Regular readers of this blog will know that I occasionally go back through old adventures, look for ones that don’t quite work, but have a good soul, and reboot them into something new. Rebooting an adventure is a very different creative process from writing a new one — by adapting someone else’s older work, you’re channeling their ideas and creativity, adding and carving away, and hopefully ending up with something that suits modern gamers a little better.

This month I returned to both horror and pirates with A Crown of Fetters, a reboot of Anne Brown’s 1991 Ravenloft adventure, Ship of Horror. I stumbled upon this adventure because I wanted to run the new wonderful, gritty, OSR-ish Pirate Borg RPG at a local game convention. I didn’t have time to craft a new adventure for it, and wasn’t happy with the ones I found. But I saw a summary of Ship of Horror and decided it would work. The original proved too long for a 4-hour slot, but after a few weeks of hacking away at it, moving it from Ravenloft to the dark Caribbean, and making some tweaks… well, it became it’s own thing.

The 1991 Original

In the original 1991 adventure, the PCs find themselves on board the eponymous Ship of Horror, a haunted merchant ship. It was cursed because its captain routinely broke his contracts to bring the dead to a certain island for proper burial. Instead, he dumped them overboard — a man of efficiency! But eventually this caught up with him, and he and his ship were cursed.

To undo the curse, the PCs need to recover the lost bodies, which are scattered across the ocean… hope you AD&D players brought your druids or Potions of Water-breathing! That done, the PCs sail to their destination to find that it’s inhabited by a new type of undead – living vampire nobles. From there, they’re led to a third island, frozen and icy, which is ruled by a powerful the necromancer Meredoth, who was originally sourcing those bodies from the vampires. I’m not sure how many groups survived this final act, since the necromancer was 20th level, and the PCs only 8th… yikes.

I like a lot about Ship of Horror. Unlike my other reboots, where I found real flaws, nothing in this adventure especially wrong. Like most horror scenarios, I think the concept is stronger for low-level PCs, vs. high-level heroic ones. And, being an early example of how D&D tried moving away from its more straightforward sandbox roots, the pacing isn’t quite right in all the places. Not having any real rules for fear or sanity makes it more difficult to motivate players. But despite those things, Ship of Horror still somehow manages to pull off an authentic gothic horror tone which I wanted to retain. (The author even noted that change in direction in a recent interview: “One of the mantras in the TSR office was ‘never another save the princess scenario,” which this adventure is certainly not.)

My only other critique is that after such a strong, spooky beginning, I didn’t love that the last act played out as a dungeon crawl, with the PCs fighting their way through a frozen mausoleum filled with hundreds of undead minions.

So really, my version, A Crown of Fetters, is more of a love letter to Anne Brown’s original. So what changes did I make?

The Reboot

First, A Crown of Fetters moves the action to the Caribbean of 1661. This helps make it more familiar to new players, and I can pull in all kinds of pirate lore. Also, since I’m convinced that pirate adventures have to be about scrappy underdogs to feel right, the PCs are lowly scum and criminals who are forced to crew the ship, the Morning Passage, else the English governor hang them. He promises to pardon them if they work for the ship’s dubious captain for a couple of weeks, transporting mysterious cargo to his new estate.

My new adventure retains much of the original’s creepy first act. The Morning Passage is haunted by ghosts for many of the same reasons, but I changed the ghosts to have more differentiation and character. Now there’s not only a lost little girl, but also a murderous cackling skull of a drunk noble (who lost his head as the captain dumped his body overboard), and a sad, haunted painting of a soldier whose fiancé is onboard, getting seduced by the captain. The different characters are more fun for the GM to roleplay and for the PCs to interact with.

Stealing a bit from Call of Cthulhu tropes, the PCs can also find an occult book on the ship that let them learn more about its curse, and even summon some eldritch creatures to learn even more (at the cost of their sanity…). Leaning more into clues and investigative horror pulls the adventure away from its more straightforward 1990’s roots.

Adding Some Action

To add some action, I added a mad bishop who is sailing the seas hunting for the Morning Passage. He’s the one who fully reveals to the players that they’re cursed along with the ship, and cannot leave until they make amends. And rather than making the players scour the bottom of the sea to recover several corpses, I placed them all on a single haunted reef, a bony place of nightmares occupied by weird visions (and undead sharks).

And finally, I collapsed the original adventure’s two final destination islands into one. This streamlines it, and makes it easier to run as a one-shot. Arriving at Whispering Cay to bury the bodies, the PCs find that the governor’s under-construction estate is the home of his grandmother… a sultry necromancer who is using the bodies of nobles for her experiments into immortality. This final act now plays out differently, and can go many ways, with the PCs sneaking into her estate to end the curse, mounting a full-scale assault with the crew, or even having dinner with the woman and staging an assassination attempt. Gone are the legions of undead, now the PCs only have to deal with this lady, a few of her servants, and a single monster. This feels, to me, more like the ending of a horror movie.

Wrapping it Up

In the end, Crown of Fetters retains a lot of the same soul and plotting of Anne Brown’s original, but the new setting, characters, destinations, and tone change make it feel different from Ship of Horrors. I even slipped in some easter eggs for my other pirate-y horror adventure, Thrusher Manor.

Have you played the original Ravenloft Ship of Horror adventure? What was your experience like? Do you like the changes I made? Let me know in the comments below. (I also tried a slightly new format for this adventure – let me know if you prefer it or like the older format better)

Get the Adventure for FREE Here!

• A Crown of Fetters (GURPS Swashbucklers)
• A Crown of Fetters (GURPS Swashbucklers) – Printer Friendly
• A Crown of Fetters (Pirate Borg)
• A Crown of Fetters (Pirate Borg) – Printer Friendly
• A Crown of Fetters – VTT Assets

Related: Romantic Pirate Adventures