Using Dwellers of the Forbidden City with Labyrinth Lord
Anyone know much about what tweaks need to be made to use an AD&D 1st edition with an older edition retro-clone like Labyrinth Lord or Swords and Wizardry? I’ve got a copy of Dwellers of the Forbidden City and I’d love to run it, but I am not sure what the differences would be in terms of monsters. I suppose converting to Swords and Wizardry would be the easiest because there’s that big document of monsters for S&W floating around the internet, so I assume anything in DotFC is written up in there anyway.
But is there any kind of general consensus as to switching around between different retro-clones and other retro games? Just curious.
This entry was posted on July 3, 2011 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Dungeons & Dragons with tags Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Adventure Gaming, B/X, Conversion, D&D, Dungeond and Reagons, Dungeons & Dragons, Gaming, Homebrew, Labyrinth Lord, Module, Monsters, OSR, OSRIC, Retro Gaming, Roleplaying Games, RPGs, Swords & Wizardry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 3, 2011 at 10:37 pm
Not sure. Have you asked the same question in the forums over at Dragonsfoot?
July 4, 2011 at 4:16 am
Ist ed, S&W, LL – they’re all sooo closely related, in many cases identical, that you don’t even need to bother with conversion. Save yourself the hassle and just run it as is. This is what’s great about everything from OD&D to the earliest iteration of 2nd ed: almost total compatibility. After that the game….changed.
July 4, 2011 at 6:04 am
Well: I for one dont bother converting anything. The numbers, spells and special abilities are all broadly compatible enough that combing through the different modules to try and convert everything just doesnt justify the effort.
It plays great whether with OD&D, B/X. AD&D, or BECMI and any retroclone variation thereof
July 5, 2011 at 2:05 pm
achijusan and bevisiscariot: that’s all just empty rhetoric.
If I’m running DotFC with Labyrinth Lord, and the PCs kill the Aboleth, the module says the Aboleth has Treasure Hoard Class “C.” That doesn’t exist in Labyrinth Lord. There is no “Class C.”
So unless I want to run it using multiple retro-clones/games simultaneously, which I really, really do not, I have to do some conversion. Even if I just convert it on the fly. That’s still a conversion.
I grant you that these games are all similar enough so that conversion is easy. But it’s still conversion.