My gaming group’s normal night for adventure is Tuesday. This year Halloween falls on a Monday night and I decided to see if my players were interested in having a special creepy gaming session and just about all of them are eager.
Earlier this week I had decided to become a dedicated Savage and start using Savage Worlds for much of my roleplaying needs. As a result, I started looking around for a Savage Worlds one-off horror module. The one that best fit my needs was “Last Rites of the Black Guard” which is also available for d20 system.
Unfortunately, it is not available for Fantasy Grounds and the screen shot below shows you where I am at in the conversion:
Last Rites starts with a request for help from a desperate single mother whose daughter has been touched by occult forces. The players respond to the plea and start investigating at her home, but the trail will lead to far stranger places.
The module reads well and seems to be a good one – it started 12 to Midnight off and they eventually became an imprint under Pinnacle. ETU (East Texas University) is an example of their work and they created the Pinebox, Texas, setting. It isn’t on rails and provides a lot of information in a fairly open way.
If it has any flaws, it is perhaps the timeline. The adventure starts at 7pm and none of the occult activity starts until midnight. Five hours is a long time to hang out, so I will probably start it at 8pm and ‘steal’ 30 minutes while the woman helps her daughter to go to sleep. Besides, getting people separated from one another is always a good ploy…
There is also a person that is going to break into a neighboring home and I don’t care for how it is handled. There are notice rolls to see them drive by, another to see that the license plate is unusual. Blah! I am going to casually mention that they see a neighbor returning home and pull into the garage (they are breaking in by using a device to cause the door openers to start). Later on, they’ll learn that the neighbor died and was rather notorious. If they realize that the dead neighbor should not be driving, good for them, but there will be no rolling for clues.
Finally, I will take a pass on the provided quick-start characters. There are only 4 and they seem to all link back to ETU – explaining ETU when I have 3 or 4 hours total is not going to happen.
I’ve got quite a few hours of work yet to finish the conversion – I’d better stop talking about it and get back to doing it! The creepy part of this for me – when I run it, it will be my first time GMing Savage Worlds and hopefully my system knowledge is up to the task.
-Kilgore
