The Strange Affairs of the Unseen Beyond

Creating a new tag based on what I said as an update at the bottom of my last part: THE STRANGE AFFAIRS OF THE UNSEEN BEYOND. This will be a more targeted world-building effort that is not part of Old Night. It will use the PFRPG rules, but there will be some pretty limiting house-rules to ensure that it is very targeted in terms of mood and tone. Not everything that PFRPG has would fit in this game and it's going to use PFRPG rules, which are essentially a slight modification to an older version of D&D, of course, but I want it to NOT feel really very much like D&D at all. 

Up front, let me be clear what the mechanical baseline is. I like a D&D 3.5 and PFRPG hybrid; mostly D&D 3.5, but using the classes and truncated skill list of PFRPG, plus, if it matters, the CMB/CMD, which is a lot easier than the combat maneuvers of 3.5, where it was a long-running joke that nobody knew how to do grapple, for instance, without stopping and looking it up. I'll also add The Elephant In the Room houserules and E6 as a default, which I won't link to in this post, but which I have many times in the past. That's just default for me using a d20 system these days. What really matters is the next part, which are mostly limitations, i.e., I'm cutting a bunch of stuff out to change specifically the tone, theme and feel of the game. And mostly this means races and classes. I'm not actually sure yet what to do with races, but I'm a huge fan of humano-centrism, and it's entirely possible that I'll only use humans as selectable races. If I do add some others back again, I haven't yet decided what they'll be. Maybe some of the Old Night races can be applied here, or adapted, or maybe not. I'll get to that later. Classes, however, is where the real "magic" happens in changing the game to not feel like D&D even if I'm using what are, essentially, D&D rules. 

And before I talk about the specific classes that I'm OK with using, it's important to note; what is this setting like? It's going to be fantasy, and it's going to be medieval fantasy, but it's not going to really be D&D fantasy. In fact, it's going to specifically lean in to a kind of early pulp, penny dreadful, city mytery, Gothic horror and supernatural sensationalism kind of thing. It's not Victorian, but in some ways, it'll feel more Victorian than D&D-ish. Kind of a hybrid of D&D and Call of Cthulhu, or even Candela Obscura (at least as I understand that game) in tone. So, there'll be adventurous classes, but not overly magical classes.

From the core classes, only the fighter, barbarian and rogue will fly.

From the "base classes", I think I could use the alchemist and vigilante are good fits.

From the "hybrid classes" the brawler, investigator, and slayer are ones I really like. I love the concept of the swashbuckler, but there's actually a better class for it, so I'm not going to expressly disallow it, but I'm going to suggest instead that... well, see below.

I'm not very familiar with them, but if you wanted the Unchained barbarian or rogue, I'd say knock yourself out.

And then, the Occult classes are all on the table. In fact, this is specifically where the "f/x" classes will come from. But, you can't take them at 1st level; however, given that it's E6, you can take the first five levels as character levels 2-6 with an occult class. psychic, spiritualist, medium, occultist, mesmerist, and kineticist. I might reconsider and say you can't take them for your first two levels, but let me read them again more carefully first. On the other hand, all of the occult classes are "half-casters" so probably giving them five levels is fine. Maybe even all six. I'll think on that.

And then from third party stuff, you can use the noble and freebooter from Freeport. 

While I'm not quite ready to assign classes to these characters, here's the iconics that I'll end up developing.

From left to right:

• Beatrice Holloway, a mesmerist who insists that she is not really a mesmerist.
• Ambrose Harrow, gentleman adventurer and monster hunter
• Lady Victoria Nightingale, society lady with an unsettling talent for communicating with the dead
• Silas Blackwood, retired surgeon and occult investigator
• Amelia Vexley, scholar of witchcraft and the occult, publishes anonymously under a pen name
• Gideon Marlowe, disgraced former clergyman and exorcist

Pathfinder Occult

In my Paizo Iconics series, which I would like to finish off this week, I'm smack dab in the middle of the Occult classes, which launched as part of the Occult line in 2015 in the summer (at GenCon, I believe, which is when the first book debuted.) I'm also thinking of pulling these titles ahead and reading them, and even of getting physical copies of at least some of them. The occult titles were launched with Occult Adventures, which is the main system book, followed by Occult Bestiary and Occult Realms in the Pathfinder Setting line, and Occult Origins in the Pathfinder Companion series. Occult Mysteries actually predates the "Occult" subline by over a year, and was a part of the Setting series, but it's hard not to see it as connected via foreshadowing if, for no other reason, because of the title. It also works fairly well in tandem with the later Horror Adventures and Horror Realms books, although technically they are not the same thing and could be used independently. 

I've long thought the idea of replacing regular D&D magic with psionics would make for a fun alternative campaign type; something that felt very different while still using (essentially) the same rules. The way that I've posited that this would work, in a 3.5 environment, is that any class with a spellcasting progression would either be removed entirely (if that was its sole purpose) or modified to replace the spellcasting with something else (appropriate for the ranger and paladin, for example.) Of the core classes from 3.5, that means that you basically only still have the fighter, rogue and barbarian and ... maybe the monk, although I don't like it's Hong Kong theatre mumbo-jumbo very much. Bard, cleric, druid, wizard, sorcerer are all completely off-limits, and the ranger and paladin need to be somewhat reworked according to principles that are found in Complete Warrior I believe. (Or maybe Complete Adventurer. I can't remember anymore.) Or, if you've got a 3pp alt.ranger, of which there were many, that doesn't have any magical abilities or spellcasting, you could of course use that. Instead of all of this magic, you'd use psionics. The psion, psychic warrior, soulknife and wilder from the Expanded Psionic Handbook as well as the ardent, divine mind and lurk from Complete Psionic would replace these classes. They're not necessarily 1:1 replacements, of course, but among the seven psionic classes, you'd be able to accomplish everything that you'd need a more traditional "magical" D&D party to do well enough, but it would just feel very different. 

When 3.5 was updated to PFRPG, of course, the same core races and classes carried through, and EPH was in the SRD, but Complete Psionic was not. Paizo never addressed psionics officially, but they had some kind of partnership with Dreamscarred Press where they made semi-official psionics material for PFRPG in the Ultimate Psionics book (the compiled and revised version of several earlier products) that added ten new classes to the game, including updates from the 3.5 SRD to the four EPH classes, and then six other unique classes that rounded out the roster. You could, using this, do the same thing for PFRPG that I was thinking of doing for D&D. I say thinking of doing; I actually did it once, but nobody ended up taking a "psion" type character; I had a barbarian, a swashbuckler, a fighter/rogue, and two soulknives in that party. And something else, although now I can't remember what the 6th character was, but I think he might have also been a rogue or something similar. 

Paizo did eventually add psychic magic to the official stuff through these Occult books, but psionics and psychics are not really the same thing, and they don't really have the same theme and tone. Whereas Dreamscarred Press' PFRPG psionics, heavily based on the D&D 3.5 psionics, is often compared more to the X-men, Paizo's occult psychic powers are more compared to the psychic occultism of fiction like penny dreadfuls and gothic horror. But, if I could replace magic with psionics and like the result, I obviously would like replacing "regular" magic with "occult" or "psychic" magic and like the result even moreso. Making magic more magical, mysterious and edgy, focusing on mysticism of a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago occultism makes it even more significantly less like D&D than even replacing magic with psionics does, in many respects, but it also makes magic much more like what I'd want it to look like. Keep it relatively low level, (E6) so that the magic doesn't get out of hand, and this would be a fascinating exercise in creative limiting being used to build a very different type of setting, tone and mood out of the same mechanical base. The image above was just a prompt to Nano Banana 2 to create a fantasy ensemble cast of psychic investigators like mediums, psychics, occultists, etc.; i.e., exactly what the Paizo stuff does, and that's what it came back with. That works for me.

So, I've already announced (although done very little with) EMPIRE OF THE MIND WIZARDS to create a subsetting based on psionics, but now I feel like I need another one based on psychic/occult magic.

UPDATE: I tried to get grok to give me an image, and Nano Banana 2. Grok shut me down entirely until this morning, and then gave me something that I didn't really love; way too "fantasy = 5e" vibe. The latter screwed around not following my instructions for one generation after another after another. I finally had to stop asking it to edit it's original one, and just start from scratch every time, and that's where I ended up with the image above, on the third or fourth "from scratch" generation on the same prompt. 

The more I look at that image, though, the more I find that I really like it. I think I'm going to take each of the characters there and turn them into "iconic" seeds. Not fully fleshed out iconic characters, but seeds of iconic characters, and then I'll figure out where to use them. I don't know that I can make them fit in the Old Night setting or not, but maybe I can. And if not, that's OK. I always like world-building, and while I prefer—generally—to stay more focused, having a few other worlds for occasional side show is still fun. And maybe this one would be a minor campaign seed rather than campaign setting; one based on E6 Pathfinder with limited access to character classes, using the "occult magic" to replace entirely the regular "D&D magic" that the game defaults to. I doubt I'll spend tons of time filling out that seed, but we'll see. Maybe it becomes so interesting to me that I end up doing more with it than I think right now that I will.

Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting

It was a little bit of a slow slog, but I finished Paizo's Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting last night. This is a book that was the big 250+ hardcover version of their setting, but written before the PFRPG, so it's D&D 3.5 compatible, and meant as a campaign sourcebook for that. It also repeats a lot of the information from the Gazetteer, which I read not that long ago, although I never read that the first time around, so when I bought and read the Campaign Setting when it was new, I didn't realize that. Of course, I bought this when it was new, which was August 2008. I know for sure that I had it within a couple of months tops of when it was released, so sometimes early Fall 2008. That's now, of course, nearly twenty years ago, and until now, I don't think I'd read it cover to cover again since I first got it. Although I do know that I read portions of it here and there, but it had been many years since I'd picked it up and really looked through it seriously until now. I struggled just a bit because I felt like the material was either two repetitive of what I'd just read, or was too mechanical and not really what I was interested in anymore. That's still mostly, or at least partly, true. 

I had also thought that going through this it would make sense to do my Golarion Remixed project. That's how I did Eberron Remixed, after all, going through the campaign setting book and noting where I'd make changes. I didn't do that, and I don't think that I want to go through the setting book again after just having read it. I'm not sure if that means Golarion Remixed is on hiatus, or if it means that I just do it while flipping through the book to remind myself of what the content is. Mostly the changes are either really big more fairly minor, and for the really big ones, most of them are merely that I'm going to ignore that area. For instance, with Eberron Remixed, there are a lot fewer countries, so for something like Breland, for instance, I could tinker with the details of it. Golarion has a ton more countries, and they're designed so that they're much more modular; each one is almost a campaign setting in its own right with its own theme and tone, i.e., Ustalav is the horror (especially Gothic horror) setting heavily based on a Hammer Horror version of Transylvania translated into fantasy, whereas Varisia is the frontier region, Taldor is the decayed old late Byzantine Empire, Osirion is a resurgent ancient Egypt, etc. For many of the nations, I don't need to really change very much, because they're already fairly well situated as they are. A few others have too strong of a theme, and it needs to be toned down, because it's a little bit ridiculous how monolithic the theme comes across. Much of the "Greater Old Taldor" for instance, where Andoran, Galt and even Cheliax to some degree is a little too on the nose with their themes.

But a bunch of other areas, honestly, I don't know what I'd do with them. The theme doesn't really work for me, and there isn't enough detail to modify it, so I'd essentially just ignore that part of the map, except possibly the physical features and city names, but otherwise treat it as just either white space on the map, or generic fantasy countries, if for whatever reason PCs found themselves there. Which I can't imagine that I would, except possibly in a "passing through" situation, but even then, mostly what it means that I essentially excise that component from my Golarion Remixed, and it simply doesn't exist. Nations like Rahadoum, Thuvia, Druma, Razmiran, probably Hermia and a few others get this treatment. Others like Numeria, Irrisen, Nex, Geb, etc. I don't really have any changes in mind to make to them, but I also don't really have a ton of interest in that setting (or module, if you like) either, so there's no reason to list it and then not actually have any compelling changes to make to them either. In fact, I think that the whole idea that I could remix Golarion the same way I remixed Eberron may not be workable. Given that Golarian is essentially a whole bunch of modular smaller campaign settings hung together in a geography that isn't really relevant in most cases, because few campaigns cross from one "module" to another. If for some reason you want to create a campaign that does cross from one to another, you can modify the geography as needed. If I wanted to put Osirion adjacent to Taldor, for instance, I could, and why not? There's no reason to worry about going around through Qadira, or sailing by Absalom, or whatever. Sure, sure, I could, but there's no reason why I need to. That's the beauty of setting elements that are essentially modular.

Now, me calling them modular might be a little bit controversial. I don't know that Paizo themselves necessarily saw them that way when they created them. They did, after all, put them in a specific geography, and there are at least some adventure paths (although honestly not that many) that cross multiple modules. Heck, even the early Curse of the Crimson Throne technically dips its toe outside of Varisia into the Hold of Belkzen. Strange Aeons starts in Ustalav, but has a long bit of travel through Taldor, into various parts of Qadira and even Katapesh (and, of course, also the Dreamlands and Carcosa.) But those are the exceptions. Given that, maybe my Remix project needs to also be modular. For the Cult of Undeath, I essentially remixed Ustalav with my older Tarush Noptii modular setting element and ended up with Timischburg. While it's not exactly a 1:1 comparison to Ustalav, Timischburg does everything that Ustalav needs to do, at least, and I consider it "effectively" a remix, or at least a setting module that covers all of the same territory. In some respects, the Hill Country, or Humberland as I've started calling it, does something similar with Varisia; it also isn't meant to be a 1:1 comparison, but if you see Barrowmere as similar in many respects to Magnimar and Garenport as similar in many respects to Korvosa, and you can even use Burlharrow if needed as a kind of Sandpoint, then you can do anything in Varisia in Humberland instead without too much fuss. If anything, that remixing might be going the opposite direction; rather than attempting to make my elements match exactly the Paizo element, or whatever, I'm looking at the Paizo element and seeing if there's some part of the module that would make an interesting addition to my own. Do I want a Mushfens, or something similar in Humberland? Well, I've already got the Eltdown Fens, so probably not, but you get the idea. Something more like the Storval Plateau would be maybe a better element to borrow, but with the Tazitta Badlands, I've already got an area that can effectively offer the same kinds of things. I hadn't yet decided if I wanted to try and put my Curse of the Crimson Throne in Humberland, given that I've got a pretty different Grand Duke and Duchess situation compared to Ileosa and her nonsense, but I can either make an alternate version of it where I change the nature of the Grand Duke and his wife, or I set it after the events of Darkness in the Hill Country have already played out, and the both of them are now gone to be replaced with whatever new characters that can play the role of Eodred and Ileosa. Or, of course, since the AP takes place almost completely in the city, I can just set it somewhere else in my own setting, too. I kind of like maybe having it be a city-state on the Corsair Coast... with travel into Porhomok for the out of town stuff, but I'm not necessarily sold on any of these ideas yet. Doing it somewhere maybe a little more unexpected like Lomar or Volek Szemenok would be interesting too.

Actually, the more I think of it, the more I like Lomar. I can work in the Zobnan vs Nyxian culture clash as part of the drama while I'm at it, and maybe the problems with "Ileosa" can actually be the bigger problem that helps resolve that one way or another.

Next up on the Paizo Chronicles trawl is Gods and Magic which is pdf (although I have two physical books in a row on that trawl after that) and next up in physical game book reading is Monster Manual III from the 3.5 era. After kicking around Campaign Setting book for as long as I did, it's nice to move on.

Of course, it also occurs to me that there's no need to read the trawls completely in order. Lacking a compelling reason to pull them out of order, I'd rather not, but I can move stuff around if I have a need or desire to read something down-trawl earlier. I got a physical copy recently of Horror Adventures, which at the rate I'm going, I won't have scheduled to read for many months, but I'll probably read it in October, because .... because October, honestly. While I'm at it, I'd like to read Curse of Strahd and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft in October too. Of those, only Curse of Strahd is actually next in its trawl; the other two won't come up for many months. I especially don't want to read the Paizo Adventure Paths or Stand-Alone modules out of order (the first even more than the latter) but the other trawls I don't care nearly as much. I'll almost certainly also not read the Eberron or FR trawls out of order, and probably not the 5e campaigns. Everything else is subject to my whim, honestly.

Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Paths

I liked the format of what I did for Second Darkness, and thought I ought to go back to do the first two adventure paths of that format before I forget too much about them (way too late for Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tide... although maybe with a good summary of each adventure I could still pull it off...)

Rise of the Runelords was Paizo's first adventure path after being cut loose from Dungeon Magazine and having to go on their own. Maybe for that reason, they went with pretty classic stuff, which is both good and bad. Runelords is generally considered by most to be one of the better adventure paths, and one of the ones remembered most fondly by fans. But, of course, being really "classic" means that sometimes it's not really very interesting, and it does predictable things. But not too badly. It really is a good adventure path, and honestly, I think Paizo stumbled across the right format when they made their own publication. The Dungeon Magazine ones were honestly too long. Savage Tide and Age of Worms, for instance, were 12 modules long and went from 1st to over 20th level. That might have been true for Shackled City, but then again, one or two of those chapters might have been added later when it was compiled into a single volume. I can't remember now. Six chapters, from levels 1-15 or so with each chapter being, admittedly, a bit longer than a Dungeon Magazine module, was the right format. 

In fact, I'd have gone even further, and had it be four chapters of two slightly slower levels each, but that's probably just me. I think most D&D players aspire to higher level, even if they don't actually play it much. I've done it and the experience has taught me that I don't really want to do it again.

Here's a slightly different take on Karzoug, the iconic runelord who iconically rises. I would have actually done another pass at him, but I'm out of images for the day on ChatGPT, and I like this take. I would just have changed the pattern of the gems on his forehead, and said that his topknot is coming out of a mohawk with shaved sides to his head, and his hair isn't that white; more salt and pepper. 

Anyway, what do I think of the various chapters of this AP?

Burnt Offerings: I've actually used the first act of this, combined with another Paizo stand-alone module, for a one-shot. I'm admittedly less interested in the final act; an "assault" on a goblin lair. I admit that it feels very iconically D&D, but not in a good way. It feels tired to me. That said, Sandpoint itself is a great setting, and the first two (of three) acts here are quite good. 

The Skinsaw Murders: This is one of my favorite modules period. I really, really like it, although I admit that I'm a bit less interested in the final act of it too, where you go to town and face a boss beyond the one in the haunted house. Naturally, adapting it to fit into another context other than what they intended you to use it for means that some of it won't make sense, and cutting much of the final act has been my solution. But it's just a great module. 

The Hook Mountain Massacre: This one is OK. Parts of it, again, are pretty good, while the hillbilly ogres kind of rubbed me the wrong way a little bit. The stuff up by the lake and the occupied ranger fort were pretty good for that kind of thing. There are elements of it I'd borrow, but it started veering into territory that I had less interest in, with more traditional D&D feels at times.

Fortress of the Stone Giants: I don't want to say that I kind of checked out on Runelords by this chapter, but I kind of did. By the time they're talking about how characters can travel via fly or teleport, I don't feel like I understand the game anymore, nor is it in the same genre that I really, really enjoyed in the earlier levels. The attack on the town by giants, and how the PCs can handle that was reasonably well done, I suppose, but it wasn't something that I was as interested in anymore, and the attack that the PCs make on the giants' own fortress just felt like a dungeon-crawl.

Sins of the Saviors: This one felt like a place filler; stuff that you needed to do, mostly in a dungeon, to get to high enough level to do the last module. Very little in this one interested me.

Spires of Xin-Shalast: Here, I'm kind of torn. The high altitude mountain survival stuff is really interesting, as is the Lovecraftian stuff at the destroyed city, which sometimes has the feel of a Mountains of Madness city lite. But it's also a relatively high level D&D adventure and dungeon-crawl, with factions in the dungeons to interact with, and a pretty predictable BBEG at the end. I enjoyed reading it well enough; I don't know how much I'd enjoy playing it, and I know I wouldn't enjoy running it. I did play partially through this campaign once years ago, but the GM got burned out and quit near the end of chapter III, so we didn't get to the final chapters. That was the same GM who ran us through all 22-23 levels, or however many it ended up being exactly, of Age of Worms. 

I think that I have certain patterns when it comes to the adventure paths: 1) I don't enjoy higher level play, so I tend to think that the last few chapters require special pleading to be interesting to me. 2) They're still too long, and should probably be cut by at least a third, with slower leveling. Ideally (obviously) I'd have preferred them to be compatible with E6, but I'm not shocked that they're not. 3) Usually around chapter III, IV or V the campaign takes a weird turn, probably on purpose to give it some variety, but it makes the whole section feel a little disjointed and out of place. Making the campaigns smaller would also make them more focused, because there would have been less perceived need to do this. 4) I've long been on record as not really liking dungeon-crawls, and Paizo does tend to include them. Those are usually the parts that I'm most likely to look at trimming out of the campaign.

And those obvious biases impact how I view these adventure paths. Without those biases, Runelords is even better, but for me, it does too many things that I'm less interested in and wish that it didn't. I tend to like the first third or so... maybe almost half of it, and some elements of the finale, and don't care about the big middle section in between them.

The second adventure path, Curse of the Crimson Throne is another very well-regarded one, and considered by many to be one of the best examples of a primarily urban-themed campaign (although not entirely.)

I actually didn't ask ChatGPT to give me all that cleavage. I guess it just assumed that that's what most people want. Which, honestly, is probably true. Otherwise, this is really close to how Paizo also described Queen Ileosa, one of the more complicated and interesting villains. Much more so than Karzoug or Allevrah—or, in most respects, than the even earlier forays with Adimarchus, a Demon Lord of madness (who's sadly not foreshadowed enough), Kyuss, the weird undead demigod or whatever he is, and Demogorgon, the Prince of Demons. Sure, sure, those are iconic villains. But Ileosa is someone you actually see and interact with from the very beginning, and her villainy is perhaps less cosmic and more villainous because of it. None of the adventure paths are perfect, of course, but Crimson Throne is considered one of the best ones for a reason. It was updated to the Pathfinder RPG itself (1e) in a hardback compilation, it was released as an audio drama, an adventure card game, and was even adapted to Savage Pathfinder (although Runelords was all of those things too.) Overall, this one comes highly recommended by me, and I'm actually thinking of how to adapt the whole thing, or at least use it as the backbone of an adaptation, much like how I did with Carrion Crown to Cult of Undeath.

Let's go through it's chapters then, shall we?

Edge of Anarchy: This first adventure is entirely urban, and while it starts off rather small and personal, it gradually gets you involved with the succession crisis and the intrigues and plots of kings and queens and the like. 

Seven Days to the Grave: Now firmly (well, I don't know about firmly) on the throne, Queen Ileosa must deal with her first crises, riots, plague and more! But all is not quite as it seems, and there's lots of skullduggery and intrigue to be had. 

Escape from Old Korvosa: Now, the Queen is clamping down and proving to be a very bad ruler indeed, and the people, represented by the PCs, can't help but notice that something is very wrong, and getting involved in it. These first three adventures are about as good as these kinds of adventures tend to get. They're well-written, thematically very consistent, and just very well done. The crime lord dungeon-crawl is the only part that I'd lose, but otherwise, I feel like this doesn't need a very strong editing hand to just be a good half campaign. Of course, that's when it decides to go do it's weird mid-point tone shift, which most of the adventure paths seem to have to do.

A History of Ashes: Escaping from the city, you have to essentially join a barbarian tribe to get more information from them. While not a bad idea; this is supposed to be an urban campaign, and this and the next chapters feel a little out of place. If you were to cut back on the length of the campaign overall, the information that you find out here could easily just be told to the PCs by someone in town, skipping the need for this adventure entirely.

Skeletons of Scarwall: Now, you have to go do a totally disconnected dungeon-crawl in yet another remote wilderness location so you can get the special MacGuffin sword needed to defeat Ileosa. Again, this could have been somewhere at the end of Old Korvosa, and you could skip this one entirely too.

Crown of Fangs: Now back in town, you find that things have gotten worse, and the the whole city is rising up against the intolerable rule of Ileosa. Not only is there this exciting uprising to manage, but the assault on the Queen herself, while admittedly kind of an exotic dungeon-crawl, is less intolerable than most, and actually kind of interesting. Somehow the whole finale is the most exciting of them I've read so far, because instead of relying on cheap thrills of doing fantasy stuff that's impossible, you do (mostly) things that are believable and grounded, but certainly in a high fantasy setting against an evil queen who's managed to get her ambitious hands on power that is well above her pay grade. 

Now, obviously, I still haven't read most of the adventure paths, but I really like Crimson Throne and suspect that in the end I'll have found it to be one of my favorites. 

Second Darkness Adventure Path

I finished--just a few minutes ago--the final pages of the Second Darkness adventure path, including even reading the Player's Guide before starting, which I'm now doing. (Why not? The pdfs are free, after all.) It's the third adventure path published after Paizo stopped doing Dungeon Magazine, the 6th adventure path in all, and the penultimate 3.5 adventure path. Next, although I'll read something else first, I'm sure, is Legacy of Fire, the last 3.5 adventure path.

While Second Darkness seemed to have elicited some excitement when it was new, because it brings the drow to Golarion, and still is the only major publication to feature them, I believe, it is also not seen as one of the better APs in retrospect, and when I asked ChatGPT to rank the APs, it put Second Darkness in the lowest, C-tier ("heavily flawed") with a summary of jarring mid-campaign tonal shift. That's fair. How about my quick summary of the six parts and the campaign as a whole?

Parts of the adventure path were actually really good. I doubt that any of the adventure paths are perfect; in fact, it seems to be a meme among fans that the 4th or 5th chapter is kind of an odd-ball that doesn't fit very well. Lower level plays out pretty classic, but as you get to higher level (5th and 6th chapters in particular) the characters are in the teens, usually ending at 15-16th level, so they're completely superheroes, and the game doesn't feel like classic fantasy anymore, it feels weird. The Avengers. Luckily Golarion isn't (yet) also the Muppets like 5e is, but it eventually gets there.

Anyway, here's the six parts, and my opinion (briefly) on each.

Shadow in the Sky: This is mostly an adventure of urban scum and villainy, hucksters, gangsters, pirates, were-rats, and the like. The vibe is very similar to Freeport, actually. While I don't really care for the casino employees gig that makes up a big part of it, it's certainly a serviceable urban adventure, and nothing at all is wrong with it. It ends with the reveal of the drow, which is supposed to be a big deal because they hadn't been revealed or described at all in Golarion up to this point. (Ironically, this adventure path was explicitly made "non-canon", I think it an effort to over-protect themselves in the wake of the OGL debacle, where they deliberately took OGL D&D concepts and made them either more generic or more specific to themselves... but no longer part of D&D. Now, it's not even clear that drow canonically exist in Golarion at all.)

Children of the Void: This is my favorite of the adventures; a treasure hunt that turns into a horror adventure of sorts, heavily based on Predator, Aliens, or any other adventure where you're trapped in a constrained space (a small island here) and under constant attack by alien monsters who are trying to turn you into a zombie. In fact, I'm going to explicitly adapt this into one of my two sailing campaigns; either Terror in Timischburg or Curse of the Corsair Coast.

The Armageddon Echo: Now, you're in the elf forest, and as agents of the elf queen, you are going to war against the invading drow in the elf forest. Quite the change from the piratey or criminal start to the campaign in a seedy, dumpy little town, but not a bad adventure, and one of the better "war-themed" adventures that I've read in a long time. Little bit hoaky finale, though. I'm not a fan of demiplanes as a constrained villain hangout.

Endless Night: I did not like this one. Here, you go undercover disguised as a drow into one of the drow households in the Underdark (er... Darklands) drow capitol city. The adventure is incredibly railroady, and the PCs have very little agency by design. Even when they're not being overtly railroaded, they're being deliberately hamstrung and put in a position where they can't do very much except be a spectator to the unfolding plot. I don't think I'd enjoy this one at all, and that's a much more significant flaw than any "tone shift". Getting jerked around by one girlboss NPC after another isn't anyone's idea of fun.

A Memory of Darkness: Another one that I did not like. You're back up on the surface now, going to a hold-out fortress in a demon-haunted section of the elf forest, but it's less of a raid and more of a visit where you're expected to go and talk to a bunch of people. It's also very railroady, and it feels more like you're a spectator rather than a "mover and shaker" in the story. Not only that, the adventure background gives the module very unlikeable context; the PCs are essentially manipulated by the girlboss elf queen, and there's an extremely transparent allegory of her being the feminist progressive "hero" and the whole point of the module is to go either convert or kill the traditionalist conservative elves who are the "villains". The module is all set up for the big reveal that elves who become "too Republican" turn into drow, which again, is supposed to be a big shocking reveal, and the module is set up as if it is, which isn't really a very appropriate way to structure a module, I don't think. I can't imagine running this one, ever. 

Descent Into Midnight: Finally, you go back to a weird section of the Underdark, fight lots of demons and drow at relatively high level, end the campaign. This is serviceable, but not particularly inspiring. The  Land of Black Blood should be cooler than it actually ends up being in practice, I found. It's a good idea that they do too little with.

Anyway, I didn't necessarily expect this to be one of my favorite campaigns. I knew ahead of time that it wasn't one of the more popular ones, and my AI ranking had it at the lowest tier at which it grouped 1e adventure paths. That said, I was pleasantly surprised by the first two chapters, the second one in particular.

Before I start Legacy of Fire I'm probably going to read Out of the Abyss, the 5e campaign that also focuses on the Underdark, drow and demons. It'll be interesting to see the same themes explored differently. 

I also ran another AI query of Google, asking it to rank the adventure paths, but I asked it to rank both 1e and 2e adventure paths. Thought I'd include that here for the heckuvit. Once again, I don't pretend to expect that my own rankings would match these. 

S-Tier: The Gold Standards

Universally praised masterpieces with exceptional writing, cohesive themes, and minimal required GM intervention.

• Curse of the Crimson Throne (1e): The ultimate urban campaign.
• Kingmaker (1e / 2e): The definitive hex-exploration and kingdom-building sandbox.
• Rise of the Runelords (1e): The quintessential high-fantasy Varisian epic.
• Season of Ghosts (2e): A masterclass in localized, atmospheric mystery and emotional storytelling.
• Strength of Thousands (2e): The premier roleplay-forward magical academy and diplomatic campaign.

A-Tier: Excellent & Highly Memorable - Silver Medal

Incredible campaigns that fully deliver on their premises, holding minor flaws or requiring light GM pacing tweaks.

• Tyrant’s Grasp (1e): A grim, high-stakes military survival campaign against the undead apocalypse.
• War for the Crown (1e): A brilliant, courtly intrigue and political espionage campaign.
• Abomination Vaults (2e): The gold standard for modern, multi-level dungeon crawls.
• Hell’s Rebels (1e): An engaging underground urban resistance and rebellion campaign.
• Wrath of the Righteous (1e): An epic mythic crusade against demon hordes (held back only by late-game 1e mythic rules bloat).
• Fists of the Ruby Phoenix (2e): A high-octane, cinematic martial arts tournament arc.
• Iron Gods (1e): Splicing sci-fi technology and crashed starships into traditional fantasy.
• Strange Aeons (1e): The definitive cosmic horror and amnesia-driven campaign.

B-Tier: Good Campaigns with Small Caveats - Bronze Medal

Fun, deeply thematic adventures that stumble slightly due to subsystem weight, repetitive encounters, or disconnected acts.

• Blood Lords (2e): Climbing the ranks of an undead-run magocracy; suffers slightly from enemy damage-type repetition.
• Skull & Shackles (1e): A phenomenal pirate simulator hampered by tedious ship combat mechanics.
• Stolen Fate (2e): A sprawling, globe-trotting scavenger hunt using the Deck of Many Things.
• Carrion Crown (1e): Classic gothic horror monster-of-the-week, though books feel narratively disjointed.
• Quest for the Frozen Flame (2e): Immersive prehistoric nomadic survival; wraps up its final act too quickly.
• Legacy of Fire (1e): Genies, desert exploration, and Arabian Nights tropes.
• Reign of Winter (1e): A wild reality-hopping portal-fantasy (including WWI Earth) with polarizing tone shifts.
• Return of the Runelords (1e): High-level fan service tying together decades of lore; best reserved for veterans.
• Hell’s Vengeance (1e): The rare "play as the evil empire agents" campaign; requires a specific table dynamic.
• Ironfang Invasion (1e): Gritty guerrilla warfare against an invading hobgoblin army.
• Recent 2e Additions (Wardens of Wildwood, Curtain Call, Triumph of the Tusk, Seven Dooms for Sandpoint): Solid, well-received modern adventures that generally provide targeted, fun genre experiences.

C-Tier: Flawed but Workable - Copper

Fascinating core concepts dragged down by pacing issues, lethal early-edition math spikes, or structural disconnects.

• Age of Ashes (2e): Plagued by early-2e difficulty spikes and a disjointed "world tour" plot.
• Agents of Edgewatch (2e): Great urban encounters marred by tonal whiplash and punishing tactical lethality.
• Mummy’s Mask (1e): Incredible Egyptian tomb exploration, but suffers from massive dungeon burnout by Book 4.
• Outlaws of Alkenstar (2e): Incredible steampunk bank-heist opening that derails into an uninspired wilderness trek in Book 2.
• Shattered Star (1e): A straightforward, nostalgia-driven dungeon-delving fetch quest.
• Giantslayer (1e): A long, combat-heavy martial slog fighting giant variants.
• Ruins of Azlant (1e): Island colonization hampered by clunky underwater combat rules.
• Jade Regent (1e): A legendary caravan trek across the north, ruined by terrible caravan subsystems and NPC spotlight-stealing.
• Gatewalkers (2e) & Sky King's Tomb (2e): Compelling paranormal/dwarven hooks that suffer from disjointed chapter pacing and missing maps.

D-Tier: The Fixer-Uppers - Feet of Clay

The weakest links structurally. Playing these successfully requires the GM to fundamentally rewrite portions of the plot or mechanics.

• Extinction Curse (2e): Famous for introducing a circus theme and then entirely abandoning it after Book 1 for a standard subterranean lizardfolk crawl.
• Second Darkness (1e): Starts as a clever casino/crime syndicate intrigue before abruptly shifting into a generic Underdark drow war.
• Serpent’s Skull (1e): Features an iconic Chapter 1 shipwreck survival sandbox, followed by five books of tedious jungle slogging and an empty faction mega-dungeon.
• Council of Thieves (1e): Lacks focus outside of one famously brilliant, interactive theatrical play in Book 2.

Carrion Crown

I've been listening to a Carrion Crown actual play podcast. Thought I'd add some "album covers" to the mp3 files just to give it some visual interest while I'm listening. Here is what I used. 

Pathfinder 1e and D&D 3.53 hybrid houserules update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D&D additional research (Oriental Adventures)

I'm writing this from the (un)lovely destination city of Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. Yes, I'm aware of the irony of the name. Needless to say, work has continued to interfere drastically with my personal life. I'm going to be here through Monday quite late. There's a decent chance I'll take Tuesday off, just because I'm going to be exhausted after all of that. Anyway, my gaming prospects have been terrible the last few months, and my blogging and vlogging prospects aren't even good. I was reminded last night that I was into SWTOR again briefly before this work crap started happening, as well as a ton of personal crap, and I just have not had a personal life at all for at least four months now, and maybe more. Depending on how you count it, up to 8 months, although it wasn't non-stop through all of that. I'm feeling really burned out on the job right now, and not at all charitable towards it or my local leadership in particular. 

Be that as it may, being stuck in a dumpy, hot, industrial Mexican desert town without a car means that even when I am free from the excruciating work drama that I have to deal with, I don't have much else to do other than go out to eat, and even then, only to places that I can reach on foot. I anticipate spending a fair number of hours this coming weekend in my hotel room with the books that I brought, for instance. I brought a novel that I'd like to finish; I'm about 60% through it and the pagecount is a modest low 300s, if I remember, Prisoner of the Horned Helmet, probably most famous for sporting a great Frank Frazetta image of the Death Dealer character with his ax raised chopping a bunch of zombies or ghouls or something. It's actually my personal favorite Death Bringer image, even moreso than the original more famous one. It's part of a series of four novels all featuring the same character, and all featuring different cover arts by Frazetta, but none of them the original iconic Death Dealer image. Author is James Silke. It's worth checking out. Pretty fun stuff.

I also brought the Golarion setting book, back from the Chronicles line, before Pathfinder 1e had even launched. I haven't started that one yet, though. Instead, I started the 3e Oriental Adventures book. It was curious; in the introduction, it said that the original Oriental Adventures book had come out sixteen years previously, which seemed like a long time when this newer one came out. But it's been twenty five years since this one came out; quite a bit longer than the gap between the first and second versions.

I seriously doubt that there will be another one. The worst people in gaming have decided that even making an Oriental Adventures book is racist. This is absurd, author of the 3e version James Wyatt is clearly a huge fanboy of both Japanese stuff, anime, manga, etc. and Chinese history and probably fantasy cinema, and has translated that love for the culture into the product. He wasn't racist, and the fact that the whole idea is being treated as racist is exactly a clear demonstration of why "racism" is nothing more than a hoax, shakedown racket, and attempt to bully white people. Oriental people can call Americans racist for "appropriating" their culture exactly when they stop 1) wearing western clothing, 2) posting from a computer, 3) in English, 4) from America. Until then, they're liars, bad faith con artists, hypocrites and scumbags. What's almost worse is the white guys who pile on. This comment is linked in the Wikipedia article on the book:  "Although Gary Gygax envisioned a campaign setting that brought a multicultural dimension to Dungeons & Dragons, the reality is that by lumping together Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Philippine, and 'Southeast Asian' lore he and co-authors David 'Zeb' Cook and Francois Marcela-Froideval actually developed a campaign setting that reinforced western culture's already racist understanding of the 'Orient.'"

ORLY? So, lumping together Chinese, Japanese, Dirty Knees and Look at These is racist, but it's totally OK to lump together ancient Rome, the Franks, the Vikings, the Celts, Medieval Merry Olde England, and anything else vaguely "Occidental?" Only Orientalism is racist? That's exactly the kind of incoherent and dishonest nonsense that this kind of fake, virtue-signaling criticism amounts to. As I said, racism is a hoax, shakedown racket, and reasonably successful (to date, but not for long) bullying tactic against white people. Nothing more. Only the spiteful, envious, hateful and dysfunctional can call you racist with a straight face, with the exception of either the con artists themselves, or the suckered victims of the con.

WotC apparently now think's it's OK to do something like Radiant Citadel, but only if you have "ethnic" authors working on it. No idea if they only think it's OK if ethnic players play it or not, but in spite of all of their propaganda to the opposite, by far the vast majority of players remain, and always will be, white males. The myth that Millennial D&D players are a vast multi-ethnic, sexually ambiguous sludge is just a myth. I'm sure it's more true than it was in the 80s, but it's not nearly as true as we're led to believe. Every poll, every survey, every look at convention attendance, i.e., every proxy except WotC's own carefully curated and not-to-be-trusted data makes this quite clear, even if they have to all be seen as proxies for the data rather than simply "the data."

In D&D and closely related D&D adjacent games (i.e., Pathfinder, which is a slightly house-ruled version of d20 D&D) there are basically three main Oriental adventures (lower case) settings. Kara-tur is the setting for the 1e AD&D Oriental adventures, and it was originally meant to be stand alone, although there were vague hints of it maybe being part of Oerik (Greyhawk.) That never really materialized, and by the time it was actually made explicit, it had been removed to Forgotten Realms, where many people assume that it's always been. This is largely because it had very little development prior to the boxed set in 1988 that was explicitly a FR product. I suppose in that sense, it's fair to call it a Forgotten Realms sub-setting; although not originally envisioned as such, in reality it never got any serious development until it "joined" the Forgotten Realms. But as the historical note on this product says, it actually didn't really "agree" with the FR; it was just bolted on because it was commercially easier to do so.

Fans of the Forgotten Realms may be surprised to learn that the world didn't originally use real-world cultures as the inspiration for its countries. One of Ed Greenwood's long-time players says that his setting was inspired by "Cities and farming regions he'd visited, yes, and the 'flavours' of them he wanted to evoke, but real-world countries or peoples or cultures no."

This changed when other authors began adding their own settings to Greenwood's world, because unlike Greenwood they often used real-world cultures as a touchstone. Technically, this practice started with the Celtic-influenced culture of the Moonshae Islands, but Kara-Tur was the first big expansion in this direction. Greenwood also notes that the real-world correlations extend beyond the major additions to the world to also include "recastings of my largely-offstage kingdoms like Unther and Mulhorand to more closely resemble real-world historical (or 'Hollywood historical') settings."

Greenwood disagrees with the results, saying that "the too-close-to-our-real-world additions like Maztica, the Hordelands, and Kara-Tur were a mistake in style". He thought that they "[pulled] gamers out of roleplaying into disputes about historical details, for one thing".

Seeing the various Oriental adventures products as "Hollywood Orient" is entirely appropriate, and actually kind of cool. I think that the more it tried to show off how multicultural the author was by adding esoteric details that normal people didn't normally care much about, the weaker the products got, honestly. In any case, in spite of it's tenuous and belated connection to Forgotten Realms, Kara-tur is probably best seen as its own setting in its own right, and the connection can only be invoked if you really want to for some reason.

The 3e Oriental adventures used Rokugan as its featured campaign setting. Rokugan was actually created by a completely different company, Alderac Entertainment Group, but WotC bought and relatively briefly owned the game, licensing the ability to make products for it back to AEG. Because Oriental Adventures 3e came out during the relatively brief window in which WotC owned the IP, they used it as the new default sample setting for the game, without any presupposed connections to Greyhawk, FR, or anything else. AEG also published their own d20 version of the setting. Which I bought used and for relatively cheap many years ago in the mid 00s, but I have never read very much of (which is why I pulled this ahead in my reading schedule; I feel like I should re-read Oriental Adventures before reading Rokugan.) It's not part of my WotC read-through, but as a prominent 3pp product during the heyday of d20 publishing, it counts more or less. If Kara-Tur was mostly Medieval Japan, but in a Chinese like geography, Rokugan was even moreso. While I'm always happy to borrow from anything, I felt like the smug "look at me and my multicultural knowledge" vibe from Rokugan as a campaign setting was always kind of off-putting, and I never loved it or had much interest in using it as is; merely in borrowing from it. That said, the 3e Oriental Adventures book had plenty of material that was explicitly disallowed from Rokugan, so it was only meant to be a sample setting, not the sum total of what you'd do with the book.

Pathfinder, of course, has Dragon Empires, or the Tian Xia continent, which is its own version of Oriental Adventures. Like every region of Golarion, they're all connected and explicitly on the same world, but they're also meant to be used much more modularly, with each setting allowing for exploration of particular themes or aesthetics and not really meant to cross over into a different campaign set in a different region. The Dragon Empires Gazetteer is the first real setting book, written by three white guys, and it was followed up in 2e with the Tian Xia World Guide and Tian Xia Character Guide written by about three dozen ethnic ambiguous people. I'm not even kidding. Look up the credits for it. I might be understating; I didn't bother counting.

Anyway, I don't care nearly as much about 2e; 1e was already overly woke for my tastes, but the Dragon Empires clearly draw from the same well as Kara-Tur and Rokugan in being "Hollywood fantasy Asia". If you're into that kind of thing, and there always are a few nerdy people with a real Yellow Fever problem, then they're pretty good settings, I suppose, but again, I'm probably more interested in looting them of interesting elements for a more western Medieval fantasy inspired setting. And some of the races, classes, and monsters (often with a more Occidental name) are pretty cool as is. I'll note that the 3e Oriental Adventures never really got a real upgrade to 3.5. There was a Dragon Magazine article that officially did so, although not completely, and then a lot of the classes and whatnot ended up popping up in other supplements. The wu jen alternate Oriental "wizard", for example, appeared in Complete Arcane. Shugenja and (kinda) the shaman were in Complete Divine, ninja in Complete Adventurer and samurai in Complete Warrior. Most of the races and classes got either direct ports into Pathfinder 1e, or close analogs as well. Plenty of the monsters showed up here and there as well, in addition to the spells.

I'll be honest with you, though, if you wanted an exotic alt.D&D, I think building it around the Expanded Psionics Handbook and Complete Psionic replacing all magic, and the races from the XPH, would have been more interesting than building it around Asia. Even if maybe you used some Asian influence here and there with it. Maybe even starting with something like Eberron's Sarlona, but getting rid of the oppressive empire which actually makes adventuring much harder, and adding a bit more weird wahoo from the XPH is a more interesting "Oriental adventures", to me at least, than any of the actual Oriental adventures.

D&D 3.5 vs Pathfinder 1e

As I've been re-reading a ton of 3.5 books, and reading a lot of Pathfinder 1e books for the first time (the rulebooks, I mean. Adventures and setting stuff I was more familiar with) I'm again forced to the conclusion that Pathfinder 1e isn't necessarily better than D&D 3.5, nor was it really necessary. It did some things better, and some things not as well. This is leaving me wondering if my "preferred" D&D-like rules would actually be a hybrid of Pathfinder, 3.5 and a few ideas from Trailblazer. I'm revisiting some of the posts I was making in 2009/10 when both were still relatively new, and I think that I still agree with it.

Pathfinder changed stuff that didn't need to be changed. What are the changes that I actually think are improvements vs changes that I don't care about or even worse, don't even want? I'm including an old 3e era Wayne Reynolds Dragon Magazine cover of a rogue, just because rogue was one class that needed some extra help, in my opinion. The Trailblazer rules clearly "priced" it as one of the most poorly balanced on the short-shrift side of all of the core classes. 

(I never did get around to costing a bunch of other classes from the Complete books, after saying that I suspected that they would come out even lower in value than the lowest ones Trailblazer costed, using the Trailblazer costing formula. I still actually want to do that, even though it's been more than fifteen years since I thought of doing it. Just for funsies.)

Let me, as I love to do, make a bulleted list. For all of these, even if house-ruling 3.5 rather than adapting Pathfinder, I would want to adapt these changes.

• CMB/CMD: Combat maneuvers were kind of a mess in 3.5. It was a joke that nobody ever remembered how to do grapple correctly, but bull rush, trip, and all kinds of other things were equally cumbrous. Simplifying all of these maneuvers to two statistics, Combat Maneuver Bonus and Combat Maneuver Defense and have them all work more or less the same was a much needed simplification. This, indeed, may have been Pathfinder's best initial contribution to the d20 system, at least when it first launched. It later added more things that are arguably even better, but we'll get to those later. 
• Skill Consolidation: Trailblazer did this too, as did Star Wars SAGA Edition and various other late d20 games, but I think Pathfinder's skill consolidation was probably the best one. But not by much. All of these games independently did more or less the same thing.
• Archetypes: Archetypes aren't really unique to Pathfinder. They were an expansion and formalization of rules that appeared in the PHB2 during 3.5. However, they became the gold standard in character customization. In fact, they became so good that they completely made prestige classes obsolete, which I don't think anyone anticipated at the time. 
• Classes: I wouldn't necessarily have said this early on in Pathfinder's run, but after I've got the entire spread before me, I think ignoring the 3.5 classes and just using Pathfinder classes is fine by me. They are more powerful compared to 3.5 classes, which is the main reason I advocate for using all of them instead of cherry-picking. Frankly, even without archetypes, most of the classes are built to be more flexible and have longer, more a la carte lists of abilities to choose from. This is even true for the psionic classes, but let's be honest; the only psionic class that I ever really loved was the soulknife, and if worse comes to worst, you can get that from the 3pp Ultimate Psionics book. Of course, this comes with my caveats already spelled out; I'm using E6, and you can't take any fullcaster option until 2nd level, and monk and bard are just banned because I like those classes. If you like the idea of either the monk or the bard, you can get there without using the class; brawler is more what I'd want a monk to look like, and the Freeport noble with some minor magic and jacked up perform skill is more like what I'd want a bard to look like. I'm on the fence about the paladin too, especially given that it's so tied to alignment, which I have no interest in. The Cavalier is probably a little bit more what I'd want a "paladin" to look like, if we really have to have some kind of semi-supernatural Mallory-style Arthurian knight. I'm less convinced that I want Arthurian anything anymore, honestly.
• Probably should have put classes first, since Archetypes are a corollary to them. I don't have an opinion on feats or spells. I don't know if they're different between 3.5 and Pathfinder other than some fixes here and there of the ones that probably don't really work. I don't care where you get your feat and spell descriptions.
• A second corollary there; I don't really go in for tools like Hero Lab or whatever. Print off a pdf blank sheet and make your character by hand with the books and a pencil. You'll have to because this is a gallimaufry of a system anyway, but I've found that I understand systems where I make my character by hand, and I don't really where I make my character with a tool. Although 5e is supposed to be simpler than d20 games, I understand d20 games intimately (or at least I did; I haven't played any of them in a good ten years now) while I just stumble through 5e as if it were d20, even though I've been playing it for over a year. Anyway, given the skill list and CMB/CMD, printing off a Pathfinder 1e sheet is probably better than printing off a 3.5 sheet, where you'd have to cross stuff off and otherwise do weird things to make it fit.
• Races: Speaking of races, I need to double check my stats. I had old d20 house rules back in the day, but I haven't looked at them in a long time. I suspect that they need a little work. Hold tight on this one for now. TBD.
• Abilities: Standard ability score generation. 4d6 six times. Drop the lowest die from each of the 4d6 rolls, so it's essentially a MAX 3d6 out of a 4d6 roll. Ideally, I'd settle on a more predictable point buy, but the reality is that I like rolling dice for abilities. It seems wrong not to. Maybe the heroic 2d6+6 six times would be better, or even 4d6 seven times so not only do you get rid of the lowest roll of the 4d6, but you throw out the lowest score altogether. While I like rolling, I find that having crappy ability scores really stinks. I'm kind of schizophrenic on this particular question.
• XP: I've never been a fan of factoring XP, although mostly because it feels like accounting rather than gaming. If I actually use XP as opposed to "milestone" leveling, I'll create handwavey XP awards rather than calculating them as the rules indicate that I "should."

On the other hand, I think most of the rest of the system, I'd rather use 3.5. 3.5 races. 3.5 combat, where they differ, etc. I'm actually not really a fan of the Pathfinder races and the way that they're written, even though in my current readthrough I've really only closely reviewed the core book races so far. I'm also not a fan of the power creep that they represent. And I'm not a fan of additional power creep with traits; especially when they recommend taking two of them! If they're supposed to be equivalent to a half-feat, why would they automatically give characters a free feat? The "mixed blessing" traits of Unearthed Arcana are a much better design, honestly, although they should be seen as optional, not as expected. 

I do need to re-read Trailblazer again, and compare it to what I'm reading in Pathfinder Core Rulebook, as well as do the class math that TB allows for to make sure that I've got them balanced. Or at least according to that formula; no guarantee that Trailblazer's balance formula is completely correct. Still, it's better than any alternative.

As much as I was excited a week or two about pursuing d20 again, I'm finding as I dig into it more and more that I prefer my own native rules lite kinda sorta OSR adjacent system better after all. Which I knew, but now I really know it, if that makes sense. Heck, maybe if going through this exercise only real result is that decide how much I prefer my own system, that's worth doing.

I do really like classes, though. The Pathfinder 1e classes tend to just excite me in their own right. 

Reading update and Greater Taldor Remixed

Quick reading update... what I tend to post the most lately, sadly. I finished the slim Pathfinder Companion book Taldor, Echoes of Glory, which I bought in physical form when it was new. I actually have the next two Pathfinder Companion books in physical form which I bought when they were new, Qadira, Gateway to the East, and Cheliax, Empire of Devils. While I know that the themes of a lot of these lands are the whole point, I feel like one of the problems with Golarion as a setting (and one of the main reasons for my Golarion Remixed project, when I get around to making the next update for it) is that the themes are actually too strong; they feel one note and almost caricaturish. Some of them need to be strong; Varisia as a frontier, for instance, or Ustalav as the horror area, Osirion as fantasy Egypt, etc. but I feel like the following themes are borderline ridiculous, and I don't mch like them: 1) Taldor as old-fashioned monarchy characterized by sad, pitiful decline, 2) Cheliax as taken over by devil-worship, 3) Galt as the never-ending French Revolution, and 4) Andoran as crusading Marxist abolitionists and anti-monarchists. Heck, a third of the counties of Ustalav have an anti-nobility bourgeois hierarchy and have the Galt and Andoran themes already built in without it being so over-the-top that it's a joke. 

So clearly that's going to be a major portion of my remix project, to make these elements, to the extent that I end up using them anyway, make more sense, feel more real, and less like a cartoonish caricature. I've kind of hinted at these points before, but let me make them more explicit here in this post. Let me do it dot points style:

• 
  All of the areas that have formerly been part of Greater Taldor and/or Greater Cheliax remain in loose association with Taldor still as a kind of confederacy of sorts; somewhere between Scotland's relationship with England and Canada's relationship with England. They all consider themselves culturally part of Taldor to a greater or lesser degree, and consider each other as allies in times of need, but otherwise operate pretty independently. But, because they all come from the same cultural and legal tradition, their governments and legal backgrounds are more similar than different.
• What is today Taldor and Cheliax remain the anchors of the agreement, and rivalry between Egorian and Oppara remain high, as each jockeys to be the more prominent or prestigious partner. Oppara is more hands-off, preferring the laissez-faire association that currently exists, while Egorian would prefer to centralize and federalize more... in exchange for greater tribute, of course. 
• Andoran is the among the silliest of nations in Golarion as written. Making it a large, prosperous area that operates independently under a Senate of sorts, mimicking the Senate of Taldor (and Rome, for that matter) with Codwin I as, instead of a former Marxist or Jacobin style leader, is a hands-off noble who, due to generations of legal bindings, couldn't have a very active role even if he wanted to. I see him as not terribly unlike King Charles, except if Canada had a separate king. Andoran Remixed was never part of Cheliax, but based on geography, is of course, between Taldor and Cheliax, and frequently serves as a go-between smack dab in the middle of the two rivals. Because of its own strong military and mercantile resources, it's one of the more powerful voices in Greater Taldor, and doesn't feel the need to curry favor with either, and they are in many ways becoming a third pole on the rivalry; only mitigated by the fact that Almas isn't interested in pursuing influence at the expense of Oppara or Egorian.
• Molthune, Nirmathas, Lastwall and Galt are all quieter frontier areas, if you want to call them that, and some of the silliness like Galt's never-ending revolution are to be greatly toned down. The conflict between Nirmathas and Molthune is also going to be less like open warfare and more of an internal issue like The Troubles. These are supported by troops from Taldor, Andoran and Cheliax as needed, but only against outside enemies, not against each other.
• More far-flung colonies, nations or others that have some ethnic Taldoran influence include Sargava, Ustalav, Korvasa, Magnimar, Absalom and others, and while not part of Greater Taldor per se, they are kind of like "junior members" in a mostly symbolic way with Greater Taldor. 
• Cheliax's House Thrune may well be devil worshippers, but not openly, if so. That's more of a conspiracy theory than something confirmed and open, and may well be based on the basalt Gothic architecture style as much as anything else. No doubt there are really bad people in House Thrune, but it's arguable that they are worse than any other noble house in any other nation, necessarily. 

Other than that, I'll probably defer on assigning any specific remix changes until I either get to a setting product that details those countries in more detail, or an adventure path or module that requires me to detail any of it. Honestly, I don't intend to set a lot of stuff in Greater Taldor necessarily, but some of the adventure paths I know for sure take place in Cheliax and/or Taldor. 

• Even Curse of the Crimson Throne is tangentially related, given Queen Ileosa's background as a minor Chelaxian noblewoman, although if I adapt this, any references to Greater Taldor are probably moot.
• Council of Thieves takes place in Cheliax. 
• Serpent's Skull takes place in Sargava, but if I remember correctly, nothing really needs to be changed.The Vidrian Revolution I have absolutely no interest in, but it doesn't feature in any APs or even modules that I can see; it all happened in the background in the update to the setting between 1e and 2e. Most of those updates, honestly, I'm not really in favor of.
• Carrion Crown is in Ustalav, but given that that was even once (briefly) a part of Greater Taldor prior to the Whispering Tyrants's first rule, and that Lastwall was founded specifically by Taldor to fight him, there may possibly be some Taldoran influence here and there to address.
• Hell's Rebels and Hell's Vengeance are both set in Cheliax and strongly feature the devil-worshipping theme of House Thrune. I'll probably need to rework these at a root level to use them in my remixed setting.
• Strange Aeons features a section that travels through Taldor, but I don't think too much of it needs to change.
• Ironfang Invasion features the actual invasion by monsters of a protected member of Greater Taldor, so it may well require some significant reworking in the remixed version too. Again, assuming I have any desire to ever run this anyway.
• War for the Crown is the iconic political thriller AP in Taldor. Of course, it, along with most of the Paizo Golarian as written stuff, is all about installing a progressive grrlboss as the new leader. But it can probably be used even if I change that. The AP, I understand it, is full of all kinds of high magic. Two candidates to the throne are resurrected after being killed, for instance. I'll probably have to change more than just turning Eutropia (or her role, anyway) into a man.
• Tyrant's Grasp is about the fall of Lastwall, and therefore impacts Greater Taldor. Then again, I'm not sure that I'm a huge fan of the meta-story changes in some of these APs as a concept. The reality is that I'd be very unlikely to run them, even as heavily redacted and changed as I do. More likely, I'll simply borrow material from them but in a different context.

A lot of the backstory of these nations is related to their religion, particularly that of Aroden, which was the patron god of Taldor and it's spin-offs, and who's death was a seminal moment in the theme of the whole setting. Given that I don't intend to use Pathfinder's religions, but substitute my own, that also will have an impact on the details of the setting. But my PANTHEON tag isn't quite ready for a major update quite yet.

APs and Campaigns Ranked by AI

Google's Gemini, or whatever their AI is that answers your search before they actually show you links, ranked the Pathfinder 1e adventure paths for me. I asked it to expand it's initial summary to include the full list, but I didn't check if it actually got everything or if it missed one. AI isn't actually as good as it should be at catching everything, which should, of course, be its strong suit.

Commentary came with the AI rankings. It's not mine. 

Tier 1: The Masterpieces (S-Tier)

• Curse of the Crimson Throne: Ultimate urban intrigue campaign.
• Hell's Rebels: Masterful political rebellion sandbox.
• Kingmaker: Definitive kingdom-building open world.
• Rise of the Runelords: Classic foundational heroic fantasy.

Tier 2: High-Quality Favorites (A-Tier)

• Iron Gods: Thrilling high-tech science-fantasy blend.
• Ironfang Invasion: Gritty guerrilla warfare and survival.
• Mummy's Mask: Traditional Egyptian-themed tomb exploration.
• Skull & Shackles: High-seas pirate sandbox adventure.
• Strange Aeons: Atmospheric Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
• War for the Crown: Intricate high-stakes political espionage.
• Wrath of the Righteous: Epic mythic-power demonic warfare.

Tier 3: Solid But Niche (B-Tier)

• Carrion Crown: Gothic horror anthology style.
• Legacy of Fire: Classic Arabian Nights genie tale.
• Reign of Winter: Whimsical plane-hopping folklore journey.
• Return of the Runelords: High-level epic trilogy conclusion.
• Ruins of Azlant: Fascinating underwater colony survival.
• Shattered Star: Direct old-school dungeon crawl.
• Tyrant's Grasp: Grim apocalyptic survival finale.

Tier 4: Heavily Flawed (C-Tier)

• Council of Thieves: Disjointed city-based organized crime.
• Giantslayer: Repetitive and exhausting giant combat.
• Hell's Vengeance: Highly restrictive evil-aligned campaign.
• Jade Regent: Frustrating caravan mechanics subsystem.
• Second Darkness: Jarring mid-campaign tonal shift.
• Serpent's Skull: Disappointing lost-continent jungle exploration.

Now, I don't pretend to be a fan of the same things as the mainstream. Seeing Carrion Crown down at B-Tier when I think it's probably the best one in many ways was weird. Why is it niche? It has the same themes as Curse of Strahd, which is largely seen as the best 5e campaign. Seeing Strange Aeons as A-Tier, when I didn't even think it was as good as Carrion Crown (although maybe I had higher expectations of it too) was weird. And I had the impression that Council of Thieves was relatively well received, but I guess not. Given that all that this AI answer is is scraping reddit posts and whatnot.

Anyway, for funsies, I did the 5e campaigns too, including the modular ones, which Gemini wanted to exclude at first.

S-Tier: The Masterpieces

• Curse of Strahd: Unmatched gothic horror sandbox.
• Lost Mine of Phandelver: The gold standard of entry-level D&D campaign design.
• Tomb of Annihilation: The pinnacle of 5e hex-crawl survival and lethal dungeon design.

A-Tier: Great & Highly Popular

• Keys from the Golden Vault: Widely praised as one of the best overall anthologies. It provides heist-focused standalone missions that are phenomenally easy to run and incredibly player-driven.
• Waterdeep: Dragon Heist: Exceptional urban roleplay and sandbox element mechanics.
• Candlekeep Mysteries: A library-themed collection focused on episodic investigations. Universally loved by DMs for its versatile, "plug-and-play" formatting.
• Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden: A gritty, isolationist sandbox praised for localized survival dread.
• The Wild Beyond the Witchlight: Whimsical feywild adventure celebrated for its brilliant pacifist run options.
• Storm King’s Thunder: A sprawling giant-slaying sandbox that captures classic grand-scale fantasy.

B-Tier: Good with Caveats

• Ghosts of Saltmarsh: Nautical-themed compilation mixing classic modules with robust seafaring rules. The town itself functions well as a campaign hub, though the maritime chapters require work to link up smoothly.
• Tales from the Yawning Portal: Recreates legendary, lethal old-school dungeons like "The Sunless Citadel" and "Tomb of Horrors." Great for tactical hack-and-slash tables but totally barren of connective narrative narrative tissue.
• Quests from the Infinite Staircase: A collection of updated classic 1e/2e modules. Highly creative sci-fi/fantasy concepts, though it relies heavily on the DM to fill in structural gaps.
• Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus: Spectacular Mad Max hellscape with an opening chapter that feels detached.
• Dragon of Icespire Peak: Reliable quest-board-style layout that works cleanly but lacks a grand plot spine.
• Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep: Compelling narrative backed by great rival NPC mechanics, tuned specifically for Exandria fans.
• Out of the Abyss: Brilliant Underdark survival escape that loses momentum in its clunky political second half.

C-Tier: Flawed or Niche Appeal

• Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel: Culturally rich, vibrant settings packed with imaginative standalone lore. Panned slightly by community rankings due to highly inconsistent adventure scaling and balancing issues.
• Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage: An immense, deep megadungeon built for combat tacticians that leaves roleplayers wanting more.
• Princes of the Apocalypse: An elemental dungeon crawl that drags under confusing sandbox pacing.
• Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk: Shifts a beloved classic into late-game cosmic horror dungeons that feel tonally jarring.
• Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen: A rigid, rail-thin military campaign targeted mostly toward setting purists.

D/F-Tier: Structural Messes

• Tyranny of Dragons (Hoard / Rise): Written before core system rules were locked, plagued by railroad structure and severe math imbalances.
• Spelljammer: Light of Xaryxis: Community-panned for a brief, linear runtime and a tragic lack of robust ship-to-ship combat.
• Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos: Tries to build a magic university school simulator but lacks compelling structural mechanics, leaving the DM to track a dizzying calendar of events.

Once again, I strongly suspect that if I were to tier these, my results would be significantly different. But reading these summaries at least gives me an expectation of what the campaigns are going to be like and about. I find that minor spoilers like this are less important to me than having expectations that aren't met, i.e., if I think a campaign should be a certain thing, or I expect it to be a certain thing and I'm not aligned with the designers, I'm more likely to dislike it than if I understand what they're trying to do and how the community thinks that they did. A lot of the problems that the community will bring out, like math problems with Tyranny of Dragons, literally won't be noticed by me at all, both because I read the campaign and I'm playing in it, but I will never and would never run it. Also, the "culturally rich, vibrant settings packed with imaginative standalone lore" of Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is much more likely to come across as obnoxious woke garbage to me. We'll see when I get there, I suppose. 

At this rate, sometime in 2030. Sigh. Also, check out that AI image, which I found online, not generated myself (I was out of images.) The tiefling girls tail comes out of the side of her hip. Sigh again.