Frankenstein Adventures?

[Psion]

Hey all,

Inspired by the "ad libbing" thread, it occurs to me I do my own adventure rather well, ad libbed or planned. But there is just something about published adventures that cramps my style. Anyone else like that?

Anyways, it seems to me I can make use of published adventures if I pull them apart and make them my own, using bits here and there, possibly combining them with other bits from other adventures.

The topic I would put before you today is: What published adventures do you think are good for pulling apart? Having you ever stitched together or modified adventures to make them better than the sum of their parts or otherwise improved on them or made them match your campaign? Any experiences or forward looking idea in this vein?

 

[Psychotic Jim]

I've had a little experience cannibalizing adventures and sewing them together. Usually when ever I run an adventure I try to customize part of it to fit the current game and put my own spin on it.

The most memorable alteration I did to an adventure was that I was running a 3E conversion the Well of Many Worlds adventure Recruiters mixed with the scene from the Planescape: Torment computer game where

Spoiler

the fallen celestial Trias was trying to get the gate-town Curst sucked into the lower planes in order to seal a pact for the fiends to invade the Upper Planes. If you're unfamiliar with that game, he did this in order to get the celestials to stop prolonging the Blood War by making them confront their fears that were the forces of evil. I set the location in Curst as per the computer game, but had all of the fiends in the Recruiters adventure aiding the fallen celestial in getting the town to become evil enough to be taken from the Outlands into Carceri.

In a sense, I just fused the module with the computer game plot directly together.

 

[Telperion]

Same here. I prefer my own stuff over the canned "ready-to-play" published stuff.

I use ideas from here and there, and the S&SS books (that I mainly use for background material) are filled with nice little details for adventures, stories and even full campaigns. It's where I get most of my ideas, although they aren't presented as adventures (there's usually a whole separate chapter for adventures that I just skim over), but as background information. It just gives the whole gaming world a better feeling when the characters go out there, and start noticing that the problems they are solving have a lot to do with the past and their present location.

I mainly run campaigns where the past comes back to haunt those in the present. History is riddled with bad decisions, mistakes and plain out disasters. I tend to use these as a starting point for a whole lot of campaigns, and there's room for almost infinite variation on the same basic idea/theme .

 

[Psion]

I mainly run campaigns where the past comes back to haunt those in the present. History is riddled with bad decisions, mistakes and plain out disasters. I tend to use these as a starting point for a whole lot of campaigns, and there's room for almost infinite variation on the same basic idea/theme .

Heh... there's a thought. Perhaps one way to retool adventures is look at them as retrospectives or revisits. Sort of like the way Monte approached the moathouse in RttToEE?