D&D 4th edition conversions of AD&D

[Lord.Starhawk]

Has anyone seen a reliable place to find 4e versions of OD&D, AD&D modules? anywhere? Palace of the Silver Princess specifically, but ANYTHING will do. Thanks!

 

[Dice4Hire]

NOBLE KNIGHT GAMES - Role Playing Games, RPG's, Board Games, Miniatures, Dungeons and Dragons - New & Out-of-Print

Magic The Gathering Cards & Decks


The above two are good.

The below might work also, but would require a lot of checking back

Used, New, and Out of Print Books - We Buy and Sell - Powell's Books

Or your local half-price bookstore, if you have one.

 

[Oldtimer]

I think you misunderstood him, Dice. It looks to me as if he's looking for 4e conversions of old modules. Not the actual modules.

 

[Insight]

WotC has produced a few 4E conversions. I know they have the Village of Hommlet and the Tomb of Horrors. Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is coming out soon.

Everything else would either be unofficial or homebrewed. Other than my own personal efforts (not fit for public consumption), I'm not aware of anything else.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Has anyone seen a reliable place to find 4e versions of OD&D, AD&D modules? anywhere? Palace of the Silver Princess specifically, but ANYTHING will do. Thanks!

No, but (contrary to some comments on the internet) doing your own conversions isn't difficult. You just need time.

(I converted a bit of Dragon Mountain, for instance, mainly because some of the NPCs were interesting.)

2e didn't have a CR/monster level system, so you might find PCs confronted with monsters that, in 4e, are either really weak or really strong compared to them.

In 2e, often an adventure would have lots of low-level monsters and/or lower-level NPCs (eg bandits), which if directly converted means lots of "dice grinding" as you throw lots of d20s and hope someone rolls a 17+ and actually manages to hit a PC. Not fun for some groups, great for others. Tweak as your group likes.

Also, feel free to give "boring" NPCs powers. As an example, there's one encounter in Dragon Mountain (for 10th to 15th level PCs, so I assume 10th at start) involving Artur (a 10th-level fighter with a flaming greatsword), Arcana (a 9th-level wizard with a wand of fireballs) and numerous bandits, some of whom specialize in archery. So I would give Artur fighter or knight-like abilities (I gave him the Essentials knight defender aura/"counter"attack and Reaping Strike), Arcana got wand of accuracy and numerous AoE attacks, the melee bandits were leveled to about 6th (from their Monster Vault or MM1 version) and the bandit archers are hand-made artillery units of the same level.

Alas, my PCs are 5th-level, so they'll never see them anytime soon. I'll probably tweak them to match Dark Sun (make Arcana a defiler or something) and use them at some point.

 

[whearp]

It's true, though, conversion to 4e is really easy to do when it comes to the older stuff. I spent some time with the Temple of Elemental Evil and the dndinsider monster catalog recently, and found that I could go down the line recreating the encounters in such a way that they worked with 4e and still kept the classic feel. It just takes time.

 

[Pour]

Yeah, I encourage you to try your hand at it. I managed one of my most memorable campaign arcs adapting the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth to 4e. The classic provided all the necessary framework, but it quickly evolved into something all its own, where, of all things, politics came heavily into play, between the Troll King, a bodak, Drelzna (I had the players enter the complex as a sequel to the original module, so she was awake and trying to wrest the greater dungeon back from the monsters who'd settled) and a drow city from earlier in my campaign.

The Compendium is an incredibly useful resource for adapting, as is Power2ool, Masterplan, or if you're a Mac user like me Freemind (the latter three all free). And Fractal Mapper, Dungeonographer and Cartographer's Guild makes maps pretty easy, though I personally make mine in Photoshop. I even played this all via Maptool. The internet is a wonderful thing. The only things you need to manage this are some basic understanding of the system (to manage encounters/traps/hazards compared to what's mentioned in the module), the original source material, a DDI account and the time.

 

[Obryn]

Yeah, conversion is hardly a bear. You just have to look at it all a bit differently.

(1) Does this look like it could be a skill challenge? If so, go ahead and make it one.

(2) What's the purpose of this encounter? 4e doesn't lend itself well to too many filler fights. When converting Road to Urik to 4e recently, I didn't find too many filler fights, but I did find a couple that wouldn't work if I didn't translate them.

One of the biggest was that the PCs needed to convince a Gladiator NPC not to go off and do something dumb. In 2e, running it as a 1-on-1 fight was fine; it would be quick, and that's what you did. In 4e, not so much. I ended up making Wenzer a mutated gladiatorial champion, four-armed and monstrous. I used a Hydra's stats for him. It worked ... well, pretty great, honestly.

-O

 

[Insight]

Yeah, conversion is hardly a bear. You just have to look at it all a bit differently.

(1) Does this look like it could be a skill challenge? If so, go ahead and make it one.

(2) What's the purpose of this encounter? 4e doesn't lend itself well to too many filler fights. When converting Road to Urik to 4e recently, I didn't find too many filler fights, but I did find a couple that wouldn't work if I didn't translate them.

Obryn hits on some key points. Skill Challenges and figuring out what encounters should be real encounters are really important factors when doing these conversions. A lot of the AD&D adventures' encounters would be complete pushovers in 4E. And you'll probably see that the older modules have a TON of what appear to be encounters. One good thing to try to do is combine them into a larger encounter.

 

[TerraDave]

So, giving all the great converting that has been going on...

Are there any 4E fan conversions out there?