Originally posted here: http://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2020/04/reviews-conversion-guides-to-caldwen.html

I am still spending a Virtual Vacation in Calidar's beautiful Caldwen. But you know what every tourist needs? A tour guide. Thankfully our thoughtful travel agent Bruce Heard has supplied us with not one, but two new "tour guides" for anyone traveling to Caldwen.

CAL2a Conversion Guide to Caldwen for Vintage Roleplaying and CAL2b Conversion Guide to Caldwen for the OSRIC System.

Both books follow the same format. The only differences are the systems they are being converted too. The books cover both CAL2 Calidar On Wings of Darkness and CA2 How to Train Your Wizard. Knowledge of PG2 A Players' Guide to Caldwen and Game Mechanics for the World of Calidar is helpful. (links are to reviews, not the products themselves.)

The books are 30 pages with full-color covers and color with black & white interior art. Prices at $3.95, but currently $2.95. You do not need both, but I find it nice for my own system analyses.

Unlike the main Caldwen/Calidar books the art here is sparse, but that is by design since the focus of this book is the stats. Here Heard make explicit the conversions he discussed in the main books using the Calidar game stats. Depending on the system book you grab, you get easily familiar stat blocks and guides on how to use the books. Now obviously the "vintage roleplaying" can be used with any 70s and 80s circa version of the World's Greatest Role-Playing Game. Or as I have called here, any Basic-Era edition. It is labeled for "Labyrinth Lord" but any game similar enough to Labyrinth Lord can be used (ie. only a Law-Chaos alignment axis, race-as-class), or adapted. The OSIRC-labeled version can also be used with any Advanced-era version of the game.

One of the main features of these books is the Mage Knight class. I am quite fond of this class so I wanted to try it out. Now I have choices, a "Basic" or an "Advanced" version. Now the class has been converted faithfully, so don't expect them to look exactly the same between the Basic and Advanced versions. There is no description of the powers the Mage Knight has, you still need the Caldwen book for that, but this is expected.

After the Mage Knight, we get into the How to Train Your Wizard material.

Throughout the book, page references to the sourcebooks are given.

So the great thing about these books is if you play a particular system then you only need one conversion book. True, it does mean you need two books, but for me the flexibility more than outweighs this minor issue. I am a system guy, so I like being able to have multiple versions of the same material to blend between my games. So yeah for 3 bucks it is totally worth it for me, hell it is worth it for 6 bucks to have both versions.