In the about a 24 hour span, I finished five books. Granted, two of them I'd been reading for quite some time; weeks, even. Two of them were quite short and I was able to read them quickly because of that. The fifth one I just read quickly. It wasn't overly long; it was a ~100 page RPG book.
- Space Pirates of Andromeda
- Eberron Campaign Setting
- Shadows of the Last War
- Whispers of the Vampire's Blade
- Tales of Freeport
I talked yesterday a bit about the first two, so let me address the last three just a bit. I don't think I've ever read the Eberron adventure series before, other than The Forgotten Forge, which is, of course, included in the campaign setting book. And I've played Shadows of the Last War once, a good twenty years ago probably, but after reading Whispers, it's clear that I never played beyond Shadows. I'm not even 100% sure that we actually finished Shadows, now that I think about it. The DM was pretty flaky and may have quit before getting to the end for whatever reason.
Not counting the small adventure included in the campaign setting, there were five adventures published during the 3e era for Eberron (also not counting a handful in Dungeon Magazine.) I guess there were also the RPGA campaigns, but they weren't available for general sale. I wonder if I could find them anyway? Anyhoo... The first three adventures were published relatively quickly; the first two came out just weeks after the campaign setting book itself and before any other additional Eberron material came out. Sharn: City of Towers was the next product, but then the concluding adventure of the trilogy was next; a mere six months after the launch of the setting. By this time we had: The main setting book, the Sharn book, which was the signature setting element, and a trilogy of modules and, at that point, nothing else yet save some articles in Dragon and Dungeon magazines, and some novels. (I miss all of those.) Curiously, the next product after that was Races of Eberron, which didn't even have the Eberron trade dress; it had the Races of... core book trade dress, which makes me wonder if it was really meant to be considered an Eberron product, or just a product that made use of Eberron. I admit that in my own collecting of Eberron, this strategy caused me to stumble for some time, and I've had to go back and acquire used books after the fact. Twenty some odd years ago, I simply wasn't interested in adventures and mechanical player's options style books were... barely interesting, sometimes, but not a lot. I got picky about what I picked up in the Eberron line. Sadly, I regretted it later; 3e era books have largely not become cheap over time, and have remained high cost on the used market. I can only presume that demand vs supply remains high. I guess that's a good thing for guys like me who remained in the 3e era until long after 4e had come and gone and who still remember it fondly, in spite of its structural flaws.
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| The cover for Shadows of the Last War |
In any case, as adventures go, these two are OK. The first one is fairly standard, ending in a reasonably big dumb dungeon-crawl, while the second one is a very different kind of thing; a railroady event-based adventure that feels a bit more like a scenario from a different type of game than D&D usually tends to be. I say railroady, but I don't mean that to be an insult in this case; I just don't know how else you'd write an event-based module other than to have it go from... well, from one event to another. The reality is that all modules have to struggle with making some assumptions about what players will do, and write that, and all GMs have to be willing and capable of adapting to unexpected developments, no matter what kind of scenario you're running for your players. It's just part of the job of running, no matter what kind of scenario it is and what kind of structure that it has. I think sometimes that people who complain about railroady adventures want to have their cake and eat it too; no written module can really be structured so that you use literally all of it exactly as written, and if it was possible to do so, it would be a bad experience to play, so you shouldn't anyway. I thought the event-based "story" of Whispers was pretty interesting, and I'd be willing to make use of it. What was perhaps more unusual is that it is the second part of a trilogy (plus preface in the form of The Forgotten Forge) yet it is kind of a completely different meta-plot; i.e., it has little if anything to do with what's been going on so far in the previous two segments of the mini-little adventure path. It feels like a stand alone adventure, yet it's billed as the middle part of a trilogy. I guess I will see when I eventually get to the third and final act if it comes together, or if it's just unrelated adventures that are poorly strung together in the illusion of being a series.
I know that the two additional adventures that came out after that were billed explicitly as stand-alone. We'll see how that all works.
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| My interpretation (through ChatGPT) of The Strangers |
It was decent stuff. It's a little D&D ish, which is always my biggest complaint with Freeport; by being so insistent on being in line with the mechanics of modern D&D, it really makes keeping it in line with its themes difficult. Or maybe it just wasn't ever really meant to have the themes that I think that it was meant to have.
I do find it interesting that Graeme Davis wrote this, one of the original Games Workshop designers on the Warhammer RPG and a primary writer and designer for the famous Enemy Within campaign. Chris Pramas also worked on the Warhammer RPG earlier in his career, because going to Wizards and working on D&D, and as I've noted before, clearly Freeport were trying to imitate some of that Enemy Within vibe. I just wish, sometimes, that they'd imitated it more.
The biggest problem with this stuff is that it retains and desires, repeated more than once through the book, the rehabilitation of the snake men. You don't rehabilitate monsters. That defeats the point of snake men. Snake men, as discussed in Howard and Lovecraft which is ultimately the source here, are supposed to be monsters that you can attack with impunity, knowing that you're doing a good thing by getting rid of more of them. This whole "nice snake priest trying to teach his fellow snake-men to be nice" is just dumb. And yet, also interesting. That's certainly a vibe in modern D&D, but it wasn't really a thing yet very much in 3e era D&D. It comes across as very unexpected, and I don't like it.
But that's beating a dead horse to some degree. I'll obviously need to change that, but otherwise, there's some interesting stuff here. The snake-men sacrifices in Soul of the Snake-men, or whatever exactly that was called, was cool, but not because it was a fake snake-man taking advantage of the snake men. That was a dumb twist.
In a completely unrelated mini-adventure, I kind of liked the concept of The Strangers. D&D and fantasy in general doesn't make enough of alien mythology. I understand why not, I suppose, but I kind of like it. I've been noodling with a front in Cult of Undeath that's based on alien mythology; cattle mutilations, lost time, abductions and probes, etc. but just not in flying saucers. I haven't completely figured out how to do it, but I think The Strangers are angling towards the same idea... but then sadly don't do very much with them. I also think the adventure into the lizard-man swamp was a neat idea, although too brief. Overall, this was a good book, and I'm glad I read it. I think I'd missed it in the past.
Next up is Black Sails Over Freeport, finally, and A Darkness at Sethanon in novels, and Flight of the Dying Sun in Kindle novels. I don't have a queued up pdf right now, so I'll decide at some point which to read... but probably not until I get at least one if not two of those three just mentioned done first.
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