Freeport using 5E

[timemrick]

Re: Freeport using 5E

Plane Shift and Freeport, Part 3: Dominaria: More Magic, more Freeport!

[timemrick]

Re: Freeport using 5E

I'm posting a little early this week due to the long Thanksgiving holiday coming up.

Unearthed Arcana and Freeport, Part 9: More Magic, Eberron, and the Sea

[modnaric]

Re: Freeport using 5E

timemrick,

I have always loved the first 3 Freeport modules and have run them as a player and as a DM in 3E. The combination of politics, intrigue, dungeon crawling, silliness, and weird stuff is perfect. I have a group of online friends that are in desperate need of a DM and I'm dusting off the old skillset to run them through Death in Freeport. We're using Roll20 VTT and I'm attempting to update my original Freeport books from 2000 to 5E. I'm beginning to understand how much of a gargantuan task this is.

My biggest problem is getting the encounter levels right. Did you ever do any work on the actual encounters and their monster statblocks? I'm struggling figuring out how to approach it. Any help, tips, insight you can give this lesser DM would be greatly appreciated. (I've read through a lot of your blog posts but I'm not finding anything specific to the encounters ... I could also be illiterate).

~modnaric~

[timemrick]

Re: Freeport using 5E

timemrick,

I have always loved the first 3 Freeport modules and have run them as a player and as a DM in 3E. The combination of politics, intrigue, dungeon crawling, silliness, and weird stuff is perfect. I have a group of online friends that are in desperate need of a DM and I'm dusting off the old skillset to run them through Death in Freeport. We're using Roll20 VTT and I'm attempting to update my original Freeport books from 2000 to 5E. I'm beginning to understand how much of a gargantuan task this is.

My biggest problem is getting the encounter levels right. Did you ever do any work on the actual encounters and their monster statblocks? I'm struggling figuring out how to approach it. Any help, tips, insight you can give this lesser DM would be greatly appreciated. (I've read through a lot of your blog posts but I'm not finding anything specific to the encounters ... I could also be illiterate).

~modnaric~

Despite thinking and writing a great deal about how I'd run a 5E Freeport game, I'm not actually running such a game yet, so I haven't yet taken the time to start converting any Freeport adventures or monsters to 5E. (The closest I've come to that is converting the Death in Freeport pregens to 5E, because that was a suitably small test case.)

Death in Freeport would almost certainly be the one I'd start with, for many reasons--it's the one that started it all, and it's 1st level, so should be one of the easiest to convert. A thorough treatment may need to wait until I've tried running it myself someday, but I can offer some initial thoughts here (which may end up as the start of a future blog post).

3E and 5E are different enough systems that I would never attempt to do an exact conversion. For some encounters, it's easy enough to just use the 5E MM stat block (orc, orog [for Scarbelly], skeleton). Human foes can be represented by the MM's NPC stat blocks for acolyte, bandit, commoner, cultist, and guard, possibly with some small tweaks to weapons and spells to better match the original.

The serpent people are the one real challenge in converting this module. For the degenerates, I'd probably re-skin the the troglodyte stat block, but replace the claws with a weapon, and drop the stench and sunlight sensitivity. For Milos, the most quick-and-dirty option is to use the cult fanatic stat block [which already has the correct 2nd-level spells!], and add darkvision and a doppelganger's Shapechanger ability.

[timemrick]

Re: Freeport using 5E

I took my reply to modnaric and expanded it into a blog post:

Converting Death in Freeport to Fifth Edition: Quick-and-dirty conversion notes for the original Freeport adventure.

[Fildrigar]

Re: Freeport using 5E

for example, a Gather Information check should now be a Charisma, or perhaps Charisma (Persuasion), check.

Or, alternately, an Intelligence or Intelligence (Investigation) check.

I would personally drop the monetary rewards by perhaps 10%.

[timemrick]

Re: Freeport using 5E

Unearthed Arcana and Freeport, Part 10: Sidekicks and Artificers.

[timemrick]

Unearthed Arcana and Freeport, Part 11: Artificer 4.0 plus Even More Subclasses: Short reviews of UA articles from May, August, and September.

[timemrick]

Unearthed Arcana and Freeport, Part 12: Even More Subclasses, Continued!: The rest of the current round of new playtest subclasses brings us to one new option per core class.

[timemrick]

Unearthed Arcana and Freeport, Part 13: Class Feature Variants: A brief overview of this month's hefty release.