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Let's Read Neverwinter: Abolethic Sovereignity
As mentioned before, one of the things the Spellplague did a century ago was to bring parts of the world of Abeir into Toril, and vice-versa. These transplanted chunks of geography also brought whoever happened to be living on them. And one of these whoevers was the Abolethic Sovereignity, a kingdom ruled by these aberrant creatures.
Shortly after arriving, the Sovereignity built a flying citadel named Xxiphu to act as their headquarters. Interested in studying the phenomenon that isekaied them, the aboleths started searching for pockets of the chaotic magic that makes up the Spellplague and sending in research teams to investigate them.
One of the pockets they found was in the Underdark beneath Neverwinter. A branch of the Sovereignity built a permanent base around it and have been studying it for the past few decades, occasionally kidnapping people from the surface to serve as test subjects.
When the eruption happened, it opened a chasm on the surface that went all the way down to the aboleth base, potentially exposing it to curious delvers from the surface. Moving the base was not an option, so they instead fortified it and began sending the results of their early experiments up the chasm as a way to discourage explorers. This worked for a long time, since the city was a mess.
When Neverember arrived and began rebuilding, the aboleths felt threatened and began taking more active steps to divert the lord’s attention elsewhere and to infiltrate his organization.
Goals
After a century of research the aboleths have a pretty good handle on the properties of the Spellplague, and they have a planned use for it.
You see, they know where Maegera is. Their entry in the book off-handedly remarks that it was a brief awakening of the primordial that caused that city-destroying eruption. The AbSov’s ultimate plan is to expose the primordial to the Spellplague, using the techniques they developed to then dominate her mind or control her in some other fashion. With a genuine primordial under their command, the Sovereignity has a real shot at taking over the whole world.
In the meantime, they’re using that expertise on a steady stream of victims brought from the surface by their agents. These unfortunates are exposed to the Spellplague in a controlled manner. Those who fail to display the proper strength of mind and soul after initial exposure to the Plague become the monsters regularly released upon the surface. Those who pass this test are then subject to a very specific series of tortures and procedures that turn them into near-mindless members of the Choir that sings the Symphony of Madness.
This Symphony can channel the chaotic energies of the Spellplague in ways that the aboleths can control, and it’s what they use to mutate their kidnapped victims. They also use it to broadcast nightmares all over the region, which afflict its more psychically sensitive individuals. The stronger it gets the more people are affected. This could eventually be the tool they use to tame Maegera, or could lead to the development of that tool depending on the GM’s designs.
Player Tie-Ins
The nightmares mentioned in the descriptions of Oghma’s Faithful and the Spellscarred Harbinger come from the Symphony of Madness. The latter in particular has very strong thematic ties to the AbSov - their starting hook sends the PC right into their clutches, as we’ll see soon.
If the GM decides to make the AbSov a major antagonist in the campaign, then the Symphony’s nightmares will likely begin affecting more and more people. Its effects are not set in stone, but the book gives various suggestions:
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They might make victims irritable and violent.
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They might drain healing surges after a long rest.
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They might impost long-lasting penalties from lack of sleep or psychological trauma.
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They might provide hints about where to find their source.
Stepping up the frequency or severity of these effects over the course of the campaign will provide a very strong incentive for PCs to find the source of these dreams and shut it down, leading to a big confrontation against the AbSov in their home base.
One way the PCs might protect themselves from the nightmares is to buy these creepy little dolls sold by Helm’s Hold. If you place one of these Dreamthief Dolls under your pillow at night, you won’t experience the nightmares. Rumor has it that the dolls send the nightmares they catch to the Hold’s patients, but Rohini, who runs the hospice at the Hold, says they’re just imbued with minor protective blessings (she’s lying; the rumors are true).
Relationships
We already know the AbSov is busily infiltrating New Neverwinter. Here we also learn that they sort of disdain the Ashmadai, because all of the cult’s attempts to infiltrate them have only fed them more converts (including Rohini). They are however more circumspect when dealing with the Thayans or the Netherese, because they fear the powerful magic those factions might be able to bring to bear if they call on their far-away epic bosses.
Impressions
This is a comparatively huge entry with an extensive encounters section, as we’ll see in the next post. This leads me to think the Aboleths are intended to be one of the campaign’s top antagonists. A campaign where you start opposing (or even working for) New Neverwinter and uncover the aboleth conspiracy seems to be an easy one to make with the book’s default setup.
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Let's Read Neverwinter: New Neverwinter Encounters
New Neverwinter’s hired goons can be represented by a variety of statblocks for characters or usually-playable ancestries extracted from the Monster Manual 2, Monster Vault, and Threats to the Nentir Vale. There’s a table here with entries ranging from level 1 to level 8. It includes a Doppelganger Sneak, every stat block from the [River Rats][1] entry in Threats plus a smattering of humans, gnomes, half-elves and dragonborn.
We also get detailed writeups for Neverember himself and for Soman Galt, and some information on General Sabine, the faction’s third big shot.
Dagult Neverember
As written, Neverember is a somewhat complex villain by D&D standards. He’s ruthless, greedy, arrogant and imperialistic, but he is not evil-aligned. His preferred way of lining his own pockets also tends to be beneficial to his trade partners, and he is sincere in his desire to improve the lives of his subjects even if it’s only so they’ll crown him king. He also behaves like a typical mercantilist aristocrat, which includes a dose of sexism. He treats “intelligent male acquaintances” with respect but “flirts outrageously” with “beautiful female guests”. I strongly suggests removing these traits from his personality if you want him to come off as sympathetic to your players.
If the PCs can stomach his horrible personality, he might end up allied with them against a greater threat, even if only because that greater threat would be worse for the region than him.
If he dies, it will cause a lot of chaos in the city, because like it or not he’s one of the region’s current stabilizing forces. The Thayans, Netherese, and the rebels would immediately feel emboldened by the chaos, and the rebels in particular will immediately turn on anyone who tries to take leadership of the city for themselves (because they want it). If no one else manages to take over, General Sabine will do it and turn the city into a brutal militarized police state. So I guess the PCs should make sure the region is set up to remain stable after his demise before facing the guy.
Neverember is a Level 7 Soldier with 84 HP. Yes, he’s a regular, which means he will have plenty of bodyguards with him. He’s armed with a Longsword whose basic attacks inflict a -2 penalty to hit for a turn, and if an adjacent enemy shifts or targets someone other than him with an attack, he can use Lord’s Rebuke to make a free basic attack against them. He can also Taunt (recharge 4+), an attack vs. Will that targets one enemy and on a hit pulls them 4 squares and makes them grant combat advantage for a turn.
General Sabine
General Sabine doesn’t get a section of her own, but I’m collecting and repeating the scattered information we get about her here. She’s the commander of the mercenary company Lord Neverember hired to act as his army and police force.
The reason he’s using mercenaries is because using his house troops from Waterdeep would make the whole situation look too much like an invasion and occupation by a foreign power. Sabine, however, is perfectly able and willing to command her army like the foreign invasion and occupation force it is. There’s not to much nuance to her character - she’s an uncomplicated brutal authoritarian. She uses the stats for the Human Cavalier from the MM2, making her a Level 7 Soldier (Leader).
I imagine there are lots of complaints about the police brutality inflicted on the citizenry of Neverwinter by the mercenaries, though I guess Neverember manages to keep them at just below the level where he’d care. If Neverember dies suddenly, General Sabine is the most likely character to replace him in the internal power struggle that will follow, and she will turn the city into a violent police state.
Mordai Vell, one of the leaders of the Ashmadai, is trying to recruit Sabine for the cult. As of the campaign’s start, he hasn’t succeeded yet - whether he will or not depends on the wishes of the GM and the events that happen in play.
Soman Galt
The acting mayor of Neverwinter gained his position because of his previous career as a government official. He’s more than a bit scatterbrained but is capable of taking his job seriously and performing it competently.
Neverember thinks of Galt as a useful puppet, and he’s right. However, he’s someone else’s puppet. Rohini, the Prophet of Helm’s Hold, got a hold of the dwarf and turned him into an asset of the Abolethic Sovereignity quite some time ago. As the campaign starts, Galt is under an incredible number of aboleth-crafted post-hypnotic suggestions, and regularly visits Helm’s Hold to receive more. This has him looking less and less healthy as time goes by.
It also means the aboleths are effectively in control of the city’s civil and social policies, and know everything that happens on it. They know which spots on the city wall are less defended, and send their monsters there. They’re going to have an incredible edge when they decide to really invade the surface.
Galt doesn’t actually know any of this, and would probably go insane from trauma and guilt if he learned it. In emergencies, one of the aboleths below can assume direct control of him, switching his alignment from Unaligned to Chaotic Evil and giving him access to extra powers. Once he becomes bloodied, that control becomes stronger and he begins moving as if he was having a seizure.
Galt is a Level 6 Controller with 74 HP. His typical dwarven speed of 5 increases to 7 when he’s bloodied. Being bloodied also activates his aura (5) of Dissonant Gibberish, which inflicts Vulnerable 5 Psychic and a -2 penalty to saves on all enemies inside.
Galt’s basic attack is a Whipping Warhammer that damages and slides the target 1 square. He can Transmute the Unwilling as a ranged attack, dealing psychic damage and slowing (save ends). Even on a miss this still slows for a turn. Once per encounter he can Weave Nightmares in a Close Burst 2, targeting all enemies, dealing heavy psychic damage and dazing (save ends). Also once per encounter he can Twist Space to teleport 3 squares. If he chooses to appear in an enemy’s space with this, they swap positions and the enemy grants combat advantage for a turn.
Impressions
I think Galt is our most pleasant surprise here, in terms of both his lore and his mechanics. As for the other two, Sabine is more dangerous than Dagult if you give her a mount and fix the damage on her MM2 stat block. I think this makes sense, both in-setting and narratively. She’s kind of his Dragon, in TVTropes parlance.
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Let's Read Neverwinter: New Neverwinter
As mentioned before, Lord Dagult Neverember of Waterdeep has recently arrived in Neverwinter at the head of a mercenary force with the intent of rebuilding the city and re-establishing order and trade. He claims descent from one of Nasher Alagondar’s bastard sons, saying this gives him the right to take over the city. Alagondar was the ruler of Neverwinter at the time depicted in the computer games.
“New Neverwinter” is a concept Neverember’s propaganda machine came up with to stir nationalistic sentiment among the populace and get them on-side. This, and the practical results of his rebuilding efforts, have worked on the majority of the city’s residents, but some of them consider the idea of a “new Neverwinter” to be an insult to the city’s memory. Chief among these dissenters are the Sons of Alagondar, militant rebels who oppose Neverember and have been clashing often with his forces.
Most of what we’ve seen so far points to Neverember being a villainous character, whose claim is fake and whose rule would be selfish and oppressive. But there’s a text box here that reminds us that not even this is set in stone. Lord Neverember’s role in a specific campaign is entirely up to the GM. His claim might be true or false, his intentions might be altruistic or selfish, and his rule could end up being good or bad for the region, and all of these “switches” are independent from each other. Also independent from all of this is the attitude of the PCs towards him - you still have a meaty campaign whether they want to support or topple the lord, and there are plenty of other things to occupy them if they’re indifferent.
Goals
Neverember’s main goal is of course to Claim the Throne. He is effectively in charge of that portion of the city his faction controls, but running the city and wearing its crown are very different things. Neverember’s current plan is to make the people love him. He’s going to improve their lives so much that they’ll beg him to become their lord, claim or no claim. Mwa-ha-ha!
Of course, Dagult will still have a much easier time of it if he can Prove his Disputed Heritage. He knows his word is not enough to prove his claim, so he’s been hiring scholars and explorers to look for documents that support it among the city’s ruined archives and libraries. He’s also not above hiring those same scholars to fabricate such documents, and has burned more than one book that had a less-than-helpful stance on his ancestry.
While seeking the crown, Neverember still has to actually Run the City, to Maintain His Position as the Open Lord of Waterdeep, and he also never loses sight of the whole reason he’s doing all of this, which is to Make Hard Coin. In order to juggle all of this, he delegates heavily. General Sabine, who commands the mercenary army, is in charge of policing and defending the territory he controls in the city. He appointed a dwarf named Soman Galt to act as mayor and oversee tax collection, grants of property, and other paperwork.
For the same reason, he loves to Hire Sellswords to care care of problems that require more discreet solutions. This includes looking for proof of his claims and spying on the opposition as mentioned above, but it also includes Finding Gauntlgrym because having that as a feather on his cap would increase his chances of being declared king by popular acclaim.
Player Character Tie-Ins
A PC with the Neverwinter Noble background is Dagult’s greatest nightmare: someone with a stronger claim to the throne of the city. He will either try to deal with the obstacle by sending mercenaries to spy on or assassinate the character, or by trying to publicly discredit them once the discreet approach becomes impossible.
The Harper Agent was also sent here to oppose Neverember, but as the campaign starts they’ve just realized nothing is as it seems. Are they proceeding with their original mission, or deviating from it now that the Harpers’ original intel proved to be woefully incomplete?
PCs with the Oghma’s Faithful theme would be eager to take part in any genuine fact-finding expedition about Dagult’s lineage (or that of his rivals!). However, their devotion is to the truth rather than to any mortal lord, and the truth they find can end up drawing the ire of either Dagult himself or his enemies, depending on whether it contradicts or supports his claim.
Depending on his exact moral disposition in the campaign, Neverember could be either a potential sponsor or a rival to the Heir of Delzoun in the search for Gauntlgrym.
PCs without direct connections to this storyline might still find New Neverwinter a ready source of miscellaneous mercenary jobs when they need some extra cash and XP. In addition to being the hired swords for the above plots, they could also bolster the faction’s efforts to evict the orcish army that has taken part of the city ruins, or get hired to investigate the numerous mysterious events in town that point to the other major factions, like spellplagued monster attacks or mysterious disappearances.
Faction Relationships
New Neverwinter has no idea the Abolethic Sovereignity is behind those monster attacks. They’re causing these to keep the surfacers distracted while they carry on their experiments.
The Ashmadai managed to secure a tenuous alliance of sorts with New Neverwinter. Dagult doesn’t know who they are beyond “a shady but influential cult”. He uses them as an occasional source of deniable muscle, and they’re hard at work subverting and corrupting his underlings with the goal of eventually inducting the man himself among their ranks. Their leader, Mordai Veil, is currently attempting to seduce General Sabine.
He was received a few reports of Thayans in the region, and has tasked General Sabine with finding out more. She has yet to deliver her first report.
Dagult is completely ignorant of Netherese operations in the region and has unwittingly hired Shadovar agents as assassins before.
Impressions
Even if you decide to make the lord himself something other than a villainous asshole, there are a lot of events in motion that could lead him and his faction in that direction. They’re heavily infiltrated by both diabolists and abolethic agents! PCs seeking to support or co-opt New Neverwinter are going to have a harder job ahead of them than those who try to destroy it. They’re also in the dark about the Thayans and Netherese as the campaign starts, and might be blindsided by either of them.
I still think Dagult and friends work better as villains, either by themselves or as an eventual tool of someone worse. Making them neutral or sympathetic would however be a good way to take New Neverwinter out of consideration if the party is not interested in tangling with it, making it a part of the background noise.
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Let's Read Neverwinter: Factions and Foes
This chapter starts the GM-focused part of the book. The factions presented here are the “other half” of all the plots hinted at in the character themes - they’re what the themes are hooking into. This chapter will contain a lot of information players won’t know at the start of the campaign.
There are five major factions operating in the Neverwinter region during this campaign:
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New Neverwinter: Dagult Neverember and his mercenary army, who want to become the legitimate rulers of the city.
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Abolethic Sovereignity: A sect from this aberrant empire is experimenting with a pocket of the Spellplague beneath the city with the eventual goal of using it to control the sleeping primordial Maegera.
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A cult of Asmodeus worshipers, also known as Ashmadai, is plotting to take over the region for themselves but is in for a whole bunch of nasty surprises.
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The Thayans want to create an undead army and possibly complete their genocidal plans from thirty years ago.
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The Netherese want to repair the flying island of Xinlenal and use it as the center of their new empire.
Aside from these, there are many other smaller factions centered around either the city of Neverwinter, like the rebel remnants, or around the Neverwinter Wood, like the Uthgardt or the angry eladrin of Ilyianbruen.
Each major faction gets their own section consisting of:
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A general overview of who they are.
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A detailed explanation of their goals. This includes text boxes with Theme Tie-Ins that could lead the faction to interact with the PCs or vice-versa. Some are obvious, others less so.
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A summary of their relationship to other major factions.
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A discussion of what encounters against them look like, complete with statistics for their important figures and any new monsters that might make up their rank-and-file.
As the introduction says, everybody’s levels are calibrated to fit in a Heroic-tier campaign, and none of the plots and goals detailed here are set in stone. Some of the faction descriptions include text boxes musing about alternate setups, or what happens if the faction’s plots are seriously derailed.
The minor factions get less space for themselves, but they still get some and we’ll be looking at all of them in the order they appear on the book.
Each major faction is going to be split into two posts here. The first will look at their general description, goals, relationships, PC tie-ins and my impressions of them. The second will deal with the Encounters section of their writeup, which tends to be pretty long and often includes new monster stat blocks.
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Wealth in D&D and Dungeon Fantasy
One thing I’ve done pretty often these past few years is converting D&D and Pathfinder adventures for use with Dungeon Fantasy (either version). These conversions didn’t have nowhere near the level of rigor of my Dragon’s Dogma adaptation, but that larger project did give me a solid grounding on the basics.
Converting from one tabletop system to the other is fairly easy, for the most part, but there are some aspects of it that I found harder to do, especially on the fly. One of these is converting wealth between the two systems.
In this post I’ll be comparing the Dungeon Fantasy RPG and Pathfinder 1st Edition and trying to come up with a way to convert monetary amounts from the latter to the former. I chose the DFRPG because I use its monetary system in my games, and I chose Pathfinder 1e because I want to convert Hell’s Rebels. Pathfinder 1e, of course, shares most of its base assumptions with D&D 3.5, the system from which it is derived.
What Money Looks Like
Dungeon Fantasy purposefully makes its coins have the exact same dimensions as those of D&D, and therefore Pathfinder. They both use chunky standardized coins that weight 1/50th of a pound (around 10 grams). These come in copper, silver, gold, and a few other exotic materials that we don’t need to look at right now.
These dimensions are apparently universal standards, and their value comes from their precious metal content. If you find a chest of thousand-year-old gold coins from an extinct civilization in a dungeon, you can carry them back to town and spend them on the market right away. Finding “non-standard” coins is usually a rare special case.
Unfortunately, though their physical dimensions are identical across both systems, their values seem to be derived from completely different assumptions.
What Money Buys
Like all variants of GURPS, Dungeon Fantasy expresses its prices and values in “GURPS dollars”, or “$”. The exact value of this unit of currency varies with the setting. Here, $1 is the worth of a copper piece. Silver pieces are worth 20 copper pieces each ($20). Gold pieces are worth 20 silver pieces each ($400). This means GURPS is effectively on a copper standard. The vast majority of Dungeon Fantasy characters gets $1000 to buy their starting gear.
For Pathfinder we have the classic decimal setup where 1gp == 10sp == 100cp. The most common coin is the gold piece, and nearly everything in the core book’s gear chapter has its price expressed in gp. So here we’re on a gold standard. Starting money is determined by a random roll that varies per class. Fighter-types start with an average of 175gp, others start with less.
In both cases, this starting money is meant to let you buy your main weapon, perhaps a backup or shield, a suit of armor, and the miscellaneous sundries that make up your typical adventurer’s kit: a pouch or pack, some camping supplies and rations, and maybe some tools like the thief’s lockpick set.
From there on out, things start to diverge quite sharply, and the way I see it it’s mainly the fault of Pathfinder’s Wealth By Level table. It subjects PCs to the tyranny of inflation. This plus the difference in base value means that while a haul of a thousand gold pieces is a fantastic fortune for even veteran Dungeon Fantasy delvers, it starts out at “pretty nice” for low-level Pathfinder adventurers and quickly becomes “pocket change” for high-level ones.
So What’s Our Exchange Rate?
We can start with the guidelines presented in the Exploits book: an adventure should pay at least enough for the party to recoup their expenses with consumables, power item recharge, and the cost of staying in town during downtime. It’s perfectly OK for it to pay more than that, even much more than that, because it’s relatively easy to get rid of “excess” money by giving them opportunities to spend it. Maybe a weird old man has a treasure map to sell, or a mystical artifact or something. Magic items don’t count as part of character wealth for this, as the game’s attitude to them is more similar to early D&D than modern Pathfinder.
So after all of that I think we can safely say that a Pathfinder 1e gold piece should be worth around $5 in Dungeon Fantasy. This leads to amounts of money that are sufficient to cover expenses with a little left over in low-level adventures, and to increasingly bigger hauls in higher-level ones, but as we established that’s OK. Some of those Pathfinder adventures even helpfully provide us with domain mini-games of their own that can soak up that extra cash.
Performing the Actual Conversion
With that basic exchange rate in mind, we can think about how that affects the actual treasure our delvers find in the adventure.
Coins
Piles of coins change to reflect their new value. The two main approaches you could take here are to prioritize keeping the same value, or prioritize keeping the same weight (which means keeping the same number of coins). Getting both value and weight to match is very hard, so I strongly recommend sticking to only one unless you like solving multi-dimensional knapsack problems in your spare time.
Prioritizing value means those coin piles will end up smaller and lighter than the originals. This will make hauling them off easier. I recommend against condensing the pile as much as possible, because you don’t want to make logistics too easy. Also, finding a single gold coin can be a bit of a letdown even if it is worth a lot. This is the easiest approach to take on the fly.
Prioritizing the number of coins means the pile will have exactly the same size and weight, but it will be made of a smaller denomination coins. Its actual value will probably be a little higher or lower than that of the original, but that’s OK as long as the value remains close. This could lead to a situation where the group only takes the most valuable portions of the pile, but I guess that’s true to how it was done in Old D&D too.
Example: A chest containing 100gp in Pathfinder should contain $500 in coins when converted to DF.
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Prioritizing value might give us a bag containing 25 silvers. That’s a satisfying number of coins that still has a non-negligible weight.
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Prioritizing weight might give us a chest containing 80 coppers and 20 silvers, with a total worth of $480.
Gems, Jewelry, and Art Objects
These things tend to have pretty arbitrary values in both systems! The biggest difference in how they handle selling this stuff in town.
In Pathfinder, you can generally exchange them for their full listed value in cash, making them perfectly efficient forms of portable wealth. PF adventurers are quite likely to convert their coins into fancy jewelry when they need to travel long distances, since it’s much lighter for its value.
In Dungeon Fantasy, the only thing that fetches its full value is coin or bulk precious metals. Everything else, including gems, jewelry, and art objects, is subject to the rules for appraisal and haggling. This means typical delvers are likely to get less than full value for this stuff back in town.
My recommendation here is to use a doubled exchange rate: each gp of gems, jewelry and treasure is worth $10. That’s the treasure’s real value, which means a typical party will get half of that on average when they sell it back in town. I feel this preserves the “original intention” of the adventure.
Magic Items
Both systems have a lot to say about magic item pricing, so my strategy here is to not attempt a conversion of the price at all. I convert the function of the item and figure out how much that would cost in Dungeon Fantasy if it was a new item. Saying it like this makes it sound easy, but this can be complex enough to warrant its own post.
If an item can be replicated with the standard enchantments from DF, it has those enchantments and is priced accordingly. Items with unique functions might be a bit harder, but I always have the “easy escape” there of just not assigning a fixed price to these. Like DF Artifacts, they’re either impossible to sell in the first place, or will be worth some arbitrary amount that matches what I want the PCs to have at that point.
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