Polycrisis

I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of a "polycrisis" or not. If not, it's a pretty self-explanatory word, really. I heard it recently in the political commentary sphere, where it's being used to refer to the state of the current Democrat party. But as expected, it refers to a kind of perfect storm; multiple crises converging at the same time where the impact of the total is more than just the sum of the impacts of the individual crises. I kind of feel like that's what my life has been like the last few weeks. A family crisis of surprising magnitude. A short term financial crisis. Two separate work crises. I've been completely unable to even think much about my hobbies, much less accomplish anything useful. About a week or so ago, I did finish the d20 Freeport Companion, so I'll talk just a little bit about that before I forget the details.

I don't actually play d20 anymore, of course (or 3.5) but I could, as I've mentioned in some of my low fantasy posts recently. Because of that, and because of my additional more charitable feelings towards the system due to my rereading of much of it, I found the Companion as interesting to read this time as it was when I first read it nearly twenty years ago. (When it was new. I got it while it was still the d20 Freeport Companion, but once 4e launched in 2008 and the d20 license was canceled, it was renamed the 3rd Era Freeport Companion and the old d20 licensing image was replaced with an OGL Compatible unofficial alternative. That one is still available, I believe, on DrivethruRPG or the Green Ronin store. Albeit, in my opinion, at a pretty overblown price point. ~$15 for a pdf for a system that it's not clear how many people are even still using? ~$30 for a POD softcover? I mean, I know this was nearly twenty years ago now, but a book this size shouldn't have sold more for than $20 as a softbound book when it was new, I wouldn't think, and if PDF is half of that, that's a more reasonable.

Too much of the book is new feats, no skills or skill uses and new spells. That's pretty par for the course for this kind of product, but it takes up a lot of space and you're not likely to use much of it. There are, however, a number of pretty cool classes, including several new base classes; a corsair (like a swashbuckling duelist), a survivalist (a less supernatural and less Kung Fu monk. I had forgotten how big a deal Kung Fu was on TV, but it started in 1972 and ran through 1975, right when D&D was first being released. I watched it myself in syndication in either the late 70s or early 80s, so it was fresh to me when I discovered D&D just as it was to Gygax when he wrote it.) There's also a full 20-level assassin, and a few others... some of them are even quite good. There's a shorter (shorter than the earlier d20 Call of Cthulhu ones, which were replicated in Unearthed Arcana at least) madness/sanity ruleset, which I still think is probably a bit overblown, but which is mercifully shorter than what was otherwise in print. There's a bunch of monsters, almost all if not all (I didn't check) were from the Creatures of Freeport book. There's a brief discussion of why they didn't include naval combat rules, and referred to you one of three already otherwise in print at the time, and there's a decent little adventure. 

It's mostly interesting to you, unsurprisingly, if you play D&D 3.5, or d20 as the license called it. Which, of course, I did for many, many years (2000-2018 or so) but even though I probably wouldn't use it again, I still found it interesting to review and refresh myself on it. I'm still not sure exactly how I'll do the other Companions, but I'll at least skim them. I think I got them on some Humble Bundle or some other kind of deal years and years ago.

That ChatGPT image is a little too DEI for my taste, but what the heck. You get what you pay for.