When I ran my D&D campaign of Curse of Strahd (CoS) that ended last year, I spent a decent amount pouring through past editions’ sourcebooks and adventures, lifting aspects of Ravenloft and Barovian lore to incorporate into Curse of Strahd’s Baroiva. One of the pieces that stuck with me the most as I dug through the archives was the idea that the leader of the Keepers of the Black Feather was the last cleric of Andral, the god of a pre-Strahd Barovia.
The immediate product of these deep-dives was two blog posts on a blog I maintain with friends:
I quickly went to work incorporating much of that into the Martikov family of CoS, expanding roles and identities withing the family, as well as establishing a thread that explains the way the history pieced together between the lore of 2E & 3.5E Ravenloft, with the Church of Andral and the Cult of the Morninglord, vs the Church of the Morninglord that is the only faith (past and present) of 5E’s Barovia.
As the campaign continued, much of this came together in scribbled notes, incomplete documents, and of course, making decisions on the fly as the campaign took new directions and players asked unexpected questions. I always intended to collect these threads, but as the campaign moved on, and then ultimately finished, I lost steam and the project was set aside. You might even note I say “multi-post deep-dive” up there in May 2020, and then never followed up. I hope to break up what I often spent too much time on into smaller posts I can knock out a little faster (although still likely with little regularity), all focused on the Martikov family and their ties to the history of religion in Barovia. I’ll continue to index posts related to the subject together, and ideally when this little project is complete (if ever complete), I’ll have something that could be collected into a supplement for others to bring my Martikovs into their Barovian campaigns.