Setting Your Game in Two Worlds

Or: The Best D&D Campaign I've Run

This came about 3 years into my GM career. I was starting to feel the grind of D&D 5e, and needed to reinvigorate myself somehow. This was also at the point where I was gathering a lot of 3rd party modules and settings, looking for inspiration beyond the comparatively bland setting books put out by Wizards of the Coast.

Enter Steinhardt

I love FromSoftware's Soulsborne games. So when I saw MonkeyDM's Steinhardt's Guide to the Eldritch Hunt, I backed it immediately. I would recommend checking it out, it's a well-written sourcebook with plenty of ideas and gruesome artwork to get the imagination whirring.

Obviously inspired by Bloodborne, the book presents a grim world packed with grisly monsters who thrive under the cloak of night. But there's a reason why you can count the number of friendly faces in Bloodborne on one hand: This world kinda sucks to live in. Running an adventure in Steinhardt's city of Luyarnha is oppressive, and orchestrating a whole campaign is soul-crushing. So I put in a release valve: Sleep.

The Mechanic

I didn't want to burden my players with learning a whole new setting for what was going to be a handful of sessions, so their characters should be just as new to this world as the players are. They started as average adventurers in the Forgotten Realms, but woke up one night in the nightmare realm of Luyarnha. After stumbling about, fighting off some baddies, and getting to safety, they took another nap to recuperate... and woke up back in Neverwinter.

So, to escape the foreboding streets of Luyarnha, our party can take a long rest to jump back to sunny Fantasyland, where they now have to solve the mystery they're faced with. And when they're too tired to go on and inevitably have to sleep again, they're back in Scaresville. This ended up being an elegant little trick with a few benefits.

Separation of Duty

First, we have a different goal depending on where the party is. At night, they just need to survive, exploring the city and finding a safe spot to rest their heads. Then during the day, they can move about in relative safety to look for clues and try to prepare themselves for the next night.

We're also giving the players a clear motivation, while presenting them a sandbox to investigate for a solution. When I ran this, I split clues across both worlds, so my players always had a clear objective when they travelled from one to another. And it will be rare for anyone to even believe their story of world-hopping, so no one will fix this problem for our heroes.

Resource Scarcity

Next, we've made Long Rests another resource to manage. The team can't just sleep whenever the wizard is running low on spell slots, they need to accomplish enough to achieve a safe place to relax. Combine this with the increased lethality of Steinhardt's setting, and we can afford to make this phase a lot more stressful for our players.

There are a couple ways we can make our players work for their rest. Scattering occasional Hallow spell scrolls can give them an emergency nap zone, or we can establish safe houses with friendly NPCs who can give them some leads on their investigations. If they try resting in an unprotected area, they'll be "woken up" and brought back to the world as soon as their sleeping bodies take damage. I would also recommend a limit of one or two short rests per long rest, and optionally changing the time for a short rest to 10 minutes.

Juxtaposing Tone

You can't keep tension dialled to the max for an entire campaign. It either becomes mentally exhausting, or you normalize the desperation and remove its impact. So we give our players that space to breathe when they're in the classic fantasy setting, and build up the dread as night begins to fall.

If you want to take this a step further, you could make Luyarnha a twisted mirror of whatever the waking world is. I haven't tried this myself, but I see a lot of potential for making warped versions of familiar people and places. With enough planning, there are also some very cool cross-world puzzles and clues to be made here.

Final Thoughts

This post felt very self-indulgent of me. Dungeons & Dragons has become a difficult topic in some circles, but there's still space for innovation and new ideas within that system. I expect I'll be playing with this two-world mechanic in other systems, as well.