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.