First; I don't run modules, especially story-heavy modules, because there's no way to write them in such a way that they're useful to customers without making them very railroady. I don't run games that way; I have a single side of one sheet as a vague outline, and that's usually enough material to get me through several sessions worth of gaming. My narrow-wide-narrow model for running games may not be an actual sandbox, but it certainly isn't a railroad either, which I find to be complete anathema. Railroads are contemptible; sandboxes are an interesting utopian delusion, but at least it's an attractive one, like libertarianism or something. A well-run game isn't going to be on either end of that spectrum though.
Second, the Paizo modules used to be politico-socially more neutral than they are now, but have quickly adapted to being crazy, emotionally and psychologically broken virtue-signaling wankfests of cringey pandering to the worst people in the world, with snide, passive-aggressive digs at anyone who has the temerity to just be normal, healthy and psychologically whole. It's become run by professional SJWs, and Paizo as a company is showing fairly a advanced state of corporate cancer. To be perfectly honest, much of this is easy to ignore in terms of running the game, but it's tedious and frustrating to have to endure it in the first place while reading the modules and figuring out how to get rid of that nonsense so that you can run a game that isn't going to chase off every player that you'd actually want to be in your game with your perverse, smug, self-righteous tortuous embrace of debauchery and filth as if it were normal and attractive.
Third, and this may sound odd, but I don't really like D&D. By this I mean that I love the concept of fantasy RPGs, and have ever since I first really discovered them, but the notion of doing dungeons and all of the rest of the attendant D&Diana that infuses the Paizo adventures is a major turnoff to me. They always fail to meet the potential of the premise that they offer. In this case, the entire adventure path is based on the premise of being a Lovecraftian horror story set in a fantasy milieu. The reality, of course, is that it's almost certainly going to turn out to be a very caricaturishly stereotypical set of dungeoncrawls and railroads with a few Lovecraftian elements essentially making cameos like a cheap character appearance at Disneyland to wave at the players and make them feel like they got a Lovecraftian experience... without actually offering anything of the kind. That's OK, though—I already know this going in, which is why I'm no longer trying to adapt the modules into something that I can actually play, like I started trying to do when I first started deconstructing Paizo stuff. Instead, I'm just reading, summarizing, and seeing what elements I can use. Kind of turning the adventure paths into a buffet, and seeing what is usable and ignoring the rest.
Anyway, without further ado, let's start summarizing In Search of Sanity.
The Strange Aeons Adventure Path begins with "In Search of Sanity," a mind-shattering foray into horror where the heroes awaken within the walls of the eerie Briarstone Asylum, their minds wracked and memories missing. Working together to recover their missing time, they soon learn that their amnesia is but a symptom of a much greater cosmic menace. As they struggle to retain their sanity, the heroes must ally with other asylum residents and fight against the monstrosities that have taken over the building and plunged it into nightmare. Can the adventurers defeat the terror that stalks the halls and free themselves from their prison of madness?
Nice touch! I've started actually a couple of games with what I call "The Hangover" model before. Granted, referring to that movie implies a gonzo comedy tone, but it's terrifing to wake up and not remember how you got where you are or what happened to you in the recent past.
PART I: PRISON OF THE MIND
The module actually starts off with a manufactured TPK, only to have the PCs wake up and realize that it was only a dream. I've actually done a manufactured TPK once before, with disposible temporary characters, to foreshadow a villain. I feel ...mixed on how well it turned out, I suppose you could say. Anyway, they wake up, they're locked up in an asylum, and it's all gone crazy. Part of it has collapsed, many of the staff (and patients) have been turned into either doppelgangers or ghouls, and they stalk through the halls looking for people to murder. As the PCs explore, looking presumably for an escape, they come across the remnants of a small chapel, who's hallowed walls offer some protection from the nightmares; both physical and in dream, that stalk the asylum. A number of refugees are here, led by what appears in the illustration to be a 16-year old girl. (!?) There's a gigantic fungus eye on the wall here, though, that's spying on the survivors, and which is needless to say, pretty disturbing (mechanically it's a haunt; which I actually imported in similar fashion to Microlite.)
A few other Dreamlands animals, as described by Lovecraft, make appearances. There's zoogs, for instance. Giant centipedes are sitting around for no reason known to mankind (how typical of a D&D dungeon environment, though) and weird, (psuedo)-naturally occurring partially reanimated undead. The trope of asylum patients being the victims of bizarre experiments, tortures and abuses is leaned into pretty heavily, given that the experimenters, torturers and abusers are also insane and most of them have been turned into monsters to boot. Most of them are dead, and those that aren't are almost as dangerous as the monsters.
Teenaged cleric girl will eventually tell the PCs that they're trapped on this river island asylum by a strange yellow fog with horrible monsters in it and strange, otherworldly weather, but can say little else other than that she was stopping by to investigate an AWOL local lord named Lowls, and this Ulver Zandalus fellow was a quiet patient for many years, but is now some kind of insane cult leader of other insane people wandering the asylum. She also tells them that the weird eye haunt is obscuring a door that leads to new parts of the asylum that they haven't explored yet. There's a few other folks huddling here who have some minor useful information, giving the players the chance to engage in some roleplaying dialogue.
All in all, this section proves the point that it's difficult to do horror in D&D. They try really hard with a lot of creepy imagery and weird scenarios, but ultimately, it's a small part of a dungeon where they just throw monsters at you without any context, much in the way of build-up, or anything else that would actually make them scary. And, to date, they haven't really used anything that's unique or unusual. Which is actually a good thing; I think sometimes D&D relies too hard on trying to create a new monster when we've already got... what, hundreds? thousands? of perfectly serviceable ones that could be scary if used properly. Not they necessarily are here, but ghouls can be perfectly scary, as the very first adventure path Paizo did (not counting the three Dungeon Magazine ones) amply showed.
PART II: THE DEAD DON'T DREAM
In this part, as the PCs start to explore the more "wild" parts of the asylum, we start seeing slightly more esoteric monsters; low-CR "shoggoths", another haunt (I do like those, and I appreciate more examples of them), and stuff that is occasionally even more overtly Lovecraftian. (I know, shoggoth-like creatures are certainly Lovecraftian, but Gygax used too many oozes and similar things to make them seem as Lovecraftian as they could; they now feel like a D&Disms.) We even get our first glimpses of "Brown Jenkinses" and nightgaunts at this point. One oddly "unfriendly" move that Paizo has made, which has shown its head multiple times by now, is that they don't include stats for monsters that are in their various bestiary books. You literally have to own all of their bestiaries that were in print at this point (at least four) to actually run this module without substitutions. Maybe that's neither here nor there to most people who might read this, but it is odd, given that Paizo built their reputation early on as being the more customer friendly company who paid attention to what their customers wanted when much of the D&D customer base was finding itself being driven away by what they considered tone-deaf moves by Wizards of the Coast with the launch of 4e.
Again; this is meant to be a kind of haunted house type adventure in this part, but it mostly feels like just a dungeon-crawl, with monsters (or cultists or ghosts or whatever) just kind of randomly sitting in various rooms. There's a peculiar trait that a lot of Paizo adventures do (although they're hardly alone) where there is a bunch of context and background information given that it seems exremely unlikely that the PCs would ever actually find out unless the GM just tells them. Oh, and there's a library where the PCs are literally, I suppose, expected to spend a day or two of game time doing research to get historical backstory on Briarstone Manor. Lolwut? It's clear that the Paizo guys don't know jack squat about haunted houses, and in trying to reskin a dungeoncrawl as a haunted house, they simply made a number of fairly clumsy missteps. This section isn't lacking in good ideas, but the execution is really nothing at all like a classic haunted house story. I know, I know; RPGs aren't stories, but the end product of one should resemble a story for the most part.
PART III: NEVER-ENDING NIGHTMARE
This is more of the same as part II, really. There's a few NPCs to talk to, and if your PCs are much nosier and insistent than most, will discover that a doctor was actually a bit of a foppish weirdo who's family sent him into seclution here for "self abuse and refusal to marry." What?! The module actually has as one guy's secret that his family put him in a sanitarium because he'd rather beat off than get married?! While by the numbers, the "boss" and "sub-boss" fights should be appropriate difficult in a routine kind of appropriate difficulty, this entire conclusion to the adventure feels very much like going through the motions. Even the haunts that it has seem more like just busy-work; the kitchen is haunted by the cook, who's mad that the patients killed him after he fed them every day? Again, lolwut?! They do make pretty good use of the meme Lovecraft himself invented in none other than "The Call of Cthulhu" itself about "sensitive" artistic types dreaming and painting or sculpting or whatever the terrible and fascinating subjects of their dreams. But even here, it feels more like a wink-wink nudge-nudge in-joke of a reference than an actual plot point in the scenario.
Part III is mostly about NPCs, though. Few new monsters, and the ones that we do have are strange "people turned into kinda sorta portals to Dreamland and the yellow mist" as a monster, which seems too esoteric and specific to the scenario that they're trying to create here to be usable anywhere else.
There's also very little in this module that would naturally draw the PCs into the next module. It doesn't end so much as just kind of stop, and presumably the players have figured out (and if they haven't little miss 16-year old cleric prodigy is supposed to tell them in the epilogue) that they are clearly a group of patients admitted some time ago with amnesia, brought by Count Lowls himself, and who worked for him. I suppose that they have to take the ferry off of the island, and maybe the next adventure starts with a hook sufficient to drag them along the railroad tracks, because otherwise there's very little to suggest what they should do to engage in what comes next. Which, no doubt, sandboxy guys will applaud, but it's not the purpose of a published adventure path to have the players ignore the next adventure and just go exploringthe countryside of HorrorLand (one of the subdivisions of DisneyLand, no doubt, and the place where the earlier deconstructed Carrion Crown adventure path took place.)
BONUS STUFF
The Tatterman, a kind of mummy-looking (sorta) Freddie Krueger concept, is treated as an NPC rather than a monster, curiously. It's a real shame; the tatterman could have had the same kind of extremely creepy ambiance as the best of the Slenderman offerings, but it utterly fails to live up to that promise. Reading this entry here, though, he's got a sufficiently strong backstory that the tragedy of this failure is even more acute. The other NPCs also reveal a backstory that could have made a great novella, if it had been written as one instead of as a dungeoncrawl D&D adventure. Sigh. There are some good ideas in here, but again, the execution is severely wanting. One of the NPCs is specifically written in such a way that she could replace a fallen PC, or perhaps become a "cohort" of the party, both of which are actually decent ideas.
The next section allows for players to use the Great Old Ones as a particularly disgusting pantheon, and provide rules for clerics of Cthulhu, Shub-Nigguruth, etc. I don't have much use for this other than I find it curious and interesting side-reading. If I were to ever actually play D&D again, and I somehow drew the short-straw and had to play a cleric, I'd find a way to use this stuff, and become a worshipper of Bokrug to the water-lizard, or Tsathoggua or something.
There's a short story, worth reading—in part because it's quite short—and we get to the module bestiary:
- Curiously, the first entry isn't a beast at all, but rather a "strange weather" table of freaky, supernatural meteorological phenomena.
- Stats for Ithaqua himself (itself?). As appropriate for a Great Old One or Demon Lord, it's CR 28. What it's doing in a low level module is unclear, other than that they obviously wanted to include it, so they did.
- Drexins, a kind of psychic gremlin creature. No connection to the action in the module at all, but at least they're thematically kind of creepy. They come across as more a dark type of fairytale creature than Lovecraftian otherworldly horror, though. They'd make a killer improved familiar, maybe.
- Three disturbing horror-themed swarms. Kind of cool stuff, although I prefer to just use the visual with existing, simpler rules. Do we really need dozens of different types of swarms with slightly different mechanical effects?
- Oneirogon—the aforementioned living portals between the Dreamworld and the normal one.
No comments:
Post a Comment