Whole cloth conversions.
Had anyone had much success converting any of the WOTC 5e adventure paths to Dungeon World?
Given that I own them figured they might as well get mined for ideas.
They seen to run on the rails which is the opposite to that dungeon world is built to do.
Is that something that can be taken care of by the MC, the players having the right kind of buy in, adventure rewrites or some kind of crazy combo of all of the above.
Would appreciate any kind of pointers in the right direction.
Cheers
Check out the appendix in the back of Dungeon World. There’s a whole chapter about how to use modules from other game systems for DW. Basically, you boil the module down to it’s fictional bits, pull out the cool elements, then rebuild it in DW. The goal is to use the material in the adventure as a framework to build on during play.
Out of the Abyss would work pretty well, because it has a relatively simple premise and is set in a whole variety of locations across the Underdark. I ran the first half of it in 5E, but have been thinking about doing the second half in DW. The hurdle is converting the characters across, although possibly I could just start with a new party and level them a bit.
I say don’t bother trying to convert the characters over Saul Alexander. DW and D&D work differently enough that I’ve found it’s hard to leave assumption about how your character should work behind. Starting with brand new characters avoids that issue.
I converted “The Lost Mine of Phandelver”. It worked well enough. It was a lot more fun in DW than when I ran it in 5th
Chris Stone-Bush Yeah, although it might also be an interesting challenge to try and see how similar you could make them.
Saul Alexander I agree, although I just like converting things in general. Jeremy Gray You could ask what the players like most about their classes and try to make a few moves for them to replace or add to the closest class in Dungeon World.
Brian Holland Do you have that conversion in a format you’d care to share? Asking because I’m just setting out on doing this exact thing..,
Are Sørli, I certainly don’t mind sharing, but I’ll have to find it. That’s from before I was saving everything on the cloud and I’ll have to find the drive it was saved on. I’ve bought a house and moved since then, so it may take a few days
Brian Holland Thanks a lot; whatever you can manage is great.
Jeremy Gray, the first thing I do with anything I’m trying to convert is an initial read where I don’t take any notes so that I can get familiar with the things that HAVE to happen. Some stuff is extraneous, some is essential.
After that I read it again and takes notes on NPC’s, locations, monsters, items, etc. for each section of the adventure, and how the encounters were designed.
Lastly, I format all of that for the game I’m converting it to.
The real question though is how do you convert that stuff to DW!
Look at the Dungeon Starters that are out there. The format works REALLY well for adventures where you already have an idea or theme you want to explore, so I use them as a guide. The one thing I suggest is that you make a LOT of questions from the material, and make them leading questions.