is that it's an isekai story without permanence. on the rare occasion that isekais are effective they function because the outworlder protagonist(s) can't—or won't—leave. they are going to live the rest of their life in the new world, and the bonds they make there are as lifelong as any other. that's their life, not just a weird three-month adventure; the consequences of what they might do are permanent, at least in theory. (practically the permanent negative consequences are sabotaged by the godlike-powers aspect of many of these shows, but even in those cases the positive ones remain)
curse of strahd, on the other hand, has the characters start the adventure by entering strahd's tiny little pocket-transylvania and end it by leaving the place. their memories are the only lasting consequences of the whole affair, which would be fine for like a One Fucked Up Night-type story (cf. one night strahd) but leaves a campaign that can take 50 hours feeling entirely too hollow. plus it's just narratively incoherent that this chick strahd's hunting is going to get bailed out by four random strangers who have no connection to this place or anything happening here. on top of that the party is also dramatically cut off from their pasts, meaning nothing from those times can ever crop up to haunt them physically, it's all emotional and memory-based. you can get away with this for one character, maybe two, but you start to lose drama after that point. backstories should matter!
so: how do we fix this?
the answer, of course, is to reverse the isekai. you don't go to the other world, it comes to you; instead of getting sucked into strahd's knockoff eastern europe, that place writes itself on top of an existing town that the protagonists already live in (or at least are visiting and/or semi-familiar with.) whatever NPCs are most relevant either fall into the existing world or merge with existing people or both. it opens up so many options:
- you can play it totally straight. it writes itself onto baldur's gate or neverwinter or Generic Fantasy City, strahd kills the ruling lord or duke, wolves start haunting the streets, etc.
- you can enter an entirely different genre. it writes itself onto an industrial city, or a modern one, or a cyberpunk city. this option adds flexibility about whether magic even existed before this shit happened, which can help amp the horror by nature of forcing the story onto even more deeply-unprepared protagonists
- hell, you can even fuck with the tone. have it write itself onto like a classic-americana high school town. i can't believe the principal got hypnotized by a vampire!
it just solves so many problems. your characters can only barely have meaningful backstory in the adventure as written because none of that stuff can ever come up. but your ranger's difficult relationship with their mom over religious differences is way more interesting if their mom gets fused with a fallen angel and suddenly begins to overflow with the magic of the heavens. wotsy won't pay me to do this and i'll be stunned if they come up with it themselves but there's a free idea for the scant few followers i have who might ever play a game of actual dnd
