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. 

Freeport, actual plays and music

A number of updates, some personal, some just hobby:

First, we've had several months of family drama involving my oldest son and his wife. Despite years of probably denial on my part, it took a real catastrophe in his life for me to connect the dots and admit that the two of them probably have some kind of clinical personality disorder. In any case, not only have we had tons of stress and anxiety for the last several months, but I've also been worried about our house, which they've been living in, up in Michigan where we used to live. Now, we heard finally that they decided to get out, stop paying us rent, and we've got about two weeks notice. In July, we'll have to spend some time (and luckily we have some friends to help us with that) fixing up a few cosmetic things as cheaply and quickly as we can and putting the house on the market. Everything that we're hearing is that it's a seller's market right now, and we can hope to make off relatively well, sell very quickly, unload the burden and make enough over and above what we still owe that we can put a nice down payment on another house for us, finally. Although... we literally just signed another year lease on the house we're renting, so we won't be moving right away. But if we can get the house sold, and get our finances a little bit more organized, then we should be able to get into a house again about this time next year, with a hopefully significantly lower payment, much shorter term, and a plan to get completely out of debt entirely so that I can actually afford to retire when I'm old enough to do so. I mean, I'd love to retire now, while I'm still young and healthy enough to enjoy my retirement, but after the drama and worry that I've been through the last few years, this is a good outcome for me. Still have to actually manage to sell the house, of course, but every indicator I can see looks good on that front. With at least one significant long-term worry looking to be resolved in the near term, I'm looking good going into the second half of the year.

Second, I've been listening to a few actual play podcasts. The Red Moon Roleplaying rendition of The Enemy Within, the Hideous Laughter rendition of Carrion Crown, and alongside that one, there's The Zone of Truth; a kind of OOC supplement to Carrion Crown, and Evil Interlude, a kind of weird prequel mini campaign running alongside it as well. I try to alternate these, and then in between them, I listen to my hardtrance megamixes. However, those are too long. Those are all 20 songs long, which gives them an average length of about two hours or so. I'm thinking about redoing them and instead of ten mixes two hours long each, I'll have twenty mixes about an hour long each, with ten tracks each. This will be better as interludes between my podcasts, which are also about an hour to an hour fifteen or so in length (although I play them at 1.5x speed.) That will also give me the chance to clean up some of my older mixes, which are a little bit more clumsy, sometimes. If I do it quick and dirty, I just split the files and mix in the ends and beginnings of the tracks right in the middle, but I'd like to actually redo the mixes from scratch. I might even reshuffle a bit what tracks are in which mix. We'll see.

On that, though, I'm enjoying these podcasts. I tend to say that RPGs are not a spectator sport, and I simply could not get in to Critical Role. However, I think the combination of making them shorter (about an hour rather than four) and having them be audio so I mostly only listen to them when driving, when I'm not going to be distracted by my phone, my computer or something else sitting around close at hand works. When I try to watch video actual plays, I find that my mind wanders and I get really distracted by... well, really by pretty much anything else around me. Podcasts work much better than video actual plays, at least for me. Video actual plays rarely, rarely work out for me. The only exception, although I never finished this, was wasd20's Rime of the Frostmaiden actual play.

Third, I'm about to finish the big fat Freeport book. I've only got 25-30 pages left, and I'll finish it for sure tonight. In fact, I'll make sure that I do, even if I have to stay up late to do so. In any case, that means that I'm on page 512 or whatever exactly I'm on of 540 or whatever exactly it is, and I think that I can effectively review it, or at least make a comparison to earlier products that it kind of replaces. Compared to The Pirate's Guide to Freeport, it advances the timeline and makes a few changes. I like that they took the time to make these changes, but most of them I don't actually care for or at least care about. I'm not a fan of the fact that they 1) greatly increased the population of orcs and goblinoids and made them a kind of obvious metaphor for black people and/or immigrants. Although, because they're orcs and goblinoids, they inadvertently make the conservatives' case for them, on accident without realizing that they've done so. They also play right into the hands of the narrative that it's liberals who are racist trolls who think that black people are like orcs. The whole thing is a somewhat amusing charlie foxtrot on the allegory that they kind of obviously were trying to make. 2) created new races, like the island trolls, which I have no use for and don't know why they suddenly came to prominence out of nowhere, 3) created this odd Salt Curse thing, but then it's almost just an offhand kind of thing with no explanation, and it's easily (and probably prudently) ignored. I feel like the city sections are just a bit lighter, but I really need to compare them again to see if some of the details were changes or are missing.

The mechanics stuff was substantially updated from the Pathfinder Freeport Companion, and I'd say improved significantly. Every prestige class and some of the base classes were changed to archetypes, and the Freebooter base class is all new, and is honestly one of my favorite 3.x classes, serving as a great alt.swashbuckler.

Mostly the presentation is improved; it's all color, for instance, and most of the art is new. I do miss some of the old art... but then again, I also have the old book, so "miss" isn't really the right word. There's a new adventure module at the end of the book, which is what I'm finishing up right now. It's actually quite long; 50-60 pages worth, but it's curiously kind of poorly organized, and it's not at all my type of adventure, being a scavenger hunt where you go all over town solving puzzles. It's probably my least favorite, or close to, of the modules/adventures for Freeport that I've read as part of this trawl.

It's gratifying to be (almost) finished with this. I'll only have to read the Pathfinder Bestiary, and I may skim that because I imagine that much of the material has already covered in earlier products. Then there's the Shadow of the Demon Lord Freeport Companion, which I can probably skim because, again, the companions are all pretty repetitive. The only thing really to read is the combined Return to Freeport since I'll probably skim rather than read cover to cover the remaining two titles. I expect that mostly that's repeating material. 

Once I'm done with the Freeport trawl, I'll do a big wrap-up post and maybe a high level 5x5 adaptation of it into my Curse of the Corsair Coast. And then, I'll pivot, I think, to the Eberron and Forgotten Realms trawls—although first I'm trying to finish reading the SPCM second saga about Yig and time travel, and read the next Paizo adventure path, Second Darkness. I actually brought Races of Eberron with me to work in my backpack today, although I didn't end up getting it out at lunch because I was listening to a podcast instead. I've already read a fair bit into it, so it's been started. Getting whole trawls finished and taken off of my page list (although I won't delete the pages, just the link to them.)

UPDATE: Yeah, I finished the book early. The final adventure was disappointing. The adventure included with the companions is way better. Heck, most of the adventures in Tales of Freeport were way better. Actually, most adventures period are way better. There are some good Freeport adventures. A poorly conceived scavenger hunt who's main purpose is really just to give you excuses to go to a lot of the writer's favorite haunts in the setting isn't one, though. Maybe I'll do a palate cleanser and read a short 32-page module or something before diving into whatever is next. It's Races of Eberron in physical books, although I also added the next short Pathfinder Companion book, which is Taldor, Echoes of Glory. As with the Osirion book I recently read, there's a larger, more fleshed out Pathfinder Setting book that came out later, but y'know. It was nice to have something to start with in the meantime. I'll be honest with you, though—by far my favorite parts of Golarion are Varisia and Ustalav. Most of the rest of the setting could get bent as far as I care. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I doubt I'd use it for much. I really need to start the next adventure path.

But not tonight. I'm tired.

Freeport Pathfinder and E6 Low Magic

I just finished the chapter on Freeport Classes, so I'm getting near the end of this monster book that's twice as big as most of my other books. I had thought that it would mostly just reprint two sources: 1) The Pirate's Guide to Freeport and 2) Pathfinder Freeport Companion. I was surprised—mostly pleasantly—to find that this was not the case. The Pirate's Guide stuff is largely intact, but there were many minor updates and changes. This wasn't necessarily good nor bad; why did the Union guy die and his widow is now taking his place, for example? I don't remember reading about him dying in one of the adventures, so I think that that's just meant to both advance minor details to make the setting "feel more alive" from a meta perspective, and I also suspect to eliminate another strong (albeit a liberal) male icon and replace him with a woman. Some of the other changes were more consequential. Why is there a new third crime lord competing with Finn and Mr. Wednesday? (None of whom are anywhere near as good as the four crime lords from Five Fingers still. Sadly.) Why are there now a lot more orcs and goblinoids than there were even in the Pirate's Guide, which is already a lot more than there were in the original Freeport sourcebook? There seems a concerted effort to make liberal themes more front and center, because in spite of the fact that they are orcs and goblins, this is clearly meant to be a morality tale of sorts around immigration, racism, etc.; although they haplessly kind of demonstrate the conservatives' point while doing so, even though they clearly expect you to take an NPC liberal perspective on it. As an aside, because of this, the Freebooter's seat on the council, which has a three year term limit and so needed to have a different NPC in it, now has Captain Scarbelly, a notoriously villainous orc captain from earlier in the game, shown prominently on the anniversary omnibus version of the original Freeport trilogy.

I was pleasantly surprised by these kinds of developments, you may ask? I suppose. It's pleasant to see that they actually took a look at the text and didn't just replicate it. Many of the changes that they made are not ones that I personally would have made, but others are interesting, and I applaud them for making the effort anyway.

The rules were also significantly changed, probably because of more things that had come out in Pathfinder since the original Pathfinder companion. There's a new base class, the Freebooter, that kind of combines the corsair and assassin into one flexible a la carte menu version. The corsair does still appear as an archetype instead of a class, as does the survivalist, and most of the prestige classes. I didn't notice too much different with the monster hunter class, but I didn't really check, and the noble seems to have been substantially restructured. The Freebooter is actually, as written, a great alt.swashbuckler class for use with the PF1e rules, and I'd highly recommend it as such. It has a more traditional feel than the swashbuckler too, which is kind of a fiddly-looking class to play, where you have a pool of points to spend, etc. This one just has a big menu of a la carte options to pick from, giving it a flavor somewhere between fighter and rogue, but with the fighters' BAB and hit die, and lots of ways to actually build it. 

In fact, they didn't do any prestige classes at all, converting all of the ones that they used to have into archetypes. I kind of think that's what Pathfinder should have done in the beginning; replace prestige classes with archetypes. I'd modify my E6 low magic rules to say that this is actually how you should do it; not use prestige classes at all, and just open up the use of archetypes. I'd also say, although not force, that players consider higher level (than 6) class abilities as your first option for feat selection; continue taking those class abilities, in order, as if they were feats for your post 6th level advancement. Sometimes you need to throw in a feat too, but I think a more "bounded accuracy" feel can be maintained by using E6 and continuing to gain class abilities.

Of course, this applies to non-magical classes. It remains the only way to cast higher level spells that you have to treat them as rituals/incantations. But hey, lower power and bounded accuracy isn't the only goal; lower magic was obviously always a goal too, right? Speaking of which, the noble offers an ability to become a minor spellcaster which I could take without skipping a level. It becomes another alternative to spellcasting where you can get some magic without having to use the spellcasting classes. Another plus. 

UPDATE: As another aside, I see the Pathfinder 1e rulebook at Half Price Books selling for $12.99 with $4.99 S&H in Very Good condition. I doubt I'll ever play it, and I wonder if I'll ever even really read it, yet I'm very tempted to buy it because having it as an actual book instead of a pdf seems much more solid. Sigh. I have enjoyed having this big Freeport book, for what it's worth. Even if I don't ever really need that either. I'm really motivated to try and finish the Freeport Trawl entirely since I'm so close to being there. I've only got about 100 pages left in the big 540+ page book, then the new(er) Freeport Bestiary then the big single book AP Return to Freeport, and then I can skim the Shadow of the Demon Lord Freeport Companion and be completely done with the trawl! Once that one's done, it'll presumably be easier for me to focus on some of my other trawls, many of which have many, many titles to read, but others of which are slightly more modest. I think I want to stick to my roots just a bit, though, and focus on Eberron 3e, Forgotten Realms 3e and the Paizo Adventure Paths before getting too involved in, say, the Paizo Companion Trawl, or the Goodman Games module trawl, both of which I'm not even very invested in doing; I just thought what the heck, why not track them too.

I do want to dig more into the Pathfinder 1e rules and Chronicles/Setting line. And, of course, the Adventure Paths and I'd like to read all of the modules eventually. Those are higher priority than Companion, Society Scenarios, or some of the others, but the Adventure Path is really the top priority from Paizo.

What would I play, PF1e edition

I added a new tag; WHAT WOULD I PLAY? where I noodle for a post about potential character concepts that I'd like to play. These aren't necessarily for any specific campaigns, I just look at character concepts in rulesets that I'm familiar with and have characters that I think are potentially interesting concepts that I'd like to play, if I get a chance. I'll probably do two per, but I don't know how often I'll come back to this series.

Many of these concepts are ones that could be readily adapted to other rulesets, but I'm looking specifically today at some classes and archetypes in Pathfinder 1e that I'd like to play. All of these would, most likely, be human males. Pathfinder 1e is, of course, very similar to D&D 3.5. I actually think either of these three character concepts that I'm looking at today could be used in 3.5 as is, just adjusting for the slightly consolidated skill list for Pathfinder 1e vs 3.5 (Listen and Spot combined into Perception, Move Silently and Hide consolidated into Stealth, Jump, Tumble and Balance combined into Acrobatics, etc.) Of course, I'd otherwise see them as perfect characters for a PF1e adventure path character, and if I could find adaptions, I'd love to see these in 5e, with the archetypes maybe converted into subclasses. I don't understand 5e as well as I do 3e and Pathfinder 1e, so I'll leave that to someone else, however...

Concept #1: Brawler. I've kind of tried to like the concept of the monk, but I simply don't, really. It's too mystical with too much supernatural crap. I really want a more "western", non-supernatural alternative rather than a character who feels like he belongs in a Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat game. The Brawler class does this quite well. I actually don't think I'd even want an archetype, although if I change my mind and use one, the Snakebite Striker is the one that I'd use, most likely. Using the Shield Champion as a kind of fantasy Captain America might be interesting. The Strangler would be an interesting one for a smaller group, especially if I can use him as a kind of murderer of sorts, although just as a UFC fighter who puts people into sleeper holds would be boring. And I don't know how often I'd be interested in playing a murderer. Maybe some kind of hit man of sorts? I dunno. The concept of the Strangler archetype isn't terrible and it kind of interests me, but I'm not sure where I'd use it.

I don't like Wayne Reynolds "Rhonda Roussey with short hair" illustration, but if it were a guy, it'd be perfect. The mixed martial arts headgear kind of thing that she has is kind of cool, though. Although it feels weird because in the fiction that characters like this are based on, we rarely see this kind of thing.

I used ChatGPT to generate a "Gaulish martial artist" and removed the tattoos, and got this image. It might be an interesting place to start. Although using metal MMA headgear might be interesting too.

It's interesting to me that this was done as a hybrid class between monk and fighter, but without much of the supernatural weirdness. Freeport did the same thing with their 3.5 and Pathfinder stuff. The Survivalist is another good western, non-supernatural fist-fighter, and in the Pathfinder version it's converted to an archetype rather than a new class. But I'd rather just use the Brawler class. Like I said, maybe with one of the archetypes mentioned, but if not, the base class as is looks interesting enough to me already.

Concept #2: I've always been a huge fan of alt.rangers, and the Slayer is a hybrid class that's like a ranger with some rogue-like abilities added too. It may be my current favorite alt.ranger, and trust me, I've played around with a lot of them! (The wildlander from the Midnight campaign setting was my previous go-to.) I like the slayer, again, as is, but the sniper is my preferred archetype if I pick one. Curiously, although I prefer more "jock" characters, and magic and supernatural abilities often are not my thing at all, the Stygian Slayer archetype is kind of a creepy alternative. Curiously, with some of these archetypes, the "ranger-ness" of the slayer is reduced. Without Track and a lot of wilderness kind of activity, is it even really a ranger, or just some kind of skirmisher? Ah, well; I'm on record as saying that I think the ranger is really more of a skirmisher than a "ranger" in most cases anyway, or at least that's how most people play them. 

I'm well and frequently on record as not being very interested in magic-using classes or spellcasters. But I also find the fighter to be, generally, too bland for my tastes. There's probably some archetypes in the Pathfinder 1e rules that make it workable for me, but I haven't looked in a long time, and I prefer these two hybrid base classes instead, if I were to actually make and play a Pathfinder 1e character anytime soon. 

I say all of that as I'm currently playing a 5e fire genasi sorcerer in my Tyranny of Dragons campaign, of course. There's always exceptions, I guess. Plus, we already had a rogue, a barbarian, a cleric, and a ranger in that campaign, so some kind of arcane magic seemed like what was needed when I joined. But again, martial with a twist non-magical "jock" characters are kind of my go-to.

Concept #3: The freebooter class in the big, fat Freeport Pathfinder setting book is a great option; another great alt.swashbuckler, kind of like a fighter with a lot of class abilities borrowed from the old assassin, the rogue and other similar classes. What would I do with this? Well, a pretty typical swashbuckling rogue, of course. Someone kind of like Captain Blood, or Andre-Louis Moreau (Scarmamouche) or D'Artagnan; a kind of flippant, merry duelist. As a friend of mine once opined on the classic 70s Three and Four Musketeers movie (absolutely brilliant movies, by the way) that as likeable and charismatic as the characters are, they are also kind of sociopathic, if not psychopathic, given how readily they'll kill someone for frivolous reasons, and take great pride in it. Mechanically, it may not be terribly different from the Slayer, but in terms of flavor, it's kind of a world apart. Although that depends, in the end, on which class abilities I end up selecting.

Now, I realize that none of these concepts; the brawler, the slayer or the freebooter, is a character concept in the traditional sense. It's a mechanics concept, i.e., what mechanics would I be interested in playing. I'd still need to come up with a character concept to back up the mechanics. But that's often how I like to build; either do the two in parallel, or come up with a mechanical concept that looks fun, and work from there on what exactly the character is like.

I'm also not a fan of over-developing backstories. I prefer brief and broad character concepts, and then I work on what the actual character is like in play. Think of characters like James Bond, for instance. He doesn't need backstory, and in fact, is probably a worse character if you try to saddle him with one. Conan too. Even Wolverine. Marvel were very reluctant to issue the Origin series back in the early 00s precisely because he was their most popular character (perhaps after Spider-man) and they were very worried that a backstory would actually make him less interesting rather than more. In the end, Origin was a success, but ultimately, it wasn't needed and I wonder if the character would have been better off if it hadn't been done.

Reading while flying

Work continues to suck. I had to travel to Hermosillo again, and not only is that kind of a dumpy little town at the best of times, but June is not the best of times. 106° highs every afternoon. I had no car. I went basically back and forth from the airport (via shuttle) to a hotel, to a supplier a block away from the hotel that was in crisis mode unable to adequately deliver parts. Travel to Hermosillo sucks; I had to spend a night in Phoenix, and then travel an entire day through DFW to get home... but thunderstorms in DFW got me stranded there another night. I'm really, really sick and tired of work completely eating into my personal life, and causing me a lot of stress and anxiety that I can't escape from in the evenings and on weekends. That said, being on site was, in some ways, less stressful than being here, even if days were longer and I had to spend my weekends traveling. And while I never really adjusted to the time zone, and didn't sleep super well, I did still have some reasonable amount of time and mental energy to read some, at least, while I was traveling. Not as much as I would have a year or two ago when I was much more relaxed while traveling. I finished three books, although one of them was short: the Pathfinder Companion version of Osirion (there's a bigger one on the Pathfinder Setting/Chronicles line, but I haven't gotten to that one yet, and it was published quite a bit later), the next book in the T. H. Lain 3e iconics character novels--this one was City of Fire and added Krusk and Alhandra, among others, the barbarian and paladin, as well as half of the next novel after that, and I finished Faiths & Pantheons, a crappy 3e Forgotten Realms sourcebook. 

I say crappy, but what I mostly mean is that it's not my type of book, I had little interest in it before I read it, little interest while reading it, and I have no idea what I'd do with a book like that anyway. I felt obligated to read it as part of the trawl, but I just wanted to get through it and move on to the next one. Which is the infamous Silver Marches, famous for the fluff vs crunch debate and drama caused by one of its main authors, Sean K. Reynolds, who comes across as a raging gamma. (It's interesting to note that he was laid off by Wizards shortly after this. Maybe getting in a public internet slap-fight with your upper management on the strategic direction is a bad move. Especially when you bet on an outcome that, as near as I can tell, doesn't come true.) In the next half dozen or so titles on my FR Trawl, I've got City of the Spider Queen, a somewhat lengthy adventure, Unapproachable East, Underdark and Serpent Kingdoms, all books that I've actually wanted to read for some time, but until I started this trawl, I never got around to. 

I also read a little more than half of the Pathfinder Freeport book on pdf, but then my hardcopy arrived while I was out, so I abandoned the pdf read, stuck a bookmark in the hard copy, and started reading it in physical form instead. I actually just read, last night, some of the early "Denizens of Freeport" chapter, where they added the character who's on the new, updated cover art. She's a terrible, terrible, unlikeable girlboss May Sue, but although they added her, I haven't seen (yet) that they've tied her to any plots or anything, so whatever. There's a lot of terrible girlboss Mary Sues in Freeport, sadly, including the Sea Lord herself. I had thought that I saw somewhere that she was going to be replaced in later products (the Return to Freeport AP maybe?) but I'm probably wrong. We'll see when I read that relatively shortly, but I doubt that such confirmed "male feminists" like Chris Pramas and his partner or wife or whatever he calls her Nicole Lindroos would ever take a powerful woman NPC off of her perch on an unmerited pedestal. (I presume that they're that kind of partnership. I don't actually know or care for sure. He could well be gay, and "she" could well be a he, for all I know.)

Luckily for me, when using any of this material from any of these woke mutants, I would necessarily need to modify all kinds of details; it would hardly resemble the original once I'm done. My reworking of some Freeport elements into Curse of the Corsair Coast will be a pretty brusque reworking, if not just new material altogether that has the same theme and tone, sorta. Changing the name and sex of an NPC that is important on paper but doesn't really matter in terms of any of the adventures, really, is super easy; barely an inconvenience.

Anyway, other than being slightly more woke and significantly more thicc, due to also incorporating all kinds of material from the Companions, this book clearly is meant to replace the older systemless Pirate's Guide, so I'm sure I'll shelve the older book in the archive section, and this will take its place. Although since I will have read both in the last three years when I finish it, I probably won't pick it up again for quite a while unless I run Curse of the Corsair Coast and need to reference it. I don't I'll actually read it cover to cover again for some time. 

As an aside, let me reiterate a point I've made before, although it's merely a minor pet peeve. Pramas and Lindroos pronounce Green Ronin like Green Roneen. That's clearly wrong. Ronin is already a word in the English language, and it's pronounced Ronin, so that's how I pronounce their company name. You don't get to establish artisan pronunciation of an existing word just because you want to, even if it's kinda sorta closer to the Japanese pronunciation where the word originally came from. 

Porhomok

Baix Pallars, more commonly called the Corsair Coast, is a relatively thin strip of heavily forested semi-tropical shading to tropical land south of Timischburg, home of the Pallaran ethnicity and various city-states dotting the coast, like Razina, St. Haspar, Alcassar, Segria, and most infamously Port Liure. These city-states cling to the coast, though, and the forests, swamps and even jungles to the interior are poorly known, and considered quite dangerous. On extremely clear days from high up on a tower or tree, the Pallarans can see many scores of miles to the east, however, that the forest doesn't last forever; distant mountains that look tiny march in a north-south line, visible from all of the of the city-states, regardless of latitude. While these mountains look tiny, and on most days can't be spied at all, in reality they are massive, and permanent snowfields and glaciers top many of their highest peaks and cirques. Beyond them is a vast rain shadow, and the rusty red deserts of Porhomok, the so-called Land of the Dead. Few except scholars of ancient history and/or the occult know much about this land, although it occasionally features in exotic fairy tales, but the reality is that long ago, before the rise of any of the modern kingdoms, before even the Kin Twilight and the kingdoms that combined to form Kinzassal, the kingdom of Taremu-Atum blossomed in this land. Massive cities of impressive architectural design were filled with splendid estates.

In ancient times, the engineers and mages of Taremu-Atum created vast dams and dikes in the mountains to the west, channeling snowmelt from them and diverting them to the east, where they formed vast reservoirs on the eastern slopes of the mountains, and continued down in massive stone-lined canals to the thirsty cities of Taremu-Atum; a lifeline in this otherwise parched desert, which is characterized by reddish sand so fine that vast clouds of it remain suspended high in the atmosphere, giving the sky itself a rusty color. This sand rarely crosses the mountains because of their extreme height and the prevailing winds that keep them to the east, but seasonally, fine, powdery rust-red dust will rain down on far-away Gunaakt even further to the east.

It is unclear exactly what disaster befell Taremu-Atum causing the collapse of its civilization and it being renamed Porhomok, the Dead Desert, or occasionally the Land of the Dead, but a good bet is that the Heresiarch Shimut the Fleasheater was involved, his name even being in the language of ancient Taremu-Atum, and his proclivity being one of foul necromancy. Vague rumors of his warring against and eventually cursing his entire people persist, and the reality is that today almost all of the land of Porhomok is, indeed, the Dead Desert, devoid of much life. But that doesn't mean that it is quiet. Stirring in ancient tombs, abandoned and half-buried cities still linger the dead of ancient Taremu-Atum, and they do not tolerate trespassers. What is less well known, but forbidden and fragmentary ancient books like the Chalyth Codex, the Nargoth Fragments, and the Annals of the Ashen Cycle suggest that the gigantic, mountain-sized Black Pyramid of Shimut still lurks deep in the desert. If so, none from the Three Realms+ have a reliable report of it.

Shimut as a young prince

A handful of the descendants of the ancient Taremese people still live as nomads in the desert, or in villages on the eastern slopes of the mountains, or even as savage barbarians feuding with the orclings far to the east on the borders of Gunaakt, but their culture is fallen and savage now, and they live only in small, primitive groups. A few remember the tales of their ancient ancestors, and claim that they wuz kangz, although in this case, they're entirely right. And, of course, that's just a joke; these people are nothing like American blacks trying to appropriate the culture of Egypt for themselves; they had copper-colored skin, long-faces like peoples far to the north, auburn hair and green or hazel eyes. Whatever happened to them, their genetics have wandered a bit from their ancient state and blended with a darker haired and darker eyed people, probably the ancestors of the Pallarans. But that blending must have gone both ways, as occasionally a 100% Pallaran is born with features not terribly unlike that of the the savages of Porhomok. Some, at least, must have wandered west of the mountains, but in doing so, they obviously lost all memory of who they had been, and now consider themselves nothing more than Pallarans. Even more occasionally; vanishingly rarely, in fact, an actual Porhomian exile will find his way to the Pallaran cities of the Corsair Coast and make a new life for himself, but to date, those few who have done so have declined to tell anyone much about their homeland to the east.

Of course in just the last generation or so, the genetics of Baix Pallars have been further enriched by increased trade, travel and intercourse with those from the north; Timischers, Tarushans, and even Humbrians and others. But still the evil report of whatever lies beyond the forests, swamps and distant mountains remains. But the bold occasionally attempt to map out the Dead Desert. Few return, and none with anything that significantly further expands the knowledge of what lies beyond. The savage tribes of Porhomok strongly and violently discourage anyone from exploring, plundering or even seeing the Dead Desert, and from those who manage to get past them come only vague reports of more undead than have been seen anywhere else in the Three Realms+, a truly horrifying realm given over almost completely to the dead. 

Undead

I was always a little bit disappointed that the following two images were only available to me in pretty low res. I'd I had hi res images I might even have made a nice printout and put it in a little frame. Anyway, I tried to upscale them using two different services, but both free, so it's not really super he res upscaling. Just better than the smaller versions that I did have. I suppose it's an improvement, if not exactly a home run. I can't really tell the difference between the two versions, and when shrunk on my phone, I can't tell the difference between them and the originals. But, if I need to use them, hey, I've got these upscaled versions!

The one guy's face looks a little weird, the one holding the red crystal knife or whatever it is, but I actually think that's an artifact of Wayne Reynolds art style sometimes rather than the AI upscaling. As much as I love the guy, he occasionally made really janky looking people.

3.x Hardcopy archive

I've been gradually over the last year, or maybe two, been going back and getting hardcopies of D&D 3.5 (mostly, but there's probably a 3e or two product in the list there too) products that I think that I want to have in hardcopy, but which I didn't buy when they were new for whatever reason, and I have to deal with pdfs. Some of them I don't care about, because I simply don't care about that book as much as others (Dungeonscape being the iconic example here, most of the Races of... titles. Of those, I bought Races of Eberron because I liked Eberron when it was new, and Races of Destiny because I found it dirt cheap somewhere. Never got the others in hardcopy, but I doubt that I have any interest in doing so either.) On the other hand, some are ones that I wanted for a long time and I was waiting forever for prices to come down at at least what they were when they were new. Heroes of Horror was one of these; I probably still paid too much for a somewhat beat-up copy.

What are the ones that are on my shortlist of titles to get?

1. More than anything else is Monster Manual IV. This is the only 3.x monster book that I don't have in hard copy, and it's bugged me for years. 

2. I jumped very quickly on the non-magical Complete books, and I have hardcopies of, say, Complete Warrior and Complete Adventurer that I bought when they were new. I even have Complete Psionic which is weird, and I bought it relatively new. (I've still never read it, though, lol. It's on my list.) I never got Complete Arcane, Mage or Divine because I was not very interested in D&D-style magic. I guess maybe that's why I liked psionics. It was magic, but different. 

3. I've had the DMG2 since forever, but somehow I never bought the PHB2. It's not super cheap, but you can get PODs from DriveThru.

There's a few other books that were more out there late books, like Book of Nine Swords or Magic of Incarnum, etc. that I probably wouldn't buy in hardcopy, because I don't care about that kind of stuff as much, but eh. Maybe. 

4. I'm also missing a few Eberron books that, if I could find them in hardcopy in decent shape at a reasonable price, I'd totally pick up, because I dropped out of collecting Eberron after a while, and had to get these later in pdf. City of Stormreach is the one I most want here, and probably the only one that I really regret not picking up in physical copy. It sells for... a lot of money, when you can even find a hardcopy available at all. Slightly less so, but I'd probably get them if I could find them cheap, Dragons of Eberron and Secrets of Xen'drik, so I've got more details on the continents that I'm missing. (I bought Secrets of Sarlona new, so I've always had that one.)

Paizo Iconics - (Nakayama) Hayato

The last iconic for today is the Samurai, another of the "new" classes. He's the fourth such, and the third to feature a last name; although because he's "Japanese" his last name is actually his first name, as indicated in the post title. Of course, he has to have a tragic yet epic backstory too; why can't 1st level character just be fresh-faced youths? Described as both "late thirties" and "est. 49-51 years old" simultaneously, he's also one of the few older characters. Of course, he's a ronin. Because he was a great warrior before he was a 1st level character, even, he had to have this honorable duel with the murderer of his prior lord, but because Minkai is steeped in dumb traditions, that meant he had to become a ronin. Actually, he became a ronin because his lords' widow forbade him from committing seppuku, so he had no choice but to come to the Golarion version of "Europe" where he appeared in .... well, in relatively few product art, because a samurai doesn't actually make much sense in this setting, and trying to fit him in was always a case of special pleading. 

Like many of these Wayne Reynolds iconics portraits, he's way too busy-looking. He's like a Warhammer 40k model turned to an acrylic or watercolor painting.

Even the Pathfinder wiki points out that the samurai is like a culturally slightly different variant on the Cavalier, which is already like an alignment variation on the paladin. Samurai seems like a very oddly specific and superfluous class. I can't imagine ever being interested in playing one myself.

The next four, which will be my next update whenever I get around to doing this tag again, include four more of the Pathfinder unique classes: Lirianne the Gunslinger, Reiko the Ninja, Feiya the Witch, and Imrijka the Inquisitor. A nice batch of girlbosses to look forward to. Sigh. Anyway, several of the classes would be potentially be interesting to me, nonetheless.

The Pathfinder wiki divides the classes up into various different categories. Maybe I should have done that instead of just going through them chronologically. The first batch are the so-called "core" classes, which are basically the same as the original 3e D&D classes. The second batch are the so-called "base" classes, which are different 1-20 level classes, not unlike the classes that appeared in 3.5 books like, say, the Complete series. Then there are the "hybrid" classes that kind of combine the territory of two core or base classes and blend them in a way. Then there are the "occult" classes which were kind of the Pathfinder take on psionics, although they weren't done very much like the 3x psionics were, unfortunately. (For that, however, there's a third party book called Ultimate Psionics that is well-regarded.) And finally, there are "alternate" classes, which it is presumed you would only use on rare occasions because they're kind of weird. The samurai above is one of those. Anyway, just to add a bit more text to this post and to keep it handy for when I want to refer to it, let me list each class by which category it calls in.

Core

• Barbarian
• Bard
• Cleric
• Druid
• Fighter
• Monk
• Paladin
• Ranger
• Rogue
• Sorcerer
• Wizard

Base

• Alchemist
• Cavalier
• Gunslinger
• Inquisitor
• Magus
• Oracle
• Shifter
• Summoner
• Vigilante
• Witch

Hybrid

• Arcanist
• Bloodrager
• Brawler
• Hunter
• Investigator
• Shaman
• Skald
• Slayer
• Swashbuckler
• Warpriest

Occult

• Kineticist
• Medium
• Mesmerist
• Occultist
• Psychic
• Spiritualist

Alternate

• Antipaladin
• Ninja
• Samurai

Of course, there's also NPC classes, but they don't have iconics, and you're not meant to use them. And there's also mythic paths, which are kind of like the equivalent to the old Epic Level Handbook, but there's no iconics of them either.

Paizo Iconics - Damiel (Morgethai)

The second character to feature a last name, and the third of the "new" Pathfinder classes, Alchemists like Damiel are kind of like an combination wizard who uses potions and stuff instead of spells and a drug dealer or mad scientist. Damiel certainly lives up to that promise; his backstory is that he got so involved in his alchemical mad scientists experiments—on himself—that he was kicked out of his home and had to become a wandering PC. (There seems to be a certain theme with the iconic character bios. Can't anyone just have had a regular, mostly happy upbringing?) Yeah, he's another James Sutter creation. Sigh. 

Damiel, like all of the new Pathfinder classes wasn't revised for 2e, or at least his artwork wasn't. In fact, he was replaced; the new 2e iconic alchemist is now a goblin named Fumbus or something. Which I'm a little bit surprised by, because he appeared in a lot of art, it seems. 

I'm not really a fan of the concept. I don't like magic-users of any kind, honestly, although a mad scientists who's "magic" actually comes from potions and the like is maybe something that I'd like better than a super traditionalist wizard or even a sorcerer.