Converting D&D to Runequest

I had planned to switch my weekly face to face game from Star Wars Edge of the Empire back to Swords and Wizardry this week. We had put S&W on hold to try out Edge of the Empire for a bit this summer. One of the players has been joining us remotely, and she asked if we could put them both on hold till January when she would be back in town and could play in person.  Absolutely!  I then solicited the other players for what games they would like to play from now till January.

We have a long running Call of Cthulhu Delta Green game. I looked at my campaign notebook the other night and the first session was dated 10/10/2007.  Seven years! That was an immediate suggestion for our next game.  Two of the players also put forward the idea of picking up our Runequest game that had wrapped up last year.  I wasn't too sure about that. Runequest is a lot of work.  The rules we use are mismash of  Mongoose's Runequest and RQII  as well as my own house rules. My plan was to move the campaign over to Griffin Mountain, but it was going to take time to get that started.  

Then I remembered one of the best adventures we'd played was "Hellpits of Nighfang" by Jennell  Jaquays. It's a neat Runequest dungeon crawl like some of the older D&D adventures. I'm a big fan of the S-Series adventures from TSR. I thought, what if I converted White Plume Mountain to Runequest and run it as a one off dungeon crawl?  Stats for Runequest versions of the iconic weapons were already forming in my brain!  I did some searching around and found there are a wealth of resources for converting AD&D to Runequest.

First I found this article that someone had written on the web a while back - Converting AD&D to Runequest.    (If you know who wrote this great article, let me know so I can give them credit.) The article was written by Bryan Malone, thanks to Matt Miller for letting me know.

Next I went over to the BRP site and found Classic Fantasy, which is a full conversion of D&D to BRP. This book translates most of the AD&D spells over to Runequest, which makes it a great resource.  (BRP or Basic Roleplaying is Chaosium's generic roleplaying system based on Runequest and Call of Cthulhu.)

Digging a little deeper on  BRP site I found a conversions of the Monster Manual and Monster Manual 2 to BRP stats! Now we're cooking!

Finally, going back to the original source material itself, All the Worlds Monsters Vol 3 has a section on converting AD&D to original Runequest.

These are all for converting D&D to original Runequest and the BRP Runequest clones, which is slightly different from Mongoose RQ/Legend/Runequest 6. (There are almost as many RQ clones as their are D&D clones.)  It's not hard to covert between versions of Runequest though. Somewhere I've got my notes from  converting Hellpits of Nightfang from original Runequest to Mongoose Runequest.  I'll post my conversion notes as soon as I find them.

So now I'm excited to start converting White Plume Mountain over to Runequest! I'll post the conversion  here once I run it. There must be some kind of Rune Spirit going around right now. Over at Dispatches from Kickassistan, +Adam Muszkiewicz just started a Runequest 6 game as well.

(BTW you can get all the old Mongoose RQ sourcebooks for $1 each from Drive-Thru RPG. It's a bargain!)