Topic: Remixing B2

I am starting to prepare a campaign world which is a mix of LotFP alt-history 16th Century France, various LotFP adventures, as well as remixed 1e AD&D modules.  I am having an easy time remixing T1-3: Temple of Elemental Evil (or, now, Temple of Elemental Goodness), but before getting to that I wanted to offer a remix of B2's Keep on the Borderlands and the Caves of Chaos to my players.

The Keep seems easy enough: remove all magic items, de-level a few NPC's, but otherwise probably keep things the same.

But then there is the Caves of Chaos.

The first steps seem easy enough: place them further away from the Keep, and spread them out over tens of miles, rather than having them squashed into a single tiny valley: Cave G in one hex, Cave A in another; C & B together, as well as H & I, K & J, and then E, D and F all together.

I am a little worried as exactly how I should present this to my players: I'm not at all experienced in hexcrawl sandbox-style games, more used to presenting players with a situation or set location before them and asking them to respond.  Any advice on how best to approach this while avoiding boredom?

Then it comes to the monsters and factions: should I change some/all to human?  Or try to twist the pre-existing notions of D&D's kobolds, orcs, and hobgoblins into something a bit more otherworldly, to better showcase the "chaos" beyond civilization?  I always liked the idea of the players being able to insert themselves into the factional disputes, and even the possibility of the players raiding the Keep, turning it into a dungeon.

What are your thoughts on this?  I have already checked out Raggi's thoughts on the module here.

Are there any good LotFP modules that could be slipped into B2, do you think?

Last edited by islan (2020-06-03 15:43:18)

Re: Remixing B2

I haven't run that module, so I just offer my thoughts as a long time LotFP Referee.

-Personally, I would definitely turn all the monsters and factions into humans. I'm not sure what they are vying for, but you could figure out a more appropriate thing for 17th century realism - some sort of resource, even if it's just territory. I would think about how to make each faction unique, again thinking about human groups throughout history, even "similar" groups have very different presentations (think of the Italian Mafia vs the Mexican Drug Cartel - both the "same" as far as what they are, but very different culturally and how they present themselves.)

-There are a lot of small modules that you could fit in there:
A Single, Small Cut
Tales of the Scarecrow
A Random Esoteric Monster or a Slug
Obscene Serpent Religion 2
The Pale Lady

Or, some non-official stuff: There are a lot of great monsters in Fire on the Velvet Horizon that are basically a mini-adventure in their own right if you want some interesting stuff dispersed throughout the land, but then that may defeat the purpose of spreading the caves out.

Finally, my players have always been more interested in running through the LotFP modules than hexcrawling/sandboxing, so I don't have too much advice on that. I sometimes just allow overland travel w/o much incident b/c they are eager to get to whatever the  next module I'm running is, and I'm happy to accommodate them! wink