Do you guys have any experience converting OSR adventures to non-OSR, non-D&D systems?
How might someone convert something like LotFP's Death Frost Doom to something like Nechronica?

Quote from: Cave Bear;1007706Do you guys have any experience converting OSR adventures to non-OSR, non-D&D systems?
How might someone convert something like LotFP's Death Frost Doom to something like Nechronica?

OSR adventures are no different than any other type of RPG adventures. They have NPCs, locales, and possibly events.

The bulk of your work will be in providing stats for the NPCs (characters and monsters). As for Death Frost Doom the bulk of the adventure is flavor text. The monsters are standard undead with a interesting backstory. So what ever undead that Nechronica has should work as is in lieu of the D&D stats that DFD uses.

I don't tend to run commercial products that are presented as scripted adventures, but I do use a lot of OSR style modules that are sand-boxy and location-focused, and I have often used these in alternate systems. Probably the most common systems I've converted to are The Fantasy Trip and Runequest.

In principle this could be a lot of work because the stat blocks are completely different, but in practice this doesn't matter much.  I know all three systems well and can wing it.

The bigger issue is that each of these games has a very different power range for PC's and monsters, and a different sort of risk/reward calculus. So, I don't find I can just translate modules 1:1. It's more like I'm using the module as a convenient and familiar map, retaining a few favorite location entries as inspiration, and then making up the rest.

The basic problem is that a normal party of PC's in TFT or RQ is at significant risk of getting nuked by any fight or trap that poses significant threat. I don't like running adventures where the fights and traps are purely symbolic walk-overs; it is just a waste of everyone's time. So, I have to prune back the overall amount of risk or there is no way the party is going to survive.

You'll wanna look at the your system's length of combat and average lethality. OSR features more and quicker fights and despite low level lethality, PCs are generally up to fighting several times over the course of an adventuring day. If your system features long to play out and always dangerous fights you'll have to consider scaling each combat down and/or eliminating extraneous fights in the scenario in order to keep the adventure moving and to offset grindy player boredom.

Good stuff...

I've used D&D adventures in RuneQuest (which has long fights, but PCs have enough healing they can fight several before needing a rest) and a college homebrew (where most fights needed at least a day of rest after). For both I tended to use smaller adventures and not the big random dungeons.

A few years ago I ran a few AD&D adventures and one-page dungeons using Barbarians of Lemuria.  Most of the conversions were done more-or-less on the fly.  The exception was Dwellers of the Forbidden City, which I spent some time developing in hopes of using it as a mini-sandbox for a BoL campaign that sadly didn't take off.

Well, I set up Dark Albion to be written in a way sufficiently minimalist in terms of OSR-rules material that it would be quite easy to run with non-OSR D&D or for that matter with a non-D&D fantasy system.