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.
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| Sandpoint, the iconic Varisian starting town. |
- 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.
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