Carrion Crown

So, in addition to reading Horror in the Museum, a Del Rey collection of the Lovecraft ghost written and revised stories that I've had for many years (and should have read years ago) I'm also listening to the Hideous Laughter podcast of Carrion Crown, the original horror campaign for Paizo's Pathfinder Adventure Path series. While the problems I have with Carrion Crown are legion (1. too D&D; not enough horror, 2. way too railroady, 3. too proto-woke) it's still probably my favorite of the adventure paths, at least in concept (I can't claim to be overly familiar with all of the actual details of most aps) and I think that there's a lot of good to be mined out of it. 

Although there are some specifically Cthulhu or Yog-Sothothery elements to Carrion Crown, especially the Wake of the Watcher episode, which was designed specifically to be a kind of "reverse Shadow Over Innsmouth" in concept, it's really more Gothic horror most of the time, with things like liches, vampires, Frankenstein's monsters, werewolves and, of course, especially early on, lots of ghost stories. Strange Aeons is the more explicitly Lovecraftian adventure path, and yet with its focus on the Dreamlands, it's less horror focused than Carrion Crown in most respects. I never did finish my DUNGEON YOG-SOTHOTHERY review of that adventure path, but it was, I admit, kind of a disappointing one for me. But now that I'm overtly reading much more because I stopped frittering away so much time on YouTube, I actually want to try and read these more and get more caught up on what Paizo has done. My general feel for Paizo adventure paths is that they're not really at all what I would want to play or run, but they have (some) good art, and generally some decent concepts that I can loot and raid and use in a different context where they work again.

Curiously, the very first AP, Rise of the Runelords, has quite a bit of Yog-Sothothery in it too. It features the Plateau of Leng, an earthy mountainous analog to Cthulhu himself (albeit in a kind of tangential role) and more. And two of the earlier adventures, The Skinsaw Murders, and The Hook Mountain Massacre are as overtly horror-themed as anything in Carrion Crown. In fact, in many respects, I like them better as horror-themed modules than any of the content in Carrion Crown. I love the idea of integrating them into a Carrion Crown "interpreted" campaign. Although neither of those two are the Lovecraftian ones. Lovecraftian fiction isn't always horror, to be fair. In fact, many of his most memorable and longest stories aren't really horror, although they do have something dark and macabre about them, even when they're more like science fiction or weird Dunsanian dream-fantasy. 

The first Carrion Crown story is very ghost-heavy, though, and I love a good ghost story, even if Lovecraft disparaged the type. 

The Hideous Laughter podcast version is pretty good (so far.) I listened to several episodes of it a couple of years ago, but that was when I was spending a lot more time at home (although I think it was after the lockdowns) and I don't do well listening to podcasts when I'm at my desk, because I get way too easily distracted. Downloading the episodes and playing them while commuting works much better. I'm also not a huge fan of actual play podcasts or youtube series; I've tried to get into them but few of them work for me. This one is pretty good, though. It probably helps that they keep the episodes to a reasonable length, they're well edited so that a lot of the fluff is removed, they're reasonably charismatic players to listen to, and the tone is my favorite type of tone anyway. I typically join Black Lodge Games in saying that RPGs aren't really a spectator sport, but as always, there's a few exceptions here and there, and the Hideous Laughter Carrion Crown is one.

However, I don't think that they play in a way that's wonderful. Pathfinder 1e isn't really the best game for podcasts (or for my playstyle, although they do seem to be aligned with me there, just using a bad game for it). The GM is frequently calling for rolls that he shouldn't bother with, and which usually have no impact. If he calls for a perception check and then tells them what he wants to regardless of what they roll, for instance, then why is he calling for it so often? I've decided, after some trial and error, that unless a check is opposed or obviously risky, there's no reason to call for them. Perception type checks in particular should really only be made against an opposed Stealth type check, not just passive "did you see that?" kind of things. 

One other extremely minor detail that I dislike is the pronunciation of Ravengro as Raven Grow. I read it as a Romanian/Transylvianian name, with a short ă sound an emphasis on the second syllable. And, at the beginning, he called Ustalav a "fantasy Russia" which is obviously untrue; it's clearly meant to be fantasy Transylvania. I guess the fact that Dracula speaks with a somewhat Slavic accent was the source of the confusion? Either way; odd take.

But it works for me. And the fact that it's a podcast designed for audio, not video, means that I can listen to it in the car, which means that I can actually listen to it period. Plus, I like it better than most that I've tried. Like I said earlier, RPGs aren't normally very good as a spectator sport, and this is one of the exceptions. Curiously, one of the other exceptions which I tried previously and will load up when I'm done here is Red Moon Roleplaying's Enemy Within playthrough, which is also an audio podcast... although they also loaded it up on YouTube, which is where I sampled it previously. But the video is just a still of the book's cover art.

That's a lot of actual play podcasting; an entire 250+ episode Carrion Crown followed by 120+ episode Enemy Within may well be more actual play podcast than I can stand.