Something has broken loose beneath the Strega family crypt. A hunters’ guild’s failed experiments have escaped into the dark, starving, half-transformed, and mad, and the living are still down there with them. In the death-trade town of Sepulchre, you’ll descend through ancestral vaults, solve the riddles of the dead, and learn that these monsters were made, not born. A gothic horror adventure for Shadowdark, levels 1-3. Iron and fire may save you. Nothing else will. These vampires aren’t power fantasies. They’re a plague, and your torches are running low.

Hello everyone, I come bearing gifts for the glory of Halloween. Every year, people ask for a good Halloween adventure, or whether Curse of Strahd can be converted to Shadowdark. This year I’d like to offer another answer: a vampire adventure module built for Shadowdark, and it starts with this first adventure, Hubris of Blood.

It doubles as a starter adventure, with notes for new GMs on adjudicating the rulings that make Shadowdark so much fun (and occasionally a little tricky) to run.

Inside you’ll find:

• Half a dozen new vampiric monsters
• The small town of Sepulchre, the setting for this crisis
• A cemetery with three entrances to the crypt
• About 50 rooms of interactive environments
• Multiple factions whose ambitions can grow into bigger problems
• Adventure seeds to expand into a campaign, if you can’t wait for the full module

This is playtest material I poured the last 10 days into, so there’s no art yet and details may change. There are a few questions at the back of the booklet I’d love feedback on if you run it. Halloween is a month out, so there’s time to get it to the table.

Okay sales pitch done. We can talk more plainly now. You’ve been reading my reviews of starting adventures & listening to my rant about design very kindly. So I should explain what this really is.

I have an ambition. As a 5e player, the talk of the town when it came to modules was always Curse of Strahd. Even after converting to Shadowdark, the number one module people want to convert or play during this time of year remains CoS. And, while I enjoy a good cosine (yeah yeah, bad dad joke), I think we can do better. That starts with an opening dungeon that’s relevant to the campaign writ large. I need your help in figuring out if I’m on the right path with this design.

I also have 2 design ambitions. FIRST, I want to show you don’t need art to make a good adventure. Good adventure design is accessible to everyone regardless of art skill levels. This is my attempt to put my money where my mouth is. I need you to tell me if I succeeded. SECOND, I may try to go the complete opposite direction and go Beach Sorcerer art heavy for the proper book. Would people want that? My art style, of course. Let me know.

I will be running sessions on the Arcane Library discord server during the month of October. (I’ll also be testing out some of the expanded ideas that I don’t have written down.) I haven’t posted the schedule of when I will run, but that will happen by Wednesday. (Probably my scheduled time of Saturday’s starting at noon CST.)

But I would love if you ran it to and gave me your feedback on how it went. What’d you like? What’d you dislike?

Also, the distribution is through Itch for simplicity’s sake.