Just like I really enjoyed Red Dead Online for a while, right up until I stopped, and then I really never worried too much about getting back into it.
I guess maybe it's time for me to unfollow those reddits too. Realistically, I should just leave reddit completely alone anyway. It's a terrible place.
OK, just did it. Unjoined /swtor and /swtor-fashion. I think I'm done. I'm a little bit sad about it, but not too sad. I can always resub later if I change my mind, but the longer it goes that I don't, the less likely that I will. I've played the game plenty. Three Jedi Knight playthroughs completed. Three agents, I believe. Three or even four hunters. Two sith warriors. Three (?) scoundrels. One each plus some partly played through consular and sith sorcerer. Sure, sure... it's a pretty cool game, but how many times do I need to replay it, honestly? Probably not any more, just like I haven't played KOTOR through in like fifteen years. I got it on Steam and never even fired it up.
Other than that, I've done some more reading, and stepped away for a day or two from my Darkness in the Hill Country campaign. I read "Scourge of the Howling Horde" a module written for D&D 3.5, clearly also tied in with D&D Miniatures which was what they were trying to push at the time. It is a decent, although uninspired IMO low level basic dungeon-crawl with a little bit of in-town roleplaying before you go into the little goblin dungeon. It had two interesting things about it, one of which was a definite negative, and one of which is...probably a negative, but it depends. That's aside from the "it wasn't really all that inspired or interesting of a module to begin with." First, it was obviously originally meant to be a full color product, like the mainline D&D books, but at the last minute was changed to grayscale. They didn't even redo anything with the layout; just printed it in black & white. Portions of the text are borderline unreadable. The longer follow-up in the same format, The Shattered Gates at the Slaughtergarde, which is next on my 3.5 adventure read-through and is surprisingly quite long; nearly 5x the page-count, is full color, however. Then one of the little "Fantastic Locations" D&D Miniatures scenarios (Frostfell Rift) and I get in to two of the highlight campaigns of the 3e era, Red Hand of Doom and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. I actually feel like this is a pretty modest trawl, and I will probably finish it this year if I don't let it slide, and I go out of my way to do so. I should be able to do the same for Eberron. But anyway... 2) it was written as a beginner's tutorial, no doubt in an attempt to get DDM players to understand how to play D&D proper. This seems very weird, because who came in to D&D through DDM? But that's clearly the vibe that it gives off. It also reminds me quite a bit of the tutorial basic BECMI style of game, although I'm not sure if that's 100% fair. But it reminds me strongly of that. Which isn't a bad idea, but the timing of it and who they were selling it to makes me wonder why they did it. It seems like in 2000, not 2006 would have been the time to do that.
I also read the last Dark Worlds book, so now I've finished three complete campaigns of the Sandy Petersen Cthulhu Mythos Campaign Sagas. So far, the second one was OK, and had some pretty cool ideas although they foundered under mediocre execution. The first one was much more mediocre, and this third one was by far my least favorite of the three. There are three more before I'm done, but of the three, I've got one that has some good ideas, if I significantly reorganize them, put them in a totally different context, and in my case, almost certainly blend it with the Paizo adventure path Serpent's Skull. While it's fair to say that published campaigns aren't really my thing, I've enjoyed reading some of them, but this is not a great track record. Luckily, Dark Worlds seems to be the least well regarded of the six. But Ghoul Island was ranked by Gemini as number two, and I didn't like it much. The next three look like they're going to be maybe a bit more up my alley, but as always, the key isn't in the high concept, but in the lower concepts and ideas that they have.
| Rank | Saga Title | Primary Threat / Theme | Best For | Biggest Drawback |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Skin Deep | Doppelgängers / Political Intrigue | Roleplay-heavy, story-driven groups | Slower pacing; less dungeon crawling |
| 2 | Ghoul Island | Ghatanothoa / Island Survival | Seamless drop-in to existing worlds | Linear "adventure path" structure |
| 3 | Have You Found It? | Hastur / Urban Mystery | Investigative Call of Cthulhu vibes | High DM prep; sharp late-game tone shift |
| 4 | Yig Snake Granddaddy | Yig & Serpentfolk / Pulp Action | Gonzo set pieces (dinosaurs, body-swaps) | Low horror factor; railroady twists |
| 5 | The Big Sleep | Tsathoggua / Post-Apocalypse | High-stakes survival horror | Repetitive middle-act ally recruitment |
| 6 | Dark Worlds | Mi-Go & Yuggoth / Sci-Fantasy | Weird planar/sci-fi experimentation | Hard to fit into standard fantasy settings |
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