Paizo Iconics - Ezren

Ezren is the first character to have a somewhat interesting backstory, and he does look the part of an actually iconic wizard. Supposedly, he was a middle son (fourth of six, or something like that) of a successful spice merchant in Absalom, so he grew up in a comfortable, affluent environment where little was expected or needed of him. But then, his father's reputation was tarnished with some kind of accusations of heresy or somesuch, which almost completely ruined the family, even though he was completely exonerated. Ezren spent a long time looking into the accusations, and was of course disillusioned to find out that they were all true. He turned his back on his family and life and went away, at the age of 42, to make his fotune.

Unable to get apprenticed because of his age, he's kind of a self-made wizard, and they seem to imply that another decade has passed since him leaving home, at some point he becomes a member of the Pathfinder Society (although as I recall from the radio plays, that was a goal of his, not something he'd already done).

In any case, he's certainly pretty iconic. He's a wizard, he's studious, he's self-taught, he looks old (even though at most he's 52. Paul Rudd is 56, for comparison.) He's not nearly as spicy as Gandalf, but he feels like a decent enough dollar store version of the Gandalf archetype, so he's honestly pretty much exactly what you'd expect a wizard to be. They even have a reason for his spergy "atheistic" approach, although that isn't necessarily iconic, but it's—in his specific case—an interesting touch.

But seriously; 52? Even I'm older than that now (just barely, I might add) and I look considerably younger.

He wasn't an iconic for the first adventure path pregens, because they went with Seoni the sorceress, but he steps in for the second iconic group for Curse of the Crimson Throne. The group itself isn't nearly as iconic, of course, but Ezren is among the most iconic of the group, followed by Harsk—both of which were brought over for the radio play iconics group. 

Although from Absalom, he's specifically called out as ethnic Taldan (many in Absalom are) which are kind of like the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantines, I guess. 

Ezren 1e

Ezren 2e

Paizo Iconics - Kyra

The next Paizo iconic is Kyra, the iconic cleric. Sadly, of course, she's a terrible character. She's a pseudo-Middle Easterner, in Middle Eastern garb that's overly fancy for an adventurer, and she worships a dawn goddess that's associated specifically with the Middle Eastern region, making her iconicness... well, pretty suspect. She's a regional character who has no real business participating in most of the adventures, because there's little reason to expect her to ever be in the region that those adventures take place in.

Her original bio was pretty sparse; something about being the only survivor of a raid of bandits on her village, and becoming a cleric because of that (??) but of course, Paizo couldn't leave well enough alone, and they also decided to make her a lesbian, and eventually even had her married to Merisiel. 

Excepting the gay nonsense, Kyra isn't necessarily a bad character concept, although she's not fleshed out enough to be a good one either, other than the obnoxious brown action grrl vibes that she gives off, but she certainly isn't iconic. If this is what's iconic to the Pathfinder game and setting, then Pathfinder isn't a worthy successor to D&D after all, and isn't itself iconic within the fantasy genre.

She's another character that got redrawn for 2e, but many of those were not necessarily improvements, and Kyra is one in particular that looks even more ridiculous after the redesign than she did before. 

Of course, I have never liked the cleric "archetype" for, among other reasons, that it's not actually archetypal, but if there needs to be one, the 3e iconic cleric, Jozan is actually iconic. He's a white, male cleric of Pelor, the sun god, not a fake Persian or Arabic (or whatever) lesbian girlboss cleric of the girlboss sun goddess. Not that he was super interesting either, but at least he wasn't the polar opposite of iconic from pretty much every angle.

Kyra 1e

Kyra 2e

I don't really love the "pantheon" of Golarion, although I suppose it's mostly pretty D&Dish in all the ways that you'd expect. Then again, I don't really love the pantheon of any of the iconic D&D settings; Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, or Eberron, etc. 

Like I said, I don't really like clerics, but if I had to make an iconic one, it'd be more like Jozan, a cleric of Sol Invictus, who's based—like the original D&D cleric—loosely on William the Conquerer's half-brother Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who according to some probably apocryphal accounts, was forbidden to shed blood, which he took as meaning he couldn't use an edge weapon, so he used a cudgel, mace or some such bludgeoning weapon instead. 

Kyra may have been part of the original four iconics group, highlighted as pregens in Rise of the Runelords and other early Gamemastery modules, but I think it's interesting that there is no cleric in the radio play iconics group; Seoni the sorceress is replaced by Ezren the wizard (coming up next in this series) and Kyra is replaced by Harsk the dwarf ranger. Kyra does play a "guest star" role in the Curse of the Crimson Throne radio play, which is the third of three that they did, where her "relationship" with Merisiel comes out of nowhere and feels very forced. Everything about Kyra feels forced. Like woke retards everywhere, she's created by checking boxes, not by actually being iconic. Which is unfortunate for a character that's supposed to be ... y'know, one of the iconic characters. But the radio play writers made a good choice in sidelining her; she simply isn't interesting, and I don't know what they could have done to make her interesting either. Her guest starring role wasn't; it was quite tacked on, and she had no personality or relationship dynamic until without any warning she's making out with Merisiel at the end. 

Just a tragic waste, Paizo. As you so often do.

Bleeding Edge modules and Rise of the Runelords

Earlier today, I finished all of the Bleeding Edge modules by Green Ronin. There are six of them set in the Ivory Ports, or nearby, which is a pretty standard D&D setting of the pre-4e variety, and the last one is set in Freeport and feels like a regular Freeport module. They call themselves Bleeding Edge, and brag about being written for the "modern gamer" (at the time; this was 2007 or so. "Modern audiences" wasn't a meme yet.) However, other than being kind of dark and edgy sometimes (sometimes childishly and gratuitously so) they weren't really very modern. The penultimate one, "Escape from Ceranir" in particular had a very old-fashioned "funhouse dungeon crawl" feel to it; not what I'd associated with the bleeding edge of modern adventure design; even nearly twenty years ago. Some of them were pretty good, especially the first one, actually (written by Rob Schwalb; not surprising that I liked it better than most of the rest of them) but in general, I'd say that the modules came across as a bit underwhelming and forgettable, for the most part. Of course, I didn't play, them, I just read them, and sometimes reading modules makes your eyes glaze over and your mind wander. I've read reviews of some of these that suggest that they were sloppy, have errors in them, etc. that you definitely notice while playing, if you play them exactly and strictly as written. 

They also suggest at many points while reading the modules that you could take all of them and make a campaign of 1-11 or so level out of them, but honestly, I don't see much in the way of any compelling reason to try and do this. Although in theory some of them are set in the same general area, they also make a point of writing these adventures so that they don't have to be played anywhere in particular, and they are very stand-alone. None of these modules really have any connective tissue; they are just stand-alone modules that you could run in order if you wanted to, but there's no reason to do so. The last one is geographically separated from the rest; it's the only one that is absolutely set in Freeport and therefore doesn't really make sense to link with the rest of them, even if you were inclined to link them at all. 

This isn't necessarily a knock on the series. Even the X-Files had what; maybe 20-25% of its episodes were part of the meta-story, while the other 75-80% were stand-alone "monster of the week" episodes, right? There's definitely a place to run these kinds of modules, and even to run a campaign made of these kinds of modules. So what if they're self-contained and don't connect to the others? Other than that, of course, that's usually seen as a desirable trait, and exactly why the adventure path model was so popular when it launched. In general, I do like the smaller, more grounded stakes of this kind of play, but I want it to be more of a connected, longer arc not just little self-contained units that are completely stand-alone. A whole campaign of smaller stakes, local adventures with more grounded local villains doing things that are more grounded, like murder here and there and stuff like that rather than "conquer or destroy the world, etc." is more my speed. There's no reason fantasy has to have such big high fantasy stakes all the time. James Bond or Mack Bolan aren't less interesting because they fight terrorists and mafiosos, etc. Levon Cade is a fascinating character in fascinating scenarios, but his enemies are as grounded as they get. Liam Neeson's character in Taken; another great example. The Bleeding Edge are obviously more fantasied up than this, but sometimes that's where it went wrong and turned into "just another D&D adventure. While they try to have a dark, edgy horror-like tone, sometimes the monsters and especially the traps are so gratuitous and ridiculous that it completely undercuts that vibe and mood, unfortunately. 

Anyway, I'm more than halfway through the Freeport Trawl now, based on number of titles at least, although probably less than halfway on page-count; the largest books are still ahead of me, I think, including the Pathfinder remake of the setting book (which is insanely long; 700+ pages, if I remember correctly) and the Pathfinder Freeport Adventure path. I haven't looked at that page-count, but I'm sure it's similar to a Paizo adventure path, so six volumes, each about 100 pages each. In general, it's certainly fair to say that so far this Freeport Trawl hasn't changed any of my opinions on Freeport or Green Ronin; the tone is frequently all over the place and often way too campy, it's definitely way too chock full of D&Disms, which fights against the tone that they claim to want to be pursuing, and the proto-wokeness is more obvious in retrospect than it was twenty or twenty five years ago—although the same is also true for WotC and Paizo. One thing that I either didn't know or didn't notice about Green Ronin is that they're kind of sloppy and careless, though, and they were chintzy about repeating the same material across numerous products sometimes. This is a bit surprising to me, because they were considered one of the bigger players in the 00s and even 10s, with lots of innovative-seeming games like Mutants & Masterminds, Blue Rose (admittedly not for me, but it raised eyebrows for charging into a genre nobody else was doing, at least) and relatively big licenses like Black Company, Thieves World, Dragon Age, etc. I'm now thinking Green Ronin really weren't ever really all that. 

Still, when I get done with all of this stuff and get to the new material, like the Pathfinder Adventure path near the end, I'm excited to see what they manage to do, and I hope that they can pull off something that's at least above average. 

Anyway, Rise of the Runelords has some of the opposite problems, as many of the adventure paths do. Like Green Ronin, it's very chock full of tropy D&Disms, and the "save the world from the awakening dark lord of the distant past" is... well, it doesn't get much more tropy than that. Compared to Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tide, it was only at least somewhat more grounded that he was actually an ancient human wizard who'd been in stasis of sorts rather than a monstrous demon lord or something.

Still, I always say that execution beats innovation nine times out of ten, and I'd rather have a tropy and cliche well executed work than an innovative but flawed and unusable one. Runelords does pretty much deliver on that front. In fact, it's got quite a few good moments, and I think "The Skinsaw Murders" in particular is just a great module no matter what context you try to use it in. One of my favorite, in fact, both to read and to run and to play, if I remember our old abortive campaign, which did at least get further along than that. The biggest flaw the campaign overall had was two-fold, but they were intimately related: 1) the modules were a little too unrelated to each other, and didn't come across as a coherent through-line of any sort, which is kind of a minimum expectation for this kind of pre-written campaign, and 2) because of that, you didn't really start even understanding much, if anything, of who the main villain was that you were supposed to be building up to until near the end of the fourth (of six) installments, which is way too late. 

I know, I know; game modules aren't screenplays or novels, and they can't be expected to play out like one exactly, but that doesn't mean that certain things that make those other mediums work very well can't be adapted to a game to make the game medium work very well too. A bit more focus on a more coherent threat that was ratcheting up the tension in a way that didn't feel disconnected or incoherent would make a game better too. I also know that writing a module or campaign that plays well isn't the same as writing one that reads well. Given that I'm reading these campaigns, and if I ever run them, it'll be by deconstructing them entirely, looting their torn apart corpses for whatever ideas I like and putting them in a completely different context, in some ways, I'm more interested in the products being good reads than good plays. Cynically, I think most consumers do too, even though they don't consciously think about it that way, because I think most consumers buy and read a lot more gaming product then they play, and that's actually their main and most common way to engage with the hobby. 

In some ways, I'd almost just as soon see novelizations by somebody famous for doing novel adaptations like Alan Dean Foster or whomever and read that rather than the adventure paths. Although I doubt that they'd do them justice. They wouldn't get Alan Dean Foster, they'd get some woke nobody who'd drop the ball and make them both woke and corporate sloppish. They wouldn't even rise to the level of forgettable D&D fiction. 

Remember, of course, that Paizo did have a run of novels for a while, although I guess that they couldn't keep that profitable, because they eventually ran out and stopped. WotC did the same with official D&D novels, for the most part too. I think Salvatore is the only one still writing, and that's because he's his own brand name now anyway. But Paizo never did have novel adaptations of their adventure paths, sadly. Just radio play adaptations of Rise of the Runelords, Mummy's Mask and Curse of the Crimson Throne. Curiously, in that order. They're... OK. Runelords is probably the best one in most respects.

Sigh

What a crappy weekend. A last minute emergency supply issue (I work for a product manufacturer) had me spending much of my weekend with my work phone on hand, making calls, having meetings, texting all over the place, etc. I'm not going to say that it necessarily took tons and tons of time; it was a few hours, but it meant that I never really "turned off" all weekend, and I'm starting the week already exhausted and frustrated rather than rested and refreshed. Luckily, it's the week of Thanksgiving. It's already slow here in the office today. I've got a few big meetings to attend to, but there won't be a ton going on after today, or a ton of people around to interact with anyway. I'll probably come in to the office tomorrow morning, probably leave around lunch and log in back at home, and probably not even come in at all on Wednesday; just log in at home, and then get an early start on my long drive that I have to make in the evening as soon as I reasonably can.

Luckily, I have meetings falling off my schedule left and right so I think I can recover from being uptight and frustrated most of the last two weeks.

So, I read some stuff, but I didn't have any mental energy to do much more than that, and honestly, I felt like my mind was wandering even while reading. I finished: 1) "Spires of Xin-Shalast" and therefore the entire Rise of the Runelords campaign, in it's originally published version. 2) Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss, finishing something that I started six months ago in reading the Paizo and the Green Ronin fiend books. Technically, I'm not "done" until I also read Fiendish Codex II: Tyranny of the Nine Hells or whatever exactly that title is, but I don't like that one as much, and won't prioritize doing that anytime too soon. I've got too many other things I would rather read first, so it's on the list... but not soon. I also read the next Bleeding Edge module, "Temple of the Death Goddess". And I read most of my physical copy of Classic Horrors Revisited. So, started inadvertently on my Pathfinder Setting/Chronicles trawl too. Given that I've finished another Adventure Path and while shortly finish the Bleeding Edge mini-series, I'll have wrap-ups on those. I may have a fiendish wrap-up too; like I said, I'm not going to wait on the final book before I do that.

I didn't even pick up my last Arkham Horror novel at all. But I'll probably finish that this week. I'll take it with me to Thanksgiving, at least. I'll definitely finish Classic Horrors Revisited today, and then read either Undead Revisited or Mythical Monsters Revisited, both of which are in my backpack. I grabbed all three of those, kind of on a whim, before going to El Paso a couple of weeks ago, so now I feel committed to reading them before I pick anything else up in physical game books. I also have Monster Manual II (3rd edition) picked out that way too. Once I read all three of those books in my backpack, I'll pick up Races of Eberron in hardback and Into the Darklands and Darklands Revisited in Paizo slimmer softback. Once I finish the last novel of the Arkham Horror run, I'll re-read the first two books of the James Silke Horned Helmet series, and then read (for the first time) the last two. And I also have a new (to me, anyway) copy of the Timothy Zahn original post Jedi trilogy to read for the first time in ~30 years. Oh, and the Von Carstein trilogy, which I have in omnibus, and the Solomon Kane collection by Del Rey that I've been meaning to read for years. 

And, of course, in pdf, I need to start Curse of the Crimson Throne, but before I do, I want to read some other pdf books, so I'll probably read The Rise of Tiamat, the second half of the originally as published Tyranny of Dragons book (it was initially published as two books), the 4e Underdark book. the next book in my Forgotten Realms 3e trawl, and the next two installments of my Freeport Trawl, which will finish the subsection on Bleeding Edge adventures.

I've also been asked to step in as a substitute DM for a campaign. I don't think I can pick up the same campaign, since I'm not even a player, and I don't know all of the people playing in it very well. But there are two back to back weeks that they're considering; I could potentially run a 2-shot, if they are amenable to meeting both nights, while the regular DM is out, and we'll see how that goes. If I do, I'll  probably run a modified version of the first Freeport module, including borrowing the Kastor Lieberung concept from Enemy Within, although he'll be a body found on a ship, not on the road, as the PCs approach town. 

It's a relatively slim module, so I think I can do it in two evenings of play, plus I leave them with a little bit of open-endedness that may leave them hungry for more. I'm not trying to poach them away from their current DM, but I wouldn't mind leaving them a little bit hungry for more of me when they can get it. We don't play in our current campaign enough to fill my time—especially while my wife's out of town, but even when she isn't—so I could easily work another campaign in parallel in. Maybe the same is true for some of them.

UPDATE: This stupid work emergency isn't over. I've got a quick touchpoint call this evening after work, and I'll have calls on Thanksgiving and Black Friday both. What a PITA.

Dear Diary, on reading...

I finished the second book of the Dark Waters trilogy the other night, Bones of the Yopasi but I haven't quite started the last one yet. After being pretty bullish on the first book, I'm feeling just a bit more bearish now. Not that this book wasn't as good, because mostly it was, but because I'm just a little bit over MacNeill's obvious flaws. Notably: 1) many of his characters and their dialogue are caricaturish, and the more of that you see, the worse it feels like. I thought it was only mildly obnoxious and occasionally kind of amusing and endearing earlier, but after another novel full of it, I'm less convinced that it was a good idea. A full on Scottish brogue from a guy with Scottish ancestry who was born and lived his whole life in Massachusetts? That was too much. It was the straw that kind of broke the camel's back and now suddenly it wasn't amusing or endearing anymore; it was too much. 2) The namedrops of monsters and characters and locations is also getting to be too much. I appreciate some of it, but I feel like this is really over-the-top in this particular novel too. Again, too much too fast and it went from being a good thing to being an annoying thing.

Other editing gaffes; although he doesn't use homely (when in an American sense it should be homey) as often, he does a few times. He does mention several times burying the lead, which is also incorrect. It's not a lead, it's a lede. I don't necessarily expect authors to know these things. McNeill is Scottish, so it's not surprising that he uses homely instead of homey, because that's what they use in the UK. But it's not what we use in America, where his book is set. And lede/lead; unless you talk to journalists or at least read about journalism, you may not know that. That's not his fault. That's his editors'. That's their job to catch stuff like that.

This doesn't mean that I'm changing my recommendation on reading them. It does mean that... I dunno, I guess maybe they're not impressing me quite as much as I remembered. But I'm still enjoying them. But yeah; just in the last fifty pages or so, there were gratuitous references to "The Horror at Red Hook," "The Strange High House in the Mist", "The Terrible Old Man", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The White Ship", of course "Call of Cthulhu," and probably more that I'm missing. It was a bit much. If you're not a Lovecraft fan already, these won't mean much to you and you may not even get them. 

I also read the module portion of "Sins of the Saviors." I didn't mark it off, because the module portion is just a little over half the page count; I need to read the setting stuff on Rune Magic, Lamashtu, and the Eando Kline serialized short story, as well as the bestiary for this time around. All in all that's a good 40+ pages, but I might finish it tonight. This is one of the least memorable of the early episodes, because it's just a high level magical funhouse dungeon crawl. Not at all my style, and almost everything that happens feels either disconnected from the actual narrative, or only connected to it by fiat, so it feels forced and fake. The final one, "Spires of Xin-Shalast" has a slightly longer module section, and slightly less fluff and mechanical goodies section, for the same overall page count. Still, there's a meme among Pathfinder fans, I guess, that most adventure paths have very strong first halves and less strong second halves. I've always thought that this was true for Rise of the Runelords, at least. 

I think the next adventure path, Curse of the Crimson Throne is also seen as a kind of classic, with more urban intrigue and whatnot. It also takes place in Varisia, but focuses much more on Korvasa. The third one is Second Darkness which seems to widely be considered one of the weakest adventure paths, forced into being just so Paizo could shoe-horn their alternate version of the Underdark and dark elves into the game. It also takes place in Varisia, I guess, starting in Riddleport, and somewhat staying nearby when it's not down in the Darklands. After that is Legacy of Fire, the last one to use the 3.5 rules, and after that is Council of Thieves, the first one that I'm not fairly familiar with, so I'm excited to get to that point and really explore new territory. Of course, after that is Serpent's Skull and Carrion Crown, which I deconstructed years ago here on this blog, and then we get to Jade Regent, which is the Orientalism adventure path, which I was never all that interested in, not being a chinoiserie punk myself. Which is a fancier word for weeabo, I guess. I don't know. The trawl goes on. After I finish Rise of the Runelords I'll probably take a small break and read something else, though. Push through on Freeport, and go back to 3e Forgotten Realms for a book or two or something.

I also started re-reading Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss, which is slimmer than I remembered. The first chapter I remember not liking, but I'm almost finished with it. The second and third chapters are great; new demon monster lists and of course the demon lords. Most of the rest of the book isn't bad either, although the obligatory "new feats, new spells, new magic items" is always pretty boring to me. Prestige classes, on the other hand, are sometimes interesting, especially late in 3.5's run, where they had much more fluff than they used to rather than just focusing on mechanics. After I read this, I've also got Monster Manual II off the shelf, as well as three of the slim Pathfinder Chronicles books (later rebranded as Pathfinder Setting, or whatever exactly they called it.) After those, I'll finally pick up Races of Eberron and get the Eberron trawl moving again too. 

Although I have an insurmountable amount of digital product in particular to read in front of me, my physical copies of things to read are actually getting manageable. I don't have too much stacked up. In fact, I need to start thinking of what novels to read a few months into the new year, because I'll probably be caught up with what I have in the batting order in the next little bit. It'll be time to go box diving to see if I can find books that I either haven't ever read in spite of owning them for some time, or at least haven't read in years and might be interested in reading again. It probably wouldn't kill me to buy a few new novels too, for that matter.

I've also been asked if I'd be willing to be a "substitute DM" for a group that I'm not in, but which overlaps a couple of people with people that I do game with. I'll get more info on that, but if I do run for them, one or possibly even two sessions in early December, I'll probably need to read something to run. Maybe I'll do the first Freeport module, especially if I get committed to two sessions. A two-shot, as it were. It was initially pitched to me as standing in in their current ongoing campaign, but if I'm not misunderstanding that, I don't think that's a reasonable approach. I don't know jack squat about their ongoing campaign or the characters, etc. I'm not even a player in that game. I appreciate the vote of confidence, but that's a tall order. I'd rather do a one or two shot separate from that.

Not that I'm trying to do so, but I wonder if that will let me poach a few of the better players for a better group. My own group, which overlaps two or three players with this group, has two solid guys (other than me) and two somewhat flaky ones who miss a lot and make scheduling often difficult. Ideally, I think we'd like one or two more reliable players, and then we can either take or leave the flaky ones.

But I've been specifically told by one of the players in my group that... er... she doesn't recommend that we attempt to get at least one or two of them in, because they're not the most fun to hang out with. I don't know them well, but I know one and maybe two of them at least well enough to have suspected exactly that; they're kind of super talkative know-it-all smartboys who have to get the last word in on every conversation types. Not creepy, just... not fun to hang out with either. Gammas, mostly.

It's better to play shorthanded than play with the wrong people. Or even not play at all than play with the wrong people, honestly.

UPDATE: It's Friday morning. I'll read some tonight and this weekend, although tomorrow in particular is a bit more busy than I'd like (I'd really love a staycation day where I literally didn't have to leave the house. I have two unscheduled PTO days left for the year. I can roll them over, but I get a lot of PTO next year too, so I might well take just some staycation days in early/mid December. Goals for this weekend to read:

• Read "Spires of Xin-Shalast" and close the book on Rise of the Runelords, at least for this trawl.
• Finish Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss
• Read at least the next Bleeding Edge module in the Freeport Trawl. Maybe the next two, if I'm lucky.
• Queue up and maybe start the next 3e Forgotten Realms trawl book (Lords of Darkness)
• Queue up and start the next novel, Dweller in the Deep by Graham McNeill. As soon as I finish that, I finish the whole Dark Waters trilogy and the whole Arkham Horror two-trilogy novel set that I own. Arkham Horror also published some standalone novels and story collections, but I don't own any of them, and probably won't ever bother. These two trilogies do it for me sufficiently. 
• Queue up and start the next physical copy gaming book, which is actually going to be Classic Horrors Revisited, a relatively slim softcover book by Paizo from back in the late 00s. January 2010. If I'm really on my reading game, I may even finish this. When I went out of town, I took three hardback 3.5 books, Stormwatch, Hordes of the Abyss, and Monster Manual II, but on a whim I also threw three Pathfinder Chronicles books; Classic Horrors Revisited, Undead Revisited, and Mythic Monsters Revisited (I think. I guess I need to make sure those are the ones that I grabbed, but I think so.) In the meantime, I also ordered and received a used copy of Darklands Revisited, so I went ahead and added a whole Pathfinder Chronicles/Setting (they rebranded partway through) trawl, which is quite lengthy. Sigh. More trawls. I'm going crazy with them. I can't put anything else in the queue until I finish what I have already off my shelf and in my backpack, but once I finish all of those, I'll turn to Races of Eberron, Into the Darklands and Darklands Revisited. But that won't be this weekend for sure, and probably not all next week either before I get all that done.
• I'd really like to finish the last of the Heirs of Ash novels, another Eberron trilogy that I'm reading on my Kindle app on my phone, before the end of the year. It'll go pretty fast once I just get it started, but I need to just get it started.

Honestly, I may get tired of reading, so the first two are the only "must dos" and even so, that's close to 200 pages of game book text. I may need to watch something after that just to cleanse the palate. 

Also, here'ssome revised Golarion Remixed bannesr, for use when I need one shortly.

Paizo Iconics - Merisiel

The next iconic to come up is the elf almost manic pixie girl rogue Merisiel. She's one of the Forlorn, which means that she didn't grow up among elves, and by the time she was a "teenager" most of the friends she'd grown up with were dead, some even of old age or other complications related to aging, because she's actually... I dunno, fifty or sixty or something by the time she grows up. She's also iconically not very smart, with intelligence being her obvious dump stat. Not that the writers of the Pathfinder Legends radio plays understood that; all they knew is that if she's the girl, she has to be the most capable and interesting "real" star of the show.

In yet another example of Paizo's inability to read the room, because of their stupid Seattle bubble, they made Merisiel gay, and she's "married" to Kyra—a "Persian" cleric human girl. What a joke. That's beyond silly, and honestly kind of obnoxious, but of course Paizo is Paizo. 

Anyway, another iconic down. Merisiel is one of the most iconic of the iconics, if that means anything, appearing in tons of artwork, appearing as the most iconic adventuring party of pregens in the first adventure path, and appearing in all three of the Pathfinder Legends radio plays as one of the most important main characters.

Merisiel also shows how Pathfinder elves aren't really exactly like D&D elves, although of course, this was the same time as 4e was coming out, so the Pathfinder elves were not too unlike the 4e "eladrin" who replaced elves for that edition. Kinda. Of course, this redesign just makes elves look a little bit like anime characters; too thin to be realistic, really big eyes, solid colored eyes, in fact. Merisiel looks a bit like a shark-eyed waifu anime girl. Blegh. Again, she's not the worst of the iconic characters, but that's mostly because they hadn't degenerated into weirdo concepts yet. They really made way too many iconics. Something like thirty or forty, and then they added another dozen or so new ones for 2e. Geez.

She got new art for 2e again, although she doesn't really look that different, just reposed. And she lost the little pteruges, and the yellowjacket ribbons seem to have swapped to the other leg. And she got a less piratey set of boots, I guess, and a new rapier—now with 80% more basket hilt!

Is it just me too, or do the Pathfinder elf ears look absurd? And why is there a rock or jewel or something glued to her forehead?

Paizo Iconics - Seoni

Seoni is the second iconic given a bio by Paizo. Naturally... she's a bit of a girlboss and a Karen, who apparently is always frustrated with Valeros' impetuosity because she's a planner. She's also very secretive and introverted, I suppose. This was back when the bios were quite a bit shorter, and lacked much depth.

Seoni is described as explicitly being "like" a Gypsy, although her blue eyes and pale ash blonde hair isn't like anything anyone from India (originally) ever had; Gypsies are notably dark haired, dark eyed and darker skinned, even with Balkan European admixture over the years. Of course, saying that Varisians are like Gypsies isn't the same as saying that they are Gypsies, and Paizo have been strangely reluctant to give very consistent phenotypes to any of their human ethnic groups.

She's fine, I guess. What do you want? She's a sorceress, and she's supposed to be mysterious and maybe even a little creepy, but in a way that you're .... fond of? Attracted to if you're super simpy? I dunno. I'd never play her, and I'd never create a character like her, but she's not the worst one by far. She's a little too liberal bohemian "the kind of girl a creepy gamma guy thirsts after" vibe to her, but it's muted... her bio is only a couple of paragraphs long, after all.

Curiously, she's part of the "iconic group" that they used in the Rise of the Runelords campaign as one of the four pregens, along with Kyra, Mirisiel and Valeros. An overly girl-heavy group, no doubt. That said, the Rise of the Runelords audio play done by Pathfinder Legends doesn't use that group; it's Valeros, Ezren, Merisiel and Harsk. The six covers of the Rise of the Runelords modules have Valeros, Seoni, Merisiel, Kyra, Ezren and Harsk respectively, so I guess that makes sense why they went with that. Of course, they then did audioplays of Curse of the Crimson Throne and The Mummy's Mask, using the same four characters (although Kyra makes a substantial guest star appearance through about half of Crimson Throne.) None of these characters are on the covers of Crimson Throne, and by Mummy's Mask, they weren't putting iconics as the featured character anymore, they were using NPCs that featured in that adventure. (Of course, they were still in all the artwork in the module, including the "cover art" behind the featured character.)

Maybe the audioplay writers figured Seoni wasn't an interesting enough character to be able to write a radio play for. An introvert who's mysterious means she... just doesn't say much and therefore doesn't have a lot to do. All of the characters that they did use are ones that they could easily give plenty of dialogue to, and keep them very distinct in their characterizations. Broad, in other words. 

Seoni, in spite of the fact that she's described as pretty uncharismatic and kind of unlikeable even, of course has a really high charisma, because she's a sorceress, so she has to. Bit of a miss there. Her dexterity is also pretty good, and her wisdom ain't bad; her strength is ... well, like a thin little girl, which she is, I guess, and her intelligence is average. Decent constitution, but nothing special. Apparently she's one of the more popular ones for modestly attractive girls to cosplay, probably because her outfit is pretty skimpy, so all the guys give her a ton of attention when she does.  She's also one of the ones that got redesigned slightly from 1e to 2e, although in her case, it mostly just gives her Chun-li thunder thighs after the redesign, and makes her a little less dreamish looking, like she's high or in a trance. Also her added cloak looks a little bit less immodest and maybe a little bit warmer or something.

Golarion Remixed - first steps

Sigh. I'm having trouble getting to a lot of sites. It looks like there's some kind of major Cloudfare outage. I hate the internet sometimes. I liked the internet of the 90s and 00s. Back when it wasn't full of corporate slop. Speaking of which, I was thinking about corporate slop with regards to WotC and their recent offerings. Although I'm not a huge fan of it, I do think that the 5e system is probably fine. It's probably better than my "beloved" 3e, honestly, although I'm obviously more familiar with 3e and understand it better. Plus, I'm currently re-reading lots of 3e books, so I'm feeling more charitable towards the system and its foibles now than I might otherwise feel. However, 5e has a definite trend wherein most of what it's done that's good, especially in the campaign adventures or books, which tend to be a huge chunk of what they're doing, is recycled. In this regard, they're not different than any other useless corporate slop factory, like Hollywood. In the last week or two we got a piss-poor Running Man remake (apparently, more faithful to the original story, which of course means that it sucks more. Suck it, Stephen King. You're not all that after all.) We had a mediocre Predator movie. Depending on how you count it, it's either the sixth or the eighth Predator movie (if you count the AVP movies) and one guy even references some obscure 9th movie that I've never heard of. Some animation on Hulu or something. In the 80s, we had good sci-fi genre movies, but they were unique, new and innovative. Today, they're still milking those same franchises, or trying to, to vastly diminishing returns with completely mediocre, forgettable products that are watered down beyond all reason. Almost nothing from Hollywood is original anymore, or innovative or even interesting, and only a few creators are even given the latitude to try something like that (Christopher Nolan, I guess? A few others here and there.) The Hollywood news is about how 2025, which was supposed to "save" the industry, has been incredibly disappointing, but hardly anyone wants to recognize (within the industry, anyway—pop culture pundits on YouTube are going crazy with this) what the obvious issue is; Hollywood has no creativity, their uncreative and banal and frankly kind of stupid management has their fingers in the product dumbing it down, playing it safe, and making everything turn into useless corporate slop which, at best, attempts merely to regurgitate a slop version of something that was successful a generation or two ago. 

WotC, of course, is doing the same thing, as noted. Their most popular, as near as I can tell, campaign is Curse of Strahd, which of course is a remake of the old Ravenloft module from 1983. Most of their campaigns are the same; repackaging of older classic material; Tales of the Yawning Portal, Tomb of Annihilation, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, etc. They're mostly all repackaging of older material. Very little has been created that's actually original, and when they do, it's rarely interesting. Tales of the Radiant Citadel was—in theory—original, but in actuality, is a repetitive regurgitation of crappy corporate slop. I'm sure I'm missing something, but the only recent decently good (or at least reasonably well-regarded, as near as I can tell) adventure that's new is the Icewind Dale winter one. 

And all of this is within a narrowly constricted frame of reference to begin with. It's one thing to say that a module is innovative or original, but at the end of the day, it's a module. The format itself isn't innovative or original anymore, so you have limited capability to be innovative or original to begin with. The innovation and originality was all 40+ years ago when the concept of the module was formulated and there was some trial and error around how to actually do it effectively. Some of these early adventure paths, like what I'm reading now, were pretty good for what they were. They were reasonably well executed and high quality. But they weren't really all that innovative or original, except by comparison to what WotC is doing.

Now, outside of the big producers of content, there's plenty of good stuff going on. That's what happens when an industry gets to the point where its unable to actually serve its primary function anymore, especially hobbyist or entertainment industries; there's a cottage industry of independents and hobbyists who do better work than the professionals. WotC isn't completely useless, but they're just repackaging stuff from the 80s, mostly. Paizo is a little better, and Kobold Press, but I'd still suggest that the real interesting stuff isn't coming out of any of the businesses in Seattle. Green Ronin, as much as I like Freeport and the Freeport Trawl really kind of started the whole trawl business I'm going through, isn't great either—I'm noticing that they're pretty sloppy. Even when they have good ideas, they require a fair bit of rework. But Green Ronin is another split off of former WotC employees.

Anyway, I spent more time writing about that than I meant to. What I meant to talk about was what I'm going to do with Golarion Remixed. First of all, I have to point out that Eberron Remixed didn't radically rewrite anything. I mostly just adjusted things to be less proto-woke, more sword & sorcery and noir and less high fantasy and superheroes. My reworking of Ustalav into Timischburg, on the other hand, was more radical; I completely rearranged the geography, renamed everything; it's basically a completely different setting, albeit one with similar themes. So which am I going to go with for Golarion Remixed?

I'm pretty sure I'm going to lean into doing it like I did Eberron. If I incorporate Ustalav, which I probably will, it'll actually be Ustalav, not Timischburg. But the other problem I'll have is that there's more material to review than there was for Eberron, so it'll be difficult to do. Rather than "remix" each nation, I'll be much more likely to focus on nations that interest me, and maybe their immediate neighbors if that's relevant, so I'll end up with a weird patchwork of stuff that's been done and stuff that hasn't and probably won't be. Which is fine; technically, that's kind of how the development itself was done. Many nations never really went beyond their high level summary, until an adventure or adventure path was set there.

Sandpoint, the iconic Varisian starting town.

Which are the ones that I want to target as part of my first wave? My favorite nations in the Golarion setting are:

• Varisia
• Ustalav
• Osirion

So I'll definitely start there. However, that suggests some things too.

• Belkzen is between Varisia and Ustalav, so it probably needs to be done. Or at least mentioned.
• Cheliax and Taldor are vastly important in the inner sea region, and are pretty interesting. They are second wave ones to remix. Same for Absalom
• I also like some of the other "North African" nations, specifically Katapesh.
• There's a bunch of stuff that I probably need to talk about because they are in neighboring some of these. I wonder if I want to talk about, like Molthune, Nimrathas, Lastwall/Gravelands, etc. Honestly, I wonder if I even want all of them. I like the idea of old Taldor breaking in half between the "western Roman Empire" Cheliax and "Byzantine Empire" Taldor, but there are a bunch of other Taldan successor states. Too many, really, and I feel like they are kind of extraneous. So, I probably need to address what Paizo has done, and what I will do; if I ignore them, I should at least have a handwavey explanation for what I'm doing with some of the neighbors of the main ones I want to do.
• I never was a huge fan of the Underdark concept; I liked it, but didn't love it. Paizo's Darklands is probably the best "Underdark" I've seen, though, so I'll probably do that as part of the second wave too. I've got Into the Darklands and I ordered up a copy of Darklands Revisited which I had somehow missed, and it'll be in my hot little hands before I get that far.

Finally; I think it's worth pointing out that the setting had some major updates going from 1e to 2e; baseline Golarion vs. Lost Omens Golarion. Honestly, I'm mostly going with 1e Golarion because I know it better, but on the off-chance that some change is better than what came before, I'll adopt it. There were even more changes going from 2e to "Remastered" but I probably won't actually adopt many of those changes. Many of them, like the elimination of the drow entirely, were way too radical, and others, like the renaming of duergar or troglodytes are pointless to me, so I don't care.

Another thing that I can obviously confirm is that I'll be eliminating or at least changing a lot of the DEI NPCs and Iconics. There's no reason why some of these exotic women adventurers would be in the regions that they're shown in, honestly. Women being equivalent to men is ridiculous, and that particular stupid idea has naturally fallen into disfavor strongly after Paizo went all in on it. I don't have a problem with women PCs; they're exceptional, after all. But assuming that most security and fighter types are women when any idiot knows that they're not physically or psychologically equipped to stand toe-to-toe with men in a lot of those roles is very 2020. It was stupid in 2020 too, don't kid yourself, but nobody takes that idea seriously anymore. Women in administrative roles, like mayors and whatnot works a little better, but there's still way too many of them; it isn't even realistic in today's world, much less one modeled on the Medieval one.

Also, since Golarion's nations are largely based on real world nations, loosely, anyway, the idea of Medieval Persians (in their ethnic dress, no less) and Medieval Africans, Medieval Asians, etc. wandering around northern Europe is kind of silly; it just strikes me as unbelievable, as we don't have any reports of that happening at all. There are few enough reports of Europeans wandering around Asia, Africa or the Middle East during the Middle Ages, although to be fair some of the stuff isn't really Medieval; much of the Osirion stuff is easily represented by European re-discovery of Egypt in the 1800s, etc.

Plus, while I don't mind some diversity, especially in the iconics, who are supposed to represent all kinds of possible player configurations, lets not forget that this hobby is one invented by and largely still populated by white guys in North America and to a lesser extent Europe. WotC likes to crow about the "changing face of the hobby" but it's largely wishful thinking. While more black, Hispanic, Asian, etc. people are probably playing than before, and more theater kid girls and women are involved than before, let's not kid ourselves; the hobby is still a white guy hobby. More to the point, I'm a white guy, and this is my remixing, so naturally I'm going to make it more to my taste. Which happens, I believe, to align with the majority opinion. The idea that these multicultural, multicolored, multiethnic places that look a lot of medieval Europe are popular is clearly not true, or all of the fantasy streaming shows that really want to be the next Game of Thrones but don't know how to would be more successful than they are.

To be fair, they have more problems than just that. But it is one that's been remarked on by most.

Paizo iconics - Valeros

I liked the idea of iconics, which Paizo has been doing since before their game came out. Heck, Wizards of the Coast kinda sorta did it too with the 3e iconics. Sadly, those iconics were never explored too well... I say as I recall that there were actually novels written about at least some of them, although I've never read them. Other than that, though—their exploits, their biographies, etc.—I don't know much about them. The Paizo iconics, on the other hand, are fairly well defined with detailed biographies written in blog posts, and some degree of discussion about their interconnectedness even. I wonder if some of the iconics were actual PCs that the staff had?

Anyway, Valeros is the most iconic of the iconics, in my opinion, because he's a fighter, the most iconic class. He's also the one on the cover of the very first adventure, "Burnt Offerings", and he seems to appear the most, or at least considerably more than most, in the art. Unlike many, who have a weird fish out of water approach, Valeros is also a local of the northern shore of the inner sea, being of Taldan descent, and coming from a small faming village in what is now Andoran. Fighters tend to be the kind of "jocks" of the D&D world, and as D&D has been taken over largely by resentful math nerds and entitled theater kids, jocks are often given short shrift, made fun of, and deliberately humiliated and treated as if they are stupid or hapless or both. Valeros, at least according to his initial biography, was none of those things, coming across in many respects like a archetypical Sigma. But as his biography developed, he—sadly—picked up some stupid, simpy stuff here and there. Heck, it happened to better men than him. I still recommend avoiding No Time to Die altogether. James Bond as a tired old hack getting upstaged by ridiculous empowered grrlbosses and dying while crying and holding a manky old teddy bear named Dou Dou. Yes, in French, which is even worse, that sounds like doo-doo. 

So it's a bit sad to me to see how Valeros has been treated by Paizo after a strong start. He was treated even worse in the radio plays, where Merisiel constantly seems to mock him and get the better of him in kind of unlikeable verbal repartee—even though 1st level statblocks, as shown in "Burnt Offerings" have Meris with an intelligence of 8 and Valeros with one of 13. Harsk and Ezren also often complain about Valeros—not so much his character and personality, although I think that they're trying to pass it off as if that's what it is, but the fact that he's a caricaturish high school jock and they're the smug, superior science nerds.

It's really sad when you can understand exactly what motivates a writer so transparently. Gammas, however, are not known for their ability to let go of imagined slights and resentment, so 40+ year old gammas still obsessing about what happened (or didn't happen) in high school is pretty on brand for them, I'm afraid. I have no idea what my own personal social ranking would be, but I do find that literary gammas are as annoying as real life ones, and literary settings and characters that glorify gamma self-delusion are painful to read. Sigmas tend to be the characters that I admire and empathize with the most. Which is one of the reasons I really like Rafael Sabatini's characters. Although a bit simpy by today's standards, by the standards of 100+ years ago, when he wrote, that was seen as gallantry and loyalty for the most part, so it's a bit more workable. In fact, if Peter Blood and Andre-Louis Moreau were as likely to write off everyone who irritated them for a moment as I tend to be, that would correctly be seen as a vice, not a virtue. Some grace and patience for the minor flaws in otherwise good people is not exactly simpy, except by today's wretched standards of behavior, of course. 

And Valeros, at least in his initial bio, comes across as kind of Sigma-like too. He does what's right, even if it's not necessarily what's best. He's super competent at what he does, and does what he wants to do. Because it's D&D, he's part of a group, but not necessarily long-term, and he's wandered in and out of his basic adventuring party, depending on the campaign. 

Sigh. I can't help but think that Paizo and Pathfinder Legends did Valeros kind of dirty.

Above is the original Valeros portrait, by the inestimable Wayne Reynolds. There is a higher res version on Paizo's blog, I think, but it's been down for a few days, so I got that off the Pathfinder wiki. Below is the Second Edition revision of his portrait. I don't know why changing editions made him need to look different, but about half a dozen or so of the iconic characters got minor facelifts. Maybe it's because he switched from sword & dagger to sword & board with the new rules?

Golarion Remixed

Wow, I need to redo that banner image. Adding the canvas filter to it was probably fine for the word Golarion, but it made the light effect look really stupid. Oh, well. There's always another chance to whip up an improved banner. 

I've been thinking about how exactly I'd do this. When I did Eberron Remixed, I literally went through the entire campaign setting, and made annotations for every chapter. While there is a pretty good Golarion setting book, which I bought when it was new some seventeen years or so ago, I don't think that's the best way to handle Golarion. The setting book is quite high level, and much of what was in it has been superseded by subsequent material. The setting book isn't as "definitive" as it is in Eberron, and unlike Eberron, it isn't as comprehensive. I remember clearly making the comparison at the time that the Golarion book was $10 more cover price ($50 vs $40) than Eberron, or the earlier Forgotten Realms book, but the two official D&D settings were both at least 50 pages longer. I mean, $50 spent almost twenty years ago is water under the bridge, but I still feel like the setting is a little light as a product for what I paid. The real problem, though, is how decentralized the setting development is. The Golarion setting book is almost too high level to be useful for what I'm looking to do.

Rather, I think that the approach to take with Golarion is to treat the regions that work as "mini-campaign settings" in their own right need to be remixed discretely. I.e., rather than remixing all of Golarion, I'll remix a section as needed when I need it. Golarion—if you're not too Spotify and Gen-Z to not know this—is more like a full album rather than a track or two. You don't need to remix the whole album to get a remix of just one song that you want to remix. Heck, some of the regions never did really get much more than a high level treatment.

I'm sure that's true for places in Eberron and Forgotten Realms too, of course (in fact, I know it is—I would have liked to see more specifically about Q'barra or the Shadow Marches, for instance, but we never did) but it's especially true for Golarion, so it needs to be treated somewhat differently.

Anyway, aside from that, I've added a lot more pages, most of them reading trawl lists of big subsets of gaming books that I'd like to read or, more commonly, re-read, since in many cases I haven't done so since buying them over 15-20 years ago. There's obviously way too much stuff. It'll take me the better part of a year just to read the Paizo Adventure paths, much less all of the 1e standalone modules, Chronicles/Setting books, Companion books, etc. And all of the 3e WotC modules. And the big stack of Goodman Games modules that I got in those two humble bundles that I bought, etc.

I've got way too many gaming products. And I don't want to just read gaming products, so I have a bunch of novels that I'm reading too. Anyway, last night I finished the fourth module of the Rise of the Runelords campaign, and I'll want to read the fifth and sixth relatively quickly—probably this week, and then I can step away for at least a few days from Adventure Paths. Also just read the next Bleeding Edge module as part of my Freeport Trawl. Those are relatively short modules, so I feel like I can get them done faster; there are three more, at which point I think I've also earned a break on the Freeport stuff after hitting a natural milestone. And I have two hardback 3e books in my backpack to read; on my trip I finished Stormwrack, and now I have Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and Monster Manual II on tap. I also have three of the much slimmer Pathfinder Chronicles books in my backpack, so I'll be busy with hard copy books for a while, but when I finish this small set, I need to pick up Races of Eberron to keep the Eberron Trawl alive. The 3e Forgotten Realms trawl also hasn't seen any action in weeks. I'm about a third of the way through book two of the Dark Waters trilogy in novels; so I want to finish that one quickly and read the last one quickly too, and I can rebox those particular books and look at what's going to be next after that. (Which I think will be the four-part Horned Helmet series by James Silke.)

Sigh. I wish I could afford to retire. I'd spend much of my time overlanding, and reading. I'd love to be reading from a rooftop tent or camp chair on my raised truck or jeep in the southwestern desert right now. Spend my days driving and hiking and my evenings reading. But I'm not there yet. And not until I pay off my house anyway.

Golarion Remixed and Pantheon Option Added

First off, a diversion. I read a fair bit while traveling, because that's mostly what I do when traveling for business and not actually working. I rarely have time to do any significant site-seeing on business trips, so I mostly load up on books. I finished Salvatore's Exile, which I was about halfway through at the start of the trip, the second book in the Dark Elf prequel trilogy, and I also read Sojourn, the final book. I'd read these before; they were all published in the very early 90s, and I probably read them by the mid-90s at the latest. I remember liking them, and don't get me wrong; I did again, but I almost wish that I hadn't bought them, because now I have them, and I doubt I'll read them again. I think that prequels generally shouldn't be done. You already know where it's going to end up, because of the prequel is a neologism of sequel, i.e., the book (or movie, etc.) that takes place later was actually made first, and this is a sequel that takes place earlier. I'm convinced more and more that while there's always a strong desire to explore the origin of a popular character before he really became that character, it rarely works out well. The Star Wars prequels were disappointing. Solo was disappointing, and shouldn't have been made. Wolverine: Origin was OK, but Marvel were right to be suspicious of it. Ultimately, although it was pretty good and no doubt sold like crazy, it probably did more damage to the "brand" of Wolverine than anything else in the end. And here; Drizzt was a cool character. As Salvatore himself "discovered" while writing the original Icewind Dale trilogy, which was supposed to star Wulfgar as the protagonist, Drizzt ended up being a much more intriguing character, and was the real break-out star of the series, and of his writing as a whole. But seeing him as he was before he was the character that we know was mostly kept afloat by the—at the time, still—exotic environment of the Underdark and the dark elf society, which was more intriguing than Drizzt as a teenager or whatever.

But I already discussed this somewhat in my brief mention of having finished the first book of the trilogy, Homeland; rather, what struck me this time, although again, it's hardly revelatory, just something that struck me particularly this time around, was that neither Drizzt nor Wulfgar, despite being indubitably D&D characters created for a D&D setting, and statted out in various D&D products, don't behave anything like D&D characters in most respects as you watch their bildungsroman in The Crystal Shard and this trilogy in particular. Rather, they start out as exceptional individuals, who go through what amounts to little more than a Rocky-style training montage, and then they're superlative characters who change very little over the course of multiple books after that. Certainly they change very little in terms of powers, abilities or capabilities; I don't mean to imply that they don't have character development. But it is nothing at all like the progression of levels in a D&D game. It just doesn't work very well, does it? The whole leveling thing is a gamism that doesn't resemble anything in the mediums which supposedly informed the game. You don't see anything like leveling in Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. They may learn, grow and age, but they don't "level up" or anything at all like that. James Bond doesn't "level up" (or have a backstory either, for that matter) he just is and we like him as he is. 

Anyway, I dunno. I kind of like leveling in my own games, but I also like flat power curves and more "static" characters. Static at least in the sense that they don't have some crazy power curve, but they just kind of are, and things that happen to increase their capabilities are more in line with things that happen in real life; acquiring materiel that would give them more capabilities, learning something new through study, getting promoted or otherwise creating a network of relationships that offer support, etc. I'm starting to lean more and more into the house rule of smoothing the leveling and minimizing its obviousness, if not eliminating it altogether

Secondly, Paizo. I've been reading and finding lots of stuff on Paizo and the Golarion setting, and watching YouTube videos by MythKeeper and stuff. It's an interesting setting. To use it, I'd still have to make lots of changes. I like the frontier "Varisia" region quite a bit, for example, but I hate Kaer Maga, the "City of Strangers" and I'd have to swap some other city in its place entirely. I'm not a huge fan of the rune magic themes of ancient Thassilon, with their Seven Deadly Sins stuff either, nor am I a huge fan of Deliverance-style ogres (which I honestly find more and more offensive the more I encounter that particular stereotype) or the "Against the Giants" vibe of the fourth installment (the one I just finished) or their take on goblins, honestly. I like the more honest and "playing-it-straight" vibe of goblins in D&D rather than an attempt to hijack them into comic relief, or at least dark silliness. Goblins in Golarion are more like the gremlins of the Gremlins movie than they are like goblins of D&D or Lord of the Rings. They even kind of look like them.

What struck me about Pathfinder, especially as I started to find out about the changes made from 1e to 2e, and even moreso the changes from 2e to the Remastered Project, was that people who went to Paizo in 2007-9 or so often cited the reason for doing so that 4e didn't resemble D&D enough, and it made too many changes to the mechanics and especially to the lore of the game. So, they stuck with Pathfinder, which felt like just another setting—albeit one with high production and writing values, and one still strongly supported—of D&D. Paizo in the early days was more similar to Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms than 4e was, or even 3.5's own Eberron setting. But Golarion of today, post Remastered Project, is less like D&D than 4e was in terms of lore, and honestly, has a lot of similarities to 4e in terms of mechanics, in many ways. It's interesting how the tables turn. I think it's a case of the boiled frog analogy that people love to refer to; 4e was too many changes too fast for most people, but honestly, many of its ideas were good ideas. Many of its mechanics have wormed their way into Pathfinder and 5e and the whole modern ecosystem of games, for instance, and many of its lore changes (which I was always a fan of relative to the "traditional" lore as represented in its later stages by 3e and again in many ways by 5e). I wonder if many of those people who hated the 4e lore are perfectly comfortable now with Pathfinder Remastered's lore or not.

Anyway, I'm thinking of doodling a bit with Varisia like I did with Timischburg. That was my attempt to make a "fake Ustalav", and I think I'd like a fake Varisia too. Varisia may not be my favorite single element of the Golarion setting, but then again, it might be. It's a good one. In some ways, the Hill Country is an even more mundane version of Varisia, and I've deliberately added two city-states that were inspired in many ways by the rivalry between Korvosa and Magnimar in my own Garenport and Barrowmere. I can re-do some of the geography, rename the Hill Country and add some more Varisia-like elements to it, and make an alternate setting that includes some traditional D&D-like races, sort of like my High Fantasy X project, such as it was, was. The draft map I sketched up for High Fantasy X was more like Eberron meets Heroes of Might & Magic III, but there's no reason not to have more than one setting for the game. I like creating settings for its own sake, after all. This one will be more explicitly Golarion Remixed, and maybe I'll use that tag, which I haven't done much with, to explore how I'd change elements of it. 

Whatever I do as part of my "Golarion Remixed" project, it'll probably be more radical than my Eberron Remixed project. Eberron feels more like a single setting with multiple areas in it, while Golarion feels almost like a patchwork of settings that are connected, but for any given campaign, you're not really expected to use more than one of the elements. Maybe two at the most. A campaign set in Varisia is not going to go to Absalom or Katapesh, for instance. Each area has its own tone and theme. If all that makes any sense.

Finally, I also want to have the alternative of using fantasy deities, a mythological pantheon, even if I'm not sure if I prefer that, or not. But certainly, it will help D&D players adjust to my more esoteric tastes if I wean them in by making games I run resemble what they're expecting just a little more. Anyway, here's my full list of gods that I'd use for High Fantasy X, Golarion Remixed (maybe), Eberron Remixed (maybe) and even as an alternative in Old Night if I wanted to do it that way.

Sol Invictus - sun god (as you'd expect) with a martial aspect. More like Pelor than like Apollo. Originally a Roman god.

Cernunnos, the Horned King - nature god from Gaulish/Celtic origin, with antlers. Not super friendly.

Summanus the Thunderer - an obscure Roman god. I'm less likely to go with the "god of xxx" kind of thing; in real mythology, gods were just characters, and they didn't necessarily belong to domains and spheres of influence as much as we like to make them be. Thor, for instance, was never once called the God of Thunder, or even the Thunderer in any Norse text. He did have a hammer that thundered when he smote with it, but he was just an adventurer Norse god with a quick temper who was very strong, heroic, and featured in more stories than most. But I agree that for D&D there probably needs to be some element of that. 

Mithras - another late-appearing Roman god, famous for his mystery cult that was popular among the legions and the foederati, so he's often considered a martial god.

Chernavog, the Dark One - a Slavic god, although I've spelled it slightly differently than normal, who also happens to be the character from the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence of Fantasia. I consider him a pretty typical dark lord style figure. 

Veles, the Sly Mage - both a trickster figure, and a god of magic of sorts; Veles is also a Slavic god originally.

Tellus, the Earth-Mother - an old Greek or Roman spelling of Terra. Pretty typical Mother Earth type of goddess.

The Gray Sisters: Wyrd, Verthand, and Skuld - The Gray Sisters is usually a literal translation of the Graeae, which were Greek (famous for their interaction with Perseus, if you've watched Clash of the Titans lately) but I've used names that are more similar to Anglo-Saxon versions of the Norse Norns. Obviously they are both old Indo-European reflections of the same idea anyway, since the Graeae and the Norns are almost identical. Goddesses of fate, divination, etc. but with a darker, edgier tone than some might have had otherwise. 

Nodens, the Silver-Handed; Lord of the Hunt - A Celtic British god, also known by his Irish name Nuada or Nuadha, although the name Nodens itself is familiar to many gamers from Lovecraft. A huntsman and fisherman, he's kind of like the iconic ranger, maybe.

Brigantia, the Mistress of Victory - a poorly attested Celtic goddess. Well, actually she's fairly well-attested in terms of figurines, but we know little about her. Not unlike Nike, the Greek Goddess of Victory, and also often conflated with the Romans with Minerva (Athena). I'd probably see her as the unlikeable girlboss of the gods that the other gods either are annoyed by, or are constantly putting in her place, although she's lacking in self-awareness enough to realize it.

Epona - Gaulish goddess of horses. Maybe some elements of Artemis too; a weird, wandering loner of a girl who prefers the company of animals, especially horses, to anyone else.

Sirona, the Healer - another poorly known Celtic goddess (I'm using lots of them, if you didn't notice) but I'll call her the pretty stereotypical Florence Nightingale goddess that D&D pantheons seem to always have.

Tzovinar, Daughter of the Seas - an Armenian goddess. I just like the name and the title that came with her. I was thinking of using Thetis, a Greek chthonic goddess of the seas, and the bad guy from Clash of the Titans, but I like this name better. I need to mix up a few more goddesses, because I'm wont otherwise to ignore them and make the whole pantheon a big ole sausage party.

Mokosh, the Swamp Mother - I can't even remember where I got this name. But a hag goddess in a swamp sounded kind of cool.

Volturnus, the Father of the River - I thought about using Father Ren, or Father Rhine from the Germanic tribes, but I relented and went with this more "generic" Roman name. An aquatic god, obviously, and maybe someone who's frequently irritated by Mokosh and Tzovinar.

Ceres - a Roman goddess of the hearth, agriculture, marriage and domesticity in general, often equated with Demeter, and who picked up the same story of Demeter and Persephone and Hades, except the names were Ceres and Proserpina and Dis Pater in those roles to the Romans.

Dagon - a dark god of the ocean, who borrows more from the Lovecraft and D&D demon lord stuff than from mythology per se.

Orcus - another name for Pluto to the Romans, but of course, he's got a long history in D&D which I'll also be borrowing; a dark demon-god, associated with undeath. He may be more like Orcus as Tenebrous, though—an undead thing. Maybe like Nagash from Warhammer in fact.

Thanatos - another alternate name for either Hades or his realm to the Greeks, although in D&D of course, this is Orcus' layer of the Abyss. I'll call him a dark god of night and murder, maybe not too unlike Zon-Kuthon of Golarion; corrupted by the Dark Tapestry, or Far Realm, or Outer Darkness, or Void Beyond, or whatever I want to call it. Conceptually, they're all the same thing. 

Zaltys, the Serpent - a snake god. The name comes from Lithuanian, and refers to the home snakes that they used to keep for whatever reason. The Teutonic crusaders who brought Christianity with the sword to the Baltic peoples killed a lot of their snakes. Elements of Yig, Ydersius, Sertrous and more

Nwt, the Sky-mother - an Egyptian goddess of the night sky.

Ashtar of the Sacred Groves - A Semitic goddess, usually known as either Ishtar or Astarte depending on the language, but I've split the difference. Infamous for her sacred groves and temple heirodules, or "sacred prostitutes" in real life. 

The Old Men of the Sea; Manann, Thaumant, and Halios Geron - odd spellings of Greek gods and one Irish god of the Sea. I thought it'd be cool to have them be a trio rather than just one. 

I've also got all my Lovecraftian entities from earlier posts, but I won't propose them as part of the pantheon that PCs could conceivably worship.

NYC

What's his name, the communist Islamicist anti-American who won the mayoral race for NYC; how did it happen? Wring hands.

The answer is pretty obvious, although hardest hit will be virtue-signaling conservatives who applauded it happening until they suddenly realized what it meant. If they've even yet realized what caused the election result.

The big White Flight dip in the 70s is pretty notable too, of course. Same thing happened in most inner cities, perhaps most visibly in Detroit. Thanks, George Romney. You are ultimately responsible for this. You and everyone else who embraced your hateful, anti-American ideology that America wasn't for Americans and had to be stolen from them and given to any rough savage who came along and demanded access to it.

Vox Day said, about this same graph: 

The result of the mayoral election was not only inevitable, it was one of the primary objectives of the architects of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. This is exactly what those who hate America, hate Christianity, and hate Western Civilization have sought to accomplish since the turn of the 20th Century. Note the steep 25 percent decline in a decade after 1965.

This is the intended result of the so-called “Melting Pot”. It always was. And as New York City has gone, as Minneapolis has gone, so too will go the rest of the United States if Americans do not take control of their country back from the foreigners who have usurped their right to rule themselves.

And contra the New and Improved Nickles Fuentes, an American is not anyone who was born inside the geographic boundaries of the United States, or who was given a piece of paper by the federal government, but rather, the legitimate Posterity of the American revolutionaries for whom the Constitution was written.

Conservatives conserve nothing. They couldn’t conserve America. They couldn’t even conserve the definition of “American”. Which is why conservatism is not, and cannot be, part of the solution.

It's not rocket science. It's literally right there in the Preamble.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

There's been a lot of sophistry around who exactly are the Posterity of the Founding Fathers, but it's blatant and obvious sophistry, because the meaning of the words are quite clear, especially in context. The people who want it to mean something else clearly are afraid—and rightly so, in many cases—that they don't have a legitimate claim of being the Posterity of the Founding Fathers, therefore they engage in sophistry to blow smoke in the faces of the actual Posterity of the Founding Fathers and confuse them in an attempt to claim their legacy for themselves. 

Sorta like a certain stereotype of a certain tribe of lawyers and other corrupt rentiers who engage in stereotypical sophistry in an attempt to bamboozle populations all over Western Civilization since the time that they were a minor yet troublesome Middle eastern tribe in the Roman Empire. Hmm...