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. 

The Silver Marches

I finished the 3e book Silver Marches last night. This was an interesting book because of the context in which it was published. Self-professed game design "rock star" Sean K. Reynolds hitched his star to this book, in a very public and kind of nasty one-sided debate, that he reported on, that he was having with management or leadership at WotC about customers wanting "fluff" instead of "crunch." It was a fundamental design difference in terms of what to do strategically with D&D products going forwards. Reynolds was championing an older 2e model that had also made a lot of hay with other companies, most notably White Wolf, where products focused more on roleplaying opportunities, setting details, and things that supported the fiction of the game, often in exactly and painstakingly tedious detail, something that Forgotten Realms had actually become somewhat infamous for over the years already by this point. He claimed that management just wanted to publish "crunch"; player facing products that offered more options for players; new feats, new prestige classes, new mechanics, etc. 

Now, I realize that that's not a very nuanced narrative about Reynolds' actual position, which matured somewhat from what he articulated expressly in 2002 in front of this book, but this book was kind of the schwerpunkt for that debate. If there really was a debate, and not just a narrative that Reynolds himself was telling. 

Unfortunately, this is the most interesting thing about Silver Marches. As a product, I didn't really find it very interesting. It did, indeed, give encyclopedic detail about social and legal customs, plants and animals that are usually just slightly recolored versions of real animals and plants, and other things that are found in the Silver Marches area of Forgotten Realms—which to be fair are one of the classic areas of the realms, adjacent to Icewind Dale (kind of) and Waterdeep, but further inland, and  big part of the territory that Wulfgar and Driz'zt traveled through in the second book of the Icewind Dale trilogy. Alustriel, the leader of the area (de facto) and leader explicitly of the big city Silverymoon, made an appearance. 

Most of this detail isn't very interesting, and I honestly struggle to see how I would have used it were I to set a game there. In fact, much of it was kind of antithetical to play as D&D is usually played. I had hoped, after finding my mind wandering and being really quite bored, that when I got to the last third or quarter or so of the book where it had "adventure sites" that it would be better, but they were honestly just pretty boring stocked site-based exploration stuff; little more than mini dungeons without much context. Somewhat ironically, because FR had become synonymous with trad-style play during 2e and into 3e, and as the nascent OSR movement, and other classic play movements started pushing back against trad, and its occasional pretentious claims like "roleplay, not rollplay" and stuff like that, because these are pretty old-school site based sandbox type stuff. Not very interesting to read, but if you like that kind of play, surprisingly (at least to me) useful for it. (Although I'm sympathetic to many of the aesthetic desires of this older school game play, which is also made up of people that I may tend to relate to more; in their 50s, played in the 80s, tend to be conservative, not impressed with the woke direction of the current industry, fans of even older sword & sorcery like Howard and Leiber, etc. I am, however, a pretty traditional trad player, and I find trad style adventures and modules, like the campaigns WotC does or Paizo's adventure paths, much more interesting and useful... even if I don't necessarily run them straight as is. As I've said many times before, I'm not old school, but I am old-fashioned. And I don't know that the play customs like OSR, Classic, Trad, Neo-trad, etc. are the best way to describe my playstyle. I prefer the GM merit badges. But if I have to have a label, I claim paleo-trad for how I play. It's trad, but with a lot of old-fashioned things that some other trad players may find somewhat exotic.)

Not that we were told, but I was always intrigued by the result of Reynolds gauntlet throwing exercise. I'm sure that if he'd been right, we'd have heard about it non-stop. I doubt that he was, and Silver Marches probably didn't sell so well as to make his case a slam dunk. Only a few months later, he was no longer working at WotC; in a so-called "amiable lay-off" by which he means, "sure I was laid off, but I was about to quit anyway." Sure. That may have even been sorta true, and he seems to have done OK for himself, working in the video game industry for a time, and doing plenty of freelance projects in the RPG sphere, including even for WotC (I think) for many years thereafter. I tend to think that that was more likely a face-saving narrative, but it did, no doubt, work out for him in the long run. WotC did, also, in fact focus much more on player facing crunch books following this. Which, in the long run, may have choked out the d20 era when all was said and done and contributed a lot to the growing dissatisfaction that many people had with the system which contributed significantly to the noisy and dramatic birth of the OSR movement as a whole, which was a rejection of much of what d20 was doing. 

There's some more context to be had here, of course. When d20 ended, it was replaced with the polarizing 4e, and many players were not interested in it. Pathfinder made a lot of hay by essentially making some slight modifications to "clean up" d20, although it's arguable to the extent that they actually improved it, and continued the 3e style of play for many more years. I also noticed in that era that 3e books never came down in price on the used market. I strongly suspect that while the narrative was that Pathfinder outsold, or at least rivaled D&D during the 4e era, that an equal order of magnitude of players just kept playing d20, and finally, the OSR was fully birthed with the launch of the first retro-clones at about this same time, and it became a fourth pole in this industry of multipolarity. It also didn't escape my notice that 5e, which changed this dynamic significantly, was essentially what Pathfinder should have been, i.e., d20 but actually cleaned up, made easier to run and play, and arguably better. (I say as a person who still prefers 3e to 5e in most respects, but.... y'know. My own preferences aren't really on trial here. I also recognize a lot of d20's flaws even though I use it partially because I'm familiar enough with it to easily work around them. Some of what 5e made "simpler" wasn't actually stuff that was a pain point, like character customization options.)

What all of this means, I'm not sure of. 5e was certainly popular, but there's a lot of good circumstantial and anecdotal evidence (as well as a lot of reactionary denials of this) that it's getting long in the tooth, its welcome has faded dramatically, and that 5.5 wasn't as well received as WotC would have hoped. I personally think that that's obvious given the very public and obvious attempts by WotC to change course with the game right now; they're obviously trying to woo back customers who have left in the relatively recent past. But some of that may be part of the greater cultural correction going on in corporate and customer facing industries all over. Heck, even my company really dialed back the DEI rhetoric the last couple of years; it's almost invisible or non-existent now, and I work for a Scandinavian-owned corporation that lemming-like followed all of the corporate trends. As do most corporations. I feel like customer-focused entertainment industries are the real canaries in the coal-mine for these kinds of cultural trends, and the wholesale rejection of wokeness, which probably had its most dramatic breakthrough with the Bud Light nonsense a couple of years ago has impacted the entertainment industry the hardest. So part of what WotC is doing is backtracking from the heavy-handed woke preaching, while still trying to quietly and less overtly remain woke for the really loud, obnoxious portion of their audience who remains woke. But the overtness of woke themes is really toned down, and WotC in particular is going on, in Dan Ayoub's own words, an "apology tour" to backtrack for the benefit of offended former customers. Again, I think that this is obvious because sales are down, 5.5 was soft, and people are losing interest in general. But I think that they're going to anyway, no matter what WotC does. I think another thing that few have recognized (shout out to Black Lodge Games for being the first to point it out, as far as I know) is that the "nerd moment" which has been going on for a number of years now seems to have peaked. Comic book movies peaked. Star Wars peaked. Science fiction in general peaked. And, consistent with that, D&D peaked. All of them are in decline. Part of that is due to their crappy slop content and woke nonsense, which turned off most people, but part of it was just that the moment peaked and now people are looking for something else now. D&D will never again be what it was in 2020-2024 or so. Or, at least it won't be again until another big turn of events. This big wave was maybe sort of like the big wave of the late 70s through the middle to later 80s when D&D had its first big boom. That kind of boom town cycle just doesn't last forever, and if WotC thinks that D&D is still possible to be put into a growth phase when it's clearly (I think) in a contraction period and probably will be for some time, then WotC's hope is vain and foolish.

Anyway, I'm now wandered rather far afield from just the Silver Marches discussion, but I think that the greater trends in how WotC strategically tries to position D&D is still very relevant, and in many ways, in the last nearly two and a half decades since this book came out, the strategy hasn't really matured very much in most respects. And the book itself was decidedly "meh" at best, and boring and pointless at worst. Next up is the Eberron sourcebook Five Nations, and then the next SPCM campaign, and then finally on to the next Paizo adventure path. Lots to read. Don't know for sure how much of it I'll do this week, though, with family being in town.

The Strange Affairs of the Unseen Beyond

Creating a new tag based on what I said as an update at the bottom of my last post: THE STRANGE AFFAIRS OF THE UNSEEN BEYOND. This will be a more targeted world-building effort that is not part of Old Night. It will use the same D&D 3.5 and PFRPG hybrid rules, but there will be some pretty limiting house-rules to ensure that it is very targeted in terms of mood and tone. Not everything that PFRPG has would fit in this game and it's going to use PFRPG rules, which are essentially a slight modification to an older version of D&D, of course, but I want it to NOT feel really very much like D&D at all. 

Up front, let me be clear what the mechanical baseline is. I like a D&D 3.5 and PFRPG hybrid; mostly D&D 3.5, but using the classes and truncated skill list of PFRPG, plus, if it matters, the CMB/CMD, which is a lot easier than the combat maneuvers of 3.5, where it was a long-running joke that nobody knew how to do grapple, for instance, without stopping and looking it up. I'll also add The Elephant In the Room houserules and E6 as a default, which I won't link to in this post, but which I have many times in the past. That's just default for me using a d20 system these days. What really matters is the next part, which are mostly limitations, i.e., I'm cutting a bunch of stuff out to change specifically the tone, theme and feel of the game. And mostly this means races and classes. I'm not actually sure yet what to do with races, but I'm a huge fan of humano-centrism, and it's entirely possible that I'll only use humans as selectable races. If I do add some others back again, I haven't yet decided what they'll be. Maybe some of the Old Night races can be applied here, or adapted, or maybe not. I'll get to that later. Classes, however, is where the real "magic" happens in changing the game to not feel like D&D even if I'm using what are, essentially, D&D rules. 

And before I talk about the specific classes that I'm OK with using, it's important to note; what is this setting like? It's going to be fantasy, and it's going to be medieval fantasy, but it's not going to really be D&D fantasy. In fact, it's going to specifically lean in to a kind of early pulp, penny dreadful, city mytery, Gothic horror and supernatural sensationalism kind of thing. It's not Victorian, but in some ways, it'll feel more Victorian than D&D-ish. Kind of a hybrid of D&D and Call of Cthulhu, or even Candela Obscura (at least as I understand that game) in tone. So, there'll be adventurous classes, but not overly magical classes.

From the core classes, only the fighter, barbarian and rogue will fly.

From the "base classes", I think I could use the alchemist and vigilante are good fits.

From the "hybrid classes" the brawler, investigator, and slayer are ones I really like. I love the concept of the swashbuckler, but there's actually a better class for it, so I'm not going to expressly disallow it, but I'm going to suggest instead that... well, see below.

I'm not very familiar with them, but if you wanted the Unchained barbarian or rogue, I'd say knock yourself out.

And then, the Occult classes are all on the table. In fact, this is specifically where the "f/x" classes will come from. But, you can't take them at 1st level; however, given that it's E6, you can take the first five levels as character levels 2-6 with an occult class. psychic, spiritualist, medium, occultist, mesmerist, and kineticist. I might reconsider and say you can't take them for your first two levels, but let me read them again more carefully first. On the other hand, all of the occult classes are "half-casters" so probably giving them five levels is fine. Maybe even all six. I'll think on that.

And then from third party stuff, you can use the noble and freebooter from Freeport. 

While I'm not quite ready to assign classes to these characters, here's the iconics that I'll end up developing.

From left to right:

• Beatrice Holloway, a mesmerist who insists that she is not really a mesmerist.
• Ambrose Harrow, gentleman adventurer and monster hunter
• Lady Victoria Nightingale, society lady with an unsettling talent for communicating with the dead
• Silas Blackwood, retired surgeon and occult investigator
• Amelia Vexley, scholar of witchcraft and the occult, publishes anonymously under a pen name
• Gideon Marlowe, disgraced former clergyman and exorcist

Pathfinder Occult

In my Paizo Iconics series, which I would like to finish off this week, I'm smack dab in the middle of the Occult classes, which launched as part of the Occult line in 2015 in the summer (at GenCon, I believe, which is when the first book debuted.) I'm also thinking of pulling these titles ahead and reading them, and even of getting physical copies of at least some of them. The occult titles were launched with Occult Adventures, which is the main system book, followed by Occult Bestiary and Occult Realms in the Pathfinder Setting line, and Occult Origins in the Pathfinder Companion series. Occult Mysteries actually predates the "Occult" subline by over a year, and was a part of the Setting series, but it's hard not to see it as connected via foreshadowing if, for no other reason, because of the title. It also works fairly well in tandem with the later Horror Adventures and Horror Realms books, although technically they are not the same thing and could be used independently. 

I've long thought the idea of replacing regular D&D magic with psionics would make for a fun alternative campaign type; something that felt very different while still using (essentially) the same rules. The way that I've posited that this would work, in a 3.5 environment, is that any class with a spellcasting progression would either be removed entirely (if that was its sole purpose) or modified to replace the spellcasting with something else (appropriate for the ranger and paladin, for example.) Of the core classes from 3.5, that means that you basically only still have the fighter, rogue and barbarian and ... maybe the monk, although I don't like it's Hong Kong theatre mumbo-jumbo very much. Bard, cleric, druid, wizard, sorcerer are all completely off-limits, and the ranger and paladin need to be somewhat reworked according to principles that are found in Complete Warrior I believe. (Or maybe Complete Adventurer. I can't remember anymore.) Or, if you've got a 3pp alt.ranger, of which there were many, that doesn't have any magical abilities or spellcasting, you could of course use that. Instead of all of this magic, you'd use psionics. The psion, psychic warrior, soulknife and wilder from the Expanded Psionic Handbook as well as the ardent, divine mind and lurk from Complete Psionic would replace these classes. They're not necessarily 1:1 replacements, of course, but among the seven psionic classes, you'd be able to accomplish everything that you'd need a more traditional "magical" D&D party to do well enough, but it would just feel very different. 

When 3.5 was updated to PFRPG, of course, the same core races and classes carried through, and EPH was in the SRD, but Complete Psionic was not. Paizo never addressed psionics officially, but they had some kind of partnership with Dreamscarred Press where they made semi-official psionics material for PFRPG in the Ultimate Psionics book (the compiled and revised version of several earlier products) that added ten new classes to the game, including updates from the 3.5 SRD to the four EPH classes, and then six other unique classes that rounded out the roster. You could, using this, do the same thing for PFRPG that I was thinking of doing for D&D. I say thinking of doing; I actually did it once, but nobody ended up taking a "psion" type character; I had a barbarian, a swashbuckler, a fighter/rogue, and two soulknives in that party. And something else, although now I can't remember what the 6th character was, but I think he might have also been a rogue or something similar. 

Paizo did eventually add psychic magic to the official stuff through these Occult books, but psionics and psychics are not really the same thing, and they don't really have the same theme and tone. Whereas Dreamscarred Press' PFRPG psionics, heavily based on the D&D 3.5 psionics, is often compared more to the X-men, Paizo's occult psychic powers are more compared to the psychic occultism of fiction like penny dreadfuls and gothic horror. But, if I could replace magic with psionics and like the result, I obviously would like replacing "regular" magic with "occult" or "psychic" magic and like the result even moreso. Making magic more magical, mysterious and edgy, focusing on mysticism of a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago occultism makes it even more significantly less like D&D than even replacing magic with psionics does, in many respects, but it also makes magic much more like what I'd want it to look like. Keep it relatively low level, (E6) so that the magic doesn't get out of hand, and this would be a fascinating exercise in creative limiting being used to build a very different type of setting, tone and mood out of the same mechanical base. The image above was just a prompt to Nano Banana 2 to create a fantasy ensemble cast of psychic investigators like mediums, psychics, occultists, etc.; i.e., exactly what the Paizo stuff does, and that's what it came back with. That works for me.

So, I've already announced (although done very little with) EMPIRE OF THE MIND WIZARDS to create a subsetting based on psionics, but now I feel like I need another one based on psychic/occult magic.

UPDATE: I tried to get grok to give me an image, and Nano Banana 2. Grok shut me down entirely until this morning, and then gave me something that I didn't really love; way too "fantasy = 5e" vibe. The latter screwed around not following my instructions for one generation after another after another. I finally had to stop asking it to edit it's original one, and just start from scratch every time, and that's where I ended up with the image above, on the third or fourth "from scratch" generation on the same prompt. 

The more I look at that image, though, the more I find that I really like it. I think I'm going to take each of the characters there and turn them into "iconic" seeds. Not fully fleshed out iconic characters, but seeds of iconic characters, and then I'll figure out where to use them. I don't know that I can make them fit in the Old Night setting or not, but maybe I can. And if not, that's OK. I always like world-building, and while I prefer—generally—to stay more focused, having a few other worlds for occasional side show is still fun. And maybe this one would be a minor campaign seed rather than campaign setting; one based on E6 Pathfinder with limited access to character classes, using the "occult magic" to replace entirely the regular "D&D magic" that the game defaults to. I doubt I'll spend tons of time filling out that seed, but we'll see. Maybe it becomes so interesting to me that I end up doing more with it than I think right now that I will.