This continues to be my worst year ever, coming up on nearly halfway through it now. Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. We're more than a third of the way through it, but only by three weeks. Still, regardless of the timing, the theme of the year has been "a long ride on the struggle bus." Work started off already more stressful and challenging than normal due to some "exceptional" one-off circumstances, or at least I thought they were exception and one-off at the time. They've all only gotten extremely worse. Orders of magnitude. Then my father died early in the year, at only 79. Not young, but not that old. My mother will probably live for a good ten years more and she's older than he was. Because of my wife's work situation, our finances have been strained this year, and while we had a good plan to quickly recover from that and get back on track, ongoing and severe drama with my oldest son and his family in Michigan has indirectly threatened our recovery plan, threatened my wife's ability to work, and needless to say, put a lot of emotional strain on us for its own sake, to say nothing of the financial implications of it. It's days like these where I start to wonder about the Hail Mary of buying lottery tickets. Not that that solves all of our problems, but if I can quit my toxic, extremely stressful job (which six months ago was pretty chill and not bad at all; a real failure of leadership that it got to this point so quickly) and not have to worry about finances, then the other problems become manageable.
Anyway, I'm babbling. My point is that if I'm lucky, I spend a couple of hours in the evening reading some D&D books or a novel (but mostly D&D books) or vegging in front of the TV with a YouTube hiking video or an old sitcom like Seinfeld or Just Shoot Me going on. That's about all that I can manage for free time. Not great. I'm up to about thirty books read so far this year, although some of them are just shorter modules, so maybe that's cheating just a bit. But that's how I count them, so eh. I finished recently the Paizo stand-alone module "Seven Swords of Sin", the first volume of the second Sandy Petersen Cthulhu Mythos Saga; y'know, the one with the unfortunately stupid name "Yig Snake Granddaddy." After reading the first SPCM Saga, I kind of knew what to expect with that one, so it's fine. I've also started reading "Death in Luxor" a Call of Cthulhu scenario (linked as Age of Cthulhu scenarios, all by Goodman Games). I'm also about a third of the way through my monster book re-read of Fiend Folio (3e version) which is the third of six official monster books. I'll be halfway done with those after I finish this one! And I still haven't even switched over to 3.5. I mean, I read the 3.5 MM rather than the old 3e one, because why not, but II and FF were 3e books that were never updated. I also put Races of Eberron in my backpack to read after that. I know that that seems a little out of order, because I'm not really into the Races Of, but it also is in order in the Eberron trawl. It'll probably just be out of order. I'll likely get to Races of Faerun on the Forgotten Realms trawl before I otherwise start reading the Races Of books too. After I read Eberron and Faerun, maybe I'll make a point of reading Wild, Stone, Dragon and Destiny just to get them done. I don't remember being super thrilled with those books, but I find that my memory of 3e books vs my thoughts on them now are not always completely aligned, so who knows what I'll think when I get to them. I've kind of put off advancing the Eberron and Forgotten Realms trawls because I wasn't super excited about the next book in the series, but I don't want to lose focus on those.
I'm also a little bit intimidated by the big Pathfinder (on pdf) version of the setting. I suspect that much fo the text is repeated from The Pirates Guide to Freeport and The Pathfinder Freeport Companion, but not all of it. If nothing else, there's at least a new adventure attached. But 500+ pages?! Insane! Once I finish it, though, I'm surprisingly close to completely finishing the Freeport Trawl. Although I have all of the titles of the Return to Freeport adventure path listed separately, I actually have them all in the single volume compilation (again, pdf, from DriveThruRPG). That's about it. I'll skim the Pathfinder Freeport Bestiary and the Shadow of the Demon Lord Freeport Companion, but I expect that both are just rules updates to books that I've already read, notably Creatures of Freeport and the other system companions. But I'll skim them to make sure. It seems like it's taken me forever to get to this Return to Freeport point, but that's what I really wanted to read when I started the trawl. Kind of insane that I made myself read, what 30 some odd books before I could get there? Even if some of them were just ~36 page modules, that's a heck of a prereq homework assignment I gave myself.
Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was "Seven Swords of Sin." This is an entry in the Gamemastery Series, which was later renamed Pathfinder Modules, and is a stand-alone module for 7th level D&D 3.5 edition characters published in 2007. So, before 4e had even come out. This had to have been one of the very early products by Paizo, although at the time, I admit I wasn't paying a ton of attention to the Gamemastery series or the idea of stand-alone modules at all. I was watching the adventure paths, although I didn't start actually acquiring them until later, and I was picking up a fair bit of the setting stuff, thinking it fun to be "on the ground floor" of a new setting. Of course, the reality is that Golarion always did get a fair bit of development in its modules. This one has a lot of connections to the ongoing Runelords of Thassilon stuff, which is the subject of at least three or four full adventure paths, and touched on in numerous others. I have opinions. To wit:
- I don't actually love Thassilon. I've mentioned before; there's only so many ways to make an organization or kingdom or whatever of evil wizards, divided into factions by school of magic, and while the Red Wizards of Thay didn't necessarily set the gold standard, they did manage to be better than the Runelords of Thassilon. That said, the Runelords and their junk is just window dressing. There's swords, and their tied to the seven deadly Catholic sins, which have been mapped to seven of the eight schools of magic, and it takes place in Kaer Maga, which has an old Thassilonian (or even older) backstory, but that doesn't matter too much. It's just a little bit of local color.
- It takes place in Kaer Maga, which is the setting element of Varisia specifically and probably Golarion at large that I like the least. Then again, that doesn't matter much either; the Kaer Maga setting book didn't come out until 2010, so it's just a tiny bit of flavor text here and there.
- The entire adventure is not only a massive dungeon-crawl, which I'm long on record as not enjoying, but even worse, it's a "funhouse dungeon" which means that it's a bunch of super random death traps and silliness that is incredibly gamist. The whole point of a funhouse dungeon is that each room is a "fun" challenge in its own right, but that the dungeon itself probably isn't very coherent. It's the kind of thing that people who love traps and puzzles will enjoy, but almost everyone else will think is silly at best and incredibly stupid at worst.
- James Sutter has a lot of "designer notes" asides in little text boxes. While this isn't necessarily a bad idea, it comes across here as self-indulgent and mostly cringe. He didn't really say anything that justified being said, in my opinion, and felt a little bit like self-flattery. There's still 18 more of these before we even update to the Pathfinder 1e modules, so I should focus on getting through them a little faster maybe. Then again, maybe I don't need to be in too much of a hurry. I still have twelve episodes of the Adventure Paths in 3.5 still; two full paths.
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