The campaign fell apart after four of the five characters got killed by a D'ivers in the Seven Cities desert and never really gained any steam once they made new characters.
But it was a fun time while it lasted, and I spent hardly any time at all adapting any rules. I restricted some races (no minotaurs, no gith races, no dwarves, no halflings, no gnomes, no other weird races). Goliaths could be subbed in for Teblor or Toblokai, Drow or Eladrin subbed in for Tisti Andi or Edur. I also allowed people to play as humans but use the mechanics of different 4e species. For example, one of my guys wanted to play a desert dwelling Seven Cities human nomad but used the stats of the half-orc to reflect his barbarian-nomad nature, but roleplayed as a human.
My party consisted of
-Seven Cities tribesman archer (specced as a half-orc ranged ranger)
-Tiste Edur exile swordsman (specced as a drow fighter)
-Teblor barbarian (specced as a Goliath barbarian)
-A Malazan mage (specced as a human wizard)
-A Grey Swords infantry officer, sole survivor of a Pannion raid (specced as a human warlord)
Adapting monsters took some work (a lot of 4e monsters don't 100% fit the setting), but there's no reason why I wasn't able to have my players fight a drake, even if drakes aren't explicitly talked about in the books.
As far as gameplay went, everything was pretty much unchanged. If I did change anything, I just reskinned or reflavored stuff rather than building an entirely new system.
Unfortunately a lot of people want to create a new system or fully adapt a new one and spend all their time doing that rather than actually playing.
My advice?
Take a current and existing system, house-rule as needed, cull the races and classes that don't fit the setting and get to playing.
This post has been edited by Mustard Tiger: 27 May 2011 - 05:22 PM