How to Adapt Different Genres for D&D

The base experience of Dungeons & Dragons is high fantasy. When Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were creating D&D in the 1970s, they adapted Tolkien's work as a foundation for the world that the game would be set in. And as much as many people love the high fantasy style of the game, others might find more enjoyment of the same system with other genres. There are, of course, so many tabletop games that utilize these genres, and there's no reason not to be playing them. However, there are some reasons to adapt other genres into a D&D game. 

One of these reasons is that you might be running a D&D campaign that you want to spice up with a bit of another genre's flavor. I've done this in most of my campaigns at some point. When I ran Listen Check, a live radio D&D podcast, we played a generally high fantasy game that was also filled with horror chapters. In the Eastweald campaign, I offered high fantasy as a base, but with mystery elements, gothic symbols, and lots of comedy. This model works well, and I recommend it. 

But there's also another reason: you might want to keep a group that enjoys playing D&D specifically happy while still adding new genres to the experience. I've run games in this model as well. In my National Treasure campaign, I took D&D and adjusted various parts of it to fit into a western genre, incorporating enough of the D&D framework to preserve that for my players. In the mystery campaign, we have played solely D&D for years, but the mystery element of the game created an experience that was new to us despite sticking with our tried-and-true foundation.

So how do you go about adapting different genres for play in D&D? The first step is in choosing a genre. You should be inspired by something about the genre that you're choosing, because you're going to be working with it closely for the duration of its time in your game. I'm going to provide us with five common genres and some ideas for each one, as well as instructions on how to do this process yourself if you have another genre in mind. The five genres we'll work with are: 

• Western
• Science Fiction
• Mystery
• Comedy
• Horror (Psychological)

There are obviously many other directions we could go—whatever inspires you should be the emphasis—but these will do for examples. 

 

Our next step is to decide which parts of the genre in question we intend to use. In my experience, it's better to go a little overboard in brainstorming and allow some ideas to not make it to the finished project than to move forward with too little to work with. We're looking for not necessarily the defining features of the genre, but the parts of it that you find interesting. And as you note the ideas that you like, allow yourself to take those ideas farther in brainstorming or just let it be an idea—whatever feels right. We're at a very conceptual stage now, so allow yourself to be incomplete just yet. 

 

Below are some bullet points on the main things that I find most narratively compelling about these genres. Note how I'm really letting it sit for now. 

• Western
• Hard life on the range
• Landscape full of criminals
• A treacherous landscape
• Science Fiction
• Stories about progress and regression
• Using specialized technologies - fueled by magic?
• Interplanetary travel
• Mystery
• Narrative tension - slow burn
• Puzzles to solve
• Complex morality
• Comedy
• Absurdism
• Ability to be both dark and funny
• Satire – criticizing power with humor
• Horror
• Feeling the up and down of tension
• Imaginative scary things – nightmares
• Feeling trapped/helpless

Your list should ideally have more than three ideas, and will probably have things that are more specific. “I like laser guns” is a perfectly good answer for science fiction, and “I like to laugh,” is a perfectly good answer for comedy. We just want to have some conceptual recognition of what we like about that thing as well for the next step.

Our next step is in deciding how we’ll adapt the things that we like into the D&D format. This step isn’t as daunting as it sounds. Here’s the process: can the thing you like about this genre exist in D&D without having to change anything? If the answer is yes, you can keep going. But if the answer is no, then you’ll need to decide what to change.

How do we change it? This is best explained with an example. When I built the wild west island of Ramsey (which was later used in the National Treasure campaign), I wanted a place where I could tell western stories in D&D. But I can’t think of a single western that doesn’t have a revolver in it. And revolvers don’t exist in D&D—some would even argue that they shouldn’t and can’t. But if you want to preserve the aesthetic of the western, the prime weapon of its style, and allow people to do shoot-outs, you have to change something. My fix was relatively simple: hand crossbow technology had advanced and could allow “gunfighters” to do exactly as they would with guns, but with handheld crossbows. The aesthetic changes slightly, but it’s fundamentally the same experience as a western, but without having to construct entire rules additions to make guns possible.

Your changes should follow this spirit: what’s the change that best presents what I like about the genre I’ve chosen? If my hand crossbows hadn’t felt like enough of a change, I would think about this question. If I really wanted revolvers in my game, I would need to develop some rules for using them. This could be simple: roll a d20 as usual, but with an adjusted roll that compensates for the revolver’s higher damage (it is, after all, harder to shoot someone with a handgun at 50 feet than to hit someone five feet away with a sword). If a character is shot, they have to roll a Constitution save—pass and take damage, fail and instantly die. I personally recommend the hand crossbow route, though; this example is just a beginning to brainstorm about how to work around something that I really wanted to keep from a genre.

Let’s do another round with our five genres. Here’s the adaptations for each genre and their inspiration points:

• Western
• Hard life on the range
• Storylines about how much people struggle, missions about helping deliver shipments of building supplies, foods, medicine
• Landscape full of criminals
• Cattle rustlers and outlaws are essentially bandits – opens door for bounty missions for the players
• A treacherous landscape
• Set on a sandy, mountainous island with little vegetation and venomous creatures
• Science Fiction
• Stories about progress and regression
• Upper class that uses advanced tech, lower classes that are stuck with primitive smithed weapons
• Using specialized technologies - fueled by magic?
• Magic users develop batteries to store extra magical energy – they sell it to the wealthy
• Interplanetary travel
• Poor people are being shipped off to other planets to mine them as punishments
• Mystery
• Narrative tension - slow burn
• Reveal only a minor clue every session to keep tension up
• Puzzles to solve
• Develop witness testimonies that has to be analyzed and compared to other testimonies
• Complex morality
• In order to solve case, players will have to do something immoral
• Comedy
• Absurdism
• Ridiculous magical creatures with funny names
• Ability to be both dark and funny
• Tell a dark storyline with lots of comic relief
• Satire – criticizing power with humor
• Overall storyline about a powerful person who turning people into money
• Horror
• Feeling the up and down of tension
• Present an enemy who is constantly threatening the players and then leaving them alone for a while
• Imaginative scary things – nightmares
• Use nightmare-like descriptions to make enemies especially terrifying
• Feeling trapped/helpless
• Restrict weapons? Players have to roll Wisdom saves to not be frightened?

You’ll notice that because my notes so far have been conceptual, I haven’t really had anything conflict. That’s an ideal scenario. If you’re running into trouble, move on to the next step. But what I have now looks a lot like the beginning of notes on running a campaign. This is a good place to move on.

Our next step is to think about things in the opposite direction: from D&D back to our genre of choice. What I mean by this is, it’s time to flip through the D&D Player’s Handbook and figure out what conflicts we’re going to have with our adaptation. Our first section is races. Does your setting call for a change to D&D’s races? Do you need to add a race or get rid of one? If I were running a science fiction D&D game that involved aliens, I would want to put together some info on that alien race by using the existing races as a model—just pick the race that’s closest to what you want, and begin to add and subtract things like you would with a custom class.

Next in the Handbook are classes. Do any classes need to be added or subtracted? For a western campaign, if the emphasis were combat, I would want to create a gunslinger class that could allow players to really go for that experience. Again, if you wanted to do so, just follow these instructions to build a class. Or conversely, you might decide to run a mystery campaign that disallows divination magic, which could seriously throw a wrench in your planning as DM. Make these decisions based on how they will affect the genre hybrid you’re imagining—will they make the game more or less the way you want your players to experience it?

The next major section in the Handbook is equipment. Depending on how you want to run it, this can be either the easier or hardest step. If you think that traditional D&D combat serves your purpose perfectly well, or if you won’t be doing that much combat in your campaign, then it’s more than fine to just take the system on wholesale. One of the advantages of using a system that was designed to allow for any action is that it’s pretty adaptable. Bottom line: if you’re able to use standard swords-and-bows-type weapons, there’s very little advantage in not doing so.

But if you need to make changes, it’s possible. Subtracting weapons is simple enough—just take them off the table for your players. Anything from “it hasn’t been invented in this world” to “it’s prohibitively expensive to make that” or even “that weapon’s been banned in this part of the world” will suffice for explanation. If you are, however, adding weapons or armor, you’ll want to be very careful. If it’s not carefully balanced, it can destroy the whole game. If ever there were a need for a playtest, it’s when you’ve introduced a new weapon or armor to the game. My advice is to give nothing that you make for the game more powerful than the best items in D&D unless you’re willing to also improve the opposite to compensate (improved weaponry? improve armor too) and then playtest. Trust me when I say you don’t want to find out that the system is flawed when you’ve already committed to it for a campaign. The bottom line here is, be careful, and make sure that it’s worth it for your vision of this genre. We are, after all, sticking with D&D rather than adopting another system, so changing too much could lead you into a situation where you’re building an entire game, which is great, but remember our goal here is to use D&D for its foundation.

The last major section in the Handbook is spells. Like with equipment, messing with custom magic can be dangerous for balance reasons. However, we should consider the source; I once created an entire language of magic and threw it into a live radio broadcast campaign. What I’m saying is, it’s a highly enjoyable endeavor to go whole hog developing spells, but you can’t do it halfway. If you remove a spell, be sure it doesn’t remove a necessary tool from the players’ arsenals. And if you add a spell, you must be sure that it can’t break the game. I would also add that I am notorious for simply inventing magical effects and using my custom magic language as an excuse; this allows me more power as a DM, but it can also complicate things if players become set on gaining the same powers.

Here’s this step performed for all the genres we’ve been tracking. Note that I’m only including mentions of things that need to be changed in order to work.

• Western
• Changes
• Revolvers to hand crossbows, most armor is leather
• Gunslinger class – combination of Ranger and Rogue
• Use of horses becomes more frequent for players—have players each start with a trusty steed
• Science Fiction
• Changes
• Custom weapon: hand blaster (hand crossbow stats, +1 to hit and d8 damage)
• Custom armor: space mesh (chainmail armor stats, but without weight penalties)
• All known magic users are being harnessed for their energy, which fuels the homes of the wealthy
• Mystery
• Changes
• No divination spells, no spells that allow people to speak with dead people
• Making all the races look more similar so that a suspect description doesn’t narrow the search as much
• Deities are disinterested in the affairs of people—won’t help out in the investigation
• Comedy
• Changes
• Laugh mechanic—any time a player makes the DM laugh, they are granted an automatic crit on their next roll
• Many new magical creatures with strange proportions with a list of funny names to develop—will likely need combat stats for funny monsters
• Use Chaos Table to keep things weird and interesting
• Horror
• Changes
• Make leveling up take longer to maximize player helplessness—double XP requirements? 1.5 times the XP requirements?
• Develop stats for nightmares monsters – players may choose to stand and fight
• Have a mechanic for coming back to life? If a player is killed by a nightmare, do they come back again, but more ghostly? X number of deaths and it’s permanent?

As you can see, these are pretty rough notes, but this is all the direction I would need to start tending to these changes. With all of the conceptual work we’ve done so far, there’s really only one last thing we need to worry about: feeling comfortable in our new hybrid world. I can tell you that once I began playing any of my genre adaptations, I quickly found that switching gears from pure high fantasy to another genre, I had RPG whiplash. I recommend spending as much time in your head in the new genre twist on D&D as you can to prepare, and allow yourself space to ease into it.

Even with as few changes as I’ve suggested for the above genres, we’re still tweaking the base game experience by a fair amount. And don’t forget that the setting, which does so much work when it comes to genre, will do a lot of the heavy lifting. My Ramsey players knew when I described the world that they were in a western, just as my many players have been able to tell when I have suddenly switched to horror. Don’t worry that your players will miss what you’re doing—they’ll be right there with you.

Once you’ve done the work create your D&D genre hybrid, it’s time to get to the playing. Gather some friends who will appreciate what you’ve done with the D&D system and prepare for a new twist on your old gameplay.

There you have it: a guide to adapting D&D to other genres, as well as notes on how to adapt five popular genres. They're not finished campaign notes yet, but I know that you'll be able to get your campaign going with some good, sound thinking. Good luck out there, DMs. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to handle shopping trips in-game, a profile on the island of Fanin in my homebrew setting, and a guide to senses of humor by culture in my homebrew setting. Until next time, happy gaming!

Back to the homepage (where you can find everything!)