Freeport "iconics"

I should look at the books more closely, but there are, I think, about four or five "iconic" Freeport characters in the latest round of products, i.e. the Pathinder Freeport: City of Adventure and the Return to Freeport omnibus, which works as a single relatively large campaign style adventure. Probably the Freeport Bestiary too, although that's mostly illustrations of the actual monsters.

1. The swashbuckler girl on the cover. She's almost certainly the iconic "freebooter" class, which is the most iconic class from the book and relative to the setting overall. And, as I've said many times, low status game designer men love man-acting grrlbosses, so I guess that makes her iconic in a sad way too. (I'm not at all suggesting that women can't be adventurers. Just that I don't buy them acting like and performing like men rather than like women. Make Women Feminine Again. Or at least make masculine pseudo-men rare again, rather than the majority of characters. Blegh.)

2. There's also a cross-dressing noble elf, or half-elf that's shown a lot. She wears a Colonial American coat, or maybe a cheesy high school marching band uniform, and dresses like a man. Dresses quite a bit like George Washington, in fact. It wasn't clear for quite a while if this character was supposed to be a man or not, but some pictures show that under that coat she does in fact have boobs, so I guess that solves that question. Sadly, the noble is another pretty good class, with a ridiculous iconic.

3. There's a survivor, based on the older class which is now an archetype. The whole thing seems superfluous in Pathfinder, since it's the same territory as the brawler, but I think they were fond of the old 3.5 era class that they'd written up. She's also kind of ridiculous; an orc or half-orc girl dressed like a skinny Ned Land from the old Disney 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea movie.

4. There is, occasionally shown, a couple of white men, or at least they are probably white, although pretty dark. Maybe they're "Hispanic" in a fantasy sense. One of them is the Inquisitor, and he dresses like a pretty typical witch hunter in a long black coat, except instead of a Puritan hat, he wears a black tricorn.

5. The other one is a fancy looking dude with darkish skin, but a George Washington wig. I don't know what either of those classes are, but neither one of them seems to be a Monster Hunter, which would be the other "iconic" new class from Freeport: City of Adventure. 

Like I said, they aren't true iconics; there's no bio or backstory, there's no stat block, there's not even a name associated with them, I don't believe. But they are frequently illustrated, enough so that it's clear that they were developed like iconics, i.e., they had visual design, and that visual design and specific look was obviously passed around to the artists and they were told to use them in subsequent illustrations. 

In any case, the last two characters are potentially intriguing concepts. The last one in particular is something that you don't usually see in D&D, The visual design kind of caught my eye, and I thought that I wasn't seeing enough of that character. If I recall, he was carrying either a sword cane or something like that, which contributes to making him look kind of fancy. I thought to myself, hey, I'd like to have a D&D character who has that look, although maybe I'd do something a little different. So here's my version of it, with a cobra staff (he's maybe some kind of spellcaster(?) and a rapier. I know, I know... I'm not really very in to spellcasters. But I can find some way to play up the investigative or even academic side of this guy rather than making him a typical D&D jock, like most of my characters tend to be, that would interest me. Almost a Call of Cthulhu character in a D&D game... for loose definitions of D&D.

I say as I'm literally playing a sorcerer in my 5e campaign right now. I didn't notice right away, but for this third version, posted here, he put his hand in his coat Napoleon style, but the staff he was holding is still standing by itself next to him. Lol. AI. Could be worse. There could be a third hand, I guess.

Delayed Friday Art Attack

Man, I haven't done a Friday Art Attack in a long time. Because I just finished my Freeport Trawl, I thought I'd highlight the Wayne Reynolds covers that he did for Freeport. Because I have all of the products, I do—after all—have all of the covers. 

There is actually one more WAR cover piece set in Freeport; the Fantasy AGE 2e cover. It's set in Freeport, but it's not a Freeport product. And I don't have it, so... eh. It's a pretty nice piece. A little too grrlbossy for my taste, but otherwise not bad. It's also readily available, since there's a pdf of the Quick Play rules available for free that includes it. A PDF24 Toolbox extraction of the image, and good to go.

Anyway, in no particular order...

Tales of Freeport

Fantasy AGE 2e (in Freeport)

Freeport: City of Adventure

The Pirates Guide to Freeport

Black Sails Over Freeport

Denizens of Freeport

Freeport Trilogy Fifth Anniversary Edition

Creatures of Freeport

Freeport Trawl is FINISHED!

Well, last night I finished Return to Freeport which was the last Freeport product. I've read them all as part of the trawl, with one exception; The Player's Guide to Freeport. However, there's a note on the shop listing for said product, which I'll reproduce below:

Note: The content of the Player’s Guide to Freeport comes from Freeport: The City of Adventure. It has been broken out separately to give players easy access to the material in a book that contains no setting spoilers.

So although I didn't read or even pick up that product, I actually have read all of the content in it, because everything in it comes from another book that I did read recently. Now, granted; although I'd never done anything like this before, and a lot of these products I'd never read before (even some of the earlier 3e products that I've had on pdf for years if not decades already by this point—Freeport the setting is two and a half decades old now, and even the latest products are almost a decade old. So I was pretty familiar with the setting. I'd read the original trilogy of modules at least a couple of times, and even read actual play posts (before doing them as videos or podcasts was popular, write-ups after the fact were the way to go.) I'd owned the system-less setting book since it was new, and I've read it several times. In at least some ways, I still like some aspects of it better than the newer, bigger, bolder setting book that came out with the Kickstarter getting close to fifteen years ago now. And I had read some of the other modules here and there, and the d20 version of the Companions many times too. Now that I've read the whole darn thing, every product, beginning to end, what do I recommend actually getting, reading, and most importantly, what do I think of the whole thing?

First things first; some high level discussion about the setting itself and the arc of its products.

Tone: Freeport sells itself as three things: 1. a D&D setting, with most of the things that that means in terms of magic, fantasy races, etc. 2. a pirate setting, with at least some of the things that that means in terms of culture and technology, although how well its done at emulating the pirate-ness and how it did so evolved over time. And 3. a horror setting, with prominent Lovecraftian elements front and center, including an original plot in the original few products that featured serpent-men like Robert E. Howard had in "The Shadow Kingdom," (probably the best Kull story) including Valossa which is clearly a "gloss" on Valusia, Yig, which Lovecraft created for "The Mound" which he transparently almost completely ghost-wrote for Zealia Bishop, and the Unspeakable One, which is one of the elements Lovecraft borrowed and expanded on somewhat after reading Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow. I'm not completely sure who first proposed merging Hastur, the King in Yellow and the Unspeakable One, but Freeport gives "him" pride of place as its preferred big villain. Probably the RPG industry through Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu game and even D&D itself through the early Deities & Demigods printing, building on rambly writings of August Derleth. 

As I've said repeatedly throughout the trawl, this tone and these themes were not applied consistently. I'm not a fan of the subversive "the monsters are actually the good guys" theme that the original trilogy had with K'Stallo; who's clearly supposed to be seen as friendly and sympathetic, which is ridiculous. But they walked that back somewhat by minimizing his role and introducing another faction among the serpent-men who were more hostile to the player characters and their races and cultures. Chris Pramas, who before founding Green Ronin had also worked on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for a while, tried to do what they did and add puns and wink-and-nod in-jokes to the setting. Way too much of it. The British have a talent for doing that subtly without over-doing it, whereas in Freeport it came across as more ham-handed and silly; it really ruined the tone for some products... but other products were appropriately dark without any real puns or silliness. I suppose that's what happens when you have multiple authors and even multiple line editors; Robert Schwalb in particular seems to have been a fan of the more grimdark, horror side of things (hardly surprising given that his own personal design magnum opus is Shadow of the Demon Lord) and anything he worked on was more serious and dark. 

In addition, there were other changes that gradually crept into the game over time. Original Freeport felt almost old school in some ways. Very humano-centric and sword & sorcery feeling. Over time, technology advanced unrealistically rapidly, and suddenly almost anyone of consequence had piratey flintlocks and cannons and sometimes even all kinds of other clockwork technology. Even the illustrations migrated from looking more Medieval sword & sorcery to looking more Colonial America or at least British colonial West Indies. New races started appearing, and suddenly were very important. It started with orcs, hobgoblins and goblins, and that was OK for a time until their prominence and position in the city started to become so notable that it was almost a parody. But then there was the azhar, who leapt from "didn't even exist" to "now have a super prominent role in the setting" almost overnight. And then "island trolls" popped up, and suddenly were all over the place; the island is a tiny little place; how in the world did they just appear out of thin air almost at the end of the run of the products while pretending tacitly that they were somehow just unknown for centuries on an island smaller than most modest sized towns in America? And why did they need to be invented at all, when they aren't really "trolls" but just a new variety of big, strong goblinoid? Something wrong with bugbears, if you're going to be D&D derived already? This rather rapid migration of new elements that significantly changed the setting, without any explanation of why was both jarring and unwelcome. Although I wonder if I hadn't read all of the products in (mostly) chronological order if it would have been subtle enough that I wouldn't really have noticed it. Even more perplexing is that the very latest products, the ones for Pathfinder 1e, suddenly had a lot of Pathfinder assumptions built in. Setting assumptions, I mean, not just mechanical assumptions. Suddenly the divs, for example, become the main bad guys of Return to Freeport, and they were introduced in Bestiary 3. I mean, sure, they are mythological creatures, but they're a somewhat esoteric mythology that hadn't been explored in D&D and D&D derivative games before. This isn't the only thing where Pathfinder setting specific things worked their way into the Freeport setting, but it's maybe the most prominent one.

Even less welcome is gradual enwokening of the setting. All of the orcs and whatnot were obviously a metaphor for a progressive simpleton narrative about black people. The art hardly shows a single white male at all anymore. Almost all of the iconic characters that they show off are women. Many of the factions are led by women, none of whom act in the least feminine. This is also not surprising; the same thing has happened to Wizards of the Coast and Paizo both too, so why not spin-off companies formed by other Seattle weirdos who worked at one (or both) of those companies in the past like Green Ronin or Kobold Press? The great culture wars of woke producers against their anti-woke consumers is the defining cultural moment of our age the last few years, and Green Ronin (and the rest of the Left Coast hipsters) are on the wrong side of it. Freeport seems to have ended as a franchise for new products (at least for now) but Green Ronin are virtue-signaling hard in their other products that their wokeness has increased exponentially since the last Freeport product was released in ~2019 or so. At this point, I almost hope that they leave it fallow before they make it even worse in this regard. Or, if not, wait until woke is completely broken and nobody is willing to make woke entertainment products anymore.

Adventures. The high water mark for the "wrong" tone are probably older, larger adventures like "Hell in Freeport" and Black Sails Over Freeport, but one notable problem was that a lot of the adventures did some unusual things, either 1) mostly took place in places other than Freeport (like Hell, in "Hell in Freeport") or 2) had very little to do with pirates or pirate themes. In fact, especially in the earlier adventures, they mostly just felt like very typical D&D adventures, and often surprisingly high fantasy, high powered D&D adventures. This may be considered also a clash in tone with the low fantasy dark fantasy nearly horror vibe, but I think in the case of the adventures its especially notable, and kind of a different problem, where adventure design is done without consideration of tone at all, in many cases. Not all the time; Black Sails clearly has silliness baked in, especially the sequence that's meant to be a case of the players characters literally playing the old Donkey Kong game where they climb ladders and jump over flaming barrels that apes are throwing at them. Others, like "Hell in Freeport" and many others, and even other parts of Black Sails are just too epic and high fantasy to feel like Freeport; rather, it feels like Forgotten Realms. 

On the other hand, some of the modules, often third party or later appearing ones, are better. Parts of Return to Freeport featured significant ship to ship action, for instance, which is as piratical as you can get, and many others are more low key crime stories, ghost stories or the like, rather than the typical D&D story of "stop the summoning of the dark god who wants to destroy the setting" thing, which happened more than once in the Freeport oeuvre, including in the original trilogy, and of course in the Black Sails module. Return to Freeport, "Dark Deeds Over Freeport," the little adventure included in the Companion books, and most of the Adamant Press adventures, the Goodman Games haunted house adventure, and many of the often small and not completely fleshed out adventures in books like Tales of Freeport had this vibe, and made Freeport feel a little smaller and more grounded in scale. They are mostly meant to be interlude adventures in a longer campaign, I think, but in a way, they really provide the backbone for a campaign that is more what the setting claims (my term, I know) to be about in theme. Although, of course, there's no campaign thread between them. They're mostly disconnected. Which, in some cases, is what OSR-like people, among others, would want to see anyway. Not that I am one, or that the designers had any idea of making Freeport an OSR friendly setting, but y'know. It is a perfectly valid way to structure campaigns, without there being a "thread" through it. 

Quality Over Time. While I think the original trilogy is, in many ways, among the best product for the line, I think that the really best stuff was quite late, and the line really stepped it up quite a bit both in terms of physical quality; better art, full color, etc. but also in terms of products that are honesty better designed. Before reading them, I expected that the big fat Pathfinder Freeport: City of Adventure was just the system-less setting book and the Pathfinder Freeport Companion mashed together, but that was not the case; the mechanics were greatly expanded and improved and even the setting stuff was rewritten, revised and looked at again. I also thought that the Pathfinder Freeport Bestiary was mostly just going to be a system update to the older d20 Creatures of Freeport, but no, it's almost a completely different book, and a significantly better book. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised all around by the Freeport Bestiary; it's one of my favorite monster books, whereas Creatures of Freeport was pretty meh. Even though there were obviously some of the same creatures involved in both. Although I'm not suggesting that I'd run Return to Freeport as is, I did in general find it to be among the best adventures—whether you consider it one big adventure in six chapters, or six linked adventures as it was originally published. In fact, the first one or two in particular were among my favorite adventures in the entire Freeport corpus, and the one with all the pirate ship combat was... I dunno, maybe it needed a little more mechanical oomph... but otherwise it's kind of surprising that this hadn't been done in the setting before this point. Unfortunately, the idea of going to "Dark Freeport" in a pocket mirror dimension to fight the big bad villain of the arc was a little corny. With some work on the end, I could turn Return to Freeport into the best Freeport campaign you could get, in theory. 

Granted, like I've said many times, there is no printed campaign or adventure path that I can run as is, and I do pretty substantial rework to all of them if I plan on using them for anything. But using the basic structure of the original trilogy, the Return to ... sextology, I think the word is, and some of the other adventures scattered throughout otherwise could be reworked into a pretty brilliant Curse of the Corsair Coast. When I get around to actually planning out that campaign brief and outline, I think that the Freeport material will be my go-to source for raw material—although how much the end product resembles Freeport when all is said and done is TBD... who knows? Maybe I can accelerate my pace at reading the Adventure Path trawl, and read Skull & Shackles before I do Curse of the Corsair Coast, and see if any of that can be added to the stew as well.

Overall, and I've said this many times too, Five Fingers from Privateer Press, i.e., is better in many ways. It has a more consistent and more compelling theme, and it understands what it wants to do more. However, it is also a bit more closely tied to its parent setting, Iron Kingdoms. Freeport is supposedly supposed to be more modular and usable in any setting. I feel like this started to feel slightly less true over time, as Freeport gradually accreted an actual setting, mostly, although it still kind of stubbornly refused to ever name any of the gods for clerics, etc. except for two pirate gods, a "good" one who's a cheery swashbuckler like Errol Flynn and a bad one who's a monstrous murderer. Given how much the "God of Knowledge" featured in the signature adventures, it started to feel obnoxious that it was always just the generic "God of Knowledge" after a while. Whatever. It's not a big deal, but in general, if they were going to create a setting of sorts to attach Freeport to, I wish they'd just gone ahead and done it. It's easy to change stuff, but it's a little bit obnoxious to not have it at all and it needs to be added by the players. Also, in spite of the fact that Freeport had all of the "companions" for various systems, it really only worked very well for systems that felt pretty much exactly like D&D. In fact, when they migrated to Pathfinder, even though Pathfinder started off being essentially just D&D 3.5+, it felt like it got just a bit more of its own character, and became somewhat more compelling in a way.

None of the settings or adventures ever made by someone else work completely for me, but Freeport does a lot that I like, and gives me a decent framework to modify rather than needing to build from scratch. I'm 100% on board to use Freeport material as the baseline for Curse of the Corsair Coast, and I think that when all is said and done, I can probably use more Freeport material that I have and with less modification than I've been having to do for the Paizo adventure paths. Like I said, I'll review some other pirate-themed stuff first; Skull & Shackles and I'll probably read Five Fingters: Port of Deceit once more before I really define Curse of the Corsair Coast, but that's only to give myself an abundance of resources to work with, not because I need them.

Curse of the Brine Witch

I finished the first adventure of Return to Freeport, "Curse of the Brine Witch." It's actually a really good adventure, written by Patrick O'Duffy, an old-time Freeport campaigner who worked for Green Ronin for many years. Apparently, he's from Melbourne and also does freelance work for White Wolf. Interesting stuff. Regardless, the adventure is quite good. Although I feel that the hook to get the characters involved is a little weak and forced, that's often true for published adventures (including the original "Death in Freeport") so I'm not going to count that too much against it. A good GM needs to come up with tailored starts that account for the PCs he actually gets, which no published adventure can possibly do. Another point against it, although this is pretty common for Paizo products too, and it's a moot point for me, is that it requires you to own a few other books, including the big Pathfinder Freeport setting book (which originally retailed for ~$80, so quite a lot) as well as two of the bestiaries, 1 and 3. I know that it saves a page or two to not repeat stats each time they need them, but it's not really worth it; it requires that you buy more stuff, which limits how much people will want to buy this product unless they already have them or already plan on getting them anyway. Even though, like I said, it's a moot point to me because I do own the referred to products, it's still a hassle to switch between various products to run a game, and it's obnoxious to tell people that they need to go buy other expensive products to properly use the one that they're reading. Maybe that's a principled or even ideological stand to take, though. I dunno. I need to use the OGL and SRD to copy portions of the Pathfinder compatible stuff onto my website to be able to even refer to how to use my conversion, but I'm going to do that rather than just say, "go buy this other book and read those few pages."

Today was an interesting day of work. I left early because there was a department picnic. I didn't go to that because I had to call into three separate meetings during it, and I figured I'd go home rather than stay in the office to do that, when nobody else was really going to be there anyway. However, two additional emergency meetings came up, so although I had some disconnected free time that I didn't exactly expect, I also wasn't able to actually quit for the day until nearly 8:30 PM, which really sucks. But, I did manage, like I said, to finish this first adventure, which was shorter than I expected; about ~35 pages or so. If they'd added the statblocks that they referred to, which they should have done (even if they're in the appendix or something after all) then it would have been maybe closer to ~40 pages. The whole omnibus is about 176 pages, I think, which is shorter than most of the WotC 5e campaigns, and significantly shorter than the Paizo adventure paths. But, of course, that's not exactly fair. While an adventure path issue is about 100 pages, only about half of that is the actual adventure, then there's several pages of setting material, new monsters (many of which don't feature in the module; they're just there because the writers thought they looked fun), episodes of linked fiction, and all kinds of other material. Still; at ~40-50 pages a module and six in an adventure path, the Paizo campaigns, ignoring all of the other material, are still 240-300 pages or so of module material; at least a third longer than this one, and maybe even almost twice as long. This doesn't really compare in size to a Paizo adventure path after all; it's not even as long as their earlier Black Sails Over Freeport. 

I was also a little bit amused to see that they recommended using the fast advancement, so that the adventure will get you to at least third level. I just re-read that in my Pathfinder Core Rulebook read (remember that while I haven't read it cover to cover, I've had it pretty much since it was new, and have read many portions of it here and there off and on for years) and thought to myself that I'd likely take the slow method, and then nearly double the XP listed there, so that instead of needing 3,000 XP to get to 2nd level, 7,500 to 3rd, 14,000 to 4th, etc. I'd require 6,000, 15,000, 28,000, etc. To my sensibilities, the entire "Curse of the Brine Witch" feels like what a 1st level adventure should feel like, and I'd be wary of even suggesting that at the end of it, you should advance to 2nd level for the next one. At least in terms of scope of the adventure, if not necessarily difficulty of the challenges.

I generated an image in Grok of the Brine Witch. Of course, Grok is the AI that, in my experience, is the least likely to actually do what you tell it to on image generation. I ran out of generations that I could use long before I got one that actually works; I don't know why it couldn't, despite very clear and repeated prompting, just have nothing but a gigantic eye inside the hood, or why the shark's teeth I requested around the eye and hood turned into a row of triangular decorations all along the edge of the cloak. Sigh. I only used Grok because I'd already used up all of my ChatGPT image generations. UPDATE: Got a slightly better one, and then hit my limit again this morning. Sigh. Anyway, I swapped out the image that I had for this improved version. This one just needs 1) I asked for it to be at night, and after a few tries, Grok completely forgot to do that, 2) I also asked for teeth around the eye, which Grok also ended up forgetting about, and 3) I'd like a little bit more brightness on the eye. It's a bit hard to see. Still, it's an improvement over what I had before. Honestly, maybe I should just be happy with what I got and not worry about the teeth, which Grok is unlikely to do well, I think. As soon as it lets me generate a new one, I'll try and get it done at night and otherwise let this one go. Honestly, I'm trying a little too hard to get this one done. It's just an image for this one post. I guess if I ever run this, I could use this as a player aid of some sort. I do like to have visualizations of what they're seeing sometimes.

When I first tried Grok for images, I quite liked them, but now I find ChatGPT reliably gives me my best results. If I do go for a premium account someday, that's the one I'd use. But again, it's not worth it for a minor toy. I don't need that many images, and even when I'm trying to correct ones that don't get it right, I'm OK with what I can generate already.

Maybe one of these days, I'll actually pay for a premium account so I don't run out after just a few images, but probably not. It's fundamentally just a minor toy to me, not something essential.

Anyway, I'd like to finish Return to Freeport by the end of the weekend. I don't want to overcommit, even to myself, and think that I'll get it done before then, but that's reasonable, I think. And 'll make a new post about module writing in general. As I've recently read quite a large number of them over the last several months, I've certainly developed preferences in terms of what I want a module to actually have and be like. 

Freeport Trawl update

Could be a slightly high magic Freeport character concept...

Well, I finished reading the Freeport Bestiary last night which, contrary to my expectations, was not just a rehash of Creatures of Freeport, and I ended up having to read it pretty much entirely. There's a good 15-20 pages at the end that are just basic rules stuff, kind of like how the 3e monster books all explain (again) the rules for reading a monster stat block, so I skimmed or more accurately nearly completely skipped all of that, but otherwise, I actually read the whole book (minus statblocks. I always skip those unless I'm actually planning on running the monster.) It was a much more than I expected, and so I was, once again, pleasantly surprised by the Pathfinder conversion of Freeport. Green Ronin really seemed to believe that Pathfinder 1e was the true "heir" of 3e, I think. Although, of course, they were already doing a lot of their own things with the AGE system and whatnot, so their support of it was less than it had been during the d20 boom, but their best material seems to have been their late Pathfinder 1e stuff. They only had one half-hearted attempt to dip their toe in the 5e market; a conversion of their first slim adventure, and have left Freeport entirely once Pathfinder migrated to 2e, other than apparently a vague allusion to it in some form or other in their Fantasy AGE stuff. I'm not interested in their Fantasy AGE system, which simply replaces everything else already in the market with a woker system, so I won't investigate any of that, I don't think. As I'm getting to the end of my massive Freeport Trawl, I'm finding that the setting is getting kind of played out. The exact same problems that I anticipated would be its downfall are, indeed, its downfall—increasing wokeness over the years, too much conflict in tone, and somewhat surprising to me, too much insistence on not just advancing the meta plot, but while doing so, changing the nature of the setting rather dramatically and adding all kinds of new elements which we're supposed to pretend were just always there. (Island trolls, for instance? Whiskey tango foxtrot.)

I also skimmed the Freeport Companion: Shadow of the Demon Lord or however exactly you want to title that book. I marked it, but kept it in gray, because I didn't really read it, and I confirmed that it was just system-specific mechanics, a bit of talk about how to fit setting elements from Shadow and Freeport together, which I wasn't terribly interested in because I still haven't read Shadow of the Demon Lord and don't know or care much about its setting, so there wasn't any need to (re) read much of the text there. I also was trawling through the Green Ronin storefront, and realized that there is, in fact, at least one RPG product for Freeport that I was missing from my trawl; a Pathfinder book called the Player's Companion to Freeport. I presume that this is similar to the player's companion books that accompany each of the adventure paths, but on looking at it in more detail, it looks like just a portion of the updated Pathfinder Freeport: City of Adventure book, and none of the material in it looks original. In would serve, I suppose, mostly as a replacement for the Pathfinder Freeport Companion with the updated rules, but missing the Madness rules and the adventure, I think. In spite of the oversight in leaving it off, I don't think I'm missing literally anything by skipping it, as everything in the table of contents appears to be a repeat of something I've already read.

By jumping ahead and skimming the Demon Lord companion, the only thing left to read in the trawl is the Return to Freeport mega-adventure, originally published in six parts like a Pathfinder Adventure Path... although much slower. The first two adventures were published in 2016 (I didn't look up the months), the second two in 2017, the fifth one in 2018 and the last one in 2019. By then, Pathfinder 1e was about done (same year, I believe that Pathfinder 2e was released) and it missed its chance, probably, to be a significant product for the game line by virtue of its poor timing. Maybe that explains it; slower sales, bad timing, and a renewed focus on their own products, plus more recently the debacle with the Diamond distributor bankruptcy, but Freeport does seem to be well and truly finished, and I will have read everything published for it when I finish these last adventures. Although I bought the omnibus from DriveThru on pdf, it was originally published as six discrete titles, so that's how I put it on the trawl, and as I finish each section, I'll write them off as if I'd read an entire "book" even though I'm still in the midst of my actual book. 

As usual, diving into Freeport tends to make me want to re-read Five Fingers: Port of Deceit again. I may put that on my physical game book list again, because, y'know. It's a great book. I re-read it recently enough that it's on my tracker document that I've been keeping since 2023, but at the very beginning. Although it'll set me back a bit on reading something else, I'd rather read something that I really quite like than knocking off stuff that I'll probably be more ambivalent on just to say that I finished it. I'm sure I'll enjoy re-reading this more than I'm enjoying my re-read of Races of Eberron for instance. 

The real intimidating trawl is all of the Pathfinder stuff, even though I've broken it up into multiple discrete trawls; one for the rules, one for the adventure paths, one for the stand-alone modules, one for the Companion line and one for the Setting line. At the rate I'm going, I'll still be reading those in ten years. Which is ironic, because the likelihood of me actually playing or running Pathfinder 1e is very low. Still, seeing it as an iteration of the d20 system which I played for many, many years, I quite like it. There's things that it did that I wouldn't have, but mostly I've come to agree that it does seem to be an actual improvement at the end of the day over 3.5 in most respects. I'm not thrilled with the bump in power level, when I think that d20 was already arguably an un-needed bump in power level vis a viz D&D as it had been before d20. I almost think that I'd prefer a hybrid of Pathfinder 1e and 3.5; races from 3.5, classes from Pathfinder, the skill consolidation and the CMB/CMD from Pathfinder. And, of course, playing with non-power gamers so that the broken builds and combos that seem to have plagued discussion of the game are a moot point because your players are really only interested in the roleplaying opportunities of the mechanical chargen options, not creating broken combos or munchkin builds. 

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.

Freeport Pathfinder and E6 Low Magic

I just finished the chapter on Freeport Classes, so I'm getting near the end of this monster book that's twice as big as most of my other books. I had thought that it would mostly just reprint two sources: 1) The Pirate's Guide to Freeport and 2) Pathfinder Freeport Companion. I was surprised—mostly pleasantly—to find that this was not the case. The Pirate's Guide stuff is largely intact, but there were many minor updates and changes. This wasn't necessarily good nor bad; why did the Union guy die and his widow is now taking his place, for example? I don't remember reading about him dying in one of the adventures, so I think that that's just meant to both advance minor details to make the setting "feel more alive" from a meta perspective, and I also suspect to eliminate another strong (albeit a liberal) male icon and replace him with a woman. Some of the other changes were more consequential. Why is there a new third crime lord competing with Finn and Mr. Wednesday? (None of whom are anywhere near as good as the four crime lords from Five Fingers still. Sadly.) Why are there now a lot more orcs and goblinoids than there were even in the Pirate's Guide, which is already a lot more than there were in the original Freeport sourcebook? There seems a concerted effort to make liberal themes more front and center, because in spite of the fact that they are orcs and goblins, this is clearly meant to be a morality tale of sorts around immigration, racism, etc.; although they haplessly kind of demonstrate the conservatives' point while doing so, even though they clearly expect you to take an NPC liberal perspective on it. As an aside, because of this, the Freebooter's seat on the council, which has a three year term limit and so needed to have a different NPC in it, now has Captain Scarbelly, a notoriously villainous orc captain from earlier in the game, shown prominently on the anniversary omnibus version of the original Freeport trilogy.

I was pleasantly surprised by these kinds of developments, you may ask? I suppose. It's pleasant to see that they actually took a look at the text and didn't just replicate it. Many of the changes that they made are not ones that I personally would have made, but others are interesting, and I applaud them for making the effort anyway.

The rules were also significantly changed, probably because of more things that had come out in Pathfinder since the original Pathfinder companion. There's a new base class, the Freebooter, that kind of combines the corsair and assassin into one flexible a la carte menu version. The corsair does still appear as an archetype instead of a class, as does the survivalist, and most of the prestige classes. I didn't notice too much different with the monster hunter class, but I didn't really check, and the noble seems to have been substantially restructured. The Freebooter is actually, as written, a great alt.swashbuckler class for use with the PF1e rules, and I'd highly recommend it as such. It has a more traditional feel than the swashbuckler too, which is kind of a fiddly-looking class to play, where you have a pool of points to spend, etc. This one just has a big menu of a la carte options to pick from, giving it a flavor somewhere between fighter and rogue, but with the fighters' BAB and hit die, and lots of ways to actually build it. 

In fact, they didn't do any prestige classes at all, converting all of the ones that they used to have into archetypes. I kind of think that's what Pathfinder should have done in the beginning; replace prestige classes with archetypes. I'd modify my E6 low magic rules to say that this is actually how you should do it; not use prestige classes at all, and just open up the use of archetypes. I'd also say, although not force, that players consider higher level (than 6) class abilities as your first option for feat selection; continue taking those class abilities, in order, as if they were feats for your post 6th level advancement. Sometimes you need to throw in a feat too, but I think a more "bounded accuracy" feel can be maintained by using E6 and continuing to gain class abilities.

Of course, this applies to non-magical classes. It remains the only way to cast higher level spells that you have to treat them as rituals/incantations. But hey, lower power and bounded accuracy isn't the only goal; lower magic was obviously always a goal too, right? Speaking of which, the noble offers an ability to become a minor spellcaster which I could take without skipping a level. It becomes another alternative to spellcasting where you can get some magic without having to use the spellcasting classes. Another plus. 

UPDATE: As another aside, I see the Pathfinder 1e rulebook at Half Price Books selling for $12.99 with $4.99 S&H in Very Good condition. I doubt I'll ever play it, and I wonder if I'll ever even really read it, yet I'm very tempted to buy it because having it as an actual book instead of a pdf seems much more solid. Sigh. I have enjoyed having this big Freeport book, for what it's worth. Even if I don't ever really need that either. I'm really motivated to try and finish the Freeport Trawl entirely since I'm so close to being there. I've only got about 100 pages left in the big 540+ page book, then the new(er) Freeport Bestiary then the big single book AP Return to Freeport, and then I can skim the Shadow of the Demon Lord Freeport Companion and be completely done with the trawl! Once that one's done, it'll presumably be easier for me to focus on some of my other trawls, many of which have many, many titles to read, but others of which are slightly more modest. I think I want to stick to my roots just a bit, though, and focus on Eberron 3e, Forgotten Realms 3e and the Paizo Adventure Paths before getting too involved in, say, the Paizo Companion Trawl, or the Goodman Games module trawl, both of which I'm not even very invested in doing; I just thought what the heck, why not track them too.

I do want to dig more into the Pathfinder 1e rules and Chronicles/Setting line. And, of course, the Adventure Paths and I'd like to read all of the modules eventually. Those are higher priority than Companion, Society Scenarios, or some of the others, but the Adventure Path is really the top priority from Paizo.

Pathfinder Freeport

I'm a little over half way through the Freeport: City of Adventure book which came out for Pathfinder 1e a number of years ago. Although it has the same name as the older 3e book, it's two iterations beyond that; the old 3e book was updated to the system-less Pirates Guide to Freeport back in 2007 or so, and this Pathfinder update is the next iteration, advancement a bit in the timeline and some details, expansion, and merging with the Pathfinder Freeport Companion. I had the system-less guide on my reading list, but I decided to remove it both because I read it kind of recently—since I was tracking my reading, at least—and because I had essentially three versions of the same material on the list. It seemed overkill to read all three. This "new" one, which is at least seven years old now, I've had on PDF for a number of years but never got around to reading. I found out, after spot checking, that it was on sale from the Green Ronin store in hardcopy for about a third of it's normal ~$80 price; under $30, anyway. Even with nearly ~$11 in S&H fees, I could get it for less than half its normal cost, so I did. However, by the time it arrives, I will almost certainly have finished reading the PDF copy, so it'll just go on my shelf until... well, until next time I want to read it or refer to it, I suppose. 

As I've said, I'm quite excited to finish the Freeport Trawl. I'm almost done. Once I finish this book, which I was a little intimidated to start because it's so long but which I shouldn't have been, because I've been making good time through it, I've got the Freeport Bestiary, a Pathfinder update to the older Creatures of Freeport, which I expect to have lots of repeat text from that book, so I can probably skim it quickly, the Shadow of the Demon Lord companion, which I can also skim, because it's just the adaption of the Companion material to yet another system, and I've already gone through half a dozen variants of that already, and, of course, the Return to Freeport mega-adventure. Technically originally released as six chapters; separate adventure books, but I bought it as a compilation into a single ~225 page omnibus, so it'll be like reading one of the 5e campaigns, at least in terms of scope, scale and size. After that...

It'll be easier to go through my trawls with one less, right? I'll do a big ole summary of All of Ye Freeport Products when I'm done, but especially focused on the "adventure path" Return to Freeport. My Curse of the Corsair Coast campaign proposal, in fact, would be very loosely adapting Freeport material, although with all of the Freeport products and adventures that I've read, many of them side quests and unrelated one-shots, exactly how I loosely adapt it is TBD. I'm not actually a huge fan of the high fantasy tropes that Freeport uses, which are very D&Dish, but not very Freeportish, if that makes sense. I mean it is, but it seems to me that Freeport undercuts its own brand considerably by presenting itself as a low fantasy, picaresque pirate game mixed with Lovecraftian horror, and then actually just being yet another D&D setting with Talk Like a Pirate Day corny aesthetics tacked on kind of half-heartedly. As much as I've liked a lot of Freeport material, it really needs a pretty heavy-handed restructuring to even work as advertised. Freeport isn't really what it advertises to be, in my opinion. It's really just a D&D setting. In fact, as time has gone on, it's become more of a woke, modern D&D setting. The real gritty pirates and Lovecraft themes are more cosmetic rather than structural in most products. 

So Curse of the Corsair Coast, like I said, will no doubt take some ideas from the Freeport material, but it'll only have 20-25% of the Freeport material, and all of it will be "roughed up" to be considerably more edgy than it actually is in print.

I also got started on the next Forgotten Realms book in my Forgotten Realms trawl, just because I hadn't touched that trawl in a long time. Faiths & Pantheons was the book I started, which was one of the ones I was least interested in, in fact, but it was next, so I needed to read it. Luckily, it's got Deities & Demigods-style long-form god stat-blocks, which I can skip through, so I'm skimming nearly 50% of the content because it's stat-block content, which I don't need and wouldn't use. Next up is Silver Marches, which I believe was a relatively well-regarded product, although I'm not 100% sure that it's the kind of product that I need or not. City of the Spider Queen is next after that, a large adventure, and Races of Faerun, a probably workmanlike product that I just have to get through to move on. Then we finally start to hit products that I'm actually kind of excited to read, like Unapproachable East, Underdark, and Serpent Kingdoms, and after a few more products, finally City of Splendors: Waterdeep. I'm still a little on the fence about Forgotten Realms of any edition, but I've got pdfs of all of the 3e stuff, and it seemed a shame that I've been sitting on them for years, so I'm glad I'm trawling through it. I think that my impression of the setting will be the same when I'm done, though—there's some interesting stuff in it, sure, but overall the themes, tone and most of the details of the setting are simply not up my alley and I'm not that interested in them. 

But the exact same could easily be said for D&D as a whole, so, eh.

Polycrisis

I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of a "polycrisis" or not. If not, it's a pretty self-explanatory word, really. I heard it recently in the political commentary sphere, where it's being used to refer to the state of the current Democrat party. But as expected, it refers to a kind of perfect storm; multiple crises converging at the same time where the impact of the total is more than just the sum of the impacts of the individual crises. I kind of feel like that's what my life has been like the last few weeks. A family crisis of surprising magnitude. A short term financial crisis. Two separate work crises. I've been completely unable to even think much about my hobbies, much less accomplish anything useful. About a week or so ago, I did finish the d20 Freeport Companion, so I'll talk just a little bit about that before I forget the details.

I don't actually play d20 anymore, of course (or 3.5) but I could, as I've mentioned in some of my low fantasy posts recently. Because of that, and because of my additional more charitable feelings towards the system due to my rereading of much of it, I found the Companion as interesting to read this time as it was when I first read it nearly twenty years ago. (When it was new. I got it while it was still the d20 Freeport Companion, but once 4e launched in 2008 and the d20 license was canceled, it was renamed the 3rd Era Freeport Companion and the old d20 licensing image was replaced with an OGL Compatible unofficial alternative. That one is still available, I believe, on DrivethruRPG or the Green Ronin store. Albeit, in my opinion, at a pretty overblown price point. ~$15 for a pdf for a system that it's not clear how many people are even still using? ~$30 for a POD softcover? I mean, I know this was nearly twenty years ago now, but a book this size shouldn't have sold more for than $20 as a softbound book when it was new, I wouldn't think, and if PDF is half of that, that's a more reasonable.

Too much of the book is new feats, no skills or skill uses and new spells. That's pretty par for the course for this kind of product, but it takes up a lot of space and you're not likely to use much of it. There are, however, a number of pretty cool classes, including several new base classes; a corsair (like a swashbuckling duelist), a survivalist (a less supernatural and less Kung Fu monk. I had forgotten how big a deal Kung Fu was on TV, but it started in 1972 and ran through 1975, right when D&D was first being released. I watched it myself in syndication in either the late 70s or early 80s, so it was fresh to me when I discovered D&D just as it was to Gygax when he wrote it.) There's also a full 20-level assassin, and a few others... some of them are even quite good. There's a shorter (shorter than the earlier d20 Call of Cthulhu ones, which were replicated in Unearthed Arcana at least) madness/sanity ruleset, which I still think is probably a bit overblown, but which is mercifully shorter than what was otherwise in print. There's a bunch of monsters, almost all if not all (I didn't check) were from the Creatures of Freeport book. There's a brief discussion of why they didn't include naval combat rules, and referred to you one of three already otherwise in print at the time, and there's a decent little adventure. 

It's mostly interesting to you, unsurprisingly, if you play D&D 3.5, or d20 as the license called it. Which, of course, I did for many, many years (2000-2018 or so) but even though I probably wouldn't use it again, I still found it interesting to review and refresh myself on it. I'm still not sure exactly how I'll do the other Companions, but I'll at least skim them. I think I got them on some Humble Bundle or some other kind of deal years and years ago.

That ChatGPT image is a little too DEI for my taste, but what the heck. You get what you pay for.

Reading

My whole world has caught on fire the last month or so. I will end up spending less than 48 hours at home in four weeks total when I'm finally done traveling for work emergencies and extended family emergencies. I have not been able to read as much as I'd like, and I've pretty much given up on trying to play SWTOR for the time being. It's been a catastrophe. I've been busy, very, very stressed, very frustrated, and simply not in a good mood for a long time. But I have managed to at least read a little. I finished Buccaneers of Freeport and have read about a third so far of the d20 Freeport Companion. Which you can't exactly buy under that title anymore, but you can get a pdf at least of the 3rd Era Freeport Companion which is the same book, just retitled and slightly modified on the cover. I bought it years and years ago before the old d20 license went caput, so I have the older, original title. 

I found, or remember, more accurately, that the rules are very specific to d20/D&D of the 3.5 edition. I suspect that the other companions are significantly different after all, although I've never really read them in detail, although also that they're so ingrained with the system that they're almost meaningless to someone who doesn't play that system. But now I'm concerned that I might possibly miss something if I don't at least do a (relatively) thorough skimming of the books, so I'll probably do that. Sigh. Let me load those pdfs on my tablet before I go out of town again later this week. I'm really determined to finish reading the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path while traveling too, so two more adventures to read. I haven't, on the other hand, touched my novels, but I have a lot of those in my backpack too right now.

All of this is a big pain. I'm getting hit up to run my "piratey" themed game by some of my gaming group, and I've had to tell them to wait for a while... after I've been hoping to get a chance to run it for a couple of months now. My plan for that is to run a very loosely adapted version of the Freeport Trilogy, followed by possibly some other Freeport modules or other related type of modules or adventures or just stuff that I come up with, if necessary. The Freeport official modules are pretty hit or miss; I'm excited about half of them, more or less, and I'd never run the other half. And even the stuff that I would run would be heavily modified.

I've got other seafaring material too, of course, like the Savage Tide adventure path that I read last year, or the Serpent's Skull adventure path that I read several years ago. Heck, I've still for the Pathfinder regular 6-part style Green Ronin adventure path, Return to Freeport. Actually, getting to that, even though it's at the end of the Trawl, was what I was probably most excited about reading. I needed, of course, to get there by getting the context of reading the other material, including some that I'd never read to date, before reading it, but I now have the final goal in sight. 

UPDATE: That's a crappy looking image. Maybe I'll replace it shortly. UPDATE II: Screw it. I'll use an old Eberron image from my blog history. UPDATE III: OK, got a better ChatGTP image.

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.

A Tale of Three Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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