First, I ran "Exit 23" on Halloween night, adapted to my game system. I was pretty rusty and kind of tired after a long and somewhat frustrating week of work, so I wasn't—unfortunately—running at my peak. But it was still successful for what I wanted it to be; a fun evening one-shot that's significantly different than what we normally play, followed by a bit of socializing and getting to know each other better. I don't feel like our group is very social. The group is basically a husband and wife (and we play at their house, because they have a "special needs" kid of about ten or so that they can't both leave their home very easily) and a father/son group pair. The father/son are the least social and more "business" of the pair, and they weren't there either this weekend. The husband/wife also go to church with me and I do see them outside of gaming sometimes. In fact, the husband had a whole long discussion with my wife when they found out that they were born the same day. If you adjust for the time zones they were born in, they were also born about at the same time of day too, which we thought was kind of funny.
I feel like our group is at a bit of a turning point. The father/son pair have been a bit flaky lately, and disengaged, not just socially but in general. The husband/wife talked to me about the need to have the so-called "come to Jesus" discussion with them about whether we're doing this Tyranny of Dragons campaign or not, since we haven't played in over two months due to scheduling issues. Three people as part of a group is a bit on the small side... but I'd rather a small group that's reliable and I enjoy than a larger group that is less reliable and half of the guys aren't super engaged. We'll see how it goes. The husband/wife are pretty big-time 5e people, even though they're not really build-focused players or mechanics focused players at all, for that matter. They just have too much inertia to play something else that covers the same space, i.e., highish super-heroic fantasy. (Ironically for a specifically D&D experience, I kind of feel the same about 3e. But I don't care for the specific D&D experience anymore anyway. I wouldn't ever choose it over something else, like a rules-lite, darker, edgier, more grounded fantasy/mystery/thriller, which is my preferred type of game.)
Second, I'll finish Ghouls of the Miskatonic some time early this week. Maybe even today. It's been fun to re-read this after not really remembering it very much. But it's the first in a trilogy, just like Homeland was that I read recently. I'm leapfrogging between two trilogies and I'm just finishing the first novel in both. I'm kind of feeling a little "oofish" about only being a third through these. I'm actually not enjoying them quite as much as I hoped to. The Drizzt prequel trilogy isn't as compelling as the trilogy in which he appeared. Bob Salvatore, the author, said that Drizzt was originally created—on the fly and under extreme time pressure, no less—to be an interesting side-kick to Wulfgar, but it became obvious fairly quickly that he was actually the most interesting character in the series by far, and he obviously became the break-out star. But sometimes those kinds of characters don't really need a lot of backstory. Would Conan be more interesting if we knew about his childhood and teenaged years in Cimmeria? Would James Bond be more interesting if we learned about his backstory (admitting that Skyfall is a pretty good movie.) Do we need to understand Wolverine's backstory? Marvel was actually right to be very concerned before greenlighting Wolverine: Origins or whatever that limited series was called that it would ruin the mystique of the character to give him a prequel. Han Solo was arguably ruined by a foolish attempt to create a backstory for him before he really became Han Solo with the characteristics that he's known for. Drizzt suffers a bit from the same concept. While the dark elf society that these novels explore is kind of interesting, and that's probably why I first liked them some twenty-five or thirty years ago, Drizzt as someone who hadn't turned into the Drizzt character that we liked in the earlier novels just isn't as compelling. While my memory of this series was positive, my experience now was that I kind of wish that they hadn't been written. Not that they're bad either, just... probably not the best idea to even do it at all, regardless of whether or not it's well done.
Third, I've been reading gaming material, of course. I started two new products or product lines. My Freeport Trawl has me now halfway through the Bleeding Edge modules of which there are six numbered ones (and one final Freeport one after that. I guess it's not quite halfway.) Most of these modules are quite slim, about 32 pages, like old-fashioned modules used to be. However, they're not really all that site-based, having a more "modern" design angle. More to the point, they are quite explicitly dark and edgy compared to what a lot of modules were doing at the time and even moreso compared to what a lot of modules are doing now. While quintessentially trad-style D&D modules, they are also very much horror modules in tone and themes. I've been enjoying the read-through so far. I think I bought these back when they were $2/pop a long time ago (nearly twenty years now!) on sale, but I had only ever read the first two previously, having a huge backlog of books that I own but haven't gotten around to reading yet. (It's worse on pdf and Kindle, especially given that I got a lot of the latter literally for free.) Now that I've read the third, I'm pretty sure that I'm further along in this series than I have been ever before. At the end of the Bleeding Edge tangent, it pulls it back to Freeport explicitly as a location, and then we're back to our regularly scheduled Freeport Trawling. That said, they all are nominally set in the "Freeport setting" and make a few references here and there to Freeport stuff. They also make a lot of references to Green Ronin's Advanced series. In fact, going through this Trawl as I am and reading everything I'm much more inclined to notice the self-referential and self-promotional nature of a lot of it. Sigh. For whatever it's worth, I actually have most of the Green Ronin 3e catalog, so it works mostly for me, but I still find it somewhat obnoxious to see.
I also, after many delays, picked up Stormwrack so I can finish the unofficial "trawl" of environmental books that I've been doing. This is the penultimate in that series, but I've never read the last one, Dungeonscape, so that'll actually be new news when I get to it. In general, I've found in the past that the environmental books focused way too much on mechanics and were very dry and tedious to read; this time around, I'm mostly finding that less so than I remembered. I'm mostly still correct, but I guess the combination of my expectations and my patience have rendered the books a little better than I expected them to be. The dry, tedious sections aren't as bad as I remember, nor as long, for the most part. I still don't think that I can necessarily recommend this subseries, but it's OK, especially if you've never done anything environmental themed before. Probably the worst part of all of them is the new races, and I'm completely indifferent to new feats, skill uses or spells and magic items. These are not interesting, for the most part.
I wouldn't have read Races of Eberron without first reading Races of Destiny which I think is the most basic of the races books, but again, the matrix alignment of these trawls makes it seem inevitable that I will. That said, I won't read Complete Psionic without first re-reading the Expanded Psionic Handbook, so I'll need to work that in too. This re-reading and reading for the first time of books that I've owned for a long time but never actually read (supplemented by books that I'm buying recently to bulk up gaps in my collection) will certainly keep me busy for a long time to come. I can't imagine that I'll be done until sometime in 2027 at the earliest. And that's just the 3e stuff focused on me getting my old books out of storage again recently.
Next up, I started the 5e campaigns. I'd read Phandelver, but wasn't sure what to do after that, since the next one in the series would have been Tyranny of Dragons, which I'm also a player in currently. That said, we won't finish that for years at the pace we're going, so I decided to say screw it and move forward. By the time we get to the later chapters, I will have read so many other things that I won't remember many of the details anyway. And if I waited, I'd either throw off the order, which was a little bit distasteful, or wait forever, so I went ahead. There are, in fact, quite a few 5e campaigns, although "campaigns" doesn't accurately describe all of them exactly. But I want to get them moving as well. I'm expecting mediocre reactions to most of them, however. After Hoard of the Dragon Queen is, of course, The Rise of Tiamat and then Princes of the Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss (which I actually read when it was fairly new) and Curse of Strahd. I want to finish the 3e Expedition to Castle Ravenloft before reading Curse of Strahd but keep them close enough together that I can actually remember them well enough to notice the differences, so that may impact my schedule somewhat too.
And I finished Ghoul Island, the first Cthulhu Mythos Saga. It was... as I'd alluded to while going through it, disappointing. Interesting in some regards, but nothing that I could ever imagine running, and not as good to read as I'd hoped it would be either. I've got five more of those to do! And then, of course, I have the actual Call of Cthulhu campaigns going back to the earliest 80s. Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is the first one. But what I really need to be faster on is the Paizo Adventure paths. That's by far the largest block of material to read, and I'm still quite early on that, having just finished the three Dungeon Magazine campaigns and just started with the first of their independently published ones. I've got so much more to read there that it's not funny. I actually read The Skinsaw Murders not that long ago, because I was looking to very loosely adapt them for my gamestore group, which didn't get very far off the ground. But I did read at least the adventure portion of it a year and half or less ago. I plan on finishing Ghouls of the Miskatonic, hopefully tonight, and hopefully finishing also Hoard of the Dragon Queen and then blasting through the remainder of Rise of the Runelords volumes without getting too distracted by other pdf game products, if I can help it. But I need to get that 5e campaign trawl moving a little faster too if I want to compare Strahd (5e) and Ravenloft (3e) by reading them close to each other.
But I'm also traveling to El Paso and Ciudad Juarez for work next week. Not having access to my desktop will obviously make reading pdfs difficult unless I remember to send them to my tablet before going. I tend to do better with physical books while traveling, and Kindle stuff, so I'll need to remember to pack several of those in my travel backpack for the plane and evenings in the hotel. I'll almost certainly read the last of my Heirs of Ash novels while on that trip too, since that's a Kindle book, and I read Kindles well while traveling in general. Plus, whichever physical game book I'm in the middle of and whatever's next in physical gamebooks. I doubt I'll be finished with the Drizzt prequel trilogy, which I have omnibused in a single thick trade paperback, so I'll probably bring that plus whatever's the next of the Dark Waters trilogy. But maybe I'll get lucky and finish the Drizzt books and I can pack the last Dark Waters and the Solomon Kane trade paperback collection. Another one that I've owned for many years and still not read. Sigh.
I'll also spend some time in the evenings getting music ready (I have some that needs to be reorganized, relabeled, and otherwise prepared to be archived) and maybe make a couple of alternate banner images that just say Old Night rather than the longer Shadow of Old Night, but in alternate fonts.
UPDATE: I did finish Ghouls last night. Ironically, given that it's obviously derivative and pastiche, I think in some ways it may be an easier entry point into Lovecraft than Lovecraft himself. Lots of people struggle with Lovecraft's prose sometimes; midwits think it's too dense and florid to understand and people like me think that it's too dense and florid to be taken seriously, sometimes. Lots of people struggle with understanding the norms of the 20s and 30s, or they go to the fainting couches because of their modern leftist morality. Well, I don't know about lots of people, but there's plenty of noise on the internet about it, although I privately suspect that it's just a few of the usual noisy suspects and most normal people don't care one way or another. Or, given the backlash against wokeism and anti-whitism, it may actually be selling point to make them more interested. Still, Graham McNeill doesn't come with that baggage, regardless of what you think of it.
He also writes in a modern style. By this I mean that the story is more fast-paced, more urgent, the horror is less "intellectual" and more visceral and emotional. (Honestly, I never bought into the idea of "if you think about this, it's really horrible! Even though space opera and science fiction have been using the same ideas without any connotation of horror at all for decades" idea. Lovecraft is paradoxically the father of modern horror, in many ways, while not really being all that horrible or even always talking about horror. Some of his iconic stories, like "The Shadow Out of Time" aren't really horrible at all, with the exception of an almost gratuitous horror ending tacked on. I kind of feel like that's the case for "At the Mountains of Madness" too; the moody, atmospheric horror of the first act, and the attempted horrible climax are largely undercut by a long second act which humanizes the weird monsters via a gigantic info dump. Like I said, Lovecraft's craft wasn't what made him memorable, honestly, it was more his ideas, which were pretty new and zany at the time. Something more modern might be easier for modern readers to digest. You see this with older movies too; the long "shoe leather" shots and lack of focus on what matters. The craft of storytelling has improved in the last 100 years, and more to the point, the craft of storytelling by modern authors more closely matches the craftsmanship expectations of their audience. Older storytelling often seems to meander, not get to the point, and then beat around the bush rather than confronting the most interesting parts of the story. A lot of this is just changing tastes for changing times, but at least in some degree, there's an objective qualitative difference between doing things one way versus another. Modern Lovecraft pastiche that's reasonably well written might be, like I said, an easier and better entry point into Yog-Sothothery than the originals. Even I, as a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s thought that some of Lovecraft's stories came across as more silly and overwrought than anything else.
That said, it has its problems in part because of that focus on modernity. Some of the characters are not believable in the context of 1926 New England. They feel like modern characters shoe-horned into the 20s just because and we're supposed to accept that the 20s were like the 2010s, when this was written. Some of the characters feel like caricatures. The Irish bootlegger was particularly ridiculous. Nobody of Irish descent runs around talking like "they're after me Lucky Charms!" and yet much of his dialogue was so bad that him saying that they were after his Lucky Charms might have even been an improvement. Also, the author is British (Scottish, to be precise) and I noticed that the editors either didn't catch or let slide the use of the word homely twice. This is a particular pet peeve of mine, or rather it's at least something that I notice. I suspect that the editors don't even know that the meaning of the word in the UK is different than it is in the US. It makes the work stand out if you notice that kind of thing as something written by a Brit, but featuring American characters and taking place in America.
Anyway, let me be clear; I'm not making the case that this is a great book. It's a fun enough book. I enjoy it. I've read it twice now, and I'll still hold on to it with the expectation that I might read it again sometime. I'm making the case that because it's more modern, it might grab a new reader into the Mythos more effectively than stuff written a hundred years or so ago that was not written to modern craftsmanship standards of writing.
In a similar manner, I wouldn't necessarily recommend to anyone that getting into 70s D&D through the OD&D set is the most effective way to onboard into the hobby either. Sometimes as you play around with a thing over time, you find minor ways to make it more effective. McNeill's book is effective. It's not necessarily super memorable. I don't even think it was in print for more than a few years. But I would absolutely lend this to someone looking to get into Lovecraft to get them up to speed on the tropes and themes in a package that's easy to swallow.
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