For the last five months, I have been Dungeon Master for a game that isn't Dungeons & Dragons (which technically means I've been a Game Master, but Jeremy Crawford will have to come tell me himself before I retire the Dungeon Master title). This exploration of a system outside Dungeons & Dragons has been a lot of fun for both myself and my players; we've learned more about Fifth Edition's strengths, and about its weaknesses; its features and its lacks.
And so of course I decided to make some Fifth Edition homebrew inspired by our game anyway.
The system we used for the campaign was Mythos World, a 2d6 system geared toward Lovecraftian horror games set in the early 1900s. Although our game didn't actually fall into the Lovecraftian horror genre, it was a snug and effective fit for what we did do: a tabletop campaign inspired by the world and story of Pathologic.
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| From Ice-Pick Lodge's press kit for the game. |
This blog isn't really the setting to talk at length about Pathologic, whether Pathologic Classic HD or the reimagining known as Pathologic 2. But suffice it to say that it's a video game, or sort of two video games, that impressed and fascinated me so much that I wanted to run a tabletop roleplaying game campaign based off of the setting and scenario. It's weird, it's engaging, and it's often both moving and horrifying.
I was also partly inspired by the story behind the game. According to the game's translator/localizer/writer extraordinaire Alexandra Golubeva,
It wasn’t a game to begin with. Not a computer game… The setting was created as part of an RPG campaign, a pen and paper RPG.(From an article by Adam Smith in Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
A pen and paper campaign that was turned into a video game? It was almost too appropriate for the snake to eat its own tail, coming full circle as the video game is made into a pen and paper experience once more.
(For a given definition of pen and paper; my players and I used a lot of digital tools. But you know what I mean.)
To make a long story short, we had a lot of fun in the campaign. Well, as much fun as can be had when you're given responsibility to rescue a Town dying of plague, when food prices double and triple in the hyperinflative panic, when favorite NPCs are discovered infected and ailing, and when the players themselves are nearly killed in a single brutal fight or by a single deadly cough.
So, a different kind of fun, but still fun. And it's not as if it's all doom and gloom; there's moments of levity to stave off the monotony of grimdarkness and to motivate a real struggle against the plague.
With Christmas right around the corner, I decided I wanted to share with my players a present at the end of the campaign. A small supplement that would let them take the campaign with them back into Dungeons & Dragons, were they so inclined. And so, "Children of Gorkhon" was born.
Being a guy who usually does subclass homebrew, this supplement was an interesting exercise. The balance and purpose of a species is much different from a subclass. A subclass needs to help the player accomplish their adventurer tasks. But a species needs to, almost more importantly, ground a player into a certain society and circumstance.
The lore and mechanics need to come together to create an identity that the player character can either lean into, work against, or engage with in any other complex way. Subclasses provide this sort of grounding too, but it's very significant with a species. In theory, characters are perhaps to some extent choosing their subclass in character. Maybe not from the pages of a book, but in a generalized 'choosing their career path' sense. Not so with species, which a character is born and/or raised with.
After the species mechanics, the second half of the supplement provides stat blocks for Nonplayer characters: two based on the odongh and herb bride, one based on a Nonplayer character from the video game, and three based on the video game's protagonists. I'm a bit more used to stat blocks, having made a few different monsters as a homebrewer and as a Dungeon Master.
In all of this, there's an important point to consider: what does it mean to adapt content from another medium to a tabletop game? And moreover, to Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons?
I think it's important to keep in mind that only Dungeons & Dragons characters are actually Dungeons & Dragons characters. The rules of that world work differently: creatures have hit points, people can claim or be assigned alignments, magic is built around spellcasting and spell slots, and the action economy means that people either seem to be really fast or kinda slow. Adapting anything from outside Dungeons & Dragons to Dungeons & Dragons as homebrew is going to be an imperfect transition. Not everything about who and what an odongh is, or who and what Daniil Dankovsky is, can be translated to Fifth Edition mechanics. And sometimes, something needs to be added: herb brides don't really have a spike growth-like power, but it's reflective of their affinity with nature and gives them some meat in the Dungeons & Dragons context.
Similarly, characters in Pathologic don't really have alignments. Since alignment only exists in Dungeons & Dragons, only Dungeons & Dragons characters have alignments—and even that is sometimes disputed! I've labeled each stat block with an alignment, but it should be considered in only very loose terms.
What I think is most important about adaptations from other mediums is that they're often done out of admiration and fandom. I made "Children of Gorkhon" because I think the world of Pathologic is fascinating, and because I think my players think so too (it is, after all, a Christmas present to them). I think the best adaptations to Dungeons & Dragons are the ones done in homage. The translation can't be one to one, and the adaptation is often more thematic than literal, but the fondness behind the activity of homebrewing gives the content a unique heartbeat.
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