Rudolph van Richten was once an ordinary doctor living on the edge of the village of Barovia with his wife Ingrid and their son Erasmus. Times were dark; with Strahd asleep, his consorts and minions roamed Barovia wreaking havoc unchecked; but the van Richtens were happy.

In a small village in the mountains, on the banks of the lake at the mouth of the Ivlis River, another family lived. Altyn, daughter of the warrior-saint Lugdana, moved herself and her young daughter Natalya to the village after her mother's heroic death, fearing retribution from the villains Lugdana spent her life fighting. There, Natalya grew up, and met and married her wife, the hakaan Barsina, one of Adaska's children. Natalya and Barsina had a daughter, Marya Natalyevna, and raised her on stories of her heroic great-grandmother; they were happy.

On a day like any other, Van Richten set off to a distant village to treat a patient who could not travel to him. The patient lived, but when he returned home the next night, he found disaster had struck in his absence. His wife was dead, and his teenage son missing, with no witnesses left alive to tell him where Erasmus had been taken, or by whom.

Van Richten searched for weeks for any clues to where his son had been taken, and eventually learned that he had been seen at Castle Ravenloft. He snuck into the castle, hoping to rescue his son, but he was too late. Erasmus had already been turned into a vampire spawn by Strahd's consort Volenta Popofsky, and Van Richten was forced to slay his son to escape with his life.

Van Richten swore to avenge his son, kill Volenta, and destroy as many of Strahd's other minions as he could. He left the village of Barovia, moved into the tower at Lake Baratok, and began collecting as much lore on monsters as he could find, wherever he could find it, whether scavenged from old libraries or collected from new arrivals to the Mists. He began hunting, and waited for the perfect chance at vengeance.

That chance came some years later, when Volenta's spies learned that Lugdana's descendants still lived and could be found in that small mountain village. Van Richten heard that Volenta planned a hunt, and planned to set an ambush for her. Van Richten, obsessed with revenge to the exclusion of all else, feared that his ambush would fail if Natalya's family visibly prepared for Volenta's impending attack. He did not warn them.

When Volenta arrived, she brought an advance guard of dozens of ghouls. Van Richten attacked, as he had planned. While he dueled Volenta, her ghouls laid waste to the village, slaughtering its few inhabitants—all but one. Earlier that night, young Marya snuck away from home into the night, toy sword in hand, determined to practice her fighting skills to be just like her great-grandmother the hero. When Marya returned, hours later, she found her village devastated, her family dead, and Van Richten long gone. She wandered the woods for weeks, eventually making her way toward the fishing village northwest of Vallaki, where she was found by the shadow elf Kasimir Velikov.

Van Richten, defeated in his duel with Volenta, fled back to his tower, but knew it was too close to town for true safety. He used the last dregs of his magic to transport himself and his library to a cave on Mount Baratok. When his injuries healed, he returned to monster hunting, but cautiously: Volenta would be looking for him, and he knew himself not yet strong enough to defeat her once and for all. As he appeared just in time to slay ghouls, disintegrate skeletons, and fend off dire wolves menacing the ordinary people of Barovia, then disappeared again just as swiftly, Van Richten's skills became legend.

Years passed, and Marya grew up, raised by Kasimir, Kithara, and Artabānu alongside Kithara's own child Sitarey. Marya assumed, mostly correctly, that Strahd or his minions were responsible for her family's violent deaths. When she became an adult and chose her name (Marya), she set out to find the now-legendary monster hunter Van Richten, and, after years of searching, succeeded, tracking him down in his secret home on Mount Baratok and convincing him to take her on as an apprentice.

Van Richten, who had never met Marya—only her mothers—trained Marya in everything he knew, and the two became close. Five years into her apprenticeship, Marya revealed her origins and her true goal: to avenge her family by killing Strahd. Consumed by guilt and fear for Marya's safety, Van Richten staged a fight, telling Marya that she should give up and that she would never amount to anything as a monster hunter.

Devastated by her mentor's rejection, Marya left Van Richten's home in a rage, and Van Richten began preparations for his last hunt: to kill Strahd, to save Marya as he failed to save her family, or to die trying.

Alas for Van Richten, his cruelty did not inspire Marya to take up a safer line of work. Instead, she immediately hunted down the worst monster she could find—the vicious werewolf Kiril Stoyanovich, also known as the Silver Terror, who bit Marya's leg off after a rescue mission gone wrong. Sidelined by the injury for months, Marya has returned to work with a brand-new prosthetic and fire in her heart. She now hunts werewolves in the woods near Lake Baratok, waiting for an opportunity to kill the Devil himself.