D&D (2024) Learning 2024 D&D rules by converting classic 1e encounters to 5e

[Saracenus]

Ok, here is a different room in the same "dungeon" I am converting.

This is an example what I call a resource burning encounter. It is, at best, something that would make the party use up spells, consumables, healing, etc.); a pretty prevalent dungeon design philosophy from the early days of D&D.

Instead I wanted to challenge the players with a different kind of monster as a change of pace; I wanted it to be one that is a damage sponge but vulnerable to area effect spells, thus rewarding players that invest in such things. Don't get me wrong this encounter could burn resources but it will be fundamentally different from the rest of the encounters on this level.

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Spoiler: Gary Gygax's Original Dungeon Key Entry From A 1e Adventure

12. CORNER ROOM
After one of their number was slain here a few weeks ago, the brigands gave this room and the entry corridor a wide berth. A huge adder, over 12 feet long, dwells here. It crawled up the rubble spilled into the moat, and found a nice safe lair where it could hole up after hunting. In the litter of its nesting place is a jeweled dagger worth 850 gp.

Giant Snake: AC 5; HD 4 + 2; hp 23; MV 15"; #At 1; D 1-3 + poison (take 2-8 points added damage, or 1-3 if the saving throw is made); XP 505

Here is my version for 5e:

MH12. CORNER ROOM​

There is a blood trail heading from the southwest corner of this rubble strewn room to its entrance in the north of it. The trail ends with a person sized blood stain and dried vomit right at the entrance.

A few weeks ago an outlaw (see area MH7. THE BLACK CHAMBER) was exploring and stumbled into two swarm of adders nesting here (the nest is in the SW corner). The swarms attacked her and in the ensuing struggle she succumbed to her multiple injuries and the poison injected into her body.
One swarm was destroyed by the outlaws during their search for their missing comrade. After recovering her body and gear they now avoid this room and the hallway leading to it.
The remaining swarm ate their dead compatriots and are now satiated. They only get aggressive and attack if the nest is directly threatened. In the litter of their nest is a bejeweled dagger.

5e Statblock:
* Swarm of adders (1): Swarm of Venomous Snakes CR 2; HP: 36, Bloodied at 18.

Treasure:
* A bejeweled dagger (worth 850 gp)

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So here is my intent, I want the PCs to know there is some kind of danger but not make it super obvious what it is. There are two entry points, either from the interior of the building or from the outside via a collapsed wall, since the snakes are "full" the PCs have time to investigate so long as they do not get too close to the nest in the SW corner of the room.

Now they have a choice.

• Do they ignore the clues in front of them or do they investigate to see if they can figure out what happened.
• Do they back away or do they temp fate and push in.

I have given the players a situation to interact with while providing DM enough info to improvise the answers to any type of investigating they chose to do.

Also, if they notice the dagger in the nest (not super likely) and see a few tiny snakes around it; that doesn't scream immediate danger, but oh boy, it go sideways fast if they try to recover it triggering the swarm attack.

I find this a more satisfying encounter now than the original because I felt that it originally a bland repetition of an already existing encounter with a giant lizard at the other end of the building.

NOTE: I am going to address the bejeweled dagger in my next post and use it as an example of telling a story or giving secrets and clues to the players al la @SlyFlourish work in his blogs and the Lazy DM series of books he has written. Thanks Mike, you have made me a better DM even though I have been doing this since 1979.

 

[Saracenus]

Ok, I lied.

My next post is not going to be about treasure; it is going to be about my design philosophy and goals for this project because this isn’t just an apples-to-apples conversion of The Moathouse from the 1e T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil to 5e 2024.

Just a side note, the Moathouse is part of T1 The Village of Hommlet which was entirely authored by Gary Gygax whereas the T2-4 sections were the work of Frank Metzner from Gygax’s notes.

So, a bit of background. I am going to run a campaign called The Wrath of the Elder Elemental Eye set in 576 CY Greyhawk using the updated version from the 2024 DMG. It is going to be a mash up of Temple of Elemental Evil, Princes of the Apocalypse, and Scions of Elemental Evil.

Here is the pitch on my campaign one-sheet I am giving to my players.

It is the dog days of summer in 2025. Scheduling time off from your dreary day jobs to pursue what is truly important, meeting up with your friends for the weekend at Oregon’s biggest LARP event, “The Battle of Sylverdeep.” Whichever Kingdom prevails has the bragging rights and control of the narrative for the coming year.

It is too bad that Crindle “Cringe” Fizzlestaff, AKA Marvin, read from the some musty “leather” tome for extra “authenticity” while “casting” his spells. You do not know how or what he summoned, but there was a lot of blood, screams, and then nothing.

You awoke in a strange new world, in bodies not your own, and a name burned into your skull… Ish’kura the Unmaking Eye!

Campaign Hook: Prevent the Elder Elemental Eye from resurrecting the Temple of Elemental Evil and maybe, maybe get home.

Yep, the players are from earth and now they are in the bodies of heroes from Greyhawk, hijinks ensue.

The other conceit is that all of us have played 2014 5e and are transitioning to the 2024 version. So, we are going to play it straight using only the three new core books with only a few house rules, if any to begin with.

Back to the topic at hand. I have been devouring the vids of a new YouTuber, Mystic Arts, and his D&D DMing videos because: A) they rock and B) I get a lot out of them.

This one, is driving my redesign of the old encounter keys. This is a master class on the concept @SlyFlourish calls “setting up situations instead of scenes” (see his blog post Setting Up Situations).

You're back? Ok, the concepts from these blogs are driving my update and redesign project. T1 Village of Hommlet is an amazing adventure that a lot of other adventures aspired to afterwards. But, Gygax sometimes assumed outcomes or put vital info into walls of text. All of my rewritten or new “box text” are designed to provide 2 or 3 things to interact with without assuming what the PCs are going to choose to do or how they are going to encounter it.

I am also dealing with 1e D&D mechanical assumptions that I am translating into 5e D&D mechanical assumptions. For example, skills did not exist in 1e D&D and anything that was “skill” based mostly relied on the actions, imaginations, and actual skill of the players, not the mechanics of the game. If there were mechanics introduced in an adventure they didn’t refer to something in the PHB or DMG, they were written into the text of the encounter key.

I am also using Obsidian because I can turn the entire updated adventure into my own private wiki so I can jump to a relevant section if I need to know how it connects to the current one. I am not telling you this is the end all, be all of note taking, but it works like my brain does and it is a dream true for me. Your mileage (or km) may vary.

Anyway, I hope this shows you how and why I am doing my conversion in a certain way.

If you are looking for the next step and want to make practical use of the building blocks I have built into my rewrite watch this vid from Mystic Arts: .

 

[Saracenus]

Disclaimer: You old-heads like me don't need or care about the history lesson that runs throughout this post, but there are a ton of players who got their start with 3e, Pathfinder, 4e, and 5e and know nothing about the old ways. So bare with me and take the parts that speak to you.

Ok, now for a post on treasure conversions. You would think that converting treasure from 1e to 5e is pretty straight forward, but it is and it isn't, also it doesn't have to be.

First you have to understand treasure assumptions in 1e AD&D were predicated on the fact that gp value of items and coin extracted from a dungeon to as safe location (usually the town nearby) were converted into xp (this was in addition to the xp gained from killing monsters).

That meant that everything you could take from said dungeon needed to have a value if it wasn't already listed in the 1e core books. You didn't have to sell the items, by the way, to get your xp value from them, but anything you left behind in the dungeon or was stolen from you before getting to the safe zone did not count towards your party's xp.

So, in the keyed encounter MH12 Corner Room that I posted in my previous post had a bejeweled dagger worth 850 gp. PCs would have trouble selling this to someone in Hommlet so what they really got was a very expensive monster poker that no longer interacts with the xp mechanics in 5e. Not to mention this can mess with treasure distribution for the party. If someone keeps it to fight with, that is 850 gp of treasure that cannot be used for other purposes.

It also doesn't say what jewels are on the dagger, what if the party wanted to pry out the gems to sell individually? Now the DM has to figure that out on the fly. Are the total value of the gems less than the value of the intact dagger? What to do? Well, there are a couple of ways to approach this:

1. List the jewels on the dagger so they can be sold off individually. I find this unsatisfying.
2. Make it a low level magic item (common or uncommon). Not really following the spirit of the treasure given.
3. Make it tell a story that ties into the larger story of the plot driving the adventure.

I am going with option 3.

So lets figure out what this is going be transformed into. I want this to tie into the elemental plot of the adventure story and give a party member something they can use. Using my design goal for PC utility, I notice that the party wizard does not have 100 gp pearl they need for their Identify spell.

Well, pearls are associated with the sea and water, so let's use of Magic Item’s Creator or Intended User table to spiff up the normal dagger. Now the blade is made of worked light pink coral (as hard as any metal), the handle wrapped in blue fish scale skin that always seems wet, and a large white pearl (worth 100 gp) forms the pommel. This elemental water themed dagger now looks like something someone from the Water Temple/Temple of the Crushing Wave faction would favor and use.

That could have all sorts of fun implications when the PCs later encounter the water faction's followers and the wizard now has a pearl that can be used with Identify. We could stop right here with a cool non-magical dagger because we have now tied the treasure into both the story of the adventure and have given it utility to the PC wielding it (and the rest of the party for that mater) with the addition of the 100 gp pearl.

Still, we could take it a step further and turn this dagger into a common magic weapon.

As a common magic weapon It will not give a bonus to hit or damage, but it will still defeat damage reduction for certain creatures. Since the water temple group is in direct opposition to the fire temple group it makes sense that it will glow faintly in the presence (within 120 ft.) of a fire elemental creature or a members of the Fire Temple/Temple of Eternal Flame. This last bit is from the Sentinel option under the Magic Item’s Minor Property table in the DMG 2024.

Either choice is fine. I will pick one soon to put in the adventure. Or if my party doesn't have a wizard I can rebuild it differently if need be.

Let's talk about a treasure parcel that I haven't listed yet, the buried chest in MH7 THE BLACK CHAMBER.
In the chest contains: 2,000 cp, two bolts of fine cloth (worth 60 gp each), A crystal flagon and four goblets (the set is worth 80 gp), An inlaid wooden box with ivory handles and decorations (worth 45 gp), and four arrows +1. I came up with the following changes:

• Four unbreakable elven arrows +1, they are half the weight of normal arrows, there is the symbol of the Knights of Luna etched in a nature themed pattern on the shaft and the arrow heads are magically hardened tree leaves.
  From the DMG 2024, Magic Item’s Minor Property table: Unbreakable: These arrows cannot be destroyed except by the blood of an elf. So, do don't shoot an elf with them or they will melt away.
• There were also two bolts of fine cloth (worth 60 gp each). Using the Trade Goods table in the DMG 2024 we now that normal cloth is worth 5 sp/sq. yd. This is fine cloth so let's up the value to 1 gp/sq. yd. and each bolt has 60sq. yds. weighing about 26 pounds each. Lets make them from the Kingdom of Furyondy (they export cloth and the realm north of the adventuring area). One is purple and the other is gold respectively.
• The rest of the treasure is fine as is.

Now we have 2 more items with ties to the adventuring world.

• If the players interact with the Knights of Luna (they are part of one of the five factions active in the adventuring area) and will definitely raise eyebrows when or if the party arrives in the Kingdom of Celene.
• If the party brings the cloth to Hommlet and are having difficulty estimating price, they can bring it the tailor (see H11 Cottage (Tailor)) and you could have him drop clue that a merchant caravan passing through tried to sell him that very same cloth, this is could be proof that banditry is once again a problem outside of Hommlet that the party could take to the village council.

Edited for clarity.