I started my FREEPORT TRAWL™ officially yesterday by opening up the 5th Anniversary pdf of the Freeport Trilogy, and read the introductory pages and "Death in Freeport" itself, a short 32-page or so module, in its original form. Chris Pramas said he'd made some kind of deal with Brom that he let him license some art that he'd created for a card game that never launched, or something, so it's got that weird skeleton on the cover—although curiously there is one encounter with skeletons in the module, it is kind of gratuitous and probably only added because the cover art had a skeleton on it. The trilogy as omnibus has a Wayne Reynolds cover on it, and Wayne Reynolds covers became a Freeport thing, where almost all of the books had one for a while there. This was during Wayne Reynolds peak proliferation, or at least was near the start of it; he also did all of the covers for Eberron, later for most 4e books, as well as most of the Pathfinder covers for several years. He still does most of the core books for Pathfinder, although you're much less likely to see him on every module after a couple of years.
That said, the real order of business for the Freeport Trawl is, of course, how much of this would work in a Shadows of Old Night game, and the answer is: after changing around a few names and details, probably all of it. The scenario is a little too D&D-ish for me, but that has little impact honestly on how much of it I could use. What I was more concerned about were issues related to 1) making a sympathetic nice guy version of the snake people in the form of K'Stallo, and 2) being too kitschy with regards to Lovecraftian name-checking. K'Stallo isn't even mentioned yet at all, and "Brother Egil", who if I recall is the guy who ends up being K'Stallo, is just played pretty straight as a scholarly monk fellow and legitimate friend of Lucius, the "damsel in distress" for this module. I strongly disagree with making K'Stallo into a "good guy", but at this point, he's still completely incognito, and even in the behind the scenes text it doesn't make any reference to anything that would make it apparent that he's more than what he's presented as. It's something to think about going forward, but not a problem yet.
The hoaky Lovecraftiana isn't so bad here, but I think I do want to change some stuff anyway. The Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign can be a different cult of my own manufacture, or even one that references something else. (Brotherhood of the Dark Tapestry would be a good example; that's how Pathfinder did legitimate Yog-Sothothery by feeling legitimately Lovecraftian yet also being a new entry into the canon of Yog-Sothothery.)
The next part of the file to read is the interlude, which was originally released as a web enhancement, I believe, but which is now integrated into the book. And going forward, I'll possibly find things that I would want to change that will "retro" stuff in this module; maybe I want some different kinds of foreshadowing about "Brother Egil", etc. I may not talk about the interlude in a separate post, but will probably talk about it along with the second module, Terror in Freeport, as soon as I can read the two of them together.
As an aside, I wondered why Green Ronin created these serpent people when we already had perfectly good yuan-ti in the Monster Manual. Pathfinder kind of did that too in their Serpent's Skull adventure path, which I deconstructed some years ago here on this blog under the ISLES OF TERROR tag. Of course, the answer was pretty obvious when I looked at an online SRD; yuan-ti were never added to the SRD, so they were never open content. Which is kind of shady, in my opinion, since they were clearly copied from the snakemen that Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft had used in their pulp fiction decades earlier, but I guess that's why both Paizo and Green Ronin had to reinvent the wheel somewhat. I guess the yuan-ti do, in fact, have a few unique elements, including the various castes, etc. and I kind of like the way that they work. I decided to make my own snakemen, when I reluctantly added them after doing the ISLES OF TERROR project, a little more mythological, and tied them to Medusa as their original progenitor. I'm using them in CULT OF UNDEATH (revised edition) where I have an arc that is deliberately based on Lovecraft's story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" but which replaces the sea with a swamp, and the fishy Deep Ones with snake people, and Dagon with Nachash. Now, this would assume, if I really follow the Deep Ones model, that people eventually turn into snakemen, but I'm not 100% sure that I'll do that. If I do actually use Freeport stuff as a campaign model the same way that I eventually used Paizo's Carrion Crown adventures to be the original Cult of Undeath inspiration, then I want my snakemen lore to be consistent between the two of them, I think. But I've got time to sort that out. It's not like I've run either Cult of Undeath or am likely to run Freeport Trawl either one anytime too soon.
A couple of minor notes; I've actually thinking about buying a POD of the Freeport trilogy, since you can at a relatively decent price on Drive Thru (less than $30). I know, I know; I've got it in PDF, but I greatly prefer having actual physical copies of books that I'm actually considering using and re-reading. PDFs are best for books that I'll read once and most likely not bother with again. That's part of the reason I ordered a Lulu.com version of my own game (just arrived last night!)
And if I get tired of reading Freeport books and want to insert something else in to break up the piratey monotony, maybe I can pick up my pdf of the 3e Forgotten Realms book Serpent Kingdoms, just to see what they said about smakes and lizards and yuan-ti and whatnot. I've always meant to read that book, and literally for years haven't done so. I've actually got a decent load of 3e era Forgotten Realms pdfs that I've had for a long time, but never read. Can't remember where I got them all. Maybe I jumped on a Humble Bundle or something, or there was a sale, or maybe I just bought them anyway. Don't know; it would have been the better part of twenty years ago now. Not to derail my own conversation, but when I finally read the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book earlier this year, all the way through, I was kind of disappointed—even without high expectations. It hasn't really endeared me to the idea of diving into more of them. But this one, which supposedly gives us more yuan-ti and lizardmen lore, seems appropriate right now.
And, with every post in the FREEPORT TRAWL tag, going forward, I'm going to mark my progress on the reading. I had previously had the Return to Freeport modules in their omnibus format pegged to 2019, but I've now used the original publication date. But I'll read them last, even so.
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