Campaign Inspiration

I am often inspired visually for d&d, and this campaign was no exception. I first conceived of the setting when Magic the Gathering began releasing art previews for its newest "Block," the Innistrad Cycle. I'm no Magic player, but I keep an eye on the cards as the art is often excellent.

Innistrad is a particularly inspired set, and you can tell in the quality of the art. I suspect that the artists really dug the dark, gothic horror setting. After marveling at the images,  I began to wonder how they could translate into a D&D game.

Obviously Ravenloft is the archetypal d&d as horror setting. I enjoy Ravenloft to a degree, but I feel that it preserves too many standard d&d-isms to truly embrace the theme. I didn't want to run the same game of Kill-the-Orcs, so I decided to avoid a straight game of Ravenloft (or the setting itself without major changes).

If I wasn't going to run Ravenloft, I still needed a rule-set for the campaign. One of the things that bugged me about the previous game were the Castles & Crusades rules we used. I was initially very excited to buy these books, but after seeing the game in play for 9 months, I have to say I'm no longer a fan. I cannot ever see myself choosing C&C over 1E in the future. For this game, I didn't want a complicated system, so I skipped 1E and went back to Basic. B/X is darn simple and perfect for modding to fit the genre.

After Innistrad and Ravenloft, the next big sources of inspiration were REH's Solomon Kane, the movies Van Helsing and Brotherhood of the Wolf, and Warhammer 40k's Inquisition. I decided that I wanted the characters to play warrior-monk inquisitors, wielding miraculous powers (modified cleric spells) and even black magic (wizard spells) if they were willing to risk corruption.

I planned to include gunpowder weapons from the start, so it made since to move the time-frame from medieval to post-Renaissance. Makes a lot more sense for gothic horror anyway. Most published "haunted house" adventures have also felt oddly out of sync with the medieval era to me.    

I really like the random chaos mutations of Warhammer Role playing, so I worked those in as penalties for becoming corrupted. Corruption is a mechanic based on d20 Call of Cthulhu's handling of sanity. Rough yes, but working so far.

That's about as far as I got before the game was set to commence. I managed to type up a summary and put it in a pdf for the players, with the caveat that things were going to have to be adjusted during play. I wasn't interested in going with entirely original adventures (due to constraints on my free-time) so I pulled out Clerics Challenge II.

This little-known module featured a low-powered, undead themed murder mystery. After reading and running it, I'm not even sure it was designed for D&D. It doesn't feature a single demi-human/humanoid! No mythical monsters, no evil wizards either. Strange for a D&D module, but perfect for what I wanted.

So that's how I set the stage... tomorrow I'll post the character creation rules and talk about how the first couple sessions went.

Chaz