Running Pathfinder Adventure Paths in other RPG systems

[Haladir]

I've been noodling on converting adventures written for one system and running them in a different system that may be more suited for the nature of the adventure.

Pathfinder (both editions) is at its heart a game about fighting monsters and taking their stuff. Two-thirds of the rules are about fighting and combat: The game is pretty much a combat system with other role-playing aspects kind of bolted onto the side. It does what it does very well. However, I find that Pathfinder is not a particularly great system to run adventures about things other than fighting and looting.

Some examples of things that Pathfinder doesn't do all that well: Romance; Courtly intrigue; Political machinations; Investigations; Naval engagements; Heists; Running a business; Family drama; Large-scale warfare; Environmental threats.

When Pathfinder adventure designers want to tackle major themes that aren't all about the fighting, they have but three choices: Lean very heavily on existing rules that are not particularly robust, use free-form role-play without formal rules underpinning them ("rulings not rules"), or create new subsystems to bolt onto the core combat rules. And even then, most adventures ostensibly not focused on combat will have a handful (or more) of superfluous combat encounters anyway, because that's what the game is really about.

Pathfinder adventure paths have top-grade writing: They are some of the best adventure series out there, for any TTRPG. Unfortunately, many of them aren't well-served by the Pathfinder ruleset. Here's my take on other TTRPG systems that would do a much better job handling the themes and subject matter of these Adventure Paths...

Curse of the Crimson Throne: Electric Bastionland
Electric Bastionland is a TTRPG based on the rules-light OSR "Into The Odd" engine. In it, PCs are desperate adventurers whose original careers didn't pan out, living in a fantasy pseudo-Victorian metropolis ruled by a mad queen. The lightweight rules are focused on adventuring in an urban setting.

Council of Thieves: Blades in the Dark
In Blades in the Dark, the PCs are members of an urban criminal gang who pull off heists in a fantasy city. It seems tailor-made for this adventure path.

Carrion Crown: Trail of Cthulhu
"Carrion Crown" is an investigation-heavy game dealing in classic supernatural entities like ghosts and vampires, and an evil cult pulling the strings and trying to bring about the end of the world. Trail of Cthulhu uses the GUMSHOE RPG engine that's all about finding clues, following leads, and fighting against the supernatural.

Skull and Shackles: Rapscallion
Rapscallion is a rules-light RPG about pirates making their fortunes on the high seas of a magical world. It's a perfect fit for this adventure path.

Mummy's Mask: Trophy Gold
Trophy Gold is a rules-light RPG about desperate treasure-hunters seeking fortunes in dangerous forgotten corners of the world. It's a perfect match for an adventure series about raiding lost tombs and dealing with the ancient strangeness therein.

Iron Gods: Apocalypse World
Apocalypse World is the original game that started the "Powered by the Apocalypse" RPG design movement. The themes of the game really match the weird "Thundarr the Barbarian" post-apocalypse themes of this adventure series in particular and of Numeria itself, with its mix of magic and alien high technology.

Hell's Rebels: Comrades: A Revolutionary RPG
It's what is says on the box: Comrades is an RPG about a group of underground revolutionaries seeking to topple an oppressive government in the name of the people. The core rules of the game include how to spy on the Regime, rally the population to your cause, create and distribute anti-government propaganda, how to stage effective protest, and how to fight back against riot police. The game delivers exactly what the adventure promises.

Strange Aeons: Cthulhu Dark
A rules-light cosmic horror RPG, Cthulhu Dark delivers an intense horror experience about the border between the seen and unseen realms. It's a game about the journey from the known to the unknown and the ramifications of learning secrets mankind was not meant to know.

War for the Crown: Blue Rose 2nd ed.
Blue Rose is a game of "romantic fantasy," where passions run high and words can cut as deep as any blade. It uses the Adventure Game Engine (AGE), which includes robust mechanics for persuasion and political intrigue. While fighting with swords is an option, using persuasion is often more effective in this game. This system meshes so well with the themes of the adventure that even the developer of "War for the Crown" believes that Blue Rose would have been a much better system for it.

Agents of Edgewatch: Blades in the Dark
In Blades, the city constabulary is listed as just another of the city's gangs... and the mechanics work just as well for running a sting as they do for running a heist.

Has anyone here ever tried doing something like this?

[@stroVal]

Very interesting post. I have thought of it in the past especially as I have moved away from such systems in recent years.

One system that would suit the 3.5-ness of Pathfinder (at least early pathfinder) whilst actually evolving beyond imo, a great example of what d20 could have been, is FantasyCraft. I would personally try to convert adventure paths using that system if I had the time...

Another one I would like to try D&D/d20 modules with, is Mythras or at least Mythras Classic Fantasy.

[Haladir]

I'm taking my own advice and am going to run a mini-campaign of Comrades: A Revolutionary RPG set in Kintargo in the grip Barzalai Thrune's iron fist. I'm going to use the "Hell's Rebels" AP as the framework for this adventure series.

Because Comrades is designed for pseudo-historical play, it doesn't have a magic system. Consequently, I'm grafting in the magic mechanics from Monster of the Week.

[Bluenose]

For Carrion Crown I'd look at Swords of the Serpentine. Based off Gumshoe, so good at investigation and basically otherwise a Lankhmar/Ankh-Morpork/Sanctuary simulator.
Actually let me post the description on the Pelgrane site:

Swords of the Serpentine offers:
A fantasy city of mystery and magic inspired by Lankhmar and Ankh-Morpork
Tools for fast and effective character creation
A customized combat system that opens the door for cinematic, heroic battles
Social combat that targets your enemy’s morale, letting you defeat some foes through wit, guile, and threats
Sorcery that allows you to rip apart a tower with the flick of a hand—but are you willing to pay the price in corruption to body and soul?
Powerful allegiances that give you influence in one or more factions across the city, but which can earn you equally powerful enemies…
Streamlined abilities that power four distinct types of heroes, and which you can mix-and-match across professions to customize your character further
Gameplay and rules mechanics that encourage players to help build the world they’re adventuring in
Rules for death curses, true names, alchemy, sorcerous items, ghostly possession, political manipulation, and more!

I reckon it woill work well a couple of the other paths once it becomes commonly available (I got it via pre-order, so my copy is one of the early batch).

[Haladir]

Bluenose wrote:

For Carrion Crown I'd look at Swords of the Serpentine. Based off Gumshoe, so good at investigation and basically otherwise a Lankhmar/Ankh-Morpork/Sanctuary simulator.

I am a HUGE fan of Swords of the Serpentine, and my name appears on the "Credits" page as a playtester. I played in a 10-month-long campaign back in 2018-19, and our group provided a LOT of feedback, particularly about how magic works. Many of our suggestions made it into the final game rules. I am eagerly awaiting my pre-ordered copy!

That said, SotS is very much a "sword & sorcery" game, and I'm not sure how well it would handle the Gothic horror setting of "Carrion Crown." I think I'd stick with my suggestion of Trail of Cthulhu for that AP. You would need to make changes to the AP, mainly to de-emphasize combat encounters. Generally, if you're playing ToC and you find yourself fighting monsters, you: a) have almost certainly done something wrong, and b) are almost certainly going to die.

[Haladir]

If you were going to run an AP using Swords of the Serpentine, I think your best bets would be any of "Curse of the Crimson Throne," "Second Darkness," or "Serpent's Skull".

[RedRobe]

I've only ever considered trying to convert my Iron Gods campaign to Fate Core/Fate Freeport Companion just for a trial run of the system to see if my players might want to use it for another campaign. It did not pan out. My groups are highly resistant to change, which is extremely frustrating.

[Haladir]

RedRobe wrote:

I've only ever considered trying to convert my Iron Gods campaign to Fate Core/Fate Freeport Companion just for a trial run of the system to see if my players might want to use it for another campaign. It did not pan out. My groups are highly resistant to change, which is extremely frustrating.

Switching from Pathfinder to Fate is a HUGE change, and not just in ruleset. I've found that running Fate successfully requires a very, very different approach and mindset than a more traditional RPG like PF. I've also found that the open-endedness of Fate gameplay and the and free-form nature of Aspects really can throw some players for a loop.

That said... Fate really would do the "Iron Gods" AP justice. I'd take a look at the Masters of Umdaar heroic science-fantasy "Fate Worlds of Adventure" setting for inspiration.

[thejeff]

When you switch these over into other systems - particularly the more narrative systems, how much reworking do you do? Are you just keeping the basic plot outline, or preserving the bulk of the encounters and combat?

For many of these APs, while the basic themes may not be well served by the PF rules, the APs are written to those rules and thus have the heavy combat focus embedded.

[Haladir]

When translating a Pathfinder adventure path to a narrative-focused system, you don't do a room-by-room conversion. Most of the narrative-forward systems I play de-emphasize combat, and a large majority of Pathfinder combat encounters aren't particularly important to the overall plot on their own: There are so many fights that don't serve any narrative purpose at all, and are only there there because PFRPG is at its core a tactical combat game and PCs need to rack up sufficient XP to level up!

I'll generally take the broad outline of the AP as a whole and convert it into a Doom Clock, per Apocalypse World. Basically, this is putting together an outline of what would happen from the perspective of an outsider if the bad guys' plans proceed without interruption by the PCs. Each bad thing that will come to pass is a "Grim Portent", which should become known to the PCs. If left unchecked, Grim Portents escalate, getting increasingly more dire, until the bad guy wins.

At the campaign level, I paint these in very broad strokes: Sometimes an item on the campaign-level Doom Clock is either a whole Book of the AP, or a large section thereof.

After I've built the campaign Doom Clock, I'll then break down the campaign-level Grim Portents into their own Adventure Doom Clocks, which is basically the same thing but at a smaller scale. I'll pull out the general themes of the adventure areas, build one or two set-piece encounters, and then leave the rest for exploration and role-playing.

I will generally remove half or more of the combat encounters from a given module. And depending on the system, combats often are much quicker; an entire combat is often resolved in three or four rolls, total. (And all of the games I play these days have exclusively player-facing dice mechanics... the GM never rolls the dice.)

For example: I recently converted the Pathfinder module The Godsmouth Heresy for the dungeon-crawling RPG Trophy Gold. I broke up the 35-room dungeon into five thematic "Sets", and wrote up the interesting bits as "Props" for each set. (Each set had between three and six Props.) Each set had an overall goal for the PCs to overcome... in story-game tradition, I flat-out tell the players what the set goal is. It's out-of-character knowledge, but that helps guide play.

[The Systems Agnostic]

Bit of a necro, but I ran the first chunk of SERPENT'S SKULL in STAR WARS / EDGE OF THE EMPIRE and found the common elements of exploration and swashbuckling matched well.

I worked up a conversion document I'd be happy to share if anyone's interested!