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lowkey13
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D&D 5E Running Old School adventures for 5e
- Thread starter fjw70
- Start date
not-so-newguy
Legend
I will be starting B10 Night's Dark Terror tomorrow, fingers crossed 
GX.Sigma
Adventurer
Overall, it's just not a good adventure. There are some really cool things in it, but it's padded out with like 40 rooms in a row of "fight 10 duergar and some spiders" over and over again, and it has the most anticlimactic ending ever (spoiler: you fight an evil wizard in a room). There are plenty of ideas to steal, but if you run it as-written, it's really boring. It has about 1-2 sessions' worth of good ideas, spread out over 5 sessions' worth of content.
I don't know if I'd say it doesn't convert well, but it's a bit of a hassle to convert. There are a lot of solo encounters with theoretically interesting monsters, but they fall flat because they are solo encounters in boring corridors. I don't know if this is a module problem or a conversion problem, but it's a big problem. Also there's a +1 sword every other room, but that's pretty easy to ignore.
devincutler
Explorer
Lost Temple of Tharizdun (A+++)
Against the Cult of the Reptile God (A++)
Temple of Elemental Evil (including Village of Hommlet) (B+)
Lost Shrine of Tamoachan (A) [get rid of the poison gas]
feartheminotaur
First Post
Oh, the EX series...I'd love to see something fun like that again, so many serious adventures these days.
AaronOfBarbaria
Adventurer
Funny as it may be, the EX modules are the only ones I've ever had my players respond to seriously.
They are the type to mock liches, scoff at demons believing themselves to be scary, and treat any apocalyptic scenario as entirely not worth stressing over in their confidence at being able to stop it... but when each player had the realization that they were in "wonderland" their faces went pale and they swallowed hard, a moment of actual fright over-taking them and coloring their response to all the stimuli around their characters until they finally escaped back to the prime material plane (to confidently trash talk a demigod to his face, even). A feline smile appearing from thin air resulted in around a dozen sessions of my players acting like "Oh <expletive deleted>, we are all going to die!" was the thought constantly on their characters' minds.
feartheminotaur
First Post
We did a bunch of them when 5e came out and our 4e DM went on deployment. We all took turns as DM, and while a lot of fun, DM'ing an older module takes a different touch than a modern one - some DMs had issues with a number of 5e 'explain this to me with a roll' features - Insight (as mentioned), zone of truth and scrying were the worst offenders
We played (I think the module numbers are right, but these are from my notes, I don't actually have a few of these):
X4 - Master of the Desert Nomads (A)- Loads of fun. Great wilderness adventure. Currently turning it into a hexcrawl.
X5 - Temple of Death (B) - Infiltrate the bad guys lair and kill him. The bad guys are, as is, way too powerful (and have way too many magic items) for the level on the front.
WG4 - Forgotten Temple of Tharzidun (A+) - Super, super awesome dungeon crawl. Don't touch anything, especially if it's purple!
C1 - Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (B) - Has a great atmosphere of exploring ruins. The DM that ran this adjusted a lot of the traps.
G1/3 - Against the Giants (INC) - We started this but had serious balance problems. Number and CR of monsters was way too hard for the PC level.
I1 - Dwellers of the Forbidden City (C) - Cool idea, but kind of a ho-hum adventure.
L1 - Secret of Bone Hill (A) - Another great wilderness/dungeon blend. We had a great time with this.
L2 - Assassin's Knot (B) - Fun and wholly different for the 3/4e folks. As noted earlier, too easy to work out the bad guys with 5e rules.
S4 - Lost Caverns of Tsojancth (B) - Liked it, but didn't love it. Dungeon ecology was wonky - like it was a monster zoo, going room to room killing the next thing on the checklist instead of an actual place to explore That soured it for a couple of us.
U1 - Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (A+) - Perfect starting module.
U2 - Danger of Dunwater (A) - Another great little starting module. Sailor background is actually useful!
U3 - The Final Enemies (B) - Fun, fun, fun. We actual played the assault of the sauhagin fortress instead of having it happen off-screen.
UK1 - Beyond the Crystal Cave (C) - Liked the caves and garden, but kinda light-weight. We ripped through it pretty easy.
We played (I think the module numbers are right, but these are from my notes, I don't actually have a few of these):
X4 - Master of the Desert Nomads (A)- Loads of fun. Great wilderness adventure. Currently turning it into a hexcrawl.
X5 - Temple of Death (B) - Infiltrate the bad guys lair and kill him. The bad guys are, as is, way too powerful (and have way too many magic items) for the level on the front.
WG4 - Forgotten Temple of Tharzidun (A+) - Super, super awesome dungeon crawl. Don't touch anything, especially if it's purple!
C1 - Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (B) - Has a great atmosphere of exploring ruins. The DM that ran this adjusted a lot of the traps.
G1/3 - Against the Giants (INC) - We started this but had serious balance problems. Number and CR of monsters was way too hard for the PC level.
I1 - Dwellers of the Forbidden City (C) - Cool idea, but kind of a ho-hum adventure.
L1 - Secret of Bone Hill (A) - Another great wilderness/dungeon blend. We had a great time with this.
L2 - Assassin's Knot (B) - Fun and wholly different for the 3/4e folks. As noted earlier, too easy to work out the bad guys with 5e rules.
S4 - Lost Caverns of Tsojancth (B) - Liked it, but didn't love it. Dungeon ecology was wonky - like it was a monster zoo, going room to room killing the next thing on the checklist instead of an actual place to explore That soured it for a couple of us.
U1 - Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (A+) - Perfect starting module.
U2 - Danger of Dunwater (A) - Another great little starting module. Sailor background is actually useful!
U3 - The Final Enemies (B) - Fun, fun, fun. We actual played the assault of the sauhagin fortress instead of having it happen off-screen.
UK1 - Beyond the Crystal Cave (C) - Liked the caves and garden, but kinda light-weight. We ripped through it pretty easy.
the Jester
Legend
So far the only old edition module I've run in 5e was a 4e one (Thunderspire Labyrinth), so not so much old-school as slightly older than current school. It went just fine, though, with a little creativity on my part when it came to converting traps.
Other than updating the mechanics and swapping in current stat blocks, though, I didn't change a thing. I run a hardcore sandbox, so I don't worry about what level the pcs are vs. the challenges; it's on the players to decide what to engage with.
I don't see any module content being especially tricky to convert, possibly excepting some 3e multi-template/prestige class-based monsters.
Other than updating the mechanics and swapping in current stat blocks, though, I didn't change a thing. I run a hardcore sandbox, so I don't worry about what level the pcs are vs. the challenges; it's on the players to decide what to engage with.
I don't see any module content being especially tricky to convert, possibly excepting some 3e multi-template/prestige class-based monsters.
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