Elder Evils and Campaigns

I mentioned in my last post that I'm about to finish the Empire in Ruins Companion tonight; I've only got about 15 pages left to read. I'll probably also finish my re-read of Elder Evils tonight; I only have the Zargon chapter to re-read. They count as different categories because the Warhammer books that I have are pdfs and most of the 3e era books that I have (including that one) are actual physical books. I'm going through them fairly quickly, but I'm concerned that what I'm going to pick up next will be slower... although I'm undecided a bit on what I'm actually going to read next. I'm considering the strange idea of reading The Book of Vile Darkness (3e) as a physical book and The Book of Vile Darkness (4e) as a pdf, and reading the two of them concurrently to see how different they actually are. Other contenders on the physical book side are Fiendish Codex 1 (the one about the demons) which will be a quick read, I think, because it's a good, easy read, or Frostburn which may well be a slow slog, like Sandstorm was. I'm also thinking of adding Libris Mortis to the list in the short term. For physical game books, I also have 1) my recent printing of the B/X Omnibus to read, 2) Basic Fantasy RPG 4e, 3) Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, and 4) Heroes of Horror all on my short list, because I bought them recently. I've got a big stack of game pdfs to review, but the 5e Iron Kingdoms setting book is probably at the top of my short list, along with a few 4e books I've never read and some 3e Forgotten Realms stuff like Unapproachable East and Serpent Kingdoms. If I like the first one, I'll read that and maybe some others. But I'm still ambivalent on 3e FR or even FR in general, so I'm on the lookout for other books to target too.

Anyway, all that said, the Elder Evils. They're a weird bunch. Some of them qualify as Lovecraftian weird entities, but some of them don't exactly. The book itself, while fascinating, offers only the barest skeleton of an outline of how to use them in a campaign. Two of the actually have entire Adventure Paths written that follow the same concept, one of them so explicitly that they even mentioned it. Sertrous is the first of these, a snake-like obyrith lord who... really isn't an Elder Evil. He's an obyrith lord. Who's already been beaten twice... and who is dead. However, an aspect of him is still kicking around, who's the same CR as the demon lords from Fiendish Codex. Mechanically, that's kind of a mess. But realistically, the obyriths kind of overlap in conceptual genesis with the Far Realm entities and Elder Evils. I don't really like the concept of overthinking and overcategorizing big monsters in D&D. But it does mean that some of what it spends precious page space telling you is either irrelevant or incoherent. 

He's still kind of a cool entity, though. Kind of a Yig, except with an outline on how to actually consider using him. And then, a few years later, Paizo wrote the Serpent's Skull adventure path. It was the 7th actual adventure path released, and the third after Paizo switched over from 3.5 to Pathfinder, so it's not exactly compatible with the material in Elder Evils, but it's pretty close. Besides, they're also not exactly the same conceptually, so you'll have to mix and match elements to make it work. The biggest problem with the adventure path is that what's actually going on isn't foreshadowed very much, so it all starts going weird and sideways without much warning near the very end. This is where utilizing some Sertrous material would actually help improve the Serpent's Skull. And for that matter, Serpent's Skull, like all Paizo adventure paths, could use some pretty judicious pruning. I've actually done a big long review of the entire thing and how I'd use it at one point in the past. 

Serpent's Skull is much more of an Indiana Jones adventure than a horror story, though, so utilizing some Yig-stuff and Sertrous stuff and—of course—all of the rest of the things that I normally do to change the tone of my D&D-like campaigns needs to be done. The Sertrous chapter of Elder Evils actually helps in that regard... but some of its other ideas are a little less useful. Trying to make Sertrous correspond to the Hebrew word nachash or nagash and the whole serpent tempter from Adam and Eve was... I guess the rationale for why he's an elder evil and not just another obyrith lord, but I don't think it really works exactly and I'm sure I'd ignore it.

I wonder if anything at all useful from the FR 3e Serpent Kingdoms can be gleaned? I hope to see shortly.

Another chapter, which I earlier hadn't flagged as "one of my favorites" is the one on Kyuss, the Worm That Walks. This one is interesting, because although it's a pretty bare bones campaign outline, it also intersect with another bare bones campaign outline from Exemplars of Evil, and the two can be combined to make a much less bare-bones outline. It also references the Age of Worms adventure path, done by Paizo before they were "independent" and it's a specifically D&D campaign in the pages of Dungeon Magazine. That probably gives you way too much material to combine with the other two, but if you look at Age of Worms as a resource to loot rather than a campaign to be run exactly as written, you're really cooking with gas.

I also was much more kindly disposed towards "Father Llymic", a weird entity that I previously had thought was kind of silly, but which now I like. I mean, I don't like the illustration of him, but that's easy enough to reskin. Taking some ideas from this and maybe Rime of the Frost Maiden, Frostburn, and even Hoth from Star Wars: Old Republic I might be able to make a really cool Hyperborean snow and ice campaign or at least mini-campaign. It doesn't hurt that swtor has a dread seed on Hoth with all its weird corruption. And while I earlier had not really grokked the Zargon chapter, realizing or remembering that he's the same dude from the old B4 The Lost City adventure makes me kind of get why he was interesting a little more; although I don't think the write-up in Elder Evils itself is all that wonderful. I like the idea of kind of blending the Zargon stuff—with a better name; Zargon sounds like a stupid 80s b-movie character—with Robert E. Howard's "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" story.

In fact, I'm really considering writing up some short stories or novelettes with Dominic Clevenger and Kim Rugova poking around in Old Night sites, but using some of these Elder Evils as seeds for those stories. Fun times! I need to stop reading so much and do something more creative, though, to make that happen.