I was in middle school when I first encountered role playing games. My best friend at the time was into Dungeons and Dragons, and I have fond memories of imagining characters and adventures. The phase didn’t last long…we eventually transitioned into a new RPG, Star Frontiers. I actually went looking for that game a few years ago to find that it had been discontinued a long time before, which was sort of sad.
To be fair, I spent way more time creating elaborate characters and stories set within the worlds of these RPGs than I ever did playing them. I was just beginning to spread my writing wings, and the luxury of the world-building having been done for me gave great structure to let my imagination run.
The Saturday morning cartoon of Dungeons and Dragons was one of my favorites, because it gave visuals to the world-building that sparked my imagination. The character classes were well illustrated, and let’s be honest…that series was very compelling to an early-teen audience.
That series was also the last time I really paid much attention to Dungeons and Dragons (the tragedy that was the recent film doesn’t count). I’ve seen it pop up in various things that I’ve read, but the online adventures that people play today bear little resemblance to the game I briefly enjoyed so many years ago. I have occasionally picked up a player’s book at the local Barnes & Noble to browse things like character classes, alignments, etc., because it was that structure that I always found fascinating. So, when I was about to take a trip a couple of weeks and was deciding on an audiobook for the flight, I decided spontaneously to choose a Dungeons and Dragons adventure.
Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd is billed as an official D&D adventure, and looked at least somewhat interesting. Out of the gate, we’re introduced to a mis-matched band of adventurers, consisting a barbarian dark elf, a cleric, a wizard, an artificer, and a paladin (my character back in the day was a paladin, I seem to recall), who are thrust into an untenable situation. They must confront hideous monsters in the first chapter, and are forced to somehow find a way to work together in order to survive their plight. This, as I understand it, is a classic Dungeons and Dragons story. I can almost imagine the players sitting around the table as the adventure plays out.
By chapter two, we’ve entered painfully predictable territory. The adventurers go to a castle, which is dark and haunted by monsters, to be the guest of Strahd, a peculiar host who has something evil and foreboding about him that the others can’t quite identify. Even though the reader has immediately deduced that Strahd is a vampire, somehow the adventurers don’t arrive at this conclusion for several chapters, as they work their way through a blatant and unoriginal riff on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Of course, one of the protagonists, Fielle, has fallen victim to Strahd’s charms, and of course she’s going to be turned into a vampire. How anyone can not see this is just a source of frustration rather than a mystery in the process of being solved, and that frustration drags on for chapter after chapter until the reader is nearly exhausted enough to stop reading.
I’m not familiar with how vampires play into the collection of monsters in D&D, but their ability to make someone a sort of half-vampire was a different twist. There are, of course, the familiar tropes: they can’t come in unless they’re invited, etc., that would be familiar to anyone who has ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The story progresses through a predictable search by the others for a way to save Fielle, that twists and turns through morbid and macabre tales of stealing corpses and hideous experiments that eventually had me rolling my eyes. Had I not the determination to finish a book I had started, I would have departed around five chapters from the end because I felt I just couldn’t take it any more, but I persevered out of sheer willpower.
In a climactic battle that is cut short on details and smacks of an editor trimming the book down with arbitrary cuts, the group seems to find a way to rescue their comrade, and we seem to have a happy ending. This progresses to where Fielle confronts her abusive parents under the ruse that she is leaving to travel with her friends, only to reveal that she is still, in fact, a vampire, and the final paragraphs are her killing her family.
That’s it. The book ends.
Really?
No redemption, a gratuitous exploration of darkness, and not even an ending to speak of. This is one of the few novels that I’m sorry to have finished, and it tarnishes any fond memory I would have had for Dungeons and Dragons. Needless to say, I don’t recommend that you waste your time reading it, and I’m tempted to not explore any more Dungeons and Dragons stories at all after this. I’m currently in the middle of the comic book adaptation of the Fallbacks. If that’s any better, perhaps I’ll change my mind, but the last page of Heir of Strahd has passed happily from my memory as nothing more than poor judgement in my choice of books, and time poorly spent.