Hello everyone,

I recently finished running a fairly long campaign in DH1. I'm about to run a campaign set in DH2 for the same group of players, and all of them want to bring back their old characters from the previous edition. The thing is that I'm not sure how I should go about converting their characters to the current edition. I think it goes without saying that any cybernetics and psychic powers already in place would remain where they are, but I'm not sure how their characteristics and skills should be handled. Should I give them extra xp to start with, or a higher base number for generating characters?

If your players' characters are very high DH1 rank, I wouldn't advise converting them. They'll start high and have really nowhere to go and it will be kind of boring.

But if you really want, my advice would be to have everyone make a starting character, then spend XP to get about to where they were with their DH1 version. Then compare costs and bring everyone up to the whatever the highest cost turned out to be. This method won't work very well if Aptitudes are all over the place (e.g. one optimized, one not), and psychic powers don't really have good equivalents in DH2.

Give them the same stuff and the same characs (convert those that do not exist anymore into those that exists actually). Then make them chose their role, background and home world. When they'll have to buy new skills, they'll be ready.

It is sure that some characters will benefit more from this option than others, but they'll get the same characters with plusses (role bonus, etc.) and be ready to advance like any other character.

Give them an amount of xp, let them re-build their characters from scratch to match their DH1st characters.
Find the new versions of the gear they already have, and give it to their characters.

That is what I would do. The psychic powers aren´t the same anymore, a lot of skills have been "boiled down", and some talents don´t work the way they used to do.

This is especially true for Psykers and Tech-Priests. Tech-Priests used to be tanks with early Access to Special weapon Features (sonic shrieking mofo-stuff). This is no more.

Oh, and simply Transfer the IP and CP, so you might want to cross-check the Madness/Mutations for "needed adjustments" (see the current once).

When DH2 first came out, my group converted our characters from DH1 to DH2. It was not possible to do a strict conversion, matching every skill & talent, etc. as it would have made the characters have insanely high XP totals. We converted as best we could in the spirit of what the characters had/were. The characters were just starting Ascension and I think the XP we had when all said and done converting was 19k. I can't recall for certain, but I do know I had to abandon some talents as the aptitude system just didn't give me "enough" XP.

Bottom line was that we held to the spirit of the character when converting more than the an exact copy.

~ alemander

We went through the same conversion and found it could only be done by rebuying talents and skills due to the aptitude system. Also The players had about 11000 xp in DH1, and were upgraded to 16000 xp in DH2. For some that was adequate, for others not enough, but giving too many xp ruins the future play, so the players went with being downgraded a bit was ok, after all they got the freedom to "respec" a bit.

I did give the players freedom to choose their 7 aptitudes freely except for max. 3 professionals and not both offence and finesse.This worked remarkable well. No one took leadership or tech though. :-)

Psykers don't convert at all. In DH1 they massively buff the party vs fear whilst flying around and one shotting almost any enemy with soul killer and ripping the secrets out of the minds of enemies whilst their combination of minor power defences make them all but unkillable. Their power level compared to other PC's is astronomically high. Converting them into DH2 with a far more balanced Psyker system means they are completely incapable of their former achievements.

Everything else converts just fine.