Café de Nuit

Okay, so I have had a little pet project over the years - an unnatural fondness for Lamordia, and the adventure Adam's Wrath.

I converted it originally to Pathfinder and then more recently to 5e, but did so in it's entirety (i.e., rewrote the entire adventure for my own purposes, so I can't just release it to the DMs Guild).

After reading and playing the hell out of Curse of Strahd, I have been struck with the desire to bring Lamordia to life via the DMs Guild, although I am afraid I am very ambitious...

Lamordia is problematic at best. Every single publication written about it conflicts with each other, and the timeline of events are off in space. Adam's Wrath, the only full adventure set in the domain, is fraught with railroading, ill thought sections, and a host of problems that can only be solved in a particular (and often in-obvious) way.

So, simply converting the module I feel is to do a discredit to the community. I want to do more, maybe introduce the same concepts as Curse of Strahd, with card readings, and making Lamordia an open and replayable game world in the same way that Curse of Strahd has opened up Barovia.

Whilst I enjoyed the Gazetteer II and its ideas and concepts for Lamordia, I was baffled by the choice to abandon the clearly German language and terminology found in earlier products and the novel Mordenheim.

So I intend to take some liberties. Rename the terms used in GazII to German-sounding names. I would abandon the timeline all together (Lamordian sourses use a '02, '06, etc. dates which don't correspond to the Barovian calendar anyway. Curse of Strahd has set the timeline back to before the grand conjunction and is more of a reimagining of Barovia and it's history anyway. There is for example, no mention of the tergs.

So I kind of am intending to do the same with Lamordia, keeping with its original spirit, and where in doubt, falling back to the themes in Frankenstein and gothic literature, reintroducing Leidenheim, and drawing much of the material from the novel Mordenheim. Lamordia would be in a state where the events of Adam's Wrath could take place (with one possible card reading), or Bride of Mordenheim.

My main question is this:
How would the community respond to this? Am I speaking blasphemy, or would it be welcomed in much the same way as the Curse of Strahd reboot?

Also, how should I treat Lamordia's neighbours? I am creating a closed borders scenario where the characters cannot adventure beyond the terrible blizzard at the borders, although in Mordenheim, several of the characters are from Darkon and Falkovnia.

TLDR: I am making a reimagined module for the DM Guild based on Lamordia, but it would be reimagined a bit and I want to know how that makes the community feel.

It takes a lot for us to call blasphemy around here. (keep away from Hag and Halfling vistani and you shoud be fine.)

With that said, Frankenstein takes place in Switzerland for the most part, where German is one of several official languages. I don't have Gaz II to hand right now, but I'd thought they'd used Swiss-dialect German for most things.

Also, you might want to take a look at NeoTiamat's re-imagined Lamordia in the most recent QtR and see if it's to your liking. ("Nation of Progress" in Qtr22)

Thanks for the reply. I've perused QtR22 in the article you mentioned, and the first thing I noted is how vastly more populated this slant on Lamordia is - Neufurchtenberg is over 60,000 people, more than 60 times the population of 3.x Ludendorf...

This is a true re-imagining but maybe a little too much away from Adam's Wrath. The domain reads more as Victorian steampunk instead of late Georgian gothic horror. Still, interesting ideas.

German living at the Swiss border here. If you need someone to double-check terms and names or suggest some, just ring.

The terms in Gaz2 had more of a Dutch vibe. (I haven't the book here right now, but I remember distinctly "goodendach", which is an English phonetic transcription of the Dutch "goedendag" - a good shift away from the German "guten Tag", and completely unlike the Swiss German "Grüezi".)
I actually found it a fun idea to inject Dutch to make it less of a blatant expy and more of a place of its own.

Skyrock wrote:German living at the Swiss border here. If you need someone to double-check terms and names or suggest some, just ring.

The terms in Gaz2 had more of a Dutch vibe. (I haven't the book here right now, but I remember distinctly "goodendach", which is an English phonetic transcription of the Dutch "goedendag" - a good shift away from the German "guten Tag", and completely unlike the Swiss German "Grüezi".)
I actually found it a fun idea to inject Dutch to make it less of a blatant expy and more of a place of its own.

Using the Netherlands as a rough analogy sort of makes sense with the sea coast and wetlands environment.

But maybe New Netherland is also worth a look?

Sleepy Hollow?

Ultramyth wrote:Thanks for the reply. I've perused QtR22 in the article you mentioned, and the first thing I noted is how vastly more populated this slant on Lamordia is - Neufurchtenberg is over 60,000 people, more than 60 times the population of 3.x Ludendorf...

This is a true re-imagining but maybe a little too much away from Adam's Wrath. The domain reads more as Victorian steampunk instead of late Georgian gothic horror. Still, interesting ideas.

Yeah it was a bit too Steampunk for me, leave that to Zhersia if you ask me.

ewancummins wrote:Using the Netherlands as a rough analogy sort of makes sense with the sea coast and wetlands environment

The coast is even aligned towards the north-west, which gives it even more sense.

A fun idea to explpre and to add more conflict may be to give the low-landers and coasters more of a Dutch accent and the mountain-dwellers and inlanders more of a Swiss German accent. The conflict between city slickers and mountain bumpkins is integral to Switzerland after all, as witnessed in Heidi and in the violent uprising that separated Basel-City and Basel-Country into separate cantones.