Good modules

I've read quite a few modules in the last year or two as I've gone through my various RPG trawls, and I've got opinions. Some of these opinions I already had, but some of them crystalized just based on the process of reading a bunch of modules in relatively close proximity, and it made me think on what I liked and what I don't. This isn't meant to be a review of any particular module, publisher, or anything else, just a general discussion (occasionally with examples) of what I like and don't like. Keep in mind that I've run very few of these modules. I'm not currently running anything except for one-offs here and there, because of my relocation a couple of years ago; I joined a group that was in a recently started campaign, so while I"m not exactly at the ground floor, they were only a couple of sessions in to a new campaign. Because they were already going, I felt like it was poor manners to try and immediately subvert the campaign and offer to run something myself, needless to say, so what I've offered to do was run stuff sometimes when the whole group is struggling to get together because of scheduling. 

Of course, since the beginning of the year, my own scheduling and stress level has been a nightmare. But prior to that I had pretty good availability and more demand for playing than I was able to get from the group. Two other people in the group were in the same boat, so we were talking about running a partial group campaign in between regular sessions in the main campaign. That hasn't actually happened, although at least in some sense, that's a good thing, because it meant that the two "flakier" group members have been participating a bit more than we anticipated, and we haven't had to cancel as many sessions. Of course, it's also been at least 2-3 months since we've been able to get together now... but I'm a big part of that problem myself with my insane travel schedule, work drama and extended family drama. (It's not all drama. A wedding isn't really drama.) Anyway, this is a larger sample Millennial-looking D&D party than we'd have; our smaller group would be me and two players, husband and wife, and all three of us are Gen-Xers in our early to mid 50s. But an image of a posing fantasy adventurer party is an image of a fantasy adventurer party, and I do at least appreciate the lower fantasy vibe of it with regular humans in regular clothes, more or less.

So, I've read a lot of modules. Some old modules. Many old style but not really that old modules. Many newer modules. Many Dungeon Magazine adventures. Adventure paths. Book-form campaigns. What do I like and dislike?

- Site based adventures are very limited in their ability to be entertaining. Most of them lack much context for why the site is there and why PCs would be exploring it. In some, this is explicit; DMs are supposed to provide that context themselves, or weave the adventure into their ongoing campaign. This is a bit of a cop-out, though. It's easier to change, modify or even ignore context that it is to create one from scratch, so I'd rather have some. 

- That said, some of those set-ups and context texts can be either pretty bad or overdone. There's no reason to provide historical context for stuff in a dungeon that the party has no way of ever finding out other than the GM simply telling it to them. Adding that just to entertain the GM while reading the module strikes me as honestly kind of silly. And overly forced or unlikely context doesn't really do anyone any favors either. It will certainly have to be ignored. At least create context that tries to be useful and interesting, not just self-indulgent or contrived.

- Also, just exploring trapped rooms stuffed with monster and treasure was cliche in the early 80s and many people eschewed the whole paradigm. It's still a problem. I just finished this morning, because I woke up almost an hour early and knew I wasn't going to fall back asleep, "Heart of Nightfang Spire", one of the early 3e adventures. It's very site based and has no context, and it was a pain to read, not very interesting, and I found myself wondering how I could possibly make it fun to run or play. The context really matters, because without it, it's just a game... you're not doing anything that feels meaningful to the characters, to the setting, or to the fiction. 

- Many designers are too afraid of railroads. Others aren't afraid enough. Having a plot, through-line of events, or something like that is not a railroad. Forcing players to stick to that regardless of what decisions they make is what makes it a railroad. Writing adventures that call for forcing PC actions is bad. That's a railroad in the making. Writing adventures that assume a certain sequence of events, but doesn't force it, is perfectly fine. In fact, that's what I think I prefer after reading all kinds of alternatives. Well-designed adventures will have some built in leeway; "yeah, we assume that the players will do this, but if not, here's some other material so you're not just on your own completely."

- Because this is the way that I like to consume modules, and it works best for me running them somewhat loosely, I don't need a lot of exacting detail about what your players will see "on the ground" with their characters; I need a looser format, where I can fill in stuff depending on how it actually goes at the table, what my PCs actually do, etc. I was somewhat surprised, and I don't think a lot of other GM's will agree with this necessarily, but I think that the format that WotC uses for their one-book campaigns is actually the format that agrees with me and my playstyle the most. That doesn't mean that the specific adventures or the content is the best, just that I like the format. ~200 page campaigns that are written somewhat loosely and focus at least as much on events and plot-point opportunities as they do on site exploration and things like that—that's exactly what I want. 

- Paizo's adventure paths are the second best format for me. I rarely can run them as is, both because they do often tend too often to be written as railroads, because there's a lot of stuff that I have to change, and because they're too long, too meandery while they lose the plot for whole adventures at a time, and because they're too enamored with dungeon-crawls for my taste. But format-wise, they're pretty nice, and I've seen lots of good moments and "stealable" stuff in the (so far) seven or eight full adventure paths that I've read all the way through. It is a bit intimidating to try and read a whole thing of them, though. A full adventure path is six ~100 page books; nearly twice as long as I really need it to be. Especially since the fiction I can take or leave, the monsters can be in the monster books, and the setting stuff is also mostly replicated or abbreviated versions of content that ... also appears in one of the setting books.

- Old school and old school like modules that are site-based and offer little or no context, backstory or much in the way of hooks other than "there's probably monsters and treasures and danger in here; go check it out because that's the game that I prepared, so if you don't, I got nothing" are my least favorite. 

- Of course, style and quality are different axes, and a module can be on the good side of one axis and the poor side of another, or vice versa, or good on both or poor on both. I hoped to like the early 3e modules better than I have so far, and given that I've read five of eight, I'm confident that that's not going to change. However, once we get past the 1-20 level "pseudo adventure path" modules, I think that the next batch of them, which were spread out throughout the entire "3rd Era" period probably vary quite a bit more. I've read Expedition to Castle Ravenloft before, and honestly, I doubt that the famous and well-regarded Curse of Strahd for 5e is much better. I guess I'll see when I eventually read that one, right? In fact, in general, far too many of the 5e campaigns are really just trumped up leftovers from classic 1e modules. The next one on my list, Princes of the Apocalypse is really just the Temple of Elemental Evil put into Forgotten Realms and written in, maybe, a format that I'll like better. But I seriously doubt that they've done anything terribly interesting or innovative with it. The original is highly regarded albeit often seen as somewhat flawed, but this oneis usually perceived as middling at best by most who've read and/or played it.

On a completely separate tangent, just because, I found this cover image of a recentish Call of Cthulhu book: talk about missing the point. Cthulhu is supposed to be a game about terror, not about being embarrassed because you had an accident in the back of your pants. Seriously, what in the world are these characters doing? If they didn't just have diarrhea in the woods, they're desperately trying not to. I've seen people try to defend it as pooping your pants is the reaction of a terrified individual. No. I mean, yeah, sure, but that's not the point. The point of horror game cover art is supposed to evoke the theme and tone to the audience who would buy it, and if the audience who would buy it is making fun of the cover art because it looks ridiculous, then that defense is a non sequitur and is dumb.

Speaking of Call of Cthulhu, I often listen to Graham Plowman's stuff while reading my game books (including right now while typing this post), and it's mostly all based on Cthulhu stories, and is deliberately designed for reading and gaming. He's my favorite of the amateur "background music" artists floating around out there, mostly because he tends to stick with sounds, themes and tones that I like the best—dark, moody and horror, with occasional touches of action and terrifying excitement. My only complaint is that he likes the theramin a little bit too much, which sounds kind of corny to me because I associate it with corny 50s sci-fi b-movies. He doesn't always use it, but he does enough that it stands out in certain of his longer tracks, like "The House on Sentinel Hill" and "Yuggoth."

Snakes, Deep Ones and undead and stuff

I've read half of the Sandy Petersen Cthulhu Mythos Saga #2: Yig Snake Granddaddy. In spite of it's stupid name, and other problems, I like it better than Ghoul Island so far, and it's made me feel more "friendly" towards the concept of snakemen than normal. I've always liked the idea of snakemen, of course, but I was reluctant to do too much with them for a long time, only adding them to the monster list after reading several years ago the Paizo adventure path Serpent's Skull. I'll read that again (once I get to it on the trawl, so not anytime too soon), but even reading what I did of the SPCM made me jones for a bit more snakemen. I pulled out my old Dragon Magazine #305 from way back in 2003 which had a Robin Laws penned Ecology of the Yuan-ti article in it. I've always liked Sertrous at least as much, if not more, than any of the other Elder Evils in the book Elder Evils. I've been as anxious to read the Serpent Kingdoms book in my FR trawl as pretty much anything else on the trawl, honestly. And, of course, "serpentfolk" feature prominently in the Freeport material, which I'm finally getting close to wrapping up on. 

Both Paizo and Green Ronin had to go back to the original Robert E. Howard well for serpentfolk, because Wizards of the Coast neglected to put yuan-ti in the SRDs for either 3e or 5e. I thought this was curious and kind of petty, given that yuan-ti were clearly themselves just remixes of Howard's serpentfolk from stories like "The Shadow Kingdom" and probably degenerate forms in "Worms of the Earth" and also mentioned prominently in the ghost-written Lovecraft story "The Mound".

Anyway, I really like the idea of these prehistoric snake people lurking in the shadows, and I've got them integrated into my own Cult of Undeath campaign, where they take the place of Deep Ones (fish people) on my Innsmouth alternative. Instead of fish people in the ocean near a coastal town, I have snake people in a swamp near a town that's on the edge of the swamp, but otherwise, they play a very similar role. I actually prefer to make the majority of them more like yuan-ti purebloods, i.e., mostly human with only a few reptilian features, like funky snake eyes and a slight greenish tint to their skin or something like that. But there has to be actual, original snake-people too, and I've generated these few images of one of their cities deep in a tropical or at least subtropical forest. 

 Although I'm doing snakemen to replace my Innsmouth, Deep Ones are still important to me. Here's some images. I can't take too much credit for them, even for generating the prompt that made ChatGPT create the image, but I'm using them shamelessly nonetheless.

And undead, of course, are always one of my favorites. Here's a few images. Again, I didn't create these. AI did, but someone else created the prompt. I screen-capped them from a YouTube video just to have a few undead images.

There's a pretty good lore video that just went up recently on Tar-Baphon, the Whispering Tyrant, the great necromancer of the Golarion (Paizo Pathfinder) setting. It also made me want to read some of my Nagash lore, the great necromancer of the Warhammer Old World setting, but I can't find a decent YouTube video of it. I'll probably have to dig around in my boxes to find my old copy of White Dwarf 173, which reproduced most of the lore text from the Warhammer Undead Army book, which came out about that same time (mid-1994.)

Which makes me perhaps want to propose Cult of Undead rather than Curse of the Corsair Coast to my gaming group as an alternative when the flaky ones aren't there. Whatever. All of my campaigns interest me, so I can run any of them. But right now, the snakes and the undead in particular are catching my eye. 

Freeport, actual plays and music

A number of updates, some personal, some just hobby:

First, we've had several months of family drama involving my oldest son and his wife. Despite years of probably denial on my part, it took a real catastrophe in his life for me to connect the dots and admit that the two of them probably have some kind of clinical personality disorder. In any case, not only have we had tons of stress and anxiety for the last several months, but I've also been worried about our house, which they've been living in, up in Michigan where we used to live. Now, we heard finally that they decided to get out, stop paying us rent, and we've got about two weeks notice. In July, we'll have to spend some time (and luckily we have some friends to help us with that) fixing up a few cosmetic things as cheaply and quickly as we can and putting the house on the market. Everything that we're hearing is that it's a seller's market right now, and we can hope to make off relatively well, sell very quickly, unload the burden and make enough over and above what we still owe that we can put a nice down payment on another house for us, finally. Although... we literally just signed another year lease on the house we're renting, so we won't be moving right away. But if we can get the house sold, and get our finances a little bit more organized, then we should be able to get into a house again about this time next year, with a hopefully significantly lower payment, much shorter term, and a plan to get completely out of debt entirely so that I can actually afford to retire when I'm old enough to do so. I mean, I'd love to retire now, while I'm still young and healthy enough to enjoy my retirement, but after the drama and worry that I've been through the last few years, this is a good outcome for me. Still have to actually manage to sell the house, of course, but every indicator I can see looks good on that front. With at least one significant long-term worry looking to be resolved in the near term, I'm looking good going into the second half of the year.

Second, I've been listening to a few actual play podcasts. The Red Moon Roleplaying rendition of The Enemy Within, the Hideous Laughter rendition of Carrion Crown, and alongside that one, there's The Zone of Truth; a kind of OOC supplement to Carrion Crown, and Evil Interlude, a kind of weird prequel mini campaign running alongside it as well. I try to alternate these, and then in between them, I listen to my hardtrance megamixes. However, those are too long. Those are all 20 songs long, which gives them an average length of about two hours or so. I'm thinking about redoing them and instead of ten mixes two hours long each, I'll have twenty mixes about an hour long each, with ten tracks each. This will be better as interludes between my podcasts, which are also about an hour to an hour fifteen or so in length (although I play them at 1.5x speed.) That will also give me the chance to clean up some of my older mixes, which are a little bit more clumsy, sometimes. If I do it quick and dirty, I just split the files and mix in the ends and beginnings of the tracks right in the middle, but I'd like to actually redo the mixes from scratch. I might even reshuffle a bit what tracks are in which mix. We'll see.

On that, though, I'm enjoying these podcasts. I tend to say that RPGs are not a spectator sport, and I simply could not get in to Critical Role. However, I think the combination of making them shorter (about an hour rather than four) and having them be audio so I mostly only listen to them when driving, when I'm not going to be distracted by my phone, my computer or something else sitting around close at hand works. When I try to watch video actual plays, I find that my mind wanders and I get really distracted by... well, really by pretty much anything else around me. Podcasts work much better than video actual plays, at least for me. Video actual plays rarely, rarely work out for me. The only exception, although I never finished this, was wasd20's Rime of the Frostmaiden actual play.

Third, I'm about to finish the big fat Freeport book. I've only got 25-30 pages left, and I'll finish it for sure tonight. In fact, I'll make sure that I do, even if I have to stay up late to do so. In any case, that means that I'm on page 512 or whatever exactly I'm on of 540 or whatever exactly it is, and I think that I can effectively review it, or at least make a comparison to earlier products that it kind of replaces. Compared to The Pirate's Guide to Freeport, it advances the timeline and makes a few changes. I like that they took the time to make these changes, but most of them I don't actually care for or at least care about. I'm not a fan of the fact that they 1) greatly increased the population of orcs and goblinoids and made them a kind of obvious metaphor for black people and/or immigrants. Although, because they're orcs and goblinoids, they inadvertently make the conservatives' case for them, on accident without realizing that they've done so. They also play right into the hands of the narrative that it's liberals who are racist trolls who think that black people are like orcs. The whole thing is a somewhat amusing charlie foxtrot on the allegory that they kind of obviously were trying to make. 2) created new races, like the island trolls, which I have no use for and don't know why they suddenly came to prominence out of nowhere, 3) created this odd Salt Curse thing, but then it's almost just an offhand kind of thing with no explanation, and it's easily (and probably prudently) ignored. I feel like the city sections are just a bit lighter, but I really need to compare them again to see if some of the details were changes or are missing.

The mechanics stuff was substantially updated from the Pathfinder Freeport Companion, and I'd say improved significantly. Every prestige class and some of the base classes were changed to archetypes, and the Freebooter base class is all new, and is honestly one of my favorite 3.x classes, serving as a great alt.swashbuckler.

Mostly the presentation is improved; it's all color, for instance, and most of the art is new. I do miss some of the old art... but then again, I also have the old book, so "miss" isn't really the right word. There's a new adventure module at the end of the book, which is what I'm finishing up right now. It's actually quite long; 50-60 pages worth, but it's curiously kind of poorly organized, and it's not at all my type of adventure, being a scavenger hunt where you go all over town solving puzzles. It's probably my least favorite, or close to, of the modules/adventures for Freeport that I've read as part of this trawl.

It's gratifying to be (almost) finished with this. I'll only have to read the Pathfinder Bestiary, and I may skim that because I imagine that much of the material has already covered in earlier products. Then there's the Shadow of the Demon Lord Freeport Companion, which I can probably skim because, again, the companions are all pretty repetitive. The only thing really to read is the combined Return to Freeport since I'll probably skim rather than read cover to cover the remaining two titles. I expect that mostly that's repeating material. 

Once I'm done with the Freeport trawl, I'll do a big wrap-up post and maybe a high level 5x5 adaptation of it into my Curse of the Corsair Coast. And then, I'll pivot, I think, to the Eberron and Forgotten Realms trawls—although first I'm trying to finish reading the SPCM second saga about Yig and time travel, and read the next Paizo adventure path, Second Darkness. I actually brought Races of Eberron with me to work in my backpack today, although I didn't end up getting it out at lunch because I was listening to a podcast instead. I've already read a fair bit into it, so it's been started. Getting whole trawls finished and taken off of my page list (although I won't delete the pages, just the link to them.)

UPDATE: Yeah, I finished the book early. The final adventure was disappointing. The adventure included with the companions is way better. Heck, most of the adventures in Tales of Freeport were way better. Actually, most adventures period are way better. There are some good Freeport adventures. A poorly conceived scavenger hunt who's main purpose is really just to give you excuses to go to a lot of the writer's favorite haunts in the setting isn't one, though. Maybe I'll do a palate cleanser and read a short 32-page module or something before diving into whatever is next. It's Races of Eberron in physical books, although I also added the next short Pathfinder Companion book, which is Taldor, Echoes of Glory. As with the Osirion book I recently read, there's a larger, more fleshed out Pathfinder Setting book that came out later, but y'know. It was nice to have something to start with in the meantime. I'll be honest with you, though—by far my favorite parts of Golarion are Varisia and Ustalav. Most of the rest of the setting could get bent as far as I care. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I doubt I'd use it for much. I really need to start the next adventure path.

But not tonight. I'm tired.

"Fake D&Ds"

This kind of made me laugh. Someone posted this meme in a discussion. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mind fake D&Ds. If I were to play "B/X" I'd probably actually want to play Labyrinth Lord or Basic Fantasy. If I wanted an OSR experience, I'd probably actually look at ShadowDark, and I'm more excited about Deathbringer coming this year than any other rules systems. Pathfinder 1e carried the D&D torch for many years after WotC created 4e. But, sometimes, when you want a Dr. Pepper, you don't want to be asked if Mr. Pibb is OK.

These are not Dr. Pepper. And Tales of the Valiant or OSE is not D&D. That doesn't mean that they're bad. As a Dr. Pepper fan, I'm the first to admit that I drink fake Dr. Pepper all the time, because I can buy a freakin' 2-liter for $1. But sometimes, you just want Dr. Pepper.

What is "dark fantasy?"

First off, I'm actually having a little bit better luck reading than I thought. Not nearly as much as I'd like, but slightly better than I thought. I'll likely be able to finish Buccaneers of Freeport today, and hopefully finish "Skeletons of Scarwall" before heading back home at the end of the weekend. Not a bad showing for having to travel for a very specific and very busy task that has occupied my free time a lot. I feel like the Freeport Trawl is actually getting close to finishing, although I still have some big chunks to swallow coming up. After I finish Buccaneers, I've got the companions to read. In theory, they should all be more or less the same, as they are about adapting the systemless Freeport setting book to various systems. I'll read the d20 one in detail, but probably skim all of the rest to ensure that I'm not missing anything. They also come with an included small adventure, but again, I believe it's the same for all companions. 

Then I've got I think three small Adamant Press third party adventures, the extremely thick Pathfinder update to the Freeport setting book, and the Pathfinder 1e adventure path. I've not read any of those before, but of course, much of the text of the big setting book should be lifted from the Pirates' Guide, which I've read many times. And once I finish the adventure path, I'm kinda done. Weird to think about.

I might well remove the page that marks the Freeport Trawl once I finish the trawl, since tracking progress will be moot once I'm done. There's a few other products here and there that I think are largely repeats updated to different systems, but I'll skim them to make sure. But that's about it. I have a pdf of the Pathfinder book and I always thought that it was just the Pirates' Guide plus the d20 Companion updated to Pathfinder 1e and mashed together into a single book, but I'm not sure that that's the case. I think the timeline was updated at least, as well as a few other changes that that made, such as a new Sea Lord. I don't know that that justifies me spending quite a bit of money to get a hardcover copy, but maybe it does. I can order one from the Green Ronin store, although it's $75. Quite a lot for a book that no doubt mostly reiterates stuff that I already own in hardcopy. But we'll see. If I really enjoy it and find it to be sufficiently updated to make it worthwhile, maybe I'll order up a copy for future use.

After I finish the Freeport Trawl, maybe I'll try and concentrate a bit harder on the 3e Eberron Trawl to get that one done too, since it's relatively short and finishable. Stuff like the Pathfinder Adventure Paths trawl is not; it's huge and will no doubt take me many years to finish. But I'll continue to at least finish the Adventure Path that I'm in before I turn away from it. 

<  †  >

One thing that Freeport always brings to mind, however, is the inevitable questions on tone, theme, mood and horror. While I like Freeport, and kind of always have, it also isn't really exactly what I want it to be. Nothing that I don't create myself is ever going to be exactly what I want it to be, but Freeport has some relatively big misses, and it's in the form of the words I just used. Chris Pramas, the creator of Freeport, used to work on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, and it shows. He clearly was trying to recreate in a Dungeons & Dragons milieu the same tone and themes as WHFRP, more or less. But even that wasn't always perfect. I never can tell, with either of them, if they're a darker, edgier fantasy that I'm supposed to take more or less straight, or if it's all a big in-joke full of bad puns and silly pop culture references. It's easier with the Warhammer stuff, as the Brits seem to be better at straddling the line between serious and parody and making something that kind of sort of works as both at once, depending on what aspects of it you're actually looking at. Pramas was much less subtle, and his editorial hand is all over the place, not to mention the specific products that he himself wrote. Sometimes, especially the Rob Schwalb pieces, are pretty straight at being horror-themed fantasy with a dark edginess that's pretty straightforward. Other stuff is so silly that I can't imagine it being present in any game that isn't selling itself as an overt parody a la Epic Movie or the Scary Movie series. The other problem Freeport specifically has in terms of tone is that it's so overtly D&D. In spite of the twist of adding pirates and some Lovecraft, it feels much more overtly D&D in every particular than explicitly D&D settings like Dark Sun or Eberron, or Planescape, etc. even though many of those have that same problem; i.e., they feel like D&D first, and their twist is often a distant second. And finally, of course, is the problem that all Lovecraft interpretations have, in that it usually tends to feel like a Disneyland ride through a Lovecraft country greatest hits rather than an actual horror story. Most of the Lovecraft-themed gaming material feels like this because its trying to too faithfully reproduce elements from the actual stories rather than creating new ideas, new monsters, new entities, etc. like Lovecraft and his circle actually did. Using well-known entities makes them feel like pop culture references more than anything else, and it doesn't work very well. Warhammer, perhaps ironically, does Lovecraftian fantasy better than actual Lovecraftian fantasy because while nothing is overtly Lovecraftian, it has much greater fidelity to the the tone and themes of Lovecraftian horror stories. Albeit, admittedly, without the sciencey angle that often undercuts Lovecrafts' own purposes. 

And maybe that's where I need to take a step back too and talk about what I mean by "dark fantasy"; exactly what themes and tone I want to look into and what I don't, how dark do I mean, how does this relate to the fad of grimdark (which from my perspective seems to be a spent force coasting on inertia, which I predicted would happen soon years ago already anyway.) Let me start by quoting a few of my past posts, in reverse order.

From June 2023: 

I've given plenty of thought to my own embrace—or lack thereof—of grimdark, and I've come to believe that while I like dark fantasy; what I call an equal parts hybrid of fantasy and horror, and I like low fantasy; the grubbier, sword & sorcery or even more "normal" aspect of fantasy rather than larger than life superheroes saving the world, and I like other aesthetic subgenres that are near to grimdark, that grimdark itself is a bridge too far. Two quotes from the Infogalactic article on grimdark highlight why:

Adam Roberts described it as fiction "where nobody is honourable and Might is Right", and as "the standard way of referring to fantasies that turn their backs on the more uplifting, Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealized medievaliana, and instead stress how nasty, brutish, short and, er, dark life back then 'really' was". But he noted that grimdark has little to do with re-imagining an actual historic reality and more with conveying the sense that our own world is a "cynical, disillusioned, ultraviolent place".

Roberts, Adam (2014). Get Started in: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Hachette UK. p. 42. ISBN 9781444795660.

Liz Bourke considered grimdark's defining characteristic to be "a retreat into the valorisation of darkness for darkness's sake, into a kind of nihilism that portrays right action ... as either impossible or futile". This, according to her, has the effect of absolving the protagonists as well as the reader from moral responsibility.

Bourke, Liz (17 April 2015). "The Dark Defiles by Richard Morgan". Strange Horizons.

I've written before about how much I dislike the George Rape Rape Martin style of storytelling, and how much I disliked my one novel of Joe Abercrombie's that I read. (Although I do like Glen Cook's Black Company. Maybe that's not quite all the way to grimdark, though—just a neighbor of it.)

From two separate posts just a couple of days apart in July 2014:

For much of its existence, the setting has been, to borrow an overly trite term from TV Tropes, basically a crapsack world. I've gradually lost my enthusiasm for that mode of thinking. I guess I've read a little too much of it, and now find the intellectual underpinnings of the notion unappealing. Or maybe I've just hit a few too many who are a few too free with their crapsackiness. When Glen Cook pioneered the notion in The Black Company, and with a bit of Lovecraftian flair to it, it sounded attractive. After reading a bit too much George Martin and Joe Abercrombie (and it's not actually like I read that much of either) I find the crapsack world nihilistic, dreary, and frankly... kinda whiny.

Now granted, horror fiction is still a major influence on [Old Night] and I suspect always will be. But the notion that being heroic, of doing what's right is always the wrong choice... I can't support that kind of paradigm anymore. Not sure that I ever really could, without playing it off for laughs eventually.

[,,,] 

[I]f this bleak, nihilistic, "crapsack" world fantasy is in opposition to "real" fantasy as we have known it, as we grew up on, and as we think of the genre, why is it relatively prevalent?  And why is (at least some of) it relatively popular?  

I think it's perceived by some to be more sophisticated, more mature, etc.  I think this perception is false, however.  Bleakness, nihilism, hopelessness, despair—these are not mature emotions.  This is not the perspective of an adult, it's the perspective of a whiny, angsty, bratty adolescent.  It's not sophisticated and deep, it's merely empty and soul-less.  [Besides,] is it really that popular?  Sure, GRRM is a pretty big deal, and guys like Joe Abercrombie and a few others.  But how much room for more is there?  Is there any nihilistic work that is still read 100 years after being written?  And how much of it can you stand, even if you can stand it, without needing to break for something more light, anyway?

Keep in mind, I'm referring specifically to nihilism, not tragedy.  Although they may resemble each other superficially in many respects, they are not the same.  There's no catharsis at the end of a nihilistic work.  The same is also true of most works of horror fiction—they're not nihilistic (well, some of them are) although certainly they are dark and the end is not usually happy for the protagonists.

[Old Night] is fantasy and horror, not nihilism.  The world is bleak, there are certainly issues that resemble that of a horror fiction story, but characters meet them like horror fiction protagonists. They may not triumph, they certainly don't "win" in a traditional sense, but their heroism can be seen and it has meaning.  Like the bleak fatalism of the Norse sagas, which Tolkien reflected in many ways, it's not purposeless.  It's not senseless.  It's not nihilistic.  This is part of the reason why fantasy is so fundamentally rooted in a romanticized Medievalism.  My own setting has looked in many ways to other romanticized adventurous periods; pirates and Westerns, in particular, but the end result is the same—without that romanticized adventure story baseline, the horror is just bleak nihilism.  It doesn't ring as profound as that of Norse sagas, Shakespearean tragedies, or even more modern works like Dracula or Lord of the Rings.  It would just feel like a tawdry snuff piece.

Old Night should basically have the exact same tone and feel and themes of shows like The X-files and Supernatural, or movies like The Mummy (1999) or Van Helsing. It's sword & sorcery in a kind of old-fashioned way, except modified slightly so that the protagonists aren't such superlative swashbuckling heroes and are a bit more investigative, like the Winchester brothers and Mulder and Scully. Just... set in a fantasy setting rather than the real world of the 90s (X-files) or the 00s/10s (Supernatural). Maybe my labels aren't really the right labels. Grimdark it clearly isn't, although it mingles with some of the same acquaintances. Dark Fantasy is often more or less synonymous with grimdark, but I've used it to refer to something more specifically horror-leaning but without the specific themes of grimdark. But the heroes are, in fact, heroic. They're not superheroes, and it's not a given that they'll win, or that they're better than anyone else in the setting, but they are at least heroic in their attitude, and they're doing the right things for the right reasons, even as it costs them. It's not bright, polite, overly fantastical or overly magical, and never really very whimsical. The differences to modern ideas of high fantasy are going to be pretty obvious, although the differences to older high fantasy like Lord of the Rings will be more subtle. Similarly, the differences to good old fashioned sword & sorcery are more subtle and more a case of how superlative the main characters are in their abilities, as well as more leaning into the tenseness and horror elements rather than gratuitous adventure. 

Ironically, it's more like what the OSR claims to want to be, but since it doesn't focus on dungeon-crawling and I do usually have characters who are meant to be likeable and relatable rather than narcissistic sociopaths it gets there in a way that's quite a bit different. I also think that it's much closer to what Call of Cthulhu games actually are, especially campaigns as opposed to one-shots. Honestly, the idea that many people have of PCs flaming out dying or going insane doesn't really happen all that much in campaign form CoC. It's just an investigative adventure game with some mystery and horror elements bolted in and made integral to the experience. Is "dark fantasy" the correct label for this kind of thing?

I'm honestly not sure anymore. Labels tend to be rather plastic things, especially for concepts that go viral or turn faddish, like dark fantasy and grimdark did. Maybe trying to tie my star to a faddish label was never the right approach, since I was never really completely aligned with it anyway. That's especially true now. Now that the zeitgeist is turning against dark fantasy, maybe you are saying, which would make me look like a bandwaggoner. David Sylvian, the lead singer for the UK 70s and 80s band Japan once said of the New Romantic movement, "There's a period going past at the moment that may make us look as though we're in fashion." Implying that it was just a coincidence that they were trendy in the earliest 80s. Kinda suss, as the kids say. So yeah, I could point to my posts from twelve years ago predicting the decline of grimdark because it went way too far, and reports of grimdark's death are, of course, premature and exaggerated. What can I say? I may be doing the same thing; jumping ship as a faddish label seems to be losing its steam. Then again, regardless of label or my association with or without one, I'm still doing basically the same thing that I've been doing since about 2001 or so in terms of my gaming and fantasy tastes. I've honed in more clearly on what exactly that looks like, but from a higher level, it's always been the same.

Contrary to OSR claims, D&D was never very low fantasy

I generated an image of Conan standing with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Or, if you like, Fafnir and the Black Rat, two characters from the Marvel Comics line of Conan who were obviously meant to be Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stand-ins. Marvel Comics Conan ran from 1970 to 1993 and was one of Marvel's best selling titles through the 70s... although because it was licensed, it may not have been necessarily one of their most profitable. (As an aside, I find it curious that G. I. Joe was Marvel's top selling title through much of the 80s. Neither, of course, is in the Marvel Universe, nor are they superhero related at all. It's funny to me that superheroes are so closely associated with comic books to learn later that a sword and sorcery comic and a military action soap opera were the, or at least among the best selling Marvel titles throughout my entire childhood and youth.) I like a lot of that good old-fashioned sword & sorcery. I'm reading, for the first time although I've owned the book for probably fifteen years, the Solomon Kane collection, and I've got the Del Rey Conan and Kull collections out again. I read the Conan ones years ago, and I dabbled with Kull, but never finished the whole collection. I'm also reading some other sword & sorcery in short order; the James Silke Horned Helmet series. James Silke just died last year at the age of 93. but he was famous for his work in Hollywood and comics. He was a co-writer for The Wild Bunch, for instance, and wrote the screenplay for the Raiders of the Lost Ark semi-parodic rip-off King Solomon's Mines loosely based off of H. Rider Haggard's character Allan Quatermain and played by Richard Chamberlain. Who also just died last year at the age of 90. I didn't realize that until looking it up. I also didn't realize that he was gay. Sigh.

Anyway, tangent aside, sword & sorcery is great. The OSR and old-school D&D players in general talk it up a lot and claim that D&D of the OSR variety, or at least prior to WotC takeover of the brand in the latest 90s and the launch of their new, derivative version in 2000, resembled sword & sorcery quite a bit. I don't think so. Gary Gygax may have famously thought that everyone should want to play a human fighter like Conan or Aragorn or something like that, but the rules of even early D&D didn't work that way. TV Tropes, discussing the long-acknowledged "linear fighter, quadratic (or even exponential) wizard" problem in D&D and many other RPGs too, for that matter, says the following, slightly edited for format and clarity by me:

This isn't just a sour grapes complaint against weak wizards or a lack of competitive balance throughout the game, but can be a deliberate thematic choice.First off, is the idea that warriors hit a development ceiling at some point. They hit the limits of human (or near-human) ability and can't bend physics any farther. If you don't have magic, how can you hope to defeat, say, an intangible ghost or a Master of Illusion? Basically, warriors can only be so fantastic, so even as they improve, those improvements mean less.

Secondly, in such a setting, it may be very difficult to even get started as a mage, requiring some sort of inherent gift or immense study. Additionally your novice talents may not save you if trouble comes too soon, further thinning the herd. Meanwhile, billions of people throughout history have learned how to use weapons, and conscription armies are based on the theory that any able-bodied person could do it. Thus, the Conans and Beowulfs have the run of the place through both numbers and ease of recruitment, while the mages are fewer and take longer to achieve results, but aim for greater profits.

Thirdly, there's more than a bit of wish fulfillment here. Gamers, and by extension game designers, tend to be nerds. The notion that a wizard (generally something of a brainy bookworm) may start out weaker than the "dumb muscle", but surpass them entirely in the endgame, proving that knowledge is the ultimate power? This account holds a lot of inherent appeal to them.

If this trope is not desired by the game designers, or enough complaints convince them to change things, there are ways to limit the awesomeness of wizards. These include restrictions on magic itself, the two classic examples being the Mana mechanic or the more restrictive Vancian Magic. Both of these serve to cap how often a wizard can cast spells. Preventing casting spells while wearing armor is another, though this is often partially countered by providing a range of protective magics that work much like normal armor only better, but of course for a limited time. Other restrictions also exist; a common one is simply to make the wizard fragile. Others involve sanity and corruption systems, or making the casting of a spell a tactically debilitating act.

Yeah, I never bought into this. I may have been a bit of a nerd myself growing up, and less inclined towards athletic pursuits, but that doesn't mean that I was just a bookworm. (Just that I liked to read!) I also played outside a lot and hiking, camping and backpacking became big hobbies of mine even at a relatively young age. I never felt that kind of resentment that a lot of bookish types do when young against the popular, athletic guys, because I could kinda sorta hold my own socially with them, and I didn't care about trying to be like them, or feel much jealousy towards their own social status vs my own. In addition, I was always a fan of swashbuckling historical action that didn't even have wizards, of course. I like Captain Blood, Robin Hood, Scaramouche and The Three Musketeers, especially the one that has Richard Chamberlain as Aramis, of course (see how I pulled him back in there?) I always thought these swashbuckling duelists and fighters were more interesting characters than smug, gamma-like magic-users. And people who claim to really like Howard and Leiber, but who like to play wizards, sorcerers or other varieties of magic-users kind of confuse me like they allegedly confused Gary Gygax. Magic-users were either villains and enemies to Conan, like Thoth-Amon or Kulan Gath, or they were mysterious and creepy plot devices to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, like Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face. Gandalf is maybe the closest archetype to a regular "PC Wizard" in the foundational literature, but he doesn't really work either, because of course, he's not even a mortal. Wizard isn't a profession, like character class is supposed to be, it was a class of being. 

Other works maybe have wizards that are more down to earth, like The Face in the Frost, which is an under-rated story that many forget from the Appendix N, which is the only place that I've ever seen it mentioned; either directly there, or in discussions of the Appendix N. While Leiber, Howard and Tolkien obviously have vast fandoms that are unrelated to D&D, I don't think The Face in the Frost would be remembered at all if it hadn't been listed by Gygax, and I'm not sure how much it's remembered even now even though he did. 

Other foundational works had more jockish, athletic fighter types as the iconic characters to be based on. Poul Anderson's works cited in the Appendix N usually feature typical warrior-heroes. Fletcher Pratt and Michael Moorcock, of course, wrote differently, but even Elric's supposed sorcerous ways are usually overstated. He had a bunch of deals with demons and gods, but especially after acquiring Stormbringer, he was mostly a sword-wielding warrior-anti-hero himself. 

In any case, the fact that D&D didn't replicate that kind of setting, and put magic-users (the title that it preferred for many years) front and center kind of belies the idea that it replicates the stories that its fans say that it replicates. My earliest complaint about D&D, and I made this complaint as early as the mid-80s, is that it didn't feel anything much at all like the stories that I was reading, especially stuff by Lloyd Alexander, J. R R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the ones that I was most familiar with at that age. Not only that, the quote above from TV Tropes, about wizards being a kind of wish fulfillment Mary Sue. That kind of stuff pings on some kind of cringe radar that I have, and makes me dislike it automatically. I have a subconscious aversion to that kind of ego-stroking, and it bugs me. One could argue that characters like Conan, John Carter or Tarzan are a different kind of wish-fulfilment Mary Sue, I suppose, but they don't feel like it to me. And characters more like Aragorn are heroic but believable. Conan and Tarzan are superlative; prototypes for superheroes in a sense, whereas Aragorn is a much more traditional hero. But in any case, it's a combination of their background and their dedication to the perfection of their craft that makes them superlative, not just the "just because" secret king special boy fantasy of women and gammas. I suppose that's the root of my dissatisfaction with the trope, although I wouldn't have even had the vocabulary to analyze or diagnose it for many, many years. And that's where the wizard character classes, and the implications of wizards in the setting turn me off; they feel like gamma secret king fantasies.

So yeah; one of the key developments that I always lean into when designing my own settings is making magic less predictable, less powerful, and less morally neutral—it's creepy, scary, and usually evil, as well as dangerous. Heroes may dabble, especially if they're darker, more compromised heroes or anti-heroes, but the only really truly powerful wizards are villains, or even supervillains in the setting. Why? Well, as noted above, I dislike the whole trope of powerful, heroic mages as a gamma Mary Sue fantasy, but also because it's the only paradigm that matches the actual sword & sorcery low fantasy source material that D&D was supposedly built on. The older editions of D&D didn't do it. Most OSR games don't do it, and if they do, they do so by rejecting original D&D paradigms that were common for decades. If anything, more modern versions of D&D have tried to introduce more parity between the power of martial and magic classes. That doesn't mean that they're better low fantasy emulators than older D&D, but it does mean that they at least recognize and mitigate one of the many reasons that D&D of any version was never really a very good low fantasy game in the first place.

Combat as...

From a post at ENWorld, of all places. ENWorld is one of the worst places on the internet; worse even than reddit, but there are only so many places to talk about RPGs, and all of them are dysfunctional woke cesspits, or have too little traffic or too tight of a focus to be useful. Sometimes, you have to just deal with it. This post, however, I thought was interesting. I've edited it mostly just for formatting, but occasional word choice to be more explicit in what I think is accurate:

I've seen the "Combat as War vs. Combat as Sport" framework come up a lot in RPG discussions, and I think it's a very useful distinction. It captures two very different priorities:

* Combat as War: asymmetric, player-driven, where preparation, avoidance, and clever tactics matter more than balance.

* Combat as Sport: balanced encounters, challenge ratings, tactical puzzle-solving, and fair challenges designed for engagement within a defined ruleset.

This comparison was frequently used by the OSR community to demonstrate a difference between OSR and 5e D&D approaches to combat. However, I think there's a third mode that often gets left out of the conversation, even though many tables quietly prioritize it: Combat as Theater.

By "Combat as Theater," I mean treating combat primarily as a performance or scene rather than an asymmetric test of survival or a challenging tactical puzzle. The focus shifts toward narrative/character expression, pacing, and dramatic impact. 

In combat as theater combat becomes a vehicle for expression: showing who a character is under pressure, how relationships evolve, or how themes emerge in action. Outcomes are often appreciated not just for success/failure, but for how they feel in the unfolding narrative. Players and GMs emphasize vivid descriptions, cinematic moments, and dramatic choices. Turns and actions are framed to highlight character identity, tone, and story beats.

Where War asks, "How do we win (and survive) this through preparation, tactics, and asymmetry?" and Sport asks, "How do we win this fair encounter efficiently using our abilities?", Theater asks, "How do we make this scene compelling while expressing character and drama?" (These questions may vary but are meant to be more illustrative of general ideas.)

I don't think these three modes are mutually exclusive. In practice, most tables blend them. A group might use sport-like mechanics, war-like caution, and theater-like narration all at once. But explicitly recognizing "theater" as a distinct lens can help explain why different groups sometimes talk past each other when discussing combat expectations. It helps clarify disagreements that aren’t really about rules, but about what combat is for at the table. What is sometimes called "Combat as Sport" may not actually be "Sport." It may actually be "Theater."

I think that this was a pretty insightful and compelling new nugget to the vocabulary of RPG philosophy. Posting it in the forums at ENWorld is searchable, sure, but it's pretty ephemeral. I wanted to give it a place where I can find it again as needed. I do also think that he's correct; tables don't really cluster too often at the actual endpoints, although to some degree, rulesets can and sometimes do. It's also yet another brick in the wall of "philosophical points that the OSR people either don't understand, refuse to understand, or lump together because they don't actually care about the differences." While a lot of interesting RPG philosophy comes from OSR thinkers, it's true that they are kind of blinkered in terms of what they allow themselves to see about playstyles that vary too much from either OSR or at most Classic.

Lights

Seen on a thread about ShadowDark, where someone was asking about hanging a lantern on your backpack or belt to keep your hands free. Interesting stuff, if you haven't ever thought of it before.

First, let me acknowledge that the goal with Shadowdark is not realism. So, do what you want at your table. Also .. magic! So ...

But then let me say that I have done a fair amount of medieval re-enactment and tried out candles, oil lamps, lanterns, torches etc.

Attaching a lit torch to your belt or pack is obviously going to set you on fire. The big advantage of torches, assuming they are well made using pitch or resin soaked rope or cloth heads and water-soaked wood or even metal shafts - they are quite difficult to put out. It would take extreme winds or quite a lot of water to do so. Dropping them probably won't extinguish them unless it's into water, for example. However, they tend to be a bit nasty as they will set things on fire quite readily so you need to be careful around other people or tents or thatched roofs or curtains, they drip hot or even flaming blobs, they are stinky and smoky. If you are carrying other torches it's real easy to accidentally light all of them at once with some flaming droplets from the lit one in a moment of inattention. They tend to only stay lit and bright for 15-30 minutes and at the high end you are talking about a big, fat head on the thing loaded with pitch or such (quite a beast of a thing to wrangle).

Candles. Small, light, flexible in size and burn times can be very long (like, all night is possible). Very subject to wind and a single drop of water will extinguish them. They really only cast light to a modest distance, although, once you are well dark adapted if you don't look into the flame you can probably see OK out to Near with one. Fairly safe if you keep it away from flammables. Hard to wander around with a naked candle without extinguishing it, accidentally settings somebody's hair on fire or whatever. The tall thin ones which tend to be brightest also go out easiest and burn fastest and drip wax.

Candle lanterns. Basically, a candle in a cage shielded by velum, parchment, rawhide or something translucent. The translucent materials available tend to cut down on light from the candle somewhat. Could have a reflector side for directional light which helps preserve dark adaptation for the user and make up some of the difference in light lost to the translucent sides. Very diffuse light. Pretty robust against wind, rain etc. If you drop it though, 95% chance it will go out. Candle lanterns solve most of the practical issues of wandering around with a light source in my view. That said, if you strap one to your belt it will still burn you, it will tilt the candle and it'll burn unevenly, drown the wick and go out, spill hot wax on your legs etc. Same with attaching it to your pack - you really need to hand-hold these things - usually hanging from a cord, chain or ring - steadying it in front of you at almost arms length as you move. It's a bit of equipment that needs to be 'operated and managed' - they are not like a LED headlamp or something that you can just turn on and let it do its thing.

Oil lamps. Getting oil that burns well / cleanly is harder than you think. Even the medieval oils that burn quite robustly tend to create a lot of black soot - and burn hot. This makes them pretty hard to get working in a medieval lantern - the translucent shell quickly turns black and/or the whole thing will catch fire. Managing air-flow is an issue. And traditional oil lamps tended to just rest a wick in a pot or tray of oil - so the whole thing can fall apart or the wick can easily fall into the oil and drown if not handled carefully. In practice, these work fairly well when carried carefully by hand as open lamps - if you can get an oil that burns well like whale oil. Really though they are at their best when stationary. The oil itself isn't as much of a fire risk as fantasy makes out - if you throw nut oil on somebody and try to light it, yeah .. that's not likely. Same even if you spill it. It needs the wick to stand much chance of burning. Medieval lamp oil is more like cooking oil than gasoline.

I think there is a very important reason that we don't really see portable glass oil lanterns everywhere until the 1800s. Kerosene (or similar) with brass or tin pressure vessels, widespread availability of glass, adjustable flat wicks, ventilation schemes etc. This is also when we start to see stuff like lamps rather than candles on miner's hats/helmets. It's a whole other level of technology. These lanterns became very bright, reliable in a wide range of conditions and relatively safe.

A niche quirk of history is the renaissance lantern shield. However, as you can read in the wikipedia entry these were mainly a gimmick intended to put an opponent at disadvantage in a duel, not for general illumination.

So, if we're trying to be somewhat consistent with medieval technology .. the practical reality is that light sources need to be managed and operated by somebody who is carefully hand-holding them.

I don't really care about ShadowDark that much, because it's especially focused on dungeon crawling, which I dislike. But who cares? This is a good summary of an issue that applies in any fantasy setting. People don't really understand about oil too. It's not nearly as flammable as most people treat it as. Without a wick, you can't set it on fire at all, and with a wick, you get a tiny, smoky flame, not a gigantic conflagration.

Environmental hazards

I'm the kind of guy who likes the outdoors a lot. I enjoy road trips. I enjoy hiking and camping. I love the wilderness, especially the wilderness of the American west and southwest; the Rockies and the deserts, in particular. I've been hiking in multiple spots in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Texas, and Utah, as well as some in Arizona, California and Washington. And of course I've also been hiking in North and South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan and elsewhere in the east or Midwest as well. I could always do more. Especially in Wyoming, which is my favorite of all of those locations, but Colorado, Montana, Utah and Idaho are not at all far behind, and some of them are pleasantly under-rated by the outdoor club, so you can get pretty good solitude out in the wilderness. Which is, along with the awe-inspiring scenery, exactly the reason to do it, of course. 

But one thing that you'll notice if you do this is that it isn't just a boring walk in the park. Wild animals can be legitimately dangerous; big, aggressive guys like moose, buffalo or grizzlies especially, but even a raccoon or squirrel that steals your food overnight can actually create a legitimate crisis if you're unprepared. Weather is similar; your chances of being struck by lightning during a violent storm are greatly increased if you're at high elevation and outside of tree cover. Rain, sleet, hail can get you soaked and cold, and then you're at real risk for hypothermia or other problems. And your food may be ruined too. I thought of this because of our weird weather today. When I left the house this morning at 7:20 AM or so, it was warm; just shy of 70⁰, but dark skies were threatening to change that. Sure enough, within about an hour or so, it was actually darker than before sunrise, pouring rain, and the temperature had dropped 25⁰ to a rather chilly under 45⁰. And I almost came to work in a short-sleeved polo because yesterday had been warm and the morning was warm. Glad I looked at the sky and thought better of it! Now, in the later afternoon, it's become bright and sunny again, but still cool, and the high for the rest of the day is barely going to skim 50⁰ if we're lucky.

I'm not a huge fan of overly complex or involved resource management rules, but I am certainly a fan of creating scenarios where resources actually matter; like what if you get turned around and start to get hungry before you find your destination? What's your plan B to keep yourself fed? What happens if a terrible thunderstorm comes by at night and your Bill the Pony runs away with your food still on his back? Plus, you're now soaking wet and it's 40⁰ and you can't get a fire started because everything else is wet too? What if raccoons steal your food? What if you slip crossing a river, get injured and lose your weapons, or more? What if someone gets giardia and has violent diarrhea for days while traveling? OK, maybe that last one isn't one that I'd be interested in in my fantasy, but the rest are all legitimate things to have to deal with that actually make travel kind of interesting. Plus, there are few things that make the game feel more grounded than having troublesome adventures just trying to get from point A to point B. The adventure isn't a location somewhere else, and the journey to the adventure isn't just a boring commute. The whole thing needs to be the adventure. And even these kind of mundane things—to say nothing of haunts, monsters, or other supernatural or fantastical hazards—emphasize that point.

Drama

Work implosion. I'm still going to El Paso and Juarez. In fact, now there's urgency to going. I'm going crazy with family drama, work drama and all kinds of things. I'm super frustrated, pretty angry, and kind of anxious about how to juggle all of this crap. Needless to say, I doubt that I'll be doing much that's "productive" in a hobby space other than maybe some reading. I can't even have lunch, as I've got emergency meetings over lunch every day now. It's ridiculous. Maybe I'll have some time mid-afternoon to take my lunch and take a break. The drama is frustrating, but manageable. Stupid, even in some cases. The work drama is more challenging for me than the personal drama, because the personal drama isn't as serious as the people involved think it is, and in a day or two, it will be gone. The problem, of course, is that by personality I'm the kind of person who has very little tolerance or patience for drama, especially stupid drama, and my natural inclination isn't to try and help resolve it, but rather to simply check out and say, "this is dumb; come back when you're not being dumb" in so many words. 

All that is a bit of an introduction to the idea of drama in D&D and other RPGs. Which of course is a playstyle question, because there are certainly plenty of people who think drama doesn't have any role in an RPG. Personally, I'm a little exhausted of the "sandbox superiority" crowd. Player agency is important, but that doesn't mean that a sandbox is a desirable state. Most players will find a platonic ideal of a sandbox frustrating, they'll be unsure of where the heck the game is, and they won't find the experience satisfying, interesting, or memorable. There are very good reasons that story-structure concepts worked their way into the roleplaying sphere. But I'm not a fan of storygames playstyle either, where dramatic beats and other things that are the clear sovereign territory of the GM is shared amongst the group. 

So what do I like? I like well-run trad style with a focus on player agency, but not an obsessive spergy focus on it. Just an acknowledgement that in order to run a good game, you can't force and railroad your players. Most people are prone to the fallacy of the false binary. Just because railroads are bad doesn't mean that sandboxes are good. Games improved tremendously in the early 80s as the trad playstyle became more mainstream. Sure, there were plenty of bad trad modules and games. It took a bit of trial and error before people figured out how to run trad well, and many people today still aren't great at it, honestly. But the promise of the medium wasn't just in exploration, dungeon-crawling, puzzle solving and pseudo-wargaming. The promise of the medium was getting something much closer to the literature that allegedly inspired D&D, except with player buy-in and involvement in the creative activity through running their agents, characters, through scenarios and situations simulated by the GM.

Therefore, what are some of these tools? One of them specifically is drama. The boys at Black Lodge Games made a video a year or so ago about how the secret to successful games is to make them soap operas. On its face, it sounds wrong, because D&D players don't really like soap operas, but... they're actually right.

Anyway, I was thinking about that in particular while reading Paizo stuff. Paizo has an interesting approach to module writing, and in some ways, I feel like their modules are written to be read almost even more than they're written to be played. There are all kinds of NPC character drama, but it's often in the background, and it's often not presented in such a way that there's any way that the characters or their players would ever find out about it, unless the GM just does an uncharacteristic and awkward info dump of the information that he's read about the situation, the location, the NPCs, etc. 

Obviously, drama is interesting in gaming, but only if there's a way to use it. If you have interesting drama associated with your villains, your locations, your set pieces, you have to foreshadow it and you have to have an organic way for the player characters to discover it. And in many ways, the sooner the better. You can keep some secrets to surprise and delight your characters, of course, but there is nothing really very fun in encountering a brooding villain with a backstory that's full of drama and human interest of some kind or another, but you never hear of the villain until you run into him, you never learn anything about his background, and he goes down like a chump in one fight never to be heard of or thought of again.

Drama adds weight to what you're doing, so that it's not just disconnected and vacuous action sequences, and so that your NPCs, especially villains and/or antagonists aren't just cardboard collections of statistics, but actual characters with some heft and some emotional gravitas. But to use it effectively, it can't be buried so deep in the background that you never see it at the table. You have to be willing to play it up and bring it forward; foreshadow it, remind them of it. Don't be afraid of overdoing it. Chances are, it's not as ham-handed and silly as you think it is, and most people are too subtle with these kinds of things. Broad is better. You can tone it down if it's coming across as too big, but in my experience, that's not likely unless you're just doing silly caricatures. And sometimes, even that is not as broad as you think it is. There's a reason melodrama is popular, even if the soi-disant guardians of what is sophisticated and urbane tend not to think so. Heck, they probably don't even know what soi-disant means anyway.

UPDATE: Oh, I meant to say, obviously I spent some time reading last night. Read most of the adventure portion of Paizo's "The Skinsaw Murders". It does have a lot of this kind of drama, and you won't necessarily understand or discover much of it as a player; you have to actually read the module to know it. Other modules are worse, but there's a bit of that here. I actually think "The Skinsaw Murders" is one of my favorite modules, but I've only ever run it in a very disjointed fashion. To be fair, the author, Richard Pett, specifically suggests doing so, and specifically says that it was written in such a way that you can take each of the three main acts out of context and adapt it easily into some other framework—which it turns out is exactly what I've done, especially with portions of the first part. I mean, I would do that anyway, and have been recommending it for years, but it's nice to see it specifically being touted as a design principle in a module.

The biggest chunk of post-adventure material is background on Magnimar, but this reads as merely an abbreviated version of the Magnimar book, which I also own. I'll probably read through it pretty breezily in the next day or so and finish it off.

I also read a fair chunk of Exile, the second in the prequel trilogy story of Drizzt. I still feel like doing a "how did he become who he was" prequel was not a great idea, but at least the second one he is quite a bit more of who he will become already. But some of the character drama that he undergoes feels forced. That's what happens when you already know what's coming because... it's a prequel. Just write stuff in chronological order, I say. Going back and exploring how things became what you already know that they will become just isn't all that interesting unless there's some kind of twist to it; something that will affect what comes after what you already know. Secret histories that offer alternative narratives and alternative options to your interpretation of what you thought you knew is interesting. Stuff that predictably just marches towards the status quo already established in the original work isn't. 

It's reasonably well written. That's not my complaint. My complaint is that I question whether it was a good idea to write it in the first place. And, of course, in retrospect the drow society that I thought was interesting ~25-30 years ago is actually caricaturishly silly. And this second one feels like kind of a holding pattern book, honestly. To be completely fair, even though I just read them a couple of year or so ago, reading the prequel trilogy just makes me want to re-read the main original trilogy again. It's honestly better, and more importantly, better conceived. 

Anyway, I think I will send some of my pdfs to my tablet to take with me to El Paso next week. Probably the rest of the Rise of the Runelords volumes (i.e., volumes 3-6, or 4-6 if I finish 3 before I go, and probably the four volumes of the next Cthulhu Mythos Saga, with the laughable name of Yig Snake Grandaddy. Even though I doubt I'll read all that, I might like having it on my tablet so I don't have to sit at my desktop to read these when I'm back at home.

Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks

Apparently, fighting fantasy gamebooks are going to be coming back into print again. These were an important part of my proto-RPG hobby middle school years, and I owned many of the early run in the early/mid 80s. I'm not a fan of some of the most popular ones, like Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which is the worst example of a dungeon crawl ever put to print, and super frustrating to read, but others like Forest of Doom and especially City of Thieves always came across to me as brilliant... although now that I'm no longer 13, I doubt I'd still find them as brilliant as I used to. In fact, I've got confirmation that I don't. But I still think of them very fondly. Although I was able to read many of them, I think, to the best of my memory, these were the ones that I owned.

Sigh. Sometimes it's a shame that I'm not 13 again, or that it's not 1985 or whatever again. That was the best.

Although there are 60 listed titles in this series, it looks like only about 20 at most were released in the US. Although I don't necessarily love the actual cover art, the US trade dress is very nostalgic to me, and I'm reluctant to entertain any other versions for my recovery efforts, honestly.

Why did I get rid of books when I was young, anyway? I've almost always regretted it.