Bluetspur is a weird, weird domain of dread.
There's already an element of cosmic horror just to the nature of Ravenloft. Even if its iconic monsters are often drawn from more gothic and dark fantasy tropes, the nature of the setting as this kind of perpetual prison that re-shapes itself to maintain a deadly status quo means that one can never feel confident that one understands it.
Cosmic horror and psychological horror are kind of opposites - one is about the terror of the vastness beyond ourselves, and the other is about the horrors lurking within our minds. And yet, there's kind of an overlap, with madness a very common trope in it.
Bluetspur doesn't make sense. While a place like Barovia will play tricks on you, a looping road through the Svalich Wood that ought not to make sense, for example, Bluetspur just doesn't compute. A vast mountain is always in view regardless of which direction you face.
There's no map of Bluetspur, because I don't think you're ever meant to really understand where you are there.
One of the major tropes of Bluetspur is a little bit of sci-fi invading our fantasy game (I think cosmic horror is often where dark fantasy and sci-fi start to overlap: a bit of the supernatural in an otherwise rational sci-fi universe, or a bit of the alien that doesn't exist within understood hierarchies and spectrums of good and evil in fantasy,) and that is the Alien Abduction trope.
In stories like the X-Files, the experience of alien abduction is harrowing, and also frustratingly vague - people find they've lost time, the clock jumping from 10 pm to 4 am with noting to mark the jump but a flash of bright light, and then only later might they recall dream-like experiences of strange experimentation, monstrous creatures, pain and horror.
This is absolutely how Bluetspur operates - its Mind Flayer inhabitants seek a way to cure the dying God Brain, the Darklord, and travel the Mists abducting people to experiment upon. The God Brain's actions that had it taken in by the Dark Powers and its torment are kept a little vague. Mind Flayers are already very alien beings, and also horrifyingly monstrous, and so I think that of all Darklords, we need not make the God Brain into a character the players really interact with very much.
I also think that Bluetspur is so weird that we should only really see it briefly.
But this is an adventure that's supposed to be set there, and while I think you could do an adventure dealing with the effects of contact with Bluetspur in another domain, I want to actually make an adventure set there.
But it won't seem like that.
Ok, first off, the players have an abduction experience. If it's a fresh group of characters, these could all happen separately - maybe the players are from different domains, or even from outside the Mists. If they're already a party, they might have one of these experiences together - traveling down the road, a blinding light appears above them, and they all feel a moment of breathlessness and panic, but then it's gone, and the sun is now in a different position in the sky.
Personally, I'd start them off in Lamordia, as its kind of steampunk vibe feels like it plays nicely with the tropes of cosmic horror, but you could have them in other locations. Anyway, this bizarre experience can kind of be brushed aside - a mystery with no clear explanation, but that also has merely inconvenienced them, and they can head on to their next destination (we'll say Ludendorf).
However, to rip this band-aid off for you readers, the truth is that they're not in Lamordia at all. They're actually in a shared illusory reality within the alien labs of Bluetspur.
Something feels off when they get to the city - the layout of the streets is unfamiliar - but this could be written off as Ravenloft being Ravenloft. The party is en route to meet with an old friend of theirs, a Professor Schulberg. En route to the Professor's home, they are attacked on the streets by crazed people, ranting and raving and begging to be "let out." The people are showing signs of strange mutilations - we probably just want to use normal humanoid stat blocks like bandits, cultists, spies, etc.
The party then eventually gets to Schulberg's home, where they find her in a dreadful state - the professor is undergoing a terrible transformation, her body turning into some kind of aberration, like a Grick. The process is slow and painful, but she still has enough of her mind to tell the party that they need to escape. Before she can finish her explanation, her "nurse" bursts in and tries to force the party to leave so they can administer a "sedative."
The nurse, it turns out, is actually a Mind Flayer overseeing the illusory reality, and Schulberg screams, accusing the nurse of being her torturer. If the party doesn't fend her off, Schulberg's transformation is completed and she is no longer able to help them, but the Nurse will then turn their attention to the party.
Should the party slay the nurse, the illusion of being a normal humanoid breaks, and their mind flayer nature is revealed. If Schulberg is still alive, she can tell them that they aren't in Ludendorf (or wherever the adventure is falsely set) but are in the clutches of these alien beings. They need to find the exit point to this simulation, which she says can be found in a building "with the belladonna flowers." Schulberg is, at best, barely hanging onto her humanity anymore, or if the party allowed the nurse to finish their work, they'll find this information in some of the professor's notes.
Going out into the streets, the transformed, aggressive people are now fully transformed into monsters like Umber Hulks, Hook Horrors, or maybe aberrations like Chuuls. Also, the false nature of the city becomes more obvious - I like to imagine that there are street signs that have that blurry, illegible text like from early AI-generated images.
Ultimately, the party finds their way to the Nightshade Hotel (belladonna is another name for Nightshade,) and finds in the lobby a strange black stone obelisk that seems to weep an unctuous fluid. Touching the obelisk wakes them from the false reality, and they find themselves in a dark, alien laboratory (heavy on the H.R. Giger vibes).
At this point, I think the threat is less physical - the Mind Flayers here are just your basic variety, and not in great numbers, because they expect the subjects to all be sedated in the dream-state. But I think the player characters might find that they're weakened by the experiments performed on them - even starting off with a level or two of exhaustion.
Because of that, any combat they encounter in the lab should actually be pretty trivial - just like, a single Mind Flayer at a time, maybe a Gibbering Mouther made of the combined remains of other experimental victims.
The party must find their way out of the labs, and eventually finds a hatch marked with the holy symbol of Ezra (a surprisingly intelligible bit of signage in a place lacking it otherwise,) which opens up into a wall of Mist, and from there, they can escape.
More than our Barovia adventure, I think this would need to take place over the course of a few sessions unless your players can resolve things very quickly. We're also probably going to want the players to be closer to mid levels, as we want a single Mind Flayer with the entire party at two levels of exhaustion to still be a pretty trivially easy fight (we might even take away the Mind Flayer's Dominate Monster ability just to be safe).
I pitched this idea to my best friend, and he pointed out that if we were doing all these adventures as a series, setting this one ostensibly in Lamordia might be a giveaway if we also have a different adventure set there. I don't know that that would totally ruin it, but you could naturally just have it in some other setting (maybe one of the Other Domains, like Zherisia, or just a homebrewed one).
Next up, we'll have some decisions to make in the dual-Darklord realm of Borca.
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