Adapting Red Hand of Doom to Ezora (2): Structure

Warning: This article contains spoilers about the overall structure of the Red Hand of Doom module. If you prefer to discover its details on your own, I recommend reading with caution!

Adapting Adventures: Flexibility as a Narrative Key

When adapting an adventure, I usually break it down into its constituent parts: locations, monsters, and NPCs. This approach is particularly useful in adventures like Red Hand of Doom (RHoD), which follow a linear structure. One question I always ask myself is: Is it possible or desirable to visit these locations (or nodes, as Justin Alexander calls them—in an order different from the one proposed in the adventure? In most cases, the answer is yes.

The structure of RHoD is brilliantly summarized in a flowchart presented by ksbsnowowl in The (New) 3.5 Red Hand of Doom Handbook for DMs:

Ambush on the road —> semi-remote town —> wilderness —> Army’s forward scouting base (Vraath Keep) —> secondary forward base/choke point (bridge) —> attack on remote town —> Army raiding & pillaging/Party evacuating towns —> army movement toward climactic battle location —> investigate secondary, off-the-beaten-path location where Army is breeding monsters for the main assault —> find blackmail item —> meet/recruit potential allies —> investigate tertiary location indicated on map, base of blackmailed Army ally —> solve Big Bad Evil Ally blackmail situation —> audience with the Lords —> climactic battle —> investigate Army home base —> deal with fiendish interlopers and BBEG

This scheme, by abstracting away the specific details of the adventure, makes it adaptable to any setting. For instance, it has been reinterpreted in settings such as Eberron, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, or Rokugan. In my case, I adapted it to Utuma, a region in my campaign setting that blends elements of Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East.

Node Structure in RHoD

The original adventure features four major nodes, to which I added a fifth:

1. The Witchwood and Drellin's Ferry.
2. The Ruins of Rhest.
3. The Tower of the Ghostlord.
4. The Hammerfist Holds (expanded from content originally designed by Saintheart here)
   
5. The Battle of Brindol
   
6. The Temple of Tiamat

My idea was to open the adventure with a pointcrawl in the Witchwood, then expand the plot so that players could decide how to thwart the advance of the Gnoll Horde. The clues they uncovered would guide them to nodes 2, 3, or 4, depending on their priorities and their perception of which threat was most urgent or significant. For this part of the structure, I took inspiration from The Legacy of the Crystal Shard, limiting the time available for players to resolve only two out of the three nodes before the Horde advanced toward Brindol. This design choice ensured that the unresolved node would have tangible consequences, such as the availability of allies to defend the city or the presence of additional enemy troops in the final battle (similar to the battle of Denerim in Dragon Age: Origins).

Freedom of choice, combined with direct consequences of players’ actions, is an element that many enjoy in role-playing games. As for node 5, I designed it as a mobile element that would appear at the most narratively relevant and dramatic moment, driving the campaign toward its climax. This way, it would not depend on a rigid event calendar, which would be impractical in my version of RHoD.

In this adaptation, the player characters would not have access to the tiri kitor's giant owls. Instead, the elves of Utuma—satyrs with horns and antelope-like legs—would use crocodiles to traverse the wetlands of their homeland. While this choice adds a unique flavor to the setting, it also means that travel would be significantly slower.

Final Node Organization

The organization of my nodes was as follows:

With this global framework in mind, I was ready to work on the detailed adaptation of each of these nodes, which we will explore in upcoming articles.