Count Strahd von Zarovich is a fictional character originally appearing as the feature villain in the highly popular Advanced Dungeons and Dragons adventure module I6: Ravenloft. Later, this character and his world would be explored in follow-up modules, novels, and the Ravenloft campaign setting. Within this setting, Strahd is the first and best-known of Ravenloft's darklords. He is a powerful ancient vampire. He is also a master necromancer, a skilled warrior, and the unquestioned ruler of the domain of Barovia. Creative origins In 1978, Tracy and Laura Hickman wrote adventures that would eventually be published as the Dungeon & Dragons modules Pharaoh and Ravenloft. Strahd was created by the Hickmans "after Tracy returned home from a disappointing session of D&D. Back in First Edition, the game was less of a storytelling game. It mostly involved charting randomized dungeons on graph paper and fighting whatever creatures were inside for their gold and experience points. In one of those random rooms was a vampire, which immediately stood out to Tracy. It didn't make sense to him why a creature like a vampire was just sitting around in a random dungeon with oozes, goblins, and zombies. So he and his wife set out to create a vampire villain with fleshed-out motivations and history". When the Hickmans began work on Ravenloft, they felt the vampire archetype had become overused, trite, and mundane, and decided to create a frightening version of the creature for the module. They play-tested it with a group of players every Halloween for five years on their own game system with the adventure titled Vampyr. However, the Hickmans kept being asked about their "Ravenloft game", and so the "Ravenloft" name stuck. The duo eventually caught the attention of D&D's original publishers. They were hired to adapt it into the First Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and was released as Module I6: Ravenloft in 1983 by TSR. When creating Strahd, the Hickmans' vampire research started with an image of Bela Lugosi from 1931 before they explored older stories such as Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), John William Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). "What the Hickmans found was that the romantic vampire of the earliest years of the genre was not just a spouse beater but a spouse killer, the archetype of abuse in the worst kind of destructive codependency". In 2016, Tracy Hickman said, "Strahd came directly from