Best pre-3E adventure you converted to 3.X?

Glyfair

Explorer
What is your best experience converting a pre-3E D&D adventure to 3E or 3.5? What converted the easiest, without much major changes to fit the 3E paradigms?
 

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Pharoah & Oasis of the White Palm have been my most successful conversions.

Oh, wait... so was Isle of Dread. PCs went there three times (this is before the Dungeon conversion), and loved it. Kept on requesting to go back. IoD requires a higher level than in Expert D&D. Still lots of fun.

Keep on the Borderlands went very well, although, again, PC levels need to be one or two higher to take it on.

Feast of Goblyns required quite a bit of conversion, but was memorable.

Cheers!
 

Most successful? Return to the Tomb of Horrors. It was excellent fun for us.

I haven't really done all that many conversions, to be honest. Gates of Firestorm Peak in the early 3e days. Umm... can't actually think of any others off the top of my head. :eek:
 

Mine would be the short campaign I ran that started with the Dungeon magazine adventures "A Hot Day in L'Trel" and "Abbey Isle" and then went on to X8 Drums on Fire Mountain. I do love that module, I mean what's not to like about a jungle island, strange ruins, a lot of orcs, a dungeon that stretches under the whole island and a really memorable arch-villain in Kalnakaa?
 


Barnacus: City in Peril, an old Dragon Magazine (#83, IIRC) adventure by Francois Nantel. I've used it in every incarnation of D&D. Every bit a true classic. That said, the reason conversion is so easy for me may be because I know the thing inside and out -- I can pretty much do the conversion work in my head, on the fly.
 

RL 1 (Castle Ravenloft, but the original title could be different).

Actually, I'd translated and converted about 75% (I just had to translate the room descriptions to German, which was crappy work) before I stopped working on it for a few weeks, and then I lost the file in a crash. But it's still the best, and I sometimes imagine our group playing it.
 

My current campaign is a pure retro-D&D romp. We started with In Search of the Unknown, added Keep on the Borderlands, Isle of Dread, White Plume Mountain, and then G1-2-3. The PCs have almost finished Hall of the Fire Giant King, and I am about 90% finished with conversions of D1-2-3 and "Kingdom of the Ghouls." (I've also done a conversion of an old White Dwarf adventure, "The Halls of Tizun Thane," as a lark.)

I used Paizo's Isle of Dread and WotC's updated White Plume Mountain; for Keep on the Borderlands I took the conversion in the EnWorld library and updated it to 3.5. For G1-2-3 I used Daniel Collin's 3.0 conversion as a base, updated it to 3.5, and used lower-HD versions of true giants. The other conversions were all me.

My basic conversion philosophy is somewhere between WotC and Necromancer Games. I want to be true to the feel of the original, but not have a strict, slavish aping of the source text. I have freely altered the numbers of monsters and treasures to better fit a 3.x game. So if a "newer" monster better fits the feel or level of the adventure than what was in the original, I will use that instead. If the original text had 16 goblins in a 20 x 20 room, this translates to an EL 5 encounter if you use a strict one-for-one conversion. I would have no problems, though, converting that encounter as 6 goblin warriors 2 -- still EL 5, but more playable and a maybe little more logical.

In general we have had a blast with all these converted modules. We've probably had the most fun with the Giant adventures, but each one gets a little tedious after 4 sessions or so.

Many of these modules I have also run in older editions. And one thing I've noticed . . . the 3e game feels substantially like a 2nd or 1st edition game, but just with more consistent mechanics. I've really been baffled by the complaints of people who think 3.x has completed changed their beloved game beyond recognition into some horrible monstrosity. I don't think 3e is perfect, and there are some older aspects of the game that I miss, but I certainly don't see 3e as all that different in play from older incarnations. In my experience, the line has bred true.
 
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I also did Gates of Firestorm Peak, and I consider that one of the best runs I've ever done of a published adventure in any edition, conversion or no. It was how I introduced the notion of the Far Realm into my (then-8th-level) now-Epic game, which has been a major theme of the campaign since that first encounter. The PCs still have the journal of the BBEG Alienist at the end of the module, and refer to it from time to time when dealing with some other possible incursion from the Far Realm.

The other conversion I did was sort of halfway, because right when I was about to run my second game through a converted Tomb of Horrors, out popped WotC with their recent 3.5-updated version. I did a comparison of the notes I'd already made for the original and the WotC one, and eventually did a sort of fusion of the two that worked relatively okay. The original module was never designed to take Psions with 60-foot Touchsight on almost constantly, though. Sigh.

Thinking about Gates again reminds me I still need to stat up those "higher" Neh-Thalggu with more than 12 legs. :) I'll have to throw an 18-legged one at my PCs one of these days, I think.
 

Cloudland, an early 80's 3rd party adventure for levels 1-3. Was able to use monsters straight out of the MM or figure out stats for them on the fly. After running my high level (15-16) group the low level mechanics were easy to keep track of. Some things that were mechanically wrong in the module for basic or 1e worked well in 3e (classed monsters, in particular an orc M-U)
 

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