For a while now, I’ve been planning on running Keep on the Shadowfell as my first 4E D&D adventure, but recent developments have caused me to modify it somewhat. I do think that I would have had to modify it a little bit in any case, since KotS is designed with five PCs in mind and I only have four. So how easy is this, you might ask? Pretty easy, all things considered.

Let me give some idea of how much I modified the original adventure. So far, I’ve added three skill challenges and two combats, one of which can be completely avoided if some of the skill challenges go well. I then had to go through and tone down some of the combats in the adventure proper because, being designed for a larger party, the might have provided too much of a challenge for mine. The creation of new encounters I’ve already covered in a previous DM’s Journal. Modifying existing encounters was almost laughably easy. See, the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the adventure, itself, really give you everything you need to do this. The adventure tells you what level each encounter is, as well as how many experience points it’s worth; that level, though, assumes five PCs. There’s a table in the DMG that gives you target experience values for encounters based on level, and this table includes values for parties larger and smaller than five PCs, so it’s pretty easy to see what the encounter’s new level is (in most cases, a level X encounter for five PCs is a level X+1 encounter for 4 PCs). All you have to do to bring the level of the encounter down a bit is take out a monster or two based on their experience value (listed in the stat blocks of the monsters, themselves); this usually winds up being one monster of the party’s level, or equivalent XP worth of minions. What’s nice about this is that it allows you to easily scale encounters to suit your party, and it allows you to scale each encounter in such a way so as to preserve its original feel. Was the party facing a horde of zombie minions and two or three normal zombies? You might want to preserve that big horde and take out one zombie rather than four zombie minions. On the other hand, if the encounter revolves around a combination of really interesting bad guys, taking out a few minions might be the way to go.

But all this effects something else: treasure. D&D assumes that it takes eight to ten encounters to go up a level. It also assumes that you get a certain monetary value of treasure per level that you gain. The DMG then breaks this treasure down into ten treasure parcels, one set for every level from one to thirty, that you can hand out in any combination through the course of that level. The parcels, themselves, tend to be fairly customizable; four of them are simply magic items of a level relative to the party’s, while each of the other parcels gives you three different choices to go with, from coin to art objects to gems to healing potions.

Now, you can either leave the treasure in the adventure as-is, hoping that it’ll all work out in the end (which it might), or you can do what I did and re-figure it all. Basically, I disregarded all of the treasure in the adventure, figured out how many encounters it would take for my party to level up, and distributed treasure parcels. It took a while, but it wasn’t particularly hard, and I think the result will be satisfying because the PCs will wind up getting all kinds of cool stuff that they’ll have fun with, all of which I intended for them to get. And like I said, it wasn’t hard.

So, while the new D&D doesn’t seem to spend much time in the actual adventures telling you how to scale the adventure, the DMG gives you all of the tools you need to do it yourself fairly easily, which is nice.