In lieu of our regular Friday night D&D duet game, Tales of Eldura, Jonathan and I decided to take some time to talk about our Land of Vampires campaign and some of the inspiration behind it. We also wanted a chance to sit down with you all in the twitch chat and answer some of your questions about playing one-on-one D&D!
Land of Vampires Highlights
Land of Vampires is based on one of our favorite sequences in our duet game, and we’re so excited to be sharing it with you all! As the player in that campaign, I was fascinated by the figure of Lord Drogo. He’s a complex vampire overlord who, depending on your PC, choices, and preferences, might turn out to be the campaign’s BBEG or could wind up as an intriguing antihero who might even serve as an ally to your PC. (I love antiheroes!)
In the video, Jonathan goes into depth about why Drogo’s character transformed in this way and how his thoughts about this vampire overlord changed as the campaign developed.
Q&A Highlights
There were lots of fun moments across the entirety of the stream, but one of my personal favorites was getting to respond to how we feel as players if/when an NPC takes center stage in the narrative in place of the PC. We’ve addressed this to some extent elsewhere, but it was really nice to be able to bounce ideas back and forth and cover a few types of scenarios and examples!
If this is something you’ve been worried about as a DM, I hope we can help you work through that concern! (It’s a really important question, and it’s going to differ for each table and player/PC!)
We also had a chance to talk about scale during combat, as that’s a question we get often and something we really want you all to feel comfortable and confident about as DMs. Jonathan got to go more in depth about his pared-down boss for lower-level parties, something we’re hoping to have a detailed post about for you all soon!
Jonathan and I hope you enjoy the video! Please post any questions you have in the comments below or on the page on YouTube!
And, be sure to join us Fridays at 7pm ET on Twitch for Tales of Eldura!
If you like what you’re reading, please consider supporting the blog by purchasing our adventures and supplements in our shop or sponsoring us on Patreon. We appreciate you so much! Thank you for joining us on this adventure! – Beth and Jonathan
Elliott says
I am very interested in your D&D Duet campaigns and impressed with the apparent quality. Recently, my 8 year-old has been asking about playing D&D with me. This lead me to your website when searching for a campaign with a single player and a DM. My question is primarily related to age level of the content in your campaigns, particularly Land of Vampires. I understand that I could obviously tailor anything I feel would be a bit mature for him as I deem appropriate, but my intent in finding a pre-written campaign is to save time on developing story and world setting, or scaling down other adventures. Basically, do you feel Land of Vampires is relatively mild, and would work with an 8 year old without too much modification (I expect some).
Beth says
Hi Elliott,
This is a great question! There are a few elements of Land of Vampires that I think would be too mature or intense for a child, but I don’t think it would take a lot of work to change them or tone them down. The biggest factor to me would be his tolerance for things like zombies—are they going to be too scary? The parents we’ve had correspond with us while working through our campaigns most often say they needed to add in encounters for their children to keep the pace up. (We tend to set up plenty of RP, and kids want to roll damage dice.)
Thematically, I would change around the primary villain, a vampire who preys on children, to something less immediately threatening but also something that’s easy to keep track of so you can help him along the thread of hunting this vampire in addition to other aims.
And then the second, larger issue we’ve heard come up at times with people gaming with children is that sometimes the genre doesn’t make sense to them, so parents have made some tweaks to better fit the campaign and setting to their child’s favorite movies or TV shows. We have a video on playing with kids that covers this in more detail.
So in short, yes, I think Land of Vampires could totally work for playing with an 8-year-old so long as the Gothic elements wouldn’t be too frightening. Please feel free to add any additional questions you have; we’d love to help!
– Beth