Cult of Undeath ... tonight

My current gamer buddies are a bit unusual. I often get invited to join their "side group" (more accurately, I am part of the side group; I often get invited to join the main group) often with very little notice, and I'm often asked if I want to run. So yesterday evening, I was asked if I wanted to run a one-shot tonight. Sadly, my schedule is a bit constrained; I can do it, but it's going to make for a tight evening. I have a first pass job interview at 6 PM, missionaries over for dinner at 6:30, and D&D at 7:30. And, naturally, my day was packed full as it always is with no free time during the day to look at anything. I re-read, or skimmed rather, "Curse of the Brine Witch" and took some notes, which I printed off. I printed off a few AI generated pictures; one of Bridgetown and one of the Blackwater Hag, and I asked ChatGPT to generate me some 1st level renditions of the Scooby Gang as D&D characters, which I also printed off. Technically, I have five characters, because it made Scooby-doo into one too.

I told Tanya, the one who asked me, that I don't think my game is a one-shot. It's too hard to run a game, especially a 5e game, in 2½-3 hours. So, we'll call it a 2-3 shot... although I'm not going to point out until we get further along, that it's an optional campaign opener, because not knowing what else to do and having recently finished the Cult of Undeath outline, I decided to run Cult of Undeath. Honestly, it might well take more than 2-3 sessions to do this first part. But if it goes really well, and if we want to continue it, I'll be glad of the slower pace.

Alternate Blackwater Hag image

So tonight will be fairly low-key. I'll kill all of the PCs first, in their Scooby gang incarnation, which I'm going to give to them. Then, the regular PCs will be investigating the murder of the Scoobers. My favorite way to start a campaign, or even a season of an ongoing campaign. I've got enough roleplaying and investigatory notes, plus some towny random encounters, that'll keep them busy for easily two sessions, probably three, and possibly four depending on how hung up we get on looking in to anything that we end up looking in to. 

I'm not going to worry over-much beyond that. I'll have to adapt to D&D, which I'm not thrilled with, but which I absolutely am capable of doing. I hope I don't get a bunch of stupid Muppets characters, but I probably will. Probably have some dragonborn, some kenku, or some other crap like that. That's what I get for not disallowing them up front, but then again, this isn't even my normal group, this was last minute, and I don't know a lot of these players yet, at least not as players, to feel comfortable laying all kinds of restrictions on them yet. I'll just subtly influence them, I hope, by presenting a more grounded, darker fantasy, and hope that they get with the program if the campaign continues. If it doesn't... well, that's OK too, I guess. I'll at least have laid some seeds for the future. I never know what to expect from a last minute session like this, when I don't even know for sure who's playing or what kinds of characters I'll get. 

Anyway, I'll keep this post fairly short, and come edit it sometime tomorrow with a report of how it went.

UPDATE: As promised; the session went relatively well. It was a little rushed. I had little time to prepare, I had little warning that it was coming, I had no time to review characters (granted, from their perspective, these are one-shot characters, so I have no idea how much thought they even put into them—the guy who named his character Hey New Guy, which we decided to spell Hanu Guy obviously didn't create any backstory) and I had a busy evening, rushing from one thing to another to another until I got here, about fifteen minutes late compared to our targeted start time. We obviously didn't finish, but we did OK. I kind of rushed them through some investigation, threw them a lot of clues that I'd otherwise possibly have made them work a little harder for (although probably not)

It was otherwise pretty much what I'd hoped. Maybe a little sillier, but that's on me for giving them the Scooby gang as pregens to get killed at the beginning, and making it very obvious that they were, indeed, the Scooby gang. 

I do feel a little rusty as a GM. Other than a few one-shots here and there, I've not really run anything in several years, and I find that some of my bad habits, like moving too quickly through stuff, are ones that I definitely need to keep an eye on. Part of that was a function of me feeling so rushed, both to prepare for the game, to try and get a lot done in about three hours or even slightly less, and the whole hecticness of the evening in general. Without those factors, I'd have reviewed my notes and outline one more time, made a few more notes with some names of NPCs that they'd likely run into instead of having to improvise them on the spot, or if I did improvise them on the spot, I'd have taken a little bit more time to look them up on my DM screen's name list panel at least. I would have been just a bit more prepared, I guess. And I like running pretty fast and loose; don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I'd be a lot more prepared; I'd just have spent a little more time in prep and reviewed what prep I did do one more time so the whole thing went a little bit smoother.

Good news is, we're meeting next week to continue, and because I know about it in advance, I can do that. Although there are two more players who are normally part of that group, so there's a possibility that I'll have more players and more things going on. While this "one shot" doesn't end on a cliff-hanger exactly, it does leave places for it to go as a more campaign-ish type thing. If we get to that point and people still want to play, then I'll need a little bit more on their characters.

I'm not super thrilled about adapting my campaign to 5e with a group where I'm kind of a back-up, but y'know... it beats not doing anything at all. And I feel like we did maybe a third of what I prepared. My outline is a good three sessions; probably four if I slow down a bit and take things a little bit more deliberately. Enough time to get my sea legs under me with running, I hope. River legs, maybe, as the case may be in this campaign.

Terror in Timischburg; first pass at expansion

Cutting and pasting my original Terror in Timischburg outline, and I'll add some more thoughts on how to expand.

1) The "white whale"—some kind of large, nasty sea monster that's been threatening the coast and shipping. It needs to be found and hunted. 

I never meant, of course, for the "white whale" to literally be a white whale. I'm actually leaning towards something like Scylla right now. Not sure how to do this, though, so it's more interesting that just "sail around for a while and then fight a monster in the ocean." The Leviathan chapter of Elder Evils might have some ideas that I need to look at again. I'm also thinking that it requires special equipment. Maybe special equipment made out of star-metal, which conveniently will be crashing on an island as part of another front below. So, there's this whole end times cult that's used some kind of ritual to call a meteor down to crash on an island as a test; a bigger and more deadly attack later. 

Not 100% sure how to tie this in to the sea monster other than that creating ballista heads of skymetal, and skymetal swords, or whatever, is necessary to slay the monster. But I'd like to think of an even tighter relationship.

2) The city-state of Rozovka has often born the brunt of vampiric slave raids, clandestinely. Joining up with Inganok, another victim, they are hoping to discourage them militarily. Although not capable of fighting them, they're looking to commission privateers via letters of marque against Timischburg's clandestine vampire raids. It's worth noting that the idea that vampires clandestinely rule Timischbrg is secret(ish), hidden behind plausible deniability, and many people don't believe in vampires.

I'm not sure what this looks like either. It sounds like sailing around hunting vampire (or at least vampire representative) pirates and attacking them, but that's not a very structured approach either. I think that I might be able to adapt some of the Freeport material, maybe particularly the one actual sailing ship combat module, "A Storm of Sails". I'm sure that there are more sailing modules out there, but I don't know them off-hand. There's a whole 5e campaign (3pp) called Call of the Deep I think, plus the Saltmarsh 5e collection, all of which I should probably read too. They're both on my radar, but not in the short term. I might consider pulling them ahead to read.

Either that, of course, or I don't finish this particular one until I get to those points in my reading. Which is fine. I'll probably leapfrog Curse of the Corsair Coast at least ahead of this, at least when I get to the final supercut.

3) Pirates have been hiding out in remote coves on the Nizrekh Islands and even hiding their treasure haul there. Of course, the locals are unfriendly, hostile, and xenophobic. And snake cultists, and cannibals. Seriously bad news. Probably undead too, some of them. And, well, Nizrekh is what's left of Atlantis, so there's even more bad news there too. 

This is where I'm thinking of adapting part 2 of Second Darkness, "Children of the Void." It's going to be a bit more bulked up, and I'll have a look at some of the jungle exploration modules that I've read earlier from Savage Tide, or maybe "Souls for the Smuggler's Shiv" adventure from Serpent's Skull. 

4) The seal mentioned elsewhere at Grozavest that keeps Tarush, the undead godling trapped underground, is weakening, and nastier, more primal and feral ghouls/vampires are slipping through. Not only in the wilds of Timischburg, but also in Nizrekh, and in the jungles to the east of the corsair cities can the PCs find out how to tighten up the seals and keep the already horrifying enough "secret" vampire aristocracy of Timischburg from being replaced by a ravening horde of daemons and undead.

This is a major change from the ship-based stuff otherwise going on. In some ways, this may be the closest to a dungeon-crawl that I've come up with; but primarily I need to focus on the PCs finding a way to strengthen or re-do the seal. Maybe the skymetal above on Nizrekh is important here, or the fellshard ore in Garskarfells. But ultimately, having Tarush somehow breaking his seal is the worst case scenario, so it needs to be prevented at all costs. 

5) The Godfather in Port Liure. A patron sends the PCs to disrupt dangerous drug and occult trade in the city of thieves which is wreaking havoc on more innocent Timischer people, and they get caught up in a gang war, among other problems.

Port Liure is already going to be the setting for Curse of the Corsair Coast, so I probably want to involve a different one of the Corsair City-states like Razina or St. Haspar or something. There are some Freeport modules that I can easily adapt to this; I need to go double check on them and see which ones best fit.

(Bonus) Innsburough in the Orlok Marches is deliberately meant to evoke Innsmouth of Lovecraft fame. Cults of Dagon threaten the entire coast, centered on this horrible town. Sea devils and deep ones and cultists. Can they be disrupted without it being fatal?

The final one, a bonus one, is just "Shadow Over Innsmouth" at least as its currently described. Again, I'm going to have a look at some existing modules for this one too. 

I think mostly my plan is pretty solid, but it's still a little light for many of these, and what I'd like to do is adapt existing material rather than make it up myself.  This post gives it a little more flesh, but it's still not enough to go on. But it's enough that I can go back and do some research with existing modules that I have, and then come back and do each of these six fronts as a separate, more detailed post.

EDIT: The current banner is probably the busiest that I've ever made for this site, but... I kinda like it. I'm sure I'll get restless with it in the future and change it again, but for now, I quite like it. I'll post it here just because at some point in the future it may not be the one that's on the header.

Cult of Undeath Supercut Add-on

At one point, I thought it would be interesting to not only have a super complete and complex 5x5 (plus add-ons) for Darkness in the Hill Country, and I created another 1x5 leg specific to the iconic characters as an example of what I'd like to do with the actual PCs, even though the actual PCs, of course, wouldn't be the iconic characters. I now think that this was not a good idea. I created some NPCs that made the iconics seems much more interesting and deep, but that means that they work better as novel characters rather than ... DM NPCs, which is what they effectively would be otherwise. Unfortunately, I think some of the NPCs that I created to be foils of these iconics are quite good, and I find myself wanting to find ways to use them. In fact, I've even made AI images for campaign use for some of them, including Vaspar Oksandros, Audley Hardwicke and a few others. One of my favorites though, and one that I initially created for Darkness in the Hill Country, but which I think would fit extremely well in Cult of Undeath is Alys. 

Alys is an agent, or support character, added to the PCs group like a cohort, but she comes from a source that is perhaps not the most trustworthy. I think that she would come up in Cult of Undeath in Gaskarfells, where she could represent the interests of either Dietmar von Hohenstahl or Roderich von Szarad. Maybe, even, she's an uneasy compromise between the two of them, who are rivals, but who both might want to convince the PCs to help with the depredations of feral vampire Velgar Tzarnik and his proto-vampire and ghoulish minions. Of course, von Hohenstahl is himself a more cultured Timischburg vampire, although the PCs wouldn't be expected to know that at first, or potentially even at all if they aren't very curious, and while von Szarad is known to be a necromancer, it's a different kind of thing in Gaskarfells, and not necessarily villainous. So yeah, they're not expected to know that von Szarad is obviously a villain himself angling at becoming a lich, no doubt at the expense of the town and the greater Timischburg population around it. Assuming that they do find out about that, it's probably not going to be surprising to eventually discover that Alys herself isn't the pretty young helpful pseudomage prodigy that she presents herself as. 

Oh, sure, she is young, pretty and probably kind of likeable. And yeah, she does offer a lot of benefit to the PC group as a potential sage to be consulted, as a non-combatant travel companion who can offer limited healing and magical buffs, as well as be consulted in all kinds of things. But she was assigned to them not only to help with the specific task of defeating Tzarnik, but also to keep an eye on the PCs, who neither von Szarad nor von Hohenstahl really trust. They also don't trust each other, and to some extent, probably not Alys neither. 

See, Alys is actually an ancient wight-witch, i.e., a wight who has access to some spells and pseudomagery (imitation of spells through magic items.) Her pleasant exterior is merely an illusion, and in certain circumstances, the PCs should have the opportunity to see through it. She's the "wife" of Tarush, the Charnel God who fell to the earth, created the first vampires (allegedly), is buried and sealed under the constant nightfall of Grozavest, and is the primary source of all undeath in the world. Although "wife" is more like the way in which Catholic nuns are considered "brides" of Christ; she's not literally his wife, of course, and she post-dates his fall to earth by many centuries. 

That said, in spite of Alys' true dark and disturbing demeanor and practices, and the casual way in which she doesn't care about most people around her and willingly and thoughtlessly sacrifices them if it helps her pursue her goals in any way, she does come to become genuinely fond of the PCs, I think. I like the idea that the PCs have an ally who is genuinely helpful and they genuinely probably want to keep around because of it, but that she genuinely creeps them out and makes them nervous too.

I may add other of these NPCs to the potential outline, i.e., Hardwicke as a corrupt fallen Shadow ranger, or Oksandros as a sinister Chersky mafia gangster, or a few of the other characters which help to make the setting a bit more rich and the plots a bit more complex. Maybe some of the former iconics who were "demoted" to cohort or NPC status, like Shule, Oisin Dughall, Dean Bannermane, etc. too.

Paizo. Huh. What are they good for?

Not absolutely nothing, say it again. I've been reading a lot of the early Paizo stuff, partly as part of my trawl of the adventure paths (nearly halfway done with Second Darkness as of this writing, but you need to remember to add the three 3.5 adventure paths done in the pages of Dungeon Magazine before starting on the Paizo adventure path books.) I've also been reading the Paizo Adventures; originally called the GameMastery series, and I've still got a little over half a dozen to read before I get to where they spill out of 3.5 and become Pathfinder the RPG. I want to finish those and the adventure paths that were for 3.5 specifically at about the same time, so I've been reading a lot of the stand-alone modules to catch up, but now I'm going to slow down and pace them a bit. Ready to read the next one of the adventure path after having not read any of that in a few weeks.

Anyway, I thought I'd document which of the modules I'm reading I think are good enough that I'd potentially revisit them and adapt them into one of my ongoing campaigns. This will obviously be an ongoing effort; there were a lot of these modules published over the years, even just for 3.5, and there were at least twice as many published for Pathfinder 1e as for 3.5. Between the two, there were probably close to seventy modules published. I'll also talk about the chapters of the Adventure Path that I think I'd like to use, although I'll probably do a second post where I talk about the adventures from Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tide. I should do some Freeport stuff too; maybe I'll even fudge it a little bit and post that under my new PAIZO REVISITED tag, which I'm creating specifically for this, since some of the modules, especially at the end, were published for the Pathfinder 1e system. All in all, I envision that the Paizo Revisited tag will be a nice little reference for me when I've done more of them in terms of what modules are workable to be adapted into one of my campaigns. I should attempt to adapt more modules into my campaigns after all; that's why I'm reading them, and although Darkness in the Hill Country and (maybe) Terror in Timischburg are not really adapted from anything at all, Cult of Undeath is largely (although radically) adapted from, mostly, the Carrion Crown adventure path, with some additional ideas inspired by the old 1e module "Against the Cult of the Reptile God" and another portion inspired by the H. P. Lovecraft story "Shadow Over Innsmouth."

Anyway, this isn't meant to be complete; I just want to document which modules I like while I still remember them well enough to do so. Maybe "like" isn't the right word; which modules have elements or even a basic structure that I'd think I want to potentially adapt. I'll bold and red the module titles so it's easier to pick them out when looking back at these posts later...

"Hollow's Last Hope", the very first stand-alone adventure, is pretty good, and pretty classic. While it isn't super innovative, and the whole "lumber barons" thinly veiled political statement is way too Seattle hipster for me, I never claimed I was going to run them straight out of the book. This module is sufficiently well-done that I could adapt it to a different setting, potentially with different monsters even and certainly within a different context, but the basic structure is sufficiently sound that I like it.

"Hangman's Noose", a low level haunted house, was a fantastic read, and is very strongly one that I want to consider finding out how to adapt it. I don't know for sure that I love the way that the characters were hooked into the adventure, but that's always campaign dependent anyway, and I don't hold that against an adventure, where they'd gotta think of something, but most likely you've gotta change it too.

"River Into Darkness" is a classic jungle river voyage, heavily influenced by The African Queen, the famous movie from 1951 starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. Although I haven't read it in a long time, I know that the first half of "Racing to Ruin" from the Serpent's Skull adventure path has a similar theme, and the two could probably be combined to give you plenty more options, if you wanted them. I dislike the anti-colonialism soapbox, or even the need to acknowledge that such existed because they absolutely cannot do so without presenting it as a propagandistic narrative, but if you switch out the wild jungle elves with convicted felons; maybe even the equivalent of Moslem rape-gangs from the UK and elsewhere in Europe, it works better, and the wild elves that are attacking the fort are, instead of justified anti-slavers, brigands and criminals in their own right who you can defend yourself against violently without feeling the least remorse. 

This is the most recent one that I've read, so I'll do any winners out of the remaining 3.5 modules in another post, maybe along with the D&D modules from the early adventure paths. I do want stuff that I can use in my newer southerly tropical and subtropical sections, like Baix Pallars and Porhomok and the jungle that separates them.

Meanwhile, from the Paizo adventure paths, I've combined "Burnt Offerings" with "Hollow's Last Hope" in an extremely abbreviated format before, and I think that they work quite well. There are other parts of "Burnt Offerings" that I like, but parts of it that I don't, so I'd certainly do some editing, if nothing else.

"The Skinsaw Murders" is one of my absolute favorite Paizo adventure that I've read so far, and I'd use the crap out of it. I'd probably change the context rather than have it be part of a campaign that has any resemblance to Rise of the Runelords, and I'd focus especially on the first half in the Sandpoint countryside, and maybe not even use the Magnimar section at all... although there's nothing really wrong with it.

I don't love "The Hook Mountain Massacre" as much as some fans do, but it does have some good material. I'd have to more liberally modify it, but as with "Hollow's Last Hope" I think that there's a good structure behind the module that I could still use. 

I'm going to skip Curse of the Crimson Throne entirely, because I'm going to hold back on that one and think about possibly adapting the whole thing more closely, as Cult of Undeath was to Carrion Crown, but of the Second Darkness adventure path, which I've not finished reading yet, "Children of the Void," the second one, which is a kind of riff of movies like Alien or Predator or even Jurassic Park in a way where you're stuck in a wilderness setting with monsters running amok is actually quite a good one, and I'm going to use the "magic ritual calling down a meteor" idea from it as part of one of my own campaigns, probably Curse of the Corsair Coast as well.

Finally, although not a Paizo adventure, I've also recently read most of the original run of 3e adventures, and of those, "Speaker in Dreams" is absolutely the stand-out one that I'd consider using.

When I revisit PAIZO REVISITED, I imagine I'll have finished all of the adventures, both adventure path and stand-alone, published for 3.5e D&D. I'll also read some summaries of the original three D&D adventure paths that Paizo wrote before they went on their own so I can remember a little better what those were like. I know for sure that at least some of those adventures would pass muster, but I don't remember which ones at this point. 

Adventure Path modules possibly need even more adaptation than stand-alone, to make them fit in a campaign of my own making instead of the one that they were originally written to take place in, as well as to level adjust any that are higher level, and to "context-adjust" them all out of a D&D context. This is more important for higher level modules too, of course, as low level D&D doesn't feel nearly as ungrounded and it is more like regular fantasy as you'd expect it to be. It quickly becomes a sub-genre of its own as access to more and more D&D magic because a given, which of course always makes these not work as well for me.

Banners - I have a problem

I admit that I have a problem. I like making banners and using what is little more than WordArt level playing around to make them with lots of fonts, backgrounds, WingDing or runic decorations, etc. That said, I enjoy it, so here's a big batch upload of most of what I have that I haven't rendered obsolete and deleted. This applies both to the setting, and to the campaigns.