It’s time for me to put on my GM hat and begin preparing my solo Hell’s Rebels campaign. As mentioned in the previous post, I want to play this using the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy rule set instead of the campaign’s native Pathfinder 1e. Let’s take a look at what this means.

But wait a minute! Wasn’t that previous most published more than a year ago? Well, turns out I started writing this one shortly after publishing it, but one thing and another got in the way and I’m only getting around to publishing it now. I’m actually a fair bit along in campaign preparation and even started playing, I’m just behind on documenting the process. Anyway, let’s keep going.

The Setting

As we all know by now, Hell’s Rebels takes place in Golarion, Pathfinder’s setting. Golarion was built from the ground up to support dungeon fantasy campaigns so we don’t have any fundamental friction between it and the Dungeon Fantasy rules. Despite the many D&D-isms of Pathfinder’s first edition we already know the setting can easily be used with other systems, since it has an official Savage Worlds port and Paizo itself is in the process of removing those D&D-isms from the latest iteration of their house system.

That being said, I do want to make a few changes to the version I’m going to use. The most obvious one is I’m going to drop the many different fiend classifications from D&D and Pathfinder in favor of Dungeon Fantasy’s simplified “it’s all demons from Hell”. Any of the demons from DF will be fair game as opposition here.

And since I’m talking about setting changes, any mention I find of Cheliax’s fascists and diabolists being in any way “disciplined” or “organized” despite their evil will be altered because incompetence, corruption, and a disregard for any rules lies at the heart of fascism. These fucks do not make the trains run on time and never have. You do not, at any point, gotta hand it to them.

I also want to lean on the similarities between this campaign and Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, so we’ll be at a Renaissance tech level with early guns widely available to guards and rebels. Make ready your blessed bullets, o devil hunters.

The Mechanics

I think this will mostly be pretty simple, because this won’t be the first time I’m converting between Pathfinder and DF. I did already run the first two volumes of Hell’s Rebels and the first three volumes of Iron Gods to different player groups. During those times two issues jumped at me as being the most difficult to handle.

The first one was treasure conversions, but I think I’ve arrived at a satisfying process for that in this post. Our delvers will eventually end up very wealthy, but I imagine the rebellion will prove to be a great money sink.

The other difficulty concerns the only somewhat common part of the dungeon delving experience that’s harder to do in Dungeon Fantasy than in D&D: underwater adventures. There’s a couple of extended underwater segments in the middle of the adventure path, and Pathfinder’s default items and spells for it are a lot more accessible than Dungeon Fantasy’s.

But hey, it turns out I already solved that too! This post collects the underwater rules I’ll be using, and this one has a nice set of more accessible items to let our PCs go for a swim and live to tell the tale. The truth is that I started writing this post before I wrote the underwater ones, so they were actually part of my effort to figure this campaign out.

Monster conversions used to be a big problem back when I started the Let’s Read, but now I have enough DF monster books that I can swipe appropriate stat blocks for nearly every one of them. If I need to create new ones for specific foes, you can be sure I’ll post them here.

Coming up Next

Character themes! Everybody loves character themes!