Blinsky and the Doll
Area N7: Blinsky Toys, Vallaki
The Shop
Area N7, down a side street. A wooden sign shaped like a rocking horse. Through dirty glass windows: toys on display, and a placard reading "Is No Fun, Is No Blinsky!"
Gadof Blinsky is the toymaker. Heavyset, wearing a moth-eaten jester's cap during store hours — more habit than performance. He has not had a real paying customer in months except for a traveler named Rictavio, who bought a stuffed Vistana doll two weeks ago and gave Blinsky his pet monkey, Piccolo, as a companion. Piccolo now wears a custom ballerina tutu and fetches toys from high shelves.
Blinsky is a genuinely strange man who makes genuinely strange toys and cannot understand why no one wants them. His worldview is sincere: he believes the burgomaster is right that happiness is the path out of Barovia, and he contributes by making toys for children. The toys are: a headless doll with a sack of attachable heads (one with its eyes and mouth stitched shut), a miniature gallows with a working trapdoor, a set of wooden nesting dolls that age into a mummified corpse at the center, a wind-up merry-go-round with wolves chasing children instead of horses, a ventriloquist's dummy of Strahd. None of this strikes Blinsky as unusual.
He will greet the party warmly. He will try to sell them something.
The Ireena Dolls
On a side shelf, not for sale: a doll. Auburn hair. Pale skin. A face that has been refined over dozens of iterations into something specific and accurate. It does not look like a generic doll. It looks like a particular person.
Blinsky makes these for Izek Strazni, the burgomaster's henchman. Izek does not pay — he threatens to burn the shop unless a new doll is delivered monthly. Each doll is modeled on a description Izek gives verbally, and each one has gotten closer to the face he is describing. Blinsky does not know the face belongs to anyone real. He thinks it is a dream Izek is chasing.
Izek's bedroom in the burgomaster's mansion (area N3j) is full of these dolls — on shelves, on the bed, dozens of them, all the same face. He has been trying to find her for years.
The face is Ireena Kolyana's.
Ireena is the woman Strahd has been pursuing across lifetimes — she carries the soul of Tatyana, whom Strahd murdered his brother for and could not keep. Izek does not know this. He does not know Ireena. He has been dreaming of her face without knowing her name, in a way that suggests the dream was not entirely his own. Whether Strahd planted it — and what Izek would do if he found her — is a question that has not been put in the open.
What the Party Knows (and Doesn't)
At this point in the campaign:
- The party has not directly spent significant time with Ireena
- Strahd's obsession with finding and possessing a specific woman is known at an abstract level
- The dolls put a face on that obsession in a way that is both more specific and more unsettling than the abstract version
If the party asks Blinsky where Ireena Kolyana is, he will not know the name. If they describe her and he recognizes the match to the dolls, he will put it together slowly and visibly. He will not be happy about what he has been making.
Piccolo
The monkey. Given to Blinsky by Rictavio (Van Richten) two weeks ago. Piccolo is fond of Blinsky and competent at fetching things. He is also the reason Van Richten gave him away — the monkey was not welcome at the Blue Water Inn.
Van Richten may want Piccolo back at some point. More immediately: Piccolo is a thread connecting Blinsky to Rictavio, which the party may find useful if they are trying to figure out who Rictavio actually is.
Von Weerg's Masterpiece
Blinsky considers himself a student of Fritz von Weerg, a legendary inventor and toymaker. He has heard rumors that von Weerg's greatest invention — a clockwork man — is somewhere inside Castle Ravenloft. He will ask the party, if they are headed there, to find it and bring it to him. He has nothing to offer but Piccolo and whatever toy they want made. He is sincere about this request in a way that is almost touching given the circumstances.
The clockwork man is real. It is in the castle. What condition it is in and what it does is not yet defined — decide before the party reaches Ravenloft.
The Torn Doll in Van Richten's Wagon
In Van Richten's carnival wagon at the Arasek Stockyard (campaign canon; the book says N5), there are the torn-up remains of a doll — a Vistana effigy, shredded by the saber-toothed tiger inside. Stitched into its pants: "Is No Fun, Is No Blinsky!" Van Richten bought this doll from Blinsky when he came in two weeks ago. He bought it to give the tiger something to destroy — an effigy of the Vistani he intends to send the tiger against.
Blinsky made this doll. Blinsky made the Ireena dolls. The same hands and the same shop connect a Vistani revenge weapon and a woman's face Izek has been dreaming about for years. The toy store is the center of a web Blinsky does not know he is part of.