Paizo reading

Every so often, I need to do a reading check-in. In spite of plenty of things going on, I've had a relatively successful reading weekend, especially of Paizo products. I finished, recently, Into the Darklands on the setting side, "Treasure of Chimera Cove" on the stand-alone module side, and "Howl of the Carrion King" on the adventure path side, the first adventure of Legacy of Fire. I've read a few other things in there too, including "Dark World #1: The Ritual" from the SPCM campaigns. So I now have five each of those three Paizo trawls before I get to the change from D&D 3.5 to PFRPG. (I'm also, in concert, reading  the PFRPG core book as well as Occult Adventures, which is admittedly out of order, but those obviously come after PFRPG launched. And I'd already jumped over on the Companion side, so I'm letting those "rest" for a time until I get caught up on the others.) I've mentioned before that it looks like the Chronicles line, which was later renamed the Setting line, was always running a little bit behind. I just read the one on the Darklands, which fit thematically with the Second Darkness adventure path after I'm already done with Second Darkness and into Legacy of Fire. The Katapesh chronicles book is still a few books away; when I'm nearly done with the Legacy of Fire adventure path. Although admittedly, once I make the jump on all Paizo trawls into PFRPG, I probably won't care or even have a good and easy way to know the release months of these anymore, so I won't pay nearly as much attention to reading them in any kind of order. In fact, I deliberately intend to bounce around with some of these and read titles that interest me out of order rather than just march through the trawl like a death march. While Occult Adventures has been a little disappointing to me given that it's nothing but mechanics and reads like a car repair manual rather than a game book, in many ways, I expect that the Chronicles/Setting books associated with the occult will be much more interesting, and thematically appropriate for the fall. I'm thinking of pulling ahead Occult Mysteries, Occult Realms and re-reading Horror Realms again, even though I read that early in 2025 too. It's been a year and a half. No biggie. I'm also thinking so soon after reading Into the Darklands, I should read Darklands Revisited, which I bought as a physical book some months ago and still haven't ever read.

Although genie-themed, the first module is all about gnolls, mostly.

What I really want to talk about though is the Adventure Path methodology. Like I said, I just finished "Howl of the Carrion King" which is the first adventure of the Legacy of Fire adventure path. In terms of just raw "feel", if that means anything, the entire adventure feels low level. Which is appropriate. However, you're supposed to be 5th level when you do that last encounter. To me, that seems wild. The whole adventure book, as all of them, is about 100 pages. Less because some of those are credits, ads, cover and back cover, and other ephemera. And, of course, the book contains some short fiction, some setting stuff, a little bestiary, etc. The actual adventure itself is just under 50 pages. And some of those pages are full page maps, nearly full page statblocks, and there are plenty of illustrations. Converted down to just raw text, it's probably about 40 pages. To me, it's insane to think that you can level up four times and do the final encounter at 5th level in that few pages. Especially, because the whole thing feels like a single, low level adventure. In feel, I'd call this the first act of a novel, and I'd expect the whole adventure to maybe take you from 1st to 2nd level when you're finished with it. Of course, then they'd be less likely to be able to challenge you with various more varied challenges. I see why they did it. But I don't like that they felt the need. It's kid of baked into the cake of D&D and D&D-like expectations, at least from a 3e and beyond version of D&D, which this is (this is still a D&D 3.5 adventure path, remember, and as far as I'm concerned, PFRPG is just a minor revision to D&D 3.5, and could well be considered merely D&D 3.75 or something.)

It's certainly a testament to me why a flatter power curve, one way or another, was such a highly desirable outcome on the 5e design side. Whether they actually accomplished it or not, I don't know, but they certainly claimed to want to do so. Characters who are powerful enough at the lowest levels to still be able to be somewhat survivable and to be able to play with some variety, but who don't get into runaway power escalation so that the game literally changes genres at the higher single-digit levels, and then again sometimes in the teens, is what I want. Much flatter power curve, in other words, all around, and generally a mostly lower power curve too.

So far, I'm relatively happy with the adventure path. Sure, sure, I'm only one book (of six) in, but so far so good. What I'd really like to do in a more straight conversion is have each book be worth one level, re-jigger the threats and challenges to be level appropriate while still utilizing the same plot and scope of the written module (more or less). The whole campaign would still take about as much time of actual play (well, maybe less, because higher level characters are much slower to play) but it would end as the characters are qualifying to level up from 6th to 7th level. In PFRPG or D&D 3.5, anyway. It would become an effective E6 even if it wasn't actually E6, for all intents and purposes.

Of course, that's using D&D 3.5, PFRPG, or my hybrid system that combines the two; what I'd really prefer to do is use my own Shadow of Old Night system, which is a much flatter game in terms of power anyway. And it also assumes that I'm just converting the existing modules down to a different power level while still keeping them exactly as is. I may have started years ago when I was doing Cult of Undeath thinking that I'd take Carrion Crown and do that to it, but now other than themes and a few points here and there that are wildly different in context, my revisions of Carrion Crown into Cult of Undeath hardly resemble each other that much after all. I often compare it to the first Star Wars movie. Ignorant people who are trying to impress people by knowing something that they don't actually know sometimes call Star Wars a remake, if you will, of Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. This is absurd. While Lucas is correct in claiming that he started out influenced by it, he actually lost almost all of the details other than R2-D2 and C-3PO kind of mimicking the peasants of the latter movie. The earliest drafts may have been more similar to Hidden Fortress, but the Death Star was always much more like Where Eagles Dare and 633 Squadron or The Dam Busters than anything from Hidden Fortress. The movie that actually got filmed is not very much like Hidden Fortress at all, and I can only imagine that people who say that have not actually watched it. I have, and I remember wondering where in the world people were getting that insane idea. I mean, they got it from George Lucas himself, of course, but Lucas said that he didn't end up borrowing that much from Hidden Fortress after all, and if you watch it, you agree with him. The people who say that it's similar are smoking something crazy.

Anyway, that's a bit of a pet peeve of mine; the point is, I'd prefer not to run these adventure paths as written anyway, even if converting them down-level or to a different system. I'd prefer to just borrow very obliquely from the themes and a few of the ideas, blend it with plenty of other adventures, books, or just original ideas, and not make any big claims about how my game is really an adaptation of the adventure path at all, because arguably it really isn't anymore anyway. 

I doubt I'll talk about this adventure path again before I finish it, but we'll see. Reading is sometimes slow when I've got this many trawls that I'm trying to juggle. I'd love to finish some of the "shorter" trawls and get them out of my hair entirely, like the Eberron, Forgotten Realms, the Third Edition modules, and the Fifth Edition campaigns, but "shorter" is relative, and they're not actually short. And Paizo has kind of taken over my trawl reading, both because there's so much of it, because I actually rather like the setting, and because reading trad-style adventure paths is more fun than reading most of the other stuff that I've got on my plate. It won't be done anytime soon, but once I get past the D&D 3.5 to PFRPG shark-jump, I'll probably step back and read... I don't know, at least something from every other trawl, before I dip too far back into Paizo again. Explorer's Handbook from Eberron, City of the Spider-Queen from Forgotten Realms, Monster Manual IV and maybe even the Draconomicon from the 3.5 books, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil from the 3e adventures, and maybe Expedition to Castle Ravenloft out of order too, so I can read 5e's Curse of Strahd and compare the two. I'll also finish another SPCM campaign while I'm finishing Legacy of Fire and I'd like to read another 3pp campaign in there too; maybe the next SPCM campaign, or maybe someone else's campaign instead.

UPDATE: In spite of it not being the most interesting read, I'm slowly starting to "get into" Occult Adventures now that I'm nearly 100 pages into a 275 or so page-count book. I don't find reading the detailed mechanics of classes all that interesting anymore, honestly, but if I can power through them (and I have) I find that they're not necessarily bad; its just that they're so hard to read. Once I go back, force myself to read the classes and actually not let my mind wander so I can parse how they work, they're not so bad. In fact, I kind of like them, even though they are more complex to run than I'd like... but that's kind of PFRPG's MO, isn't it? Occult magic isn't really exactly the low magic "penny dreadful" alternative I hoped for... or at least, not really. The psychic, for instance, while having different flavor, is very much a "regular" caster with access to 9th level spells at the highest level, and some of the other classes, like kineticist, doesn't even have any spells at all, and just uses magical super-powers. (While psionics vs psychic magic is usually seen a more "the X-men", but the kineticist works as that too. The mesmerist is kind of a "Jedi mind trick" class, although anti-bard works to describe it too. The occultist is mostly about causing items to be magical, etc. 

Even looking at really basic classes like the fighter, D&D 3.5 write-up vs PFRPG write-up, the PFRPG class is at least three times the word-count. To be fair, much of that is because instead of just super simple mechanics, they give you options, and you have to choose between them. PFRPG classes are like big buffets, and you aren't meant to take everything; you're meant to pick from a long list of options. Because of this, you don't use in any given character, all of the rules of the class, and the fact that they have these options means that any individual fighter (or whatever) build might differ significantly from another fighter. That's good. But it makes it harder to read, because there's so many rules that you have to parse, and as I said, they kind of feel like reading an algebra text book or something else equally boring. But the point is, I'm making progress through the book again. I think I'm going to stop buying physical copies of PFRPG rulebooks. I may buy more setting books... maybe... but that's it. The rest of their stuff I can live with my older digital pdf versions. I got a little bit too excited recently in ordering Occult Adventures and Horror Adventures and I doubt that I'll use either very much for anything, or possibly even re-read them at all. I'm starting to suspect that neither one is likely to be something I like better than even 3.5's Heroes of Horror or the FFG 3pp Darkness & Dread (written by Mike Mearls.)

Honestly, while I've been going through this brief flirtation with returning to heavily house-ruled d20, as I dig more and more into that flirtation, I'm reminded more and more why I left it in the first place. Maybe this can best be seen through the lens of a hot fling or affair with an ex... the inevitable result of which is that you remember exactly why you broke up in the first place and it reinforces that that was the right idea all along. I still think that tinkering with the options of a rules-heavy game like d20—either D&D 3.5, d20 Modern, PFRPG or any other iteration of the core game engine, is interesting, but I tend to like creativity through limitations, i.e., rather than the big "anything goes" gallimaufry that we usually get, limitations and exclusions create interesting setting implications. I still like the idea of STRANGE AFFAIRS OF THE UNSEEN BEYOND and EMPIRE OF THE MIND-WIZARDS both, but I need to rethink exactly how to to them, given that my brief enchantment with the mechanics is mostly over... but I'm still left with a fascinating implications for them as potential settings or sub-settings.

UPDATE II: I didn't get to read anything at all during "lunch" because work continues to be too crazy for me to count on having any lunch. And my wife and I are going out tonight, I think, and we're closing on our house that we've been trying to sell tomorrow. So, I won't be reading much for the next couple of days anyway. I do want to get at least a couple of books done this week, though. If I get really lucky, I read Occult Adventures before the week is over, and if I get really lucky, I also finish Guide to Absalom which is next done this week too. If the weekend and later in the week is a good catch-up time, maybe I'll get super lucky and also read "Hungry Are the Dead" and "Dark World #2: Nithon" done. Chances that I read all of those and "House of the Beast," next book in Legacy of Fire is not great. That's a lot of reading. But we'll see what I can do.

Oriental Adventures (3e)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pathfinder 1e and D&D 3.53 hybrid houserules update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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