The Pfizer vaccine

I have no intention of taking any Chinva virus vaccine. But if for whatever reason I'm "forced" to or anyone else in my family (like when my youngest son is supposed to go on a mission), the only one I would ever consider would be the Johnson & Johnson one, which is the only one that is actually a vaccine in the strict sense.

Here's some data, or rather, discussion on (and links to) the data.

https://gilad.online/writings/2021/3/23/the-probe-into-the-israeli-vaccine-policy-and-its-outcome-is-beyond-damning

https://gilad.online/writings/2021/1/9/guinea-pigs-united

https://gilad.online/writings/2021/1/30/a-brief-examination-of-some-facts-related-to-mass-vaccination

https://gilad.online/writings/2021/2/7/israels-third-lockdown-a-spectacle-of-failure

https://gilad.online/writings/2021/3/2/the-vaxi-nation-people-like-no-one-else

But again, is there any reason at all to get the vaccine other than these absurd and tyrannical vaccine passports?

https://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2021/02/hong-kong-flu-vs-covid-descent-into.html

I will point out that while Gilad Atzmon has been sometimes accused of anti-semitism, this is as nonsensical as accusing Ron Unz of anti-semitism (and for the same reasons.) Both are, of course, ethnic Jews, although secular and non-practicing from a religious standpoint. Unz has always only had American citizenship and lived in California, as far as I know, other than when he went to school, and was raised to speak Yiddish as his first language. Atzmon was born in Tel Aviv and didn't move to London until he was an adult, and although he has renounced his Israeli citizenship in favor of a British one, that's just paperwork; you can't change your ethnicity, and he's just as Jewish as Unz, or Netanyahu, or the lead character from Fiddler on the Roof regardless of his citizenship. 

But because they're honest enough to question certain pro-Jewish narratives as being highly unlikely and not backed up by actual facts, two Jewish guys are accused of being anti-semitic. 

See, this is the kind of thing that makes me suggest that we live in ClownWorld.

(As an aside, I doubt that Unz really has an IQ of 214. He's sharp, certainly. Smarter than me. But 214 is almost eight standard deviations above the norm. C'mon.)

Deconstruction: Paizo Adventure Path 121: Strange Aeons #3: Dreams of the Yellow King

On to the next chapter of my Strange Aeons deconstruction!

The cult of Hastur no longer threatens Thrushmoor, and now the adventurers board a riverboat to Cassomir to track down their obsessed and corrupted former employer. Along the way, they explore the Dreamlands and attempt a number of bizarre dream quests, after which the adventurers can heal their fragmented minds—but they also learn of a greater threat looming over Golarion. Can they survive the perilous Dreamlands and emerge intact or will they be stranded in a dimension of nightmares?

Well... onwards out of Ustalov, I suppose. Given that there are pastiche elements upcoming that are clearly based on The Nameless City, "the mad Arab" from various works, much of the Dreamlands cycle in general, and even shows a lot of the influence that Lovecraft got from Vathek, going to the Golarion Middle East seems certainly thematically appropriate. (Edit: When I first wrote that, I had briefly confused Cassomir with Katheer. Cassomir is the Golarion version of Constantinople during the Byzantine Empire, not the Middle East per se. But it's an important waystop from the "Eastern Europe" of Ustalav to the Middle East. And Katheer is the destination given at the end of this adventure, anyway.) There's a lot of Dream Cycle references going on here, actually, as well as nods to Clark Ashton Smith's parallel creations that may not be part of the Lovecraft Mythos overall, but perhaps an extremely similar development alongside it.

PART I: THE SELLEN PASSAGE

Curiously, this portion of the adventure is supposed to represent nearly three months of travel, mostly by waterways and navigable rivers. There's some sample encounters, not all of them combat, that you can throw in to make the journey feel that long, but ultimately, you're going to have to do a Raiders of the Lost Ark style red-line, even if you do add some encounters to break it up. In real life, a long boat trip through potential exotic and hostile territory is an adventure in and of itself, but of course, it's also an adventure occasionally and a long, tedious slog most of rest of the time. While some of this stuff is pretty good, it—unfortunately—doesn't really fit the horror vibe, either. It's more of a... temperate African Queen, or something. The red-sailed boat following them would be the Germans in this analogy, although you can't really go on the attack against that ship, I suppose. In fact, it reads more than anything like a travalog of this part of the settings, which is perhaps a little on the undeveloped side compared to some other regions. We get the brief Illmarsh episode, the brief Razmiran episode, the brief River Kingdoms episode, the brief Galt episode, etc. This may be somewhat unavoidable given that... well, that's exactly what's called for to get to Cassomir (a kind of Golarion Constantinople from the twilight of the Byzantine Medieval period) but it's not the mood of the adventure path, so the red line and avoiding any of these encounters may be called for if keeping the mood is the more important goal. 

PART II: DREAM QUESTS

Part two of the module is stuff happening in the Dreamlands. This is meant to be another list of different things that happen at different points during the journey, concurrently with part 1. The GM has a lot of flexibility in terms of how to arrange these to make it feel somewhat less like a railroad (technically a boat trip down a river isn't exactly the same as a train ride down the tracks, but y'know... facultatively, what's the difference?)

Now, given that these events are largely a pastiche of a bunch of Lovecraftian story elements, it helps if you and the players have read most of the stories in the Dream Cycle, but my experience is that many Lovecraft fans don't really get, like, or partake of the Dream stories, because they're significantly different than his horror stories. This is unfortunate, because personally, I find them to be my favorite of Lovecraft's stories sometimes. I went to my bookshelf and pulled up my Del Rey trade paperback anthologies, which although I've had for several years I've never read. (Because I read the Complete works of Lovecraft online or on my Kindle instead, since they're public domain stories. But I do have this copy, and I recommend it. The introduction by Neil Gaimen is interesting, and it's always nice to have physical copies of the books you love so that when the inevitable infrastructure collapse comes, you can still read.) 

I recommend sampling the Dream Cycle stories before playing this or running this. My personal favorites, and ones that get quite a mention here, include "The Doom That Came to Sarnath", "The Other Gods", "The Cats of Ulthar", "The Nameless City" (which isn't really a dream story; not sure why it's collected in this volume. It is heavily pastiched later in this adventure path, though, so certainly read it. It's one of the "lesser" Lovecraftian works that many probably haven't read before) and the magnum opus of the Dream Cycle, "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath." Of course, in terms of pastiche, keep in mind that this adventure path also features heavily "The King in Yellow" by Robert Chambers, written well before Lovecraft. Although Lovecraft referred to Chambers' elements as if it were part of the Mythos proper, and they've been usually treated as such ever since.

There's a little rules subsystem on research here, which refers to a more expanded version in another rulebook. Of course there is. That's definitely the Pathfinder way. But again, this is an attempt to make D&D play out in the way that the stereotypical Call of Cthulhu game plays out, at least a little. Once the initial research is done, the PCs can travel to the Dreamlands itself in dream and do more research/adventuring. Curiously, in their occult subline, Paizo had already introduced some of these same ideas, but here they need to be adapted slightly to be more explicitly Lovecraftian in tone.

There are then seven little mini-quests to travel to various locations in the Dreamlands and gather various McGuffins so Abdul Alhazred, "the Mad Poet" as he's been recast as in this adventure path, will talk to them. Again, these aren't really horrifying, and many of them are little more than pastiches of stories from the Dream Cycle. They do, however, manage to mostly be surreal at least, which I think was probably the "dream-like" goal.

PART III: RETURN TO THE YELLOW KING

Returning from all of these quests to the Yellow King, the advisor who sent them on the quests in the first place, and who is a fragment of Lowls from before he went crazy and/or evil, they find that he's been kidnapped and taken to the Dreamlands moon—so more pastiche, echoing an extended sequence of the DreamQuest itself. 

The PCs travel on shantak-back to the moon where they must storm a prison to rescue the Yellow King. Oh, and the prison is currently in a state of revolt; one of the junior wardens has rebelled against the warden and holds half of the prison. Not sure why that is such a cliche D&D trope, but it kinda is. Maybe because presumably the power-struggle implicitly gives the PCs an opportunity to turn one side to its advantage against the other, or something? In any case, when Randolph Carter was a prisoner of the moon-beasts in the DreamQuest, it was one of the creepier scenes; here, the moon-beasts are humanized completely in their behavior and psychology, which ruins the effect. Anyhoo, once the Yellow King is rescued, they can get directions to the Mad Poet, and complete the adventure. He gives them clues, tells them to wake up and go to Katheer in the Golarion Middle-east, which is as I mentioned above, hardly surprising, and then they fight dream images of themselves to get their memories back (whatever that means exactly, as there aren't really any memories to speak up that we haven't already pieced together.)

BONUS STUFF

There are three NPCs detailed; the Mad Poet, Abdul Alhazred himself—one of the most iconic NPCs from all of Lovecraftiana, the Yellow King, who is a profoundly important character to the narrative, and .... the strange halfling tough girl who plays a cameo role, but who gets all kinds of bizarre detail on her personality, her history, her heritage, and her sexuality. Lolwut indeed. Freakin' Paizo SJWs. Not only do we not care about this character at all, but giving her twice as much fluff as one of the most iconic pastiche characters you can, as well as one that plays a much more significant role in the development of the plot of this module is just bizarre. There's a discussion on the geography and encounters one may expect among the river traffic crowd, which is kind of interesting, especially considering that some of the countries here never got the regional treatment with a book of their own (although some of them got entire adventure paths dedicated to them.) Some of the random encounters are a little weird though; in the colder northern regions, for instance, the first one listed is a giant amoeba. Huh?

The story is, again, kind of charming in the sense that it feels like a Disneyland reenactment of a scene from the DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath. If you find that kind of thing charming, anyway. There's a bestiary, mostly of creatures that don't feature in the module. In fact, the first, a "formless spawn" derived from a Clark Ashton Smith tale are almost certainly just reinventing the shoggoth wheel. Tsothaggua itself is next. Then, we do get one that actually makes an appearance; an Ib shade. Again, if you know your mythos. then you know that this is the undead original inhabitants of Ib, the city mentioned in The Doom That Came to Sarnath. I always imagined them as little different than softer Deep Ones, though.

In general, the module uses a lot of esoteric mythos creatures, few of them detailed in the module itself (buy their various Bestiary books for full details!) Most of them start to feel a bit overkill at times; it's a little like the dozen or more variations on an incorporeal undead in D&D normally; ghosts, spectres, wraiths, and many more; when conceptually they kind of are all the same thing already. I didn't see anything that I'd have an interest in statting up in m20 yet; I already had a fairly Lovecraftian heavy monster list from the get-go, and adding really esoteric monsters like the wamp or the zoogs, or even a shantak for that matter, seems like more than I need. I'm a big fan of not proliferating rules anyway; if I really needed one in one of my games, I could repurpose a similar-enough creature and use those stats.

And while I'm a big fan of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle of stories in general, I'm a big fan of them as proto-Sword & Sorcery after a Dunsany-like tradition, not really a fan of using the Dreamlands to go into while the characters are dreaming to have a kind of plane-hopping vibe to it. I know that relative to my earlier go-through of this (the Serpent's Skull adventure path on my Isles of Terror tag) I'm mostly just summarizing these adventures and spending less time talking about what I'd specifically borrow out of them. The truth is, I've both gotten more picky about what I'd borrow and what I think m20 needs added to it, as well as found less that I'd be interested in borrowing anyway. I did that in the prior series, in part treating it as if I were to try and convert the module as is into my game as opposed to merely raid it for good ideas. Because my mindset has drifted more firmly into the latter camp, discussing the module the way I did then seems silly. To be honest with you, most of the discussion of how I'd take stuff from this AP has to be done at the end of the read-through anyway.

As an aside, since I did Isles of Terror, I did read the entire Rise of the Runelords collected edition in a single book. This was a while ago now, but I wonder why I didn't do a series out of that? Probably because I didn't want to take the time after reading each section to write one of these up, and I was feeling a little bit burned out on the project at the time. I am drawn back to it on reading this though; while Rise of the Runelords clearly isn't as thematically strong as Strange Aeons or Carrion Crown that I did first, it does, arguably, have better moments of horror than either. The second and third modules in particular had a horror basis (The Skinsaw Murders and The Hook Mountain Massacre) at their core, and while they weren't necessarily trying to be anything other than D&D, in many respects, they realized the horror angle better than the AP's that later were specifically thematically geared towards horror. 

Curiously, I did play Rise of the Runelords up through the third chapter. Or somewhere in the third chapter, at least. But it took me reading it to really get that. Probably because we weren't really focusing on trying to create the horror ambiance. Our haunted house excursion felt more like a dungeoncrawl than a haunted house. But I can see, after having played it and then much later having read it, that if you'd been inclined to do so, you could really have done this as a good horror module. Or at least some elements of it. As I'm reading Strange Aeons, I find myself more and more drawn to some of those effective Rise of the Runelords scenes and wondering if I'd rather work them in than the actual Strange Aeons content, sometimes.

Wagner Ohne Worte

I suspect that I'm not alone in loving the orchestral music of Wagner (and some other operas too, but especially Wagner) while having no interest at all in actual opera. It's been traditional for many decades to offer up selections, overtures, extracts, etc. of his greatest operas as orchestral only works with no vocals; the Tannhäuser "Festmarch" and Overture, the Ride of the Valkyries from the Ring, etc. Heck, I've had some of those since I was a teenager, and many of them were CD pressings of recordings that were done decades earlier. My first Ring selections was recorded by the conductor George Szell of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1968; near the end of his decades long stewardship of that particular group. Leopold Stokowski (the conductor you'll see if you watch Disney's Fantasia) did about a full album's worth of selections, although not aggregated in any way. Now, I always felt like I was missing something to have merely a selection of about five minutes or so of an operatic work that has a performance run time of something like fifteen hours. Granted, I doubted that I really needed to hear fifteen hours of the Ring, even without the vocals (which wouldn't have impressed me much, because I don't care for operatic singing), but certainly there was more than a few minutes, right? A typical Romantic era symphony by someone like Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, etc. would run 20-30 minutes or so on average if you played all four movements back to back. 

Luckily, in the late 80s, the first so-called "potted Ring" arrangements started popping up. These were attempts to rearrange selections from the full work in such a way that you felt like you were listening to a Cliff's Notes of the actual Ring, in correct order, and telling somewhat of the story of the full four opera cycle—but just orchestral. Der Ring Ohne Worte (The Ring Without Words) arranged by Maazel was the first, and by many still considered one of the best; the German label Telarc was state of the art sound, and Maazel himself conducted the Berlin Philharmoniker. But there are now four arrangements all offering something different, and they come in a variety of recordings by a variety of orchestras and composers. The most readily accessible and easy to get is the so-called The Ring—An Orchestral Adventure by Dutch composer Henk de Vlieger (performed with "his" orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, at least in it's first recording). It's about an hour long; about 10 minutes shorter than Maazel's arrangement (depending on the performance). Both can fit on a single CD. De Vlieger's has been recorded by many orchestras and composers, giving you somewhat of some choice.

The last two are a bit harder to acquire, although you can hear them on YouTube or Spotify, and you can get Amazon digital versions of most without too much trouble or expense. Dressler and Tarkmann are the two arrangers in question here. 

Anyway, although I rarely talk about, and in fact, I haven't listened to much of it over the last year or two, I'm a huge fan of Classical music (and by Classical, I really mean the Romantic era. Most people consider that music classical, but if you want to be nitpicky, the Romantic era was the ~100 years or so that followed the Classical era, starting with Beethoven and going into the early years of the 1900s. Most people consider early modern orchestral music to be classical too, so don't listen to most people, I guess.) Wagner's talent and influence in this arena is prodigious. If you haven't ever listened to any Wagner, you should. And if you don't like opera, I can sympathize, because I don't either, but the good news is that for quite some time now, you can get an awful lot of great Wagner without any opera in a format that more closely resembles a longer symphony of sorts; the format that I wish he'd put it in in the first place, if I could have my way. 

As an aside, I do sometimes regret that the German/Austrian school of Romance era music was only really challenged by the Russian school, and a some French and Italian composers, but there wasn't much going on in British or American music; my actual people. That said, the Germans are not really so different than us, having a common North Sea post-Roman origin, a common Hajnal Line crucible, etc. And for that matter, Wagner's topics (although not in the Ring itself) were quite often related to the Matter of Britain, including his Tristan und Isolde, his Parsifal, his Lohengrin, etc. I'm OK with patronizing their work, as although most of the composers were sponsored by patrons from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they often came from all over, and not all of them were Germans or Austrians themselves. And their works spread throughout the entirety of Western Civilization during this era, and were well-known across the entire civilizational horizon.

As an aside, Maazel also did an arrangement for a "potted Tannhäuser" and de Vlieger did arrangements for a "potted Parsifal" and a "potted Tristan und Isolde." I'm not aware of a "potted Lohengrin", so the only extract that remains overly familiar from that one is the bridal chorus.

Two quick socio-political observations

The Babylon Bee posted an interesting satire article the other day, suggesting that 15-year old boys soccer teams are demanding equal pay to women's soccer teams. They had another similar one where it suggested that Americans weren't outraged that women were being paid less than men to play soccer, but were actually outraged that anyone was being paid to play soccer and wondered exactly where the money was coming from in the first place.

If you're the kind of idiot who thinks that the women's pay gap is a meaningful thing in any sense, but especially with regards to women's sports, which I gather must be making the rounds of ClownWorld news again, I submit to you an interesting number.

https://www.outkick.com/ncaa-tournament-men-women/

A sample of what it says:

The NCAA Division I men’s basketball championship budget for the 2018-19 season was $28 million — almost twice as much as the women’s budget.

Information provided by the NCAA to ESPN on Friday shows the men’s tournament brought in a total net income of $864.6 million that season, while the women’s event lost $2.8 million — the largest loss of any NCAA championship.

With numbers like that, women's NCAA basketball players can't demand equal pay (and I know, jumping from soccer to basketball is a different sport. Not that the liberals who make these demands really know all that much about "sportsball" anyway.) But with numbers like that, they should be grateful to be paid anything at all. And with regards to soccer, I think the Babylon Bee's "satire" is closer to truth than to satire, as is often the case. Who's watching women's soccer games? How do they make any money? And if they don't make money, which I suspect that they don't really, then why does that weird lavender haired shrieking harpy from the team think that it's OK to demand more money? Where's it going to come from? Subsidized by the federal government?

This goes back to the Z-man's quote that I shared yesterday. You can make the case with data all that you want that there is no meaningful pay gap. You can make the case all that you want that there is no justificiation for women professional athletes to make what men professional athletes make, because they're only able to draw in a fraction of the money with which to get paid. But facts don't matter to cultists, do they?

Speaking of which, there's no such thing as "dual loyalty." That was a polite softening of what the people who say that really mean.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-blunt-interview-pollard-claims-jews-will-always-have-dual-loyalty/

What Jonathan Pollard is describing here isn't dual loyalty, although he uses that term too. It's single loyalty. To Israel. Thanks for the heads-up! So those with dual citizenship shouldn't be expected to have dual loyalty, they should be expected to have a singular loyalty that trumps their "other" loyalty, which is only a loyalty of convenience. This is actually what we call "normal behavior" but for some reason, pointing it out is "anti-semitic" which is more specific hoax than the broader hoax of "racist" but similar in its particulars. 

Asked how he felt about being accused by US Jews of having dual loyalties, Pollard did not take issue with the title. “If you don’t like the accusation of double loyalty, then go the F*** home,” he said bluntly.

“It’s as simple as that. If you live in a country where you are constantly under that charge, then you don’t belong there. You go home. You come home. If you[‘re] outside Israel, then you live in a society in which you are basically considered unreliable. The bottom line on this charge of dual loyalty is, I’m sorry, we’re Jews, and if we’re Jews, we will always have dual loyalty,” he added.

An he suggested that if asked for advice, he would counsel a young US Jew working in the American security apparatus to spy for Israel.

To be honest, he should be grateful to America, and like all Fake Americans, he isn't. The penalty for treason is death. And just because his treason was in behalf of Israel instead of the Soviet Union like fellow Jews Ethel and Julius Rosenberg doesn't mean that he shouldn't have recieved the same penalty that they did. Why did he get off with an effective slap on the wrist? Especially when he's so clearly unrepentant? Americans need to wake up and realize that Fake Americans working in our intelligence organizations, our legislature, our courts, or in any position of authority in America are not pursuing the interests of Americans. Why else do you think we've gone to all of these wars in the Middle East that no American can ever articulate a reasonable cause for that benefits America? Because America isn't intended to be the beneficiary, America is expected to pay the cost so Israel doesn't have to. Why else do you think our courts routinely mangle the Constitution to "mean" the exact opposite of what it actually says? How does that benefit America? It clearly doesn't. Etc. etc. and on and on. 

As an aside, and this data is a little old (2018) but I doubt it's significantly different today, 13 of 60 US Senators have dual citizenship with Israel. 27 representatives did. The list of names is a who's who of who were constant thorns in the side of the America First agenda: Diane Feinstein, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Chuck Schumer, etc. 

Why in the world are these people allowed to hold positions of authority in the US government? They may be slightly better agents than Jonathan Pollard in Israel's behalf, because they don't wear their true loyalty quite so loudly on their sleeves as he did, but is there really any difference between them? Not that I can see. 

But again, "anti-semitism!" and with that one magical word, the cultist Pavlovian response kicks in. Which, honestly, is a more insidious bit of treason against American ideals then telling Israel some details of our war plans in the Middle East. It directly undermines one of the key elements of the Bill of Rights and criminalizes free speech that the Jews don't want Americans to say. And where they can't overtly criminalize it, which they've had less success in America than in the rest of the Western world, they can at least make it have a similar social cost.

As Vox Day said about the situation, you can hardly blame a guy for being loyal to his people. That's not just normal, but actually an admirable trait. What you can blame him for, however, is lying to you and telling you that he's just as loyal to your people as he is to his people, so go ahead and feel safe giving him the keys to your kingdom, so to speak. Then again, is that really the fault of the Jews in America that that ridiculous story is believed because they said it? Or at some point do we have to admit the fault that we have in believing something so absurd in the first place, especially when it's been literally demonstrated to us over and over again that it's not true? I sometimes wonder if the lack of pattern recognition to identify threats and danger to our prosperity and security doesn't mean that we don't deserve what we're just barely starting to get, and what is coming in a much, much uglier stage in the near future. If a wild animal had such poor pattern recognition skills, it'd be extinct in short order because it would never be able to avoid getting killed by predators or competitors.

And it's not like we weren't warned. "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other." —Jesus Christ

Eberron Remixed and Paizo Deconstructed... why not Golarion Remixed?

Y'know, it occurs to me that I've had two projects that I've kind of enjoyed over time that I've done just more as an intellectual exercise than as an attempt to actually use this. But the end result is certainly something that's useable just because I have no immediate plans to do so. I'm talking specifically about the Paizo Deconstructed projects I've done, where I've gone through a Paizo Adventure Path and looted it for anything useable in a gaming environment that's much more my style than anything Paizo provided. I've mostly only done this for the adventure path adventures, though—with just a bit of a look at some other adventures; a handful of stand-alones, and the not yet finished big project of reviewing all of the Pathfinder Society Scenarios for useableness in my own milieu (I'd have to get a hold of all those e-booklets again, though, in order to review them. They weren't mine and I was reading someone else's copies on their device when I was doing that earlier.) This has been kind of fun, and I just kicked off another Adventure Path deconstruction earlier this week.

I also just recently finished my Eberron Remixed review, though, where I talked about how I'd convert that setting into my own system, complete with remixing not just the setting to be a little more how I'd like it, but also how I'd shoehorn it into a system with a pretty dramatically different demihuman line-up, different magic, and a somewhat darker tone. Why, then, have I not thought about doing that with other settings that I like, but which I think failed to completely live up to their potential? Like... Golarion? I'm remixing Golarion through adventure paths, but it hadn't occurred to me to think about remixing the setting like I've done with Eberron.

Now, at least in one sense, it doesn't make quite as much sense. While Eberron was designed specifically for D&D, and as the saying goes, "if it's in D&D, there's a place it can fit in Eberron." But Eberron was also looking to do something unique with tone and feel and mood. In this sense, it made obvious sense to remix it, because being tied to D&D held it back, according to my conceit anyway, from adequately doing what it was trying to do with said tone and feel and mood. Golarion, on the other hand, is also designed for D&D (it was a 3.5 edition setting book before the Pathfinder system debuted. And the Pathfinder system was specifically launched with the premise of keeping "3.5-like" D&D current in an era when loads of people were shearing off from D&D because 4e was too different.) And not only that, it's designed specifically to feel like D&D. The whole point of Golarion (and later the Pathfinder system) was to maintain what the designers and many customers thought was greater fidelity to the D&D tone and feel and mood than the current edition of D&D itself was doing. 

Makes me wonder; is it worth doing? I tend not to like "vanilla" D&D settings all that much. Forgotten Realms has gotten a decided "meh" from me; I like it well enough, but I don't love anything about it, nor care what it does for the most part. Greyhawk has never excited me much at all. Settings like Kingdoms of Kalamar, etc. never got much oomph with my interest. But for some reason, Golarion, which is a quintessentially D&D-like setting, regardless of the name of the actual game that most people played it in, is one that I've always liked. If I convert that to my Dark Heritage rules, it'll obligatorily lose some of its quintessential D&D-ness. Wouldn't something like Iron Kingdoms or Freeport be more your speed? Well.. honestly, yeah, on paper that would seem to be true. That said, Golarion is the one that's singing to me right now, given that Eberron Remixed is finished. 

I'm going to finish the DUNGEON YOG-SOTHOTHERY before I really get going, and I'm going to use the original 3.5 version of the campaign setting; although I may refer a little bit to the Lost Omens 2e version, and cherry pick stuff that I like better from whichever of the versions offers what I like better. I kind of like the idea that the Worldwound is closed, for instance, although demons still linger. I didn't think Lastwall was a very compelling nation, so having it turned into the Graveyard, or whatever exactly they call it now, is fine by me. On the other hand, the overthrow of Sargava is just a deliberate albeit oblique slight at white people. Paizo are hardly strangers to wokeness and political correctness, and they are not in the least reading the market that has had enough of that BS and revolting against it in nerd franchise after nerd franchise over the last couple of years or so. Rather, they're obviously doubling down, as SJWs do. Of course, that's part of the reason the setting needs remixing, to get back to a more "Gygaxian" style setting, maybe. Or better yet, the original source material that Gygax himself referenced, but then failed to really emulate very well in many cases. Maybe that's why I like Golarion so much; the love that the original development team had for the source material, including the OG source material that even Gygax was referencing (as opposed to going through the filter of too much Gygax) really shows through.

New banners

I figured I needed to spend just a bit more time to get my updated banners "right." My old banner had a bit of its bottom cut-off, for instance, and the "Baphomet" pentagram wasn't really the vibe I wanted to project, when I could get a Lovecraftian alternative instead.

I needed to make the inverted dark versions, because you never know when you need an inverted dark version of the same banner, but I can't decide which of the two alternates I like better. I might switch back and forth on the blog trying them both on for size until I settle on one.

Asian-"Americans" the victims of violence?

I don't watch the news anymore, so I often don't really know what trends are getting all of the hysterical attention of ClownWorld like I used to. But I do have just enough of a connection to a few places that I've seen vague references to violence against Asian-"Americans" (as if an Asian could ever be an American. Can you imagine a white guy claiming to be "Americo-Chinese" or "Americo-African"? As far as I'm concerned, the only people who qualify as Asian American are those who have one Asian parent and one white, American parent.) I still can't find any actual details through a few half-hearted Bing searches on what this is all about, but apparently—of course—white supremacy is to blame. And obviously, as is always the case, this is nothing more than a hoax and a lie spread by white-hating bigots.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/who-really-blame-rise-asian-hate-crimes-spoiler-alert-its-not-white-supremacy

Well, isn't that shocking. Mahometan violence, and the biggest culprit when it comes to violent crime against Asians (or anyone else) in America are blacks. Who in the world could possibly have ever seen that coming?

Do facts matter at all? Of course not. Quoting the Z-man:

The Left wins when they can claim the moral high ground, because that means Conservative Inc. will fold up like a cheap tent and beg for forgiveness. Part of seizing the moral high ground though is claiming a thoroughgoing knowledge of the issue. The reason the Left is festooned with barnacles claiming to be policy experts is so they can claim a mastery of the topic. This lets them say “we know best” and push through their policies.

With guns, this is not possible. All of the facts work against gun grabbing. Whether it is the mythological gun show loophole or the assault weapon ban, any discussion of the issue quickly reveals the Left knows nothing about guns. In fact, it is like they make a point of not knowing anything about guns or gun laws. They say insane things that even the sympathetic find cringe inducing. One result is the people in favor of gun grabbing tend to come off as ignorant fanatics.

The gun issue is useful in another way. All of those normies on the other side of the divide think that facts matter when dealing with the Left. Gun grabbing is a great issue to show them that facts really do not matter much at all. No matter how many times they explain the facts of firearms to these people, they will keep chanting the slogans from their cult about guns. The reason for that is the Left is about morality, their morality, not facts or reason. They are the anointed, so facts do not matter.

Gun-grabbing cultists are related to (and in fact, often the literal same people) as racism cultists, sexism cultists, white supremacy cultists, climate hysterics cultists, there is no election fraud when Democrats win cultists, and all kinds of other strange and insane cultists who's fanatical and delusional beliefs are completely impervious to facts. It's generally not only useless, but actually harmful to attempt honest, good-faith discussion with these people about these issues. If they can't be shunned and avoided altogether, any political, social or serious discussion of any kind should be. 

Of course, there's a difference between people who don't know the facts about any of those issues and people who refuse to know any facts about those issues, and it's important to be able to tell the difference. 

Anyway, there's been one curious development in my Dark•Heritage settings over the years, as a bit of a reaction against the ubiquitous anti-white racism present in America and the world overall. When I was younger, I was really into the folklore, history and mythology of my forebears in Western civilization; I like a western European (British and Scandinavian specifically) Medieval background, with a bit of the American Old West flavored in to give it a kind of "Medieval frontier" vibe. Because I had done this and seen this so much, I actually kind of migrated away from it for quite a while. Not because I didn't like it, but because I wanted to do something a bit different. Earlier Dark•Heritage iterations had a kind of Medieval Mediterranean/Iberian vibe to them with the cultures that humanity represented. I've decided to go back to Celtic/Germanic, and British and Scandinavian specifically because they need the representation. Even "European" Medieval fantasy these days is skewered with nonsensical Diversity Inc. crap. It gives the dark in Dark•Heritage a kind of ironic in-joke vibe; in reality, the human races (as opposed to demihuman races) are going to be the whitest, malest setting I can make it. Of course, white is dark in Clown World, because everybody hates whiteness and whispers darkly their slander about our ancestors. I'm taking a little bit of a stand in a small way against the rampant, overt racism against my people, the slander and hoax that my own people are racist, and the attempts to blackwash, brownwash and pinkwash everything that white men represent.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over

My renewed interest in the Pathfinder adventure paths and how I might convert them has had me wandering over to ENWorld a bit again this last 24 hours or so. And what happened? Umbran happened. Again. And on an alignment thread again, too.

Why do I think that there's decent discussion to be had there? Well, there is—occasionally. In fact, I had some decent discussion with some guys about Pathfinder, their business model, the launch of 2e, etc. I might even synthesize my thoughts, updated after that discussion on it. Oh, sure. We're all just a bunch of armchair little CEOs, talking about stuff without access to much of the data, but still. 

Anyway, you know the apocryphal story. Apparently Einstein said that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity. I doubt that he actually said that, although of course it's not impossible. Of course, falsely attributing to him something that he probably didn't say is hardly the most egregious hoax related to Einstein. 

In any case, my experience at ENWorld, after even only a few short hours, was predictably ridiculous. The only sad thing was, I didn't predict it. Anyway, here's a visualization of your typical ENWorld conversation.

Deconstruction: Paizo Adventure Path 120: Strange Aeons #2: The Thrushmoor Terror

Adventure Summary: 

After escaping from the waking nightmare of Briarstone Asylum, the former captives venture to the dismal town of Thrushmoor to unravel the enigma of their lost memories. Upon arrival, the adventurers find that the town’s leadership has either fled town or gone missing, and a rash of kidnappings and rumors of the Briarstone Witch spread terror among the townsfolk. As the adventurers investigate the unsettling mysteries, they uncover a secretive cult that plans to use Thrushmoor’s ancient monuments to grow its power. Will the heroes discover the secret behind their affliction and find answers in an uninviting town, or will they fall victim to the ruthless villains who want to sacrifice the people of Thrushmoor for some terrible purpose?

PART I: RETURN TO THRUSHMOOR

The adventure summary says that the PCs are going to Thrushmoor to find clues to uncover their missing past, but in reality, they have little reason at this point to suspect that there are any clues there. They're mostly going to Thrushmoor because it's the only place to go, presuming that they don't want to remain on the island with the ruined asylum and all of the dead and injured and stuff. At this point, all that they know is that Count Lowls dropped them off at the asylum, they used to work for him in some capacity, and that his behavior has been cagey enough that it's attracted the unwanted attention of the king's inspectors. Although they don't have any reason to know this, Lowls manor house is in Thrushmoor. Although he hasn't been there in some time, either.

This section starts off with a long monolog of what's going on behind the scenes, but then gives event-based encounters, which are supremely useful things in general, as well as some location based encounters, which of course can be adapted to another location or to an event-based encounter type as needed. Some of this stuff is trying to anticipate what the PCs are likely to do, or even prod DMs to prod the PCs so that they do do those things. Some of this gets into the Hangover type scenario, described in the last post, where NPCs will have knowledge of the PCs that the PCs themselves don't have because of their amnesia. 

Nicely, there is little if anything in this section that is new mechanically. It's a hallmark of clever scenario design that you can design it without the crutch of a mechanical novelty. For a mechanics-lite system like what I use, it's essential. In general, my impression of this section is that it has a lot of really cool stuff worth incorporating, but that the scenario that hangs it all together is rather weak. This isn't really the fault of the module itself, but of the carryover sitch from the last module, and the structure of the meta-plot of the adventure path overall. 

PART II: MISSING MAGISTRATE

There are two places other than the general town itself that PCs will no doubt be drawn to after wandering about town, talking to NPCs, etc. The method by which the PCs are supposed to be diverted into doing them in the "proper" order is some shady railroading, but again, I don't need to complain about the structure of the adventure non-stop since I don't intend to use it as written anyway. There's actually little to no progression of the "story" of the module in this part other than the fact that the Fort and the local government in general has been murdered and taken over by monsters. Here you'll face a doppelganger that can ambush out of mirrors, juju zombies and skum (fake deep ones, as reported in my Cult of Undeath review). The PCs will likely not find anything that links these monsters to the strange goings on in town other than that the bodies and occasional still living disappeared townspeople (some of them anyway) were obviously brought here; many of them killed and eaten by the deep ones. The whole affair feels a bit like spinning your wheels and getting enough XP to challenge the last phase of the module, which is Lowls' manor house (although there should be no expectation by anyone that Lowls is actually there, or even has been in a long time.)

PART III: AGAINST THE CULT OF HASTUR

The final part of the module is the storming of the boss's headquarters (surely a timeless horror story trope, right?) There's even an interesting note in the very beginning of this section; it claims that if the PCs want to stop the boss from aligning Thrushmoor and Carcosa and taking the town to that blighted dimension, they'll need to storm it. Of course... nothing whatsoever that's occurred in the module to this point would clue in the PCs in to that possibility; all that they know is that the people up in the manor are suspicious, people have been disappearing, other people in town are afraid, and that monsters have taken over the government buildings in town. If the PCs were supposed to have heard from the Deep Ones what was up, I didn't see it. I didn't even see that the Deep Ones knew anything about the boss's plans other than that they were promised that they'd be able to run through town eating all of the people that they wanted when she got whatever it is that she wanted. Granted; this might have been me. I was reading a bit distractedly, and maybe I missed something. But it feels much more like a flaw in the adventure design to me; you're supposed to go do this, because otherwise you have nothing else to do, by design, not because there are actually clues that point you there.

This section of the module is a fairly typical dungeon-crawl, to be honest. The main monsters on the above ground floors are kuru thugs (represented here as if they were a different race, but really all that they are is the stereotypical East Indies cannibal savage. This is especially appropriate, given Lovecraft's own use of "half-castes" and whatnot from the islands in "Call of Cthulhu" but somewhat surprising given Paizo's own political correctness. They tried to cover it up by making it a non-human (but barely) race, but c'mon. Kuru is even the native word for the laughing sickness, a neurological disorder caused by cannibalism of the brain. There are also cultists, and a handful of monsters, mostly just sitting in their rooms waiting for the PCs to find them kind of thing.

Below ground, the dungeon turns into an amusement park, where name-dropping Mythos creatures is the attraction for the players. Come! Fight the Hound of Tindalos! See freaky Elder Things and maybe try to talk to them before they fight you! The monstrous Men from Leng are represented! A star vampire! Rats in the Walls! Etc. I'm sure I'm not the first person to note this, although it's been a recurring theme on my blog for many years, but this is exactly the wrong way to do horror elements in your fantasy. Even something as iconically high fantasy as The Lord of the Rings did a much better job of emulating horror during the first half of the Fellowship of the Rings when the pursuit by the Ringwraiths was the main plot point to resolve. If that work can do it better, then something that's deliberately trying (allegedly) to emulate horror should do it even better. With a lot of work, this could be salvaged by a good GM, but why should the GMs have to wrench a module into actually doing what its stated purpose is?

The boss is a forgetable cultist figure, who sadly you will have heard very little about before you fight her, so there's another drastically wasted opportunity. But my biggest complaint about this module, you can probably tell (and the AP overall, although granted, it may improve) is that it isn't really what it purports to be. It isn't really a Lovecraftian horror adventure. It's a very typical, standard D&D adventure with a dash of Lovecraftian name-dropping. And even that almost comes across as more kitschy rather than in the true spirit of Yog-Sothothery.

But the module does provide what the last one didn't—clear pointers on what to do next. The PCs will have discovered that Lowls is traveling to the Pathfinder Middle East to find a copy of the Necronomicon, that he's a nasty cultist of some sort or another himself, that he's dabbled in the DreamWorld, and even that he sacrificed the PCs own memories somehow in the DreamWorld to a figure called the Mad Poet for more information, and then turned them over to the asylum as part of a pre-existing agreement. 

BONUS STUFF

There's a discussion and description of the town of Thrushmoor, which is a nice addition (I always like a good town description) included here. The historic Thrushmoor Vanishing is an interesting addition, but the module itself makes little use of it, and it actually seems likely that the players would never discover that it even happened. There's a discussion on the cult of Hastur, a decent little micro-story, and the bestiary. Let's review that, as normal:

• Byakhee - one of the most iconic Lovecraftian "low level" monsters, the Dark•Heritage ruleset has included them from the very beginning. There's some new development on their society, and an interesting etymological discussion, if you will, of the byakhee and its appearances in the literature.
• Faceless Hulks - kind of like giant-sized doppelgangers, sorta, with an aboleth related history.
• Mordiggian - Paizo clearly wanted to take advantage of this adventure path to stat out additional Great Old Ones that were unlikely to be added in subsequent bestiaries. This has no relation to the module, but it's a fun addition, I suppose. Throwing in some of somewhat lesser known Clark Ashton Smith deities is always a fun idea too.
• Keeper of the Yellow Sign - an undead kind of herald of Hastur, based on handwavy interpretations of some of the characters appearances in the stories.
• Star Vampire - another "classic" of the Mythos ouevre. One does actually appear in the module, although it's just a cameo.

Advertising agencies are Fake American

For the last... oh, probably two weeks or so, everytime one of my phone apps plays an ad, it seems 95% likely to be a shortened cut of this long-form ad for Apple AirPods Pro.

Is there seriously anyone at all who thinks that this portrayal of the "vibrant" life in a Third World shithole is attractive, and that watching someone navigate it is going to pique their interest in your product? What is especially galling is that this almost certainly was filmed in America, but not a single American is shown. The main "star" is an Asian, the place is crawling with Hispanics and blacks—the group that is the single most likely to resist integrating into American life and adopting an American identity. Even Jews are more likely to intermarry and very slowly become Americanized. (Although they are the second most likely to resist integration.) This is the narrative of conquerors, flaunting in the face of the conquered that their time has passed, their country is no longer their own, their culture is no longer their own, and their streets are filled with ungrateful foreigners playing their uncouth foreign music.

Now, granted, Apple probably doesn't really need to advertise anything; they're Apple and the stupid Apple drones will likely pick this crap up just because it exists, regardless of what any advertising does or doesn't do. But I just have to scratch my head and ask myself who this is supposed to be appealing to. Other Fake American advertising people, most likely, and the hostile, Fake American corporate elite that's buying the ads. But it certainly isn't going to enthuse customers. It should be telling; people assume that ads are to enthuse customers, but that clearly is no longer their purpose, and those who think it is are often conned into wasting their money. 

Deconstruction: Paizo Adventure Path 119: Strange Aeons #1: In Search of Sanity

Well, I announced that I wanted to do more Paizo Deconstructed again, going back to the Adventure Paths where that whole thing started for me. Sadly, few of the adventure paths look all that appealing to me; even if they touch on themes that I like in gaming, a quick perusal of even the summaries show me that I'm unlikely to find what I want in them. But... the show must go on, and I'm going to make an effort to see what I can discover in some of these after all. I've done now two full adventure paths deconstructed, and while the first one ended up being kind of rough as I struggled to figure out how I could take a structure that is so antithetical to how I run games and adapt it to something useful. However, by the time I was over, I had something workable, and I was happier in many respects with what I ended up doing with the second project. When I did those two, the Cthulhu-horror themed adventure path either wasn't even out yet or was still in the process of coming out, I believe. I now have that adventure path in hand, borrowed from a friend (I don't really want to buy it, given that I certainly won't use it much) and I'm going to read it through, summarizing each adventure, and figuring out what I can strip mine out of it, either as setting/rules elements, or as potential adventure/module elements. I should probably summarize again what I don't like about Paizo adventure path type modules, since its been so long since I did so, to make sure everyone who stumbles across this has the context to actually understand what I'm doing. And then, let's jump into the first module!

First; I don't run modules, especially story-heavy modules, because there's no way to write them in such a way that they're useful to customers without making them very railroady. I don't run games that way; I have a single side of one sheet as a vague outline, and that's usually enough material to get me through several sessions worth of gaming. My narrow-wide-narrow model for running games may not be an actual sandbox, but it certainly isn't a railroad either, which I find to be complete anathema. Railroads are contemptible; sandboxes are an interesting utopian delusion, but at least it's an attractive one, like libertarianism or something. A well-run game isn't going to be on either end of that spectrum though.

Second, the Paizo modules used to be politico-socially more neutral than they are now, but have quickly adapted to being crazy, emotionally and psychologically broken virtue-signaling wankfests of cringey pandering to the worst people in the world, with snide, passive-aggressive digs at anyone who has the temerity to just be normal, healthy and psychologically whole. It's become run by professional SJWs, and Paizo as a company is showing fairly a advanced state of corporate cancer. To be perfectly honest, much of this is easy to ignore in terms of running the game, but it's tedious and frustrating to have to endure it in the first place while reading the modules and figuring out how to get rid of that nonsense so that you can run a game that isn't going to chase off every player that you'd actually want to be in your game with your perverse, smug, self-righteous tortuous embrace of debauchery and filth as if it were normal and attractive.

Third, and this may sound odd, but I don't really like D&D. By this I mean that I love the concept of fantasy RPGs, and have ever since I first really discovered them, but the notion of doing dungeons and all of the rest of the attendant D&Diana that infuses the Paizo adventures is a major turnoff to me. They always fail to meet the potential of the premise that they offer. In this case, the entire adventure path is based on the premise of being a Lovecraftian horror story set in a fantasy milieu. The reality, of course, is that it's almost certainly going to turn out to be a very caricaturishly stereotypical set of dungeoncrawls and railroads with a few Lovecraftian elements essentially making cameos like a cheap character appearance at Disneyland to wave at the players and make them feel like they got a Lovecraftian experience... without actually offering anything of the kind. That's OK, though—I already know this going in, which is why I'm no longer trying to adapt the modules into something that I can actually play, like I started trying to do when I first started deconstructing Paizo stuff. Instead, I'm just reading, summarizing, and seeing what elements I can use. Kind of turning the adventure paths into a buffet, and seeing what is usable and ignoring the rest.

Anyway, without further ado, let's start summarizing In Search of Sanity. 

The Strange Aeons Adventure Path begins with "In Search of Sanity," a mind-shattering foray into horror where the heroes awaken within the walls of the eerie Briarstone Asylum, their minds wracked and memories missing. Working together to recover their missing time, they soon learn that their amnesia is but a symptom of a much greater cosmic menace. As they struggle to retain their sanity, the heroes must ally with other asylum residents and fight against the monstrosities that have taken over the building and plunged it into nightmare. Can the adventurers defeat the terror that stalks the halls and free themselves from their prison of madness?

Nice touch! I've started actually a couple of games with what I call "The Hangover" model before. Granted, referring to that movie implies a gonzo comedy tone, but it's terrifing to wake up and not remember how you got where you are or what happened to you in the recent past.

PART I: PRISON OF THE MIND

The module actually starts off with a manufactured TPK, only to have the PCs wake up and realize that it was only a dream. I've actually done a manufactured TPK once before, with disposible temporary characters, to foreshadow a villain. I feel ...mixed on how well it turned out, I suppose you could say. Anyway, they wake up, they're locked up in an asylum, and it's all gone crazy. Part of it has collapsed, many of the staff (and patients) have been turned into either doppelgangers or ghouls, and they stalk through the halls looking for people to murder. As the PCs explore, looking presumably for an escape, they come across the remnants of a small chapel, who's hallowed walls offer some protection from the nightmares; both physical and in dream, that stalk the asylum. A number of refugees are here, led by what appears in the illustration to be a 16-year old girl. (!?) There's a gigantic fungus eye on the wall here, though, that's spying on the survivors, and which is needless to say, pretty disturbing (mechanically it's a haunt; which I actually imported in similar fashion to Microlite.)

A few other Dreamlands animals, as described by Lovecraft, make appearances. There's zoogs, for instance. Giant centipedes are sitting around for no reason known to mankind (how typical of a D&D dungeon environment, though) and weird, (psuedo)-naturally occurring partially reanimated undead. The trope of asylum patients being the victims of bizarre experiments, tortures and abuses is leaned into pretty heavily, given that the experimenters, torturers and abusers are also insane and most of them have been turned into monsters to boot. Most of them are dead, and those that aren't are almost as dangerous as the monsters. 

Teenaged cleric girl will eventually tell the PCs that they're trapped on this river island asylum by a strange yellow fog with horrible monsters in it and strange, otherworldly weather, but can say little else other than that she was stopping by to investigate an AWOL local lord named Lowls, and this Ulver Zandalus fellow was a quiet patient for many years, but is now some kind of insane cult leader of other insane people wandering the asylum. She also tells them that the weird eye haunt is obscuring a door that leads to new parts of the asylum that they haven't explored yet. There's a few other folks huddling here who have some minor useful information, giving the players the chance to engage in some roleplaying dialogue. 

All in all, this section proves the point that it's difficult to do horror in D&D. They try really hard with a lot of creepy imagery and weird scenarios, but ultimately, it's a small part of a dungeon where they just throw monsters at you without any context, much in the way of build-up, or anything else that would actually make them scary. And, to date, they haven't really used anything that's unique or unusual. Which is actually a good thing; I think sometimes D&D relies too hard on trying to create a new monster when we've already got... what, hundreds? thousands? of perfectly serviceable ones that could be scary if used properly. Not they necessarily are here, but ghouls can be perfectly scary, as the very first adventure path Paizo did (not counting the three Dungeon Magazine ones) amply showed.

PART II: THE DEAD DON'T DREAM

In this part, as the PCs start to explore the more "wild" parts of the asylum, we start seeing slightly more esoteric monsters; low-CR "shoggoths", another haunt (I do like those, and I appreciate more examples of them), and stuff that is occasionally even more overtly Lovecraftian. (I know, shoggoth-like creatures are certainly Lovecraftian, but Gygax used too many oozes and similar things to make them seem as Lovecraftian as they could; they now feel like a D&Disms.) We even get our first glimpses of "Brown Jenkinses" and nightgaunts at this point. One oddly "unfriendly" move that Paizo has made, which has shown its head multiple times by now, is that they don't include stats for monsters that are in their various bestiary books. You literally have to own all of their bestiaries that were in print at this point (at least four) to actually run this module without substitutions. Maybe that's neither here nor there to most people who might read this, but it is odd, given that Paizo built their reputation early on as being the more customer friendly company who paid attention to what their customers wanted when much of the D&D customer base was finding itself being driven away by what they considered tone-deaf moves by Wizards of the Coast with the launch of 4e.

Again; this is meant to be a kind of haunted house type adventure in this part, but it mostly feels like just a dungeon-crawl, with monsters (or cultists or ghosts or whatever) just kind of randomly sitting in various rooms. There's a peculiar trait that a lot of Paizo adventures do (although they're hardly alone) where there is a bunch of context and background information given that it seems exremely unlikely that the PCs would ever actually find out unless the GM just tells them. Oh, and there's a library where the PCs are literally, I suppose, expected to spend a day or two of game time doing research to get historical backstory on Briarstone Manor. Lolwut? It's clear that the Paizo guys don't know jack squat about haunted houses, and in trying to reskin a dungeoncrawl as a haunted house, they simply made a number of fairly clumsy missteps. This section isn't lacking in good ideas, but the execution is really nothing at all like a classic haunted house story. I know, I know; RPGs aren't stories, but the end product of one should resemble a story for the most part. 

PART III: NEVER-ENDING NIGHTMARE

This is more of the same as part II, really. There's a few NPCs to talk to, and if your PCs are much nosier and insistent than most, will discover that a doctor was actually a bit of a foppish weirdo who's family sent him into seclution here for "self abuse and refusal to marry." What?! The module actually has as one guy's secret that his family put him in a sanitarium because he'd rather beat off than get married?! While by the numbers, the "boss" and "sub-boss" fights should be appropriate difficult in a routine kind of appropriate difficulty, this entire conclusion to the adventure feels very much like going through the motions. Even the haunts that it has seem more like just busy-work; the kitchen is haunted by the cook, who's mad that the patients killed him after he fed them every day? Again, lolwut?! They do make pretty good use of the meme Lovecraft himself invented in none other than "The Call of Cthulhu" itself about "sensitive" artistic types dreaming and painting or sculpting or whatever the terrible and fascinating subjects of their dreams. But even here, it feels more like a wink-wink nudge-nudge in-joke of a reference than an actual plot point in the scenario.

Part III is mostly about NPCs, though. Few new monsters, and the ones that we do have are strange "people turned into kinda sorta portals to Dreamland and the yellow mist" as a monster, which seems too esoteric and specific to the scenario that they're trying to create here to be usable anywhere else.

There's also very little in this module that would naturally draw the PCs into the next module. It doesn't end so much as just kind of stop, and presumably the players have figured out (and if they haven't little miss 16-year old cleric prodigy is supposed to tell them in the epilogue) that they are clearly a group of patients admitted some time ago with amnesia, brought by Count Lowls himself, and who worked for him. I suppose that they have to take the ferry off of the island, and maybe the next adventure starts with a hook sufficient to drag them along the railroad tracks, because otherwise there's very little to suggest what they should do to engage in what comes next. Which, no doubt, sandboxy guys will applaud, but it's not the purpose of a published adventure path to have the players ignore the next adventure and just go exploringthe countryside of HorrorLand (one of the subdivisions of DisneyLand, no doubt, and the place where the earlier deconstructed Carrion Crown adventure path took place.)

BONUS STUFF

The Tatterman, a kind of mummy-looking (sorta) Freddie Krueger concept, is treated as an NPC rather than a monster, curiously. It's a real shame; the tatterman could have had the same kind of extremely creepy ambiance as the best of the Slenderman offerings, but it utterly fails to live up to that promise. Reading this entry here, though, he's got a sufficiently strong backstory that the tragedy of this failure is even more acute. The other NPCs also reveal a backstory that could have made a great novella, if it had been written as one instead of as a dungeoncrawl D&D adventure. Sigh. There are some good ideas in here, but again, the execution is severely wanting. One of the NPCs is specifically written in such a way that she could replace a fallen PC, or perhaps become a "cohort" of the party, both of which are actually decent ideas.

The next section allows for players to use the Great Old Ones as a particularly disgusting pantheon, and provide rules for clerics of Cthulhu, Shub-Nigguruth, etc. I don't have much use for this other than I find it curious and interesting side-reading. If I were to ever actually play D&D again, and I somehow drew the short-straw and had to play a cleric, I'd find a way to use this stuff, and become a worshipper of Bokrug to the water-lizard, or Tsathoggua or something.

There's a short story, worth reading—in part because it's quite short—and we get to the module bestiary:

• Curiously, the first entry isn't a beast at all, but rather a "strange weather" table of freaky, supernatural meteorological phenomena.
• Stats for Ithaqua himself (itself?). As appropriate for a Great Old One or Demon Lord, it's CR 28. What it's doing in a low level module is unclear, other than that they obviously wanted to include it, so they did.
• Drexins, a kind of psychic gremlin creature. No connection to the action in the module at all, but at least they're thematically kind of creepy. They come across as more a dark type of fairytale creature than Lovecraftian otherworldly horror, though. They'd make a killer improved familiar, maybe.
• Three disturbing horror-themed swarms. Kind of cool stuff, although I prefer to just use the visual with existing, simpler rules. Do we really need dozens of different types of swarms with slightly different mechanical effects?
• Oneirogon—the aforementioned living portals between the Dreamworld and the normal one.

Then we get an outline for the remainder of the adventure path. It looks like a pretty typical adventure path, some good ideas here and there strewn together in an extremely railroady format, littered with mediocre or worse ideas interspersing the good ones, and a rather hoaky contrived plot that the PCs will hopefully not ask too many question about, and if they do, just throw some more monsters at them to distract them, or something.

Most of the better ideas in this module were stolen directly from a Lovecraft (or at least Lovecraftian) story published in the pulps decades ago, but there's a few new good ideas too. Honestly, I found a lot of stuff that it did was a retread, quite curiously, of concepts that had been better done earlier in the AP history. The ghouls of the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, for instance, are considerably better than they are here, and it wouldn't be too difficult to adapt that usage to this module, if you were so inclined.

Eberron Remixed is DONE

Just an announcement; my Eberron Remixed project is DONE! I've done everything that I hoped to do with the project. Well, with one exception; come up with specific adventures in the Remixed version of the setting and run them. But otherwise, the thing is finished, and I don't anticipate making any additional updates to the Eberron Remixed tag. Unless I do run a game there. Honestly, a lot would have to change to get me to that point; I've got my own settings to run first, and that'll keep me going indefinitely. I think I'll officially stick a fork in this project.

I also actually recently re-read my Isles of Terror tag, where I went through the Serpent's Skull adventure path, and discussed how I would adapt it, or more accurately, borrow elements from it. I'm considering picking another adventure path and doing that again.I've done two now; ISLES OF TERROR adapts the Serpent's Skull and CULT OF UNDEATH adapts The Carrion Crown. The obvious choice here for me to do next is Strange Aeons, but I might go on and do even more. Probably the one that I'd be most likely to want to adapt after that are Age of Ashes, War for the Crown, Council of Thieves, Tyrant's Grasp, and maybe The Crimson Throne. That's plenty to keep me busy, but assuming I do all six of those, I'll look and see if I care to do any more. Because I suspect, although I haven't actually read it yet, that Strange Aeons has way too many dungeoncrawls imbedded in it, I'll give that one the tag DUNGEON YOG-SOTHOTHERY and proceed with that one first. 

DH5 hand drawn map options

My first (possibly my last; we'll see) hand drawn map for DH5 has now been scanned. I also spent some time creating a digitally aged version, and one that has just a little bit of coloration to make it easier to read some features at a glance. Enjoy! Or don't, if you don't like this kind of thing.

You'll see, of course, that it's not exactly the same as the Inkarnate version of the map, but close enough. I tend to see that as typical for "Medieval" style maps; they simply aren't exact enough to look the same. That's OK. It's actually a feature not a bug.

Some people like to put things like scale, compass rose, borders and name of the "world" on the map. I elected not to do any of those things, for various reasons. The compass rose and borders were just for issues of space. It's kind of a busy map, with a lot going on, and I just didn't really have space to put either of those features without making it look even more crowded than it already did.

I left the scale off, because I want the scale to be somewhat elastic, and expand or contract as needed, on occasion. And I didn't put a world name, because I don't believe in world names. What do we call our world? We call it "the world." The setting is Dark•Heritage. Specifically, Dark•Heritage Mk. V, or DH5 for short, but that's just a label for my own convenience. Nobody else would call the world that, especially not anyone living in it. Any campaigns run in this setting would have their own names. If I called a campaign "Dunsbury Vice" or "Waychester 5-O", the setting would be referred to outside of the game as "the setting of Dunsbury Vice" or whatever. 

Or I'd just continue to call it DH5, more likely. But I certainly wouldn't label the map with that nickname.

Jesselyn

Just a quick aside on the micro-genre splitting of EDM, and how ridiculous it sometimes is. I recently picked up two tracks (A and B sides of the same release) by Jesselyn called "Iron" and "Cyrus". Discogs calls this release trance. Juno Download calls this release Hard Trance. Beatport calls it Tech House. 

If those are really three really different things, then why can't they be in agremeent about what it is?

As is usually the case, they sound really stomping with the speed (although tempo would work too, I suppose) adjusted from the "factory setting" of 140 bpm to my preferred standard of 150 bpm. In Audacity or Cross DJ or any other app like that, that's a change of 7.1429%.

Calendar, coinage and most importantly... languages

I'm bucking tradition just a bit with a few items of worldbuilding. I notice that many fantasy settings, for both gaming and for fiction, do things differently than I'm going to do. In fact, in the past, I've often done differently. I'll be referring to what I did in the Mk. IV iteration of the setting, as a matter of fact, to compare and contrast with where I'm at now.

The first is the calendar. Some settings, like Eberron and Forgotten Realms, for instance, use calendars that sound all fantasied-up, with renamed days of the week, ten day long weeks, months that are unfamiliar, and a big tale of years stretching back tens of thousands of years. Tolkien, on the other hand, certainly did the latter (maybe not tens of thousands, but thousands) but otherwise used normal days of the week and months. The more I think about it, the more I'm in favor of familiar time-keeping. While it may add some color to talk about dates with weird names of days and months, it never means anything to your readers or players. It's kinda like trying to force the metric system on Americans; sure, we can understand it, but we can't really envision it, so it won't catch on. If you tell me that a city is a certain number of kilometres away by car, that means absolutely nothing to me until I do the conversion in my head to miles. I've kind of rebelled more overtly recently against the globalist nonsense that's tried to push that system on us, and refuse to talk about kilometers, kilograms, meters, or what have you in any fashion at all whatsoever. It's just not worth the effort to learn a new system to make somebody else happy, nor is it worth the effort to try and convert what that actually means in my head every time. The same is true for days of the week and months of the year. And honestly, those long tale of years type chronologies, with all these ages of this and ages of that? Does anyone really care? Does it even matter? I suppose some people sometimes like them for their own sake, but I'm much more leaning towards just having maybe half a dozen dot points in order with vague order of magnitude distance in the past. Because, honestly, otherwise, who really cares? It's not likely to matter, and if you just want facts to "namedrop" on occasion to give your setting depth (like a reference to the cats of Queen Beruthiel—shout out to Tolkien) just make up the name-drop already; you don't need to put it in context with a detailed chronological history.

I didn't always think this; this is where I've gotten by experience, struggling to make stuff actually work and having to admit that it either distracted from what I was trying to do and confused people at worst, or added nothing of any value at best.

The same is true for money. For DH4, I actually came up with a quite detailed and realistic approach, where different political entities minted their own coins, which had their own names, and their own weights and purity and which therefore weren't necessarily interchangeable on a one to one basis. Now, I couldn't use this stuff now because DH4 was heavily focused on a pseudo-"Thalassocracy of Aragon" type vibe, and I don't want any of this pistoles and pieces of eight and doubloons kind of thing going on anymore, because I'm now using Robin Hood or Ivanhoe era Anglo-Saxons instead. Even then, this was mostly meant for color; in an actual gaming environment, I never intended to treat money as anything more complicated than the default D&D-like gold pieces, silver pieces and copper pieces, where they represented dollars, dimes and pennies respectively. Anything other than that; unless you have a really unusual group who likes worrying about exchange rates of different coins and spending time on those kinds of tasks that most groups will find too banal to want to worry about, is worrying about a color element to the point where it becomes a tedious chore, and should be avoided.

The last one is languages. I really haven't given (yet) any thought at all to languages for DH5, and while I did obviously have languages for DH4, they never actually made their way into the rules. And this is an easy thing to over-do too; there's a reason why going all the way back to Tolkien, he defaulted to almost everyone speaking Common, so that characters could talk to each other, because stories in which characters couldn't communicate didn't tend to be very interesting stories, even if it was realistic after a fashion. Again, my DH4 languages won't work, because I'm not having a pseudo-Spanish as my "main" language. But let's look at what I did there, and see how much of it could be ported into DH5?

Terrasan (Standard Dialect): name list drawn mostly from Occitan, Catalan and a bit of Portuguese to give it that Spanish-like sound without sounding like it just comes from southern California. Not that southern California isn't a strange and alien place to most normal people, but... y'know.

Terrasan (Northern Dialect): name list drawn from minority languages of Italy, mostly—like Ligurian, Sardinian, etc. so they were similar but had a slightly different cast to them. In terms of actual language use, though, this was never meant to be more than color in the names used and maybe the fact that I'd describe someone as speaking with a strong northern accent.

Terrasan (Eastern Dialect): this worked the same as North Terrasan except that the namelist mostly came from Romanian. As Timischburg gradually emerged, the language of the peasant underclass would probably be represented by names from this language, although how often they'd actually speak it in the public square is TBD.

Balshatoi: a totally foreign language; my namelist had Russian and Old Norse names on it, and it was mostly supposed to mimic the rising Rus ethnicity in the 10th century or so.

Hamazin: This was associated with the Baal Hamazi nation, and therefore the kemling nationalisty is most likely to speak it, although it's probably the native language of most drylander humans as well. Given the politically fractured nature of the Hamazin speakers, it probably comes in multiple dialects too. Most of the names come from a combination of old Egyptian words and names and old Elamite words and names. I could us this pretty much as is for the kemlings and Baal Hamazi in DH5 too.

Tarushan: Tarush Noptii was a nation in DH4, that's been replaced by the similar but not exactly the same concept in Timischburg. I used mostly Hungarian names and words for this namelist, and I could mix them in a bit with the pseudo-Romanian of East Terrasan for the same purpose; the peasant underclass of Timischburg.

Sylvan: This namelist is mostly made up of Georgian names (the Caucasus Mountains country, not the southern US state), and I used it frequently for my woses. In DH5, the woses wouldn't have their own language, and they would probably be most thickly found in Timischburg, therefore speaking a Timischer language.

Qazmiri: I had al-Qazmir as a pseudo-Persian state, using Persian and Arabic names. I now have the jann acting a bit more like the Kurushat of DH4, and using names more properly associated with them instead. I know, I know... City of Brass and all that normally has a kind of Arabian Nights romanticism about it, but let's face it; we know too much about the Middle East and MENAS in general to see it as romanticized anymore. I'm just not interested in including any calques of their culture anymore.

Kurushi: This is the language of Kurushat, and I use Barsoom and Barsoom-like names here. (Why not? the jann are red too, right?) This is a bit interesting, because Kurushat was originally a hobgoblin empire that went through a number of changes over time to emerge on the other side as the northern western region of the map; kinda sorta bordering on Baal Hamazi, the politically unaligned Boneyard wilderness area, and coming into contact with the westernmost Hill Country towns. This isn't the entirety of Kurushat, but these represent colonial city-states that are in the region and that would be from Kurushat in DH5. 

Kvuustu: I now transliterate this as either Kavoost or Cavoost, because the hillmen are the most likely to refer to it and it's an unintelligble mess of consonants and weird vowels to the typical hillman. But the language itself comes from an old language generator file that I have somewhere (if I can still find it, that is.) I'd mix this up with some Lovecraftian Dreamlands type names, and have it be the language of Lomar and Zobna and the Cursed in general... when the Cursed don't just speak Timischer, which they probably do if they live in Timischburg. Ironically, because the Cursed aren't really anything like them, I initially devised Kvuustu to be an orc language, but it later became a Neanderthal language, and... well, it just got kicked around a lot.

So out of the DH4 language list, I can retain Hamazin was a de facto kemling language, Kurushi as a de facto jann language, Kvuustu as a de facto Cursed language (at least from the Curseds' own native lands) and the underclass language of Timischburg. 

The hillmen just speak what is represented with English, and would have pretty typical early Medieval English (Anglo-Saxon) and/or Scottish/British (Cumbric, Welsh) type names; pretty familiar stuff to us, but without the really Norman influence. I wouldn't use the really exotic Cumbric, Welsh or Scottish names, but I probably wouldn't use really common names like John or Robert without giving them at least a little bit of a spelling facelift to sound just a tad less banal. (I certainly would not entertain the Forgotten Realms custom of just replacing all of the vowels with y's and adding gratuitous apostrophes either though.)

And the Timischer upper class use German names, to represent Timischburg as the eastern, Transylvania-including part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire during the time of Bram Stoker's Dracula. So my list of languages spoken normally on the face of the world would include High Timischer, Low Timischer, Hill-speech, Hamazin, Kurushi and Kvuustu. Although it doesn't necessarily make total sense, I'll have Hill-speech be a kind of common; not terribly unlike the position of English in Western Europe today. Most people speak at least a smattering of it, and almost everywhere you go, you can find locals who are fluent in it, albeit probably with localized strong accents. 

D&D also has "supernatural" languages; the language of dragons, demons, angels, elementals, etc. I'll probably grab two that I used to use in early DH4 before I kind of forgot about them, and assume that they exist, although few people know these languages, and for that matter, many people don't even know that these languages exist. There could be other languages spoken "off screen" in DH5, and in fact there probably are (orcish at the very least comes to mind; maybe Normaundian and a few others, but I'm not interested in digging in to any of them at the moment.)

Infernal: This is the primary language spoken by those from the Realms Outside, although myriad other tongues exist amongst this diverse breed as well. In addition, this is the language of magic, so a smattering of it, at least, is known by any practitioner of the arcane arts. Perfect fluency in this language, on the other hand, is almost impossible for any mortal to achieve. Because of this, it takes two skill points to earn this language, not one.

Despite that, it was always very fashionable in Baal Hamazi, where the demonic taint of their bloodline was a source of pride to the ruling caste, to speak Infernal natively, and many noble houses took great pains to ensure that their children didn't hear any other language until they were five years of age. Some households still speak Infernal in the home, and it is still a living language of some importance in some of the successor states to Baal Hamazi, and amongst the hamazin in particular.

Dagonic: This is a bizarre pre-human language, remnants of which float around on isolated and moldy standing stones and other areas. Intriguingly, it appears to have originally been a underwater language. Few people on the surface can even make an attempt to learn it, due to the challenges of speech that an underwater language had to have overcome, and the language itself is only known from very scanty and fragmentary remains, making fluency all but impossible for even the most dedicated scholar. Roleplaying note: Because of the difficulty in learning this language, it takes three skill points rather than one to do so. Also, for all intents and purposes, it is a written language only, not a spoken language, since there are no speakers that anyone knows of at all, and how to pronounce the language is anyone's guess.

And finally, that list predates my use of the Microlite ruleset. Referring to skill points to learn the language is a d20 houserule, after all. How do I do languages in Microlite? I think for Dark•Heritage, at least, at character creation, I'd let characters roll a d4, modified by MND score (but never able to go lower than 1 or higher than 5) be the number of languages you know, and you can pick them from the list. I wouldn't adapt the colorful rules about how many skill points it takes to learn Infernal or Dagonic, if someone wanted to do so, but I would insist that each player who picked one of those languages explain how they learned it, since you can't just go buy the Rosetta Stone program for Dagonic or Infernal.

I'd probably also insist that everyone pick Hill-speech as a language, since it serves as a Common tongue. In fact, I'll probably just drop the Hill-speech label and call it Common already. Going back to my discussion on why not mess with days, weeks, months and coins because it just confuses players/readers, I'll use the same convention and not create a new name for what is basically just Common.