Sense and Sensibility

I read effectively nothing yesterday. As reported, lunch was busy, evening was busy. I went with my wife to see a "mystery movie" where they sometimes show an early movie that hasn't been released yet, but you don't know what it is until you see it. However, because they give at least a mostly accurate runtime and rating, which they kind of have to do, you can usually pretty accurately predict what it will be if you take the time to, and my wife was quite sure that it was going to be the new Sense and Sensibility... which it was.

Now, a lot of people like me who are ... y'know, dudes, who like dude lit like Robert E. Howard, J. R. R. Tolkien, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc take a pretty dim view of chick lit like Jane Austen, and I totally get it. That's what I thought for many years too. My wife, very early in our marriage, convinced me to watch the 1995 Pride & Prejudice with Colin Firth—the role that made him a star, essentially—and I was suitably impressed in spite of it being literally the prototype for every chick lit book that followed, that it Austen was both an astute observer of human nature and a writer of extreme cleverness. Around that same time while I was still in college, I was in an English lit class and had to read Emma, another Austen book, and the basis for the charming 90s teen comedy Clueless (the movie that made Paul Rudd a star) which had also come out in 1995. I probably saw them both in 1996 or so. Ever since, I've been a confirmed Jane Austen fan. I have a rule that I literally will not read a woman writer that I don't already know or have recommended to me by a highly trusted recommender because I've been burned by so many crypto-romances, but even so, Jane Austen is a legitimate master of English literature, and anyone who comes from an ango-sphere culture; England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and of course America—barring the fake anglo-sphere foreigners living among us—cannot call themselves properly educated in our culture without having read at least one of her books. I've actually only read two; Emma and Pride and Prejudice, but I own a nice Flame Tree copy of the latter and read it every few years or so. It's up there with the three authors mentioned above (and H. P. Lovecraft) as one of my favorites that I come back to and revisit fairly frequently. I can probably make a few guilty pleasure authors make the cut too, like the Riftwar books by Raymond Feist and the Icewind Dale trilogy by R. A. Salvatore, but I have no pretentions about them being serious literature that will still be remembered in decades. 

So my wife is to "blame" for me being a Jane Austen fan, and she's only read (by which I mean audiobook) Pride and Prejudice but of course since they are perennially popular, they have been adapted to the screen many times (it helps that it's relatively inexpensive to make them. You just need some Regency costumes and sets and maybe a few location shots at some nice old houses in England). Her favorite adaptation of any of them had been Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility (also came out in 1995, curiously), which is star-studded, to be sure, but in my opinion badly cast. Emma Thompson was too old to play a 19 year old Elinor Dashwood (she was 35, but looks closer to 40), and honestly, Kate Winslet didn't look like a 16 year old either. Curiously, the youngest sister looked too young. And Alan Rickman looked closer to 50 than 35, making his interest in Marianne seem kind of creepy, and while Hugh Grant did a credible job, I never liked him in the role as Edward Ferrars. He's better in a more self-deprecatory role, like he has in Notting Hill, which is the Hugh Grantiest Hugh Grant movie ever made. So, I actually hoped and expected to like the new one better than the "original" one... which of course isn't really original, but it was kind of the gold standard for many years. In spite of the fact that it didn't quite work for me.

So, I was curious how the younger looking cast was going to fare, and if it would be, as with the Pride and Prejudice comparison of the BBC miniseries (1995) to the Keira Knightley movie (2005); the newer one was shorter and more abbreviated, but what it did was more emotional and dramatic, and ultimately, mostly more fun. Sense and Sensibility is one theatrical release movie vs another, so I didn't expect a significant length difference (136 vs 132 minutes) but I did expect it to maybe be a little broader, less subtle, and ultimately more entertaining. And I expected it to be cast in such a way that it felt... more authentic, if you will. Both of those were true. I actually rather liked it. I'm not going to say that I loved it, but I liked it quite a bit, I'll almost certainly buy a copy (for my wife, in theory) and I'll almost certainly watch it more frequently than she does.

There is another Pride and Prejudice adaptation coming out at the end of the year as a miniseries, so I'll have another one to watch with her too.

Anyway, I don't know that I'll read much if anything today either, as we have a busy evening. Thursday is D&D. I don't know what I'm going to be able to read until the weekend, so my aggressive reading prognostication over the weekend will probably not come true.

UPDATE: Quick update. On reddit, where I sometimes spend a few minutes, I look at a lot of D&D AI images based on subreddits that are dedicated to specifically that purpose. There's some good stuff there, but three things immediately get a thumbs down from me, and they come up a lot. 1) super butch girlbosses, 2) lesbian lovers, 3) weird anime or animal people characters.

What in the world happened to fantasy? Who should I blame? A generation who grew up on Pokemon? I don't know, but it sucks.

UPDATE II: And this, interestingly.

Did USAID really make rap music more popular than it organically would have been? I wonder. I wouldn't be surprised, but that's an odd one to put first. I mean, I know that it's not meant to be super serious, but that one is actually one that I see tossed around quite a bit.

Paizo reading

Every so often, I need to do a reading check-in. In spite of plenty of things going on, I've had a relatively successful reading weekend, especially of Paizo products. I finished, recently, Into the Darklands on the setting side, "Treasure of Chimera Cove" on the stand-alone module side, and "Howl of the Carrion King" on the adventure path side, the first adventure of Legacy of Fire. I've read a few other things in there too, including "Dark World #1: The Ritual" from the SPCM campaigns. So I now have five each of those three Paizo trawls before I get to the change from D&D 3.5 to PFRPG. (I'm also, in concert, reading  the PFRPG core book as well as Occult Adventures, which is admittedly out of order, but those obviously come after PFRPG launched. And I'd already jumped over on the Companion side, so I'm letting those "rest" for a time until I get caught up on the others.) I've mentioned before that it looks like the Chronicles line, which was later renamed the Setting line, was always running a little bit behind. I just read the one on the Darklands, which fit thematically with the Second Darkness adventure path after I'm already done with Second Darkness and into Legacy of Fire. The Katapesh chronicles book is still a few books away; when I'm nearly done with the Legacy of Fire adventure path. Although admittedly, once I make the jump on all Paizo trawls into PFRPG, I probably won't care or even have a good and easy way to know the release months of these anymore, so I won't pay nearly as much attention to reading them in any kind of order. In fact, I deliberately intend to bounce around with some of these and read titles that interest me out of order rather than just march through the trawl like a death march. While Occult Adventures has been a little disappointing to me given that it's nothing but mechanics and reads like a car repair manual rather than a game book, in many ways, I expect that the Chronicles/Setting books associated with the occult will be much more interesting, and thematically appropriate for the fall. I'm thinking of pulling ahead Occult Mysteries, Occult Realms and re-reading Horror Realms again, even though I read that early in 2025 too. It's been a year and a half. No biggie. I'm also thinking so soon after reading Into the Darklands, I should read Darklands Revisited, which I bought as a physical book some months ago and still haven't ever read.

Although genie-themed, the first module is all about gnolls, mostly.

What I really want to talk about though is the Adventure Path methodology. Like I said, I just finished "Howl of the Carrion King" which is the first adventure of the Legacy of Fire adventure path. In terms of just raw "feel", if that means anything, the entire adventure feels low level. Which is appropriate. However, you're supposed to be 5th level when you do that last encounter. To me, that seems wild. The whole adventure book, as all of them, is about 100 pages. Less because some of those are credits, ads, cover and back cover, and other ephemera. And, of course, the book contains some short fiction, some setting stuff, a little bestiary, etc. The actual adventure itself is just under 50 pages. And some of those pages are full page maps, nearly full page statblocks, and there are plenty of illustrations. Converted down to just raw text, it's probably about 40 pages. To me, it's insane to think that you can level up four times and do the final encounter at 5th level in that few pages. Especially, because the whole thing feels like a single, low level adventure. In feel, I'd call this the first act of a novel, and I'd expect the whole adventure to maybe take you from 1st to 2nd level when you're finished with it. Of course, then they'd be less likely to be able to challenge you with various more varied challenges. I see why they did it. But I don't like that they felt the need. It's kid of baked into the cake of D&D and D&D-like expectations, at least from a 3e and beyond version of D&D, which this is (this is still a D&D 3.5 adventure path, remember, and as far as I'm concerned, PFRPG is just a minor revision to D&D 3.5, and could well be considered merely D&D 3.75 or something.)

It's certainly a testament to me why a flatter power curve, one way or another, was such a highly desirable outcome on the 5e design side. Whether they actually accomplished it or not, I don't know, but they certainly claimed to want to do so. Characters who are powerful enough at the lowest levels to still be able to be somewhat survivable and to be able to play with some variety, but who don't get into runaway power escalation so that the game literally changes genres at the higher single-digit levels, and then again sometimes in the teens, is what I want. Much flatter power curve, in other words, all around, and generally a mostly lower power curve too.

So far, I'm relatively happy with the adventure path. Sure, sure, I'm only one book (of six) in, but so far so good. What I'd really like to do in a more straight conversion is have each book be worth one level, re-jigger the threats and challenges to be level appropriate while still utilizing the same plot and scope of the written module (more or less). The whole campaign would still take about as much time of actual play (well, maybe less, because higher level characters are much slower to play) but it would end as the characters are qualifying to level up from 6th to 7th level. In PFRPG or D&D 3.5, anyway. It would become an effective E6 even if it wasn't actually E6, for all intents and purposes.

Of course, that's using D&D 3.5, PFRPG, or my hybrid system that combines the two; what I'd really prefer to do is use my own Shadow of Old Night system, which is a much flatter game in terms of power anyway. And it also assumes that I'm just converting the existing modules down to a different power level while still keeping them exactly as is. I may have started years ago when I was doing Cult of Undeath thinking that I'd take Carrion Crown and do that to it, but now other than themes and a few points here and there that are wildly different in context, my revisions of Carrion Crown into Cult of Undeath hardly resemble each other that much after all. I often compare it to the first Star Wars movie. Ignorant people who are trying to impress people by knowing something that they don't actually know sometimes call Star Wars a remake, if you will, of Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. This is absurd. While Lucas is correct in claiming that he started out influenced by it, he actually lost almost all of the details other than R2-D2 and C-3PO kind of mimicking the peasants of the latter movie. The earliest drafts may have been more similar to Hidden Fortress, but the Death Star was always much more like Where Eagles Dare and 633 Squadron or The Dam Busters than anything from Hidden Fortress. The movie that actually got filmed is not very much like Hidden Fortress at all, and I can only imagine that people who say that have not actually watched it. I have, and I remember wondering where in the world people were getting that insane idea. I mean, they got it from George Lucas himself, of course, but Lucas said that he didn't end up borrowing that much from Hidden Fortress after all, and if you watch it, you agree with him. The people who say that it's similar are smoking something crazy.

Anyway, that's a bit of a pet peeve of mine; the point is, I'd prefer not to run these adventure paths as written anyway, even if converting them down-level or to a different system. I'd prefer to just borrow very obliquely from the themes and a few of the ideas, blend it with plenty of other adventures, books, or just original ideas, and not make any big claims about how my game is really an adaptation of the adventure path at all, because arguably it really isn't anymore anyway. 

I doubt I'll talk about this adventure path again before I finish it, but we'll see. Reading is sometimes slow when I've got this many trawls that I'm trying to juggle. I'd love to finish some of the "shorter" trawls and get them out of my hair entirely, like the Eberron, Forgotten Realms, the Third Edition modules, and the Fifth Edition campaigns, but "shorter" is relative, and they're not actually short. And Paizo has kind of taken over my trawl reading, both because there's so much of it, because I actually rather like the setting, and because reading trad-style adventure paths is more fun than reading most of the other stuff that I've got on my plate. It won't be done anytime soon, but once I get past the D&D 3.5 to PFRPG shark-jump, I'll probably step back and read... I don't know, at least something from every other trawl, before I dip too far back into Paizo again. Explorer's Handbook from Eberron, City of the Spider-Queen from Forgotten Realms, Monster Manual IV and maybe even the Draconomicon from the 3.5 books, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil from the 3e adventures, and maybe Expedition to Castle Ravenloft out of order too, so I can read 5e's Curse of Strahd and compare the two. I'll also finish another SPCM campaign while I'm finishing Legacy of Fire and I'd like to read another 3pp campaign in there too; maybe the next SPCM campaign, or maybe someone else's campaign instead.

UPDATE: In spite of it not being the most interesting read, I'm slowly starting to "get into" Occult Adventures now that I'm nearly 100 pages into a 275 or so page-count book. I don't find reading the detailed mechanics of classes all that interesting anymore, honestly, but if I can power through them (and I have) I find that they're not necessarily bad; its just that they're so hard to read. Once I go back, force myself to read the classes and actually not let my mind wander so I can parse how they work, they're not so bad. In fact, I kind of like them, even though they are more complex to run than I'd like... but that's kind of PFRPG's MO, isn't it? Occult magic isn't really exactly the low magic "penny dreadful" alternative I hoped for... or at least, not really. The psychic, for instance, while having different flavor, is very much a "regular" caster with access to 9th level spells at the highest level, and some of the other classes, like kineticist, doesn't even have any spells at all, and just uses magical super-powers. (While psionics vs psychic magic is usually seen a more "the X-men", but the kineticist works as that too. The mesmerist is kind of a "Jedi mind trick" class, although anti-bard works to describe it too. The occultist is mostly about causing items to be magical, etc. 

Even looking at really basic classes like the fighter, D&D 3.5 write-up vs PFRPG write-up, the PFRPG class is at least three times the word-count. To be fair, much of that is because instead of just super simple mechanics, they give you options, and you have to choose between them. PFRPG classes are like big buffets, and you aren't meant to take everything; you're meant to pick from a long list of options. Because of this, you don't use in any given character, all of the rules of the class, and the fact that they have these options means that any individual fighter (or whatever) build might differ significantly from another fighter. That's good. But it makes it harder to read, because there's so many rules that you have to parse, and as I said, they kind of feel like reading an algebra text book or something else equally boring. But the point is, I'm making progress through the book again. I think I'm going to stop buying physical copies of PFRPG rulebooks. I may buy more setting books... maybe... but that's it. The rest of their stuff I can live with my older digital pdf versions. I got a little bit too excited recently in ordering Occult Adventures and Horror Adventures and I doubt that I'll use either very much for anything, or possibly even re-read them at all. I'm starting to suspect that neither one is likely to be something I like better than even 3.5's Heroes of Horror or the FFG 3pp Darkness & Dread (written by Mike Mearls.)

Honestly, while I've been going through this brief flirtation with returning to heavily house-ruled d20, as I dig more and more into that flirtation, I'm reminded more and more why I left it in the first place. Maybe this can best be seen through the lens of a hot fling or affair with an ex... the inevitable result of which is that you remember exactly why you broke up in the first place and it reinforces that that was the right idea all along. I still think that tinkering with the options of a rules-heavy game like d20—either D&D 3.5, d20 Modern, PFRPG or any other iteration of the core game engine, is interesting, but I tend to like creativity through limitations, i.e., rather than the big "anything goes" gallimaufry that we usually get, limitations and exclusions create interesting setting implications. I still like the idea of STRANGE AFFAIRS OF THE UNSEEN BEYOND and EMPIRE OF THE MIND-WIZARDS both, but I need to rethink exactly how to to them, given that my brief enchantment with the mechanics is mostly over... but I'm still left with a fascinating implications for them as potential settings or sub-settings.

UPDATE II: I didn't get to read anything at all during "lunch" because work continues to be too crazy for me to count on having any lunch. And my wife and I are going out tonight, I think, and we're closing on our house that we've been trying to sell tomorrow. So, I won't be reading much for the next couple of days anyway. I do want to get at least a couple of books done this week, though. If I get really lucky, I read Occult Adventures before the week is over, and if I get really lucky, I also finish Guide to Absalom which is next done this week too. If the weekend and later in the week is a good catch-up time, maybe I'll get super lucky and also read "Hungry Are the Dead" and "Dark World #2: Nithon" done. Chances that I read all of those and "House of the Beast," next book in Legacy of Fire is not great. That's a lot of reading. But we'll see what I can do.

Adventure Path Trawl IX

The final APs before 2e came out! War for the Crown is generally pretty well regarded, Return of the Runelords was a fun bit of fan service (plus, the one dude who I picked looks like Namor from Marvel Comics, kinda—I and coincidentally a combination of the actual comic book version and the ridiculous movie version, but that's because it's a fantasy setting) and Tyrant's Grasp was a fitting finale to 1e, with probably the biggest single meta story change happening with the return of one of the settings most infamous supervillains.

Adventure Path Trawl VIII

Strange Aeons I actually read half of several years ago. While I didn't finish it, now that I know what it is, I'm anxious to get back to that one, actually. The next two don't necessarily do much for me; Ironfang Invasion is well regarded, Ruins of Azlant sounds interesting but is supposedly hampered by crappy underwater combat rules. I don't care about the rules, since I won't use them anyway.

I admit I'm turned off by the probable monster sympathetic girlboss from Ironfang Invasion, but if I actually adapt this stuff, changing the sex of an NPC is obviously super easy.

Adventure Path Trawl VII

Giantslayer is another one that's based on old stuff; the Against the Giants series, but it's also one that's seen as kind of repetitive and tedious. Hell's Rebels is a very popular one, and Hell's Vengeance is... maybe not popular, but I think a lot of people appreciated the boldness of even trying to make an "evil" campaign in the first place. I'm curious to read those last two especially.

I made my storm giant look like the storm titans from 4e rather than the storm giants as described by Paizo. I just like the look better.

Adventure Path Trawl VI

Not super interested in any of the next three, honestly. Wrath of the Righteous, with it's anti-demon crusade seems OK, Mummy's Mask I know a bit about and while I love the theme, I'm not sure that I'm a huge fan of the actual execution, which is infamous for tedious dungeons, and Iron Gods is a favorite for many, but as the "Expedition to Barrier Peaks" sci-fi inspired one, it's not nearly as much up my alley.

Adventure Path Trawl V

Skull & Shackles, the pirate themed one, is another one of the favorites, and because it has cool pirate characters, I have two covers for it; one the final boss, and one the hot pirate girl from the cover of one of their own adventures. Shattered Star and Reign of Winter are not likely to be my favorites; the former being especially focused on dungeon-crawls, and the latter having a controversial "twist" that I think is more corny than cool.

Adventure Path Trawl IV

The next two are two of the ones I've read. Carrion Crown in particular, being horror-themed, is one of the ones most up my alley, and the ultimate source of my Cult of Undeath campaign. Maybe that's one of the reasons it has two covers; one for the ghost NPC who is such a prominent character in the first adventure, and the Beast of Lepidstadt who is a prominent character in the second.

Jade Regent is the only 1e campaign set in the Pathfinder version of "Oriental Adventures" but it's not really seen as one of the favorites.

Adventure Path Trawl III

The first of these is the last D&D 3.5; the next two are PFRPG adventure paths. Legacy of Fire was also what they were going to do after Savage Tide if the OGL/4e thing hadn't happened and Paizo hadn't had to go solo. In the long run, it was better for us that they did, but I'm sure it was a chaotic and stressful time for them at the time.

The last one of thus bunch, Kingmaker, is probably their most popular one, and the only one that they converted to second edition. 

Adventure Path Trawl II

These three are all D&D 3.5, but now published under Paizo's own auspices rather than as a 3pp contractor. Two of the three are considered among the best of the adventure paths that they did.

Adventure Path Trawl I

I've spent the last ... oh, some weeks or so, on occasion generating new cover images for each adventure path that I could use for a complete PDF that had the whole thing in it, or just as an image for the blog here. I actually decided to post all of them. This is for all of the D&D 3.5 and PFRPG adventure paths, but not the second edition ones, which I may or may not end up getting to, even though they're on my list. It does include the three that appeared in Dungeon Magazine before Paizo had to fly solo. In fact, that's the focus of today's. Because the images are rather large, I decided to make nine posts and only have three images each.

Each image includes one of the iconic NPCs from the adventure path, or even the main boss in most cases... but occasionally the final boss isn't really the most interesting character visually associated with the adventure paths, so sometimes I did someone else instead. Two of them actually have two alternate covers, because I had two characters, and rather than decide, I made one for each. But you'll see.

You can see which adventure path each is based on the title, which I made (with two exceptions) from my own fonts rather than just copying and pasting the title png. I'm excited to read the rest of these.

5.5e

Catch it before he gets pressured to delete it! Freakin' hilarious. Super well played. Brilliant, even.

Exhausted

I'm exhausted. We're in the home stretch on closing on the house we're trying to sell, which is good. Work has been careening from one crisis to another, and I'm exhausted and incredibly frustrated with it over the last several months. That's actually the biggest reason why I'm frustrated, but home has also been frustrating with a lot going on, and little of it super pleasant. So I'm also not sleeping enough and I'm too stressed all of the time, and honestly, the week I just took off wasn't really what I needed or wanted. It was nice, don't get me wrong, but I needed some time to recharge me and it did not give me that at all. I'm absolutely, definitely missing that. I'm not looking forward to this weekend accomplishing it either, unfortunately. It's a pretty packed weekend, as far as that goes, what with the General Conference broadcast, a church cleaning assignment, a double date, etc. The only good thing is that I'll be able to sleep in, but I won't get to recharge. I'm desperately in need of a real recharge.

The sad thing when this kind of thing happens is that even fun things start to feel stressful. The double date tomorrow night? Should be fun, but it's stressful. The game I have to run tonight? Should be fun, but it's stressful, because I have too much going on and I'm already stressed out. I kind of wish it was the other campaign where I'm a player. I'm stressed out about even remembering where we were exactly and exactly how we left things.

Sigh.

On top of all of that, I'm frustrated once again with ENWorld. Specifically with Umbran, the absolute gamma mod who is the only one who ever does anything, and everything he does sucks. I don't know why I keep going back there, but I'm feeling very RPGish the last several months, and other than there and reddit, there aren't many good online places to talk RPGs. Then again, given how terrible those discussions are not to mention most of the people having them, maybe it's not worth trying. 

I was also really looking forward to reading the Paizo books Occult Adventures and Horror Adventures, but almost fifty pages into the former, I'm less so. It's very much a mechanics heavy textbook that reads like a book on accounting or statistics. The six classes, which I was also excited about, are very long and tedious to read; extremely mechanically oblique. I know PFRPG was (in)famous for being overly crunchy, but this is really over-the-top. I shouldn't have been too surprised; even something as simple as the base PHB fighter is at least twice as long as the 3.5 counterpart that it's supposed to be replacing, but mostly just because it offers more options rather than because it would be more difficult to run. All of these occult classes (so far; I haven't read all of them) are just complex to play. And I don't just mean, oh, hey, the kineticist has a big list of powers that are like spells but not, I mean actually the mechanics of how to use them are very complex. I really like the idea of a pseudo-horror "penny dreadful" but in fantasy feel, as a slightly different alternative tone to my "X-files" but in fantasy feel that I normally refer to, but I'm increasingly less likely to think that these occult rules are really what I'm looking for. I was really hoping for some more roleplaying hooks, but (and I shouldn't have been too surprised) this looks like it's really going to go hard into mechanics hooks instead.

In a barely related tangent, given the romanticism of the Gypsies and their supposed supernatural ties during the penny dreadful era, Roma is a word that bugs me. We're told, rather smugly, that Gypsy is an exonym and borderline offensive. This is flat-out untrue. Gypsy, of course, comes from Egyptian, and the reason the Gypsies were called that is because when they arrived in Europe in the Middle Ages, many of them literally told people that they were from Egypt. Many of them may have even believed it, even though they ultimately were almost certainly from the Punjab region of what is now northwestern India and Pakistan, and they crossed Sassanid Persia, settled for a time in Byzantine Anatolia, and only moved into Europe, especially the Balkans, after the Moslem conquest of Anatolia. Not only that; offensive? To whom? Many Gypsies still prefer that name and that's what they call themselves. This is very similar to how we're told that it's better to say "Native Americans" because Indian is offensive, and yet the federal government agency is still the Bureau of Indian Affairs and many, if not most, Indians prefer to call themselves Indians. Who exactly is offended and why?

Gypsies. Don't get the watered down crappy version of Strahd where they tone these guys down because of.... reasons.

Anyway, my Cult of Undeath does have some pseudo-Gypsies, and that's what I'll continue to call them and refer to them as. The idea that Gypsy is offensive is, in turn, offensive to me.

Also, AI, amirite? Those horses are hitched, but somehow they're standing beside the wagons rather than pulling them. Whiskey, tango, foxtrot.

UPDATE: For better or for worse, had a last minute cancellation of D&D last night. We were already kind of at the minimum number, with one of four players out, the fifth potential player who hasn't actually ever come yet incommunicado, and with one more last minute work-related cancelation, we were below critical mass to run the actual campaign. There was some brief talk of doing something else, but I decided that it would be better to just try again next week.

Feeling marginally less stressed so far today, although I didn't sleep well again, because I woke up, had to go the bathroom, and couldn't stop thinking about work-related stress. Sigh. Sometimes that's psychological, though. I think everything will be fine today, and then I can just do what I can to enjoy the weekend.

Three books and future reading

Last night I finished "Madness in London Town", the Goodman Games Call of Cthulhu module that I had been reading for a couple of days. Then, because I ended up having more time than I thought, I read the Legacy of Fire Player's Guide in preparation for reading the adventure path shortly. But, before I do, I wanted to finish the 3.5 compatible adventure paths, stand-alone modules, and Chronicles books all at the same time. I had six of each. Rather than starting immediately with the adventure path, I read the next Chronicles book instead, Into the Darklands, since it was mostly aligned with the last adventure path after all. In fact, I've got two more to read still before I get the Katapesh one, which is aligned with my current adventure path that I need to start. I'll probably round robin the three trawls, with their six portions:

Chronicles:

1. Into the Darklands
2. Guide to Absalom
3. Dragons Revisited
4. Dark Markets: A Guide to Katapesh
5. The Great Beyond
6. Dungeon Denizens Revisited

Stand-along modules

1. Treasure of Chimera Cove
2. Hungry Are the Dead
3. The Pact Stone Pyramid
4. Clash of the Kingslayers
5. Blood of the Dragonscar
6. Beyond the Vault of Souls

Legacy of Fire adventure path

1. Howl of the Carrion King
2. House of the Beast
3. The Jackal's Price
4. The End of Eternity
5. The Impossible Eye
6. The Final Wish

But before I read any more of either of these, I want to pick up a few other things; I want to read my hard-copies that I got recently of Occult Adventures and Horror Adventures during October while they fit seasonally. And I also want to read the next SPCM campaign, in four chapters, Dark Worlds before reading the Paizo adventure path. That'll keep me hopping. UPDATE: I'm enjoying Occult Adventures less than I thought that I would. I'm still reading it, but I want to get something else in there after all. I'm also considering doing Legacy of Fire before Dark Worlds after all. I think this weekend, I want to read "Treasure of Chimera Cove" and then decide once and for all whether to try and slam through Dark Worlds as fast as I can, or defer it until after this run of D&D 3.5 compatible Pathfinder stuff is finished, after which I can roll over all Paizo trawls to PFRPG compatible ones. Not that that makes much of a difference, given that the two systems are basically the same other than a bump in complexity of running your character and a power bump. Reading the adventures of 3.5 vs PFRPG, you can barely tell the difference, and even then, only if you get into the weeds with the stat blocks of the NPCs and monsters anyway.

I do have some non-gaming book in my queue too. I'm about halfway through my Celtic mythology/folklore book, I've picked up my copy of Pride & Prejudice, and I've got the next three books of the James Silke Horned Helmet books on the short list. I don't know how fast I can read all of this or how long it will really take, but I've at least got a list of things to do.

I really like how Paizo took the Underdark concept and made it, in most respects, more Lovecraftian. In fact, they specifically in a small side-bar, made that comment, that it was largely based on a combination of the underground stuff of "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath" and "The Mound" with some Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs (Journey to the Center of the Earth and Pellucidar) thrown in too. And the Shaver mystery stuff too, especially with their redone derro. I like the skum as a kind of replacement Deep One, although honestly 5e's interpretation of them as a slimy much more aberrant, aboleth like creature rather than just a "fish man" is even better.

The book talks a lot about the drow, of course, and in the wake of the OGL crisis a few years ago, Paizo seems to have decided that they don't even have drow in Golarion at all anymore. That seems really extreme; they took the skum and renamed them ulat-kini, and they took the aboleths and renamed them alghollthu. Why couldn't they just rename the drow as svartalfar or dokkalfar, maybe make an update or two to not be "too D&Dish" and keep them? Weird.

I don't necessarily love the drow. They were cool until they got a little bit over-exposed, and now I'm a little over them, but I have no reason to dislike them either, I'm just a little tired of them and not as interested in seeing them as I used to be. Let them stay. Change the name, if you really need to. But you shouldn't. Drow comes from Scottish folklore. But if you do need to, then like I said, svartalfar or dokkalfer is already out there in mythology too.

Gaming update

Well, I had an interesting evening last night. We were supposed to meet for Tyranny of Dragons, the game that I'm a player in, but two of the four players couldn't make it kind of last minute due to work issues. (The DM and other player are husband and wife, and we play at their house, because they have a highly autistic young son, and can't really lave him.) We decided that I'd come anyway, and we did an interesting round-robin DM experiment; I pulled up a 2nd level character that I'd created for another one-shot and still had in my D&D Beyond character list, and we took turns running the game; passing the torch when we felt like it was fun. The rules were that we put our character kind of "to sleep" when we were running, but I ended up running at the very end when we were at the finale, and I let my character fight in the boss fight, because we needed him (and I took a bit of a beating anyway. Probably saved the other characters a lot of grief by absorbing attacks that otherwise would have TPKed them.) It was a lot of fun. I had an older image of this character, but I made some minor updates to it for this one-shot. I'll keep him around. I think he's a lot of fun to play.

My one-shot low level character, Kazar Thorn

The more interesting thing that happened is that the group that I'm not really part of but which overlaps considerably with my group, found out that their campaign is well and truly over. The DM moved out of state and two time zones over, and is considerably more busy with work than he expected maybe to be. There was talk for the better part of a couple of months that he's try to keep running the campaign online, which is how that group started in 2020 during covid, apparently, but also apparently he admitted the obvious that it just wasn't going to work. I honestly thought that they'd make a good run at trying, but that after a few months, it would collapse under its own weight, and they'd all figure something else out instead. I had been running a stop-gap game, loosely adapting my own Cult of Undeath campaign to 5e, as best as I could, but I was never really intending to run it long term, but now without much warning, that's what it looks like it might be. I kind of laughed with these guys, as I'm pretty upfront about not actually knowing the rules for 5e, which is pretty rich given that I'm running a 5e game. I was OK fudging it as if it were a different d20 game (like 3e) while it was just a short-term stop game game, but if that ends up becoming the main campaign for the group, that's a little weird. I should either learn to run 5e, or run a different system that I'm more familiar and comfortable with, or defer to someone else to run while I play a different character. But I'm not sure which of those I actually want to do, so maybe I'll keep doing what I'm doing anyway. It's been working well enough so far.

That said, I've got more gaming going on now than I have in quite a while. Literally two sessions this week, in different campaigns, although one of them fell through and ended up being a one-shot experiment. I still had fun.

Rethinking d20 project

I spent a lot of time in the early 00s and even the 10s doing house rules for d20. Ultimately, I ended up with two options; one that was a highly curated class/race list with E6, and one that was essentially using d20 Modern + d20 Past to get a lower magic approach. I abandoned it when I migrated to m20 and embraced that more rules lite paradigm instead, but there were always reasons for which I liked some of the more rules; particularly with regards to character generation and definition. While in play, I don't find that I care all that much about all of the rules, but I love being able to define characters with the rules, and I feel like it does indeed create roleplaying opportunities because it defines the character much more. 

Sure, sure... in rules-lite games, you can define the character outside of the rules, just like a novelist would do with a character for his novel, and then utilize the rules to run the character that you've defined outside of the rules. OSR types have been saying this for years, the you can just use the old fighting-man class and decide that your character is a witty and urbane swashbuckler, or a gritty and cynical mercenary, or a proud and noble knight, etc. To some degree that's true, although to some degree also it is not. Some of those concepts aren't well represented by the rules, and if you try to do that, you just kind of have to pretend like your swashbuckler is swashbuckling, even though the rules are going to penalize you for playing that way when you have a class that's optimized to be run like a pole-arm utilizing soldier or whatever. As much as I have problems with d20 that put me out in the wilderness avoiding it for years, now that I'm back more firmly in the hobby again, playing much more regularly again (my 5e Tyranny of Dragons session is tonight, BTW, in which I'm a player) I'm caught in this same bind again, where I want two things that are mutually exclusive at the same time. Obviously, I can't have it, but I'm doing my best to navigate the straight between Scylla and Charybdis, so to speak.

I've got two potential projects, that I'm trying to decide if I really want to do or not. (If I won the lottery or something like that, I'd absolutely do both of these, and take them on as valuable uses of my now freed up time. Given that I do still have to work full-time, I'm not 100% sure that these projects... TARR out, for lack of a better term; i.e., is it really worth it to do or not, or does it just generate a lot of effort and very little benefit? I'd do it anyway if I had the free time) The first of these is to take my existing rules-lite game engine and revise the document for it so that it's got better layout and a better look and feel. It would also give me an opportunity to possibly correct some minor things, or add them. I might even take the opportunity to get rid of my D&D-ish spell-list and go back to my original Cthulhu-ish spell list. Yeah, yeah... most of the spells had mechanics taken from old D&D or m20 spell lists, but the names and feel and spell selection were deliberately Lovecraftian. This is another decision that I've been on the fence about for years, and go back and forth on.

The second, more ambitious project would be to take the 3.5 and PFRPG SRDs (found here) and create my own rule system that utilizes all of my house rules integrated into a modified SRD. I.e, it would use a 3.5 base, Pathfinder classes, and have Elephant in the Room and E6 built in from the get-go. The problem with this is that while it would be quite personally satisfying to create this fantasy heartbreaker ruleset by editing, splicing and kitbashing the 3.5 SRD, the PFRPG SRD and the E6 and Elephant in the Room house rule documents, I doubt—honestly—that I'd ever really use them.

One thing that would make it more fun for me as well is to have three completely separate and discrete f/x "systems" and for any given game, you don't mix and match, you use one and only one of them. The way that this works is that for "standard" RPG fantasy, you'd use "regular" D&D classes like the wizard, sorcerer or cleric, etc. for your magic. These would only be 4-level classes, and you can't take a level in them until third level, so 1st and 2nd level characters simply don't have access to magic yet. If you were going to play a magic using class, you'd probably want to use rogue for your first two levels and focus on skills. Or maybe noble (from Freeport) or something like that. 

I could expand this with many of the additional magic classes of Pathfinder; the witch, arcanist, shaman, oracle, etc. And some of them could be five level classes; if the classes are written so that that they don't get 3rd level spells until 5th level, then they can only be four level classes and you can't take them until 4rd level, but if they don't get 3rd level spells until 6th level, then they can be five level classes and you can take them at 2nd level. All 3rd level (and higher) spells that you want to allow need to be treated as or converted to rituals/incantations. 

The "Occult Adventures" iconics

Of course, I'm also talking about variants, utilizing the occult classs, only one of which (the psychic) would need to be started after 1st level, and a psionics variant using. the Ultimate Psionics book. I'd need to do this if I ever actually run STRANGE AFFAIRS OF THE UNSEEN BEYOND or EMPIRE OF THE MIND-WIZARDS, so maybe it's worth doing just to have those project actually available. If I think that actually doing those projects is worth the trouble. Maybe if I retire in a strange environment where I can run whatever I want and can find players who will play it, it would be worth doing. Otherwise, I'm just spending many man-hours on a hypothetical because I have very complicated house rules.

Shackled City

It's Sunday. My week-long vacation is almost over. Today is, in fact, a rather busy day for me, and then it's back to the grind at work tomorrow morning bright and early, sadly. People always ask after a vacation if you're refreshed and ready to get back to work; I never feel that way. Being off work always reminds me how much I hate work and wish that I could afford to retire early, i.e., right now, and not have to deal with the manufactured hassle and people that I don't like. 

That said, as vacations go, this was kind of a weird one. I was off work, certainly, but I didn't really go anywhere or do anything. My daughter and her family came and stayed with us, so mostly we sat in the living room and watched movies, talked, played a few games, and watched my grandson run around playing with toys. We went out a few places, but never very far and never for more than a couple of hours at a time. In addition to that, because he was taking naps in my office room, and went to bed much earlier than I do, I didn't even really have access to my computer at all for more than an hour max each day. Which is fine, don't get me wrong, but I didn't get to do a lot of the things that I'd normally do on either a vacation or a staycation; it was just a family hang-out week.

—( † )—

A number of years ago, I read the Shackled City adventure path, the first adventure path, at least in the modern format that we recognize today, or close to it at least. This is a level 1-20 slog, with twelve chapters (at least in its compiled format; I think it originally had only ten) and it is super-rife with late "3rd Era" D&D-isms. Hardly an opponent to be found doesn't have a bizarre concoction of templates applied to make it mechanically and otherwise unique and weird. The adventure is nominally set within the Greyhawk setting, like all official D&D material was during this era, but in reality, it spends most of its time concerned with and even located in various extra-planar destinations. 

Vhalantru, a Tarterian "Smoking Eye" beholder

I read the adventure path long enough ago that I can't remember many of the details of it, and I'm not about to re-read it just for this post, so I asked my search bar, which now—like all search bars—is most likely to give you an AI answer rather than an actual search, to summarize the adventure path for me, including "detailed" summaries with spoilers of each chapter. Otherwise, I wouldn't have remembered well enough to do this. I also re-read at least the introductory material and campaign background section of the compilation pdf. I'll copy and paste the AI answer to my query below:

The Shackled City Adventure Path is a Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in the city of Cauldron, which is built atop a dormant volcano.  The story follows player characters as they uncover a conspiracy by the Cagewrights, a secret society dedicated to freeing the Demon Prince of Madness, Adimarchus. The adventure path spans levels 1–20 and was originally published in Dungeon magazine before being collected in a hardcover edition.

Early Intrigue and City Defense

1. Life's Bazaar: The party arrives in Cauldron and investigates a series of kidnappings. The trail leads them to Underdark passages where they discover a slaver operation run by Lord Vhalantru, a beholder.  After defeating the slavers and rescuing the victims, including a Shackleborn child, the party is hailed as heroes but learns that Vhalantru is only a pawn in a larger scheme. (ed. actually, this isn't entirely true. Vhalantru is not revealed as a beholder at this point, and he remains the primary antagonist, mostly in secret, for most of the campaign. Sigh. AI. In the course of subsequent questions I asked, I caught it making numerous small errors, like calling Erik Mona Paizo's CEO and putting Eberron details into a discussion of Golarion, etc. The weirdest was a misspelling of the word mayor, which I've corrected below. I don't know what a Mayer is, but eh...)

2. Drakthar’s Way: Added for the hardcover collection, this chapter involves small bands of goblins vandalizing the city. The party tracks the goblins to a hidden cave system beneath the city, led by a vampiric bugbear named Drakthar.  This chapter serves to introduce the city's factions and the threat of the Underdark, though the goblins are largely a distraction from the main plot.

3. Flood Season: The city is threatened by massive flooding during the rainy season. The magical wands of control water, which normally prevent this disaster, have been stolen.  The party tracks the thieves to a lair below the city, where they discover the Cagewrights are behind the theft. The party recovers the wands, saving the city from destruction. 

4. Zenith Trajectory: An Umber Hulk attacks the city, after which the party is hired to find Zenith Splintershield, a dwarf who vanished into the Underdark.  They discover Zenith has been captured by kuo-toa who worship him as a prophet.  The party retrieves him, uncovering more clues about the Cagewrights' plans and the looming threat of the volcano.

5. The Demonskar Legacy: The party is sent to find a missing paladin who ventured to the nearby city of Redgorge.  Following his trail through a jungle and a giant-controlled cavern, they enter the Plane of Mirrors via the Starry Mirror. They find the paladin possessed by demons and must defeat the demonic architect behind the incursion, receiving a dying warning to "seek the sign of the Smoking Eye." 

6. Test of the Smoking Eye: Acting on the paladin's warning, the party meets a mysterious plane-wanderer who guides them to the Abyss (specifically the layer of Occipitus). They undergo a series of tests to redeem an abandoned layer of the Abyss. This chapter reveals the true nature of the Cagewrights' goal: to free Adimarchus by opening a permanent gate to Carceri. 

Escalation and Revelation

7. Secrets of the Soul Pillars: After assassination attempts trace back to the temple of Wee Jas, the party assaults the temple and fights its undead inhabitants.  They are led to an ancient frozen complex, Karran Kurral, where they defeat a Dracolich guarding the Soul Pillars. These pillars are key to the Cagewrights' ritual to open the planar gate.

8. Lords of Oblivion: An ally of the party is kidnapped by the Last Laugh, Cauldron's thieves' guild.  The party breaks into the guild's safe house and learns of a secret meeting among Cauldron’s criminal elite. They discover that the Last Laugh's beholder overlord is also involved in the Cagewrights' unholy rituals, deepening the city’s corruption. 

9. Foundation of Flame: The Cagewrights awaken the volcano beneath Cauldron, causing lava eruptions and earthquakes. The party must help evacuate the city while fighting off demodands emerging from a planar rift.  The chaos leads to the death of the Lord Mayor, leaving the city leaderless and vulnerable.

The Final Confrontation

10. Thirteen Cages: The party marches into the volcano to stop the Cagewrights' ritual before a permanent gate to Carceri opens above the city. They battle through the stronghold, destroying the Tree of Shackled Souls, an artifact used to focus the life forces of Shackleborn slaves to power the ritual.  The leader, Dyr'ryd, is slain, and the immediate threat to the city is neutralized.

11. Strike on Shatterhorn: The remaining Cagewrights flee to their jungle retreat, Shatterhorn. The party pursues them, battling through the insane remains of the cultists. They confront a crazy cleric who is attempting to free Adimarchus by sacrificing a PC to Nerull, but this fails as only Adimarchus’ successor can release him. 

12. Asylum: The party travels to the Abyss to confront the source of the Cagewrights' designs: Adimarchus, the Demon Prince of Madness, imprisoned in the asylum of Skullrot. They penetrate deep into the prison and battle Adimarchus's deranged form, finally destroying him utterly. The party returns to Cauldron, which is left in ruins but safe, to lead the city’s long recovery. 

As not a huge D&D guy myself, I'm not quite sure what I think of a campaign in which a beholder in (magical) disguise is the major antagonist, and the political interplay between various esoteric fiends (demodands, fallen angels as demon lords, etc.) is the main thrust of the story. As is often the case, I find the earlier adventures when the stakes are more down-to-earth and relatable the most interesting, and when you suddenly say screw it and take off for the Abyss, Carceri, and various other extraplanar destinations, the game feels less like the low fantasy base on which D&D was built, and more The Avengers in some of their wilder space-faring adventures, facing the Skrulls or Thanos or Galactus or whatever. Can't be helped, especially with a 1-20 level campaign. This is why I always liked E6 as soon as I came across it and honestly see it as absolutely necessary for any d20 game, including 5e, to be what I'd want it to be. I feel like in the current 5e game that I'm playing, where we're only 4th level still, we're already too super-hero-like. 

On the other hand, some of the supervillains of D&D, like the demon lords, are super iconic to the game. Graz'zt plays a minor role in this one, even though Adimarchus, a more esoteric demon lord (whom I can't find earlier references to than this adventure path, honestly) is the main one here. I wouldn't want them to be missing from the game, but I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure how to treat them in an E6 game either. Certainly you don't just shout huzzah and attack them, unless your characters are suicidal. 

The best element of the Shackled City is the city itself, Cauldron, set inside and on the slopes of a very regular-shaped caldera of an extinct volcano. What a great idea! My own city of Bucknerfeld utilizes this same idea plus memories of long-ago trips to Capulin Volcano National Monument in northern New Mexico while passing nearby from Texas to Utah. (ed. I highly recommend stopping by if you're anywhere near. It's been a good twenty-five or more years since I was there, and maybe things have changed, but when my wife and I stopped with my at the time very young oldest son, we pretty much had the place to ourselves. It was probably mid-morning on a weekday in the early summer, if I remember. I know outdoorsy locations have become more crowded over the years, but I still suspect that this one wouldn't be, especially on a weekday. It's too remote and isn't a big enough draw to get people to go too far out of their way to visit it.)

Overall, my impression of Shackled City is that it was interesting and very popular, but as the first of it's kind, it feels a little primitive nowadays, and it certainly feels very, very rooted in the late 3rd Era paradigm. There's lots of dungeon-crawling, and lots of very weird antagonists that have multiple stacked templates, extraneous class levels added on, and stuff like that, and the super-hero feel was, in some ways, more overt than even in today's D&D, where it's kind of baked into the ambient cake, but they still pretend like you're playing kinda sorta fantasy games sometimes. Here, you never forget that you're playing D&D specifically, and while it's technically set in the Greyhawk setting, I doubt it's a Greyhawk that Gary Gygax would have recognized other than a few alignments in names and geography—although he was still alive and would be for a few more years after its publication. Gygax himself died rather young at only age 69, and if I recall, he was still active and occasionally seen online still up until nearly his death in March 2008, and this was originally published in 2003-4 and reprinted and compiled in 2005. I've never seen any record of him having commented on it, and being nominally set in Greyhawk but far removed from the City of Greyhawk, or the elements of Greyhawk that Gygax was more strongly associated with in the first place means maybe there would have been no reason for him to. In fact, it's clear that the adventure path was originally designed to be setting agnostic, and was deliberately put in a remote and unexplored part of Greyhawk deliberately so as not to conflict with anything going on either there or in any other setting that the game might be run in (such as, of course, Forgotten Realms, or perhaps even Eberron, although given the extraplanar nature of much of what's going on, the latter would have been harder to pull off without changing a lot of details.) So its inclusion in Greyhawk is really more nominal rather than substantial. In fact, in the early introduction, this was itself more explicit; "The Shackled City Adventure Path is not set in any particular campaign world. It uses deities from the core D&D pantheon, and some proper names from the Greyhawk campaign setting, but the campaign itself has been designed for easy integration into any Dungeons & Dragons campaign." but partway through and certainly in the hardback reprint omnibus, if anything it actually became slightly more anchored in Greyhawk with more explicit references to stuff in the setting. But it's not like you go to the city of Greyhawk or anything like that, as you do in the next AP which I'll talk about in a different post, so it might as well not really be seen as taking place there other than that you need a Greyhawk friendly cosmology to run it without changing a lot of details about what's going on with the various fiends and demon lords and whatnot. Honestly, though, most D&D settings could pull it off OK. 

Although, it's often assumed that most DMs enjoy that kind of world-building, or at least that kind of kit-bashed approach of using material and adapting it. Eberron would be a more difficult one given it's significantly different cosmology, and no guide was ever officially released, although of course, there are fan-made suggestions, some of them quite interesting. Especially given that by "fan-made" I include blog and forum posts made by Keith Baker himself. Perhaps a more interesting approach, given that while this predates the formation of Golarion, it's done by Paizo, who were the third party contractors doing Dungeon and Dragon magazines at the time, would be putting it in Golarion. There have been numerous suggestions on how and where to do so, and the most common is that it should to be in Sargava due to jungle and ocean proximity, with the Mwangi Expanse substituting for the Amedio Jungle. 

5x5 Fronts progress... or lack thereof

In this post a couple of months or so ago, I laid out a schedule of updates, which I have slipped. I had actually forgotten that I'd even done that, and now that September is rapidly ending, I still haven't done what I said I was going to do in August. Time to recalibrate, I suppose. 

This one is done. I could run it, probably literally today. I don't want to run it in 5e, like I'm currently running, I want to run it in ideally my own Shadow of Old Night system, or as a consolation prize in my still incomplete, but I could finish it with a couple of hours tops, D&D 3.5 game which utilizes a few upgrades from PFRPG (1e).

Which I should also put as a goal; let's finish that house rule delineation, and then I have it ready to go.

This one is also complete, and I'm running a bowdlerized 5e version of it, although I don't like or really even know the 5e system. I've said many times before that I'm not sure what our current gaming scenario will look like, which is why I'm willing to do this, because it's kind of a stopgap until we figure out what we're really doing. I'd like to run this in a different way, though, again, with either of the two systems. Because this was (originally) meant to be an adaptation of Carrion Crown, I'm more friendly towards the 3.5/PFRPG hybrid system for this one, but I'd probably still prefer to run everything in Old Night.

I have a short "executive summary" style 5x5 or even 6x5 for this, but it needs to be fleshed out into a full-blown 5x5 Front before I could actually use it. I still want to do this before September is over, but the timing is getting really tight. It might more fairly be sometimes before October reaches the midpoint.

My original plan was to use the original Freeport Trilogy, plus any additional Freeport material, to make an even more overtly pirate-themed campaign than Terror In Timischburg was. I could still do that, and I've got plenty of material. I'd kind of like to read the Skull & Shackles adventure path before I commit a 5x5 down, but we'll see where it goes.

In spite of the fact that this is one of the original three campaign seeds, the other two of which are finished, I still don't have much of an idea of what exactly this one would look like other than that it's loosely based on the same concept as The Hangover. 

Originally mean to be a "mini-campaign", which I never really defined, this is really just a campaign idea set in the icy wastes of what is Hyperborea, probably at least partially inspired while playing SWTOR on Hoth and thinking that that was a cool environmental theme for a campaign. I really have no idea on an outline for it, though, honestly.

I should probably pull this one up in the timing given that I've already read Yig Snake Granddaddy and long ago I also already read Serpent's Skull. I'll probably do it after I get to my re-read of Serpent's Skull, which honestly isn't that far away. It'll come up relatively quickly in the trawl read of adventure paths, as soon as I get back to adventure paths.

Other than the high concept of this being an urban supernatural thriller, possibly as a hybrid of Curse of the Crimson Throne, Council of Thieves, and any other lingering Freeport material that I didn't use (and yes, I realize that those are technically all settings that rely on devils, not demons, but in Old Night, I don't care about that D&D-specific pedantry) this is only a vague idea and a theme so far. But after I read Council of Thieves, I think I'll have a lot of material to work with, so I'd like to start arranging it into something soon before I forget too many details of what I'd already read earlier.

I actually feel like I have a better idea of what I want this campaign to do than some of the others, although I lack source material to adapt it from... or at least, I lack source material that I've read either recently or so far at all. I have vague ideas of possibly adapting some of the material I have, like Sands of Doom, Mummies Mask, Legacy of Fire, or others, but I won't get those read for some time. Maybe I should just do this one as another original, like Darkness in the Hill Country.

Again, other than a theme; "Underdark" meets "Shadowfell", I don't have a great idea of what to do with this either, and I'm not so far really loving any of the Underdark campaigns that I've read, like Second Darkness or Out of the Abyss; or at least I'm not finding material in them that I want to adapt. I do have more material, but maybe this is another one best done as an original.