Canonfire!

Wed Oct 08, 2014 6:36 am Should I do 5th for new campaign?

I'm going to be getting my 9 year old son and his friends into the game. I have a lot of the old modules and such. I have A LOT of Living Greyhawk info, too. I had figured I'd just do 3.5 Ed as it was the last I played and the LG material was all that. I was going to use all the meta orgs for feats and prestige classes and all that. I figured that was the easiest.

I've had a friend play test the new version and have the new version. He's thinking I should just go with 5th Ed. Is it worth it? Does any of the old LG material carry over? Would I lose too much detail that was built into the LG system? Are the benefits of 5th good enough and the changes for LG small enough that I can easily convert all their adventures over?

Thu Oct 09, 2014 8:44 pm

Yes if you want to port over LG material, stick with 3.5 (or maybe Pathfinder)
5e I would advise to anyone who wants to start a campaign without so much converting of old crunch material (though it will come with time).

Tue Oct 14, 2014 12:02 pm

It completely depends upon you and your group.

In general, any campaigns which I run are unique. I tend to tailor them for the group and make adventures appropriate for whatever setting I'm running in.

Greyhawk is perfectly fine as a setting for a home campaign. The Living Greyhawk Gazetteer is fairly system neutral. The calendar, races, history, leaders, languages, countries, gods, etc. all work fine in 5E. 5E includes Greyhawk specific flavor-text, domains for gods, etc. No reason it can't serve as a setting, provided you are making up your own adventures.

If you are trying to reuse 3.x material from the LG system -- then that would depend on how much time you are trying to save. Some LG adventures were extremely specific and you may find that converting over stat blocks, monsters to appropriate CRs, etc. may not be easy. You can certainly reuse the ideas, plots, NPCs, etc. for the adventures and the various region's "feel" on the events.

Personally, I'd just write your own. Especially with younger children, some of the more complex plots of the LG adventures are likely beyond them. Just pick an area of the map, have players make up characters from there, and make up some plot based what is happening in the area. Make your first few adventures fairly simple, and use the GG to center the campaign and fill in flavor for the area.

Say... pick Parrenland. Maybe the players start on a ship crossing the lake to Traft when they discover a row boat with two dead men and a message from a Wolf Nomad leader to the Lord Mayor of Traft offering to trade something. The mayor knows nothing of this and sends the PCs to the north to try to find out who this leader is and what the note is about? You then build out your campaign from there.