How do I reskin a campaign frame without rewriting the book?

When I set up our Motherboard campaign, I wanted it to feel like my own city, with my own names and my own version of how everything turned. I could have written a homebrew bible. What worked was much smaller. I swapped the surface, kept the structure, pitched the table in three sentences and ran session 1.

Swap the surface and keep the structure

The surface is the names, the place words, the look of the ancestries and what the air smells like. The structure is the conflicts, the sparks, the countdowns, who wants what from whom, and when Fear should spike. If you change the conflict map, you are writing a new frame. If you only change the coat, you can run it next week.

What I leave alone

I do not reskin the maths, the adversary types, the Fear loop, or the way rests and Hope feed the night. Those are why a frame plays well at the table, and new paint does not replace them.

Before and after from my table

The Motherboard campaign frame gave me a machine world with the Network running through everything. In my version, the AI at the centre of the city is Mother, and she speaks to people through the Network. The city is Mother’s Embrace. The night everything turned is green embers erupting from the Network towers, falling like snow and then burning like acid. I call the bots that turned remnants, and the ones Mother saved are just bots. The places the party can run to are Mother’s Reach, Scholea and Scar Mesa.

What I kept is the structure. Machines have turned on people, the survivors have to decide where to go, and pressure comes from every direction. My long-term countdowns still tick between sessions, and Fear is still the thing that makes the city get worse. The adversaries are printed stat blocks with new names and new descriptions. The two bots that turned in our first fight were Tier 1 Standards with red eyes, and nobody at the table needed to know anything else.

The pitch I read in three sentences

At session 0 I read this out before anyone touched a character sheet.

Mother has kept the city of Mother’s Embrace running for fifty years, and her bots do the work nobody else wants. Tonight green embers are going to fall from the Network towers, and something is going to go very wrong with those bots. You are somewhere in the city when it happens, and I need to know what your character is to Mother.

That last sentence became the question that shaped every character, and the rest of that session 0 is in going from campaign frame to session 1.

What I would do tonight

List five nouns you want to swap and three structures you will not touch. Write the three-sentence pitch and read it aloud once. Then close the wiki tab and run the first scene. If you are building a frame from nothing instead, I wrote about writing a Daggerheart campaign frame.