D&D 3E/3.5 1e to 3.5e Module conversion

[rotokq]

Hi, I'm new out there and I am wondering is anyone around here still doing module conversion? I was thinking of doing one and was hoping to get some advice. I found an old section of your page here and wondered if this was still valid/active? http://www.enworld.org/ericnoah/3econversionsdocs.htm#Blank Are there more conversions going on? I am interested in running running campaigns in my area (D/FW Texas) for 3.5ed. but enjoy the classics. I was hoping to find more modules. I saw a list of about 10 or so on the page and thought maybe of converting some myself as I have source material on many from 1st ed and 5th ed. but no one has them on 3.5 which IMHO is the best of the lot.

 

[Celebrim]

The short answer to your question is that WotC basically threatened legal action on the people doing conversions. They issued guidelines on how modules could be converted that then made conversion on the one hand a pointless and uncreative exercise with no value added, and on the other hand meant that if followed to the letter would produce results that would be often unworkable and valueless to anyone that picked up the conversion. After that, people just stopped doing it, or at least, stopped making it public.

The longer answer is that I never really felt WotC's guidelines could have passed legal review, in that they were attempting to defend a copyright claim against works that involved none of the actual text of the works that they were claiming to defend and which only used materials which they had made publically available through the SRD. The fact that we would later see SRD based material which converted copyrighted works like 1e and BECMI materials and which was much more invasive of the copyright and relied on far more materials actual wording and was produced for actual sale and commercially distributed, and yet did not see cease and desist notices from WotC only reinforces to me that they must have known such a claim against a work like that would be futile and possibly counterproductive. Nonetheless, they drained the life out of the conversion community here at EnWorld because many of us wanted to respect their desires even if they were nuts simply because they asked, while at the same time we knew they were issuing a document which no one who ever converted anything ever met in its strict standards.

Add to that the fact that at various times a lot of the materials that had been uploaded were lost in database crashes and never replaced and that in the years since the projects have become less compelling and exciting, and you have the current situation.

Personally, I'd take the little work that is left with a grain of salt. I downloaded one (I won't say which) to compare it to document I'd once uploaded but which isn't here anymore and not only does it grossly violate the copyright in ways my take never did (in that it actually contains text from the original!), but it also abundantly violates the terms of the license that WotC issued and does not contain that license as part of the document, and despite being potentially illegal and certainly is rude even by my rebellious standards of what constitutes rude the result manages to be still less than true to the spirit of the original while not actually producing good or balanced encounters or even necessarily understanding the rules of the edition it is adapting to (for example incorrect stat blocks).

Or to speak even more briefly, you are probably on your own. And that's pretty sad because I know from my own experiences that adapting the material from 1e to 3e is a surprisingly complex process and a lot more work than I expected it to be when I started.