Pathfinder adventure paths

So far in my Adventure Path trawl, the longest and most complex of all the trawls that I'll do, and technically the one that I started first, although I've not been diligent about it until recently, I've read the three full adventure paths that appeared in Dungeon Magazine as Dungeon adventures. They were 10-12 adventures each of about 20-30 pages (including ads, illustrations, maps, etc. Maybe 10-15 pages of actual text... which includes long statblocks too, so maybe 8-13 pages of real actual text.) While Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tide were the proof of concept and one of the most popular series of articles that the magazine produced, when Paizo had to go it on their own with their own Pathfinder Adventure path they had a somewhat different format.

I just finished "Burnt Offerings", the very first episode of this new format, so maybe it's a bit premature for me to be making this post, but of course, I've read the entire Rise of the Runelords before (in its Pathfinder single volume update format) and the entire Curse of the Crimson Throne before, and the entire Skull & Shackles and Carrion Crown and half of Strange Aeons, so I'm not exactly a complete neophyte to what's going on here. (I've also listened to the radio plays that were done for Rise of the Runelords, Curse of the Crimson Throne and Mummy's Mask.) Rather than 10-12 dungeon-style modules, the new Adventure Path format is ~100 page book, with a 30-40 page module included, and then also some setting development and other context around which the adventure runs, some additional monsters that are themed to fit as side quests or as subject of random encounters while out and about doing the adventure, or whatever. There's even some short fiction in many of them, although honestly I always felt like that was filler when that appeared. If I want fantasy fiction, an adventure module is not where I'd go expecting to find it. And while setting development in the supplemental material of the modules doesn't seem like a bad idea—it provides context to the adventure—in reality it mostly ended up being repeated when later setting products came out. Paizo released a lot of product in the day. I don't know if their volume of product is the same or not now, because I started slowly losing interest in much of it after a couple of years, but it was really, really heavy for a while there, and much of the setting products that came out over-wrote setting related stuff in the modules just a couple of months or so at most later. Even the module bestiaries were usually overwritten by the actual bestiaries. Pathfinder 1e had six full bestiary books, after all. 

A "normal" module is usually about 32 pages or so. It's pretty slim, but sufficient for a few evenings of play, and probably a whole level in a modern D&D or D&D adjacent (like Pathfinder) system. The actual module portion of an adventure path chapter is at least 50% bigger than that, in most cases, maybe stretched to 100% bigger with better utilization of the page space at best. For my money, I kind of wish that they'd actually just printed them at ~50 pages, charged half as much for them, and left the rest of the stuff out, or packaged it as a separate product that supported the adventure path. But I don't blame Paizo for experimenting somewhat with the format, or for not immediately doing what I wish that they would have done. I'm not 100% sure that I'm really the type of gamer who's the normal target audience for this kind of thing anyway; my usage of adventure path products is not the same as people who order them specifically to run them as written in the setting as written, after all. That said, while the supplemental material, like an exploration of some of the NPCs and businesses in Sandpoint aren't going to make or break the module, they can be useful or silly (Sandpoint includes plenty of silliness—including the always dubious inclusion of proto-woke socio-political details, but there's some useful ideas there too.) Clearly, however, the real quality of the adventure path is going to be 90%+ driven by the actual module content, though. The rest of the stuff is, at best, a nice add-on that doesn't too meaningfully contribute to the overall quality of the book as a whole product. As I discuss the adventure paths, going forward, this is an important thing to keep in mind. I don't always dislike or not care about the supplemental product, but it will rarely have any real significant impact on the quality of the adventure path overall, so I'm mostly going to ignore it in my discussions. Oh, I'll read it, and really extraordinary stuff (good or bad, either one) might get a brief mention, but I'll really be talking about the adventures themselves.

So in that sense, Burnt Offerings is, charitably, described as "classic" and uncharitably as "borderline cliche." There's only so much you can do with goblin raids, after all, especially if you're trying to make it into a dungeon crawl of sorts. But they do OK. While it's not my favorite of the modules in this adventure path (that would be the next one) it takes a pretty classic D&D trope and does what it can to make it interesting. I watched some quick reviews of various adventure paths on YouTube recently, and he ranked each AP according to four categories: mechanics and combat, roleplaying opportunities, coherence of the overall path, and X-factor. I don't know that I care too much about the first two, because I can of course create my own opportunities for both that I like better than anything I've read for the most part, and x-factor is too vague to mean anything other than "did I like it or find the high concept intriguing enough" but I think that the third category is an interesting one... because he's right to suspect that many of the adventure paths aren't super good at that. In their desire to add variety and not have everything that happens be directly related in a thru-line to the metaplot of the adventure path as a whole, there are often whole modules that only barely touch on the actual plot at all, and the whole thing can feel like an extended side quest or tangent. 

Which is generally assumed to be a good thing, at least in small doses, for RPG campaigns. And I'm not going to say that it isn't, but it's one clear example of how writing novels and writing adventures really are not compatible, because that absolutely is not a good thing for a novel or screenplay. Side quests and tangents usually have to follow the rule of Chekov's revolver; i.e., they actually turn out to be related to the main story after all. Or at least provide important character building moments. Honestly, I'd prefer games that did that more too; campaigns can be shorter and more focused, and they're usually better as a result. But Paizo, and others, are locked into the idea that their campaigns must follow a certain arc and certain pace of "leveling up" and most of them, and certainly all of them for many years, were designed specifically to take a couple of years to play and take characters from levels 1 to ~15 or so. Obviously how much "real time" that takes varies wildly based on a number of factors; how often you play, how long your sessions are, how focused you are during play, how distracted your group gets, do you roleplay shopping trips and interactions around town a lot, etc. But even at the fast pace of "modern games" leveling, it's hard for me to imagine playing an entire adventure path in less than ~150-200 hours of play. It's probably good to have some variety over that many hours... but it's probably also even better to condense the experience to half that or even less, compress it over considerably fewer levels, and have a briefer and more focused experience that trims out a lot of the excess side questing, the weird D&Disms like stupid traps, puzzles, and dungeon-crawls that are really for "the experience" rather than because they're necessary to drive towards the endpoint of the "plot."

And that's, of course, assuming that following a pre-written plot is the goal, which isn't always something that everyone agrees on, of course. Also, Pathfinder is a very tedious combat type game; any system I'd run these in now would have action scenes resolve much faster. And we don't play nearly as often as once a week.

RPGs and Time

Yesterday, as I pointed it, it occurred to me that 2026 is an interesting year in the history of RPGs. And that hinges on the fact that 2000 was an interesting year. 2000 was the year that the first edition of D&D that was developed by WotC (instead of TSR) was sold. It was the advent of the Open Gaming concept, the OGL, and the huge wave of third party publishers. It was the end of D&D systems that were all broadly compatible with each other (as OD&D, BD&D, B/X, RC, BECMI, AD&D 1e and 2e had all been.) Even today, it's kind of seen as the hinge where "old" gaming transitions to "modern" gaming; although that's usually a perspective promoted by people who dislike modern gaming. I'm not sure that 5e players necessarily think that. Or, for that matter, players of games other than D&D; games like Call of Cthulhu and other BRP based games have had only minor updates to the mechanics since their inception in the late 70s and early 80s. But given the preponderance of D&D and d20, other than making that caveat up front, I can now proceed to ignore it for purposes of the rest of this post.

Personally, it's also when I got back in to gaming and D&D specifically. I'd just finished grad school and started my "real" job, and had enough money to buy a lot of books in the 00s, and I did. My collection of 3e related and derivative stuff is still quite large, and I still enjoy it even today. I had already gotten back into RPGs in the 90s, but I was playing old out of print Top Secret and buying some of the World of Darkness stuff. And "playing" is generous; mostly I was buying and reading, but too busy to play; I was after all working full time, going to grad school, and had two small children. After moving for work and the release of d20, I actually started playing again much more regularly than I ever had been previously. 

But 2000 and the release of d20, and D&D 3e was a major watershed moment both for my own personal investment in the hobby as well as a clear dividing line between what came before and after in the hobby at large. Which is why it's so interesting to me that sometime in 2026 we'll hit the point where 2000 is the midpoint of the hobby; it will have been as long since 2000 and the "OGL Revolution" as it was between the inception of the hobby with the publishing of the first edition of OD&D and 2000 itself. That's a huge deal. I don't feel like the magnitude of changes in the first decade and a half or so of the hobby has been anything at all like it's been since, with the exception of 2000. There was a brief flourishing of new ideas in the wake of the OGL, but the pace of innovation has certainly been more staid in general for some time now, and people generally "seem" to think of 3e, 4e and 5e has similar in many ways in their thrust. At least people who don't typically play those systems anymore think that.

Pre-3e D&D, like I said, went through many versions, but they are all quite similar to each other, and were broadly compatible. You could say that they were more like iterative minor details and tweaks to the same system rather than calling them all separate versions of the same game, and you'd be pretty accurate, all things considered. But 3e lasted quite a while, depending on how you count it. Technically, 3e was replaced by 4e in 2008. But Paizo (and many others) continued to make 3e compatible product for some time; they issued four adventure paths, which means two years worth. And then they released the Pathfinder game in 2009; nine years after the release of 3e. Pathfinder made some updates to the system, but it was still "broadly compatible" with 3e and 3.5, and can be seen as another iteration of the same system. It lasted until it was replaced by the more radical remodeling of Pathfinder 2e in later 2019, so it essentially added an additional 11 years to the lifecycle of 3e, making it last almost twenty years. Not quite as long as the 1974-2000 period with interchangeable versions of the game, but nearly so. 

And for that matter, after the radical remodeling WotC did itself to D&D with 4e, 5e came back and feels like a streamlining and major refreshing of 3e. I don't think I'd go so far as to say that it's broadly compatible in the same way that B/X was to AD&D, or that 3e was to 3.5 and Pathfinder, but at the same time, it is still remarkably and notably quite similar again. 

In any case, after the four 3.5 adventure paths (two of which were later updated and combined in omnibus format for Pathfinder) there were twenty Pathfinder 1e adventure paths. At one volume a month, and six issue arcs for each path, that means two adventure paths a year. Combining 3.5 and Pathfinder 1e, that means twelve years of adventure paths. I do have a problem with adventure paths in some ways, and I think the one volume 5e campaign books is a better model (certainly that's true for the way I play, where a lot of the details and stats aren't going to matter to me). That said, as I was deciding which trawl to pursue last night, I started Rise of the Runelords #1: Burnt Offerings and read about a third of it last night. I do still need to read the last part of Ghoul Island, but I like leapfrogging rather than being stuck in a single campaign for a long period. My attention span is, probably, not very good.

UPDATE: I did finish Homeland but rather than immediately picking up Exile, I went for Ghouls of the Miskatonic instead, the first of the Dark Waters trilogy. I'll leapfrog those two trilogies, so after Ghouls will be Exile, then back to Dark Water 2 (Bones of the Yopasi) and so on until both trilogies are done. Once both are done, I'll go to the James Silke Horned Helmet quadrilogy, which I'll leapfrog with Steven Savile's Vampire Wars trilogy. I probably don't need to think too far past that; that's a dozen novels ahead still. For my game books trawls, I'll be leapfrogging between more than two streams; I should finish Burnt Offerings today, then I'll read the last Ghoul Island book, then back to the Bleeding Edge subseries within the Freeport trawl before going back to book two of Rise of the Runelords, the first book of the next SPCM Saga (Yig, I think?), etc.

The Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path begins here, in the small coastal town of Sandpoint. Five years after a tragic fire and spate of brutal murders, the people of Sandpoint eagerly anticipate the Swallowtail Festival to commemorate the consecration of the town's new temple. At the height of the ceremony, disaster strikes!

In the days that follow, a sinister shadow settles over Sandpoint. Rumors of goblin armies and wrathful monsters in forgotten ruins have set the populace on edge. As Sandpoint's newest heroes, the PCs must deal with treachery, goblins, and the rising threat of a forgotten empire whose cruel and despotic rulers might not be as dead as history records.

Reading update over the weekend

Just a quick update. I've read two of the Bleeding Edge adventures, which are part of the Freeport Trawl. These two I've actually read before; I've had the entire series for many years, but I don't recall if I ever got around to reading any more beyond these. (I have a problem with buying books and not getting around to reading them for a long time. This is bad enough with physical books, but it's even worse with pdfs, especially when I end up buying lots on sale, or in humble bundles, etc.) The Bleeding Edge adventures are mostly pretty short, so I should go through them relatively quickly, although they have absolutely tiny font, surprisingly. Luckily, I can enlarge the pdf, but then it's a pain scrolling every page, lol. Anyway, in theory, they can be combined to form a single campaign, but they were also written so that they could be stand-alone adventures, so the coherence between them as a pseudo-adventure path is—so far—limited to geographical proximity. And even that is a handwavy detail, since little of the geography is spelled out.

They take place, in theory, in the Freeport setting, and there are references to places in the Pirate's Guide to Freeport (which means that I probably should have read that before reading these adventures; but luckily for me I've already read it. In fact, although it's on my trawl, I'm considering skipping it because when I started tracking my reading a couple of years ago, I read that book, so it's already on my relatively recently read list as is.) Except for the last one, they don't take place in Freeport, however, although there are vague references to a bit of stuff that has to do with the setting. That said, they were deliberately kept vague enough that they can be used anywhere without a bunch of specific details getting in the way of you using it in your setting instead. Although the Bleeding Edge adventures are, of course, regular D&D adventures of the 3e version, which was still current at the time and would be for a little while yet, they definitely have that much darker tone coming from a guy who used to work on Warhammer FRPG and Rob Schwalb, who seemed to be the kind of oversight editor for the line. They also did darker, edgier stuff like the Black Company and Thieves World adaptations to d20. Schwalb, of course, is the creator of Shadow of the Demon Lord. Not surprising, I suppose, that this is kind of a darker and edgier series, but Green Ronin wasn't always so, and their tone is sometimes all over the place, even within the Freeport series, much less in other settings. 

I thought it interesting that there's some intro text by Pramas talking about Bleeding Edge being written for the "modern gamer." This predates the sarcastic use (or even more so the cringy sincere use) of "modern audiences" and actually does refer to perceived differences in mainstream play style. Of course, that "modern" play style dates back to at least the early 80s when the trad style of play started going mainstream, but still... These books came out in 2006, I believe. The 3e era started exactly in 2000—August was the first release, if I remember correctly. In 2026, 2000 will literally be the midpoint in the chronology of the hobby, with just as much between 2000 and now as there was between the beginning of the hobby in 1974 and 2000. To me, that's a sobering thought, because to me, 3e doesn't seem like that long ago relative to "the olden days" of the hobby, but there's a weird time dilation affect, of course, as you get older. In 1974 when D&D was originally released, I was a toddler. In 2000, I had just finished my MBA and started my "real" career job and was, of course, in my late twenties. Now, I'm in my early rolling into middle 50s, and quite advanced in my career. I can't afford to retire any time soon, but I'm hardly new in my career either. A lot has happened. When 3e came out, I had two young toddlers of the four kids that I would eventually have. Both of those kids have kids of their own now. So plenty has happened, but somehow, it doesn't seem as long as it does since the hobby started. Heck, I still (sometimes) post on ENWorld, which I was doing back in 2000 too. Wild. 

I've also stepped back from the Eberron Trawl because I have other physical gamebooks to read before I read Races of Eberron which is next for that trawl. Rather than rearrange my reading schedule, I'm going to let the Eberron trawl "rest" for a bit until I'm ready to add Races into the reading docket. But that won't be until after I've read probably half a dozen physical game books that I want to read first: Stormwrack, Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss, Monster Manual II, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft and probably either my B/X combined omnibus (I had Lulu print that from my pdfs) or Basic Fantasy 4e. After those and Races of Eberron I have other physical game book re-reads on my schedule, but only vaguely, so those can wait. What I'd prefer to concentrate on, honestly, is the Adventure Path read-through. In part this is because that is, I think, the longest trawl; there's so much material to read there that even if I focus on it, it'll still be the last one I get done. 

I also finished the third (of four) parts of the first "Sandy Peterson Cthulhu Mythos Sagas", Ghoul Island. It's fine. A little rough, honestly. I hoped for better; Sandy's a veteran of decades of RPG campaign design, although many of those earlier Cthulhu campaigns are supposed to be railroads too. (Not just Horror on the Orient Express, which is literally a railroad, lol.) That particular trawl was a later add, but I've been leaning in to it pretty heavily because I was quite interested in it. After I finish the conclusion of Ghoul Island in the next few days, I'll probably take a step back from that trawl until I'm able to read Rise of the Runelords at least. Maybe that's the way to go with those; leapfrog a Paizo Adventure path with a campaign from 3pp or from WotC's 5e to keep them at least kinda sorta in parity.

And, I'm almost done with Homeland the first part of the Drizzt prequel trilogy. I had actually hoped to finish that this weekend, but I got distracted by the fact that my daughter-in-law's twins were born early on Saturday morning, so I spent more time in particular on Sunday on the phone with various people than I expected; a good couple of hours with my wife, who's staying with my son and daughter-in-law for a while to help with their other kids, with my parents, etc. I also made sure to "get out" while I had decent weather and decent fall colors on Saturday, so I spent several hours poking around. I tried to go to Pilot Mountain, which I thought would be quicker and easier, but the summit parking lot was full so I was turned back. I ended up going to Hanging Rock instead. That meant more time driving around, and much more time hiking since it's about four times as long a hike (which elevation gain that I have to hike, not drive, too.) It was still worth it, but all in all, I spent a lot more time doing things other than reading than I expected, so I haven't picked up that book since Friday. I'll probably finish it today though. I only have 30-40 pages left, I think. After that, even though the whole trilogy is in a single omnibus, I'll probably leapfrog to another series and read Ghouls of the Miskatonic, the first part of the Dark Waters trilogy, a Lovecraftian story set in the 20s that was written as a tie-in specifically for Arkham Horror. If I leapfrog those two trilogies, I'll easily get them done before the year is over; hopefully before November is over, even, so I can read some other fiction too. I feel like fiction has been "held hostage" by my game books, adventures and other gaming manuals and supplements reading lately, but fiction reading is ultimately more satisfying in some ways.

I've also been "trawling" if you want to call it that through the first season of The X-Files again. I feel like I've tried to do that before years ago. I've seen lots of episodes of that show over the years, but I haven't ever really tried to watch the whole dang thing and gotten even halfway through the first season before. I'd really like to get as far as the first theatrical movie, that came out between seasons 5 and 6 before I lay off on that one.

Anyway, this is what you do when your wife is out of town for an extended break. I'll probably be traveling for work soon too, but if anything, that means more reading. What else am I going to do on the plane?

Demogorgon art attack II

A number of years ago now I did an "art attack" post specifically focused on the D&D "character" Demogorgon. I've got a lot more art that I've found online here and there since then. Here's some more. Most of these are probably more recent vintage, but some may be older and I just didn't find them at the time.

I cropped this one; it had a bunch of other demon lords in it, but this was the part I liked best.

vs. Orcus

Concept for a model you can 3D print. It actually looks just like that too.

Kinda classic, kinda new

I really like this one, with the much more snaky heads

I think in 4e and beyond, the notion of "baboon heads" has been completely forgotten. But the new look... isn't bad.

Obviously more "comic book" style, but still cool

Why is he in a cave, anyway?

Actually, this one was (I believe) in my earlier post, but this is a better version of the image.

Much more iconic and traditional than most of these newer ones.

Exit 23

I volunteered to run a Halloween-themed one-shot for my gaming group, or at least for the host of my gaming group and maybe a slightly different crowd, depending on availability, and we're looking at actually doing it on Friday, Halloween evening.

This is a group that, as far as I know, has only played 4e and 5e. I thought it was a great opportunity to introduce them to something new, as a one-shot, because hey, the cost is low, and if it's not what they want to play ongoing, that's OK, they're not committed to it. I thought about going really radical and doing Dread, the game that uses a Jenga tower instead of dice to resolve actions, but I decided that that was too much. I'll probably whip up a few pre-gens using a very slightly modified version of Old Night (which I prefer to typing Shadow of Old Night all the time) to a modern setting, and then run "Exit 23", or a slightly bulked up version of it anyway. "Exit 23" is the small adventure that was included in original Dark•Matter setting book, first published in December 1999. 

Quick history aside. Wizard of the Coast bought TSR in 1997, and continued to publish material for it, especially in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2e line, although the schedule was minimized, and they went to work pretty quickly on revamping D&D, relaunching it, rebranding it even, as 3e, which happened in August and into the fall of 2000. However, TSR had also been working on a science fiction game, Alternity, which was released in 1998, delayed slightly from its 1997 schedule and quick play preview due to the acquisition of TSR by WotC. Alternity was probably more like D&D than prior TSR science fiction non-D&D games, like Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Top Secret, etc. had been, and it was meant, I presume, to be the second pillar of RPGs alongside D&D, and be able to support anything that wasn't fantasy. It didn't get a ton of rules support, about half a dozen products or so, and it officially had four settings released for it (as well as kinda sorta a Sliders mimicking setting in the book Tangents. Which wasn't really a setting, but kind of was, and was focused on alternate realities/dimensions and the ability to go back and forth between them.)

It also had four official settings, each of which had some material beyond just the setting book published for it. The first was Star*Drive (the asterisk is usually how it was officially written) which was a pretty standard space opera setting not terribly unlike that of Traveller, TSR's own earlier Star Frontiers, or Star Trek, etc. It also got a Gamma World re-release for this rule-set, and a licensed StarCraft game, based on the wildly popular (during the 90s) Blizzard computer RTS game of the same name. And, of course, it got the Dark•Matter release; a setting, some adventures, even some novels. (Again, the stylized way of writing it with the • is pretty typical, even if it requires an awkward keystroke to pull off.) Dark•Matter was heavily influenced by the popularity of The X-Files throughout the 90s, which was still going strong at the time of its release. I'm not 100% sure that that's what most people considered "science fiction" not taking place in any setting more exotic than the normal real world—just with exotic stuff rolled into it, like The X-Files did. 

The X-Files was really incredibly well-known and well-regarded in the 90s and early 00s, though. It was an important cultural touchstone too, because it highlighted the distrust that people had developed of the government. Although obviously less serious, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was another big "indie" hit during the same period, that explored similar themes, except in a high school light-hearted way compared to The X-Files. Dark•Matter was hardly unique; during that period, we also got games like Conspiracy X (Unisystem; same system as the Buffy RPG), Delta Green (a kind of Cthulhu-themed X-Files for Call of Cthulhu; has since become its own game), Bureau 13 (which actually predates The X-Files by a few months, and is obviously somewhat sillier, or at least it looks like it with the Phil Foglio cover art), and even World of Darkness (also huge in the RPG scene in the 90s) got in on the action in 1995 with "Year of the Hunter" where each of their product lines had a supplement that was focused on regular guys and government agents hunting the monstrous characters that were otherwise normally the protagonist PCs of the World of Darkness. And I'm sure that's just a sampling of the ones that I was more familiar with. I doubt that GURPS wasn't in on it too, for instance (Black Ops and Illuminati, I think, both had similar themes—there were probably many more.)

I think Dark•Matter may have been the most well-known, or most highly regarded of them. At least, it's certainly the one I heard about the most, even from people who were familiar with all of them. It was a bit of a kitchen sink; Delta Green was more focused, and generally seen as therefore "better" but Dark•Matter could do everything from aliens to ghost stories to Bigfoot to dark mages, etc. Alternity didn't last very long, but d20 Modern was the spiritual successor to it, and Dark•Matter got both a mini-update to d20 Modern in the pages of Polyhedron magazine, and later its own actual source book; it was essentially re-released as a d20 Modern setting. Most of the rest of the old TSR stuff was also released for d20 Modern, but it wasn't stand-alone like Dark•Matter was, it was just kind of folded into the generic d20 Modern (d20 Future had a lot of elements that were originally from Star Frontiers or Star*Drive, for instance, but Star Frontiers and Star*Drive were not released as settings or supplements for d20 Modern.) Another clue that Dark•Matter was by far the runaway success of the line and the most popular.

All that said, and I'm of course a fan of The X-Files as a campaign model in terms of themes, tone and even structure, even for fantasy, moreso than I am for your typical D&D model, my "Exit 23" is not really meant to be an introduction to an X-Files-inspired game; I'm considering it a stand-alone supernatural horror adventure of a group of PCs stuck in a remote rest stop (I'll probably relocate it to Wyoming or Montana, because that feels even more remote to me than just a few miles from Spokane) by a sudden, unexpected snow storm, a summoned ice demon or wendigo kind of thing, and some bad guy sorcerers who are in over their head after the death of their cabal leader. 

I'm going to rewrite a few minor details, but it will still mostly resemble the scenario as written. I anticipate enjoying myself. I've run that at least three times in the past at conventions—maybe four, but I don't remember anymore—as a one-shot, and its a great scenario. Depending on how fast people do stuff vs roleplaying and conversation with each other and NPCs, it can be a little light, though, so I want to make sure that I have a little bit more meat on the bones, just in case I need it. And, of course, I'll document it here.

Cult of Undeath—pre-5x5 column noodling on The Strangers

One of the Strangers

I don't yet know exactly how I'm going to end up adapting the UFO mythology into a fantasy setting. I know that the aliens will be entities from another dimension, most likely, something like the Plane of Shadow or the Shadowfell or whatever they're calling it these days. The Upside-down is basically the same idea too (a more esoteric thing that Stranger Things stole from D&D.) But we'll see. I've got plenty of ideas, but I'm not 100% sold on any of them yet. I'll "noodle", as the title says, with some possible interpretations, but this is just brainstorming at this stage, not anything that's concretely decided.

But let me make a quick and dirty list of what some of the most iconic elements of the UFO mythology are in the real modern world. Later, I can refer to this list as I look for elements to adopt into a Lovecraftian-like fantasy format. 

• The most iconic, of course, is mysterious lights in the sky, moving more quickly than can be explained. I suspect that I'm not going to have "craft" that fly, because that's too on-the-nose UFOs, but maybe the Strangers, my version of the aliens, can transform themselves into insubstantial ghost-forms or something like that to travel in an odd, alien way.
• Loss of power? I mean, heck—the very first episode of The X-Files, Mulder and Scully are in a car that dies mysteriously when they reach an ominous stretch of road. This is a little harder to replicate in fantasy, of course, but maybe some kind of combination of darkness and paralysis will work; the idea is that the characters have a measure of helplessness. That works well anyway, for some of the other things that I have in mind for the Strangers; if they come from a Shadowfell-like place, why wouldn't they have darkness abilities, and paralysis is already a UFO mythology detail as part of abduction narratives.
• One of the most iconic elements of the UFO mythos is official government explanations that are so janky that they tend to engender more contempt and derision than being taken seriously, as if they're not even trying to really explain anything. Swamp gas? Weather balloons? Ball lightning? Some accounts are worse than others, of course, but the rather ham-handed cover-up is certainly a huge part of the UFO mythos themes.
• People (probably NPCs) experiencing lost time or lost memories, which may or may not have been because of abductions, experimentation, "anal probing", etc., although that last has become possibly a joke in and of itself. In any case, victims being able to access memories of what happened to them is difficult, because the Strangers have in some way stolen those memories. Therefore, they're a little off, bewildered, and skittish after it's all over, or they are subject to malaise and borderline unresponsiveness.
• Alien implants. In real life UFO mythology, these are alien high-tech devices, but in fantasy, they'd probably be some kind of weird Lovecraftian alien parasitic devices or even organisms. Maybe even something like the "black oil" of the movie Prometheus or some of the middle seasons of The X-Files could be the delivery vehicle, or what's within it, at least. Unexplained and eerily timely nosebleeds, weird scarring, etc. would be the clues. Whether there's some kind of "Manchurian candidate" something or other behind it is TBD, but... why not, amirite?
• I have no idea how to work these in, but there has to be crop circles and cattle mutilations going on out in the rural areas.
• Meanwhile, the Men In Black as almost but not quite human, threatening figures who ... well, literally threaten people who get too close to figuring stuff out. The California Dark Watchers mythos, while unrelated to UFOs, could play a role here too, if nothing else, just for creepy encounters that the PCs can't quite come to grips with.
• The UFO mythos has a long history of alleged crash sites, debris fields, recovered alien artifacts and even alien autopsies. Lovecraft did something not too terribly different from this many decades earlier in "The Horror at the Camp" episode in At the Mountains of Madness, so there's certainly a way to adopt some of this stuff to a fantasy setting. Not that that's fantasy per se, but it's at least early enough modern that the ideas can pass muster, and the aliens don't need to have crashed their flying saucer to end up on an autopsy table, and they can have inadvertently left weird stuff laying around in the wilderness without having to fly and crash it to get it there.
• Area 51. The idea of corrupt government groups, already mentioned above, having some kind of secret site where they're experimenting with alien stuff that they've either recovered, captured, stolen, or been given in corrupt bargains with the Strangers is another one of the most iconic line items of UFO mythology. Doesn't have to be the government, of course—but some powerful, shady organization with backing that makes them effectively immune from consequences other than mob violence. In the kind of decentralized, localized government that I'm more likely to have, a strong federalized Deep State doesn't quite make sense like it did in the X-Files.

I did create a Hero Forge model of a Yaddithian. While it doesn't look very much like the AI image of an alien in a fantasy setting, as above, it might be another alternative. I'd kind of thought of them as a more overtly Lovecraftian homage in the same way mind flayers are (even more than the wink-wink, nudge-nudge that D&D did, since Yaddithians are at least mentioned once in a Lovecraft story) and could potentially fill a similar role. It occurs to me that The Strangers already are that similar role—alien, inscrutable, horrible, and possessed of weird psychic powers that operate unlike magic as it's described already in the setting. So I guess the actual physical appearance of the Strangers remains unknown. I do kind of like making them overtly more "gray alien" like rather than a substitute mind-flayer but I may yet change my mind. After all, playing up the Lovecraftian angle probably makes it much easier to adopt UFO ideas and concepts into a fantasy milieu without it feeling really out of place and strange. I'm also not 100% certain that I want this whole thing to be solved and figured out as part of play; leaving it slightly unresolved and mysterious is, of course, another key element of UFOs.

Yaddithian

Forgotten Realms is by and for gammas?!

I spent much of the weekend not feeling good. Part of it is being home by myself. I feel like I want to do everything and nothing at the same time. Everything I try to do, I lose momentum after twenty to thirty minutes and want to do something else, so I bounce around from one thing to another. I think I'm partly sick because I'm home alone, meaning that I'm more bored than normal, which means I'm tired and not sleeping super well at the same time. I crashed early last night so I could have a chance at a decent day in the office today. Partly because I'm probably not eating well, which is messing me up digestively. Ugh, it's the worst. I haven't been apart from my wife for this long in quite a long time, and of course, I'm really kind of just starting. I may not see her in person again until the week of Thanksgiving, and she won't be home again until after New Years. 

So I've got movies to watch, although I'm finding that after 25 years or however long it's been, that I don't really like Brotherhood of the Wolf that much after all. It's a good study in mood, costume and visual design, etc. but I'm not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I did considerably better a few days ago with The Living Daylights and the new Naked Gun. I'm also starting over with season 1 of The X-Files, but again, I've seen the first few episodes of the first season several times, and I'm not feeling it as much as I'd hoped. I'll probably feel the same about Supernatural which I also wanted to watch. I even stalled out on a slow episode of Seinfeld. 

I'm reading Magic of Faerun, which I didn't expect to love, although I like it better in many ways than I expected to. But I'm about to get to the tedious list of spells, which makes up almost half the page count, so I'm not anticipating it being a good read going forward. I'm also reading the Ghoul Island campaign by Sandy Petersen Games, and it's a little on the rough side. It's fine enough to read, most of the time, but it would be terrible to play, and it has other challenges as well. Honestly, I think I'd enjoy it better as a novella in a collection of Lovecraftian-themed fantasy stories, like the Swords Against Cthulhu series. Honestly, it probably would have been among the better ones in the first volume of that collection. I wonder if the rest of the campaigns will feel that way too? In any case, I also want to start reading "Rise of the Runelords" shortly, and advance in my Adventure Path trawl, as well as "Mansion of Shadows" to continue my Freeport Trawl. Was that the title? I'm going by memory here.

I'm also reading a very old book that translates (among other things) the Mabinogion, but that's been a difficult read. Once I finish this Celtic volume, I still have a Norse volume to read. I read the Greek volume earlier this year, all of them nearly 500 pages. I guess I kind of hoped that they'd been rewritten to be... better written, but they're more "original" text volumes. I feel like it's a good thing that I'm reading them because I want to have read them, but I'm not really enjoying it. Then I have Stormwrack, the next in my environment read-through, and the penultimate that I have left to read, although I haven't started that yet, and I'm about ⅔ through Homeland the first book in Salvatore's Drizzt prequel series, long delayed after I finished the Icewind Dale original trilogy a couple of years ago. I would have started that earlier if my omnibus book hadn't been "lost" in storage for over a year. Of all of the entertainment media I'm trying to consume, that's the one that I'm finding the easiest to digest this last weekend, but I still found that I couldn't read more than a few chapters at a time before wanting to stop and do something else. This kind of lack of focus and motivation is unusual for me, but I find that it seems to spike when I'm home by myself. I have all kinds of grand plans of things I want to do when I'm alone and uninterrupted, but I find that it's supremely difficult for me to just settle down and do any of them without being distracted by the thought of doing one of the other ones of them instead. 

Maybe I would be better served by actually doing something rather than passively consuming something; i.e., I haven't made a setting related YouTube video in months, and I should buckle down, finish the Cult of Undeath 5x5 and rework the parts of it that are clunky, and just have both that and Darkness in the Hill Country presented as a decent set of notes that I could literally sit down and start running right away if I wanted to. And maybe I should start writing that Darkness in the Hill Country serialized story that I've been wanting to do for a long time. Then I can pivot and do Cult of Undeath. Cult of Undeath in particular seems like it's been begging for some attention, and given that it's now late October, it's the perfect season for it, isn't it?

Weather's finally improved too, and the Indian summer seems to have ended. I want to see if I can do some of the small mountain hikes nearby while there's still some evening daylight, like Hanging Rock or Pilot Mountain. Given that sunset is 6:37 PM today according to weather.com, that means I'll have to either do it on Saturdays, or I'll have to leave work early to do it before it gets dark. Or both, ideally. I certainly can't today, but I'll keep my eyes open on my schedule for an opportunity to duck out an hour or two early this week. Spending some time outside in cool but sunny air with fall colors sounds absolutely perfect. Just what I need to clear my head.

That long off-topic intro aside, one thought that really struck me while reading the Forgotten Realms books is that the setting seems to have been written by and for gammas. I wouldn't have had the vocabulary to really articulate it back then in the early 00s, or even before, but something about the setting was always very off-putting to me, and it was hard to describe exactly why. The setting always seemed to be focused on magic-users, and more martial "jock" type characters were minimized... when they weren't women. These wizards and other magic-users all have this arrogant, smarmy, talk too much personality, and in the fiction, they're unaccountably successful with women. Who all kind of wander around in a hippy free-love commune style social network.

If gammas can be described, among other things, as imaging that they secretly deserve to be alphas, while being completely clueless that they don't have the goods to be alphas, then it's pretty clear that the Forgotten Realms is the fantasy playground of gammas. Of course, it's sufficiently professionally written to still be workable to everyone, but like I said, in spite of whatever good ideas and presentation it had, there was always something very off-putting to me about it. What really clinched it this time around reading through it was a few off-hand quotes added from a couple of major characters; Elminster and Khelben "Blackstaff" Arunsun, where their smarmy, overly wordy, arrogant monologues to unnamed characters who didn't matter came across as the quintessential gamma posturing and grand-standing. Once that clicked, the rest of the setting clicked too. Ed Greenwood is a quintessentially creepy old midwit; a gamma for certain, and Sean K. Reynolds, the writer during the 3e period most closely associated with Forgotten Realms, is prone to all kind of gamma rage episodes. He may be good at what he does, maybe, but gammas can be, if you can get them to just focus on and do it. I obviously don't know either of them personally, but they both come across as gammas.

The detail of Forgotten Realms, for which it is famous (or infamous, perhaps) is another gamma tell; it gives gammas the perfect opportunity to know more about "the lore" than anyone else around them and be able to bring it up and score points in their own mind for knowing stuff that people around them don't. Now, none of this means that Forgotten Realms should be absolutely ditched and not used by "normal" people. It's still a setting with plenty of good ideas, if you like a very D&D-ish superhero themed game, I suppose. I'm enjoying my 5e Tyranny of Dragons game well enough, even if it is both Forgotten Realms and 5e; both typically red flags against it, because of course the most important component of anyone's game is the people that you're playing it with. I've enjoyed the Salvatore Forgotten Realms books, or at least I've enjoyed the original Icewind Dale trilogy and the prequel Underdark trilogy. I read 3-4 or so of the books that followed, but I enjoyed them less over time and eventually quit caring. I've also read some other books; Paul S. Kemp, etc. and liked them a little less, but they weren't terrible, just not what I was interested in. And I've read some of the campaigns here and there. I'll read more as time goes on. I certainly think Forgotten Realms is a useful setting to be familiar with, and I'll continue my 3e Forgotten Realms trawl. But this eye-opening realization certainly explains why I've also found certain elements of the setting very off-putting, and more specifically, why I've found fans of the setting kind of off-putting. Being aware of their genesis in gamma attitudes means that I can avoid the pitfalls more easily, I suppose.

Horror in a D&D-like system

I finished two products last night, kind of surprisingly given how busy I was yesterday, although to be fair, I'd been reading them for a little while. Since there is a similar thematic element to them, horror in D&D, it makes sense to bundle this discussion about them. The first was "The Voyage to Farzeen" the first part of the first Cthulhu Saga campaign, Ghoul Island. This, and the other five campaigns, purport to be adventure path-like products. The first five are published in four parts, and the last one is a single volume. The entire campaign says it takes you from level 1 to 15. However, I was shocked that this product claims to take you to level 5. It has about as much content, fluffed up a bit due to art, layout and description, of an old 32-page module that I would barely—at best—expect to take you from level 1 to maybe level 2. If even that much. I know fast leveling is a thing in 5e, but this is absurd. There's no way that this is a five level module in any reasonable context. You don't level up after just one or two minor combats and a few hazards or skill checks. I can see the entire module taking you from level one to level two, although even that would be too fast for me.

There are other things that I didn't love about this module. Like much of the third act of Savage Tide, which I recently reviewed, the authors' idea of "roleplaying" is having to suck up to angry, capricious girl-bosses who will screw you over if you don't bend over backwards to make them feel special. In this case, not only that but the girl-bosses are Haitian voodoo savages, at least according to the illustration. Or it's a "Mythos ghoul" which is really kind of like a dirtier version of a gnoll who eats old bodies. Sigh. And yet the authors of one of these two products, and probably both, have said before that they recognize that one of the reasons people play D&D is to feel powerful... and yet they supplicate to unattractive and unlikeable girl-bosses reflexively? Truly, the scourge of gamma and even delta writers in the industry, while related to the scourge of wokeness and rabid liberal animals is, in fact, truly a scourge.

It wasn't terrible to read, I suppose. It would be terrible to play. I'm very interested in seeing how they continue to develop, but there will probably be less for me to borrow from these campaigns than I hoped. Much like the Strange Aeons adventure path, which I read half of a few years ago, and which is overtly and explicitly based on Lovecraft for Pathfinder, it just didn't fly for me. I'm more and more convinced that the "correct" way to do Lovecraftian adventures is to mimic the themes and tone, and make maybe offhand references to actual Lovecraftian entities, if at all. Use your own monsters. You can do some great Lovecraftian D&D with aboleths or mind-flayers, although they've rarely been done that way, rather than with "Mythos ghouls" or Deep Ones. Overly overt references to Lovecraftian details, and a focus on them, makes them feel more like theme park attractions that anything else. 

But again, I find that I'm curious about the development of the line. I wonder if there's a kind of almost emergent setting related to all of these Cthulhu Mythos Sagas, or adventure paths as published by Sandy Petersen games. If so, sadly, the company went out of business, and the products are rather hard to get now. Good luck finding them at a decent price. Luckily for me, I was in a position to not worry over much about the price. Egh. RPGs are still a cheaper hobby than most even if I'm overpaying for esoteric titles, I suppose. Heckuva lot cheaper than golf or hunting, to name two hobbies that I could have had instead. Can you imagine how much I'd spend if restoring classic cars was my hobby?

There were a lot of allusions to content from the Sandy Petersen Cthulhu Mythos book in this adventure path episode, which isn't surprising, so I'm glad that I pulled that up to the front of the line a few weeks ago and read it first. That book has a dread check, and you add dread levels much like you add exhaustion levels. I'm not super familiar with the 5e rules, still having not read my 5e Player's Handbook, but I was able to parse this system well enough, and I find that it's yet another better alternative to the hoary old Call of Cthulhu Sanity system. 

The other book that I finished is one that I've been reading for at least a week, interrupted by other things, and that's the late 3e product Heroes of Horror. I've read this before, a long time ago, and have had vacillating opinions on it over time. My first impression was that it was only baby-steps into the material that it was supposed to provide an in-depth coverage of, which I think still is true for a large amount of the 3e product line, especially they were about a slightly different modes of play (Cityscape got an especially scathing review from me on this very problem—although I've since come around to appreciating it a little bit more for what it is rather than resenting it for what it isn't in the years since). The second time I read it, or maybe I was just skimming—I don't remember now—I liked it better. This third time I found it somewhere in between. There are still too many mechanics, which of course was a 3e problem overall, but especially so in the sourcebooks. Too many feats, too many new spells, too many new prestige classes, etc. And way too much focus on dreams and taint, neither of which are topics that I care about at all. Not sure why they went all in on thinking those two were "core" to horror gaming. However, one thing that I thought pretty good was an alternative to madness/Sanity that actually was pretty clever, made use of existing mechanics in an easy way, and could easily be ported over to Old Night. I already have a very abbreviated and simple sanity system, but I could make it even more simple, and I may yet, because I like this. I also like that it's less Sanity and more Fear, i.e., you get literally freaked out by stuff, and the reactions are more appropriate for that more appropriate way to treat it. 

If a character fails a Sanity check, you only need roll a d4 to determine the reaction:

1. Character is stunned for 1d4 rounds, and cannot do anything except stare in horrifying shock at what's happening around him. If this seems too punitive then a GM can, if he wishes, on each round after the first that the character is stunned, he can make another Sanity check and if he passes it, change his reaction to 2 below.
2. Character is shocked by what he perceives and is only able to react in a passive, stunned manner. All d20 checks are at -2, but through the haze of shock, he's at least able to attempt to react normally. He's just so shaken by what he's seen that he's not doing it as well or with as much focus as normal. This lasts for 1d6 rounds.
3. Same as 2, except slightly more severe; all d20 checks are at disadvantage for 1d6 rounds.
4. Character is so shocked that he drops what he is holding and attempts to flee in mindless terror as fast as he can, in whatever direction is opposite the source of his fear. This lasts also for 1d4 rounds. At GM's option, an additional sanity check can attempt to end it early after 1 round, at which point he reverts to option 3, but can act normally otherwise.

I also finished "The Vampyre" by John William Polidori, which I had thought was more of a novel, but really is much shorter; probably not even a novella. It is often considered the prototype on which Dracula was later built, in many ways. It's curious to me that it was written based on a fragment that Lord Byron wrote, and is, at least in some tongue-in-cheek way, "casting" him in the role of the vampire. Written the same summer that Polidori, Byron, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont were hanging out in Switzerland debauching themselves as they were wont to do. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein that same summer. I don't know what Percy Shelley wrote, as he didn't get famous until after his death. Claire Clairmont just got pregnant with Lord Byron's kid. This isn't shocking; Mary Shelley's mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the infamous proto-feminist and proponent of proto-hippy free love debauchery. Lord Byron is the source of the phrase "mad, bad and dangerous to know" as well as "famous for being famous."

I don't think a lot of these old "classics" are really that great. Some of it is cultural; "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." Older books are often slow, overwrought in some places, underwrought in others, and coy about certain things that need to be plain to have the proper impact. But no doubt they had impact to their contemporary readers. I don't think Frankenstein is that good. I didn't love "The Vampyre" and I'm glad is was shorter than I thought it was. Of course, the fact that the principles were arrogant, indolent profligates and deviants doesn't make me more inclined to give them a pass on the context in which they wrote; the books just aren't that great or interesting to modern readers, and I'm totally OK with saying that. Other authors from the same period (admittedly playing a little fast and loose with what I call the same period) I still like; Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow is a great novel, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe is too. When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula a bit later, that's a work that still holds up well. 

That said, I don't have a region or clan in Timischburg called Ruthven, curiously, and I should. It's a much better name than Vyrko, and as good as Orlok, Dracul or Nosferatu for counties that have counts ruling them.

A Tale of Three Reviews

Gangs of Freeport. This is an interesting module. Written by Adamant Press, and slotting in basically right before Crisis in Freeport since Xander Williams still features as a character but it's obviously after the fall of Milton Drac, it makes pretty good use of locations and characters from previous Freeport products. It's certainly grounded in the setting in some ways even more than official products for the setting. It's 49 pages long, but there's no art at all, and the layout is pretty spartan and features a decent amount of white space. I don't think it's really much longer in terms of wordcount than your typical ~35 page or so module. Seriously, there's not even cover art. The only concession to art of any kind are some crudely made maps here and there.

The module is written for ~level 6 players, but I don't think it really needs to be. It feels like a low level module, because there is almost no supernatural at all. As the title suggests, this is a crime story module, and it plays out more like Three Days of Condor or The Untouchables than a D&D adventure. The closest thing to a monster I remember reading about was a gnome wizard. It's all about criminal humans mostly and a takeover bid of the underworld of Freeport. Although you'd have to use different statblocks, you could easily run this as a first level adventure—and generic statblocks from the DMG would do, if you even needed statblocks to run it at all, which I wouldn't. It was an interesting experiment to read; on paper, it seems like it's right up my alley; in reality, however, I found that it felt just a tiny bit flat. I guess I prefer some supernatural or occult angle to the menace, and a drug that is kinda sorta an addictive charm person spell isn't quite enough. I also think that these third party Freeport modules are interesting, because they try to integrate elements of the setting, but they also insist on not changing anything, so they have to be side quests and minor issues to some degree by default. I think that I could use this, but I'd weave the elements of it into a bigger picture, I think, at the same time. Plus, I never thought that the gangs of Freeport were nearly as interesting as the gangs of Five Fingers anyway. The Buccaneers and the Cuttthroats were silly gangs, and they still haven't been replaced by Mister Wednesday, which while maybe a little bit lacking in flavor, is still significantly better. (Plus, a quick Google search indicates that the name was probably stolen from Neil Gaiman. Blegh on multiple fronts.) I'm curious at what point Mister Wednesday makes his debut in Freeport. He's clearly referenced in the Pirates Guide to Freeport, which I'll be re-reading soon as part of my trawl, but it seems like that may be his debut... even though he's presented as if he's been there already. In any case, yeah; the crime element is an important theme of Freeport, I'd think, but Five Fingers treats that theme so much better, all the time. It's a bit disappointing. But, since I have Five Fingers, it works for me anyway; I can borrow elements that are better from there and adapt them to Freeport. 

I do really love the crime lords of Five Fingers. That's probably its best element, honestly. I like its dark cult and horror theming too, but I have little interest in the specific Iron Kingdoms Thamar cults, and Orgoth history, and... well, all of the campaign specific stuff. Iron Kingdoms was one of my favorite settings in the early 00s, but as it developed and became a high powered superhero setting to accommodate the wargames and compete with Games Workshop, it kind of lost its way over time. Which is part of the reason that Five Fingers was such a delight, because it was a pretty late book in the line, and yet it had the original theme and tone which made me like Iron Kingdoms so much in the first place. 

That said; just because I like it doesn't mean that I want to set my own games there, so a lot of the details just don't do it for me because they're too specific to the setting.  But I'm not reviewing Five Fingers; "Gangs of Freeport" is a pretty solid, low magic module that could be adapted with almost no real work to any level up to the level that it's posted for. Higher magic, i.e. higher level D&D would start to cause problems with it, though. I found it refreshing to read, even though my earlier reading of "Crisis" (should have swapped the order, but whatever) indicates that Freeport had returned to that same kind of low magic theme and tone too. Next up on the Freeport Trawl are the Bleeding Edge adventures, which as I've said before, don't actually take place in Freeport (with the exception of the last one) but are nominally set in the Freeport setting. Even then, they're deliberately designed, at least according to the blurbs, to be capable of being slotted into any setting, and being stand-alone, although loosely tied together if you wanted to turn it into a pseudo Bleeding Edge Adventure Path or something.

Of course, Adventure Paths were just starting the same year that this came out, I think.

Grasp of the Emerald Claw. My Eberron Trawl will probably slow down, because I just finished this module, and next up is Race of Eberron. I've actually got a pretty full docket of physical game books to read, and squeezing this in, near the front of the line no less, probably isn't going to happen. So Eberron will "rest" for a time, I think, while I read some other stuff instead. This module was quite the contrast to "Gangs of Freeport"; it's a very stereotypical D&D adventure in many ways. It's got much denser text; while only 36 pages long, compared to "Gangs"' 49, I think it had more actual words. There was all kind of silly stuff; puzzles and riddles that cause you to teleport to where you want to go, wandering "dire tigers" within the temple complex, etc. "Grasp" is also the fourth of four in a proto-Adventure Path of sorts made up of the three modules published thus far plus the mini-module included in the campaign setting book of Eberron, but one of the key elements of the concept of the adventure path; a coherent meta narrative that connects the modules and builds within them to a peak near the end, was poorly rendered here; I'm not sure if the authors of the modules had a guiding hand that ensured such a thing happened, which Paizo's guys certainly did do and focused on.

I feel like the structure of the Eberron modules was a little too focused on "here's a little dungeon, of sorts, so play it and then zip off to the other side of the world and do another little dungeon of sorts." I've never liked that style of play, so these three (or four, if you count the one in the setting book) weren't my favorite. Not that I expected them to be, but they were even less intriguing to me than I hoped, and just the novelty of being set in Eberron, and having fast travel and a warforged antagonist and "shades of gray" semi-noir alignment issues and vague hints about the origin of warforged in Xen'drik with the Age of Giants wasn't enough to liberate them from being pretty run-of-the-mill dungeon-crawlers. And not only do I not really like dungeon-crawlers very much anyway, but these weren't even super good ones, like "Shadows in Freeport" was; they were just "meh" dungeon-crawlers. What was probably the most interesting aspect of this module specifically was the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea inspired submarine journey to Xen'drik from Sharn with an attack by sea devils and a dire shark. But, of course, it's exactly that kind of stuff that has people saying stuff like "magitech" and "magipunk" and calling Eberron a steampunk setting. Or worse; trying to coin a new term to describe it. (As an aside, I'm more irritated than not these days by the gratuitous apostrophe in Xen'drik. And the gratuitous use of X instead of Z, honestly, which is harder to type.)

Like my discussion of Iron Kingdoms above, a little bit; Eberron is always a setting that I liked. But I feel like it was poorly served by some of its details, which actually fought against the concepts of the setting sometimes. And other details just weren't how I would have implemented them. This particular series of modules is a great example of that. They're not bad, they're just forgettable and not my style of module. I'm glad I finally read the entire run after having played the first one many years ago. (I realize that there are two more official Eberron modules, but those are not part of the same "arc" and are completely stand-alone relative to these other three.)

The Naked Gun. I noticed that this is on Amazon Prime and that I could watch it "for free" by which I mean, what I already pay and with several commercials at the beginning, I didn't have to pay extra to watch it. I always wanted to watch this, but never got around to it. I was a huge fan of the original Naked Gun movie and the Police Squad show on which it was based. The new Naked Gun is pretty well-meaning. Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson do a good job, as do the other minor roles. The writers and creators honestly wanted to ditch a lot of the problems Hollywood has developed in the last few years and make a throwback movie that was like the older Naked Gun and its whole style of movie.

That said, it simply isn't as funny as the originals. It was well-meaning, and it tried to be the same kind of movie. But it didn't have nearly as many gags as the original. The density of gags was much lower, which meant that I was laughing a lot less. Plus, the gags were much more low-key. One of the keys to the original Airplane and Naked Gun's success (same team of creators) was that they ran gags down until they were absolutely ridiculous. Here, they are content to merely be drily sarcastic, overly literal, and stuff like that and consider that a gag. And they're funny, don't get me wrong. But they're not as funny, and there aren't as many of them, so overall, the movie is merely amusing rather than hilarious, like its predecessors. The only gag that was as ridiculous as the originals is when the guy was watching Neeson and Anderson through a wall with infrared binoculars and it looks like they're having freaky sex, only to cut to the room and see that everything is innocent and it's just the angles that make it look funny. And that was ridiculous, but it was also too dirty to be funny to a guy my age. I'm not 13 anymore, and more and more I don't even remember why I thought 13-year old me thought stupid things like that funny. Maybe that's down to me rather than the movie, but also the fact that it's the only sequence that really rises to the level of what the original did. The original had exaggerated, extended, ridiculous sequences: 1) when Drebin was going to the bathroom and forgot to turn off his mike, 2) when Drebin was sneaking around on the skyscraper, 3) when Drebin was pretending to be the opera singer singing the national anthem, and 4) when Drebin was pretending to be the umpire during the baseball game. The new one had only one such sequence, and it was, like the skyscraper one, one that relied on puerile sex-adjacent humor. 

In any case, the shorter, less exaggerated sequences in the original were much more plentiful and much more funny, and the longer exaggerated ones really make you fall out of your chair because you're laughing so hard sequences are also much more frequent and much more funny. And some of the shorter ones are almost as long and ridiculous; Drebin and the pen that killed the fish. Drebin fighting the terrorist and communist world leaders, OJ slowly "dying" on the boat, etc. This new movie just didn't have those kinds of sequences.

Of course, I also watched the movie by myself. Comedies are rarely as funny by yourself as they are with a friend, my wife, my kids, etc. But it really just wasn't as funny, and it really didn't quite rise to the same level. And the funniest stuff was in the trailer.

I'm glad it got made. I'm glad I watched it. But I'll forget it in a few days and probably never think of it again.

Cult of Undeath Front #3: The Bitter wood of the Bitterwood or something

Here's the Cult of Undeath 5x5 Front as it currently stands:

Front #1: Murder of Alpon von Lechfeld, etc. Already done.

The Shadow Over Inns... uh.. .Eltdown meets Against the Cult of the Reptile God(dess). Already done. 

Ghouls and other "savage" proto-vampires are also coming out of the swamp in the other direction, westwards into the Bitterwood, and are attacking villages, hamlets, and even hunting lodges frequented by wealthy and powerful. This will replace the werewolf and/or swamp witch idea that I had previously, which was loosely based on one of the adventures of the old Carrion Crown adventure path. Y'know, who whole reason Cult of Undeath was originally created.  This may replace the vampire threat, since I'm going to be treating ghouls as savage proto-vampires, probably ruled by vampires or at least near vampires, not unlike Age of Sigmar's Flesh Courts vampires.

The Frankenstein monster stuff in Mittermarkt. This is the sad and tragic fate of one of Alpon von Lechfeld's academic correspondents, and important clues to the murder need to be found here... while also dealing with the obvious problems of a rampaging yet cunning monster. (I already have this in Front #1! But that's OK; this is the one I'm going to replace with my X-files front.)

A mundane threat of highwaymen and bandits making travel between the Copper Hills and Mittermarkt (via Eltdown) dangerous; not to mention all of the crap going on in Eltdown mentioned above. Maybe this one can get up into the Sabertooth Mountains itself, and at least have a different environmental theme too.

Feral vampire

This front is probably best "started" by assuming that the PCs need something to handle the problems from the other fronts. If there is a monster that needs magical assistance to defeat (and there are, in plenty of the above) then Gaskarfells is the obvious place to go. Maybe even to stop the Werner Otten Beast outside of Mittrmarkt, which I alluded to earlier is generally not very vulnerable to regular combat. I may need to have a look at the fronts I've already done; I feel like Front #1 has half of the original plan embedded in it. I may be a bit too scatterbrained to be doing these fronts in a logical sense, and I need to go back and rewrite them once I get them more done. That said, so the PCs go to Gaskarfells, looking for some magic items that will help them handle the Otten-beast. While in Gaskarfells, they will find that the town is in a bit of trouble, and is somewhat under siege. Ghouls and even proto-vampires are assailing anyone coming or going from the city. Even the farmers are struggling, and most are now living inside city limits. The pseudomage necromancers of Gaskarfells have redirected some of the undead workers to work on the farms so that the city isn't starved out by these attacks, but that, of course, impacts the production of magic items, which is Gaskarfells main economic activity.

What exactly is going on, and what's driving these attacks? Well, there are ghouls, of course. Where else does a proto-vampire come from? These ghouls are mostly coming from the western edge of the Eltdown Fens, and have "seeped" into the Bitterwood both because they're drawn by more plentiful prey, and are drawn by the corruption of the fellshard ore, although this is subconscious. The leader of the ghouls is not just a proto-vampire, he's now advanced to becoming an actual vampire, but because he's a feral one, he's completely outside of the hierarchy of Timischburg's vampire population. This individual, the feral vampire, is Velgar Tzarnik and he has a small hierarchy of proto-vampire lieutenants; Rask, Kroven, Morvak, and Volach.

However, there is a minor noble vampire in Gaskarfells already, and he's not amused at the rise of this feral vampire attempting to destroy Gaskarfells, which is an important strategic resource for the vampires and the human nobles alike (remember, that the vampires operate kind of like a Deep State. Most of the nobility at least suspect their existence, if not actually know it, but they don't really interact directly with it. Plenty of people in Timischburg think that the idea that a cabal of vampire deep state agents actually run the country is a wild conspiracy theory. It just happens to be true.) This vampire is Dietmar von Hohenstahl and he could actually be a patron of sorts for the PCs, since he needs some help ending the threat of Tzarnik's attacks on shipments out of the town.

Of course, the head of the pseudomage/necromancer/artificer's guild is actually less happy about an overbearing vampire noble (who's being coy about being a vampire, but this guy knows) in "his" town attempting to run things his way when Gaskarfells was running smoothly without him before than he is about the feral vampire attacking from the countryside. This is Roderich von Szarad, and he's a powerful mover and shaker in his own right, without being a vampire (in fact, he's researching turning himself into a lich instead!) Although none of these three is a "good guy"; but what's best for the regular folks in town? That's up to the PCs to decide, I suppose. Probably letting von Szarad get back to running things the way he used to. But maybe taking him out so a successor who isn't so obviously crazy that he wants to become a lich is the way to go? This three way power struggle means that either of the two in town could be seeking to have the PCs as agents against not only the feral vampire and his ghouls, who have increased in numbers tremendously in the last few weeks (or so it seems).

Potential sites of interest: A) a camp or lair or something in the woods on the swamp boundary where Tzarnik and his ghouls are.  B) von Hohenstahl's lair in a manor in town, or at least near town. C) the necromancer guild house, where von Szarad is trying to turn himself into a lich. D) deep lairs under the city where Orridathis, the Watcher Beneath the Clay, made somewhat self-aware or at least awake by the corruption of the fellshard ore. The undead are being drawn subconsciously by this Elder Evil wanting to essentially birth itself into "undead fullness", which is the real threat lurking behind the feral vampires and the cultured one both, as well as part of what drove von Szarad to undead related madness.

Anyway, this entire front's write-up needs to be seen as a draft that's subject to even more revision than my last one when I do the supercut consolidated post on it.

Fiction reading

I've talked a lot about my reading trawls lately, which are all gamebooks of a certain theme; I've also been trying to read a lot of fiction. Some of this is audiobooks; older stuff from Librivox that I listen to while driving (recently did Scaramouche and Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, and just yesterday finished At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I've actually read read those, so doing them as audiobooks was a reminder rather than a new one.) In fact, I haven't even remembered to put the latter on my read list yet.

Here's the cover of my physical copy. Of course, it's not nearly as cool as the Frazetta cover, but y'know. It's the one that I have. I think I bought it at Half Price Books back in the later 80s. It was obviously a reprint to tie-in with the release of the movie in the 70s.

I also have the next book in the Pellucidar series, Pellucidar, queued up to play in the near future, but probably not until I listen to A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes. The Mars book was ERB's first big hit, published under the alternate title as serialized stories as Under the Moons of Mars. The first Tarzan book was published in 1912, and the first Pellucidar book was published in 1914. I should also throw The Mad King on, although I do have a recently acquired paperback copy of that too. And, incredibly, I haven't ever read the Moon series, I don't think, so I should get that too. Probably as audiobook. Older public domain books on audiobook are great, because you can get them, and usually for free. I've also got Polidori's The Vampyre downloaded, and some of the longer Lovecraft stories: "Call of Cthulhu," "At the Mountains of Madness," "The Dunwich Horror," and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Before I'm done with him, I might also get a few more, but maybe not. I have a new physical copy omnibus of his stuff to read anyway.

I'm still undecided what else to "read" in audiobook format for the remainder of the year, but since I'll continue to commute to and from the office most days, and I'll have to do at least three out of state road trips before the end of the year, I've got plenty of time to listen to plenty of audiobooks.

My Kindle app is one that I don't necessarily spend lots of time on, but I'll still read, I hope, the last book of Rich Wulf's Ashen Legacy trilogy; I've read the first two earlier this year. I'd also like to read Lin Carter's Pellucidar Pastiche; I bought a Zanthodon megapack years ago and still haven't read it. It has all five books of the series included. I have lots more to read, but I doubt I'll get beyond those before the end of the year.

In physical books, I just started my omnibus copy of the Dark Elf prequel trilogy which followed the Halfling Gem trilogy, which I read a couple of years ago again. I haven't ever re-read the Dark Elf prequel trilogy, but I've had a copy for a couple of years or more that I've been meaning to read. I just started last night, and I'm at about 60 pages in, or almost 20% of the first novel. I should finish the first novel this week easily, and all three of them within a couple of weeks tops, even while also reading other stuff. I also have a Black Library Von Carstein trilogy, which I've had for quite a bit longer but also still haven't read, other than the new segments that preceded the actual novels. And then I also have the Arkham Horror Dark Waters trilogy, which I've had out of my boxes for a while and meaning to read, and the original Timothy Zahn Star Wars trilogy too. And then I have the four-book James Silke Horned Helmet series. Although some of those are bundled in anthologies, that's still sixteen novels just by itself, not counting some of the other material, like Dracula, The Mad King and my Solomon Kane collection, which I also want to read this year.

In non-fiction, I have a few books here and there I'd like to read too, so I continue to be quite busy. With my wife out of town between now and the end of the year helping with the birth of my son's twin daughters (she's mostly helping with the three existing small kids) I've got more free time for reading than I'm used to, so I should get a lot of this done. But my to-read list is certainly longer than my likely capability, even so. For one thing, I can only read so much before I get antsy and have to stop and do something. Even if it's just watch a TV show or a movie or something, or get out and take a walk around the neighborhood. 

And let's not even get started on movies I want to watch or TV shows. At least the first seasons of Supernatural and The X-Files. And more. Sigh.

I've also been asked, after I soft-volunteered, to run a Halloween themed one-shot for some guys. I'm not even sure who it will be participating, or what I'll run. I'm seriously thinking of adapting "Exit 23" because, of course, I've run that at least three times in the past, and I know it pretty well. Even though it's been years since I've run it. But a haunted house D&D-like game might go well too, or even the opening to Darkness in the Hill Country. Or something out of my d20 Call of Cthulhu book; it has two interesting one-shot adventures included. Or a Dread game. I've run that before as a Halloween one-shot before.

It'll probably "Exit 23", maybe fleshed out and made a bit longer.