Role: Strahd’s murdered wife
Status: Deceased — appears as a ghost or illusion
Origins
Revealed through Strahd’s own diary (recovered in the castle’s audience hall, Session 2): Tatiana was Strahd’s wife, left in the care of his older brother Sergei while Strahd was away on a military campaign. Her growing closeness with Sergei — mentioned more and more often in her letters home — curdled Strahd’s affection into jealousy and finally rage. He returned early, found his fears confirmed, and killed them both: Sergei in a duel, Tatiana afterward. Their deaths are what sealed the curse of vampirism onto Strahd and his entire domain. Strahd’s diary spells her name Titania in its earliest entries before settling on Tatiana.
Session 2
Enki met a version of her in a warm, out-of-place study hidden behind a secret door in the castle’s belfry — reading by the fire, calling herself “Countess of this fair castle,” seemingly unaware of (or unwilling to acknowledge) her own death, and mildly put out that “the Count never tells her these things.” When Enki, starving and furious, grabbed her for answers, she dissolved into nothing.
Down in the castle’s crypts, Sergei’s ghost asked the party to bring Tatiana to him so the two of them might finally rest together in death, since they never got the chance to live together — he does not know how, or that, she died, and believes she may have lived a long life.
A haggard, middle-aged woman the party ran into later that session — the one who handed off a doll and asked them to mind “the kid” — was briefly mistaken for Tatiana at the table. She has since turned out to be Clover herself, aged decades in the span of a single evening, not Tatiana at all (see Clover’s page).
Open Threads
How the version of Tatiana Enki met in the study — a youthful illusion, vividly red-haired, dissolving to nothing the moment she was grabbed — squares with a curse that supposedly killed her outright and sealed itself the night she died remains unresolved. So does whether she’s some kind of restless spirit bound to the castle, or something Strahd conjures deliberately to torment his guests.