Rewriting existing adventures/campaigns, do you do it?

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com

Scuba Steve

Is a real Human Bean (TM)
Joined
Feb 25, 2020
Messages
212
Reaction score
479
So I got the campaign book Shiki for the Sengoku RPG last year, and while I've read through it, it's collecting dust on my bookshelf. I took a look at it the other day, and decided to thumb through it again, and quickly realized that I could utilize it for my Anglo-Saxon campaign. That might sound weird, but at the core of it, the themes and plots aren't all that different. There's the whole concept of loyalty to a lord, a strong warrior culture, spiritual/religious reverence, and these themes are pretty easy to translate from one culture to another one without much difficulty.

So I decided that I'm going to take the adventures from this campaign, and make it fit to late 5th early 6th century Britain. Wondering if any folks here have done something similar. Do you do it on the regular? If you've only done it once, would you ever do it again?
 
I rarely play published adventures as written. I otfen find there are bits that either don't make sense to me or that I consider make for bad player experience. Other times, I just tweak them to match better my current campaign.

A good example of that is the ICONS adventure "Jailbreak". The concept of the adventure is that the team of heroes are invited to test a new max security prison by allowing themselves to get locked in. Except it turns out, it's actually a supervillan that built the prison and it's all one big trap.

I was little uncomfortable setting up the characters to be duped that way so I figured wouldn't it be more fun if the setting's Justice League equivalent was the team that got duped and the player characters have to break in the prison to rescure them, rather than break out? Much of the content stays the same, but it's just more satisfying for me. Also in the supervillain in the advenure was called "The Killer GM". I was not having any of that, so I substituted him with a supervillain the players characters had previously cross swords with in that campagin.

Those were fairly small tweaks. Some times the changes are much more extensive.
 
Historically, I've taken bits and pieces from modules I've liked. I've hardly ever run adventure modules complete as written. I would always grab concepts and maps out of them and assemble them into my own thing.

With my ongoing run of Keep on the Borderlands, I'm doing far more of a rewrite while still using the original material. In my rewrite, the Temple of Chaos is instead a sinister secret advance base of an undead army about to sweep the lands. The humanoids believe the temple just to be to a more mundane evil god, like the ones they worship. The humanoids don't normally live in the Chaves of Chaos, but are instead representatives of their tribes from larger dungeon complexes elsewhere which the tribes have sent at the request of this new religion and possible ally. The Temple meanwhile hopes to use the humanoids as pawns against the Keep, and if they die... well... the dead humanoids can continue to serve the cause.

Instead of the module's original intended arc of killing a bunch of humanoids and then destroying the temple, I'm hoping my arc will end with an alliance of men with some of the more agreeable humanoid tribes against the forces of the army of death. I intend to cap things off with a big battle at the Keep.
 
Yeah, I always adapt any module/campaign I use.

I wrote about my process a while back here, lemme see if I can find it...


Edit: Oh yep, here it is...

Generally speaking, this is how I handle a published module...I'll use Call of Cthulhu as an example, as its the game I'm most likely to use a published adventure rather than just sandboxing it...


First I'll read through the adventure once to get an overall feel for how it is meant to transpire. Then, I'll read it again, this time specifically looking for "traps" i.e. areas where players wont move forwards without railroading, or performing a specific anticipated action (searching in exactly the right place, talking to exactly the right person etc). These are the primary things I need to fix before the adventure is ready for play. Next, I'll prepare a flowchart for the adventure showing what points lead to what other points (with a mystery, this often means clues; in fact, I'm going to refer to everything as 'clues' for simplicty's sake, meaning a magic item, a key, a map to a wizard's lair, a town rumour, etc - anything vital to the completion of the adventure). I prioritize clues as "Vital", "Bonus", or "Chasers". Vital Clues are needed to move forward. Chasers are hints that point towards the direction of Vital Clues (I often have to add these). Bonus Clues either allow the players to skip steps or provide some advantage (a magic weapon, an opportunity to learn a spell, grounds for blackmail, etc). I'll often add Bonus clues, especially if the adventure is part of an ongoing campaign, as stuff related to the bigger picture rather than the immediate concern. I then will make up two charts, one of Vital Clues, one of Bonus Clues and Chasers. These are the charts I will roll on (or chose an appropriate one) when the players are clever or successful (as opposed to acting 'correctly' as dictated by the adventure). For example, if the adventure calls for the players to search the archives at a university library to find a Vital Clue in a specific book, and the players instead search the private library of a suspicious person of interest looking for information, then the roll on the chart will occur based on their success at that attempt.

Next Ill look at significant NPCs and antagonists. Generally what I'll do is draw a picture of them which for me is a great method of getting to know them and get inside their heads. On the back of the picture I'll give them stats (I convert everything to my House system, Phaserip, which was specifically designed to allow me to easily model characters in game terms on the fly), and then record their primary and secondary motivations and a few notes to aid in roleplaying. Depending on their role in the adventure I may also create a flowchart that shows what they will be doing at any point during the adventure. So instead of the players meeting them at one appointed time and place, they may encounter them anytime their paths cross in the course of events.

Something else I like to do is tie my Mythos adventures to specific places and dates in time in history, and so at this point I may do some research to see if the adventure lines up with any significant or odd pieces of history interest. This often means I'll change the location to a specific realworld city or even replace NPCs with appropriate historical figures. Not major famous icons of history, mind you, but the sort of people you'd only know about if you actually did some studying up on the time period or location. A few of my players are in the habit now of taking to google the week after an adventure and seeing if they can find the people or events I used. This goes even deeper with me inserting complex in-jokes, most of which pass over my player's heads, but a few have landed successfully or been discovered after the fact. But that all is just my interests, it has nothing to do with making the adventure a success. The point is mainly that you can enirch a published adventure by inerting parts of yourself, or your interests into it,

So thats the starting prep for the course of the adventure. Now I start thinking in the more abstract. Moods, themes, etc. I spend a day or two putting together a soundtrack for them game. A mix of period music with ambient stuff. I draw out any maps needed. (even if the adventure provides maps, and I'm still using the same setting, I like to redraw it as it instills in me an innate familiarity, and gives me a broader sense of geography). I'll google up a collection of photos of architecture and items that are applicable to the game. And, this is probably the trickiest part, and something that only comes with experience, I look at the pace of the adventure and then alter what I need to to either increase or slow it down as appropriate. For a horror game, a simple premise with a slow burn is good, but hard to accomplish in a single night's game session, or maintain over several sessions. For an action adventure, I make sure there are a few opportunities for quiet times to collect thoughts, interact, and assess. etc.

Thats the basics. All in all, I'll spend about a week with an adventure before I've made it my own and ready to run. Does this mean that its now foolproof, above critique, and always plays out well? Of course not. But at this point I feel prepared enough that everything else I can easily handle on the fly. A large part of actually GMing is spur of the moment, but the more solid the basework, the easier improvisation is for me, because I know the subject matter aand what I'm (or the NPC I'm roleplaying) is trying to accomplish and can predict the ramifications of anything "Off-script".
 
Yeah, I always adapt any module/campaign I use.

I wrote about my process a while back here, lemme see if I can find it...


Edit: Oh yep, here it is...

Generally speaking, this is how I handle a published module...I'll use Call of Cthulhu as an example, as its the game I'm most likely to use a published adventure rather than just sandboxing it...


First I'll read through the adventure once to get an overall feel for how it is meant to transpire. Then, I'll read it again, this time specifically looking for "traps" i.e. areas where players wont move forwards without railroading, or performing a specific anticipated action (searching in exactly the right place, talking to exactly the right person etc). These are the primary things I need to fix before the adventure is ready for play. Next, I'll prepare a flowchart for the adventure showing what points lead to what other points (with a mystery, this often means clues; in fact, I'm going to refer to everything as 'clues' for simplicty's sake, meaning a magic item, a key, a map to a wizard's lair, a town rumour, etc - anything vital to the completion of the adventure). I prioritize clues as "Vital", "Bonus", or "Chasers". Vital Clues are needed to move forward. Chasers are hints that point towards the direction of Vital Clues (I often have to add these). Bonus Clues either allow the players to skip steps or provide some advantage (a magic weapon, an opportunity to learn a spell, grounds for blackmail, etc). I'll often add Bonus clues, especially if the adventure is part of an ongoing campaign, as stuff related to the bigger picture rather than the immediate concern. I then will make up two charts, one of Vital Clues, one of Bonus Clues and Chasers. These are the charts I will roll on (or chose an appropriate one) when the players are clever or successful (as opposed to acting 'correctly' as dictated by the adventure). For example, if the adventure calls for the players to search the archives at a university library to find a Vital Clue in a specific book, and the players instead search the private library of a suspicious person of interest looking for information, then the roll on the chart will occur based on their success at that attempt.

Next Ill look at significant NPCs and antagonists. Generally what I'll do is draw a picture of them which for me is a great method of getting to know them and get inside their heads. On the back of the picture I'll give them stats (I convert everything to my House system, Phaserip, which was specifically designed to allow me to easily model characters in game terms on the fly), and then record their primary and secondary motivations and a few notes to aid in roleplaying. Depending on their role in the adventure I may also create a flowchart that shows what they will be doing at any point during the adventure. So instead of the players meeting them at one appointed time and place, they may encounter them anytime their paths cross in the course of events.

Something else I like to do is tie my Mythos adventures to specific places and dates in time in history, and so at this point I may do some research to see if the adventure lines up with any significant or odd pieces of history interest. This often means I'll change the location to a specific realworld city or even replace NPCs with appropriate historical figures. Not major famous icons of history, mind you, but the sort of people you'd only know about if you actually did some studying up on the time period or location. A few of my players are in the habit now of taking to google the week after an adventure and seeing if they can find the people or events I used. This goes even deeper with me inserting complex in-jokes, most of which pass over my player's heads, but a few have landed successfully or been discovered after the fact. But that all is just my interests, it has nothing to do with making the adventure a success. The point is mainly that you can enirch a published adventure by inerting parts of yourself, or your interests into it,

So thats the starting prep for the course of the adventure. Now I start thinking in the more abstract. Moods, themes, etc. I spend a day or two putting together a soundtrack for them game. A mix of period music with ambient stuff. I draw out any maps needed. (even if the adventure provides maps, and I'm still using the same setting, I like to redraw it as it instills in me an innate familiarity, and gives me a broader sense of geography). I'll google up a collection of photos of architecture and items that are applicable to the game. And, this is probably the trickiest part, and something that only comes with experience, I look at the pace of the adventure and then alter what I need to to either increase or slow it down as appropriate. For a horror game, a simple premise with a slow burn is good, but hard to accomplish in a single night's game session, or maintain over several sessions. For an action adventure, I make sure there are a few opportunities for quiet times to collect thoughts, interact, and assess. etc.

Thats the basics. All in all, I'll spend about a week with an adventure before I've made it my own and ready to run. Does this mean that its now foolproof, above critique, and always plays out well? Of course not. But at this point I feel prepared enough that everything else I can easily handle on the fly. A large part of actually GMing is spur of the moment, but the more solid the basework, the easier improvisation is for me, because I know the subject matter aand what I'm (or the NPC I'm roleplaying) is trying to accomplish and can predict the ramifications of anything "Off-script".

I love it! That's almost exactly what I tend to do. I never really run adventures as themselves, but I like to have a large number of them ready to use and tie into whatever it is the players are doing, so I keep a lot of the details vague so they can be thrown into the sandbox as necessary. So in my Anglo-Saxon campaign, I've got their Thegn who presented them a few things for them to do, and then after whatever they'd choose to do, the other stuff would still get done but by other people in the setting/employed by the person who is requesting help.

I kind of take it to how Bethesda describes the lore in the Elder Scrolls for past games; In Skyrim for example, every quest, every faction gets completed and is canon. But for the next game, not all of them were done by "The Last Dragonborn".
 

Rewriting existing adventures/campaigns, do you do it?


I do it on the regular and find that older material tends to consistently work better. With a minimum of work and creativity, any GM worthy of the title could easily work B2, B4, X1 and the G series into their homebrew fantasy setting. I especially appreciate the generic presentation of B2 Keep on the Borderlands.

We are in a golden age for our hobby so there are many excellent OSR adventures that manage to be both evocative yet easy enough to plunk into different settings without much fuss. This list isn't exhaustive but Barrowmaze, The Red Prophet Rises, Many Gates of the Gann, Death Frost Doom, and The Barbarian King come to mind off the top of my head. Since these adventures are easy to insert into a setting with a minimum of work, it's no big deal if the PCs decide to pass on any of them as they are want to do in a sandbox setting.

Some adventures hinge on setting-specific details that are difficult to excise or change without a lot of work. Adventures like The Palace of Unquiet Repose, The Dark of Hot Springs Island, Operation Unfathomable, and Castle Xyntillan come to mind. Rewriting isn't a casual undertaking so I tend to make this kind of adventure a campaign tentpole.
 
Last edited:
All the time.

I wouldn't be able to use existing adventures as is in most cases without heavily modifying them to my campaign. However, that doesn't mean I don't get an IMMENSE amount of satisfaction from them. I'm currently doing Blood Drive for Deadlands and I've turned the premise into an entire campaign with the individual encounters modified to be short adventures.
 
I doubt any referee with experience beyond starter sets and similar introductory material uses scenarios exactly as written. Players will create the need to improvise and expand on what is written. This is especially true of investigative scenarios (e.g. Call of Cthulhu), where it is impossible to predict the avenues players will pursue.
 
While I totally understanding re-writing adventures, and assume I will be doing a good deal of it in my current Cryptworld campaign, I'm actually trying NOT to re-write right now. Since this is my first time with the game, I sort of want to see how it plays "by itself" before I go back in and make edits for a future campaign. I guess there's also a bit of a purist side to me that wants to make sure that the game is played as written. When I start running Chill 1st ed. modules, then re-writing will totally be necessary, but until then, I'm mostly leaving it to the authors to take the players where they will.
 
Oh yeah.

First, there are often adventures in a genre for other systems than the one you are running with cool ideas. I've adapted several ICONS adventures for Mutants & Masterminds. This is also especially useful when you are playing a new system that doesn't have much adventure support. E.G., I rewrote One Crowded Hour for Traveller as an adventure for The Expanse.

Also, some cool adventures are really overwrought, or are part of a adventure path that I will never run in its entirety. I was running the Serpent Skull adventure path (incidentally, not in its original Pathfinder, but adapted to Fantasy Craft), but it had a somewhat lackluster jungle crawl adventure early on. So I ripped it out and stuffed in The Indomitable Fire Forest of Innenotdar, a really cool adventure in the Burning Sky AP by ENPublishing.

In the vein of adventures I would otherwise never run: Some may be familiar with the famed boxed campaign Night Below for AD&D 2e. But TBH, Book 2 of the campaign was a slog, dubbed "Death by Perpetual Encounter" by my players. We gave up on the campaign, but I really liked book 3 with its Kuo-Toa and Aboleth cities. So later on, when I ran Rod of Seven Parts, I decided I didn't like the Aboleth dungeon crawl of the Ro7P, so I pulled it out and put in book 3 of Night Below, swapping out a few details to make it fit.

Some adventures are classics I would run again and again, regardless of the fact that my system tastes have moved on. I originally adapted the 7th Sea/Swashbuckling Adventures adventure Four and Twenty Blackbirds (from "Rapier's Edge: Adventures in Théah"), an adventure that apes the "on the clock" thriller mood of the 24 TV Series, to my Fantasy Craft Freeport campaign to fit its espionage adventure mood. Then more recently, I adapted it too the Gumshoe urban fantasy game Swords of the Serpentine.
 
Last edited:
So I got the campaign book Shiki for the Sengoku RPG last year, and while I've read through it, it's collecting dust on my bookshelf. I took a look at it the other day, and decided to thumb through it again, and quickly realized that I could utilize it for my Anglo-Saxon campaign. That might sound weird, but at the core of it, the themes and plots aren't all that different. There's the whole concept of loyalty to a lord, a strong warrior culture, spiritual/religious reverence, and these themes are pretty easy to translate from one culture to another one without much difficulty.

So I decided that I'm going to take the adventures from this campaign, and make it fit to late 5th early 6th century Britain. Wondering if any folks here have done something similar. Do you do it on the regular? If you've only done it once, would you ever do it again?
My players still have no idea how many events in our wuxia sessions were produced by a cyberpunk generator:shade:.
 
Does anyone re-write monsters? If you're unsatisfied with the abilities that one is given in a game, do you give it new ones? Maybe this is less of an issue in fantasy games, but I'm finding myself wanting to do this in horror, especially with creatures usually considered "cryptozoological" by most but are given supernatural abilities by the game.
 
Does anyone re-write monsters? If you're unsatisfied with the abilities that one is given in a game, do you give it new ones? Maybe this is less of an issue in fantasy games, but I'm finding myself wanting to do this in horror, especially with creatures usually considered "cryptozoological" by most but are given supernatural abilities by the game.
Why not? Statblocks ain't sacred.
 
For this to make sense I should first note that, given any chance, as a game master, I will nearly always try to put a comic twist on things at the table. The more screwball, the better. I will also link up disparate scenarios into a sort of little baby campaign within the larger context of the campaign or the world setting.

I rewrite things routinely, and I rewrite things on the fly if I need to do so.

This leads by a short pipe to the Magical Silver Pooping Bear of North West Donara, which I have commented upon before in other posts. Long story short, I ran a mystery scenario in which one of the culprits was a bear trainer in a carnival. The players solved the mystery and the player characters ended up with the bear. Fine. It was a perfectly ordinary, mundane, standard issue bear at that point, described as such in the module.

The countryside was described as open hills, with few woods. I therefore, for comic relief, began to describe the bear as constipated (it had no woods and therefore...) The players knew there was missing cash but the player characters hadn't found most of it. (One of the player characters palmed it, but no one noticed that either.)

One of the players put 2+2 together and wound up with 5 and started jabbering. "I know why the bear can't go. I know why he is constipated." No one paid attention until I finally turned to him and said "All right, why do you think the bear has issues."

"The criminal fed him the loot."

This led to an immediate rewrite of the bear. It was logical, it was elegant, it took up all of the available evidence with no facts left over. It was also completely wrong and needed rewarded. So at a dramatically appropriate moment (one of the other players was running a cleric and decided to preach, and was told, by me, unexpectedly, to take a skill check, which he passed brilliantly,), the bear magically let drive a stream of silver pennies, which was duly proclaimed a miracle locals.
 
Why not? Statblocks ain't sacred.
For me and monsters, they sort of are. I'm pretty particular when it comes to monster manuals and making sure that creatures are presented in the way that the game intends. But I guess if I'm already committed to re-writing modules, and shifting things around when it comes to monsters, then I probably need to get over it. Making changes while trying to preserve the spirit of the game is probably best.
 
It depends on the game. When I played a lot of Shadowrun, the adventure modules were sacred. Yeah, sure, the PCs' actions during play forced certain changes and adaptions as the would with any adventure, but I would never have sat down ripped the adventure up and mined it for ideas prior to playing. Looking back, I figure this is because some the ideas where so new to me that I was happy with the adventures as presented. I can't say the same for some of the fantasy stuff I'm seeing these days. I still wouldn't say I'm big into rewriting adventures, but just the other day I did re-write one of the introductory Dragon Age adventures and took the background from another as a backdrop to what the PCs were already doing. I sometimes meddle with monster stats, but that's normally due to a player not being able to make a session and a creature becomes a adolescent version. Nothing shows your lack of understanding of a game system like tweaking a monster's stats and watching on in horror as it unexpectedly scythes through the PCs.
 
I reskinned Red Hand of Doom for Dragon Age... twice.

When I read a module and I like it, I ask myself what is it about the module that excites me, and I keep those; and I ask myself which bits don't make sense to me, and I tweak those.

Then I trim the number of NPCs down to a number that I can keep in my head - I know their names, key descriptions, and most importantly their motivations and plans - which allows me to respond to whatever actions the PCs make.

P.S. - I love the Anglo-Saxon period myself, and once ran a 1040s campaign, and plan to run a "The Last Kingdom" campaign next year.
 
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top