converting other games adventures into runequets adventures.

[Elcid321]

Hey there everyone, so, as the title imples, what adventures from other games (or videogames) have you translated or converted to runquest, and how?

[Godlearner]

I have done a number of conversions from "other" games. What I found useful is taking a story line, the maps and main characters; using these, but getting rid off random encounters and various monster variations. The biggest issue is moving these things into a Gloranthan setting and taking out things which do not fit. It is generally easier to convert an encounter, than a whole module.

[Rodney Dangerduck]

I've "converted" mainly from movies and TV shows.  A recent session was, very very loosely, based upon Die Hard.  The current one is loosely based upon a BBC Musketeers episode.  To me, the imagery, notable scenes and characters, and key lines, like "Yippee-ka-yay" or "I'll be back", are much more useful than stat blocks that need to be converted anyhow.

Ironically, the player whose PC was most involved in the "Die Hard" scenario had never seen the movie.

[ffilz]

I’ve utilized a variety of adventure resources from other systems (mostly D&D). Sometimes I just use the map. Sometimes I use the encounters as inspiration and sometimes I might be more true to the original.
 

When I get back from vacation and have a chance to look over my modules I’ll give a bit more detail. 

[Squaredeal Sten]

Only a heroquest from King of Dragon Pass.  So it's Gloranthan background, but a transition from an electronic game system.

Edited August 25, 2022 by Squaredeal Sten
Spelling, really typing.

[Joerg]

Most such conversions are little different from developing scenario hooks provided in a setting description - the GM still needs to describe a location, provide some stats for the opposition, and adjust rewards to fit into the setting.

Floorplans and NPC dialogue / catch phrases might be the easiest to steal.

[Austin]

I've played a fair amount of non-RQ adventures using RuneQuest, and I've GM'd some RQG using non-RQ adventures.

Our old campaign ran through a number of classic D&D dungeons in RQ, and Glorantha. We nowadays call that system "RQ Bastard" because it's RQ3, but with ~20 years of oral houserules. The original campaign we got the rules from is still going, though our own campaign ended awhile ago. Some fun adventures we ran which stick out include Lost Shrine of Tamoachan, the Caves of Chaos (I believe?), and The Lost Island of Castanamir. I'm told the other game completed Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain.

We didn't worry about trying to bend setting stuff much. Just pop and go. If something doesn't fit, well, that's weird magic stuff beyond mortal ken, ain't it?

Personally, I've run some Pathfinder and D&D stuff, and also some stuff from Forbidden Lands (by Free League) within my RQG campaigns. The Spire of Quetzel for FL was a lot of fun; it has the right sort of over-the-top crazy to feel like an uncontrolled jaunt on the Hero World. Also the Mellifluous Mage, or something like that, is interesting. A bees-themed dungeon with interesting secrets and weirdness. FL has a lot of good sword and sorcery vibes, which reskins pretty OK into Glorantha. Plus, its treasure values don't require much fiddling to fit Gloranthan economy. Another adventure I enjoyed running was I believe The Spire of Iron and Crystal for Pathfinder. Not certain the name, but I think it was by Frog God Games. I reskinned the adventure as a God Learner ruin on the coasts of God Forgot.

One of my rules of thumb for mechanical conversions is to take an attack bonus, and multiply it by 5 to get an RQ skill percentage. Damage values can remain similar at low D20 levels, but require more tweaking at high levels. This x5 trick works pretty OK with D&D 5E, though I've used it mostly with Pathfinder 1E.

Another useful trick for playing adventures out of the book is to take any difficulty class (DC) effect, and make it either a resistance roll (POW against the DC), or an opposed roll using the DCx5 against like, Dodge or Scan or whatever.

These tricks don't get you all the way, but they'll cover like 50% of "winging it" when playing an adventure written for D20 within RQ.

Magic is a bit trickier. It depends on how comfortable you are with the system, if you want to ad hoc stuff. I'm pretty OK with going "Eh, 3 to 5 points of spirit magic, made up as I go along" because I know that's usually a few points of Bladesharp, Heal, or Protection. Those are your staples, IMO. Other spells might wind up on the list, but are they actually gonna get cast in a combat situation? Hard to say.

Bigger magic is tough, because it's hard to have fluency with the whole RBM to sort of sideways guess at similar magic. Remember that everyone has common magic, though. And sometimes, it's more dramatic to keep an antagonist with the D&D-style magic. A fireball spell is VERY FUCKING SCARY if you're an Orlanthi fighting a weird enemy sorcerer. Area effect attacks? the horror! A rule of thumb which comes up less often is assume a Big Magic Dude has 18 MP (or maybe an additional 10-20 MP from enchantments), and that a D&D spell costs MP equal to its level. Disruption replaces basically all cantrips or magic missile or other basic damaging things. To be frank, with the speed of many RQ combats, casters with bigger magic shouldn't bother with Disruption - just bring out the big guns first.

I like to take notes first, but that's because I like having a good written skeleton before GMing. Not everyone's going to need as much support as myself, and not everyone's going to have fluency with the material for this prep process to be relatively quick.

Lore translations are hard, but honestly, a lot of the time we got away with just not worrying about it. Looking back, I think it's sort of a Gordian Knot. Shit's weird and strange and your problem is survival. This works well coming from adapting adventures out of the D20 publications because of the heavy use of combat, conflict, and dungeons. A lot of the time, you can place a dungeon within a broader Gloranthan story context. Feuds and rivalries are common setups, and you can adapt those to Orlanthi-style blood oaths and High Drama without too much labor. So what if dungeons don't always make "ecological sense" or some garbage - they're fun, yeah? Like, there's a reason people have been dungeon-crawling for over 40 years.

The best dungeons do make sense, but don't let that deter you from using adventures which have fun ideas with middling execution.

I know this is kind of long and definitely rambling, but I hope it has a few useful insights. We've had a lot of fun using RQ's system to play non-RQ adventures, and I definitely encourage other people to do the same. There's tons of cool stuff out there, and in my experience the dangerousness of RQ's combat makes playing through combat-junky D20 adventures more exciting, not less.

Oh, one last note - make sure to trim down the numbers in pretty much every D20 adventure you run. Equal number of antagonists to the adventurers is a good rule of thumb. Up to x1.5 for weak mooks like trollkin. And remember that a big baddie which can soak damage in D20 games is at a pretty serious disadvantage during RQ games, because of action economy. If you have 30 hit points instead of 150, you go down quick.

[ffilz]

So a partial list of D&D adventures I've used in RQ:

UK5 Eye of the Serpent (AD&D), used twice for adventures on Tada's High Tumulus in Prax. PCs got carried by rocs to the top of the mountain (the 2nd time, not all the PCs were carried, the rest climbed the mountain to find the PC who was carried, the first time the rocs returned to carry off more party members). As the PCs descended the mountain, I made various adaptations of the encounters to what was appropriate for RuneQuest. I did not use the "dungeon" at the bottom. Yea, my Tada's High Tumulus is very different from canon...

The Fell Pass from Dragon 32 (AD&D), used in the mountains between Sartar and Prax. I don't remember all of what I did with this. I do recall a dragon snail encounter. I may have mostly just used it as a map.

Lady of the Lake from Dungeon 5 (AD&D), lead up to The Fell Pass. I mostly just used the lady in distress and not much of the actual module.

Assault on Edistone Point from Dunegon 1 (AD&D), I just used the tower as a ruin in the Big Rubble. Mostly just used the map.

The Dwarves of Warka from Dungeon 16 (AD&D) I used the cave map as a cave in Prax which the PCs retreated to after spotting a large group of trolls. I don't recall if I based any of the RQ encounters on the published encounters. I need to remember this one for my current campaign, it's another place PCs could encounter Eurmal's Crumbs...

Chandrather's Bane from Dungeon 18 (AD&D), this was fun adventure.

The Well of Lord Barcus from Dungeon 41 (AD&D) made a nifty encounter with some cool benefits.

I particularly love using adventures from early Dungeon Magazine because they tend to be smaller which is more suitable for RQ where a party isn't going to fight many encounters before running low on POW and/or hit points. Sometimes I just use the map, though usually I take at least a few elements from the adventure. I might pick a roughly equivalent creature to use for a given encounter. Eye of the Serpent was neat because it was a small wilderness area with a number of small encounter areas (rarely more than 5 rooms, almost never more than 10) and many just single encounters.

[Elcid321]

19 hours ago, Crel said:

I've played a fair amount of non-RQ adventures using RuneQuest, and I've GM'd some RQG using non-RQ adventures.

Our old campaign ran through a number of classic D&D dungeons in RQ, and Glorantha. We nowadays call that system "RQ Bastard" because it's RQ3, but with ~20 years of oral houserules. The original campaign we got the rules from is still going, though our own campaign ended awhile ago. Some fun adventures we ran which stick out include Lost Shrine of Tamoachan, the Caves of Chaos (I believe?), and The Lost Island of Castanamir. I'm told the other game completed Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain.

We didn't worry about trying to bend setting stuff much. Just pop and go. If something doesn't fit, well, that's weird magic stuff beyond mortal ken, ain't it?

Personally, I've run some Pathfinder and D&D stuff, and also some stuff from Forbidden Lands (by Free League) within my RQG campaigns. The Spire of Quetzel for FL was a lot of fun; it has the right sort of over-the-top crazy to feel like an uncontrolled jaunt on the Hero World. Also the Mellifluous Mage, or something like that, is interesting. A bees-themed dungeon with interesting secrets and weirdness. FL has a lot of good sword and sorcery vibes, which reskins pretty OK into Glorantha. Plus, its treasure values don't require much fiddling to fit Gloranthan economy. Another adventure I enjoyed running was I believe The Spire of Iron and Crystal for Pathfinder. Not certain the name, but I think it was by Frog God Games. I reskinned the adventure as a God Learner ruin on the coasts of God Forgot.

One of my rules of thumb for mechanical conversions is to take an attack bonus, and multiply it by 5 to get an RQ skill percentage. Damage values can remain similar at low D20 levels, but require more tweaking at high levels. This x5 trick works pretty OK with D&D 5E, though I've used it mostly with Pathfinder 1E.

Another useful trick for playing adventures out of the book is to take any difficulty class (DC) effect, and make it either a resistance roll (POW against the DC), or an opposed roll using the DCx5 against like, Dodge or Scan or whatever.

These tricks don't get you all the way, but they'll cover like 50% of "winging it" when playing an adventure written for D20 within RQ.

Magic is a bit trickier. It depends on how comfortable you are with the system, if you want to ad hoc stuff. I'm pretty OK with going "Eh, 3 to 5 points of spirit magic, made up as I go along" because I know that's usually a few points of Bladesharp, Heal, or Protection. Those are your staples, IMO. Other spells might wind up on the list, but are they actually gonna get cast in a combat situation? Hard to say.

Bigger magic is tough, because it's hard to have fluency with the whole RBM to sort of sideways guess at similar magic. Remember that everyone has common magic, though. And sometimes, it's more dramatic to keep an antagonist with the D&D-style magic. A fireball spell is VERY FUCKING SCARY if you're an Orlanthi fighting a weird enemy sorcerer. Area effect attacks? the horror! A rule of thumb which comes up less often is assume a Big Magic Dude has 18 MP (or maybe an additional 10-20 MP from enchantments), and that a D&D spell costs MP equal to its level. Disruption replaces basically all cantrips or magic missile or other basic damaging things. To be frank, with the speed of many RQ combats, casters with bigger magic shouldn't bother with Disruption - just bring out the big guns first.

I like to take notes first, but that's because I like having a good written skeleton before GMing. Not everyone's going to need as much support as myself, and not everyone's going to have fluency with the material for this prep process to be relatively quick.

Lore translations are hard, but honestly, a lot of the time we got away with just not worrying about it. Looking back, I think it's sort of a Gordian Knot. Shit's weird and strange and your problem is survival. This works well coming from adapting adventures out of the D20 publications because of the heavy use of combat, conflict, and dungeons. A lot of the time, you can place a dungeon within a broader Gloranthan story context. Feuds and rivalries are common setups, and you can adapt those to Orlanthi-style blood oaths and High Drama without too much labor. So what if dungeons don't always make "ecological sense" or some garbage - they're fun, yeah? Like, there's a reason people have been dungeon-crawling for over 40 years.

The best dungeons do make sense, but don't let that deter you from using adventures which have fun ideas with middling execution.

I know this is kind of long and definitely rambling, but I hope it has a few useful insights. We've had a lot of fun using RQ's system to play non-RQ adventures, and I definitely encourage other people to do the same. There's tons of cool stuff out there, and in my experience the dangerousness of RQ's combat makes playing through combat-junky D20 adventures more exciting, not less.

Oh, one last note - make sure to trim down the numbers in pretty much every D20 adventure you run. Equal number of antagonists to the adventurers is a good rule of thumb. Up to x1.5 for weak mooks like trollkin. And remember that a big baddie which can soak damage in D20 games is at a pretty serious disadvantage during RQ games, because of action economy. If you have 30 hit points instead of 150, you go down quick.

Wow, this actually quite detailed. It's easy to see you have done this. 

And now that i think of it, yeah, there are more games out there tgat have a closer feeling to runequest than dnd, so i should probably look into those (like trudvang chronicles, or symbaroum). 

Thanks for the info.

[Austin]

15 hours ago, Elcid321 said:

Wow, this actually quite detailed. It's easy to see you have done this. 

And now that i think of it, yeah, there are more games out there tgat have a closer feeling to runequest than dnd, so i should probably look into those (like trudvang chronicles, or symbaroum). 

Thanks for the info.

Always happy to help. 🙂 All I ask is that if you come across any useful tips yourself, you'll share them with the rest of us!

[ffilz]

On 8/25/2022 at 3:47 PM, Elcid321 said:

Wow, this actually quite detailed. It's easy to see you have done this. 

And now that i think of it, yeah, there are more games out there tgat have a closer feeling to runequest than dnd, so i should probably look into those (like trudvang chronicles, or symbaroum). 

Thanks for the info.

Yes, Crel has offered some nice guidelines. I tend not to be so formal in my conversions, but I'm in violent agreement that there is good material out there waiting to be adapted whether it be just grabbing a map, a loose adaptation, or a more formal adaptation.

[svensson]

So, to the OP, I've converted several plots from other games, but that's entirely separate from an 'apples-to-pears' full conversion.

I've long since given up on d20 games, so I tend to gravitate towards the more off the wall game systems. Some of these are great for setting and writing, some have interesting mechanics to go with the writing.

From Columbia Games' 'Harn' setting and and HarnMaster system, three adventures have plots that are eminently suited to RQG adaptation:

Two are HarnMaster [the game system] QuickStarts, 'Field of Daisies' and 'Dead Weight'. The first is looking for a missing child with the complication of a cursed knife. The second is a shipwreck with a cargo of plague ridden dead. This plague can make the victims undead.

The last one is '100 Bushels of Rye' about a village needing the help because they're under nighttime attack by a mysterious murderer. The local knight who holds the fief [insert 'thane' here] isn't prepared to deal with an enemy that won't fight him in open battle [the knight is a famed jouster, but tracking something in the woods is beyond him] and has retreated to the bottle. The villagers have responded by not sending their annual taxes to the knight's overlord.

All three of these adventures are available at drive thru.

Edited August 27, 2022 by svensson