Add-on to Out of the Abyss

I just read the add-on to Out of the Abyss that was about Orcus. It essentially acts as if it were a "missing" chapter of the campaign, featuring a mind-flayer lair, and an undead Elder Brain controlled by Orcus himself. You sneak in, kill mind-flayers and their thralls, role-play with a few characters, kill the Elder Brain and then face Orcus. You don't actually have to fight Orcus; because when you kill the undead Elder Brain, the rest of the mind-flayers are freed of his influence and immediately teleport in to fight him themselves, and you're told that even if you sit it out they'll eventually win. Of course, if you don't fight Orcus, the the mind-flayers will almost certainly turn on you next, and even if you do, you can't really trust the things, of course. 

It's not a bad little supplement. It's only 14 pages, two pages of which are front and back cover respectively, so like I said, you essentially treat it as if it's a missing late chapter in the original campaign. It is, however, significantly sillier, even though it claims that it's dark and it even has a super gay content warning, just in case the product somehow ends up in the hands of some total pussies, or liberals. Or Millennials, I suppose. For instance, one room has a Squidward clarinet. Another has a blue suit and tie with a child's drawing in crayon of a family, labeled mom, dad and a kid, and the dad is a mind-flayer wearing the suit. It's certainly not worth reviewing as a separate product, but I thought I'd make a little mini-post noting that I read it, and found it OK, I guess.

I also finished the James Silke (and Frank Frazetta, although that's more of an honorary credit than a real one) book Prisoner of the Horned Helmet. I had been kind of struggling with the last third of it for a while, and I just sat down and read it today; about 80-90 some odd pages or so. As I recall, the second book is considerably better (although the cover art for the first is the best in the series), and I've never read the third or fourth. In fact, the reason that I'm finally reading them is that I finally got my hands on the fourth one, which had been unavailable at any kind of reasonable price (if at all) on the used book market for years. I may not turn around and read that one literally next, though. I've got some other stuff on my list to finish, including some that I feel duty bound to finish, and some that I want to read, and honestly, I'm not quite as jazzed about James Silke as I was when I started it. I remember liking this book better than I actually did this time around.

I also finished reading "Lord of the Iron Fortress" and after I read one more 3e adventure, "Bastion of Broken Souls" I'll finish the first original pseudo-adventure path series. There are still plenty more official 3e or 3.5 modules to read, including big campaign-length ones like "Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil" or "Expedition to Castle Ravenloft" and more. I'm actually planning on putting off my Curse of Strahd read-through until I'm at the point where I can also read Expedition to Castle Ravenloft at the same time, so I can kind of compare and contrast. 

I feel like with some of these trawls, I need to free myself up just a bit, and not be so strict. Plus, I need to bounce around a bit more between different trawls. So I'm next going to read one of the Age of Cthulhu scenarios (number 2, which takes place in London) and then the next SPCM Saga before before actually reading a totally different third party campaign like Empire of Ghouls or something; plus, I want to read Silver Marches and Five Nations to keep my FR and Eberron trawls moving. These are all bigger books than some of the somewhat slim modules that I've been reading, so it'll take me more time to get through them, obviously. After I knock these out, we're back to Paizo and the next adventure path as well as the final bunch of 3.5 compatible stand-alone modules. In physical books, I've been on the Pathfinder Campaign Setting for a little while, which I need to finish off so I can Gods and Magic which is next (in pdf) and then move on to the next two physical game books, which are also in the Pathfinder Chronicles/Setting line; Into the Darklands and after a couple more titles, Dark Markets: A Guide to Katapesh. Obviously the former of those I'm behind on, because it's associated with the Second Darkness Adventure Path which I've already finished, and the latter is associated with Legacy of Fire which I want to start soon. It's maybe a bit much to juggle four Paizo series trawls, and try to keep them chronologically more or less aligned. But hey, I could be doing five instead of four and trying to keep the core rules trawl moving on the same timing, so it could be worse, lol.

So, anyway. Juggling lots of stuff that I'm reading. Looking to finish two rather large physical books soon; my Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting and my much delayed Celtic Myths & Tales. I still also have a Norse version of that series, but I'm not going to read that right away. In fact, I think it's past time that I picked up some of the books my daughter bought me that I haven't read, so after Celtic is finished, I'm going to read my nice copy of Dracula... which technically comes with other novels included, but I'm going to skip those. Then I'm going to read the copy she gave me of Vol. 1 of Saints. And then I'm going to read whatever is next on my paperback novels list. Which might or might not be the next Death Dealer novel, but The Mad King, Tarnsman of Gor and Thieves World are all contenders, as is the first book in the Timothy Zahn post Star Wars novels that kind of kickstarted the Star Wars Expanded Universe of novels. I've had copies of that whole series for a couple of years too and meant to read them. Sigh. So many books. So little time. And so many other things to spend it on too, for that matter. I feel like Burgess Meredith's character in that one old episode of The Twilight Zone; y'know, the antisocial librarian who finally has all the time in the world to read after the nuclear bomb goes off and kills everyone else, but then be breaks his glasses and can't read? I've always identified somewhat with that poor guy, even if the ironic drama was super contrived. 

Anyway, conclusions on what I finished reading recently?

Prisoner of the Horned Helmet: not as good as I remember. I wouldn't go out of my way to track down a copy if I didn't already have one.

"Lord of the Iron Fortress" - I don't actually like any of the 3e adventures very much except maybe "Speaker in Dreams." 

Out of the Abyss: OK, but not really what I would have hoped for it to be.

"Out of the Abyss: The Fall of Cyrog": If you do Out of the Abyss, sure, get it. Otherwise, pass.

5e Meme

I don't like to just post AI generated images, but sometimes they can be useful as a kind of meme. 

Top image is what I want my fantasy gaming to look like. 

Below that it what 5e offers.

That, more than anything, adequately, I think, explains my biggest dissatisfaction with 5e and D&D in general. 5.5 was absolutely a bridge too far, although they'd already gone many bridges too far honestly before that even happened. But with 5e, I know for sure that I'll never have any interest in D&D again, except reluctantly because I'm playing with other people who were already playing D&D.

It's just gotten silly. And no, Dark Sun isn't going to win me back. Having it have ridiculous, over-the-top violence like Fist of the North Star where girlbosses punch straight white males in the face and cause them to explode, curated by sensitivity readers to make sure that it's Lindsay Clancy friendly and still hews to the dying Diversity, Inc. trend is literally the opposite message of what I want from D&D. 

Out of the Abyss

It took me longer than I expected, as it was a busier and more stressful weekend than I expected, but before going to bed last night, I finished Out of the Abyss, an early 5e campaign that has a mixed reputation: it's considered a good narrative, a good campaign, but not really a very well organized book, and one that requires more work than one would expect to actually run. I read at least some of the book; maybe all of it, although I don't remember now, about eight years ago, although it wasn't even new then having first been published eleven years ago next week, I think. By this point, most of those earlier 5e campaigns are sadly out of print, and can only be picked up digitally. This is especially difficult for ones like Ghosts of Saltmarsh which you simply cannot find in physical book copy at a reasonable price anywhere, if you can find it at all. Out of the Abyss you can at least buy at about the same price as the cover price. After the last campaign, Princes of the Apocalypse was a reworking of a classic adventure from the 80s ("Temple of Elemental Evil") it was nice to see this one being an original. But, I kind of agree that as much as the gist of the campaign was a pretty cool idea, there are a number of things that I didn't like about it. I know it's easier to focus on the negative, and maybe that's a personality flaw of mine anyway, but let me, before I dive into all that, try and caveat this as saying that I rather liked the book, more so than Tyranny of Dragons or Princes of the Apocalypse, but I'm focusing on specifically things that I would change.

First, I think certain elements of the organization of the campaign is legitimate to complain about. The main conflict is the arrival of the demon lords (some of them anyway) in the Underdark, but we don't even get a solid understanding as a GM of what's going on until halfway through the book. Lacking some kind of introductory chapter, or at least a few pages where the campaign is summarized for the GM up front made for somewhat difficult reading, and I can see exactly why people suggest that it's difficult to run, and difficult to prepare for, and GMs need to read it at least twice just to understand how to run it, because you're given very little clarity on what's going on until it resolves. The kick-off event that starts the whole thing was published in a novel and if you didn't read it (which I did not) then it gives you nothing until more than halfway through the book to explain what the context is of anything at all that's happening. That's fine for players, but kind of rough for GM.

Another structural complaint which I think it definitely legit is that there are way too many NPCs who are sidekicks to the party, and actually keeping them straight, coming up with a unique enough roleplaying voice for them that they have some personality, and even just managing them mechanically is a huge headache. The NPCs don't have enough detail given to them to have much personality as written, so GMs will need to provide most of that on their own, which is fine, but its a bit onerous when there are so many. You'll inevitably focus on a few and leave the rest to be unremarkable and probably forgotten. And many times, the "hook" for an NPC is just mechanical. "What if there were a gelatinous cube that were sentient and wanted to tag along with the PCs?" Well... what if there was? What if there's a myconid "kid brother" who tagged along with the PCs? What if there were a quaggoth who were crazy and thought he was a curse elf prince? OK, the last one is actually something workable, but curiously, he's an easily forgettable NPC in terms of actually reading the campaign. In fact, I forgot about most of the NPCs most of the time except in the first chapter where they were introduced in about half of a column each, at most, or when they had a reason to be mentioned specifically again, like the pacificist kuo-toa monk being mentioned when you get to the kuo-toa village. Frankly, ideas like a "pacifist kuo-toa monk, deep gnome twins who are were-rats, and a sentient gelatinous cube" were more novelty value than deep more meaningful anyway.

Which brings me to my second problem; clashes and inconsistency with tone. Unlike most iterations of demons in D&D, the demons here, or even their presence kinda sorta nearby causes madness. This is a very Lovecraftian idea, that exposure to the demons like Cthulhu or even Elder Things causes you to make a Sanity check, and many NPCs nearby to fail it and become weird and crazy, and while I don't want to suggest that it is exactly like playing a Call of Cthulhu game in that respect, it does have some echoes of it, and the madness system, simplified and easy as it is creates much of that same ambience. Both the PCs and their NPC entourage are at pretty constant risk of going at least temporarily insane, requiring the use of either lots of restoration spells, or dealing with the consequences of a failed "sanity check", at least for a few rounds or two, which can be a big deal in combat. Chris Perkins, who was the lead editor, called Out of the Abyss "D&D on hard mode". So far so good, right? That's a solid bit of theming, and one that's right up my alley.

Prince of Demons, on his home layer of the Abyss

But Chris Perkins also thought that the Underdark was like Alice in Wonderland, and was very proud of noticing that, mentioning it several times in interviews, and even in a brief forward to the book. References to Lewis Carroll were scattered all throughout the book, including a "white rabbit" character that you were supposed to chase, who said something to the effect of "I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date!" as you did, mushrooms that made you bigger or smaller, lots of explicit references to "The Jabberwocky". This stuff took the Lovecraftian horror and added to it a strong dose of whimsy and silliness that is really baked right in to the game. Almost the entirety of the time spent with the oddly friendly myconids has them giving off Alice in Wonderland vibes; they're weird for the sake of being weird, but also whimsical and the only threat there is that the demon lord (lady?) of mushrooms wants to "marry" a gigantic sentient fungus, and you can actually meet her working on her mushroom wedding dress. When you come back later in the game, it's somewhat more serious, but this mismatch of horror alongside silliness and whimsy characterizes the whole adventure. Maybe that's not a problem per se, but it's not something that I particularly liked, and I thought that leaning in to the Underdark being "Wonderland" where normal little girls like Alice just get annoyed by crazy characters who act silly rather than sensible was not a direction that I cared to lean in to. Perkins said in another interview that he actually talked to R. A. Salvatore in preparation for this multimedia tie-in event (Salvatore wrote the novel that kicked it off, as mentioned above) and asked him if he had deliberately leaned in to those themes when he created the modern interpretation of the Underdark in the Dark Elf trilogy, the prequel trilogy to the Icewind Dale trilogy. He said no, but he could see the appeal of making the comparison. So that's all Perkins pushing that, not Salvatore, nor anyone else who created the predecessors to what Salvatore did. (I'm actually quite pleased that I recently read the Dark Elf trilogy again less than a year ago. Good timing!) More to the point, although not well described at the time, Gygax probably came up with the idea of the Underdark more directly from Lovecraft, specifically the underground parts of "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath" and the story that he ghost-wrote for Zealia Bishop, "The Mound." That's the vibe that the Underdark was "supposed" to have. And frankly, the Underdark of the Dark Elf Trilogy isn't nearly as Wonderland-like as Chris Perkins is making it out to be. 

As an aside, resist the urge to reorder books. You can buy omnibus versions of a lot of Salvatore's series; I bought the omnibus version myself of the Dark Elf trilogy, and would have bought the Omnibus version of the Icewind Dale trilogy if I didn't still have pretty solid paperback copies that bought back in the late 80s or early 90s when they were pretty new. But just because it takes place chronologically before the Icewind Dale trilogy, it doesn't make sense to read them in that order. That was a prequel, and without the context of having already read the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy doesn't make as much sense. I think people forget what prequel actually means. It's been around long enough that people forget that it's a "clever" neologism; taking the word sequel which means of course a subsequent work that follows an earlier work, but changing the first couple of letters to indicate that it takes place earlier. It was published later of course, and reading books in publication order, unless they've been heavily edited to facilitate reading the in the new order. Reject the new ordering. The Dark Elf trilogy is not the first three books of the Driz'zt saga. It's the second three books. 

To add to the tone challenges, the art, while often quite good, is sometimes also very cartoonish, especially of the NPCs. I'm not going to include any of it, because it's readily viewable online, but I really like some of it, and I really dislike some of it... or rather, I think that it encourages the whimsical silliness when it needs to be leaning more into the cosmic horror. NPCs who look like cartoons next to demon lords who look... well, more savage and alien then they have ever looked previously, is a weird juxtaposition, and once again, there's a kind of mismatch between the tone that the demonic incursion is meant to invoke vs the tone that the Underdark normally invokes. But the Underdark was literally pioneered by H. P. Lovecraft, most especially in "The Mound" where K'n-yan, the upper level, is most like the land of the drow and the Underdark as its usually known, Yoth below that was once the abode of the now extinct Serpent-men, and N'kai below that is pitch black, and apparently where Tsathoggua-worshipping shoggoths now roam, sealed off in panic by the K'nyanians. In "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath" the first layer is the Twilight Realm of the Gugs, with gigantic Cyclopean architecture, including the Tower of Koth, which is a staircase leading to the surface in the Enchanted Wood. Below that is the Abyss of the Ghasts and the Kingdom of the Ghouls. The darker, savage tone of the demon lords absolutely applies to the Underdark too, or at least it should.

The Underdark was probably invented as a D&D concept in the Against the Giants series by Gary Gygax himself, when after fighting giants for a while you find out the drow are secretly the mastermind villains of the adventures. The D-series trilogy was much more explicitly set in the proto-Underdark, and kind of late 1e AD&D's Dungeoneer's Survival Guide is the first really explicit source, and coined the name Underdark. 2e AD&D had some source material, including a modular campaign, Night Below, a number of drow products, and of course the Driz'zt Dark Elf trilogy, which largely spawned the D&D sourcebooks. 

3e had a book called Underdark, although it was part of the Forgotten Realms line specifically, but it also had Drow of the Underdark which was mostly campaign neutral, but implicitly was a Greyhawk setting, and instead of Menzoberranzan we had Erelhei-Cinlu and the Vault of the Drow. 4e's Underdark was explicitly part of the Nentir Vale setting, although the very late Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue book was specifically Forgotten Realms. 5e, of course, has mostly pretended like Forgotten Realms is just D&D, and done relatively little to support, or even admit that other settings exist, until very recently. I know that that's an exaggeration, but don't argue with me on that; I like looking at high level patterns and generalities, and pedantic nit-picking does not impress me. 

Anyway, I think the older Underdark is a tone that works much better for me, but there you have it.

Finally, at least in terms of things to "complain" about, the finale where you are basically spectators to the Rumble in the Underdark between the demon lords and then you fight a weakened Demogorgon was pretty weak-sauce, especially considering that you fight an unweakened (well, sorta) Demogorgon at the finale of Savage Tide. There's a lot of potential weirdness; Juiblex and Zuggtmoy might have already had their rumble together, and you only had to fight a weakened Juiblex afterwards, and Yeenoghu and Baphomet might have had their rumble together previously too. And, of course, Orcus shows up out of nowhere, and other than one off-hand reference from some mind flayer, you might not have ever suspected that he's supposed to be here in the Underdark at all. Chris Perkins calls this a "plot seed"; I call that gas-lighting. They either never developed it, or cut it for space. There's art for it, but it was in a totally different book that didn't even reference it... except in that piece of art. In general, I feel like the finale was altogether kind of confused, chaotic (not in a good way... I know, demons) and a little bit underwhelming.

UPDATE: There is a small mini-adventure published by a 3pp that fleshes this out in about 15 pages or so. I ran down a copy; I'll read it too in a little bit and see if I think it better fleshes out the narrative or not.

Ultimately, the bigger questions are would I use this material, and can I combine it with other Underdark material that I have, like the recently read Second Darkness adventure path? (And I should point out that Second Darkness was significantly less Underdark focused than I would have liked.)

I think actually that I'd need to combine them, and maybe with some other Underdark material too. Second Darkness really only has two modules (of six) that take place in the Underdark, and one of those is one that is hard to adapt, because you're posing as servants in a drow household. Out of the Abyss has too much of the wrong tone; funky and friendly cartoon-like mushroom people, deep gnomes, and whatnot. When I check out stuff related to Paizo's 1e Darklands stuff, it feels much more like what I want, but there simply aren't enough adventures that feature it.  (That video is quite long, by the way. Don't click on it unless you want to spend a good hour and a half going through it.) Ultimately, if I do a massive Underworld campaign in some kind of Old Night version of the Underworld or the Underdark, or the Darklands, or whatever you want to call it, I can borrow a few elements from these two works, but I can't do it as is. I'll need more material. 

Given that, I'm not going to move on to the next 5e campaign (Curse of Strahd) anytime too soon. I'm going to focus on some third party campaigns, including Kobold Press's Empire of Ghouls, the next Sandy Petersen Cthulhu Mythos Saga, and... well, we'll see from there. While I do have, and have had for some time now, the aspiration to create a campaign 5x5 Front focused on the Underworld, or whatever you want to call a more generic version of "the Underdark"—but ultimately, I'll probably have to create most of it myself. Despite the Underdark being such an iconic D&D setting, there's not much going on there that I feel that I can use. Out of the Abyss shows how it could be done, but then kinda goes the wrong direction with it.

Oriental Adventures (3e)

Last night I queued up one of those super long music mixes from YouTube based on the search relaxing Asian themed music, or something like that, and read the last 40 or so pages of 3e's Oriental Adventures, which I'd been reading for a little while now. I'm not really, nor have I ever been, a fan of Orientalism, chinoiserie, yellow fever, or whatever else you may want to call it. Sure, sure, during the 80s, I thought video games about ninjas and martial arts like Shinobi or Double Dragon were pretty cool, and I played a lot of Street Fighter in the 90s. I remember thinking that I wanted to get around to watching Michael Dudikoff's American Ninja movies, although I never did, and now I have to imagine that they'd feel laughably bad and dated after a good 40 years of time has passed and the fad that led to them seeming like a good idea is long gone. The original AD&D Oriental Adventures came out the same year as American Ninja, and I have to think that the fad of ... whatever you want to call it is part of that same movement. (Orientalism seems like it would be right, but actually mostly refers to fascination with Western Asia, i.e., it's more Arabian Nights than Far East. Chinoiserie is usually meant to refer specifically to China, whereas the fad in the 80s was much more focused explicitly on Japan. Japanophilia works, I suppose, and to some degree weeb or wapanese. I'll stick with using chinoiserie and Orientalism, imperfect though the terms clearly are.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. I've never been all that interested in the Far East, any more than I am any other exotic non-Western corner of the world. Sure, I'd like to visit, site-see, etc. and there are some elements of their folklore and culture that could easily be adaptable to fantasy gaming, but I'm a Westerner, and fantasy as a genre is heavily rooted in Western civilization (even in the far east, reference D&D players' older obsession with pointing towards Record of the Lodoss War, or even most of the the Zelda games) and I'm neither tired of fantasy rooted in my home civilization nor very tempted by exotica for its own sake. In fact, as time has gone on and its clear that Western civilization has come under sustained attack by our very own globalist, post-Western soi-disant leaders, I've instead become more entrenched into promoting my own civilization, and am even less likely to show much interest in Oriental Adventures than I was when I bought it, mostly just because I had money, I was still young, I was still excited about 3e, and I was always looking for options—not because I ever thought that I'd actually spend time or effort seriously playing in an Oriental Adventures campaign, nor that I'd ever consider running one. But I thought, if nothing else some alternate races, classes, prestige classes, spells, feats or monsters from that book would almost certainly be welcome, and mostly that's still true, even though I no longer care too much about most of those concepts, or the mechanical framework of 3e at all, anymore, for that matter. 

I do have two additional Orientalist products from more or less that era; both d20 books published by Alderac Entertainment Group, the original publishers of the Rokugan campaign setting that Wizards of the Coast used as the "sample" or default setting of this newer Oriental Adventures book; one is Creatures of Rokugan, which I bought because, hey, it was a monster book, and I can always use more monsters (although I also have a lot of 3pp d20 monster books that I read once, put on the shelf and never looked at again, this one included) and the Rokugan campaign setting, which I got new as a door prize at a local gaming convention in Chicago that I drove out to a couple of times in the early 00s. In spite of the fact that I've owned that book for over 20 years (although the copy was new, it wasn't a "new" product when I got it) I've never read more than a few pages of it. I've paged through it, and I looked specifically at the classes for it, like the ninja and courtier, etc. but I've never read it much otherwise. Which is kind of weird; if there's a type of product that I tend to be interested in in D&D, it's not really all that much new mechanics (other than monsters, and to a lesser degree, alternative magic systems, races and classes) but settings. This should have been exactly right up my alley as a new setting, that I got for free and have had for a good twenty years or even more... but never have read. 

Better late than never; one of the reasons I pulled Oriental Adventures earlier into the line was so that I would be prepared to read Rokugan honestly, so now I'll do that relatively shortly... after I read a few other physical game books that are in front of the line of it first, like Pathfinder Campaign Setting and Heroes of Horror and maybe either the Draconomicon  and Monster Manual III. Midnight and maybe DragonStar would be the only campaign settings (3pp) that I'd also make an attempt to read this year. But Golarion and other "Western" settings are the ones that I'm really most interested in (I know Golarion is, in reality, multiple settings stitched together, including it's own version of Oriental Adventures in the form of the Dragon Empires Gazetteer and the related adventure paths and other modules (Jade Regent, Season of Ghosts) but it's just a little dabble for variety, not the focus of Golarion. And with the development of my own settings, which I always prefer anyway, I only like reading other settings because I'm a fan of world-building for its own sake, and seeing what other people do is always interesting. I may utilize some of that stuff, for inspiration at least, a little bit, for my psionic Empire of the Mind-Wizards world-building exercise... which I haven't done anything with.

I keep asking the AI image generators to create an all psionic D&D party though, to see what I'll get. Not that I expect my setting development to look like that, but here they are anyway; or at least the latest.

One of the things that impressed me in spite of myself about Oriental Adventures is that it pretty casually posited a darker, lower magic setting than the default. Rokugan and it's ShadowLands enemy is actually relatively dark. Most of the magic using classes are replaced with the shugenja, which is kind of a wizard/cleric hybrid, I guess, but lower power and definitely less common in the setting overall, and subject to numerous social limitations. 

The book also made a point of talking very explicitly about limiting options to create a campaign setting, rather than the "throw it all in" approach that has become commonplace since this was published. The idea that you can actually tell your players no is one that seems to have been lost in official eyes.

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.