The Nightmares Underneath: Looking for Follow-Up Adventures to City of Poison

#1

So I started a former D&D group on The Nightmares Underneath this weekend and they fell for it pretty hard, esp. digging the emphasis on interaction and investigation. I updated the setting to being something like the early 1900s (adding gas lights, limited electricity, and a mix of horse-drawn cabs with urban trains), kept things in the City of Neth, and stuck with the introductory adventure, The City of Poison. The group will be a rotating cast, so I like to keep the adventures fairly urban so that the players have a chance to get into the incursion and out of it in a brief period of time.

We finished the first part of City of Poison and the next couple of sessions should take us through the other two parts. What other short adventures might make good nightmare incursions in or near an urban area? D&D-esque recommendations are quite welcome, but so are Call-of-Cthulhu-style mysteries that might make good incursions.

3 Likes
#2

Temple of the Peerless Star (Codex Starlight) part of a university or someones hillside manor.

Trepallidic Parasites (Codex Crystal)

Asylum City (Codex Madness) not a new city but a series of changes to an existing city, and things that you never noticed before…

2 Likes
#3

The stygian library supplement could be cool. Maybe the stygian library is a nightmare itself contained within a nightmare that’s in an actual library?

I’d look at one page dungeons. I’m sure they could work too.

2 Likes
#4

Used the Stygian Library with TNU at a con, it was amazing. I think it works best when the library has something they need, but an incursion could be a good way to introduce it!

1 Like
#5

Glad you had a swell time with it. The library as a semi persistent nightmare inside of a nightmare sounds scary in a cosmological sense. The library is always there. It’s not a defeatable place. Maybe it does have an anchor and you’d have to play and find it. But the safest thing to do is to defeat the current incursion that bridges to the library and hope it doesn’t take hold elsewhere. All you can do is shut off the entrances.

1 Like
#6

One-page dungeons are great. You can use them as-is or build more stuff on top of them really easily. I also like Tony Dowler’s Purple Worm dungeon. Judging from the Fear of a Black Dragon review, Ravenloft could make a decent incursion.

Call of Cthulhu adventures can also work really well, especially if they have a monstrous lair that you can make into an incursion. Here are some that I like:

Fatal Experiments (1990) has 3 adventures in it. Tatterdemalion has the PCs go to a costume party in New England and then get transported to Carcosa where they meet the Yellow King (high level incursion). The Songs of Fantari has a Deep One lair on an island, so you’d at least need a lake or coastal city for that one. The Lurker in the Crypt is about wealthy ghouls and takes place mostly in the New York City Sewers.

Those three have substantial dungeon or incursion type aspects to them, more so than the following, which tend more toward the investigation side of things.

Tales of the Miskatonic Valley (1991) has some good scenarios if you want to really move away from dungeons into weirder territory. For real small, nearly 1-room incursions, you can look at A Painetd Smile (single house) or Trail of Yig (snake den with 1 monster in it). Regiment of Dread (civil war ghosts) and The Watcher in the Valley (native burial ground) can work for outdoors incursions. Fade to Grey will give you a wizard who pulls dreaming PCs into incursions mentally, not physically.

And speaking of Dreamlands, I’ve enjoyed Pickman’s Student and Season of the Witch in the Dreamlands supplement from 1988. I ran The Pits of Bendal-Dolum (from Cthulhu Classics) for my wizard convicts disarming arcune uxo alt setting, and while the evil temple can make for an okay incursion, some of the interstitial dreamlands stuff was a bit tedious.

8 Likes
#7

I think I ultimately want to push them back into the library when they need information from forbidden books (or souls), so it may be worthwhile to reveal it early and let them remember it’s there.

#8

Awesome recommendations - thanks! I grew up on D&D, classic WoD, and GURPS, and never got to try CoC.

#9

These are great, Blake! Thanks!

#10

Sometimes I like to say my favourite edition of D&D is Call of Cthulhu.

(It’s what I played the most as a kid, and I saw a lot of similarities when I finally started playing old school D&D.)

2 Likes