I'm just wondering how many of you indulge in this particular pasttime. Do you have a pet system that you like, and whatever book you get, you just convert it wholesale? Do you find that some games just don't work with the system they came with, and some other system immediately suggests itself? Tell us of the settings/games you've converted, and how well it came out.

One project I did was I converted the Engel game, which had a wonderful, evocative setting, but a terrible implementation of D20, to the new World of Darkness ruleset. It seemed to me to be a perfect fit for the setting, and I think it came out pretty nice, if I do say so myself. I also converted Etherscope to True20. It was only for a one-shot, so I didn't make copious changes (and it wasn't really very hard to begin with anyway, since Etherscope starts with D20), but it worked great.

There have been others that have suggested themselves to me, but I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. There's a thread over at Big Purple with someone converting Underground to Wild Talents, which I also think is a great fit.

I find myself doing this very often. Two most recent examples:

I used the Feng Shui system for a couple of Star Wars adventures. It worked very well. Although I used some materials from the prequels I leave a hell of a lot of stuff out -fuckin' midicholorians (sp) for one. The combat, magic and esp mook rules worked out extremely well, and if ever I run a SW campaign, I'll use the FS system.

I FUDGED Castle Faulkenstein - enough said.

I'm cheating a bit with this last, but here it is. I'm researching a city based campaign set during the Crusades to be set in Jerusalem. The setting of my Jerusalem is actually going to be based on Kult - the mythos etc. I'm thinking of using the True20 system .

Regards,
David R

I find myself doing this almost compulsively.  My most recent projects include (but are not limited to): True20 50 Fathoms, Unisystem Ars Magica and Burning Wheel The End.  I never end up running most of these (50 fathoms provisionally excluded), but it's usually fun to play around with.

I converted some spacemaster: privateers characters over to gurps once, the only ahrd part is the psionic rules in SM, which are old school and hard to replicate in gurps, but I managed to get close enough.

One thing with gurps is making "lethal weapons" because of gurps' unique rules re death. I mean, you MAY die at -1xHP, but you may not, you only defnintely die at -5xHP.

So to be s "sure kill" a weapon would have to do an average of 60 points of damage, taking joe average from 10hp to -50 hp in one shot.

Eventually I decided to make a "lethal weapon", assuming we're talking about joe average, no armor, a hit to the body and no critical hit, to be on average 20 points of damage, enough to take him to -10HP and force a 'mortality save" roll, and even if he survived he'd be massive injured, possible unconscious, etc.

If I ever finish my big fantasy setting for Unisystem, I want to finish my Amber Unisystem material and Nightspawn to Angel/Cinematic Unisystem translations.

Sometimes. Typicaly if there are two very compelling things that I can't find prepacked together. My general rule of thumb to starting on the endevour is to have solid prior play experience with one, preferably both, for it's natural purpose. Or read/watched it at least a couple of times in the case of a setting coming from an outside source. Scope needs to be fairly limited too, with minimal intertwining. If "boilerplating" isn't going to do it I'll likely consider it not worth the effort.

Um, most recent example is I did up a Cthulhu Mythos inspired Emotional Attribute/Magic for Burning Wheel for a couple of different play groups (one is actually a 1-player+GM 'group') of Lovecraft-head friends of mine. It runs 10 A5 pages right now, wouldn't want the scope to go much beyond that. I'm suppose to run it for the first time in about 2 weeks, we'll see how that goes.

Vanilla Pendragon to Glorantha (based on David Dunham's Pendragon Pass but with some changes). Required a magic system (adapted from RQ), rules for bronze vs iron, creature stats, religious bonuses, altered tables etc.

Vanilla Pendragon to a quasi-historical Dark Ages. Required removing Chivalry, ignoring the 'Historical Compression', altering some previous experience rules and not much else, to my surprise.

HeroQuest to a Dark Ages setting. Required writing some new keywords and jettisoning the magic system. Relied heavily on research done for previous conversion.

I've still got a bundle of notes for a Bronze Age setting I want to run some day. Hmmm, I seem to be in a pattern.