So, I finished Stranger Things (actually, when I started writing this post, the finale hadn't aired, but I've seen it now).
The show, a pastiche of 1980s tropes, draws heavily on classic elements of D&D to name the various monsters, villains, and elements of the supernatural terror that invades Hawkins, Indiana. There's a clear love of the game built into its narrative (even if there are some anachronisms, like talk about Sorcerers in 1987 when the class didn't show up until 2000).
But one of the central elements of the show is the Upside-Down, a dark alternate version of Hawkins that is accessible only by traversing dimensional rifts. The Upside-Down is filled with deadly monsters, and while it contains the same buildings and overall landscape of the town, it's ominously covered in a perpetual storm of red lightning and meaty "vines" grow everywhere, and strange spores float in the air.
While the Shadowfell wouldn't officially be part of D&D lore until 4th edition, the Upside-Down is a pretty strong contender for a good portrayal of what it would be like.
I love Planescape as presented in 2nd Edition (especially through the lens of Tony DiTerlizzi's art, which lends it an off-beat and weird tone) with its many outer planes and inner planes. But I do think that my favorite plane in D&D lore is the Shadowfell, which, as mentioned before, did not yet exist in its lore at the time.
The Shadowfell retroactively became the home of the Domains of Dread (aka, the Ravenloft setting,) which imagines little pocket-demiplanes that are the prisons of the evil darklords, and again, while I find that setting very cool (preferring the recent 5th Edition version which does away with the singular continent that physically connects all the domains) I really, truly find the Shadowfell as a mirror-realm the most compelling option.
The Feywild, actually, works the same way, though it also has its Domains of Delight, which seem to be a kind of bright reflection of the Domains of Dread, but again, I prefer the version that is the uncanny reflection of the world that we know.
In this season of Stranger Things, the protagonists (who have ballooned to a fairly large group) have been undergoing "Crawls," named after dungeon crawls, in which former Sheriff Jim Hopper sneaks into a rift into the Upside-Down to try to locate the series' primary villain.
It got me thinking:
This is actually a pretty cool idea for an adventure.
If we reverse-engineer it and turn it into an actual D&D adventure, here's how I think you could make it work:
In your classic old-school D&D adventure, you often have some town that the party retreats to where they can relax and resupply, and then ventures to some distant dungeon, which is filled with monsters and traps and other hazards.
But here, you could make the dungeon and the town one and the same - it's just that the safe town would be in the prime material plane and the "dungeon" would be its Shadowfell reflection.
Dungeon-crawling has, to a large extent, sort of gone out of fashion in modern D&D, which tends to expect more of a globe-trotting adventure. But I think you could make something pretty fun and exciting by creating an unconventional dungeon in this way.
Here are some elements I'd consider:
Limited Access:
In Stranger Things, the primary rift into the Upside-Down is, as of season 5, controlled by a hostile US Military operation that seeks to study and weaponize the monsters. The protagonists have come up with a system that allows Hopper to sneak in, but it's risky, and it's also difficult to track Hopper's movements, taking advantage of the fact that radio signals can transmit across the planes, but requiring persistent directional tracking of his movements.
The monsters are far less limited, able to open rifts basically wherever it's convenient for them, which means there's plenty of action in the town itself. But for our heroes, finding a way through is a big challenge.
One of the things that D&D, and particularly 5E, struggles with is enforcing its attrition-based challenges. The game is built for resource management more than overwhelming you with any individual combat encounter, but that makes it optimal for players to take a rest after every single challenge if they can.
By making the access points between the Shadowfell and the prime limited in number and at set locations, you force the party to expose themselves when they set out from them.
Having monsters on the move, then, who might be using those same access points/planar portals, creates tension, as the party will need need to scope out these places before they head back to (relative) safety, and might need to fight monsters to get back, or come up with clever plans to draw monsters away without engaging them directly.
Adventure Structure:
I think the cool appeal to this as an idea is that, with relatively short physical travel (probably the entire scope of distance from one end of the "adventure zone" to the other is in the thousands of feet), the locations will be familiar. Similarly, going into the Shadowfell lets you go to similar locations as the ones you can scout out in the "real" world.
This is, thus, not the kind of dungeon where you're just trying to get through it and reach the deepest chamber or highest tower. Instead, I think that the structure that makes the most sense is one in which you have to do various tasks in an effective sequence.
For example, if you envision some final boss fight against the adventure's main villain, it need not be in some new location. Indeed, it might even feel particularly resonant for the final fight to take place in an important location seen early in the adventure - maybe the Shadowfell version of some temple, or even some central plaza in the town - perhaps even in the prime material side of it, if the villain's plan is to try to break through to that side.
Time:
This is good advice for just about every adventure, but a villain who is working on their own plan the heroes are trying to stop creates some of that pressure to keep pushing forward. Make no mistake, this is always hard to pull off, and I wish basically every fantasy TTRPG was better at guiding DMs/Directors/GMs on how to create pacing that builds that pressure without threatening to make the challenge unwinnable.
But this can also overlap with the Limited Access point - if the portals are being guarded (as they are in the show) by a hostile kind of secondary antagonist faction, and maybe only open when that faction can open them, it also makes access a kind of limited resource - we can only go in at a certain time each day, and might need to be back to the portal at a specific time as well.
Spatial Vicinity, Planar Distance:
One of the really cool ideas in Stranger Things is that some forms of electronic communications can cross between Hawkins and the Upside-Down. In D&D, long-distance communication is generally pretty limited, with Sending as a 3rd level spell that basically lets you send a long text message.
I think it would be cool in an adventure like this if there were some incentive to have the party split up, with some entering the Shadowfell and others staying on the Prime side, but perhaps moving in the same spaces (if you want to avoid splitting up the party, maybe you have NPCs who are helping them on the other side).
You could do some really cool puzzles this way - requiring some sequence of actions on both sides to clear the way somehow.
Use the Space:
Because you're going to have the party moving around a familiar space, and perhaps one without the kind of natural barriers like big thick dungeon walls, you'll want to think very hard about what their goals are and how to make an interesting challenge of said goals.
The way I see it, you'll want to kind of work backwards from your big climax, and seed some mixture of mechanical challenges (as in: there's a gate around this one building that we need some key to open, so we first have to get it from this other building") and mystery challenges (as in: "we need to find the crystal that's dampening magic in this area").
Of course, D&D doesn't afford you the ability to ensure your players do things in the exact order you intend, so I think the best structure here is some kind of checklist of things that have to be done to bring about the climax, and let them pursue those options in any order as separate quests.
And if you break down these prerequisites into different paths through town that cross one another, you can make it feel less linear, and the players might sometimes find themselves switching from quest line to quest line as they make their efficiency-minded crawls across the town.
Set Pieces:
Generally, as cool as it is to have random encounters, I think D&D works best when each combat feels like a set-piece. Especially because you have the opportunity to show the players the spaces where they might encounter monsters in the safe light of day in the prime material plane, you have the opportunity to foreshadow what might go down later on.
In filmmaking, often the very best action sequences take their time establishing the space. Think of the Battle of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers, or the Battle of Castle Black in Game of Thrones' 4th season finale. These are incredibly satisfying battle sequences because the audience knows exactly where each character is relative to one another, and you can really have a sense of coherence.
D&D's different, of course, and if you play with battle maps (which I would assume most people do) players can, of course, look at the map and take their time determining their character's actions. But I think that you could have a lot of fun by making the players really familiar with key locations of the town, and thus make the fights in the Shadowfell versions of those locations all the more memorable.
Anyway, these are all kind of vague thoughts - I haven't written out an adventure like this. But it does appeal to me.
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