By Simon McNeil
I’ve also always been a bit of a goth. Whether it manifest as a fondness for the Edward Gorey influenced aesthetics of the Gloom card game, the masochistic pleasure of playing the nearly impossible co-op board game Ghost Stories, the stubborn joy of playing through a souls-like or even the willingness to admit to enjoying Vampire: The Masquerade, I have enjoyed a fair number of gothic games in my life.
But there’s a tension at the heart of the gothic as a form and enjoyable gameplay. With the thematic focus on the return of the repressed past, the cyclical eruption of buried violence into the present, and the focus on the degeneracy and degradation of its subjects, the gothic pushes against the idea of agency. It is a question of time. Specifically, gameplay simultaneously structures and abstracts time. A flop of a card is a frozen moment of time. There is an action, a change, and then it is fixed on the table. A stone on a Go board, once placed, cannot be removed until taken. In role playing games, especially, the abstraction and restructuring of time is especially evident. In periods of conflict, time is segmented into arbitrary segments (Dungeons and Dragons assumes durations of six seconds, while Vampire: The Masquerade assumes three) and, within these temporal sections, everybody has the opportunity to take a turn to act. Simultinaity is cut away to create a sequence of discrete frozen moments.
This is critical because, in a role playing game, each of these three or six-second turns may take quite a lot more than six seconds to play out. Every player has to have the opportunity to choose what their character will do with their allotted turn. Character actions, in a role playing game, are not the immediate reactions of the characters but are, rather, a set of carefully considered choices. Should I move or should I stand still? Should I attack or should I help an injured companion? A player might agonize over their decision for thirty seconds before picking up a die and leaving the consequences of their choice to chance.
And chance, just like choice, pushes against the determinism of the gothic. Most games would not expect a player to be burdened by the inevitable return of a bad roll. The deck of cards has no memory. This is a significant contrast to the presence of memory in gothic time.
The mid-20th century philosopher and political theologian, Walther Benjamin, who is considered one of the founders of Gothic Marxism, describes the Angel of History, “his face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.”
And so we have a problem with gothic gameplay: if we are to actually lean into gothic themes, especially with the gothic treatment of time and the past, we risk abrogating both the agency of the player to choose their path and the role of chance in determining the success of those choices. Simply put, Dungeons and Dragons does not operate by the principle of Amor Fati.
And yet, Curse of Strahd exists.
Curse of Strahd is an adventure module built in the campaign setting of Ravenloft, a gloomy land surrounded by inescapable mists. Anyone who wanders into Ravenloft(barring a few plot-expedient exceptions) becomes trapped, doomed to enter into the cyclical punishments of the “Dark Lords”, the principal villains of Ravenloft games who also present as gothic protagonists.
It would be a mistake to dismiss Curse of Strahd as merely an aesthetic appropriation of gothic signifiers. It is, fundamentally, a properly gothic text. In Ravenloft, each Dark Lord is the corrupted heart of a territory, which becomes a psychogeographic reflection of the nature of their evil deeds. The ruler of the land is coterminous with the land itself and, through this connection, is trapped within it. Doom is fundamentally built into the structure of Ravenloft. Within the Ravenloft setting there are many Dark Lords. But in the Curse of Strahd adventure module only one will be relevant: Strahd von Zarovich – the vampire count of Barovia. In this adventure, he is forever seeking Tatiana; she is forever dying to escape him.
So what do we do about the players? A playthrough of Curse of Strahd could potentially exist where every player rolled a natural 20 on every roll, where every fight ended in a decisive victory and where the players confidently progressed to a conclusion that, in light of its own extreme statistical improbability, is absolutely contingent.
How do we square Benjamin’s Angel of History with choice and with chance?
I think, to do away with our hypothetical perfect playthrough, it is valuable to examine how people have played Curse of Strahd, as a game. And, happily, this is relatively easy to do thanks to the preponderance of “let’s plays.”
One of my personal favorite let’s play programs is High Rollers. This British D&D show features a set cast of players who run through a variety of adventures. Most of these are custom creations of Mark Hulmes, the show’s Dungeon Master, or DM. However, throughout the five or so years that High Rollers have been producing videos and podcasts, they have done several actual play run-throughs of commercial campaign modules, and their Curse of Strahd play is one of their most interesting.
Right off we see the interplay of choice and fate in the way in which the player choice of character construction is guided into the setting. Disparate characters from the core campaign setting of the Forgotten Realms assemble in a tavern: a cleric and her ranger body guard and a pair of dragon-like siblings, a sorcerer and her brother, a fighter. They come together for a Tarot reading delivered by the character of a player who has some prior experience with the module. This character informs the others that it’s their destiny to follow him to Ravenloft, eliding precisely what that means and what dangers they might face, and the characters all agree to follow him.
Things proceed effectively as one would expect from an ordinary, heroic fantasy, D&D campaign until roughly around the end of the eighth episode, in which the sorcerer is killed during a fight with a vampire. And it’s during the ninth session, proceeding until the twenty-fifth session, that we begin to see how gothic gameplay emerges.
First, we must treat role playing games as asymmetrical. In early iterations of Dungeons and Dragons, the Dungeon Master was referred to and considered to be a referee. This is a misconception. While the Dungeon Master has great latitude to adjudicate the rules of the game, they are also quite actively playing the game. The dungeon master, as a player, has quite a lot of power compared to the other players. But that doesn’t make them a non-player even if the characters they control are called non-player characters. A dungeon master might choose to be collaborative with or antagonistic to the other players, but that is a choice available to any player at the table.
In fact, during a period of conflict between player characters that the Dungeon Master quite obviously set up, Hulmes mentions that while he generally dislikes conflict between the players, he would happily make an exception for this campaign.
Throughout the ninth episode “Unspoken Pacts,” Hulmes asks the players to deliberately avoid knowing certain things happening to other players. Specifically he doesn’t want Tom Hazell, who plays the fighter, to know the play going on between Hulmes and Rhiannon Gower, who plays the recently deceased sorcerer.
The sorcerer encounters the powers that rule Ravenloft, which offer her a bargain in exchange for her life. Simultaneously, the fighter is approached by Asmodeus, the literal devil, and offered a bargain in exchange for the sorcerer’s life. Hazell is unaware of the dual nature of these bargains not because of any technological or rules restriction, but because he consents not to know. Hulmes asks for various players to remove their headphones at specific times in order to compartmentalize knowledge. They all happily comply. The bargains offered by the dark powers of Ravenloft and by Asmodeus are just in conflict enough with each other and with the overall goals of the adventuring party to doom these two characters. And their players volunteer for it.
What follows is roughly 32 hours of lies, half-truths, betrayals, and degradations that fit very well with gothic themes. The adventuring party, as a unit, collapses under the wreckage of history and, by the time these sessions end, the brother and sister are both dead, their souls commended to the care of Asmodeus, who recrafts them both as devils. Their filial bond undoes them in much the same manner as the siblings of The Fall of the House of Usher. All of it is enthusiastically volunteered for.
And I think this gets to how the treatment of time in gameplay serves player agency, and the operation of chance with the gothic focus on the cyclical and the inevitable. The players choose to be fated. There is an amor fati to the gameplay undertaken by all the players at the High Rollers table throughout the Curse of Strahd campaign, but particularly by Hazell and Gower. I referred to another player as collaborative previously but the truth is that the whole table is collaborative here – because they know they are playing a gothic game, they subvert the general structure of the adventuring party to a gothic reconstruction of it. The DM openly admits to what he’s doing and all the players look at that play and say yes to it.
One of the great contemporary scholars of the Marxist gothic is Jonathan Greenaway and he pairs the work of Walther Benjamin with another Marxist intellectual: Ernst Bloch. Greenaway says that, for Bloch “history is not about getting to the truth, it is about investigating a crime.” This requires an open-eyed interrogation of the eruption of the past into the present. The gothic is a close cousin to the detective story; both are engaged with an attempt to reconcile the failures of the past either by showing how the present does not overcome them or by giving us a toolkit with which to interrogate them.
For Greenaway, Bloch collapses the dialectical contradiction between the cyclicality and inevitability of the gothic and a better, dare we say, utopian future. The objective of the adventuring party in Curse of Strahd is to uncover a hidden history and to assemble the tools to break the cycle of historical violence, to put Strahd to rest and to allow Tatiana to stop running. Hulmes ends the campaign by allowing the Angel of History to finally stop and to make whole what has been smashed. Those dead characters who stayed true to the cause of overturning Strahd are reconciled and the heroes escape. Strahd is dragged to hell. The land that was coextensive with Strahd is faced with an uncertain future: either collapse into undifferentiated chaos or, perhaps, utopia. “From a situation in which nothing is possible, suddenly anything is possible again,” as Mark Fisher famously said.
Why play gothic games? Why create a situation where we choose to simulate doom, inevitability, inescapable cycles, degradation and despair? We do it to ourselves after all. We all make the choice to enter into an asymmetrical game, to take off our headphones and let a player twist our choices until we do terrible things. In part we do it because it’s fun. It’s like a horror movie – a safe exploration of things that make us uncomfortable – but I think this is just a surface read. It isn’t enough to reconcile the key dialectics. Instead, I think we do it because it lets us simulate an exit. We do it because we might break the cycle. We might free Barovia of Strahd. This time we might beat Ghost Stories. This is a simulation, like all games. We aren’t enacting a revolution just by playing a gothic game. But we are helping ourselves to learn what it is like to live against a gothic world. Greenaway reminds us that, “the Utopian future always begins again at Year Zero,” that there is a necessary breaking of the epoch intrinsic to the reification of the new. It’s the desire for this exit that drives a love for gothic gameplay and the uncertain hope for a Barovia without Strahd.
Simon McNeil is a genre author and critic living on a small permacultural farm in Prince Edward Island, Canada with his wife, daughter and various animal companions. He enjoys martial arts movies, tabletop games and weird books.