Successful one shot

I'm so tired. Last night's one-shot went longer than I would have liked (slow start due to the host making the whole thing a kind of buffet dinner party, and seven players—I think I kept the game moving along pretty fast in relation to what it likely would have been like had I not.) I was already tired before it started, and only got maybe six hours of sleep last night, if I was lucky. I'm very tired. 

Luckily, although work hasn't completely come to a halt, there's not much going on today. I have to present a BS presentation this morning, and call into a couple of other minor meetings in the late morning and earliest afternoon. I do have a few people who've scheduled things for mid-afternoon, but given that I feel like I'm almost the only person here (not literally, but you know what I mean) I'm almost certainly going to blow off the latest of the meetings and just go home early afternoon. I have a 12-12:30 meeting, which is my last one that I have to be in. I also have half hour meetings at 2 and at 3, but those are the ones I think I'm not going to do. Rather than eat the lunch I brought, I'll finish my lunchtime meeting and then go home, and check my work phone just in case there were any updates later. Meanwhile, I think I need a siesta muy bad.

That said, I'm pretty happy with how my one-shot went, and I felt from the room energy that it seems to have been fairly successful. Let me recap briefly. 

I adapted two existing Paizo adventures, rather slapdash in a way, to create a Krampus themed adventure, with the holiday "D&D meets the old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer stop motion Christmas special" kind of feel. By request; that theme and tone is not really in my wheelhouse, but y'know. It worked. I took the first part of Paizo's "Burnt Offerings"; the goblin attack on Sandpoint at the Swallowtail Festival and combined it with their early Game Mastery module D0: Hollow's Last Hope. As it is, I thought this was kind of brief, but I wanted to have plenty of material; I did end up cutting a lot of stuff. I turned Sandpoint into Snowpoint, the Swallowtail Festival into a Christmas Festival (but I did have the church dedication) and the goblins into gremlins. Like literal gremlins from the Gremlins movie, which I recall does take place at Christmas and has some iconic Christmas theming. Of course, I also made the gremlins have greasy furs and leathers, because scaly gremlins bounding around in the snow is incongruous, to say the least. I thought the dark comedy vibe of the gremlins and their mischief was an obvious match to the Paizo version of goblins, and what the heck. 

I had the first encounter, a rather easy one against a few goblins running amok, doing stupid stuff and generally being a light-hearted encounter. But then it escalated to a mounted "hobgremlin" on a mangy cross between a wolf and a giant naked mole rat and gremlins with torches who set a hay wagon on fire. This was a slightly more serious combat, but still one that the PCs were able to win handily. Only one character was seriously injured. There were other encounters, or at least one other encounter, as well as a bunch of roleplaying opportunities in town that I had in mind for the characters to engage in, but as it was now already getting later than I thought, I cut all of that, had the PCs walk down the street a few blocks to the apothecary (where they were given some healing potions, or whatever they call cure light wounds in 5e) and learned that the weird toxic coal that the gremlins were carrying is a disease vector. It seems that they were trying to introduce a plague to Snowpoint.

Holly, the Christmas elf (really a gnome, since that is the closest regular PC race to a Christmas elf) remembered some lore from her childhood of Santa's fallen brother and the elves that he took with him—who according to Christmas elf urban legend were corrupted and degenerated into spiteful little creatures; not unlike the gremlins that they just fought. The apothecary, who's name I didn't bother looking up in the moment, and so he became "Doc Brown" told them that he could create a cure for the disease but he was missing a few ingredients, which could be found in the wild. This is the pivot to "Hollow's Last Hope", but of course, that module has three ingredients, not two. I was starting to get really conscious of time.

I had a ranger, a druid, and a monk who had some wilderness background, so at least some of my characters were capable in the wild, which was good. They went to the lumber camp, failed a few diplomacy checks, or whatever exactly they're called in 5e (I think I mislabeled them several times. The skill list is significantly truncated from 3e to 5e, and many names changed for probably no good reason) and finally convinced the camp supervisor that they were on the up and up. He gave them directions to the oldest tree in the forest, where they could gather a lichen McGuffin, and then also told them how to get to the old dwarven monastery. They set off into the woods.

I'm a confirmed outdoors-o-phile, so I actually had some stuff planned for the woods, and my players (the actual players, not their characters) had just enough experience with camping and stuff to get into it too. By this time, it was nearly dark, so they had to set up camp; curiously where we found that some people didn't have any gear at all, or even rations. Luckily, between the party, they had both the skills and the gear to take care of everyone, but I think it was actually a surprisingly satisfying effort to set up an effective camp and keep everyone warm and fed. They were also able to cleverly outwit a pack of hunting wolves and escape them without any combat. It's always satisfying to solve some problems without just fighting them. The next day they went to the oldest tree in the forest, but due to some poor working together, they were not spared the encounter there. They could have been; the wizard wanted to use mage hand to pluck the lichen from a distance, but another character saw the bodies hanging up in the tree Predator style and of course had to go check them out. He even cut one of them down, where they found—among other things—a magical crossbow (important for overcoming Krampus' damage reduction later.) But curiously, they only cut down one body, not all three, so they only got one magical weapon, not three of them. And, of course, they disturbed the "tatzylwurm" that lived in the hollow trunk of the tree. However, the party all had terrible initiative rolls in the combat against the gremlins in town; they had really good rolls here, and were able to really whale on the enemy while he was waiting for his turn, so he didn't manage to do too much to them to slow them down.

Finally, as we were approaching the time I would have liked to end the session, they arrived at the dwarven monastery. After a quick encounter with some undead crows and ravens, which I allowed one PC to solve quickly and easily both in the interest of time and in the interest of letting her do something cool, I had them find that the whole thing was deserted and they could just go find the mushrooms—any real exploration or encounters that the monastery had were cut for time. Of course, by the time they finished all of this, it was nearly dark again. They were tempted to camp right there in the monastery, but the dwarf PC noticed that the dwarves had obviously fallen to some dark cult before they disappeared, so they decided that staying there overnight was probably a really bad idea. It actually would have been a good one, because since they didn't, they were just out in the open at dark when Krampus attacked them finally.

This was actually a serious fight. In the first three rounds, three different PCs went down, although not permanently. My Krampus had a few unusual abilities; damage reduction (although I wrote down hit point damage, I wasn't actually tracking it and had no idea what I thought his reasonable hit points where, so I just decided when I felt like it had been long enough that he was within about half a dozen hit points of dying, and told them that if they were lucky, the next shot could take him down. Of course, then the player rolled low damage and passed the baton to another player. I'm a fan of letting players know stuff that actually increases anticipation and engagement in combat, though. Mystery numbers can be good for immersion, but it can also lead to disconnect from what's going on, paradoxically. I tend to share more numbers than not during combat.) He could also pounce—charge forward and do a full attack, which was pretty devastating because he had a pretty high to hit bonus and pretty high damage, especially against first level characters. I also gave him a chance to reflect spells back on the caster, which ended up being kind of fun. Anyway, it wasn't really my intention to kill PCs, but I was a little surprised how 1) difficult it actually is to kill 5e PCs. I mean, I could have done it, but I'd have had to deliberately do so, like having Krampus take an action to coup de grace a downed PC. Which I thought about, but decided against. 2) the 5e action economy is kind of ridiculous. PCs can, if they're interpreting the rules correctly, do way too much, especially at first level. It may be obvious reading between the lines here, but I don't actually know the 5e rules, and I basically ran the game as if it were 3e, and let the players run their PCs, trusting that they knew what they were doing with their characters. Again; not sure that I care to learn 5e better or not. I don't like 5e, and I have enough experience with it to say that confidently now, as opposed to before where my opinion was more that I simply wasn't very interested in 5e. I will say that I don't hate it either, though. It just seems like a slightly over-powered and dumbed down 3e; 3e on training wheels, with a few admittedly clever innovations like advantage/disadvantage, a few improvements, and a whole bunch of changes that are neither improvements or detriments; just things different for its own sake. I have legitimate complaints about 3e after all the years that I played it, but I don't hate it either. But I don't think 5e fixed my problems with 3e. It's just a slightly different take on the same rules concepts, mostly. I haven't concluded that I think any of the changes are necessarily improvements, though. I'd honestly rather play 3e still.

I also played completely theatre of the mind. I didn't actually intend to do that, but the table was too far away to be easily reached and interacted with, and I'm quite certain that my theater of the mind approach made the game move much more quickly than it otherwise would have, which ended up being a significant KPI I needed to hit. 

Afterwards, some of the players were really into the idea that Krampus must have a bag full of children, because that's all that they know about Krampus. That hadn't actually been my intention, but I thought what the heck; if that's what they want and expect, that's an easy thing to deliver. They did find a bag, and it had lumps of coal, but softer, less mature lumps of coal, with the images of tiny children inside, kind of like General Zod and his buddies in the Phantom Zone from the old Superman movies. So, they got to rescue 11 children; except they were stranded out in the woods, a full day away from the town, in subzero temperatures (I did point out that there was no indication that these kids were even from that town, but that's something to be solved off screen, as we were better part of an hour past my targeted end time and it was getting quite late.) Just a little twist that things weren't peachy, and they had to still be on their game. Even as the game was literally winding down.

All in all, a pretty successful evening. I kept the game rolling and moving in spite of a lot of inertia that it naturally had to slow it down, we accomplished quite a bit, really, and in spite of the fact that I don't really like or even know very well the rules, that had no appreciable impact on the game itself. I do think that I'm a little less enamored of the idea that I can run 5e for them, at least not until I figure out a few things about the rules, like the action economy (a very trendy phrase in RPG discussions these days); one character in particular always seemed to have more actions than everyone else. Either he's a consummate power gamer who builds "better" characters than everyone else, or he's fudging the rules in his favor and isn't supposed to be able to do that either. I think he may be taking the offhand attacks option and optimizing it, but whether he's doing so "legitimately" or exploitatively I'm not sure yet.

E6 with Pathfinder 1e

E6. I haven't talked about that in a long time, because I've pretty much abandoned regular D&D as a favored rule set for my setting(s). E6 was originally developed late in the 3.5 era. I don't know how late; that thread has a 2007 date, but it is by its own admission, the 5th thread on the subject since it was developed. I moved on from this, because I was as tired of D&Disms in D&D as I was with the higher level scaling problems. 

Right now, I'm feeling a bit more charitable towards D&D specifically than I normally do. I still prefer my alternative, of course, but I'm more willing to play D&D specifically than I otherwise would be. But if I could run "D&D" the way that I want to, I would prefer Pathfinder 1e + E6. Why Pathfinder 1e? It seems like the easiest way to get what I want. I actually don't really think that Pathfinder was necessarily enough of an improvement on 3.5 that it justified the change, up until archetypes came out. Archetypes are exactly what the classes needed to give me the flexibility to keep playing. Sadly, they came out for Pathfinder 1e, not 3.5. Most of them can be used as is with 3.5, but I think it's a bit too fiddly to say, "we're playing 3.5, but you can use Pathfinder archetypes." Just ... Pathfinder is fine. It's 95%+ the same as 3.5 anyway. The biggest problem that Pathfinder developed, which 3.5 started, was its focus on char-op build strategies, but with E6, this isn't quite a moot point, but... mostly it won't matter too much.

Of course, Pathfinder has a bunch of weird stuff—as does 3.5 after late stage 3.5; there's a ton of races, for instance, that I'd have to say no to. 5e has developed this problem by now too; as I said yesterday, the game feels more like The Muppets than it does any fantasy that I'm familiar with. Or want to be familiar with. There's a reason why I prefer humanocentric campaigns, and even when I have other races, like in Old Night, they tend to be demihumans. Not in the sense that Gary Gygax used the word, which was in opposition to monstrous humanoids, but both meant the same thing except demihumans were non-humans with better PR. No, a demihuman is still mostly a human, just with a twist due to some magical event in the past, some genetic admixture, or something like that. This way you do get some variety, but also get to maintain your humanocentric feel. For me, it's the best of both worlds. Non-humans, on the other hand, should be explicitly more alien. Elves and dwarves in D&D, for instance, are not nearly non-human enough for non-humans. I addressed this in my High Fantasy X, or whatever I will end up calling that, by specifically making most non-humans into demi-humans. Having elves and dwarfs that are recognizable for what they are, but also more demi-human-like really works well for me. Could I adapt some of these racial ideas into D&D? Change just a bit what races like elves and dwarves are? Or is that too much trouble if I'm just doing D&D anyway.

Blegh. The whole thing is enough to make me second guess if Pathfinder 1e + E6 is worth doing after all. Anyway, I'm just about ready to run my corny Santa-themed one-shot. When I was asked, there wasn't necessarily any Santa themed expectation, but I kinda got strong-armed a little bit by being accommodating and not really having a plan. I don't mind doing much of anything for a one-shot, but this is kind of a corny premise, and kind of the opposite of my strong suit in terms of theming and tone. That said, I'm kind of excited for it. I think it'll be good as a one-shot. The biggest upside is that I generated these ChatGPT images for the game, and I think they turned out pretty good. I'll slide them into the "front" side of my GM screen or something.

I think I like the top two, at least for this corny premise, because I gave them Christmas colored eyes, and because AI kept wanting to shrink the monster's antlers otherwise. But I can't decide if I like the blizzard or the light snowfall better.

Old Movies

I recently watched Singin' In the Rain again, one of my favorite old movies. I hadn't realized that Donald O'Connor was 27 when he did the famous "Make 'em Laugh" routine. My daughter, the only one of my kids who likes that movie too, is 27 right now. Crazy. Debbie Reynolds was 20. Gene Kelly, her love interest, was 40. Somehow that doesn't come across as too creepy. Gene Kelly was a pretty good looking 40, and Debbie Reynolds didn't necessarily look that young in this movie... although she did in The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, which came out a whole year later. I guess maybe pairing her opposite Bobby Van somehow made her look younger even though she's actually a year older. Those two movies are also curious in that both feature one of the same songs, although performed very differently, "All I Do is Dream of You." As much as I love the Singin' In the Rain version, the slower, more romantic Dobie Gillis version is my favorite. Including Bobby Van in duet form, and he's strummin' a ukulele. Like most songs in Singin' in the Rain, it actually comes from a much older movie, Sadie McKee, which came out 18 years earlier, and which is also slow and romantic in nature. 

Not that it's a Debbie Reynolds exclusive, of course (she would have been a toddler when Sadie McKee came out); Judy Garland also has a nice version of it from a Andy Hardy movie from 1940. I've even got a jaunty Dean Martin version of the song too. It's a great song. Seriously; I really, really like it.

I watched another video a while ago called something like "why do old movie stars look so old compared to modern stars at the same age?" The opening comparison is Carrol O'Connor (Archie Bunker from All in the Family, which everyone's thinking about now after Meathead's recent murder.) He was 46 in that show, whereas... Paul Rudd is 56 right now and looks at least 15 if not 20 years younger than Archie. I don't know that I look like I'm 53 right now, but I am, and I do at least have pretty graying hair. I'm the same age the actor who plays Mr. Roper was during the first season of Three's Company! The actor who played Grandpa Munster was obviously wearing a lot of makeup, but he was only 41!

Anyway, I don't know that it's that we've uncovered the secrets of anti-aging, although there is some truth to that. Cary Grant was 60 when he filmed Father Goose and he looks at least as good as I do now. If I dyed my hair to get the gray out, I'm sure I'd look way younger. Reportedly, Grant was a bit uncomfortable being cast as the romantic lead against Leslie Caron, who was only 33, and next time he made a movie, Walk, Don't Run, which was his final one, actually, he refused to play a romantic lead and instead set himself up as a businessman and amateur matchmaker. Although he doesn't come across as he's supposed to be 62 in that movie, and he doesn't look it either. 

Then again, Tom Cruise is 63 right now, and Brad Pitt is 61. If you've recently watched the latest Mission Impossible movie or F1, Pitt's recent racing movie, you wouldn't think that they were that old either. Bradley Cooper is 50; all three look about the same age to me. 

I don't know where I'm going with this. Age is hard to guess, I suppose. As I've gotten older, what I consider young and middle-aged has migrated over time, no doubt. In the 80s, I thought that the 40s or even the 50s was so long ago that it was basically a foreign country; we're now even further on the other side of the 80s than those decades were in front of them. 

Some pictures

I don't do Friday Art Attacks very often anymore (although I should!) but here's a few images. I had downloaded them while taking a break at work, but I don't really want them on my work laptop, so I'm posting them online. Many of them I generated through ChatGTP. But not all.

A recent Eberron picture. Meant to be, we think, the city of Wroat. Because why not? It's got a moat. And a boat. Probably at least one goat.

Weird things washing up on shore in the mist.

Ghostly pirate ships and fall colors. Believe it or not, Colonial Americans made up more pirates than we're often told about, so why not ghost pirate ships off the coast of New England?

Some guy took this at a work cost event. I'm the fat guy with the beak nose on the right. I've been meaning to send this picture "home" for months and haven't gotten around to it until now.

Thursday night gaming

Well, I'm running this substitute Thursday Night one-shot this week. I've decided to adapt 1) the first "scene" of "Burnt Offerings" from the first Paizo adventure path, except converting the "swallowtail festival" to a Christmas festival, and Sandpoint to Snowpoint or something. The goblins will be furry little gremlins or frostlings or something like that. They will be leaving plague around too; so after the frostling attack, I will migrate to an adaption of "Hollow's Last Hope" except the "worg" lair will be Krampus instead, Santa's rival. Some of the players have expressed a keen interest in some Christmas theming. One player wants to adapt a gnome to be one of Santa's elves, and another player wants to use a warlock with cold-themed spells to be Jack Frost. 

I've kinda shrugged and said sure to everything here. This is just a one-shot. I don't care that much. I want it to be fun, in fact, I want it to be fun enough that there's some interest in me possibly running a "real" campaign at some point in the future. But in that case, I will not go with the anything goes stuff. What I can tolerate in a one-shot and what I can run in a campaign are two very different things. For a campaign, I want to set the tone and have limits on stuff in the setting. There are a bunch of really goofy ideas in 5e and even more in 5.5e that I wouldn't want people playing, because they're dumb—or at least, they wouldn't fit the tone of any campaign that I'd be willing to run.

Anyway, this is just a quick short update. I'll probably not post another one until after I run it. Then I'd like to post one more time over the weekend before heading out of town for the holidays, during which I don't intend to post anything at all, because I'll be too busy and don't want to try and post from my phone because that'd be terrible. 

I did, however, finish the actual adventure of "Seven Days to the Grave." I haven't finished the whole book, although I likely will tonight, but I did finish the adventure, which is of course by far the biggest chunk of the book. And I started packing up a few physical books to take with me this weekend when I leave. I'd like to finish the novel I'm reading before I go, though, and take another one instead. 

I also binge-watched Wednesday, which has two seasons as of right now. What a surprise and delight show that ended up being! I didn't really expect to like it, but in fact, I very much did after all. Too bad season two just dropped a few months ago; it'll be at least another year or two before season 3 will be available, I'm sure. I think I needed a break from reading. I don't want to slip back into frittering away all my time on line, but I needed a break after all the crap going on at work, and this ended up working out perfectly.

UPDATE: I got some intel on the characters that I'm expecting. Blegh. But it's just a one-shot. Whatever.

• Holly, the Christmas elf bard (stand-in race: gnome)
• Dragonheart a "mark of warding" dwarf fighter, whatever a mark of warding dwarf is, exactly. (ed. looks like it's an Eberron specific thing, which makes sense. I don't know why someone is using Eberron rules for this, but again, I specifically said I don't care, so I have to not care now.) The name is going to make me think of that cheesy Dennis Quaid movie from the 90s with the dragon who's soundtrack was used for a bazillion trailers in the later 90s and 00s.
• Brock Timbers, a forest gnome ranger.
• Reiner, a goliath wizard who bilked a circus and embezzled their funds when he ran away.
• Saul Adal, a wood elf monk who... actually comes from a Buddhist temple?!
• Frispira, a copper dragonborn druid
• ...and name TBD, a warlock who's built to be an ersatz Jack Frost with a lot of ice and cold powers. Of course, since the game will be set up north... that's not necessarily the most effective. Everything is adapted to the cold. (Update: Name is Pukkasakka, apparently "the Finnish Jack Frost" or something.)

I don't even know who all of these players are. Two are from my regular gaming group, another is someone that I know reasonably well but don't game with, and a fourth is someone that I know a little bit but not well, and I also don't game with. Two of them I've never met, and the last is... I'm not sure who it is, actually. Might be a third guy from my current gaming group that I don't know very well. I think, actually, that it is. But it might be another person that I've met briefly once but don't really know. Or maybe it's someone else entirely. The name "John" is all I've got, and because John is such a common name that I don't know if it's the John that I think it is. If it is, then he's a guy that I currently game with, but he's kind of a cypher, and I don't feel like I know him very well. I'm not even 100% sure that his name is John, lol.

Personally, I think a tongue-in-cheek Santa themed adventure is kind of silly. But like I said, for a one-shot? I'll give anything a try. If I don't like it, well, it's not like I'm coming back to it. If I get talked into running a mini-campaign after this, I've been specifically and discretely told that there's probably two people (and I think I know who they are) that I'd do better not to invite. And I'd also start with nothing beyond the PHB in terms of races or classes. And a few other things here and there, but let's cross that bridge when—or if—I come to it.

The problem, of course, is that I don't really like 5e very much. I greatly dislike the idea (which was also true for 3e and 4e especially) that combat is like a separate tactical boardgame that you have to stop your RPG to play, and I greatly dislike that the implied setting, as delineated by the rules, is about half The Avengers and half The Muppets. What I really want is an immersive singular experience that is like reading a book in a setting that's more like a somewhat more grounded and grittier Lord of the Rings or pulp fantasy story, of course. That doesn't seem like an odd ask. But more and more, D&D specifically has drifted away from it. It never was super good at that, but at least it started out on the same page as that's what it was trying to do, I think. Now, it's just somewhere else altogether.

Surprise visitor

Had a surprise visitor last night. My son-in-law does IT deployment for a very major nationwide (and beyond) company, and often has to travel. He had spent much of the week about three hours away from us to the east, but had a flight to catch about an hour or so to the west of us today. Because the IT deployment is a pretty chancy thing, and he often waits a long time for stuff to be available, and then can get work done quickly, he often spends more time on the road than he strictly speaking needs to. Yesterday as I was wrapping up work, he mentioned that he was done with everything he needed to do on site, and other than have a batch run, which he could do remotely, he was done with the deployment, so wondered if I wanted to catch dinner with him, since he had nothing else to do and doesn't mind driving. I actually invited him to stay at our house, which would cut a good 5-6 hours of driving total out, plus our guest bed is almost certainly more comfortable than a hotel bed, and we got to hang out last night, and get one of our personal favorites, Red Robin and their new A1 Steakhouse burger. Because he was able to expense dinner, he also sprung for an extra appetizer; the onion ring tower, even though it made dinner ... er... more than we're used to eating a little bit. I don't usually spring for appetizers, because I'm usually not hungry enough to eat them along with the regular meal anyway. And if I was still hungry, I'd just have gotten an extra helping of their bottomless fries anyway, which needless to say, I was not hungry enough to do. 

Anyway, it was fun to see him, and we had a good time. My son-in-law and I get along quite well because we have similar personalities in many ways and lots of common interests. Among them, are roleplaying games. And hiking/camping. (And the outdoors, especially in the American west in particular.) Classic geek-themed pop culture (although he's a Dr. Who fan—that's always been way too cringe for me.) Etc. Plus, he's a great guy generally, and the father of one (so far) of my grandchildren, so I can't complain. 

Not that I would, even if I could. It did obviously put my binge watching of Wednesday behind, but I've got all weekend to do that, which is much more time than I need, so I'm not feeling like I'm out anything. The break for an actually pleasant social interaction, unlike all of the crap going on at work lately, was welcome. Only one thing that it inadvertently caused me to miss; I was going to email the material I'm going to run in my one-shot on Thursday to myself to print off so I could have printed copies of it at the table, and I forgot to. I can still do it next week, but today was the perfect day to have done it; quieter and less busy, I suspect, and less busy at the printer too. But I suspect next week we'll continue to see slowdowns here in the office as people who haven't spent their time off for the year are forced to do so so as not to lose it at year end. Man, I cannot wait to get to that point at the end of next week myself. November and December have been miserable for work this year. Not that things'll be instantly better in the new year, but there are certain things that will necessarily make them better than they have been, at least. Next weekend, and I'm not sure if it'll be Saturday or Sunday yet, I'll make the drive back to my old house where the family will be waiting, and we'll have the two week Christmas break. Merry Christmas, in advance! I probably won't post during that entire time. I would like to have time to make a quick report of my one-shot before I go, though.

Work, meanwhile, continues to get worse just when I thought it's already at rock bottom. I can't believe what's going on. How incredibly miserable. 

Wednesday

I'm not much of a binger, but I binged the first season of Wednesday on Netflix the last two evenings. Today and tomorrow I'll no doubt binge season 2. I think I needed the relatively mindless activity of binging TV after all the BS going on at work lately, and Wednesday was (mostly) up my alley. Sure, sure, the first season was made a few years ago now and woke hadn't completely gone out of style, so there's a handful of moments in it that are cringe because they're almost woke... but all in all, this is surprisingly free of too much of that, other than a little gag comparing Enid's discussions with her family about not "wolfing out" as being akin to being gay or something, including with a summer camp for "conversion therapy" for kids who don't completely turn into werewolves yet. If that was really more than a gag, though, they screwed up the punchline by having her fully wolf out in the season finale finally, as a little bit of character arc denouement, and she's happy that she did. But like I said, that wasn't a metaphor, it was just a joke, obviously. Otherwise, it would literally be anti-woke, since being straight and normal (for a werewolf) was the desired state. And Wednesday's quoting once or twice of some feminist claptrap came across as cynical even in her own eyes when she said it. 

There's also an ongoing theme of putting down the Pilgrims as super bigoted or something, but I don't necessarily completely disagree with that, as a descendent of backwoods Dukes of Hazzard-style Southerners. Or at least I identify with the southerners on my dad's side. My mom's side were from the north, but they weren't Pilgrims, just regular guys. But even their identity is more as pioneers and later farmer/cowboys that moved out west much later but still long ago. Echoes of Tim Burton's earlier work on Sleepy Hollow with that particular theme, added to Harry Potter with this show. It works because the plots are sufficiently engaging and the characters and their actors have plenty of charisma and chemistry together. It's not brilliant, but it's pretty entertaining, and vegging out in front of the TV is about all I'm up for. 

I included a screenshot (from Wikipedia) of a children's book of nursery rhymes from the 1880s which is supposedly the source of Wednesday's name. Although apparently, the characters didn't really have names for decades when this was a comic strip in The New Yorker in the 30s, 40s and 50s, and they had to come up with names for the TV show of the 60s. I was born on a Saturday. Just my luck. 

In some potentially possibly interesting family drama, my wife wanted me to watch Stranger Things instead, which she is apparently watching. I don't really love that show, but I was happy to watch it with her. But I have no interest in watching by myself. She also admitted that she had committed to one of my sons that we'd go see the finale in theatres coming up here at Christmas. I told her that I was perfectly fine going to see it in theatres, but there was no way I was going to do the better part of 10 hours of homework to get all caught up so that I could watch it; I'd spend half an hour tops reading summaries on Wikipedia. She really had in her mind this idea that we'd independently watch the show and then see the finale together, and I really had in my mind the idea that once she came back home after Christmas and left the kids on their own again, that we'd watch it together. I simply don't care enough about the show to watch it if I'm not watching it with her. That's the only reason I'd care to watch it, is for it to be something that we did together. Stranger Things was pretty clever in season 1, when it was The X-Files meets HP Lovecraft meets The Goonies. It was fresh, and nobody else was doing anything quite like it, etc. But most of the rest of the show afterwards was absolute garbage; poorly planned, wasting of likeable characters, focus on unlikeable characters (creepy Jonathan and bratty princess Nancy, instead of Steve, etc.) and with incoherent plots. Buzz on the latest season isn't great. They kind of redeemed themselves in the 4th season, except that 11 herself got really bratty and unlikeable and the whole Will gay angle was stupid and irritating beyond belief. I think Netflix, or the show, or someone flinched at the last second on that gay angle too, because it was all transparently built up and then kind of quietly not concluded. I dunno. The show isn't terrible, but definitely not good enough that I had any interest in watching it by myself. If she doesn't want to rewatch it with me when she's home, I probably won't watch it at all. I'm actually a little bit frustrated with how it all went down, because I had my own plan of watching this together. But in the end, I guess I don't care that much. If I never watch season five, I won't care.

UPDATE: Also, just saw this. Guns of Mars. Chuck Dixon is great. I love his Levon Cade novels. I doubt that this is very much like Edgar Rice Burroughs, though. It sounds like a classic western focused on survival and psychological drama of being hunted. ERB never wrote anything like that, and Mars wasn't harsh for its environment, which was generally pretty clement, but for its inhabitants. Which is fine. Dixon is a self-professed huge fan of Westerns, so why not? But it feels much more like the Mars of the 50s, not the Mars of ERB's 1911 story. Which is still pretty cool, but has some different themes and is somewhat different.

In some ways, I actually like those better. Just based on the description, I have to admit it reminded more of an Erik John Stark story than something from ERB's Barsoom, though. Which reminds me; although I only re-read it a year or two ago, I wouldn't mind doing it again, if I can find the box that that book is sitting in. I think I saw it a couple of months ago, so hopefully it won't be too hard to find.

Blegh

I took my four-day weekend staycation. In a few hours I need to go to bed so I can go back to work in the morning. Blegh. Unfortunately, while it was restful, it wasn't restful in a good way; a flu or cold seems to have been going around, and because I've been a bit more stressed and tired than normal, I was more susceptible. I spent way too much of the four days kind of out of it and not feeling well. So I didn't get everything done that I wanted to. I did, however, finish reading Lords of Darkness, I read the first of the Pathfinder Stand-alone modules (called Gamemastery at that time) which is the slim "Hollow's Last Hope" which... upon reading, I know for sure that I've read before, because I remembered it quite well. I think, however, with some slight adaptation, that's what I'm going to run for my one-shot guest GM appearance. I'll append the goblin attack from "Burnt Offerings" to the front of it, and change the celebration to a Christmas celebration, and the goblins to frostlings, ala Age of Wonders, which my oldest son really wants me to be excited about again because Age of Wonders IV is apparently a really good game. (I won't be, I don't think. The last two video games I cared about were Red Dead Redemption 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. I don't think I care about either of them anymore, nor that I'll care about any other games again for a long time, if ever. I'm just kind of over video games, I think. Weird for an 80s kid who grew up with a pocket full of quarters is weird, dusty arcades. Anyway, I'll read it again before I run it, and maybe dabble a bit in the 5e player's handbook so I understand how it works differently than 3e too, because otherwise I'm totally fakin' it. Which, I don't think will matter for a one-shot, or even for a campaign honestly, but maybe it'll be easier on me if I know the rules at least a little bit. 

I also read the whole first episode of Curse of the Crimson Throne, "Edge of Anarchy." I'm actually not sure that I've read the whole thing before now after all, now that I just did. I thought I had read most of the combined Pathfinder Revision when I had a copy of it from the library, but I guess I didn't get as far into that as I thought. I did listen to the whole radio play, so I knew what was coming, I suppose. Nicholas Logue, who wrote a lot of the edgier, darker modules. This one qualifies. It's an interesting one, because it "meanders" is maybe the best way to describe it, but taking it's time getting to the point while not feeling like it's just taking you on pointless tangents is maybe a better way of describing it. This particular campaign is one that I'm actually kind of looking forward to going through in toto. Urban intrigue, skullduggery, and stuff like that is right up my alley, and so far (and from what I remember of the radio play) this delivers. Not that it's perfect; there's a bit too much grrlboss power going on, and the lesbian themes are eye-rollingly stupid. That said, changing the character of Sabine to Stephan or Sebastian or something like that solves that pretty well. Maybe one or two other minor NPCs gender swapped back to being white dudes, but it's not a huge deal. 

I also felt like the Varisian and Harrow stuff that came after the module was kind of poor. Not necessarily terrible, just really not interesting. The way liberals romanticize Gypsies as a prototype of the Bohemian lifestyle or something is kind of weird and off-putting, but you've gotta admit that at least it was thematically appropriate for this module. More and more I'm kind of wishing that the Pathfinder adventure path modules were just the modules without the extra stuff and that they'd cost less. I think the list price when these were new was $19.99, but I'd have been willing to pay $14.99 for just the module and the stats needed in the appendix. I do kind of like the Eandro Kline ongoing fiction, but I wouldn't miss it much if it wasn't there, and little else of what it has really does much for me. Even the bestiaries start to feel kind of superfluous when several of the entries every episode aren't featured in the module. 

Another thing that I thought about this one in particular is that with it having a kind of urban skullduggery and intrigue theme, the whole leveling up from 1 to 15 or whatever is kind of weird for this one, actually. If this were a flatter system rather than a level one, it would work better. The whole campaign kind of feels more like a fantasy James Bond or Jason Bourne story or something; reasonable capable characters who stayed flat in power level the entire time would have worked better.

But I think that in general, the more I get older. I've been back and forth over time on what I think about levels over the years, but right now I'm more down on the idea than normal. 

And anyway, here's the kinda sorta Zorro character of this adventure path, Blackjack. Cool idea. Not exactly original, but using it here and having him on the lookout for an heir to the mantle among the PCs works pretty well.

I should re-up my Hero Forge subscription in the new year and make a version of this guy. I might even be able to get that pose, or something close to it.

UPDATE:... aaaand came back to work to set my hair on fire immediately. Sigh. Wow, what a terrible year end this has been for me for work this year.

What is fantasy (high concept)

By funny coincidence (probably not any coincidence at all; probably the infamous Algorithm™) I've seen two videos in the last day or two complaining about D&D of today no longer resembling Medieval fantasy, or even fantasy—it's just modern day social structures put in a cozy utopian setting with some fashion cues from the middle ages. That said, I don't think fantasy is supposed to be medieval simulationism, and while I think something like Hârnworld or Hârnmaster is an interesting idea, it's never been what I was interested in doing in my fantasy. Grounded and realistic doesn't have to look like historical simulationism. As much as I don't like "woke fantasy" or "cozy fantasy" or whatever, I do think that fantasy is at its best when it, at least partially, reflects our current society in some way, and by reflecting it in a different context, makes it more meaningful. Applicability, as Tolkien liked to call it. And he did the same thing; The Shire was very much a reflection of a romanticized rural pre-industrialized Edwardian England from his own childhood, for instance, even though most of the rest of Middle-earth reflected heroic mythic Europe. The familiar is a powerful tool to make the work more accessible to the reader, the viewer (in the case of movies and these TV shows) and the gamer in the case of RPGs.

From my perspective, fantasy at a high level is a combination of three things, and all fantasy that I have any interest in does some of this. Any fantasy that eschews any of these three doesn't really feel like the fantasy genre to me, or if it does, it's so strange that it feels way too different to really qualify as fantasy as I expect it to be.

First, as noted, it needs to be relatively modern. I like watching Modern History TV as much as the next guy, and while much of what he says is actually quite fascinating, I'm not interested in using that as the basis for my fantasy except as items here and there of local color. In order to engage or immerse your audience, either as an author or as a Gamemaster, you need to present a world that is fantastic, but it also needs to be sufficiently familiar that your audience doesn't feel too disconnected from it. They need to understand how it works at a basic level, i.e., if you travel, and stay at an inn, as with Frodo and Co. at the Prancing Pony, it's more like checking in to a modern hotel with modern English pub as a common room than it is like anything that actually happened in the real Middle Ages. The more you dig into the actual Middle Ages of Europe, the more you start to discover that they were much more foreign than you think in how they thought and how they behaved. The more the exercise feels like a smug lecture or an anthropological study on a foreign way of life, the less you can engage with it. Fantasy should be fantastic and have things that are different, but it also needs a grounded foundation that is familiar. The idea that we need to be super Medieval instead of modern is false. I think fantasy needs to be more modern than not. And even when I'm not using "Medieval inns" more like a modern Fairfield Inn, I also use modern fiction conventions. My games and stories tend to have an awful lot of hard-boiled-like influences, and modern thriller influences. I often say James Bond and Robert Ludlum are as important an influence as anything fantastic. Of course, those are pretty fantastic without belonging to the fantasy genre anyway...

Secondly, fantasy is ultimately a romanticized genre that looks backwards and romanticizes some aspect of the past. Usually the Medieval period, but as many people have pointed out, American fantasy tends to have the trappings of the Middle Ages while in many ways reflecting the culture and social structure and environment of the Old West frontier just as much. Two comments: 1) romanticizing doesn't necessarily mean making it pleasant. It could mean making it exciting, which could mean making it particularly unpleasant. So even darker, borderline horror fantasy, like some of what I dabble in, is certainly romanticized. Fantasy is idealized and larger than life. 2) I'm just as likely to hearken back to the frontier or Old West and the Golden Age of Caribbean piracy or the Musketeer era of pre-Revolutionary France as I am the actual Medieval period. The setting of Old Night should—deliberately—come across as much cowboys and mountain men, swashbuckling action like old Errol Flynn movies, and stuff like that as it does Arthurian romance or even Dark Ages post-roman early Medieval, or any other Middle Ages milieu. The European Middle Ages is our shared cultural heritage with our European cousins, because it is part of our heritage from before we split off from them, but the pirate stuff and the pushing back the frontier is a very specifically American mythology, and as a very specifically American man, it's part of my heritage and maybe a more immediate part of my heritage than the Middle Ages.

And thirdly, fantasy needs some kind of overt fantastical elements. This may seem obvious, but I think sometimes people try too hard to be grounded and forget to include this. I also don't mean that fantasy needs to be all fantastic all the time; I actually definitely prefer a more grounded fantasy that is more realistic than not, but if something fantastic and unworldly isn't an important part of the setting, and frankly, the development of the plot and scenario, I don't really consider it much of a fantasy. That said; the fantastic can be subtle, discrete, and even hidden from most people in the setting. But the PCs or protagonists, being special, are the ones who are going to interact with it the most.

UPDATE: Not worthy of its own post, but I've noticed in the last couple of years or so that whereas people always used to say RPGs, they now say TTRPGs. We used to default to the acronym RPG meant of course table-top RPGs, and if we were talking about a computer RPG, we'd say CRPG for something like, I dunno, Final Fantasy or Knights of the Old Republic or whatever. I'm not sure when the need to add TT to RPG seems to have become a thing, but mostly, people now call RPGs TTRPGs and the hobby is called the TTRPG hobby. As an old cuss who doesn't care, I of course will refuse to jump on this bandwagon, but it's a curious observation nonetheless.

What am I reading?

I've been busy with work still, although not quite as much as I was the last few weeks. And I'm back home by myself again after being out of town. As much as I miss having my wife around, I also have to admit... I've kinda started to get used to having the whole house to myself and doing whatever I want to do wherever in the house I want to do it without worrying about her being anxious about my music or my videos I'm watching, or whatever. I'm honestly going to have some mixed feelings about her coming back. Sorry, hon. I love you!

I also have a busier weekend than I'd like, but I noticed that I had two days of time off for the year that weren't scheduled. I can roll them, although if I do I have to use them in the first quarter. I've honestly probably got plenty of time off for next year, so what seemed smartest to me was to schedule a little "staycation" and use those days up this year before December is over while my wife is still away and I can literally spend some days where I don't leave the house at all. So, I scheduled Friday and Monday off. Saturday, I have some meetings that I'm supposed to go to, but depending on the weather, I may blow them off. Sunday I have church, but it's in another building with a bigger crowd than normal. That may be literally the only time I leave the house. Except for maybe grocery shopping. I'm running low on a lot of things. Maybe I'll pick some stuff up tonight. Anyway, that's a long rambly way of saying... I'm going to spend a lot of time at home in the next few days, so what I'm reading is a significant question, because I'm going to knock back (hopefully) quite a few things. So:

• I'm reading Lords of Darkness, an early Forgotten Realms 3e book. On PDF. When I finish, I'll let FR rest for a bit; I think the faiths and pantheons (which might actually be exactly its name) product is next, which honestly I'm not that excited for. Plus, I've got other trawls waiting. I'm about a third through this; I should easily finish before the weekend really even starts, I think.
• Next up on PDF I'll turn to the next Pathfinder Adventure path product, just because that trawl is the longest with the most products and I'm still very much at the beginning of it. I'll start Curse of the Crimson Throne, and once I finish the first episode, I'll stick with it until I read all six, I think. This is another one of the reasonably well-regarded APs from the series, so I'm happy to go through it, I think. I already know it fairly well; I've listened to the radio play adaptation, for instance. I'm sure that I won't finish the AP before the weekend is over.
• I may have to throw something something in there out of sequence, especially if I do end up running as a substitute GM in the next couple of weeks on Thursday night. Which I need to also nail down this week and see if I'm doing it or not, if I am, what am I going to be doing and when I'm I going to do it, etc.
• I really want to read the last book of the Dark Waters trilogy, and the last of the two trilogies of Arkham Horror novels that I have this weekend too. I've been carrying the book around for a couple of weeks but still haven't started it. Once I get started, it'll be a fairly quick read. I'll probably pick up my Solomon Kane collection after that. I bought that ... geez, probably fifteen years ago, and still haven't read it. It's making me feel guilty. Not that it's the only book like that. That's part of the reason I'm doing these trawls; to read books that I bought, was excited about getting, but for whatever reason never got around to reading. That's even worse for digital (pdf) books than for real books, but it's a problem I recognize that I have all around. After that, I've got plenty more to read; the Horned Helmet four-book series, a Robert Ludlum omnibus that includes The Holcroft Covenant, The Bourne Identity and The Materese Circle, a Barsoom omnibus with the first five novels, and more. And of course, I still have my mythology books. I was so pleased to have bought those, but they're harder to read than I expected. I'd like to at least make a bit of a dent in my Celtic book, although I don't plan on finishing it before the end of the year.
• I read just a few pages of the last Heirs of Ash, a kindle book I have on my phone. I'd like to finish that.
• I put away the Pathfinder Chronicles books that I had out and decided to push them to later. Instead, I picked up Monster Manual II from the 3e era, and decided to do that first. After that, it's Races of Eberron, since that kills two birds with one stone and gets my Eberron Trawl started up again. After that, maybe I'll start my Pathfinder Chronicles/Setting trawl for real. I've read some of those books, although not in order, in the last year, and I just acquired two more physical books that I haven't read at all yet. I don't want those to go on the list of "books that I've owned for a long time but haven't read yet" pile. 

On top of reading, I've been very slowly watching the Critical Role animation, and I'd like to probably knock back a few more episodes. I had thought about watching Andor while my wife was away, but maybe I'll try and watch it with her when she gets back, along with the new Stranger Things season. But I've got Seinfeld, X-Files and Supernatural that I've been watching a bit here and there, and I'm kind of in the mood for some more James Bond. I watched The Living Daylights shortly after my wife left, and I meant to watch at least another one, but I'm not sure if I wanted to continue with Timothy Dalton and License to Kill, or pick up Daniel Craig's Casino Royale again. And I've kind of been jonesing to watch The Untouchables again. The Kevin Costner movie from the 80s, not the old TV show from the early 60s with Robert Stack. Even though I wouldn't mind trying that out. I stuck his image in; a promotional shot from the show, just for some visual interest on the post. Oh, and I've kinda been jonesing to watch the Michael York Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers again. It's been a few years, and those movies have been on my mind for a while.

I don't want to over plan, though. If I do, I'll start to feel guilty about all the things that I want to accomplish and am not accomplishing, and I'll schizophrenically start going back and forth between different activities, unable to focus. My number one goal for Friday, Saturday, and probably Monday is to sleep in. I'm not as good at it as some people; I tend to wake up and can't go back to sleep, but as tired as I've been, that won't happen too early. Read some pdfs. Read a novel. Maybe my Kindle novel too. Knock back a physical gamebook. Watch some stuff, as I feel like it, with plenty to choose from.

Now, maybe you can see why I'm not necessarily worried about my wife being out of town. I've got so many things that I want to do still while she's gone that there's no way I'm getting very many of them actually done. And this is just hobby reading and watching of some things, not even anything productive. I'd still like to make some YouTube videos and prep for upcoming gaming too, and I've got a few chores around the house that are starting to beg to be done. 

Runelords and Red Wizards

My history with D&D is kind of spotty. This is probably an overly self-indulgent tangent to lead up to the point I'm actually blogging about, but it's my blog, so you'll indulge me or move on; whatever, I don't care. Although I played D&D fairly early (1980 was my first game, I believe) and played a lot of early versions of the game; OD&D, BD&D, B/X (but not BECMI or RC) and AD&D in the early to mid-80s, but I stopped paying too much attention to D&D specifically before 2e came out. One side effect of that vintage of entry into the hobby is that settings written by setting developers weren't really a thing. OD&D had a Blackmoor and a Greyhawk supplement, but both were much less campaign settings as we'd consider them today and more like expansion optional rules; more classes, more monsters, more magic, etc. Back in those days, running the game and homebrewing your setting were basically seen as synonymous activities. Only much later did they split into two different activities and people start to behave as if using the built-in setting was a given. Because I wandered away from D&D before 2e, which is especially famous for its settings, I never really "got the memo" and changed my perception away from the paradigm that running the game = creating the setting.

A gazetteer cover from the Known World

This change was a long time coming. 3e, for instance, had Greyhawk as the "default" setting in the books that weren't specifically about another setting, but that didn't amount to too much that was actually substantial; the Greyhawk pantheon was given as a sample list of gods, the subraces for elves and dwarves, etc. were specifically Greyhawkian, although generic enough that in theory they could apply anywhere, and a bunch of adventures, especially in Dungeon Magazine, were set explicitly in Greyhawk. But even then, the developers went out of their way to assert that this was just a sample way of doing things, and most products had alternatives for how it would fit to another setting or two that WotC supposedly supported. In terms of very explicitly Greyhawk setting information, there was really only one book that I recall that would qualify as a "setting" book as we think of it today, and that was the early 3e product Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. I couldn't help but not be at least somewhat familiar with the setting, although I hardly was any kind of deep lore kind of guy, but I was familiar with the names of many of the important NPCs, many of the locations, etc. You couldn't not be.

Similarly, I absorbed some of Mystara, another old school setting more closely associated with the D&D line after D&D and AD&D officially split. By familiar, I mean of course that I played some modules set in this "Known World" as it was originally called, like "Keep on the Borderlands" or "The Isle of Dread" and a few others, and I remember the early hex maps of the Grand Duchy of Karameikos from the Expert set. And I knew a little bit about some of the differences, like Shadow Elves vs Drow, etc. between the two settings. But again, the fact that these settings existed didn't imply that people were really using them religiously, and they weren't even structured in such a way to facilitate that anyway.

Through the 90s, I was back into RPGs as a hobby, but explicitly not D&D. I read a bunch of Traveller. I read a bunch of World of Darkness (super chic in the 90s, I know). I read a bunch of Top Secret. I read or played a few other games here and there. I paid more attention to these non-D&D games than to D&D, obviously, but I was at least a little familiar with stuff going on in D&D. I was aware of Forgotten Realms and its immense popularity. I read about a dozen Forgotten Realms novels, including at least 8-9 of the original Salvatore novels; the Icewind Dale trilogy, the Dark Elf prequel trilogy, and probably about 2-3 books that followed, before I gave up. I read some later Paul S. Kemp FR novels.  I knew a bit about Planescape, but mostly because I read about it rather than because I read it. Because I was going through a phase of valuing novelty over tradition, Planescape in particular was much more interesting to me than other settings at the time. I knew about Dark Sun; the kind of "sure, it's D&D, but it's also Barsoom and Mad Max just as much" setting. I knew about Kara-Tur, Al-Qadim, Maztica, Hollow Earth, and many more... although knowing about them and knowing anything significant about them were obviously two different things. I started to like the idea of seeing settings as interesting things to read about that I could raid at will for my own homebrew, but it was really in the era of 3e that I started digging into some of these settings. Many of these settings I actively was still  disinterested in in many ways, as I was still on a novelty kick, and FR, Greyhawk, etc. hardly seemed novel; they seemed pretty vanilla, in fact. Dragonlance was another major setting, and I read a bunch of the novels, and even the Endless Quest books set there, but it seemed so caught up in the metaplot that I admit I didn't really think of it as a setting that you'd actually play in. I know that a lot of people did, but I never had much interest in doing so, and was less interested as I learned more about it. That one's relationship to me is kind of weird. And as I've gotten older, I've found that the novels weren't as good as I remembered them being either, although that isn't to say that they're bad. But Dragonlance to me was always a setting for novels, not games.

As I got back into caring about D&D specifically following the release of 3e, I thought it was a good opportunity to "get in on the ground floor" of some of the settings as they were coming out. Other than the aforementioned Greyhawk gazetteer book, WotC officially supported two campaign settings; a cleaned up and revised Forgotten Realms, that had is own trade dress separate from D&D, and which is fairly highly regarded among fans of the setting as probably the best iteration of the setting (with the possible exception of the original AD&D "gray box" depending on who you ask and what they're using it for) and the new setting, Eberron. I gradually got most of the Forgotten Realms products, hence my ongoing Forgotten Realms trawl, from 3e, but I didn't ever care too much about it, and honestly am only even now cracking some of them open decades after I bought them. Sad, I know. Many were bought used and relatively cheap, in my defense. But I have a problem where I buy books and then don't get around to reading them for years. I know. I never cared that much about FR, as I said, but I liked Eberron's core conceit quite a bit, I liked many of the ways it was executed, and being in on the ground floor, buying the actual campaign setting manual when it was brand spanking new, etc. I felt like I had buy-in on Eberron that I never did on any of the older settings, where I flitted around the edges of them while they got popular and mainstream. With Eberron, however, I was there. It's one of the maybe three or four published settings that I'd seriously consider using, possibly.

Another one is Golarion. Although not official, Paizo had been doing Dragon and Dungeon magazine for years, and many of their employees had written a lot of official D&D products. I always saw Golarion as a kind of para-official D&D setting, if that makes any sense. And being there at the ground floor, it's another one that I always kind of liked, even though I had (as always) my problems with some of the choices that they made. I have a few other third party settings, like Midnight, Dragonstar, etc. but the only truly third party (again, Golarion is para-official) setting that I was at the ground floor on was Iron Kingdoms. 

For Golarion, it got too big, too detailed, too easy to lose track of what was going on, and too easy to find details that I didn't like. But for at least a couple of years, I really loved the original campaign setting book and the earlier waves of products that expanded on it before I lost the plot of Paizo's obsession with rules and charop builds. It also looks like it drifted away from being too explicitly a D&D setting over the years and picked up a lot of its own thing. In general, I'd applaud this as a good move, but in this case, I think what they implemented was actually worse than D&D default in many ways.

Iron Kingdoms is another one that I liked a lot when we didn't have a lot of information on it. The original Witchfire trilogy and the setting that you could just see around it was fascinating to me. The original Lock & Load brief setting treatment was mostly pretty fascinating. The Five Fingers book was phenomenal; one of my favorite RPG sourcebooks of all time, honestly. But the big two volume campaign setting books underwhelmed me and I kind of lost my way with Iron Kingdoms. I even dabbled a bit in Warmachine because I liked the setting, and I have more than a dozen issues of their magazine, No Quarter. But the wargame inevitably changed the tone and themes of the setting; now instead of a brooding, dark setting with a few interesting industrial elements, it became a loud and proud turned up to 11 steampunk war setting that was all fighting, all "coolness" all the time, and honestly; it lost a lot of its original charm by doing so. 

So those three settings are the ones that I have at least some level of buy-in on; Eberron, Golarion and Iron Kingdoms. And Forgotten Realms is the one that I can't quite avoid, and although there are plenty of things not to like about it, there are plenty of things that aren't bad too. And outside of D&D, the Warhammer Old World is a setting I could potentially think of using. Maybe. 

Now; all that said, that's background context. What am I specifically talking about today? Because I just read Rise of the Runelords recently, I'm thinking about the Runelords, and honestly, I've never really liked them. The idea of a powerful magocracy is nice, but mages who are focused on the seven deadly sins, and mapping the sins to the 3e schools of magic? Kind of weak and corny, honestly. Although it seems obvious, I don't think it really occurred to me until this time around that the Red Wizards are better in every way than the Runelords, and if you really needed to, you could use them in place of the Runelords. I mean, I know that Paizo couldn't use the Red Wizards because they weren't open content, but as a player, I'm looking at the two of them and thinking; there's no good reason not to swap the Red Wizards in where the Runelords were, and treat Thasillon as if it's basically Thay. There are a couple of reasons why they aren't exactly the same, though, in terms of theme and tone. To wit: 1) Thassilon is an ancient realm that's been gone for 10,000 years even though its zulkirs... er, I mean runelords are all in stasis and can be recovered. 2) Thassilon's schtick is runelords jockeying for power as sub-kings in a single confederacy against each other, and nobody knows what relationship (if any) they really had with most of their neighbors. Thay is like that too, but strongly driven by an expansionist ideology, and their context is that as powerful as they are, they are only one among many rival nations. 3) In 3e in particular, the Thayan enclaves and Thayan magic items business is one of their most important things going, and while I could easily use that if needed for Thassilon, there's nothing like it in Thassilon as described. But again, the various domains of the various zulkirs stand in almost perfectly with the runelords and their sin-besotted nations; what's exactly the difference between Karzoug the transmuter; super high level wizard king of Shalast which in a hoaky way is associated with greed, and Druxus Rhym, the zulkir of transmutation during the 3e era anyway? Especially if the guy's in stasis and only makes a few remote phone calls to the PCs before showing up at the very end of the campaign to be (supposedly) defeated anyway?

I dunno; maybe I'll feel differently after reading Return of the Runelords, but I doubt it. I think the Red Wizards are superior in every way. Heck, honestly, I think the ties to sins of the runelords was super hoaky and silly; even just generic archmages from long ago would have been better than the runelords

Carrion Crown / Cult of Undeath

Cult of Undeath is a rather radical reworking of the Carrion Crown; so radical, in fact, that its genesis as the Carrion Crown isn't super obvious, much like Star Wars as filmed doesn't really resemble The Hidden Fortress anymore (although earlier drafts of the screenplay did so more.) Now, if I wanted to run it a little bit more as written, what would I need to do? Or what would I want to do, at least? Listening (again) to the Hideous Laughter podcast and actually doing a bit more with my 5e group has made me feel more charitable towards actual D&D. More or less. I'd still rather run Cult of Undeath as I earlier described, but realistically, nobody else is going to be as interested in that as I would be.

Let me make a list.

Firstly, the adventure path is way too long. 15 levels, or whatever it is, is twice as much as I want. And I don't know how many hours that converts to, but "common wisdom" according to the internet is that 200 hours is a reasonable time for an entire AP. We play 3-4 hour sessions, so that would come to 50-67 sessions. If we're lucky we play twice a month (sometimes less frequently) meaning that that is, at best, over two years to finish, but realistically probably as much as twice that and maybe even more than that. Not only do I think closer to 100 hours is a more reasonable time, but I also don't want to go higher than about 7th level at the most either. I can certainly cut a lot of material and shorten the thing by ~50% in terms of runtime, but shortening the levels is a bit more finicky; I'll have to end up making a great number of changes to the monsters and encounters and NPCs to make that work. Which is fine; there's no chance that I'm running this in Pathfinder 1e, as it was originally published anyway, I'll probably end up running it as a handwavy on the fly 5e conversion. Which is kinda funny, as I don't actually know the rules for 5e very well. I've been playing for some months, but I've mostly been playing as a 3e player and accepting correction or direction when that leads me astray. Honestly, that hasn't happened too much. I think handwavy on the fly conversion is certainly possible between these two systems, as long as you're not to spergy about rules. I most certainly am not, nor would I tolerate spergy rules-lawyering at my table anyway.

Secondly, there's some great Paizo horror elements that aren't part of the Carrion Crown adventure path, but are honestly even better in most respects that what the Carrion Crown did. Both, curiously, by Richard Pett as writer. I mean, of course, the stand-alone module "Carrion Hill", a Lovecraftian module that works very well and was originally written for 5e. If "Wake of the Watcher", chapter 4 of Carrion Crown is supposed to be a kind of "reverse Innsmouth", then Carrion Hill is clearly a "Dunwich Horror" pastiche. In most respects, I like it better as a "Lovecraftian chapter" than "Wake of the Watcher", and I'd be likely to read the two of them, think about how to combine them, but focusing more on "Carrion Hill" rather than "Wake of the Watcher." Similarly, although I like the intro haunted house adventure of Carrion Crown well enough, the same theme is explored even better in "The Skinsaw Murders" way back in Rise of the Runelords, literally the second adventure path chapter that Paizo did as part of their post-D&D run. I'd probably look to combine Harrowstone and Foxglove Manor, including the murders taking place around town, the ghoul farms sequence, both of which are brilliant, and then maybe lean a bit more into Harrowstone when you go to the actual haunted house. Which probably won't be a prison full of half a dozen serial killer boss ghosts, because that feels very video-gamey in its structure. 

That said, even though I'm running it more like Skinsaw than like Haunting of Harrowstone, I do want the whole Professor Lorrimor's funeral set-up.

I also want to mix in the whole mistaken identity caper from "Enemy in Shadows", the first chapter of the iconic Warhammer FRP campaign. If this seems like a lot going on front-loaded in a campaign that's already too long and complicated, that's because much of the later parts of Carrion Crown are going to be significantly trimmed due to... them not really working very well, honestly. For instance:

Thirdly, although I raved about Richard Pett's entries in these other modules, he also penned the second part of Carrion Crown. I think it's a reasonably well done module, so I can't fault Pett for this, I don't think, but the entire premise just doesn't work for me. Putting a monster on trial is kind of silly to begin with, and then making the monster a relatable "good guy" who's being framed maybe is supposed to be some kind of "subverting expectations" move, but it absolutely doesn't work for me. Not even a little, tiny bit. Yes, yes... subverting expectations might be overdoing it, because I realize of course that this is a significant theme, simplified to the point of false binary dumbness, of the Frankenstein novel, but I absolutely cannot go with it. That said, many of the encounters that the PCs are meant to have while investigating the Beast's guilt (or not, in this case) are still great encounters. The context in which they happen needs to be completely changed though.

Fourth, if "the monster is a nice guy, it's the white male Christian southerners who are the real monsters" problem wasn't kind of obnoxious already (I know I'm exaggerating, but y'know. I don't care) in the Frankenstein adventure, they go ahead and repeat the same themes in the werewolf chapter (#3) and the vampire chapter (#5) meaning that those entire modules are questionable for use, at best. Maybe the themes aren't exactly the same, but saving some monsters from even worse monsters because they're actually not that bad but just misunderstood is really, really stupid. While cutting two entire modules out certainly works towards my goals of trimming the whole campaign by ~50%, it's not really a great solution either, honestly. But those modules are going to be dramatically cut back, and much of what they "need" to accomplish will be folded into another module that I already have. Plot beats, or story discoveries, or whatever, can be divorced somewhat from the action that surrounds them, especially when the action that surrounds them is often somewhat gratuitous or superfluous anyway. Maybe taking another page from "The Enemy Within", the Whispering Tyrant and the "wake up the ancient dark lord" trope can be more localized, like it is in Bogenhafn. There's nothing wrong with scaling back the scope of these high fantasy epics into something more horror and sword & sorcery-like, and a lich waking up and consuming a decent sized town or medieval-scale city is certainly sufficient stakes for the tens of thousands of people who live there. It also worked for Wisburg, the German(ic?—this was before the German Unification, but I have no idea where exactly it's supposed to be, as it's not a real city as near as I can tell. Austria, possibly, since Transylvania would have been part of the Austrian Empire at the time.) from the various versions of Nosferatu. Save the whole world is tired and tropy in D&D anyway, as far as I'm concerned. 

Anyway, I need to reexamine the modules (it's been too long since I've read them, but listening to an actual play podcast only has me 20-25% or so into the second module so far). I've also been leapfrogging that with an Enemy Within podcast, but even aside from that, I've been wanting to borrow elements of that for some time. Turning the Purple Hand Tzeentch cult into a Whispering Way undead cult shouldn't be too much of a stretch.