Pathfinder Freeport

I'm a little over half way through the Freeport: City of Adventure book which came out for Pathfinder 1e a number of years ago. Although it has the same name as the older 3e book, it's two iterations beyond that; the old 3e book was updated to the system-less Pirates Guide to Freeport back in 2007 or so, and this Pathfinder update is the next iteration, advancement a bit in the timeline and some details, expansion, and merging with the Pathfinder Freeport Companion. I had the system-less guide on my reading list, but I decided to remove it both because I read it kind of recently—since I was tracking my reading, at least—and because I had essentially three versions of the same material on the list. It seemed overkill to read all three. This "new" one, which is at least seven years old now, I've had on PDF for a number of years but never got around to reading. I found out, after spot checking, that it was on sale from the Green Ronin store in hardcopy for about a third of it's normal ~$80 price; under $30, anyway. Even with nearly ~$11 in S&H fees, I could get it for less than half its normal cost, so I did. However, by the time it arrives, I will almost certainly have finished reading the PDF copy, so it'll just go on my shelf until... well, until next time I want to read it or refer to it, I suppose. 

As I've said, I'm quite excited to finish the Freeport Trawl. I'm almost done. Once I finish this book, which I was a little intimidated to start because it's so long but which I shouldn't have been, because I've been making good time through it, I've got the Freeport Bestiary, a Pathfinder update to the older Creatures of Freeport, which I expect to have lots of repeat text from that book, so I can probably skim it quickly, the Shadow of the Demon Lord companion, which I can also skim, because it's just the adaption of the Companion material to yet another system, and I've already gone through half a dozen variants of that already, and, of course, the Return to Freeport mega-adventure. Technically originally released as six chapters; separate adventure books, but I bought it as a compilation into a single ~225 page omnibus, so it'll be like reading one of the 5e campaigns, at least in terms of scope, scale and size. After that...

It'll be easier to go through my trawls with one less, right? I'll do a big ole summary of All of Ye Freeport Products when I'm done, but especially focused on the "adventure path" Return to Freeport. My Curse of the Corsair Coast campaign proposal, in fact, would be very loosely adapting Freeport material, although with all of the Freeport products and adventures that I've read, many of them side quests and unrelated one-shots, exactly how I loosely adapt it is TBD. I'm not actually a huge fan of the high fantasy tropes that Freeport uses, which are very D&Dish, but not very Freeportish, if that makes sense. I mean it is, but it seems to me that Freeport undercuts its own brand considerably by presenting itself as a low fantasy, picaresque pirate game mixed with Lovecraftian horror, and then actually just being yet another D&D setting with Talk Like a Pirate Day corny aesthetics tacked on kind of half-heartedly. As much as I've liked a lot of Freeport material, it really needs a pretty heavy-handed restructuring to even work as advertised. Freeport isn't really what it advertises to be, in my opinion. It's really just a D&D setting. In fact, as time has gone on, it's become more of a woke, modern D&D setting. The real gritty pirates and Lovecraft themes are more cosmetic rather than structural in most products. 

So Curse of the Corsair Coast, like I said, will no doubt take some ideas from the Freeport material, but it'll only have 20-25% of the Freeport material, and all of it will be "roughed up" to be considerably more edgy than it actually is in print.

I also got started on the next Forgotten Realms book in my Forgotten Realms trawl, just because I hadn't touched that trawl in a long time. Faiths & Pantheons was the book I started, which was one of the ones I was least interested in, in fact, but it was next, so I needed to read it. Luckily, it's got Deities & Demigods-style long-form god stat-blocks, which I can skip through, so I'm skimming nearly 50% of the content because it's stat-block content, which I don't need and wouldn't use. Next up is Silver Marches, which I believe was a relatively well-regarded product, although I'm not 100% sure that it's the kind of product that I need or not. City of the Spider Queen is next after that, a large adventure, and Races of Faerun, a probably workmanlike product that I just have to get through to move on. Then we finally start to hit products that I'm actually kind of excited to read, like Unapproachable East, Underdark, and Serpent Kingdoms, and after a few more products, finally City of Splendors: Waterdeep. I'm still a little on the fence about Forgotten Realms of any edition, but I've got pdfs of all of the 3e stuff, and it seemed a shame that I've been sitting on them for years, so I'm glad I'm trawling through it. I think that my impression of the setting will be the same when I'm done, though—there's some interesting stuff in it, sure, but overall the themes, tone and most of the details of the setting are simply not up my alley and I'm not that interested in them. 

But the exact same could easily be said for D&D as a whole, so, eh.