RPG MASH-UPS, PART 1

I’ve been playing RPGs for better than 35 years, and for a significant majority of that time have served as the primary Game Master for whichever group I am involved. I particularly enjoy taking a published adventure and mixing it with elements from another adventure or even different setting. My players never know what is going to happen next, but most of them seem content in the knowledge that whatever happens or appears fits somehow into the game’s internal logic. Years ago, some of my players tried to gain an edge by asking my wife and daughter (both of whom were playing in that particular game, as well) what books I had recently checked out of the library. My daughter’s reply was along the lines of “It doesn’t work that way; Dad’s library books are for researching his NEXT campaign.”

That being said, there are a few adventures that are regularly recycled in my games, regardless of genre or game system. Among my favorites are:

• The Haunted Keep – From an old D&D Basic “red book”, this adventure probably shows up in some form or another at least once in every campaign I run. Naturally, I make changes to it depending upon the genre…but it’s kind of like a frequently-used set in television and movies; after a while, my players will recognize it for what it is.
• The Keep on the Borderlands (D&D, B2) -- Whenever I need a castle in a remote area, this is the one I like to use. At one point, I even had a 3-ring binder with the Keep detailed for use with AD&D 2e, complete with names for every inhabitant of the Keep and capsule biographies for most of them.
• The Isle of Dread (D&D, X1) -- My go-to stand-in for Atlantis or anything similar. Many of my players have come to fear this module more than any other...because there’s no telling what I’ve come up with to put on it.
• Castle Amber (D&D, X2) -- Another favorite; a mysterious mansion lost in time. I frequently link this adventure module to the various legends regarding the Knights Templar.
• Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (AD&D, S3) -- Just your average, every-day “crashed spaceship in the mountains”. After Isle of Dread, it is the most commonly adapted module I use for modern settings; the spaceship has appeared in the Rocky Mountains near Great Falls, Montana (in a Boot Hill-based game), in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa (for Call of Cthulhu), and even on Mars (in a Cyberpunk campaign).
• Barnacus, City in Peril (AD&D, Dragon Magazine issue #80) -- Like B2 and X1, this is another go-to location for me. In this case, it is a port city…and, like with most of my favorite adventures, my “expansion notes” for it have been known to take up an entire three-ring binder.
• The Village of Hommlet (AD&D, T1) – Sometimes I don’t need an entire city, but instead want a small village. Hommlet fits the bill rather nicely, and there is plenty of flexibility to shuffle NPCs around. More often than not, I’ll start my campaigns there.
• The Rock of Bral (AD&D 2e Spelljammer, SJR5) -- Spelljammer is “AD&D in Space” and the Rock of Bral is essentially a city on an asteroid. I’ve used it for everything from an Earth-bound island to an aerostat “floating city” in Venus’ upper atmosphere.

Speaking of Spelljammer…one of my favorite mash-ups is a science fantasy campaign I ran years ago called Space: 1899 that mixed Spelljammer with Masque of the Red Death (AD&D as 1890s Horror), although I patterned the ships after those in Space: 1889 and used the Cthulhu mythos rather than the Red Death. Now that I am thinking about it, I may revisit that setting at some point in the future. I think it would be interesting to see what I could do with, say, Spelljammer’s Under the Dark Fist campaign setting, particularly since there are already legendary and mythological precedents for dog/wolf-headed warriors…

Oddly enough, the Space: 1899 campaign was actually a sequel to an earlier campaign called Little Witch on the Prairie, in which the (fictional) Thorndyke Academy in post-Civil War Minneapolis was secretly a school for aspiring wizards. Please note that this campaign was created and run years before I had ever even heard of the Harry Potter series of books. Little Witch on the Prairie itself had been spun off from Sixguns and Sorcery, an odd little Boot Hill/AD&D crossover arc that I had run for a couple of months back in the late 80s.

In the other direction, Space: 1899 would eventually give way to Moonshine & Magick, which can best be described as essentially a Gangbusters/Ghostbusters mash-up game set primarily in 1920’s Chicago and using the Masque of the Red Death rules. This, in turn, led into Twilight: 1930, in which humanity was fighting a desperate war for survival against Yig-worshiping reptoids from the Cretaceous. (This campaign shift was totally the fault of the PCs; they were supposed to interrupt the ritual that would open the Portal to the Realm of Kukulkan. Instead, they got the bright idea to “let the priests complete the ritual, and see what happens”, confident that they could handle anything that might come through said portal. Needless to say, they were wrong.)