Grimrock

Hi to all, I was wandering about translating the entire game, secrets, story, equipment, notes,treasure and monsters into a classical D&D 1st edition campaign.
What do you think? Can it work?

with heavy modification.

well, maybe not really heavy. im just stuck on how you would translate the boss fight into D&D gameplay without making it just incredibly boring/easy. or i guess retardedly difficult either...

You'd have to leave the Save Crystals and alchemy system more or less intact, as well. Given how weak Natural Healing (from resting) is in DnD, you'd have to give your Party a leg up or else they're never going to survive their first encounter with multiple Giant Spiders.

Daght wrote:Hi to all, I was wandering about translating the entire game, secrets, story, equipment, notes,treasure and monsters into a classical D&D 1st edition campaign.
What do you think? Can it work?

That would require a lot of work;
-create a new class system
-new combat and spell system
-rebalancing the monsters
-change the monsters
-expansion of the inventory
-another world setting (LoG is in the Northern Realms, a D&D would have to be set to a D&D universe; Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft or Greyhawk)
-change of races

All this would make it a new game entirely, and if wouldn't be Grimlock anymore. I'd love to see a new (or a remake of the old) Eye of the Beholder set to Forgotten Realms with the LoG engine (concerning movement, graphics quality and effects, and such), but Grimlock is Grimlock and should remain so.

And with the D&D 1st Edition, you mean AD&D 3rd Edition? With the rules used in Neverwinter?

Encephalon wrote:And with the D&D 1st Edition, you mean AD&D 3rd Edition? With the rules used in Neverwinter?

I mean the first edition of the 80's. The red-boxed set (not the remake for the 4th edition). It was a dungeon crawling style wih simple rules and easy to mod changes.

Daght wrote:I mean the first edition of the 80's. The red-boxed set (not the remake for the 4th edition). It was a dungeon crawling style wih simple rules and easy to mod changes.

Ah, now I remember! I've seen that and played it for a short while before before we found the AD&D 2nd Edition. When it was more roleplaying than rollplaying. At least from my experience. Now it seems many are obsessed with numbers and math and statistics, and roleplaying and the sense of adventure is (at best) second most important.

I really think you could do this 1st Edition style with a minimum of fuss.

1) Either start your Party at a slighty higher level (say, 5?) instead of Level 1, or make up monster statistics that are in-line with a small, weak, Level 1 party.

2) Make Clerics and Druids available, or allow for the easy crafting of Healing Potions (either by making the D&D Alchemy work like Grimrock Alchemy or by replacing Herb "drops" with pre-brewed Potions).

3) Either buff how much HP is restored while Resting, or allow Mages to re-learn their spells more quickly (fewer hours needed to restore spell slots), or give Mages more Spell Slots (maybe double?), or import the Save Crystals into the D&D version as-is. Or some combination of these four.

If you try this with AD&D rules - no healing classes, rare healing items, no Save Crystals, and mages with jack and shit for spell slots... well, I don't fancy any Party surviving for long, barring the DM fudging dice rolls behind the screen or simply gutting monster stats into the ground. The players are going to all turn into the parties that died horribly in Grimrock before Toorum and Our Heroes arrived.

Encephalon wrote:

Daght wrote:Hi to all, I was wandering about translating the entire game, secrets, story, equipment, notes,treasure and monsters into a classical D&D 1st edition campaign.
What do you think? Can it work?

That would require a lot of work;
-create a new class system
-new combat and spell system
-rebalancing the monsters
-change the monsters
-expansion of the inventory
-another world setting (LoG is in the Northern Realms, a D&D would have to be set to a D&D universe; Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft or Greyhawk)
-change of races

All this would make it a new game entirely, and if wouldn't be Grimlock anymore. I'd love to see a new (or a remake of the old) Eye of the Beholder set to Forgotten Realms with the LoG engine (concerning movement, graphics quality and effects, and such), but Grimlock is Grimlock and should remain so.

And with the D&D 1st Edition, you mean AD&D 3rd Edition? With the rules used in Neverwinter?

I don't think it would require as much work as that.

-It may not have as many things going on mechanically per level as LoG's class and skill system but the 1st Ed. D&D class system should be fine. If you limit it to the LoG classes of Fighter, Thief, and Magic-User, then you won't have to worry about divine spellcasting.
-The D&D combat system should be sufficient and not really need any changes. The changes needed will be adapting the monsters and items.
-The spell system will require some extra work depending on what spells you allow. If you want to make spells the same as LoG it shouldn't be too difficult to adapt them to D&D as they are mostly elemental damage spells and D&D already has some spells similar to them (i.e. Burning hands is similar to the fire burst spell). You might have an issue with the Vancian magic system of D&D as this will most likely be a pure dungeon crawl with a lot of combat. If you use LoG spells they are not necessarily as versatile as some D&D spells (like sleep) so low level mages may end up not feeling so useful through out the campaign once they run out of spells. 2 ways I can think of to mitigate this is to:

• a) allow mages more spells per day and be more liberal with the recovery of spells. For example you can allow the spells to recover after a certain amount of time and allow full spell re-memorization at crystals instead of the standard re-memorize after 8 hours rest only.
  b) convert to a spell point system. Here are a couple examples I found online: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/spellPoints.htm and http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Mana-Bas ... nt_Rule%29 . While they are for 3.5 ed D&D it shouldn't be too hard to convert them to 1st ed. You may want to increase the total number of spell points though as the links to the examples I gave are just more of a straight conversion from the Vancian system and don't really give mages any extra spells. Also similar to point a) you might want to restore spell points at crystals and allow some portion of spell point recovery out of combat.

-You would have to probably change or create many of the monsters to make them like the LoG monsters. You would also have to balance them properly for D&D game play. This might not be so dificult if you can find similar creatures in the Monster Manual.
-As far as the world goes, the LoG world should be fine since the D&D ruleset doesn't require the use of D&D settings. Many DMs make up their own worlds and change the D&D rules as necessary to make it appropriate to that world (i.e. a non magical world wouldn't have spellcasting classes or magical items, a world with no gods or gods that don't respond readily to worshipers wouldn't have clerics).
-For races, the non-human LoG races are considered monster races in D&D. I think there are some rules for using monster races as PCs but you would probably have to make sure they aren't unbalanced. Or you can just make stat adjustments similar to how LoG does it (i.e. Minotaur might get +4 to Str, +2 to Con and -4 to Dex, -2 to Int).
-Another thing you'll need to do is adjust the weapons and items to fit the D&D ruleset.

\/4n!ll4 ][c3 wrote:with heavy modification.

well, maybe not really heavy. im just stuck on how you would translate the boss fight into D&D gameplay without making it just incredibly boring/easy. or i guess retardedly difficult either...

One thing you can use is the maps and notes from this walk-through: http://www.gamebanshee.com/legendofgrim ... level1.php . It should be easier than manually translating the maps by hand plus the walk-through should have all the items, puzzles and secrets neatly listed for you.

So all in all it will probably take a good amount more work (particularly the magic) than I originally thought when I first started writing this unexpectedly long winded post, but I think its doable.

I was thinking about a pre-made party compsed by a Fighter (Human Warrior, with mastery in swords and heavy armors), a Monk (minotaur) so get a high damage representing the brute force, a Rogue (lizardfolk) with a sort of natural resistance and a Mage (insectoid with a limited spell list).
The restoration of Spells goes by touching the Crystals (only twice a day per character) to resotre full HP and Speel slot. If touched by a dead PC, it turns to life with full hp/spells but canot touch the crystal for that day.
Brewing potion is simple, you got the herbs, the mortar and mix it. All classes can do it, like in LoG.
Set the starting level at 5 with ad ammount of HP higher then the medium dice-roll. Every dungeon level bring a new level to players, so it's easy to level-up and see your PC grow up.

Here's a screen of the impagination. The project has begun. The introduction text was taken from the translation in Italian of the manual on this site at the link:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=385 on this forum or the direct download http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?736gobcbruo865n.