Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saracenus" data-source="post: 9663574" data-attributes="member: 47839">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.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. [MEDIA=youtube]-4Tu2zzDU3I[/MEDIA]This is a master class on the concept [USER=54840]@SlyFlourish[/USER]  calls “setting up situations instead of scenes” (see his blog post <a href="https://slyflourish.com/situation_checklist.html" target="_blank">Setting Up Situations</a>).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 <a href="https://obsidian.md/" target="_blank">Obsidian </a>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: [MEDIA=youtube]tZHF26Yb_bg[/MEDIA].</blockquote>

Verification