Best Module Modding

[Justin Bacon]

Essentially everyone's used a published adventure at some point. And essentially everyone has tweaked those published adventures in one way or another -- to make them fit their game world; to fix a design issue; to expand on something your players found intriguing; to make iit suit your own personal tastes and preferences.

For example, right now I'm in the process of tweaking and prepping RAPPAN ATHUK (from Necromancer Games) for a campaign. I've been prepping fully developed mazes for Level 6 of the dungeon and posting them to my website (http://www.thealexandrian.net) as a general resource for other DMs running the module. And it's gotten me thinking about some of my other favorite updates I've done in the past:

- Replacing the lower-levels of THE FORGE OF FURY with a vast dwarven complex overrun by dark dwarves seeking the enchanted forges of the ancient dwaves.

- Revamping THE SUNLESS CITADEL so that it took place in the same setting as THE STANDING STONE.

And so forth. (I find I get a lot of mileage out of simply taking two modules and merging their backgrounds. You can find all kinds of nifty synergies by, for example, combining DEATH IN FREEPORT with the Opium War of CITY OF LIES.)

What have you done to customize a module that makes you particularly proud?

Justin Alexander Bacon
http://www.thealexandrian.net

 

[LostSoul]

I used the Call of Cthulhu with the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Although that campaign stalled...

 

[jdrakeh]

What have you done to customize a module that makes you particularly proud?

I've extensively modded The Isle of Dread as follows:

• Re-tooled the cosmology of the island (including the horrible tribe names) to reflect that of our own Earth (circa 1886 and 1920).
  
  
• Replaced the Kopru with a race of intelligent apes similar to those in H. P. Lovecraft's Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.
  
  
• Removed the phanaton and aranea encounters (as well as any other overtly D&D encounters) entirely.

 

[Justin Bacon]

It's interesting that both replies have dealt with taking D&D material and infusing it with a Lovecraftian sensibility. I'm working with a mixture of the taint and sanity rules (from Unearthed Arcana) for my Rappan Athuk campaign, specifically in an attempt to work a Lovecraftian sensibility and "otherness" into my world's basic cosmology. The Evil Gods aren't just the Good Gods with a different color scheme and some ichor -- there's something fundamentally *wrong* and *different* to their interpretation of how the universe should work.

Justin Alexander Bacon
http://www.thealexandrian.net

 

[jdrakeh]

I'm currently working on converting swaths of the Titan setting from Advanced Fighting Fantasy (which in and of itself has some heavy Lovecraftian overtones) to Castles & Crusades (and I'll probably throw in 12 to Midnight's OGC sanity rules from Fear Effects for good measure). I suppose I simply have a love of truly alien fantasy settings, having grown a bit bored with the countless Eurocentric settings in circulation.

 

[BullMarkOne]

The last campaign I DM'd kicked off with a slightly modified Sunless Citadel. With a few tie ins to the Palace of the Silver Princess (which I never actually used, just mined for a couple of npc names, and a potential antagonist and location). Amidst their travels the pary also had the opportunity to play through a scaled up version of Dance of the Dead (from dungeon magazine), as well as the Alchemists Eyrie (also scaled up). The pc's later ended up returning to the Sunless Citadel, which had undergone some major seismic activity, and also a little bit of rebuilding. The main antagonist of the campaign was also tapped from that module. I had plans to incorporate the old module Skarda's Mirror as well, but the campaign disintegrated before that point.

So, in brief, yeah I modify modules alot.

 

[DarrenGMiller]

I have:

- Placed Crucible of Freya (NG) into the plot of Temple of Elemental Evil (of course, I removed the Crucible and changed the deities of CoF) and located it south of the moathouse. They became two outposts for the Temple.

- Placed Tomb of Abysthor into ToEE 's plot as well. The players actually got NPC's to go to the ToEE, while they went into the ToA.

- Modified Forge of Fury to fit the Midnight Campaign setting (specifically the Crown of Shadows campaign) and placed it deep underground as a ward of a larger Dwarven city (a la Moria).

Those are the things that come to mind right away.

DM