CONVERTING THE BRIDE OF LIAO MANOR

Shortly I will have a more thorough update on our latest release, Strange Tales of New England, here on the blog, but in the mean time I want to talk about the work we have been doing on Bride of Liao Manor. For those who are not familiar with it, Bride of Liao Manor is a short adventure for Strange Tales of Songling that I posted to the blog HERE. It was one of the more successful Strange Tales of Songling adventures I posted that season and I recently began converting it to the Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate System with my Thursday game group. My plan is to make a 30 page Bride of Liao Manor PDF module that can be played with both Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate and Strange Tales of Songling. Hopefully if this is successful we can make more short adventure releases. 

In order to convert the material I had to decide whether the book would be primarily intended for Ogre Gate or Strange Tales of Songling. It should work for both, but the text will need to be written towards one setting or the other. I am leading with Ogre Gate, because that is our most popular game. So the module will be re-written to fit the Ogre Gate setting with gray text notes for adjustments to fit it to Strange Tales of Songling (including Strange Tales of Songling stat blocks in gray text). 

Some things in the original adventure convert very easily because many of the Strange Tales of Songling entries began as entries using the Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate system for my Gaming Strange Tales from the Chinese Studio blog series. I converted most of those when I wrote Strange Tales of Songling. However some things do not have pre-existing Ogre Gate material or clear Ogre Gate analogs and there isn't a simply formula one can use to cleanly make a conversion. Converting is quite easy, but it requires making judgement calls based on the logic of the Strange Tales of Songling entry in question. For example there are stats for Corpses and when I checked their Max Wounds, it became obvious to me they were based on the Jiangshi entry in Strange Tales of Songling as a base. So I used the Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate Jiangshi entry as a base for the conversion. But in some other instances things were less 1-1. 

The Bride in the adventure is a unique type of ghost and I had to consider and rework each ability and stat block entry. Where this got most challenging was figuring out how to convert her immunities. In Strange Tales of Songling, she is vulnerable to a Demon Hunter's Magic Techniques. But those don't really exist in Ogre Gate. There are rituals that resemble them and there are Kung Fu techniques that resemble them. So the cleanest way to convert it was to have her be vulnerable to Ritual Magic and any Kung Fu technique that is based on Dragon energy (in Ogre Gate Yin and Yang are Dragon and Phoenix energy). There were other changes to her immunities too but this was the main point of discussion. 

There is also a change in feel that is going to happen simply due to the games being different. Strange Tales of Songling is an extremely lethal system for PCs, but Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate is not. The setting has a greater prevalence of powerful characters as well, so some of the local NPCs, like security chief officials have to be beefed up. 

One area things were most challenging was taking the Path abilities and deciding what to do with those in Ogre Gate. In some instances, they make no sense in Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate so they can be ignored. But others might be converted to Kung Fu Techniques or Rituals. Much of what we were doing in last night's session was exploring different ways to make a power like Life Eradicating Sword into a comparable Kung Fu Technique. 

Something I want to do with this book if there is space (and it seems there is) is have it also serve as a kind of minimalist setting supplement for a district. We have covered Prefectures and Empires or Kingdoms, but not focused in on the district scale. If I do this I will also be covering the prefecture itself on a blog entry, so it will provide information on locations in a single district inside that prefecture. Space is limited though. Right now I think it will be 20 pages of adventure material and 10 pages of minimalist setting entries (so brevity will be the key to making it work).

I will keep folks updated as things go forward.