Bad Idea Corner (Patreon)

This morning, I was struck by an idea that is either brilliant or kind of silly or maybe both.

It's been lodged in my head hard enough that I want to get it down in a more substantial fashion just so it doesn't keep repeating over and over demanding my attention. (This is not the first idea to take over my brain in this fashion, nor will it be the last).

Drakkenheim

I'm currently playing in a campaign of Dungeons of Drakkenheim, a D&D 5e adventure created by the Dungeon Dudes, prominent D&D creators on YouTube. The adventure is adapted from their podcast series by the same name, and features the ruined/doomed/cursed city of Drakkenheim, which was hit by a giant extradimensional magic meteor 15 years ago and is not a several-mile-wide disaster zone of magical corruption, ravening undeath, and conflicting factions.

Staying inside the city for too long is dangerous all on its own, as the city is permeated by a corrupting haze that will begin to infest people over time. Too much corruption and you become a NPC monster of the gibbering tentatcled aberration variety.

It's a campaign that requires a lot of very specific buy-in from players, as 99% of the campaign is meant to take place in the city itself, a village outside the city that serves as a staging ground/downtime hub, and the few miles between the two. This is not a world tour campaign where characters are expected to bounce between a bunch of settings across a large fantasy world. Your characters all need *good reasons* to go to Drakkenheim, because Drakkenheim is a bad place and incredibly lethal to almost everyone that enters it.

Our game is about 20 sessions in, and we just hit level 5, with the campaign expected to go to level 13. So I've gotten a pretty good sense of the campaign setting, tone, and vibes, as presented very well by our GM, Khitan.

But, even with this, even with other 5e games I'm in that are well-run, I still have lots of problems with 5e. I've talked about a lot of that here in previous essays, plus on streams over at twitch.tv/TurboTango (also, I am streaming again! Join me tomorrow (Friday) as I continue the DLC for Citizen Sleeper!)

Heart

The other thread of this is the news that there's a forthcoming adventure supplement for Heart: the City Beneath, a game by Rowan, Rook, and Decard, written by Grant Howitt and Jonathan Taylor, illustrated by Felix Miall. It's a game about doomed adventures delving deep into a red, wet, heaven, navigating ever-shifting passageways, looting ancient temples to forgotten gods, and other extremely metal dark fantasy dungeon delving stuff.

So much so that it has a whole sub-system for dangerous travels and dungeon delves called, unsurprisingly, Delves.

Most of my experience with Heart is listening to Sangfielle, a Weird Western podcast series by Friends at the Table. But I also ran a one-shot of Heart last year as part of my friend Greg's ArvCon, a charity event.

The Idea

Okay, that pretty much catches us up.

The Bad/Great idea I had was to convert Dungeons of Drakkenheim in order to run it as a campaign of Heart: the City Beneath.

The two have a lot in common in terms of theme and tone, both are dark fantasy about adventures, both foreground setting as a crucial element of the story, both are player-directed in structure, where it's important to know why each character is taking such an intense risk going into a deadly strange place.

Heart is a very narrative and fiction-focused game, while still having cool mechanics and flavor to help create memorable set-pieces (fights, chases, etc.).

The Delve system is a great way to make dangerous travel through strange environs feel dramatic without the story dragging - it's easy to make Delves shorter or longer, to calibrate difficulty based on what areas you're traveling through, etc.

The Fallout system should be able to incorporate corruption by treating Delerium effects as sources of Heart stress, and adapting the corruption symptoms as Heart fallouts.

Now, some caveats - I haven't *run* Dungeons of Drakkenheim, just played in it. But our DM has been pretty transparent in talking about how core mechanics of the campaign work (random encounters, some of the rules of corruption, etc.). Actually doing this would require buying the book and reading it, naturally.

But since I both like the broader awareness of campaign modules like Dungeons of Drakkenheim or Odyssey of the Dragonlords or any of the Pathfinder Adventure Paths but wouldn't necessarily want to run a long-term campaign of 5E or Pathfinder without substantial hacking to the system, I've been thinking about other ways of getting at it, both in terms of "What shows/series to do for Speculate in terms of attracting a 5e/DND audience" and "What games would I want to run if I expanded my StartPlaying.Games offerings?"

So that's that.

Have any of you tried adapting a big D&D module to a non-DND/DND-alike system? How did it go?