Freeport Trawl is FINISHED!

Well, last night I finished Return to Freeport which was the last Freeport product. I've read them all as part of the trawl, with one exception; The Player's Guide to Freeport. However, there's a note on the shop listing for said product, which I'll reproduce below:

Note: The content of the Player’s Guide to Freeport comes from Freeport: The City of Adventure. It has been broken out separately to give players easy access to the material in a book that contains no setting spoilers.

So although I didn't read or even pick up that product, I actually have read all of the content in it, because everything in it comes from another book that I did read recently. Now, granted; although I'd never done anything like this before, and a lot of these products I'd never read before (even some of the earlier 3e products that I've had on pdf for years if not decades already by this point—Freeport the setting is two and a half decades old now, and even the latest products are almost a decade old. So I was pretty familiar with the setting. I'd read the original trilogy of modules at least a couple of times, and even read actual play posts (before doing them as videos or podcasts was popular, write-ups after the fact were the way to go.) I'd owned the system-less setting book since it was new, and I've read it several times. In at least some ways, I still like some aspects of it better than the newer, bigger, bolder setting book that came out with the Kickstarter getting close to fifteen years ago now. And I had read some of the other modules here and there, and the d20 version of the Companions many times too. Now that I've read the whole darn thing, every product, beginning to end, what do I recommend actually getting, reading, and most importantly, what do I think of the whole thing?

First things first; some high level discussion about the setting itself and the arc of its products.

Tone: Freeport sells itself as three things: 1. a D&D setting, with most of the things that that means in terms of magic, fantasy races, etc. 2. a pirate setting, with at least some of the things that that means in terms of culture and technology, although how well its done at emulating the pirate-ness and how it did so evolved over time. And 3. a horror setting, with prominent Lovecraftian elements front and center, including an original plot in the original few products that featured serpent-men like Robert E. Howard had in "The Shadow Kingdom," probably the best Kull story, including Valossa which is clearly a "gloss" on Valusia, Yig, which Lovecraft created for "The Mound" which he transparently almost completely ghost-wrote for Zealia Bishop, and the Unspeakable One, which is one of the elements Lovecraft borrowed and expanded on somewhat after reading Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow. I'm not completely sure who first proposed merging Hastur, the King in Yellow and the Unspeakable One, but Freeport gives "him" pride of place as its preferred big villain. Probably the RPG industry through Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu game and even D&D itself through the early Deities & Demigods printing, building on rambly writings of August Derleth. 

As I've said repeatedly throughout the trawl, this tone and these themes were not applied consistently. I'm not a fan of the subversive "the monsters are actually the good guys" theme that the original trilogy had with K'Stallo; who's clearly supposed to be seen as friendly and sympathetic, which is ridiculous. But they walked that back somewhat by minimizing his role and introducing another faction among the serpent-men who were more hostile to the player characters and their races and cultures. Chris Pramas, who before founding Green Ronin had also worked on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for a while, tried to do what they did and add puns and wink-and-nod in-jokes to the setting. Way too much of it. The British have a talent for doing that subtly without over-doing it, whereas in Freeport it came across as more ham-handed and silly; it really ruined the tone for some products... but other products were appropriately dark without any real puns or silliness. I suppose that's what happens when you have multiple authors and even multiple line editors; Robert Schwalb in particular seems to have been a fan of the more grimdark, horror side of things (hardly surprising given that his own personal design magnum opus is Shadow of the Demon Lord) and anything he worked on was more serious and dark. 

In addition, there were other changes that gradually crept into the game over time. Original Freeport felt almost old school in some ways. Very humano-centric and sword & sorcery feeling. Over time, technology advanced unrealistically rapidly, and suddenly almost anyone of consequence had piratey flintlocks and cannons and sometimes even all kinds of other clockwork technology. Even the illustrations migrated from looking more Medieval sword & sorcery to looking more Colonial America or at least British colonial West Indies. New races started appearing, and suddenly were very important. It started with orcs, hobgoblins and goblins, and that was OK for a time until their prominence and position in the city started to become so notable that it was almost a parody. But then there was the azhar, who leapt from "didn't even exist" to "now have a super prominent role in the setting" almost overnight. And then "island trolls" popped up, and suddenly were all over the place; the island is a tiny little place; how in the world did they just appear out of thin air almost at the end of the run of the products while pretending tacitly that they were somehow just unknown for centuries on an island smaller than most modest sized towns in America? And why did they need to be invented at all, when they aren't really "trolls" but just a new variety of big, strong goblinoid? Something wrong with bugbears, if you're going to be D&D derived already? This rather rapid migration of new elements that significantly changed the setting, without any explanation of why was both jarring and unwelcome. Although I wonder if I hadn't read all of the products in (mostly) chronological order if it would have been subtle enough that I wouldn't really have noticed it. Even more perplexing is that the very latest products, the ones for Pathfinder 1e, suddenly had a lot of Pathfinder assumptions built in. Setting assumptions, I mean, not just mechanical assumptions. Suddenly the divs, for example, become the main bad guys of Return to Freeport, and they were introduced in Bestiary 3. I mean, sure, they are mythological creatures, but they're a somewhat esoteric mythology that hadn't been explored in D&D and D&D derivative games before. This isn't the only thing where Pathfinder setting specific things worked their way into the Freeport setting, but it's maybe the most prominent one.

Even less welcome is gradual enwokening of the setting. All of the orcs and whatnot were obviously a metaphor for a progressive simpleton narrative about black people. The art hardly shows a single white male at all anymore. Almost all of the iconic characters that they show off are women. Many of the factions are led by women, none of whom act in the least feminine. This is also not surprising; the same thing has happened to Wizards of the Coast and Paizo both too, so why not spin-off companies formed by other Seattle weirdos who worked at one (or both) of those companies in the past like Green Ronin or Kobold Press? The great culture wars of woke producers against their anti-woke consumers is the defining cultural moment of our age the last few years, and Green Ronin (and the rest of the Left Coast hipsters) are on the wrong side of it. Freeport seems to have ended as a franchise for new products (at least for now) but Green Ronin are virtue-signaling hard in their other products that their wokeness has increased exponentially since the last Freeport product was released in ~2019 or so. At this point, I almost hope that they leave it fallow before they make it even worse in this regard. Or, if not, wait until woke is completely broken and nobody is willing to make woke entertainment products anymore.

Adventures. The high water mark for the "wrong" tone are probably older, larger adventures like "Hell in Freeport" and Black Sails Over Freeport, but one notable problem was that a lot of the adventures did some unusual things, either 1) mostly took place in places other than Freeport (like Hell, in "Hell in Freeport") or 2) had very little to do with pirates or pirate themes. In fact, especially in the earlier adventures, they mostly just felt like very typical D&D adventures, and often surprisingly high fantasy, high powered D&D adventures. This may be considered also a clash in tone with the low fantasy dark fantasy nearly horror vibe, but I think in the case of the adventures its especially notable, and kind of a different problem, where adventure design is done without consideration of tone at all, in many cases. Not all the time; Black Sails clearly has silliness baked in, especially the sequence that's meant to be a case of the players characters literally playing the old Donkey Kong game where they climb ladders and jump over flaming barrels that apes are throwing at them. Others, like "Hell in Freeport" and many others, and even other parts of Black Sails are just too epic and high fantasy to feel like Freeport; rather, it feels like Forgotten Realms. 

On the other hand, some of the modules, often third party or later appearing ones, are better. Parts of Return to Freeport featured significant ship to ship action, for instance, which is as piratical as you can get, and many others are more low key crime stories, ghost stories or the like, rather than the typical D&D story of "stop the summoning of the dark god who wants to destroy the setting" thing, which happened more than once in the Freeport oeuvre, including in the original trilogy, and of course in the Black Sails option. Return to Freeport, "Dark Deeds Over Freeport,", the little adventure included in the Companion books, and most of the Adamant Press adventures, the Goodman Games haunted house adventure, and many of the often small and not completely fleshed out adventures in books like Tales of Freeport had this vibe, and made Freeport feel a little smaller and more grounded in scale. They are mostly meant to be interlude adventures in a longer campaign, I think, but in a way, they really provide the backbone for a campaign that is more what the setting claims (my term, I know) to be about in theme. Although, of course, there's no campaign thread between them. They're mostly disconnected. Which, in some cases, is what OSR-like people, among others, would want to see anyway. Not that I am one, or that the designers had any idea of making Freeport an OSR friendly setting, but y'know. It is a perfectly valid way to structure campaigns, without there being a "thread" through it. 

Quality Over Time. While I think the original trilogy is, in many ways, among the best product for the line, I think that the really best stuff was quite late, and the line really stepped it up quite a bit both in terms of physical quality; better art, full color, etc. but also in terms of products that are honesty better designed. Before reading them, I expected that the big fat Pathfinder Freeport: City of Adventure was just the system-less setting book and the Pathfinder Freeport Companion mashed together, but that was not the case; the mechanics were greatly expanded and improved and even the setting stuff was rewritten, revised and looked at again. I also thought that the Pathfinder Freeport Bestiary was mostly just going to be a system update to the older d20 Creatures of Freeport, but no, it's almost a completely different book, and a significantly better book. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised all around by the Freeport Bestiary; it's one of my favorite monster books, whereas Creatures of Freeport was pretty meh. Even though there were obviously some of the same creatures involved in both. Although I'm not suggesting that I'd run Return to Freeport as is, I did in general find it to be among the best adventures—whether you consider it one big adventure in six chapters, or six linked adventures as it was originally published. In fact, the first one or two in particular were among my favorite adventures in the entire Freeport corpus, and the one with all the pirate ship combat was... I dunno, maybe it needed a little more mechanical oomph... but otherwise it's kind of surprising that this hadn't been done in the setting before this point. Unfortunately, the idea of going to "Dark Freeport" in a pocket mirror dimension to fight the big bad villain of the arc was a little corny. With some work on the end, I could turn Return to Freeport into the best Freeport campaign you could get, in theory. 

Granted, like I've said many times, there is no printed campaign or adventure path that I can run as is, and I do pretty substantial rework to all of them if I plan on using them for anything. But using the basic structure of the original trilogy, the Return to ... sextology, I think the word is, and some of the other adventures scattered throughout otherwise could be reworked into a pretty brilliant Curse of the Corsair Coast. When I get around to actually planning out that campaign brief and outline, I think that the Freeport material will be my go-to source for raw material—although how much the end product resembles Freeport when all is said and done is TBD... who knows? Maybe I can accelerate my pace at reading the Adventure Path trawl, and read Skull & Shackles before I do Curse of the Corsair Coast, and see if any of that can be added to the stew as well.

Overall, and I've said this many times too, Five Fingers from Privateer Press, i.e., is better in many ways. It has a more consistent and more compelling theme, and it understands what it wants to do more. However, it is also a bit more closely tied to its parent setting, Iron Kingdoms. Freeport is supposedly supposed to be more modular and usable in any setting. I feel like this started to feel slightly less true over time, as Freeport gradually accreted an actual setting, mostly, although it still kind of stubbornly refused to ever name any of the gods for clerics, etc. except for two pirate gods, a "good" one who's a cheery swashbuckler like Errol Flynn and a bad one who's a monstrous murderer. Given how much the "God of Knowledge" featured in the signature adventures, it started to feel obnoxious that it was always just the generic "God of Knowledge" after a while. Whatever. It's not a big deal, but in general, if they were going to create a setting of sorts to attach Freeport to, I wish they'd just gone ahead and done it. It's easy to change stuff, but it's a little bit obnoxious to not have it at all and it needs to be added by the players. Also, in spite of the fact that Freeport had all of the "companions" for various systems, it really only worked very well for systems that felt pretty much exactly like D&D. In fact, when they migrated to Pathfinder, even though Pathfinder started off being essentially just D&D 3.5+, it felt like it got just a bit more of its own character, and became somewhat more compelling in a way.

None of the settings or adventures ever made by someone else work completely for me, but Freeport does a lot that I like, and gives me a decent framework to modify rather than needing to build from scratch. I'm 100% on board to use Freeport material as the baseline for Curse of the Corsair Coast, and I think that when all is said and done, I can probably use more Freeport material that I have and with less modification than I've been having to do for the Paizo adventure paths. Like I said, I'll review some other pirate-themed stuff first; Skull & Shackles and I'll probably read Five Fingters: Port of Deceit once more before I really define Curse of the Corsair Coast, but that's only to give myself an abundance of resources to work with, not because I need them.

APs and Campaigns Ranked by AI

Google's Gemini, or whatever their AI is that answers your search before they actually show you links, ranked the Pathfinder 1e adventure paths for me. I asked it to expand it's initial summary to include the full list, but I didn't check if it actually got everything or if it missed one. AI isn't actually as good as it should be at catching everything, which should, of course, be its strong suit.

Commentary came with the AI rankings. It's not mine. 

Tier 1: The Masterpieces (S-Tier)

• Curse of the Crimson Throne: Ultimate urban intrigue campaign.
• Hell's Rebels: Masterful political rebellion sandbox.
• Kingmaker: Definitive kingdom-building open world.
• Rise of the Runelords: Classic foundational heroic fantasy.

Tier 2: High-Quality Favorites (A-Tier)

• Iron Gods: Thrilling high-tech science-fantasy blend.
• Ironfang Invasion: Gritty guerrilla warfare and survival.
• Mummy's Mask: Traditional Egyptian-themed tomb exploration.
• Skull & Shackles: High-seas pirate sandbox adventure.
• Strange Aeons: Atmospheric Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
• War for the Crown: Intricate high-stakes political espionage.
• Wrath of the Righteous: Epic mythic-power demonic warfare.

Tier 3: Solid But Niche (B-Tier)

• Carrion Crown: Gothic horror anthology style.
• Legacy of Fire: Classic Arabian Nights genie tale.
• Reign of Winter: Whimsical plane-hopping folklore journey.
• Return of the Runelords: High-level epic trilogy conclusion.
• Ruins of Azlant: Fascinating underwater colony survival.
• Shattered Star: Direct old-school dungeon crawl.
• Tyrant's Grasp: Grim apocalyptic survival finale.

Tier 4: Heavily Flawed (C-Tier)

• Council of Thieves: Disjointed city-based organized crime.
• Giantslayer: Repetitive and exhausting giant combat.
• Hell's Vengeance: Highly restrictive evil-aligned campaign.
• Jade Regent: Frustrating caravan mechanics subsystem.
• Second Darkness: Jarring mid-campaign tonal shift.
• Serpent's Skull: Disappointing lost-continent jungle exploration.

Now, I don't pretend to be a fan of the same things as the mainstream. Seeing Carrion Crown down at B-Tier when I think it's probably the best one in many ways was weird. Why is it niche? It has the same themes as Curse of Strahd, which is largely seen as the best 5e campaign. Seeing Strange Aeons as A-Tier, when I didn't even think it was as good as Carrion Crown (although maybe I had higher expectations of it too) was weird. And I had the impression that Council of Thieves was relatively well received, but I guess not. Given that all that this AI answer is is scraping reddit posts and whatnot.

Anyway, for funsies, I did the 5e campaigns too, including the modular ones, which Gemini wanted to exclude at first.

S-Tier: The Masterpieces

• Curse of Strahd: Unmatched gothic horror sandbox.
• Lost Mine of Phandelver: The gold standard of entry-level D&D campaign design.
• Tomb of Annihilation: The pinnacle of 5e hex-crawl survival and lethal dungeon design.

A-Tier: Great & Highly Popular

• Keys from the Golden Vault: Widely praised as one of the best overall anthologies. It provides heist-focused standalone missions that are phenomenally easy to run and incredibly player-driven.
• Waterdeep: Dragon Heist: Exceptional urban roleplay and sandbox element mechanics.
• Candlekeep Mysteries: A library-themed collection focused on episodic investigations. Universally loved by DMs for its versatile, "plug-and-play" formatting.
• Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden: A gritty, isolationist sandbox praised for localized survival dread.
• The Wild Beyond the Witchlight: Whimsical feywild adventure celebrated for its brilliant pacifist run options.
• Storm King’s Thunder: A sprawling giant-slaying sandbox that captures classic grand-scale fantasy.

B-Tier: Good with Caveats

• Ghosts of Saltmarsh: Nautical-themed compilation mixing classic modules with robust seafaring rules. The town itself functions well as a campaign hub, though the maritime chapters require work to link up smoothly.
• Tales from the Yawning Portal: Recreates legendary, lethal old-school dungeons like "The Sunless Citadel" and "Tomb of Horrors." Great for tactical hack-and-slash tables but totally barren of connective narrative narrative tissue.
• Quests from the Infinite Staircase: A collection of updated classic 1e/2e modules. Highly creative sci-fi/fantasy concepts, though it relies heavily on the DM to fill in structural gaps.
• Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus: Spectacular Mad Max hellscape with an opening chapter that feels detached.
• Dragon of Icespire Peak: Reliable quest-board-style layout that works cleanly but lacks a grand plot spine.
• Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep: Compelling narrative backed by great rival NPC mechanics, tuned specifically for Exandria fans.
• Out of the Abyss: Brilliant Underdark survival escape that loses momentum in its clunky political second half.

C-Tier: Flawed or Niche Appeal

• Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel: Culturally rich, vibrant settings packed with imaginative standalone lore. Panned slightly by community rankings due to highly inconsistent adventure scaling and balancing issues.
• Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage: An immense, deep megadungeon built for combat tacticians that leaves roleplayers wanting more.
• Princes of the Apocalypse: An elemental dungeon crawl that drags under confusing sandbox pacing.
• Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk: Shifts a beloved classic into late-game cosmic horror dungeons that feel tonally jarring.
• Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen: A rigid, rail-thin military campaign targeted mostly toward setting purists.

D/F-Tier: Structural Messes

• Tyranny of Dragons (Hoard / Rise): Written before core system rules were locked, plagued by railroad structure and severe math imbalances.
• Spelljammer: Light of Xaryxis: Community-panned for a brief, linear runtime and a tragic lack of robust ship-to-ship combat.
• Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos: Tries to build a magic university school simulator but lacks compelling structural mechanics, leaving the DM to track a dizzying calendar of events.

Once again, I strongly suspect that if I were to tier these, my results would be significantly different. But reading these summaries at least gives me an expectation of what the campaigns are going to be like and about. I find that minor spoilers like this are less important to me than having expectations that aren't met, i.e., if I think a campaign should be a certain thing, or I expect it to be a certain thing and I'm not aligned with the designers, I'm more likely to dislike it than if I understand what they're trying to do and how the community thinks that they did. A lot of the problems that the community will bring out, like math problems with Tyranny of Dragons, literally won't be noticed by me at all, both because I read the campaign and I'm playing in it, but I will never and would never run it. Also, the "culturally rich, vibrant settings packed with imaginative standalone lore" of Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is much more likely to come across as obnoxious woke garbage to me. We'll see when I get there, I suppose. 

At this rate, sometime in 2030. Sigh. Also, check out that AI image, which I found online, not generated myself (I was out of images.) The tiefling girls tail comes out of the side of her hip. Sigh again.

Good modules

I've read quite a few modules in the last year or two as I've gone through my various RPG trawls, and I've got opinions. Some of these opinions I already had, but some of them crystalized just based on the process of reading a bunch of modules in relatively close proximity, and it made me think on what I liked and what I don't. This isn't meant to be a review of any particular module, publisher, or anything else, just a general discussion (occasionally with examples) of what I like and don't like. Keep in mind that I've run very few of these modules. I'm not currently running anything except for one-offs here and there, because of my relocation a couple of years ago; I joined a group that was in a recently started campaign, so while I"m not exactly at the ground floor, they were only a couple of sessions in to a new campaign. Because they were already going, I felt like it was poor manners to try and immediately subvert the campaign and offer to run something myself, needless to say, so what I've offered to do was run stuff sometimes when the whole group is struggling to get together because of scheduling. 

Of course, since the beginning of the year, my own scheduling and stress level has been a nightmare. But prior to that I had pretty good availability and more demand for playing than I was able to get from the group. Two other people in the group were in the same boat, so we were talking about running a partial group campaign in between regular sessions in the main campaign. That hasn't actually happened, although at least in some sense, that's a good thing, because it meant that the two "flakier" group members have been participating a bit more than we anticipated, and we haven't had to cancel as many sessions. Of course, it's also been at least 2-3 months since we've been able to get together now... but I'm a big part of that problem myself with my insane travel schedule, work drama and extended family drama. (It's not all drama. A wedding isn't really drama.) Anyway, this is a larger sample Millennial-looking D&D party than we'd have; our smaller group would be me and two players, husband and wife, and all three of us are Gen-Xers in our early to mid 50s. But an image of a posing fantasy adventurer party is an image of a fantasy adventurer party, and I do at least appreciate the lower fantasy vibe of it with regular humans in regular clothes, more or less.

So, I've read a lot of modules. Some old modules. Many old style but not really that old modules. Many newer modules. Many Dungeon Magazine adventures. Adventure paths. Book-form campaigns. What do I like and dislike?

- Site based adventures are very limited in their ability to be entertaining. Most of them lack much context for why the site is there and why PCs would be exploring it. In some, this is explicit; DMs are supposed to provide that context themselves, or weave the adventure into their ongoing campaign. This is a bit of a cop-out, though. It's easier to change, modify or even ignore context that it is to create one from scratch, so I'd rather have some. 

- That said, some of those set-ups and context texts can be either pretty bad or overdone. There's no reason to provide historical context for stuff in a dungeon that the party has no way of ever finding out other than the GM simply telling it to them. Adding that just to entertain the GM while reading the module strikes me as honestly kind of silly. And overly forced or unlikely context doesn't really do anyone any favors either. It will certainly have to be ignored. At least create context that tries to be useful and interesting, not just self-indulgent or contrived.

- Also, just exploring trapped rooms stuffed with monster and treasure was cliche in the early 80s and many people eschewed the whole paradigm. It's still a problem. I just finished this morning, because I woke up almost an hour early and knew I wasn't going to fall back asleep, "Heart of Nightfang Spire", one of the early 3e adventures. It's very site based and has no context, and it was a pain to read, not very interesting, and I found myself wondering how I could possibly make it fun to run or play. The context really matters, because without it, it's just a game... you're not doing anything that feels meaningful to the characters, to the setting, or to the fiction. 

- Many designers are too afraid of railroads. Others aren't afraid enough. Having a plot, through-line of events, or something like that is not a railroad. Forcing players to stick to that regardless of what decisions they make is what makes it a railroad. Writing adventures that call for forcing PC actions is bad. That's a railroad in the making. Writing adventures that assume a certain sequence of events, but doesn't force it, is perfectly fine. In fact, that's what I think I prefer after reading all kinds of alternatives. Well-designed adventures will have some built in leeway; "yeah, we assume that the players will do this, but if not, here's some other material so you're not just on your own completely."

- Because this is the way that I like to consume modules, and it works best for me running them somewhat loosely, I don't need a lot of exacting detail about what your players will see "on the ground" with their characters; I need a looser format, where I can fill in stuff depending on how it actually goes at the table, what my PCs actually do, etc. I was somewhat surprised, and I don't think a lot of other GM's will agree with this necessarily, but I think that the format that WotC uses for their one-book campaigns is actually the format that agrees with me and my playstyle the most. That doesn't mean that the specific adventures or the content is the best, just that I like the format. ~200 page campaigns that are written somewhat loosely and focus at least as much on events and plot-point opportunities as they do on site exploration and things like that—that's exactly what I want. 

- Paizo's adventure paths are the second best format for me. I rarely can run them as is, both because they do often tend too often to be written as railroads, because there's a lot of stuff that I have to change, and because they're too long, too meandery while they lose the plot for whole adventures at a time, and because they're too enamored with dungeon-crawls for my taste. But format-wise, they're pretty nice, and I've seen lots of good moments and "stealable" stuff in the (so far) seven or eight full adventure paths that I've read all the way through. It is a bit intimidating to try and read a whole thing of them, though. A full adventure path is six ~100 page books; nearly twice as long as I really need it to be. Especially since the fiction I can take or leave, the monsters can be in the monster books, and the setting stuff is also mostly replicated or abbreviated versions of content that ... also appears in one of the setting books.

- Old school and old school like modules that are site-based and offer little or no context, backstory or much in the way of hooks other than "there's probably monsters and treasures and danger in here; go check it out because that's the game that I prepared, so if you don't, I got nothing" are my least favorite. 

- Of course, style and quality are different axes, and a module can be on the good side of one axis and the poor side of another, or vice versa, or good on both or poor on both. I hoped to like the early 3e modules better than I have so far, and given that I've read five of eight, I'm confident that that's not going to change. However, once we get past the 1-20 level "pseudo adventure path" modules, I think that the next batch of them, which were spread out throughout the entire "3rd Era" period probably vary quite a bit more. I've read Expedition to Castle Ravenloft before, and honestly, I doubt that the famous and well-regarded Curse of Strahd for 5e is much better. I guess I'll see when I eventually read that one, right? In fact, in general, far too many of the 5e campaigns are really just trumped up leftovers from classic 1e modules. The next one on my list, Princes of the Apocalypse is really just the Temple of Elemental Evil put into Forgotten Realms and written in, maybe, a format that I'll like better. But I seriously doubt that they've done anything terribly interesting or innovative with it. The original is highly regarded albeit often seen as somewhat flawed, but this oneis usually perceived as middling at best by most who've read and/or played it.

On a completely separate tangent, just because, I found this cover image of a recentish Call of Cthulhu book: talk about missing the point. Cthulhu is supposed to be a game about terror, not about being embarrassed because you had an accident in the back of your pants. Seriously, what in the world are these characters doing? If they didn't just have diarrhea in the woods, they're desperately trying not to. I've seen people try to defend it as pooping your pants is the reaction of a terrified individual. No. I mean, yeah, sure, but that's not the point. The point of horror game cover art is supposed to evoke the theme and tone to the audience who would buy it, and if the audience who would buy it is making fun of the cover art because it looks ridiculous, then that defense is a non sequitur and is dumb.

Speaking of Call of Cthulhu, I often listen to Graham Plowman's stuff while reading my game books (including right now while typing this post), and it's mostly all based on Cthulhu stories, and is deliberately designed for reading and gaming. He's my favorite of the amateur "background music" artists floating around out there, mostly because he tends to stick with sounds, themes and tones that I like the best—dark, moody and horror, with occasional touches of action and terrifying excitement. My only complaint is that he likes the theramin a little bit too much, which sounds kind of corny to me because I associate it with corny 50s sci-fi b-movies. He doesn't always use it, but he does enough that it stands out in certain of his longer tracks, like "The House on Sentinel Hill" and "Yuggoth."

Curse of the Brine Witch

I finished the first adventure of Return to Freeport, "Curse of the Brine Witch." It's actually a really good adventure, written by Patrick O'Duffy, an old-time Freeport campaigner who worked for Green Ronin for many years. Apparently, he's from Melbourne and also does freelance work for White Wolf. Interesting stuff. Regardless, the adventure is quite good. Although I feel that the hook to get the characters involved is a little weak and forced, that's often true for published adventures (including the original "Death in Freeport") so I'm not going to count that too much against it. A good GM needs to come up with tailored starts that account for the PCs he actually gets, which no published adventure can possibly do. Another point against it, although this is pretty common for Paizo products too, and it's a moot point for me, is that it requires you to own a few other books, including the big Pathfinder Freeport setting book (which originally retailed for ~$80, so quite a lot) as well as two of the bestiaries, 1 and 3. I know that it saves a page or two to not repeat stats each time they need them, but it's not really worth it; it requires that you buy more stuff, which limits how much people will want to buy this product unless they already have them or already plan on getting them anyway. Even though, like I said, it's a moot point to me because I do own the referred to products, it's still a hassle to switch between various products to run a game, and it's obnoxious to tell people that they need to go buy other expensive products to properly use the one that they're reading. Maybe that's a principled or even ideological stand to take, though. I dunno. I need to use the OGL and SRD to copy portions of the Pathfinder compatible stuff onto my website to be able to even refer to how to use my conversion, but I'm going to do that rather than just say, "go buy this other book and read those few pages."

Today was an interesting day of work. I left early because there was a department picnic. I didn't go to that because I had to call into three separate meetings during it, and I figured I'd go home rather than stay in the office to do that, when nobody else was really going to be there anyway. However, two additional emergency meetings came up, so although I had some disconnected free time that I didn't exactly expect, I also wasn't able to actually quit for the day until nearly 8:30 PM, which really sucks. But, I did manage, like I said, to finish this first adventure, which was shorter than I expected; about ~35 pages or so. If they'd added the statblocks that they referred to, which they should have done (even if they're in the appendix or something after all) then it would have been maybe closer to ~40 pages. The whole omnibus is about 176 pages, I think, which is shorter than most of the WotC 5e campaigns, and significantly shorter than the Paizo adventure paths. But, of course, that's not exactly fair. While an adventure path issue is about 100 pages, only about half of that is the actual adventure, then there's several pages of setting material, new monsters (many of which don't feature in the module; they're just there because the writers thought they looked fun), episodes of linked fiction, and all kinds of other material. Still; at ~40-50 pages a module and six in an adventure path, the Paizo campaigns, ignoring all of the other material, are still 240-300 pages or so of module material; at least a third longer than this one, and maybe even almost twice as long. This doesn't really compare in size to a Paizo adventure path after all; it's not even as long as their earlier Black Sails Over Freeport. 

I was also a little bit amused to see that they recommended using the fast advancement, so that the adventure will get you to at least third level. I just re-read that in my Pathfinder Core Rulebook read (remember that while I haven't read it cover to cover, I've had it pretty much since it was new, and have read many portions of it here and there off and on for years) and thought to myself that I'd likely take the slow method, and then nearly double the XP listed there, so that instead of needing 3,000 XP to get to 2nd level, 7,500 to 3rd, 14,000 to 4th, etc. I'd require 6,000, 15,000, 28,000, etc. To my sensibilities, the entire "Curse of the Brine Witch" feels like what a 1st level adventure should feel like, and I'd be wary of even suggesting that at the end of it, you should advance to 2nd level for the next one. At least in terms of scope of the adventure, if not necessarily difficulty of the challenges.

I generated an image in Grok of the Brine Witch. Of course, Grok is the AI that, in my experience, is the least likely to actually do what you tell it to on image generation. I ran out of generations that I could use long before I got one that actually works; I don't know why it couldn't, despite very clear and repeated prompting, just have nothing but a gigantic eye inside the hood, or why the shark's teeth I requested around the eye and hood turned into a row of triangular decorations all along the edge of the cloak. Sigh. I only used Grok because I'd already used up all of my ChatGPT image generations. UPDATE: Got a slightly better one, and then hit my limit again this morning. Sigh. Anyway, I swapped out the image that I had for this improved version. This one just needs 1) I asked for it to be at night, and after a few tries, Grok completely forgot to do that, 2) I also asked for teeth around the eye, which Grok also ended up forgetting about, and 3) I'd like a little bit more brightness on the eye. It's a bit hard to see. Still, it's an improvement over what I had before. Honestly, maybe I should just be happy with what I got and not worry about the teeth, which Grok is unlikely to do well, I think. As soon as it lets me generate a new one, I'll try and get it done at night and otherwise let this one go. Honestly, I'm trying a little too hard to get this one done. It's just an image for this one post. I guess if I ever run this, I could use this as a player aid of some sort. I do like to have visualizations of what they're seeing sometimes.

When I first tried Grok for images, I quite liked them, but now I find ChatGPT reliably gives me my best results. If I do go for a premium account someday, that's the one I'd use. But again, it's not worth it for a minor toy. I don't need that many images, and even when I'm trying to correct ones that don't get it right, I'm OK with what I can generate already.

Maybe one of these days, I'll actually pay for a premium account so I don't run out after just a few images, but probably not. It's fundamentally just a minor toy to me, not something essential.

Anyway, I'd like to finish Return to Freeport by the end of the weekend. I don't want to overcommit, even to myself, and think that I'll get it done before then, but that's reasonable, I think. And 'll make a new post about module writing in general. As I've recently read quite a large number of them over the last several months, I've certainly developed preferences in terms of what I want a module to actually have and be like. 

New Conan animated series

https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/tv-shows/conan-the-barbarian-animated-series-genndy-tartakovsky/

Pretty terrible article and a dubious premise to begin with. Robert E. Howard wasn't a novelist, and he's credited with creating sword & sorcery not sword & sandal, which is a completely different genre. And the idea that Conan "found love" with Bêlit sounds pretty silly and out of character to me. I think a lot of low status men are anxious to "promote" her to his equal for the same reason that they love Jirel of Jorey or other girlboss female characters... even though Howard never wrote her as such. I'm more and more irritated by the trend to try and make strong women characters by low status men who get turned on by them. Why can't women just be feminine? And why can't men just be happy with that? I mean, I realize why; it's because too many creatives are low status, but man is it irritating. Howard may have been low status in his way; he seems to have been obsessed with his mother, and never had too serious a relationship with any woman (although he did, maybe, have a girlfriend for a little while) but at least he understand masculinity and femininity. It must be a generational thing.

Not that Conan hasn't already been pretty poorly treated in anything other than the original stories anyway. Starting with the oft-times questionable "revisions" updates and edits of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, the vast corpus of novels in the 80s, even the movies... even the popular one with Arnold... other than some of the comics over the years, I haven't been very impressed with Conan pastiche. Luckily, I've had the complete collection in three trade paperbacks by Del Rey for many years. In fact, I've got them "out" of their box and readily available. I might even re-read them again soon.

Reading

I am sick and tired of traveling. I'm sick and tired period. I rarely get more than 5-6 hours of sleep a night lately. Too much anxiety about work, about my house situation, about retirement and our debt, etc. Life as an adult hurtling towards retirement age and not really being prepared for it, as well as one who was kind of screwed over by one of my own kids who, in retrospect I have to admit probably has some kind of personality disorder like malignant narcissism or something, is really bringing me down. 

Anyway, it wasn't really my intention to whine about my anxieties, financial or otherwise. Maybe I'll get lucky and win a lottery or something, and I can retire early to a nice big chalet or timber home in Wyoming with no neighbors for at least a mile in every direction and more or less swear off people entirely other than my wife and some of the rest of our family in limited doses. And a vacation home in Destin for my wife, who hates the cold and loves the beach. What I really wanted to talk about was reading. More likely, I'll get a better job, make more money, and get ahead little by little that way. I actually am expecting a new offer shortly, and if not, I've got more irons in the fire still too. Sigh. No wonder I've always liked fantasy. Real life can suck, sometimes.

I got a "pocket" sized Pathfinder (1e) Core Rulebook, but I found that I didn't want to carry it around in my backpack, because it was starting to beat up the cover a bit. I also didn't want to read it in that format because the text is very small on my elderly eyes. Luckily, I bought a pdf years ago and never read it, so I fired up that pdf and am reading it there, when at home, and moving my bookmark in the book too, just in case I read the physical book occasionally. It's a little bit ridiculous that I've had this since... well, essentially since it was new, and I've never read it. But the entire Pathfinder 1e corpus is on my reading list now, in the form of five separate trawls (core rules, adventure paths, stand-alone modules, chronicles/setting, and companion books) However, that's a monster book, 578 pages or something (although that includes covers, title pages, and an index, etc. It's still big) so I don't want it to consume my Freeport Trawl which I was poised to finish shortly, with only one relatively modest sized campaign book to read. 

I took several physical books with me, Prisoner of the Horned Helmet, the novel that for some reason I'm struggling with even though I've read it twice before; once in the late 80s when it was new, and once in the late 00s or early 10s, so I know what to expect. I also took the 3e Pathfinder Campaign Setting which is the next book in that trawl, Oriental Adventures which I haven't read since it was new, but I figured I better read before I finally and very belatedly read the Rokugan campaign setting, all for 3e. (I've had the latter for probably twenty years and only flipped through it and read a few pages here and there.) I also brought the Pathfinder Core Rules book mentioned above, but didn't crack it open, as well as the early Companion series on Taldor. But I'll probably read pdfs more frequently, and the only book I finished while traveling was the next T. H. Lain ebook in the old 3e iconics ten novel series. I'm now half way through that series, for whatever that's worth. 

I want to finish the Freeport trawl by reading the Return to Freeport module, which was originally published in six parts (although I bought the "omnibus" pdf from DriveThru), read the next adventure path, Second Darkness, also in six parts, as adventure paths are, and read the big Pathfinder Core Rulebook, all on (mostly) pdf.

I added that image just for visual interest. I don't like making a post without an image. But that also reminds me, given that that prompt was something along the lines of D&D party in a dungeon confronts a Lovecraftian horror, that I also need to finish the Yig Snake Granddaddy campaign, which I've read half of. It comes in four books, and I've read two of them. 

The problem with having so many trawls, especially because the Paizo trawls have so much material in them, is that it feels incredibly slow moving to get some of the other trawls moving. I'd like to finish the next two there too, as well as read the next 5e campaign, Princes of the Apocalypse in the relatively short term. It'll feel nice to get the Freeport Trawl done so that I'm not juggling so many balls in the air at once. The Eberron 3e trawl is the next most reasonable to finish, but 3e Forgotten Realms and 5e campaigns aren't crazy, if I just buckle down on them. The 3pp trawl is also manageable, and I can massage somewhat what's on it as well, as some of the products aren't really campaigns in the traditional sense. 

And maybe I can reach hanging points on some of the others, like on the Pathfinder Modules trawl, I can at least finish the D&D 3.5 compatible modules and then feel like I've reached a half-time of sorts for that trawl. Same thing with the 3e Adventure Trawl if I finish the pseudo-Adventure Path modules, and then just have the stand-alones in chronological order left to read. I'm halfway to that half-time already, and those modules are pretty short. Maybe if I focus on them, I can feel like I can "rest" that trawl for a little while, at least.

UPDATE: Last night I wanted to read the first volume of Return to Freeport, but instead I read the classes chapter of the Pathfinder Core Rules. It was longer than I expected, because I had forgotten that many of the classes have much longer and more expansive a la carte menus of options than their 3.5 equivalents. After reading that, I didn't feel like reading anything else, so I watched some stuff on the TV and then went to bed. I'll be reading it today, though.

Golarion Remixed

I'm going to do it. I'm going to remix Golarion. I've already got a good start with some earlier noodling that I did, but I'm going to actually start with remixing the rules. I'm going to use the Race Builder rules to build the races that Old Night has, I'm going to tweak available classes, use E6, and otherwise tweak the Pathfinder 1e rules to work for my setting, if I wanted to use them, and then I'm going to take this House Rule document and remix the setting. Some of the elements of Golarion will get a minor face lift. Some will be ignored and will essentially not exist for all intents and purposes (although I don't think I'll literally excise them, I'll just deliberately ignore them.) Where Golarion has nations that I'm not interested in at all, Golarion Remixed will have blank spots on the map with nothing of interest. Like I did with Eberron Remixed, changing up the races and adapting it to a low magic dark fantasy vibe will naturally change the setting quite a bit, and Golarion Remixed will work perfectly well with the Shadow of Old Night rules... but it won't need to, because my Pathfinder 1e House Rules document will perfectly model the setting as well. They'll be two complementary systems for achieving the same thing, and the "DesdichadoFinder" house rules for Pathfinder 1e will also work perfectly for the Old Night setting too. 

But as with the Eberron Remixed project, the real fun is actually remixing the setting to fit the rules, including the allowed races and the changed assumptions about magic availability and PC power in general. If Darkness In the Hill Country is meant to be run in the Old Night setting with the Old Night rules, it could equally well be run in Golarion Remixed's version of Varisia with the Pathfinder house rules. That is, in fact, exactly the point. 

There may be some third party rules in play. I'll almost certainly use the Freebooter class from the Freeport book, because it's a great class, and I like it for the swashbuckler archetype more than I like Paizo's own Swashbuckler class. I may also take some of the Madness rules from that book as well. (After I compare them to whatever Horror Adventures has, and even maybe what the 5e SPCM book has to see which gives me the best experience). This will be an old-fashioned "binder of house rules". Well, maybe not that bad. I hope actually that by kitbashing and mostly by limiting what's available, I can do it in just a few short pages. But it's a weird exercise. This isn't the way most people would play a Pathfinder game. But I'm not trying to play a Pathfinder game, I'm trying to get Pathfinder to accommodate my specific tastes for a low magic, dark fantasy game with a low magic, sword & sorcery, dark fantasy tone and themes. Although 1e is arguably a little better at that than 2e or than D&D 5e is, it's still very much a game of Open Society, Diversity, Inc. super-heroes who are meant to appeal to the power fantasies of broken wokesters first and foremost, so it'll need some help to get there. But it's not a lost cause; the elements are there, you just need to go through them with a highlighter saying "don't use this, it won't work". And that's 95% of what I'll be doing; creativity by limit rather than actually building all that much that's new. 

Of course, although I'm pretty familiar with Pathfinder 1e from years of poking around it's PSRD and reading all kinds of setting and adventure supplements that are supported by it, I've never actually read the rulebooks in a the traditional sense. So this will also probably be a long-running work in progress, as Pathfinder 1e is infamous for, among other things, having lots of lots of rules spread over lots and lots of books. I've had many of the original core rulebooks in pdf for a long time; they were worth it to extract the art alone! but I've recently bought the pocket (trade paperback, really) sized core rulebook, and intend to start reading it shortly, cover to cover. But it'll be until I get to the Advanced Player's Guide and some of the other subsequent books that I'll really be able to start sifting through many of the options like archetypes and alternate classes, etc. 

I've created a new tag, PATHFINDER REMIXED and a new banner both. Some posts will merit both Golarion Remixed and Pathfinder Remixed, but many will focus on just the rules or just the setting, and therefore will get one or the other. 

Paizo Iconics - Imrijka

In spite of the fact that I'm not a fan of a sheboon half-orc girl, Imrijka actually has the best backstory of an iconic that I've read in a long time. Of course, she's a half-orc, so her parentage is kind of mysterious; she was turned in to a church orphanage as an infant, but she seems to have had a happy enough childhood, well-cared for by her "grandfather," an elder of the church. It's nice to see someone without a tragic, tortured backstory for a change.

That said, they did give her something interesting. As a teenager, her "grandfather" told her that three times mysterious strangers have approached the church attempting to adopt or claim her, pretending to be her parents (in spite of obviously not being), etc. She actually snuck out to try and meet with them, but the Inquisitors of the church interfered before she could have the tragic backstory of most of these other characters, and chased off whatever mysterious monster was trying to claim her. Because of this, she threw herself unapologetically into the church out of, of all things, what appears to be gratitude and appreciation. An actual psychologically healthy character? And a half-orc orphan raised by the church, of all things? Not at all what you'd expect from the woke mutants of Paizo.

Of the four that I've done today, she's by far the best one.

The Inquisitor class is also an interesting one, kind of like a cleric, but with less magic and more class abilities that are non-spell abilities. I'm listening to the long Carrion Crown actual play podcast by Hidous Laughter, and one of the characters there is an Inquisitor of Pharasma too. While I love the idea of an Inquisitor or Witch Hunter, I don't think this class is the way that I'd want to play that idea. Maybe I can find an archetype that does the job, though. There are plenty to choose from.

The next four iconics, whenever I get around to doing them, are Balazar the Summoner, Jirelle the Swashbuckler, Quinn the Investigator, and Oloch the Warpriest. I don't actually see most of those illustrated much. Balazar was even replaced with a different iconic summoner for 2e, and for my money, the Freebooter is a better swashbuckler class than the actual swashbuckler. But, of course, it's 3rd party, done by Green Ronin.

Paizo Iconics - Feiya

I suppose making the iconic witch be a woman is, probably, iconic, but once again, she has a bizarre deus ex machina tragic backstory. Bizarrely, she's a "Japanese" girl, daughter of two "Japanese" merchants who lived in fantasy Viking-land. Kidnapped as a child by hags, and tortured and abused for years, she somehow escaped after following her fox friend, and an avalanche or something killed the hags. Unexplained. Then she was on her own, with yet another tragic Cinderella backstory, just like at least half of these iconic characters. 

Sigh. She also has white hair, but I guess that's kind of a Chinese witch ghost story or whatever thing that probably makes her somewhat iconic of sorts. The reality is that the witch isn't an iconic archetype, except as exemplified by the hags in the monster manuals. Even the Asian witch character, which Feiya kind of looks like, is still a villain, not a PC archetype. Witches, of course, are also the darlings of weird Seattle hipster woke retards, because of Wiccans and pagans and other weirdos who claim the title. That said, mechanically, the witch is probably a fine alternative to the sorcerer or wizard. Maybe a bit darker and edgier... a little... but y'know, what are you doing to do? The attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of what was always considered black magic go back to Tolkien and his inversion of wizards. Even Merlin from Medieval romances was an often shady figure, although not always... they tried to rehabilitate the idea back then too.

Of course, if I'm playing a "guy witch" I'd almost certainly have to rename the class. I just can't imagine calling a man a witch. Warlock would probably be my go-to. But I don't really love playing spellcasters, so the idea that I'd actually play one is probably moot. The idea that I'd play any Pathfinder 1e game is pretty remote, and if I did, I've got tons of non-spellcasting options that are front of witch in line to be used.

For whatever reason, probably because of the popularity in general of the class, Wayne Reynolds did a refresh of it after a few years, so there are two Wayne Reynolds portraits of Feiya.

Also, for whatever reason, her fox turned from being a normal-looking fox to being some kind of weird magical being. Probably level differences.

Paizo Iconics - Reiko

The ninja is a superfluous class, in my opinion. Not only is it too culturally constrained, but it covers the same territory as the slayer does, only not as well. It also uses a pool of points to power abilities, which is a mechanic which I don't like. Whatever. It was inevitable that it be done. Complete Adventurer also did a ninja for 3.5, although it was a little underpowered. Rokugan also had a ninja, but of course, that makes perfect sense, since that class was the 3e version of Oriental adventures. 

Although I'm not a fan of all of the girlbosses in Paizo's iconic line-up, having been a fan of games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and King of Fighters for a long time, I have to admit that the girl ninja is kind of actually iconic if you're going to make a ninja. Not as iconic as the 80s video game character Shinobi or something like the 80s movie character American Ninja, but there are a lot of girl ninjas around. If they'd made Reiko more cute like Ibuki from Street Fighter, I might have actually liked her more, but instead she's got to be cynical and have a tragic backstory. Then again, you've got to have some reason to get a fantasy Japanese archetype into fantasy Europe, so there's probably only so many ways to do that. Orphaned and adrift in Andoran, Reiko comes across as more condescending and cynical than anything else. Too bad. Then again, they hardly use her, or the samurai, and for good reason. Ironically, she's probably more iconic, although she is in a narrow sense. 

Paizo Iconics - Lirianne

Her backstory is, again, not what I'd expect from a 1st level character. Did Paizo decide that the iconics weren't really meant to be used by players as example pregens, and just make them Mary Sue characters in the meta fiction of the setting? Yes, I think, obviously so. Anyway, the gunslinger was kind of an interesting class for a variety of reasons; flintlock firearms being something that Golarion didn't have right up until suddenly it did. Mechanically, it's a bit fiddly for my taste, with points to spend to do special tricks and stuff like that. That's the kind of thing that I never loved about Pathfinder 1e, and Paizo's approach to game design in general, but of course, firearms are also just weapons, and having used sources like Freeport and Iron Kingdoms for years before this, the idea of having flintlock pistols and muskets that any class could use was hardly a new idea to me. Darkest Dungeon did so as well, with a Musketeer class, and the Highwayman who used a flintlock pistol as his main signature weapon. I like the inclusion of guns more than a class that specializes in using them.

Lirianne is this kind of wild-eyed adventuresome person who feels, as most adventuring female characters do, more like a man in a woman's body than a woman. I expect that all of today's crop of four girlbosses will feel that way, although I don't remember the backstory (yet) of those to come. Anyway, she was from Alkenstar, but got magically teleported to Avistan in a crazy case of deus ex machina and now adventures there, I guess. 

Because she's kind of an esoteric character concept, there aren't a ton of illustrations of her. More than the samurai and ninja and the psionic classes, but less than the truly iconic iconics. Her get-up is obviously steampunk too, and I have to think that that was a design goal for her; to appeal to that aesthetic crowd. 

Of course, making her a steampunk pirate with some samurai armor who's from fantasy Africa is... really weird. She's yet another iconic who doesn't feel very iconic because the choices made to build her are simply too esoteric. I think the people writing these iconics got bored doing the predictable and... y'know, iconic things with these characters after a while, and had to go off the reservation more and more with them after a time. 

Freeport Trawl update

Could be a slightly high magic Freeport character concept...

Well, I finished reading the Freeport Bestiary last night which, contrary to my expectations, was not just a rehash of Creatures of Freeport, and I ended up having to read it pretty much entirely. There's a good 15-20 pages at the end that are just basic rules stuff, kind of like how the 3e monster books all explain (again) the rules for reading a monster stat block, so I skimmed or more accurately nearly completely skipped all of that, but otherwise, I actually read the whole book (minus statblocks. I always skip those unless I'm actually planning on running the monster.) It was a much more than I expected, and so I was, once again, pleasantly surprised by the Pathfinder conversion of Freeport. Green Ronin really seemed to believe that Pathfinder 1e was the true "heir" of 3e, I think. Although, of course, they were already doing a lot of their own things with the AGE system and whatnot, so their support of it was less than it had been during the d20 boom, but their best material seems to have been their late Pathfinder 1e stuff. They only had one half-hearted attempt to dip their toe in the 5e market; a conversion of their first slim adventure, and have left Freeport entirely once Pathfinder migrated to 2e, other than apparently a vague allusion to it in some form or other in their Fantasy AGE stuff. I'm not interested in their Fantasy AGE system, which simply replaces everything else already in the market with a woker system, so I won't investigate any of that, I don't think. As I'm getting to the end of my massive Freeport Trawl, I'm finding that the setting is getting kind of played out. The exact same problems that I anticipated would be its downfall are, indeed, its downfall—increasing wokeness over the years, too much conflict in tone, and somewhat surprising to me, too much insistence on not just advancing the meta plot, but while doing so, changing the nature of the setting rather dramatically and adding all kinds of new elements which we're supposed to pretend were just always there. (Island trolls, for instance? Whiskey tango foxtrot.)

I also skimmed the Freeport Companion: Shadow of the Demon Lord or however exactly you want to title that book. I marked it, but kept it in gray, because I didn't really read it, and I confirmed that it was just system-specific mechanics, a bit of talk about how to fit setting elements from Shadow and Freeport together, which I wasn't terribly interested in because I still haven't read Shadow of the Demon Lord and don't know or care much about its setting, so there wasn't any need to (re) read much of the text there. I also was trawling through the Green Ronin storefront, and realized that there is, in fact, at least one RPG product for Freeport that I was missing from my trawl; a Pathfinder book called the Player's Companion to Freeport. I presume that this is similar to the player's companion books that accompany each of the adventure paths, but on looking at it in more detail, it looks like just a portion of the updated Pathfinder Freeport: City of Adventure book, and none of the material in it looks original. In would serve, I suppose, mostly as a replacement for the Pathfinder Freeport Companion with the updated rules, but missing the Madness rules and the adventure, I think. In spite of the oversight in leaving it off, I don't think I'm missing literally anything by skipping it, as everything in the table of contents appears to be a repeat of something I've already read.

By jumping ahead and skimming the Demon Lord companion, the only thing left to read in the trawl is the Return to Freeport mega-adventure, originally published in six parts like a Pathfinder Adventure Path... although much slower. The first two adventures were published in 2016 (I didn't look up the months), the second two in 2017, the fifth one in 2018 and the last one in 2019. By then, Pathfinder 1e was about done (same year, I believe that Pathfinder 2e was released) and it missed its chance, probably, to be a significant product for the game line by virtue of its poor timing. Maybe that explains it; slower sales, bad timing, and a renewed focus on their own products, plus more recently the debacle with the Diamond distributor bankruptcy, but Freeport does seem to be well and truly finished, and I will have read everything published for it when I finish these last adventures. Although I bought the omnibus from DriveThru on pdf, it was originally published as six discrete titles, so that's how I put it on the trawl, and as I finish each section, I'll write them off as if I'd read an entire "book" even though I'm still in the midst of my actual book. 

As usual, diving into Freeport tends to make me want to re-read Five Fingers: Port of Deceit again. I may put that on my physical game book list again, because, y'know. It's a great book. I re-read it recently enough that it's on my tracker document that I've been keeping since 2023, but at the very beginning. Although it'll set me back a bit on reading something else, I'd rather read something that I really quite like than knocking off stuff that I'll probably be more ambivalent on just to say that I finished it. I'm sure I'll enjoy re-reading this more than I'm enjoying my re-read of Races of Eberron for instance. 

The real intimidating trawl is all of the Pathfinder stuff, even though I've broken it up into multiple discrete trawls; one for the rules, one for the adventure paths, one for the stand-alone modules, one for the Companion line and one for the Setting line. At the rate I'm going, I'll still be reading those in ten years. Which is ironic, because the likelihood of me actually playing or running Pathfinder 1e is very low. Still, seeing it as an iteration of the d20 system which I played for many, many years, I quite like it. There's things that it did that I wouldn't have, but mostly I've come to agree that it does seem to be an actual improvement at the end of the day over 3.5 in most respects. I'm not thrilled with the bump in power level, when I think that d20 was already arguably an un-needed bump in power level vis a viz D&D as it had been before d20. I almost think that I'd prefer a hybrid of Pathfinder 1e and 3.5; races from 3.5, classes from Pathfinder, the skill consolidation and the CMB/CMD from Pathfinder. And, of course, playing with non-power gamers so that the broken builds and combos that seem to have plagued discussion of the game are a moot point because your players are really only interested in the roleplaying opportunities of the mechanical chargen options, not creating broken combos or munchkin builds. 

Races of Eberron

I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of the four Eberron races, warforged, shifter, kalashtar and changeling. I wasn't sure if it would actually be able to parse that, but it did OK. The changeling is the only one that it didn't really understand, and I wasn't super pleased with either the shifter or the kalashter, but y'know. Whatever. It's just to add visual interest to the post.

I've been reading Races of Eberron and I'm reminded once again that I'm not really a huge fan of the signature races. Even the ones where I like the concept, I'm often not a fan of the mechanics, which are often more fiddly than I'd like. Let me talk about the four races and tell you what I think of them.

Warforged: I don't like the concept of the warforged, actually. They are probably the most signature of the signature races. They're really kind of a pain to use, though. From a roleplaying perspective, they aren't necessarily a bad idea. but I'm not really a fan of them. Fantasy robots animated by magic. They have much of the exact same vibe as emancipated robots in many science fiction settings. But mostly I just find that the mechanics of playing them are kind of a pain, and the concept doesn't fit D&D to me, and I just don't really like or care for them. I can, however, at least understand why they're important to the setting, and why someone who doesn't mind the mechanical nonsense around healing and whatever might find the idea of roleplaying one to be interesting. 

Shifter: This is one that I've always really love the concept of the race, but it's also a bit complicated to build, with lots of things to choose from; but if you set it up where it's a pretty standard shift, kind of like a barbarian rage, then it probably works OK. I do like the concept of a "wild man", whether associated with lycanthropy like the shifters or not a lot. It's really up my alley (although I don't love the image ChatGPT just gave me. I'm going to guess that that character is shifted which is why she looks more inhuman.) Their communities of xenophobic introverts who hang out in the forest and avoid everyone else doesn't really lend itself to being eminently role-playable, but I guess maybe that kind of depends on the campaign.

Changeling: This is another great roleplaying race, if you want to play a disguised spy or something. However, I can tell you by personal experience that you have to be careful to validate that your campaign will actually accommodate your concept, or you'll be pretty disappointed. My changeling rogue in Age of Worms wasn't meant to be a trap-finding, lockpicking scout, but more of a con artist and disguised spy or criminal type, but it turns out that that didn't matter at all, and I couldn't use the character the way that I intended to. That's the one that I ended up retiring shortly after getting to Greyhawk City and replacing with my shifter barbarian/ranger/stuff character. In most respects, he was more straightforward, at least from a roleplaying perspective. I had a prestige class that basically gave me the Pounce ability, and I'd just shift and rage and jump in and do maximum damage as fast as I could. I'm still a little bit regretful that I didn't get the roleplaying opportunity to play the changeling that I wanted to. I've also seen a changeling rogue played without any particular roleplaying hook; he just liked to use his disguise ability to impersonate enemies and do stuff like that. I think this is a pretty fun race.

Kalashtar: I don't care for this one, and it really doesn't feel like it belongs. Because their whole thing is that they're from the other side of the world, but a few of them have started to trickle into the main Eberron area (Khorvaire) I've always felt like they came across as very tacked on, and they don't really have much of a place in the normal setting that isn't kind of forced. Also, the weird, peaceful "shaolin monk elves" kind of vibe that they give off is one that I don't like. I do like that the guys, Keith Baker and whomever else he worked with on this one, deliberately wanted to find a race that was set up to use the psionics rules, but I think the decision to make them too foreign and really associated with Sarlona, which is far enough away to almost be it's own sub-setting that's not really related to Khorvaire except by awkward fiat. 

I'd really like to finish Races of Eberron this week, and maybe I can get quite a bit read while traveling. I'm taking tomorrow off to drop my wife off at the airport, but I actually don't have to take her until late afternoon. It's about an hour and a half to two hour one-way drive, depending on traffic. so I'll still have most of the day to sleep in, maybe pack my bag, or at least half of it, and have a couple of hours to read before I have to do that. And then I travel the next day, but again it's late in the day, so I'll sleep in, finish any last minute packing (like my toiletries that I'll still need to use) and I'll still have some time. With any luck, I'll actually finish it before I leave, and I can pack it away and read something else on the flight.

Snakes, Deep Ones and undead and stuff

I've read half of the Sandy Petersen Cthulhu Mythos Saga #2: Yig Snake Granddaddy. In spite of it's stupid name, and other problems, I like it better than Ghoul Island so far, and it's made me feel more "friendly" towards the concept of snakemen than normal. I've always liked the idea of snakemen, of course, but I was reluctant to do too much with them for a long time, only adding them to the monster list after reading several years ago the Paizo adventure path Serpent's Skull. I'll read that again (once I get to it on the trawl, so not anytime too soon), but even reading what I did of the SPCM made me jones for a bit more snakemen. I pulled out my old Dragon Magazine #305 from way back in 2003 which had a Robin Laws penned Ecology of the Yuan-ti article in it. I've always liked Sertrous at least as much, if not more, than any of the other Elder Evils in the book Elder Evils. I've been as anxious to read the Serpent Kingdoms book in my FR trawl as pretty much anything else on the trawl, honestly. And, of course, "serpentfolk" feature prominently in the Freeport material, which I'm finally getting close to wrapping up on. 

Both Paizo and Green Ronin had to go back to the original Robert E. Howard well for serpentfolk, because Wizards of the Coast neglected to put yuan-ti in the SRDs for either 3e or 5e. I thought this was curious and kind of petty, given that yuan-ti were clearly themselves just remixes of Howard's serpentfolk from stories like "The Shadow Kingdom" and probably degenerate forms in "Worms of the Earth" and also mentioned prominently in the ghost-written Lovecraft story "The Mound".

Anyway, I really like the idea of these prehistoric snake people lurking in the shadows, and I've got them integrated into my own Cult of Undeath campaign, where they take the place of Deep Ones (fish people) on my Innsmouth alternative. Instead of fish people in the ocean near a coastal town, I have snake people in a swamp near a town that's on the edge of the swamp, but otherwise, they play a very similar role. I actually prefer to make the majority of them more like yuan-ti purebloods, i.e., mostly human with only a few reptilian features, like funky snake eyes and a slight greenish tint to their skin or something like that. But there has to be actual, original snake-people too, and I've generated these few images of one of their cities deep in a tropical or at least subtropical forest. 

 Although I'm doing snakemen to replace my Innsmouth, Deep Ones are still important to me. Here's some images. I can't take too much credit for them, even for generating the prompt that made ChatGPT create the image, but I'm using them shamelessly nonetheless.

And undead, of course, are always one of my favorites. Here's a few images. Again, I didn't create these. AI did, but someone else created the prompt. I screen-capped them from a YouTube video just to have a few undead images.

There's a pretty good lore video that just went up recently on Tar-Baphon, the Whispering Tyrant, the great necromancer of the Golarion (Paizo Pathfinder) setting. It also made me want to read some of my Nagash lore, the great necromancer of the Warhammer Old World setting, but I can't find a decent YouTube video of it. I'll probably have to dig around in my boxes to find my old copy of White Dwarf 173, which reproduced most of the lore text from the Warhammer Undead Army book, which came out about that same time (mid-1994.)

Which makes me perhaps want to propose Cult of Undead rather than Curse of the Corsair Coast to my gaming group as an alternative when the flaky ones aren't there. Whatever. All of my campaigns interest me, so I can run any of them. But right now, the snakes and the undead in particular are catching my eye.