Shotgun post—movies and movie music, 5x5 campaigns, Eberron and Freeport

A bunch of small updates for this morning, none of which justifies its own post, so they're all bundled together and shot out like buckshot.

First, because listening to podcasts and actual plays becomes an endurance challenge, at least with my low attention span personality, I've recently interspersed every episode with two movie soundtracks. One thing that I'd been meaning to do for a long time was a complete playthrough of the Indiana Jones and Star Wars soundtracks. Even the movies that I don't like, like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and movies that I never watched like Dial of Destiny had John Williams soundtracks. I'd thought years ago that Crystal Skull had a kind of phoned in soundtrack; everything that was memorable came from past movies. On the other hand, I thought the profoundly mediocre and disappointing movie The Force Awakens still had a good soundtrack, so I was willing to give it all a go.

I haven't gotten too far yet; I finished all five Indiana Jones movies and am near to finishing the first 1977 Star Wars movie. Lots more Star Wars to go. The music is, of course, good as its always been. But I find that I don't have quite the same happy associations with it that I did for years and years. I'm not saying that the music is ruined for me; that's too far. But its also not the same. I almost find that I quite enjoy listening to soundtracks for movies that I haven't even watched, if they're good soundtracks, because I have no association with them other than whatever I'm using them for. So, movie soundtracks like Slenderman or Alien: Covenant to me just sound like Shadows of Old Night. 

And I can't even just blame Iger and the modern Disney corporation. Raiders has been significantly impacted by my discovering the audio of the brainstorming sessions between Lucas, Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan to work out the screenplay.

Kasdan: I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don't have to build it.

Lucas: I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

Kasdan: And he was forty-two.

Lucas: He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship.

Spielberg: She had better be older than twenty-two.

Lucas: He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.

Lucas: It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

Spielberg: And promiscuous. She came onto him.

Lucas: Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he...

Spielberg: She has pictures of him.

Other than one bit of sanity from Spielberg questioning the age, nobody batted an eye, and Lucas himself comes across as the really creepy one. Karen Allen doesn't look young enough to have been a kid when she had her affair with Jones, but the actors are nine years apart in real life. Although they fixed the worst of that problem with casting, I still can't not think about what they were about to do when they meet each other again in Marian's bar in Nepal. Something is seriously wrong with George Lucas, and that makes even the older Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies look suspect. Of course the bad movies that came out later than the original good ones have tainted the older ones; I'm now much more jaded about their flaws, and I see them as interesting but not necessarily great after all. What a change from what I thought twenty or so years ago!

Second, I didn't put my campaigns in order! I just grabbed all of the images with the Shift key and they loaded in whatever order they loaded in, and that's how I described them. Cult of Undeath is indeed the original one I worked on, before I even had this methodology, but Darkness In the Hill Country is the first one that I built with the 5x5 Front methodology, and it was specifically built to "go first." If I were to run these campaigns back to back (to back to back, etc.) for the same or at least some returning PCs, which would be fun but unlikely, I'd do them in the following order:

1. Darkness In the Hill Country
2. Cult of Undeath
3. Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes
4. Icy Graves of Hyperborea
5. Terror in Timischburg
6. Curse of the Corsair Coast

The advantage of doing it that way is that there is (with one little side-trip campaign; the Hyperborean one) a general movement west and south. They kind of link; Darkness In the Hill Country naturally takes place in the Hill Country, Cult of Undeath starts in the Hill Country and migrates slowly westward into western Timischburg near the southern edge of the Boneyard. A week or two caravan ride across the Boneyard from where that finishes put's the PCs in Simashki for Mind-Wizards; not that they know how they got there, which is the whole point of Mind-Wizards. From there, they're close to Lower Kurushat, and can do the side trip to Hyperborea and back. And then, once they're back, they just have to move across the peninsula a little bit to the coastal cities of Baal Hamazi to start Terror in Timischburg, which gradually pulls them south to the Corsair Coast and Port Liure, where they can do Curse of the Corsair Coast. 

The one that really stands out there, of course, is the Hyperborean one, which has the PCs travel from Lower Kurushat to Hyperborea and back; a much longer trip than any of the other campaigns offers. More travel, even than all of the others combined (with the possible exception of Terror In Timischburg because of all the sailing, which makes travel easier.) I may rethink that one, and make Hyperborea be a spin-off meant to use other characters entirely, or something, that starts somewhere closer like Burlharrow. We'll see. I haven't developed much of anything at all yet on that one anyway, so there's time to modify my thoughts on it.

Third, I've been reading Eberron pretty quickly. I'm now at least half way through it, and I'm in the actual setting stuff now; the descriptions of the nations. The next chapter is organizations, and then tips for running a campaign the way the designers envisioned. But then there's still two chapters of mostly mechanics; magic items and monsters, respectively, and then the little introductory adventure, "The Forgotten Forge." I created an Eberron Trawl page too, although I'm going to be a little bit less aggressive about those than I am about Freeport. I did notice that if I placed the products in order that they were released, though, that two modules follow the setting before anything else came out. And, that the original module series was supposed to follow up as a "sequel" of sorts to the included mini-module. I suspect that they're much more stand-alone, but we'll see; it's been a really long time since I looked at the Eberron modules. I even played in at least the first one, although I don't remember how long that campaign lasted before falling apart due to GM losing interest in running (his attention span was worse than mine, especially when it came to this kind of follow-through.) Anyway, I'm kind of curious how this will go. There are several Eberron products that I never did get around to reading, so maybe they'll be really interesting to pick up now, years after the fact. I had thought some of them seemed redundant, so I didn't buy them when they were new, but we'll see now.

Finally, I finished "Denizens of Freeport" last night, the latest in the Freeport Trawl. I can't read the next until I finish Eberron, since the next one is "Black Sails" which I have in physical copy. I think I'd never actually read this one before, or if I did, I didn't remember it hardly at all, which is odd because I've had it for a good twenty years. I probably just forgot that I read it years ago. While it does include NPC statblocks, as most d20 products were prone to do in 2003, this luckily didn't take too much space (except when applied to spellcasters) and it instead focused on presenting the character as someone, not that you'd fight with or interact with mechanically necessarily, but as actual characters in the city that you could meet, and all of them have at least a few "hooks" associated with them; adventure seeds that could be used to get the characters doing something. The format here is very familiar to me from my multiple re-reads of 2007's "Pirates Guide to Freeport", with the exception of the statblocks of course. There are one or two repeat characters from other sources (like whathisface, the Dented Helm dwarf brewer), and another one or two that are repeat characters but their status changed (like Torya Ironoak, etc.) but mostly, this is new stuff.

Some of it is hoaky, of course. There's a few ridiculous pop culture or literary references here and there. There's a few concepts that are absurd. There's several that are way too D&D to be useable by me. Woke didn't exist as a concept in 2003 of course, but the ideas did and Chris Pramas was all about the proto-woke just like he's all about woke now. That ruins a few characters here too. But really; I didn't expect anything different. This is still a good book, a useful book, and because each "chapter", i.e., each NPC, is only a page or two long, it's an easy one to pick up and read at your leisure in short bursts when you have time. I—unfortunately—don't expect "Black Sails" to be nearly as fun and easy and relaxing to read, because I remember it; it's got long chapters full of silliness, and I'm kind of expecting it to be a bit tedious. But maybe going in with low expectations I'll find that it's not as bad as I remember, and there'll be stuff that I can use after all.

Finally, check out that cover art! It's a great example of why Wayne Reynolds catapulted very quickly to becoming one of the most popular D&D and D&D-adjacent artists of the 00s and 10s. I don't see his work nearly as often anymore as I did back then, and I think he's slowed down either because he's just not as young and hungry as he used to be, or he's working more in some other venues where I just don't see his stuff anymore (I personally believe he probably made enough money that he could slow down and relax.) But man, he used to really be all over the place. Not everything he did was golden (the Black Company cover he did, also for Green Ronin, is particularly bad), but most of it was excellent. This was always one of my favorites of his. He's associated with a lot of companies, but I associated him with Freeport earlier than most. If you count the Fantasy AGE 2e cover, which obviously is set in Freeport, he did eight covers for the line. Oddly, the later ones would be among the best, but they feature (at Green Ronin's request, no doubt) too much Diversity, Inc. action grrl pox characters on them to really work for me anymore. Sadly.