I learned a big lesson writing this month’s free adventure! Mood changes everything.

Coming off of Gotham ’39, a noir adventure filled with twists, interconnected families, and dark secrets, I yearned to move on to something simpler. Good GMs know when to pull back and do something different for their players (and they’re own sanity).

I picked an old adventure I had written ages ago, back when I was running weekly games for my friends and I didn’t have the time to create detailed scenarios. The adventure, “Ogre Prince,” was a simple one — the PCs were hired by a princess to hunt down three ogres in the nearby forest, one of which was her transformed brother. There were a few woodland encounters along the way, a big battle at the end, and if the PCs were smart, they wouldn’t accidentally kill the brother.

Beware – A New Mood Changes Everything

To keep it creatively interesting for me to re-adapt this adventure, I decided to change the mood. While I think the original adventure was set in the Forgotten Realms, I decided to shift to a dark folkloric feel. After all, the PCs are traveling into a haunted woods to find the cursed scion, and a dark folkloric mood is perfect for such a task. I had fun years ago writing the dark medieval Lands of the Dark Wicche adventure. Or, maybe I’ve just been inspired by too many Vaesen games!

Little did I know that that one decision would radically change everything — the story, the characters, the monsters, and the length of the adventure. The switch to dark folklore made massive changes to the adventure structure, including:

• In folklore, people get lost in the woods. Therefore, rather than a few linear encounters, the forest became a sprawling place, a sandbox with many, many possible encounters, both set ones and random ones.
• In folklore, whispered rumors build the world. The world of folklore is built on rumors: whispered half-truths about ogres with visions, druids who vanish in bark, and witches who turn into red-haired seductresses. Rumors are better than exposition. Folklore leaves the truth muddy—and tastier for players to uncover. Therefore, my forest needed lots of secrets, rumors, and familial relationships that were kept buried.
• In folklore, safety is rare. Characters in old stories are almost never directly helpful. This required a host of gray-shaded NPCs into the adventure, where trust, like treasure, must be earned. One of my players commented, “no one seems to like us here.” And that’s exactly what I was going for.
• In folklore, there is weirdness. Authentic folklore has weird parts, parts that are inexplicable or defy reason. Therefore, the forest in this adventure needed more magic — a sunken manor, a section of the forest with a split personality, dark elves spending decades looking for shattered bits of a statue for no apparent reason.

The list could go on. But the lesson here is that one change to an adventure’s mood made massive changes to the entire adventure, where now, other than the setup, it’s 95% different than the “Ogre Prince” that I started with.

And as a result, it took me MUCH longer than I anticipated to finish and run!

The First 1Shot Campaign!

Thanks to that one tweak, The Beast of Black Keep is the biggest 1ShotAdventure I will have released. In fact, I’m going to call it the first 1Shot short campaign! It will likely take groups ~5 sessions to complete this one. This length seems to match some recent surveys of gamers RPG habits, too, where most campaigns begin and end in under 8 sessions.

This is also the first adventure I will have released for Shadowdark, a system I’ve been enjoying recently to replay some old TSR adventures I never got around to trying. But you GURPS fans will find a lot to like too, as it unveils a new section of Yrth’s horrifying Blackwoods.

I’m curious if any of you have done this before — take an existing adventure, change the mood, and end up with something totally different? Or did I just go down my own haunted rabbit hole with this one?

Get The Beast of Black Keep FREE here:

Enter the cursed Blackwoods, where a vanished duke may not be as gone—or as human—as they say. Amidst twisted trees strange creatures barter in riddles, a witch trades secrets for organs, and a monstrous plot brews to shatter the peace of the northern towns.

• The Beast of Black Keep (GURPS Fantasy)
• The Beast of Black Keep (GURPS Fantasy) – Printer Friendly
• The Beast of Black Keep (Shadowdark)
• The Beast of Black Keep (Shadowdark) – Printer Friendly
• The Beast of Black Keep – VTT Assets

Related: Historical folklore