Falkovnia got, as I understand it, a bit of a revamp in Van Richten's. In earlier editions, the male Vlad Drakov was a bit more similar to the historical Vlad the Impaler while Strahd was more similar to Bram Stoker's Dracula, who was loosely (loosely) based on the historical Wallachian nobleman (indeed, I believe that "Dracula" - meaning "Son of the Dragon," was not exclusively used by Vlad and that Stoker's vampiric creation might have only coincidentally been connected to the historical figure).
Anyway, Vladeska Drakov is still a tyrannical ruler over her domain of dread, but the threat here is not vampiric but instead the undead: Falkovnia is the zombie apocalypse (or "zombocalypse," as I like to call it) domain.
The zombie genre has been around since the 1960s, and you could argue that there are antecedents that might also count. But I think there's been an interesting move in the last few decades in which the zombies are more background pressures that then reveal more direct villains in humans who allow themselves to sink to new levels of brutality in the face of this pressure. 28 Days Later and its various sequels and The Walking Dead are some examples of this: zombies don't really grow and evolve as threats, and once you've got a good fortified system for keeping them at bay, they're largely taken care of.
Instead, the horror of these stories is how the safety of a society that has broken down erodes - it's not just that there are flesh-hungry ghouls in the streets (interestingly, George Romero, establishing the trope for the genre, never calls the zombies in Night of the Living Dead zombies, and indeed preferred the term "ghoul") but that the structures of authority and security have broken down.
Now, there's plenty of social commentary you can make about how even without zombies, those systems have already been a threat, but I think there's something to be said about how the fear of terrorists in the early part of this century (aren't suicide bombers kind of "zombie-like?" in their disregard for their own lives?) led to a militarization of police forces across the US. The vague threat, whether that be terrorists, foreign gangs, or zombies, starts to feel far less urgent than the growing tyranny and brutality of people who are ostensibly here for our protection.
There's a pretty obvious route for an adventure in Falkovnia, where the party gets press-ganged into defending the capital, Lekar. Every month, the zombies swarm the place and things feel doomed, that this is a last stand and the only possible outcome is annihilation, only for the survivors to just barely make it through the night after heavy losses.
But what happens the rest of the month? There's a whole wide region to explore here.
As I see it, an interesting narrative here would be for the party to encounter a group of deserters. Commanded by a former Talon (Drakov's elite kind of state-security forces who are there to capture deserters and punish them with impalement) whom we'll call Svorich, a group of perhaps fifty soldiers were sent out on patrol by Drakov and came to Zamirara Ranch (a location on the map that doesn't have a description in Van Richten's).
The soldiers found that the Zamiara family had built an underground granary to store food, and were planning on offering it as a hiding place for their neighbors, rather than giving their grains to the army to be taken back to Lekar. This "hoarding" of critical supplies was considered criminal, and so the entire family was impaled and put on display at the front of the ranch as punishment.
However, upon realizing that the Zamiaras had, in fact, built a highly defensible position, Svorich decided that he thought his chances of survival there were better than back in Lekar, and so ordered his men to seize the underground bunker and take up residence there. While they still use the authority of the Blood Falcon, the symbol of Vladeska Drakov, the truth is that they're actually deserters, and will stop at nothing to remain in control and prevent anyone from reporting on their crime.
All this happens before the party arrives.
We find the party crossing the Tithelands, extremely exposed out in the rural fields and having numerous draining encounters with zombies and other appropriate undead. They see lights at the ranch, and would naturally conclude that this is probably going to be at least a temporary respite from the undead.
Svorich and his people initially seem like allies, and the party might get their first uninterrupted long rest in a while under their protection. Svorich offers them shelter if they'll help out organizing and distributing the supplies that had been stored at the ranch, and to aid in keeping guard. There might be small side quests where the party, accompanied by some of his soldiers, go out on excursions to recover supplies from some of the nearby abandoned farms - the party might develop an attachment to some of the soldiers who go out on patrol with them.
However, Svorich's paranoia grows and grows the longer they stay there - he becomes convinced that the party was sent here by Drakov, and eventually tries to have them locked up and even executed. While Svorich's mind begins to unravel, the party might also start to find evidence of what actually happened here, maybe a letter from a nearby farmer thanking the Zamiaras for their offer of shelter, and announcing a plan to arrive there on a date that has already passed (these farmers were already killed by Svorich's people).
Svorich's forces are probably primarily Warriors of various kinds, perhaps with some Scouts. Depending on the level of the party, Svorich might be a Warrior Veteran or a Warrior Commander (the latter if we're talking late tier 2 or even tier 3).
But I think that, as paranoid as Svorich is, he's hesitant to make the first move - instead, if he begins to suspect that the party suspects him, he'll contrive to lock them out of the ranch's fortifications at night, when the undead are more active, even sacrificing some of his men if they'd gone out with the party.
Thus, the tension comes to a boil when the party has to fend off the undead, and then has to face down Svorich and his most loyal soldiers. The commotion might draw additional undead, and so the adventure might end not with the party taking Svorich down, but perhaps just fleeing while he's overwhelmed by zombies.
Next, we'll take a look at the black desert of Har'Akir, and the enormous network of tombs beneath the sands.
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