The Stranger Things finale has been a divisive topic since it dropped on Netflix on New Year’s Day. While some fans were left fully satisfied by how the Duffer Brothers concluded the show – a supernatural horror, ‘80s-set pop cultural phenomenon – others were left hungry for more. But what about Dungeons & Dragons fans? Stranger Things has been rooted in the world of the iconic fantasy role-playing game from the get-go – even borrowing inspiration for its central villain, Vecna, from it.
That’s why, if you’re au fait with all things D&D and get a kick out of every reference to the game, great and small, in the show, you would have been delighted by the surprise inclusion of another famous D&D villain right at the end of the series’ final (yes, final…) episode. For everyone else, it’s an incredibly minor, easy-to-miss detail among the spectacle and emotion of the last battle and the extended epilogue. But digging deeper into this Easter egg gives it wider resonance at the conclusion of this 10-year story, so let’s do just that.
What Is the Strahd Easter Egg in Stranger Things’ Finale?
Towards the end of Season 5, Episode 8, ‘The Rightside Up’ and several months after the climactic final battle with Vecna, Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas, and Max gather for one last D&D game. The activity kept most of them bonded throughout their childhoods in Hawkins, as well as provided much of the terminology, lore, and survival tactics they used to understand and fight against the supernatural events unfolding around them. Here, on the cusp of adulthood, it’s set up as one last adventure, albeit one that’s ‘theatre of the mind’ rather than real-life danger.
The scene we’re shown is at the end of a campaign run by Dungeon Master Mike, where the other four players are about to face the Big Bad. Mike dramatically places a mini figure in front of the Dungeon Master screen, revealing that this final hurdle between them and victory is a vampire called Strahd (for whom a fully-committed Mike even puts in a set of false fangs to role-play as).
Who Is Strahd, and Why Is He So Important In D&D?
In the world of D&D, Strahd von Zarovich is a powerful and ancient vampire who rules the land of Barovia with a tightly-clenched, iron fist. He’s a master of necromancy and other forms of magic, as well as a formidable warrior, and resides in Castle Ravenloft – a gothic fortress full of dark secrets and deadly traps.
The character was created by husband and wife Tracy and Laura Hickman in 1978, born out of their frustrations with the First Edition of the game not being sufficiently narratively-driven. Like Dracula, Strahd comes with a tragic and twisted backstory, a gothic setting, and an atmosphere of dread; friends who playtested their early versions of the game – initially called ‘Vampyr’ – loved it, leading to the couple adapting it for an official module in 1983’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, called Ravenloft.
The setting and character, like the vampire myth itself, have endured through decades of new D&D editions, all the way up to 2016’s Curse of Strahd, a relaunch of the original Ravenloft adventure for 5th Edition. The Edition has been one of the most successful in the game’s half-century history, thanks, in part, to putting storytelling at the heart of its construction, just as the Hickmans wanted back in the late ‘70s.
As a villain with rich lore, his own distinctive domain, and a ‘sandbox’ campaign that players have to puzzle and fight their way through, Strahd is naturally (or unnaturally) as beloved as ever, maybe even more so, to some, than the godlike lich, Vecna.
Why Strahd Is the Perfect Mirror of Stranger Things’ Vecna
The ‘Vecna’ you get to know in Stranger Things is similar to his D&D counterpart in name and appearance alone (as well as some psychic and illusionary abilities, I suppose). In fact, the Duffer Brothers’ character actually has a lot more in common with Strahd.
Both are formerly human, Strahd once a prince and warlord, and Vecna a boy in the 1950s called Henry Creel; both were ‘infected’ by a dark magic, of sorts, Strahd by the vampire curse, and Henry by an interdimensional entity, and made pacts with them for power at the cost of a symbiotic relationship and outcasted life (Strahd was said to have made his with Death itself); both rule over domains separate from ours from hard-to-reach fortresses – Castle Ravenloft is functionally the same as Vecna’s kaiju-like ‘Mind Flayer’ – and both cut off the hero party from the outside world: Barovia is a pocket dimension that can only be left when Strahd is slain; Vecna’s actions put Hawkins into lockdown in Season 5.
In Curse of Strahd, the vampire lord covertly offers select players the chance to work with rather than against him in the way that Henry, or ‘One’, as he was known in Hawkins Lab, tries to persuade Eleven to join him. They’re both master manipulators and obsessively paranoid control freaks who use others as spies and puppets. And on a thematic level, Strahd and Stranger Things’ Vecna are figures you can both sympathise with and easily root against.
In the end, the ultimate tragedy is that neither wants to nor can be saved: you either throw your lot in with Strahd or slay him. Mirroring this, when Will attempts to broker an alliance with Vecna in the series finale, suggesting they team up against the entity with which Vecna made a pact, he immediately turns it down. You can regret having to kill these antagonists, but you can never redeem them.
All of this is to say that Strahd is more than just another D&D reference in Stranger Things. That tiny figure of plastic and paint encapsulates the entire arc of the show. Mike and Co. slayed their monster, escaped their Barovia, and now can lay their weapons down at last.
