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A recent thread got me thinking about doing conversions from Pathfinder 2nd edition back to Pathfinder 1st edition, and I decided to take a stab at Hellknight Hill to see how much work it would be to convert. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't too bad. I may very well convert the rest of the AP.
>> Link the Conversion Guide <<
I haven't had a chance to run this yet (and when I do it will probably be a solitaire mock run because my players are in the middle of another campaign) but I think this is sufficient to run it. I'm interested to hear any feedback people have.
Monsters and magical items were converted to their PF1 equivalents, and where ones didn't exist I statted them up. XP awards were a little harder, but based on the party's expected APL it was able to ballpark it. I've done a more thorough pass the XP totals and it holds pretty close to the APL expectations set forth in the adventure overview (if you fully-explore the dungeon and solve most of the challenges, you will reach the expected levels). I only eye-balled loot; it looks fine, I'll go over it with a fine-toothed comb later.
Skill checks are mostly unchanged, just mapping each skill to its context- appropriate PF1 counterpart. Since PF1 and PF2 skill checks are pretty close at low levels the DC's didn't need to change in most cases. Since we have more obscure skills in PF1, I did lower the DC of more obscure skill checks, and a few checks I changed to better comport with PF1 guidelines. I did consider raising the DC's for things that we can take 20 on with no risk of failure, but in the end I only did that with a couple Disable Device checks. Saving throw DC's, where called for, are reduced since PF1 saves are significantly lower than PF2 saves.
The one thing that really bothers me is that Mephit encounter. I absolutely love that encounter, but when converted back to 1st edition it's a CR 5 encounter that occurs when the party is still 1st level. The combination of DR/magic, fast healing, an SLA that deals just enough damage to 1-shot a 1st level character, and a very deadly environmental hazard (smoke is way more dangerous in PF1 than it is in PF2) make this encounter incredibly deadly. I've made some modifications to hopefully make it less deadly, but I'm still afraid because... well, it's still a nasty encounter. I'd love any feedback or opinions other people have on this one.
Just a few other thoughts on the various conversions:
Backgrounds
Dragon Scholar: the PF2 effect of this background is completely useless when backported to PF1, so I had to come up with something completely new. I decided to create a half-powered version of Eldritch Heritage, which fits the background's flavor (even if it's completely different from its actual effect).
Items
Doubling Ring: I'm kinda interested to see how useful this will be in PF1. It's a huge cost-saver on enhancement bonuses and have some cheeky application with using a thrown weapon in your off-hand, but occupying both your ring slots is a huge downside.
Monsters/NPC's
Pib and Zarf: while it might seem weird to have gone with Elemental bloodline instead of Draconic, had I gone with Draconic I wouldn't have been able to properly emphasize their elemental divergence. With this approach Pib gets an acidic version of Burning Hands to match Zarf's default fire version, and they get matching elemental rays as well. This ultimately serves their flavor better.
Skeletal Hellknight: there was no way in any of the lower planes that I was converting this guy's on-hit stun effect. Yikes. Instead I gave him Charnel Soldiers and the Precise Strike feat to better emphasize his role as a leader of the skeletons in the encounter in which he appears.
Malarunk: in a surprising inversion, 2nd edition Malarunk has access to a spell that 1st edition Malarunk can't really duplicate. I have to admit, that's pretty much the last problem I expected to have given how magic is in PF2. I put a wand of sending on him to fill that narrative niche and kept the charges low so it doen't break the WBL bank.
Wow nice, im very interested on this.
Yeah, I read through book 2 and wasn't particularly inspired by it, and then when book 3 failed to captivate me I just completely lost interest in this project. I don't like leaving projects unfinished and I've often felt this was a loose end that I wanted to clean up (which is why I randomly checked in on this thread today, wondering if anyone ever posted anything here).
I don't know how much I can contribute at this point in time, as I've got a lot of things going on. The process of converting Hellknight Hill to PF1E was rather tedious. A lot of time searching the pages of the book for skill checks, double-checking treasure and XP rewards, and very little on the interesting stuff like converting tactics based on the actual abilities the PF1 versions of the characters would have.
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