The Silver Marches

I finished the 3e book Silver Marches last night. This was an interesting book because of the context in which it was published. Self-professed game design "rock star" Sean K. Reynolds hitched his star to this book, in a very public and kind of nasty one-sided debate, that he reported on, that he was having with management or leadership at WotC about customers wanting "fluff" instead of "crunch." It was a fundamental design difference in terms of what to do strategically with D&D products going forwards. Reynolds was championing an older 2e model that had also made a lot of hay with other companies, most notably White Wolf, where products focused more on roleplaying opportunities, setting details, and things that supported the fiction of the game, often in exactly and painstakingly tedious detail, something that Forgotten Realms had actually become somewhat infamous for over the years already by this point. He claimed that management just wanted to publish "crunch"; player facing products that offered more options for players; new feats, new prestige classes, new mechanics, etc. 

Now, I realize that that's not a very nuanced narrative about Reynolds' actual position, which matured somewhat from what he articulated expressly in 2002 in front of this book, but this book was kind of the schwerpunkt for that debate. If there really was a debate, and not just a narrative that Reynolds himself was telling. 

Unfortunately, this is the most interesting thing about Silver Marches. As a product, I didn't really find it very interesting. It did, indeed, give encyclopedic detail about social and legal customs, plants and animals that are usually just slightly recolored versions of real animals and plants, and other things that are found in the Silver Marches area of Forgotten Realms—which to be fair are one of the classic areas of the realms, adjacent to Icewind Dale (kind of) and Waterdeep, but further inland, and  big part of the territory that Wulfgar and Driz'zt traveled through in the second book of the Icewind Dale trilogy. Alustriel, the leader of the area (de facto) and leader explicitly of the big city Silverymoon, made an appearance. 

Most of this detail isn't very interesting, and I honestly struggle to see how I would have used it were I to set a game there. In fact, much of it was kind of antithetical to play as D&D is usually played. I had hoped, after finding my mind wandering and being really quite bored, that when I got to the last third or quarter or so of the book where it had "adventure sites" that it would be better, but they were honestly just pretty boring stocked site-based exploration stuff; little more than mini dungeons without much context. Somewhat ironically, because FR had become synonymous with trad-style play during 2e and into 3e, and as the nascent OSR movement, and other classic play movements started pushing back against trad, and its occasional pretentious claims like "roleplay, not rollplay" and stuff like that, because these are pretty old-school site based sandbox type stuff. Not very interesting to read, but if you like that kind of play, surprisingly (at least to me) useful for it. (Although I'm sympathetic to many of the aesthetic desires of this older school game play, which is also made up of people that I may tend to relate to more; in their 50s, played in the 80s, tend to be conservative, not impressed with the woke direction of the current industry, fans of even older sword & sorcery like Howard and Leiber, etc. I am, however, a pretty traditional trad player, and I find trad style adventures and modules, like the campaigns WotC does or Paizo's adventure paths, much more interesting and useful... even if I don't necessarily run them straight as is. As I've said many times before, I'm not old school, but I am old-fashioned. And I don't know that the play customs like OSR, Classic, Trad, Neo-trad, etc. are the best way to describe my playstyle. I prefer the GM merit badges. But if I have to have a label, I claim paleo-trad for how I play. It's trad, but with a lot of old-fashioned things that some other trad players may find somewhat exotic.)

Not that we were told, but I was always intrigued by the result of Reynolds gauntlet throwing exercise. I'm sure that if he'd been right, we'd have heard about it non-stop. I doubt that he was, and Silver Marches probably didn't sell so well as to make his case a slam dunk. Only a few months later, he was no longer working at WotC; in a so-called "amiable lay-off" by which he means, "sure I was laid off, but I was about to quit anyway." Sure. That may have even been sorta true, and he seems to have done OK for himself, working in the video game industry for a time, and doing plenty of freelance projects in the RPG sphere, including even for WotC (I think) for many years thereafter. I tend to think that that was more likely a face-saving narrative, but it did, no doubt, work out for him in the long run. WotC did, also, in fact focus much more on player facing crunch books following this. Which, in the long run, may have choked out the d20 era when all was said and done and contributed a lot to the growing dissatisfaction that many people had with the system which contributed significantly to the noisy and dramatic birth of the OSR movement as a whole, which was a rejection of much of what d20 was doing. 

There's some more context to be had here, of course. When d20 ended, it was replaced with the polarizing 4e, and many players were not interested in it. Pathfinder made a lot of hay by essentially making some slight modifications to "clean up" d20, although it's arguable to the extent that they actually improved it, and continued the 3e style of play for many more years. I also noticed in that era that 3e books never came down in price on the used market. I strongly suspect that while the narrative was that Pathfinder outsold, or at least rivaled D&D during the 4e era, that an equal order of magnitude of players just kept playing d20, and finally, the OSR was fully birthed with the launch of the first retro-clones at about this same time, and it became a fourth pole in this industry of multipolarity. It also didn't escape my notice that 5e, which changed this dynamic significantly, was essentially what Pathfinder should have been, i.e., d20 but actually cleaned up, made easier to run and play, and arguably better. (I say as a person who still prefers 3e to 5e in most respects, but.... y'know. My own preferences aren't really on trial here. I also recognize a lot of d20's flaws even though I use it partially because I'm familiar enough with it to easily work around them. Some of what 5e made "simpler" wasn't actually stuff that was a pain point, like character customization options.)

What all of this means, I'm not sure of. 5e was certainly popular, but there's a lot of good circumstantial and anecdotal evidence (as well as a lot of reactionary denials of this) that it's getting long in the tooth, its welcome has faded dramatically, and that 5.5 wasn't as well received as WotC would have hoped. I personally think that that's obvious given the very public and obvious attempts by WotC to change course with the game right now; they're obviously trying to woo back customers who have left in the relatively recent past. But some of that may be part of the greater cultural correction going on in corporate and customer facing industries all over. Heck, even my company really dialed back the DEI rhetoric the last couple of years; it's almost invisible or non-existent now, and I work for a Scandinavian-owned corporation that lemming-like followed all of the corporate trends. As do most corporations. I feel like customer-focused entertainment industries are the real canaries in the coal-mine for these kinds of cultural trends, and the wholesale rejection of wokeness, which probably had its most dramatic breakthrough with the Bud Light nonsense a couple of years ago has impacted the entertainment industry the hardest. So part of what WotC is doing is backtracking from the heavy-handed woke preaching, while still trying to quietly and less overtly remain woke for the really loud, obnoxious portion of their audience who remains woke. But the overtness of woke themes is really toned down, and WotC in particular is going on, in Dan Ayoub's own words, an "apology tour" to backtrack for the benefit of offended former customers. Again, I think that this is obvious because sales are down, 5.5 was soft, and people are losing interest in general. But I think that they're going to anyway, no matter what WotC does. I think another thing that few have recognized (shout out to Black Lodge Games for being the first to point it out, as far as I know) is that the "nerd moment" which has been going on for a number of years now seems to have peaked. Comic book movies peaked. Star Wars peaked. Science fiction in general peaked. And, consistent with that, D&D peaked. All of them are in decline. Part of that is due to their crappy slop content and woke nonsense, which turned off most people, but part of it was just that the moment peaked and now people are looking for something else now. D&D will never again be what it was in 2020-2024 or so. Or, at least it won't be again until another big turn of events. This big wave was maybe sort of like the big wave of the late 70s through the middle to later 80s when D&D had its first big boom. That kind of boom town cycle just doesn't last forever, and if WotC thinks that D&D is still possible to be put into a growth phase when it's clearly (I think) in a contraction period and probably will be for some time, then WotC's hope is vain and foolish.

Anyway, I'm now wandered rather far afield from just the Silver Marches discussion, but I think that the greater trends in how WotC strategically tries to position D&D is still very relevant, and in many ways, in the last nearly two and a half decades since this book came out, the strategy hasn't really matured very much in most respects. And the book itself was decidedly "meh" at best, and boring and pointless at worst. Next up is the Eberron sourcebook Five Nations, and then the next SPCM campaign, and then finally on to the next Paizo adventure path. Lots to read. Don't know for sure how much of it I'll do this week, though, with family being in town.

The Strange Affairs of the Unseen Beyond

Creating a new tag based on what I said as an update at the bottom of my last part: THE STRANGE AFFAIRS OF THE UNSEEN BEYOND. This will be a more targeted world-building effort that is not part of Old Night. It will use the PFRPG rules, but there will be some pretty limiting house-rules to ensure that it is very targeted in terms of mood and tone. Not everything that PFRPG has would fit in this game and it's going to use PFRPG rules, which are essentially a slight modification to an older version of D&D, of course, but I want it to NOT feel really very much like D&D at all. 

Up front, let me be clear what the mechanical baseline is. I like a D&D 3.5 and PFRPG hybrid; mostly D&D 3.5, but using the classes and truncated skill list of PFRPG, plus, if it matters, the CMB/CMD, which is a lot easier than the combat maneuvers of 3.5, where it was a long-running joke that nobody knew how to do grapple, for instance, without stopping and looking it up. I'll also add The Elephant In the Room houserules and E6 as a default, which I won't link to in this post, but which I have many times in the past. That's just default for me using a d20 system these days. What really matters is the next part, which are mostly limitations, i.e., I'm cutting a bunch of stuff out to change specifically the tone, theme and feel of the game. And mostly this means races and classes. I'm not actually sure yet what to do with races, but I'm a huge fan of humano-centrism, and it's entirely possible that I'll only use humans as selectable races. If I do add some others back again, I haven't yet decided what they'll be. Maybe some of the Old Night races can be applied here, or adapted, or maybe not. I'll get to that later. Classes, however, is where the real "magic" happens in changing the game to not feel like D&D even if I'm using what are, essentially, D&D rules. 

And before I talk about the specific classes that I'm OK with using, it's important to note; what is this setting like? It's going to be fantasy, and it's going to be medieval fantasy, but it's not going to really be D&D fantasy. In fact, it's going to specifically lean in to a kind of early pulp, penny dreadful, city mytery, Gothic horror and supernatural sensationalism kind of thing. It's not Victorian, but in some ways, it'll feel more Victorian than D&D-ish. Kind of a hybrid of D&D and Call of Cthulhu, or even Candela Obscura (at least as I understand that game) in tone. So, there'll be adventurous classes, but not overly magical classes.

From the core classes, only the fighter, barbarian and rogue will fly.

From the "base classes", I think I could use the alchemist and vigilante are good fits.

From the "hybrid classes" the brawler, investigator, and slayer are ones I really like. I love the concept of the swashbuckler, but there's actually a better class for it, so I'm not going to expressly disallow it, but I'm going to suggest instead that... well, see below.

I'm not very familiar with them, but if you wanted the Unchained barbarian or rogue, I'd say knock yourself out.

And then, the Occult classes are all on the table. In fact, this is specifically where the "f/x" classes will come from. But, you can't take them at 1st level; however, given that it's E6, you can take the first five levels as character levels 2-6 with an occult class. psychic, spiritualist, medium, occultist, mesmerist, and kineticist. I might reconsider and say you can't take them for your first two levels, but let me read them again more carefully first. On the other hand, all of the occult classes are "half-casters" so probably giving them five levels is fine. Maybe even all six. I'll think on that.

And then from third party stuff, you can use the noble and freebooter from Freeport. 

While I'm not quite ready to assign classes to these characters, here's the iconics that I'll end up developing.

From left to right:

• Beatrice Holloway, a mesmerist who insists that she is not really a mesmerist.
• Ambrose Harrow, gentleman adventurer and monster hunter
• Lady Victoria Nightingale, society lady with an unsettling talent for communicating with the dead
• Silas Blackwood, retired surgeon and occult investigator
• Amelia Vexley, scholar of witchcraft and the occult, publishes anonymously under a pen name
• Gideon Marlowe, disgraced former clergyman and exorcist

Pathfinder Occult

In my Paizo Iconics series, which I would like to finish off this week, I'm smack dab in the middle of the Occult classes, which launched as part of the Occult line in 2015 in the summer (at GenCon, I believe, which is when the first book debuted.) I'm also thinking of pulling these titles ahead and reading them, and even of getting physical copies of at least some of them. The occult titles were launched with Occult Adventures, which is the main system book, followed by Occult Bestiary and Occult Realms in the Pathfinder Setting line, and Occult Origins in the Pathfinder Companion series. Occult Mysteries actually predates the "Occult" subline by over a year, and was a part of the Setting series, but it's hard not to see it as connected via foreshadowing if, for no other reason, because of the title. It also works fairly well in tandem with the later Horror Adventures and Horror Realms books, although technically they are not the same thing and could be used independently. 

I've long thought the idea of replacing regular D&D magic with psionics would make for a fun alternative campaign type; something that felt very different while still using (essentially) the same rules. The way that I've posited that this would work, in a 3.5 environment, is that any class with a spellcasting progression would either be removed entirely (if that was its sole purpose) or modified to replace the spellcasting with something else (appropriate for the ranger and paladin, for example.) Of the core classes from 3.5, that means that you basically only still have the fighter, rogue and barbarian and ... maybe the monk, although I don't like it's Hong Kong theatre mumbo-jumbo very much. Bard, cleric, druid, wizard, sorcerer are all completely off-limits, and the ranger and paladin need to be somewhat reworked according to principles that are found in Complete Warrior I believe. (Or maybe Complete Adventurer. I can't remember anymore.) Or, if you've got a 3pp alt.ranger, of which there were many, that doesn't have any magical abilities or spellcasting, you could of course use that. Instead of all of this magic, you'd use psionics. The psion, psychic warrior, soulknife and wilder from the Expanded Psionic Handbook as well as the ardent, divine mind and lurk from Complete Psionic would replace these classes. They're not necessarily 1:1 replacements, of course, but among the seven psionic classes, you'd be able to accomplish everything that you'd need a more traditional "magical" D&D party to do well enough, but it would just feel very different. 

When 3.5 was updated to PFRPG, of course, the same core races and classes carried through, and EPH was in the SRD, but Complete Psionic was not. Paizo never addressed psionics officially, but they had some kind of partnership with Dreamscarred Press where they made semi-official psionics material for PFRPG in the Ultimate Psionics book (the compiled and revised version of several earlier products) that added ten new classes to the game, including updates from the 3.5 SRD to the four EPH classes, and then six other unique classes that rounded out the roster. You could, using this, do the same thing for PFRPG that I was thinking of doing for D&D. I say thinking of doing; I actually did it once, but nobody ended up taking a "psion" type character; I had a barbarian, a swashbuckler, a fighter/rogue, and two soulknives in that party. And something else, although now I can't remember what the 6th character was, but I think he might have also been a rogue or something similar. 

Paizo did eventually add psychic magic to the official stuff through these Occult books, but psionics and psychics are not really the same thing, and they don't really have the same theme and tone. Whereas Dreamscarred Press' PFRPG psionics, heavily based on the D&D 3.5 psionics, is often compared more to the X-men, Paizo's occult psychic powers are more compared to the psychic occultism of fiction like penny dreadfuls and gothic horror. But, if I could replace magic with psionics and like the result, I obviously would like replacing "regular" magic with "occult" or "psychic" magic and like the result even moreso. Making magic more magical, mysterious and edgy, focusing on mysticism of a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago occultism makes it even more significantly less like D&D than even replacing magic with psionics does, in many respects, but it also makes magic much more like what I'd want it to look like. Keep it relatively low level, (E6) so that the magic doesn't get out of hand, and this would be a fascinating exercise in creative limiting being used to build a very different type of setting, tone and mood out of the same mechanical base. The image above was just a prompt to Nano Banana 2 to create a fantasy ensemble cast of psychic investigators like mediums, psychics, occultists, etc.; i.e., exactly what the Paizo stuff does, and that's what it came back with. That works for me.

So, I've already announced (although done very little with) EMPIRE OF THE MIND WIZARDS to create a subsetting based on psionics, but now I feel like I need another one based on psychic/occult magic.

UPDATE: I tried to get grok to give me an image, and Nano Banana 2. Grok shut me down entirely until this morning, and then gave me something that I didn't really love; way too "fantasy = 5e" vibe. The latter screwed around not following my instructions for one generation after another after another. I finally had to stop asking it to edit it's original one, and just start from scratch every time, and that's where I ended up with the image above, on the third or fourth "from scratch" generation on the same prompt. 

The more I look at that image, though, the more I find that I really like it. I think I'm going to take each of the characters there and turn them into "iconic" seeds. Not fully fleshed out iconic characters, but seeds of iconic characters, and then I'll figure out where to use them. I don't know that I can make them fit in the Old Night setting or not, but maybe I can. And if not, that's OK. I always like world-building, and while I prefer—generally—to stay more focused, having a few other worlds for occasional side show is still fun. And maybe this one would be a minor campaign seed rather than campaign setting; one based on E6 Pathfinder with limited access to character classes, using the "occult magic" to replace entirely the regular "D&D magic" that the game defaults to. I doubt I'll spend tons of time filling out that seed, but we'll see. Maybe it becomes so interesting to me that I end up doing more with it than I think right now that I will.

Reading updates

Council of Thieves... coming soon!

Some of the personal life issues that were really, really stressing me out are finally resolving, and reasonably satisfactorily. I'll be busy; I have my daughter and her family in town on Friday for a week, but otherwise, I'll probably start doing a little better on reading. Thought it might be a good time for a little update on my reading plans. I always do these as a kind of freeform brainstorming session, where I talk about my plans as as I write, they mature, develop and evolve. As noted recently, I just had a couple of big finishes; I finished the 250+ page Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting and decided that GOLARION REMIXED is going to be less systemic than EBERRON REMIXED was, and I might utilize it as part of my efforts reading their adventure paths rather than working through the setting book, as I did with Eberron. I'll talk about modifications that I'd make more in the context of how I'd use the adventure paths as I read them. Speaking of which, of course, that's the single biggest and most "intimidating" trawl in my reads. But I'm taking a brief break from it to finish some other stuff before I dive into the next adventure path, Legacy of Fire. Also, as I read Legacy, I'm going to leapfrog adventure path modules with stand-alone modules, and I'll finish the D&D 3.5 compatible adventures in both trawls at the same time. Of course, since PFRPG is almost identical to 3.5 except for a slight power scaling upwards and a few other minor details, I doubt I'll really even notice the difference. 

But before I read that, I'm reading Silver Marches. This is a hard one to read. Way too much detail, and little of the detail is super useful; I read the chapter on cities last night, and found my attention wandering; I'd look at a page I just read and realize that I had no idea what it just said. When I get to later chapters that have small adventures in them, I think I'll do better, but I'm not really loving this product. In fact, I'm not really loving the 3e FR at all. It's very much living up to exactly what my expectations were for it, i.e., there's some good stuff, but it's couched in a context of cozy, Canadian liberal high fantasy that I don't care for, meaning that I'm just not really digging it, honestly. Also, before I turn to Legacy of Fire, I want to finish that book, the next (very similar sized) book in the Eberron Trawl, Five Nations, which I haven't ever read before and I didn't buy when it was new because it sounded like it kind of retreaded a lot of the same material that the campaign setting had already done (although I'm sure that that won't actually end up having been true when I read it.) I'm also reading "Bastion of Broken Souls" which is the last of the pseudo-adventure path adventures for 3e. There are, of course, more adventures for 3e, but up to this point, they had been level set so that they could in theory have been played back to back. That will no longer be true with the remining 3e and 3.5 adventures, which are more explicitly stand-alone after this. The little free adventure "Caves of Shadow" and the Level 1 adventure "Fight at Tristor" are both short and will come next after the pseudo-adventure path. But finishing the pseudo-adventure path will certainly feel like the end of a chapter, and I'll probably "rest" that whole trawl for a little while after I do. 

I'm not really close to finishing off any of the trawls, but I do have some trawls where I'm close to hitting a major milestone and finishing off a "chapter" if you will of the trawl, so I'm kind of looking forward to that. 

Meanwhile, I've been doing so many gaming books that I haven't been reading any of my novels or other fiction books, which I kind of miss. I've got the next three of the Death Dealer James Silke series queued up. I've got the three Timothy Zahn old-fashioned post Return of the Jedi Star Wars trilogy. I've got Dracula. I've got the first five John Carter books in an omnibus. I've got three Robert Ludlum classics in an omnibus. I've got the Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft (not actually complete, as it doesn't show the stuff that was credited to someone else but he ghost wrote. But I recently read a compilation of all of that stuff anyway.) Ever since I read the Dark Elf Trilogy earlier this year, I've been kind of in the mood to read Icewind Dale trilogy again too, even though I did about three years ago. I've got the Von Carsten trilogy in an omnibus. I've got the Mathias Thulman trilogy queued up and haven't read that in sixteen or more years. I've also still got the rest of the "T. H. Lain" D&D 3e iconics novels to read. 

Trying to decide which physical game books to read in the nearish term too. Like I said yesterday, I've already got three in my backpack, Monster Manual III, Into the Darklands and Dark Markets: Guide to Katapesh. I also want to read Horror Adventures and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft in the relatively near term, as part of a "Halloween read" if you will. After that, I still have, of course, Monster Manual IV and V and the Draconomicon for monstrous books, and the full complete series to read, as well as the psionics stuff. Those are all relatively short term 3.5 books that I've got targeted to read, but by short term, I mean between now and the end of the year and maybe even a little bit beyond.

I see that Occult Adventures is priced pretty low; less than $20. I'm tempted to scare up a hard copy of that book too.

Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting

It was a little bit of a slow slog, but I finished Paizo's Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting last night. This is a book that was the big 250+ hardcover version of their setting, but written before the PFRPG, so it's D&D 3.5 compatible, and meant as a campaign sourcebook for that. It also repeats a lot of the information from the Gazetteer, which I read not that long ago, although I never read that the first time around, so when I bought and read the Campaign Setting when it was new, I didn't realize that. Of course, I bought this when it was new, which was August 2008. I know for sure that I had it within a couple of months tops of when it was released, so sometimes early Fall 2008. That's now, of course, nearly twenty years ago, and until now, I don't think I'd read it cover to cover again since I first got it. Although I do know that I read portions of it here and there, but it had been many years since I'd picked it up and really looked through it seriously until now. I struggled just a bit because I felt like the material was either two repetitive of what I'd just read, or was too mechanical and not really what I was interested in anymore. That's still mostly, or at least partly, true. 

I had also thought that going through this it would make sense to do my Golarion Remixed project. That's how I did Eberron Remixed, after all, going through the campaign setting book and noting where I'd make changes. I didn't do that, and I don't think that I want to go through the setting book again after just having read it. I'm not sure if that means Golarion Remixed is on hiatus, or if it means that I just do it while flipping through the book to remind myself of what the content is. Mostly the changes are either really big more fairly minor, and for the really big ones, most of them are merely that I'm going to ignore that area. For instance, with Eberron Remixed, there are a lot fewer countries, so for something like Breland, for instance, I could tinker with the details of it. Golarion has a ton more countries, and they're designed so that they're much more modular; each one is almost a campaign setting in its own right with its own theme and tone, i.e., Ustalav is the horror (especially Gothic horror) setting heavily based on a Hammer Horror version of Transylvania translated into fantasy, whereas Varisia is the frontier region, Taldor is the decayed old late Byzantine Empire, Osirion is a resurgent ancient Egypt, etc. For many of the nations, I don't need to really change very much, because they're already fairly well situated as they are. A few others have too strong of a theme, and it needs to be toned down, because it's a little bit ridiculous how monolithic the theme comes across. Much of the "Greater Old Taldor" for instance, where Andoran, Galt and even Cheliax to some degree is a little too on the nose with their themes.

But a bunch of other areas, honestly, I don't know what I'd do with them. The theme doesn't really work for me, and there isn't enough detail to modify it, so I'd essentially just ignore that part of the map, except possibly the physical features and city names, but otherwise treat it as just either white space on the map, or generic fantasy countries, if for whatever reason PCs found themselves there. Which I can't imagine that I would, except possibly in a "passing through" situation, but even then, mostly what it means that I essentially excise that component from my Golarion Remixed, and it simply doesn't exist. Nations like Rahadoum, Thuvia, Druma, Razmiran, probably Hermia and a few others get this treatment. Others like Numeria, Irrisen, Nex, Geb, etc. I don't really have any changes in mind to make to them, but I also don't really have a ton of interest in that setting (or module, if you like) either, so there's no reason to list it and then not actually have any compelling changes to make to them either. In fact, I think that the whole idea that I could remix Golarion the same way I remixed Eberron may not be workable. Given that Golarian is essentially a whole bunch of modular smaller campaign settings hung together in a geography that isn't really relevant in most cases, because few campaigns cross from one "module" to another. If for some reason you want to create a campaign that does cross from one to another, you can modify the geography as needed. If I wanted to put Osirion adjacent to Taldor, for instance, I could, and why not? There's no reason to worry about going around through Qadira, or sailing by Absalom, or whatever. Sure, sure, I could, but there's no reason why I need to. That's the beauty of setting elements that are essentially modular.

Now, me calling them modular might be a little bit controversial. I don't know that Paizo themselves necessarily saw them that way when they created them. They did, after all, put them in a specific geography, and there are at least some adventure paths (although honestly not that many) that cross multiple modules. Heck, even the early Curse of the Crimson Throne technically dips its toe outside of Varisia into the Hold of Belkzen. Strange Aeons starts in Ustalav, but has a long bit of travel through Taldor, into various parts of Qadira and even Katapesh (and, of course, also the Dreamlands and Carcosa.) But those are the exceptions. Given that, maybe my Remix project needs to also be modular. For the Cult of Undeath, I essentially remixed Ustalav with my older Tarush Noptii modular setting element and ended up with Timischburg. While it's not exactly a 1:1 comparison to Ustalav, Timischburg does everything that Ustalav needs to do, at least, and I consider it "effectively" a remix, or at least a setting module that covers all of the same territory. In some respects, the Hill Country, or Humberland as I've started calling it, does something similar with Varisia; it also isn't meant to be a 1:1 comparison, but if you see Barrowmere as similar in many respects to Magnimar and Garenport as similar in many respects to Korvosa, and you can even use Burlharrow if needed as a kind of Sandpoint, then you can do anything in Varisia in Humberland instead without too much fuss. If anything, that remixing might be going the opposite direction; rather than attempting to make my elements match exactly the Paizo element, or whatever, I'm looking at the Paizo element and seeing if there's some part of the module that would make an interesting addition to my own. Do I want a Mushfens, or something similar in Humberland? Well, I've already got the Eltdown Fens, so probably not, but you get the idea. Something more like the Storval Plateau would be maybe a better element to borrow, but with the Tazitta Badlands, I've already got an area that can effectively offer the same kinds of things. I hadn't yet decided if I wanted to try and put my Curse of the Crimson Throne in Humberland, given that I've got a pretty different Grand Duke and Duchess situation compared to Ileosa and her nonsense, but I can either make an alternate version of it where I change the nature of the Grand Duke and his wife, or I set it after the events of Darkness in the Hill Country have already played out, and the both of them are now gone to be replaced with whatever new characters that can play the role of Eodred and Ileosa. Or, of course, since the AP takes place almost completely in the city, I can just set it somewhere else in my own setting, too. I kind of like maybe having it be a city-state on the Corsair Coast... with travel into Porhomok for the out of town stuff, but I'm not necessarily sold on any of these ideas yet. Doing it somewhere maybe a little more unexpected like Lomar or Volek Szemenok would be interesting too.

Actually, the more I think of it, the more I like Lomar. I can work in the Zobnan vs Nyxian culture clash as part of the drama while I'm at it, and maybe the problems with "Ileosa" can actually be the bigger problem that helps resolve that one way or another.

Next up on the Paizo Chronicles trawl is Gods and Magic which is pdf (although I have two physical books in a row on that trawl after that) and next up in physical game book reading is Monster Manual III from the 3.5 era. After kicking around Campaign Setting book for as long as I did, it's nice to move on.

Of course, it also occurs to me that there's no need to read the trawls completely in order. Lacking a compelling reason to pull them out of order, I'd rather not, but I can move stuff around if I have a need or desire to read something down-trawl earlier. I got a physical copy recently of Horror Adventures, which at the rate I'm going, I won't have scheduled to read for many months, but I'll probably read it in October, because .... because October, honestly. While I'm at it, I'd like to read Curse of Strahd and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft in October too. Of those, only Curse of Strahd is actually next in its trawl; the other two won't come up for many months. I especially don't want to read the Paizo Adventure Paths or Stand-Alone modules out of order (the first even more than the latter) but the other trawls I don't care nearly as much. I'll almost certainly also not read the Eberron or FR trawls out of order, and probably not the 5e campaigns. Everything else is subject to my whim, honestly.

Lovecraftian entities and demon lords

I've said many times over many years that Lovecraftian entities are basically equivalent, in D&D, to Demon Lords or other similar archfiends. But especially demon lords. Several months ago, I asked ChatGPT to generate some unique Lovecraftian entities for me so that I didn't feel the need to always just focus on Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Shub-Niggurath, etc. I had no idea if it was going to be any good or not, but I did it, and I had some results that weren't terrible, after I ignored a bunch of the results. They're not necessarily great either, but I had at least a few usable entities. 

More recently, I asked it to create demon lords for me, and the results were similar. In fact, they were so similar, that I'm honestly kind of hard pressed to see where one list begins and the other ends, honestly.

Let me document both lists here. I'm also using an AI rendering of an old Wayne Reynolds image of a famine spirit to represent one of the consumptive demon lords, even though it was described slightly differently in the text.

🜏 THE COSMIC AND PRIMAL ENTITIES — The Iron Idols

Name	Epithet / Aspect	Summary
Kholgorath	The Beast Beyond the Mountains	Primal earth-force, embodiment of strength, fertility, and slumbering hunger beneath mountains.
Urzathoon	The Devourer of Suns	Vast cosmic fire that consumes light and creation; analog of destructive solar energy.
Velkraith	Lord of the Red Obelisk	Titan of war and stone; represents violence fossilized into monuments.
Thunorak	Serpent of the Hollow Earth	Wyrm of the deep earth and gold veins; symbol of buried greed and endless burrowing.
Yraggul	Wolf Without Shadow	Predator-void of darkness; cycles of winter and death.
Zaltharion	Black Crowned King	God of dominion and necrotic kingship; lord of rulership through decay.
Mornath-Gul	Horned Flame	Living fire of transformation, renewal through destruction.

---

☿ THE EARTHBOUND EMANATIONS — The Ashen Circle of Veyrholm Vale

Name	Epithet / Aspect	Parent Idol	Summary
Orridathis	The Watcher Beneath Clay	Zaltharion	Guardian of memory and death; buried awareness beneath soil.
Elythagar	The Brine That Walks	Urzathoon	Cold inverse of solar fire; sea-born hunger and tidal rot.
Voruzethis	The Feast in Dust	Velkraith	Endless consumption of decay and war’s remnants.
Khaltheron	The Smoldering Veil	Mornath-Gul	Smoke-spirit of ruin; the ghost left behind after fire.
Drovanyth	The Crooked Root	Thunorak	Serpentine hunger turned vegetal; corruption within the soil.
Seryvokath	The Ashen Host	Yraggul	The wolf’s breath dispersed into a swarm of moths; silent consumption.
Ghorthalyx	The Carrion Crown	Zaltharion	Manifestation of death’s kingship; rot enthroned.
Zhulgrithan	The Mire That Breathes	Kholgorath	Living bog, respiration of the earth.
Throzkivar	The Ember-Womb	Mornath-Gul	Creation through destruction; new fire birthed from ashes.
Vraggonith	The Horn in Hollow Hills	Velkraith	Sound of petrified war echoing through caverns.
Khar-Ghoryn	The Silt That Devours	Urzathoon	Devouring darkness of rivers and estuaries; light drowned.
Vruz-Kathor	The Ashen Maw	Kholgorath	Subterranean hunger that persists after death of flesh.
Zhar-Khuneth	The Mourning Mire	Thunorak	The sorrow of the earth; decay felt as grief.

---

Original Demon Lords of the Abyss

1. XAL'GOROTH, THE KING IN THE LAST MIRROR

Demon Lord of Shadow, False Selves, Identity, and the Darkness Between

The mirror imagery has long since been abandoned. Xal'goroth is a tall, imposing humanoid figure formed entirely from absolute blackness—not black flesh, smoke, or stone, but something resembling solidified shadow and anti-light. His body seems to swallow illumination rather than merely block it, and the eye instinctively struggles to determine exactly where his form ends.

His entire body is bound in heavy, ancient chains, wrapped around his torso, arms, legs, and throat in layer upon layer. Some chains disappear into his shadowy flesh and emerge somewhere else, as though ordinary physical space does not quite apply to them.

Two enormous glowing red eyes burn from his otherwise featureless face. There are no visible pupils.

A jagged crown of black iron rests upon his head.

The longer one looks at Xal'goroth, the more difficult it becomes to remember what one's own face looks like.

Symbol: A pair of glowing red eyes surrounded by blackness and crossed chains.

Realm: The Shattered Dark, a lightless realm of enormous black monoliths, bottomless chasms, and impossible shadows that sometimes move independently of the objects casting them.

---

2. MORVATH, THE CROWN OF WORMS

Demon Lord of Parasites, Rot, Infestation, and Consumption

Morvath is an enormous, bloated humanoid corpse with gray-green flesh stretched tightly over his swollen body. His abdomen has split open into a deep cavity, within which countless pale worms writhe.

His face is vaguely human but horribly distended, with sunken yellow eyes, a flattened nose, and a mouth filled with small, irregular teeth. His scalp is completely hairless, except for thin pale worms that emerge from the skin like living hair.

A corroded golden crown has grown through his skull.

His body constantly produces parasites that crawl across him and disappear beneath his skin. Occasionally, one seems to emerge from a place where no opening exists.

Morvath does not represent death. He represents the refusal of living matter to remain properly dead.

Symbol: A worm coiled beneath a corroded crown.

Realm: The Feast Eternal, an immense swamp filled with rotting forests, drowned cities, fossilized bones, and stagnant waters beneath which enormous things occasionally move.

---

3. THE VELVET MAW

Demon Lord of Addiction, Obsession, Pleasure, and Hunger

The Velvet Maw is a gigantic, grotesquely corpulent humanoid demon seated upon an extravagant throne of gold, bone, and accumulated treasures.

Its body is enormous, but its head is strangely small and almost delicate by comparison. Six jeweled eyes stare from its pale, hairless face.

Its defining feature is the enormous vertical mouth running down the front of its torso, stretching from its lower abdomen almost to its throat. Thick crimson lips surround several rows of narrow teeth, while the interior disappears into an apparently bottomless darkness.

It has only two arms, both long and elegant, ending in delicate hands. It uses them to offer food, jewels, beautiful objects, intoxicants, and other temptations.

It wears magnificent crimson and purple velvet robes, though portions of the garment disappear into the darkness of its great mouth.

Those who spend too long in its presence begin to experience a disturbing certainty that the mouth is looking at them, even when its eyes are facing elsewhere.

Symbol: A crimson vertical mouth.

Realm: The Palace of Every Desire, a vast and beautiful city where every conceivable pleasure can be obtained, yet nothing ever satisfies its inhabitants for long.

---

4. KHARZUN, THE ASHEN GENERAL

Demon Lord of Conquest, War, Military Glory, and Betrayal

Kharzun is an immense, powerfully built humanoid demon with six arms, an exception to the otherwise predominantly humanoid anatomy of the Demon Lords.

His skin is dark charcoal gray, cracked like cooled volcanic stone. His head resembles a stern, elongated human skull covered in blackened flesh, with six swept-back horns forming a crown around his head.

He wears the armor of countless defeated civilizations, each piece bearing unfamiliar heraldry. Some symbols are recognizable as the insignia of kingdoms that never existed in the mortal world.

Each of his six hands carries a different weapon: spear, sword, axe, mace, whip, and a black war-banner mounted on a lance.

Kharzun does not fight like a beast. He fights like a perfect general, studying the movements of his enemies with an unsettling patience.

Sometimes, his six weapons move before he has consciously decided to strike.

Symbol: Six crossed weapons beneath a burning crown.

Realm: The Thousand Battlefields, an endless continent where armies of demons, mortals, and stranger things wage wars whose causes have been forgotten for ages.

---

5. ULMOG, THE SLEEPING MOUNTAIN

Demon Lord of Earthquakes, Collapse, Ruins, and Buried Things

Ulmog is a colossal humanoid demon whose body is composed of black volcanic stone.

He is so enormous that mountains rise from his shoulders and back. Rivers of molten rock flow through cracks in his body. Ancient ruins are buried within his flesh.

His enormous head rests among the mountains. His face is broad and primitive, almost resembling a weathered statue of some forgotten god.

At the center of his forehead is one colossal closed eye.

It has never been seen open.

Or, at least, no surviving mortal remembers seeing it open.

Entire civilizations have unknowingly built temples and cities upon his sleeping body.

Symbol: A closed eye beneath a mountain.

Realm: The Fallen Deep, a subterranean world of collapsed civilizations, buried temples, shifting mountains, and enormous fossilized bones whose owners are unknown.

---

6. SYRAXIS, THE WIDOW OF STARS

Demon Lord of Darkness, Isolation, Lost Travelers, and Cosmic Terror

Syraxis is a towering, skeletal humanoid woman with jet-black bones and unnaturally elongated limbs.

Her rib cage is enormous, and within it floats a tiny but complete galaxy, slowly rotating inside her chest.

Her skull is smooth and almost featureless except for two brilliant white stars burning within its eye sockets.

Behind her hangs a vast cloak resembling a spiderweb woven from darkness and silver threads. Eight long, skeletal spider limbs emerge from beneath it.

Syraxis hunts the lost—not simply those who have lost their way, but those who have become separated from reality itself.

Her victims sometimes see familiar stars in her realm.

They are always in the wrong places.

Symbol: A black star caught in a silver web.

Realm: The Lightless Expanse, an infinite darkness scattered with drifting ruins, dead worlds, wrecked vessels, and enormous shapes moving far beyond the visible stars.

---

7. GRINN, THE LAUGHING PLAGUE

Demon Lord of Madness, Cruelty, Mockery, and Maniacal Laughter

Grinn is a tall, lean humanoid with an unnerving combination of human and alien characteristics.

His skin is a strange blue-violet coloration, mottled with patches of pale gray. Beneath it, faint luminous patterns occasionally pulse like bioluminescent organs.

His limbs and proportions are mostly human, although his fingers are slightly too long and his joints bend just a little farther than they should.

His face is unmistakably humanoid but grotesquely exaggerated.

His mouth is far too wide, extending almost to his ears, and contains numerous rows of thin, sharp teeth.

His eyes are large, yellow-green, and slightly too far apart.

He is almost always smiling.

He is almost always laughing.

And he finds absolutely everything funny.

Grinn's laughter is contagious, but the true horror is psychological: people exposed to him gradually lose the ability to distinguish something being funny from something being horrible.

Symbol: A wide, tooth-filled smile.

Realm: The House of Laughter, an immense, decaying city where every building contains theaters, banquet halls, and chambers filled with people laughing at things that happened long ago.

---

8. VORGATHA, THE IRON MOTHER

Demon Lord of Tyranny, Slavery, Oppression, and Obedience

Vorgatha is a colossal female humanoid demon clad in heavy black iron.

Her body remains fundamentally humanoid, though her lower legs gradually become tangled masses of living chains that trail behind her.

Her face is severe and almost beautiful, but her eyes are narrow vertical openings glowing with white furnace-light.

Long iron chains emerge from her scalp and hang around her shoulders like hair.

Her abdomen contains a visible furnace-like cavity, glowing with an intense white heat.

She wears no crown.

She needs none.

Those who serve her eventually begin to find themselves instinctively kneeling whenever they hear her approaching footsteps.

Symbol: An iron fist wrapped in chains.

Realm: The Iron Dominion, an endless landscape of fortresses, mines, prisons, and enormous industrial structures whose architecture seems designed according to geometries that are uncomfortable for the human eye.

---

9. THAUMRAX, THE EATER OF MAGIC

Demon Lord of Arcane Hunger, Forbidden Knowledge, Magical Corruption, and the Destruction of Magic

Thaumrax is an enormous serpentine humanoid, roughly twenty feet tall when fully reared.

His lower body is a powerful serpent's tail, while his upper body is muscular and humanoid.

His skin is matte black with subtle iridescent blue and violet highlights, as though it absorbs the colors around him.

His elongated humanoid face has four glowing violet eyes, with two smaller eyes positioned above the primary pair.

Six enormous horns grow backward from his skull. They resemble blackened, petrified magical crystals, with faint violet light moving through cracks within them.

His mouth appears normal when closed.

When he opens it, however, there is no tongue, throat, or anatomy inside. There is only an endless starless void.

He wears the tattered robes of an impossibly ancient sorcerer, covered with arcane writing in languages both forgotten and unknown.

Thaumrax consumes spells.

He does not merely dispel them. He feeds upon the magic itself.

Symbol: A black serpent coiled around a blank spellbook.

Realm: The Library That Devours, an endless labyrinth of forbidden books, impossible manuscripts, and libraries built within the fossilized remains of creatures larger than mountains.

---

10. NEMETHRA, THE BRIDE OF THE GALLOWS

Demon Lord of Murder, Execution, Betrayal, and Ritual Death

Nemethra is a towering, corpse-pale humanoid woman wearing a once-beautiful white wedding gown that has become ancient, filthy, and severely tattered.

The gown hangs from her body in shredded layers.

Her head is covered by a stark white executioner's hood, weathered and stained, with dark openings through which two faintly glowing eyes can be seen.

Her arms are long and unnaturally elegant, ending in enormous hands tipped with elongated black claws.

She carries a gigantic headsman's axe, its broad blade almost absurdly large even for her imposing stature.

Her neck is visibly broken, permanently twisted at an unnatural angle.

Behind her head floats a rusted iron halo shaped like a gallows.

Nemethra considers execution a sacred ceremony. To her, murder without ritual is merely wasteful.

Symbol: A noose arranged like a wedding ring.

Realm: The Hanging Gardens, beautiful gardens of pale flowers growing among endless forests of gallows and ruined wedding chapels.

---

11. BUL-KARAK, THE GOD BELOW THE SKIN

Demon Lord of Mutation, Transformation, Alien Flesh, and Bodily Horror

Bul-Karak is a massive, vaguely humanoid creature with an extraordinarily muscular body.

His skin is almost entirely absent, exposing dark red and violet musculature beneath.

His anatomy is disturbingly incomplete. Bones occasionally shift visibly beneath his muscles, and organs appear to move into different positions while he stands.

His head is vaguely human but elongated, with a completely exposed brain visible beneath a translucent membrane.

Several additional eyes have grown irregularly along his shoulders and chest.

None of them blink at the same time.

His hands remain humanoid, but his fingers can lengthen, divide, and rejoin.

Bul-Karak does not simply mutate living things.

He believes that the human body is itself an unfinished mistake.

Symbol: A hand emerging from beneath stretched skin.

Realm: The Living Crucible, where forests grow from bone, mountains pulse like organs, and the landscape continually changes its anatomy.

---

12. NIVARAK, THE PALE HUNGER

Demon Lord of Starvation, Winter, Famine, and Cannibalism

Nivarak is a gigantic, skeletal humanoid covered in tightly stretched white skin.

His body is gaunt almost beyond comprehension, yet he possesses enormous physical strength.

His ribs protrude from his chest, while his abdomen is a hollow cavity containing a small blue-white flame.

His head is essentially human in shape but stretched and narrow, crowned by enormous antlers made from translucent ice.

His jaw can split into four sections when he feeds.

He wears the remnants of ancient fur garments and carries no weapon.

He does not need one.

The cold follows him.

Symbol: A skeletal mouth containing a snowflake.

Realm: The White Silence, an endless frozen wilderness where nothing grows and distant shapes sometimes move beneath the ice.

---

13. KETHRIEL, THE THIEF OF TOMORROW

Demon Lord of Stolen Futures, Ruined Destiny, and Broken Prophecy

Kethriel is a tall, elegant humanoid demon with pale bronze skin covered in faint patterns resembling cracks in ancient marble.

His face is almost beautiful but completely expressionless.

He has no eyes.

Instead, two narrow vertical black slits occupy the places where his eyes should be.

Six enormous ivory horns grow from the back of his skull, curving around his head like a broken halo.

Kethriel has two arms, each ending in long, elegant claws.

From his hands trail countless strands of luminous golden thread.

Each thread represents a possible future.

Some are beautiful.

Some are terrible.

Some end abruptly.

Kethriel carries a long ceremonial blade with which he cuts futures away from living creatures.

Behind him hangs an enormous, ghostly tapestry depicting possible histories that never occurred.

Symbol: A golden thread severed by a black blade.

Realm: The Unhappened, a landscape filled with cities that were never built, graves of people who were never born, and ruins belonging to civilizations that exist only as possibilities.

---

14. DRAKAROS, THE BLACK ADMIRAL

Demon Lord of Piracy, Shipwrecks, Mutiny, and Drowned Treasure

Drakaros is a gigantic humanoid demon with the lower body of an enormous squid.

His upper body resembles that of an immensely powerful, weather-beaten pirate captain.

His skin is dark blue-gray and covered in scars and barnacles.

His head has a long, predatory shape, somewhere between human and shark.

He has rows of sharp teeth, one glowing green eye resembling a lantern, and one completely black eye.

A battered black admiral's coat hangs from his shoulders.

A cracked crown is incorporated into his old black tricorn hat.

His tentacles coil around an enormous rusted anchor.

Sometimes, sailors hear bells ringing from beneath the water before Drakaros appears.

There are no bells in his ships.

Symbol: A black anchor beneath a broken crown.

Realm: The Drowned Fleet, an endless black ocean filled with wrecked ships, drowned cities, and vast shapes moving beneath the waves.

---

15. YSSARAK, THE CRAWLING TYRANT

Demon Lord of Civilization, Urban Corruption, Decay, Greed, and Collective Horror

Yssarak is a gigantic humanoid rat demon, approximately fifteen feet tall.

He has a massively muscular humanoid body covered in mangy charcoal-gray and black fur.

His face is distinctly rat-like, with a long muzzle, enormous pointed ears, black whiskers, glowing yellow-orange eyes, and huge rodent incisors.

Two twisted horns curve backward from his skull.

His hands end in long black claws, and his long hairless tail drags behind him.

He wears heavy, scavenged armor assembled from rusted iron, broken gates, chains, pieces of weapons, and fragments of ceremonial objects stolen from conquered civilizations.

Upon his head rests a massive, crooked iron crown, decorated with tiny representations of towers and gates.

Yssarak represents civilization at its ugliest: greed, overcrowding, disease, corruption, violence, and the endless hunger of cities that consume everything around them.

Symbol: A horned rat beneath a crooked iron crown.

Realm: The Crawling Metropolis, an enormous Abyssal landscape of filthy streets, leaning towers, ruined districts, overflowing sewers, and labyrinthine structures whose inhabitants have forgotten who built them.

Tarzan cover art (Friday Art Attack)

I've been looking in to some of the brands and trade dress and cover artists who were popular in the field when I was a kid and teenager, really getting in to fantasy and science fiction (but especially fantasy. Although keep in mind that through the 80s, they were not actually branded as two different things yet.) The traditional publishing industry has become incredibly cancerous; it can't seem to publish anything that I really want to save its life--literally; the industry is dying on the vine--but in the 80s that was not true. Not only was it publishing a lot of stuff that I liked, but in the used book market, I was still finding stuff that had been published in the 60s and 70s. Not to mention the fact that some of what I bought in the 80s were second (or more) printings of what has originally came out in the 70s. Some of my favorites:

TSR was a surprisingly prolific, or at least it was surprising to me, of fantasy novels in the 80s, and some of their novels, like the original Icewind Dale trilogy by R. A. Salvatore and the original Dragonlance trilogy by Weis and Hickman, were genuine best-sellers. Because of this, the TSR in house artists became very well-known in the fantasy world; Larry Elmore did the Dragonlance covers, as well as the first Icewind Dale book, although Clyde Caldwell and Jeff Easley did the third. Elmore did all of the Dragonlance books.

Tor Books published the Conan pastiches during the 80s, including by many of them written by Robert Jordan. Jordan later turned Tor into a real fantasy powerhouse, of course, in the 90s with his Wheel of Time series. Wheel of Time, of course, had the Darrell K. Sweet covers. He was one of the most important fantasy cover artists of the 70s and 80s, and you could hardly pick up a random half dozen or so fantasy books during those decades without getting a Sweet cover or two. He was so prolific, that estimates of how many of his pieces ended up in print are over 1,000 and up to nearly 3,000. Not only these, but he did the 80s versions of Lord of the Rings, Thomas Covenant, and many more; some of the most popular and well-known works in print. The only cover artist who may challenge him for recognizability is Michael Whelan, but even then, I think Sweet was more easily recognizable and iconic, and the books he did were bigger than ones Whelan did. Not that that's a slight on Whelan; he did the 80s prints of the John Carter books, which I love, for instance, and he did the Pern books, which while kind of forgotten today (it seems) were extremely popular in the 80s.

Ballantine Books, which was owned by Random House but operated as a more or less independent brand since the early 70s, published a lot of my favorite books in the 80s. They also developed the Del Rey brand specifically for genre works, but not everything I have was Del Rey. Lord of the Rings was, at least the version that I grew up with. But the Tarzan books were notably published by Ballantine.

That's what I'm warming up to, actually; The black label Tarzan reprints by Ballantine, which started in the mid to late 70s and remained in print throughout the 80s are some of my favorite "fantasy" covers, and I absolutely love them. I don't have the full set, but I have many of them. Neal Adams was originally contracted to do all twenty-four Tarzan covers, but it became clear that the deadlines were too aggressive, so they split the series, and Adams ended up doing twelve and Boris Vallejo--another very prolific 80s artist--did the other twelve. Today, I'm going to post all twelve Adams covers as a Friday Art Attack. Wow, these were just great. I miss the trade dress and branding of the 80s. I don't feel like modern books really sell their content with the same gusto. Which I wouldn't do either if I were trying to sell that kind of woke slop that is much of what's getting published. I find that I'm honestly more interested in chasing older books in older printings most of the time. The time where publishers, cover artists, and to some degree even authors are strong brands in their own right seems to be over, and it's all a sea of sludge nowadays. 

Add-on to Out of the Abyss

I just read the add-on to Out of the Abyss that was about Orcus. It essentially acts as if it were a "missing" chapter of the campaign, featuring a mind-flayer lair, and an undead Elder Brain controlled by Orcus himself. You sneak in, kill mind-flayers and their thralls, role-play with a few characters, kill the Elder Brain and then face Orcus. You don't actually have to fight Orcus; because when you kill the undead Elder Brain, the rest of the mind-flayers are freed of his influence and immediately teleport in to fight him themselves, and you're told that even if you sit it out they'll eventually win. Of course, if you don't fight Orcus, the the mind-flayers will almost certainly turn on you next, and even if you do, you can't really trust the things, of course. 

It's not a bad little supplement. It's only 14 pages, two pages of which are front and back cover respectively, so like I said, you essentially treat it as if it's a missing late chapter in the original campaign. It is, however, significantly sillier, even though it claims that it's dark and it even has a super gay content warning, just in case the product somehow ends up in the hands of some total pussies, or liberals. Or Millennials, I suppose. For instance, one room has a Squidward clarinet. Another has a blue suit and tie with a child's drawing in crayon of a family, labeled mom, dad and a kid, and the dad is a mind-flayer wearing the suit. It's certainly not worth reviewing as a separate product, but I thought I'd make a little mini-post noting that I read it, and found it OK, I guess.

I also finished the James Silke (and Frank Frazetta, although that's more of an honorary credit than a real one) book Prisoner of the Horned Helmet. I had been kind of struggling with the last third of it for a while, and I just sat down and read it today; about 80-90 some odd pages or so. As I recall, the second book is considerably better (although the cover art for the first is the best in the series), and I've never read the third or fourth. In fact, the reason that I'm finally reading them is that I finally got my hands on the fourth one, which had been unavailable at any kind of reasonable price (if at all) on the used book market for years. I may not turn around and read that one literally next, though. I've got some other stuff on my list to finish, including some that I feel duty bound to finish, and some that I want to read, and honestly, I'm not quite as jazzed about James Silke as I was when I started it. I remember liking this book better than I actually did this time around.

I also finished reading "Lord of the Iron Fortress" and after I read one more 3e adventure, "Bastion of Broken Souls" I'll finish the first original pseudo-adventure path series. There are still plenty more official 3e or 3.5 modules to read, including big campaign-length ones like "Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil" or "Expedition to Castle Ravenloft" and more. I'm actually planning on putting off my Curse of Strahd read-through until I'm at the point where I can also read Expedition to Castle Ravenloft at the same time, so I can kind of compare and contrast. 

I feel like with some of these trawls, I need to free myself up just a bit, and not be so strict. Plus, I need to bounce around a bit more between different trawls. So I'm next going to read one of the Age of Cthulhu scenarios (number 2, which takes place in London) and then the next SPCM Saga before before actually reading a totally different third party campaign like Empire of Ghouls or something; plus, I want to read Silver Marches and Five Nations to keep my FR and Eberron trawls moving. These are all bigger books than some of the somewhat slim modules that I've been reading, so it'll take me more time to get through them, obviously. After I knock these out, we're back to Paizo and the next adventure path as well as the final bunch of 3.5 compatible stand-alone modules. In physical books, I've been on the Pathfinder Campaign Setting for a little while, which I need to finish off so I can Gods and Magic which is next (in pdf) and then move on to the next two physical game books, which are also in the Pathfinder Chronicles/Setting line; Into the Darklands and after a couple more titles, Dark Markets: A Guide to Katapesh. Obviously the former of those I'm behind on, because it's associated with the Second Darkness Adventure Path which I've already finished, and the latter is associated with Legacy of Fire which I want to start soon. It's maybe a bit much to juggle four Paizo series trawls, and try to keep them chronologically more or less aligned. But hey, I could be doing five instead of four and trying to keep the core rules trawl moving on the same timing, so it could be worse, lol.

So, anyway. Juggling lots of stuff that I'm reading. Looking to finish two rather large physical books soon; my Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting and my much delayed Celtic Myths & Tales. I still also have a Norse version of that series, but I'm not going to read that right away. In fact, I think it's past time that I picked up some of the books my daughter bought me that I haven't read, so after Celtic is finished, I'm going to read my nice copy of Dracula... which technically comes with other novels included, but I'm going to skip those. Then I'm going to read the copy she gave me of Vol. 1 of Saints. And then I'm going to read whatever is next on my paperback novels list. Which might or might not be the next Death Dealer novel, but The Mad King, Tarnsman of Gor and Thieves World are all contenders, as is the first book in the Timothy Zahn post Star Wars novels that kind of kickstarted the Star Wars Expanded Universe of novels. I've had copies of that whole series for a couple of years too and meant to read them. Sigh. So many books. So little time. And so many other things to spend it on too, for that matter. I feel like Burgess Meredith's character in that one old episode of The Twilight Zone; y'know, the antisocial librarian who finally has all the time in the world to read after the nuclear bomb goes off and kills everyone else, but then be breaks his glasses and can't read? I've always identified somewhat with that poor guy, even if the ironic drama was super contrived. 

Anyway, conclusions on what I finished reading recently?

Prisoner of the Horned Helmet: not as good as I remember. I wouldn't go out of my way to track down a copy if I didn't already have one.

"Lord of the Iron Fortress" - I don't actually like any of the 3e adventures very much except maybe "Speaker in Dreams." 

Out of the Abyss: OK, but not really what I would have hoped for it to be.

"Out of the Abyss: The Fall of Cyrog": If you do Out of the Abyss, sure, get it. Otherwise, pass.

5e Meme

I don't like to just post AI generated images, but sometimes they can be useful as a kind of meme. 

Top image is what I want my fantasy gaming to look like. 

Below that it what 5e offers.

That, more than anything, adequately, I think, explains my biggest dissatisfaction with 5e and D&D in general. 5.5 was absolutely a bridge too far, although they'd already gone many bridges too far honestly before that even happened. But with 5e, I know for sure that I'll never have any interest in D&D again, except reluctantly because I'm playing with other people who were already playing D&D.

It's just gotten silly. And no, Dark Sun isn't going to win me back. Having it have ridiculous, over-the-top violence like Fist of the North Star where girlbosses punch straight white males in the face and cause them to explode, curated by sensitivity readers to make sure that it's Lindsay Clancy friendly and still hews to the dying Diversity, Inc. trend is literally the opposite message of what I want from D&D. 

Out of the Abyss

It took me longer than I expected, as it was a busier and more stressful weekend than I expected, but before going to bed last night, I finished Out of the Abyss, an early 5e campaign that has a mixed reputation: it's considered a good narrative, a good campaign, but not really a very well organized book, and one that requires more work than one would expect to actually run. I read at least some of the book; maybe all of it, although I don't remember now, about eight years ago, although it wasn't even new then having first been published eleven years ago next week, I think. By this point, most of those earlier 5e campaigns are sadly out of print, and can only be picked up digitally. This is especially difficult for ones like Ghosts of Saltmarsh which you simply cannot find in physical book copy at a reasonable price anywhere, if you can find it at all. Out of the Abyss you can at least buy at about the same price as the cover price. After the last campaign, Princes of the Apocalypse was a reworking of a classic adventure from the 80s ("Temple of Elemental Evil") it was nice to see this one being an original. But, I kind of agree that as much as the gist of the campaign was a pretty cool idea, there are a number of things that I didn't like about it. I know it's easier to focus on the negative, and maybe that's a personality flaw of mine anyway, but let me, before I dive into all that, try and caveat this as saying that I rather liked the book, more so than Tyranny of Dragons or Princes of the Apocalypse, but I'm focusing on specifically things that I would change.

First, I think certain elements of the organization of the campaign is legitimate to complain about. The main conflict is the arrival of the demon lords (some of them anyway) in the Underdark, but we don't even get a solid understanding as a GM of what's going on until halfway through the book. Lacking some kind of introductory chapter, or at least a few pages where the campaign is summarized for the GM up front made for somewhat difficult reading, and I can see exactly why people suggest that it's difficult to run, and difficult to prepare for, and GMs need to read it at least twice just to understand how to run it, because you're given very little clarity on what's going on until it resolves. The kick-off event that starts the whole thing was published in a novel and if you didn't read it (which I did not) then it gives you nothing until more than halfway through the book to explain what the context is of anything at all that's happening. That's fine for players, but kind of rough for GM.

Another structural complaint which I think it definitely legit is that there are way too many NPCs who are sidekicks to the party, and actually keeping them straight, coming up with a unique enough roleplaying voice for them that they have some personality, and even just managing them mechanically is a huge headache. The NPCs don't have enough detail given to them to have much personality as written, so GMs will need to provide most of that on their own, which is fine, but its a bit onerous when there are so many. You'll inevitably focus on a few and leave the rest to be unremarkable and probably forgotten. And many times, the "hook" for an NPC is just mechanical. "What if there were a gelatinous cube that were sentient and wanted to tag along with the PCs?" Well... what if there was? What if there's a myconid "kid brother" who tagged along with the PCs? What if there were a quaggoth who were crazy and thought he was a curse elf prince? OK, the last one is actually something workable, but curiously, he's an easily forgettable NPC in terms of actually reading the campaign. In fact, I forgot about most of the NPCs most of the time except in the first chapter where they were introduced in about half of a column each, at most, or when they had a reason to be mentioned specifically again, like the pacificist kuo-toa monk being mentioned when you get to the kuo-toa village. Frankly, ideas like a "pacifist kuo-toa monk, deep gnome twins who are were-rats, and a sentient gelatinous cube" were more novelty value than deep more meaningful anyway.

Which brings me to my second problem; clashes and inconsistency with tone. Unlike most iterations of demons in D&D, the demons here, or even their presence kinda sorta nearby causes madness. This is a very Lovecraftian idea, that exposure to the demons like Cthulhu or even Elder Things causes you to make a Sanity check, and many NPCs nearby to fail it and become weird and crazy, and while I don't want to suggest that it is exactly like playing a Call of Cthulhu game in that respect, it does have some echoes of it, and the madness system, simplified and easy as it is creates much of that same ambience. Both the PCs and their NPC entourage are at pretty constant risk of going at least temporarily insane, requiring the use of either lots of restoration spells, or dealing with the consequences of a failed "sanity check", at least for a few rounds or two, which can be a big deal in combat. Chris Perkins, who was the lead editor, called Out of the Abyss "D&D on hard mode". So far so good, right? That's a solid bit of theming, and one that's right up my alley.

Prince of Demons, on his home layer of the Abyss

But Chris Perkins also thought that the Underdark was like Alice in Wonderland, and was very proud of noticing that, mentioning it several times in interviews, and even in a brief forward to the book. References to Lewis Carroll were scattered all throughout the book, including a "white rabbit" character that you were supposed to chase, who said something to the effect of "I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date!" as you did, mushrooms that made you bigger or smaller, lots of explicit references to "The Jabberwocky". This stuff took the Lovecraftian horror and added to it a strong dose of whimsy and silliness that is really baked right in to the game. Almost the entirety of the time spent with the oddly friendly myconids has them giving off Alice in Wonderland vibes; they're weird for the sake of being weird, but also whimsical and the only threat there is that the demon lord (lady?) of mushrooms wants to "marry" a gigantic sentient fungus, and you can actually meet her working on her mushroom wedding dress. When you come back later in the game, it's somewhat more serious, but this mismatch of horror alongside silliness and whimsy characterizes the whole adventure. Maybe that's not a problem per se, but it's not something that I particularly liked, and I thought that leaning in to the Underdark being "Wonderland" where normal little girls like Alice just get annoyed by crazy characters who act silly rather than sensible was not a direction that I cared to lean in to. Perkins said in another interview that he actually talked to R. A. Salvatore in preparation for this multimedia tie-in event (Salvatore wrote the novel that kicked it off, as mentioned above) and asked him if he had deliberately leaned in to those themes when he created the modern interpretation of the Underdark in the Dark Elf trilogy, the prequel trilogy to the Icewind Dale trilogy. He said no, but he could see the appeal of making the comparison. So that's all Perkins pushing that, not Salvatore, nor anyone else who created the predecessors to what Salvatore did. (I'm actually quite pleased that I recently read the Dark Elf trilogy again less than a year ago. Good timing!) More to the point, although not well described at the time, Gygax probably came up with the idea of the Underdark more directly from Lovecraft, specifically the underground parts of "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath" and the story that he ghost-wrote for Zealia Bishop, "The Mound." That's the vibe that the Underdark was "supposed" to have. And frankly, the Underdark of the Dark Elf Trilogy isn't nearly as Wonderland-like as Chris Perkins is making it out to be. 

As an aside, resist the urge to reorder books. You can buy omnibus versions of a lot of Salvatore's series; I bought the omnibus version myself of the Dark Elf trilogy, and would have bought the Omnibus version of the Icewind Dale trilogy if I didn't still have pretty solid paperback copies that bought back in the late 80s or early 90s when they were pretty new. But just because it takes place chronologically before the Icewind Dale trilogy, it doesn't make sense to read them in that order. That was a prequel, and without the context of having already read the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy doesn't make as much sense. I think people forget what prequel actually means. It's been around long enough that people forget that it's a "clever" neologism; taking the word sequel which means of course a subsequent work that follows an earlier work, but changing the first couple of letters to indicate that it takes place earlier. It was published later of course, and reading books in publication order, unless they've been heavily edited to facilitate reading the in the new order. Reject the new ordering. The Dark Elf trilogy is not the first three books of the Driz'zt saga. It's the second three books. 

To add to the tone challenges, the art, while often quite good, is sometimes also very cartoonish, especially of the NPCs. I'm not going to include any of it, because it's readily viewable online, but I really like some of it, and I really dislike some of it... or rather, I think that it encourages the whimsical silliness when it needs to be leaning more into the cosmic horror. NPCs who look like cartoons next to demon lords who look... well, more savage and alien then they have ever looked previously, is a weird juxtaposition, and once again, there's a kind of mismatch between the tone that the demonic incursion is meant to invoke vs the tone that the Underdark normally invokes. But the Underdark was literally pioneered by H. P. Lovecraft, most especially in "The Mound" where K'n-yan, the upper level, is most like the land of the drow and the Underdark as its usually known, Yoth below that was once the abode of the now extinct Serpent-men, and N'kai below that is pitch black, and apparently where Tsathoggua-worshipping shoggoths now roam, sealed off in panic by the K'nyanians. In "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath" the first layer is the Twilight Realm of the Gugs, with gigantic Cyclopean architecture, including the Tower of Koth, which is a staircase leading to the surface in the Enchanted Wood. Below that is the Abyss of the Ghasts and the Kingdom of the Ghouls. The darker, savage tone of the demon lords absolutely applies to the Underdark too, or at least it should.

The Underdark was probably invented as a D&D concept in the Against the Giants series by Gary Gygax himself, when after fighting giants for a while you find out the drow are secretly the mastermind villains of the adventures. The D-series trilogy was much more explicitly set in the proto-Underdark, and kind of late 1e AD&D's Dungeoneer's Survival Guide is the first really explicit source, and coined the name Underdark. 2e AD&D had some source material, including a modular campaign, Night Below, a number of drow products, and of course the Driz'zt Dark Elf trilogy, which largely spawned the D&D sourcebooks. 

3e had a book called Underdark, although it was part of the Forgotten Realms line specifically, but it also had Drow of the Underdark which was mostly campaign neutral, but implicitly was a Greyhawk setting, and instead of Menzoberranzan we had Erelhei-Cinlu and the Vault of the Drow. 4e's Underdark was explicitly part of the Nentir Vale setting, although the very late Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue book was specifically Forgotten Realms. 5e, of course, has mostly pretended like Forgotten Realms is just D&D, and done relatively little to support, or even admit that other settings exist, until very recently. I know that that's an exaggeration, but don't argue with me on that; I like looking at high level patterns and generalities, and pedantic nit-picking does not impress me. 

Anyway, I think the older Underdark is a tone that works much better for me, but there you have it.

Finally, at least in terms of things to "complain" about, the finale where you are basically spectators to the Rumble in the Underdark between the demon lords and then you fight a weakened Demogorgon was pretty weak-sauce, especially considering that you fight an unweakened (well, sorta) Demogorgon at the finale of Savage Tide. There's a lot of potential weirdness; Juiblex and Zuggtmoy might have already had their rumble together, and you only had to fight a weakened Juiblex afterwards, and Yeenoghu and Baphomet might have had their rumble together previously too. And, of course, Orcus shows up out of nowhere, and other than one off-hand reference from some mind flayer, you might not have ever suspected that he's supposed to be here in the Underdark at all. Chris Perkins calls this a "plot seed"; I call that gas-lighting. They either never developed it, or cut it for space. There's art for it, but it was in a totally different book that didn't even reference it... except in that piece of art. In general, I feel like the finale was altogether kind of confused, chaotic (not in a good way... I know, demons) and a little bit underwhelming.

UPDATE: There is a small mini-adventure published by a 3pp that fleshes this out in about 15 pages or so. I ran down a copy; I'll read it too in a little bit and see if I think it better fleshes out the narrative or not.

Ultimately, the bigger questions are would I use this material, and can I combine it with other Underdark material that I have, like the recently read Second Darkness adventure path? (And I should point out that Second Darkness was significantly less Underdark focused than I would have liked.)

I think actually that I'd need to combine them, and maybe with some other Underdark material too. Second Darkness really only has two modules (of six) that take place in the Underdark, and one of those is one that is hard to adapt, because you're posing as servants in a drow household. Out of the Abyss has too much of the wrong tone; funky and friendly cartoon-like mushroom people, deep gnomes, and whatnot. When I check out stuff related to Paizo's 1e Darklands stuff, it feels much more like what I want, but there simply aren't enough adventures that feature it.  (That video is quite long, by the way. Don't click on it unless you want to spend a good hour and a half going through it.) Ultimately, if I do a massive Underworld campaign in some kind of Old Night version of the Underworld or the Underdark, or the Darklands, or whatever you want to call it, I can borrow a few elements from these two works, but I can't do it as is. I'll need more material. 

Given that, I'm not going to move on to the next 5e campaign (Curse of Strahd) anytime too soon. I'm going to focus on some third party campaigns, including Kobold Press's Empire of Ghouls, the next Sandy Petersen Cthulhu Mythos Saga, and... well, we'll see from there. While I do have, and have had for some time now, the aspiration to create a campaign 5x5 Front focused on the Underworld, or whatever you want to call a more generic version of "the Underdark"—but ultimately, I'll probably have to create most of it myself. Despite the Underdark being such an iconic D&D setting, there's not much going on there that I feel that I can use. Out of the Abyss shows how it could be done, but then kinda goes the wrong direction with it.