Whew, this is taking me much longer than I expected...
Last June I had decided to convert my vintage (circa 1978-81) megadungeon "
Underport: Abyssal Descent" from our home-ruled v.3.5 to 5e and also improve some of the shortcomings of the original presentation, specifically the long stat blocks and often illegible scanned maps.
The first part of the project was to add color to the maps, which in addition to making them more legible also came out purdy:
Shortly thereupon, however, I participated in an online
B/X game with
Jeff Rients and had a blast. So much so that I prevailed upon my home gaming group to switch from 5e to
Advanced Labyrinth Lord, a B/X & AD&D retro-clone. At the same time I gathered myself to move the revision of
Underport from 5e to the more original
Advanced Labyrinth Lord.
A problem developed in that the original-original
Underport (pictured below) was not a complete dungeon. It was bits and pieces formed over time as adventuring parties delved there. With the home-ruled v.3.5 version I used
Tome of Horrors from
Necromancer Games (one of my favorite publishers from the 3rd edition days) to fill in critters and encounters. Now with deciding to go back to my roots, I was faced with converting 3rd edition stats to 1st edition. Bleh!
 |
| (The "original" original Underport.) |
So I am looking through the different iterations for
Tome of Horrors Complete that Frog God Games has put out since Necromancer merged with them. Lo and behold, there is a
Swords & Wizardry version of the tome!!!
Swords & Wizardry is an OD&D retro-clone harkening back to the
"White Box" set of little brown books that started the game way back in 1974. I had considered S&W as one of the option to propose to my home group when I wanted to pitch them going back to an earlier version. The reason I ultimately went with
Advanced Labyrinth Lord is that we gamed 1st ed. AD&D from 1978 until 2005 and
Advanced Labyrinth Lord adhered close to those rules while cleaning up some unnecessary Gygaxian complexities.
The bottom line is that the conversion is going soooo much smoother with the S&W
Tome! Maybe even get this done by next June...
PS My plan is to replace the existing v.3.5
Underport on
DriveThruRPG with the new retro-clone version. That means everyone who purchased the first version will get the new version for free, but if for some reason needs to re-download the first version will need to contact me to do that.
