The Curse of Strahd NPC Roadmap: 8 commissions worth making

Curse of Strahd has somewhere north of fifty named NPCs. If you tried to paint all of them, the campaign would be over before the pack shipped. The honest question for any GM running this module is not how many portraits can I afford? — it is which eight will my players actually remember? This is the roadmap I send every GM who emails me about a Curse of Strahd commission. Eight names. The order they enter the story. The week of the campaign each one matters most. And the budget conversation about whether you need the full eight at all.

If you have already read the process walkthrough on the six-week NPC pack, this piece is the planning document that should come before that one. The pack-build article tells you how I paint eight NPCs in one continuous run. This article tells you which eight, and why those eight.

Contents

• Why these eight NPCs, and not the other forty
• 1. Strahd von Zarovich — the centre
• 2. Ireena Kolyana — the catalyst
• 3. Madam Eva — the prophecy
• 4. Ezmerelda d'Avenir — the ally
• 5. Rictavio — the disguise
• 6. Kasimir Velikov — the side quest
• 7. Victor Vallakovich — the comic relief
• 8. Sergei flashback — the backstory beat
• The chapter pacing and suggested order
• Full pack vs essentials-only — the budget conversation
• Where to start a brief

Why these eight

A campaign module has too many faces. The temptation is to commission a portrait for everyone with a name in the book, and the result is a stack of portraits the players never look at. The opposite temptation is to commission only Strahd, which is what most GMs do, and the result is that every other Barovian feels like an index card.

The right number is somewhere in the middle, and the right selection matters more than the count. The eight names below are the ones that pay off the cost of a commission. They appear at moments when the players need a visual hook to anchor them, and they appear often enough that the portrait gets used at the table more than once.

Bran, a GM running his second Strahd campaign through summer 2025, emailed me with a list of fourteen NPCs he wanted painted. We spent ninety minutes cutting that list down to eight. Two of the fourteen never appear after Chapter 3. Three were functionally interchangeable Vallaki shopkeepers. The remaining eight ended up on this list, and Bran told me afterwards that he could not now imagine the campaign without those eight on the table.

An NPC earns a portrait when at least two of these are true: they appear in three or more sessions, they have a moment where the players need to recognise them at a glance, they carry an emotional beat the GM wants to land, or they have a costume the players will keep talking about. Below is who clears that bar and why.

1. Strahd

The centre of the campaign and the only non-negotiable on this list. A painted Strahd at the table fixes the players' mental image of the count from session one.

I have written a longer piece on what makes a Strahd portrait actually look like Strahd, so I will not rehash the decisions here. The short version: gray eyes not red, late-Renaissance eastern European cuts, no visible fangs in a neutral expression, and pick a campaign moment before the brief goes anywhere near a canvas.

In the pack schedule, Strahd is week one or week two because every other NPC's palette and lighting gets calibrated against him. He is the north star.

2. Ireena

Ireena Kolyana is the campaign's emotional centre. She is the daughter of the late burgomaster of Barovia, the current Tatyana reincarnation, and the person Strahd is hunting. Without Ireena in the foreground, the campaign loses its stakes.

The decision that matters most for an Ireena portrait is the relationship between her painting and Strahd's. If they are painted as a matched pair — and I recommend they are — the lighting should mirror across the two canvases. Strahd catches his key light from one side, Ireena from the other, and when the two portraits sit beside each other on the GM's table the light falls toward each other. The players read it as a relationship before they consciously notice why.

Ireena's palette is the warmest in the pack. Copper hair, soft pink underpainting, a moss-green dress her father could have afforded as the burgomaster of a struggling town. Her gaze should not meet the viewer directly — she is the one being protected, not the one in charge of the room.

3. Madam Eva

Madam Eva is the Vistani seer who reads the players' tarokka deck. She does most of her work in one session. That sounds like a low-ROI commission. It is not — the players will go back to that prophecy every session for the rest of the campaign, rereading the cards, arguing about what they meant. A portrait of Madam Eva on the GM's table is the visual anchor for the most important single conversation in the module.

Mei, a GM running the campaign in late 2024, told me her players spent twenty minutes on a Discord call before one session rereading the prophecy out loud. Madam Eva's portrait was the avatar on the call.

I paint Madam Eva with the most saturated palette in the pack — a deep madder red shawl that no other portrait uses. Heavy texture in the skin, brush marks left visible, lit from below by a fire that is implied rather than shown.

4. Ezmerelda

Ezmerelda d'Avenir is the half-Vistani monster hunter who can become a party ally if the players play their cards right. She is the only NPC in the module who is competent, trustworthy, and on the players' side. That makes her the rarest visual type in Barovia, and worth a commission.

Direct eye contact is the cheapest, most reliable way to make a character read as trustworthy. I save it for the one NPC who actually is.

Ezmerelda is the one portrait in the pack where the subject looks straight at the viewer. She wears a practical leather coat, a holy symbol just visible at her throat, modern-for-the-setting boots that show she has actually travelled. The brief is short. The painting almost paints itself once you have decided she is the trustworthy one.

5. Rictavio

Rictavio is the campaign's trick. A travelling entertainer at the Blue Water Inn in Vallaki who is actually Rudolph van Richten, the setting's most famous vampire hunter, in deep disguise. The players are supposed to figure this out eventually.

A portrait of Rictavio is one of the clues. I paint him with a slightly theatrical posture, a waxed mustache that does not quite sit right, a smile that is doing none of the work his eyes are doing. The players spend twenty minutes at the table staring at the face trying to figure out what is off. That is the painting working as in-world evidence. Rictavio is the hardest of the eight to brief — the portrait has to read as both charming entertainer and something is wrong here in the same frame. The trick is in the eyes.

6. Kasimir

Kasimir Velikov is the dusk elf in mourning at Krezk, obsessed with bringing back his sister Patrina. He runs the campaign's biggest side quest, the Amber Temple — most parties either visit or avoid the Temple based entirely on how compelling Kasimir is at the table.

Kasimir is the only non-human face in the core pack. I paint him in profile, looking off-frame, with the key light catching the back of his head rather than his face. His skin is the coolest in the pack, a desaturated lavender-gray that lets him sit visually apart from the Barovians without screaming elf. His grief is in the posture — shoulders rotated away from the viewer, hands not visible. If your party is unlikely to visit the Amber Temple, drop Kasimir from the pack and swap in another character.

7. Victor

Victor Vallakovich is the sixteen-year-old apprentice wizard with delusions of competence, son of the Vallaki burgomaster, the only character in the module whose tone is genuinely funny. Curse of Strahd is a heavy campaign. Victor is the relief valve.

I paint him three-quarter, slightly too close to the picture plane, with a robe that is one size too big and a singed sleeve he clearly does not want you to notice. His key light is brighter than anyone else's in the pack, almost overexposing his forehead. He is the only portrait where I let the background go nearly white, because he does not yet understand what he is living through. This is the portrait the players will quote at each other in Discord for months.

8. Sergei flashback

Sergei was Strahd's younger brother, the one Tatyana actually loved, whose death at Strahd's hands kicked off the entire curse. He never appears in the present-day campaign. He appears in a flashback that some GMs play through and some skip.

If your campaign hits the Sergei flashback at all, the portrait pays for itself. It is the only image in the pack set in the past — Sergei in his wedding clothes, lit with morning light instead of candlelight, painted in slightly softer brushwork to read as a memory. The only piece of the pack that does not feel like Barovia. The contrast is the whole point. If your players skip the flashback, swap Sergei for Lady Wachter, Father Donavich, or the Abbot of Krezk — whichever your campaign leans on.

Chapter pacing

The module's structure tells you when each portrait gets used. Roughly, in published-module order:

• Chapter 1 (Barovia village): Ireena and Strahd both enter. Both portraits on the table from session one.
• Chapter 2 (Tser Pool encampment): Madam Eva. The portrait carries the prophecy through the rest of the campaign.
• Chapter 3 (Vallaki): Rictavio, Victor, and possibly Ezmerelda. The Vallaki arc is the longest single chapter and benefits most from multiple painted NPCs.
• Chapter 4 (Krezk and the Amber Temple): Kasimir. The portrait lands when the party meets him, often around session ten or twelve.
• Optional flashback: Sergei. Whenever your campaign hits it.

If you commission the pack before session one, the schedule tells me the painting order. Strahd and Ireena first. Madam Eva second. Rictavio and Victor third. Kasimir and Ezmerelda fourth. Sergei last. The earliest portraits drop weeks before they are needed; the later ones land just before their chapters.

Budget conversation

Eight portraits is the full pack and the maximum I recommend. It is also not the only option, and most GMs do not order the full pack on first contact.

The three budget tiers I most often quote:

• Essentials-only (3 portraits). Strahd, Ireena, Madam Eva. The three NPCs whose presence is felt in every single session. This is the smallest commission that meaningfully changes the table experience.
• Core six (6 portraits). Add Ezmerelda, Rictavio, Victor. Now the long Vallaki arc has visual anchors and the players have a recurring ally to recognise.
• Full pack (8 portraits). Add Kasimir and Sergei. The pack is now complete for a campaign that visits the Amber Temple and plays through the flashback.

A pack commission saves per-portrait cost against one-offs spread across the campaign, because I batch the early stages and lock the palette once. The math works best on the full pack.

Sera, a GM who emailed me in February 2025, started with essentials-only because she was not sure her campaign would last past the Vallaki arc. It lasted. Eight months later she came back and ordered the remaining five as a top-up, and we matched the style by pulling out the original palette and lighting notes. If your budget cannot support the full eight, essentials-only is the right place to start, and we can extend later.

Closing

A Curse of Strahd commission is one of the few campaign-prep purchases that actually changes how the campaign feels at the table. Eight named faces, painted to match, sitting alongside the GM's screen. The players stop forgetting which name belongs to which NPC. The prophecy lands harder. Victor gets a laugh.

If you have already read the six-week pack process walkthrough, you know how the pack comes together once the names are picked. The Strahd portrait deep-dive covers the central commission. The horror character art guide and the D&D 5e commission guide sit above both pieces as the broader entry points. When you are ready, the order form is where the pack starts — mention which tier you want and roughly when your session zero is.

Curse of Strahd is a Wizards of the Coast property. The studio paints NPC packs as personal-use commissions for individual GMs and players, never for commercial resale. The GM world-building service page has the closest portfolio references for what an eight-portrait pack actually looks like in hand.