Some time ago I wrote up an adventure I have been referring to as "Facility Designate 339-19" - you will find a link below to a Google docs folder containing all the material I put together for this thing. There are two main parts to this adventure; a short prelude involving an African village in an alternate history Earth, and a main portion that is a somewhat more classic delve into a demon-haunted scientific facility. I really feel I should do some additional research and probably a full re-write of the section on the village. I live in fear that Enziramire will read that part and rip me a new one (quite rightfully) for my shabby appropriations of Africa. I think the facility part stands up pretty well, but what do I know. There are definitely a few things in here that are specific to my game and players, and which you should feel free to discard or change if you would like to use it. If I ever sought to publish this professionally, I would clean that stuff up, but it's free, and my hope is that even if you don't use it wholesale, you find a part of it you like, maybe a single encounter or a magic item, or a monster. Or the art. God only knows how I talked Julian Feylona into letting me use his art for the equivalent of a few cups of coffee, but he was really gracious about it. It won't be the layout, which is pretty much nonexistent. Around this time I looked at a few layout tools (Affinity for one) and found out that layout is HARD. But part of punk is working with the tools, ideas, and skills you have - if the guitar only has a low E and an A string, you can still make power chords - so that's what I did, and pardon me if it's a little out of tune.
This was written for 5e, but honestly, that stuff is mostly just stats, which you should feel free to change and re-arrange in any way you please. I didn't follow the script when I ran this thing (introducing an encounter with a T-Rex to kick things off and get players moving, for example) and you shouldn't either.
This worked for me and my players when I ran it, but I took a slightly insane approach - I split the four players up pretty early and then ran four remote game sessions a week (instead of a single game session for all four players). In some ways this might be easier to run remotely than it would be to run face to face. I spent some time before I ran this feeling out schedules to determine if splitting the party up in that way would actually work from a commitment standpoint, and was happy when my players bought in. I put together a chart (found towards the end of the main document) to track which players had been through which experiences in the maze so that I could re-use an experience if I wanted (or note if something was changed). There's a corruption system here as well, but you certainly don't have to use it if your players would rather you did not. Once I split my players up I gave each one a proposal at some point or another to be a secret villain, and I may have rather purposely let it slip that it was ok if they decided not to join the dark side, I could just ask someone else. I don't think they trusted each other very much when they finally re-united near the end of the adventure.
I refer to the ultimate prize should the PCs successfully defeat the demon (or be rewarded for releasing it into the world) as a MacGuffin, but I only use that term in the sense that it is a prize used to drive action. In fact, as a powerful reality-reshaping instrument it could easily be the kind of reward that totally changes the nature of the world and the campaign itself, depending on what the PCs do with it and what the DM agrees to, and there are plenty of other reasons the PCs may want to explore the maze.
One other note - there are some assumptions about other works the DM should refer to - the most important of these is probably Veins of the Earth. There is a full list near the beginning. You can certainly make this work without access to that stuff, but it helps.
The reason I share this thing now is because it's Halloween, and the goal of this thing was to see if I could turn D&D into an effective vehicle for horror. It worked for me and my players and I hope it does for you, should you decide to use it.
Happy Halloween!
The dark secret is that I have a place in my heart for all African-inspired game content made with love and vision ^_^. Like Sofinho said of the OSR creators he admires - "sometimes that love is careless, but it is always passionate" and it's passion more than anything else that I hope to see. My ire is reserved for soulless ideas-by-committee and bad faith racism.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I think there's good bones here! The alt-hist angle chosen is a solid one. I spent a while as a fervent anti-AH snob, largely bc I used to be an ah.com lurker extraordinare when younger and there's no zeal like that of the convert. I've gotten better, though; most of the actual products out in the wild still make me twitch but I've regained my love for the endeavor itself. "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness" and all. Anyways, to specifics. I know you said that you'd probably rethink the whole concept back in (the other) comments, but it's so fun that I couldn't help trying to figure out ways to make it work. Looked through my books (mostly Laband's fantastic "The Land Wars: The Dispossession of the Khoisan and amaXhosa in the Cape Colony" and my aging copy of Ross' "Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa") over the past day or so and I've narrowed my ideas down to one major point of divergence - a more cantankerous Batavian Republican administration during the brief return of the Cape to Dutch rule. The period just before the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 compelled the British to hand the reins over to the Batavian Republic was a really eventful one and there's a lot of opportunity for alt-hist work there.
To hypersummarize: the Brits under Brigadier-General Thomas Packenham Vandeleur set out to remind rebellious Trekkers in the Camdeboo of their place in 1799. They do so easily and seeing the Boers get whooped (with the help of Khoikhoin men in spiffy British uniforms, no less) convinced local Khoikhoin and San people that the day of reckoning for their brutal treatment - switching between enslavement to work on Trekker homesteads and outright extermination - at the hands of the settlers had come. There's a great bit on this from Laband's book:
"This notion was powerfully reinforced by the sight of Khoikhoi soldiers in the British ranks. Many supposed that the moment had come to rise up against their cruel masters. Moving in large groups from farm to farm, they aggressively demanded guns and goods in lieu of their unpaid wages. Having put themselves beyond the pale, they then sought the shelter of the British forces for fear of Boer reprisals. Their leader, Klaas Stuurman, harangued Vandeleur, speaking darkly of the blood his people were required to avenge, and calling on the brigadier to bring back Khoikhoi liberty: ‘Restore the country of which our fathers were despoiled by the Dutch, and we have nothing more to ask.’"
While the Khoikhoin are dunking on the settlements, the British pick a basically unnecessary fight with the amaXhosa (in their defense, there were some intricate politics going on between the amaGqunukhwebe and the amaRharhabe that went entirely over their heads) and lose. The British go into full retreat, exposing their Khoikhoin allies to the counter-vengeance of the Trekkers. The Khoikhoin, led by the aforementioned hardened guerilla leader Klaas Stuurman, unite with the amaXhosa chieftains Chungwa and Ndlambe to protect themselves and the alliance proves wildly successful. The Boer commandos are broken once the lines to resupply them are cut and the settlers of the Zuurveld flee en masse soon after.
Great quotes, from Laband, C.S. Lewis, and Sofinho! Laband's book is pretty cheap and available, I'll definitely be picking that up. Physical copies of Ross' book seem to be textbook-level expensive, but it was pretty easy to find a PDF so I have a copy of that already. Thank you so much for the recommendations, I’ve no doubt that these will be extremely helpful! I have never really delved into alternate histories before, except in reading a few books. The only ones that jumps immediately to mind is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which was so well done I eventually looked up Sitka, Alaska in order to see if there was possibly a section of history I had just completely missed somehow. But I don't want to get off track - the books you mention look like great resources and I mean to examine them - thank you for the recommendations!
DeleteThis dangerous (for colonists) situation was largely diffused by conciliatory policies that the Batavian Republic grudgingly continued due to the lack of manpower available, but a somewhat stronger Batavian position could lead to a renewed provocation of the Khoikhoin-amaXhosa alliance. We want them big enough to bite off more than they can chew, the same way that the British did. Local fears that the Batavian takeover would mean hardline settler favoritism are vindicated and the resistance networks that trashed the last army kick in again. In this dreamed-up scenario, the combined armies of Chungwa of the amaGqunukhwebe, Ndlambe and his brother Mnyaluza of the amaRharhabe, and the Khoikhoin - swelled by rebellious (and well-trained) members of the "Hottentot Corps" - sweep across the Zuurveld and into the Camdeboo. Assuming the best-case scenario, the enslaved Khoikhoin bound to Boer farms in the area join their victorious march and the settlers are forced to join those of the Zuurveld in desperate flight. The town of Graaff-Reinet falls to amaXhosa-Khoikhoin forces and the whole eastern half of the colony is functionally lost to the Cape Town administrators by 1803.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, we probably want something to go down in Cape Town itself. Historically, there was the "March to Cape Town" slave (including indentures and bondsmen) rebellion slated to happen a few years later in 1808, but maybe the timetable gets pushed up by the success of the eastern armies and an influx of extremist Trekkers-turned-refugees pressuring the local Khoikhoin and transported slave populations. The leader of this one was a slave from Mauritius named Louis, who rallied foreign and native bondsmen right in the "in the heart of the major grain-growing district of the colony." Interestingly, two of the three planners of the uprising were Irishmen. Although they got cold feet on the night of the actual uprising in our timeline, there's def the possibility of a "servile white" component in another best-case scenario setup. The impetus was rumors of imminent British crackdowns on slaving and announcement of manumission - that can stay the same here. It actually helps! In both the east and the west of the Cape Colony, I'd ideally like for there to be something of a pro-British slant to the war on the colonial structure. The British *are* coming back and in strength…but if the Dutch have already been torn to hell by a combination of the eastern alliance (which cut deals with Britain in the past) and a pro-British uprising in Cape Town, the Cape Colony might be reincorporated as a Cape ~Protectorate~ instead with a much more lenient measure of self-rule. Something like the princely states in India for the western amaXhosa and the Khoikhoin rebels, perhaps. Frees up British soldiers for the ongoing wars in Europe and gets us most of what we want, a layer of insulation from the direct rapacity of the colonial system in SA. Even turning the clock back a hundred years before your initial point of divergence, I think a half-victory with some British involvement is still the likeliest outcome, but that's a huge change itself. The development of the Cape (and what is now SA as a whole) will be wildly different and prolly more firmly in the hands of its native peoples going forward.
I’m really happy to get such specificity in the feedback. Absolutely the history would influence modernity in the setting. These are fucking GREAT ideas. It surprises me not one whit that my distant kin from Hibernia would have been responsible for helping to plan an uprising. I also keep being surprised by how little information I really got in the school system about countries other than the US (and a smattering of Europe, with heavy emphasis on Western Europe). I had kind of a phantasmagoric moment a few years back looking over some of the Osprey books and realizing I had almost no information about the history of the Middle East except, “Once upon a time there were some crusades,” and then realizing that I had about the same level of information about most of the planet.
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ReplyDeleteNow I don't expect that all of this, or whatever exists in its place, would be presented in a long ass text readout or something but it influences the design of the setting significantly. I mean, if this Cape Protectorate-and-Friends eventually includes the Zulu (as the adventure initially implied) there may be much less distinction between Southern and Northern Nguni peoples without the crystalizing effects of colonial ethnogenesis. For more immediate help, maybe a ranching town would work for the adventure location? I'm not sure we can save the jungle vibe unless the rest of the setting is changed radically. A sleepy livestock-raising rural setting would fit the Eastern Cape perfectly and prob accomplish the goal of providing an out-of-the-way site for the Facility. It's also an easy way to display some of the changes to the timeline through local culture. The amaXhosa, the Khoikhoin, and the Boers all have old and complex cattle cultures - just from living in North Texas, I can think of lots of ways that could bleed into modern self-identity/fashion/etc. Nguni herdboy stick-fighting bouts and traditional cattle poetry competitions in place of rodeos, cowhide cloaks or karosses painted with ochre and tall Trekker hats with a clan councilor's crane feather badge of office in the brim acting (like cowboy hats and boots do here) as symbols of the ranching life. I'm imagining rondavel style homes, albeit leaning towards the beehive look associated with Xhosa structures - there's a lot of designs for modernized rondavels done by Jonno Smith for Farmers' Weekly SA that come to mind.
On the…majority of the setting, I found the horror effective, but I'm hopeless at dungeon design. I have some decidedly less useful thoughts about the rest of the adventure, but I’ve ranted for way too long already. Thanks a ton for putting this up, Blackout, great work!
Yeah, the jungle setting needs to be changed; that cannot be salvaged, you are right. A ranching community really would be a perfect fit. Reading this comment made me realize just how diverse even this one little tip of the continent is, and how mashing together the folks from a somewhat arbitrarily defined geography is like mashing together people from Chicago and New Orleans and expecting them to have the same history because they are both in the U.S. I love the idea of the stick fighting bouts and cattle poetry, and I will have to look up the big hats! There’s a picture of a Khoekua marksman on the Wikipedia page for the Khoekhoe that’s incredibly evocative and makes me want to reflect the image in words on a re-write. Definitely doeks will be around!
DeleteLooking at your comments as a whole I have to say it's incredibly thoughtful of you to take the time to not only look over the material, but to leave such detailed (and gentle!) feedback and I truly appreciate it. I was feeling like I should do a re-write before I saw your feedback, but now that you’ve given me some sources (and some incredibly specific avenues to explore in terms of research), I feel compelled to follow through on that instinct, so I hereby make an internet promise: before the end of next year I will do a re-write on the village and get it posted!
Thank you for your work! I genuinely believe that there's lots of promise in this idea, it's kinda dominated my idle daydreams for at least a solid day or so. One thing that I completely missed talking about was the role of the facility itself in the adventure. There's a cool book that I've admittedly only part-read (one of those times where you're looking for a specific section of a book and then dip once you've read the bit you need) called "The Scientific Imagination in South Africa: 1700 to the Present" by Beinart and Dubow that's particularly relevant. The experience of science-as-institution in the Cape Colony and later settler dominated states in the region is def one where Progress (™) was done ~to~ people in a way that is likely familiar from elsewhere in the world:
Delete"The new South Africa that emerged in 1910 was formally independent of outside control and increasingly geared to exclusive nation-building around racial segregation. In this period, science and technology were utilised in order to consolidate the embryonic state, which legitimated white authority by valorising rationality, order, and progress…Scientific work in some spheres directly justified apartheid and white domination. Exponents of volkekunde, a distinct form of anthropology entrenched in some Afrikaans-speaking universities, worked with the state in order to conceptualise and implement tribal forms of governance as the integral core of ‘separate development’. Keith Breckenridge has shown how computerised biometrical schemes were designed to implement the apartheid Population Registration Act and to support the implementation of the hated pass laws. Armament programmes launched in the 1970s with the help of the CSIR and its spin-off companies, resulted in the development of armoured vehicles, long-range artillery, aircraft, and nuclear weaponry."
I think there's a real thread of effective horror somewhere here - even considering that in the fiction, history has probably been different (and kinder) to the Cape + Friends, readers still live in a world where phrenological skull measurement was taught at Stellenbosch University well past the 1950s. You already did this pretty well in the original, I should add. The Facility and its people are clearly unwelcome creepy interlopers that end up stealing children from the community. It worked on me, for sure. If anything, leaning on that angle is prob a good way to integrate the facility with the revamped setting. I'm extremely psyched to see what you come up with, both with this adventure and whatever else you have cooking. Stay cool, fam!
You too sir! I'm really glad you enjoyed it. Thanks again very much for the feedback - your observations are incredibly helpful!
DeleteI wrote up some notes as I read through this which I'll send you, but just want to say that this is really cool and thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThanks a ton Max! I'm glad you enjoyed looking through it - looking forward to seeing your notes!
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