exes, strangers to kismesises speedrun, they hate each other so much because they are so, so similar

Azalin is a king without a kingdom, prickly and a lil bit insecure and unsure of where he's landed and who this weird goth is and whether or not he should apply fireball directly to the problem yet. Strahd is 500% on edge, knowing full well that this is the fated necromancer he was warned about, and is in the process of sussing out exactly how worried he should be. the answer: very!

correctly surmising that this guy can turn him inside-out if he wanted to, and that Azalin is also a fellow Royal Personality and thus might feel motivated to cover his insecurities by yoinking rule of Barovia out from under Strahd's dainty lil goth boy boots, Strahd thinks very fast and manages to trap his new houseguest in a nonaggression pact of hospitality. Azalin is his guest, however unwillingly, and there are rules a guest and a host must observe with each other dammit.

and thus did two undead bastards become study buddies. neither of them like being stuck here, and Azalin doesn't have the distraction of hunting down the reincarnations of a girl he knew in high school. he's a better wizard than Strahd is at this point, too, of which Strahd is keenly aware, and between the two of them they're confident they can blow this popsicle stand within six months

they're there for forty years

to summarize a lot of slow-moving plot, Strahd does his new roomie the favor of restoring that old manner house he'd found him in into a proper wizard's lab, and by the time the renovations are finished Strahd wants Azalin out of he got damn house so fuckign badly, i love it

Azalin knows Strahd's nature well enough, but has managed to keep his own a secret in addition to his fun new curse of being unable to learn any new magic from this point forward. this manifests in the infuriating habit of having Strahd do a lot of the magical gruntwork with testing new escape spells, and good god it's like they're tenured professors arguing over whose turn it is to supervise the interns, it's delightful

eventually they make their first proper attempt, something something summer solstice, combining a translocation with a summoning, it's not important. what is important is it blows up spectacularly and is genuinely one of the funniest points in the book i shit you not

Strahd barely avoids getting atomized, employing the age-old tactic of Hiding Behind Something While The Fireworks Go Off, and when he finally picks himself back up and stops being crosseyed, he just looks at Azalin's desiccated husk of a body splatted across a wall and says "well fuck, that killed him extra dead didn't it"

and then when Azzie starts moving again Strahd briefly remembers what having a functioning lower intestine feels like bc "oh shit oh fuck he was like that the whole time, abort, ABORT, HE'S A FUCKMOTHERING LICH" and then just. plays dead.

he lies down on the goddamn floor and prays Azalin didn't notice that he saw him with his pants i mean illusions off.

i swear to you, dear reader, i had to put the book down and try to remember how to breathe for a solid twenty minutes

anyway Strahd's fakeout somehow works, and they immediately start bickering over whose fault this shitshow was, which provides more than enough cover for Strahd to Fuckign Book It and go triple his own magical defenses, and also have a delightful lil panic attack

i maintain that P.N. Elrod is butch as all hell, by virtue of no one but butches understand masculinity well enough to satirize it this beautifully. she manages to convey Strahd's "i'm not panicking, you're panicking" with this delightfully wry tone that i can't get enough of, and i fully intend to track down her other non-Ravenloft vampire novels once my brain loosens its vicegrip on this setting, bc by god i need more of her voice in my life

we're about halfway through now, and it's at this point that things start Happening in the wider world. namely, that there is suddenly a wider world for things to be Happening in. for about two hundred years at this point, Barovia has been totally isolated by the mists, and most ppl have just gotten used to this, barring a pair of geriatric wizards who keep trying to give spacetime what-for.

but now! all of a sudden! there's another country just. attached to the southwest end of Barovia like a malignant growth.

what's a local vampire lord to do? apparently commandeer a few of the refugees fleeing said new country to go show him where the fuck they came from, is what.

tragically Strahd still can't physically leave the bounds of his own country, mists or no mists, but he can mindcontrol a dude to go back in and have a look around for him. long story short, this new place is Forlorn and it is uhhhhh largely empty! just a bunch of weird magical mutants, and some hermits who aren't too jazzed about said weird magical mutants, and who all move into Barovia within a few months of the two nations sharing a border. 

this provides our two best buddies plenty of new study material, as do the next seven or so new countries that appear periodically like weird geographic parasites grafting themselves onto Barovia's decreasingly misty borders. Azalin can actually leave Barovia, which he's extremely smug about for the twelve minutes before Forlorn physically flings him back over the line in a pinwheel of stuffy robes and flailing knobbly legs, and boy i hope Strahd got a good knee-slapping laugh out of that bc god knows i sure did

the appearances of new lands culminates in Azalin's disappearance from Strahd's radar, and the emergence of his largest neighbor yet: Darkon. using his favorite remote-viewing magical scrying drone trick, Strahd starts sniffing around and is immediately yanked by the collar on a flash tour of the place, ending in the throne room of Castle Avernus, because if anyone knows how to cultivate an impression, it's Azalin Fucking Rex

yes after forty years of bumming around Strahd's backyard, Azalin has a shiny new gilded cage of his very own! congrats buddy, ur still stuck here like the rest of us. but at least ur not rubbing shoulders with that guy anymore.

unfortunately for Azalin's dramatic sense, Strahd is a) not physically there to intimidate, and b) an expert in the art of Not Being Impressed With Your Shit, so the dramatic tension lasts about five minutes before they're back to jabbing at each others' insecurities in the best long-distance shouting match i've ever seen

seriously they should televise this shit, sell tickets, they'd make a fortune

so far the titular War Against Azalin is less of a war and more of an Ongoing Domestic Dispute With Azalin, but the instant their bargain of hospitality is no longer required, that's when that forty year cold war goes real fucken hot

it's a bit of an anticlimax really. you'd think, being undead archmages, these two would fight like wizards and just hurl lightning and rocks and Spell Of Fuck You at each other over the borders, but instead they just… chuck some zombies at some dudes in armor and call it a day

military commander habits die hard i suppose

Strahd's in a bit of a genuine pickle actually, his noble caste have had two hundred years to get lazy and indolent, and he has to do a whole "I'll Make A Man Out Of You" montage to get them into fighting shape. but Azalin keeps handicapping himself by executing half his most effective lieutenants bc they don't agree with his pizza topping preferences or whatever, so Strahd gets to feel smug about being able to actually retain the loyalty of his people on his own

granted, it's not hard to be more charismatic than a bog mummy that got lost on a tour through the beef jerky factory, but still

we end on a narrow battle victory for Strahd, leaving Azalin to spend a few years rebuilding his forces out of corpses and whatever new talent he can scrape up, and having set the stage very effectively for the hundreds of years of conflict between Barovia and Darkon to come. the resentful roommates have become the viciously estranged exes, and nowhere in the dread domains will know peace ever again. 

tragically they will never really come to physical blows in the spectacular wizard fight way i really want them to, bc neither of them can leave their respective houses here, but u know what i think i can live with the kind of needlessly convoluted machinations guys like that come up with in order to fight proxy wars via soldiers and agents and all the tools of statecraft at their disposal. 

it's just. god i love this book. i love watching bitchy old men be bitchy at each other, i love how deep the world feels despite experiencing it through the viewpoints of two guys who have to share Ebeneezer Scrooge's allotment of goodwill, i love the tiny sprinklings of vampire horniness and lich avarice, i love it i love it i love it

absolutely track this book down if you can, or listen to the audiobook as it'll likely be a lot cheaper. if you need me i’ll be rereading Vampire of the Mists for old time’s sake, and also wallpapering my house in pdfs of the Ravenloft Gazetteers bc did u know there’s fuckign travelogues published for these places? with sneaky metaplot about Azalin and his many many kids i mean clones? holy shit yall.

#church's ravenloft reviews #longest yea boi ever #guys im just #i love this setting so fuckign much #i love this AUTHOR so fuckign much #someone hold me im emotional