I think the two things you have to do "manually" are monsters and treasure conversion, which will actually probably be more of a "re-imagining" than a conversion. That can be fairly labor intensive, though, and I don't know a way around it. Using the compendium and monster builder can definitely help in tracking down and/or creating equivalent monsters, though. I recently used the monster builder to rebuild myconids from scratch to make them like 1e myconids, and it actually went pretty smoothly.
Although you said you don't want to buy new source books, there is a Ravenloft book coming out for 4e that puts the setting in the Shadowfell.
I have some 4×6 index cards that I've made to collect information for DDAL convention play, where time is often a critical factor. The information I collect is:
- Character Name
- Class & Level
- Race
- Background
- Armor Class
- Save DC
- Passive Perception
- Passive Insight
- Passive Investigation
The first couple are obvious, while Background is helpful in a DDAL content because some of the Season 8 modules provide for automatic successes or extra information based on it.
Knowing their Armor Class and the Save DC of their abilities (spells, fighter subclass features, monk ki abilities, etc.) in advance greatly accelerates combat; any question I don't have to ask a player more than once makes things go faster. AC can change from round to round for some characters, so I generally instruct players to provide a most-of-the-time-AC - casters with mage armor but without shield, melee combatants with or without shields based on how they normally fight, etc.
Collecting the three observational passives has much the same effect. Why bother even asking for a roll when most of the time, the character is likely to succeed anyway? If they're not a race that has darkvision by default, I ask that here, too.
Best Answer
I've been able to find a couple. I had better luck searching for
"form fillable" pdf "ad&d 2e"instead of "modifiable", since that's the term that Adobe and therefore most PDF creators use. Here are a couple good ones:A character sheet based on the TSR original for a an AD&D setting called 10th Age can be used for other AD&D 2e settings. The only thing that makes it specific to the creator's 10th Age setting is the text in the upper right, where the AD&D 2e logo would have been. As a bonus, it looks uncannily like the original green-fill character sheets that TSR used to sell.
A minimalist style of character sheet might suit you better. The fonts are clean sans-serif and the lack of extra decoration will be nicer to your printer's ink/toner supply – especially useful if you plan to print a freshly-updated copy before every session.
For more of a multi-page character record than a simple sheet, Mad Irishman's character sheets are highly regarded. They were orphaned for a while, but his site is back up. The form-fillable one is the v4.6 sheet, second link.
As an alternative to a pre-existing one, if you have access to Adoble Acrobat (not just Reader), you can take an existing PDF character sheet (such as Mad Irishman's other 2e sheets that haven't been made form-fillable yet) and run it through the form wizard to make it form-fillable. That's more work, but it means you can use any PDF sheet you can find.