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mercutial · 5 years

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A More Wholesome Take on Victor Vallakovich

Hey guys! I hadn't found any deeper interpretations that made Victor out to be particularly wholesome, so here's the version I'm using in my campaign.

I've read u/guildsbounty's post on Victor, and while I love it because it fits in so well with the gothic horror themes, my party had already become friendly with Victor and he had already been established as a mild-mannered guy who didn't really have an aversion to people in general, mostly just timidity.

I've borrowed elements from u/MandyMod's fleshed out version of the Vallakovich household - the parts about Vargas and Lydia neglecting Victor emotionally for pretty much his entire life.

Background

Vargas has avoided contact with Victor out of fear of being abusive like his own father was to him, and Lydia is no more than a brainwashed peanut. They don’t really bother socializing him with people outside of the household either... so Victor has been deprived of healthy human relationships. To pass the time, he read all of the books in his father’s library, which were mostly old histories and a few on philosophy, passed down from his great-grandfather.

Cats

In lieu of human relationships, Victor has always loved cats. Cats are the closest thing he's had to companionship. He understands their need for space, their fickleness, and he loves it when he can finally earn their affection.

His first cat he found as a stray kitten and named it Twinkle, because as a child he read a book that talked about stars in the night sky, and how they “twinkled”. Being a Barovian, he had never seen a clear night sky before. So he named his cat after the sight he wished he could see, out in the free and open world beyond the mists.

However, Twinkle met an untimely end. (You can decide whether this is caused by the Wachter boys, either accidentally or intentionally, or if Twinkle was killed by an accident or rabid dog or something.) Victor was devastated. He refused to bury Twinkle, keeping the cat’s decaying body in a chest in his room until a maid noticed the smell and freaked out, prompting his parents to make him bury Twinkle in the garden. Later he went and dug up the grave in secret and took the body back to the attic. He never buried it, even after the body rotted away, leaving only the skeleton, which he kept hidden in an old toy chest.

He had read in a book somewhere of a mage who had been able to raise animals and people from the dead. Surely that was possible? Some of the travelers who came through Vallaki from were capable of magic. Driven by the promise of possibilities, he acquired spellbooks and books about magery, scouring them for knowledge. His two focuses: magic to raise the dead, and teleportation out of Barovia.

Magic

Eventually through numerous trials and errors, he figured out how to perform simple raisings. Despite the fact that Twinkle was now a mere skeleton, when Victor attempted to raise Twinkle, it was an undeniable success. The little feline skeleton picked itself up off the ground, turned to face him, and rubbed up against his leg just as it had always done. He was overjoyed.

His teleportation experiments weren’t so successful, however. The incomplete diagrams that he had acquired were not enough for him to complete a working teleportation circle. No matter what he did, the countless circles he drew in chalk, in ashes, in blood all remained inert.

Stella

Around a year and a half before the campaign started, Lady Wachter began to push her agenda of attempting to wed Stella to Victor, likely due to her husband’s recent death. Victor and Stella had met a few times in the past, but neither had really been made to interact. But now Lady Wachter began bringing Stella over for tea, “accidentally” bumping into Victor the few times he was out and about, and insisting that she and the Vallakoviches leave the two alone to talk on their own.

At first, Victor was resistant to the forced interactions. He had always been shy around people, and occasionally mocked or at least stared at, and so always tried to limit his time with other people as much as possible. But for whatever reason, Stella seemed to take a genuine interest in him. She was a cheerful and polite person, and her well-mannered inquiries into Victor’s daily life and activities grew on him over time. When eventually asked about why he spent so much time indoors in the attic, he dropped his hedging and timidly hinted at his “experiments”.

To his surprise, she wasn’t put off. In fact, when he admitted that he wanted to find a way to cross the mists, Stella’s eyes grew wide in fascination. Uncharacteristically, she immediately began bombarding him with more questions about what he was doing, how he was doing it, what he had tried. Flustered, he offered to show her.

And so the two of them began to work together on the experiments in earnest. After swearing her to secrecy, Victor brought Stella up to speed on everything he had found – not difficult as she proved to be a quick learner. Lady Wachter and the Vallakoviches were curious at first as to why their children were spending so much time together, but the Vallakoviches quickly lost interest, and Fiona decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Soon it felt to Victor as if progress had more than doubled; Stella’s fresh inquiries and perspective revealed a couple of the faulty assumptions that Victor had subconsciously incorporated into his calculations.

Then at last, a breakthrough! One day, one of their circles came to life and zapped a test mouse away. However, Victor and Stella soon realized there was still some kind of issue with the circle. The various inanimate objects and mice that they zapped through only came back in pieces, and even then only occasionally came back at all.

The two didn’t give up, however. At this point, several months into their pursuit, they were not only energized by their recent successes, but had also grown close. Perhaps, Victor hoped, as real friends… or perhaps even something more?

He had never really felt this close to anyone before – not his parents, not the servants, and certainly not the other townspeople. In contrast he found himself actually wanting to see Stella again, looking forward to hearing her lively voice, seeing her bright smile at the front door. He had always suspected that the love spoken of in his history books and novels might have a basis in reality, but he had never really felt it to be true until now. His parents’ loveless mess of a marriage, built upon the farce of a happy town they had created, had never come close to the ideal. But what he felt when he saw Stella… perhaps that was what the books meant. And perhaps the shining looks she gave him, the smiles and knowing winks they traded in their parents’ presence, the little inside jokes they had started to develop… perhaps that meant she felt the same way.

They had also begun to open up about things other than their experiments. He learned what she thought of her family – her concerns about her mother, her loving but somewhat antagonistic relationship with her jokester brothers. And he poured out his heart about his parents – how he wondered, after all he’d read in his books, whether something could have been different between him and them.

At one point they made several modifications to their most recent iteration of the teleportation circle. They were no longer receiving body parts of unfortunate mice and rats in return, but they were also fairly certain that the bodies weren’t being vaporized. Perhaps, perhaps they were really sending them elsewhere? But there was no good way to tell. Unless…

The Accident

Stella offered to send herself through the circle. Victor objected vehemently. Hadn’t she seen what happened to some of the things they sent through? It was their first full-scale argument, and it ended in tears and Stella storming back to her house.

Later that night, Victor was awakened by a sound on the stairs. He made it quietly to the door just in time to see someone slipping into the attic. Following, he discovered the intruder was Stella – activating the teleportation circle and stepping into it.

It all happened so quickly. One moment Stella was setting foot into the circle, the next thing Victor saw a blur of fur and realized one of his cats had darted into it as well… and then a flash of light blinded him.

In hindsight, it was lucky that Stella hadn’t been shredded to pieces, sent far away, or ended up with cat-like features or fur. But her mental state was just about as impossible to explain, and Victor was in no state to explain it. Lady Wachter was furious. She immediately took Stella home and locked her away while threatening the Vallakoviches with all manner of consequences she could safely threaten, and all Victor could do was watch miserably, numbly, in utter shame. Couldn’t he have stopped her if he’d just been a little faster? If he hadn’t lingered on the stairs? He should have known, he should have kept the attic door locked. In fact, he never should have introduced her to magic.

Victor had always been reclusive, but after the incident, he often shut himself away for days on end. Tray after tray of uneaten food sat by his door.

Eventually he went back to his attic and his books, but with a new objective in mind: restoring Stella Wachter.

During the Campaign

Stella is the only person who has ever shown that she truly likes Victor. He would feel numb about his parents dying, but if Stella died, he would probably lose all will to live. So she’s basically all he has left. If the party befriends him, he’ll likely ask them to help him find a scroll of Greater Restoration and/or someone who can cast it on Stella (e.g. Rictavio.)

However, even if the party manages to free Stella and find a scroll/caster, Victor will be nervous about restoring her to sanity. He’s afraid that she’ll be angry and blame him for her condition, and she’ll end up hating him… like everyone else in his life. To that end, he’s unsure if he should have someone perform a Greater Restoration on her at all.

And the way Stella is now (if she’s freed and gets to spend time with Victor), at least she’s very affectionate with him. She likes him a lot and wants to be with him all the time. If her sanity was restored, would she still feel that way? He doubts that. Why would anyone like him so much anyway?

Somewhere in the pit of his heart he feels that her former affection towards him was a fluke, or worse, fake. He knows that keeping her from being restored is selfish, but he also justifies it by arguing that it’s far crueler to force someone to understand the bleak world than it is to have them live in blissful ignorance. He feels that she’s probably happier being the way she is now. He feels like he would be.

–––––

So that’s it! Hope this was an interesting take on Victor and gives you a few ideas for how to run him in your campaigns. In mine, it led to an interesting (though a little frustrating) roleplaying scenario between Victor and the party when he started getting cold feet about using Greater Restoration on Stella. Let me know if there’s anything you want me to expand on!

#curse of strahd #victor vallakovich #cos #dnd #dnd 5e homebrew

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