Bridgetown Part II

Made some very slight improvements to Bridgetown's images, and made a major decision; Bridgetown is going to be where Alpon von Lechfeld lives, Revecca's father, an important sage-like NPC in DARKNESS IN THE HILL COUNTRY, and a raison d'etre for what happens in CULT OF UNDEATH. I also want to change Alpon's first name, since I believe that I subconsciously got it from the original Carrion Crown adventure path, although it applies to a very different character there, so I'm going to go with some similar like Anton or Albrecht von Lechfeld. 

Bridgetown will be a large town, as you can probably see from the image, although rather crammed. Not much more than two hundred feet wide, and about three quarters of a mile long, crossing the Humber River at nearly it's widest point; but at a relatively flat one. A number of hamlets and villages are within just a few miles, or even less than a mile in some cases, but they are simply farming communities that support the "greater Bridgetown" region, north of the Copper Hills and Haunted Forest and south of the Golden Wolds, which is what the farming frontier gives way to in the south and north respectively. The waters around the wide spot in the river on either side of Bridgetown are also rather slow and shallow, as the water spreads out and eddies in its especially wide channel, making for rich fishing.

Professor Anton von Lechfeld and his only daughter Revecca live in a townhouse, as nearly everyone does, but as a relatively wealthy fellow, his is wider than most and actually spans the entire width of the bridge (minus the walkways up against the water on either side, of course) and occupies every floor of his building (a real rarity in a town like this) including a peaked tower where his study, laboratory and library are.

The immediate vicinity around Bridgetown is relatively quiet and peaceful; orderly and safe. But, as always, not everything is as it seems. About a year and a half ago, a serial killer stalked the streets of Bridgetown, striking seemingly at random and widely enough separated in time that it took some time to put together the clues to identify him. The man was hanged, of course, but persistent rumors of either his ghost or the ghost of at least some of his victims linger on certain foggy nights, and small attached building to the main buildings where he lived has never been reoccupied, and still gives off a sinister mien to those sensitive to such things. Worse, he seems to have been some kind of strange cultist, and persistent rumors that he wasn't the only one in town also still linger. 

Danger from hostile Tazitta tribesmen wandering further afield than normal from the Haunted Forest or even the downriver Tazitta Bandlands is one thing, but rumors of some other kind of mysterious threat occasionally striking isolated farming homesteads of ranches have started coming in to town from its more far-flung neighbors. Strange cryptids, including the skunk ape are said to lurk in marshes along the riverbanks and rumor claims that they attack lone boats late at night... although always with some degree of separation from the person telling the rumor. Strange cattle mutilations occurring out isolated ranches far from the homes of any people have also started to spread.

The most obvious ominous feature is the Blackstone menhir, a tall standing stone of dark basalt, with heavily weathered carvings or runes that are undecipherable on it. This stone stands about a mile outside of town, but can be seen from taller towers. It has a notable sinister feel to it, and even those not sensitive to occult or psychic "emanations" report feeling uneasy, light-headed and anxious just being within a few hundred yards of it. Few indeed can approach it close enough to study it up close without being triggered into a fainting spell, a panic attack, or a bout of such unease and nausea that they must withdraw from it. On moonless nights it is especially avoided, when the people of Bridgetown claim that some form of queerness from the distant (but not as distant as they may like) Plateau of Leng or from deep within the Haunted Forest approach the Blackstone menhir, although if there is any truth to this local legend, nobody has any idea what it is that they do. Professor Anton von Lechfeld may be the foremost expert on this phenomena, although he doesn't advertise his deep expertise in matters of occult.

Anyway, here's the fixed images.

AI images are all about doing enough iterations to get what you really want. Here's probably my favorite; slight variations on the ones above.

Campaign Banners and Briefs

I'm going to write up some new campaign briefs, even though I don't yet have a solid idea on what exactly each of the potential Old Night campaigns will look like yet. But first, I want to have some solid banners for them, because I like having them. I'm going to go a little more with my current banner style, so let's see how these work. I may have more than one option for each.

Cult of Undeath A uses the Necrofonticon runes on the top, JungleSlang runes on the bottom, and the Kothika font for the main title. Add some drop and inner shadow and extra outline on the main title, and it looks pretty good. I made it transparent so I can use it over background images, but that might make it hard to read on a black background.

This next one simply swaps the Kothika for LLPaladin. I also noticed that I accidentally outlined the drop shadow, so I didn't do it this time. Let me try the Kothika one more time with the outline and drop shadow applications reversed.

Huh. That doesn't look quite as different as I'd thought. Rather subtle. Of course, I also increased the opacity of the drop shadow a bit. I'm not sure that I have a favorite between them, or care even about the difference. Let's try one more Cult of Undeath main font, and then I'll switch to another campaign.

This one uses Season of the Witch Black, which is a relatively chunky looking font. I think that's enough for this one. I might need alternative color schemes too, depending on where I want to use it. But I like this one for now, and it looks good with the blog, at least.

This Curse of the Corsair Coast banner uses CybertronianFinal for the runes and Treasure Map Deadhand for the text. For the one below, I swapped the main text to Treasure Hunt PERSONAL USE, which is just slightly more ragged looking than the very similar Treasure Hunt. I'm obviously going for a bit of a Pirates of the Caribbean look on this one. Let me try a couple more options. I have a lot of piratey fonts, although many of them are actually quite similar to each other.

This one is called The Rum is Gone. I like how the lower case Os are skulls. Given that it's an all caps style font, I probably should have had some upper case Os to mix it up. Let's try one more that's a bit of a different style...

This one is Sovereign, and it's surprisingly not quite as legible.

This is a lot of banners, even though I've got several more campaigns to do. I'm only a third of the way done! I'll continue to think about it, #3 for Cult of Undeath and #1 for Curse of the Corsair Coast, at least right now. Let's see if I decide late to change my mind. 

Revecca von Lechfeld

I should have been using Grok's image generator instead of ChatGPT all along. This is great! Some images of Revecca von Lechfeld, showing the iterative process of actually trying to get them. Every single one of them is better than what ChatGPT gave me.

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.

Carrion Crown / Cult of Undeath

Cult of Undeath is a rather radical reworking of the Carrion Crown; so radical, in fact, that its genesis as the Carrion Crown isn't super obvious, much like Star Wars as filmed doesn't really resemble The Hidden Fortress anymore (although earlier drafts of the screenplay did so more.) Now, if I wanted to run it a little bit more as written, what would I need to do? Or what would I want to do, at least? Listening (again) to the Hideous Laughter podcast and actually doing a bit more with my 5e group has made me feel more charitable towards actual D&D. More or less. I'd still rather run Cult of Undeath as I earlier described, but realistically, nobody else is going to be as interested in that as I would be.

Let me make a list.

Firstly, the adventure path is way too long. 15 levels, or whatever it is, is twice as much as I want. And I don't know how many hours that converts to, but "common wisdom" according to the internet is that 200 hours is a reasonable time for an entire AP. We play 3-4 hour sessions, so that would come to 50-67 sessions. If we're lucky we play twice a month (sometimes less frequently) meaning that that is, at best, over two years to finish, but realistically probably as much as twice that and maybe even more than that. Not only do I think closer to 100 hours is a more reasonable time, but I also don't want to go higher than about 7th level at the most either. I can certainly cut a lot of material and shorten the thing by ~50% in terms of runtime, but shortening the levels is a bit more finicky; I'll have to end up making a great number of changes to the monsters and encounters and NPCs to make that work. Which is fine; there's no chance that I'm running this in Pathfinder 1e, as it was originally published anyway, I'll probably end up running it as a handwavy on the fly 5e conversion. Which is kinda funny, as I don't actually know the rules for 5e very well. I've been playing for some months, but I've mostly been playing as a 3e player and accepting correction or direction when that leads me astray. Honestly, that hasn't happened too much. I think handwavy on the fly conversion is certainly possible between these two systems, as long as you're not to spergy about rules. I most certainly am not, nor would I tolerate spergy rules-lawyering at my table anyway.

Secondly, there's some great Paizo horror elements that aren't part of the Carrion Crown adventure path, but are honestly even better in most respects that what the Carrion Crown did. Both, curiously, by Richard Pett as writer. I mean, of course, the stand-alone module "Carrion Hill", a Lovecraftian module that works very well and was originally written for 5e. If "Wake of the Watcher", chapter 4 of Carrion Crown is supposed to be a kind of "reverse Innsmouth", then Carrion Hill is clearly a "Dunwich Horror" pastiche. In most respects, I like it better as a "Lovecraftian chapter" than "Wake of the Watcher", and I'd be likely to read the two of them, think about how to combine them, but focusing more on "Carrion Hill" rather than "Wake of the Watcher." Similarly, although I like the intro haunted house adventure of Carrion Crown well enough, the same theme is explored even better in "The Skinsaw Murders" way back in Rise of the Runelords, literally the second adventure path chapter that Paizo did as part of their post-D&D run. I'd probably look to combine Harrowstone and Foxglove Manor, including the murders taking place around town, the ghoul farms sequence, both of which are brilliant, and then maybe lean a bit more into Harrowstone when you go to the actual haunted house. Which probably won't be a prison full of half a dozen serial killer boss ghosts, because that feels very video-gamey in its structure. 

That said, even though I'm running it more like Skinsaw than like Haunting of Harrowstone, I do want the whole Professor Lorrimor's funeral set-up.

I also want to mix in the whole mistaken identity caper from "Enemy in Shadows", the first chapter of the iconic Warhammer FRP campaign. If this seems like a lot going on front-loaded in a campaign that's already too long and complicated, that's because much of the later parts of Carrion Crown are going to be significantly trimmed due to... them not really working very well, honestly. For instance:

Thirdly, although I raved about Richard Pett's entries in these other modules, he also penned the second part of Carrion Crown. I think it's a reasonably well done module, so I can't fault Pett for this, I don't think, but the entire premise just doesn't work for me. Putting a monster on trial is kind of silly to begin with, and then making the monster a relatable "good guy" who's being framed maybe is supposed to be some kind of "subverting expectations" move, but it absolutely doesn't work for me. Not even a little, tiny bit. Yes, yes... subverting expectations might be overdoing it, because I realize of course that this is a significant theme, simplified to the point of false binary dumbness, of the Frankenstein novel, but I absolutely cannot go with it. That said, many of the encounters that the PCs are meant to have while investigating the Beast's guilt (or not, in this case) are still great encounters. The context in which they happen needs to be completely changed though.

Fourth, if "the monster is a nice guy, it's the white male Christian southerners who are the real monsters" problem wasn't kind of obnoxious already (I know I'm exaggerating, but y'know. I don't care) in the Frankenstein adventure, they go ahead and repeat the same themes in the werewolf chapter (#3) and the vampire chapter (#5) meaning that those entire modules are questionable for use, at best. Maybe the themes aren't exactly the same, but saving some monsters from even worse monsters because they're actually not that bad but just misunderstood is really, really stupid. While cutting two entire modules out certainly works towards my goals of trimming the whole campaign by ~50%, it's not really a great solution either, honestly. But those modules are going to be dramatically cut back, and much of what they "need" to accomplish will be folded into another module that I already have. Plot beats, or story discoveries, or whatever, can be divorced somewhat from the action that surrounds them, especially when the action that surrounds them is often somewhat gratuitous or superfluous anyway. Maybe taking another page from "The Enemy Within", the Whispering Tyrant and the "wake up the ancient dark lord" trope can be more localized, like it is in Bogenhafn. There's nothing wrong with scaling back the scope of these high fantasy epics into something more horror and sword & sorcery-like, and a lich waking up and consuming a decent sized town or medieval-scale city is certainly sufficient stakes for the tens of thousands of people who live there. It also worked for Wisburg, the German(ic?—this was before the German Unification, but I have no idea where exactly it's supposed to be, as it's not a real city as near as I can tell. Austria, possibly, since Transylvania would have been part of the Austrian Empire at the time.) from the various versions of Nosferatu. Save the whole world is tired and tropy in D&D anyway, as far as I'm concerned. 

Anyway, I need to reexamine the modules (it's been too long since I've read them, but listening to an actual play podcast only has me 20-25% or so into the second module so far). I've also been leapfrogging that with an Enemy Within podcast, but even aside from that, I've been wanting to borrow elements of that for some time. Turning the Purple Hand Tzeentch cult into a Whispering Way undead cult shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

Cult of Undeath—pre-5x5 column noodling on The Strangers

One of the Strangers

I don't yet know exactly how I'm going to end up adapting the UFO mythology into a fantasy setting. I know that the aliens will be entities from another dimension, most likely, something like the Plane of Shadow or the Shadowfell or whatever they're calling it these days. The Upside-down is basically the same idea too (a more esoteric thing that Stranger Things stole from D&D.) But we'll see. I've got plenty of ideas, but I'm not 100% sold on any of them yet. I'll "noodle", as the title says, with some possible interpretations, but this is just brainstorming at this stage, not anything that's concretely decided.

But let me make a quick and dirty list of what some of the most iconic elements of the UFO mythology are in the real modern world. Later, I can refer to this list as I look for elements to adopt into a Lovecraftian-like fantasy format. 

• The most iconic, of course, is mysterious lights in the sky, moving more quickly than can be explained. I suspect that I'm not going to have "craft" that fly, because that's too on-the-nose UFOs, but maybe the Strangers, my version of the aliens, can transform themselves into insubstantial ghost-forms or something like that to travel in an odd, alien way.
• Loss of power? I mean, heck—the very first episode of The X-Files, Mulder and Scully are in a car that dies mysteriously when they reach an ominous stretch of road. This is a little harder to replicate in fantasy, of course, but maybe some kind of combination of darkness and paralysis will work; the idea is that the characters have a measure of helplessness. That works well anyway, for some of the other things that I have in mind for the Strangers; if they come from a Shadowfell-like place, why wouldn't they have darkness abilities, and paralysis is already a UFO mythology detail as part of abduction narratives.
• One of the most iconic elements of the UFO mythos is official government explanations that are so janky that they tend to engender more contempt and derision than being taken seriously, as if they're not even trying to really explain anything. Swamp gas? Weather balloons? Ball lightning? Some accounts are worse than others, of course, but the rather ham-handed cover-up is certainly a huge part of the UFO mythos themes.
• People (probably NPCs) experiencing lost time or lost memories, which may or may not have been because of abductions, experimentation, "anal probing", etc., although that last has become possibly a joke in and of itself. In any case, victims being able to access memories of what happened to them is difficult, because the Strangers have in some way stolen those memories. Therefore, they're a little off, bewildered, and skittish after it's all over, or they are subject to malaise and borderline unresponsiveness.
• Alien implants. In real life UFO mythology, these are alien high-tech devices, but in fantasy, they'd probably be some kind of weird Lovecraftian alien parasitic devices or even organisms. Maybe even something like the "black oil" of the movie Prometheus or some of the middle seasons of The X-Files could be the delivery vehicle, or what's within it, at least. Unexplained and eerily timely nosebleeds, weird scarring, etc. would be the clues. Whether there's some kind of "Manchurian candidate" something or other behind it is TBD, but... why not, amirite?
• I have no idea how to work these in, but there has to be crop circles and cattle mutilations going on out in the rural areas.
• Meanwhile, the Men In Black as almost but not quite human, threatening figures who ... well, literally threaten people who get too close to figuring stuff out. The California Dark Watchers mythos, while unrelated to UFOs, could play a role here too, if nothing else, just for creepy encounters that the PCs can't quite come to grips with.
• The UFO mythos has a long history of alleged crash sites, debris fields, recovered alien artifacts and even alien autopsies. Lovecraft did something not too terribly different from this many decades earlier in "The Horror at the Camp" episode in At the Mountains of Madness, so there's certainly a way to adopt some of this stuff to a fantasy setting. Not that that's fantasy per se, but it's at least early enough modern that the ideas can pass muster, and the aliens don't need to have crashed their flying saucer to end up on an autopsy table, and they can have inadvertently left weird stuff laying around in the wilderness without having to fly and crash it to get it there.
• Area 51. The idea of corrupt government groups, already mentioned above, having some kind of secret site where they're experimenting with alien stuff that they've either recovered, captured, stolen, or been given in corrupt bargains with the Strangers is another one of the most iconic line items of UFO mythology. Doesn't have to be the government, of course—but some powerful, shady organization with backing that makes them effectively immune from consequences other than mob violence. In the kind of decentralized, localized government that I'm more likely to have, a strong federalized Deep State doesn't quite make sense like it did in the X-Files.

I did create a Hero Forge model of a Yaddithian. While it doesn't look very much like the AI image of an alien in a fantasy setting, as above, it might be another alternative. I'd kind of thought of them as a more overtly Lovecraftian homage in the same way mind flayers are (even more than the wink-wink, nudge-nudge that D&D did, since Yaddithians are at least mentioned once in a Lovecraft story) and could potentially fill a similar role. It occurs to me that The Strangers already are that similar role—alien, inscrutable, horrible, and possessed of weird psychic powers that operate unlike magic as it's described already in the setting. So I guess the actual physical appearance of the Strangers remains unknown. I do kind of like making them overtly more "gray alien" like rather than a substitute mind-flayer but I may yet change my mind. After all, playing up the Lovecraftian angle probably makes it much easier to adopt UFO ideas and concepts into a fantasy milieu without it feeling really out of place and strange. I'm also not 100% certain that I want this whole thing to be solved and figured out as part of play; leaving it slightly unresolved and mysterious is, of course, another key element of UFOs.

Yaddithian

Cult of Undeath Front #3: The Bitter wood of the Bitterwood or something

Here's the Cult of Undeath 5x5 Front as it currently stands:

Front #1: Murder of Alpon von Lechfeld, etc. Already done.

The Shadow Over Inns... uh.. .Eltdown meets Against the Cult of the Reptile God(dess). Already done. 

Ghouls and other "savage" proto-vampires are also coming out of the swamp in the other direction, westwards into the Bitterwood, and are attacking villages, hamlets, and even hunting lodges frequented by wealthy and powerful. This will replace the werewolf and/or swamp witch idea that I had previously, which was loosely based on one of the adventures of the old Carrion Crown adventure path. Y'know, who whole reason Cult of Undeath was originally created.  This may replace the vampire threat, since I'm going to be treating ghouls as savage proto-vampires, probably ruled by vampires or at least near vampires, not unlike Age of Sigmar's Flesh Courts vampires.

The Frankenstein monster stuff in Mittermarkt. This is the sad and tragic fate of one of Alpon von Lechfeld's academic correspondents, and important clues to the murder need to be found here... while also dealing with the obvious problems of a rampaging yet cunning monster. (I already have this in Front #1! But that's OK; this is the one I'm going to replace with my X-files front.)

A mundane threat of highwaymen and bandits making travel between the Copper Hills and Mittermarkt (via Eltdown) dangerous; not to mention all of the crap going on in Eltdown mentioned above. Maybe this one can get up into the Sabertooth Mountains itself, and at least have a different environmental theme too.

Feral vampire

This front is probably best "started" by assuming that the PCs need something to handle the problems from the other fronts. If there is a monster that needs magical assistance to defeat (and there are, in plenty of the above) then Gaskarfells is the obvious place to go. Maybe even to stop the Werner Otten Beast outside of Mittrmarkt, which I alluded to earlier is generally not very vulnerable to regular combat. I may need to have a look at the fronts I've already done; I feel like Front #1 has half of the original plan embedded in it. I may be a bit too scatterbrained to be doing these fronts in a logical sense, and I need to go back and rewrite them once I get them more done. That said, so the PCs go to Gaskarfells, looking for some magic items that will help them handle the Otten-beast. While in Gaskarfells, they will find that the town is in a bit of trouble, and is somewhat under siege. Ghouls and even proto-vampires are assailing anyone coming or going from the city. Even the farmers are struggling, and most are now living inside city limits. The pseudomage necromancers of Gaskarfells have redirected some of the undead workers to work on the farms so that the city isn't starved out by these attacks, but that, of course, impacts the production of magic items, which is Gaskarfells main economic activity.

What exactly is going on, and what's driving these attacks? Well, there are ghouls, of course. Where else does a proto-vampire come from? These ghouls are mostly coming from the western edge of the Eltdown Fens, and have "seeped" into the Bitterwood both because they're drawn by more plentiful prey, and are drawn by the corruption of the fellshard ore, although this is subconscious. The leader of the ghouls is not just a proto-vampire, he's now advanced to becoming an actual vampire, but because he's a feral one, he's completely outside of the hierarchy of Timischburg's vampire population. This individual, the feral vampire, is Velgar Tzarnik and he has a small hierarchy of proto-vampire lieutenants; Rask, Kroven, Morvak, and Volach.

However, there is a minor noble vampire in Gaskarfells already, and he's not amused at the rise of this feral vampire attempting to destroy Gaskarfells, which is an important strategic resource for the vampires and the human nobles alike (remember, that the vampires operate kind of like a Deep State. Most of the nobility at least suspect their existence, if not actually know it, but they don't really interact directly with it. Plenty of people in Timischburg think that the idea that a cabal of vampire deep state agents actually run the country is a wild conspiracy theory. It just happens to be true.) This vampire is Dietmar von Hohenstahl and he could actually be a patron of sorts for the PCs, since he needs some help ending the threat of Tzarnik's attacks on shipments out of the town.

Of course, the head of the pseudomage/necromancer/artificer's guild is actually less happy about an overbearing vampire noble (who's being coy about being a vampire, but this guy knows) in "his" town attempting to run things his way when Gaskarfells was running smoothly without him before than he is about the feral vampire attacking from the countryside. This is Roderich von Szarad, and he's a powerful mover and shaker in his own right, without being a vampire (in fact, he's researching turning himself into a lich instead!) Although none of these three is a "good guy"; but what's best for the regular folks in town? That's up to the PCs to decide, I suppose. Probably letting von Szarad get back to running things the way he used to. But maybe taking him out so a successor who isn't so obviously crazy that he wants to become a lich is the way to go? This three way power struggle means that either of the two in town could be seeking to have the PCs as agents against not only the feral vampire and his ghouls, who have increased in numbers tremendously in the last few weeks (or so it seems).

Potential sites of interest: A) a camp or lair or something in the woods on the swamp boundary where Tzarnik and his ghouls are.  B) von Hohenstahl's lair in a manor in town, or at least near town. C) the necromancer guild house, where von Szarad is trying to turn himself into a lich. D) deep lairs under the city where Orridathis, the Watcher Beneath the Clay, made somewhat self-aware or at least awake by the corruption of the fellshard ore. The undead are being drawn subconsciously by this Elder Evil wanting to essentially birth itself into "undead fullness", which is the real threat lurking behind the feral vampires and the cultured one both, as well as part of what drove von Szarad to undead related madness.

Anyway, this entire front's write-up needs to be seen as a draft that's subject to even more revision than my last one when I do the supercut consolidated post on it.

Heqet, the Reptile Goddess

My take on the "Reptile God" in adapting "The Cult of the Reptile God" kinda sorta as part of my "swamp Innsmouth with snake people instead of fish people" is Heqet (an Egyptianized interpretation of the Greek name Hecate—I'm ignoring the third syllable.) I've also got some snake cultist Hero Forge models, although I need to check and see if they're still good with all of the updates before I repost them. But Heqet has recently had a minor redesign, in the wake of the release of the new Medusa "hair" snakes option. Using horns repurposed wasn't the same. 

I need to finish fleshing out Cult of Undeath a little bit more, or at least I should, since that's the whole point of doing this exercise. Although I'm also reminded that the more I flesh stuff out as part of the exercise of developing for its own sake, the more likely I am to feel committed to using it in play, even if it doesn't actually make as much sense "on the ground" as it did when doing this exercise.

Here's the old one for comparison. If you click on it, it'll expand.

5x5 Listing

Because I just got a few new fonts, and am having fun creating new banners, here's a complete listing of my 5x5s that I've either partly (or completely, in one case) planned, or am thinking about doing in the next... I dunno, months or couple of years tops or so. I want to have more options than just the three I started with, especially as I've had more regions added to the orbit of The Three Realms since I came up with my original list. A few of them have slight renaming issues, or other things; Shadow Over Garenport sounds too much like The Shadow of Old Night, and it isn't really accurate that it's super focused on Garenport anyway. 

Cult of Undeath is literally the original campaign that I've worked on. It started as my attempt to adapt the Carrion Crown adventure path by Paizo into something that I could use; taking some of the better elements from it and putting them into a different framework that didn't focus on so many fetchit macguffin quests, railroads, dungeon-crawls and other D&D nonsense. By the time I finished it (for generous definitions of finished) it resembled Carrion Crown very little, and only one or two story beats are even passingly familiar. Although of course all Old Night campaigns are going to be horror-like, this one is based on really classic Gothic horror, with vampires, ghosts, and stuff like that featuring prominently.

Curse of the Corsair Coast is what I'm going to call my Freeport-inspired adaptation. I don't know how much of Freeport modules that I intend to liberally raid for fun elements and ideas will still be left over when I'm done, but it should at least have a similar feel, and that's my starting point.

Originally developed under the title Chaos in Waychester, and later renamed Shadows Over Garenport, Darkness in the Hill Country is the final name of this campaign, and the first that was finished under the new 5x5 Front methodology. It's a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, lacking perhaps the super-strong theming of most of the others, and just being focused on the relatively familiar Hill Country area of the setting. I consider this the most iconic campaign of Old Night.

I haven't yet given a lot of thought to this, but as I added more references to Hyperborea to the setting as I worked on it, I developed a strong desire to have a 5x5 Front (or maybe a smaller 3x5 or something; we'll see) set there, with a focus on Lovecraftian horrors and icy wilderness. A kind of fantasy At the Mountains of Madness if you will. I presume that it may well start in Lower Kurushat, and involve some stuff there too before taking off across the Wolfwood to reach Hyperborea.

My main inspiration for this is, believe it or not, The Hangover. The idea is that the PCs start this campaign by waking up in the desert a day or two journey from Simashki, surrounded by dead bodies and charred and broken wagons; what looks like the remains of a massacred caravan. But, they have no idea who any of these bodies are, why they themselves are here, or—and they notice this soon enough—how and why at least two weeks have passed since the last thing that any of them can remember.  Trying to unravel the mystery will have them galivant across the blasted, daemon-haunted deserts of the Daemon Wastes, naturally. Slightly more light-hearted than the other ones, as I intend to put as many awkward moments in based on stuff that happened that the PCs can't remember as I can. But it's still an Old Night campaign; it'll be dark and horror-themed, of course.

As Cult of Undeath started to migrate a little bit to the east, and now straddles the Hill Country and Timischburg, I thought I needed another campaign in the West. This started out as my first stab at a Corsair Coast 5x5, but it ends up spending time on the Timischburg coastline a lot, and even makes a stop at exotic Nizrekh. Just a high level outline for now, but what I have, I'll want to focus a little less on the Corsair Coast (since I now have a whole new campaign for that) and more on the Timischburg coastline.

Carrion Crown

So, in addition to reading Horror in the Museum, a Del Rey collection of the Lovecraft ghost written and revised stories that I've had for many years (and should have read years ago) I'm also listening to the Hideous Laughter podcast of Carrion Crown, the original horror campaign for Paizo's Pathfinder Adventure Path series. While the problems I have with Carrion Crown are legion (1. too D&D; not enough horror, 2. way too railroady, 3. too proto-woke) it's still probably my favorite of the adventure paths, at least in concept (I can't claim to be overly familiar with all of the actual details of most aps) and I think that there's a lot of good to be mined out of it. 

Although there are some specifically Cthulhu or Yog-Sothothery elements to Carrion Crown, especially the Wake of the Watcher episode, which was designed specifically to be a kind of "reverse Shadow Over Innsmouth" in concept, it's really more Gothic horror most of the time, with things like liches, vampires, Frankenstein's monsters, werewolves and, of course, especially early on, lots of ghost stories. Strange Aeons is the more explicitly Lovecraftian adventure path, and yet with its focus on the Dreamlands, it's less horror focused than Carrion Crown in most respects. I never did finish my DUNGEON YOG-SOTHOTHERY review of that adventure path, but it was, I admit, kind of a disappointing one for me. But now that I'm overtly reading much more because I stopped frittering away so much time on YouTube, I actually want to try and read these more and get more caught up on what Paizo has done. My general feel for Paizo adventure paths is that they're not really at all what I would want to play or run, but they have (some) good art, and generally some decent concepts that I can loot and raid and use in a different context where they work again.

Curiously, the very first AP, Rise of the Runelords, has quite a bit of Yog-Sothothery in it too. It features the Plateau of Leng, an earthy mountainous analog to Cthulhu himself (albeit in a kind of tangential role) and more. And two of the earlier adventures, The Skinsaw Murders, and The Hook Mountain Massacre are as overtly horror-themed as anything in Carrion Crown. In fact, in many respects, I like them better as horror-themed modules than any of the content in Carrion Crown. I love the idea of integrating them into a Carrion Crown "interpreted" campaign. Although neither of those two are the Lovecraftian ones. Lovecraftian fiction isn't always horror, to be fair. In fact, many of his most memorable and longest stories aren't really horror, although they do have something dark and macabre about them, even when they're more like science fiction or weird Dunsanian dream-fantasy. 

The first Carrion Crown story is very ghost-heavy, though, and I love a good ghost story, even if Lovecraft disparaged the type. 

The Hideous Laughter podcast version is pretty good (so far.) I listened to several episodes of it a couple of years ago, but that was when I was spending a lot more time at home (although I think it was after the lockdowns) and I don't do well listening to podcasts when I'm at my desk, because I get way too easily distracted. Downloading the episodes and playing them while commuting works much better. I'm also not a huge fan of actual play podcasts or youtube series; I've tried to get into them but few of them work for me. This one is pretty good, though. It probably helps that they keep the episodes to a reasonable length, they're well edited so that a lot of the fluff is removed, they're reasonably charismatic players to listen to, and the tone is my favorite type of tone anyway. I typically join Black Lodge Games in saying that RPGs aren't really a spectator sport, but as always, there's a few exceptions here and there, and the Hideous Laughter Carrion Crown is one.

However, I don't think that they play in a way that's wonderful. Pathfinder 1e isn't really the best game for podcasts (or for my playstyle, although they do seem to be aligned with me there, just using a bad game for it). The GM is frequently calling for rolls that he shouldn't bother with, and which usually have no impact. If he calls for a perception check and then tells them what he wants to regardless of what they roll, for instance, then why is he calling for it so often? I've decided, after some trial and error, that unless a check is opposed or obviously risky, there's no reason to call for them. Perception type checks in particular should really only be made against an opposed Stealth type check, not just passive "did you see that?" kind of things. 

One other extremely minor detail that I dislike is the pronunciation of Ravengro as Raven Grow. I read it as a Romanian/Transylvianian name, with a short ă sound an emphasis on the second syllable. And, at the beginning, he called Ustalav a "fantasy Russia" which is obviously untrue; it's clearly meant to be fantasy Transylvania. I guess the fact that Dracula speaks with a somewhat Slavic accent was the source of the confusion? Either way; odd take.

But it works for me. And the fact that it's a podcast designed for audio, not video, means that I can listen to it in the car, which means that I can actually listen to it period. Plus, I like it better than most that I've tried. Like I said earlier, RPGs aren't normally very good as a spectator sport, and this is one of the exceptions. Curiously, one of the other exceptions which I tried previously and will load up when I'm done here is Red Moon Roleplaying's Enemy Within playthrough, which is also an audio podcast... although they also loaded it up on YouTube, which is where I sampled it previously. But the video is just a still of the book's cover art.

That's a lot of actual play podcasting; an entire 250+ episode Carrion Crown followed by 120+ episode Enemy Within may well be more actual play podcast than I can stand.

Gaskarfells pseudomage necromancer

Improved the Hero Forge image a bit and took some more shots of it. Thank goodness for the flexibility that body customizer and kitbashing allows. I'm not a great Hero Forge artist by any means, but I can still get cool results.