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.

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.

What would I play, PF1e edition

I added a new tag; WHAT WOULD I PLAY? where I noodle for a post about potential character concepts that I'd like to play. These aren't necessarily for any specific campaigns, I just look at character concepts in rulesets that I'm familiar with and have characters that I think are potentially interesting concepts that I'd like to play, if I get a chance. I'll probably do two per, but I don't know how often I'll come back to this series.

Many of these concepts are ones that could be readily adapted to other rulesets, but I'm looking specifically today at some classes and archetypes in Pathfinder 1e that I'd like to play. All of these would, most likely, be human males. Pathfinder 1e is, of course, very similar to D&D 3.5. I actually think either of these three character concepts that I'm looking at today could be used in 3.5 as is, just adjusting for the slightly consolidated skill list for Pathfinder 1e vs 3.5 (Listen and Spot combined into Perception, Move Silently and Hide consolidated into Stealth, Jump, Tumble and Balance combined into Acrobatics, etc.) Of course, I'd otherwise see them as perfect characters for a PF1e adventure path character, and if I could find adaptions, I'd love to see these in 5e, with the archetypes maybe converted into subclasses. I don't understand 5e as well as I do 3e and Pathfinder 1e, so I'll leave that to someone else, however...

Concept #1: Brawler. I've kind of tried to like the concept of the monk, but I simply don't, really. It's too mystical with too much supernatural crap. I really want a more "western", non-supernatural alternative rather than a character who feels like he belongs in a Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat game. The Brawler class does this quite well. I actually don't think I'd even want an archetype, although if I change my mind and use one, the Snakebite Striker is the one that I'd use, most likely. Using the Shield Champion as a kind of fantasy Captain America might be interesting. The Strangler would be an interesting one for a smaller group, especially if I can use him as a kind of murderer of sorts, although just as a UFC fighter who puts people into sleeper holds would be boring. And I don't know how often I'd be interested in playing a murderer. Maybe some kind of hit man of sorts? I dunno. The concept of the Strangler archetype isn't terrible and it kind of interests me, but I'm not sure where I'd use it.

I don't like Wayne Reynolds "Rhonda Roussey with short hair" illustration, but if it were a guy, it'd be perfect. The mixed martial arts headgear kind of thing that she has is kind of cool, though. Although it feels weird because in the fiction that characters like this are based on, we rarely see this kind of thing.

I used ChatGPT to generate a "Gaulish martial artist" and removed the tattoos, and got this image. It might be an interesting place to start. Although using metal MMA headgear might be interesting too.

It's interesting to me that this was done as a hybrid class between monk and fighter, but without much of the supernatural weirdness. Freeport did the same thing with their 3.5 and Pathfinder stuff. The Survivalist is another good western, non-supernatural fist-fighter, and in the Pathfinder version it's converted to an archetype rather than a new class. But I'd rather just use the Brawler class. Like I said, maybe with one of the archetypes mentioned, but if not, the base class as is looks interesting enough to me already.

Concept #2: I've always been a huge fan of alt.rangers, and the Slayer is a hybrid class that's like a ranger with some rogue-like abilities added too. It may be my current favorite alt.ranger, and trust me, I've played around with a lot of them! (The wildlander from the Midnight campaign setting was my previous go-to.) I like the slayer, again, as is, but the sniper is my preferred archetype if I pick one. Curiously, although I prefer more "jock" characters, and magic and supernatural abilities often are not my thing at all, the Stygian Slayer archetype is kind of a creepy alternative. Curiously, with some of these archetypes, the "ranger-ness" of the slayer is reduced. Without Track and a lot of wilderness kind of activity, is it even really a ranger, or just some kind of skirmisher? Ah, well; I'm on record as saying that I think the ranger is really more of a skirmisher than a "ranger" in most cases anyway, or at least that's how most people play them. 

I'm well and frequently on record as not being very interested in magic-using classes or spellcasters. But I also find the fighter to be, generally, too bland for my tastes. There's probably some archetypes in the Pathfinder 1e rules that make it workable for me, but I haven't looked in a long time, and I prefer these two hybrid base classes instead, if I were to actually make and play a Pathfinder 1e character anytime soon. 

I say all of that as I'm currently playing a 5e fire genasi sorcerer in my Tyranny of Dragons campaign, of course. There's always exceptions, I guess. Plus, we already had a rogue, a barbarian, a cleric, and a ranger in that campaign, so some kind of arcane magic seemed like what was needed when I joined. But again, martial with a twist non-magical "jock" characters are kind of my go-to.

Concept #3: The freebooter class in the big, fat Freeport Pathfinder setting book is a great option; another great alt.swashbuckler, kind of like a fighter with a lot of class abilities borrowed from the old assassin, the rogue and other similar classes. What would I do with this? Well, a pretty typical swashbuckling rogue, of course. Someone kind of like Captain Blood, or Andre-Louis Moreau (Scarmamouche) or D'Artagnan; a kind of flippant, merry duelist. As a friend of mine once opined on the classic 70s Three and Four Musketeers movie (absolutely brilliant movies, by the way) that as likeable and charismatic as the characters are, they are also kind of sociopathic, if not psychopathic, given how readily they'll kill someone for frivolous reasons, and take great pride in it. Mechanically, it may not be terribly different from the Slayer, but in terms of flavor, it's kind of a world apart. Although that depends, in the end, on which class abilities I end up selecting.

Now, I realize that none of these concepts; the brawler, the slayer or the freebooter, is a character concept in the traditional sense. It's a mechanics concept, i.e., what mechanics would I be interested in playing. I'd still need to come up with a character concept to back up the mechanics. But that's often how I like to build; either do the two in parallel, or come up with a mechanical concept that looks fun, and work from there on what exactly the character is like.

I'm also not a fan of over-developing backstories. I prefer brief and broad character concepts, and then I work on what the actual character is like in play. Think of characters like James Bond, for instance. He doesn't need backstory, and in fact, is probably a worse character if you try to saddle him with one. Conan too. Even Wolverine. Marvel were very reluctant to issue the Origin series back in the early 00s precisely because he was their most popular character (perhaps after Spider-man) and they were very worried that a backstory would actually make him less interesting rather than more. In the end, Origin was a success, but ultimately, it wasn't needed and I wonder if the character would have been better off if it hadn't been done.

Golarion Remixed

I'm going through some of my trawls, and I'm reading the early Gazetteer product by the Paizo crew, almost of all which was incorporated whole cloth into the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting... I believe. Anyway, the largest section of this is the "Nations" section, and I thought I'd add my comments as I read it, since it's a slowish Saturday afternoon for me.

Absalom: I'm currently reading the Old Testament on audiobook while commuting in the morning, and it wasn't that long ago that I finished the two books of Kings and started well into Chronicles. The name feels fake to me, knowing of course, that this is King David's son who led an ultimately unsuccessful coup against the King. I know that America has largely lost many of the details of its originally Christian cultural traditions, and people don't recognize Old Testament stories the way that they used to a few generations ago, but it's still weird that they use such a clearly prominent Bible name. Other than that, though, I don't really have any problems with this element of the setting. I think the siege castles of weird dungeons just outside of town is a stupid D&D affectation, but that's easier to just ignore than to overtly change it.

Andoran: The self-righteous proselytizing of "muh democracy" was tiresome before I even finished reading the basic description. Sadly, his over-the-top stupid detail tends to hide the fact that otherwise Andoran, as a nation with cultural and ethnic ties to both Taldor and Cheliax, but unwilling to accept the rule of the House of Thrune, is a fine idea. I don't have any interest in that non-stop ideological bent of Andoran; that needs to be replaced with them just acting like normal people, not woke mutants. But I do like the idea that in spite of their ties to both Cheliax and Taldor, they're unwilling to unite with either until they get their act together. But maybe they're more like the Commonwealth than like the fully independent US, i.e., all of the former Taldoran and Chelaxian nations still recognize the authority of the thrones in Oppara and maybe even Egorian; they simply can't work them them. For that matter, other former dependencies like Galt, etc. will have this same thing going on. I don't know if it's because Paizo is made up of professional woke mutants or not, but they don't understand how normal people think and act, and have made some of the "personalities" of some nations unbelievably one-dimensionsal and tedious and frankly unbelievable. 

Belkzen: In one ironic place where I actually agree with the woke mutants in gaming, I think orcs as they've been portrayed in D&D and RPGs in general is pretty boring. This doesn't have to have anything to do with the "orcs as black people" nonsense; all the way back to early Warhammer, Warcraft and Heroes of Might and Magic games in the 90s, the idea of orcs as at least somewhat sympathetic if savage and barbaric peoples who act more or less like people rather than caricatures has been growing. Before getting coopted by the woke mutants and leading to the nonsense of 5.5's "Mexican orcs" joke. Anyway, I've already talked at length about how to make orcs more interesting, and I've done this already in Old Night; I'll no doubt do the exact same to Belkzen. Having Belkzen simply be "Mordor, but without a real Dark Lord holding it together" was never very interesting to me. 

Brevoy: This is a weird frontier region that because it is largely disconnected from most of the rest of what's going on in Avistan, doesn't really need anything changed. 

Cheliax: Other than downplaying the open-ness of House Thrune's diabolical connections, I probably don't need to change much here either. I think it's ridiculous that a whole society of open devil-worshippers would put on a civilized face, so we'll have it be more a case of Gothic aesthetic and secret, or at least discrete with plausible deniability connections to devils. I also dislike the myriad of distinctions between fiends in D&D and D&D-like games. Sure, sure; factions that don't get along with each other, that makes sense. The full on use of alignment to separate them along the chaos/law axis doesn't. That probably doesn't matter too much to Cheliax's nature, however.

I also want to make Cheliax to still be (at least on paper) suzerain over places like Andoran, Galt, etc., although the strength of that suzerainty is waning fast.

Druma: The idea of a nation of capitalist-cultists with a religion of consumerism is exactly the kind of nonsense you'd expect from Seattle weirdos. That doesn't mean that the idea of a mercantile kingdom with a weird, clannish aristocracy isn't salvageable, though, just that you need to downplay the over-the-top weirdness that Paizo allowed Druma to accumulate. 

Galt: The idea of a French Revolution that's been going on for generations now is also stupid. Like with Andoran, Galt needs to tone down it's over-reliance on one, kind of overplayed and shrill idea. Sure, sure, it's unhappy with House Thrune, and the degree to which its leaders actually still support being considered a part of Cheliax, when they're quite a ways away from it anyway, is OK. The idea that there is a competing faction of nouveux aristocrats, and skullduggery and intrigue, murder and political machination is commonplace in Galt; I can get behind all of that. But people still need to actually live normal lives, or this kind of thing can't last. The real French Revolution didn't last 40+ years; it lasted ten and for decently long stretches there, it was quiet, only flaring up into widespread violence on relatively few occasions.

Geb: I don't know for sure what to think of the high-magic countries like Geb or Nex. I understand why they exist, I suppose, but I've never had much use for them. I think Geb also feels like a less-developed also-ran of Ustalav. To be fair, I haven't read the Blood Lords adventure path. I'll probably uneasily leave it more or less as it is, but of course, since I greatly prefer a much more low level and low magic game, I'm not quite sure what an African or semi-Egyptian undead nation will actually offer me. I'll probably mostly just refer to it, if at all, very obliquely and otherwise pretend that it doesn't exist. honestly.

Irrisen: I'm not quite sure what to make of this one either. A nation where it's literally always winter is a wasteland, not capable of supporting a population. One ruled by fey-touched witches and whatnot, where winter is long and cold and the witches have a cold-weather Frozen kind of aesthetic works, but again, it's too exaggerated to take seriously. And the adventure path set here literally has an adventure where you're supposed to travel to WWI era Russia and deal with Rasputin. Lolwut? I need to do a bit more research into the details to understand exactly how to change this, but right away, I know for sure that having it literally always be winter doesn't work.

Isger: The notion of Isger as a thoroughly dominated frontier region of Cheliax, recovering from a devastating series of invasions by goblinoids (or orcs) and now a kind of Mad Max-like shell of its former self probably doesn't really need any particular change at a high level. Details may, of course, vary, but the Gazetteer doesn't provide many, and I don't think I've read any modules or anything else that takes place in Isger that I'd feel inclined to change.

Jalmeray: This is another high magic bastion of wokified Orientalism. I've met way too many Indians to be impressed with Indian-inspired cultural elements in gaming. But as a foreign place with an elemental/genie kind of vibe that you don't actually do much of anything with, I suppose it works. Maybe the Princes of the Apocalypse can actually be from a place like this, or at least are worshipped here. A cult of "elemental evil" reigning on Jalmeray is more interesting to me than a culture of Bollywood martial artists. 

Katapesh: I've always quite liked Katapesh more or less as it is. Or at least as it was in 1e. I hear that they've taken the tooth out of it, like so many other elements, in the wake of the move to 2e, so I'll almost certainly be ignoring that. The chance that I actually get to doing anything meaningful with 2e or its products is pretty low, though, so eh. Who cares?

Kyonin: While I admit to not being a huge fan of fantasy elves and weird, flaky elf-kingdoms, I also recognize that it's probably important that they exist in a D&D-adjacent fantasy. I wonder sometimes if I should swap the elves for some kind of fey-touched humanoid that's a little less... elfin, or whatever, (even if they use the same name) but I'll otherwise probably pretty much ignore them. 

Lastwall: While the concept of Lastwall is fine, actually finding something interesting to do with it seems kind of a lost cause. In 2e, Lastwall has fallen and been converted to the Gravelands. I might go ahead and do the same, honestly, in one anachronistic referral to 2e. At least the Gravelands as a place for adventure is an interesting place to go. Lastwall was just like hanging out on a self-righteous military base, and then going somewhere else to actually do anything.

The other alternative is to give them the melancholy aspect of the fading Crusader States; aristocrats, formerly warriors, surrounded by foreigners and holding on to a way of life that is doomed to end within a generation or two. But that makes Lastwall more like a normal place, with Ustalavian commoners running an Ustalavian way of life outside of the ethnic and cultural Taldoran nobles castles. It probably doesn't matter. Paizo couldn't ever figure out anything interesting to do with Lastwall other than destroy it, so maybe I just ignore it too. That's the benefit of a large, diverse setting like Golarion. Anything that I can't think of to make actually better than what they came up with, I can simply ignore and pretend like it doesn't exist at all. I kind of like the idea of it being like a portion of Ustalav, except under the influence of foreigner-kings who owe no loyalty to Ustalav.

Or, if not Ustalav, maybe Molthune and Nimrathis, etc. from the south.

Linnorm Kings Lands: I changed the name slightly to make it fit alphabetically; in the Gazetteer, it was referred to as Linnorm Kings, Lands of, which I thought was kind of dumb. This nation is more or less OK as is. I'd, again, tone down it's "wintriness"; Scandinavia is certainly a habitable place today, for instance. And White Astrid the female Linnorm King is pandering to people who apparently don't know any real women. But those are minor details; mostly a kingdom of para-Vikings tends to work fairly well in most Eurocentric fantasy.

Mammoth Lords Realm: Another one with the strange alphabeticization; but still. A place where Conan-like barbarians live alongside Rancholabrean fauna and even dinosaurs coming up from a Pellucidar-like Underdark vault deep under the earth is fine.

Mendev: This is another nation that has one, too-shrill note for its existence. I think treating it like it was before the Crusades, i.e., kind of like Brevoy, but with lots of companies of mercenaries due to conflicts with both Brevoy, Numenaria and Sarkoris/the Worldwound is more interesting than literally a nation of cold Crusaders and various pointedly corrupt hangers-on.

Molthune: Like many of the former Chelaxian or Taldoran colonies, I prefer to see Molthune as simply a more autonomous frontier region of Cheliax still; one that is not subservient, and might even be openly rebellious against House Thrune, but not against the notion of a united Cheliax of which it is a part. Othewise, surprisingly little else needs to change. The same can be said for Nimrathas, except their conflict and rebellion is more local. 

Mwangi Expanse: I actually like the idea of savage pulp-tale inspired jungles, and Paizo have only somewhat poisoned this idea with their leftist disapproval of "colonialism" and "racism." Still, other than ignoring those themes, and maybe race or alignment swapping a few details here and there, this works pretty well as is. 

Nex: I'll be honest with you; I know even less what to do with this kingdom than I do with Geb. I think maybe the two of them work better if, instead of being high fantasy magical superhero countries in two flavors, they are instead shown as a post-apocalyptic wasteland (in two flavors) based on based battles of two Heresiarchs or other powerful mages that are more like The Ten Who Were Taken rather than D&D archmages. But I just fundamentally don't really like or trust the high magic stuff, so where Golarion focuses on that, which it should as a setting meant to have something for everyone, no doubt, I will tend to either change the theme or just ignore that area altogether. 

Nidal: This is another place that I'm not quite sure what to do with, and neither is Paizo, I feel. The idea of a place under the thrall of the Plane of Shadow as it's theme is fine, but in doing that, they've created a land where agents of Nidal operating outside its borders is much more interesting than anything you could actually do in Nidal itself. I'd probably have to have it be an area that's "coterminous" for lack of a better word with the Plane of Shadow and replace its capital that you're never supposed to visit anyway, with something like Gloomwrought from the 4e Shadowfell book would work better.

Nirmathas: I prefer to see this as a rebellious area of Molthune, and therefore, like Molthune, a frontier province of Cheliax. Closely allied with whatever Lastwall is, and actually the subject of plenty of sympathy from day-to-day Molthunian people, it's more a case of the terrible leadership and mismanagement of Molthune by its elites that has led to the crisis that it finds itself in. Nirmathas also doesn't see itself as anti-Chelaxian, and has in fact made some tentative overtures to Cheliax for aid against the mismanagement of those of Molthune, but Cheliax has its own problems, is in decline, and the House of Thrune doesn't care much about the plight of a bunch of frontier yokels and their claims of being oppressed by bad nobles. 

Numeria: I've never really cared for the idea of a "Barrier Peaks" kingdom, which is honestly exactly what Numeria was meant to be. I'd rather see it as a semi-barbaric land, but instead of aliens and robots and lasers, I'd be more likely to have Lovecraftian entities that also share some similarities with the gray alien mythos adapted to fantasy be the source of the weirdness. If I ever were to get around to adapting the Iron Gods adventure path, it'll be a real challenge given the significant changes to the base setting.

Osirion: Your fantasy needs an Egypt. There's nothing significant I'd change about this one.

Qadira: I don't know why Qadira has to be merely the westernmost province of an unseen and undescribed vast Keleshite empire. I mean, I guess they were going for the Imperial Persian feel here, but Qadira vs Taldor already gives us an effective Sassanids vs Byzantines vibe without needing to postulate a completely unseen eastern majority to Qadira. Let Qadira just stand alone. And with that minor change, I don't think I need to do much else. I don't particularly like Sarenrae as the patron goddess of Qadira, but I'll change all of the religion of my Golarion Remixed anyway, so I'll deal with that in another post some other time.

Rahadoum: This is another one of the stupidest idea of the Golarion design team; a kind of western north African kingdom that is defined by being aggressively anti-religious? Yeah, no, that's dumb. I'd rather combine Rahadoum and maybe even Thuvia as merely regions in a Barbary Coast like situation. And the Rahadoumi (?) are no more or less religious than anyone else. What an inane idea.

Razmiran: Whenever Paizo attempts to do something weird with religion, it's a mis-step. I don't mind a tyrannical wizard-king as a ruler, but him having this secret cult where he pretends to be a god and isn't is just silly. Again, I don't know how much changing that matters; I don't think there are a lot of adventures or other material that really focuses on the Razmiran cult that I'd have to even change anyway.

River Kingdoms: This feels a little too patchwork for my taste, but I'll probably leave it more or less as is. I haven't ever read the Kingmaker adventure path, so until I do, I'm reluctant to postulate any significant changes until I do, I suppose. I'm more likely to see the River Kingdoms as the River Communities, however, and see them as a decentralized yet culturally contiguous area less marked by constant warfare against each other and more marked by threats from their neighbors encroaching on the border communities. Paizo already does this part OK, so it's just a question of focusing more on that instead of violence just being something that's always happening between different sections of this area.

Sargava: Sargava is a metaphor or allegory for how bad European colonialism is. Since I tend to think European colonialism is mostly good for the natives, if not necessarily for the Europeans, this is actually backwards; the failing of the Sargavan colony due to being cut off isn't something to be celebrated and accelerated, it's to be mourned. It's a tragedy of the greatest order. I'll tend to focus less on the failing of Sargava, though, and make it probably more thriving.

Shackles: The Shackles was such a disappointment. Paizo couldn't think of what to do with a pirate-themed area other than make it a collage of all kinds of other crap that doesn't fit. It really just needs to be northern, mostly Chelaxian, pirate-lords on a kind of Corsair Coast. Hey, have I had that idea somewhere already before? If I want to have a darker version or element within it, than something like Iron Kingdom's Cryx works well. Otherwise, yeah; just borrow loads of Freeport-ish stuff and make it just piratey. The Shackles was hugely, hugely disappointing to me. I looked up my original review when I first got it, and at the time I was bravely trying to like it, it seems, but now I just find it pretty silly and unlikely to work for me. 

Sodden Lands: There isn't much material, I don't think, set in the Sodden Lands, but a place lashed by a supernatural storm that won't abate after decades, inhabited by 1) savage cannibals who attack and eat anyone who lands on sight, and 2) an abandoned soothsayer culture who's soothsayers saw something that caused them all to commit suicide; I mean, what's not to love there?

Taldor: As one of the biggest, most consequential, but still kind of tragic nations of the setting, Taldor works pretty much as is. It's basically the fantasy version of the late Byzantine Empire, but you have the opportunity to reverse the decline rather than watch it disappear and get swallowed up by the Ottomans and the Islamic conquest, if you like. Not that Paizo's woke mutants would ever really understand that theme exactly, but I do. I'd have to adapt War for the Crown, if I ever do, to make sure that I focus on that theme rather than sexism or whatever stupid theme the authors gave it.

Thuvia: Another nation that is based on a trumped idea that isn't deep or interesting enough to support a whole nation. I'll just merge it with my revised Rahadoum. Maybe the sun orchid elixir can still exist, but it's just a significant trade good, not the whole raison d'etre for the whole nation. 

Ustalav: This was already always one of the best elements of the Golarion setting. Although I've heavily modified it into my Timischburg nation for my setting, if running a Golarion Remixed, I'd change very little if anything of this, other than perhaps to expand its borders a bit into the dubious neighboring kingdoms that I don't particularly care for.

Varisia: Varisia is another one that I quite like as is, at least if I'm specifically playing a Golarion Remixed game (although once again, my Humberland/Hill Country region largely can be seen as a reflection of the same themes.) The only thing I'd change is replace Kaer Maga with some other city that isn't so stupid. I'm considering the old 3e Bluffside, but I still have to read that book to verify it.

World-wound: I actually like the idea of Old Sarkoris better than the World-wound. A land of creepy witches and barbarians? Fallen to demonic or Lovecraftian cults, but still there, just a place that's almost as bad as "an Abyssal layer, but on the regular world." Sure, sure, they summon all kinds of obyrith and aberration like insanity, but it isn't literally the Abyss spreading across the landscape. It's still a normal place, more like the benighted and creepy backwoods of Lovecraft's stories like Innsmouth or Dunwich.

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Anyway, that's my review of the nations of the Gazetteer, at least. The next chapter is on religion in the Inner Sea region, but I already have my alternate D&D pantheon. Curiously, I detailed it in a post in which I was also talking about Golarion Remixed.