I've got three topics. Two of them are closely related, but one is not. Let me actually reverse the order of them from what the title says; I'll talk about the gaming generations and Shadow of Old Night first. How does Shadow of Old Night fit into the discussion yesterday that I had about Mike Mearls blog post on generations? Well, that's interesting. My game's evolution came about as I was looking to "fix" 3e in a number of ways; first to get rid of the clunky rules-heavy approach that I was super tired of by that time, and secondly to modify the theme, tone and feel of the game into a more dark fantasy pseudo-Lovecraftian approach to "D&D." I found Microlite20, or m20, which accomplished the first goal quite well, and I used that for a long time. Honestly, Microlite probably went too far into removing the rulesiness of the game and I added back in a few things here and there. But by funny coincidence, the rules are about the same complexity as OSR darlings based on OD&D or B/X, but with some "modern" fixes either taken from newer games or some other standard. While based on a thoroughly "modern" fourth generation game (3e), I converged in many ways with the OSR, even though there were always things that I didn't like about old D&D or the OSR playstyle. That said, I think I'm more into a fifth generation (according to Mearls' definition of such) stuff; OSR that's been pretty heavily modified into an indie D&D-like game of sorts. It's definitely clear to me that my game, relative to 3e, does not lean at all into bespoke character design with all kinds of options. I've cut options way down, and ultimately decided that I don't really care to offer mechanical options for characters. What I do like to do is look at old 3e and 1e Pathfinder stuff, and take concepts from those characters classes, prestige classes, archetypes, etc. and make low-res interpretations of them in my system. Because, y'know, I don't really care about representing them necessarily with unique and bespoke mechanics.
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| For example, this witch-hunter type is a cool concept. He doesn't need a bespoke character class to be played well and be fun. |
I'll read the Freeport Companions soon, and I wonder how much of that will offer archetypes that I like. I know for sure that the d20 companion had a pirate core class and an assassin core class that were additional to the game. Complete Warrior and Complete Adventurer offered some great ideas too, but they ended up feeling a little underpowered. The swashbuckler, ninja, scout and even the hexblade were all great ideas that needed just a little bit of tweaking to stand up alongside the real core classes as they should. Not a problem for me, because I believe that you can play these concepts without needing a class to play them. For a guy who's much more into roleplaying than rollplaying (to use the now quite ancient, curmudgeonly meme), there's no need to have that.
But even I have to admit that I didn't always think so. I liked having the bespoke options once upon a time, because it's fun to think about how you would use them, and in many ways, the mechanics give you roleplaying hooks here and there to work with. The reality of actually using bespoke character building rules is that it makes the whole experience pretty tedious. But it takes actually playing 3e or Pathfinder 1e for a few years to really reach that conclusion, I think. My current take is a backlash of may years of 3e and deciding that I won't ever want to play that way, I don't think, ever again, unless someone somehow manages to create a game that offers that without being tedious. And I have to be motivated to actually look at it.
Maybe games like Shadow of the Demon Lord slash Weird Wizard or even Savage Worlds already do it. Don't know if I care right now. Savage Worlds seems a little meta to me. I'd probably have trouble getting really into it, although I'm sure I could play it and enjoy it. But I doubt it would be my favorite way to play.
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I've continued the Freeport trawl. I won't count "the book" for my reading goals as complete until I read the entire Freeport Trilogy book, but because it's an omnibus, I can talk about sections of it as I read them, because they would originally were, of course, separate products. I read "Terror in Freeport" now (which doesn't have any undead in it, in spite of its original Brom cover art). This isn't a big enough topic for its own post, I don't think, so I'm adding it here. Bottom line; I could use almost everything in this module too. Nothing in it is "too" D&D. However, the structure of the module isn't really entirely to my liking. It's very much a pre-written story with pre-written beats that have to happen for the module to play as expected. It's a railroad, in other words. While there's nothing exactly wrong with it, I don't like the structure of it, and would like to make it more flexible with the PCs figuring out exactly how to interact with the stuff that the bad guys are doing without the module having to tell me how they should interact with it.
And I was wrong in my last post; Brother Egil isn't the disguised "good guy" snakeman, that's actually Father Thuron, the "boss" of the temple. He reveals himself to the PCs at the very end of the module. I'm not a fan of that, but I'll discuss that below. And the brief "sewer crawl" is kinda sorta a dungeon-crawl, I guess, but it feels very much like the similar sewer crawl in the Bogenhafn section of Warhammer's famous Enemy Within campaign.
But other than that... it's OK. I'll add an update here later when I read the next interlude, "Thieves and Liars", and I'll have that as part of an updated version of this post later today. UPDATE: "Thieves and Liars" is a completely disconnected adventure. A corrupt city official keeps an expensive mistress, who he caught in flagrante delicto with another lover. The rake managed to escape, but her normal lover beat her until she told him who he was, and now there's a huge bounty out for him. The corrupt official wants to kill him, then kill her; she wants to escape with him, he just wants to escape, and potentially dangerous bounty hunters want the big haul. It's a little D&Dish in that he's a bard and she's a sorceress, so they've got some magic that they've used to charm their way into their gold-digging successes, but if you want to pad your run through with this, you certainly can. It also offers three mini-adventure ideas, although not with any details; all three are crammed into a single page. But in terms of what you could make of the three of them, they're probably all about as meaty as the interlude itself. They're a little more supernaturally; one involves a mystery of a murdered merman, one involves aquatic ghouls attacking the corpse barge heading to the crematorium, and one involves a succubus setting up shop in a whore house.
Now for the third item, in terms of actually adapting Freeport and the trilogy to my setting, if I were to do that, there's a different discussion (the second Freeport in the title). While the module isn't too D&Dish, it is still kinda D&Dish. There's a few details that I'd like to discuss on how I'd convert if I were to use. I'll probably do this section as a dot point list.
- There is no Temple of the Knowledge God. I know that this was deliberately vague so that you could slot in whatever god from your setting was most appropriate, but in Port Liure, this would just be the Academy. There may be a chapel and small chaplaincy associated with the university or library; kind of like a medieval monastery, and if I even need a religious (as opposed to academic) background for "Brother Egil", then he'll be a chaplain of the chapel of the Academy. But it's OK if it's just a scholar too.
- Snakes suck, and almost everyone thinks so, so they make good bad guys. Chris Pramas also picked them for this module series, no doubt, because of the whole Yig deal from Lovecraft, and the disguised serpent-people of Howard from stories like "The Shadow Kingdom." Pramas even designed Freeport to be built on the ancient ruins of the serpent kingdom Valossa is clearly based on the name Valusia, which the serpent people tried to take over in "The Shadow Kingdom." But just because snakemen make good bad guys doesn't mean that they're necessarily the best ones I could use. I kind of think my skaven-like ratmen would work very well for this module to replace the snakemen. I guess I could go either way; snakes or rats; everyone pretty hates both of them, so they've got bad guys written all over them, but wandering around in the sewers and stuff seems more ratlike than snakelike. Plus, switching to rats makes it feel a little less like Freeport, even if I'm technically running the Freeport modules.
- Thuron, or whatever I rename him to because that name doesn't fit my setting, will either 1) not actually be a disguised snakeman (or ratman), or if he is, he'll be killed. I kind of like that, actually, because then he reverts to his real form and nobody knows what to think about that. Was he opposing the other snakemen who attacked the "temple"? Was he helping them? What's going on with them? I like the mystery. And if the PCs go haring after this, it can develop into something interesting. Not that I need more hooks with things to do. Freeport is pretty chock full of things to do already.
- Mentioned this already, but I want to either make up my own cult dedicated to my own new Great Old One analog, or use a more obscure one than Hastur (the Unspeakable One) and his Yellow Sign. I'm not great at creating names, so I'm unlikely to attempt it, but there are enough super obscure elements of the Mythos that I can easily coopt an existing name that has no real development and turn it into something interesting. Names that I currently like include Zo-Kalar, Gol-Goroth, Yogash the Ghoul, Ghoth the Burrower, and maybe even Sebek, who is also a real Egyptian god and a Robert Bloch created Mythos analog of such.
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