u/Brainman515

I've been thinking more about edition conversion after a discussion here last week, and I've run into a related problem:

At what point does a conversion stop being a conversion?

Suppose you're adapting a published adventure between two editions with substantially different encounter design. You can preserve the story, locations, NPCs, encounter objectives, and intended outcomes fairly easily. The difficult part is the mechanics. If a monster originally existed to pressure the back line, you could recreate that behavior. If an encounter was deliberately overwhelming, you can preserve that difficulty. If several variants of the same creature originally filled different battlefield roles, you can reproduce those distinctions.

But every time you add an ability or alter an encounter to reproduce its original function, you're technically moving farther away from a literal mechanical conversion. I've been using a principle of:

Preserve the published material wherever possible, then make the minimum mechanical changes necessary to reproduce the original encounter's intended function.

But "minimum necessary" is obviously subjective. So, I'm curious how other designers approach this.

Where do you draw the line between faithful adaptation and redesign?

Is trying to stay true to the original primarily about preserving the original rules, preserving the play experience, preserving authorial intent, or something else?

I've been thinking about campaign continuity lately, especially in longer campaigns where the party moves between different adventures, locations, and groups of NPCs. One of my favorite ways of making a world feel persistent is having people remember what the characters actually did.

Not necessarily huge reputation systems or numerical faction scores. Just consequences. Maybe the merchant the party helped fifteen sessions ago gives them information when they desperately need it. Maybe a guard they humiliated remembers them when they return to town. Maybe killing members of a faction solves today's problem but quietly makes something much worse several adventures later. Maybe an NPC who seemed completely unimportant becomes significant simply because the players decided to build a relationship with them.

The part I struggle with is how much of this a DM can realistically maintain before continuity becomes another giant bookkeeping exercise. So for people running long campaigns:

How do you make NPCs, factions, and locations remember the party without drowning yourself in campaign notes?

Do you formally track reputation and relationships, keep short notes, rely on memory, or only carry forward the consequences that seem important?

I've been thinking about equipment durability in survival heavy games after a recent discussion here about resource scarcity. Weapon breakage seems like one of those mechanics that sounds perfect for a harsh campaign on paper but could become irritating very quickly in actual play.

Dark Sun is the obvious example I'm looking at. Metal is scarce, so characters commonly rely on weapons made from bone, stone, obsidian, wood, and similar materials. If those materials are mechanically identical to steel, though, part of that scarcity becomes cosmetic.

On the other hand, if I'm constantly rolling to see whether someone's bone sword snaps, I've probably just replaced an interesting survival problem with another thing everyone has to track.

What interests me more is whether durability can create decisions.

Things like:

• carrying backup weapons;
• deciding whether to risk a valuable weapon;
• scavenging equipment from enemies;
• maintaining or repairing gear;
• choosing an inferior but more durable material;
• suddenly having to improvise after equipment fails.

For people who've actually used weapon durability or breakage rules:

Did they create interesting gameplay at your table?

And if they did, what made them work without turning every attack roll into an equipment maintenance check?

I've been working on connecting a series of previously published adventures into one continuous campaign, and I'm finding that the individual adventures are actually the easy part. The difficult part is everything between them. Each adventure was originally written to work independently, so characters, factions, locations, and consequences don't necessarily carry naturally into the next one.

I don't want to rewrite the adventures themselves just to manufacture continuity. My preference is to preserve the published adventures as much as possible and build the connective material between them.

The approaches I've been considering include:

• developing recurring NPCs who can naturally appear across multiple adventures;
• consequences from one adventure becoming background conditions in another;
• factions remembering what the party has done;
• short interludes between published adventures;
• rumors and foreshadowing that establish future locations before they're needed;
• allowing unresolved relationships to survive beyond the adventure where they originated.

The danger is going too far and creating so much connective material that the original adventures become secondary to the new campaign structure. For people who've stitched separate adventures or modules into a longer campaign:

What techniques made the campaign feel genuinely continuous without requiring you to rewrite the adventures themselves?

I'm currently converting some 4E Dark Sun encounters into D&D 3.5, and I've run into an interesting question about how far a conversion should go. 4E monsters were often explicitly designed around combat roles; Brute, Soldier, Artillery, Controller, Lurker, etc.

When moving one of those creatures into 3.5, there seem to be two approaches:

1. Convert the creature.
Find the closest 3.5 version, adjust the statistics as necessary, and let 3.5's mechanics determine how it plays.

2. Convert the creature's job.
Look at what the 4E monster was actually supposed to accomplish during the encounter and build the 3.5 version so that it still fills that role, even if that requires changing or adding abilities.

For example, I'm currently dealing with Silt Runners where different variants are supposed to function very differently despite being the same basic creature: aggressive melee attackers, ranged poison users, and eventually a much more dangerous leader.

My instinct has been to preserve the published 3.5 creature as the mechanical baseline, then make the minimum changes necessary to recreate what each adventure specific variant was supposed to do.

For people experienced with 3.5:

How far would you go?

At what point does preserving the original encounter role stop being a conversion and start becoming homebrew?

I've been working through the problem of converting encounters from one edition of a TTRPG to another, and I've started thinking that preserving the original mechanics may actually be less important than preserving what the encounter was designed to do.

For example, if the original encounter uses a creature designed to pressure the party, force movement, exhaust resources, or make retreat look attractive, directly translating its numbers may produce something mechanically accurate that no longer serves the same purpose.

I'm currently experimenting with treating the original encounter's role, difficulty, expected player response, and narrative purpose as the things that need to survive conversion, while allowing the actual mechanics to change. For people who have converted published adventures or encounters between substantially different systems/editions:

What do you consider the "identity" of an encounter that absolutely needs to survive the conversion?

Hello everyone.

I've been working on a conversion of Sand Raiders to D&D 3.5, and one of the things I've been trying hardest to avoid is changing the feel of the adventure just because the mechanics are different. Rather than rebuilding encounters from scratch, my goal has been to preserve:

• the intended challenge,
• the atmosphere,
• resource scarcity,
• and the role each encounter plays in the story.

I've found that converting the mechanics is often the most straight forward part, while not the easiest, but preserving the tone and pacing is much harder. For those of you who've run or converted Dark Sun adventures before:

What parts have you found the hardest to preserve?

Was it survival? The feeling of Athas? Creature balance? Psionics? Or something else entirely?

Hello folks, I am working on a comprehensive Dark Sun campaign, The Last Dream of Athas, that includes as most of the written Dark Sun adventures as possible. As part of the campaign I am working on a companion document, The Last Dream of Athas Campaign Bible, that will include a campaign overview linking all the converted adventures together as well as an NPC database, Faction database, Location database, Major Events tracker, Foreshadow tracker, Relationship trackers as well as a place to put memorial campaign quotes and an extensive campaign glossary.

Below I have included but a tiny piece of a section detailing the complete history of Athas in which I attempt to weave all the lore of 2E and 4E together with a unique take on Athas cosmology. As well as a suggestive way to deliver the lore in a campaign ender that will surely drop jaws. Please let me know what you think!

[HOMEBREW] Before there were gods, there was only the Maker, the first being and the source of all creation. Seeking to understand life, the Maker fashioned Athas, its sun, and its two moons as the first complete world. The land, seas, plants, and beasts lived in perfect harmony, but they possessed no will beyond instinct. Wishing for life to grow and create on its own, the Maker imbued every stone, drop of water, flame, breath of air, plant, beast, and living soul with a tiny fragment of his own creative essence, its life force. Unlike later worlds, where magic would remain under the Maker's control and be governed by gods, Athas itself became inherently magical. Wherever enough life force gathered, consciousness naturally emerged. The elemental forces of Athas awakened as gentle nature spirits, while the first intelligent race, the rhulisti (halflings), arose to serve as caretakers of this living world. Upon Guthay and Ral, other intelligent races likewise flourished beneath their own nature spirits.

For untold ages this system existed in perfect balance. The rhulisti mastered life-shaping, learning to guide and cultivate the world's living essence without violating its harmony. That age ended with the Brown Tide. In desperation, the rhulisti created the Pristine Tower to save Athas, but in doing so they unknowingly pierced the barrier separating Athas from its sun and, to a lesser extent, its moons. The Tower became a bridge through which raw paraelemental consciousness from the sun, the beings later remembered as the Primordials, first reached Athas. Weaker fractures formed the Moon Gates, allowing small numbers of the moon-born races to cross into Athas while countless others remained upon their distant homes.

Realizing its first creation had been irreparably wounded, the Maker refused to destroy it, for every living thing carried a fragment of his own essence. Instead, he concealed Athas from the rest of the universe. He wrapped the world within the Gray, a veil that obscured Athas from the gods and the greater cosmos while preventing outside powers from interfering. He anchored every spark of life together through the Black, an unseen metaphysical web that forever bound the minds and souls of Athas to one another, inadvertently giving rise to psionic potential. Finally, he enclosed the world within an impenetrable Crystal Sphere and cast it to the far reaches of the universe, where it would remain isolated from all later creations.

The Primordials and the elemental nature spirits eventually waged a cataclysmic war for the soul of Athas, remembered only in fragmented myths that echo in legends recorded. Though the elemental spirits prevailed, both sides were devastated. No longer able to manifest freely upon Athas, the surviving elemental spirits retreated into the spiritual aspects of their elements, communicating only through clerics, druids, and other chosen servants. The Primordials too were nearly destroyed, with only the greatest powers. most notably Sun and Silt, enduring in diminished form.

The so-called Elemental Planes are therefore not separate physical realms but the living spiritual aspects of Athas itself. Mortals perceive them as planes because their minds require such a framework to commune with elemental consciousness. Only the Gray and the Black exist as true planes, both created by the Maker as part of Athas's imprisonment and preservation.

When the Maker departed, he never returned. Having learned from Athas, he created all future worlds differently. Rather than placing his own creative essence within every living thing, he retained the source of magic under his own authority and appointed gods to oversee its use. Athas therefore stands alone among all worlds: the Maker's first creation, his greatest triumph, his greatest failure, and the only world where magic is woven directly into the fabric of life itself.

Campaign Party
Unknown to nearly all, Athas herself refused to surrender. As her strength slowly faded over the ages, she divided what remained of her own essence among a handful of unborn heroes. Every living creature carries one spark of the Maker, but these chosen souls bear two: the Maker's spark shared by all life and a second spark drawn from Athas herself. This dual inheritance grants them two wells of potential, explaining their extraordinary capabilities and foreshadowing the role they alone can play in determining the fate of the dying world.

The Messenger and the Final Revelation

One possible way to reveal the complete history of Athas is through The Messenger, treating it as the legendary life-shaped vessel hinted at by Dark Sun's creators. Built by the greatest rhulisti nature-shapers during the final days of the Blue Age, the living ship was launched shortly after the creation of the Pristine Tower in a desperate attempt to preserve the knowledge and culture of their civilization. Existing partially outside the normal flow of time, only weeks or months pass aboard the Messenger for every forty-five years that pass on Athas. Believing the world would eventually heal, its crew periodically returned to the planet, one such visit allowing them to meet the Wanderer, who recorded fragments of their history that later became the Wanderer's Chronicle. Realizing Athas continued to decline, they departed once more, hoping future generations might yet save their home.

Over the millennia, the Messenger slowly became an ark of memory rather than a vessel of escape. As generations passed, its caretakers gradually forgot the ancient life-shaping arts required to fully command the living ship, eventually leaving only a single elderly halfling; the last true heir of the rhulisti. Rather than serving as an all-knowing source of exposition, he is simply the final witness to a forgotten age, carrying the stories of his ancestors and the living memories preserved within the ship itself. At the climax of the campaign, the Messenger can become the means by which the party experiences the true history of Athas, not through time travel, but by walking through the ship's own living memories. The last halfling does not tell the heroes how to save Athas; instead, he reminds them what Athas once was, why it is worth saving, and entrusts them with the final chapter of its story.

Hello fellow Dark Sun fans, tabletop nerds, and lovers of all things Athas!

I've been working on a passion project to create a complete D&D 3.5 Dark Sun campaign, taking characters from level 1 through 20+ by converting classic adventures, expanding them with original content, and tying as many of the 2E/4E written adventures together into one continuous story as I can.

Alongside the adventures, I'm also building The Last Dream of Athas Campaign Bible; a living reference that creates a compendium for all the recurring NPCs, factions, locations, mysteries, relationships, and more while tying in all the stand-alone adventures with original homebrew content for levels 15 and beyond.

The first adventure is Welcome to Athas, my expanded 3.5 conversion of the 4E adventure Sand Raiders. Rather than doing a straight conversion, I've focused on making it a stronger introduction to Athas by expanding roleplaying, adding recurring NPCs, improving encounters, introducing long-term mysteries, and giving players more agency.

Any and all comments/questions are welcomed!

Hello fellow Dark Sun fans, tabletop nerds, and lovers of all things Athas!

I've been working on a passion project to create a complete D&D 3.5 Dark Sun campaign, taking characters from level 1 through 20+ by converting classic adventures, expanding them with original content, and tying as many of the 2E/4E written adventures together into one continuous story as I can.

Alongside the adventures, I'm also building The Last Dream of Athas Campaign Bible; a living reference that creates a compendium for all the recurring NPCs, factions, locations, mysteries, relationships, and more while tying in all the stand-alone adventures with original homebrew content for levels 15 and beyond.

The first adventure is Welcome to Athas, my expanded 3.5 conversion of the 4E adventure Sand Raiders. Rather than doing a straight conversion, I've focused on making it a stronger introduction to Athas by expanding roleplaying, adding recurring NPCs, improving encounters, introducing long-term mysteries, and giving players more agency.

Unfortunately, I can't share the first draft as I seem to have crossed to the dark side and defiled in my attempt to fast track image generation and battle map updates and don't wish to break the subreddit rules.

If any artists would like to join this massive project I have taken on to assist me with bringing it forth to the community I would be forever grateful!