I’m in the process of fitting Reavers of Harkenwold into my Eberron campaign, and it’s a lot of fun to separate the elements that work perfectly within the world from the ones that don’t, and create new Eberron-unique stuff to fill in the gaps. Has anyone else run or played an adventure that originated in another campaign setting? How did it go?
I’ve converted LMOP, DOIP, and Dragon Heist. A lot could be converted by just changing some surface details. Especially converting factions. It’s also pretty easy to take straightforward adventures and wrap them up in a larger political plot.
The biggest challenge honestly was that a lot of the connecting tissue in WOTC adventures was just stupid.
WOTC really likes to tell the players about quests and expect the players to follow them just because they’re there. Quest boards, or the Fireball in Dragon Heist just happening with no reason to investigate. The “why are you asking us” problem is ubiquitous, and most of the time the NPCs have no good reason to ask the players for help other than that they are the main characters.
NPCs being completely illogical: “go ahead and borrow my Apparatus of Kwalish to go underwater and find treasure for me” even through the PCs are total strangers and could just fuck off with your legendary artifact and the underwater treasure. And now they can protect themselves from vengeance using that legendary artifact you gave them.
WOTC modules also reproduce the same colonialist bullshit that D&D always has. Orcs and goblins are filthy marauders with little motivation beyond causing chaos. Drow are always villains despite no longer being inherently evil in the lore. The PCs are guardians of the status quo rather than heroes who free oppressed people from it. You can switch the fluff around, but at a certain point the structure of the story has to fall back on those tropes.
At a certain point I had to just use the modules as inspiration and turn them completely into my own thing.
Yeah I’ve encountered those things as well. Even in Reavers of Harkenwold, which a lot of folks consider the best adventure arc in 4e, there’s a sidequest that’s basically “If you want us noble woods-dwelling elves to help you, please go kill that bunch of goblins, our hated enemy.” I changed that entire section to have a group of nomadic shifters instead of elves, and they want you to help them restore a sacred site of theirs that had been desecrated (no combat involved). But other times I’ve replaced “orcs” or “goblins” etc with dolgrims, wights, or even “bandits” of all types.
But yeah in general, I’ve found the majority of pre-written adventures (even Eberron ones) to be either unusable or only worth stealing a few NPCs or concepts. It’s really satisfying though when you can make them work with just a couple of changes.