Role: One of Strahd’s brides
Also recorded early on as “Christina,” and given to Brother Kristoff as “Catherine” — all one person. Christine is the canonical name.
Charming, forceful, and unsettlingly familiar to the party, Christine met the group at the crossroads in the Count’s carriage alongside the coachman Gunther. She plied them with champagne none of them had tasted before, and explained — almost casually — that a curse had fallen over all the Count’s lands and people, handing out perfumed handkerchiefs before the carriage passed through a plague-choked village on the way to the castle.
Session 2
Brother Kristoff described being captured at the drawbridge alongside the castle’s doorman and a white-haired maid (Dorothy) by a third figure: a charismatic noblewoman in a big red dress with an elaborate updo, whom he called “Catherine.” That was Christine.
Session 3
Christine is one of Strahd’s brides — confirmed by her own mouth this session. The cherry-wood coffin in Strahd’s crypt is hers: Randoah breathed in the perfume of its silk lining and lived through Christine’s own memory of a young noblewoman in a nobleman’s court, courted by a dark and handsome stranger, swept off her feet into an elopement, and undeceived only on the honeymoon, when she saw what had carried her out of her father’s house and screamed.
The party met her again on the mountainside below the castle, at a full dining table set out impossibly in the middle of the forest — tablecloth, roast chicken and pork, champagne, two attending servants, and three saddled hunting horses. She was in riding leathers with her hair pulled back in a simple ponytail rather than the elaborate updo she wore at the masquerade. She was hosting the hunt.
She offered the party food, safety from the dogs, and a choice: join the hunt, or be hunted — the quarry being whichever of them refused. She was openly puzzled that anyone would want to leave “such a wonderful playground for people like us,” and told them they had drunk the blood of the innocent over and over and simply hadn’t realised what they’d become. Asked about her courtly life, she went briefly somewhere far away — oh, that was a lifetime ago, darling; I was a different person then — before recovering and allowing that the Count is generous and the parties are worth it. She said Strahd is older than she is by many generations, that she is certainly not his first bride, and that he eventually tires of all of them: some he lets leave, some wander off, and others become too troublesome to keep around. Asked whether she’d rather rule Ravenloft herself, she said being Count is too much responsibility and she much prefers the parties, and refused flatly to betray her sire.
When Brielle mounted one of her horses, Christine called her a thief and set the two servants — who dropped into a crouch, drew swords and grew fangs — on the party. Randoah caught her eye with Strahd’s own signet ring and left her hypnotised and drooling; Enki drove a sharpened stake into her heart. She screamed, and the scream turned to ecstasy, and she leaned in and pushed the stake deeper herself before hurling him the length of the campsite and overturning the table: Enough. You are all base creatures unworthy of his attention. I shall destroy you.
She survived it. As the party rode off she pulled the stake out of her own chest, cut the throat of one of her own arriving riders, threw him from the saddle and took his horse and hunting horn to lead the chase herself. She lost them to a false trail, a discarded witch’s hat, a felled tree and a shrieking bat, but she stopped in her stirrups to smell the air on the way past and very nearly had them.
She also mentioned, usefully, that the river only rings the castle: there are many ways down, including the bridge the party first crossed.
Status: Alive, staked and unimpressed.