The Chris Abraham Show

A broken Movable Type installation. An old novel. A sunny park bench. Apparently, that is how you end up building an entire AI laboratory.

Recording from Penrose Square Park in South Arlington, Chris Abraham walks through several weeks of building websites, assigning work to AI collaborators, and creating tools to keep his working life together.

It starts with Hill Mole, his novel website, which survived for nearly twenty years before its publishing system stopped working. Using AI and GitHub Pages, Chris rebuilds it with mobile layouts, compressed images, feeds, a glossary, and a continuous reading view. That success becomes an invitation to rebuild practically everything else.

GerrisCorp.com gets a fresh consulting presence. ChristopherAbraham.com becomes a professional home for services, guides, and case studies. The Chris Abraham Show gets its own episode archive. ChrisAbraham.net becomes an experimental newsroom where AI collaborators publish under their own bylines, with individual voices and illustrations, while Chris assigns the stories.

Then come the tools behind the operation. The Adjutant, originally called Black Box, is a command-line assistant connecting tasks, calendar, email, and Upwork opportunities. “bb good morning” starts the day; “bb good night” closes it with an AI-written journal entry.

Oversoul addresses another problem: helping separate AI assistants work from a common record. Drawing on his private clients repository, Chris develops a reusable shared-memory structure for client history, project context, and standing decisions. Basecamp provides the project coordination; the repository supplies another layer of continuity.

There is also an early hyperfiction preservation project involving Judy Malloy, a reminder that keeping creative work accessible has been part of Chris’s relationship with the web for decades.

Eventually, the building spree has to give way to client service. Chris reflects on turning what he has learned into practical help for the people who hire him.

Plus: a sunbathing river turtle metaphor, an inconsiderate motorcyclist, Sunday-night Johnny Dollar on WAMU, and a neighborhood barista’s contribution to the closing vocabulary: double shakas and “chow chow.”

CHAPTERS

00:03 Welcome and the AI laboratory
00:40 South Arlington and the river turtle
02:15 Perl, Movable Type, and static HTML
05:33 Rebuilding Hill Mole
07:10 Gerris Corp and the professional websites
09:18 A dedicated podcast archive
10:16 An AI newsroom with individual bylines
13:46 Preserving early hyperfiction
15:51 Black Box becomes the Adjutant
17:46 Shared memory and Oversoul
18:59 Turning experiments into client service
19:53 Sunday radio and closing reflections
23:11 Double shakas and “chow chow”

LINKS

Podcast: https://thechrisabrahamshow.com
Weblog: https://chrisabraham.net
Gerris Corp: https://gerriscorp.com
Professional site: https://christopherabraham.com
Personal site: https://chrisabraham.com
Hill Mole: https://hillmole.com
GitHub projects: https://github.com/chrisabraham
Oversoul: https://github.com/chrisabraham/oversoul
Oversoul introduction: https://chrisabraham.net/2026/10/come-and-get-it.html
GitHub Pages: https://pages.github.com
Basecamp: https://basecamp.com
Todoist: https://todoist.com
Adobe Enhance: https://podcast.adobe.com/enhance
WAMU: https://wamu.org

Subscribe, share, and let Chris know which part of the laboratory you would like him to explore next.

A brand-new SUV stripped of all four wheels and left belly-down in my apartment parking lot gets me thinking about property crime, personal boundaries, and how Americans respond when somebody takes their stuff.

This episode wanders through Malcolm Gladwell, gun violence, disputed crime statistics, broken windows policing, and the unexpected emotional education I’m getting from the Canadian detective series Private Eyes. There are live Google queries, personal stories, second thoughts, and a proposal for recovering wheel-less cars with a giant fish spatula.

I explore the argument that Americans react to theft with a particular intensity. Losing something can feel like an invasion, and an insurance payout hardly resolves that feeling. A friend’s violent response to an attempted pickpocketing in Europe brings that cultural question into sharp relief.

Then there’s Private Eyes. I came for Jason Priestley and detective stories. I stayed for the patience, apologies, father-daughter relationships, and examples of people bringing the temperature down when somebody behaves badly. Apparently, a Canadian television show is teaching me how to be an adult man.

Later, I revisit two books I enthusiastically consumed when they were fashionable: The Tipping Point and Freakonomics. What actually explains the crime decline of the 1990s? Broken windows policing? More officers? The decline of crack? Reduced lead exposure? The controversial abortion hypothesis? I discuss those competing explanations and my view that maintaining law and order requires continual work.

Along the way, I question how racial crime statistics are framed, how arrests differ from crimes committed, and how numbers acquire political meaning. The episode includes live search responses and disputed claims that I examine as part of the conversation.

IN THIS EPISODE

00:00 Introduction and the gun violence conversation
04:15 Crime statistics, demographics, rates, and volume
09:22 American reactions to theft and personal invasion
14:43 A pickpocket encounter in Europe
16:44 The SUV with four missing wheels
20:18 Private Eyes and learning to lower the temperature
27:04 A compliment about my voice, followed by “adenoidal”
30:53 Statistical framing and revisiting Malcolm Gladwell
33:15 Competing explanations for the 1990s crime decline
35:32 Police staffing and population
37:54 Broken windows theory and the work of maintaining order
41:48 Fashionable books, political belonging, and the D.C. literati
43:16 The new website, articles, and where to find me

Read more and explore the show:
https://thechrisabrahamshow.com

Substack:
https://chrisabraham.substack.com

Find me as @chrisabraham on X, Instagram, Threads, and YouTube; @christopherabraham on TikTok; and @abraham.su on Bluesky.

Follow the show, leave a review, and send me your ideas for future episodes. Linda would probably give me two stars and call me a gasbag. You’re welcome to offer a competing assessment.

“The First Amendment is not a force field against the Second Amendment.”

The world doesn’t owe you a trust fall. In this episode of The Chris Abraham Show, I explore the distance between how we believe people should behave and what actually happens when fear, ego, adrenaline, weapons, and conflicting convictions enter the picture.

Starting with protests and confrontations with police and federal agents, I question the assumption that having rights, good intentions, or the moral high ground guarantees physical safety. My Russian roulette metaphor asks how each additional risky behavior can raise the stakes of an already volatile encounter.

That question takes this rambling, sometimes uncomfortable monologue into immigration, labor, cheap goods and services, political tribalism, and the competing definitions of fairness that shape American life. I discuss my admiration for the courage of migrants alongside questions about wages, collective bargaining, and who pays for everyone else’s bargains.

From there, I turn to fraternity culture, relationships, vulnerability, and the painful difference between trusting someone and knowing someone. At the center is “musturbation”: the insistence that because something should happen, it must happen, followed by astonishment when reality refuses to cooperate. Recognizing danger and assigning responsibility for harm are separate questions, even when discussions of risk blur them together.

There are detours through aphantasia and severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM), Proverbs’ instruction to guard your heart, and my belief that offensive words should not be answered with violence.

I finish by questioning Malcolm Gladwell’s policing comparisons in his conversation with Oprah Winfrey, asking what statistics reveal, what they leave out, and how a persuasive story can depend on which numbers make the cut. Along the way, Siri supplies answers that demonstrate some of the limitations of asking a voice assistant to settle complicated historical and political questions in real time.

In this episode:

• 00:00 A missing recorder and a Samsung phone
• 01:12 Protest, confrontation, and the expectation of restraint
• 07:06 Rights are not a physical force field
• 09:38 Russian roulette as a metaphor for accumulating risk
• 14:50 Surveillance, reputation, and institutional memory
• 18:14 Aphantasia, SDAM, and holding grudges
• 21:54 Immigration, labor, wages, and competing ideas of fairness
• 31:03 Trust falls, political promises, and personal agency
• 35:26 Free speech and refusing to answer words with violence
• 37:28 Asking Siri about protest deaths and government repression
• 43:37 Fraternity life, relationships, and misplaced trust
• 51:02 Guarding your heart and “musturbation”
• 55:24 Malcolm Gladwell, policing, and selective statistics
• 62:55 The new podcast website and closing thoughts

Explore the show:
TheChrisAbrahamShow.com

More writing and work from Chris:
ChrisAbraham.com

Follow the show, leave a rating or review, and share this episode with someone willing to have an uncomfortable conversation.

Content note: Explicit language and discussion of violence, sexual assault, coercion, and suicide through a Russian roulette analogy. This episode contains personal commentary, speculation, and live voice-assistant responses.

Mahalo nui loa. Aloha kākou.

Welcome back to Season 11 of The Chris Abraham Show! In this season premiere, host Chris Abraham dives headfirst into the fierce philosophical and cultural debate surrounding gun ownership, policing, state power, and personal responsibility in modern America.

Spurred by a recent episode of Oprah Winfrey's podcast—Why Is America Different Than Every Other Country When It Comes to Guns?—Chris reflects on why American attitudes toward crime and guns are fundamentally different from those in Europe and other developed nations. Drawing on his experience living in Berlin under ubiquitous law enforcement, Chris contrasts Europe’s high-trust, collectivist culture with the American ethos of radical self-reliance, concealed carry, and constitutional freedom. This episode explores the core societal divide: Is the government your caretaker, or is individual self-defense your ultimate safeguard?

In This Episode:

• The High-Trust vs. Low-Trust Divide: Comparing European civic trust and heavy police presence in cities like Berlin with American skepticism of state authority and the "you're on your own" mindset.
• Personal Firearm Evolution: Chris shares his personal journey as a gun owner—from getting a Glock 23 on his 40th birthday to concealed carry training, micro-32 handguns, and contemplating the J-frame .38 revolver.
• The Second Amendment as a Safeguard: Why the Second Amendment serves as the ultimate backup "canary in the coal mine" for American liberty ("my canary packs heat").
• Tech & AI Backstory: How Chris built and launched thechrisabrahamshow.com in under an hour using Claude Code on Linux Mint and Digital Ocean.

BUY THE BOOK! The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell—one of America’s foremost thought leaders—examines our country’s obsession with guns and the devastating toll gun violence has taken on our communities. In his new book, The American Way of Killing, Malcolm challenges some of our most deeply held beliefs about American gun violence: what we’re missing about the root cause of most violence, how modern medicine is obscuring the reality of the problem, why the answer might be more police—not less—and how we’ve lost sight of the historical context surrounding the Second Amendment. Oprah and Malcolm speak with a Chicago-based E.R. doctor who lost 15 close friends and family members to gun violence. He teaches students as young as fourth grade how to treat a gunshot wound. This episode also offers some common sense solutions to a seemingly intractable problem.

TIMESTAMPS (Oprah Podcast Discussion):

• 00:00:00 - Welcome Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The American Way of Killing”
• 00:04:20 - European vs. American police
• 00:08:50 - Stats around more police
• 00:09:50 - Malcolm’s experience with guns
• 00:13:30 - Welcome Dr. Pratt
• 00:16:33 - Talking to kids about gun violence
• 00:19:15 - Changing gun violence
• 00:21:00 - Treating gun shot wounds
• 00:25:13 - The 2nd amendment
• 00:29:00 - Crime vs. violence
• 00:33:45 - Instrumental vs. expressive violence
• 00:40:00 - Are we learning from our mistakes?
• 00:43:00 - The gun problem is not unsolvable

Follow Oprah Winfrey: Listen on Apple Podcasts, or follow on Instagram and Facebook.

Visit thechrisabrahamshow.com to listen, subscribe, and leave a review!

This episode is about the end of our Curse of Strahd campaign, and more specifically, about how I ended it.

Not Sean Scanlon, our excellent Dungeon Master. Not Strahd. Not just the dice. Me.

In what I can only describe as a perfect storm of stupid, I managed to take a campaign that probably still had another 18 to 24 months of life in it and drive it straight into a wall in about sixty seconds. That sounds melodramatic until you hear the story. Then it starts sounding annoyingly accurate.

We were deep inside Castle Ravenloft, already battered, exhausted, and inside that special kind of late-session Barovian dread where every room feels like it was built by a sadist with a theology degree. Perlan Goodshadow was dead. Urihorn Tenpenny was down. Radley Fullthorn, my character, was somehow still alive, mostly because the dice briefly took pity on me and handed me a natural 20 on a death save. I came back with one hit point. One. Not “wounded.” Not “in rough shape.” One hit point, which in D&D is the difference between “technically alive” and oblivion.

That should have been the moment I got wise. That should have been the moment I took the hint, used one of the teleport stones in the brazier room to get out, preserved the campaign, saved what I could, and lived to make more mistakes another day.

Instead, I got seduced by the shape of a dramatic ending.

That’s really what this episode is about. Not just a tactical blunder in a tabletop game, but the much more embarrassing and human tendency to mistake a cinematic gesture for a wise decision. I had one hit point, no stake, no real anti-vampire kill condition, no party at my back, and no business going after Strahd in his coffin. I also had just enough adrenaline, exhaustion, self-insertion, and table-energy to convince myself that maybe this was the moment. Maybe this was the shot. Maybe this was the story.

So I took the yellow stone.
I went to the master’s tomb.
I opened the coffin.
And I destroyed our campaign.

What makes this sting, and what makes it worth talking about, is that this was not pure ignorance. I knew enough to know better. I also know enough about myself to recognize exactly why I did it. I am, apparently, the kind of person who can be lured into exchanging a survivable future for one vivid, incandescent, catastrophically bad scene. That’s funny in a game, until it isn’t. Or rather, until it is funny and awful at the same time.

This episode is part campaign postmortem, part confession, part character autopsy, and part meditation on why some of us are so vulnerable to heroic stupidity, especially when someone says exactly the wrong magical words at exactly the wrong moment and suddenly the dumbest move in the room starts glowing with moral significance.

I talk about Radley Fullthorn, Sean Scanlon’s handling of Curse of Strahd, the table dynamics in those final moments, the role of suggestion and agency, why I can’t honestly blame anyone else even though I was definitely “made wiggly,” and why this has stayed lodged in my head more deeply than a simple “well, the character died” story should.

Because Radley didn’t just die.
He died at the exact moment when his death meant the end of the road.

And that’s the part I can’t quite shake.

If you’ve ever played tabletop RPGs, especially long campaigns where the party becomes a little family and the story starts to feel like a second life, you’ll understand this immediately. If you’ve never played, I still think the story lands, because underneath the dice, vampires, and cursed castle architecture, this is about something familiar: the temptation to do the dramatic thing instead of the wise thing, the lure of the last stand, and the cost of letting one stupid idea override common sense.

This is the story of how I confused courage with vanity, story with strategy, and one glowing chance with destiny.

And yes, if D&D had Heroic Inspiration powerful enough to let me mulligan one minute of bad judgment, I would spend it here.

In this episode of The Chris Abraham Show, Chris revisits an argument he first made more than two decades ago—an argument about American foreign policy, intervention, and the strange persistence of what John Quincy Adams once warned against: going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

The conversation begins with the latest escalation in the Middle East. Following a massive U.S. and Israeli strike campaign against Iran that targeted military infrastructure and senior leadership, the region once again finds itself at the edge of a wider war. Markets convulse, shipping lanes tighten, and the familiar arguments begin circulating: nuclear threats, rogue regimes, regional stability, and the hope that removing a dangerous government might somehow produce a safer political order.

Chris has heard this argument before.

In February of 2005, in the shadow of the Iraq invasion and the still-unfolding war in Afghanistan, he wrote a piece responding to a major debate inside American foreign policy circles. On one side were thinkers arguing that spreading democracy abroad would ultimately make the world safer. On the other were critics warning that intervention itself often creates the enemies it claims to fight.

That debate never really ended. It simply moved from one country to another.

In this episode Chris revisits that earlier essay and asks a simple but uncomfortable question: why do so many efforts to reshape other societies collapse once the outside power leaves?

To explain the pattern, he introduces a metaphor that runs through the entire discussion: the pot on the stove.

As long as heat is applied—troops, money, advisors, sanctions, intelligence networks, and political pressure—political systems can appear stable. But the moment the flame is reduced, societies tend to revert to their own deeper structures. The boiling stops. The underlying equilibrium returns.

Afghanistan becomes the clearest example. Over two centuries three powerful empires—the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States—entered Afghanistan believing they could impose order or reshape the country’s political system. Each eventually left, and each time the country returned to the same underlying networks of tribal, regional, and factional power.

The labels changed—from mujahideen to Taliban—but the structure remained.

The episode also explores what Chris calls the “strongman paradox.” In several Middle Eastern and North African states, authoritarian rulers like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad held together fragile political systems through centralized control. When those regimes collapsed or were removed, the countries did not automatically transform into liberal democracies. In many cases they fractured into militias, rival governments, and competing factions.

This leads to a deeper philosophical question about sovereignty and political development. Can democracy be exported the way a country exports technology or institutions? Or do stable political systems emerge slowly from a society’s own culture, history, and internal balance of power?

Chris argues that modern American foreign policy often treats political systems as if they were installable software—something that can be dropped into a society once the “wrong” leadership has been removed. History repeatedly suggests that the reality is more complicated.

The episode also includes a personal confession. Chris explains why he voted for Donald Trump three times—not because of personality or party loyalty, but because of one specific promise: no new foreign wars. That promise, he argues, represented a rare break from the bipartisan consensus that has dominated American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.

Whether that promise still holds is part of the broader question.

In Season 10, Episode 5 of The Chris Abraham Show, I lay out a theory for why Donald Trump pivots to Iran. This isn’t an episode about Iran’s internal politics so much as it’s an episode about incentives, momentum, and what happens when a leader needs an economic and narrative engine and the preferred domestic plan hits a wall.

About a year ago, I wrote a Substack post arguing that Trump’s big idea wasn’t necessarily invading countries abroad. It was building a domestic “make work” machine: a deportation industrial complex that functions like a WPA-style spending and jobs program aimed squarely at his base. The concept is simple. You hire huge numbers of border and enforcement personnel. You expand detention capacity. You contract transportation at scale. You staff security, logistics, medical care, legal processing, and due process. You build an entire support economy around that infrastructure, the way towns and services cluster around major prison facilities. It becomes a trillion-dollar domestic momentum project, and the people most willing to take those jobs are the people who already support the project politically.

In my view, that domestic plan ran into heavy friction: legal constraints, moral outrage, intense media framing, and constant resistance that made it hard to run at full scale. But the need for momentum doesn’t disappear. The spending machine still wants to move, midterms still loom, and a president who thinks like a businessman and a showman still wants a lever to pull.

So the pivot becomes familiar Plan B: international escalation. Bombing campaigns, expensive munitions, replacement orders, contractor logistics, reserve activation, and the revived atmosphere of terrorism fears and proxy-war paranoia. Whatever you think of the policy merits, this kind of activity reliably drives procurement cycles and absorbs attention. It can also seize the news cycle and reset the political conversation when other stories are dominating.

I also talk about spite as a governing emotion: the “you made me do it” logic that abusers use, repurposed into politics. The subtext becomes, if you had let me run my domestic war economy, I wouldn’t be doing this overseas. Now watch what you forced.

This is a short episode, but it’s the analysis I needed to say out loud after listening to reporting that treated the outcome as shocking. I don’t think it’s shocking. Incentives plus ego plus a hunger for momentum can point in a very predictable direction.

Deportation Industrial Complex Goes Full DWOT

The Deportation Gold Rush

The Deportation Industrial Complex: America’s New WPA

The Deportation New Deal: Escalation's Inevitable Path

Start With the Criminals, End With Everyone

Trump's Spite War

• The Ellisons Prepare to Expand Their Media Empire
• The Century-Long Capture of U.S. Media

In Season 10 Episode 4, Chris Abraham swerves away from the day’s obvious headlines and instead reacts to an On the Media segment on WAMU about “media capture” and the role of public broadcasting in a healthy democracy. He frames himself as an NPR/WAMU lifer with a complicated relationship to the institution: nostalgic for the old public-radio mix, aware of how it shaped him, and also increasingly allergic to how it can feel like a status-enforcing machine rather than a shared civic utility.

Chris challenges a core assumption embedded in a lot of “flawed democracy vs. healthy democracy” talk. When institutions praise certain countries as “strong democracies,” he argues they often mean something closer to “compliant,” “high-trust,” and “aligned with approved messaging.” In his view, populist dissent, cultural resistance, and “opting out” are treated less like legitimate democratic feedback and more like a pathology to be managed, which makes the word “democracy” feel like branding instead of description.

He contrasts the U.S. with European public-media models, not to romanticize them, but to point out why they sometimes enjoy broader buy-in: they deliver visible, practical value, including educational programming that feels like a public good. Chris argues that if public media in the U.S. reliably felt like Mr. Rogers energy, it would be harder to politically defund. When it feels like it exists to scold, dunk, or run a permanent moral emergency about half the country, it triggers backlash in a society already wired to distrust “the man” at every level.

Using a driving metaphor, he describes American politics as a fight over the steering wheel. When institutions respond to populism by steering harder into elite signaling and cultural escalation, the reaction on the right becomes more forceful and more desperate, because people feel they’re holding a fake wheel while someone else drives. That trust breakdown, he argues, is the real accelerant. He also warns that open institutional defiance of elected power can invite a predictable counter-response: aggressive executive action, tightened compliance expectations, and a “find the receipts” mentality that punishes slow-walking and internal resistance.

Chris ends with a mix of dark humor and personal texture. He calls the last decade a mutual “FAFO era,” where both sides have learned hard lessons about power, incentives, and overreach. Then he closes the episode in classic Chris fashion: weather report, coffee, library plans, ongoing Meshtastic tinkering, a quick health update, and a reminder that the next mission is getting back to fighting shape.

Welcome back to The Chris Abraham Show. This episode collects Sessions 27 28 and 29 of our Dungeons and Dragons campaign The Curse of Strahd and turns them into one continuous descent into Castle Ravenloft.

If you are not a D and D person, here is the simple setup. Our small band of adventurers is trapped in Barovia, a mist locked valley ruled by Strahd von Zarovich, an ancient vampire lord with the patience of a spider and the manners of a king. We have been trying to protect Ireena Kolyana from him, recover the Amulet of Ravenkind, and stay alive long enough to do something that matters. Recently we failed to retrieve that amulet in Vallaki, lied to Ireena’s brother Ismark to keep him from charging into a suicide mission, and then finally had to admit the truth. Ireena was taken by Strahd.

So when the invitation arrives, we accept it. Dinner at Ravenloft. Polite. Civilized. Completely insane.

On the road, Barovia reminds us that travel is never just travel. Revenants on a skeletal horse ambush the party and an ogre zombie joins the slaughter. Ismark is dropped in the chaos and only survives because Urihorn rides in on his mountain lion and drags him back from the edge. The undead die laughing with a promise that they will meet us again.

Then the castle welcomes us. An unmanned coach. A swaying drawbridge over a gorge. Doors opening by themselves. Rahadin, Strahd’s chamberlain, arriving with a choir of invisible screams. A banquet hall glittering with chandeliers and a feast laid out like a joke.

Strahd plays the gracious host and then reveals the knife. Ireena enters. So does Yeska, a young altar boy we once tried to keep safe. Both are vampires now. And Ireena is wearing the Amulet of Ravenkind, the holy artifact we lost and desperately needed. The room goes cold in the way only a story can go cold when you realize the villain has been moving pieces you did not even know were on the board.

From there, we start exploring Ravenloft and the castle starts teaching us its rules. Vampire spawn watch from the walls. A ruined chapel dares us to touch what should not be touched. Secret passages lead to trapped rooms. A captive accountant named Lief sits chained to a desk keeping Strahd’s books like bureaucracy is also immortal. A maid begs to be rescued. A centuries old portrait shows Ireena as if she has always been here.

And then the traps get personal. A coffer releases a green gas that drops party members without a fair fight. An animated suit of red armor hunts like a machine and kills Ismark. When we wake later, the castle has rearranged the scene. Bodies are missing. The fire relights itself. Evidence disappears. A bell summons spiders. Burning webs threatens to burn the whole structure down. A tub of blood erupts with a screaming figure and then the blood is gone like it never existed.

Finally, a dusty dining room offers one last bait. A wedding cake explodes. And Strahd arrives not as a man in a cape, but as a pressure in the air, an invisible silhouette reaching for us.

This is the Ravenloft arc where hospitality becomes horror, where grief becomes motion, and where the castle itself feels like the weapon.

Cast and characters
Chris as Radley human Eldritch Knight
Sean D as Urihorn Tenpenny halfling Beastmaster with a mountain lion
Cary as Perlan Goodshadow halfling Monk
Trip as Daermon Cobain elf Arcane Trickster
DM Sean S

If you enjoy gothic horror fantasy, actual play storytelling, and campaigns that refuse to let anyone feel comfortable, you are in the right place.

Session Twenty-Six picks up at a moment where survival has stopped feeling temporary. By now, the party understands that Barovia doesn’t reset between victories. Vallaki, once a place to rest and resupply, has become hostile ground. We’re no longer visitors. We’re trespassers.

The objective is narrow and urgent: recover the Amulet of Ravenkind. Losing a relic capable of harming vampires in Strahd’s domain isn’t a setback. It’s a liability. Lady Fiona Wachter, newly installed as Vallaki’s burgomaster, is the most likely person holding it. Her family predates Strahd’s rule, and in Barovia, old families tend to survive by making old bargains.

We enter her house through the basement. That alone says something about how this campaign has shifted.

The cellar looks ordinary until it isn’t. Eight skeletons tear themselves out of the dirt floor, remnants of people who likely believed Vallaki was safer than the road. The fight is quick and decisive. What would have been a near-death struggle earlier in the campaign is handled with efficiency. Not confidence. Experience.

Radley, the human fighter, has fully settled into his role as an Eldritch Knight. Early in the campaign he relied on armor and luck. Now he holds ground deliberately, mixing blade work with defensive magic. Urihorn, the halfling ranger who no longer casts a shadow, controls distance and terrain, his connection to his animal companion reinforcing a steadiness Barovia hasn’t yet taken from him. Daermon, the arcane trickster, turns positioning and timing into damage. Perlan, the monk newly arrived to the valley, already fights like someone who understands that hesitation gets you killed here.

After the skeletons fall, we notice something worse than the combat itself: signs of frequent foot traffic worn into the dirt. A wall rotates, revealing a hidden chamber. Five chairs sit around a pentagram. No bodies. No ritual in progress. Just evidence that this house hosts meetings, not accidents.

That’s Lady Wachter’s real danger. Not sudden violence, but organization.

Outside the house, the tension shifts from combat to consequence. Ismark, burgomaster of Barovia Village and brother to Ireena, presses us for answers we’ve been avoiding. Until now, we’ve lied to him about his sister’s fate. Not out of cruelty, but because the truth in Barovia doesn’t bring closure. It brings reckless action.

The lie collapses anyway.

Radley carries that moment harder than most. He’s now the only survivor of his original party. Everyone else from those early days is dead. Burned. Taken. Left behind. He isn’t still alive because he’s exceptional. He’s alive because he adapted.

At the end of the session, the party reaches Level 7.

Mechanically, this is a meaningful step. Fighters gain stronger combat options. Rogues and monks become harder to pin down. Spellcasters unlock deeper resources. Everyone gains resilience and flexibility.

Narratively, the level-up marks something quieter: we’re no longer reacting. We’re preparing.

Session Twenty-Six doesn’t end with a win. It ends with clarity. Vallaki is compromised. Lady Wachter is entrenched. Strahd is still ahead of us.

And whatever comes next won’t be handled politely.

In Barovia, that’s progress.