Mystara 3e--Anyone else following this?

[That Genie Is Pissed]

Yes! The 7 secret crafts would be a great thing to add to 3e (or 3.5 i guess). You could probably rig up epic level feats. Or, in those "Path of..." (path of sword, shadow, etc) books you could probably create a legendary class like Runemaster or Alchemist.

So who's gonna help me convert my faenare to 3e? What ever happened to them? Best race ever...

 

[johnsemlak]

So who's gonna help me convert my faenare to 3e? What ever happened to them? Best race ever...

Don't remember feanare. Where are they from?

 

[That Genie Is Pissed]

Don't remember feanare. Where are they from?
--------------

I forget the exact name, but it was the air gazeteer. "Top Ballista" i think. Had a lot of gnomes in biplanes and a flying city and some ridiculous stuff. But the races included gremlins, faenare (elf-birds), sphinxs (worse XP chart of any race), etc. The faenare were kind of wild elves, bard-things that sing and fly around. That might be a little fruity sounding, but they were pretty tough: they had some unique spellsongs that were great against undead (damage undead and let you have saves vs. draining, and stuff).

 

[Tessarael]

My DM put together a Top Ballista prestige class with some of my input. It is here:
http://www.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/~knight/campaign/3edition/prestige/topballista.html

We have a Faenre in our party, in a 3.5E campaign. I don't know exactly what the racial attributes are.

 

[That Genie Is Pissed]

Hey, that's great, Tessarael. I had to fish around, but there's a windsinger template that's the faenare one. I'll have to sneak some looks at it while I'm still at work. Song of Life...that's a good memory from 0e days.

 

[That Genie Is Pissed]

We have a Faenre in our party, in a 3.5E campaign. I don't know exactly what the racial attributes are.

So it looks like windsinger is set up as a 3.5 prestige class that has a faenare racial requirement. Not sure about the d4 hp, maybe more of a druid/cleric type in the campaign i played in. If you can track down the faenare race stuff you're using, that'd be cool. Lemme know.

I suppose i could hammer it out with the Savage Species book stuff or something, but I'm guessing that the natural flight alone would start getting the level adjustment pretty up there.

 

[Mark_Aurel]

I feel the same way about the conversions at Birthright.net. They spent 3 years arguing, finally released a playtest document a few months ago (which seemed pretty slick me) and now it's gone again, as far as I can tell. I know that they mean well and that they're working for free, but at some point you just loose so much momentum it's not worth it anymore.

Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that it is still entirely downloadable off Birthright.net - http://www.birthright.net/download/brcs-playtest.zip

A new version should be up pretty soon, to account for the feedback that's come in - it should be substantially improved mechanically, and hopefully much slicker looking graphically. I tend to agree that a project like this loses momentum after a while, but what can you do, fire the volunteers? In proper terms, I think the Birthright project has been around for only a little over a year anyway.

/digression

In more general terms, I think that fan-driven projects like these tend to suffer from an essential dichotomy between those who just want to "convert" mechanics, and those who want to "design" mechanics tailormade for the new (or, at the present point, not-so new) rules; several of the attempts I've seen online seem to struggle between trying to fulfill both schools.

 

[Estlor]

My main source in the early days was http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/6011/ - especially for spell and monster conversions.

Yeah, mine too... considering that's my old website

The stuff I started doing drifted beyond the confining limits of Yahoo Geocities, hence the reason it's on my PC and not on the net.

 

[Estlor]

How do you do the elf?

Personally, I do find their elf a bit confusing. They're not clear how the character levels are distributed between the classes. Is a 0e 10th level elf a 3e Level 8 Wizard/5 fighter according to their system.

The elf is the elf. Standard 3e high elf. I know they went around and around about this and somehow decided the gray elf was more like the Mystara elf, but that to me just makes no sense. I have regional feats, and one region is Elf (Sylvan) which has a feat that lets you reduce the Spell Fail %.

As for converting an OD&D elf to a 3e elf, first thing I'd do is use the alternate rules in the back of the Rules Cyclopedia to turn it into a base 36 character (36 levels, not 10 and combat ranks). Then I'd use the rules in the Cyclopedia to convert it to 2e levels, then use the old conversion guide to find the total number of levels the elf should have. Then use past roleplaying as a guide to what class/classes they should have.

I mean, my whole point is the aim shouldn't be to force OD&D concepts into the 3e world. It should be about finding a balance between OD&D and 3e so that the spirit of the OD&D is alive in 3e rules.

They may not be balanced, but the way I did secret crafts (as an example) is I set up a 5 level prestige class called "Craft Mage" to which there is a different variety for each Secret Craft. You get a circle power each level (save the last level unless you are the leader of the craft). I just culled the circle powers down into five level benefits. It's pretty elegant, gets the job done, and brings the spirit of the OD&D concept into a pre-existing 3e rule.

THAT'S how you convert. As the saying goes, "Keep it simple, stupid."

 

[johnsemlak]

They may not be balanced, but the way I did secret crafts (as an example) is I set up a 5 level prestige class called "Craft Mage" to which there is a different variety for each Secret Craft. You get a circle power each level (save the last level unless you are the leader of the craft). I just culled the circle powers down into five level benefits. It's pretty elegant, gets the job done, and brings the spirit of the OD&D concept into a pre-existing 3e rule.

Mongoose's Elementalism has a good system for Elementalists that works very similarly to the GlantrI Secret Craft system. Characters spend xp to advance from the 1st circle to the 2nd, and so on. I'm hoping some of the other books in that series are good as well. I've ordered the 'Dragon Magic' supplement recently, I hope that's good.