Hello everyone.
I'm trying to get some friends into the PbP format, but some of them don't want to commit for too long for their first adventure. I thought I could run them through "Hollow's Last Hope", since it's pretty brief and gives the opportunity to continue the adventure with the subsequent modules, but some of those friends will only play along if we use the new Second Edition rules.
How hard would it be to convert the adventure from 3.5 to PF2? Is it even possible? I know there are at least two monster in the adventure which don't appear in the new Bestiary, would it still be possible to update them?
Thank you in advance for your answers.
You might find this helpful.
Thank you, but I already knew about the Guide. It doesn't help much in terms of converting monsters not appearing in the new Bestiary, but it's something nonetheless. Thank you.
Honestly, converting the monsters is probably a far simpler situation than converting the treasure, especially if any treasure is placed to potentially be used in the module. Some magic items, and items like masterwork weapons and armor end up being non-existent. I did some work on the beginner box adventure, and most of the monsters were really easy. The DCs in many cases were very easy though I adjusted a few. Treasure is the part that gets significantly harder.
I made a list of items, and tried to list out the items that seemed like they would have direct comparable items. That adventure seems to have quite a bit of treasure comparatively, especially higher level items comparatively. So that further made me question, what to keep out of style (the adventure was designed to have some higher level items) and which ones to consider removing or replacing with other treasure. The items that are just monetary, I was looking at the total and was going to try to compare it what a party was supposed to find through their 1st level adventuring. It seemed like it would probably be 1/20 to 1/40 original cash awards, just eyeballing it on that adventure, but I haven't had a chance to verify, it made sense.
For monsters, I was able to fine a level appropriate/CR equivalent creature to swap in in all the cases, save for the big bad at the end. Really only one other creature required customization. I replaced the spell selection for a monster with spells to be more consistent with original on the lead monster in one encounter.
The big bad, I found a similar (same family) unintelligent version of a monster, with an appropriate seeming level based on the original CR. I then swapped, several of the actions and names from the stronger version of the intelligent creature, and tweaked the damage down closer to the lower PF2 level version of the creature. It seemed to make it rather reasonable opponent, actually, in the end.
One big thing came up, what do you do with mostly expended wands that are supposed to be found as treasure. Obviously permanent wands were probably not intended, but having a stack of scrolls seems a bit off too. The other thing being masterwork items that were a nice, pre-magic. I started to think about using special materials, but noticed that actually those are generally more valuable/expensive than magic now. In theory, you might be able to treat masterwork items as non-striking/non-resilient magic weapons/armor, but that is sort of higher treasure than before, especially armor.