Announcing Isles of Terror

Well, although it took me a while to get it to the point where I liked how it was working, I ended up being relatively happy with the CULT OF UNDEATH project.  I got a whole new system out of it, which ended up expanding into FANTASY HACK, so that was worth it for its own sake.  I'm also slowly but surely getting a whole new setting out of it, which I've so far called TIMISCHBURG, but which I'll probably have to rename since Timischburg is only one of several countries in the setting.  What are some lessons learned from the drawn-out CULT OF UNDEATH series, then?  Well, in no particular order:

• I don't really like the Paizo adventures.  They've got two major structural problems at a high level, and then a third problem that isn't necessarily killer, but which doesn't work for me so well.
• They're horribly railroadish in their structure.  They really need to be carefully strip mined of their valuable content, but then run in a fashion that has little if nothing to do with the structure that they're written in.  
• They're horribly politically correct.  Paizo seems to be almost completely inhabited by professional SJWs, which really hurt the usability and entertainment value of the material that they write.
• And third, they're very, very into the "derived D&D" vibe.  I prefer a more wild and woolly gonzo sword & sorcery without all the clutter and baggage.  Paizo brings all their clutter and baggage with them.  
• I don't really like over-planning anyway.  Attempting to adopt a whole 15 level adventure path, even if part of the adaptation is a major pruning of the content to make it shorter, is still coming up with way too much in the way of planning for my taste.  I kinda knew that this was going to be a feature of attempting to do this, but it ended up being worse and less satisfying than I thought.
• To fix some of these problems, I think I'd do what I did near the end of the CULT OF UNDEATH project, but start on the right foot.  Rather than a have a framework that I'm trying to fit the encounters, scenarios, characters, and locations from the game into, I should do the strip-mining first and then see what all that raw material suggests to me.  It'll probably be something considerably different than what Paizo did with it.  And I'll keep that deliberately vague and high-level anyway.

What this sounds like it means that if I do another one of these, I should just go through each module—maybe even in more detail than I did for Carrion Crown, and archive what the encounters are like, the NPCs, the locations, etc. and spread them out (virtually, of course) as a buffet, and then after I've done that, figure out what if anything I can do with it.

So; let's do that, shall we?  Heck, if that's how I'm going to do things, then I can do tons more of them.  Now that I've got a model—finally, and with only a little bit of trial and error, all things considered—I can crank through these relatively quickly, until I run out of the ones in my collection.

I'm also going to use it as an excuse to gradually develop the setting a bit.  So, to start with, let's do The Serpent's Skull adventure path.  Because it all starts with a shipwreck and builds from there into a tropical, King Kongian adventure of sorts, I'm going to call it ISLES OF TERROR.  Now I just have to figure out exactly where I'm going to place these islands...

And yes, I'm aware of the vaguely Isle of Dread-like vibe that the adventure path starts off with.  Which, I have no doubt, is very deliberate.

I should point out that I'm not completely done with CULT OF UNDEATH either.  I still want to pull all of the work I did together; going back and treating the whole thing the way I'm going to do this one, maybe.  Yeah, it'll only be another post or two; or maybe I'll just put it on the wiki and make reference to it here.  Not sure yet how I'm going to finish that one off.