I picked up Dark Chateau earlier today, another part of the Castle Zagyg series of modules from Troll Lord Games. In actual fact, the copy I’d ordered from MilSims hasn’t arrived yet – I picked this up as a pdf, as it was on special with a bunch of other Castles & Crusades adventures at RPGnow.

I then printed it out in booklet form and stapled it together. Heh. Knew there was a reason I  bought that extra-long stapler. Now I just need a guillotine to cut the pages nicely to size…

Anyway, I’m intending to use Dark Chateau as part of my Castle Greyhawk campaign, so I have just spent a couple of hours going through the module, finding all the monsters, and converting them. This serves two purposes: one, it lets me become more familiar with the 4e monster system. I’ve got to say, with the aid of those tables in the DMG, it’s a snap to do some rough and ready conversions. The other is that it lets me get a feel for the balance of C&C encounters.

Hmm. Interesting.

You see, C&C is built on the same mathematical basis as AD&D and oD&D. It is just neater about expressing it all. Without lots of special abilities cluttering up the monster statblocks, you get an idea of how they’d go if the PCs didn’t cheat. Of course, the PCs will cheat – they’ll use spells, ranged weapons, and the like. It’s what PCs do.

So, take your Giant Weasel (just as well I have the D&D Miniature for it, huh?) HD 3d8, hp 21, ac 16, move 20 feet. It attacks with a bite for 1d6 points of damage.

This weasel is pretty well fed – it averages 7 on the hit die. Still, let’s assume that your doughty band of PCs are dealing about 5.5 damage on average when they hit. That weasel, well fed as it is, will survive 4 hits rather than just 3. (The origin of Hit Die comes from the fact that in the Chainmail system, a Hero needed four consecutive hits to be killed, and this got converted into 4 Hit Dice when D&D came along).

Meanwhile, a PC will probably survive only one or two hits from the weasel. The very, very original D&D had both attacks and hit dice rolled on d6. For everything. Still, I’m guessing your fighter-types are going to have about 8+ hp, so perhaps even three hits if they’re lucky.

Weasel hits – let’s say – about 35% of the time. A PC hits the AC 16 weasel about 40% of the time. A party of five PCs meet the weasel… after one round, it’s taken 11 damage and returned (on average) 1.22 damage. Hmm. After two rounds, the weasel really should be dead, and one of the party might be sort of hurt.

The big thing about that encounter is that it isn’t really all that interesting. That’s one of the chief problems with vanilla monsters – you need to spice them up with interesting situations. In 4e, I run into the problem that a lone weasel is even less likely to be interesting. So, I spice it up a bit. I’m not sure how weasel-like my resulting creation is, but hey…

Giant Weasel; Level 3 elite skirmisher (200 XP)
Init +7; HP 94, bloodied 47; AC 19, F17, R17, W15; +2 saves; 1 action point
Spd 4; Bite +8 vs AC; 1d10+3 plus secondary atk +6 vs Ref; target is knocked prone and weasel shifts up to 3 squares.
When bloodied, makes an immediate attack.

It’s quick and nasty, but it’ll prove a minor foe for the group. Probably won’t last more than a couple of rounds, but neither would the C&C weasel.

More interesting is the group of giant frogs. Give me groups any day… they’re interesting! Solo opponents – which there are utterly too many of here – just allow gang-up tactics.

C&C stats: HD 2d8, HP 12, AC 12, Move 10 feet or 45 feet swimming. They attack with a bite for 1d4 points of damage. Their special abilities include a +4 on their initial attack when using their tongue.

D&D 4e conversion: Giant Frog; level 4 brute (175 XP)
Init +2; HP 68, bloodied 34; AC 16, F18, R15, W15, Speed 2, swim 9
Bite +7 vs AC; 2d8+4 damage
Ranged 4: Tongue Grab +5 vs Ref; pull 4 squares

I’ve got a soft spot for Giant Frogs due to Village of Hommlet, but they look quite amusing to play. The level is entirely arbitrary on my part, as I reckon a group of them at that level will be a fair challenge for a party of 6 PCs of about 2nd level or so when they wander that way.

The great moments of the adventure aren’t in the combats, in any case… but in the weird and mysterious magics that RJK has sprinkled around the Manse. But the combats are needed to break up the weird and mysterious… and combat is just fun.