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H Series : Bloodtone module conversions

Scary

Explorer
Does anyone have or know where to find the following conversions to D&D 3.5
Hello everyone, does anyone here have or know where to find D&D 3.5 conversions of the H series modules, H1 - Bloodstone Pass
H2 - The Mines of Bloodstone
H3-The Bloodstone Wars
H4-The Throne of Bloodstone

please if anyone has or knows where they can be found, let me know

Larry
FYI: I have done some google searches and the only message threads I found were 10+ years old. I messaged the owners of those threads, but I do not have much hope. Anyway, again if you know where they are, please, please, please, I would really appreciate you letting me know.

 

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Celebrim

Legend
H3 and H4 are not convertible, and you really shouldn't bother. H2 is convertible with a bit of difficulty, but you really wouldn't want to do a straight conversion.

The H series depends on various specific rules artifacts of the 1e AD&D era, and particularly that high level characters are nearly invincible. As such, straight conversions to third edition are nearly impossible. Consider that in the 1e AD&D era, it was reasonable to suggest that a 30th level character had god-like power. Also, a 30th level character might not be that much stronger at least in a single encounter than a 17th level character and even a 100th level character might not be that much more powerful than a 30th level one. The 17th level, 30th level, and 100th level character could reasonably adventure together. But in 3e, all the assumptions you could make about how things might play out at a given high level have to be thrown out the window. It's not even clear that there are particularly coherent rules for 3e D&D much beyond 20th level, but to the extent that there are a 17th level character certainly couldn't reasonably contribute alongside a 100th level character or even threaten anything that could threaten a 100th level character.

On top of that, H3 and H4 are not good well thought out modules, nor does H4 give you much help running it. H4 in particular is a bunch of very vague 'rooms' that each themselves imply a whole adventure, but which is not in any way detailed. They are things like, "Xth layer of the Abyss is home to some demon lord. Here are his stats. Write an adventure around going to kill him."
 

Scary

Explorer
H3 and H4 are not convertible, and you really shouldn't bother. H2 is convertible with a bit of difficulty, but you really wouldn't want to do a straight conversion.

The H series depends on various specific rules artifacts of the 1e AD&D era, and particularly that high level characters are nearly invincible. As such, straight conversions to third edition are nearly impossible. Consider that in the 1e AD&D era, it was reasonable to suggest that a 30th level character had god-like power. Also, a 30th level character might not be that much stronger at least in a single encounter than a 17th level character and even a 100th level character might not be that much more powerful than a 30th level one. The 17th level, 30th level, and 100th level character could reasonably adventure together. But in 3e, all the assumptions you could make about how things might play out at a given high level have to be thrown out the window. It's not even clear that there are particularly coherent rules for 3e D&D much beyond 20th level, but to the extent that there are a 17th level character certainly couldn't reasonably contribute alongside a 100th level character or even threaten anything that could threaten a 100th level character.

On top of that, H3 and H4 are not good well thought out modules, nor does H4 give you much help running it. H4 in particular is a bunch of very vague 'rooms' that each themselves imply a whole adventure, but which is not in any way detailed. They are things like, "Xth layer of the Abyss is home to some demon lord. Here are his stats. Write an adventure around going to kill him."
Well I have found a few other post's that say the opposite to what u are saying, they have been converted back in 2007 and a few people played through them. So, I would like to take a look at some one's conversion and if the party I am dming, if they are interested, will play through them

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Celebrim

Legend
Well I have found a few other post's that say the opposite to what u are saying, they have been converted back in 2007 and a few people played through them.

My reading of the old threads you are referring to, including the ones you've recently commented in, is very different than yours. The majority of comments are similarly negative, including often the comments of the person writing the conversion.

People write: "I've not seen conversion of these...there was some talk a while back of someone wanting to convert H4, but I think it was dubbed as being an almost insane undertaking."

"currently impossible without breaking the 'Gentlemens' agreement that is out there. Since orcus and most of the higher level creatures are level 20+ and that material is NOT SRD..."

"I am trying to convert the games only 100th level adventure, H4 - The Throne of Bloodstone. yes it is absurd, yes it is silly and no, I don't think it is worth it, but I am at least going to make the four generic PCs and at least one or two encounters..."

I should also note that when I talk about 'conversions', I mean something very specific. I mean documents conforming to the legal agreement: http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=128

It might be possible to do full rewrites of the H series (rather than conversions) but they technically wouldn't be legal to share.

I looked at several of those older threads and found blatant copyright violations (people sharing word documents containing full texts of the original module, for example). I found no usable conversions legal or otherwise, except a possible hint from a guy who said that he'd managed to convert it for his own use and the "conversion" ran to hundreds of pages (which I fully believe) but he wasn't going to publish it.

One of the reasons I stopped writing 1e to 3.5e conversions is that it wasn't possible to follow the WotC rules and post a legal and usable conversion of a 1e module to 3e - and I wasn't even posting any of the original text. The vast majority of 1e material requires adaptation, which is officially illegal. All of the H series requires a very large amount of (officially illegal) adaptation. You can't just 'convert' it. For example, one of the stated assumptions of H4 is that 100th level characters are much less than 10 times as powerful as 10th level characters. In 3e, a 100th level character is 100's or even 1000's of times as powerful as a 10th level character. Quite obviously a straight adaption can't be performed, even not getting into the many other serious questions the module raises.

Basically what I'm telling you is that speaking as someone that used to be quite involved in the 3e conversion library 10 years ago, I'm fairly sure you won't find what you are looking for. You might find someone like BOZ has written the modules for 3e and would share his campaign notes privately, but they won't strictly speaking be a conversion.
 
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Celebrim

Legend
Check out this conversion list and all were done legally: http://classicmodulestoday.com/modules-conversion-list/

Those are for 5e. You specifically requested for 3.5e. Not only will those be done under different legal constraints, but converting 1e directly to 5e is easier than converting 1e directly to 3e, both because stat blocks are simpler and because the stat cap makes dealing with encounters of vastly different challenge ratings much easier for the would be converter.

Besides that, the documents are behind a pay wall, which makes it difficult for me to evaluate their quality.

But, if they are anything like the (surviving) conversion documents in EnWorld's 3e conversion library, they are little more than straight up copies from the edition appropriate SRD and as such, are therefore of very little use. Just because someone has claimed to have converted something, doesn't mean that the end result is very handy.

We went through this discussion 10 years ago. It does no good, to, for example, provide the stat block for a 5e Flind if the relative power of a Flind has changed drastically between editions. It does little good to provide the stat block for a 3e orc, write the number (16) beside it, and assume that encounter plays exactly the same for a party of 4th level characters regardless of edition. It does little good to say the party encounters Orcus if in one edition Orcus is a reasonable foe for 17th level characters, in another for 50th level characters, and in another for 30th level characters. When I converted I3: Pyramid I ran into issues like the stat blocks were for 5HD creatures, but they had been 'minionized' by giving them 1-10 h.p. each. There was no literal conversion. It was pure judgment call.
 

Scary

Explorer
Yes, I know they are 5e, but it is a good list for conversions. I am going to contact the guy who signed up to convert them and see what he is doing.

As far as 3.5e conversions, I am going to keep looking and asking until I find them. I will not be giving up easily.

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Celebrim

Legend
Yes, I know they are 5e, but it is a good list for conversions. I am going to contact the guy who signed up to convert them and see what he is doing.

As far as 3.5e conversions, I am going to keep looking and asking until I find them. I will not be giving up easily.

I suppose tenacity can be a virtue, but in this case I suspect you are headed for disappointment. Fifteen years ago, when the edition was new, there was a large and very active conversion community, converting pretty much everything that had been written for 1e/2e over to third edition, and people were excited to do things. But even at that community's height, all the H series conversions started with a flurry of excitement and for the most part never reached fruition. Nothing I saw suggested anyone ever finished a conversion document, and I found only one post that suggested anyone ever ran a successful H series campaign in 3e - and he said in the post he didn't want to share his material. I saw one prominent converter say he'd told his players that he'd convert the H series, but I don't know if anything came of that, and certainly there is not now a conversion document in the library.

When I converted I3, I spent about 60 hours on it. The resulting document was 64 pages long - exactly twice as large as the original document. It was also - despite containing none of the text of the original, no maps, and no basically no flavor text - pushing the boundary on what was legal because the strict interpretation of the rules regarding conversions put out by WotC allowed for no judgment calls, rebalancing, or otherwise making the module playable. Basically, they were wanting to protect their right to release official 3e 'Return to...' type modules, and as such did not want anyone to share work that would supplant that. And that's understandable, but it meant at the time that real conversions rather than just cut and paste out of the SRD work weren't strictly speaking sharable. I do know that it was used successfully by several EnWorlder's because they messaged me, but when EnWorld's database blew up my version of I3 disappeared and I never made an attempt to put it out there again.

My guess is that a true conversion of the H series runs over 200 pages of fairly small font in a Word document. I doubt one was ever finished. You might be able to find a conversion of H2, because that's by far the easiest to convert. But it converts to something like a rather awkward module for 13th-15th level characters. There are some notes for an attempted conversion of it already out there.

I guess what I'm trying (and failing) to say is two-fold.

First, your energy would be better spent converting it yourself. Even if you find what you are looking for, based on my experience with what most people put forward as 'conversion documents', it won't be all that useful to you anyway. It won't have the right amount of treasure for 3e's expected wealth by level. It won't offer the right amount of XP to follow the adventure path. It won't be balanced. It won't answer critical rules questions about skill use, or won't do it well. It won't offer the right sort of challenges to be interesting to a player of a 3e character. You'll find only the 'easy' things have been done, like copying stat blocks out of the SRD, which basically just saves you from flipping to the right page of the monster manual or cutting and pasting out of ENWorld's creature catalogue.

Secondly, if you really want to run an epic Orcus focused campaign in 3e, you'd be much better off finding a complete set of the Rappan Athuk books than trying to convert a set of modules that aren't that highly respected in the first place and which additionally poorly convert to 3e. If you want to borrow ideas from the H series for that adventure, then you certainly could, and it would be easier than trying to convert the H series wholesale.
 
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Scary

Explorer
I have just started working on Converting Curse of the Azure Bonds to 3.5, =
once I am done that, I may look at starting work on the H series if I canno=
t contact anyone who has done the conversion already.
By chance, have you done many conversions from 1e/2e to 3.5?

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