The Chris Abraham Show

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