Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 4740822" data-attributes="member: 697">My current campaign is based on the original Temple of Elemental Evil. I found that the moathouse was a lot of fun to convert, but it did require some thought.1. Don't be afraid to combine a few encounters into one, both to give the PCs more room to move around and to draw a number of monsters together. For instance, a single ogre in a room is a dull 4e encounter, but having that ogre move from his room to the ghoul room next door in the middle of the fight is interesting.2. Modify the map to avoid encounters with too many chokepoints. Keep in mind that the 1e maps had a 10 foot per square scale, and in AD&D you were meant to fit three characters in a 10-foot wide corridor. I'd break each 10 foot square into a 3 by 3 square area for 4e. That alone creates a ton of space.3. Aim for the feel of the encounter when converting monsters, rather than a straight conversion. For instance, if a room has 12 hobgoblins, I might use a few different hobgoblins from the MM to fill different roles, along with a bunch of minions to bulk up the encounter.4. The important thing is to aim for the adventure's feel, rather than a straight conversion. For instance, the first level of the moathouse is inhabitated by a bandit gang. I changed the gang into a group of goblins and <insert critter from MM 2 here>. They were still bandits, but their mechanics made for an interesting, hit and run defense of the moathouse.Look at the adventure as a template, not a script, that you can use to drive your campaign forward. I ended up making a few changes to the adventure as we played through it, adding a ghoul warren dungeon and a hidden temple beneath the moathouse. They worked well for the campaign, since the PCs had some loose ends to work through before traveling to the Temple of Elemental Evil.</blockquote>

Verification