Out of the Abyss

As I've been reading the Out of the Abyss as well as The Shackled City books, I can't help but compare and contrast them.  Chris Perkins is, probably only coincidentally, heavily involved with both, as a principle architect of the series for both, and the author of five of the twelve adventures of the latter.

I greatly prefer the former, however.  I like the format—a 250 or so page book that describes a campaign, with enough detail to be easily usable, but more focused on bigger picture stuff than on "pixel-bitching" room after room after room.  The latter is how I feel reading The Shackled City, however.  Out of the Abyss feels very high level in some ways.  Sure, there are actual text boxes here and there, and a few location maps, and NPCs with specific conversation details.  But mostly, it describes the campaign at a much more high level, and expects that you as the GM will be filling in more of the details about conversations you have, NPCs you meet, and minor details of places you explore.  It is structured to much more closely resemble a novel when all is said and done than your "typical" D&D adventure which would be incredibly boring as a novel as you explore every square inch of every room of improbably Byzantine locations.

Now, I suppose there are many GMs who, on reading that, would suggest that it seems difficult to run an adventure if you have to fill in many of the details yourself, and figure out exactly how to arrange the elements that it does give you.  I understand that.  I'm the kind of GM who prefers to do that anyway, though, so I find reading someone else's attempt to spell out every detail for me tedious and unhelpful, while an adventure that assumes I'm capable of doing so on my own filling in of details and instead gives me something interesting to work with that's flexible and high level is perfect.  So... good for Wizards of the Coast for designing such a product, I suppose.  Not that it's the first; apparently it's the third, even for 5th edition (in the wake of Princes of the Apocalypse and others, and even Third Edition Return to Castle Ravenloft seems like it has a similar format.  I've flipped through but not read the latter, and I've read a few chapters of the former.)

So, the good news is that I've got plenty of more material to work through besides the more structured and detailed Paizo Adventure Paths, which is good.  For one thing, it's already closer to a format that works for me, but for another, some of those topics are iconic and pretty interesting.

I had earlier said that I thought my own efforts to adapt Out of the Abyss were likely to see it moved to my comatose DREAMLANDS REMIXED setting, but I'm having some second thoughts.  Where I earlier said that TIMISCHBURG probably didn't have a place for something as bizarre as even a heavily modified Underdark is likely to be, I'm now thinking that adopting an old idea from DARK•HERITAGE Mk. III where I had a gigantic Valles Marinaris (as on Mars) that was perpetually shrouded by a lowlying layer of cloud or fog.  Underneath it was a bizarre world that bore only a few correspondences to the rest of the setting, because the environment was so different.  And I think something not terribly unlike the Underdark combined with the Plane of Shadow can exist here, and may in fact be the true origin of the Cursed race (which here would probably take the place of the drow in the module.  Roughly.  Although I'm tempted to go full underground Sea of Omean and First Born here, especially since I'm re-reading The Gods of Mars as we speak.)

Anyway, I'm not going to do it right away, anyway, but it gives me a future project to work on, after I decide which of the two setting assumptions is more interesting to me; a gigantic canyon in the TIMISCHBURG setting (I've attached the old location bubble "map" and drawn in the canyon's probable location as a gigantic squiggly thing) or as it's own setting drawing heavily from Lovecraft's Dreamlands and Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea.

One obvious side effect of placing that there is that Gunaakt is, to a great degree, cut off from the rest of the continent.  Tesculum is as well, although it can go around through Baal Hamazi and through the Lexoviian mountain ranges.  But there's no denying that placing a gigantic rift valley that drops into the depths of the earth with difficult terrain and a persistent cloud cover is, for all intents and purposes, unpassable unless there are a handful of "passes" that are guarded and maintained as routes through them.

Rage of Demons

I'm (quite belatedly) discovering the Rage of Demons storyline that D&D did back in... what; late 2015, I think?  2016 maybe, for the majority of the execution?  There were some Salvatore Drizzt novels (up to... what, 31 titles now?  Holy cow.  I read maybe 7-8 of them years ago, but since have lost track completely.  I don't even particularly like the character anymore.  I did, however, not get rid of my original Icewind Dale trilogy in paperback.)  There was a computer game. And a Neverwinter Nights expansion.  And a big megamodule, Out of the Abyss, which I'm also reading currently.

This last is what is intriguing.  While it's obviously very D&Dish, even specifically Forgotten Realmsish, which is not normally my thing, I also can see converting the Underdark environment into a strange, alien world on the surface, and maybe figuring out some way to adapt this megamodule into something that I might even run.  Chris Perkins, who wrote the forward, said that it deliberately has a Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass vibe.  I came for the demon lords, but I find that the adventure itself is surprisingly intriguing, and that I might want to see what I can do with it.

Now, what I wish Wizards of the Coast had done was chartered some independent novels not set in the Forgotten Realms that were tie-ins with the Rage of Demons theme.  I wonder if I couldn't do my own spin-off of some kind with the theme?  Hmm...   I suppose that had they done this, it would resemble somewhat the Abyssal Plague series.  Now, the Abyssal Plague series isn't really very good, I'm afraid.  I think I got rid of my copies, but I got the two preview novels from the public library, and bought the regular trilogy itself.

Of course, that brings to mind the fact that while I liked very little about 4e (and it marks my separation from D&D per se) I did really like the concept of the "Points of Light" Nentir Vale campaign setting, and I see it as the platonic ideal of what a campaign setting should look like.  Forgotten Realms (Gray Box), and old Mystara before we knew much about it (the Grand Duchy of Karameikos?) or even early work on settings like Eberron or Golarion before they got more "built up" is really where it's at, and Nentir Vale, whatever other faults the 4e era may have had, never fell victim to this (a Gazetteer was scheduled, but never released, but most likely it never would have risen above that of the old Greyhawk Gazetteer or Forgotten Realms Gray Box in terms of detail.  Besides, the setting is observably smaller.)

My own TIMISCHBURG setting is meant to mimic this to some extent, although I have no idea where I could possibly fit something like Out of the Abyss in that setting, unless I decide to get into traveling to parallel worlds or planar adventures or something.  It's simply too alien to fit in a setting that is otherwise deliberately rather traditional in most senses.  On the other hand, maybe the DREAMLANDS REMIXED setting is perfect for exactly this type of adventure.  In fact, I'm more and more convinced that adapting it to DREAMLANDS REMIXED is probably the best thing I can do with the tag in the first place, which has otherwise languished without any development at all other than a list of place names and a small discussion on Lomar.

So... it looks like I have my next project ahead of me after ISLES OF TERROR is done.  I'll have to take a different approach to this one, but still—I think that there's a lot to be said for a rather drastic reworking of this adventure into something workable in my milieu.

Here's the YouTube trailer for the event, in case you didn't see it before.

Lomar

Just a bit of research that I'm doing for the DREAMLANDS REMIXED setting.  I'm a bit inspired after reading the first three stories of Libram Mysterium to look back into this kind of stuff.  Plus, sword & sorcery is always good.

Anyway, most of these details are from Lovecraft's very short story "Polaris" but some come from "The Mound" or "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" or other sources.  Every detail that I was able to scrounge about Lomar is presented here; which isn't much.  But it's enough to start with.  The image is one I found online at Mark Foster's blog and is of the cannibal Gnophkeh's whom the men of Lomar defeated to settle the land of Lomar, and who it is expected, will eventually reclaim the land after the Inutos finally defeat them.

I also plan on using the Inutos in my MAMMOTH LORDS setting, and if I'm doing that, why not Lomar too?

Anyway, without further ado: here are some details about Lomar.  All of the known details, as it happens.

Lomar
capital city is Olathoë
which is located on the plateau of Sarkis
betwixt the peaks of Noton and Kadiphonek
there is a vaporous distant valley called Banof that can be seen from the towers of Olathoë
Olathoë is "ghastly" and built of towers, domes, pavements and pillars of marble
Olathoë is "many-templed" but only the worship of Tsathoggua is specifically mentioned
the upper part of the city has carved images of grave, bearded men
the Lomarians are tall and gray-eyed
Daikos is another city of Lomar
Lomar was at war with the Inutos and they were eventually over-run
the Inutos could come upon Olathoë via a narrow pass behind Noton
the watchtower of Thapnen guarded the pass
Alos is a politician-general of Olathoë
the Lomarians moved to Lomar from Zobna in the north due to advancing ice
Lomar is located near the north pole
the air of Olathoë was warm, despite it's northern lattitude
Olathoë contains a square with many statues from which its leaders speak
besides the Inutos, they Lomarians also contended with "hairy, long-armed cannibal Gnophkehs"
the Inutos are "squat, hellish yellow fiends" come from the west, who are mighty in the arts of war and fight without scruples of honor
the men of Lomar wear strange robes and are noble and wise
the men of Olathoë were the bravest of Lomar
the men of Lomar brought with them from Zobna the Pnakotic manuscripts as well as the "wisdom of [their] Zobnarian Fathers"
the Pole Star shines balefully above Olathoë and seems to be possessed of a malignant antipathy towards Lomar

Now, granted, we can presume, I think, that some of the above is nativist propaganda since it comes from a patriotic denizen of Olathoë itself.  But that's a sufficient capsule view of Lomar to make it usable, I think, to potential gamers.

It is worth noting that there are Gnophkehs and Gnoph-kehs, which are not the same.  The former, referred to here, are in the words of Clark Ashton Smith, "detested," "repulsively hirsute cannibals" from his Hyperborean chronicles, who worshiped the cosmic obscenity Rhan-Tegoth.  They were driven from Hyperborea by the Voormis to Lomar (the Voormis themselves supposedly the ancestors of the sasquatch and yeti.)  After being driven from Lomar by the men from Zobna (and there's a minor discrepancy between Smith and Lovecraft's narrative, since Zobna was north of Lomar, and the Lomarians drove the Gnophkehs to the north of Lomar also) they started worshiping instead Ithaqua.

The relationship between Lomar and Hyperborea is unclear; Lovecraft himself seems to have once hinted that they were indeed the same, or at least neighbors, and that Olathoë was very near to Commoriom, both located (presumably) under the ice of Greenland today in a letter to Smith. Smith called his Hyperborean stories the most similar to the Lovecraft Mythos (although told with a tone of grotesque humor not entirely compatible with the Mythos as it is normally presented.)

For my stories, I don't necessarily need to maintain every (admittedly not entirely consistent) detail as told by Lovecraft and Smith of the area... but if I'm going to diverge, it's nice to know where I'm starting from first, at least.

Starting the Dreamlands Remixed

I'm really feeling it (again) for the DREAMLANDS REMIXED setting concept that I outlined some time ago (a little over a year ago, as it happens.)  Let's establish (or reestablish, in some cases) the baselines.

• The Dream Cycle of Lovecraft's stories purportedly take place in the Dreamlands, a unique setting where people go when they dream, that resembles a fantastic sword & sorcery setting, in many ways.  Many of the so-called Dream Cycle stories actually don't detail any locations in the Dreamlands, however.  The only one that really surely does is The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
• This brings up another point.  Many of the stories that are traditionally "binned" to the Dream Cycle are probably actually not meant to belong to the Dreamlands at all.  Lovecraft's habit of reusing names of characters, places, and objects—regardless of the genre that he was writing in—means that one can draw tenuous ties between his horror stories, his dream stories, his weird science fiction stories, etc. that may not have been meant to be seen "together" at all.  Stories such as "Polaris," "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" or "The Cats of Ulthar" (and others) therefore get mentioned prominently in, for example, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and therefore some of their details are adopted into the Dreamlands, but these are more likely meant to be seen as a kind of prehistoric proto-sword & sorcery type story, not unlike the Hyperborean stories of Clark Ashton Smith.  This isn't necessarily super important; I'm going to follow the tradition of letting these locations be in the Dreamlands, of course, but it's worth mentioning.
• Given that, it makes even more sense to add Smith's Hyberborea directly to the Dreamlands.  Why not?  For that matter, why not add Zothique?  Sure, it's supposed to be Dying Earth far future sword & sorcery, but the tone is still very similar.
• None of the maps of the Dreamlands (or for that matter, Zothique or Hyperborea) that I've ever seen is truly definitive.  They are all simply the inventions of writers who came along later, and most are heavily dependent on the map included in the Call of Cthulhu supplement on the Dreamlands.  This means that the geography that most of these maps posit is readily suitable for change; even quite significant change, as needed.
• For that matter, the CoC supplement started the habit of including locations detailed in a bunch of Gary Myers stories.  These stories were only ever published in pretty limited form, and they are not readily available today, making their inclusion as "canonical" in the Dreamlands questionable at best.  Frankly, if we need to go beyond the Lovecraft and Smith stories, we'd be better off looking at Brian Lumley's Primal Lands stuff; that's at least in the same vein.  And Lumley even wrote some specifically Dreamlands stuff.  None of that seems to pop up in the maps and gazetteers I've seen.
• I'm not that familiar with the Primal Lands myself, though.  Honestly, I'd rather take some names from the Thulian Age of Robert E. Howard instead.  The Hyborian Age is perhaps a bit too familiar to really fit in the same oeuvre as the Dreamlands, on the other hand.
• I've been trawling through wiki entries on the various Dreamlands, Zothique and Hyperborean stories, and I've created a pretty big list of place-names.  Referencing the Gazetteer in the Dreamlands sourcebook, I should be able to create from this a new Gazetteer for my remixed setting easily enough.  I'll have to do a bit more research into the Zothique places—I don't know them as well, and there's a lot of names from those stories.  Of course, I may not use them all...
• The single most important sources for this setting are the stories "Polaris," "The Doom That Came to Sarnath", "The Cats of Ulthar", "Celephaïs" "The Quest of Iranon," The Other Gods" and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.  Other stories, including the entirety of the Clark Ashton Smith corpus, will be added in a more ad hoc nature, but I expect that eventually I'll get around to making the entirety of Hyperborea on the map.  Smith himself, in a letter to Derleth in the 40s said: "My Hyperborean tales, it seems to me, with their primordial, prehuman and sometimes premundane background and figures, are the closest to the Cthulhu Mythos, but most of them are written in a vein of grotesque humor that differentiates them vastly. However, such a tale as 'The Coming of the White Worm' might be regarded as a direct contribution to the Mythos."  And Lovecraft, in a letter to Smith said this: "I must not delay in expressing my well-nigh delirious delight at 'The Tale of Satampra Zeiros'... [W]hat an atmosphere! I can see & feel & smell the jungle around immemorial Commoriom, which I am sure must lie buried today in glacial ice near Olathoe, in the Land of Lomar!" As an aside, this is pretty compelling evidence that many of these so-called Dream Cycle stories of Lovecraft's were always meant to be a prehistoric setting, not unlike Hyperborea or Howard's stuff.

Which is why I'm making the Dreamlands not a Dreamlands at all, but rather a regular sword & sanity setting that I'm playing straight.  

Someone else's Dreamlands Remixed

As is frequently the case, when I think I've got a great idea, someone else has already done it.

Here is my DREAMLANDS REMIXED setting, as done by someone else, featuring the Dreamlands with a bunch of Zothique and Hyberborea from Clark Ashton Smith added in, as well as a bit of Pegana by Lord Dunsany (including the name of the "world".)

I probably would have been a bit more direct in my borrowing of Zothique and Hyperborean elements myself (i.e., they'd be explicit big islands, easily spottable in the setting) and would have used some Hyborian and Thurian Age borrowings from Howard as well.  But this is still very close to what I would have done.

Sigh.

https://sabode.wordpress.com/2014/10/04/pegana-a-campaign-world-for-a-pulp-style-fantasy-campaign/

As I'm currently re-surveying much of my classic sword & sorcery collection right now, I'm feeling like this setting is in need of revisiting; or perhaps initial visiting, since it never advanced in my mind beyond being a high concept.  I don't have the wherewithal to make a map as nice as this guys, but I can still pull something together, and then make a quick and dirty gazetteer to go along with it.

Setting noodling

I've got a number of irons in the fire with this basic idea; noodling around with high concepts for settings, including REALMS TRAVELER, SOLNOR and ODD D&D.  There may be others that I'm not thinking of at the moment.  But, in my read-through of the Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft, I got to the novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which was always actually my favorite Lovecraft story, in spite of its atypical nature.  And I thought, as I have done before, that there's a wealth of useful information in that setting.  Therefore, here I am adding yet another setting noodle tag: DREAMLANDS REMIXED.  Sigh.

Not that I'd want to actually game in the Dreamlands per se.  That can be done, of course.  There's a Call of Cthulhu scenario/setting that explores the Dreamlands.  But I'd rather just use the map and a few of the details of the Dreamlands as a setting, and then play it straight as a secondary world fantasy setting, rather than using it as it really is meant to be.

How would I do this, if so?

1st: There's really only one PC race; human.  It's not possible to play one of the almost-men of Leng, or a zoog, or a moon-beast, or one of the lunar fish people of Ib or whatever.  Only human.

2nd: I'd look to the primary sources (or perhaps secondary sources) of the Dreamlands for inspiration, but not force myself to be completely stuck into the interpretation thereof.  Ghouls and ghasts, for example, might be like they are in D&D, or how they are in Dream-Quest, or some other interpretation that differs even more.

3rd: Might have to whip up a little bestiary.  Zoogs, gugs, ghouls, ghasts, night-gaunts, shantak birds, moon-beasts, and more all make notable appearances.

4th: The Great Ones, or gods of the Dreamlands, are only vaguely referred to, really, in spite of their prominent "off stage" roles in a few stories.

5th: Magic seems relatively subtle.  I don't see any role for clerics, although the more arcane magic-users aren't necessarily out of place.

6th: I'd almost certainly use an m20 variant anyway, although I don't know that I'd use the same one that I use for DARK•HERITAGE.  Maybe a more "classic" m20 variant is called for; "Purest Essence" without clerics and a few minor house-rules (like Heroism Points, fer instance, to counter a bit the lack of healers.)

7th: Lovecraft himself never wrote any action-oriented stories of any kind.  Randolph Carter is not an action star, and he's a bit questionable in his choice of allies and actions.  I'd rather borrow a bit of Robert E. Howard's tone here, and make it a bit more straight-forward in some ways, while still retaining the sense of dark fantasy sword & sorcery as much as possible.

8th: Not all Dreamlands stories were by Lovecraft.  Gary Myers wrote a long set of them, collected in the book Country of the Worm.  Brian Lumley wrote others.  A lot of Lovecraft's own stories are unclear; do they take place in the Dreamlands, or in some kind of semi-mythological past world, not unlike the Hyborian Age?  And Lovecraft also generously makes reference to the works here and there to places created by Howard or Clark Ashton Smith, including Valusia, Hyperborea, etc.  Some of these would not be unwelcome in my Hybrid Dreamlands campaign.

9th: The map linked in the image is not the DREAMLANDS REMIXED but rather an interpretation of the actual Dreamlands.  I wouldn't mind whipping up a DREAMLANDS REMIXED map.  I'd love to figure out a way to color hand-drawn maps well and without as much effort as I need to use to do it digitally myself, though.

10th: I'm going to also think about adding some of these locations to my Forbidden Lands area of my setting.  I already had, of course, but now that I'm reworking the setting a bit, well, that gives me the opportunity to rework that as well.