Races of Eberron

I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of the four Eberron races, warforged, shifter, kalashtar and changeling. I wasn't sure if it would actually be able to parse that, but it did OK. The changeling is the only one that it didn't really understand, and I wasn't super pleased with either the shifter or the kalashter, but y'know. Whatever. It's just to add visual interest to the post.

I've been reading Races of Eberron and I'm reminded once again that I'm not really a huge fan of the signature races. Even the ones where I like the concept, I'm often not a fan of the mechanics, which are often more fiddly than I'd like. Let me talk about the four races and tell you what I think of them.

Warforged: I don't like the concept of the warforged, actually. They are probably the most signature of the signature races. They're really kind of a pain to use, though. From a roleplaying perspective, they aren't necessarily a bad idea. but I'm not really a fan of them. Fantasy robots animated by magic. They have much of the exact same vibe as emancipated robots in many science fiction settings. But mostly I just find that the mechanics of playing them are kind of a pain, and the concept doesn't fit D&D to me, and I just don't really like or care for them. I can, however, at least understand why they're important to the setting, and why someone who doesn't mind the mechanical nonsense around healing and whatever might find the idea of roleplaying one to be interesting. 

Shifter: This is one that I've always really love the concept of the race, but it's also a bit complicated to build, with lots of things to choose from; but if you set it up where it's a pretty standard shift, kind of like a barbarian rage, then it probably works OK. I do like the concept of a "wild man", whether associated with lycanthropy like the shifters or not a lot. It's really up my alley (although I don't love the image ChatGPT just gave me. I'm going to guess that that character is shifted which is why she looks more inhuman.) Their communities of xenophobic introverts who hang out in the forest and avoid everyone else doesn't really lend itself to being eminently role-playable, but I guess maybe that kind of depends on the campaign.

Changeling: This is another great roleplaying race, if you want to play a disguised spy or something. However, I can tell you by personal experience that you have to be careful to validate that your campaign will actually accommodate your concept, or you'll be pretty disappointed. My changeling rogue in Age of Worms wasn't meant to be a trap-finding, lockpicking scout, but more of a con artist and disguised spy or criminal type, but it turns out that that didn't matter at all, and I couldn't use the character the way that I intended to. That's the one that I ended up retiring shortly after getting to Greyhawk City and replacing with my shifter barbarian/ranger/stuff character. In most respects, he was more straightforward, at least from a roleplaying perspective. I had a prestige class that basically gave me the Pounce ability, and I'd just shift and rage and jump in and do maximum damage as fast as I could. I'm still a little bit regretful that I didn't get the roleplaying opportunity to play the changeling that I wanted to. I've also seen a changeling rogue played without any particular roleplaying hook; he just liked to use his disguise ability to impersonate enemies and do stuff like that. I think this is a pretty fun race.

Kalashtar: I don't care for this one, and it really doesn't feel like it belongs. Because their whole thing is that they're from the other side of the world, but a few of them have started to trickle into the main Eberron area (Khorvaire) I've always felt like they came across as very tacked on, and they don't really have much of a place in the normal setting that isn't kind of forced. Also, the weird, peaceful "shaolin monk elves" kind of vibe that they give off is one that I don't like. I do like that the guys, Keith Baker and whomever else he worked with on this one, deliberately wanted to find a race that was set up to use the psionics rules, but I think the decision to make them too foreign and really associated with Sarlona, which is far enough away to almost be it's own sub-setting that's not really related to Khorvaire except by awkward fiat. 

I'd really like to finish Races of Eberron this week, and maybe I can get quite a bit read while traveling. I'm taking tomorrow off to drop my wife off at the airport, but I actually don't have to take her until late afternoon. It's about an hour and a half to two hour one-way drive, depending on traffic. so I'll still have most of the day to sleep in, maybe pack my bag, or at least half of it, and have a couple of hours to read before I have to do that. And then I travel the next day, but again it's late in the day, so I'll sleep in, finish any last minute packing (like my toiletries that I'll still need to use) and I'll still have some time. With any luck, I'll actually finish it before I leave, and I can pack it away and read something else on the flight.

Some pictures

I don't do Friday Art Attacks very often anymore (although I should!) but here's a few images. I had downloaded them while taking a break at work, but I don't really want them on my work laptop, so I'm posting them online. Many of them I generated through ChatGTP. But not all.

A recent Eberron picture. Meant to be, we think, the city of Wroat. Because why not? It's got a moat. And a boat. Probably at least one goat.

Weird things washing up on shore in the mist.

Ghostly pirate ships and fall colors. Believe it or not, Colonial Americans made up more pirates than we're often told about, so why not ghost pirate ships off the coast of New England?

Some guy took this at a work cost event. I'm the fat guy with the beak nose on the right. I've been meaning to send this picture "home" for months and haven't gotten around to it until now.

A Tale of Three Reviews

Gangs of Freeport. This is an interesting module. Written by Adamant Press, and slotting in basically right before Crisis in Freeport since Xander Williams still features as a character but it's obviously after the fall of Milton Drac, it makes pretty good use of locations and characters from previous Freeport products. It's certainly grounded in the setting in some ways even more than official products for the setting. It's 49 pages long, but there's no art at all, and the layout is pretty spartan and features a decent amount of white space. I don't think it's really much longer in terms of wordcount than your typical ~35 page or so module. Seriously, there's not even cover art. The only concession to art of any kind are some crudely made maps here and there.

The module is written for ~level 6 players, but I don't think it really needs to be. It feels like a low level module, because there is almost no supernatural at all. As the title suggests, this is a crime story module, and it plays out more like Three Days of Condor or The Untouchables than a D&D adventure. The closest thing to a monster I remember reading about was a gnome wizard. It's all about criminal humans mostly and a takeover bid of the underworld of Freeport. Although you'd have to use different statblocks, you could easily run this as a first level adventure—and generic statblocks from the DMG would do, if you even needed statblocks to run it at all, which I wouldn't. It was an interesting experiment to read; on paper, it seems like it's right up my alley; in reality, however, I found that it felt just a tiny bit flat. I guess I prefer some supernatural or occult angle to the menace, and a drug that is kinda sorta an addictive charm person spell isn't quite enough. I also think that these third party Freeport modules are interesting, because they try to integrate elements of the setting, but they also insist on not changing anything, so they have to be side quests and minor issues to some degree by default. I think that I could use this, but I'd weave the elements of it into a bigger picture, I think, at the same time. Plus, I never thought that the gangs of Freeport were nearly as interesting as the gangs of Five Fingers anyway. The Buccaneers and the Cuttthroats were silly gangs, and they still haven't been replaced by Mister Wednesday, which while maybe a little bit lacking in flavor, is still significantly better. (Plus, a quick Google search indicates that the name was probably stolen from Neil Gaiman. Blegh on multiple fronts.) I'm curious at what point Mister Wednesday makes his debut in Freeport. He's clearly referenced in the Pirates Guide to Freeport, which I'll be re-reading soon as part of my trawl, but it seems like that may be his debut... even though he's presented as if he's been there already. In any case, yeah; the crime element is an important theme of Freeport, I'd think, but Five Fingers treats that theme so much better, all the time. It's a bit disappointing. But, since I have Five Fingers, it works for me anyway; I can borrow elements that are better from there and adapt them to Freeport. 

I do really love the crime lords of Five Fingers. That's probably its best element, honestly. I like its dark cult and horror theming too, but I have little interest in the specific Iron Kingdoms Thamar cults, and Orgoth history, and... well, all of the campaign specific stuff. Iron Kingdoms was one of my favorite settings in the early 00s, but as it developed and became a high powered superhero setting to accommodate the wargames and compete with Games Workshop, it kind of lost its way over time. Which is part of the reason that Five Fingers was such a delight, because it was a pretty late book in the line, and yet it had the original theme and tone which made me like Iron Kingdoms so much in the first place. 

That said; just because I like it doesn't mean that I want to set my own games there, so a lot of the details just don't do it for me because they're too specific to the setting.  But I'm not reviewing Five Fingers; "Gangs of Freeport" is a pretty solid, low magic module that could be adapted with almost no real work to any level up to the level that it's posted for. Higher magic, i.e. higher level D&D would start to cause problems with it, though. I found it refreshing to read, even though my earlier reading of "Crisis" (should have swapped the order, but whatever) indicates that Freeport had returned to that same kind of low magic theme and tone too. Next up on the Freeport Trawl are the Bleeding Edge adventures, which as I've said before, don't actually take place in Freeport (with the exception of the last one) but are nominally set in the Freeport setting. Even then, they're deliberately designed, at least according to the blurbs, to be capable of being slotted into any setting, and being stand-alone, although loosely tied together if you wanted to turn it into a pseudo Bleeding Edge Adventure Path or something.

Of course, Adventure Paths were just starting the same year that this came out, I think.

Grasp of the Emerald Claw. My Eberron Trawl will probably slow down, because I just finished this module, and next up is Race of Eberron. I've actually got a pretty full docket of physical game books to read, and squeezing this in, near the front of the line no less, probably isn't going to happen. So Eberron will "rest" for a time, I think, while I read some other stuff instead. This module was quite the contrast to "Gangs of Freeport"; it's a very stereotypical D&D adventure in many ways. It's got much denser text; while only 36 pages long, compared to "Gangs"' 49, I think it had more actual words. There was all kind of silly stuff; puzzles and riddles that cause you to teleport to where you want to go, wandering "dire tigers" within the temple complex, etc. "Grasp" is also the fourth of four in a proto-Adventure Path of sorts made up of the three modules published thus far plus the mini-module included in the campaign setting book of Eberron, but one of the key elements of the concept of the adventure path; a coherent meta narrative that connects the modules and builds within them to a peak near the end, was poorly rendered here; I'm not sure if the authors of the modules had a guiding hand that ensured such a thing happened, which Paizo's guys certainly did do and focused on.

I feel like the structure of the Eberron modules was a little too focused on "here's a little dungeon, of sorts, so play it and then zip off to the other side of the world and do another little dungeon of sorts." I've never liked that style of play, so these three (or four, if you count the one in the setting book) weren't my favorite. Not that I expected them to be, but they were even less intriguing to me than I hoped, and just the novelty of being set in Eberron, and having fast travel and a warforged antagonist and "shades of gray" semi-noir alignment issues and vague hints about the origin of warforged in Xen'drik with the Age of Giants wasn't enough to liberate them from being pretty run-of-the-mill dungeon-crawlers. And not only do I not really like dungeon-crawlers very much anyway, but these weren't even super good ones, like "Shadows in Freeport" was; they were just "meh" dungeon-crawlers. What was probably the most interesting aspect of this module specifically was the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea inspired submarine journey to Xen'drik from Sharn with an attack by sea devils and a dire shark. But, of course, it's exactly that kind of stuff that has people saying stuff like "magitech" and "magipunk" and calling Eberron a steampunk setting. Or worse; trying to coin a new term to describe it. (As an aside, I'm more irritated than not these days by the gratuitous apostrophe in Xen'drik. And the gratuitous use of X instead of Z, honestly, which is harder to type.)

Like my discussion of Iron Kingdoms above, a little bit; Eberron is always a setting that I liked. But I feel like it was poorly served by some of its details, which actually fought against the concepts of the setting sometimes. And other details just weren't how I would have implemented them. This particular series of modules is a great example of that. They're not bad, they're just forgettable and not my style of module. I'm glad I finally read the entire run after having played the first one many years ago. (I realize that there are two more official Eberron modules, but those are not part of the same "arc" and are completely stand-alone relative to these other three.)

The Naked Gun. I noticed that this is on Amazon Prime and that I could watch it "for free" by which I mean, what I already pay and with several commercials at the beginning, I didn't have to pay extra to watch it. I always wanted to watch this, but never got around to it. I was a huge fan of the original Naked Gun movie and the Police Squad show on which it was based. The new Naked Gun is pretty well-meaning. Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson do a good job, as do the other minor roles. The writers and creators honestly wanted to ditch a lot of the problems Hollywood has developed in the last few years and make a throwback movie that was like the older Naked Gun and its whole style of movie.

That said, it simply isn't as funny as the originals. It was well-meaning, and it tried to be the same kind of movie. But it didn't have nearly as many gags as the original. The density of gags was much lower, which meant that I was laughing a lot less. Plus, the gags were much more low-key. One of the keys to the original Airplane and Naked Gun's success (same team of creators) was that they ran gags down until they were absolutely ridiculous. Here, they are content to merely be drily sarcastic, overly literal, and stuff like that and consider that a gag. And they're funny, don't get me wrong. But they're not as funny, and there aren't as many of them, so overall, the movie is merely amusing rather than hilarious, like its predecessors. The only gag that was as ridiculous as the originals is when the guy was watching Neeson and Anderson through a wall with infrared binoculars and it looks like they're having freaky sex, only to cut to the room and see that everything is innocent and it's just the angles that make it look funny. And that was ridiculous, but it was also too dirty to be funny to a guy my age. I'm not 13 anymore, and more and more I don't even remember why I thought 13-year old me thought stupid things like that funny. Maybe that's down to me rather than the movie, but also the fact that it's the only sequence that really rises to the level of what the original did. The original had exaggerated, extended, ridiculous sequences: 1) when Drebin was going to the bathroom and forgot to turn off his mike, 2) when Drebin was sneaking around on the skyscraper, 3) when Drebin was pretending to be the opera singer singing the national anthem, and 4) when Drebin was pretending to be the umpire during the baseball game. The new one had only one such sequence, and it was, like the skyscraper one, one that relied on puerile sex-adjacent humor. 

In any case, the shorter, less exaggerated sequences in the original were much more plentiful and much more funny, and the longer exaggerated ones really make you fall out of your chair because you're laughing so hard sequences are also much more frequent and much more funny. And some of the shorter ones are almost as long and ridiculous; Drebin and the pen that killed the fish. Drebin fighting the terrorist and communist world leaders, OJ slowly "dying" on the boat, etc. This new movie just didn't have those kinds of sequences.

Of course, I also watched the movie by myself. Comedies are rarely as funny by yourself as they are with a friend, my wife, my kids, etc. But it really just wasn't as funny, and it really didn't quite rise to the same level. And the funniest stuff was in the trailer.

I'm glad it got made. I'm glad I watched it. But I'll forget it in a few days and probably never think of it again.

Book quick reviews

In the about a 24 hour span, I finished five books. Granted, two of them I'd been reading for quite some time; weeks, even. Two of them were quite short and I was able to read them quickly because of that. The fifth one I just read quickly. It wasn't overly long; it was a ~100 page RPG book.

1. Space Pirates of Andromeda
2. Eberron Campaign Setting
3. Shadows of the Last War
4. Whispers of the Vampire's Blade
5. Tales of Freeport

I talked yesterday a bit about the first two, so let me address the last three just a bit. I don't think I've ever read the Eberron adventure series before, other than The Forgotten Forge, which is, of course, included in the campaign setting book. And I've played Shadows of the Last War once, a good twenty years ago probably, but after reading Whispers, it's clear that I never played beyond Shadows. I'm not even 100% sure that we actually finished Shadows, now that I think about it. The DM was pretty flaky and may have quit before getting to the end for whatever reason. 

Not counting the small adventure included in the campaign setting, there were five adventures published during the 3e era for Eberron (also not counting a handful in Dungeon Magazine.) I guess there were also the RPGA campaigns, but they weren't available for general sale. I wonder if I could find them anyway? Anyhoo... The first three adventures were published relatively quickly; the first two came out just weeks after the campaign setting book itself and before any other additional Eberron material came out. Sharn: City of Towers was the next product, but then the concluding adventure of the trilogy was next; a mere six months after the launch of the setting. By this time we had: The main setting book, the Sharn book, which was the signature setting element, and a trilogy of modules and, at that point, nothing else yet save some articles in Dragon and Dungeon magazines, and some novels. (I miss all of those.) Curiously, the next product after that was Races of Eberron, which didn't even have the Eberron trade dress; it had the Races of... core book trade dress, which makes me wonder if it was really meant to be considered an Eberron product, or just a product that made use of Eberron. I admit that in my own collecting of Eberron, this strategy caused me to stumble for some time, and I've had to go back and acquire used books after the fact. Twenty some odd years ago, I simply wasn't interested in adventures and mechanical player's options style books were... barely interesting, sometimes, but not a lot. I got picky about what I picked up in the Eberron line. Sadly, I regretted it later; 3e era books have largely not become cheap over time, and have remained high cost on the used market. I can only presume that demand vs supply remains high. I guess that's a good thing for guys like me who remained in the 3e era until long after 4e had come and gone and who still remember it fondly, in spite of its structural flaws.

The cover for Shadows of the Last War

In any case, as adventures go, these two are OK. The first one is fairly standard, ending in a reasonably big dumb dungeon-crawl, while the second one is a very different kind of thing; a railroady event-based adventure that feels a bit more like a scenario from a different type of game than D&D usually tends to be. I say railroady, but I don't mean that to be an insult in this case; I just don't know how else you'd write an event-based module other than to have it go from... well, from one event to another. The reality is that all modules have to struggle with making some assumptions about what players will do, and write that, and all GMs have to be willing and capable of adapting to unexpected developments, no matter what kind of scenario you're running for your players. It's just part of the job of running, no matter what kind of scenario it is and what kind of structure that it has. I think sometimes that people who complain about railroady adventures want to have their cake and eat it too; no written module can really be structured so that you use literally all of it exactly as written, and if it was possible to do so, it would be a bad experience to play, so you shouldn't anyway. I thought the event-based "story" of Whispers was pretty interesting, and I'd be willing to make use of it. What was perhaps more unusual is that it is the second part of a trilogy (plus preface in the form of The Forgotten Forge) yet it is kind of a completely different meta-plot; i.e., it has little if anything to do with what's been going on so far in the previous two segments of the mini-little adventure path. It feels like a stand alone adventure, yet it's billed as the middle part of a trilogy. I guess I will see when I eventually get to the third and final act if it comes together, or if it's just unrelated adventures that are poorly strung together in the illusion of being a series.

I know that the two additional adventures that came out after that were billed explicitly as stand-alone. We'll see how that all works.

My interpretation (through ChatGPT) of The Strangers

The Freeport stuff, on the other hand, fits neatly into my Freeport Trawl. Tales of Freeport is ~100 pages. It includes one bigger adventure, ~35 pages or so, three or four smaller adventures, ~10 pages or so, and then some additional plot hooks, ideas, and the inevitable rules. Some of the rules are repeats of stuff that's appeared elsewhere. In fact, as I'm going through the Freeport Trawl, I'm finding that Green Ronin wasn't shy about copying and pasting material from one product into another if it made sense. Most of the Focus on Freeport articles were repurposed as part of at least one other regular product. Two of them are repeated in their entirety here, for instance; Falthar's Curios and Salon du Masque. 

It was decent stuff. It's a little D&D ish, which is always my biggest complaint with Freeport; by being so insistent on being in line with the mechanics of modern D&D, it really makes keeping it in line with its themes difficult. Or maybe it just wasn't ever really meant to have the themes that I think that it was meant to have.

I do find it interesting that Graeme Davis wrote this, one of the original Games Workshop designers on the Warhammer RPG and a primary writer and designer for the famous Enemy Within campaign. Chris Pramas also worked on the Warhammer RPG earlier in his career, because going to Wizards and working on D&D, and as I've noted before, clearly Freeport were trying to imitate some of that Enemy Within vibe. I just wish, sometimes, that they'd imitated it more.

The biggest problem with this stuff is that it retains and desires, repeated more than once through the book, the rehabilitation of the snake men. You don't rehabilitate monsters. That defeats the point of snake men. Snake men, as discussed in Howard and Lovecraft which is ultimately the source here, are supposed to be monsters that you can attack with impunity, knowing that you're doing a good thing by getting rid of more of them. This whole "nice snake priest trying to teach his fellow snake-men to be nice" is just dumb. And yet, also interesting. That's certainly a vibe in modern D&D, but it wasn't really a thing yet very much in 3e era D&D. It comes across as very unexpected, and I don't like it. 

But that's beating a dead horse to some degree. I'll obviously need to change that, but otherwise, there's some interesting stuff here. The snake-men sacrifices in Soul of the Snake-men, or whatever exactly that was called, was cool, but not because it was a fake snake-man taking advantage of the snake men. That was a dumb twist.

In a completely unrelated mini-adventure, I kind of liked the concept of The Strangers. D&D and fantasy in general doesn't make enough of alien mythology. I understand why not, I suppose, but I kind of like it. I've been noodling with a front in Cult of Undeath that's based on alien mythology; cattle mutilations, lost time, abductions and probes, etc. but just not in flying saucers. I haven't completely figured out how to do it, but I think The Strangers are angling towards the same idea... but then sadly don't do very much with them. I also think the adventure into the lizard-man swamp was a neat idea, although too brief. Overall, this was a good book, and I'm glad I read it. I think I'd missed it in the past.

Next up is Black Sails Over Freeport, finally, and A Darkness at Sethanon in novels, and Flight of the Dying Sun in Kindle novels. I don't have a queued up pdf right now, so I'll decide at some point which to read... but probably not until I get at least one if not two of those three just mentioned done first. 

Music, movies, books and Eberron

In spite of the fact that my daughter, son-in-law and grandson were visiting all of last week, and that my wife was going through a bit of a professional crisis (at least it felt like it to her) and needed to spend some time talking to me and watching some shows to take her mind of things that were stressing her out, I still managed to do some reading. And, as I mentioned earlier, I'd been listening to some classic John Williams music too as part of a retrospective. Mostly during my commutes and then when I go out to my car during lunch, but still, it's something. A few things happened.

First, although I posted earlier that I'd been pretty soured on both Star Wars and Indiana Jones by the actions of Disney and even George Lucas himself, I still found myself feeling nostalgic, especially while going through the Special Edition expanded soundtrack albums for Empire and Jedi. When my wife goes out of town in a month or two to help my other son with his coming twins and I'm stuck at home alone most evenings and weekends, I think it likely that I'll pull out my old laserdisc rips of the theatrical original versions of the original trilogy and watch it again, and maybe the original Indy trilogy too. In spite of my fickle moodiness about the two series, they were good movies, which is why I loved them for so long. I don't have to have a relationship with the movies, and they don't have to be perfect to still be enjoyable. I also don't have to like the creator to enjoy the creation. 

I literally just finished the Special Edition soundtrack end titles for Jedi—as I'm writing the last few notes are playing in my earbuds (quieter day at work. Or at least fewer meetings.) Next up are some of the incidental songs, like the ewok village music, "Lapti Nek", the original version which was replaced (foolishly) in the Special Edition by "Jedi Rocks" and then the original "Yub Nub" version of the end titles. My own folder is better than the soundtracks that I bought years ago in some ways, because I prefer the original versions there. That's also why when I watch them, I'll watch my laser disc rips rather than my Special Edition discs, or stream it from Disney+ or whatever.

I may also end up watching "Andor" while my wife is gone. I've been trying to get her to watch it with me, but she has been kind of reluctant. I guess I'm not "completely" over Star Wars after all. Like I said, it's not an ex-girlfriend. It's a few movies from my childhood, as well as various additional titles and media projects, of wildly varying quality. I can appreciate those that are decent and roll my eyes and avoid those that aren't. 

Secondly, by funny coincidence, one of the things I watched with my wife when she needed to distract herself from being stressed about work was The Big Bang Theory, and we saw the episode where Amy Farrah Fowler "ruins" Raiders of the Lost Ark for the guys by pointing out that Indiana Jones himself was completely incidental to the plot. Nothing he did made any effect on anything; the Nazis would literally have found the ark with or without him, they would have taken it to their island, they would have opened it, and they would have all died. Indy brought it back, just so it could get stuffed in a warehouse and forgotten. That's his only actual accomplishment in the movie, according to her. This isn't entirely true; Marian would probably have been killed by the Nazis, and arguably, Indiana Jones reconnecting with Marian was a more important plot point than finding the ark even. So it made a difference to her. There's even a line in the movie where this is acknowledged, but whether this was a nod by the screenwriter Kasdan that he recognized this or not is unclear; when Indy has the bazooka trained on the ark before the Nazis open it, he tells the Nazis that all he cares about is the girl. 

Anyway, shortly I'll listen to a Wandering DMs podcast, then the Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones soundtracks. I don't have the same nostalgia for the prequel trilogy as younger Millennials do, so I don't expect anything to come of that other than my original intention; hear the John Williams soundtracks and appreciate them for their own sake in spite of the movies. Then another podcast, followed by Revenge of the Sith and The Force Awakens, etc. until I run out of Star Wars soundtracks to listen to. I've got plenty of other music, of course, after that, to keep the same basic pattern going. 

Thirdly, on our side of the social spectrum, there's obviously been a lot of disappointment in more recent Star Wars offerings, and a desire to have a good swashbuckling space opera that recreates what was good about Star Wars while excising the stuff that sucks about it. This is especially relevant, because Star Wars was just a grab-bag of copied elements from a bunch of older space opera anyway; it's almost as if the setting was a hybrid of Dune and the Lensmen, and the plot was a hybrid of Where Eagles Dare in space with The Dam Busters Anyone can do essentially the same thing; take a bunch of old space opera elements and rather transparently put them all together and rip them off. I've even done so myself. For a while, I hoped that the Galaxy's Edge series would be the replacement Star Wars I was hoping for, but it's not. Cole and Anspach said that's what they were doing, but only one of the novels actually felt like Star Wars; the rest of it was overtly military science fiction, written for former military science fiction fans. Not bad, but not Star Wars, and not my cup of tea either. I also thought that maybe John C. Wright, who's well regarded in "our" sphere might be the guy. He's got a four-book space opera that claims to be exactly the kind of old fashioned Star Wars rip-off space opera that I'm looking for. My daughter bought me the first book in the series (off my Amazon wish list) a while ago (for Christmas I think) and just finished the first title, Space Pirates of Andromeda. Honestly, I didn't really love it, and based on my now a couple of different experiences with John C. Wright's work, I think he's a over-rated. He's a great prose stylist, I'll give him that, but that's one of the author skills that I care about the least. I didn't think his character or plot development was anything special at all, and his world-building kind of actively turned me off on occasion. Apparently the space-faring races of his space opera Andromeda galaxy are just animal people, and their species names are the scientific names of the animal families that they resemble; deer people are Cervidae, weasel people are Mustelidae, fox people are Vulpinae, etc. 

He also shares, to some degree, with Lucas himself, a somewhat beta (delta?) approach to girls in his fiction. The somewhat bratty space princess teenager with the special magical powers that nobody else has has to save the hapless hero several times through her astral projection. That kind of turned me off too. In fact, in general, he didn't really get the old-fashioned vibe of capable men who just jump in there, roll up their sleeves and make things happen. There's considerably too much reliance and technology and magical powers (of someone else, no less) and considerably too little on his own competence, resilience and innovation. And I literally groaned and rolled my eyes when he referenced Asian-morph humans as the most attractive. Nerds with yellow fever are particularly cringe.

And his Christian references were too on-the-nose for my taste. I prefer Tolkien to Lewis, but Wright is writing the Narnia of space opera, not the Lord of the Rings of space opera. I feel like... eh. I do think that I'll get around to ordering the next three books of the series—eventually—but I'm not in any particular hurry to do so. Especially because, see below:

Fourth, I finally found a lot of the books that I'd been looking for in boxes in my garage, which I didn't have space to unpack after relocating (yet) so they were kind of "lost" in storage. That brings a bunch of stuff back to the reading list, including an omnibus of the Drizzt prequel series (I read the original Halfling Gem trilogy a year or two ago, and meant to read this shortly after, but then when I relocated, it's been lost in storage for just over a year), an omnibus of the first five Barsoom books, the original Timothy Zahn sequel trilogy of novels for Star Wars, and maybe some of the M.Y.T.H. and Thieves World books by Robert Asprin (et al.) I also have plenty on my novel list already; a trilogy of Arkham Horror novels, The Mad King, the James Silke Horned Helmet four-book series, Dracula, and another dive after several years into Lovecraft, etc. Before any of that, I want to finish the Riftwar Saga and read the last book there, A Darkness at Sethanon. Man, I've got so much to read. But that's novels. In terms of game books:

Fifth, I'm only a few pages away from finishing the original Eberron book. I actually just need to read the Forgotten Forge adventure included at the end, at which point I'll be done. I'll be picking up the next Eberron book, which is the first module, on pdf next, as well as the next Freeport book, which is "Black Sails" in physical gamebooks, so my "what I'm reading" is A Darkness at Sethanon, Black Sails Over Freeport and Shadows of the Last War by this afternoon. I don't want this Eberron (and other) trawl projects to start muscling out Freeport, but some of them were ideas that I had in mind for what to read for a long time before I started the Freeport Trawl anyway. The Freeport Trawl, for instance, is going to eventually feed my Curse of the Corsair Coast 5x5 Front, so of the bunch, it's the slighter higher priority. But I also don't want to lose momentum on my Eberron Remixed 2e project, which now has a page created on the Eberron Remixed site (although not yet any content on it) and reading the products that I haven't in many years is the best way to keep up my motivation to do that.

And to end, here's a ChatGPT image of ghostly pirates; a theme of Black Sails if I remember correctly. Although, again; I'm expecting Black Sails to be silly, it mostly takes place in weird pocket dimensions, and it probably isn't really very appropriate for Old Night use. I hope that after I get past this product, though, that most of the rest of what Freeport offers will be more appropriate for my use.

UPDATE: Finally, I picked up Black Sails to start reading it this evening, and right there in the very first paragraph, it makes mention of Tales of Freeport already being out when it came out, so my order is a little wrong. Sigh. It probably doesn't matter, but I'm going to pull that one ahead and read it first now. I was thrown off by a typo somewhere, because I thought it was released in 2005, which was... obviously not correct.

Shotgun post—movies and movie music, 5x5 campaigns, Eberron and Freeport

A bunch of small updates for this morning, none of which justifies its own post, so they're all bundled together and shot out like buckshot.

First, because listening to podcasts and actual plays becomes an endurance challenge, at least with my low attention span personality, I've recently interspersed every episode with two movie soundtracks. One thing that I'd been meaning to do for a long time was a complete playthrough of the Indiana Jones and Star Wars soundtracks. Even the movies that I don't like, like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and movies that I never watched like Dial of Destiny had John Williams soundtracks. I'd thought years ago that Crystal Skull had a kind of phoned in soundtrack; everything that was memorable came from past movies. On the other hand, I thought the profoundly mediocre and disappointing movie The Force Awakens still had a good soundtrack, so I was willing to give it all a go.

I haven't gotten too far yet; I finished all five Indiana Jones movies and am near to finishing the first 1977 Star Wars movie. Lots more Star Wars to go. The music is, of course, good as its always been. But I find that I don't have quite the same happy associations with it that I did for years and years. I'm not saying that the music is ruined for me; that's too far. But its also not the same. I almost find that I quite enjoy listening to soundtracks for movies that I haven't even watched, if they're good soundtracks, because I have no association with them other than whatever I'm using them for. So, movie soundtracks like Slenderman or Alien: Covenant to me just sound like Shadows of Old Night. 

And I can't even just blame Iger and the modern Disney corporation. Raiders has been significantly impacted by my discovering the audio of the brainstorming sessions between Lucas, Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan to work out the screenplay.

Kasdan: I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don't have to build it.

Lucas: I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

Kasdan: And he was forty-two.

Lucas: He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship.

Spielberg: She had better be older than twenty-two.

Lucas: He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.

Lucas: It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

Spielberg: And promiscuous. She came onto him.

Lucas: Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he...

Spielberg: She has pictures of him.

Other than one bit of sanity from Spielberg questioning the age, nobody batted an eye, and Lucas himself comes across as the really creepy one. Karen Allen doesn't look young enough to have been a kid when she had her affair with Jones, but the actors are nine years apart in real life. Although they fixed the worst of that problem with casting, I still can't not think about what they were about to do when they meet each other again in Marian's bar in Nepal. Something is seriously wrong with George Lucas, and that makes even the older Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies look suspect. Of course the bad movies that came out later than the original good ones have tainted the older ones; I'm now much more jaded about their flaws, and I see them as interesting but not necessarily great after all. What a change from what I thought twenty or so years ago!

Second, I didn't put my campaigns in order! I just grabbed all of the images with the Shift key and they loaded in whatever order they loaded in, and that's how I described them. Cult of Undeath is indeed the original one I worked on, before I even had this methodology, but Darkness In the Hill Country is the first one that I built with the 5x5 Front methodology, and it was specifically built to "go first." If I were to run these campaigns back to back (to back to back, etc.) for the same or at least some returning PCs, which would be fun but unlikely, I'd do them in the following order:

1. Darkness In the Hill Country
2. Cult of Undeath
3. Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes
4. Icy Graves of Hyperborea
5. Terror in Timischburg
6. Curse of the Corsair Coast

The advantage of doing it that way is that there is (with one little side-trip campaign; the Hyperborean one) a general movement west and south. They kind of link; Darkness In the Hill Country naturally takes place in the Hill Country, Cult of Undeath starts in the Hill Country and migrates slowly westward into western Timischburg near the southern edge of the Boneyard. A week or two caravan ride across the Boneyard from where that finishes put's the PCs in Simashki for Mind-Wizards; not that they know how they got there, which is the whole point of Mind-Wizards. From there, they're close to Lower Kurushat, and can do the side trip to Hyperborea and back. And then, once they're back, they just have to move across the peninsula a little bit to the coastal cities of Baal Hamazi to start Terror in Timischburg, which gradually pulls them south to the Corsair Coast and Port Liure, where they can do Curse of the Corsair Coast. 

The one that really stands out there, of course, is the Hyperborean one, which has the PCs travel from Lower Kurushat to Hyperborea and back; a much longer trip than any of the other campaigns offers. More travel, even than all of the others combined (with the possible exception of Terror In Timischburg because of all the sailing, which makes travel easier.) I may rethink that one, and make Hyperborea be a spin-off meant to use other characters entirely, or something, that starts somewhere closer like Burlharrow. We'll see. I haven't developed much of anything at all yet on that one anyway, so there's time to modify my thoughts on it.

Third, I've been reading Eberron pretty quickly. I'm now at least half way through it, and I'm in the actual setting stuff now; the descriptions of the nations. The next chapter is organizations, and then tips for running a campaign the way the designers envisioned. But then there's still two chapters of mostly mechanics; magic items and monsters, respectively, and then the little introductory adventure, "The Forgotten Forge." I created an Eberron Trawl page too, although I'm going to be a little bit less aggressive about those than I am about Freeport. I did notice that if I placed the products in order that they were released, though, that two modules follow the setting before anything else came out. And, that the original module series was supposed to follow up as a "sequel" of sorts to the included mini-module. I suspect that they're much more stand-alone, but we'll see; it's been a really long time since I looked at the Eberron modules. I even played in at least the first one, although I don't remember how long that campaign lasted before falling apart due to GM losing interest in running (his attention span was worse than mine, especially when it came to this kind of follow-through.) Anyway, I'm kind of curious how this will go. There are several Eberron products that I never did get around to reading, so maybe they'll be really interesting to pick up now, years after the fact. I had thought some of them seemed redundant, so I didn't buy them when they were new, but we'll see now.

Finally, I finished "Denizens of Freeport" last night, the latest in the Freeport Trawl. I can't read the next until I finish Eberron, since the next one is "Black Sails" which I have in physical copy. I think I'd never actually read this one before, or if I did, I didn't remember it hardly at all, which is odd because I've had it for a good twenty years. I probably just forgot that I read it years ago. While it does include NPC statblocks, as most d20 products were prone to do in 2003, this luckily didn't take too much space (except when applied to spellcasters) and it instead focused on presenting the character as someone, not that you'd fight with or interact with mechanically necessarily, but as actual characters in the city that you could meet, and all of them have at least a few "hooks" associated with them; adventure seeds that could be used to get the characters doing something. The format here is very familiar to me from my multiple re-reads of 2007's "Pirates Guide to Freeport", with the exception of the statblocks of course. There are one or two repeat characters from other sources (like whathisface, the Dented Helm dwarf brewer), and another one or two that are repeat characters but their status changed (like Torya Ironoak, etc.) but mostly, this is new stuff.

Some of it is hoaky, of course. There's a few ridiculous pop culture or literary references here and there. There's a few concepts that are absurd. There's several that are way too D&D to be useable by me. Woke didn't exist as a concept in 2003 of course, but the ideas did and Chris Pramas was all about the proto-woke just like he's all about woke now. That ruins a few characters here too. But really; I didn't expect anything different. This is still a good book, a useful book, and because each "chapter", i.e., each NPC, is only a page or two long, it's an easy one to pick up and read at your leisure in short bursts when you have time. I—unfortunately—don't expect "Black Sails" to be nearly as fun and easy and relaxing to read, because I remember it; it's got long chapters full of silliness, and I'm kind of expecting it to be a bit tedious. But maybe going in with low expectations I'll find that it's not as bad as I remember, and there'll be stuff that I can use after all.

Finally, check out that cover art! It's a great example of why Wayne Reynolds catapulted very quickly to becoming one of the most popular D&D and D&D-adjacent artists of the 00s and 10s. I don't see his work nearly as often anymore as I did back then, and I think he's slowed down either because he's just not as young and hungry as he used to be, or he's working more in some other venues where I just don't see his stuff anymore (I personally believe he probably made enough money that he could slow down and relax.) But man, he used to really be all over the place. Not everything he did was golden (the Black Company cover he did, also for Green Ronin, is particularly bad), but most of it was excellent. This was always one of my favorites of his. He's associated with a lot of companies, but I associated him with Freeport earlier than most. If you count the Fantasy AGE 2e cover, which obviously is set in Freeport, he did eight covers for the line. Oddly, the later ones would be among the best, but they feature (at Green Ronin's request, no doubt) too much Diversity, Inc. action grrl pox characters on them to really work for me anymore. Sadly. 

Eberron and 3e

Eberron is, of course, the quintessential 3e setting. The "setting search" ensured that it was designed specifically for 3e (3.5, if you want to be nitpicky) and was the only official setting designed from scratch during that period. A few other official settings were explored; Greyhawk was the "default" setting in the books, and a few references were made to it in various places. There was also a Gazetteer released, which is probably one of the most comprehensive guides to the setting ever done. The Adventure Paths, which also debuted in the pages of Dungeon Magazine also came out in this era, and were a bit more explicitly set in Greyhawk, although little sidebars on adapting them to other settings existed. And, of course, there was a relatively busy schedule of Forgotten Realms releases. Most sourcebooks that were in the more mature late 3.5 stage had various notes on adapting the material in it to those three settings. 

They also published Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, which wasn't really a setting per se, but which brings the Ravenloft setting into the edition kinda sorta. 

Of course, this was also the era of the OGL and the d20 License, so there were plenty of unofficial settings published by third party publishers, and many of them were at least as good, if not better, than ones published by WotC. Not that this is comprehensive, but off the top of my head, I'm trying to remember the settings that I bought: Rokugan, Midnight, Dragonstar, Sovereign Stone, Iron Kingdoms, the Black Company, the DCC setting (whatever it was called) and Thieves World. Very late in the era I got the Pathfinder setting book, which was released as a 3.5 book before it became a Pathfinder book. I probably have some others that I'm not remembering off-hand too. I didn't have a gazetteer, but I had some scattered Scarred Lands books too. Not to mention downloadable stuff, like World of Xoth, etc. 

But Eberron was kind of special. Because I submitted my own 1-pager submissions to the setting search contest (2 of ~11,000, apparently) I felt kind of invested in it. I was there from the ground floor, which wasn't true for any other D&D setting really, at least not one that had a long product line. (That may be one of the reasons I've always liked Freeport too, for that matter.) And, I kind of liked Eberron for what it was. D&D meets Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, set in a kinda sorta Cold War interbellum? What's not to like? On top of that, it was well written, and had some cool ideas. Eberron wasn't necessarily what I was looking for, then or now, but there was always a lot to like about it, and other than my own homebrew settings, it's probably the one I'd be most likely to use. With some possible significant updates. Not counting, of course, Freeport which I'm reading with an eye to adapt. 

I had previously decided that I wanted to re-read my Eberron stuff—before I decided to do the Freeport Trawl, even, although it was a more casual endeavor, and I hadn't really started it. But I needed to read, of course, the original setting book again before I could do that, because it's been at least three years since I've done so. That's the bottleneck I'm in right now; I'm trying to finish Eberron before I can pick up Black Sails Over Freeport. After that, they won't interfere with each other too much, because I've got Eberron hard copies of plenty of things to read (Sharn would be next) while most of my Freeport stuff is pdf. But I've got a lot on my plate still this year for physical gaming books, so I don't know how much of that I anticipate getting done in the next few months. I'll read Eberron and Sharn, and then we'll see what's next. I don't necessarily intend to re-read everything from Eberron 3e.

One thing that I find more egregious than I remembered is that there isn't a ton of setting stuff, relatively speaking, in the book. I'm almost at page 100 (out of ~315), and almost all of the actual setting info has been incidental and offhand so far. 3e was so heavy into mechanics, that they've spent 100 pages and given almost nothing of setting info, except what you can pick up in the subtext of prestige classes and races. There is a big section of setting info, coming up soon in my case, but it's really only about half of the book. 

That does tend to make the book harder to read than I remember. I've been reading and reading and expecting it to get somewhere, and it's still not there yet... This is a big part of the reason why I got tired of 3e eventually. It was fun while it lasted, but it was also tedious the entire time. Of course, almost all of my gaming product is... 3e. I have other stuff here and there, but it's (relatively) thin and far between. And frankly, most of those other systems weren't interested in splatbook bloat anyway. They have relatively fewer products to collect. And even when they were interested in splatbooks, like some of the old 90s White Wolf stuff, it was actual setting info, not more mechanics.

3e was the first system that was created with an actual business model behind its design. The OGL and d20 licenses were to facilitate getting product to consumers that would strengthen the ecosystem, but not cost WotC anything (third party modules, was mainly what it was meant to do) but most of what WotC themselves released was mechanics that were useable by players, and products that were specifically meant to be purchased by players; a play by WotC to increase their sales of books by targeting them to everyone instead of mainly GMs. 

The (perhaps) unintended side effect of this, however, was that the game developed into an overly complicated super-rulesy game, and the focus started to move to power-building, because players had all of these tools to play with. At first, they were probably intended to be roleplaying tools, but even I, who am not a power gamer at all, remember building Henrik whatsisname in my Age of Worms campaign; a shifter barbarian/ranger/reachrunner/someotherprestigeclass craziness, because that's just how you had to build your characters in those days. Sigh.

I can see why it was done, but the end result was really bad for gaming, and especially bad for the kind of gaming that I enjoy. That's one (of two) big fat reasons why I'm not a huge fan of Paizo and their approach; they carried the torch of the player-centric power-gaming wicked build style of gaming that the OSR and 5e (to some degree) abandoned. Although 5e is migrating back to that model slowly but surely. Not because its good for the game, but because it juices sales somewhat in the short term. 

In any case, although it hardly needs be said that Eberron didn't invent these concepts, Eberron brought to d20 and to D&D overall several ideas that were absent from D&D. They were also kind of vague in fantasy and folklore and it was nice to have them, including concepts even that I use today in Old Night. The shifter race, more or less, is the genesis of my woodwose race, even though I use an old medieval word for the concept, they wouldn't exist without Eberron and it's shifters. The pseudomage is based in part on Massha, the "mechanic" from the M.Y.T.H. Inc. series of novels by Robert Asprin, but it probably wouldn't exist either without Eberron and it's plentiful low level magic, its magewrights, etc. I developed my own concept of pseudomages for my Eberron Remixed project first, and only then decided that they were a good enough fit for Old Night too. 

Sadly, I don't think Eberron does a great job of meeting its own promise, though. It was held back by having to be too D&D, when it was really deliberately reaching towards stuff that isn't... careful tactical combat in a dungeon. 

Anyway, I've got a list of books on my Freeport Trawl; but what am I thinking of re-reading in the near term from my physical game books? Let me make a quick and dirty little list:

• Eberron Campaign Setting
• Monster Manual II
• Monster Manual III
• Monster Manual IV
• Monster Manual V
• Fiend Folio (all 3e, of course)
• Monster Compendium
• Heroes of Horror
• Expedition to Castle Ravenloft
• Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss
• Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells
• Libris Mortis
• Stormwrack
• Sharn: City of Towers
• Secrets of Xen'drik
• Secrets of Sarlona
• Dragons of Eberron
• City of Stormreach
• the Eberron adventures (I think there were 5-6 of them)
• Expanded Psionics Handbook
• Complete Warrior
• Complete Psionic

Most of those last titles are all Eberron stuff, obviously. And I may add more Eberron to that; when's the last time I read Races of Eberron or Dragonmarked or Forge of War? But I don't want to be as rigid on this list as I am on my Freeport Trawl, so this is just a vague roadmap of what I'll probably read. No doubt a few of those titles will fall off or get pushed back, and other titles will pop up that aren't on my radar right now, but which I'll end up wanting to read. And the order isn't meant to be indicative of anything. It's just a list, not an ordered list. 

Eberron Remixed, Second Edition

A few years ago, I had a lot of fun adapting Eberron to Dark Fantasy X as a remix of sorts. Of course, Dark Fantasy X has now evolved into Shadows of Old Night; and that's not just a change in name and a few superficial mechanical details (although it is also that.) More to the point, I've kicked off (and not yet finished) the High Fantasy X project as a fork of Shadows of Old Night, which is another temp name too like Dark Fantasy X was. Not yet sure what I'm going to rename HFX to, but in the meantime, I think it's worth pointing out one salient and interesting detail:

Namely that the setting of High Fantasy X is heavily and deliberately influenced by Khorvaire, the main continent of Eberron. It's also equally heavily and deliberately influenced by Heroes of Might and Magic III, my favorite old computer game from my college days in the latest 90s and early 00s. But one thing that I discovered, accidentally as I was tinkering with ideas for the HFX setting is that Heroes3 and Eberron actually match up shockingly well. All of the Eberron kingdoms (on Khorvaire)—or at least almost all of them—have shockingly close analogs in the factions of Heroes3, especially if you add some of the new Horn of the Abyss factions, like Cove. When I drew my first draft of the High Fantasy X map (which I still need to scan and post) it actually looked quite a bit like Khorvaire, and I was no doubt influenced in many ways both subconscious and conscious when I drew it, like putting the Necropolis-like kingdom in the same location (more or less) as Karrnath, and all of that. It's fair to say that the HFX map is a redrawn, slightly pruned, and renamed/relabeled version of Khorvaire.

This is, of course, because I quite like Eberron. I remixed it, and then I made a pastiche of it as a different setting too.

I kind of want to do two things, one as a step, if you will, to the other. First, I want to take my old Microlite20 Dark Fantasy X EBERRON REMIXED project and create an updated remix of it that more closely matches the HFX rules and races, etc. I'm not going to mess too much with the Eberron Remixed site; I'll leave that alone and redo the pages on it as blog posts with a new tag, EBERRON REMIXED 2e. This means that if I ever want to run Eberron (Remixed) I don't have to go back to an out of date and "primitive" version of my rules. Not that I think that I will ever do that, but y'know. It was fun to remix the setting, so why not remix it again, but better?

After I've done that, it'll be easier to continue transitioning to the even more dramatically "remixed" HFX. I don't consider that a remix at all, although of course it's a setting that is influenced very obviously in some ways by Eberron—except with a darker, Lovecraftian lens applied to it, among other changes. I hope by the time I get that far, that I've come up with a permanent name for High Fantasy X. But if not, I can continue to use the temporary name indefinitely, I suppose.

While, like I said above, the mechanics did change when I migrated from Microlite20 DFX to Shadows of Old Night, the changes are, actually, more modest than you'd think. Sure, sure... I added back in the missing D&D-style ability scores, and rounded out the skills to six as well. I also eliminated the classes, and have an a la carte Feats system which is basically a build-your-own class, just without that label. But what really will change more substantially is that Shadows of Old Night has more races (and a few different ones) than old Dark Fantasy X, which mean that I'll need to remap my Eberron races and nations a little bit to work in this new paradigm. That also gives me an opportunity to revisit some other remix changes that I made to see if they still hold up. Let me first list the races from High Fantasy X, which are a closer match to D&D in some ways—I've got elves and dwarfs back in, for instance—although less so in others, since just because I have elves and dwarfs doesn't mean that they're really exactly like D&D versions of the same, for instance.

I will need to redraw the map; if nothing else, I'd like to add two more minor nations, based (loosely) on Droaam (my remixed interpretation of it, anyway) and Q'barra, since HFX lacks any analog to those. I'll see HFX converge in some ways even closer to my new Eberron Remixed, which will in turn diverge even more from Eberron as printed. 

In any case, HFX lacks the Eberron specific races, so I need to decide what (if anything) to do with them: kalashtar, changelings, shifters and most iconically, war-forged; do I port them to HFX, or leave them off? Probably off, but we'll see. After all, otherwise, why wouldn't I just use Eberron Remixed 2e and not even bother doing HFX at all?

In any case, join me (or don't) as I go through this exercise to re-remix Eberron, and then find out how much of that remixing can translate into useable material for whatever HFX eventually transitions to.

The Inquisitives

As an aside, I just finished the fourth book of The Inquisitives series, a 4-book series of Eberron novels. Like The War-Torn series which I reviewed here years ago when it was still relatively new, it really isn't a series at all; it's four stand-alone books with completely different characters, all written by different authors. I've had a rough relationship in many ways with D&D fiction. Ten years ago when I was reviewing The Crimson Talisman it was a pretty scathing review, and I even was kind of harsh on The Orb of Xoriat and Claws of the Tiger even though I liked them. (I can't find my review for Blood and Honor. I know that I read it, but maybe I never wrote one for some reason.)

I don't know if this series is better than that one, or if I'm just more mellow in my older age. Ten years sometimes will do that to a guy. But I actually don't much hesitate to recommend these novels, at least to D&D players. Sometimes the specifics of the mechanics show up more than I'd like, or rather; a lot of stuff that's implied about the setting in the rules features prominently. That's probably not actually a complaint, although I complained about in the past; stuff like the magical healing and some of the very specific magic items and spells, etc. I mean, c'mon, every fantasy setting's gotta have some of that, right, and if in Eberron's case that resembles the rules of D&D to a great degree, even in the novels, that really shouldn't be too surprising. I guess my problem is that I don't really love the implied setting of D&D all that much, which is why I guess I was so motivated to "fix" Eberron, or rather, remix it into something else.

I guess maybe my vision of Eberron is just different than the creator's. And that's OK. Check out, for example, this synthwave remix of The Outfield's "Your Love" which I found a few weeks ago. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the original, especially if you're a guy my age who was in middle school when it came out, but this synthwave remix is amazing, because it replaces the original 80s pop with a kind of retro-futuristic view of the 80s that never really existed, but which at the same time distills the tone and feel of the 80s in a way that almost feels more 80s than actual 80s music does. I guess that's how I always felt about Eberron; it was too hampered by being D&D when it was really trying to be a really cool swashbuckling setting in some other system. (Not to hype my own past work, but if you're interested, here's the Eberron Remixed stuff. It requires access to the original 3.5 Eberron Campaign Setting book to use.)

Anyway, all of the four Inquisitives novel feature mystery plots that unfold in Eberron. The first one, Bound by Iron was probably the weakest, but the next three are all actually pretty fantastic. Night of Long Shadows, the second one, was my favorite. Curiously, there's a sequel to it, but it's not the next book in this series. I imagine it's because the main character and his side-kick are probably the most likeable characters of all that we're shown, and have the most charisma and chemistry between them, but the characters of Legacy of Wolves and The Darkwood Mask are pretty cool too. The last one, unfortunately, ends on a slightly unresolved cliff-hanger about a bunch of things, and as far as I know, there was never any follow-up to tie that off in a sequel or anything. A little disappointing. 

However, I think any D&D fan would enjoy these novels. I certainly did, more than I expected to. I have certainly mellowed over the years in my criticisms of game fiction, but that may be only because I find regular fiction to be really bad these days, so older game fiction from a decade or two ago is pretty good in comparison. But it's hard to say. I got to a point where I wasn't really reading very much for fun any more for many years, and now that I'm back doing a fair bit of it (sort of) again, I'm finding that the lighter fare is actually pretty fun. 

I don't know if you can even find this stuff any more. I don't think any Eberron novels have been in print for many years, and these were originally published in 2007-8 or so, if I recall. It looks like they're not too hard to pick up on Thriftbooks for about the same price they would have retailed at new, however. I don't think that they're super collectible, just out of print and ultimately meant to be fairly forgettable. But I enjoyed them, and recommend them to you.

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. 

Revisiting Eberron Remixed

Just a quick announcement. I'm not doing anything here on the blog, but if you followed my Eberron Remixed project, I've actually recently kind of rediscovered it and brought it back. It is one of the projects, however, that because it has its own Google Sites site, I probably won't bother crossposting updates here and there, I'll just make them there and occasionally refer to the fact that I'm doing stuff over there.

One side effect of doing things this way is that I sometimes forget about stuff that's disconnected from this, the "main" blog, though. I'd almost completely forgotten about some of my other blogs that I used to spend more time on than obviously I do now, Lone Star Hiker, Synthpop80s and SFKOFFF being the most notable examples there. And I've been making all kinds of Ad Astra updates over the last few months on my Ad Astra Google Site without announcing most of them here. 

Anyway, I'm interested in actually finishing the Eberron Remixed project. I'm a good... I dunno, 2/3s through already? 3/4s maybe? I finished up my review of the longest chapter in the setting book, and reread my entire corpus of work on the project so far just recently. And then maybe I'll continue my Youtube vlog series about it once I'm a bit further along too.

All of this because I'd actually like to get back to RPGs. Y'know, the whole frikkin' reason I started this blog in the first place? I might have an angle on building a new group, maybe. And even if I don't, I want to talk more about RPG related stuff than I have been the last year or two, where my RPG investment has been waning and fallow for a while. This, plus my Ad Astra investment, is the first two prongs of that approach. It is, however, notable to point out that I'm not necessarily always using this blog as the primary avenue to post that kind of stuff, although I'll try to at least make announcements when I think that there's something significant enough new that someone might want to go check out.

Anyhoo, the image below is a link to my Eberron Remixed project, as it currently stands. As pointed out in the Home page, it does expect you to have, be familiar with, and maybe even refer to the 3.5 version of the Eberron Campaign Setting while you're using that document, and it might be difficult to follow if you don't, unless you just happen to know the Eberron setting so well that my esoteric references make sense to you (they wouldn't even to me, and I wrote them!)

Someone else's Eberron Remixed

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eberron/comments/eg1h6r/homebrewed_khorvaire_revised_map/

Pretty interesting. I mean, he didn't remix it in the same sense that I am, and I strongly suspect that he's still using regular 5e D&D rules, but he remixed the geography to turn Scion's Sound into a proper, big, epicontinental sea, not unlike the Baltic, as he keeps saying. This allows him to create different strategic and political challenges as well as have proper naval activity and piracy going on.

Plus, it's a nice map. Some of the other changes, like adding more settlements that he pulled from other official sources, and increasing the populations of many of them so that there's a bit more urban centers than the setting otherwise posits, allows for better intrigue and skulduggery too.

Anyway, pretty nifty.

City of Towers by Keith Baker

I tried to read this book when it was pretty new, nearly fifteen years ago, but I never really got very far into it for whatever reason.  After stumbling across my EBERRON REMIXED tag recently, I decided to try again, and got this from the library and read it; I remember thinking in the past that it was fairly thick and dense, but this time around, I found it more light and breezy.  Anyway, even with my busy schedule, I was able to finish it in a few days and request the next book in the series, which I've now also started.  Even though the book is old, I thought I'd review it.

I've long been fascinated with stories that take place in a definitely fantasy setting, but which tell a different kind of story.  The City of Towers by Keith Baker is one such story.  Keith Baker is the creator of the Eberron setting, and this was not only the first Eberron novel, but also Baker's first novel.  It's part of a trilogy; The Dreaming Dark, and while Eberron is, of course, a fantasy setting (given that it's a D&D setting) this story is really a noir story, and it hits all kinds of noir beats as it develops.  It takes place almost entirely in an urban setting, and it focuses on the amoral; the criminal elements, and the skulduggery of the elites who maneuver and connive to get ahead politically or otherwise.  There's a fair bit of mystery involved, and the plot is certainly involved with solving a mystery of disappearing victims, but there are other "meta mysteries" that are touched on and often left unresolved so they can dangle into the rest of the trilogy.

The characters are also very much like noir characters; kind of cynical and weary, veterans of a war that recently ended, unwanted and unwelcome in their new environment, and struggling to find their place and deal with their past.

The book logs in at just about 335 pages, plus a lot of appendices and stuff at the back giving some setting explanation.  I personally think that was unnecessary; the story stands on its own without it, and most people who read it will have bought the actual setting book too.  About typical for this kind of fantasy story, really.

For a first time novelist, Baker does a pretty decent job.  There are only a handful of minor complaints about his writing that I can make, and I've certainly seen worse from more established writers.  For instance, the novel feels occasionally like it's making stops for no other reason than to show off some aspect of the setting.  I guess he can hardly be faulted for doing so, and maybe it's even a good idea given the purpose of the novel in being published, but occasionally I was left wondering what the point of some vignette was other than to give us some kind of gratuitous exotica (even within the standard terms and conventions of D&D.)  The tone was occasionally jarring too; the main point of view character in particular, who's usually kind of somber and bitter, would occasionally throw out this strange one-liner joke; almost a dad joke, even.  I felt like the clues pointed more towards the meta mystery than the mystery associated specifically with this novel; it almost felt like a scenic detour when we did the resolution.

All of those seem kind of nitpicky, though, and I almost hesitate to call them out for fear that they sound like crippling flaws.  They are nothing of the kind; there are merely minor technicalities; the novel would be marginally better if they were fixed, but they don't really harm its initial impression too much.  What is perhaps more irritating is one aspect of the characterizations; the main characters seemed to have bizarrely emotional sensitive triggers, and were suddenly either really mad or really sad at the drop of a hat.  For supposed officers and veterans of a war, they were lacked an equanimity that that experience should have given them in dealing with certain kinds of adversity, and I thought that this aspect of their characterizations was both juvenile and unrealistic.  And a structural flaw that, admittedly, might be a personal pet peeve of mine, but I don't think so: a lot of stuff is held back to increase suspense, I presume, but it is information that the main characters know quite well; we just aren't told as the readers, so when the main characters finally say, "I yeah, I'm a member of that house" or whatever the big reveal is, rather than it seeming like suspense, it just felt like irritation and frustration.  Why don't we as the readers know that if the point of view character who's head we've been in obviously does, because it's his whole freakin' backstory?  This is a very cheap trick and only works on the most unsophisticated of readers; pretty much everyone else will find it irritating.

In any case, the novel was certainly competent enough that I was willing to move on and read the rest of the trilogy.  I'm about 20% or so into the second book now, so hopefully by the end of the week, or at most, early next week, I'll review that one too.

The Legacy of Dhakaan

Last night, whilst en route to the mall so my teenaged son could spend his birthday money on new shoes and clothes at a variety of stores that were literally painful after a time for me to be standing around in (Abercrombie & Fitch in particular makes me feel more stupid and shallow just for walking in) I finished the last book of Don Bassingthwaite’s Legacy of Dhakaan trilogy, a trilogy of relatively slim (about 300 or so pages each) novels set in Darguun, a country in the Eberron campaign setting. (And because I finished it before we even got to the mall, I had nothing to do for the better part of three or four hours except stand around listening to really crappy music, smelling lots of excessive cologne, and trying to keep my younger boys, who were just as bored as I was but who handled it less gracefully, from running all over the place making a nuisance of themselves. I haven’t yet decided if that was a welcome respite from boredom or a frustrating thing in its own right.)

Er… anyway. Don Bassingthwaite’s a pretty good writer. He’s much better than most who write “game fiction” and the equal to most who write any normal genre fiction in the fantasy mold, at least. I was initially drawn to The Legacy of Dhakaan because it 1) featured a shifter protagonist (although it turned out that it’s really an ensemble cast of protagonists with a rotating point of view from section to section), 2) was written by Don Bassingthwaite, and not one of the other authors who dabbles in Eberron fiction, and 3) most especially, it focuses on the goblinoid (mostly hobgoblin) nation of Darguun and treated them in a way that was more than simply a lowish level humanoid antagonist from the Monster Manual. In fact, in general, I’d say that one of the strongest aspects of the series was the exploration—done in passing rather than as info dumps that intrude on the narrative—of goblinoid culture in Eberron. See, ever since I saw Claudio Pozas’ old “Pax Hobgoblinica” image on the old ENWorld image galleries, I’ve been drawn to the notion that as a lawful and militaristic race, the hobgoblins should honestly have empires and kingdoms to equal that of any of the other races, with high cultural levels of achievement and whatnot. The fact that they didn’t was clearly a failure of “Gygaxian naturalism”—the notion that the mechanics of the game should inform the setting (rather than the other way around), or at least that the mechanics and the setting should “match” and be in harmony. When Eberron first came out, I was intrigued by the notion of Darguun, the goblinoid nation, which seemed at first glance to match my own delving into the concept. I later became a bit disillusioned with Darguun, thinking that it failed to really rise above the notion the hobgoblins were crude and savage humanoids after all.

I later became more enamored of the Skorne Empire from Iron Kingdoms. While Skorne are not exactly hobgoblins per se, they really aren’t any different conceptually (or visually, for that matter) and to me, it was a great example of what Darguun should have been. Later, I spent some time on my original conception of my modular campaign setting working up my own hobgoblin-led empire, Kurushat, that incorporated a few of the better ideas from the Skorne, some stuff from the history of the rise of the Roman Empire, the way succession worked in later Mongol or Turkic khaganates, and some Gygaxian naturalism of my own, with my attempt to find an appropriate role for various goblinoid related things from the D&D source material, etc. Later, my concept changed a bit; my modules became tightly integrated into just being another campaign setting after all, and I decided that goblinoids didn’t have a place in my setting—I still used everything about Kurushat but made them just an ethnicity of humans. But, my fascination with the concept of a goblinoid empire, ruled by militaristic hobgoblins, first inspired by Claudio’s picture, remained. And to date, the only work I know that caters to this particular fascination is the Legacy of Dhakaan series. So, when it came out, I hurriedly picked it up. I did not, however, hurriedly read it—it took me quite a while to get through a heavy backlog of books and distractions to finally focus on it. I believe the last book in the series was released in 2010.

One thing that fantasy writers often struggle with is making an exotic culture that doesn’t feel like a familiar Earth culture warmed over, or devolve into over-the-top stereotypes and caricatures of “national character and personality.” The first “problem” isn’t necessarily one; I’ve long been an on the record fan of the so-called Hyborian Model of making your fantasy cultures transparent analogs of real Earth cultures as a shorthand that allows you to focus quickly on other elements instead, like plot or character. But Bassingthwaite’s Darguun is much more than that; it truly presents an exotic culture that feels “realistic” and robust, rather than flimsy and lazy. I found that quite interesting, and in fact one of the series’ strongest qualities.  It also greatly expanded on culture and traditions of the goblinoids beyond what any sourcebook to the game ever did, and I suspect that that is all Bassingthwaite's own invention.

I also like the plot. This is a classic intrigue and power grab story, with murder, spies, and political machination and maneuvering. There’s a bit of a somewhat unfortunate tendency to “send everyone looking for the MacGuffin”—first the Rod of Kings, and then the next MacGuffin that will counter the Rod of Kings. Here it moves quickly, but always with interest, some nice twists and turns (although not too many; it’s mostly straightforward). There’s even a mystery from the end of the first book that takes us on numerous red herrings before finally resolving itself late in the second book.

However, I didn’t really fall in love with the characters. They weren’t bad or unlikeable—they just didn’t ever become really likeable either. I also think they suffered from another problem; we were expected to already be familiar with them, due to the fact that most of them starred in another earlier appearing trilogy which—needless to say—I haven’t read. There are three main point of view characters (as well as several other main characters who we rarely or never see from point of view) Ekhaas, the hobgoblin duur’kala (a bard), Ashi, the fighter and scion of House Deneith, and Geth the shifter (of vague D&D class—although it seems mostly fighter too; maybe a level or two of rogue or ranger rounds him out. Maybe. I actually think it’s to the novel’s credit that the Gygaxian naturalism isn’t so strong that it’s easy to pinpoint everyone’s character class and game stats.) All three of them have a bit too much of the same vibe; they’re all reluctant heroes thrust into a role that they’re fighting against the entire time. Despite this reluctance about their obvious role, there’s not really enough interpersonal conflict either, which reduces the level of interest somewhat.

That minor complaint is what makes this series one that I’m happy to have read and recommend, but one that I’m unlikely to keep on my shelf and re-read again sometime, though. My expectation is that I’ll give these to the Friends of the Public Library bookstore as a donation, so someone else can enjoy them.

Now that I’m done, I just started another tie-in novel, Lies of Solace, which is in the Arkham Horror line. It could also be Call of Cthulhu fiction, of course, since both Call of Cthulhu and Arkham Horror draw on the exact same corpus of public domain stories by Lovecraft and Co. And, no sooner did I start that, then an ILL request for Broken Blade by Kelly McCullough came in. I’ll have to read them both quickly, but they’re both short. Assuming that they’re light and easy to read, that shouldn’t be a problem.