Reconsidered: Night Below Campaign
During the 90’s, I hardly ever bought D&D supplementary material. I mean, I had so many seeds of ideas in my head when it came to gaming, I never felt I needed to buy other people’s ideas. Plus as a Scotsman, I’m notoriously cheap (and yet can never seem to save any money).
But when I got back into gaming after several years off, I had a hankering to purchase some of the interesting sounding items that I passed on many years before. So some time around winter of last year I got great deals from Ebay on the Dark Sun boxed set, and the Night Below boxed set.
By then I had a nice little campaign going, running countryside adventures to build up PC’s for an eventual dungeon crawl. Although they were interesting reads, Dark Sun and Night Below didn’t seem to have any immediate use in my current games. Actually, I had mulled over making a gateway in the dungeon that would transport the party to the Dark Sun world, that would be sort of a post-apocalypse version of my regular game world. But that was just a thought.
The party is getting up there in levels, most around 6th or 7th, and it is starting to seem like they will be at least 3 levels higher than I had planned them to be for the dungeon. So this last weekend I broke out my copy of Night Below, wondering if it might just make a decent alternative to the dungeon players were heading to. I took a good look at the first two of the three books of NB. I started to see the events of book 2 would be easily adapted to my current scenarios.
Book 1 features little adventures in a populated area of towns, villages, and farms. Much like my games have been so far, these little Mickey Mouse outdoor adventures are designed to beef up the party for eventual underground adventuring. Many little situations in book 1 are meant to give motivations for the Underdark adventures in book 2, but I should have no problem using what has already happened in my games to tie this in. For one thing, in the last couple of games the party has explored a gnomish “Safechamber,” a secret pad under the human frontier town of Overtown built long ago as a place for gnomes to hide from the monsters that once roamed the surface world in greater numbers. The party found a hidden trap door within, and that one appears to lead to an even larger gnomish area around a half mile under the town. I didn’t plan to have them go much deeper than that, but seeing as the underground gnome town (apparently abandoned) had passages to the Underdark, why not switch gears a bit and give the party good reason to go deeper (waaaaay deeper) below?
In the last few games I’ve had party members running afoul of a group of Drow who are in the area, secretly planning to eventually go to the same dungeon the players are going. But no problem, I can now have them coming to the area to meet up with Mind Flayers (from book 2) and working out a deal to capture spellcasters for them. So I can change the human slavers the party eventually encounters near the Derro area underground to these drow no problem. The players deserve a real face-off with these pesky dark elves anyway.
In the next game the party will explore the little abandoned sub-surface gnomish town, and they will discover gnome historians (and their infant daughter) from the gnome areas up north. They will have been spending years here studying and restoring this once bustling little community. The gnome family will be getting bothered by gnolls who have moved into upper caves near the abandoned gnome town of “Southgem”. These gnolls in turn will have been displaced from lower caverns by the troop of orcs that are working for the Mind Flayers who have been moving back and forth between the surface area and the City of the Glass Pool far below in the deeper underdark.
So all this, with a bit of prodding, should get the adventurer’s on their way to the Deep Gnome city, and eventually to the Kou-Toa.
There is a lot I don’t like in the Night Below material, and it will take a lot of my personal tweaking. But it has always been thus when I use modules or adventures created by others. You have personal taste, and you have to take that into account and make mods if you are a creative DM.
So in a later posts I will detail some of the changes, for good or better, that I plan to make in Night Below. If you have used the NB material in your games, I’d love to hear what kind of changes you might have made, and how the adventures panned out. If you have only read the material, I’d still love to hear what you think about it.
During the 90’s, I hardly ever bought D&D supplementary material. I mean, I had so many seeds of ideas in my head when it came to gaming, I never felt I needed to buy other people’s ideas. Plus as a Scotsman, I’m notoriously cheap (and yet can never seem to save any money).
But when I got back into gaming after several years off, I had a hankering to purchase some of the interesting sounding items that I passed on many years before. So some time around winter of last year I got great deals from Ebay on the Dark Sun boxed set, and the Night Below boxed set.
By then I had a nice little campaign going, running countryside adventures to build up PC’s for an eventual dungeon crawl. Although they were interesting reads, Dark Sun and Night Below didn’t seem to have any immediate use in my current games. Actually, I had mulled over making a gateway in the dungeon that would transport the party to the Dark Sun world, that would be sort of a post-apocalypse version of my regular game world. But that was just a thought.
The party is getting up there in levels, most around 6th or 7th, and it is starting to seem like they will be at least 3 levels higher than I had planned them to be for the dungeon. So this last weekend I broke out my copy of Night Below, wondering if it might just make a decent alternative to the dungeon players were heading to. I took a good look at the first two of the three books of NB. I started to see the events of book 2 would be easily adapted to my current scenarios.
Book 1 features little adventures in a populated area of towns, villages, and farms. Much like my games have been so far, these little Mickey Mouse outdoor adventures are designed to beef up the party for eventual underground adventuring. Many little situations in book 1 are meant to give motivations for the Underdark adventures in book 2, but I should have no problem using what has already happened in my games to tie this in. For one thing, in the last couple of games the party has explored a gnomish “Safechamber,” a secret pad under the human frontier town of Overtown built long ago as a place for gnomes to hide from the monsters that once roamed the surface world in greater numbers. The party found a hidden trap door within, and that one appears to lead to an even larger gnomish area around a half mile under the town. I didn’t plan to have them go much deeper than that, but seeing as the underground gnome town (apparently abandoned) had passages to the Underdark, why not switch gears a bit and give the party good reason to go deeper (waaaaay deeper) below?
In the last few games I’ve had party members running afoul of a group of Drow who are in the area, secretly planning to eventually go to the same dungeon the players are going. But no problem, I can now have them coming to the area to meet up with Mind Flayers (from book 2) and working out a deal to capture spellcasters for them. So I can change the human slavers the party eventually encounters near the Derro area underground to these drow no problem. The players deserve a real face-off with these pesky dark elves anyway.
In the next game the party will explore the little abandoned sub-surface gnomish town, and they will discover gnome historians (and their infant daughter) from the gnome areas up north. They will have been spending years here studying and restoring this once bustling little community. The gnome family will be getting bothered by gnolls who have moved into upper caves near the abandoned gnome town of “Southgem”. These gnolls in turn will have been displaced from lower caverns by the troop of orcs that are working for the Mind Flayers who have been moving back and forth between the surface area and the City of the Glass Pool far below in the deeper underdark.
So all this, with a bit of prodding, should get the adventurer’s on their way to the Deep Gnome city, and eventually to the Kou-Toa.
There is a lot I don’t like in the Night Below material, and it will take a lot of my personal tweaking. But it has always been thus when I use modules or adventures created by others. You have personal taste, and you have to take that into account and make mods if you are a creative DM.
So in a later posts I will detail some of the changes, for good or better, that I plan to make in Night Below. If you have used the NB material in your games, I’d love to hear what kind of changes you might have made, and how the adventures panned out. If you have only read the material, I’d still love to hear what you think about it.
