Golarion Remixed

I'm going to do it. I'm going to remix Golarion. I've already got a good start with some earlier noodling that I did, but I'm going to actually start with remixing the rules. I'm going to use the Race Builder rules to build the races that Old Night has, I'm going to tweak available classes, use E6, and otherwise tweak the Pathfinder 1e rules to work for my setting, if I wanted to use them, and then I'm going to take this House Rule document and remix the setting. Some of the elements of Golarion will get a minor face lift. Some will be ignored and will essentially not exist for all intents and purposes (although I don't think I'll literally excise them, I'll just deliberately ignore them.) Where Golarion has nations that I'm not interested in at all, Golarion Remixed will have blank spots on the map with nothing of interest. Like I did with Eberron Remixed, changing up the races and adapting it to a low magic dark fantasy vibe will naturally change the setting quite a bit, and Golarion Remixed will work perfectly well with the Shadow of Old Night rules... but it won't need to, because my Pathfinder 1e House Rules document will perfectly model the setting as well. They'll be two complementary systems for achieving the same thing, and the "DesdichadoFinder" house rules for Pathfinder 1e will also work perfectly for the Old Night setting too. 

But as with the Eberron Remixed project, the real fun is actually remixing the setting to fit the rules, including the allowed races and the changed assumptions about magic availability and PC power in general. If Darkness In the Hill Country is meant to be run in the Old Night setting with the Old Night rules, it could equally well be run in Golarion Remixed's version of Varisia with the Pathfinder house rules. That is, in fact, exactly the point. 

There may be some third party rules in play. I'll almost certainly use the Freebooter class from the Freeport book, because it's a great class, and I like it for the swashbuckler archetype more than I like Paizo's own Swashbuckler class. I may also take some of the Madness rules from that book as well. (After I compare them to whatever Horror Adventures has, and even maybe what the 5e SPCM book has to see which gives me the best experience). This will be an old-fashioned "binder of house rules". Well, maybe not that bad. I hope actually that by kitbashing and mostly by limiting what's available, I can do it in just a few short pages. But it's a weird exercise. This isn't the way most people would play a Pathfinder game. But I'm not trying to play a Pathfinder game, I'm trying to get Pathfinder to accommodate my specific tastes for a low magic, dark fantasy game with a low magic, sword & sorcery, dark fantasy tone and themes. Although 1e is arguably a little better at that than 2e or than D&D 5e is, it's still very much a game of Open Society, Diversity, Inc. super-heroes who are meant to appeal to the power fantasies of broken wokesters first and foremost, so it'll need some help to get there. But it's not a lost cause; the elements are there, you just need to go through them with a highlighter saying "don't use this, it won't work". And that's 95% of what I'll be doing; creativity by limit rather than actually building all that much that's new. 

Of course, although I'm pretty familiar with Pathfinder 1e from years of poking around it's PSRD and reading all kinds of setting and adventure supplements that are supported by it, I've never actually read the rulebooks in a the traditional sense. So this will also probably be a long-running work in progress, as Pathfinder 1e is infamous for, among other things, having lots of lots of rules spread over lots and lots of books. I've had many of the original core rulebooks in pdf for a long time; they were worth it to extract the art alone! but I've recently bought the pocket (trade paperback, really) sized core rulebook, and intend to start reading it shortly, cover to cover. But it'll be until I get to the Advanced Player's Guide and some of the other subsequent books that I'll really be able to start sifting through many of the options like archetypes and alternate classes, etc. 

I've created a new tag, PATHFINDER REMIXED and a new banner both. Some posts will merit both Golarion Remixed and Pathfinder Remixed, but many will focus on just the rules or just the setting, and therefore will get one or the other. 

Snakes, Deep Ones and undead and stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

<  †  >

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. 

Low magic Pathfinder 1e E6 project

One more post on the races options for my E6 project. While my setting doesn't necessarily have the same races as Pathfinder, which is very D&D, part of the reason I'd possibly use Pathfinder is to have more races available. Here's the complete list (minus psionics) of races in the rulebooks, I believe. I'll bold the ones that represent races explicitly in my setting, leave races that I wouldn't mind if someone played alone, and use strikethrough on races that I explicitly won't allow. Any kind of animal people or Oriental fantasy races are explicitly not really in the cards. I don't want them.

Core:

• Dwarf
• Elf
• Gnome
• Half-elf
• Half-orc (called just Orc in Old Night system)
• Halfling
• Human

Featured: (about 50/50 in terms of what I'd allow)

• Aasimar (called seraphim, but moved to appendix. On the fence, but it someone really wanted to play one, I wouldn't probably balk. 
• Catfolk
• Dhampir (another appendix race)
• Drow
• Fetchling (shadow genasi?) (Would use for Grislings/Hyperboreans)
• Goblin
• Hobgoblin
• Ifrit (fire genasi) (called surturs)
• Kobold
• Orc (could use as an alternate for orc. There's no half-orcs in my setting, but I don't care which stats you use.
• Oread (earth genasi) (called dvergs_
• Ratfolk  (they exist but are specifically a monster race only)
• Sylph (air genasi) (hey, I use the same name!)
• Tengu
• Tiefling (called kemlings)
• Undine (water genasi) (called tritons)

Uncommon: (otherwise known as, with one potential exception, not appearing in any of my games for any reason)

• Changeling
• Duergar
• Gillmen
• Grippli
• Kitsune
• Merman
• Nagaji (snakeman)
• Samsaran
• Strix
• Suli
• Svirfneblin
• Vanara (monkey)
• Vishkanya
• Wayang

UPDATE: In a completely unrelated tangent to add on, I've often been fascinated by the tiny home movement, but I think it's gotten out of hand. Let's say, for example, that my wife dies or something, I'm a widower in my mid-50s, and I decide that even though I probably can't afford it, I want to retire. Because I probably can't afford it, although maybe I can with life insurance, I want to buy some land out in the country for $100k or less, in Wyoming or maybe Colorado or Montana or even parts of Utah or Idaho. But Tiny Homes are usually surprisingly expensive. Why wouldn't I buy a regular mobile home instead? For about the same price, I can easily get 2-3x the square footage. I don't need lots of space, but if I'm sleeping in a loft, have no real space for an office and small library because I'm somewhere between 300-500 sq feet, why wouldn't I just get a mobile home for the same price that's 1200+ square feet, comes with three bedrooms (one of which could become an office/library) two bathroom, a spare bedroom for visitors, and a decent kitchen and living room space?

Living in a mobile home naturally comes with a bit of a stigma if you're in a trailer park, but if you have one isolated out in the country, who cares? It's cheap, it's functional, and it gives me everything that I need. Why overspend on a tonier tiny home, or a big full-sized "normal" house when I can do this instead and have all I need? A double wide is easily under $100k, maybe even under $80k. Heck, I've seen 100-+ sq ft single wide's in the $50ks. Although in that case, I probably lose the spare bedroom.

This assumes I'm a widower. My wife is unlikely to go for this plan. For multiple reasons. She really doesn't want to live in Wyoming or any other "cold state" either.

I don't know what brought that on. Watching a bunch of widower and/or bachelor retirees in tiny homes on YouTube over the weekend, I guess. Kind of made me wonder what I would do if I were in their shoes.

Further Low Fantasy musings

In my "D&D as low fantasy" post, I discussed how I would house-rule 3.5, the version that I'm most familiar with, to be something that I could play. The more I think about it, though, the more I think that Pathfinder 1e would be a better baseline to play with than 3.5. It's basically the same game already, but a bit streamlined in some respects, and with more options. A little bit more powerful, but I'm adding steps below that mitigate that. And frankly, I like a flatter curve rather than zero to hero anyway. I absolutely want to limit the soaring heights of hero, but let's also not start literally at zero. 0-level character funnels and stuff like that is fun as a gimmick, but not what I want for a long-term, serious campaign. Let me reiterate and expand just a bit on how to do this. I'd still like to do this, honestly, and will probably make this an official page at some point; how exactly to use these rules to get the low fantasy that I want.

• The number one rule is: don't play with powergamers! Late in 3.5's life cycle and throughout Pathfinder 1e, it certainly had a reputation as a powergamers' paradise, with all kinds of optimization combos and stuff that you could use. If you instead look at all of these options from a roleplayers' perspective, as offering you all kinds of ways to customize your character experience rather than ways to optimize your mechanical character experience, most of the problems with the game go away on their own. That said, maybe something like "The Elephant in the Room" help to mitigate it. 
• Use E6. If it works for 3.5, it works just as well for Pathfinder 1e, since the games differ only in details, not at all in base structure. 
• All races beyond core need to be explicitly approved. I'll try to make a lot of stuff work, but a lot of stuff simply won't, no matter what. Especially the animal people.
• All PCs are by default, banned from taking a full spellcasting (or psionic powers using) class at 1st level. You can multiclass into it at 2nd level without penalty, however. "Half-casters" like ranger or paladin, etc. can still be used as is. And non-casters can, of course, also be used as is right away.
• Incantations were never officially introduced, I don't think, into Pathfinder 1e, but they were certainly present in d20 D&D and Rituals work almost exactly the same way in 5e. Higher level spells that you want to be present in the game can be converted by GMs into Incantations or Rituals, but that, of course, makes them unlikely to be useful in combat, because the casting time is in minutes or even longer rather than in rounds.
• One of the main reasons I was reluctant to use Pathfinder 1e vs 3.5 is because I wanted psionics from 3.5 to be available. For this reason, I include Dreamscarred Press's Ultimate Psionics as a "core" book useable in the Pathfinder version. I know, I know—it's not exactly just a direct port of the 3.5 psionics into Pathfinder. It couldn't be even if it wanted to; the Expanded Psionics Handbook material was added into the SRD, but the Complete Psionic material was not. While I miss the Lurk or the Ardent sometimes, they did a pretty good job of attempting to get the same material, more or less, out of their book. It'll do. Psionic classes, like spell-casting classes, however, are subject to the same "half-caster" rule at first level, i.e., full-casters can't be taken at 1st level. You'll have to use your best interpretation of what is considered a "fullcaster" psionic class, but certainly the Psion and the Wilder qualify, at least. I don't remember the Pathfinder specific rules well enough to comment otherwise; I know for sure that the soulknife and aegis, for instance, probably don't. Anyway, maybe this is a moot point. I don't know a lot of psionic players, and if there are psionic players, they often tend to gravitate to the soulknife for obvious reasons; because it's like a combination of Psylocke from the X-men and a Jedi or Sith. It may actually be the only psionic class that I've seen played, come to think of it, and I know that I've been in campaigns with at least two of them before.
• If needed, and if you play into the E6 feat progression part of the game, higher level class abilities can be converted into feat chains that characters can continue to take after they hit the max level cap of E6. Yeah, this will require a little bit of review and work, but it's not a big deal. And you have to run quite a long campaign for it to even be relevant anyway. Speaking of which, I'll almost certainly ditch XP and do something like 5e's milestone experience. Which will be a fair bit slower as well. There's no rush to get new abilities. Get used to the ones you have for a while before you start immediately adding new ones.
• Because of the class list and archetypes formula of Pathfinder 1e, which built on the same idea in the Complete books (and others) of 3.5 as well as the PHB2 but greatly expanded and in the game almost from the get-go, I don't think prestige classes are nearly as important in Pathfinder 1e as they were in 3.5. I'm almost tempted to just say ignore them completely. However, if as GM you want to allow them, you'll have to look at them carefully; if you think that they're OK, they should be playable at 2nd level. Let the PC take as many of the prerequisites as he can at 1st level, and then just waive the rest of the prerequisites and let him take 5 levels of the prestige class, as if it were a fullcaster class. Feel free to veto any prestige class, or even the entire concept of them. Pathfinder with all classes and archetypes enabled is already even more open of a game in terms of optional character concepts than 3.5 was. Because it was built on the 3.5 chassis after seeing what 3.5 did, and it deliberately enabled some of the better late appearing ideas early on.
• Sanity rules aren't necessarily necessary for low fantasy, but I like them. There's lots of options out there, but if I'm doing Pathfinder 1e anyway, why not use the Fear and Sanity and possibly even Corruption systems from Horror Adventures? I'm not as much a fan of Corruption as a mechanic, but it could be useful in the right game. Fear and Sanity I always like, however.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'd still prefer to use my own rules-lite, kinda sorta old school adjacent system. I like rules-lite kinda sorta old school adjacent systems as long as I'm not playing in the OSR playstyle; I'm very much in the trad camp, and I've always been interested in D&D because I liked fantasy fiction and roleplaying, not because I was interested in any of the gamist elements of D&D, or the dungeon-crawling environment, or anything like that. But, I have a lot of nostalgia for d20 games, and this is something that I could run with and enjoy. And I do enjoy using the 3.5 and Pathfinder 1e mechanics of character building, not for the optimization nonsense, but for the built-in customization for roleplaying that it offers.

Gaming tomorrow

I may well make my pitch tomorrow. We're supposed to play in the afternoon. One of the two flaky guys said he's out, the other one hasn't confirmed one way or another. I wouldn't be surprised if neither show. If that happens, or even if he does, I may hang around a few minutes and talk to the hosts, I'm going to pitch my "last minute backup campaign" proposal and see what they think. That way, we can have much more regular gaming, and if the flaky guys don't show, we've still got something else to do anyway. 

If I run a chopped up Carrion Crown, i.e. Cult of Undeath, I actually had someone make some great suggestions... on reddit, of all places. Sigh. Reddit is sometimes the worst, but it's also one of the few parts of the internet that isn't dead and made up of bots. 

Let me just copy and paste his suggestions, and then I'll annotate my comments alongside.

• Replace the original BBEG with Mierela Tsilda, the leader of the Night Harrows group (Rival Guide). This group is more suitable as main antagonists due to lore reasons. Don't know about this one. It's probably fine. I'll need to look her up and read it, though. I don't think I've read that book before. I'm at the very least renaming everyone, so lore reasons doesn't matter to me anyway. Looks like the Night Harrows are a villainous party of adventurers; an anti-PC group with undead theming. I dunno. 
• Introducing corruption rules (Adventure Horrors, Vile Corruption variant). Every adventure has a specific curse (the players may risk contracting depending on the adventure, due to the influence of certain locations and monsters), in the following order: Possessed, Promethean, Lycanthropy, Deep One, Vampirism and Lich. This seems more like mechanical gimmickry, and while I understand that mechanical gimmickry is kind of the direction Pathfinder has specifically always gone, I'm less interested in it than most. Plus, I'll be running it in 5e. Not that those curses can't probably port over as is, since the systems are less unlike than many would like to admit, but still. I don't know that I think that's really the kind of game I like to run where there's enough of a focus on mechanical gimmickry to make it worth doing.
• Professor Lorrimor is still alive at the beginning of the campaign. The players received a letter by the NPC, who wanted to invite them in his house to commemorate his friendship with them and, eventually, asking them a favor about a certain problem. This is a huge change in terms of making it feel less like Carrion Crown and more like a classic whodunit to some degree. I'll almost certainly do this. I don't know about an invitation to "commemorate his friendship" but him being alive rather than it starting with his funeral is a great idea.
• Using Murder's Mark module as introductive adventure, before The Haunting of Harrowstone, set in Ravengro. In this way the players can explore the town and put into practice their investigative skills. Professor Lorrimor is destined to die while the players are facing the villains of this adventure (he noticed strange activities around the abandoned prison and visited that place; here, he met the Night Harrows and these people killed him to cover their tracks). I'm not familiar with that module, but I do have a pdf copy of it, so I need to pull it ahead and read it and see if this is a good idea or not if I actually do this. It sounds like it works quite well not only for establishing the tone, but also for tying stuff together fairly well.
• Since Lorrimor didn't expected to die, there is no last will. Instead, his daughter Kendra will take the dangerous books her father kept and also say that her father mentioned "something strange" about the prison (in this way, she gave the players a trail to follow). Lots of people have wills without expecting necessarily to die. It's just good preparation. Plus, even without a will, inheritance law might be pretty well established and it might be a moot point anyway. The purpose of the will is to give the players themselves both a hook and a reason to stick around for a little while and do the first adventure. I don't know that this change is substantial or needed.
• In the second adventure, the Trial of the Beast, Kendra will follow the players to Lepidstadt in order to return these dangerous books at the University. However, once separated from the players, Kendra got involved into the heist of the antiquities department. She was injured and eventually knocked unconscious; Vrood chose to frame Kendra instead of killing her by leaving some (fake) incriminating evidence of her involvement with the "Beast". In this way, Kendra is arrested on charges of being the mastermind behind the Beast's activities; she is now in danger of being sentenced to death on the ground of mass hysteria and forged evidence. This is exactly the brilliant breakthrough I needed to solve the whole dilemma of "the beast isn't the real monster, white males are!" or whatever. In retrospect, it seems so obvious, but... hindsight is always 20/20. I didn't think of it, but once I had it recommended to me, it's obvious and essential.
• This is why Judge Daramid will ask help to the players. She was an old friend of the Lorrimor family and she also knew that the Beast is innocent, but her hands are tied by her duty of impartial judge: she is unable to take the law into her own hands to have the charges against Kendra and the Beast dropped. During this encounter, make sure that the players understand that Kendra and the Beast's fate are bound together — if they want to save Kendra, they must clear the Beast's reputation as well! No, the Beast isn't innocent. Probably isn't coherent or cognizant either. The Beast will be like Dean Allen Halsey from Lovecraft's story "Herbert West—Reanimator"; a former (and very dead) man of science who was resuscitated as a feral, cannibalistic Beast. I know that that story was a deliberate parody of Frankenstein, but honestly, I don't hold Frankenstein in quite the same high regard many others of us "genre fans" do. I dislike the core theme of the story that the "monster" may not be in fact as much a monster as the scientist who created him. Frankenstein, as many literary works from that era are, is a little too high on high concept and a little too light on tight plotting and well-written, page-turning structure. I can appreciate what it's trying to do, but I don't really enjoy it all that much, and I disagree with its fundamental premise.

In addition, I could do the Kastor Lieberung thing easily here; they roll into town and come across the massacre of the coach Kastor was on, just like in The Enemy Within. Not sure exactly how that will play out, but probably not much other than some unsettling social encounters with cultists until they go to Lepidstadt. Which, of course, is Mittermarkt in Cult of Undeath. I didn't change the names above.

"The Beast" is not innocent. I don't like that idea at all.

My intention also was to replace the Harrowstone with the haunted house from The Skinsaw Murders and work "Carrion Hill" in somewhere, perhaps in place of the Lovecraftian episode that we have. As I've said many times before, I don't really like to nail down plans very firmly in advance; just have a handwavy idea of where I think it'll likely go if the PCs don't do anything to change it. But because they always might, I want to be flexible. My campaign arcs are much less firm than anything Paizo writes. That said, they do tend to play out more or less as I plan. I'm pretty good at anticipating what PCs are likely to do. If my plans do change, it's often as much on me as it is on the players anyway.

But we'll see. First step is make the proposal. Then I can worry about actually figuring that campaign out. It's all just moot stuff until we actually agree to have a "backup" campaign going on in the background.

In other news, I've been borderline sick all week, so I haven't done as much as I planned to. A bit of Old Republic in the evenings, early to bed. My wife has also been sick, so at least she doesn't feel too left out. We watched a few shows, and hung around moving in slow motion and feeling kind of bad. Tonight, we're supposed to go out. If we feel up to it and not exhausted. Maybe we'll do it tomorrow instead, depending on how we feel. 

I also played SWTOR just a bit with my son-in-law the other day. He was interested in doing it again yesterday, but he didn't log on until kind of late, so we suspected it wasn't going to happen. Maybe we'll hook up on Korriban again briefly this weekend sometime.

Runelords and Red Wizards

My history with D&D is kind of spotty. This is probably an overly self-indulgent tangent to lead up to the point I'm actually blogging about, but it's my blog, so you'll indulge me or move on; whatever, I don't care. Although I played D&D fairly early (1980 was my first game, I believe) and played a lot of early versions of the game; OD&D, BD&D, B/X (but not BECMI or RC) and AD&D in the early to mid-80s, but I stopped paying too much attention to D&D specifically before 2e came out. One side effect of that vintage of entry into the hobby is that settings written by setting developers weren't really a thing. OD&D had a Blackmoor and a Greyhawk supplement, but both were much less campaign settings as we'd consider them today and more like expansion optional rules; more classes, more monsters, more magic, etc. Back in those days, running the game and homebrewing your setting were basically seen as synonymous activities. Only much later did they split into two different activities and people start to behave as if using the built-in setting was a given. Because I wandered away from D&D before 2e, which is especially famous for its settings, I never really "got the memo" and changed my perception away from the paradigm that running the game = creating the setting.

A gazetteer cover from the Known World

This change was a long time coming. 3e, for instance, had Greyhawk as the "default" setting in the books that weren't specifically about another setting, but that didn't amount to too much that was actually substantial; the Greyhawk pantheon was given as a sample list of gods, the subraces for elves and dwarves, etc. were specifically Greyhawkian, although generic enough that in theory they could apply anywhere, and a bunch of adventures, especially in Dungeon Magazine, were set explicitly in Greyhawk. But even then, the developers went out of their way to assert that this was just a sample way of doing things, and most products had alternatives for how it would fit to another setting or two that WotC supposedly supported. In terms of very explicitly Greyhawk setting information, there was really only one book that I recall that would qualify as a "setting" book as we think of it today, and that was the early 3e product Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. I couldn't help but not be at least somewhat familiar with the setting, although I hardly was any kind of deep lore kind of guy, but I was familiar with the names of many of the important NPCs, many of the locations, etc. You couldn't not be.

Similarly, I absorbed some of Mystara, another old school setting more closely associated with the D&D line after D&D and AD&D officially split. By familiar, I mean of course that I played some modules set in this "Known World" as it was originally called, like "Keep on the Borderlands" or "The Isle of Dread" and a few others, and I remember the early hex maps of the Grand Duchy of Karameikos from the Expert set. And I knew a little bit about some of the differences, like Shadow Elves vs Drow, etc. between the two settings. I even played the Capcom side-scrolling beat-em'ups set in Mystara. Heck, I even still have copies of it from Steam on my PC right now in spite of their age. But again, the fact that these settings existed didn't imply that people were really using them religiously, and they weren't even structured in such a way to facilitate that anyway.

Through the 90s, I was back into RPGs as a hobby, but explicitly not D&D. I read a bunch of Traveller. I read a bunch of World of Darkness (super chic in the 90s, I know). I read a bunch of Top Secret. I read or played a few other games here and there. I paid more attention to these non-D&D games than to D&D, obviously, but I was at least a little familiar with stuff going on in D&D. I was aware of Forgotten Realms and its immense popularity. I read about a dozen Forgotten Realms novels, including at least 8-9 of the original Salvatore novels; the Icewind Dale trilogy, the Dark Elf prequel trilogy, and probably about 2-3 books that followed, before I gave up. I read some later Paul S. Kemp FR novels.  I knew a bit about Planescape, but mostly because I read about it rather than because I read it. Because I was going through a phase of valuing novelty over tradition, Planescape in particular was much more interesting to me than other settings at the time. I knew about Dark Sun; the kind of "sure, it's D&D, but it's also Barsoom and Mad Max just as much" setting. I knew about Kara-Tur, Al-Qadim, Maztica, Hollow Earth, and many more... although knowing about them and knowing anything significant about them were obviously two different things. I started to like the idea of seeing settings as interesting things to read about that I could raid at will for my own homebrew, but it was really in the era of 3e that I started digging into some of these settings. Many of these settings I actively was still disinterested in in many ways, as I was still on a novelty kick, and FR, Greyhawk, etc. hardly seemed novel; they seemed pretty vanilla, in fact. Dragonlance was another major setting, and I read a bunch of the novels, and even the Endless Quest books set there, but it seemed so caught up in the metaplot that I admit I didn't really think of it as a setting that you'd actually play in. I know that a lot of people did, but I never had much interest in doing so, and was less interested as I learned more about it. That one's relationship to me is kind of weird. And as I've gotten older, I've found that the novels weren't as good as I remembered them being either, although that isn't to say that they're bad. But Dragonlance to me was always a setting for novels, not games.

As I got back into caring about D&D specifically following the release of 3e, I thought it was a good opportunity to "get in on the ground floor" of some of the settings as they were coming out. Other than the aforementioned Greyhawk gazetteer book, WotC officially supported two campaign settings; a cleaned up and revised Forgotten Realms, that had is own trade dress separate from D&D, and which is fairly highly regarded among fans of the setting as probably the best iteration of the setting (with the possible exception of the original AD&D "gray box" depending on who you ask and what they're using it for) and the new setting, Eberron. I gradually got most of the Forgotten Realms products, hence my ongoing Forgotten Realms trawl, from 3e, but I didn't ever care too much about it, and honestly am only even now cracking some of them open decades after I bought them. Sad, I know. Many were bought used and relatively cheap, in my defense. But I have a problem where I buy books and then don't get around to reading them for years. I know. I never cared that much about FR, as I said, but I liked Eberron's core conceit quite a bit, I liked many of the ways it was executed, and being in on the ground floor, buying the actual campaign setting manual when it was brand spanking new, etc. I felt like I had buy-in on Eberron that I never did on any of the older settings, where I flitted around the edges of them while they got popular and mainstream. With Eberron, however, I was there. It's one of the maybe three or four published settings that I'd seriously consider using, possibly.

Another one is Golarion. Although not official, Paizo had been doing Dragon and Dungeon magazine for years, and many of their employees had written a lot of official D&D products. I always saw Golarion as a kind of para-official D&D setting, if that makes any sense. And being there at the ground floor, it's another one that I always kind of liked, even though I had (as always) my problems with some of the choices that they made. I have a few other third party settings, like Midnight, Dragonstar, etc. but the only truly third party (again, Golarion is para-official) setting that I was at the ground floor on was Iron Kingdoms. 

For Golarion, it got too big, too detailed, too easy to lose track of what was going on, and too easy to find details that I didn't like. But for at least a couple of years, I really loved the original campaign setting book and the earlier waves of products that expanded on it before I lost the plot of Paizo's obsession with rules and charop builds. It also looks like it drifted away from being too explicitly a D&D setting over the years and picked up a lot of its own thing. In general, I'd applaud this as a good move, but in this case, I think what they implemented was actually worse than D&D default in many ways.

Iron Kingdoms is another one that I liked a lot when we didn't have a lot of information on it. The original Witchfire trilogy and the setting that you could just see around it was fascinating to me. The original Lock & Load brief setting treatment was mostly pretty fascinating. The Five Fingers book was phenomenal; one of my favorite RPG sourcebooks of all time, honestly. But the big two volume campaign setting books underwhelmed me and I kind of lost my way with Iron Kingdoms. I even dabbled a bit in Warmachine because I liked the setting, and I have more than a dozen issues of their magazine, No Quarter. But the wargame inevitably changed the tone and themes of the setting; now instead of a brooding, dark setting with a few interesting industrial elements, it became a loud and proud turned up to 11 steampunk war setting that was all fighting, all "coolness" all the time, and honestly; it lost a lot of its original charm by doing so. 

So those three settings are the ones that I have at least some level of buy-in on; Eberron, Golarion and Iron Kingdoms. And Forgotten Realms is the one that I can't quite avoid, and although there are plenty of things not to like about it, there are plenty of things that aren't bad too. And outside of D&D, the Warhammer Old World is a setting I could potentially think of using. Maybe. 

Now; all that said, that's background context. What am I specifically talking about today? Because I just read Rise of the Runelords recently, I'm thinking about the Runelords, and honestly, I've never really liked them. The idea of a powerful magocracy is nice, but mages who are focused on the seven deadly sins, and mapping the sins to the 3e schools of magic? Kind of weak and corny, honestly. Although it seems obvious, I don't think it really occurred to me until this time around that the Red Wizards are better in every way than the Runelords, and if you really needed to, you could use them in place of the Runelords. I mean, I know that Paizo couldn't use the Red Wizards because they weren't open content, but as a player, I'm looking at the two of them and thinking; there's no good reason not to swap the Red Wizards in where the Runelords were, and treat Thasillon as if it's basically Thay. There are a couple of reasons why they aren't exactly the same, though, in terms of theme and tone. To wit: 1) Thassilon is an ancient realm that's been gone for 10,000 years even though its zulkirs... er, I mean runelords are all in stasis and can be recovered. 2) Thassilon's schtick is runelords jockeying for power as sub-kings in a single confederacy against each other, and nobody knows what relationship (if any) they really had with most of their neighbors. Thay is like that too, but strongly driven by an expansionist ideology, and their context is that as powerful as they are, they are only one among many rival nations. 3) In 3e in particular, the Thayan enclaves and Thayan magic items business is one of their most important things going, and while I could easily use that if needed for Thassilon, there's nothing like it in Thassilon as described. But again, the various domains of the various zulkirs stand in almost perfectly with the runelords and their sin-besotted nations; what's exactly the difference between Karzoug the transmuter; super high level wizard king of Shalast which in a hoaky way is associated with greed, and Druxus Rhym, the zulkir of transmutation during the 3e era anyway? Especially if the guy's in stasis and only makes a few remote phone calls to the PCs before showing up at the very end of the campaign to be (supposedly) defeated anyway?

I dunno; maybe I'll feel differently after reading Return of the Runelords, but I doubt it. I think the Red Wizards are superior in every way. Heck, honestly, I think the ties to sins of the runelords was super hoaky and silly; even just generic archmages from long ago would have been better than the runelords

Carrion Crown / Cult of Undeath

Cult of Undeath is a rather radical reworking of the Carrion Crown; so radical, in fact, that its genesis as the Carrion Crown isn't super obvious, much like Star Wars as filmed doesn't really resemble The Hidden Fortress anymore (although earlier drafts of the screenplay did so more.) Now, if I wanted to run it a little bit more as written, what would I need to do? Or what would I want to do, at least? Listening (again) to the Hideous Laughter podcast and actually doing a bit more with my 5e group has made me feel more charitable towards actual D&D. More or less. I'd still rather run Cult of Undeath as I earlier described, but realistically, nobody else is going to be as interested in that as I would be.

Let me make a list.

Firstly, the adventure path is way too long. 15 levels, or whatever it is, is twice as much as I want. And I don't know how many hours that converts to, but "common wisdom" according to the internet is that 200 hours is a reasonable time for an entire AP. We play 3-4 hour sessions, so that would come to 50-67 sessions. If we're lucky we play twice a month (sometimes less frequently) meaning that that is, at best, over two years to finish, but realistically probably as much as twice that and maybe even more than that. Not only do I think closer to 100 hours is a more reasonable time, but I also don't want to go higher than about 7th level at the most either. I can certainly cut a lot of material and shorten the thing by ~50% in terms of runtime, but shortening the levels is a bit more finicky; I'll have to end up making a great number of changes to the monsters and encounters and NPCs to make that work. Which is fine; there's no chance that I'm running this in Pathfinder 1e, as it was originally published anyway, I'll probably end up running it as a handwavy on the fly 5e conversion. Which is kinda funny, as I don't actually know the rules for 5e very well. I've been playing for some months, but I've mostly been playing as a 3e player and accepting correction or direction when that leads me astray. Honestly, that hasn't happened too much. I think handwavy on the fly conversion is certainly possible between these two systems, as long as you're not to spergy about rules. I most certainly am not, nor would I tolerate spergy rules-lawyering at my table anyway.

Secondly, there's some great Paizo horror elements that aren't part of the Carrion Crown adventure path, but are honestly even better in most respects that what the Carrion Crown did. Both, curiously, by Richard Pett as writer. I mean, of course, the stand-alone module "Carrion Hill", a Lovecraftian module that works very well and was originally written for 5e. If "Wake of the Watcher", chapter 4 of Carrion Crown is supposed to be a kind of "reverse Innsmouth", then Carrion Hill is clearly a "Dunwich Horror" pastiche. In most respects, I like it better as a "Lovecraftian chapter" than "Wake of the Watcher", and I'd be likely to read the two of them, think about how to combine them, but focusing more on "Carrion Hill" rather than "Wake of the Watcher." Similarly, although I like the intro haunted house adventure of Carrion Crown well enough, the same theme is explored even better in "The Skinsaw Murders" way back in Rise of the Runelords, literally the second adventure path chapter that Paizo did as part of their post-D&D run. I'd probably look to combine Harrowstone and Foxglove Manor, including the murders taking place around town, the ghoul farms sequence, both of which are brilliant, and then maybe lean a bit more into Harrowstone when you go to the actual haunted house. Which probably won't be a prison full of half a dozen serial killer boss ghosts, because that feels very video-gamey in its structure. 

That said, even though I'm running it more like Skinsaw than like Haunting of Harrowstone, I do want the whole Professor Lorrimor's funeral set-up.

I also want to mix in the whole mistaken identity caper from "Enemy in Shadows", the first chapter of the iconic Warhammer FRP campaign. If this seems like a lot going on front-loaded in a campaign that's already too long and complicated, that's because much of the later parts of Carrion Crown are going to be significantly trimmed due to... them not really working very well, honestly. For instance:

Thirdly, although I raved about Richard Pett's entries in these other modules, he also penned the second part of Carrion Crown. I think it's a reasonably well done module, so I can't fault Pett for this, I don't think, but the entire premise just doesn't work for me. Putting a monster on trial is kind of silly to begin with, and then making the monster a relatable "good guy" who's being framed maybe is supposed to be some kind of "subverting expectations" move, but it absolutely doesn't work for me. Not even a little, tiny bit. Yes, yes... subverting expectations might be overdoing it, because I realize of course that this is a significant theme, simplified to the point of false binary dumbness, of the Frankenstein novel, but I absolutely cannot go with it. That said, many of the encounters that the PCs are meant to have while investigating the Beast's guilt (or not, in this case) are still great encounters. The context in which they happen needs to be completely changed though.

Fourth, if "the monster is a nice guy, it's the white male Christian southerners who are the real monsters" problem wasn't kind of obnoxious already (I know I'm exaggerating, but y'know. I don't care) in the Frankenstein adventure, they go ahead and repeat the same themes in the werewolf chapter (#3) and the vampire chapter (#5) meaning that those entire modules are questionable for use, at best. Maybe the themes aren't exactly the same, but saving some monsters from even worse monsters because they're actually not that bad but just misunderstood is really, really stupid. While cutting two entire modules out certainly works towards my goals of trimming the whole campaign by ~50%, it's not really a great solution either, honestly. But those modules are going to be dramatically cut back, and much of what they "need" to accomplish will be folded into another module that I already have. Plot beats, or story discoveries, or whatever, can be divorced somewhat from the action that surrounds them, especially when the action that surrounds them is often somewhat gratuitous or superfluous anyway. Maybe taking another page from "The Enemy Within", the Whispering Tyrant and the "wake up the ancient dark lord" trope can be more localized, like it is in Bogenhafn. There's nothing wrong with scaling back the scope of these high fantasy epics into something more horror and sword & sorcery-like, and a lich waking up and consuming a decent sized town or medieval-scale city is certainly sufficient stakes for the tens of thousands of people who live there. It also worked for Wisburg, the German(ic?—this was before the German Unification, but I have no idea where exactly it's supposed to be, as it's not a real city as near as I can tell. Austria, possibly, since Transylvania would have been part of the Austrian Empire at the time.) from the various versions of Nosferatu. Save the whole world is tired and tropy in D&D anyway, as far as I'm concerned. 

Anyway, I need to reexamine the modules (it's been too long since I've read them, but listening to an actual play podcast only has me 20-25% or so into the second module so far). I've also been leapfrogging that with an Enemy Within podcast, but even aside from that, I've been wanting to borrow elements of that for some time. Turning the Purple Hand Tzeentch cult into a Whispering Way undead cult shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

Golarion Remixed

Wow, I need to redo that banner image. Adding the canvas filter to it was probably fine for the word Golarion, but it made the light effect look really stupid. Oh, well. There's always another chance to whip up an improved banner. 

I've been thinking about how exactly I'd do this. When I did Eberron Remixed, I literally went through the entire campaign setting, and made annotations for every chapter. While there is a pretty good Golarion setting book, which I bought when it was new some seventeen years or so ago, I don't think that's the best way to handle Golarion. The setting book is quite high level, and much of what was in it has been superseded by subsequent material. The setting book isn't as "definitive" as it is in Eberron, and unlike Eberron, it isn't as comprehensive. I remember clearly making the comparison at the time that the Golarion book was $10 more cover price ($50 vs $40) than Eberron, or the earlier Forgotten Realms book, but the two official D&D settings were both at least 50 pages longer. I mean, $50 spent almost twenty years ago is water under the bridge, but I still feel like the setting is a little light as a product for what I paid. The real problem, though, is how decentralized the setting development is. The Golarion setting book is almost too high level to be useful for what I'm looking to do.

Rather, I think that the approach to take with Golarion is to treat the regions that work as "mini-campaign settings" in their own right need to be remixed discretely. I.e., rather than remixing all of Golarion, I'll remix a section as needed when I need it. Golarion—if you're not too Spotify and Gen-Z to not know this—is more like a full album rather than a track or two. You don't need to remix the whole album to get a remix of just one song that you want to remix. Heck, some of the regions never did really get much more than a high level treatment.

I'm sure that's true for places in Eberron and Forgotten Realms too, of course (in fact, I know it is—I would have liked to see more specifically about Q'barra or the Shadow Marches, for instance, but we never did) but it's especially true for Golarion, so it needs to be treated somewhat differently.

Anyway, aside from that, I've added a lot more pages, most of them reading trawl lists of big subsets of gaming books that I'd like to read or, more commonly, re-read, since in many cases I haven't done so since buying them over 15-20 years ago. There's obviously way too much stuff. It'll take me the better part of a year just to read the Paizo Adventure paths, much less all of the 1e standalone modules, Chronicles/Setting books, Companion books, etc. And all of the 3e WotC modules. And the big stack of Goodman Games modules that I got in those two humble bundles that I bought, etc.

I've got way too many gaming products. And I don't want to just read gaming products, so I have a bunch of novels that I'm reading too. Anyway, last night I finished the fourth module of the Rise of the Runelords campaign, and I'll want to read the fifth and sixth relatively quickly—probably this week, and then I can step away for at least a few days from Adventure Paths. Also just read the next Bleeding Edge module as part of my Freeport Trawl. Those are relatively short modules, so I feel like I can get them done faster; there are three more, at which point I think I've also earned a break on the Freeport stuff after hitting a natural milestone. And I have two hardback 3e books in my backpack to read; on my trip I finished Stormwrack, and now I have Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and Monster Manual II on tap. I also have three of the much slimmer Pathfinder Chronicles books in my backpack, so I'll be busy with hard copy books for a while, but when I finish this small set, I need to pick up Races of Eberron to keep the Eberron Trawl alive. The 3e Forgotten Realms trawl also hasn't seen any action in weeks. I'm about a third of the way through book two of the Dark Waters trilogy in novels; so I want to finish that one quickly and read the last one quickly too, and I can rebox those particular books and look at what's going to be next after that. (Which I think will be the four-part Horned Helmet series by James Silke.)

Sigh. I wish I could afford to retire. I'd spend much of my time overlanding, and reading. I'd love to be reading from a rooftop tent or camp chair on my raised truck or jeep in the southwestern desert right now. Spend my days driving and hiking and my evenings reading. But I'm not there yet. And not until I pay off my house anyway.

Golarion Remixed and Pantheon Option Added

First off, a diversion. I read a fair bit while traveling, because that's mostly what I do when traveling for business and not actually working. I rarely have time to do any significant site-seeing on business trips, so I mostly load up on books. I finished Salvatore's Exile, which I was about halfway through at the start of the trip, the second book in the Dark Elf prequel trilogy, and I also read Sojourn, the final book. I'd read these before; they were all published in the very early 90s, and I probably read them by the mid-90s at the latest. I remember liking them, and don't get me wrong; I did again, but I almost wish that I hadn't bought them, because now I have them, and I doubt I'll read them again. I think that prequels generally shouldn't be done. You already know where it's going to end up, because of the prequel is a neologism of sequel, i.e., the book (or movie, etc.) that takes place later was actually made first, and this is a sequel that takes place earlier. I'm convinced more and more that while there's always a strong desire to explore the origin of a popular character before he really became that character, it rarely works out well. The Star Wars prequels were disappointing. Solo was disappointing, and shouldn't have been made. Wolverine: Origin was OK, but Marvel were right to be suspicious of it. Ultimately, although it was pretty good and no doubt sold like crazy, it probably did more damage to the "brand" of Wolverine than anything else in the end. And here; Drizzt was a cool character. As Salvatore himself "discovered" while writing the original Icewind Dale trilogy, which was supposed to star Wulfgar as the protagonist, Drizzt ended up being a much more intriguing character, and was the real break-out star of the series, and of his writing as a whole. But seeing him as he was before he was the character that we know was mostly kept afloat by the—at the time, still—exotic environment of the Underdark and the dark elf society, which was more intriguing than Drizzt as a teenager or whatever.

But I already discussed this somewhat in my brief mention of having finished the first book of the trilogy, Homeland; rather, what struck me this time, although again, it's hardly revelatory, just something that struck me particularly this time around, was that neither Drizzt nor Wulfgar, despite being indubitably D&D characters created for a D&D setting, and statted out in various D&D products, don't behave anything like D&D characters in most respects as you watch their bildungsroman in The Crystal Shard and this trilogy in particular. Rather, they start out as exceptional individuals, who go through what amounts to little more than a Rocky-style training montage, and then they're superlative characters who change very little over the course of multiple books after that. Certainly they change very little in terms of powers, abilities or capabilities; I don't mean to imply that they don't have character development. But it is nothing at all like the progression of levels in a D&D game. It just doesn't work very well, does it? The whole leveling thing is a gamism that doesn't resemble anything in the mediums which supposedly informed the game. You don't see anything like leveling in Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. They may learn, grow and age, but they don't "level up" or anything at all like that. James Bond doesn't "level up" (or have a backstory either, for that matter) he just is and we like him as he is. 

Anyway, I dunno. I kind of like leveling in my own games, but I also like flat power curves and more "static" characters. Static at least in the sense that they don't have some crazy power curve, but they just kind of are, and things that happen to increase their capabilities are more in line with things that happen in real life; acquiring materiel that would give them more capabilities, learning something new through study, getting promoted or otherwise creating a network of relationships that offer support, etc. I'm starting to lean more and more into the house rule of smoothing the leveling and minimizing its obviousness, if not eliminating it altogether

Secondly, Paizo. I've been reading and finding lots of stuff on Paizo and the Golarion setting, and watching YouTube videos by MythKeeper and stuff. It's an interesting setting. To use it, I'd still have to make lots of changes. I like the frontier "Varisia" region quite a bit, for example, but I hate Kaer Maga, the "City of Strangers" and I'd have to swap some other city in its place entirely. I'm not a huge fan of the rune magic themes of ancient Thassilon, with their Seven Deadly Sins stuff either, nor am I a huge fan of Deliverance-style ogres (which I honestly find more and more offensive the more I encounter that particular stereotype) or the "Against the Giants" vibe of the fourth installment (the one I just finished) or their take on goblins, honestly. I like the more honest and "playing-it-straight" vibe of goblins in D&D rather than an attempt to hijack them into comic relief, or at least dark silliness. Goblins in Golarion are more like the gremlins of the Gremlins movie than they are like goblins of D&D or Lord of the Rings. They even kind of look like them.

What struck me about Pathfinder, especially as I started to find out about the changes made from 1e to 2e, and even moreso the changes from 2e to the Remastered Project, was that people who went to Paizo in 2007-9 or so often cited the reason for doing so that 4e didn't resemble D&D enough, and it made too many changes to the mechanics and especially to the lore of the game. So, they stuck with Pathfinder, which felt like just another setting—albeit one with high production and writing values, and one still strongly supported—of D&D. Paizo in the early days was more similar to Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms than 4e was, or even 3.5's own Eberron setting. But Golarion of today, post Remastered Project, is less like D&D than 4e was in terms of lore, and honestly, has a lot of similarities to 4e in terms of mechanics, in many ways. It's interesting how the tables turn. I think it's a case of the boiled frog analogy that people love to refer to; 4e was too many changes too fast for most people, but honestly, many of its ideas were good ideas. Many of its mechanics have wormed their way into Pathfinder and 5e and the whole modern ecosystem of games, for instance, and many of its lore changes (which I was always a fan of relative to the "traditional" lore as represented in its later stages by 3e and again in many ways by 5e). I wonder if many of those people who hated the 4e lore are perfectly comfortable now with Pathfinder Remastered's lore or not.

Anyway, I'm thinking of doodling a bit with Varisia like I did with Timischburg. That was my attempt to make a "fake Ustalav", and I think I'd like a fake Varisia too. Varisia may not be my favorite single element of the Golarion setting, but then again, it might be. It's a good one. In some ways, the Hill Country is an even more mundane version of Varisia, and I've deliberately added two city-states that were inspired in many ways by the rivalry between Korvosa and Magnimar in my own Garenport and Barrowmere. I can re-do some of the geography, rename the Hill Country and add some more Varisia-like elements to it, and make an alternate setting that includes some traditional D&D-like races, sort of like my High Fantasy X project, such as it was, was. The draft map I sketched up for High Fantasy X was more like Eberron meets Heroes of Might & Magic III, but there's no reason not to have more than one setting for the game. I like creating settings for its own sake, after all. This one will be more explicitly Golarion Remixed, and maybe I'll use that tag, which I haven't done much with, to explore how I'd change elements of it. 

Whatever I do as part of my "Golarion Remixed" project, it'll probably be more radical than my Eberron Remixed project. Eberron feels more like a single setting with multiple areas in it, while Golarion feels almost like a patchwork of settings that are connected, but for any given campaign, you're not really expected to use more than one of the elements. Maybe two at the most. A campaign set in Varisia is not going to go to Absalom or Katapesh, for instance. Each area has its own tone and theme. If all that makes any sense.

Finally, I also want to have the alternative of using fantasy deities, a mythological pantheon, even if I'm not sure if I prefer that, or not. But certainly, it will help D&D players adjust to my more esoteric tastes if I wean them in by making games I run resemble what they're expecting just a little more. Anyway, here's my full list of gods that I'd use for High Fantasy X, Golarion Remixed (maybe), Eberron Remixed (maybe) and even as an alternative in Old Night if I wanted to do it that way.

Sol Invictus - sun god (as you'd expect) with a martial aspect. More like Pelor than like Apollo. Originally a Roman god.

Cernunnos, the Horned King - nature god from Gaulish/Celtic origin, with antlers. Not super friendly.

Summanus the Thunderer - an obscure Roman god. I'm less likely to go with the "god of xxx" kind of thing; in real mythology, gods were just characters, and they didn't necessarily belong to domains and spheres of influence as much as we like to make them be. Thor, for instance, was never once called the God of Thunder, or even the Thunderer in any Norse text. He did have a hammer that thundered when he smote with it, but he was just an adventurer Norse god with a quick temper who was very strong, heroic, and featured in more stories than most. But I agree that for D&D there probably needs to be some element of that. 

Mithras - another late-appearing Roman god, famous for his mystery cult that was popular among the legions and the foederati, so he's often considered a martial god.

Chernavog, the Dark One - a Slavic god, although I've spelled it slightly differently than normal, who also happens to be the character from the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence of Fantasia. I consider him a pretty typical dark lord style figure. 

Veles, the Sly Mage - both a trickster figure, and a god of magic of sorts; Veles is also a Slavic god originally.

Tellus, the Earth-Mother - an old Greek or Roman spelling of Terra. Pretty typical Mother Earth type of goddess.

The Gray Sisters: Wyrd, Verthand, and Skuld - The Gray Sisters is usually a literal translation of the Graeae, which were Greek (famous for their interaction with Perseus, if you've watched Clash of the Titans lately) but I've used names that are more similar to Anglo-Saxon versions of the Norse Norns. Obviously they are both old Indo-European reflections of the same idea anyway, since the Graeae and the Norns are almost identical. Goddesses of fate, divination, etc. but with a darker, edgier tone than some might have had otherwise. 

Nodens, the Silver-Handed; Lord of the Hunt - A Celtic British god, also known by his Irish name Nuada or Nuadha, although the name Nodens itself is familiar to many gamers from Lovecraft. A huntsman and fisherman, he's kind of like the iconic ranger, maybe.

Brigantia, the Mistress of Victory - a poorly attested Celtic goddess. Well, actually she's fairly well-attested in terms of figurines, but we know little about her. Not unlike Nike, the Greek Goddess of Victory, and also often conflated with the Romans with Minerva (Athena). I'd probably see her as the unlikeable girlboss of the gods that the other gods either are annoyed by, or are constantly putting in her place, although she's lacking in self-awareness enough to realize it.

Epona - Gaulish goddess of horses. Maybe some elements of Artemis too; a weird, wandering loner of a girl who prefers the company of animals, especially horses, to anyone else.

Sirona, the Healer - another poorly known Celtic goddess (I'm using lots of them, if you didn't notice) but I'll call her the pretty stereotypical Florence Nightingale goddess that D&D pantheons seem to always have.

Tzovinar, Daughter of the Seas - an Armenian goddess. I just like the name and the title that came with her. I was thinking of using Thetis, a Greek chthonic goddess of the seas, and the bad guy from Clash of the Titans, but I like this name better. I need to mix up a few more goddesses, because I'm wont otherwise to ignore them and make the whole pantheon a big ole sausage party.

Mokosh, the Swamp Mother - I can't even remember where I got this name. But a hag goddess in a swamp sounded kind of cool.

Volturnus, the Father of the River - I thought about using Father Ren, or Father Rhine from the Germanic tribes, but I relented and went with this more "generic" Roman name. An aquatic god, obviously, and maybe someone who's frequently irritated by Mokosh and Tzovinar.

Ceres - a Roman goddess of the hearth, agriculture, marriage and domesticity in general, often equated with Demeter, and who picked up the same story of Demeter and Persephone and Hades, except the names were Ceres and Proserpina and Dis Pater in those roles to the Romans.

Dagon - a dark god of the ocean, who borrows more from the Lovecraft and D&D demon lord stuff than from mythology per se.

Orcus - another name for Pluto to the Romans, but of course, he's got a long history in D&D which I'll also be borrowing; a dark demon-god, associated with undeath. He may be more like Orcus as Tenebrous, though—an undead thing. Maybe like Nagash from Warhammer in fact.

Thanatos - another alternate name for either Hades or his realm to the Greeks, although in D&D of course, this is Orcus' layer of the Abyss. I'll call him a dark god of night and murder, maybe not too unlike Zon-Kuthon of Golarion; corrupted by the Dark Tapestry, or Far Realm, or Outer Darkness, or Void Beyond, or whatever I want to call it. Conceptually, they're all the same thing. This Lovecraftian corruption possibly places him in a similar role to Tharizdun from D&D.

Zaltys, the Serpent - a snake god. The name comes from Lithuanian, and refers to the home snakes that they used to keep for whatever reason. The Teutonic crusaders who brought Christianity with the sword to the Baltic peoples killed a lot of their snakes. Elements of Yig, Ydersius, Sertrous and more

Nwt, the Sky-mother - an Egyptian goddess of the night sky.

Ashtar of the Sacred Groves - A Semitic goddess, usually known as either Ishtar or Astarte depending on the language, but I've split the difference. Infamous for her sacred groves and temple heirodules, or "sacred prostitutes" in real life. 

The Old Men of the Sea; Manann, Thaumant, and Halios Geron - odd spellings of Greek gods and one Irish god of the Sea. I thought it'd be cool to have them be a trio rather than just one. 

I've also got all my Lovecraftian entities from earlier posts, but I won't propose them as part of the pantheon that PCs could conceivably worship.