Putting it All Together

Hi Everyone!

Let’s try quick-converting a few monsters from Pathfinder into Swords & Wizardry. You’ll notice that the monsters won’t be exactly the same. But… it’ll be close enough for the game table. I picked a couple of weird ones that I haven’t used before: the Ant Lion and the Hound of Tindalos.

In Pathfinder, the Ant Lion has 67 HP. So using our table, it should have 6 HD in Swords & Wizardry. I just took the CR 6 and listed it as CL 6 too since it has a linear relationship. It’s BIG and has a hard shell so I add the “Plate” modifier and the “Taller” modifier to the base of 9 and get AC 17. I would give it a Move of 12 with a Burrow value of 3. It uses a Bite as its melee attack so I use 1d8 for its bite. I would also ask the victim to roll a saving throw or be grappled. In the description, we see that Ant Lions build traps so we can just use that as flavor rather than a mechanic. So how does it compare to the official conversion from Tome of Horrors Complete?

The official version has HD 8 rather than 6. No big deal but it will change the monster’s Saving Throw value. The AC is spot on. The regular Move speed is the same but the Burrow speed is faster in the official version. The big difference is the Bite damage. The official version uses 2d8. I use 1d8+Grapple. In the end, that isn’t a problem. It retains the flavor of the beast and just gives us a little variability in how it carries out an attack. In the case of the Ant Lion, I would have it grapple a PC and then use it to bludgeon the other characters. That’s too much fun!

Now, let’s try one that is more complex. I haven’t seen this one in any S&W books so this is completely built using my method. The Hound of Tindalos is a commonly occurring monster in the Cthulhu Mythos. It has some vicious bite and claw attacks but it can also teleport into other dimensions. In PF, it has HP 85, CR 7, AC 20, Speed 40, melee and magic. I would quickly convert it to HD 7, CL 7, AC 17 (+4 Stealth, +2 Pain Perception [it already looks dead], +2 Leather[y]), Move 15, and Attack Bite (1d6)/ 2 Claws (1d8). Now, I add the spells. Its primary magic is teleportation so I give it Teleport. It also gets Invisibility, Locate Object (MU), Haste, and Slow. I think he’s ready for the table. It cuts out a lot of the detail that the PF version has but it retains the flavor of a teleporting, otherworldly killing machine. Compared to a Blink Dog (CL 4), the Hound of Tindalos is much more terrifying.

I hope you enjoyed these posts. I’m thinking about doing another system next. Possibly 5e to SW. If you have a request, let me know. Happy converting!

 

-ATH