"Backup" campaign

Well, I think it's a reality. We had a proposal for the 7th for the next session of our Tyranny of Dragons campaign. That might still happen, but I'm the only one who responded. The DM and her husband are, of course, in and made the proposal. The other two "flaky" guys have made no response. I'm sure there will be one additional push to get them to answer and commit to coming or not coming. But I've already talked to the other two about what to do if they don't respond and we don't have a ToD session after all. And it's not a question of if; it's a question of when. If not a week from Saturday, then it will come up as a possibility every. single. time. we try to play. 

So, I think the other two are already thinking about potential characters for a pirate themed game, which will be my adaptation of the Freeport Trilogy, rather loosely run, I think. I'm going to re-read Death in Freeport from the Freeport Trilogy pdf that I've had for many, many years, I'll at least skim some of my Enemy Within material to add the mistaken identity "Kastor Lieberung" subplot. The Unspeakable One will be revised to some other entity of my own creation (name generated by ChatGPT probably to be deliberately reminiscent of a Lovecraftian entity, but a new one.) The serpent people will be replaced with rat people, which I like better. This was mentioned in my brief notes on how to run Freeport via the Freeport Trawl, which will be fleshed out and followed pretty strictly. 

Fighting ratmen in Port Liure

That image could be the two person party, which I imagine will be a man and a woman since a husband and his wife will be playing them and most people are a little bit uncomfortable playing long term a character of a different sex than they are. I'll copy and paste my older commentary into this post, from Death, Terror and Madness (in Freeport) respectively, the three modules in the Freeport Trilogy. Then I'll go through and make some minor edits to that copy-pasted text.

Death

[H]ow much of this would work in a Shadows of Old Night game, and the answer is: after changing around a few names and details, probably all of it. The scenario is a little too D&D-ish for me, but that has little impact honestly on how much of it I could use. What I was more concerned about were issues related to 1) making a sympathetic nice guy version of the snake people in the form of K'Stallo, and 2) being too kitschy with regards to Lovecraftian name-checking. K'Stallo isn't even mentioned yet at all, and "Brother Egil", who if I recall is the guy who ends up being K'Stallo, is just played pretty straight as a scholarly monk fellow and legitimate friend of Lucius, the "damsel in distress" for this module. I strongly disagree with making K'Stallo into a "good guy", but at this point, he's still completely incognito, and even in the behind the scenes text it doesn't make any reference to anything that would make it apparent that he's more than what he's presented as. It's something to think about going forward, but not a problem yet.

The hoaky Lovecraftiana isn't so bad here, but I think I do want to change some stuff anyway. The Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign can be a different cult of my own manufacture, or even one that references something else. (Brotherhood of the Dark Tapestry would be a good example; that's how Pathfinder did legitimate Yog-Sothothery by feeling legitimately Lovecraftian yet also being a new entry into the canon of Yog-Sothothery.)

Terror

I could use almost everything in this module too. Nothing in it is "too" D&D. However, the structure of the module isn't really entirely to my liking. It's very much a pre-written story with pre-written beats that have to happen for the module to play as expected. It's a railroad, in other words. While there's nothing exactly wrong with it, I don't like the structure of it, and would like to make it more flexible with the PCs figuring out exactly how to interact with the stuff that the bad guys are doing without the module having to tell me how they should interact with it.

And I was wrong in my last post; Brother Egil isn't the disguised "good guy" snakeman, that's actually Father Thuron, the "boss" of the temple. He reveals himself to the PCs at the very end of the module. I'm not a fan of that, but I'll discuss that below. And the brief "sewer crawl" is kinda sorta a dungeon-crawl, I guess, but it feels very much like the similar sewer crawl in the Bogenhafn section of Warhammer's famous Enemy Within campaign, i.e. too small and focused to be what most people would think of as a "true" dungeon-crawl.

But other than that... it's OK. I'll add an update here later when I read the next interlude, "Thieves and Liars", and I'll have that as part of an updated version of this post later today. UPDATE: "Thieves and Liars" is a completely disconnected adventure. A corrupt city official keeps an expensive mistress, who he caught in flagrante delicto with another lover. The rake managed to escape, but her normal lover beat her until she told him who he was, and now there's a huge bounty out for him. The corrupt official wants to kill him, then kill her; she wants to escape with him, he just wants to escape, and potentially dangerous bounty hunters want the big haul. It's a little D&Dish in that he's a bard and she's a sorceress, so they've got some magic that they've used to charm their way into their gold-digging successes, but if you want to pad your run through with this, you certainly can. It also offers three mini-adventure ideas, although not with any details; all three are crammed into a single page. But in terms of what you could make of the three of them, they're probably all about as meaty as the interlude itself. They're a little more supernaturally; one involves a mystery of a murdered merman, one involves aquatic ghouls attacking the corpse barge heading to the crematorium, and one involves a succubus setting up shop in a whore house.

[...] There's a few details that I'd like to discuss on how I'd convert if I were to use. I'll probably do this section as a dot point list.

• There is no Temple of the Knowledge God. I know that this was deliberately vague so that you could slot in whatever god from your setting was most appropriate, but in Port Liure, this would just be the Academy. There may be a chapel and small chaplaincy associated with the university or library; kind of like a medieval monastery, and if I even need a religious (as opposed to academic) background for "Brother Egil", then he'll be a chaplain of the chapel of the Academy. But it's OK if it's just a scholar too.
• Snakes suck, and almost everyone thinks so, so they make good bad guys. Chris Pramas also picked them for this module series, no doubt, because of the whole Yig deal from Lovecraft, and the disguised serpent-people of Howard from stories like "The Shadow Kingdom." Pramas even designed Freeport to be built on the ancient ruins of the serpent kingdom Valossa is clearly based on the name Valusia, which the serpent people tried to take over in "The Shadow Kingdom." But just because snakemen make good bad guys doesn't mean that they're necessarily the best ones I could use. I kind of think my skaven-like ratmen would work very well for this module to replace the snakemen. I guess I could go either way; snakes or rats; everyone pretty hates both of them, so they've got bad guys written all over them, but wandering around in the sewers and stuff seems more ratlike than snakelike. Plus, switching to rats makes it feel a little less like Freeport, even if I'm technically running the Freeport modules.
• Thuron, or whatever I rename him to because that name doesn't fit my setting, will either 1) not actually be a disguised snakeman (or ratman), or if he is, he'll be killed. I kind of like that, actually, because then he reverts to his real form and nobody knows what to think about that. Was he opposing the other snakemen who attacked the "temple"? Was he helping them? What's going on with them? I like the mystery. And if the PCs go haring after this, it can develop into something interesting. Not that I need more hooks with things to do. Freeport is pretty chock full of things to do already.

Mentioned this already, but I want to either make up my own cult dedicated to my own new Great Old One analog, or use a more obscure one than Hastur (the Unspeakable One) and his Yellow Sign. I'm not great at creating names, so I'm unlikely to attempt it, but there are enough super obscure elements of the Mythos that I can easily coopt an existing name that has no real development and turn it into something interesting. Names that I currently like include Zo-Kalar, Gol-Goroth, Yogash the Ghoul, Ghoth the Burrower, and maybe even Sebek, who is also a real Egyptian god and a Robert Bloch created Mythos analog of such.

Madness

"Madness" has four parts listed, but two of them are actually quite similar and run together, and only are split by kind of fiat, and because it makes the four parts roughly equal in size that way. I see it as fundamentally a three part module, with a longer and mostly frustrating middle act. The first act is a soiree held by the corrupt Sea Lord to honor the PCs, but also to entrap them and frame them. It's mostly a roleplaying opportunity, where they get to wear nice things and hang out with important people in the palace, sniping at each other, getting information, and looking for clues. It's also meant to be tense, because by this point, the PCs already know that at least some of the people that they have to tolerate during this section are corrupt. This part of the module, and the way that it was written, reminds me strongly of a similar event in Warhammer's famous Enemy Within campaign, in the "Power Behind the Throne" module, and I can't believe that that wasn't deliberate. In fact, in many ways the Freeport Trilogy reminds me of the Enemy Within campaign, although clearly smaller in scope and more D&D-ish rather than embracing it's differences, as Warhammer did. Graeme Davis very explicitly said that Enemy Within was written with the directive of being a Call of Cthulhu scenario in a D&D-like fantasy setting, and it feels like it. The Freeport Trilogy, on the other hand, feels very much like a D&D scenario in D&D that pays some superficial lip service to Yog-Sothothery. Sometimes second-hand, as here where it's imitating the most famous Warhammer campaign explicitly. [...]

The next two parts are two connected and back to back dungeon crawls. The PCs are meant to infiltrate first a haunted semi-flooded cave on the coast where some pirate treasure is hidden, and which connects to the second; the old serpent temple, which of course is also haunted. Not only do I not like dungeon crawls at all, but I also don't like the sympathetic "friendly" ghost monsters of some of the snakes, I hate the riddles and traps and randomness of many of the monsters present, and I also hate the McGuffin angle; find the Yig McGuffin which will counter the Unspeakable One McGuffin that the bad guys are using like paper to the bad guy's rock. I don't mind the idea of caves on the shore of some cliffs that you have to watch the timing of because of the tides. That's a whole Pirates of the Caribbean (the original ride from the 60s) angle that's pretty cool, and is a cool environment. But there's way too much of it here, and they don't even focus on the sea caves and tides all that much, instead focusing on traps and crap. 

The final part is the confrontation with the Sea Lord and his cronies in his big, finished lighthouse where they're trying to summon Hastur (never named, but c'mon, it's obviously him). I don't like the "substitute the magical Hastur crystal for the healing Yig crystal angle", but a climactic confrontation in the lighthouse is, of course, inevitable. 

— (  †  ) —

So, how would I change this module to make it fit? To make it more overtly dark, Lovecraftian and all that, the monsters have to all be monstrous. There can't be any friendly, sympathetic or nice ones. Rather than an artifact from the evil serpent god who surprise! he isn't really all that evil that saves you from the other evil Lovecraftian god, I think a summoning ritual (not unlike the call deity spell from the d20 Call of Cthulhu book) can be used to summon a different alien monstrosity to drag the one that the Sea Lord summoned away from the earth to fight in the Far Realm. Or whatever. 

The massive confrontation therefore becomes a fight with two different summoning parties each trying to get their Elder Evil summoned. The cost will be tremendous; most of the PCs, the NPCs fighting, and maybe even many people in the city itself, even if shrouded in thick fog, will find the experience terrifying in the extreme, and will lose sanity like it's going out of style. The disruption to the day to day will be tremendous as cases of people going insane, and many of them not really recovering, will spike, and even people who do recover and suppress their memories of what happened, (and like I said, even if it's hidden in thick fog) it will be a devastating thing to the city, and there will almost certainly be lingering impacts for quite a long time to go in the campaign overall; NPCs that are suddenly gone, new ones that have resettled from the mainland or elsewhere, political and social upheaval, etc. 

If I do swap the serpent people and the Unspeakable One for my ratmen and .... the Horned Rat, or whatever equivalent I come up with, maybe I can still use the snake people as the alternate. PCs have to summon something more like Sertrous from the Elder Evils book or Ydersius from the Serpent's Skull adventure path. Or maybe it's just Dagon, who's already both Lovecraftian and D&Dish at the same time in equal measure. 

ChatGPT's idea of Dagon

I dunno; that's just a vague attempt to see how I could make it work. I do also like keeping the snake theme and maybe borrowing the signs and portents from the Sertrous chapter of Elder Evils to make the creepiness increase. Although I'm sure I could adapt those to rats too.

It's also worth noting that the Freeport Trilogy starts out for 1st level characters, but ends them around 7th or so level, if I remember correctly. In keeping with the way I run, my games will be more like a Lovecraftian game where lots of leveling up and getting powerful simply isn't a feature [...]. I would think that even if I adapt literally all of the Freeport adventures into a Corsair Coast campaign, the entirety of all of the adventures wouldn't get them past level 3-4 or so.