I’m currently running a Call of Cthullu campaign that my players have been enjoying quite a bit, set in the long-ago times of…the late 1990s. I’ve been winging it for the most part, as I tend to do, and have managed to keep things mostly straight, which has been something of a miracle. Still, watching the players handle the insanity has been quite fun thus far.
To keep things fresh, though, we tend to jump around between systems and settings, and since this campaign will be coming to a close after the next arc, after some discussion with the players, I’ve decided I’ll be running a D&D 5E campaign. I’ve thawed somewhat on 5E since it first came about and there are more options available now, and after having several more games as a player under my belt (having only ran one previous campaign), I think it’s time for another one. And with the input from the players and some recalling of old war stories, I’m going to be revisiting a classic: the Mind Flayer trilogy from good ol’ 2nd Edition.
If you’re not familiar with the trilogy, it was in the Monstrous Arcana line, tied to the Illithiad (all one could ever want to know about mind flayers), and consisted of ‘A Darkness Gathering’, ‘Masters of Eternal Night’, and ‘Dawn of the Overmind’. This set of adventures also brought in elements of Spelljammer, which was pretty awesome back in the day when the whole RPG thing was still new.
The best part about these old school adventures is that they’re actually fairly easy to convert to 5E; most of the monsters have no need of conversion since they have already been updated, and those that do need to be brought over won’t be terribly difficult. Aside from that, it’s really just a matter of reading the old text and converting a few traps/hazards to the current edition. 5E is thankfully simple in that regard.
What’s actually going to prove more challenging is getting the players to that set of adventures. See, they’re meant for characters between 7th and 10th level, so that leaves a whole lot of play time to build up to dealing with the mind flayer threat. So, my plan is to make use of the ‘Lost Mine of Phandelver’ adventure from the 5E Starter Set, but not as written.
The idea is to take the basic core of the adventure as is and rework it to fit my own campaign setting (which I’ll be further developing alongside this adventure), and use it as a bridge to reach the Mind Flayer trilogy. And from there, well, we’ll see…still quite a bit of room for more adventures once the mind flayer threat has been dealt with, especially once the Spelljammer aspects have entered the picture. The sky is literally the limit, and not even just one set of skies since you can easily add planeshifting to the mix (my previous 5E campaign was a Planejammer campaign, so…I might be a little partial to these).
I’m hoping to share my campaign building processes and notes here as I go, for anyone who might be curious and who may want to take a crack at running these adventures my way. Granted, I generally do a lot of improvisation when I DM, so I can’t say exactly how much there’s going to be, but hopefully it’ll turn into a more substantial bit of content, and maybe even a regular thing, no matter what campaign I may happen to be running. And no doubt I’ll come up with some fiction to throw in as well to spice up the campaign setting in my preferred style.
Stay tuned, everyone, and thanks for reading! Till next time…
