Fixes for 5e

A discussion on how a fix for some of the most egregious problems with 5e is already right there in the DMG (5e, not 5.5. I don't know about the new one.)

To its great credit, there are a lot of interesting variant rules in the 2014 DMG. One of these is Gritty Realism, which I’m planning on using in an upcoming campaign: long rests take 7 days, and short rests take 8 hours. I haven’t played with it yet, but it seems - assuming that the difference between an hour, a week and a day matters at all in one’s campaign - that it combats a lot of “problems” with 5e:

The 15 minute Adventuring Day: It much easier (narratively, mechanically, etc.) to consistently put players up against the resource attrition that 5e seems designed for. Places that are safe for 7 days in a row are hard to come by, presumably mostly friendly towns. So, resource expenditure on quests (the best spells, abilities, health/healing) must be allocated with care. Decisions and performance in one encounter more significantly influence the next. The final fight of the week is gonna be tense.

Martial/Caster Imbalance: Casters can’t really count on getting to use all their best spells each fight. The endurance of martials and their short rest recoveries shine.

Many Annoying Spells Elegantly NERFED: Rope trick and Tiny Hut are no longer free short and long rests respectively (Tiny Hut with its ritual casting is still kind of crazy IMO but progress is made). For exploration oriented campaigns, Goodberry’s nourishment is no longer an every day gimme - casting the spell everyday (since the nourishing berries spoil after 24 hours) is an actual cost. Likewise Create Food and Water - it now requires more conscious use in periods of nutritional scarcity. Wind Walk gives you one day of crazy travel a week instead of 7 until you are very high level.

Wilderness Adventuring: Besides some of the aforementioned wilderness travel-killing spells getting nerfed, multi-day travel away from a safe haven becomes much more attritional (and thus a possible challenge requiring some planning) across the board: DMs don’t have to choose between parties going nova on every challenge or having a slog of multiple challenges each day. It is now possible that Ranger exploration abilities may actually matter and get used in a way that is more interesting than automatically solving any survival or navigational obstacle.

Time Becomes a More of a Resource: A lot can happen in 8 hours, or 7 days. The world keeps moving, dungeons restock, factions do stuff. Players get to trade off resting decisions against broader movements in the campaign world. Political and villianous developments can arise naturally. You can more plausibly have a race against time that plays out over days and weeks. You can also now plausibly make Living/Lifestyle expenses have an effect since they need to be paid semi-regularly: you even could let higher lifestyle expenses in a settlement let you shave days off of the 7 day long rest, for instance. There is now a pace of adventuring that naturally supports the use of Downtime Activities. Parties will no longer look back and realize they went from level 1-10 in a few weeks.

Of course, the other problem is bloat. 5e claims to be simplified compared to earlier editions. That may be in terms of some questions of complexity, but the page count begs to differ. I asked Gemini to summarize for me, and it came up with the following page counts for the combined three core rulebooks for each edition, PHB, DMG and MM.

• 1e: 480 pages
• 2e: 831 pages
• 3e: 722 pages
• 3.5: 960 pages
• 4e: 832 pages
• 5e: 992 pages
• 5.5: 1,152 pages

Calling 5e or 5.5 a pared down, simplified game system compared to earlier versions of D&D, (and honestly even 1e is too complex by far) is a joke. If the books are going to be huge anyway, give me some meat on them. But better yet, let's not go for the complex gaming.

What I find with 5e, limited in some ways though my experience is, is that the game itself plays very similarly to 3.5, especially in combat, which isn't good, but it lacks the character customization that made that complexity tolerable. In other words, in spite of a few shortcuts, like advantage/disadvantage and stuff instead of calculating bonuses and penalties (which I didn't do anyway; I always saw that as an example rather than a rule) they actually cut the part of the complexity that I liked and left all of the complexity that I didn't. And somehow, still managed to become significantly larger.

Sure, some of that is adding more spells or monsters, or whatever. But again; the game isn't simple. That's an insane thing to claim.

But the solution above? It works, if I run 5e. I'd still prefer not to run 5e.

This has nothing to do with the post. It's just gratuitous visual interest.

Some images before going out of town. And a brief movie review.

Someone else's image; all I did was brighten it up, because ChatGPT tends to make stuff too dark and murky. I love this demon monster lady. I'd totally use this as a BBEG NPC.

The Highwayman from Darkest Dungeon made more realistic looking. 

An older image I had, but it had old fashioned explorers with pith helmets and stuff, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" kind of vibes. I asked ChatGPT to replace them with a D&D party, and this is what I got.

Another Revecca in her action girl pseudomage pose, but with her "vacation" outfit. Just for fun. I'm about done making Revecca variations, I think. 

A conceptopolis aboleth modified and placed in a murky underwater setting.

Three more variations of my Gloomwrought requests, although for the final one, I was kind of over the dark and foggy look and wanted a brighter variation.

Master of Vermin; one of my own Hero Forge images converted by ChatGPT to a supposedly "realistic" look. It still looks like a Hero Forge image to me, I'll admit.

Deep Ones. 

I found this on a reddit AI post, took the image, and had ChatGPT give him a different hat.

Another one of my favorite old generations.

Reading something horrible in the section of the library that he should stay out of.

Someone else's mindflayer, or illithid.

I also saw The Odyssey with my wife. I wasn't really very excited to see it, but she was, so I went. It wasn't as bad as I feared, which I kind of expected. It was even good, at least on a first pass. But it certainly wasn't great. And I think that the things that I didn't like are exactly what I expected to not like; the diversity stunt casting was annoying, and turning around and suggesting that their roles were small; little more than cameos, doesn't make that less so. The changes specifically to the character of Odysseus to make him more sad, serious, guilty, etc. was annoying. The themes Nolan added about war or whatever were unwelcome. The suggestion that Odysseus somehow "accidentally" caused the entire Bronze Age collapse was laughable. The historical Trojan War, if it happened, was at least a couple of generations before the Bronze Age collapse and the advent of the Sea Peoples, so to have Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus and Menelaus all talking about them was silly.

So, I dunno. I'm not actually a big Christopher Nolan fan. I think he's an over-rated film maker. I like Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception quite a bit. I don't really care about the rest of his movies. Interstellar is his most over-rated movie, but y'know. He's over-rated in general. That said, this isn't his worst movie. I can't exactly recommend it, but I can't exactly tell you that you shouldn't see it either.

People love to talk about the Rotten Tomatoes audience score, but as it says in this video; Rotten Tomatoes isn't to be trusted. The Metacritic audience score is 5.2. That feels much more real.

Back to gaming; it looks like I am being asked to run at least some short term stuff, for this group that's losing it's GM. He's hopeful that he can continue the campaign online, at least in a month or two, but I'm skeptical, honestly, that that's going to work out. Either way, my big disconnect, of course, is that 5e is a combination of The Avengers and The Muppets, and I don't want my fantasy to resemble either. But this is a 5e group, and while, sure, I could say, "I'm running, you play what I'm running or don't play," I'm looking to be a bit more accommodating to that. Not quite sure how I'll do this, but I want a more traditional game, and I'll almost certainly offer up one of two options; a dark pirate campaign, with material drawn from the Freeport modules, or a Gothic horror campaign with material drawn (mostly) from the Carrion Crown adventure path.

Which I may need to pull ahead in my reading schedule...

Both Gothic horror and pirates in one image

A few AI image modifications

A few modified AI images, including some Realm of Files modifications—probably the last ones I'm interested in making, a slight modification to "Revecca on vacation" and a slight modification of my half-orc one-shot character, originally based on a Hero Forge model I made of an Old Night orc character PC.

Mostly just got rid of her dumb arm tattoo. If I'd noticed that at first, I'd have done it right away, but I didn't notice it until later. I think it modified her hair slightly though.

Darker Five O'clock shadow on both his face and head, mostly.

Lots of ravens. Too many. But also changed the tower

A few minor changes. The dock seems to just do down into the water in this image, but I was running out of images to replace it with.

One shot

Revecca on vacation, which is what I'm cheekily calling this, even though it's really Revecca cosplaying as somewhere between Aladdin and Jasmine from the Disney movie. As I said with the earlier version, the image came from someone else, but since the face looked almost exactly the same as my Revecca, I thought I'd adopt it, load it and ask for longer hair. I should have also asked for the removal of the arm tattoo, but I forgot. Maybe I can still do that today before I run out of images. Anyway, this is just for fun; no big deal. 

This, on the other hand, is a conversion of one of my old Hero Forge images to AI, done for a one-shot character that I played last night. I imaged him as kind of a late 60s or early 70s Clint Eastwood character; a combination of Dirty Harry and The Man With No Name. In reality, my voice probably sounded more like the recentish interpretation of Batman. I created him as a half-orc barbarian (and come to think of it, I never even thought to rage...) but I couldn't help thinking about how I'd rather have had him be a Pathfinder character class like Slayer or even the Freebooter focused on class abilities from the old Assassin class. Although I'd probably have changed his weapon to a longsword or even rapier if the latter. Or maybe a saw-toothed scimitar. 

OSR folks often talk about how it's really hard to die in 5e, but in this 5e one shot (admittedly, only 2nd level, but still) we had one of three characters die outright and we were only a one or two unlucky rolls away from a TPK. That doesn't mean that I like 5e; I still don't love it, but it's not really exactly what everyone says that it is either, especially at lower level. It was a pretty fun game. I kind of wish I could play this character again, but I doubt that I will. 

I also found out that this other big group, which I've run a little bit for, but am mostly a fringe associate of, is losing their DM. He's moving out of state, and apparently rather rapidly. So, there may—and in fact almost certainly will be—some significant changes in our gaming group. I think the group is thinking that they can keep their current campaign going online with the current GM running it online for them. And maybe they can. They started during the covid lockdowns online, after all. However, there are a lot of reasons why I don't think this will be as successful as they think it will be 

• The DM is moving two time zones to the west. 7:30 PM start time on a weeknight might be great for people here in the Carolinas, but someone in the Rockies would have to start at 5:30, which is tricky. Or, if they use his schedule, they have to run until very late. If they split the difference, it might not be a very feasible spot for anyone.
• Moving is complicated. At a bare minimum, there's going to be a short term miss while he's too busy moving to run. He's starting a new job. Chances are that even if everything works well, the frequency of play will drop, which may leave folks with an appetite for more gaming than they're able to get.
• Just because they did online before doesn't mean that they'll want to again. They've been playing normally for years now. Downgrading to online just may not be satisfying enough to keep it going.

One of the players, who knows that I've DMed before, and even has recruited me to run some one-shots, made an offhand comment about asking me to pick up his campaign and finish it for them. I didn't say so at the time, but I was very skeptical about this. The more I thought about it, the more sure that I can't do it, or at least am not willing to.

• Their campaign is one of the 5e ones about the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, which is a dungeon-crawling game. I have no interest in running a dungeon-crawl.
• They're at 10th level, which is already higher than I like, and they expect to go all the way to 20. I have no interest in running a 10-20 level game.
• The DM has homebrewed a lot of stuff around the written campaign. I obviously have no idea what any of it is, but I doubt that it's the kind of stuff that I would have any interest in. It sounds like a big portion of it is a Harry Potter-esque magical boarding school. No thanks.
• The characters are obviously halfway through their trajectory, but I don't know jack squat about them.
• The group is, I hear, terrible about making decisions, and frequently takes half an hour to get through a single round of combat. Part of this is the cumbersome nature of 5e combat, the cumbersome nature of higher level combat, but part of it is the lack of engagement, for whatever reason, of the players. 
• The tone and whatnot of the campaign doesn't sound like anything that I'm interested in.

No, if I end up running something for this group, it'll be, as probably expected:

• A low level campaign that starts at level 1 and goes to maybe level 6-7 before encountering a planned ending.
• A darker themed campaign, where the silliness comes from the absurd actions of the players, not from silly whimsy built in before it even starts. As near as I can tell, these group is kind of the Muppets with bird people, dragon people, and all kinds of other weird races and classes built in. That's a hard thing for me to grapple with, honestly.
• Probably not closely based at all on anything written by WotC, although a very loosely adapted Carrion Crown Adventure Path (CULT OF UNDEATH), a very loosely adapted Freeport trilogy+ (CURSE OF THE CORSAIR COAST) or a sorta Hangover-inspired game (MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTES—or in a pinch, of some other location maybe) are the pitches that I'll probably make to them. 

Why not something based on DARKNESS IN THE HILL COUNTRY adapted to 5e? After all, that's the most developed, right? Yeah... but I don't want to. I want to preserve that one for my own game, not adapt it hodge-podge to 5e.

In addition, I'm going to have a Session Double Zero (00) before the Season 0 (which I think is a necessity in complicated games like anything based on d20, inluding 5e) where I do a character funnel. They won't be obligated to convert any of their funnel characters into PCs, but they will have the option to, plus it will foreshadow stuff in game. I guess it's like a twist on my "kill some randos who look like the Scooby gang" before introducing the PCs gambit. Plus, it'll be a fun exercise (I think) in its own right. Honestly, though, it's entirely possible that some of the people in this group will not be a good fit for the kind of game that I could successfully run. I can't just run anything, at least not happily or very successfully, and I don't want to try. I've gotten old, and I've got my way of running; any game that doesn't fit that better be a one-shor or super short mini-campaign before I get frustrated with it. 

Ideally, it wouldn't be 5e at all, but I think that that ship has sailed. Anyway, if some of them are not a good fit for my game, that's no big deal. It's a big group; I honestly don't think I'd mind shedding a few if they're going to be not really on board. We can do something else with them some other time. Ideally, I'd like to have two or three concurrent campaigns, because our frequency of play isn't great anyway.

Pathfinder 1e and D&D 3.53 hybrid houserules update

I decided to use the OLD NIGHT tab for setting stuff, and the SHADOW OF OLD NIGHT for rules stuff, whether my actual rule set, or the hybrid house rules that I'm playing around with. I also just created a new tab, and I'll eventually create a series of posts that use it for a new region in the Old Night setting, that will be a bit disconnected from the rest of the setting, but which will be the place where I can develop an alternate house rule and setting strategy. This was based on a throwaway line in my last post where I said that if I wanted an exotic setting variant, I'd rather base it on the psionics stuff rather than Asian-themed, or maybe there could be some minor Asian theming in a psionic themed campaign. This wouldn't really work for my own rule set, but I could easily do this with either 3.5, or Pathfinder 1e, or my hybrid rules. I also created a tab called WORLD-BUILDING which I'm going to go back and retroactively apply to a lot of posts where I noodle on setting variants other than Old Night and its immediate predeccesors, like Dark Fantasy X or Dark•Heritage. Stuff like ODD D&D will fit here, and some of the others. Many of these experiments are just meant as high level experiments, and are not meant to be fully developed, just... explored a little bit. After all, as much as I like world-building for its own sake, I don't want to get too distracted from my "main" world building effort in Old Night. Anyway, this new tab will be EMPIRE OF THE MIND-WIZARDS, and maybe I'll have some very tenuous ties between them and my version of Atlantis, and Gothan the Mind-Wizard, a Heresiarch, and the whole Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes campaign. But they will be tenuous... I don't really envision the fact that they exist on the fringes of the setting to be anything other than an off-hand reference, much like my orcling homeland of Gunaakt. The difference here is that I'll be exploring it as if it were an alternate setting that canonically kinda sorta exists in the same world, but you're not ever at all meant to go from one to the other. For all intents and purposes, they are completely different settings, that only exist in the same world as an easter egg, if you will.

I like the title Empire of the Mind-Wizards, but I don't know that I'll actually have an actual Empire or not. My early thoughts are that I need to read a few things, and it's quite a few things which I may pull out of order, because they are all on my trawl, to see if I can integrate them or borrow from them, or at least draw some kind of inspiration from them: 

• Expanded Psionics Handbook - for the races and whatever other setting material it has. If I use 3.5 exclusively (instead of P1e classes) then I'd use these too.
• Complete Psion - sadly, I've had a physical copy of this since it was new, and while I've read parts of it, I've never read it all the way through. Again, if I use the 3.5 classes, then this will become very important, because it offers four more and makes the use of psionics without any magic, arcane or divine, a well-rounded and balanced approach.
• Ultimate Psionic - a 3pp product that adapts 3.5 psionics to P1e. But it can't do Complete Psion exactly because it isn't open content. I've not read this, but one crucial (yet small) bit of information that I've heard is that it finally creates a soulknife that doesn't suck, lol. I made one a while ago based on the Star Wars d20 Jedi, so I've got options there if needed.
• Although Ultimate Psionic was the adaptation of 3.5 psionics to P1e, P1e had its own psionic or "psychic magic" line that explored the topic in a different way. Sadly for me, that means reading four books, most of them kind of chunky, to figure out what I need to do:
• Occult Adventures - the main one, with the six classes
• Occult Bestiary - in a pinch, I don't really need to read this one in order to develop this subsetting.
• Occult Realms - setting stuff, would like to peruse, but not critical
• Occult Origins - more player customization stuff, like archetypes 

Seven books, three of them quite lengthy, one of them mid-size, and the other three more modest, especially Occult Origins which I could probably read in an hour or two tops. But wait! There's more!

Given that I talked about potentially checking out Sarlona as a template for a psionic humano-centric setting, I should probably pull ahead the Eberron book Secrets of Sarlona too, which I've read before and I've had in physical form since it was new back in the mid 00s. But I don't remember much about it, so I probably need to read that one again too, just to see if it's got anything that I'd want to use for my Empire of the Mind-Wizards. The Riedran Empire of the psionic Inspired is, for all intents and purposes, an empire of the mind-wizards, so it'd be nice to see a fairly fully fleshed out version of one to see if there's anything to borrow.

All of these are already in my various trawls, but I'd have to pull them way out of order to read them now. But I'm willing to do that; for the most part, the order doesn't matter for these products. The 3.5 books in particular don't really have an order, Eberron is a relatively short list, so I'll catch up before too long; Paizo stuff just is. Ultimate Psionic, being a 3pp is technically not on the list, but I threw it in there anyway.

Also, since I had one more image that I generated yesterday for the Oriental adventures post, which inadvertently led to this little series, I'll go ahead and add the image here anyway.

D&D additional research (Oriental Adventures)

I'm writing this from the (un)lovely destination city of Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. Yes, I'm aware of the irony of the name. Needless to say, work has continued to interfere drastically with my personal life. I'm going to be here through Monday quite late. There's a decent chance I'll take Tuesday off, just because I'm going to be exhausted after all of that. Anyway, my gaming prospects have been terrible the last few months, and my blogging and vlogging prospects aren't even good. I was reminded last night that I was into SWTOR again briefly before this work crap started happening, as well as a ton of personal crap, and I just have not had a personal life at all for at least four months now, and maybe more. Depending on how you count it, up to 8 months, although it wasn't non-stop through all of that. I'm feeling really burned out on the job right now, and not at all charitable towards it or my local leadership in particular. 

Be that as it may, being stuck in a dumpy, hot, industrial Mexican desert town without a car means that even when I am free from the excruciating work drama that I have to deal with, I don't have much else to do other than go out to eat, and even then, only to places that I can reach on foot. I anticipate spending a fair number of hours this coming weekend in my hotel room with the books that I brought, for instance. I brought a novel that I'd like to finish; I'm about 60% through it and the pagecount is a modest low 300s, if I remember, Prisoner of the Horned Helmet, probably most famous for sporting a great Frank Frazetta image of the Death Dealer character with his ax raised chopping a bunch of zombies or ghouls or something. It's actually my personal favorite Death Bringer image, even moreso than the original more famous one. It's part of a series of four novels all featuring the same character, and all featuring different cover arts by Frazetta, but none of them the original iconic Death Dealer image. Author is James Silke. It's worth checking out. Pretty fun stuff.

I also brought the Golarion setting book, back from the Chronicles line, before Pathfinder 1e had even launched. I haven't started that one yet, though. Instead, I started the 3e Oriental Adventures book. It was curious; in the introduction, it said that the original Oriental Adventures book had come out sixteen years previously, which seemed like a long time when this newer one came out. But it's been twenty five years since this one came out; quite a bit longer than the gap between the first and second versions.

I seriously doubt that there will be another one. The worst people in gaming have decided that even making an Oriental Adventures book is racist. This is absurd, author of the 3e version James Wyatt is clearly a huge fanboy of both Japanese stuff, anime, manga, etc. and Chinese history and probably fantasy cinema, and has translated that love for the culture into the product. He wasn't racist, and the fact that the whole idea is being treated as racist is exactly a clear demonstration of why "racism" is nothing more than a hoax, shakedown racket, and attempt to bully white people. Oriental people can call Americans racist for "appropriating" their culture exactly when they stop 1) wearing western clothing, 2) posting from a computer, 3) in English, 4) from America. Until then, they're liars, bad faith con artists, hypocrites and scumbags. What's almost worse is the white guys who pile on. This comment is linked in the Wikipedia article on the book:  "Although Gary Gygax envisioned a campaign setting that brought a multicultural dimension to Dungeons & Dragons, the reality is that by lumping together Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Philippine, and 'Southeast Asian' lore he and co-authors David 'Zeb' Cook and Francois Marcela-Froideval actually developed a campaign setting that reinforced western culture's already racist understanding of the 'Orient.'"

ORLY? So, lumping together Chinese, Japanese, Dirty Knees and Look at These is racist, but it's totally OK to lump together ancient Rome, the Franks, the Vikings, the Celts, Medieval Merry Olde England, and anything else vaguely "Occidental?" Only Orientalism is racist? That's exactly the kind of incoherent and dishonest nonsense that this kind of fake, virtue-signaling criticism amounts to. As I said, racism is a hoax, shakedown racket, and reasonably successful (to date, but not for long) bullying tactic against white people. Nothing more. Only the spiteful, envious, hateful and dysfunctional can call you racist with a straight face, with the exception of either the con artists themselves, or the suckered victims of the con.

WotC apparently now think's it's OK to do something like Radiant Citadel, but only if you have "ethnic" authors working on it. No idea if they only think it's OK if ethnic players play it or not, but in spite of all of their propaganda to the opposite, by far the vast majority of players remain, and always will be, white males. The myth that Millennial D&D players are a vast multi-ethnic, sexually ambiguous sludge is just a myth. I'm sure it's more true than it was in the 80s, but it's not nearly as true as we're led to believe. Every poll, every survey, every look at convention attendance, i.e., every proxy except WotC's own carefully curated and not-to-be-trusted data makes this quite clear, even if they have to all be seen as proxies for the data rather than simply "the data."

In D&D and closely related D&D adjacent games (i.e., Pathfinder, which is a slightly house-ruled version of d20 D&D) there are basically three main Oriental adventures (lower case) settings. Kara-tur is the setting for the 1e AD&D Oriental adventures, and it was originally meant to be stand alone, although there were vague hints of it maybe being part of Oerik (Greyhawk.) That never really materialized, and by the time it was actually made explicit, it had been removed to Forgotten Realms, where many people assume that it's always been. This is largely because it had very little development prior to the boxed set in 1988 that was explicitly a FR product. I suppose in that sense, it's fair to call it a Forgotten Realms sub-setting; although not originally envisioned as such, in reality it never got any serious development until it "joined" the Forgotten Realms. But as the historical note on this product says, it actually didn't really "agree" with the FR; it was just bolted on because it was commercially easier to do so.

Fans of the Forgotten Realms may be surprised to learn that the world didn't originally use real-world cultures as the inspiration for its countries. One of Ed Greenwood's long-time players says that his setting was inspired by "Cities and farming regions he'd visited, yes, and the 'flavours' of them he wanted to evoke, but real-world countries or peoples or cultures no."

This changed when other authors began adding their own settings to Greenwood's world, because unlike Greenwood they often used real-world cultures as a touchstone. Technically, this practice started with the Celtic-influenced culture of the Moonshae Islands, but Kara-Tur was the first big expansion in this direction. Greenwood also notes that the real-world correlations extend beyond the major additions to the world to also include "recastings of my largely-offstage kingdoms like Unther and Mulhorand to more closely resemble real-world historical (or 'Hollywood historical') settings."

Greenwood disagrees with the results, saying that "the too-close-to-our-real-world additions like Maztica, the Hordelands, and Kara-Tur were a mistake in style". He thought that they "[pulled] gamers out of roleplaying into disputes about historical details, for one thing".

Seeing the various Oriental adventures products as "Hollywood Orient" is entirely appropriate, and actually kind of cool. I think that the more it tried to show off how multicultural the author was by adding esoteric details that normal people didn't normally care much about, the weaker the products got, honestly. In any case, in spite of it's tenuous and belated connection to Forgotten Realms, Kara-tur is probably best seen as its own setting in its own right, and the connection can only be invoked if you really want to for some reason.

The 3e Oriental adventures used Rokugan as its featured campaign setting. Rokugan was actually created by a completely different company, Alderac Entertainment Group, but WotC bought and relatively briefly owned the game, licensing the ability to make products for it back to AEG. Because Oriental Adventures 3e came out during the relatively brief window in which WotC owned the IP, they used it as the new default sample setting for the game, without any presupposed connections to Greyhawk, FR, or anything else. AEG also published their own d20 version of the setting. Which I bought used and for relatively cheap many years ago in the mid 00s, but I have never read very much of (which is why I pulled this ahead in my reading schedule; I feel like I should re-read Oriental Adventures before reading Rokugan.) It's not part of my WotC read-through, but as a prominent 3pp product during the heyday of d20 publishing, it counts more or less. If Kara-Tur was mostly Medieval Japan, but in a Chinese like geography, Rokugan was even moreso. While I'm always happy to borrow from anything, I felt like the smug "look at me and my multicultural knowledge" vibe from Rokugan as a campaign setting was always kind of off-putting, and I never loved it or had much interest in using it as is; merely in borrowing from it. That said, the 3e Oriental Adventures book had plenty of material that was explicitly disallowed from Rokugan, so it was only meant to be a sample setting, not the sum total of what you'd do with the book.

Pathfinder, of course, has Dragon Empires, or the Tian Xia continent, which is its own version of Oriental Adventures. Like every region of Golarion, they're all connected and explicitly on the same world, but they're also meant to be used much more modularly, with each setting allowing for exploration of particular themes or aesthetics and not really meant to cross over into a different campaign set in a different region. The Dragon Empires Gazetteer is the first real setting book, written by three white guys, and it was followed up in 2e with the Tian Xia World Guide and Tian Xia Character Guide written by about three dozen ethnic ambiguous people. I'm not even kidding. Look up the credits for it. I might be understating; I didn't bother counting.

Anyway, I don't care nearly as much about 2e; 1e was already overly woke for my tastes, but the Dragon Empires clearly draw from the same well as Kara-Tur and Rokugan in being "Hollywood fantasy Asia". If you're into that kind of thing, and there always are a few nerdy people with a real Yellow Fever problem, then they're pretty good settings, I suppose, but again, I'm probably more interested in looting them of interesting elements for a more western Medieval fantasy inspired setting. And some of the races, classes, and monsters (often with a more Occidental name) are pretty cool as is. I'll note that the 3e Oriental Adventures never really got a real upgrade to 3.5. There was a Dragon Magazine article that officially did so, although not completely, and then a lot of the classes and whatnot ended up popping up in other supplements. The wu jen alternate Oriental "wizard", for example, appeared in Complete Arcane. Shugenja and (kinda) the shaman were in Complete Divine, ninja in Complete Adventurer and samurai in Complete Warrior. Most of the races and classes got either direct ports into Pathfinder 1e, or close analogs as well. Plenty of the monsters showed up here and there as well, in addition to the spells.

I'll be honest with you, though, if you wanted an exotic alt.D&D, I think building it around the Expanded Psionics Handbook and Complete Psionic replacing all magic, and the races from the XPH, would have been more interesting than building it around Asia. Even if maybe you used some Asian influence here and there with it. Maybe even starting with something like Eberron's Sarlona, but getting rid of the oppressive empire which actually makes adventuring much harder, and adding a bit more weird wahoo from the XPH is a more interesting "Oriental adventures", to me at least, than any of the actual Oriental adventures.

D&D 3.5 vs Pathfinder 1e

As I've been re-reading a ton of 3.5 books, and reading a lot of Pathfinder 1e books for the first time (the rulebooks, I mean. Adventures and setting stuff I was more familiar with) I'm again forced to the conclusion that Pathfinder 1e isn't necessarily better than D&D 3.5, nor was it really necessary. It did some things better, and some things not as well. This is leaving me wondering if my "preferred" D&D-like rules would actually be a hybrid of Pathfinder, 3.5 and a few ideas from Trailblazer. I'm revisiting some of the posts I was making in 2009/10 when both were still relatively new, and I think that I still agree with it.

Pathfinder changed stuff that didn't need to be changed. What are the changes that I actually think are improvements vs changes that I don't care about or even worse, don't even want? I'm including an old 3e era Wayne Reynolds Dragon Magazine cover of a rogue, just because rogue was one class that needed some extra help, in my opinion. The Trailblazer rules clearly "priced" it as one of the most poorly balanced on the short-shrift side of all of the core classes. 

(I never did get around to costing a bunch of other classes from the Complete books, after saying that I suspected that they would come out even lower in value than the lowest ones Trailblazer costed, using the Trailblazer costing formula. I still actually want to do that, even though it's been more than fifteen years since I thought of doing it. Just for funsies.)

Let me, as I love to do, make a bulleted list. For all of these, even if house-ruling 3.5 rather than adapting Pathfinder, I would want to adapt these changes.

• CMB/CMD: Combat maneuvers were kind of a mess in 3.5. It was a joke that nobody ever remembered how to do grapple correctly, but bull rush, trip, and all kinds of other things were equally cumbrous. Simplifying all of these maneuvers to two statistics, Combat Maneuver Bonus and Combat Maneuver Defense and have them all work more or less the same was a much needed simplification. This, indeed, may have been Pathfinder's best initial contribution to the d20 system, at least when it first launched. It later added more things that are arguably even better, but we'll get to those later. 
• Skill Consolidation: Trailblazer did this too, as did Star Wars SAGA Edition and various other late d20 games, but I think Pathfinder's skill consolidation was probably the best one. But not by much. All of these games independently did more or less the same thing.
• Archetypes: Archetypes aren't really unique to Pathfinder. They were an expansion and formalization of rules that appeared in the PHB2 during 3.5. However, they became the gold standard in character customization. In fact, they became so good that they completely made prestige classes obsolete, which I don't think anyone anticipated at the time. 
• Classes: I wouldn't necessarily have said this early on in Pathfinder's run, but after I've got the entire spread before me, I think ignoring the 3.5 classes and just using Pathfinder classes is fine by me. They are more powerful compared to 3.5 classes, which is the main reason I advocate for using all of them instead of cherry-picking. Frankly, even without archetypes, most of the classes are built to be more flexible and have longer, more a la carte lists of abilities to choose from. This is even true for the psionic classes, but let's be honest; the only psionic class that I ever really loved was the soulknife, and if worse comes to worst, you can get that from the 3pp Ultimate Psionics book. Of course, this comes with my caveats already spelled out; I'm using E6, and you can't take any fullcaster option until 2nd level, and monk and bard are just banned because I like those classes. If you like the idea of either the monk or the bard, you can get there without using the class; brawler is more what I'd want a monk to look like, and the Freeport noble with some minor magic and jacked up perform skill is more like what I'd want a bard to look like. I'm on the fence about the paladin too, especially given that it's so tied to alignment, which I have no interest in. The Cavalier is probably a little bit more what I'd want a "paladin" to look like, if we really have to have some kind of semi-supernatural Mallory-style Arthurian knight. I'm less convinced that I want Arthurian anything anymore, honestly.
• Probably should have put classes first, since Archetypes are a corollary to them. I don't have an opinion on feats or spells. I don't know if they're different between 3.5 and Pathfinder other than some fixes here and there of the ones that probably don't really work. I don't care where you get your feat and spell descriptions.
• A second corollary there; I don't really go in for tools like Hero Lab or whatever. Print off a pdf blank sheet and make your character by hand with the books and a pencil. You'll have to because this is a gallimaufry of a system anyway, but I've found that I understand systems where I make my character by hand, and I don't really where I make my character with a tool. Although 5e is supposed to be simpler than d20 games, I understand d20 games intimately (or at least I did; I haven't played any of them in a good ten years now) while I just stumble through 5e as if it were d20, even though I've been playing it for over a year. Anyway, given the skill list and CMB/CMD, printing off a Pathfinder 1e sheet is probably better than printing off a 3.5 sheet, where you'd have to cross stuff off and otherwise do weird things to make it fit.
• Races: Speaking of races, I need to double check my stats. I had old d20 house rules back in the day, but I haven't looked at them in a long time. I suspect that they need a little work. Hold tight on this one for now. TBD.
• Abilities: Standard ability score generation. 4d6 six times. Drop the lowest die from each of the 4d6 rolls, so it's essentially a MAX 3d6 out of a 4d6 roll. Ideally, I'd settle on a more predictable point buy, but the reality is that I like rolling dice for abilities. It seems wrong not to. Maybe the heroic 2d6+6 six times would be better, or even 4d6 seven times so not only do you get rid of the lowest roll of the 4d6, but you throw out the lowest score altogether. While I like rolling, I find that having crappy ability scores really stinks. I'm kind of schizophrenic on this particular question.
• XP: I've never been a fan of factoring XP, although mostly because it feels like accounting rather than gaming. If I actually use XP as opposed to "milestone" leveling, I'll create handwavey XP awards rather than calculating them as the rules indicate that I "should."

On the other hand, I think most of the rest of the system, I'd rather use 3.5. 3.5 races. 3.5 combat, where they differ, etc. I'm actually not really a fan of the Pathfinder races and the way that they're written, even though in my current readthrough I've really only closely reviewed the core book races so far. I'm also not a fan of the power creep that they represent. And I'm not a fan of additional power creep with traits; especially when they recommend taking two of them! If they're supposed to be equivalent to a half-feat, why would they automatically give characters a free feat? The "mixed blessing" traits of Unearthed Arcana are a much better design, honestly, although they should be seen as optional, not as expected. 

I do need to re-read Trailblazer again, and compare it to what I'm reading in Pathfinder Core Rulebook, as well as do the class math that TB allows for to make sure that I've got them balanced. Or at least according to that formula; no guarantee that Trailblazer's balance formula is completely correct. Still, it's better than any alternative.

As much as I was excited a week or two about pursuing d20 again, I'm finding as I dig into it more and more that I prefer my own native rules lite kinda sorta OSR adjacent system better after all. Which I knew, but now I really know it, if that makes sense. Heck, maybe if going through this exercise only real result is that decide how much I prefer my own system, that's worth doing.

I do really like classes, though. The Pathfinder 1e classes tend to just excite me in their own right. 

Reading

I finished the last part of Yig Snake Granddaddy by SPCM, a four-part 5e D&D campaign that goes with the SPCM book. While I didn't really like the first campaign that much, Ghoul Island, this one I thought was a much more compelling concept, and it really kind of made me more in the mood to focus on snakes, snakemen, reptilian enemies, alien enemies, etc. The concept is that there's some serpentman dude who's slowly enacting a phased ritual which is "prehistoricizing" an area, bringing back dinosaurs, and, because it's Lovecraft, also bringing back Yithians and Elder Things, and their cities, which were there back in the Mesozoic. The campaign had a few different subthemes, or aesthetics, maybe—part of it was a kind of Lost World or King Kong like exploration of a wilderness full of dinosaurs and other exotic wildlife hazards, part of it was a kind of "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" with the Yithians in their city, that had very science-fictiony elements. In fact, kind of prosaic science fiction elements, honestly; should have been more alien! But still; not a lot of D&D campaigns tread that particular water, so it was interesting. And there was the "invasions" of the Elder Things city which was more overtly Lovecraftian horror, with their shoggoth break-out going on and all kinds of things like that, as well as the invasion of the city that the serpent-folk were attempting to conquer. 

This isn't really how I imagined it, but hey, a quick Grok prompt, and it's something for some visual interest.

Anyway, while I obviously didn't love every detail, because I never do of anyone else's campaign, this was still one that I found relatively appealing and interesting, and I had more fun reading it than not. This is Saga two of six; I'm not going to start the next one for a little while because I want to read at least another full Paizo Adventure Path (maybe two) and a 5e campaign (maybe two) before I turn back to this again, but the next one is called Dark World and involves getting the characters sent to Yuggoth to be in exile and try and find their way home, I believe. In fact, I can confirm that. I just did a google search (which these days is really usually a Gemini query) and got this AI summary of all of the campaigns in the series, all of which I'll eventually read and discuss briefly here.

The Cthulhu Mythos Sagas by Petersen Games are structured as 4-act massive adventure paths. They are listed below in their chronological release order:

    1. Ghoul Island (Late 2019)

• Core Entities: Ghatanothoa (The First-Born of Cthulhu) and Deep Ones.
• Themes: Apocalyptic dread, isolation, decay, and local cult infiltration.
• Topics: The story starts with a shipwrecked party arriving on the remote, tropical island of Farzeen. It begins as a localized island survival mystery but escalates into a frantic battle against an ancient undead threat. Players must stop a apocalyptic cult attempting to wake an entity slumbering deep beneath the ocean floor.

    2. Yig Snake Granddaddy (2020)

• Core Entities: Yig (The Father of Serpents) and Serpentfolk.
• Themes: Prehistoric survival, lost worlds, and biological devolution.
• Topics: This campaign plunges players into a primordial landscape dominated by dinosaurs, pterodactyls, and ancient reptilian masterminds. The plot focuses on a fanatical serpentfolk cult trying to revert the modern world back into its prehistoric state. Players must navigate primal wildernesses while fighting to maintain their humanity against ophidian corruption.

    3. Dark Worlds (2020)

• Core Entities: The Mi-Go (Fungi from Yuggoth) and the Zepzeg.
• Themes: Cosmic isolation, planar displacement, and techno-organic horror.
• Topics: Triggered by a mad ruler's catastrophic arcane ritual, the adventurers are violently ripped from their home plane. They find themselves cast across the cosmos and marooned on the nightmare alien world of Yuggoth. The saga handles themes of survival in a physically hostile environment under the unsettling observation of the insectoid Mi-Go.

    4. The Big Sleep (Early 2021)

• Core Entities: Tsathoggua (The Sleeper of N'kai).
• Themes: Political instability, global doom, and pervasive lethargy.
• Topics: Cultists threaten to unleash a worldwide curse that plunges civilization into a supernatural, un-awakening slumber. Players must navigate the fracturing political landscapes of kingdoms and empires to assemble an army. It culminates in an active, macro-level war to prevent the ravenous Great Old One from consuming all living things on Earth.

    5. Have You Found It? (Mid 2021)

• Core Entities: The King in Yellow (Hastur).
• Themes: Paranoia, political intrigue, and infectious madness.
• Topics: Confined almost entirely within the massive metropolitan city of Tiarazan, this campaign leans heavily into social investigation and urban mystery. After a series of minor local disturbances, the glowing Yellow Sign appears upon the moon, spreading madness through the populace. Players navigate high-society political treachery and dimensions-warping architecture to stop a young aristocrat's nihilistic plot.

    6. Skin Deep (Early 2022)

• Core Entities: Deep Ones and shifting eldritch infiltrators.
• Themes: Psychological espionage, murder mystery, and hidden rot.
• Topics: The campaign starts as a tense murder investigation tracking a legendary serial killer who seemingly vanished eighty years prior. As clues unfurl, players discover that a shapeshifting race of monsters has deeply infiltrated the governments of rival human kingdoms. The plot shifts into a gritty gauntlet of war mitigation, political maneuvering, and weeding out invisible monsters hiding in plain sight.

Anyway, of that batch, the next one is actually the one that I'm least excited to read, but we'll see. I didn't expect to necessarily like Yig Snake Granddaddy, but that may partly be based on the incredibly stupid name the campaign had. And yet, I found it rather charming when all was said and done, and although I couldn't help but think about how I'd change it, the fact is that while reading it, my mind was often fired up thinking about how to use some of that material that I was reading, so that's exactly what I want to read these things for in the first place, right? It's also interesting to read someone else's take on elements that were very prominent in the Freeport material (serpentmen, Yig, etc.) yet done somewhat differently.

I still believe that, contrary to first, immediate ideas, it's better to do Lovecraftian themes without really borrowing specific Lovecraftian stuff. Yithians and Elder Things in the jungle felt kind of hoaky and fan servicey rather than anything else, honestly. But if they'd been, say, mind flayers and aboleths, done suitably creepy, it could have been just as good if not better, in spite of their prominent nature in D&D. Of course, it's no secret that D&D has always borrowed a lot of elements from the Lovecraft circle... just as it's no secret that it essentially divorced them from their context and just made them monsters. The refrain is that it was up to the DM to make them creepy, if that's what you wanted them to be, but the reality is that hardly anyone ever really thought of them that way.

And these SPCM Sagas, while overtly and heavily Lovecraft Circle influenced, don't really do the themes very well either. It's D&D. You're meant to be, to borrow the TV Tropes expression, "Big damn heroes" saving the day heroically, and at relatively high level, for that matter. The Lovecraftian stuff is more superficial aesthetics than anything else; these are just D&D campaigns. The Dread mechanics are mentioned off-hand several times, but that is just window-dressing too, honestly.

Anyway, so yeah! Paizo Adventure Path (Second Darkness) coming up next, and WotC campaign Princes of the Apocalypse. Then we'll see. I don't want to overcommit on adventure reading. I have other trawls that aren't adventures too that I'll be working in there while I'm doing it.

APs and Campaigns Ranked by AI

Google's Gemini, or whatever their AI is that answers your search before they actually show you links, ranked the Pathfinder 1e adventure paths for me. I asked it to expand it's initial summary to include the full list, but I didn't check if it actually got everything or if it missed one. AI isn't actually as good as it should be at catching everything, which should, of course, be its strong suit.

Commentary came with the AI rankings. It's not mine. 

Tier 1: The Masterpieces (S-Tier)

• Curse of the Crimson Throne: Ultimate urban intrigue campaign.
• Hell's Rebels: Masterful political rebellion sandbox.
• Kingmaker: Definitive kingdom-building open world.
• Rise of the Runelords: Classic foundational heroic fantasy.

Tier 2: High-Quality Favorites (A-Tier)

• Iron Gods: Thrilling high-tech science-fantasy blend.
• Ironfang Invasion: Gritty guerrilla warfare and survival.
• Mummy's Mask: Traditional Egyptian-themed tomb exploration.
• Skull & Shackles: High-seas pirate sandbox adventure.
• Strange Aeons: Atmospheric Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
• War for the Crown: Intricate high-stakes political espionage.
• Wrath of the Righteous: Epic mythic-power demonic warfare.

Tier 3: Solid But Niche (B-Tier)

• Carrion Crown: Gothic horror anthology style.
• Legacy of Fire: Classic Arabian Nights genie tale.
• Reign of Winter: Whimsical plane-hopping folklore journey.
• Return of the Runelords: High-level epic trilogy conclusion.
• Ruins of Azlant: Fascinating underwater colony survival.
• Shattered Star: Direct old-school dungeon crawl.
• Tyrant's Grasp: Grim apocalyptic survival finale.

Tier 4: Heavily Flawed (C-Tier)

• Council of Thieves: Disjointed city-based organized crime.
• Giantslayer: Repetitive and exhausting giant combat.
• Hell's Vengeance: Highly restrictive evil-aligned campaign.
• Jade Regent: Frustrating caravan mechanics subsystem.
• Second Darkness: Jarring mid-campaign tonal shift.
• Serpent's Skull: Disappointing lost-continent jungle exploration.

Now, I don't pretend to be a fan of the same things as the mainstream. Seeing Carrion Crown down at B-Tier when I think it's probably the best one in many ways was weird. Why is it niche? It has the same themes as Curse of Strahd, which is largely seen as the best 5e campaign. Seeing Strange Aeons as A-Tier, when I didn't even think it was as good as Carrion Crown (although maybe I had higher expectations of it too) was weird. And I had the impression that Council of Thieves was relatively well received, but I guess not. Given that all that this AI answer is is scraping reddit posts and whatnot.

Anyway, for funsies, I did the 5e campaigns too, including the modular ones, which Gemini wanted to exclude at first.

S-Tier: The Masterpieces

• Curse of Strahd: Unmatched gothic horror sandbox.
• Lost Mine of Phandelver: The gold standard of entry-level D&D campaign design.
• Tomb of Annihilation: The pinnacle of 5e hex-crawl survival and lethal dungeon design.

A-Tier: Great & Highly Popular

• Keys from the Golden Vault: Widely praised as one of the best overall anthologies. It provides heist-focused standalone missions that are phenomenally easy to run and incredibly player-driven.
• Waterdeep: Dragon Heist: Exceptional urban roleplay and sandbox element mechanics.
• Candlekeep Mysteries: A library-themed collection focused on episodic investigations. Universally loved by DMs for its versatile, "plug-and-play" formatting.
• Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden: A gritty, isolationist sandbox praised for localized survival dread.
• The Wild Beyond the Witchlight: Whimsical feywild adventure celebrated for its brilliant pacifist run options.
• Storm King’s Thunder: A sprawling giant-slaying sandbox that captures classic grand-scale fantasy.

B-Tier: Good with Caveats

• Ghosts of Saltmarsh: Nautical-themed compilation mixing classic modules with robust seafaring rules. The town itself functions well as a campaign hub, though the maritime chapters require work to link up smoothly.
• Tales from the Yawning Portal: Recreates legendary, lethal old-school dungeons like "The Sunless Citadel" and "Tomb of Horrors." Great for tactical hack-and-slash tables but totally barren of connective narrative narrative tissue.
• Quests from the Infinite Staircase: A collection of updated classic 1e/2e modules. Highly creative sci-fi/fantasy concepts, though it relies heavily on the DM to fill in structural gaps.
• Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus: Spectacular Mad Max hellscape with an opening chapter that feels detached.
• Dragon of Icespire Peak: Reliable quest-board-style layout that works cleanly but lacks a grand plot spine.
• Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep: Compelling narrative backed by great rival NPC mechanics, tuned specifically for Exandria fans.
• Out of the Abyss: Brilliant Underdark survival escape that loses momentum in its clunky political second half.

C-Tier: Flawed or Niche Appeal

• Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel: Culturally rich, vibrant settings packed with imaginative standalone lore. Panned slightly by community rankings due to highly inconsistent adventure scaling and balancing issues.
• Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage: An immense, deep megadungeon built for combat tacticians that leaves roleplayers wanting more.
• Princes of the Apocalypse: An elemental dungeon crawl that drags under confusing sandbox pacing.
• Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk: Shifts a beloved classic into late-game cosmic horror dungeons that feel tonally jarring.
• Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen: A rigid, rail-thin military campaign targeted mostly toward setting purists.

D/F-Tier: Structural Messes

• Tyranny of Dragons (Hoard / Rise): Written before core system rules were locked, plagued by railroad structure and severe math imbalances.
• Spelljammer: Light of Xaryxis: Community-panned for a brief, linear runtime and a tragic lack of robust ship-to-ship combat.
• Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos: Tries to build a magic university school simulator but lacks compelling structural mechanics, leaving the DM to track a dizzying calendar of events.

Once again, I strongly suspect that if I were to tier these, my results would be significantly different. But reading these summaries at least gives me an expectation of what the campaigns are going to be like and about. I find that minor spoilers like this are less important to me than having expectations that aren't met, i.e., if I think a campaign should be a certain thing, or I expect it to be a certain thing and I'm not aligned with the designers, I'm more likely to dislike it than if I understand what they're trying to do and how the community thinks that they did. A lot of the problems that the community will bring out, like math problems with Tyranny of Dragons, literally won't be noticed by me at all, both because I read the campaign and I'm playing in it, but I will never and would never run it. Also, the "culturally rich, vibrant settings packed with imaginative standalone lore" of Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is much more likely to come across as obnoxious woke garbage to me. We'll see when I get there, I suppose. 

At this rate, sometime in 2030. Sigh. Also, check out that AI image, which I found online, not generated myself (I was out of images.) The tiefling girls tail comes out of the side of her hip. Sigh again.

Good modules

I've read quite a few modules in the last year or two as I've gone through my various RPG trawls, and I've got opinions. Some of these opinions I already had, but some of them crystalized just based on the process of reading a bunch of modules in relatively close proximity, and it made me think on what I liked and what I don't. This isn't meant to be a review of any particular module, publisher, or anything else, just a general discussion (occasionally with examples) of what I like and don't like. Keep in mind that I've run very few of these modules. I'm not currently running anything except for one-offs here and there, because of my relocation a couple of years ago; I joined a group that was in a recently started campaign, so while I"m not exactly at the ground floor, they were only a couple of sessions in to a new campaign. Because they were already going, I felt like it was poor manners to try and immediately subvert the campaign and offer to run something myself, needless to say, so what I've offered to do was run stuff sometimes when the whole group is struggling to get together because of scheduling. 

Of course, since the beginning of the year, my own scheduling and stress level has been a nightmare. But prior to that I had pretty good availability and more demand for playing than I was able to get from the group. Two other people in the group were in the same boat, so we were talking about running a partial group campaign in between regular sessions in the main campaign. That hasn't actually happened, although at least in some sense, that's a good thing, because it meant that the two "flakier" group members have been participating a bit more than we anticipated, and we haven't had to cancel as many sessions. Of course, it's also been at least 2-3 months since we've been able to get together now... but I'm a big part of that problem myself with my insane travel schedule, work drama and extended family drama. (It's not all drama. A wedding isn't really drama.) Anyway, this is a larger sample Millennial-looking D&D party than we'd have; our smaller group would be me and two players, husband and wife, and all three of us are Gen-Xers in our early to mid 50s. But an image of a posing fantasy adventurer party is an image of a fantasy adventurer party, and I do at least appreciate the lower fantasy vibe of it with regular humans in regular clothes, more or less.

So, I've read a lot of modules. Some old modules. Many old style but not really that old modules. Many newer modules. Many Dungeon Magazine adventures. Adventure paths. Book-form campaigns. What do I like and dislike?

- Site based adventures are very limited in their ability to be entertaining. Most of them lack much context for why the site is there and why PCs would be exploring it. In some, this is explicit; DMs are supposed to provide that context themselves, or weave the adventure into their ongoing campaign. This is a bit of a cop-out, though. It's easier to change, modify or even ignore context that it is to create one from scratch, so I'd rather have some. 

- That said, some of those set-ups and context texts can be either pretty bad or overdone. There's no reason to provide historical context for stuff in a dungeon that the party has no way of ever finding out other than the GM simply telling it to them. Adding that just to entertain the GM while reading the module strikes me as honestly kind of silly. And overly forced or unlikely context doesn't really do anyone any favors either. It will certainly have to be ignored. At least create context that tries to be useful and interesting, not just self-indulgent or contrived.

- Also, just exploring trapped rooms stuffed with monster and treasure was cliche in the early 80s and many people eschewed the whole paradigm. It's still a problem. I just finished this morning, because I woke up almost an hour early and knew I wasn't going to fall back asleep, "Heart of Nightfang Spire", one of the early 3e adventures. It's very site based and has no context, and it was a pain to read, not very interesting, and I found myself wondering how I could possibly make it fun to run or play. The context really matters, because without it, it's just a game... you're not doing anything that feels meaningful to the characters, to the setting, or to the fiction. 

- Many designers are too afraid of railroads. Others aren't afraid enough. Having a plot, through-line of events, or something like that is not a railroad. Forcing players to stick to that regardless of what decisions they make is what makes it a railroad. Writing adventures that call for forcing PC actions is bad. That's a railroad in the making. Writing adventures that assume a certain sequence of events, but doesn't force it, is perfectly fine. In fact, that's what I think I prefer after reading all kinds of alternatives. Well-designed adventures will have some built in leeway; "yeah, we assume that the players will do this, but if not, here's some other material so you're not just on your own completely."

- Because this is the way that I like to consume modules, and it works best for me running them somewhat loosely, I don't need a lot of exacting detail about what your players will see "on the ground" with their characters; I need a looser format, where I can fill in stuff depending on how it actually goes at the table, what my PCs actually do, etc. I was somewhat surprised, and I don't think a lot of other GM's will agree with this necessarily, but I think that the format that WotC uses for their one-book campaigns is actually the format that agrees with me and my playstyle the most. That doesn't mean that the specific adventures or the content is the best, just that I like the format. ~200 page campaigns that are written somewhat loosely and focus at least as much on events and plot-point opportunities as they do on site exploration and things like that—that's exactly what I want. 

- Paizo's adventure paths are the second best format for me. I rarely can run them as is, both because they do often tend too often to be written as railroads, because there's a lot of stuff that I have to change, and because they're too long, too meandery while they lose the plot for whole adventures at a time, and because they're too enamored with dungeon-crawls for my taste. But format-wise, they're pretty nice, and I've seen lots of good moments and "stealable" stuff in the (so far) seven or eight full adventure paths that I've read all the way through. It is a bit intimidating to try and read a whole thing of them, though. A full adventure path is six ~100 page books; nearly twice as long as I really need it to be. Especially since the fiction I can take or leave, the monsters can be in the monster books, and the setting stuff is also mostly replicated or abbreviated versions of content that ... also appears in one of the setting books.

- Old school and old school like modules that are site-based and offer little or no context, backstory or much in the way of hooks other than "there's probably monsters and treasures and danger in here; go check it out because that's the game that I prepared, so if you don't, I got nothing" are my least favorite. 

- Of course, style and quality are different axes, and a module can be on the good side of one axis and the poor side of another, or vice versa, or good on both or poor on both. I hoped to like the early 3e modules better than I have so far, and given that I've read five of eight, I'm confident that that's not going to change. However, once we get past the 1-20 level "pseudo adventure path" modules, I think that the next batch of them, which were spread out throughout the entire "3rd Era" period probably vary quite a bit more. I've read Expedition to Castle Ravenloft before, and honestly, I doubt that the famous and well-regarded Curse of Strahd for 5e is much better. I guess I'll see when I eventually read that one, right? In fact, in general, far too many of the 5e campaigns are really just trumped up leftovers from classic 1e modules. The next one on my list, Princes of the Apocalypse is really just the Temple of Elemental Evil put into Forgotten Realms and written in, maybe, a format that I'll like better. But I seriously doubt that they've done anything terribly interesting or innovative with it. The original is highly regarded albeit often seen as somewhat flawed, but this oneis usually perceived as middling at best by most who've read and/or played it.

On a completely separate tangent, just because, I found this cover image of a recentish Call of Cthulhu book: talk about missing the point. Cthulhu is supposed to be a game about terror, not about being embarrassed because you had an accident in the back of your pants. Seriously, what in the world are these characters doing? If they didn't just have diarrhea in the woods, they're desperately trying not to. I've seen people try to defend it as pooping your pants is the reaction of a terrified individual. No. I mean, yeah, sure, but that's not the point. The point of horror game cover art is supposed to evoke the theme and tone to the audience who would buy it, and if the audience who would buy it is making fun of the cover art because it looks ridiculous, then that defense is a non sequitur and is dumb.

Speaking of Call of Cthulhu, I often listen to Graham Plowman's stuff while reading my game books (including right now while typing this post), and it's mostly all based on Cthulhu stories, and is deliberately designed for reading and gaming. He's my favorite of the amateur "background music" artists floating around out there, mostly because he tends to stick with sounds, themes and tones that I like the best—dark, moody and horror, with occasional touches of action and terrifying excitement. My only complaint is that he likes the theramin a little bit too much, which sounds kind of corny to me because I associate it with corny 50s sci-fi b-movies. He doesn't always use it, but he does enough that it stands out in certain of his longer tracks, like "The House on Sentinel Hill" and "Yuggoth."