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Miniatures Adventure => Fantasy Adventures => Topic started by: Darksider on June 24, 2020, 02:03:36 PM

Title: Scarlet Raven (a mix of Castle Ravenloft BG and Scarlet Heroes)
Post by: Darksider on June 24, 2020, 02:03:36 PM
Hello,

I played castle ravenloft (the boardgame) today and thought how it would be cool, if I could make my own heroes, use a lot of different monsters from all the osr books and how I would do all this.

So I also play D&D sometimes with friends and I really like it, but if you don't have at least two players it's kinda boring.
Scarlet heroes is something I play most of the time alone and a few times I played it with my friends, instead of regular D&D.

Today I thought about of combining the two games, Scarlet Heroes and Castle Ravenloft (or another title in the series, they should all work the same).



The two games seem to blend into each other really well, you can use most of the cards of castle ravenloft if you wish and even the adventure guide to play them with your band of heroes or your lone hero.

Scarlet Heroes on the other hand allows you to make your own heroes and convert other osr classes really well, so you should have lots of options to play.

Now some will say that castle ravenloft has ascending ac and scarlet heroes descending and how that's gona work out. It's easy. Use the monster from an osr game (like a wolf for example) or convert the ac to whatever you like (descending or ascending). There are guids how to make this. But it should work like this. Ascending an unarmored creatures has AC 10 and descending an unarmored creature has AC 9. So say the wolf has ascending AC 16 it should have an descending AC of 3 (hope this is correct, but I only wanted to show an example for ease of explanation).

You can use most of the treasures (the fortunes and blessing need sometimes conversion, so I would probably exclude them from the game), you can use the encounter deck, you only have to sort out cards that won't fit well and adjust the to hit bonus(depends on how boardgamey you like your game, i would set the bonus depending on hp of the creature so 2 hp is +2 to hit and for traps and encounters I would set it on the average lvl of the heroes; so a lonly lvl 1 hero would get traps and encounters with +1 to hit) and you can use the tiles of course with the adventure book and play an epic story ;).

The only stuff that don't work is the hero powers (you can use them also, if you really want to but you have to kick the to hit bonus as with other cards or convert it).

The dmg from the ravenloft cards should be applied as seen (so no dmg table like in scarlet heroes), most of the cards only do 1-3 dmg.
For disabling traps you can use the number on the trap (10) or you set a difficulty level with scarlet heroes.

If you play with more than 3 Heroes you could think about kicking the fray die or you take an osr book for monster stats and play with normal hp instead of doing dmg to hit dice like in scarlet heroes. You also could up the number of monsters the heroes encounter and let them keep fray dice.

If you want to make you own heroes, roll them up how it is described in scarlet heroes and give them gear. Want to play a tiefling or aasimar also easy to do. You only have to give them one or two special traits like charming devil and tiefling senses or devine heritage etc.

Other classes are also easy to convert, give them max Hp corresponding to their starting hitdice (Paladin starts with 1 d8 HD so you get 8 HP). Fray dice martials get d8, semi martial get d6 and casters get d4. Have a special ability keep it or make it a trait.

You can probaly do a lot more with these two games, but it should be cool little dungeon crawler with more rpg options and a more boardgame feel for an rpg.

Try it out, I think it fills a little niche and it don't cost a lot of money. If you tried it report back here and say what you made different or how you played it.

Hope you like the idea :)