I'm brainstorming some stuff for DCC, thought /tg/ might have some good ideas.Premise: Dungeon Crawl Classics night at the local pub, we do one-shots every week (characters persist, but it's different DMs doing different stuff across a bunch of settings and plot threads). Games have to be tight, well-paced, and light on the deep RP and bartering with shopkeepers; the best adventures start with "You are at the entrance to the dungeon."The arc I'm working on is the city of Noctburg; its central-europe-themed gothic/industrial horror. It mostly exports alchemical goods; the Chymic League has enough political power to ignore what scant regulations exist regarding pollution, and working conditions in their refineries are horrible enough that organized labor agitators are popping up.The theme of Noctburg is predation and exploitation; humans are very much part of the food chain. Half the muggers are human, the other half are some manner of urbanized monster; ettercaps with garottes, cockroaches that walk upright and wear trenchcoats, selkies/kelpies/rusalkas/ect in the river. Heavy emphasis on anglerfish tactics; everything that wants to eat you has a pretty face or sounds like a child in peril.Even the spooky stuff just wants to eat you/live in you. There's ghosts, but also all manner of non-dead-human psychic parasites and manifestations of ambient misery; Silent Hill stuff happens at lot here.The alchemical/industrial stuff means that players have access to lots of consumable items; flares, grenades, acid, healing serums that cause addiction, chemical sprayers. I've been considering including blade oils as well. Also, constructs; less steam and clockwork, more wet-cell batteries.So, Dunwall+Yharnam.
These are the Silent-Hill-Esque monsters I've been working on, they're adapted from the Sorrowsworn in 5e; I've been trying to crack the "Only vulnerable when illuminated" mechanic without making lightsource bookkeeping miserable. I used the lesser monsters once and it went okay, but I want to be more ambitious and use the bosses next.The most recent idea I had was property-flipping; there's a lot of real-estate in Noctburg that's perma-condemned due to hauntings and spooky contamination; warehouses and temples and tenement buildings that WOULD be valuable, but anyone who spends time there goes all Jack Torrance in short order. So adventurers get hired to go in and clear out the nastiness (either investigating to figure out what atrocity happened and setting it right, or just killing all the spooky monsters and exorcising/fumigating the place).
Here's a sample adventure where there's an outbreak of Russet Mold at a refinery; PCs sneak in to steal formulas and product, see what happened to the first official cleanup team, then run into the second cleanup team on the way out; very Half-Life, with environmental storytelling, repeated use of encounter areas, and logistical hazards.
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What I'm stumped on right now is Vampires. No one else has done anything vampire-y yet that I've seen, so it'd be novel content for the group. But I want to up the urban predator angle and do Blade vampires; I want that scene from Blade 1 where the PCs are at the in-universe-equivalent of an underground rave, then the blood sprinklers turn on. The problem is how to translate "techno rave" into gothic gaslamp fantasy, and I'm still lacking a proper premise/narrative.Also, haven't put much thought into representing them mechanically; lean into the more-grounded Blade vampires, or the spookier Nosferatu shapeshifting-shadow-projecting-animal-controlling sort.I just want people to be humming techno beats to themselves while they kill vampires in a basement.
