D&D 5E Any cool adventure mashups?

[Giltonio_Santos]

Has anyone tried to create new adventures as mashups of published ones? I'm thinking something like, for example, picking the Tyranny of Dragons adventures and Princes of the Apocalypse and creating an adventure where Tiamat plots an invasion of the material plane with the help of elemental priests. This is a pretty obvious example, but I'm curious about other ones.

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

Not as such, but I've created connections between adventures that weren't in the published version for the purpose of linking them together in to a campaign.

Example - Using Lareth: The Beautiful (cleric of Lolth) from Temple of Elemental Evil as foreshadowing to lead in to the GDQ adventures.

 

[Rabbitbait]

Kind of. My last campaign (4e) was a mashup of:

1) The Tomb of Horrors by Ari Marmell
2) The overthrow of the Church of the Silver Flame (Homebrew)
3) The release and re-entrapment of Bel-Shalor (Homebrew)
4) A bunch of seleceted Dungeon magazine adventures

I like the players having a bunch of options put in front of them and having to navigate their way through. It makes them make choices between the lesser of two evils. In this case, defeating the Lich meant that they ended up not stopping the release of Bel-Shalor and having to deal with the fallout from that.

The Tomb of Horrors was particularly well designed for mashups as it had set 'intermissions' where one part of the adventure would end and the party were expected to be a few levels higher before the next part began. Most major modules don't do that which makes it harder to mix and match.

 

[Bupp]

I'm running Age of Worms and for Encounter at Blackwell Keep I replaced the lizardfolk lair with Tomb of the Lizard King. I used the travel sections from Tomb for the journey to Blackwell Keep. After the party broke the lizardfolk siege, they followed them into the swamps to rescue the prisoners from the Tomb. The evil human clerics in the Tomb are now Ebon Triad cultist.

Here's some of the play reports. I'm working on typing up the final session now.
http://5egrognard.blogspot.com/search/label/Age of Worms

 

[Umbran]

Not as such. The beauty of mashups is in the obvious juxtaposition of disparate known elements, to defy expectation - a mashup of two songs is at its best when you are familiar with both of the originals.

I hope I'm generally running adventures my players don't already know.

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

I have done genre mash-ups - putting modern characters through the Isle of Dread via a shipwreck.

 

[Wik]

Well, my campaign is a bunch of unrelated adventures. There is no overarching story arc, but there are events that carry on that the PCs can get involved in.

I also drop in hooks for several adventures in each adventure I run, and the PCs chase the hooks that interest them. In my current adventure, Goodman Games' "People of the Pit", the PCs have found a map in a strange language. The sage knows hte city he can get information and translation from. If they follow up on this, it'll lead to "Dwellers of the Forbidden City", which I'm "mashing up" with the old Goodman Games' "Emerald Cobra" and POSSIBLY "The Hidden Shrine of Tamoanchan".

In that mix of adventures, there will be a hook to "Chadranthar's Bane" from Dungeon Magazine.

Of course, the party could go another way. One of the PCs is a Lycanthrope (and no one knows! How often does THAT happen?), and if she wants to get cured, I have to figure out a story arc to run for her.

 

[Deathstrike]

I read an interesting article somewhere, I wish I could remember where! Anyway, they talked about building a sandbox campaign using published modules. The idea is to take some hex paper or whatever, and a (handful of adventures. Make some marks on the paper- one for each adventure. Then fill in the terrain as appropriate- have a desert adventure? Put it in a desert, right?
Find logical links between the modules. Then find a strong base of operations for the PC'S- a city, a keep or fort, etc., and let them explore. Prepare some random roadside encounters, drop a plot hook when you feel like it, and see what happens. Your players will think that you're brilliant. ...and they could be right.

 

[delericho]

Has anyone tried to create new adventures as mashups of published ones?

No, but that's definitely an idea with potential.

Not as such. The beauty of mashups is in the obvious juxtaposition of disparate known elements, to defy expectation - a mashup of two songs is at its best when you are familiar with both of the originals.

I hope I'm generally running adventures my players don't already know.

This is a good point. Probably the best way to do a D&D adventure mashup would be to take two classic adventures (that the players have probably heard of, if not played), pull out key points, but then build a new adventure on top of that - perhaps a campaign where Strahd is engaged in a shadow war with the drow from the Vault, or something like that?

That way, the players get to see the disparate known elements, but they're also facing something new?

 

[77IM]

I have long yearned for a Ravenloft / Tomb of Horrors mash-up. Somebody please make this happen!