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“Monsters” are creatures that don’t have a stat line (str, dex etc), just HD, AC, and attacks.
First of all, if you have the same creature in your monster manual, that’s always going to be better. Use that.
Otherwise, use the “oHD” header based on their original HD in the table below to find the correct row for them. Their AC is going to be 18 minus their 1e AC.
Their ability modifier (sans proficiency) for both constitution and their main attacking ability is listed under “mod”. Halve that for their other four abilities, if needed.
Add that ability modifier to the 1e damage for each attack, and if there’s a †, each attack should have two dice (of whatever the 1e die size is) and ‡ means that it should have three dice. (Unless they have a great sword or maul, this isn't necessarily part of the weapon. It can be explained by abilities like Brute, Sneak Attack etc.) If the 1e stat block already has at least that many dice, use the 1e amount instead.
Give them a number of attacks equal to their #Atk value here, or their 1e number if that’s higher.
Their hit bonus is listed under AV. AV 15 means that they hit with +5.
The HP is what you add to their existing 1e HP, based on their new HD (listed under nHD) and their constitution modifier (listed under Mod). The XP value is for 5e.
oHD Mod #Atk AV HP nHD XP 1 1 1 13 +6 2 50 2 2 1 14 +10 3 100 3 3 2 15 +16 4 200 4 3†2 16 +27 6 450 5 4†2 17 +37 7 700 6 4†2 17 +41 8 700 7 4‡ 2 18 +36 9 1100 8 4‡ 2 18 +49 10 1100 9 4‡ 3 18 +53 11 1800 10 4‡ 3 18 +63 12 2300 11 4‡ 3 19 +61 13 2300 12 4‡ 3 19 +73 15 2900 13 4‡ 3 19 +77 16 3900 14 4‡ 3 19 +81 17 5000 15 4‡ 4 19 +85 18 5900 16 4‡ 4 19 +89 19 7200
For hit dice 17 or higher, their new HD is going to be three more, so you can calculate their new hitpoint value by (4(hd+3) + 13) and then looking up appropriate stats in a 5e book like Forge of Foes or similar.
For HD less than one, don’t add anything. They’re fine the way they are. Mod is 1 and attack value is 13. XP is 25, 10, or even 0 depending on the situation.
By “people”, I mean creatures that have a stat line. They already have a con, a str, a dex…
Converting people is a chore so if you wanna treat them like monsters and just scroll up, I don’t blame you.
There are two approaches: keep their HD the same, or bump it up. That’s not the kind of decision you want to be making arbitrarily on the fly if you’re playing blorbily, so have a consistent policy. For example: “bump hack&slash–style enemies, not NPCs.” Or always bump or never bump, whatever you decide. Stick with that decision.
Bumping them up means selecting the row that matches their oHD, and changing their HD to instead be the nHD, the same way you would for a “monster”.
If you did not bump them, look up their HD in the nHD column directly instead.
All you’re getting from the row is their XP value, their number of attacks, and (by looking for †or ‡) their dice per attack.
You’ve already got their ability mods. Add their proficiency bonus to their main stat to find their tohit value (and then add eight to that for their save DC or ten to that for their AV, if you’re using the “attack value” house rule).
The proficiency bonus is based on nHD if you bumped it and oHD if you didn’t. It’s (Level+7)/4, so 1–4: 2, 5–8: 3, 9–12: 4, 13–16: 5, 17–20: 6.
Add HP based on their con. (And if you bumped the HD, add 4.5 per HD.) Or just add con to 4.5 and multiply that by the current HD.
An AC of 18 minus 1e AC makes for good gameplay at these these high hit point and damage values, but it doesn’t make sense for an AC 13 guy to then have been revealed as wearing chain mail when the party takes his gear after the fight. 21 minus 1e AC matches up with most of the 1e armor types.
So you have two options.
AC 18 minus 1e for fun gameplay but confusing for looting sticklers.
Or, use 18 minus 1e for monsters and for plate, splint, and chain (reading that as “halfplate”, “breastplate”, and “chain shirt” respectively) but 21 minus AC for other armor types.
The 1e PHB didn’t have chain shirts or half plates or breastplates. These lower ACs are more fun to fight against.
Stan Shinn made homebrew conversions rules when 5e was still in playtest and called “next”, and updated them when the real game came out. We used them for B4 The Lost City and it was good. Most of the monsters, we’d use the 5e version of, when available, but still. Nice to have.
Then the official conversion rules came out and I switched to them right away. They were a lot simpler and I didn’t need a table, I can do it in my head (AC is 19-(b/x AC) or 20-advanced AC, tohit is 2+half HD, damage & HP is unchanged, super low for 5e) and we used them for many years. But we weren’t happy. Player characters were whiffing a lot and once they did hit they were one-shotting the enemy. Whenever an OSR module had 5e stats, like Temple of the Blood Moth, that always worked a lot better.
So for our visit to Arden Vul (at the time of writing, we’re forty sessions deep into that campaign), we switched back to Shinn’s version. It worked so much better!
Not having any XP values easily available was a problem, and my players are weird about expecting monsters to work similarly to PCs, so if they see someone fighting with 1d6+8, they think “that’s one hell of a magic weapon” and get suspicious when they pick it up and it’s not.
So in my table here, I worked with Stan Shinn’s table and with the table in the Forge of Foes book to find numbers where there is some plausible explanation for the new HP and damage values, and set appropriate XP. More HP is explained by high constitution and more hit dice, and more damage is more dice and more attacks instead of high static modifiers.
Shinn has different AC values at different levels. And inverted, to compensate for 1e’s steeper curve. So HD1 creatures would have 20-1e AC, HD2 would have 19-AC etc. That has worked OK. It gives values a lot lower than Forge of Foes, but that has been a good thing. But it’s a li’l fiddly. I changed that to 18 across the board, with the option of 21 for some armor types that the party is gonna loot.
One weird thing in the WotC monster manuals is that proficiency for monsters is based on their CR, not their HD, while (at least for the core MM), their spell slots and “caster levels” and such is based on the HD. Here I made the HD match up to proficiency bonus more consistently, both for monsters and people. Trying to have the best of both worlds of consistency and game play. The XP reflects the resulting CR.
