Converting 3.x home brew to 4th, part one.

I have been spending some of my free time lately thinking about and working on my home brew D&D campaign. The campaign started a few years ago while we were playing 3.5. Up until that point I had always run D&D games using an official setting and had never tried creating my own home brew world.

Well I had just recently picked up Heroes of Horror and Frostfell at Half-Price books and like all good DM's when you get new books you become flooded with ideas. In this case I was inundated with ideas for a horror game and then ideas for a game of frozen survival. I didn't take me long to figure out that they would go good together. So I cooked up the idea for a world of eternal winter, called Aerion, that was slowly being taken over by things from beyond.

I also have held that man is his own worst horror and that one-half of the antagonists of this world should be like and look like the PCs. So my world became populated with one single nation, the last kingdom of men lead by a pharaoh like ruler and dictator. But in this harsh reality of eternal winter this nation's sole goal would be the preservation of its own people and that the greater good would have to out way individual freedoms. Now the player characters are thrust into a setting where the world around them is very hostile and their ability to do good can be contested by their very allies and patrons. It became a combination of Grimm Fairy Tales meets Greek Tragedy. It turned out to be a pretty good (though not original) idea at the game table and now my players want to play in it again, with 4th edition.

So I sat down to think about how to convert it. The first thing I realized was how really D&D generic the setting was. It was just a heroes of horror campaign in a Frostfell setting that used Greek and Egyptian mythology as background to tell Grimm-like stories. Okay maybe not that generic, but I had a very "If its reasonable for the setting its in" attitude toward what books I gave the players access to during 3.5. This is what gave the game its genericness. There were so many spices thrown in the stew that it ended up tasting just like everything else. The races and classes the characters played didn't feel completely connected to the setting.

So my first goal was to rewrite the races so that they fit into Aerion and those that didn't got tossed out. So the result being the half-elf, halfling, and eladrin getting tossed from the game after I decided that they weren't appropriate (half-elf), redundant (halfling), or needed so much work it was better to just create a brand new race (eladrin). The dwarf, elf, and human make the cut but will get racial feats and backgrounds that make them fit. While for now I table the dragonborn and the tiefling. They probably have a place in the setting, they probably exist in it, but they don't really fit into the area of the setting that the campaign takes place in.

Next some old 3.5 races that don't exist in 4th get converted. In doing this I really thought about their place in the world, which lead to all kinds of ideas, background and stories that have influenced the setting as a whole. Now the UA Snow Elf isn't just an elf that lives in the snow, but is now the Alfar, a race of fey from the Winter Court, that have consumed their dead god-king's soul in order to give them the power to survive. The Aasimar are now the Solarans, decedents of the angelic Helion Choirs, they have usurped leadership of human culture. Shifters are now Huldran, no longer the guys who were descended of man and werewolf, they now are a race breed by Dryads to help them protect their sanctuaries. Gnomes are no longer just short guys who like magic, but now were once Harry Potter-like house elves who were enslaved by the ancient kingdoms, but now free use the powers that made them such great servants to their own ends.

Its a pretty good start I think and has given me a lot of great ideas about other ways I can change the setting to give it more flavor and spice, but I'll talk about that more in my next blog.

I have created a wiki to put all my work for Aerion up in one place so that my players and I can all have easy access. It's a work in progress so only the stuff I have converted over so far is up there. None of it has been play tested either so I'm sure some of it is broken. I doubt we will actually start to play the campaign till early next year. You can check it out here:

Shattered Sun Wiki