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.