When I first read through Van Richten's, I struggled a bit with Hazlan.
A realm of magical experimentation gone wrong, the vibe of the place felt, yes, bad, but not really "horror"-themed. It felt too bright, too open.
Then, finally, something clicked for me.
In Dark Souls III, there's an area you have to go to in kind of the latter part of the middle act of the game (it's not explicitly divided into acts, but it's where one of two major bosses you need to beat are that unlock the final, sprawling area where the penultimate boss is). The region is called The Profaned Capital, where the locals engaged in dangerous experiments to try to preserve the world by messing around with a kind of primordial chaos.
The area is potentially very short and linear - you can go to the boss there pretty directly, and you might not even realize that there is more to it. But if you do some exploring, you can find some new weapons, items, and spells. You'll also find these bizarre creatures that are like a small elephant, or maybe an enormous baby with a big hand for a head, and a creepy maw in the center of that hand that you'll only see if they use certain attacks.
And I think that's really they key: the monsters that players encounter in Hazlan should be utterly surreal and bizarre.
D&D uses the aberration creature type in a couple different ways. It's honestly a little frustrating, because some aberrations are very clearly "alien, Lovecraftian beings" like the Mind Flayer or Star Spawn, and some are "the experimental results of misguided wizards."
But this latter definition can also be used to describe some Monstrosities. Arguably, it'd be better to use Aberrations for the experiments given how Monstrosities cover such a massive span of creatures.
(Actually, Aberrations has also expanded in 5.5 to include creatures that are more or less humanoid but have some psionic powers, like Gith or Kuo-Toa.)
Regardless, I think we can focus a Hazlan adventure around monstrous experiments.
Now, in a game like Dark Souls, all but a tiny fraction of the beings we encounter are hostile and there to be fought (or fled). In D&D, you can certainly be in a hostile environment, but there are a lot more "verbs" the players have access to.
I think the party needs to get their hands on some kind of McGuffin - something that may set up a future adventure, or simply something that is desired by a quest giver who can reward them. We'll say that they are hired by one of Hazlik's apprentices, an archmage named Kytho Dree.
Dree tells the party that they're leading an expedition into an uncharted region of Moonstone Valley - last new moon, there was a massive explosion that seems to have broken through the surface and revealed what they believe is a long-lost civilization, which may hold within it powerful ancient technology.
However, there's a strange, shimmering barrier that surrounds the region - Dree postulates that it could be some sort of ancient defense mechanism for the ancient city beneath the surface. Experimentally, they've determined that living, conscious beings cannot survive crossing the barrier, but if one is rendered unconscious first, the barrier can be crossed safely (yes, this is sort of borrowed from The Southern Reach series).
Dree will lead the expedition, and will have their own assistants cast Sleep on the party.
Here, we have our first uncannily weird thing: the party is encouraged to voluntarily fail the saving throws for the spell (which you can always elect to do,) but if a party member resists it (I realize that things might be complicated if you have an Elf or other sleepless party member - adjust as needed) they will actually just fail to go through the barrier and instead be shunted into the Ethereal Plane without an obvious way to get back.
By the time the party awakens from the spell, Dree has somehow gone missing. Within the meteor-blasted valley (which I imagine looking like a more colorful version of the surface of the moon) there is, indeed, a crater that seems to have broken into the surface of the world, and only by hopping from floating rock to floating rock (or just having Fly or Feather Fall or something like that) can the party safely descend into the crater.
As they go down to the "ancient city," the party will start to see strangely familiar things: while Dree was sure that this predated Hazlik and his reign over the region, the Eye of Hazlik can be seen on the buildings and engraved in the pavement of the city.
Making their way to the center of the city, the party encounters strange monsters: Gibbering Mouthers and Nothics, probably (we're probably talking either late tier 1 or early tier 2 for the adventure level). The Gibbering Mouthers are, of course, just horrifying monsters, but the Nothics show signs of being former members of Hazlan society.
Investigating ruined buildings, they find that this city, simply called Hazlan (suggesting that perhaps this was the original form that the Domain took?) sought to transform its inhabitants to better survive the nightmare that is the Demiplane of Dread, and there is a lot of optimistic talk that their new forms will better be able to plumb the depths of the arcane.
When they reach the city's center, they find a grand plaza where there is a series of concentric rings controlling the magical energy flowing into a central conduit. If the party moves the rings, they find that fragments of Dree begin to phase into being - as if a third of their matter was separated by each of the rings.
Depending on how much your players enjoy puzzles, you could make a pretty simple one or a more complex one (maybe you can only rotate two of the rings at a time, not just a single one, and must align them correctly). Once the rings are aligned properly, Dree's body is reconstructed, but something is deeply wrong with them.
The power of the city that transformed its inhabitants has now been channeled through Dree, and while they initially look like their former self, they have only a moment of horror before their body melts into a gory sludge, before reconstructing itself into a monstrous form. I'm tempted to suggest you use a Hydra stat block, but rather than a reptilian/semi-draconic appearance, this Hydra bears a horrid, fleeing memory of Dree's face on each head.
When the transformed Dree is slain, the party awakens on the edge of the crater, which now is a simple rocky divot in the earth.
I'll confess, this one still took me a while to figure out. I really think that in order to make the horror hit in Hazlan, you need to emphasize the weirdness of it all. Hallucinations, troubled dreams, and really going out of your way to describe the monsters in unusual ways will help sell it. Gibbering Mouthers are pretty gross and scary monsters (and feel like they should be higher CR) but I think you could also reflavor them to still bear the appearances of the people absorbed into them - maybe faces, half-familiar, seem to form and then dissipate in their ever-shifting forms.
A non-hostile Nothic NPC could also help flesh out the history of what happened here, though you run the risk of humanizing them and thus dulling the alien wrongness of the place. Perhaps instead the players could find the notes of an arcane researcher who eventually became one of them.
Now, if we're going for nightmares and losing touch with reality, our next stop on this tour of the Domains is all about that, with the dream world of I'Cath.
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