While I am loathed to admit it my last Victorian adventure started out quite well then floundered in final execution as it started to feel more like a traditional 5e adventure with a dungeon delve than it did something of the Victorian age with a spicing of Lovecraftian horror.
In some respects, this would have been alright, as Lovegood’s (The writer of the awesome Cthuhlu Casebooks) tales typically have at least one smasher of an action set piece (The final book had a full-on Kaiju battle after all). However, for the first tale that wasn’t what I wanted to happen. The problem is, however, D&D and specifically, 5e is very much a combat-first game. The choice then is to either drink the Kool-Aid and accept it or rip apart the system in order to get to a meeting place of D&D’s more pulpy action and the dread of a good Victorian horror piece.
I struggled with this quite a bit and in the end, I looked to more modern avenues to help bridge this issue. Specifically, the Robert Downey Junior led Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, The Young Indiana Jones Adventures, and the Sean Connery led League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and video Games like Greedfall, and Vampyr. Each of these had the elements I had to work with, action, suspense, and a bit of horror (or fake out horror). So with that, I have set to work on a new adventure set in the Victorian English Port City of KnavesRest.
This adventure takes the PCs from a Tavern Brawl, the pleading wails of a dying nun, to a Reverent-held Church, and finally into a forgotten underground warren where things worse than the murder of a good man lay in wait.
Below or the first of several maps for the adventure.
Maps Created with DungeonDraft Commerical. Maps are Copyright 2021 – Genius Loci Games
As before these adventures are based on and inspired by Limitless Adventures’ 5 Evolution line of D&D 5e products.
