I'm looking for some helpful suggestions on how to convert.

It's a fairly gritty game already so the mechanics should fit just fine(We'll be keeping our homebrew setting).

My biggest concern is converting existing characters classes to careers. Warlord and Paladin in particular don't seem to have a WHFRP equivalent.

Races seem easy enough though.

Any thoughts?

This isn't going to be very helpful, but if you want to play WFRP, I'd suggest starting a new campaign set in the Old World. It's not just mapping classes to careers, it's that the traditional D&D levels won't translate either. If you have just started your D&D game, you haven't lost much if you decide to start over and if you have higher level characters, the Core Set may not be adequate since it doesn't feature many Advanced Careers and assumes you'll be starting out with new characters. While more support for experienced characters will be coming out sometime in the future, it's a currently lacking, so again, you'd be better served starting over rather than trying to convert higher level D&D characters. You're going to find the Bestiary lacking compared to a typical D&D setting so you'll have a lot of work to do there as well. Most importantly, the setting is (at least) half the attraction of WFRP, not it's novel new dice or other game mechanics.

CMtheGM said:

Read carefully what Mac 40k talks about characters. Also WFRP is completely opposite on 4e in regard to magic items.

As for the warrior / paladin, they would most likely fall under the priest careers (warrior priest). As stated they are not many options for priest / wizards advancement as the core set only comes with the initial career and one advance career.

Not overly concerned with the magical items, I basically stripped them from my game anyway.

I may occassionally dabble in the setting, but I am actually interested in the mechanics of game more than anything else, it seems like it will allow for an excellent plot based game, have quick, non-tactical combats and have the level of grit and customability I desire. And lord do I like the dice pool......

Level wise I would probably just give the characters several advances to start (5 or so seems reasonable for fairly competent characters). I'm not sold on importing the existing characters so this isn't a given anyway, I'm more likely to try new characters, but I want the option should I choose to do so.

I will likely use the warhammer setting and the adventure in the box to serve as an intro to the game for 2-4 sesssions however. I would actually like to try running the warhammer setting as I find it rather interesting, but my players have enough to deal with leaving their D&D comfort zone as it is, leaving the setting (at least at this moment) is likely pushing them a touch to far.

I tend to use mostly common human types(including elves, dwarfs,etc) as foes so there isn't really much issue beastiary-wise, but then my games are more intrique based typically.

Thanks for the advice guys.

I too have a 4E campaign I have been running (although it is young) which is based on converted 3.5 edition Paizo content... So lest any of my players be here, nothing I say will come to haunt you. Yet.

I played around with converting D&D content to 2E WFRP, and I settled on the following basic guidelines:

• For every NPC I would find the closest career and then reverse-engineer them back to the most likely starting career. If I was in a bit counting mood, I would give them 1 + ((LVL-1)*3) advances. (iow 7 advances for a 3rd level character) to match the amount of gametime a player in 3.5 E would need to get to that level. This seemed to work okay for most situations.
• I clustered dungeon areas together since I was doing Temple of Elemental Evil, and frankly there wasn't much hope of people lasting through that density of fighting using 2E WFRP rules (although some parts were fun)
• If you are trying to stay true to setting (if not Old World) be somewhat loose and meta-gamey around Career System.

Ultimately I felt too much was lost in the charm of WFRP's setting and rules to play this way, so we scrapped the idea and went back to a more make-it-up as we go along WFRP game. I played 1E (before I remember people talking editions for most of these games actually), and I have to say that was probably the best times I ever had with a game. We did that all in a home brewed setting, and it just plain worked.

Good luck with the conversion, if you go through with it, I'd be interested in knowing. I just got the set today, and I have to say I'm pretty giddy about it (although wanting to fill the holes in the rules in advance of their releasing them.... Where's my Rat Catcher!.