Gaming tomorrow

I may well make my pitch tomorrow. We're supposed to play in the afternoon. One of the two flaky guys said he's out, the other one hasn't confirmed one way or another. I wouldn't be surprised if neither show. If that happens, or even if he does, I may hang around a few minutes and talk to the hosts, I'm going to pitch my "last minute backup campaign" proposal and see what they think. That way, we can have much more regular gaming, and if the flaky guys don't show, we've still got something else to do anyway. 

If I run a chopped up Carrion Crown, i.e. Cult of Undeath, I actually had someone make some great suggestions... on reddit, of all places. Sigh. Reddit is sometimes the worst, but it's also one of the few parts of the internet that isn't dead and made up of bots. 

Let me just copy and paste his suggestions, and then I'll annotate my comments alongside.

• Replace the original BBEG with Mierela Tsilda, the leader of the Night Harrows group (Rival Guide). This group is more suitable as main antagonists due to lore reasons. Don't know about this one. It's probably fine. I'll need to look her up and read it, though. I don't think I've read that book before. I'm at the very least renaming everyone, so lore reasons doesn't matter to me anyway. Looks like the Night Harrows are a villainous party of adventurers; an anti-PC group with undead theming. I dunno. 
• Introducing corruption rules (Adventure Horrors, Vile Corruption variant). Every adventure has a specific curse (the players may risk contracting depending on the adventure, due to the influence of certain locations and monsters), in the following order: Possessed, Promethean, Lycanthropy, Deep One, Vampirism and Lich. This seems more like mechanical gimmickry, and while I understand that mechanical gimmickry is kind of the direction Pathfinder has specifically always gone, I'm less interested in it than most. Plus, I'll be running it in 5e. Not that those curses can't probably port over as is, since the systems are less unlike than many would like to admit, but still. I don't know that I think that's really the kind of game I like to run where there's enough of a focus on mechanical gimmickry to make it worth doing.
• Professor Lorrimor is still alive at the beginning of the campaign. The players received a letter by the NPC, who wanted to invite them in his house to commemorate his friendship with them and, eventually, asking them a favor about a certain problem. This is a huge change in terms of making it feel less like Carrion Crown and more like a classic whodunit to some degree. I'll almost certainly do this. I don't know about an invitation to "commemorate his friendship" but him being alive rather than it starting with his funeral is a great idea.
• Using Murder's Mark module as introductive adventure, before The Haunting of Harrowstone, set in Ravengro. In this way the players can explore the town and put into practice their investigative skills. Professor Lorrimor is destined to die while the players are facing the villains of this adventure (he noticed strange activities around the abandoned prison and visited that place; here, he met the Night Harrows and these people killed him to cover their tracks). I'm not familiar with that module, but I do have a pdf copy of it, so I need to pull it ahead and read it and see if this is a good idea or not if I actually do this. It sounds like it works quite well not only for establishing the tone, but also for tying stuff together fairly well.
• Since Lorrimor didn't expected to die, there is no last will. Instead, his daughter Kendra will take the dangerous books her father kept and also say that her father mentioned "something strange" about the prison (in this way, she gave the players a trail to follow). Lots of people have wills without expecting necessarily to die. It's just good preparation. Plus, even without a will, inheritance law might be pretty well established and it might be a moot point anyway. The purpose of the will is to give the players themselves both a hook and a reason to stick around for a little while and do the first adventure. I don't know that this change is substantial or needed.
• In the second adventure, the Trial of the Beast, Kendra will follow the players to Lepidstadt in order to return these dangerous books at the University. However, once separated from the players, Kendra got involved into the heist of the antiquities department. She was injured and eventually knocked unconscious; Vrood chose to frame Kendra instead of killing her by leaving some (fake) incriminating evidence of her involvement with the "Beast". In this way, Kendra is arrested on charges of being the mastermind behind the Beast's activities; she is now in danger of being sentenced to death on the ground of mass hysteria and forged evidence. This is exactly the brilliant breakthrough I needed to solve the whole dilemma of "the beast isn't the real monster, white males are!" or whatever. In retrospect, it seems so obvious, but... hindsight is always 20/20. I didn't think of it, but once I had it recommended to me, it's obvious and essential.
• This is why Judge Daramid will ask help to the players. She was an old friend of the Lorrimor family and she also knew that the Beast is innocent, but her hands are tied by her duty of impartial judge: she is unable to take the law into her own hands to have the charges against Kendra and the Beast dropped. During this encounter, make sure that the players understand that Kendra and the Beast's fate are bound together — if they want to save Kendra, they must clear the Beast's reputation as well! No, the Beast isn't innocent. Probably isn't coherent or cognizant either. The Beast will be like Dean Allen Halsey from Lovecraft's story "Herbert West—Reanimator"; a former (and very dead) man of science who was resuscitated as a feral, cannibalistic Beast. I know that that story was a deliberate parody of Frankenstein, but honestly, I don't hold Frankenstein in quite the same high regard many others of us "genre fans" do. I dislike the core theme of the story that the "monster" may not be in fact as much a monster as the scientist who created him. Frankenstein, as many literary works from that era are, is a little too high on high concept and a little too light on tight plotting and well-written, page-turning structure. I can appreciate what it's trying to do, but I don't really enjoy it all that much, and I disagree with its fundamental premise.

In addition, I could do the Kastor Lieberung thing easily here; they roll into town and come across the massacre of the coach Kastor was on, just like in The Enemy Within. Not sure exactly how that will play out, but probably not much other than some unsettling social encounters with cultists until they go to Lepidstadt. Which, of course, is Mittermarkt in Cult of Undeath. I didn't change the names above.

"The Beast" is not innocent. I don't like that idea at all.

My intention also was to replace the Harrowstone with the haunted house from The Skinsaw Murders and work "Carrion Hill" in somewhere, perhaps in place of the Lovecraftian episode that we have. As I've said many times before, I don't really like to nail down plans very firmly in advance; just have a handwavy idea of where I think it'll likely go if the PCs don't do anything to change it. But because they always might, I want to be flexible. My campaign arcs are much less firm than anything Paizo writes. That said, they do tend to play out more or less as I plan. I'm pretty good at anticipating what PCs are likely to do. If my plans do change, it's often as much on me as it is on the players anyway.

But we'll see. First step is make the proposal. Then I can worry about actually figuring that campaign out. It's all just moot stuff until we actually agree to have a "backup" campaign going on in the background.

In other news, I've been borderline sick all week, so I haven't done as much as I planned to. A bit of Old Republic in the evenings, early to bed. My wife has also been sick, so at least she doesn't feel too left out. We watched a few shows, and hung around moving in slow motion and feeling kind of bad. Tonight, we're supposed to go out. If we feel up to it and not exhausted. Maybe we'll do it tomorrow instead, depending on how we feel. 

I also played SWTOR just a bit with my son-in-law the other day. He was interested in doing it again yesterday, but he didn't log on until kind of late, so we suspected it wasn't going to happen. Maybe we'll hook up on Korriban again briefly this weekend sometime.