Orcus of Necromancer Games says "You were right, I was wrong"

[Orcus]

Hi everyone.

It's been awhile.

Normally I wouldn't talk about new releases here in the main forum. But I'm going to. Why? Because many of you were right and I was wrong. Yep. I said it. I was wrong.

What are you talking about you crazy demon lord, you might say.

Back when 3.5 "officially" ended and 4E started many of you may remember me being 4E's big cheerleader. Well, I still feel the same way about -wanting- to support 4E. But I dont want to get off track. At that time we (meaning me, my partner Bill disagreed but deferred to my wishes on this issue at the time) decided to hold three products we had in the can, essentially. The plan was to retool them and release them for 4E. That plan was thwarted by many things--WotC and the GSL 1.0 and all sorts of factors discussed ad infinitum before. During that process, my position was "dont worry it will all work out and we will have these great 4E modules!" Turns out I was wrong. It didnt all work out.

So here I am. Ready to eat crow. Go ahead. Give it to me

Of course, the end result is that some of you get a win/win--you get to tell me you were right and I was wrong AND you get access to those three awesome adventures. When you read them you will see why I was so stoked to do them for 4E (not to play favorites, but in particular Slumbering Tsar).

Here's the link: http://www.enworld.org/forum/publis...mancer-vault-opens-lost-modules-released.html

So all of you who said you would be starving for 3E adventure goodness (or evil badness as the case may be) come on in! The tomb is open! The vault doors thrown aside! And I have to stand here and admit I should have released them over a year ago.

Better late than never I guess.

Clark

 

[pawsplay]

I'm sorry to hear things did not work out as planned. I can't think of anyone who did more to try to make the edition change a positive thing for fans of thirty party products. It's good to see you posting.

 

[MichaelSomething]

So what does Necromancer Games plan to do? Try to get in on 4th Edition? Stay with 3.5 until it dies? Jump on a retro-clone? Hibernate (for forever perhaps)?

 

[Kzach]

So there's no way to release adventures under the 4e GSL?

 

[Orcus]

So there's no way to release adventures under the 4e GSL?

I wont say "no way." It was just proving to be a difficult thing to do for lots of reasons. And the adventures we had done were all awesome (in particular Greg's Slumbering Tsar is amazing) and the fans had just waited long enough. Bill convinced me it was time to just let them be released as 3.5 pdfs.

Clark

 

[Rechan]

I'm sad these couldn't be 4e. But, it's mighty big of you Orcus.

 

[CapnZapp]

You're a quality act, Clark.

Still hoping WotC will see that too...

 

[delericho]

Oh no! More support for my edition of choice! Whatever shall I do?

Seriously, though, it's unfortunate that you couldn't make it work. Perhaps you'll find a way in the future.

If it's any consolation, encounter design in 4e appears to be sufficiently different from 3.5e that I would suspect an adventure designed for 4e from the outset would probably work better than an adventure initially designed for 3.5e and then ported over. So the end result is that those three adventures might make for a more satisfying experience in their 'native' edition.

 

[CapnZapp]

Converting a module certainly is more work than just posting a bunch of stat blocks.

Generally you would want to bunch together three 3E encounters or so into a single 4E encounter.

And tweak the map to match. And by "tweak", I don't just mean "enlarge", but also "spruce" - the expectations on the presence of exciting terrain from a quality 4E 'venture are simply higher.

So yes, making a d20 -> 4E conversion without involving the cartographer is probably not a good idea.

 

[Snoweel]

I told you so.