#Markovia

[darklordazalin]

Azalin Reviews: Darklord Frantisek Markov

Domain: Markovia Domain Formation:  698 BC Power Level: 💀💀⚫⚫⚫ Sources: Neither Man nor Beast (2e); Ravenloft Third Edition; Domains of Dread (2e); Realms of Terror (2e); Gazetteer II (3e), Fair Barovia Dungeon Magazine #207

Franktisek Markov is the Darklord of Markovia, a heavily forested island with the scatterings of a few small, abandoned villages reclaimed by nature; “Fran’s” manor; and the aptly named Monastery of Lost Souls. 

Franktisek grew up on a small pig farm outside of the village of Vallaki in Barovia. This was after von Zarovich became a vampire and started all this nonsense with these Misty prisons. He married Ludmilla, a young woman from Vallaki and opened a butcher shop there. Franktisek enjoyed the act of slaughtering his pigs, though the act itself was not enough for him and in time he began to experiment on the animals. He performed amputations, skin grafts, glandular injections and became fascinated with the results. I’m not sure where he learned the art of surgery…it is not as if Barovia is known for its education system nor pig farmers for their collection of books. I digress, when his wife discovered his grim experiments, she threatened to leave him and inform the villagers of what he was doing.

Overreacting to this threat, Markov made Ludmilla his next experiment and performed numerous surgeries on her over the course of three days. She died on the third day, her body now resembled an animal more than a person. However, once the villagers realized the truth, they chased Markov into the Mists and Markovia formed.

The Markov Manor was eventually claimed by Thaani refugees from Bluetspur and the echoes of Markov’s past deeds upon Ludmilla had some…well, let’s just say interesting effects on the Thaani. 

Before the Grand Conjunction, Markovia lay where the Shadow Rift now lies. Now Markovia has been transformed into an island west of the township of Ludendorf in Lamorida on the Sea of Sorrows. This transformation of Markovia is quite suitable for our transformed Darklord. Once a man, Franktisek is now a beast with the face of a man, forever searching for his lost humanity.

Franktisek continues his experiments on Markovia. Capturing various species of animals and transforming them into beasts with human-like features. Every attempt he sees as a failure as they have not sufficiently shed their animal side. These “Broken Ones” roam the island and worship Franktisek as a god, referring to him as “the god who walks among us”. Though I believe the Vistani have a better name for him: “Master of Pain”.

Any humanoid that finds themselves on Markovia will likely end up in Markov’s lab, where he transforms them into humanoids with beast-like features. He does not use any anesthesia, so these ‘surgeries’ of his are quite...memorable.

Markov can take on the form of any beast, though always retains his human head and face, which is as ridiculous and terrifying as it sounds. He tends to take the form of an ape, believing it makes him look more human. Perhaps there are no mirrors on the island so he can see how much that is not the case?

[spooky-owl-necromancer]

Is it gay to marry your best friend before you march on castle ravenloft in case you might die?

Hopefully they'll live longer than the AC benefits!!

[demiplanardemagogue]

The hope for a Lamordian theme park on Markovia all but disappeared today with the horrid destruction of the park's premiere love boat ride by a kraken with no heart or soul. Many hearts were broken as the park's fate ran aground on the jagged shores of reality.

[raisingcain-onceagain]

Thank you very much for this artwork, I love them 😍 They look so radiant and happy!!

Commission for @raisingcain-onceagain

commission info

[windona]

Sure, Markovia may be in a different place in Europe depending on the run or even if the writer and artist didn't share notes on what 'East' or 'West' Europe is, but if it's a country with Earth metahumans whose to say we can't No Prize it to say they move the country around every once in a while.

[eliotbaum]

I'd like to do more locations of Barovia in this mock postage stamp style! Here's the abbey of St. Markovia and the church of St. Andral for a start.

[barovianchickenandwaffles]

Great novel. Underrated book in the Ravenloft canon.

Finally have some time to read this Ravenloft classic. It’s a fun story, but also a nice tour of lesser-known domains.

Side note: Gundar sucks. But every Barovian knows that.

[wafflecrew-outofcontext]

Strix: Diath, come breathe this dust in

Diath: What?

Strix: I don’t know just sniff it up

DM: Go snort Saint Markovia

Diath: I am not doing a line of Markovia

Paultin: Not with that attitude you're not

[shrimpari]

"I see all of you as rats. Nothing...but...rats."

The Abbot of Saint Markovia

[lemonsdaily-artdump]

Strahdtober Day 29 - Sun

"The Abbey of Saint Markovia

May her light cure all illness."

We didn't explore the abbey a whole lot when we first went there. My DM tends to stay pretty close to how the campaign is written but the Abbey I know he's going to change a bit. (should we explore more of it when we make our way back to Krezk)

I cannot wait to see how he expands upon her Lore. I know "the big twist" as he discussed it with me in regards to Kasia, but I have no idea how he'll do the reveal or how he'll change the legend around Markovia or the actions/roles she played. But I'm chomping at the bit for it.

[tofu-bento-box]

CAR OF STRAHD.

we now host sessions in our lovely barbarian player’s house!!! this led to me narrating the restoration of argynvostholt while lovingly petting their cat. and victor doing lore drops while petting his skeleton cats. and i’ve been rolling around on the floor method-acting ghosts. so. much. cat. hair. good lord. anyway

so they walked rahadin off a bridge. strahda has imposed a mandatory mourning period over all of barovia, which includes a curfew mandating that all lights must be extinguished by sunset. this is bad on its own but the party also just relit the beacon. so now they’ve just got a neon sign up there reading

“FUCK YOU I STOLE YOUR GIRLFRIEND. AND YOUR BFF DIED LIKE A CHUMP. GIT GUD.”

[ID: bright pink swirly text reading “fuck you i stole your girlfriend. and your bff died like a chump. git gud.”]

stay tuned for the murder mystery going on in the abbey. and the abbot. who is not covering up anything about the victim. it’s such a tragedy, truly (;

[dinfern0]

also, if anyone's wondering of what happened to Ismark (sorta) there is that. In my COS rendition he + some other NPCs were the pieces of Saint Markoviases soul reincarnated as fragments of her personality, eventually when they all reunited (by the dying method) she managed to reincarnate into the next era :D

[dexadin]

Hi there! I love your guides for Curse of Strahd! 💞 If it's not too much, could you give some tips for running the abbey of St. Markovia? Or really just how you dealt with the module's ableism in general, since it's a lot to tackle and I'm not sure where to begin. Thank you! 💋

Hello! Sorry this took me a while to work on, like you said, it's a lot to tackle. Curse of Strahd suffers from being both a product of its genre and a product of the typical carelessness D&D likes to serve its marginalized fans. As much as I adore the genre, (modern) gothic horror does often rely on ableist tropes to create fear and suspense in what I'd call a misguided attempt to recreate the scenarios present in the literature that formed the basis of the genre in the early 19th century. Ableism is rife in early gothic novels, in part because of the rampant ableism of the time and in part because a lot of these works were critiques of ableism written by both disabled and abled but progressive authors. Then there's just WotC, who isn't exactly known for always making good moves in their settings. Sometimes they at least realize they fucked up, like with the Hadozee (😬), but as evident with their CoS "Revamped" edition, they thought making a meager attempt to Remove the Slurs was... more or less enough work for it. Lol.

So, here's some of my notes of what I've needed to fix up and how I did it. Abbey of St. Markovia will be at the end because... yikes. Major spoilers for CoS and CW for ableism below!

Casual Ableism A.K.A. The Real Curse Of Strahd Is Mental Illness

There are questionable story beats about mental illness from really early on. Mad Mary is the first NPC I can think of that really explicitly exemplifies this, but Stella Wachter in Vallaki and Luca Barbu in Kresk both also fit the bill of being random NPCs who got painted with the ableism brush. Treating these characters with empathy I think is the best way to fix a lot of them.

In ATSBB, I chose to keep the name "Mad Mary" as a pejorative title from the other villagers, because my game includes an amount of real-world ableism that is portrayed negatively. The party heard her cries and went to her house to find a lonely woman grieving the loss of her daughter. They spent a snall fortune at the mercantile to make her a big pot of soup she could simmer for days over her stove and helped her clean up her house a bit, before giving her hours of company over dinner. Mary was kind and appreciative and treated them terribly well. They did eventually sneak upstairs to find evidence of the circumstances of her daughter's disappearance (I just turned her into a werewolf to avoid the Yikes factor there). We see that Mary is unwell because upon seeing that her beloved daughter was cursed with Lycanthropy, she did everything (even too much) to ensure her safety, and then Gertruda still got out. Mary is more than "mad," she's heartbroken. She's devastated of grief and feels like a failed mother because she couldn't protect her baby. That amount of empathy gives her more depth and makes her portrayed as not ableist, but as a victim of vilified in-world ableism because nobody will give her the time of day.

In Stella's case, I did have a hard time. I wanted the party to have a clear reason to fight Victor (I don't know how some parties make him an ally, that guy is such a tool) and I did like the idea fleshed out in MandyMod's guide of Victor trying to leave Barovia through self-taught wizardry. Instead of changing much about Stella's cat curse, I just gave it privacy. They saw Stella very, very briefly--just enough to note the condition she was in and see that interrogating her would do very little for them, and then her siblings came in to tell them Stella needed her rest and it was time for them to go. Stella was not a spectacle to them, and it was portrayed as bizarre, but ultimately a product of Victor's abuse and Fiona's neglect to fix it. The party kicked Victor's ass and made a plan to sneak Stella out and get her to the house of a particularly nurturing NPC.

Luca Barbu was a little easier for me to fix because they tried to write him with sympathy but the module still certainly isn't nice to him, and it felt really gross a lot of the time. Luca is an adult man "with the intelligence of a 3 year old" who was "hit in the head with a rock" as an explanation for it, whose father and presumably full-time carer passed away, leaving him no support. If you didn't catch on yet, yikes. My Luca Barbu is autistic and had a farming accident that gave him a head injury that causes him to have a hard time processing information quickly, particularly numbers and the passage of time, and that can make him vulnerable to manipulation because he's a good hearted guy who has a hard time discerning if people are being genuine or not. He's very smart about farming, and good with the sheep like nobody's business, but he sometimes will forget to take care of himself when nobody's around because his dad isn't around to remind him. The townsfolk are not suspicious of him at all, and only have the chance to become so inclined if the party truly fails the encounter with Ilya. In fact, in my campaign, the situation with Anna Kreskov and the broken fence can only happen because she brings him dinner and bread every night since his fathers passing so she can make sure he eats every day. Anna's betrayal is then portrayed as desperate, not malicious, and it's a lot more tragic than it is evil.

Ez d'Avenir

Weird move of CoS to make an explicitly disabled character in a blink-and-you-miss-it passage who uses the coolest prosthetic ever and then just hide it from shame (???) They did add in a passage that changes this in the errata and in the revamped, as well as fleshing out Ez a lot more in Van Richten's Guide, so I'm giving them half a pass for this, because at least they admitted and fixed how they fucked up. That said, I think it's weird to do that with someone who is apparently the only disabled person in Barovia. This can be helped by letting Ez play a more active role in your campaign, as well as by having other disabled characters. You don't need to be ablebodied to be important to the world, so why should it be in fantasy? You don't really need a reason for a character to be disabled either, because disability doesn't happen because of a Reason in the real world. Not giving Ez the burden of being the only disabled rep in Barovia lets you have more fun with her and with other NPCs.

Finally, The Abbey of St. Markovia

The Abbey is infamous in ATSBB for me having planned out my alterations in advance and still finding places in the text I missed in which I said, "Oh, god, well, we're not doing that," and had to improv in several areas. To preface this, for my campaign, I did give my players a red/yellow/green light consent list in advance in which I included "asylum horror" as one of the potential triggers, and it was greenlit by my party, so we all went in knowing that there would be some ableist medical type horror. I explained that I wanted the vibe to feel less like Arkham Asylum and more like the way people treat asylums and old hospitals on ghost hunting TV shows--with the knowledge that something is deeply, deeply wrong here, but the fault never lies with the patients. Now, a lot of my edits are additions to MandyMod's "Fleshing Out CoS" on Reddit rather than on the official text, so if you're not familiar with it, I highly reccommend you check that out and then return here.

First off, I didn't call the people here Mongrelfolk, because... who thought that was a good idea in the first place, much less one that wss good enough not to fix in Revamped?? Anyway, I simply referred to the people residing at the Abbey as "patients" and it worked just fine. Inspired by MandyMod's guide, I wanted the Abbot to be an angel who lost his way in his desperation to help people in the absence of the Morning Lord, an angel who doesn't really understand the intricacies of sustaining life in humanoids, and treats sick and injured people with the same curiosity and naivety as a child "fixing" their broken toys by sticking together parts that only kind of fit with duct tape and glue. My abbot tried to heal the people as best he could with his limited magic, without understanding the differences between people and animals, or why a person with a broken hand might not be able to return to his every day life when that hand has been replaced with a turkey's claw. He's not trying to be evil, he just doesn't realize what he's doing isn't helping, because he's distracted by his own goal of building Vasilka. Now, I know Vasilka is sort of controversial in the CoS scene, but I think the concept is So Fucking Cool. I also think that building a little Frankenstein's monster that should be able to stop Strahd from hurting people is a suitible gothic, but ultimately noble goal for the Abbott to have. Does it justify the Abbot "borrowing" pieces from people who asked him for healing? Well, no. But it certainly makes sense for an angel desperate to escape Barovia to lose his shit a little bit and use unethical means to a supposedly moral end.

I also wanted to give agency back to the patients at the Abbey. Rather than the hallway of rooms of "laughing mongrels" and "violent mongrels," I just filled the rooms with families of patients. They were trying to start their own little civilization at the Abbey, far from their old lives, that they felt they couldn't return to for a variety of reasons. Some patients were too in shock and horrified by the results of their 'surgery' to return home alone, as the Barovian mountains are dangerous. Others had sought out the Abbot because they had already lost everything they had at home. Some people needed continuous upkeep on their replacement bits, just like Vasilka does, and don't want to stray too far from the Abbey. The Belviews and Clovin exist, but more as middlemen between the Abbott and the patients, who often understandably do not with to communicate with the Abbott. The Belviews will go hunting in the local woods and bring back stew meat for everyone at the Abbey (a plot point that makes them an easy suspect in Ilya's plotline). In short, the patients aren't 'insane,' they're disabled and/or chronically ill, and were failed by the Abbott. Again, this only works if you lean into the tragic, gothic horror tilt and lean away from the more modern "freakshow" type horror that was written in the text.

I think those are the main points I really wanted to make regarding the ableism in CoS, but if there's anything glaring I missed, please feel free to add on!!

[windona]

late prompting night ask! in spirit of the season: Outlaw AU -- the Outlaws' (Brion, Jason, Rose, Kory) different reactions to cold and snow. Could be a list of headcanons or a snippet.

"This is the worst," Rose said as she wrapped her arms around herself, big coat pulled on tight. She leaned against Brion. "Keep me warm?"

Chuckling, Brion wrapped her in a one armed hug and let a gentle wave of heat roll off him. "I must admit, it is odd to be in snow and not cold."

"The Shadows do training for different climates, don't they?" Jason asked as he idly compacted a snowball. "I was stuck on Infinity Island, but they had a mountain."

"I am trained for it and could complete a mission in any climate," Rose huffed. "But this is the worst."

Kory stuck out her tongue, letting a snowflake drop on it. "I find it rather pretty. However, I now understand why humans tend to wear so many layers of cloth."

"I bet Brion was the type to wear shorts in winter even before he got his powers."

"When I could get away with it," Brion admitted. He grinned. "Rose, did you ever have a snowball fight?"

She shook her head. "Didn't exactly have a lot of snow where I grew up, or on Santa Prisca. Had to travel specially for it."

A small ball hit Brion in the back. He smiled. "Well then, there's a first for everything." He bent over and compacted a ball of snow, kneading it for the correct amount of stability before handing to Rose.

She smiled, and flung it back to Jason. He stumbled, then grinned and with a practiced motion made his own ball of snow.

"I may not have grown up in the mountains of Markovia, but we had the occasional snow even without Mr. Freeze," Jason called out as he and Kory made their own snowballs.

[transpanda-1]

🌋on tonight’s episode of DND, we finally reveal this cool art done by @impossiblevariable of our player character only to get their hands ripped off 5 minutes later

[sheabeanie]

I love your ez x ireena art and your art in general so much it’s soooo good omg 😭

shfjshcbgdhc thank you???!!! 💜

I love these two so much,, gay people stay winning