The Immortal Zoo is my comfort zone. When I'm too depressed to invent something or to dig into a new adventure, this is the place that I know and like. This is where the characters find themselves.
Things that make revisiting the adventure more fun:
- A new player who hasn't been here before.
The more experienced players have the pleasure of muttering "Aha, and now this!" - they know what's happening, but the new character - and the new player - doesn't.
- There are things that the players don't remember well - or things that they just didn't encounter in their previous visit.
The Zoo is basically a sandbox with immortal creatures, you can explore it in a dozen different ways.
- The characters have grown but this place has stayed the same.
The Immortal Zoo was built to stay the same over the years, decades, centuries. It can give you this warm, fuzzy feeling inside when you step into the familiar corridors, and hear the rustling of the Narcissus Peacock's feathers. Well, this time you've got something special that you prepared for this birdie.
- Or maybe the whole place had changed, too.
Because why not? If the whole world changes, so can the Zoo - there can be a new manager, new animals, new monsters. Even a twist to the Zoo's magic keeping everyone alive.
And since we're playing "Edo-era Japan with antropomorphic animals", I changed things a bit.
The singing toad is an amazing creature in Vornheim, but it can be just a singing girl who happens to be a toad if your party consists of a fox, a pig, and a cat. I think Em, Becami and Zak discussed how replacing goblins in a dungeon with humans immediately changes the atmosphere. A maniac is scarier than a monster. Though in this case, I think the players were just creeped out by my singing every time - they never try to interact with the singing creature, they just sneak by and pretend they weren't there.
The goat-headed scorpion strangely fits right in our game.
Keep some of the parts that make the creatures of the Zoo fun, and replace the other parts with something different but similar enough. The peacock became a capricious women wearing a magical kimono, the snail became a very Blue Caterpillar-like old man sipping tea.
The drunk gryphon stays, though, he just acquired some personal traits from Zatoichi.
Note 1: No, I don't know why did the kappa keep a copy of "What should a normal human have". He cares about his diet, I guess.
Note 2: You think translating the song about little monkeys loving their red clothes from Japanese via English subtitles into Ukrainian is easy?!
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