Big Trouble For A Little Blood

Adapting a cinema masterpiece to TTRPGs

Mar 28, 2024

So I’m gearing up to Kickstart another project! I’ve got Big Trouble For A Little Blood, now there’s also a bonus adventure called The Sinister Secret of the Slugmen, plus a zine for WHPA called Visitors to Fairhaven. So there’s a lot here. Go follow the campaign!

Plus, there’s a Kickstarter for a new official Weird Frontiers adventure: Last Stop, Perdition! This is a great adventure that I was able to enjoy as a player at LongCon ‘23. Plus, Dave Baity has put the Weird Frontiers core rulebook on sale over at DriveThruRPG. You can get the PoD+PDF version of the core rules for $75 (instead of the usual $100) or the PDF for $15 (instead of the usual $30). Go check it out!

Anyway, as you may have guessed, Big Trouble For A Little Blood is very much inspired by Big Trouble in Little China. Today I’ll be talking in a spoiler-free way how I took inspiration from that film and created an adventure that I’m very proud of.

The script for Big Trouble in Little China was originally a western, but the studio thought “western” and “fantasy” didn’t mix well. Discovering that is what inspired me to turn one of my favorite movies into an adventure for Weird Frontiers.

I first wrote down all the elements I thought were core to the movie and made another list of what I thought was really cool. I struggled with how to put those back together in a form that worked in a TTRPG adventure. Quickly enough, I realized that I needed to create a branching path. But what changed and what stayed the same? Well, I didn’t want to have all the baddies be wizards or evil mystic monks. Plus, I’d also reread Dracula at around this time so weird west vampires sounded great. That core change helped me start moving all the other pieces around. I did a little research on Chinese folklore and mythology around vampires, plus what vampires looked like in older Chinese cinema. So I arrived at “kung fu vampires”.

The introductory scene finally formed. It’s the Chinese New Year parade/festival in San Francisco when vampires attack and kidnap a girl with green eyes. Now, just prior to this, the PCs have the opportunity to hang out and have fun at the festival. Maybe they gamble, talk to folks, or do some little competition with folks. As this is a moment where everyone is kinda doing their own thing, I made sure to keep each of these activities brief and they each boil down to a quick roleplay moment or a single die roll.

But after the vampires attack, I introduce an “Egg Shen” inspired character who can provide more context about the whole vampire situation in Chinatown. He tells the PCs that he knows of two paths that they can take. Go into a “thin place” beneath the earth or to a dockside bar/brothel that is run by the vampires. The players essentially get to decide between a dungeon crawl or a more roleplay focused experience. In my experience, most players choose the dockside bar/brothel because that’s more “wild west”.

I won’t go into specifics on the two branches but I was able to put different aspects of the movie into the different areas. But the PCs find a way to confront the “head vampire” and have a weird, dream-like experience in the end. For the last sequence, I tried to pull inspiration from the different “Chinese Hells”, but also felt inspired by the game Thousand Year Old Vampire. Wish I could say more, but there’d be too many spoilers! I hope I’ve piqued your interest though! I’ll be talking more about the other aspects of my Kickstarter soon.

What other non-western movies might make good weird west adventures? And for those who’ve read the BTiLC comics, should I be checking those out? Let me know!