Night’s Dark Terror (Adapted for Shadowdark) by TSR UK

B10: Night’s Dark Terror is the gold standard for Basic/Expert-level hexcrawls. It’s a sprawling magnum opus of a campaign written by one of the best teams TSR ever fielded (and the team members went on to design Warhammer Fantasy RPG, another iconic setting).

I used the idea of a magic map and the Valley of Hutaaka, inserting the hidden valley west of Needle. You can find these sessions written up in the summaries, but here I’ll talk about running Night’s Dark Terror in Shadowdark.

Play Time: Six sessions, 2.5 hours each (15 hours total), the vast majority of the module left untouched. Probably another 15+ sessions of material.

General Thoughts: I ran this when I was in middle school, and remembered it being fantastic. And unlike many things from an earlier era, B10 withstood the test of time. It’s a glorious, sprawling campaign module for Basic D&D which smoothly transitioned into Shadowdark with almost no hiccups.

I introduced the idea of a hidden map leading to a valley (the Valley of Hutaaka) early on in my campaign, and finally, the adventurers took the hook. The first two sessions were just getting into the valley, and then we had four full sessions in the valley itself, with a vast amount of material still untouched. We even introduced a new PC, Jain, a Hutaakan priestess who decided to flee the valley with her newfound allies.

The biggest speedbump in my off-the-cuff conversion was Night’s Dark Terror assumes some Basic D&D elements like “clerics have turn undead” and “infravision.” While Shadowdark priests do have turn undead, it’s a spell, not an ability, and can exhaust itself. Infravision is not a Shadowdark thing at all, which changed the dynamic of a few locations, such as the Temple of Pflarr.

Another notable change was having to ad-lib the magic users. Golthar and Kfordez are given Basic D&D stats, but these require some quick interpretation at the table. Golthar’s spells came over more or less smoothly, while Kfordez’s spell list was a bit harder.

I didn’t even touch Xiquata, the Mirror Isle, the Shroud Spider lair, Loshad, or the urban adventures, so I’ll tuck all of those locations in my back pocket – that’s one of my GM tricks, is when an adventure has leftovers encounters or locations, I mentally file the leftovers in my inventory for later use at the table. Prep smarter, not harder.

Available on DriveThruRPG: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/17119/B10-Nights-Dark-Terror-Basic?affiliate_id=14013