On to the next chapter of my Strange Aeons deconstruction!
The cult of Hastur no longer threatens Thrushmoor, and now the adventurers board a riverboat to Cassomir to track down their obsessed and corrupted former employer. Along the way, they explore the Dreamlands and attempt a number of bizarre dream quests, after which the adventurers can heal their fragmented minds—but they also learn of a greater threat looming over Golarion. Can they survive the perilous Dreamlands and emerge intact or will they be stranded in a dimension of nightmares?
Well... onwards out of Ustalov, I suppose. Given that there are pastiche elements upcoming that are clearly based on The Nameless City, "the mad Arab" from various works, much of the Dreamlands cycle in general, and even shows a lot of the influence that Lovecraft got from Vathek, going to the Golarion Middle East seems certainly thematically appropriate. (Edit: When I first wrote that, I had briefly confused Cassomir with Katheer. Cassomir is the Golarion version of Constantinople during the Byzantine Empire, not the Middle East per se. But it's an important waystop from the "Eastern Europe" of Ustalav to the Middle East. And Katheer is the destination given at the end of this adventure, anyway.) There's a lot of Dream Cycle references going on here, actually, as well as nods to Clark Ashton Smith's parallel creations that may not be part of the Lovecraft Mythos overall, but perhaps an extremely similar development alongside it.
PART I: THE SELLEN PASSAGE
Curiously, this portion of the adventure is supposed to represent nearly three months of travel, mostly by waterways and navigable rivers. There's some sample encounters, not all of them combat, that you can throw in to make the journey feel that long, but ultimately, you're going to have to do a Raiders of the Lost Ark style red-line, even if you do add some encounters to break it up. In real life, a long boat trip through potential exotic and hostile territory is an adventure in and of itself, but of course, it's also an adventure occasionally and a long, tedious slog most of rest of the time. While some of this stuff is pretty good, it—unfortunately—doesn't really fit the horror vibe, either. It's more of a... temperate African Queen, or something. The red-sailed boat following them would be the Germans in this analogy, although you can't really go on the attack against that ship, I suppose. In fact, it reads more than anything like a travalog of this part of the settings, which is perhaps a little on the undeveloped side compared to some other regions. We get the brief Illmarsh episode, the brief Razmiran episode, the brief River Kingdoms episode, the brief Galt episode, etc. This may be somewhat unavoidable given that... well, that's exactly what's called for to get to Cassomir (a kind of Golarion Constantinople from the twilight of the Byzantine Medieval period) but it's not the mood of the adventure path, so the red line and avoiding any of these encounters may be called for if keeping the mood is the more important goal.
PART II: DREAM QUESTS
Part two of the module is stuff happening in the Dreamlands. This is meant to be another list of different things that happen at different points during the journey, concurrently with part 1. The GM has a lot of flexibility in terms of how to arrange these to make it feel somewhat less like a railroad (technically a boat trip down a river isn't exactly the same as a train ride down the tracks, but y'know... facultatively, what's the difference?)
Now, given that these events are largely a pastiche of a bunch of Lovecraftian story elements, it helps if you and the players have read most of the stories in the Dream Cycle, but my experience is that many Lovecraft fans don't really get, like, or partake of the Dream stories, because they're significantly different than his horror stories. This is unfortunate, because personally, I find them to be my favorite of Lovecraft's stories sometimes. I went to my bookshelf and pulled up my Del Rey trade paperback anthologies, which although I've had for several years I've never read. (Because I read the Complete works of Lovecraft online or on my Kindle instead, since they're public domain stories. But I do have this copy, and I recommend it. The introduction by Neil Gaimen is interesting, and it's always nice to have physical copies of the books you love so that when the inevitable infrastructure collapse comes, you can still read.)
I recommend sampling the Dream Cycle stories before playing this or running this. My personal favorites, and ones that get quite a mention here, include "The Doom That Came to Sarnath", "The Other Gods", "The Cats of Ulthar", "The Nameless City" (which isn't really a dream story; not sure why it's collected in this volume. It is heavily pastiched later in this adventure path, though, so certainly read it. It's one of the "lesser" Lovecraftian works that many probably haven't read before) and the magnum opus of the Dream Cycle, "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath." Of course, in terms of pastiche, keep in mind that this adventure path also features heavily "The King in Yellow" by Robert Chambers, written well before Lovecraft. Although Lovecraft referred to Chambers' elements as if it were part of the Mythos proper, and they've been usually treated as such ever since.
There's a little rules subsystem on research here, which refers to a more expanded version in another rulebook. Of course there is. That's definitely the Pathfinder way. But again, this is an attempt to make D&D play out in the way that the stereotypical Call of Cthulhu game plays out, at least a little. Once the initial research is done, the PCs can travel to the Dreamlands itself in dream and do more research/adventuring. Curiously, in their occult subline, Paizo had already introduced some of these same ideas, but here they need to be adapted slightly to be more explicitly Lovecraftian in tone.
There are then seven little mini-quests to travel to various locations in the Dreamlands and gather various McGuffins so Abdul Alhazred, "the Mad Poet" as he's been recast as in this adventure path, will talk to them. Again, these aren't really horrifying, and many of them are little more than pastiches of stories from the Dream Cycle. They do, however, manage to mostly be surreal at least, which I think was probably the "dream-like" goal.
PART III: RETURN TO THE YELLOW KING
Returning from all of these quests to the Yellow King, the advisor who sent them on the quests in the first place, and who is a fragment of Lowls from before he went crazy and/or evil, they find that he's been kidnapped and taken to the Dreamlands moon—so more pastiche, echoing an extended sequence of the DreamQuest itself.
The PCs travel on shantak-back to the moon where they must storm a prison to rescue the Yellow King. Oh, and the prison is currently in a state of revolt; one of the junior wardens has rebelled against the warden and holds half of the prison. Not sure why that is such a cliche D&D trope, but it kinda is. Maybe because presumably the power-struggle implicitly gives the PCs an opportunity to turn one side to its advantage against the other, or something? In any case, when Randolph Carter was a prisoner of the moon-beasts in the DreamQuest, it was one of the creepier scenes; here, the moon-beasts are humanized completely in their behavior and psychology, which ruins the effect. Anyhoo, once the Yellow King is rescued, they can get directions to the Mad Poet, and complete the adventure. He gives them clues, tells them to wake up and go to Katheer in the Golarion Middle-east, which is as I mentioned above, hardly surprising, and then they fight dream images of themselves to get their memories back (whatever that means exactly, as there aren't really any memories to speak up that we haven't already pieced together.)
BONUS STUFF
There are three NPCs detailed; the Mad Poet, Abdul Alhazred himself—one of the most iconic NPCs from all of Lovecraftiana, the Yellow King, who is a profoundly important character to the narrative, and .... the strange halfling tough girl who plays a cameo role, but who gets all kinds of bizarre detail on her personality, her history, her heritage, and her sexuality. Lolwut indeed. Freakin' Paizo SJWs. Not only do we not care about this character at all, but giving her twice as much fluff as one of the most iconic pastiche characters you can, as well as one that plays a much more significant role in the development of the plot of this module is just bizarre. There's a discussion on the geography and encounters one may expect among the river traffic crowd, which is kind of interesting, especially considering that some of the countries here never got the regional treatment with a book of their own (although some of them got entire adventure paths dedicated to them.) Some of the random encounters are a little weird though; in the colder northern regions, for instance, the first one listed is a giant amoeba. Huh?
The story is, again, kind of charming in the sense that it feels like a Disneyland reenactment of a scene from the DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath. If you find that kind of thing charming, anyway. There's a bestiary, mostly of creatures that don't feature in the module. In fact, the first, a "formless spawn" derived from a Clark Ashton Smith tale are almost certainly just reinventing the shoggoth wheel. Tsothaggua itself is next. Then, we do get one that actually makes an appearance; an Ib shade. Again, if you know your mythos. then you know that this is the undead original inhabitants of Ib, the city mentioned in The Doom That Came to Sarnath. I always imagined them as little different than softer Deep Ones, though.
In general, the module uses a lot of esoteric mythos creatures, few of them detailed in the module itself (buy their various Bestiary books for full details!) Most of them start to feel a bit overkill at times; it's a little like the dozen or more variations on an incorporeal undead in D&D normally; ghosts, spectres, wraiths, and many more; when conceptually they kind of are all the same thing already. I didn't see anything that I'd have an interest in statting up in m20 yet; I already had a fairly Lovecraftian heavy monster list from the get-go, and adding really esoteric monsters like the wamp or the zoogs, or even a shantak for that matter, seems like more than I need. I'm a big fan of not proliferating rules anyway; if I really needed one in one of my games, I could repurpose a similar-enough creature and use those stats.
And while I'm a big fan of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle of stories in general, I'm a big fan of them as proto-Sword & Sorcery after a Dunsany-like tradition, not really a fan of using the Dreamlands to go into while the characters are dreaming to have a kind of plane-hopping vibe to it. I know that relative to my earlier go-through of this (the Serpent's Skull adventure path on my Isles of Terror tag) I'm mostly just summarizing these adventures and spending less time talking about what I'd specifically borrow out of them. The truth is, I've both gotten more picky about what I'd borrow and what I think m20 needs added to it, as well as found less that I'd be interested in borrowing anyway. I did that in the prior series, in part treating it as if I were to try and convert the module as is into my game as opposed to merely raid it for good ideas. Because my mindset has drifted more firmly into the latter camp, discussing the module the way I did then seems silly. To be honest with you, most of the discussion of how I'd take stuff from this AP has to be done at the end of the read-through anyway.
As an aside, since I did Isles of Terror, I did read the entire Rise of the Runelords collected edition in a single book. This was a while ago now, but I wonder why I didn't do a series out of that? Probably because I didn't want to take the time after reading each section to write one of these up, and I was feeling a little bit burned out on the project at the time. I am drawn back to it on reading this though; while Rise of the Runelords clearly isn't as thematically strong as Strange Aeons or Carrion Crown that I did first, it does, arguably, have better moments of horror than either. The second and third modules in particular had a horror basis (The Skinsaw Murders and The Hook Mountain Massacre) at their core, and while they weren't necessarily trying to be anything other than D&D, in many respects, they realized the horror angle better than the AP's that later were specifically thematically geared towards horror.
Curiously, I did play Rise of the Runelords up through the third chapter. Or somewhere in the third chapter, at least. But it took me reading it to really get that. Probably because we weren't really focusing on trying to create the horror ambiance. Our haunted house excursion felt more like a dungeoncrawl than a haunted house. But I can see, after having played it and then much later having read it, that if you'd been inclined to do so, you could really have done this as a good horror module. Or at least some elements of it. As I'm reading Strange Aeons, I find myself more and more drawn to some of those effective Rise of the Runelords scenes and wondering if I'd rather work them in than the actual Strange Aeons content, sometimes.
No comments:
Post a Comment