Blogging next steps...

My blogging hasn't been as consistent as it used to be. A few things have changed in my personal life that have made blogging a little more difficult than it used to be.

1) I started a new job about six months ago. It started off slow, but since the beginning of the year, it's been much more busy and stressful. Including a number of night meetings with Japan, right smack in the middle of what would be our evening where I'm doing things like blogging. And even during the day, my time is spent doing more busy work than I was used to in my other job, and the people at my new job are people who run around with their hair on fire all of the time, so it's slightly more stressful environment as I'm still trying to figure out what is really important and urgent, and what just seems like it is but isn't really.

2) My wife has engaged us in a lot more plans than we used to have as we've become facultative empty nesters. My evenings and weekends are also much more busy than they used to be with these personal plans and activities.

Between those two changes, I've not only got less time than I used to do to things like blog, but I've also got less mental energy than I used to, so what free time I do have is often spent on more relaxing "vegetative" things, like reading, watching movies, or watching hiking videos and pop culture commentary on YouTube. I mean, I haven't even attempted to play SWTOR since... well, since pretty much I started my job back in October. I've been reading more. I'm in the middle of that Robert E. Howard horror story compilation that I mentioned a few posts ago. I've watched a number of movies. I just started this week a run on Daniel Craig James Bond movies (ignoring the most recent one, which I've decided that I'm going to pretend doesn't exist.) 

But I believe that it's important to actually have a plan and an idea of what I'm going to do next, so that's what this post is all about. I'll do this in a bullet point format.

• Chaos in Waychester only has one task left to do (other than run it), and that's make a new regional map with new details specific to the campaign. This is not an insignificant task, but it is also not trivial. I've been meaning to do it for weeks, but I have to dedicate a few hours to it, so I haven't yet.
• Cult of Undeath will start as soon as Chaos in Waychester is finished. In fact, I've already kind of started it with some early brainstorming. By the time summer rolls around, I'd like to be hip deep into this project.
• I'd like to maybe talk a bit about some of my reading, especially the genre-specific stuff, like my fantasy reading, my adventure path reading, etc. 
• Speaking of gaming, I stopped halfway through my Paizo Decontructed project on the Strange Aeons adventure path. I really would like to finish it, and then maybe pick another one to do again after that. 
• I want to start up my Friday Art Attack project again. In fact, here's a few samples just to get me back in the mood, with a theme of ratling monsters.

Deconstruction: Paizo Adventure Path 121: Strange Aeons #3: Dreams of the Yellow King

On to the next chapter of my Strange Aeons deconstruction!

The cult of Hastur no longer threatens Thrushmoor, and now the adventurers board a riverboat to Cassomir to track down their obsessed and corrupted former employer. Along the way, they explore the Dreamlands and attempt a number of bizarre dream quests, after which the adventurers can heal their fragmented minds—but they also learn of a greater threat looming over Golarion. Can they survive the perilous Dreamlands and emerge intact or will they be stranded in a dimension of nightmares?

Well... onwards out of Ustalov, I suppose. Given that there are pastiche elements upcoming that are clearly based on The Nameless City, "the mad Arab" from various works, much of the Dreamlands cycle in general, and even shows a lot of the influence that Lovecraft got from Vathek, going to the Golarion Middle East seems certainly thematically appropriate. (Edit: When I first wrote that, I had briefly confused Cassomir with Katheer. Cassomir is the Golarion version of Constantinople during the Byzantine Empire, not the Middle East per se. But it's an important waystop from the "Eastern Europe" of Ustalav to the Middle East. And Katheer is the destination given at the end of this adventure, anyway.) There's a lot of Dream Cycle references going on here, actually, as well as nods to Clark Ashton Smith's parallel creations that may not be part of the Lovecraft Mythos overall, but perhaps an extremely similar development alongside it.

PART I: THE SELLEN PASSAGE

Curiously, this portion of the adventure is supposed to represent nearly three months of travel, mostly by waterways and navigable rivers. There's some sample encounters, not all of them combat, that you can throw in to make the journey feel that long, but ultimately, you're going to have to do a Raiders of the Lost Ark style red-line, even if you do add some encounters to break it up. In real life, a long boat trip through potential exotic and hostile territory is an adventure in and of itself, but of course, it's also an adventure occasionally and a long, tedious slog most of rest of the time. While some of this stuff is pretty good, it—unfortunately—doesn't really fit the horror vibe, either. It's more of a... temperate African Queen, or something. The red-sailed boat following them would be the Germans in this analogy, although you can't really go on the attack against that ship, I suppose. In fact, it reads more than anything like a travalog of this part of the settings, which is perhaps a little on the undeveloped side compared to some other regions. We get the brief Illmarsh episode, the brief Razmiran episode, the brief River Kingdoms episode, the brief Galt episode, etc. This may be somewhat unavoidable given that... well, that's exactly what's called for to get to Cassomir (a kind of Golarion Constantinople from the twilight of the Byzantine Medieval period) but it's not the mood of the adventure path, so the red line and avoiding any of these encounters may be called for if keeping the mood is the more important goal. 

PART II: DREAM QUESTS

Part two of the module is stuff happening in the Dreamlands. This is meant to be another list of different things that happen at different points during the journey, concurrently with part 1. The GM has a lot of flexibility in terms of how to arrange these to make it feel somewhat less like a railroad (technically a boat trip down a river isn't exactly the same as a train ride down the tracks, but y'know... facultatively, what's the difference?)

Now, given that these events are largely a pastiche of a bunch of Lovecraftian story elements, it helps if you and the players have read most of the stories in the Dream Cycle, but my experience is that many Lovecraft fans don't really get, like, or partake of the Dream stories, because they're significantly different than his horror stories. This is unfortunate, because personally, I find them to be my favorite of Lovecraft's stories sometimes. I went to my bookshelf and pulled up my Del Rey trade paperback anthologies, which although I've had for several years I've never read. (Because I read the Complete works of Lovecraft online or on my Kindle instead, since they're public domain stories. But I do have this copy, and I recommend it. The introduction by Neil Gaimen is interesting, and it's always nice to have physical copies of the books you love so that when the inevitable infrastructure collapse comes, you can still read.) 

I recommend sampling the Dream Cycle stories before playing this or running this. My personal favorites, and ones that get quite a mention here, include "The Doom That Came to Sarnath", "The Other Gods", "The Cats of Ulthar", "The Nameless City" (which isn't really a dream story; not sure why it's collected in this volume. It is heavily pastiched later in this adventure path, though, so certainly read it. It's one of the "lesser" Lovecraftian works that many probably haven't read before) and the magnum opus of the Dream Cycle, "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath." Of course, in terms of pastiche, keep in mind that this adventure path also features heavily "The King in Yellow" by Robert Chambers, written well before Lovecraft. Although Lovecraft referred to Chambers' elements as if it were part of the Mythos proper, and they've been usually treated as such ever since.

There's a little rules subsystem on research here, which refers to a more expanded version in another rulebook. Of course there is. That's definitely the Pathfinder way. But again, this is an attempt to make D&D play out in the way that the stereotypical Call of Cthulhu game plays out, at least a little. Once the initial research is done, the PCs can travel to the Dreamlands itself in dream and do more research/adventuring. Curiously, in their occult subline, Paizo had already introduced some of these same ideas, but here they need to be adapted slightly to be more explicitly Lovecraftian in tone.

There are then seven little mini-quests to travel to various locations in the Dreamlands and gather various McGuffins so Abdul Alhazred, "the Mad Poet" as he's been recast as in this adventure path, will talk to them. Again, these aren't really horrifying, and many of them are little more than pastiches of stories from the Dream Cycle. They do, however, manage to mostly be surreal at least, which I think was probably the "dream-like" goal.

PART III: RETURN TO THE YELLOW KING

Returning from all of these quests to the Yellow King, the advisor who sent them on the quests in the first place, and who is a fragment of Lowls from before he went crazy and/or evil, they find that he's been kidnapped and taken to the Dreamlands moon—so more pastiche, echoing an extended sequence of the DreamQuest itself. 

The PCs travel on shantak-back to the moon where they must storm a prison to rescue the Yellow King. Oh, and the prison is currently in a state of revolt; one of the junior wardens has rebelled against the warden and holds half of the prison. Not sure why that is such a cliche D&D trope, but it kinda is. Maybe because presumably the power-struggle implicitly gives the PCs an opportunity to turn one side to its advantage against the other, or something? In any case, when Randolph Carter was a prisoner of the moon-beasts in the DreamQuest, it was one of the creepier scenes; here, the moon-beasts are humanized completely in their behavior and psychology, which ruins the effect. Anyhoo, once the Yellow King is rescued, they can get directions to the Mad Poet, and complete the adventure. He gives them clues, tells them to wake up and go to Katheer in the Golarion Middle-east, which is as I mentioned above, hardly surprising, and then they fight dream images of themselves to get their memories back (whatever that means exactly, as there aren't really any memories to speak up that we haven't already pieced together.)

BONUS STUFF

There are three NPCs detailed; the Mad Poet, Abdul Alhazred himself—one of the most iconic NPCs from all of Lovecraftiana, the Yellow King, who is a profoundly important character to the narrative, and .... the strange halfling tough girl who plays a cameo role, but who gets all kinds of bizarre detail on her personality, her history, her heritage, and her sexuality. Lolwut indeed. Freakin' Paizo SJWs. Not only do we not care about this character at all, but giving her twice as much fluff as one of the most iconic pastiche characters you can, as well as one that plays a much more significant role in the development of the plot of this module is just bizarre. There's a discussion on the geography and encounters one may expect among the river traffic crowd, which is kind of interesting, especially considering that some of the countries here never got the regional treatment with a book of their own (although some of them got entire adventure paths dedicated to them.) Some of the random encounters are a little weird though; in the colder northern regions, for instance, the first one listed is a giant amoeba. Huh?

The story is, again, kind of charming in the sense that it feels like a Disneyland reenactment of a scene from the DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath. If you find that kind of thing charming, anyway. There's a bestiary, mostly of creatures that don't feature in the module. In fact, the first, a "formless spawn" derived from a Clark Ashton Smith tale are almost certainly just reinventing the shoggoth wheel. Tsothaggua itself is next. Then, we do get one that actually makes an appearance; an Ib shade. Again, if you know your mythos. then you know that this is the undead original inhabitants of Ib, the city mentioned in The Doom That Came to Sarnath. I always imagined them as little different than softer Deep Ones, though.

In general, the module uses a lot of esoteric mythos creatures, few of them detailed in the module itself (buy their various Bestiary books for full details!) Most of them start to feel a bit overkill at times; it's a little like the dozen or more variations on an incorporeal undead in D&D normally; ghosts, spectres, wraiths, and many more; when conceptually they kind of are all the same thing already. I didn't see anything that I'd have an interest in statting up in m20 yet; I already had a fairly Lovecraftian heavy monster list from the get-go, and adding really esoteric monsters like the wamp or the zoogs, or even a shantak for that matter, seems like more than I need. I'm a big fan of not proliferating rules anyway; if I really needed one in one of my games, I could repurpose a similar-enough creature and use those stats.

And while I'm a big fan of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle of stories in general, I'm a big fan of them as proto-Sword & Sorcery after a Dunsany-like tradition, not really a fan of using the Dreamlands to go into while the characters are dreaming to have a kind of plane-hopping vibe to it. I know that relative to my earlier go-through of this (the Serpent's Skull adventure path on my Isles of Terror tag) I'm mostly just summarizing these adventures and spending less time talking about what I'd specifically borrow out of them. The truth is, I've both gotten more picky about what I'd borrow and what I think m20 needs added to it, as well as found less that I'd be interested in borrowing anyway. I did that in the prior series, in part treating it as if I were to try and convert the module as is into my game as opposed to merely raid it for good ideas. Because my mindset has drifted more firmly into the latter camp, discussing the module the way I did then seems silly. To be honest with you, most of the discussion of how I'd take stuff from this AP has to be done at the end of the read-through anyway.

As an aside, since I did Isles of Terror, I did read the entire Rise of the Runelords collected edition in a single book. This was a while ago now, but I wonder why I didn't do a series out of that? Probably because I didn't want to take the time after reading each section to write one of these up, and I was feeling a little bit burned out on the project at the time. I am drawn back to it on reading this though; while Rise of the Runelords clearly isn't as thematically strong as Strange Aeons or Carrion Crown that I did first, it does, arguably, have better moments of horror than either. The second and third modules in particular had a horror basis (The Skinsaw Murders and The Hook Mountain Massacre) at their core, and while they weren't necessarily trying to be anything other than D&D, in many respects, they realized the horror angle better than the AP's that later were specifically thematically geared towards horror. 

Curiously, I did play Rise of the Runelords up through the third chapter. Or somewhere in the third chapter, at least. But it took me reading it to really get that. Probably because we weren't really focusing on trying to create the horror ambiance. Our haunted house excursion felt more like a dungeoncrawl than a haunted house. But I can see, after having played it and then much later having read it, that if you'd been inclined to do so, you could really have done this as a good horror module. Or at least some elements of it. As I'm reading Strange Aeons, I find myself more and more drawn to some of those effective Rise of the Runelords scenes and wondering if I'd rather work them in than the actual Strange Aeons content, sometimes.

Deconstruction: Paizo Adventure Path 120: Strange Aeons #2: The Thrushmoor Terror

Adventure Summary: 

After escaping from the waking nightmare of Briarstone Asylum, the former captives venture to the dismal town of Thrushmoor to unravel the enigma of their lost memories. Upon arrival, the adventurers find that the town’s leadership has either fled town or gone missing, and a rash of kidnappings and rumors of the Briarstone Witch spread terror among the townsfolk. As the adventurers investigate the unsettling mysteries, they uncover a secretive cult that plans to use Thrushmoor’s ancient monuments to grow its power. Will the heroes discover the secret behind their affliction and find answers in an uninviting town, or will they fall victim to the ruthless villains who want to sacrifice the people of Thrushmoor for some terrible purpose?

PART I: RETURN TO THRUSHMOOR

The adventure summary says that the PCs are going to Thrushmoor to find clues to uncover their missing past, but in reality, they have little reason at this point to suspect that there are any clues there. They're mostly going to Thrushmoor because it's the only place to go, presuming that they don't want to remain on the island with the ruined asylum and all of the dead and injured and stuff. At this point, all that they know is that Count Lowls dropped them off at the asylum, they used to work for him in some capacity, and that his behavior has been cagey enough that it's attracted the unwanted attention of the king's inspectors. Although they don't have any reason to know this, Lowls manor house is in Thrushmoor. Although he hasn't been there in some time, either.

This section starts off with a long monolog of what's going on behind the scenes, but then gives event-based encounters, which are supremely useful things in general, as well as some location based encounters, which of course can be adapted to another location or to an event-based encounter type as needed. Some of this stuff is trying to anticipate what the PCs are likely to do, or even prod DMs to prod the PCs so that they do do those things. Some of this gets into the Hangover type scenario, described in the last post, where NPCs will have knowledge of the PCs that the PCs themselves don't have because of their amnesia. 

Nicely, there is little if anything in this section that is new mechanically. It's a hallmark of clever scenario design that you can design it without the crutch of a mechanical novelty. For a mechanics-lite system like what I use, it's essential. In general, my impression of this section is that it has a lot of really cool stuff worth incorporating, but that the scenario that hangs it all together is rather weak. This isn't really the fault of the module itself, but of the carryover sitch from the last module, and the structure of the meta-plot of the adventure path overall. 

PART II: MISSING MAGISTRATE

There are two places other than the general town itself that PCs will no doubt be drawn to after wandering about town, talking to NPCs, etc. The method by which the PCs are supposed to be diverted into doing them in the "proper" order is some shady railroading, but again, I don't need to complain about the structure of the adventure non-stop since I don't intend to use it as written anyway. There's actually little to no progression of the "story" of the module in this part other than the fact that the Fort and the local government in general has been murdered and taken over by monsters. Here you'll face a doppelganger that can ambush out of mirrors, juju zombies and skum (fake deep ones, as reported in my Cult of Undeath review). The PCs will likely not find anything that links these monsters to the strange goings on in town other than that the bodies and occasional still living disappeared townspeople (some of them anyway) were obviously brought here; many of them killed and eaten by the deep ones. The whole affair feels a bit like spinning your wheels and getting enough XP to challenge the last phase of the module, which is Lowls' manor house (although there should be no expectation by anyone that Lowls is actually there, or even has been in a long time.)

PART III: AGAINST THE CULT OF HASTUR

The final part of the module is the storming of the boss's headquarters (surely a timeless horror story trope, right?) There's even an interesting note in the very beginning of this section; it claims that if the PCs want to stop the boss from aligning Thrushmoor and Carcosa and taking the town to that blighted dimension, they'll need to storm it. Of course... nothing whatsoever that's occurred in the module to this point would clue in the PCs in to that possibility; all that they know is that the people up in the manor are suspicious, people have been disappearing, other people in town are afraid, and that monsters have taken over the government buildings in town. If the PCs were supposed to have heard from the Deep Ones what was up, I didn't see it. I didn't even see that the Deep Ones knew anything about the boss's plans other than that they were promised that they'd be able to run through town eating all of the people that they wanted when she got whatever it is that she wanted. Granted; this might have been me. I was reading a bit distractedly, and maybe I missed something. But it feels much more like a flaw in the adventure design to me; you're supposed to go do this, because otherwise you have nothing else to do, by design, not because there are actually clues that point you there.

This section of the module is a fairly typical dungeon-crawl, to be honest. The main monsters on the above ground floors are kuru thugs (represented here as if they were a different race, but really all that they are is the stereotypical East Indies cannibal savage. This is especially appropriate, given Lovecraft's own use of "half-castes" and whatnot from the islands in "Call of Cthulhu" but somewhat surprising given Paizo's own political correctness. They tried to cover it up by making it a non-human (but barely) race, but c'mon. Kuru is even the native word for the laughing sickness, a neurological disorder caused by cannibalism of the brain. There are also cultists, and a handful of monsters, mostly just sitting in their rooms waiting for the PCs to find them kind of thing.

Below ground, the dungeon turns into an amusement park, where name-dropping Mythos creatures is the attraction for the players. Come! Fight the Hound of Tindalos! See freaky Elder Things and maybe try to talk to them before they fight you! The monstrous Men from Leng are represented! A star vampire! Rats in the Walls! Etc. I'm sure I'm not the first person to note this, although it's been a recurring theme on my blog for many years, but this is exactly the wrong way to do horror elements in your fantasy. Even something as iconically high fantasy as The Lord of the Rings did a much better job of emulating horror during the first half of the Fellowship of the Rings when the pursuit by the Ringwraiths was the main plot point to resolve. If that work can do it better, then something that's deliberately trying (allegedly) to emulate horror should do it even better. With a lot of work, this could be salvaged by a good GM, but why should the GMs have to wrench a module into actually doing what its stated purpose is?

The boss is a forgetable cultist figure, who sadly you will have heard very little about before you fight her, so there's another drastically wasted opportunity. But my biggest complaint about this module, you can probably tell (and the AP overall, although granted, it may improve) is that it isn't really what it purports to be. It isn't really a Lovecraftian horror adventure. It's a very typical, standard D&D adventure with a dash of Lovecraftian name-dropping. And even that almost comes across as more kitschy rather than in the true spirit of Yog-Sothothery.

But the module does provide what the last one didn't—clear pointers on what to do next. The PCs will have discovered that Lowls is traveling to the Pathfinder Middle East to find a copy of the Necronomicon, that he's a nasty cultist of some sort or another himself, that he's dabbled in the DreamWorld, and even that he sacrificed the PCs own memories somehow in the DreamWorld to a figure called the Mad Poet for more information, and then turned them over to the asylum as part of a pre-existing agreement. 

BONUS STUFF

There's a discussion and description of the town of Thrushmoor, which is a nice addition (I always like a good town description) included here. The historic Thrushmoor Vanishing is an interesting addition, but the module itself makes little use of it, and it actually seems likely that the players would never discover that it even happened. There's a discussion on the cult of Hastur, a decent little micro-story, and the bestiary. Let's review that, as normal:

• Byakhee - one of the most iconic Lovecraftian "low level" monsters, the Dark•Heritage ruleset has included them from the very beginning. There's some new development on their society, and an interesting etymological discussion, if you will, of the byakhee and its appearances in the literature.
• Faceless Hulks - kind of like giant-sized doppelgangers, sorta, with an aboleth related history.
• Mordiggian - Paizo clearly wanted to take advantage of this adventure path to stat out additional Great Old Ones that were unlikely to be added in subsequent bestiaries. This has no relation to the module, but it's a fun addition, I suppose. Throwing in some of somewhat lesser known Clark Ashton Smith deities is always a fun idea too.
• Keeper of the Yellow Sign - an undead kind of herald of Hastur, based on handwavy interpretations of some of the characters appearances in the stories.
• Star Vampire - another "classic" of the Mythos ouevre. One does actually appear in the module, although it's just a cameo.

Deconstruction: Paizo Adventure Path 119: Strange Aeons #1: In Search of Sanity

Well, I announced that I wanted to do more Paizo Deconstructed again, going back to the Adventure Paths where that whole thing started for me. Sadly, few of the adventure paths look all that appealing to me; even if they touch on themes that I like in gaming, a quick perusal of even the summaries show me that I'm unlikely to find what I want in them. But... the show must go on, and I'm going to make an effort to see what I can discover in some of these after all. I've done now two full adventure paths deconstructed, and while the first one ended up being kind of rough as I struggled to figure out how I could take a structure that is so antithetical to how I run games and adapt it to something useful. However, by the time I was over, I had something workable, and I was happier in many respects with what I ended up doing with the second project. When I did those two, the Cthulhu-horror themed adventure path either wasn't even out yet or was still in the process of coming out, I believe. I now have that adventure path in hand, borrowed from a friend (I don't really want to buy it, given that I certainly won't use it much) and I'm going to read it through, summarizing each adventure, and figuring out what I can strip mine out of it, either as setting/rules elements, or as potential adventure/module elements. I should probably summarize again what I don't like about Paizo adventure path type modules, since its been so long since I did so, to make sure everyone who stumbles across this has the context to actually understand what I'm doing. And then, let's jump into the first module!

First; I don't run modules, especially story-heavy modules, because there's no way to write them in such a way that they're useful to customers without making them very railroady. I don't run games that way; I have a single side of one sheet as a vague outline, and that's usually enough material to get me through several sessions worth of gaming. My narrow-wide-narrow model for running games may not be an actual sandbox, but it certainly isn't a railroad either, which I find to be complete anathema. Railroads are contemptible; sandboxes are an interesting utopian delusion, but at least it's an attractive one, like libertarianism or something. A well-run game isn't going to be on either end of that spectrum though. (The more I think about it, the idea of railroads as Marxism/Leftism and sandboxes as Libertarianism; both delusional wishful thinking ideologies, but one of them clearly more "friendly" than the other, is really interesting to me.)

Second, the Paizo modules used to be politico-socially more neutral than they are now, but have quickly adapted to being crazy, emotionally and psychologically broken virtue-signaling wankfests of cringey pandering to the worst people in the world, with snide, passive-aggressive digs at anyone who has the temerity to just be normal, healthy and psychologically whole. It's become run by professional SJWs, and Paizo as a company is showing fairly a advanced state of corporate cancer. To be perfectly honest, much of this is easy to ignore in terms of running the game, but it's tedious and frustrating to have to endure it in the first place while reading the modules and figuring out how to get rid of that nonsense so that you can run a game that isn't going to chase off every player that you'd actually want to be in your game with your perverse, smug, self-righteous tortuous embrace of debauchery and filth as if it were normal and attractive.

Third, and this may sound odd, but I don't really like D&D. By this I mean that I love the concept of fantasy RPGs, and have ever since I first really discovered them, but the notion of doing dungeons and all of the rest of the attendant D&Diana that infuses the Paizo adventures is a major turnoff to me. They always fail to meet the potential of the premise that they offer. In this case, the entire adventure path is based on the premise of being a Lovecraftian horror story set in a fantasy milieu. The reality, of course, is that it's almost certainly going to turn out to be a very caricaturishly stereotypical set of dungeoncrawls and railroads with a few Lovecraftian elements essentially making cameos like a cheap character appearance at Disneyland to wave at the players and make them feel like they got a Lovecraftian experience... without actually offering anything of the kind. That's OK, though—I already know this going in, which is why I'm no longer trying to adapt the modules into something that I can actually play, like I started trying to do when I first started deconstructing Paizo stuff. Instead, I'm just reading, summarizing, and seeing what elements I can use. Kind of turning the adventure paths into a buffet, and seeing what is usable and ignoring the rest.

Anyway, without further ado, let's start summarizing In Search of Sanity. 

The Strange Aeons Adventure Path begins with "In Search of Sanity," a mind-shattering foray into horror where the heroes awaken within the walls of the eerie Briarstone Asylum, their minds wracked and memories missing. Working together to recover their missing time, they soon learn that their amnesia is but a symptom of a much greater cosmic menace. As they struggle to retain their sanity, the heroes must ally with other asylum residents and fight against the monstrosities that have taken over the building and plunged it into nightmare. Can the adventurers defeat the terror that stalks the halls and free themselves from their prison of madness?

Nice touch! I've started actually a couple of games with what I call "The Hangover" model before. Granted, referring to that movie implies a gonzo comedy tone, but it's terrifing to wake up and not remember how you got where you are or what happened to you in the recent past.

PART I: PRISON OF THE MIND

The module actually starts off with a manufactured TPK, only to have the PCs wake up and realize that it was only a dream. I've actually done a manufactured TPK once before, with disposible temporary characters, to foreshadow a villain. I feel ...mixed on how well it turned out, I suppose you could say. Anyway, they wake up, they're locked up in an asylum, and it's all gone crazy. Part of it has collapsed, many of the staff (and patients) have been turned into either doppelgangers or ghouls, and they stalk through the halls looking for people to murder. As the PCs explore, looking presumably for an escape, they come across the remnants of a small chapel, who's hallowed walls offer some protection from the nightmares; both physical and in dream, that stalk the asylum. A number of refugees are here, led by what appears in the illustration to be a 16-year old girl. (!?) There's a gigantic fungus eye on the wall here, though, that's spying on the survivors, and which is needless to say, pretty disturbing (mechanically it's a haunt; which I actually imported in similar fashion to Microlite.)

A few other Dreamlands animals, as described by Lovecraft, make appearances. There's zoogs, for instance. Giant centipedes are sitting around for no reason known to mankind (how typical of a D&D dungeon environment, though) and weird, (psuedo)-naturally occurring partially reanimated undead. The trope of asylum patients being the victims of bizarre experiments, tortures and abuses is leaned into pretty heavily, given that the experimenters, torturers and abusers are also insane and most of them have been turned into monsters to boot. Most of them are dead, and those that aren't are almost as dangerous as the monsters. 

Teenaged cleric girl will eventually tell the PCs that they're trapped on this river island asylum by a strange yellow fog with horrible monsters in it and strange, otherworldly weather, but can say little else other than that she was stopping by to investigate an AWOL local lord named Lowls, and this Ulver Zandalus fellow was a quiet patient for many years, but is now some kind of insane cult leader of other insane people wandering the asylum. She also tells them that the weird eye haunt is obscuring a door that leads to new parts of the asylum that they haven't explored yet. There's a few other folks huddling here who have some minor useful information, giving the players the chance to engage in some roleplaying dialogue. 

All in all, this section proves the point that it's difficult to do horror in D&D. They try really hard with a lot of creepy imagery and weird scenarios, but ultimately, it's a small part of a dungeon where they just throw monsters at you without any context, much in the way of build-up, or anything else that would actually make them scary. And, to date, they haven't really used anything that's unique or unusual. Which is actually a good thing; I think sometimes D&D relies too hard on trying to create a new monster when we've already got... what, hundreds? thousands? of perfectly serviceable ones that could be scary if used properly. Not they necessarily are here, but ghouls can be perfectly scary, as the very first adventure path Paizo did (not counting the three Dungeon Magazine ones) amply showed.

PART II: THE DEAD DON'T DREAM

In this part, as the PCs start to explore the more "wild" parts of the asylum, we start seeing slightly more esoteric monsters; low-CR "shoggoths", another haunt (I do like those, and I appreciate more examples of them), and stuff that is occasionally even more overtly Lovecraftian. (I know, shoggoth-like creatures are certainly Lovecraftian, but Gygax used too many oozes and similar things to make them seem as Lovecraftian as they could; they now feel like a D&Disms.) We even get our first glimpses of "Brown Jenkinses" and nightgaunts at this point. One oddly "unfriendly" move that Paizo has made, which has shown its head multiple times by now, is that they don't include stats for monsters that are in their various bestiary books. You literally have to own all of their bestiaries that were in print at this point (at least four) to actually run this module without substitutions. Maybe that's neither here nor there to most people who might read this, but it is odd, given that Paizo built their reputation early on as being the more customer friendly company who paid attention to what their customers wanted when much of the D&D customer base was finding itself being driven away by what they considered tone-deaf moves by Wizards of the Coast with the launch of 4e.

Again; this is meant to be a kind of haunted house type adventure in this part, but it mostly feels like just a dungeon-crawl, with monsters (or cultists or ghosts or whatever) just kind of randomly sitting in various rooms. There's a peculiar trait that a lot of Paizo adventures do (although they're hardly alone) where there is a bunch of context and background information given that it seems exremely unlikely that the PCs would ever actually find out unless the GM just tells them. Oh, and there's a library where the PCs are literally, I suppose, expected to spend a day or two of game time doing research to get historical backstory on Briarstone Manor. Lolwut? It's clear that the Paizo guys don't know jack squat about haunted houses, and in trying to reskin a dungeoncrawl as a haunted house, they simply made a number of fairly clumsy missteps. This section isn't lacking in good ideas, but the execution is really nothing at all like a classic haunted house story. I know, I know; RPGs aren't stories, but the end product of one should resemble a story for the most part. 

PART III: NEVER-ENDING NIGHTMARE

This is more of the same as part II, really. There's a few NPCs to talk to, and if your PCs are much nosier and insistent than most, will discover that a doctor was actually a bit of a foppish weirdo who's family sent him into seclution here for "self abuse and refusal to marry." What?! The module actually has as one guy's secret that his family put him in a sanitarium because he'd rather beat off than get married?! While by the numbers, the "boss" and "sub-boss" fights should be appropriate difficult in a routine kind of appropriate difficulty, this entire conclusion to the adventure feels very much like going through the motions. Even the haunts that it has seem more like just busy-work; the kitchen is haunted by the cook, who's mad that the patients killed him after he fed them every day? Again, lolwut?! They do make pretty good use of the meme Lovecraft himself invented in none other than "The Call of Cthulhu" itself about "sensitive" artistic types dreaming and painting or sculpting or whatever the terrible and fascinating subjects of their dreams. But even here, it feels more like a wink-wink nudge-nudge in-joke of a reference than an actual plot point in the scenario.

Part III is mostly about NPCs, though. Few new monsters, and the ones that we do have are strange "people turned into kinda sorta portals to Dreamland and the yellow mist" as a monster, which seems too esoteric and specific to the scenario that they're trying to create here to be usable anywhere else.

There's also very little in this module that would naturally draw the PCs into the next module. It doesn't end so much as just kind of stop, and presumably the players have figured out (and if they haven't little miss 16-year old cleric prodigy is supposed to tell them in the epilogue) that they are clearly a group of patients admitted some time ago with amnesia, brought by Count Lowls himself, and who worked for him. I suppose that they have to take the ferry off of the island, and maybe the next adventure starts with a hook sufficient to drag them along the railroad tracks, because otherwise there's very little to suggest what they should do to engage in what comes next. Which, no doubt, sandboxy guys will applaud, but it's not the purpose of a published adventure path to have the players ignore the next adventure and just go exploringthe countryside of HorrorLand (one of the subdivisions of DisneyLand, no doubt, and the place where the earlier deconstructed Carrion Crown adventure path took place.)

BONUS STUFF

The Tatterman, a kind of mummy-looking (sorta) Freddie Krueger concept, is treated as an NPC rather than a monster, curiously. It's a real shame; the tatterman could have had the same kind of extremely creepy ambiance as the best of the Slenderman offerings, but it utterly fails to live up to that promise. Reading this entry here, though, he's got a sufficiently strong backstory that the tragedy of this failure is even more acute. The other NPCs also reveal a backstory that could have made a great novella, if it had been written as one instead of as a dungeoncrawl D&D adventure. Sigh. There are some good ideas in here, but again, the execution is severely wanting. One of the NPCs is specifically written in such a way that she could replace a fallen PC, or perhaps become a "cohort" of the party, both of which are actually decent ideas.

The next section allows for players to use the Great Old Ones as a particularly disgusting pantheon, and provide rules for clerics of Cthulhu, Shub-Nigguruth, etc. I don't have much use for this other than I find it curious and interesting side-reading. If I were to ever actually play D&D again, and I somehow drew the short-straw and had to play a cleric, I'd find a way to use this stuff, and become a worshipper of Bokrug to the water-lizard, or Tsathoggua or something.

There's a short story, worth reading—in part because it's quite short—and we get to the module bestiary:

• Curiously, the first entry isn't a beast at all, but rather a "strange weather" table of freaky, supernatural meteorological phenomena.
• Stats for Ithaqua himself (itself?). As appropriate for a Great Old One or Demon Lord, it's CR 28. What it's doing in a low level module is unclear, other than that they obviously wanted to include it, so they did.
• Drexins, a kind of psychic gremlin creature. No connection to the action in the module at all, but at least they're thematically kind of creepy. They come across as more a dark type of fairytale creature than Lovecraftian otherworldly horror, though. They'd make a killer improved familiar, maybe.
• Three disturbing horror-themed swarms. Kind of cool stuff, although I prefer to just use the visual with existing, simpler rules. Do we really need dozens of different types of swarms with slightly different mechanical effects?
• Oneirogon—the aforementioned living portals between the Dreamworld and the normal one.

Then we get an outline for the remainder of the adventure path. It looks like a pretty typical adventure path, some good ideas here and there strewn together in an extremely railroady format, littered with mediocre or worse ideas interspersing the good ones, and a rather hoaky contrived plot that the PCs will hopefully not ask too many question about, and if they do, just throw some more monsters at them to distract them, or something.

Most of the better ideas in this module were stolen directly from a Lovecraft (or at least Lovecraftian) story published in the pulps decades ago, but there's a few new good ideas too. Honestly, I found a lot of stuff that it did was a retread, quite curiously, of concepts that had been better done earlier in the AP history. The ghouls of the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, for instance, are considerably better than they are here, and it wouldn't be too difficult to adapt that usage to this module, if you were so inclined.

Eberron Remixed is DONE

Just an announcement; my Eberron Remixed project is DONE! I've done everything that I hoped to do with the project. Well, with one exception; come up with specific adventures in the Remixed version of the setting and run them. But otherwise, the thing is finished, and I don't anticipate making any additional updates to the Eberron Remixed tag. Unless I do run a game there. Honestly, a lot would have to change to get me to that point; I've got my own settings to run first, and that'll keep me going indefinitely. I think I'll officially stick a fork in this project.

I also actually recently re-read my Isles of Terror tag, where I went through the Serpent's Skull adventure path, and discussed how I would adapt it, or more accurately, borrow elements from it. I'm considering picking another adventure path and doing that again.I've done two now; ISLES OF TERROR adapts the Serpent's Skull and CULT OF UNDEATH adapts The Carrion Crown. The obvious choice here for me to do next is Strange Aeons, but I might go on and do even more. Probably the one that I'd be most likely to want to adapt after that are Age of Ashes, War for the Crown, Council of Thieves, Tyrant's Grasp, and maybe The Crimson Throne. That's plenty to keep me busy, but assuming I do all six of those, I'll look and see if I care to do any more. Because I suspect, although I haven't actually read it yet, that Strange Aeons has way too many dungeoncrawls imbedded in it, I'll give that one the tag DUNGEON YOG-SOTHOTHERY and proceed with that one first.