Rappan Athuk and DungeonSlayers

[Kersus]

I've never played Rappan Athuk. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but although the adventure has been around since the early days of D&D in one form or another, it wasn't actually published until the so-called 3rd edition, the later converted to Pathfinder and the so-called 5th edition

I first heard of RA from Necromancer Games which when the D20 license came out of 3e they claimed to be the "First Edition Feel." I in no way have ever felt like their material was similar to 1e feel.

So yeah, 3e is the roots of the published product and supposedly it started back in the old days. The version I have is Swords & Wizardry which is a riff off of OD&D. The stat blocks are just a couple lines as opposed to 3e/5e half page things - thus the book is slimmer.

I've run RA a few times (always the same level). I honestly can't remember the first system I used.... Uhm... Something old-school. Last time I used BlueHack which is a more pulpy OD&D in that you roll to hit and you roll to avoid. The DM never rolls to hit you. I have altered it to you roll and either hit or are hit. Thus half the rolling. I think it's free (or PWYW) on DTRPG (or I could send you the file). It's supposed to be The Black hack but with a Holmes D&D spin. Essentially it runs really quickly but has a lot of rolling.

I would just look at RA as a mostly nonsensical megadungeon with tons of things that can kill you and yet comes down to what you choose to do as opposed to combat after combat. The hard part is that you can't easily play on the fly without reading ahead of time because there are so many things that could hear you and groups of humanoids split up. For example, brigands with a hideout inside a level where you might find yourself crushed between two forces or as we played, the leader fleeing to haunt the troupe another day. Add that to it being a ton of material and that characters can easily move between levels - it's hard to think ahead much as a GM.

Despite that, I have just played it on the fly and figured things out. I didn't do any conversions ahead of time for whatever systems I've used. None of my players even know I've used the same level multiple times because they've always picked a different direction.

I don't recall the impetus to my original question. Perhaps because I didn't like how BlueHack played out and I didn't want the bogginess of D20 style either and wondered if there were any thoughts on it. I'm guessing really.

One of the issues I had with SCHWA when I ran some DCC dungeon adventure was that a player liked Barbarians and so threw everything he could into Warrior, maybe a little into Adventurer and nothing into Sorcerer which when an attack dropped his Sorcerer die, he was done. For whatever reason, he tends to die in my games - probably because he tries to take things head on like in Traveller 1e when I warned him how deadly gunfire was and he died in the first encounter, shot. The rest of the group avoided being shot at.

I'm rambling.

Basically it's a situation of converting OD&D traps and monsters on the fly.