The most annoying part of creating adventures for most DMs is making maps. As such, many DMs steal existing maps from ꦰthe Internet or from older adventures that their players haven't experienced yet. There are some DMs who pilfer maps from video game walkthroughs, as many of them can easily b꧟e repurposed for a D&D dungeon, but why stop there?
The original Resident Evil is the game that brought survival horror to the masses. In it, a special forces team is dispatched to investigate reports of bizarre murders taking place outside of Raccoon City. The team soon finds themselves trapped in a battle for their life, as they must uncover the secrets of the deadly🍃 Spencer Mansion and survive against the zombies that stalk its halls.
Resident Evil used a contemporary (for 1998) setting and its villains had roots in science fiction, rather than fantasy. Despite this, it's still possible to turn the events of the game into low-level Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
Transplanting The Spencer Mansion Into A D&D World
The setup for the adventure can be taken straight from the game. A series of bizarre murders have happened near an isolated town. A team of guards is sent out into the wilderness to follow the tracks of the potential killers, only to disappear without a trace. The party is the second group assꦿigned to find the guards and the killers, with the promise of a reward at the end. The players are given a map of the region and there is nothing but wilderness for miles around.
The party finds the tracks of the original group sent out into the wildern🗹ess and they stumble across a mangled corpse in the middle of the night. They are beset by a horde of undead dogs, and a running battle starts. The party spot a mansion in the distance that wasn't on their map, so they make a beeline for it in order to better defend their position. Once inside, they find themselves caught in a desperate ba𝔉ttle for survival, as the mansion is home to deadly traps and vicious monsters.
As this adventure takes place in a D&D world, there is no Umbrella Corporation or T-virus. Instead, the enemies will be a secret group of mages who want to perform magical experiments away from prying eyes. A cult of clerics who worship the god of dea𝕴th also works as potential villains. The villains' goal was to find a way to create undead without the aid of magical spells, in order to prove that zombies cꦯould be made with alchemy. The purpose of this experiment is to create undead that are immune to the holy powers of a cleric or the magical control of an arcane spellcaster. The mansion was used as a testing ground, with the more hospitable areas used so that the researchers could live in comfort, and could pass off the building as a secret getaway for a wealthy nobleman, should it be discovered by accident.
The reason why the building is full of traps is to try and slow down any test subjects that escape, in order to give the researchers time to flee to a safe area. The puzzles exis💞t in order to make sure that it's not easy for non-qualified individuals to move to different parts of the mansion, especially in a lockdown/outbreak situation.
As you could probably guess if you played any of the Resident Evil games, the experiments succeeded. The villains managed to create alchemical zombies without the aid of spells. The problem is that they didn't anticipate that the zombies could create more of their own kind by biting living beings. As such, the mansion was overwhelmed during an outbreak and it was soon teeming with undead. Magical illusionary wards had beeไn placed around the mansion in order to stop undead from straying too far if they managed to escape from the building, but these are starting to fade away.
Dangers Of The Mansion
The magical wards around the mansion will keep the players safe from the undead stalking the perimeter outside, but they are now trapped with the creatures who inhabit the research areas. The Resident Evil adventure is best suited for low-level players, as mid/high-level characters have numerous ways to escape from the mansion with magic. Even a fly spell would make it possible for a player to flee in safety. As such𓆏, it's recommended for a party of levels 1-4.
Resident Evil featured a solo protagonis☂t who had to ration their ammo and healing items throughout the course of the 🐭game. The fact that the adventure will use a party of characters with a diverse range of powers makes this trickier to accommodate. We'll discuss the details of the monsters in a future article, but the encounters will often involve a group of enemies, rather than a single foe.
Onꦇe way in which to ramp up the tension is to prevent players from being able to fully benefit from resting while within the mansion. The magical wards that cover the building act as a convenient explanation for this, as being able to rest between each encounter will remove the tension of the situation. The players should be allowed to take a short rest between battles, but long rests should be restricted to the Save Rooms, and the player should have a finite number of uses for these. The explanation could be that the wards in this room are designed to let the researchers sleep in peace, but they are starting to fade as well, limiting their long-term usage.
Changing The Items
There are many items in the mansion that will need to be changed for a D&D adventure. A𓆏 lot of the puzzle i♒tems can remain the same (keys, crests, gems), and we'll discuss specific changes in a future article.
The green herbs will be replaced with potions of healing, while blue herbs can be replaced with antitoxin. The researchers in the mansion were alchemical geniuses, so these potions are of the highest quality, allowing them to be combined into a single concoction that heals/cures poison in a single action. The red herbs will remain the same and the players should discover notes left by the researchers that explain their purpose. The red herbs have the ability to enhance the effects of potions of healing, so that they restore 3D8+8 instead of 2D4+2. The researchers were growing a lot of these herbꦦs, but they perished before tꦐhey were usable, which is why the players will find them spread around the mansion.
In terms of weapons, many of them can be replaced with magic items. The party's basic weapons can act as the knife/pistol, but there are potions and scrolls that can substitute the rest. Alchemist's fire can act as grenades and it's feasible that the researchers created a "launcher" that is used to propel flasks from a distance, to act as the grenade launcher. Potions of fire breath can replace the shotgun & shotgun shells, spell scrolls of scorching ray can replace the flamethrower, w𒀰hile a wand of fireballs can replace the rocket launcher. The DM might consider replacing these with melee/ranged weapons that better suit the party, depending on the characters and their﷽ builds.
In the next article, we'll discuss the creatures that stalk the Spencer Mansion and how they differ from the standard monsters that appear in the Monster Manual.