There aren’t a lot of sequels on this website, even though I’ve gotten quite a few asks for them. There isn’t a great reason for this other than a) I like writing new things; b) sequels are really hard!
But this month bucks the trends and features a sequel to one of the downloaded adventures on this site, the Lovecraftian ice age horror adventure Canyon of the Snow Cairns.
Sequels are Hard!
So why are sequels so difficult to write? It’s because audiences want more of the same thing, but don’t want exactly the same thing. So writers are on a tightrope. If they give the audiences more of the same, they’ll get complaints that the sequel was too safe and too predictable. If they depart heavily from the original in an effort to be fresh, they get lambasted that they forgot what made the original so good in the first place.
So on one end you have The Force Awakens and on the other end you have Joker: Folie à Deux. Yikes!
Game designers have very similar challenges. Give your group something too close to their last session, they’ll find it predictable. Stray too far… and they’ll wonder why the game doesn’t feel the same anymore. For real evidence of this, check out the reactions from the gamers who have played the Alien RPG’s adventures. Some gamers who loved Alien: Chariot of the Gods, a claustrophobic adventure that explores a derelict starship with just a few key NPCs hated Destroyer of Worlds, which puts them into the roles of marines in the middle of a large scale planetary invasion. Reactions often depended on which one people played first.
The only other sequels on this site are my pulp adventures, but they are very loose sequels. They take the same cast of pregenerated PCs and send them on very different adventures around the world. In one adventure, the heroes are racing Nazis around Europe, in another adventure they are lost in a jungle alongside ex-Confederates. They’re in the same pulp genre, but they’re totally different from each other.
I decided to try the opposite approach with this month’s adventure, Warrens Beneath the Glacier. I took inspiration from George Lucas’ advice for writing Star Wars sequels — “it’s like poetry… they rhyme.”
Armed with this quote, my strategy was to invent a sequel that would rhyme – share familiar, but never identical, elements – with the original, Canyon of the Snow Cairns.
Canyons vs. Warrens – They Rhyme
The new adventure takes place a generation after the original. Temperatures have plummeted and the PCs’ clan is freezing to death. A Neanderthal wanderer visits and miraculously promises that his village in the mountains can shelter the clan.
This is a different setup from the original, which involved the rescue of a chief. But what progresses is a fuzzy mirror of that first adventure.
- In the original, the PCs cross a river and venture into a haunted forest, a small sandbox. One of the earliest encounters is with an old mastodon. In the sequel, they have hills and mountains to explore… and eventually encounter an ornery wooly rhino.
- In the original, there was a throwaway encounter with the Voormi-Men, Lovecraftian degenerates. Here, they are the primary villains. Familiar foes… but with more depth than the first time.
- And finally, in the original, there’s an opportunity to enter a frozen cosmic dimension, Borea. In the sequel, there’s a dimension of stone and darkness the PCs can enter during the climax.
In Warrens Beneath the Glacier, everything is different, but it rhymes with the original. No places are identical, no NPCs are shared, no plot point is the same… but it feels familiar.
Pick Your Path
So if your players finish an adventure and ask for “more!” — then carefully think about what worked. Was it the setting? The antagonist? The humor? Figure out which elements they enjoyed and try to find, or write, an adventure that mirrors those elements.
Do you have a favorite RPG sequel? Let me know why it worked in the comments below.
Download Warrens Beneath the Glacier for FREE – Here
- Warrens Beneath the Glacier (GURPS)
- Warrens Beneath the Glacier (GURPS) – Printer Friendly
- Warrens Beneath the Glacier (Call of Cthulhu)
- Warrens Beneath the Glacier (Call of Cthulhu) – Printer Friendly
- Warrens Beneath the Glacier – VTT Assets
Related: The Original Ice Age Horror
