This massive D&D adventure from the Forgotten Realms creator hits Backerkit soon

Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood teams up with Elderbrain for a huge adventure that blends horror, epic adventure, and sandbox exploration

The trailer for Spawns of the Mindrender, the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons adventure campaign from publisher Elderbrain, is an explosive concoction of 80s epic metal mixed with a hint of Lovecraftian horror. There is a lot to unpack there, but Elderbrain has never been afraid to go big — their first adventure campaign, Crown of the Oathbreaker, is over 900 pages.

When Polygon asked Gabor Dan, Elderbain CEO, the secret behind turning out such massive, in-depth campaigns, the answer was simple: It’s all about the community. The imprint takes its name from a D&D monster that Baldur’s Gate 3 players may be familiar with. Elder brains are the leaders of the mind flayer communities, created by a conglomeration of illithid brains.

“The concept of Elderbrain was always to rely on community feedback and to create something that the community craves and like,” Dan said. “We are always relying on surveys and the input of our hive mind members, mostly on Discord. Each book is written based on a 100-question survey taken by our community.”

For Spawns of the Mindrender, Dan and his team decided to bring in another “big brain” of the D&D-space, one with knowledge and experience that would impress even a true mind flayer: Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood. “Gabor met me at a convention and said, ‘Hey, would you like to do this?’” Greenwood said to Polygon in a video interview. “And I said yes, because I always like to do cool things, and it sounded cool. And then when they sent me the adventure background, I went ‘I want to play this!’ It’s that easy, just give me cool things to play, and I’m in.”

Greenwood’s contribution to Spawns of the Mindrender consists of a special encounter location available exclusively to pre-launch followers. That location will be written by Greenwood based on the votes of the campaign followers, with each milestone unlocking new content to vote on: first the dungeon, then the main NPC, a featured magic item, the boss monster, and finally a brand-new subclass. Besides that, Greenwood is also contributing to Elderbrain’s one-shot series, Mindscape.

For someone with the writing and creative background that Greenwood has, this approach must have felt pretty novel. “It’s very much like being a Dungeon Master,” Greenwood said. “You can plan the adventure, and your players are not going to fit with your planning. So the backers who are suggesting changes are pretty much like your group of players sitting at the table and coming up with their own ideas.”

Spawns of the Mindrender will be 600 pages long, a massive number by any standards. By comparison, the longest D&D adventures published by Wizards of the Coast in the 5e era are around 320 pages in length (Dungeon of the Mad Mage and Rime of the Frostmaiden). “We couldn’t hold back because we are so enthusiastic about writing our story,” Dan said. “It’s been 35 years that we’ve been playing this game, and there is so much inside us that we want to share.”

Publishing a campaign of this scale comes with its own unique challenges. “Early on, we realized our books were too big, for shipping and for consumption,” Dan said. “People mostly buy these adventure campaigns to get ideas from them, and very few play them from start to end. We calculated it would require at least 300 hours of gameplay to reach the ending, and that’s not considering all the side quests and alternative paths. So we also created Mindscape as an alternative, which is 20-30 page one-shots, because we realized our big books are not for everyone.”

For Greenwood, this massive page count is not a challenge, but paradise. “You’re talking to a guy who routinely overwrote by 25 or 30,000 words for TSR in the old days, where there were no pixels and everything had to be squiggles of ink on paper,” Greenwood said. “I routinely overwrote and then chopped it off, threw it in a bucket, and then reused it later for another Realms product.”

Elderbrain’s adventures all take place in the same world, called Eldain (a name chosen by fans in a poll). Each adventure has a strong thematic focus. For example, Torrents of the Spellhoarder takes place underwater, while Scepter of the Lightbringer is an urban investigation. Dan described Spawns of the Minderender as “a mountain range Mad Max, no-magic kind of scenario with a very thick layer of Lovecraftian horror.” It’s an impressive cauldron of ideas, and the overall creative vision and its inspirations seem clear. “We are big fans of Call of Cthulhu, and we are big fans of the average horror feeling,” Dan said. “And we also wanted to feature a mountain range region with a mechanical tech advanced barbarian civilization. It's all pistons and steam, but I wouldn’t call it steampunk, more Mad Max-like. The mountain region evokes At the Mountains of Madness.”

Lovecraft’s novella also inspired one of the best official D&D 5e adventure campaigns, Rime of the Frostmaiden, but Spawns of the Mindrender wears its Chthulian themes more openly. In the campaign’s story, otherworldly horrors summoned by an ancient giant kingdom have infested the region before being sealed by a host of dark angels. When the celestials left, the Vordani tribes came to inhabit the area, eschewing and fearing both magic and divinity, turning instead to merit, tradition, and massive siege engines. Then, the eldritch horror known as the Mindrender is freed from its shackles, and its madness and twisted spawns begin to infest the land again.

The adventure is designed for character levels 11-15, and its low-magic setting offers unique challenges. Just like Rime of the Frostmaiden, it offers a sandbox environment with a focus on survival and exploration. Spawns of the Mindrender also introduces mechanics and rules to simulate the chaos of a battlefield, so if your D&D dream is leading a barbarian horde into war, then this is the book for you.

Balancing high-level play has been an issue for D&D 5e, with most published campaigns stopping around level 10. Dan’s answer to that is as metal as they come: “We don’t care. We don't care if the book is eight pounds, we don't care if it's 900 pages. We don't care if it's high level, low level. We just do it for the game. I don't think balance is an issue. I mean, I love playing. I once played my dog in a cool adventure. So did the dog win? Yes, all the other humans died. The dog could run fast. It doesn't matter what level you're at, it's just the story and the fun and the adventure. I know it's different, of course, there's a lot of technique put into figuring out what the players can do, but we've done that in our previous 16 to 20 level adventure, we covered everything, and you can fix that problem easily.”

It’s clear that Dan and his team love D&D. They also love and respect Ed Greenwood and his work, which inspired them for decades, and Dan hopes that Elderbrain’s work will, in turn, inspire more people to create. “It’s a little humbling,” Greenwood said, “and a little embarrassing, because I'm just a guy who likes to play games, and I've been working on this invented fantasy setting since I was like five, so it's always been there for me. But it feels good to leave something that will survive after you're gone.”

You can follow the Spawns of the Mindrender campaign on Backerkit until May 5 to receive the exclusive encounter location written by Ed Greenwood. The live campaign launches on May 5 at 12:00 pm ET.