D&D 5E A Red and Pleasant Land (5e hack)

SavageCole · Dec 22, 2014

Since falling back in love with D&D with the release of 5e, I have been scouring the web and bookstores looking for a campaign setting for a campaign. Forgotten Realms is cool and all, but I am looking for something different to run eventually.

One mind-blowing option is A Red and Pleasant Land. It seems easy enough to convert to 5e, but honestly any game that's going to grab me isn't really about mechanics, but ideas and opportunities for players to thrash around heroically in a vibrant world filled with interesting NPCs wrapped in compelling relationships.

So, Alice in Wonderland meets Dracula? Come on. Imagining what I can do with that ... what my friends/players will do with that ... this is going to be something special.

Anyway, this isn't a review. There are plenty of raves out there you can google. I'm hoping to find 5e people who want to talk about how to convert and how you might use some of the rich material in your game.

Daern · Dec 22, 2014

I haven't used it in my game yet, but here's the variation I've got going for the Alice character class. The only thing I've been wondering about for when my players to end up in the Red and Pleasant Land is how to roll with vampires. My conversion style so far has been to try to just use MM monsters but the MM vampires are either super gnarly or pretty average. If you reckon the queens and king are Vampires, then it might be worthy making Rooks, Knights, etc based on the Vampire spawn entry. Maybe a lil tougher.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/...rOR4lD73wsBztc6WE/edit#heading=h.3wuwpg2te48l

SavageCole · Dec 22, 2014

I really like what you've done with your cut at it.

The concept of the Alice intrigues me so much, but I'm not sure yet that I need it to be a class. If you've ever played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd, I sort of see it like a Party Card, where the party can tap into Exasperation at critical moments. I also like the idea of a rotating Alice in the party. The inhabitants of the Red and Pleasant land can see who is the Alice at any moment, but the PCs have to figure that out ... and by the time they do, someone else might be the Alice. Right now, I'm just having too much stream of consciousness fun with it to pin down any hard mechanics yet.

Zak S · Dec 22, 2014

I recommend making the Heart Queen, Colorless Queen, Pale King and Red King as tough as monsters in your setting can get and then scaling everyone else from there.

seebs · Dec 22, 2014

Yeah, I'm not sold on Alice as a class, because I think it feels more like a role orthogonal to how D&D uses classes. But D&D doesn't really *have* another way to assign stuff.

Elvish Lore · Dec 22, 2014

SavageCole said:
One mind-blowing option is A Red and Pleasant Land.

<cut>

Anyway, this isn't a review. There are plenty of raves out there you can google. I'm hoping to find 5e people who want to talk about how to convert and how you might use some of the rich material in your game.

I'm sorry to disappoint you but I'm going to have rave about this product and not (yet) offer meaningful feedback. This setting supplement is blowing me away -- insanely imaginative, heaps of ideas... I don't easily get impressed with rpg settings but this right here is a home run.

Daern · Dec 22, 2014

Zak S said:
I recommend making the Heart Queen, Colorless Queen, Pale King and Red King as tough as monsters in your setting can get and then scaling everyone else from there.

I guess the Red King could be a Death Knight or a Liche. Definitely out of the league of any adventurers I DM. On the other hand, I'm still learning thet 5e characters can handle some pretty high level foes given the right conditions.

SavageCole · Dec 22, 2014

I'm toying with idea of using this world as an alternative place that people find or are sent to .... like the Dreamlands or the Village of The Prisoner fame. Beyond 5e, I could even see The Place of Unreason being a surreal place that even characters in my Night's Black Agents or Call of Cthulhu campaigns would find themselves after some sort of mind-bending trigger.

As far as 5e goes, I love the idea of outside characters (interlopers) coming here ... probably because I can't shake the original Alice story. It makes it fun for the players to discover the place just as their characters do.

My thought is to run characters in a more standard fantasy world until they reach a medium level. In the initial "real world", I'm going to try to give hints and mirrored foreshadowing of things they will encounter in Voivodja. It'll be fun to have the players grow accustomed to the rules and logic of one campaign setting, just to spin them around in The Place of Unreason. Getting them there at mid-level gives them a chance to grow stronger in that world before taking on the biggest challenges of the place ... regicide.

Nebulous · Dec 22, 2014

SavageCole said:
Since falling back in love with D&D with the release of 5e, I have been scouring the web and bookstores looking for a campaign setting for a campaign. Forgotten Realms is cool and all, but I am looking for something different to run eventually.

One mind-blowing option is A Red and Pleasant Land. It seems easy enough to convert to 5e, but honestly any game that's going to grab me isn't really about mechanics, but ideas and opportunities for players to thrash around heroically in a vibrant world filled with interesting NPCs wrapped in compelling relationships.

So, Alice in Wonderland meets Dracula? Come on. Imagining what I can do with that ... what my friends/players will do with that ... this is going to be something special.

Anyway, this isn't a review. There are plenty of raves out there you can google. I'm hoping to find 5e people who want to talk about how to convert and how you might use some of the rich material in your game.

Never heard of this! I was thinking of running the classic I6 Ravenloft adventure. What about plopping it right in the middle of this setting? Are they compatible?

SavageCole · Dec 22, 2014

A Red and Pleasant Land is more surreal and imaginative, whereas Ravenloft is sort of dips into staid baroque melodrama. Two different flavors for sure. It would not be a simple drop, but a clever person could find a way to fold Ravenloft in.

Having recently played the classic Ravenloft, I see the straight forward attraction, but A Red and Pleasant Land is definitely more of a mind-bending experience to elevate play.

What you definitely can do is mine one for ideas and encounters that you can drop in the other. There's enough innovative encounter and NPC/monster material in A Red in Pleasant Land that you can mine that joint for years for quality material.