Professor Dungeon Master’s Frankenstein – Horror RPG Review

A review of Professor Dungeon Master’s generic horror adventure, Frankenstein, based on the classic Mary Shelley novel. If you’re looking for a short, fast-paced adventure, and don’t mind a little GM prep, check this adventure out!

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hey folks I’m JC and once again I am returning to horror one of my favorite genres for one-hot Adventures now horror Adventures are great because they’re self-contained easily finished in one session and are often filled with surprises and shocks for your players and today I’m going to take a look at Professor dungeon Masters Frankenstein an adventure based on the classic Mary Shelly novel in this homage the pces are Travelers who arrived tolat Germany in the year 1799 where they soon discover that the town is overcome by desperation Calera and death and in this Moody atmosphere a certain mad scientist has just begun his secretive dark work now this adventure is curious because it’s written in a generic way so you can use it for any game system you like but but obviously it’s going to work better if you use the ones that do action horror really well game systems where life is cheap Darkness actually matters and a single strong creature can take on an entire party of wouldbe Heroes and scare the hell out of them so does a classic novel like Frankenstein make for a good RPG Adventure will players who are fans of the book or movies love this or will they be bored because they know how it all ends well grab your corpse cart and get ready for some serious spoilers because not only am I going to give you a full review of Professor dungeon Masters Frankenstein I’m also going to give you gms’s some tips and tricks on how to run this like a true mad scientist Frankenstein was written by Daniel defasio AKA Professor dungeon master a YouTube influencer who does a wonderful job covering Indie Dungeons and Dragons like games and one who actually inspired me to give this channel a go having seen Daniel GM at Gen Con I can say he knows his stuff he takes pride in giving his players a lot of agency and loves to toss his groups into a RW iron roller coaster of bloody RPG fun Frankenstein is a short Adventure it’s only about 15 pages long and can easily be run in just a single session making it great for nights where you need a break from your regular campaign or you want a spooky event night or you’re gming at a convention now because this adventure is written generically GMS will have to do some work to prep the adventure for their favorite game system mostly this means converting a handful of NPCs over to whatever system you’re going to use for example you might have an encounter with grave robbers and the adventure will say that they’re kind of pathetic shovel wielding scum and then it’s up to you to really design them are they clever and play dirty tricks or are they dumb strong brutes or is one of them a boss who might actually be a threat in combat this is all up to you and some GMS may love this aspect I do but others might not because it does require a little bit more prep for what it’s worth I R the adventure in gerps and I had fun tweaking the encounters just the way I like but I can see this easily working in other systems like old school DND D call of cthulu or Savage worlds and by the way you gerps GMS can steal my pre-made characters and NPCs and PCS on my website just check the link in the description below and there’s also tokens and maps that anybody can use the adventure begins in 1799 with the PC’s entering Engle Germany a town overcome by chalera and death as they enter the city Gates they hear a cry for help from a nearby Street a young woman named Elizabeth lenza is being cornered by Thugs and she desperately needs their help and after a quick Skirmish she’s relieved and explains that she is new to the city and she’s here to find her brother/ fiance Victor who has not written her in quite some time she’s really worried and asks the PC help to track him down this Victor of course is Victor Frankenstein and if you’re wondering why I said brother/ fiance well that’s a very curious detail from the novel basically Elizabeth was raised by Victor’s family after her mom died and they fell in love and she eventually promised to marry him so Elizabeth my dear what you’re saying is that your brother/ fiance might be up to something unnatural H this is a creepy Adventure Mary Mary shell was the George RR Martin of her age it only takes the PCS a few minutes to find Victor but he’s hold himself up in his upstairs apartment and refuses to come out even to see Elizabeth she’s heartbroken and concerned and she actually asks the PC’s help to keep watch on Victor’s activities to see what’s up with him is he having an affair is he sick she asks the PCS to investigate later that night the PCS see unsavory men pull up in a wagon and chat with Victor Money Changes hands these men then make their way to a local graveyard where they’re discovered to be grave robbers here’s another opportunity for a skirmish since grave robbing is illegal and these men are nasty and brutish and by the way I know he’s not in the book but I added an eigor like character here a hunchback graveyard keeper to the scene he was armed with a flint lock ready to shoot anyone messing with his graveyard yard turning this into a potential three-way encounter I just thought that was a fun little add to the scene confronting Victor about this whole event finally gets him to admit what’s going on he tells the PCS the entire story about how his lust for scientific advancement caused him to create a monster which he now really regrets but after losing track of the monster for a few weeks the monster is now back in angle stat and threatening him the monster is blackmailing Victor to create him a bride else he will hurt everyone that Victor loves and Victor even suspects that this monster already killed his younger brother William back in Geneva and to prove his story Victor shows the PCS his lab where a stitch together corpse of the Bride is nearly ready for reanimation he says that in 2 days the monster will come to claim his prize but he deeply hates what he is doing at this point the PCS will likely debate what the right thing for them to do is the adventure mostly assumes that the PCS will make plans to capture or kill this monster but GM stay on your toes here your players may come up with something very creative that could threaten and derail the whole adventure for example one group that I ran this adventure with decided to expose Victor to the authorities hoping to see him jailed while then exposing his crazy work to Elizabeth and then getting her to return back to Geneva that plan required some serious creative gming to kind of get it to line up with the rest of the adventure another group though took the bait and decided to hang out with Victor to try to negotiate with the monster when he arrived but fully armed to in case that chat went bad there’s then a short interstitial scene where the monster Corners one of the pcs one night and gives his side of the story that Victor is the real monster and because he was born hideous the world will always hate him and so Victor owes him a companion but the creature also admits to fully killing Victor’s youngest brother in a fit of rage the monster urges the PCS to force Victor to finish his bride the scene is a little heavy-handed and feels like an expo dump especially to players who may not be familiar with the novel it works but I added a little twist here to give the players a little more agency in this conversation but I’ll talk about that later but exactly like the novel The Adventure captures that gray morality that is sometimes missed in adaptations of this work both Victor Frankenstein and his creature are monsters and they’re stuck in a cycle of continually making each other worse and now the PCS are flatly stuck in the middle and it’s really cool how this adventure just like puts the PCS right into the middle of that moral dilemma and every group that I’ve run this with are truly baffled about which side to take here even the players who know the novel well well it’s a tough choice eventually the night of the reanimation has come and Victor and the monster confront each other over the corpse of that bride in the lab but at the last minute Victor refuses to finish it and destroys the body enraging the creature again gms’s make sure you have a few ways to accomplish this the adventure says that Victor will just run up and pour acid all over the body but my players have always been smart enough to keep Victor away from the Brides corpse so that he couldn’t do just that but I described how the body was surrounded by all this fragile lab equipment and even when the PCS kind of kept him away and restrained him Victor was able to like pull out his gun and take a wild shot at the monster which caused a fire and they asked it to burn that body of his bride so just leave yourself some flexibility here because your players will kind of know that this this event could go either way his bride destroyed the enraged creature attacks and swears that he will get revenge on Victor’s wedding night a fire breaks out in the lab and in a random amount of turns the entire place will explode forcing the PCS to flee you really don’t want the monster killed in this battle although it’s short um make sure that you you tune your monster to be able to survive some pretty Grievous injuries especially since some game systems like Call of culu or gerps weapons like flint lock pistols at the PCS are like have can do some serious damage so just make sure you design your monster to survive a few rounds of lethal combat you just don’t want this adventure to end suddenly with a lucky head shot Frankenstein I swear I will be with you on your wedding night the adventure then time jumps about a month the monster hasn’t been seen in weeks and the players are now charged with guarding Victor and Elizabeth’s wedding high up in the snowy mountains at a nice Chateau near Geneva Victor highly suspects that the monster will fulfill his promise of ruining his wedding night and so he sends the PCS to a small honeymoon Chalet to secure it and if you know the book you know Victor’s absolutely right in the original story The Monster sneaks into the Chalet and brutally kills Elizabeth so the PCS will likely be on high alert here but Professor dungeon master throws a nice twist here and has the monster avoid the tactics of the book and instead impersonate the couple’s coach driver and whisk them away into the mountains as they go leave the wedding while I love this twist here I struggled a little bit gming the logic of this scene especially the first time I ran the adventure Victor suspects that the creature will attack at the honeymoon Chalet but the PCS will suspect that the creature might also attack at the Chateau where the wedding is actually taking place so they’ll likely insist to stay with Victor at all times and there’s simply not a logical reason why Victor would refuse this request but you can make this work easily enough like first put two coaches at the wedding Chateau a small one for the couple and a bigger one for the guests now as the wedding takes place and the PCS are keeping watch the monster will sneak out kill the couple’s coach driver and then sabotage the second coach so now when they all go to move to the honeymoon Chalet the creature will run rush off with the couple and the PCS are left with a broken coach forcing them to either rapidly fix it or ride after them on Horseback I love adding a little chase scene to this part of the adventure with the coach flying through a blizzard on a steep Mountain Pass and the PCS barreling after them so if your PCS insist on staying with Victor give that a try eventually the couple’s coach crashes and slides down an embankment onto a frozen lake in this final battle the players have to take down the creature before he can kill Elizabeth and the breaking ice of the lake makes for really fun tactics here getting to the monster is not going to be easy the terrain is rough there’s snow coming down and there’s just ice everywhere the adventure also suggests that if one of the PCS falls into the lake the creature will show compassion and dive in to save him sacrificing himself as his own heavy body sinks into the icy water but I only really do this if the PCS or one of the PCS has shown some empathy towards the creature along the way but with some bold action the PCS can save both Elizabeth and Victor and the creature plunges into the ice never to be seen [Music] again and that’s Professor dungeon Masters Frankenstein so what do I think first of all I think that this adventure does a wonderful job capturing the events the feel and the set pieces of the novel I seem to remember that Professor dungeon master is an English teacher and if so you can really really tell here there’s just a ton of little details that pay homage to Mary Shell’s book it’s not a perfect match but it doesn’t have to be to work really well in an RPG sort of a template for how to adapt something for example the book’s ending takes place in the North Pole but you can’t really logically just teleport the players to the North Pole in an RPG so instead he transforms that into a final confrontation on the ice in the Alps it’s not an exact match but it feels right second I like the pacing of this adventure it contrasts the book which can be thoughtful and ponderous at times this adventure is fast with one scene rapidly playing out after another which is great for a one-hot RPG the adventure is very straightforward there are no Puzzles no hidden Clues no complex encounters nothing that slows the players down other than a few good roleplaying encounters with some well motivated characters and a handful of pretty easy fights and while I like what this does to the pacing of an adventure it does mean that efficient players can play through this adventure very fast even too fast I found myself wanting one or two optional encounters that I could insert to better allow me as a GM to control the pacing of this adventure for example one time when I ran Frankenstein my players skipped the entire trip to the Great graveyard they never follow the grave robbers and instead they just waited and confronted Victor when the robbers returned to bring him like parts for his bride this cut out an entire scene and a potential combat which shortened an already short adventure and if the players do skip the graveyard scene which I think can very easily happen then they’ve lost an opportunity for ageny since that’s one of the few scenes in the adventure that isn’t directly tied to the book and without a few scenes disconnected from the plot of the book it can feel more un rails to your players so to help address this I put a Twist Midway into the adventure that I use to control the pacing and give the players a little bit more agency in my version after the creature first Converses with the PCS he concludes the conversation by giving the PCS a corpse that he specifically wants Victor to use to build his bride he says that he likes this Corpse’s fa and as it turns out this corpse was once a woman named Justine a servant in the book who was framed and hanged for the death of Victor’s brother so the monster is basically trolling Victor with the PCS as the middleman and now the PCS have to decide like what to do about this and this serves to make the monster seem a bit crazier and a bit more callous towards Victor and Victor much more likely to refuse to create that bride in the next scene in the LA and whatever the PCS do if Victor finds out what the Monster proposed well he’ll insist that they go bury Justine in the graveyard which sets up an encounter with those unsavory grav diggers who will either likely acost the PCS for confronting them the night before or if the PCS skipped the graveyard scene entirely then they’ll set upon the PCS wanting to steal this new body from them give this a try I’d love to know how it works for you I also do wish that the adventure included some pre-generated characters I know that’s hard since it’s designed for all game systems but even some short backstories on a few possible character types would really help reduce the work on the part of the GM I love historical hor I play it all the time but it even took me a little while to figure out what kinds of characters in 1799 might be helping Victor Frankenstein like most horror Adventures I find that ordinary to slightly above average characters make for better choices here not PCS who are running around in plate armor or wielding Fireballs so I created a mixed group of players that included a Russian scholar a foreign Diplomat a hunter and a wouldbe Alchemist like that sort of thing oh and for you book fans I actually included Henry cleril as a pre-generate character who in the book was one of Victor’s best friends who would likely be trying to help them and later died horribly being strangled by the creature it was fun for the players to pick him while I don’t usually comment on the production design of Adventures they’re designed to be disposable run just a couple times I will say I didn’t really like the Art and Design here in this adventure it’s a weird Clash of bright blue borders close-ups or blurry photos of painted Miniatures and some not great handdrawn stuff but I’m not going to judge that too harshly since the actual Adventure is strong and if you think the content of this video is strong and want to see more reviews like this one go ahead and Electrify that like And subscribe button overall Frankenstein is a super fun adventure it’s easy to run and will no doubt be a change of pace for your group I think its combination of action moral dilemmas and role playing will likely please most RPG fans but most of all this adventure is playing fun and my players always really love it they love the familiarity of the tale but also that they can very easily mess with it my favorite moment running Frankenstein was when one of my players actually fell in love with Elizabeth and decided that Victor was such a bad match for her that he proposed to her and that player had taken such good care of her the entire time and protected her and been sympathetic that I said Elizabeth said yes sure then I had to rearrange the ending of the adventure so that it was his wedding not Victor’s but Victor was still there very awkwardly attending because hey he’s Elizabeth’s brother so he’s got to be at the wedding and somehow that transformed the adventure from a straightup homage of the novel to a great really special roleplaying experience that I’m going to always remember if you’ve played in this adventure and messed with Mary Shell’s Cannon like let me know in the comments below I’d love to hear that either way I hope that Professor dungeon master does more Adventures like this I loved his mcdeath adventure and this one is great too Phantom of the Opera maybe professor until next time I’m JC and just remember Frankenstein is the scientist not the creature but they’re both horrible monsters and only one of them is marrying his [Music] sister