Paizo titles

It's been a couple of months since I posted anything related to roleplaying games or my setting; ostensibly the purpose of this blog.  That's OK, I suppose—focus sometimes changes, drifts, and centers on other things from time to time, and stuff like WESTERN HACK was clearly a spin-off from DH5 (and actually contributed some great options to it, like the mythical horses, etc.)  But I do feel like between my various vacations, lots of stuff going on at work, and my interest in a variety of topics that have hit me this summer, it's been a particularly dry spell for RPG related stuff, whether with regards to DH5, WESTERN HACK or even AD ASTRA; my three main RPG topics of note.  It's also been lean with regards to the PAIZO DECONSTRUCTED projects, and for that matter even for my reading of anything, fiction, RPG or otherwise.  I've just been busy and when I had a few moments, other hobbies have occupied my thoughts lately.  It's the last of those topics, PAIZO DECONSTRUCTED that I want to refer to momentarily.

While I'm not really a customer of new stuff too much, I did manage to get my hands on a big lot of Paizo stuff from a friend retiring from the hobby not too long ago, so I've got a lot of material to review much of it really quite new.  (Or at least newish. New by my standards.)  And yes, I'm aware that Pathfinder just got a major upgrade to a new edition, which was probably a marketing/sales imperative after 5e ended up being pretty good and bringing lots of D&D prodigal sons back into the fold who left during 4e (many of them wandering into Paizoland, at least for a time.)  I'm vaguely aware of what some reviews are saying about Pathfinder 2, but I'm not particularly interested in it myself.  What I have enjoyed, at least to some degree, are less the Paizo "crunch" books and more the Golarion setting and the adventures—at least once I filter out the raging SJW nonsense that has infected them.  Because of that, I still suffer through both the over-the-top ridiculous crunch paradigm that I've long since left behind (to the degree that I ever belonged to it in the first place) as well as the over-the-top ridiculous Diversity, Inc.™ (which of course really means anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-Western Civilization bigotry) paradigm to filter out whatever gold flakes of value might be pannable out of the material I have. (I like also like tortured metaphors, apparently.)

Anyway, I'm going to both continue my Pathfinder Society Crawl as well as go through some of the more recent setting and rulebooks in a combination of review and deconstruction to see what strikes my fancy as usable material for me.  It's clearly not as much as I first thought, but there's still stuff out there that I can use, even in my current iteration of my setting, as I discovered a few months ago.  The most recent book I've read through (mostly, anyway) is the Villain Codex, a book that I had high hopes for once I saw what it was.  One of my favorite aspects of some very late 3.5 era books was the organizations that they described.  While several books had them, the one that sticks out most notably in my mind is the whole notion of the Black Scrolls of Ahm and the organization (or cult, almost, if you prefer) associated with them.  Sadly, the organizations in this book do not come close to that high bar; what we get are some pretty basic villainous organizations (without even any specifics!), a few paragraph long story hooks, a few new feats or spells or magic items, and then a bunch of NPC stats.  Curiously, for a book that's meant to be "plug and play", you can't actually do very much with the material here without having to whip up a lot of details on your own to make it usable.  Sure, sure—if you're in the middle of a session and get bogged down by needing some thieves' guild members, you can use them, I suppose (this is really only a problem for really "crunchy" systems anyway) but then you'll be scrambling between then and the next session trying to figure out what the deal with this thieves' guild really is.  The book itself would have been better served by cutting back on the crunch and fleshing out the organizations with some more specifics.

That's not to say some of the organizations aren't a good seed, merely that you'll need to put a lot of effort into cultivating it from seed to a plant that offers usable fruit to your game.  One way in which this is facilitated, the book's credit, is potential ties between various of the organizations, meaning that you can incorporate more than one of them to better effect than a single one—although that means that potentially even more work needs to be done.  Another curious aside is that not all of these villainous organizations are really all that villainous (the Queen's Musketeers, for example) and their aims and goals might be as sympathetic as anything else.  Heck, even the "brutal slavers", if you get rid of the curious recent SJW craze about slavery as the worst of all evils, are potentially patriotic privateers or a sort who may be as useful as allies as they would be as villains.

Now, granted, if these are just side color, then you can do without anything other than maybe making up a name for these organizations, which curiously lack any.  But if you want to actually make them an integral part of any campaign, they simply don't have enough information to be usable.  Probably that's the point; they aren't meant to be the source of an entire campaign, or to be the "main villain" of a campaign.  If they were, they'd need much more fleshing out.  But as a "side villain" or a cult or organization that can be dredged up on demand in a heartbeat, it works fairly well, I suppose, and as the seed of an organization that can be better fleshed out, these ideas verge from kinda clever to dreadfully cliche.

Here's the list of groups and organizations.  I've put a bold, red asterisk by those that I think are the most intriguing to potentially use in some fashion or other:

• Arcane Society. * A magical guild that feigns philanthropy but in reality is ruled by a lich who makes human sacrifices to maintain the appearance of youth and beauty and who wishes to otherthrow the kingdom and set herself up as the new dark Queen.
• Brutal Slavers. Pretty standard group of slavers, although the fact that they raid an enemy during a state of cold war makes them less evil than the authors would like them to actually be.
• Carnival Troupe. A traveling carnival that's maybe a bit more sinister than most.  Very low level and odd threat; I can't imagine I'd use them for anything.
• Corrupt Guard. * A great way to manage urban intrigue.  This combination of the police and the organized crime in a single organization is one of the better, albeit not exactly innovative, ideas here.
• Cruel Musketeers. * In spite of the cheesy name, what they really are is a group of disbanded musketeers who have fallen out of favor following a coup attempt by the Queen against her husband.  While ready to rescue the Queen, they've fallen into a bit of banditry and recruitment of less savory characters than during their golden age.  Almost require the use of some of the other groups to give them some context.
• Death Cult. Pretty standard undead cult.  I don't have a problem with undead cults, but this one offers little that better cults (such as Orcus or Tar-Baphon) don't already provide.
• Demon Knights. A savage group of renegades who, for reasons that aren't exactly clear, emulate demons.  They really are just vicious psychopaths and barbarians who have banded together to sack villages and towns and kill almost everyone in them.  
• Diabolical Church. There's some aspects I like of this, particular the insidious way that it comes to power (I doubt the authors were able to draw the obvious comparisons to the Left, but they're oh so very much there.)  That said; at the end of the day, an evil church, yawn.
• Fang Monastery. I don't really have much interest in monks as a D&D archetype to begin with, and one that's a bit on the sinister side and seems to really like snakes isn't enough to purge me of that bias.
• Merchant Caravan. How exactly a caravan of hucksters and con artists can manage to travel all around the kingdom and not make sufficient nuisance of itself to be put out of its misery isn't really very clear, but in case you want one of those, here's one.
• Merry Outlaws. * Another curious parallel with the Left; this is obviously Robin Hood, except stripped of the veneer of folk hero morality.  Oh, the common people still believe that it has that vaguely socialist morality, but in reality, they're just bandits with a good PR department.  This would be really nice contrasted with an actual good, noblesse oblige philanthropist as a patron or victim of the PCs against these guys.
• Nature's Scourge. * A kind of watered down version of what I've posted (more fairly, stolen) in the past about druids; eco-terrorists in a magical fantasy kingdom.
• Regal Court. *  The kingdom's highest echelons are a hot bed of murder and intrigue.  The Queen led a rebellion against the king, and was locked in the tower for her trouble.  That said, she's a mirror witch, and unknown to the King and his corrupt vizier, can come and go at will if necessary, so is plotting still.  Combined with the corrupt guard, the musketeers, and others, this is a nice way to go.
• Ruthless Brigands. Nothing particularly noteworthy; a mercenary company that's between clients, so is kinda living off of banditry in the meantime.  Useful combined with some of the other factions.
• Savage Marauders. * A combination of barbarians outside of society raiding.  The Huns, the Mongols, the Comanche, etc. all rolled into a single cavalry (mostly) horde.
• Scandalous Pirates. I don't know why they're so scandalous; they're pretty much just "pirates" although united (loosely) into a single faction or fleet, so they're more than just a single ship or captain, I guess.
• Secret Society. * Given what is likely true about Epstein and the Deep State, this one strikes pretty close to home; a very sinister cult of elitists who seek to dominate everyone else.  For some reason, they wear cat masks and use cat iconography, but that's easy enough to change if you don't like it.
• Sinister Cult. * The closest thing here to a Lovecraftian cult.  Curiously, of course, as with the Death Cult, Paizo already has a Lovecraftian cult, which for reasons that aren't clear to me, they didn't touch on in this book, preferring to reinvent the wheel.
• Slayer's Guild. * Another wheel reinvented; the Red Mantis group is ignored in order to handwave up this additional assassin's cult which is basically the same thing except without so clear of a visual cue.
• Thieves' Guild. Nothing special here; Thieves' Guilds have been a standard part of wretched hive of scum and villainy city-based fantasy for as long as that genre has existed.  It's just the Mafia transported into fantasy.