The village map shows 157 total structures. Removing the six named locations leaves 151 residential buildings. At 60% occupancy, one man per occupied house, a 30% chance of a wife, and a 10% chance of children, this yields 91 occupied homes: 91 men, 27 wives, roughly 41 children, and 9 named NPCs. Village total: approximately 168.

The 60 empty houses matter as much as the occupied ones. They are the physical record of centuries of attrition: families that died out, people who tried to flee and did not survive the fog, households that simply stopped one night. The Rhenari add an estimated 35 to 40, bringing the valley total to approximately 200.

The Rhenari figure is an inference, not a direct count: 11 statted camp members, a plausible wandering encounter group averaging around 16, and non-combatants making up the remainder. They are protected clients in a valley that has no other patrons. Unlike the villagers, they are not ordinary prey.

Of approximately 200 living humans in Barovia, roughly 33 have a character class of any kind. The remaining 167 are unstatted villagers and non-combatant Rhenari. The genuine fighting ratio is approximately ten hostile combatants per one human fighter.

Notable Households

Bildrath Cantemir runs the only functioning commercial establishment in the village, pricing recovered goods at ten times standard rates. This is not simple gouging. In a sealed valley with no supply lines, the most plausible source for most of the shop’s stock is previous adventuring parties. His nephew Parriwimple, estimated in his twenties to early thirties and orphaned young under circumstances consistent with valley predation, has been the building’s primary defence since his mid-teens. His 9th level fighter status in a village of zero-level men is explained by decades of repeated lethal encounters against the full spectrum of valley threats, including trained adventurers who attempted to take rather than buy. Parriwimple almost certainly carries equipment from Bildrath’s recovered stock adequate to deal with undead, since an employee who cannot harm the valley’s primary threat is a liability Bildrath would not accept.

Father Donavich maintains the church and its graveyard. He has buried villagers, Rhenari, and adventurers alike across his entire ministry. He knows which graves are occupied and which are not, having observed the graveyard change overnight on occasions the module does not specify. In a valley where that distinction is operationally significant, Donavich’s knowledge of the graveyard is the most complete record of the valley’s losses available to any living person. The graveyard itself functions as an archive of failed expeditions: foreign names on markers, equipment too damaged or personal to trade, graves opened from within.

Subsistence

The module describes the Svalich Woods as dominated by wolf packs of up to 25 animals in Strahd’s nightly attack alone, with additional worg patrols. Worgs are Semi- to Low intelligence and communicate with wolves. A predator load of this scale on a sealed valley implies that conventional game hunting has been severely depleted. The realistic protein sources available to villagers are river fishing from the Ivlis, small-animal trapping close to the village perimeter, and opportunistic hunting of wolves themselves in hard winters, preferring wolves over worgs on the reasonable inference that a missing wolf is less likely to be reported than a missing worg. Agriculture on the land of what was once a larger settlement, with surviving households working fields formerly maintained by more people, is the primary food base. The 60 empty houses represent abandoned agricultural capacity as much as lost population.

The witches in K56, by contrast, forage across a wider range with greater confidence, protected from wolf encounters by Strahd’s active interest in keeping them functional. Their foraging access extends to plant materials, fungi, and components the wolves do not compete for. This is what distinguishes their provisioning from the villagers’ rather than any significant game advantage.

Fifty-four combat-capable hostile entities occupy fixed locations across the module, independent of any random encounter roll. The tally is room-by-room: 10 skeletons (K69), 8 Strahd zombies (K28, K76), 7 witches (K56), 5 giant spiders (K40), 3 hellhounds (Crypt 38), 3 standard zombies (K65), 3 cat familiars (K54), 2 wraiths (K35), 1 werewolf (K75), and 12 singular entities.

The split is 29 undead, 19 non-undead hostile, and 6 other. Undead includes Strahd himself and Helga alongside the zombies, skeletons, wraiths, ghost, spectre, banshee, and wight trap. Non-undead hostile covers witches, spiders, cats, hellhounds, and the werewolf. Other covers shadow demon, nightmare, trapper, green slime, guardian portrait, and Guardian of Sorrow.

If every encounter table entry fires exactly once, a strict finite reading, the total hostile ceiling is approximately 205, excluding non-combatant bats. The figures below are independent encounter-source reservoirs, not components of a single additive sum. Tables draw from overlapping populations; ~205 is a ceiling, not a sum.

The model contains a self-consuming logic. Wights drain energy levels; any human killed by a wight rises as a wight. Ghouls propagate similarly. The 200 living humans are therefore not only the target population but the reserve supply of future undead. The module does not describe a stable equilibrium. It describes a clock.

The module runs its intelligent undead as pure combat encounters. The stat blocks do not. Wights, wraiths, and spectres carry High intelligence (13 to 14) with Lawful Evil alignment. Ghasts are Very Intelligent (11 to 12), Chaotic Evil. This does not mean smarter than a wolf. It means human-level cognition: planning, recognition, social awareness, deliberate use of environment and knowledge.

Three claims follow, with different evidential weight. That these creatures are capable of recognising living people they formerly knew is strongly supported, given local origin and a sealed valley. That they may retain significant knowledge of their former lives is probable but degrades with age. That they may understand what they have become is compatible with their intelligence and alignment, and explicit for vampires and ghosts, though not directly stated for wights and wraiths.

The structural implication the module never draws: the nighttime encounter tables do not describe aimless threats. They describe former Barovians, born in this valley, who knew its streets and families, now acting with intelligence, deliberate malice, and probable recognition of their targets within the same community they came from.

Barovia is not populated by monsters. It is populated by former people who now act as monsters. The barred doors become rational. The village paralysis becomes socially informed fear. The encounter tables become the reappearance, night after night, of the community’s own dead.

What follows is interpretive rather than directly stated in the module. It is presented as the reading that best fits the internal logic of I6’s closed system, not as a claim about what the module explicitly describes.

The seven witches of K56 are best explained as local recruits from the valley’s settled human population. The valley has been sealed for centuries and external recruitment is implausible at scale. They are the only group Strahd keeps alive in the castle rather than turning or destroying, which implies they provide something he values that death would extinguish. Their communal spellbook, held collectively rather than individually, is consistent with a controlled arrangement: one visible resource is easier to monitor than seven private ones. Their individual hit points suggest recruitment across different periods rather than a single founding event. Some are recent enough that village connections may still be living memory.

The valley’s only sources of traded goods and magical texts are adventuring parties who entered and did not leave. Bildrath’s stock is most plausibly explained as recovered equipment from those parties rather than from any external supply chain that no longer exists. The graveyard, maintained by Donavich, is the physical record of where those people ended up.

The most coherent reading of the valley’s exchange economy is that Bildrath and the witches occupy complementary positions within it. The witches have access to the castle interior and can recover magical materials, including spellbooks, from adventurer deaths there. Bildrath has practical goods and no obvious use for spellbooks. The witches have no obvious use for swords and armour but need supplies they cannot safely obtain themselves. More speculatively, a trade relationship between them is the simplest explanation for how both populations remain provisioned. That relationship is not stated in the module and should be treated as speculation, not established fact.