During the pandemic, we started a Shadow World campaign and I got to play. We made it to about 5th level, but then the game fizzled out and we stopped playing. The GM caught covid, and that caused the first break, then they had another time clash, and before you know it two months had gone by and we had lost all the momentum.
Now the GM has lost the motivation to restart the game and that was the end of that.
I was running a game set in my generic, not quite forgotten realms. It started as a one-shot for us to learn how to use Fantasy Grounds, and it turned into a campaign. The characters are about 6th level now.
I have often been interested in converting between systems and for their current adventure I have taken Lost Mines of Phandelver, a low-level D&D 5e adventure, and I am converting it to RM Classic.
I haven’t moved over to RMu yet for two reasons, the first is that we can only play via Fantasy Grounds and there is no FG support yet for RMu, and secondly, the RMu rules are still only partially published and I don’t what to faff around with house ruling the missing parts or using beta stats.
RMC is complete and we know it and it is well supported.
It is interesting to convert D&D stuff to RMC. A 10′ pit is no threat to a 5e character, a few hit points lost that are recovered at the first rest. In RM they can break your hip, if not your neck.
I am also dealing with a level disparity. My characters are 6th level, and the adventure is written for 1st-5th level D&D characters. Some challenges are way too easy, such as stock goblins, but the adventure has a young green dragon as the main showdown, and RM has lots of options for me to use, lesser drakes, greater drakes, and if I really needed it, actual dragons.
D&D 5e characters are a lot more robust than RM characters, and they recover faster. It will be interesting to see if these many small encounters will grind my characters down, and what seemed easy at the start becomes death by a thousand cuts by the end.
How’s the campaign going? Recovery in RM is tricky if you don’t have a legit healer given all the specialization in specific injuries that happen.
Our present campaign party are foraging gurus … got a Ranger, Animist, and Druid in the mix. So we are a traveling apothecary of herbs! I ended up writing an tool for “mass foraging” using like an ARPG style loot generator table for all known RM/SW herbs. It’s quite nice and solves a bunch of the “abuse” issues with the core rules (where you can end up with like 100 doses of something).
I too am interested in running OAR and 5e adventures for Rolemaster (v2). It seems like the conversions aren’t “too bad” but you may have to juice some encounters up, or nerf some down like you mention. I would love to do a side quest to Ravenloft (via any one of the Portals in SW, and coupling it to the Unlife), or have them storm the Temple of Elemental Evil! Tons of options when pulling from material going back 30+ years.