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I bought all of Serpent's Skull back during the Golem Sale because I had my eye on it for a while and just couldn't pass up the opportunity at $36 for the whole AP. Well, coming up in the next moth or two I will get to dive in to running it finally and I'm really excited. I really enjoy tinkering with published adventures and when I say 'tinkering' I mean mutilating sometimes beyond recognition.
So here is my question to those who have experience running this AP. I am considering converting the campaign over to AD&D 2E because as much as I love Pathfinder I prefer more rules light game systems for longer campaigns. How difficult might this campaign be? I am curious about encounters and special rules considerations and whatnot and how accessible the same monsters and whatnot are in 2E materials. I have a pretty extensive 2E game collection from the 90s when it was my game of choice so lack of access to the books isn't a huge concern.
I thought it might be fun to try this conversion but it it's going to mean creating a ton of custom monster stat blocks than I'll just run it in Pathfinder and deal with the heavier rules system. On a similar thought, how difficult is it to convert monster stats over from Pathfinder to 2E?
AD&D 2nd edition were the first rules I played with and I have a lot of nostalgia for them so I totally understand where you are coming from. I think it would be doable and if 2nd edition is your preferred system then I say go for it!
Having said that, I do think it might be a lot of work converting any PF adventure to 2nd edition due to monster stats and encounter balance considerations.
If you want something "rules light", that runs faster and has an earlier edition feel I would highly recommend Blood & Treasure
I converted my Crimson Throne campaign to B&T and I was really happy about how it turned out. It was also very easy to do since B&T has most of the 3rd edition monster stats and because B&T is somewhere in between 1st/2nd edition and 3rd edition.
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I wasn't sure how much of the campaign, rules-wise, strayed into territory not covered by AD&D materials. By this, I mostly mean monster stats. Encounter balance is also something to consider though, from the way it looks, monsters are pretty even from system to system. For example, an ogre at CR 3 is a decent challenge for a third level party in either iteration of the game.
I'm not married to 2E as a rules system, I just like how much faster it plays over Pathfinder and in a long campaign the story doesn't get bogged down in the rules or encounters. I considered running it in Swords & Wizardry but didn't want to invest in a new game when I had the 2E books already on hand. Blood & Treasure looks neat, but again, it's an investment in a new game. I do like the blending of d20 era rules and material into a retro-clone though.
I'll probably give the first book a whirl and see how it goes.
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I ran through the first book and tried a quick conversion and it went pretty well. There are a few monsters, such as the chupacabra, that require creation whole cloth but for the most part everything was represented in the Monstrous Manual. The euriptids are just aquatic scorpions, so they were easy. The NPCs would require a bit more work than the mosnters however, especially with no serpentfolk to draw from, though they are mechanically not that different than lizardfolk.
I don't know how easy the latter books would be but Souls for Smuggler's Shiv wasn't too difficult. The biggest trouble I can forsee in a conversion like this is the scaling and balance over multiple levels. With the variable and slower character progression in AD&D 2E compared to Pathfinder the comparable levels of the party may lag behind the assumed level of the adventure causing the difficulty to climb quickly. This problem can't be easily rectified the same was a 3.X conversion would be by simply handing out levels by GM fiat.
I ended up deciding to run this game using Pathfinder since it will just be easier, however it was a neat experiment.
Cool! Good to know. Thanks for posting.
Not that it matters, but I think the Frog Gods opened Swords & Wizardry as a free product (the complete rules, not just the core).
With that said, I'm glad to hear that the converted game is going well. And, to plug another system I enjoyed (but has gone under), by all means look at Myth & Magic. Apparently, it is a great 2e retro game with many coherent/linear concepts the occasionally arbitrary 2e/AD&D game could have. I don't think the Paizo marketplace has it, but I think it is on the OneBookShelf collective.