Has anyone here used DW to run existing D&D or retroclone modules? If you did, what were the results? Did you change things much or use the adventures as written?
Has anyone here used DW to run existing D&D or retroclone modules?
Has anyone here used DW to run existing D&D or retroclone modules?
I used DW to run Secret Party House of the Hill Giant Playboy (written for Labyrinth Lord iirc) at a convention earlier this year. I only decided to use DW about an hour before the game was due to start and did a quick conversion of the monsters and away we went. I just kept to the spirit of the adventure as written and followed the flow of DW for everything else. It worked very well. I don’t know if a serious dungeon procedural module would work as well.
I’m doing it- at the moment. I thought better to convert that module to an adventure front format with multiple dangers. It’s easyer to follow and allows for more flexibility when playing to see what happens.
Grim portents and the Stakes questions, which were not in the original module, help a lot to foster the open ended way any DW game should be experienced.
It was the first front I created and it took me 4 hours to deconstruct the module and put it back up together the DW way. I bet I could do it now in 2 hours.
Andrew Coles Ha, great title! I just downloaded a copy and will read later. Glad to hear it worked so well with minimum prep.
Philip Espi Nice to see someone approaching from the other side via full conversion. What module are you using?
It’s a module published in a french collection of generic fantasy modules called scenarii med fan (http://www.jdreditions.com/scenarii.php). By themselves, those modules are very “oldschool” (very linear), with very limited input expected from the players.
I mine them for adventure front and danger ideas anyway.
At the moment, my players found themselves in a remote island (they arrived through a magical portal while beeing chased by the Ptolus city guards). They have encountered a few zombies and have just freed a princess from the inside of a huge statue of Mahat, the god of sleep, nightmares and life exiting your body. The princess is under the blessing of her god and almost any people that approches her fall asleep immediately (that’s why she has been imprisonned by her father the king, or so she said). She was not aware that zombies roamed her father’s land because she has been jailed for 7 years. The funny thing is that the PCs have noticed that time was flowing 60 times slower inside the god’s statue …
That’s where we stopped our second session.
I’m planning to run The Keep on the Borderlands and I found its sandbox approach is perfect for DW. I have the factions and clans drawn on a big map and I’ll update relations when heroes have started making a mess. From there, the fronts should write themselves. Or such is my hope anyway =)
Philip Espi Awesome stuff.
Eric Nieudan Yeah, I could see B2 working really well. I was thinking of doing a similar thing with B4: The Lost City. The various Cynidicean factions under the looming threat of Zargon make great DW fodder.
One setting that would work really well is the pathfinder Curse of the Crimson Throne AP.
I’m playing it at the moment as an urban ranger/druid with the official pathfinder rules.
Our GM is railroading us too much, but the setting and NPCs would make wonderfull fronts and dangers and I can see tons of interesting Stakes questions emerging from our play.
Working on Temple of Elemental Evil now. Haven’t started playing yet but I anticipate no problems.
Andrew Scott I have fond memories of running The Lost City and I thought of it as the perfect DW module. Looking through my old Red Box recently, I found the cover/map for it, but no booklet sadly.
Eric Nieudan The pdf is available again and fairly cheap:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/17084/B4-The-Lost-City-%28Basic%29?term=b4+&it=1
Philip Espi I haven’t read any of the Pathfinder AP’s but I’ve often heard high praise for Crimson Throne.
Chris McNeilly Yeah, Temple would be great! From my read through DW is perfect for epic conflicts across sprawling environments.
Cheers, I’ll have a look!
I think Mike Shea converted an adventure fairly recently.
Currently running GDQ (in the middle of the G part right now) for my group and it’s working pretty well. I’m not railroading at all, and they can choose to go off the rails anytime they want, but they seem to want to stick to the path and see where things go. Of course, that doesn’t mean they haven’t come up with creative solutions to problems, and it’s there that the beauty of DW shines.
My group has run several of the Goodman Games DCC line as DW games, each has gone pretty well. There’s a bit of editing involved to change things into fronts, and some de-railroading work to do, but it’s nothing major. The work past simply reading the module, then formulating the changes, took perhaps an hour and a half for Idylls of the Rat King and Revenge of the Rat King — and their actions deviated heavily from the script of either module, but that’s actively fun to play out anyway. My girlfriend ran the one w/ Pyrexis (I forget the module’s name) and it went pretty well too, I think it took less conversion work.