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 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. 

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. 

D&D as low fantasy

Given what I said yesterday about D&D never really emulating the sword & sorcery low fantasy that OSR fans claim to be such fans of, I thought it'd be good to noodle out how it could be. Ironically, some of the non-D&D OSR games actually do so in terms of mechanics vis-à-vis magic and what-not. But, of course, the OSR playstyle is heavily focused on dungeon-crawling, which is my other main complaint about the disconnect between D&D and sword & sorcery fiction. I saw someone (on ENWorld, of all places) once say that the first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark has more dungeon-crawling than the entire oeuvre of sword & sorcery fiction. That was meant to be hyperbole, but it's also not really incorrect. The best rhetoric might not be true from a literal, dialectical perspective, but it's still "true" if you know what I mean.

Anyway, what I want to talk about, as a tangent from my normal topics (not that my normal topics have been very focused for quite a long time lately anyway) is: how would I actually play D&D if I wanted it to have that kind of low magic low fantasy vibe that I do, actually, want it to have? What modifications would I make? And because 3e is the version of D&D that I know by far the best, played the most, and has the most modifications already floating out there, that's the edition that I'm going to focus on. Although everything I say here would apply equally well to 5e and probably to any edition of D&D. So, if I want that low magic, low fantasy swashbuckling dark adventure feel—and I definitely do—what changes would I make? Let me list them:

• Use E6. This is the single most important overlay or house rule to implement, as it keeps the game from ever getting out of the lower fantasy quadrants to begin with. Read the post in the link, if you need to (maybe I'll copy and paste to have my own post that "archives" it as a page, just in case, here on the blog.) But I don't think that this is sufficient by itself. WotC have reported in the past that their research indicates most "campaigns" only last seven sessions and hardly anyone plays higher than level 6-8 anyway. Higher level D&D may be aspirational gameplay for a lot of players, but it's not reality for most. If most campaigns start at level 1 and fizzle before getting more than a few levels under its belt anyway, then there's no reason to worry about it too much. Some other editions don't have the feat progression posited for 3e, but you can always just have slower leveling and shorter campaigns that never get above 6th level anyway. 
• No PC can start at first level with a spellcasting class. That is, if the class gives you a spellcasting ability at 1st level, then you have a take a level of something else first that does not. Wizards, sorcerers, clerics, etc. have to take a level of fighter, or rogue or something else like that before they can advance into their spellcasting class. Ignore the multiclassing penalty, if you use XP, for purposes of this requirement. In fact, ignore multiclassing penalties and favored class altogether. It's kind of a stupid rule anyway, and with only 6 levels to play with, just let people take levels in whatever class that they want. Note that classes like ranger or paladin that have a spellcasting progression, but one that doesn't start at 1st level aren't affected by this rule, since their spell progression doesn't come in until nearly the level cap anyway.
• Higher level spells can be at DM's discretion, converted to Incantations, which greatly limits their tactical utility, but which does allow for magic-users, especially villains, who can do all kinds of weird things with enough time and will. 5e has done something similar with Rituals, although I'm a little less familiar with them. But if you're unsure how to do this, or uncomfortable house-ruling spells as Incantations, look to the 5e Rituals rules to see if they can be used. (5e is really just a streamlined version of 3e, for the most part. Many systems work very similarly, and those that don't can usually be ported as is without any problem.)
• Higher level class abilities can be converted, if needed, into feat chains that can be accessed via the ongoing feat access of E6.
• While normally, prestige classes wouldn't really work in E6, at the DM's discretion, characters can start at 1st level of a prestige class and take it as if it were a normal class, ignoring the prerequisites. Emphasis on at the DM's discretion, and if a prestige class is too powerful for this to work (honestly, most are not, but you know your group and how they play better than I do, and power-gamers can't be given a free hand to screw up your game) the DM can either disallow it or work with you to modify it. What I would probably do is allow prestige classes to start at 2nd level, and I'd make at least some attempt to encourage PCs to take as many of the prereqs as they could during their first level, but then waive whatever's left, let them take five levels of the prestige class (2-6) at which point the E6 cap would come into play. Any additional class features could be converted to feat chains if needed.
• Full utilization of optional classes from other sources, like the Factotum (kind of smug-sounding name, but cool class) from Dungeonscape, the Complete series classes, etc. should be allowed and explicitly encouraged.
• Full utilization of alternate class features from PHB II and other books should be encouraged. If more are desired, Pathfinder 1e archetypes are exactly the same thing, and since Pathfinder 1e was built off of the SRD, much of the archetypes for Pathfinder can be used as is in D&D 3.5.
• I don't remember the psionics rules very well, honestly, so I'm a little hesitant to comment on their use, but the same concept as with spellcasting classes should be applied to "full time" psionic classes like the psion or wilder. Whether it applies to "part time" psionic classes like the soulknife or the lurk is up to the DM. I'd probably say they're OK as is. But again, my caveat is that I don't remember how psionics works very well because I haven't played or even seen played a psionic character in many, many years.
• Not strictly speaking necessary, since low fantasy is not necessarily equivalent to pseudo-horror dark fantasy, but there are a lot of fear checks, sanity systems, etc. for d20 games, and you could use one, if desired, to further mute the superhero feel of D&D vs. the low fantasy source material that you're trying to engage with. If you do, finding some way to apply it to the use of magic is desirable too, because it makes magic less utilitarian and more dangerous and edgy. I've completely changed the way magic works in my game where this is already baked into how it works. I'm not entirely sure how to do this with a modified D&D game without it drastically challenging the utility of even taking spellcasters at all, but one quick and dirty method would be to make the character roll a d20 every time they cast a spell. On a critical failure, i.e, a natural 1, the spell would fail and whatever sanity system you're using would come into play. I like this rule a lot, but that's because I want to push even further into dark fantasy rather than simply S&S low fantasy, so this isn't strictly speaking necessary for my project. 

A low fantasy party of adventurers. Although DALL-E 3 thinks that they're all Millennials, I think.

I think those things would make the game feel much more low fantasy, but in reality, the rules changes are probably less important than what you do at the table anyway. Do you have bizarre animal-people characters playing weirdo superheroes, or do you have much more grounded characters? What kinds of adventures are your ensemble cast of characters getting up to? Stuff that feels gamist and D&D-like, like dungeon-crawling, or stuff that feels similar to what characters in low fantasy S&S stories are doing? Do you have grounded realistic settings mostly full of normal people, or do magic and monsters appear on your daily commute and are commonplace? High magic and highly monstrous elements can and should certainly appear, but it's a question of context; are they routine because the game is highly fantastic, or are they stand-out set pieces because the game is more grounded and realistic?

Anyway, I did this just because it is of interest to me at the moment, and because I've been revisiting a lot of my 3e collection lately, I'm feeling more charitable towards that system than I otherwise might. It's still not my ideal way to play, but this is a method that I could happily run. As long as I also get to be handwavey about rulings, play theatre of the mind style, and tell players to avoid feats and other choices that maximize their tactical grid options, because I'm not very interested in the tactical grid style of play. If I can get rid of the tactical grid, get rid of the scourge of D&D's higher level scaling problem (which applies to every edition of D&D and many D&D-like games equally) and reduce the higher magic D&Disms in favor of a more muted, grounded approach, then the game works for me, and I'd really enjoy the many options for character customization. 

3e, and it's associated family (I really mostly mean 3.5 and even Pathfinder 1e, but I genericize the entire era into one label) is infamous as a power-gamer's paradise with all kinds of optimization combination to explore, but if you don't play with power-gamers, it can be a role-players paradise as well with all kinds of customization options to explore. But once again, what goes on at your actual table is the real deciding factor, much more important than the rules. I don't think power-gamers have a lot to work with with E6, so they'll probably stay away. Which is exactly what you want to have happen anyway.

UPDATE: Not related to making it more low fantasy, but I'd truncate the skill list somewhat like Pathfinder 1e did. Hide/Move Silently fold together into Stealth. Spot/Listen into Perception. Maybe Balance, Tumble and Jump into Acrobatics. The only problem here is that Rogue's already have so many skill points that when you consolidate skills, it arguably goes too far. Then again... I probably don't really care.

E6 with Pathfinder 1e

E6. I haven't talked about that in a long time, because I've pretty much abandoned regular D&D as a favored rule set for my setting(s). E6 was originally developed late in the 3.5 era. I don't know how late; that thread has a 2007 date, but it is by its own admission, the 5th thread on the subject since it was developed. I moved on from this, because I was as tired of D&Disms in D&D as I was with the higher level scaling problems. 

Right now, I'm feeling a bit more charitable towards D&D specifically than I normally do. I still prefer my alternative, of course, but I'm more willing to play D&D specifically than I otherwise would be. But if I could run "D&D" the way that I want to, I would prefer Pathfinder 1e + E6. Why Pathfinder 1e? It seems like the easiest way to get what I want. I actually don't really think that Pathfinder was necessarily enough of an improvement on 3.5 that it justified the change, up until archetypes came out. Archetypes are exactly what the classes needed to give me the flexibility to keep playing. Sadly, they came out for Pathfinder 1e, not 3.5. Most of them can be used as is with 3.5, but I think it's a bit too fiddly to say, "we're playing 3.5, but you can use Pathfinder archetypes." Just ... Pathfinder is fine. It's 95%+ the same as 3.5 anyway. The biggest problem that Pathfinder developed, which 3.5 started, was its focus on char-op build strategies, but with E6, this isn't quite a moot point, but... mostly it won't matter too much.

Of course, Pathfinder has a bunch of weird stuff—as does 3.5 after late stage 3.5; there's a ton of races, for instance, that I'd have to say no to. 5e has developed this problem by now too; as I said yesterday, the game feels more like The Muppets than it does any fantasy that I'm familiar with. Or want to be familiar with. There's a reason why I prefer humanocentric campaigns, and even when I have other races, like in Old Night, they tend to be demihumans. Not in the sense that Gary Gygax used the word, which was in opposition to monstrous humanoids, but both meant the same thing except demihumans were non-humans with better PR. No, a demihuman is still mostly a human, just with a twist due to some magical event in the past, some genetic admixture, or something like that. This way you do get some variety, but also get to maintain your humanocentric feel. For me, it's the best of both worlds. Non-humans, on the other hand, should be explicitly more alien. Elves and dwarves in D&D, for instance, are not nearly non-human enough for non-humans. I addressed this in my High Fantasy X, or whatever I will end up calling that, by specifically making most non-humans into demi-humans. Having elves and dwarfs that are recognizable for what they are, but also more demi-human-like really works well for me. Could I adapt some of these racial ideas into D&D? Change just a bit what races like elves and dwarves are? Or is that too much trouble if I'm just doing D&D anyway.

Blegh. The whole thing is enough to make me second guess if Pathfinder 1e + E6 is worth doing after all. Anyway, I'm just about ready to run my corny Santa-themed one-shot. When I was asked, there wasn't necessarily any Santa themed expectation, but I kinda got strong-armed a little bit by being accommodating and not really having a plan. I don't mind doing much of anything for a one-shot, but this is kind of a corny premise, and kind of the opposite of my strong suit in terms of theming and tone. That said, I'm kind of excited for it. I think it'll be good as a one-shot. The biggest upside is that I generated these ChatGPT images for the game, and I think they turned out pretty good. I'll slide them into the "front" side of my GM screen or something.

I think I like the top two, at least for this corny premise, because I gave them Christmas colored eyes, and because AI kept wanting to shrink the monster's antlers otherwise. But I can't decide if I like the blizzard or the light snowfall better.

Horror in a D&D-like system

I finished two products last night, kind of surprisingly given how busy I was yesterday, although to be fair, I'd been reading them for a little while. Since there is a similar thematic element to them, horror in D&D, it makes sense to bundle this discussion about them. The first was "The Voyage to Farzeen" the first part of the first Cthulhu Saga campaign, Ghoul Island. This, and the other five campaigns, purport to be adventure path-like products. The first five are published in four parts, and the last one is a single volume. The entire campaign says it takes you from level 1 to 15. However, I was shocked that this product claims to take you to level 5. It has about as much content, fluffed up a bit due to art, layout and description, of an old 32-page module that I would barely—at best—expect to take you from level 1 to maybe level 2. If even that much. I know fast leveling is a thing in 5e, but this is absurd. There's no way that this is a five level module in any reasonable context. You don't level up after just one or two minor combats and a few hazards or skill checks. I can see the entire module taking you from level one to level two, although even that would be too fast for me.

There are other things that I didn't love about this module. Like much of the third act of Savage Tide, which I recently reviewed, the authors' idea of "roleplaying" is having to suck up to angry, capricious girl-bosses who will screw you over if you don't bend over backwards to make them feel special. In this case, not only that but the girl-bosses are Haitian voodoo savages, at least according to the illustration. Or it's a "Mythos ghoul" which is really kind of like a dirtier version of a gnoll who eats old bodies. Sigh. And yet the authors of one of these two products, and probably both, have said before that they recognize that one of the reasons people play D&D is to feel powerful... and yet they supplicate to unattractive and unlikeable girl-bosses reflexively? Truly, the scourge of gamma and even delta writers in the industry, while related to the scourge of wokeness and rabid liberal animals is, in fact, truly a scourge.

It wasn't terrible to read, I suppose. It would be terrible to play. I'm very interested in seeing how they continue to develop, but there will probably be less for me to borrow from these campaigns than I hoped. Much like the Strange Aeons adventure path, which I read half of a few years ago, and which is overtly and explicitly based on Lovecraft for Pathfinder, it just didn't fly for me. I'm more and more convinced that the "correct" way to do Lovecraftian adventures is to mimic the themes and tone, and make maybe offhand references to actual Lovecraftian entities, if at all. Use your own monsters. You can do some great Lovecraftian D&D with aboleths or mind-flayers, although they've rarely been done that way, rather than with "Mythos ghouls" or Deep Ones. Overly overt references to Lovecraftian details, and a focus on them, makes them feel more like theme park attractions than anything else. 

But again, I find that I'm curious about the development of the line. I wonder if there's a kind of almost emergent setting related to all of these Cthulhu Mythos Sagas, or adventure paths as published by Sandy Petersen games. If so, sadly, the company went out of business, and the products are rather hard to get now. Good luck finding them at a decent price. Luckily for me, I was in a position to not worry over much about the price. Egh. RPGs are still a cheaper hobby than most even if I'm overpaying for esoteric titles, I suppose. Heckuva lot cheaper than golf or hunting, to name two hobbies that I could have had instead. Can you imagine how much I'd spend if restoring classic cars was my hobby?

There were a lot of allusions to content from the Sandy Petersen Cthulhu Mythos book in this adventure path episode, which isn't surprising, so I'm glad that I pulled that up to the front of the line a few weeks ago and read it first. That book has a dread check, and you add dread levels much like you add exhaustion levels. I'm not super familiar with the 5e rules, still having not read my 5e Player's Handbook, but I was able to parse this system well enough, and I find that it's yet another better alternative to the hoary old Call of Cthulhu Sanity system. 

The other book that I finished is one that I've been reading for at least a week, interrupted by other things, and that's the late 3e product Heroes of Horror. I've read this before, a long time ago, and have had vacillating opinions on it over time. My first impression was that it was only baby-steps into the material that it was supposed to provide an in-depth coverage of, which I think still is true for a large amount of the 3e product line, especially they were about a slightly different modes of play (Cityscape got an especially scathing review from me on this very problem—although I've since come around to appreciating it a little bit more for what it is rather than resenting it for what it isn't in the years since). The second time I read it, or maybe I was just skimming—I don't remember now—I liked it better. This third time I found it somewhere in between. There are still too many mechanics, which of course was a 3e problem overall, but especially so in the sourcebooks. Too many feats, too many new spells, too many new prestige classes, etc. And way too much focus on dreams and taint, neither of which are topics that I care about at all. Not sure why they went all in on thinking those two were "core" to horror gaming. However, one thing that I thought pretty good was an alternative to madness/Sanity that actually was pretty clever, made use of existing mechanics in an easy way, and could easily be ported over to Old Night. I already have a very abbreviated and simple sanity system, but I could make it even more simple, and I may yet, because I like this. I also like that it's less Sanity and more Fear, i.e., you get literally freaked out by stuff, and the reactions are more appropriate for that more appropriate way to treat it. 

If a character fails a Sanity check, you only need roll a d4 to determine the reaction:

1. Character is stunned for 1d4 rounds, and cannot do anything except stare in horrifying shock at what's happening around him. If this seems too punitive then a GM can, if he wishes, on each round after the first that the character is stunned, he can make another Sanity check and if he passes it, change his reaction to 2 below.
2. Character is shocked by what he perceives and is only able to react in a passive, stunned manner. All d20 checks are at -2, but through the haze of shock, he's at least able to attempt to react normally. He's just so shaken by what he's seen that he's not doing it as well or with as much focus as normal. This lasts for 1d6 rounds.
3. Same as 2, except slightly more severe; all d20 checks are at disadvantage for 1d6 rounds.
4. Character is so shocked that he drops what he is holding and attempts to flee in mindless terror as fast as he can, in whatever direction is opposite the source of his fear. This lasts also for 1d4 rounds. At GM's option, an additional sanity check can attempt to end it early after 1 round, at which point he reverts to option 3, but can act normally otherwise.

I also finished "The Vampyre" by John William Polidori, which I had thought was more of a novel, but really is much shorter; probably not even a novella. It is often considered the prototype on which Dracula was later built, in many ways. It's curious to me that it was written based on a fragment that Lord Byron wrote, and is, at least in some tongue-in-cheek way, "casting" him in the role of the vampire. Written the same summer that Polidori, Byron, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont were hanging out in Switzerland debauching themselves as they were wont to do. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein that same summer. I don't know what Percy Shelley wrote, as he didn't get famous until after his death. Claire Clairmont just got pregnant with Lord Byron's kid. This isn't shocking; Mary Shelley's mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the infamous proto-feminist and proponent of proto-hippy free love debauchery. Lord Byron is the source of the phrase "mad, bad and dangerous to know" as well as "famous for being famous."

I don't think a lot of these old "classics" are really that great. Some of it is cultural; "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." Older books are often slow, overwrought in some places, underwrought in others, and coy about certain things that need to be plain to have the proper impact. But no doubt they had impact to their contemporary readers. I don't think Frankenstein is that good. I didn't love "The Vampyre" and I'm glad is was shorter than I thought it was. Of course, the fact that the principles were arrogant, indolent profligates and deviants doesn't make me more inclined to give them a pass on the context in which they wrote; the books just aren't that great or interesting to modern readers, and I'm totally OK with saying that. Other authors from the same period (admittedly playing a little fast and loose with what I call the same period) I still like; Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow is a great novel, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe is too. When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula a bit later, that's a work that still holds up well. 

That said, I don't have a region or clan in Timischburg called Ruthven, curiously, and I should. It's a much better name than Vyrko, and as good as Orlok, Dracul or Nosferatu for counties that have counts ruling them.

Ghouls > Vampires (house rule)

I listened to this podcast while commuting yesterday afternoon and this morning on ghouls in D&D. It's a pretty interesting podcast; much more interesting than the lizardman podcast that I listened to earlier, mostly because it's more topical without wandering into strange ideas like relating lizardmen to some human ethnicity who supposedly is a victim of white colonialism or something idiotic like that. (That almost put me off the podcast for good in its first episode that I listened to. I'm glad I tried at least one more, though—this ghoul episode is recommended.) Of course, that reminds me that one thing I never got around to doing, even though I talked about it several years ago now, is modifying my ghoul and vampire stats to reflect the idea that ghouls can, possibly, evolve into vampires, although they can also evolve into something else... Warhammer calls them vargheists and varghulfs, but I prefer something like ... [generating some ideas on ChatGPT]... morgeist, strighast, varcolex or something like that.

But, because I actually ordered up a hard copy of my rules, I'm not interested in changing them to reflect this. So, this has to remain, strictly speaking, a house rule. But when I'm done with it, I think that I'll use these house rules in place of the official rules. Maybe I'll even call them errata. But first, I suggest listening to that podcast; it gives a lot of history on ghouls in D&D specifically and why they're structured the way that they are, and a little bit on the literary or folklore antecedents for them. But I'll summarize my thoughts:

Ghouls come from the Arabic folklore ghūl, but in OD&D, where they first appeared in the first D&D package, they are lumped somewhat with wights. Wights, of course, have a more European origin. Gygax was specifically referencing the barrow-wights of Tolkien and William Morris, which is a translation of the Old Norse draugr. (Curiously, the Old Norse word draugr appears to us in Northern English and Scottish dialects as the word drow!) Dan from the podcast looks at the stats of ghouls in this original version, and concludes that the ghoul's signature paralysis attack is actually a wight element that "accidentally" became a ghoul element; it probably originates in the "freezing touch" of the barrow-wights mentioned by Tolkien, and because ghouls (and even zombies!) are lumped in with the same powers in OD&D, it became a ghoul thing. Wights have since ended up with energy drain (negative levels) instead, which I actually don't much like as a mechanic. There's also a discussion on ghoul tactics; how do they work, and how deadly is the paralysis? Do ghouls attack in swarms with one attack (OD&D) or three attacks (Greyhawk supplement) or something else? How bad is the paralysis (hours? Permanent? a few rounds?) and are they animalistic, starving, frenzied feeders who start munching on a paralyzed opponent right away, or are they more cunning and try to paralyze as many of their opponents as possible before eating, etc.? In other words; what is the "platonic" nature of a D&D-style ghoul? And how does it differ from its folkloric and fictional predecessors?

Well, here's my ghoul, in my rulebook. It's heavily based on the Microlite20 ghoul, which of course is a simplified version of the 3e SRD version of the ghoul.

GHOUL:

Level: 2

Armor Class: 13

Hit Points: 8

Attack: claws or bite +2 (1d6)

Speed: +0

Special: touch paralyzes for 1d4 rounds, humans wounded by ghouls are cursed if they fail a CHA + level check (difficulty 12) and will slowly turn into ghouls themselves. This process involves taking 1 point of WIS damage every day (which does not heal overnight) until they reach -5, at which point the conversion is complete. GM may provide antidote/remedy to counter this curse. 

Formerly humans, who fell prey to daemonic, cannibal rituals, and were transformed via blackest necromancy into feral, subhuman monsters that endure endless hunger for human(oid) flesh. Their most fearsome ability is their tendency to spread their curse to those who survive their attacks.

In spite of my use of the word human, any of the demihumans could also turn into ghouls, since they are merely humans with a supernatural or other twist to them. Orcs and goblins are flat-out non-humans, though, so it conceivably wouldn't apply to them—I hadn't thought of that until just now. Huh. I like that the paralysis isn't too punitive; the DC is relatively low, and the paralysis doesn't last too long. Maybe even as little as one round. 

You'll see the "zombie plague" ghoul conversion and the paralysis both on my ghouls. I don't think I need to house-rule or change anything here; these ghouls work very much like what I expect ghouls to work. Other than to specify that it's two claws or one bite, which isn't super clear from this entry, and maybe to suggest that paralysis comes from claws and the ghoul conversion comes from being bitten, I don't think we need anything else. I'm also not sure why I picked CHA as the stat against which the check was made; I think CON makes more sense. It's also worth thinking about what the aforementioned remedies or antidotes might be, but I'll worry about that later. There is something to the notion that there isn't really one. Classic horror movies like The Wolfman and others don't offer one; the bitten protagonist is just doomed, and that's his arc. That could be a theme in a dark fantasy game, after all. But probably not.

In the podcast, they also mention the real disease kuru as an antecedent for the ghoul conversion curse/disease, although they get some details wrong. It's not an African disease, it's a Papuan one, caused by ritual funerary cannibalism, where the relatives eat the body of the deceased at a funeral. Women and children tended to eat the brain, which is where the disease comes from. It causes a kind of lack of motor coordination, stumbling around like a zombie, and eventually, "laughing sickness" which is why the podcaster thought it was African; he was trying to make a link between this and hyenas.

Ghouls

Which means, if I use that as an analog for gradually turning into a ghoul, maybe characters that contract it lose 1 point of WIS and DEX damage until both reach -5, at which point they "die" and rise after a day or two as ghouls; now an undead creature rather than a living one, with a hideous, emaciated and predatory appearance, much as ghouls are usually illustrated in D&D these days. I'll refer you to this Wayne Reynolds from yesterday once again for reference.

Ghouls can also be formed without an existing ghoul biting and passing on the curse or disease. Foul necromantic rites involving cannibalism, human sacrifice and other blasphemous practices can cause evil cultists to contract the ghoul curse and turn into ghouls without an instigating ghoul to bite them. 

Ghouls aren't exactly mindless, but they are so frenzied by their hunger, that they are certainly insane, feral and animalistic in most respects. But on occasion, a ghoul is able to wrangle coherent thoughts in his rotten brain, and if he develops the ability to do this with some frequency, he's well on his way to becoming a vampire. As you can see from the Wayne Reynolds vampire illustrations (most of them anyway) vampires retain the somewhat feral faces and features as well as the emaciated appearance of ghouls, but they are able to approximate a more human-like appearance. Vampires in Old Night will be more like Nosferatu than otherwise; ugly, inhuman, monstrous, and unsettling to look at, and barely in control in many cases of their hunger... or thirst. It's not clear what the distinction between eating flesh and drinking blood is between ghouls evolving into vampires, but it is apparent that vampires rarely feast on flesh, especially compared to ghouls, and prefer to instead absorb life essence through drinking blood. Although exceptions do exist, and the whole Flesheater court faction of Age of Sigmar, or the Strigoi vampires of old Warhammer are good examples of vampires who are still very ghoulish rather than the urbane, sophisticated vampires like Strahd, Lestat or even Dracula. Here's my stats for vampires from Old Night, which also come from D&D 3e through the lens of Microlite20. They are heavily based on Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, and I'll probably change them somewhat in my houserules below.

VAMPIRE:

Level: 9

Armor Class: 17

Hit Points: 36

Attack: bite +9 (1d6 + special) 

Speed: +9

Special: immune to mind control, disease or poison, only takes half damage from non-silver weapons, regenerate 3 hp per round, on a successful hit (CHA + level to resist, difficulty 19) does 1d4 CON damage, shape change into bat, can hypnotize (CHA + level check, difficulty 19), avoids garlic and mirrors, immobilized and apparently dead if a stake is driven through its heart, drowns underwater in one round, creatures reduced to -5 CON by the vampire’s bite will die and rise 24 hours later as a lesser vampire under the control of their creator.

Another possible end state for the evil and powerful who wish to prolong their life unnaturally (like the lich.) Vampires retain their human appearance, but the cost is the undeniable thirst for human blood and sacrifice.

I like a vampire that isn't quite so beefy in terms of difficulty, since vampire hunting is a time-honored tradition in horror literature that I'd like to emulate. I also don't think that the traditional vampire weaknesses and strange abilities are all that cool, honestly. I think the "default" vampire would look more like this:

VAMPIRE (standard)

Level: 5

Armor Class: 15

Hit Points: 36

Attack: bite +5 (1d6 + special) or +5 (1d6+5) attack with weapon or two claws

Speed: +5

Special: Only takes half damage from non-silver weapons. On a successful hit (CHA + level to resist, difficulty 15) target is paralyzed for 1d4+1 rounds. Can shape change into bat. Within 1d4 days of being "killed" a vampire will regenerate to 2d4 hit points. Vampires also gain hit points by attacking opponents with their bite attack. This will cause 1d4 CON damage (CON + level to reduce by half, DC 15) to the character, but heals the vampire for 1d6 hp. A vampire that attacks a paralyzed opponent with a bite attack is automatically successful and doesn't need to roll to hit. To keep a vampire from regenerating, a wooden stake needs to be driven through its heart, or it's head removed and mouth stuffed with garlic, or the body destroyed by fire. Characters reduced to -5 CON by the vampire’s bite will die and rise 1d4 days later as a ghoul. Vampires cannot regenerate during daylight, and all d20 rolls are at disadvantage in sunlight. GMs can adjudicate the effect of heavily overcast days.

Vampires are another possible end state for the evil and powerful who wish to prolong their life unnaturally (like the lich.) Vampires retain their human appearance if they can crawl upwards from their "larval" ghouls state, but the cost is the undeniable thirst for human blood and sacrifice.

An advanced vampire, a Strahd, Lestat or Dracula, on the other hand, will be like this. They will appear less feral and creepy, but will still be subtly inhuman and monstrous, much like the classical vampire. 

VAMPIRE (advanced)

Level: 9

Armor Class: 18

Hit Points: 63

Attack: bite +9 (1d6 + special) or or +5 (1d6+9) attack with weapon or two claws

Speed: +9

Special: Non-silver weapons do not cause damage. On a successful hit (CHA + level to resist, difficulty 19) target is paralyzed for 2d4 rounds. Can shape change into bat or swarm of bats. Within 1d4 days of being "killed" a vampire will regenerate to 2d8 hit points. Vampires also gain hit points by attacking opponents with their bite attack. This will cause 1d6 CON damage to the character, but the vampire will heal 1d6 hp. A vampire that attacks a paralyzed opponent with a bite attack is automatically successful and doesn't need to roll to hit. To keep a vampire from regenerating, a wooden stake needs to be driven through its heart, or it's head removed and mouth stuffed with garlic, or the body destroyed by fire. Characters reduced to -5 CON by the vampire’s bite will die and rise 1d4 days later as a ghoul.

Advanced vampires lose their disadvantage in sunlight, but they still hate and fear the sun nonetheless, and prefer to avoid it as much as possible. Frankly, the sunlight thing could apply to most undead; including ghouls. There's a reason undead are associated with the night, and with attempting to blot out or cover the sun. And finally, a proto-vampire; somewhere between a ghoul and a vampire, would be as follows:

PROTO-VAMPIRE

Level: 4

Armor Class: 14

Hit Points: 30

Attack: bite +4 (1d6 + special) or +4 (2d6+4) attack with weapon or two claws

Speed: +3

Special: On a successful hit (CHA + level to resist, difficulty 15) target is paralyzed for 1d4+1 rounds. Proto-vampires also gain hit points by attacking opponents with their bite attack. This will cause 1 CON damage to the character, but heals the proto-vampire for 1d4 hp. A proto-vampire that attacks a paralyzed opponent with a bite attack is automatically successful and doesn't need to roll to hit. Characters reduced to -5 CON by the proto-vampire’s bite will die and rise 1d4 days later as a ghoul.

Proto-vampires are not as powerful or lucid as vampires, but are slowly getting there from the ghoul state. More cunning and less feral than ghouls, and capable of some conversation (although their insanity is often apparent in conversation.)

Finally, vampire can devolve into a different monstrous state, usually caused by extreme deprivation. Vampires are consummate hunters, so this is unlikely to occur unless a vampire is deliberately kept from a food source by another powerful being, such as a stronger vampire or lich, etc. 

MORGEIST? STRIGHAST? VARCOLEX?

Level: 8

Armor Class: 17

Hit Points: 56

Attack: Two claws +8 (1d6+8) and bite +8 (1d10+4 and special)

Speed: +8

Special: Flies, and is immune to weapon damage not delivered by silver weapons. Paralyzes opponents on successful claw attacks; CHA + level DC 18 to resist. Has a terrible bite that does massive regular damage plus 2d4 CON damage. At -5 CON, a bitten character is dead. The morgeist heals by an equal amount of hp to the CON damage dealt. Within 1d4 days of being "killed" a morgeist will regenerate to 2d8 hit points. A morgeist that attacks a paralyzed opponent with a bite attack is automatically successful and doesn't need to roll to hit. To keep a morgeist from regenerating, a wooden stake needs to be driven through its heart, or it's head removed and mouth stuffed with garlic, or the body destroyed by fire. Characters reduced to -5 CON by the morgeist's bite will die and rise 1d4 days later as a ghoul.

Morgeists (name still TBD) are vampires that have devolved due to starvation and deprivation into insane caricatures of what they once were. They lose the ability to turn into bat form, but they become a hybrid of regular vampire and gigantic bat, and they can fly. They are difficult to kill, and their attacks are more potent than even advanced vampires, but they lose many of their special abilities, and their intelligence and cunning is replaced with ravenous, frenzied hunger. 

Here's an image that is a good representation.

Campaigns and levels

A week or so ago, I posted this advancement chart, which shows how characters advance.

The reason for it at the time was thinking about how to smooth leveling. What I mean by that is that rather than leveling "like normal" you can get one of the advancements associated with the next level at a time, which stretches it out. You can't advance beyond the next level until you've taken all of the advancements associated with the level that you're on. For example, if a first level character were to advance to second level, but with level smoothing, when he got his first advancement, he would take, maybe the new hit points. The second time, it would be the skill points. At that point, he's "fully" 2nd level, and the next time he gets an advancement, he can start taking advancements associated with 3rd level. If I counted right, there are 24 total advancements to get a a fully 10th level character from a 1st level character at chargen.

If I decided that, just picking some numbers at random, you'd get an advancement after five sessions, say, which seems like it'd be pretty comparable to a game like Call of Cthulhu, which also has modest improvements that are relatively infrequent. Under this scheme, in Old Night I'd get to full 10th level after 120 sessions. That's similar, more or less, to my 100 session estimate from before... except that I don't know for sure that I really want to play at a full 10th level or not. What I'd like to do is also approach it from a different method; what if I gave one advancement every time a column on the 5x5 were completed? If I did that, the characters would be able to advance to 3rd level immediately after finishing Darkness in the Hill Country, would advance two levels while doing Cult of Undeath, etc. Two levels every full 5x5 campaign. 

While that seems reasonable, that also means that I wouldn't want the same group of characters to do all six campaigns, because that would get them all the way to 10th level and beyond. It's also worth wondering how long I think my campaigns would last in terms of sessions. This is somewhere between a "wild guess" and an "experienced estimate" but given my relatively light, fast and loose planning style anyway, I'd think that one box on the 5x5 Front matrix could take from one to three sessions, depending on how meaty it is (and they're not all created equal. By design.) Let's say, for the same of argument, that there's an average of two sessions per box on the matrix. There are twenty five boxes in the 5x5 matrix, so that's fifty sessions. Does that seem reasonable? That actually seems really long to me. But maybe it's not unprecedented. Especially if I fudge it and throw in additional boxes for the campaign starting stuff; at least two to three sessions, and time spent on out of matrix character hooks. If I have sessions that are three to four hours long, that's 150-200 hours of play. Of course, how focused we are matters; my current group is more focused in many respects than the one I used to have back in my old state. We spend more time playing and less time chatting. Although after switching DMs, we also spend more time on puttering around doing shopping, and other roleplaying things that don't necessarily advance our "plot" very much. I guess I'm not sure what to expect there, as my experience is that this is pretty group and GM dependent. I think I'd move faster; I'm using a much leaner system, and depending on who we play with, we'd likely be more "on task" than either of those two groups were. I also tend to err on the side of rushing forward as a GM; I need to actually take a moment to think about not going too fast. I'm confident that I can easily fit a campaign in fifty sessions. Maybe even considerably less. Without doing a bit more planning in the immediate preceding days before a session, I could easily do it in half that time. But let's stick with that estimate for now; fifty sessions per campaign as a max number, and twenty five for a minimum number, depending on speed and pacing. That's my bracketed estimate of how long one of my 5x5 Front campaigns would take to play.

Long story short (too late), what does this mean for smoothed advancement? Here's my smooth advancement chart, which I think needs to be printed off on the back side of your character sheet.

If I go with my expectation above that we do two full levels each campaign, then I'd need 25-50 sessions to get to a full 3rd level, at which point Darkness in the Hill Country would be over. Ideally, I'd time it so that the characters reach third level literally at the end of the campaign, and are ready to start playing again as fully 3rd level character working towards 4th level when they start Cult of Undeath. There are five advancements that they'd need to get in the smoothed system, which means, under the minimum expected number of sessions, they'd need to get one on average about every five sessions, and under the maximum, every ten sessions.

Thinking about it this way makes me see it differently. One minor advancement every ten sessions seems... slow, even to me. I know, I know; I'm the preacher of slow advancement. But its worth it to go through this episode to see what slow advancement really means. If it means you get halfway to level 2 after ten sessions and level 2 after twenty sessions, that's probably considerably slower than even players who are on board with the concept would be happy with. If I broke up the +2 hit Points into two +1 Hit Points as separate advancements, that helps a little, but still. I could, in theory, add yet a third hit point per level, and have it be a separate advancement. That would spread it even more (as well as making the hit point escalation less flat), but might be a way to extend campaigns without running into either the problem of too infrequent advancement of any type, or two fast advancement. The goal, of course, is to have the flexibility of extending play if you desire to have extra long campaigns without power creep becoming a problem like it does in D&D.

What this makes me wonder, more than anything else, is if I actually think its viable to have one group of characters do all of the campaigns back to back (to back, etc.) Maybe that's the problem; I'm trying to keep this going with the same characters, when I need to think about just having a different set of characters for each campaign. This was my original paradigm a couple of years ago when I first started the campaign briefs, the modern run of iconic characters, and all that jazz. There's several ways to skin that cat; 

First, keep my current advancement schedule. Characters will finish a campaign just reaching 3rd level. Then go to another set of characters for the next one. Then leapfrog back to the other set. If I go back and forth between two sets of characters, then they only do three campaigns each. They play the first campaign as levels one and two, their second as levels three and four, and the third as levels five and six. We don't ever get to the higher levels under this scheme, unless the campaigns are going on the slow side of the bracket. If I do that, then it's likely that each campaign will get an additional level out of each campaign, and they'd end at just reaching 9th or 10th level. 

Second, and related to that, is to attempt specifically to stretch the campaigns more to the longer side of the brackets, so characters can actually see more of the levels and more of the powers. These levels shouldn't really be seen like levels in D&D; they benefits of each level are much more modest. I should probably not worry as much as I do about having character accumulate so many levels, to be honest with you.

Finally, the real ideal state would be to be able to run multiple campaign concurrently with two different groups of players. That way, it's very clear that not everyone is meant to be running the same campaign; I have one group that does, for example, Darkness In the Hill Country, Icy Graves in Hyperborea and Cult of Undeath. An eastern group, while a western group does (maybe not in this order, even) Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes, Terror in Timischburg and Curse of the Corsair Coast. Whether any of those need to be reset with new characters can be TBD, depending on pacing and flow. And, honestly, character replacement. It's entirely possible that either characters will die and need to be replaced with sufficient frequency that getting all the way to the top isn't a worry, or that players just want to change characters at some point for variety and change.

Which is another question; especially with the smoothing house rule; if there are replacement characters, how do they start? At 1st level? Or at the same level (or near the same level) as the rest of the characters in the party?

I'll keep that for a part II post, though.

Fast leveling

This is one of my favorite of Professor Dungeon Master's videos, and I agree and endorse it completely. I once made a post where I posited that for Shadow of Old Night (under an earlier name) I expected that it would take 100 sessions to reach 10th level, the top of what I'd consider playing. The more I think about it, the more I think that even that is too fast. I counted 10th level as a level that I'd play for a number of sessions. If I were actually to run a campaign that I expected to be both evergreen; i.e., lasting potentially forever, and also one where we played pretty regularly (maybe not weekly, but still pretty frequently) I'd need to stretch it even more. For each level, here's ... more or less ... how many sessions I'd envision playing them for.

1. 5 sessions
2. 10 sessions
3. 15 sessions
4. 20 sessions
5. 20 sessions
6. 25 sessions
7. 25 sessions
8. 30 sessions
9. 35 sessions
10. 35 sessions
11. At some point you need to start over. This is now at 220 sessions. 

And that's just a swag; I wanted to move from 1st to 2nd relatively quickly, but to quickly slow down, and maintain as long as possible the sweet spot of the middle levels. To get through 6th level would be 100 sessions (more or less) and that's probably enough. By then, most likely, people will be ready to start over with new characters. But if they don't...

Let's assume that we played, on average, every other week. Twenty-six weeks a year. 220 sessions is less than 8½ years. While that seems like a long time, there are campaigns that have run longer. Of course, if we averaged closer to monthly, which seems more realistic for my current situation, then that lasts almost 19 years.

——(  †  )——

Of course, there is another way to do this, and that reduces the levels impact, by smoothing them out rather than having their improvements come in big chunks. This is a simplified advancement table for Old Night, showing what characters would normally get at each level.

First level is just character creation, so it can mostly be ignored, but if you look at, for example, 2nd level, you'll see that the character would get +2 hitpoints, +1 to all skill points, and no other advantages. At 3rd level, he'd get another +2 hit points, a new feat selection, and a +1 to his To Hit score. At 4th level, another +2 hit points, another +1 to all skill points, and a +1 to one ability score, or stat. And so on down to level ten.

In many systems of advancement, you've got something like experience points, XP. The Smooth Advancement™ (not really™) system uses sessions played. The easiest way to track advancement would be to replicate this small table in your notes, or on the back of your character sheet is probably best, and then also keep a tally of how many sessions you've played with the character. It is possible that different characters would not participate in every session, depending on player availability, so characters can be a little bit off from each other and out of synch in terms of when they get an advancement. But because Smooth Advancement smooths out the levels and dribbles out their advancement at a slower, more smoothed pace, that hardly matters.

Under this system, let's assume that a character, Garrett Undergrove, is a first level character. His player, Nathan, plays five sessions with him. After reaching five sessions, he can pick one of the advancements from level 2 on the table above. Level 2 only has two to choose from; the increase in hit points and the increase in skill points. Nathan can choose one of those two, and apply it to his character. Then he marks it off on his version of that table, so he knows he can't pick it again.

After he hits five more sessions, he can pick the other level 2 advancement. This means that after ten sessions, he's had all of the advancements associated with level 2, and is effectively a level 2 character. Once he has all of the advancements associated with level 2, he can now start taking advancements associated with the next level, level 3, but not until he's had all that level 2 offers. The same concept scales upwards; once he starts taking level 3 bonuses, he has to take all that's associated with level 3 before he can start getting level 4 bonuses. This prevents a character from taking all of the hit point adds, for example, before doing anything else. Although each level is smoothed, you still need to complete the level before you can start doing the next level.

Depending on the speed at which the GM wants the game and characters to progress, you now go in increments of ten sessions. That would be a little bit longer than the 220 sessions noted above. If you want faster leveling, every five sessions giving you a new advancement would be ~100 sessions to reach all levels, but still with a smoother progression. Of course, you can do something in between two; every seven or eight sessions. Or, if you really want to, pick up a new advancement every 2 or 3 sessions, for shorter campaigns with characters that get more powerful faster. 

But for Smooth Advancement, the track and goals should be known and communicated in advance. Like XP, players know when they're going to get another advancement, even if it is more modest than a whole level all at once, and they can track their progress to it themselves by noting with tallies or something how many sessions they have played and when they will be eligible for another improvement.

The advantage of Smooth Advancement is twofold: 1) it's not as disruptive a jump in power as a full level; character advancement is more modest session to session—although while still giving, in the end, the same advancement as leveling, and 2) for players who want to see advancement, they have the ability to track when it comes. Now, if they're the kinds who want to advance quickly and get powerful quickly, they're not going to love this system, because the advancements are modest. They need to learn to appreciate both delayed gratification and the fun involved in struggling rather than, effectively, turning on the cheat codes. But there are already plenty of games that offer power fantasy playing and fast leveling. The whole point is that Old Night is a different kind of game aiming for a different kind of tone, and therefore, it has to have mechanics that are a little different too.

Of course, you could also extend the "levels" upwards by replicating the same table further down.

I neither recommend nor am super interested in doing so, but it is always a possibility, of course.

Knowledge ► Research

I'm considering a small tweak to the DFX rules. I would rename Knowledge to Research, and then redescribe how it's used. My current usage is similar to the 3e Knowledge skills, but I just have one of them; this would be a bit more like a combination of Research from d20 Modern and the Cthulhu Mythos skill from Call of Cthulhu. You'd also get a benefit (advantage next time you check it, if related to something occult or supernatural, etc.) if you read a blasphemous tome before you make the check. Of course, you don't read a blasphemous tome real quick in combat, so this would again, focus more on slowly building tension and a different kind of investigative paradigm for how to play the game. More like Call of Cthulhu than like D&D, but then again, I've said that for a long time.

It's a relatively minor change, and if I decide not to do it, I might write it up anyway as an optional house rule. 

This is in part driven by my reread of Darkness & Dread, which has a whole chapter on how to use the Knowledge skill from 3e for this purpose. I think that's overkill, but it's pretty part for the course for 3e, so not surprising. I've actually had a few minor details hit me as interesting on this reread, many years after the first time. There might be a few more minor changes. I should probably reread Heroes of Horror first, just in case it suggests something to me too.

I'm even considering renaming the blog and the game again. Sigh. Or at least the game. I picked Dark Fantasy X because it had a Conspiracy X and X-files like feel, and because it matched my tongue in cheek Spacer X username and YouTube channel, which was meant to evoke the old Speed Racer character Racer X, but in space. Probably won't change the URL of the blog, because that's kind of a pain (I can tell you that first hand!) but might well change the name of the game.

And when I do, and when I've made whatever minor changes I do make, I'll see about getting it Lulu printed, and I'll have a hard copy that will... never again really be subject to change, because if I make a hardcopy, I won't want to mess with it anymore after that. I've kind of gotten to the point where my tinkering isn't very consequential anyway, so I should decide if I'm going to "fish or just cut bait forever", as they say.

Anyway, here's a character doing more of the new research stuff as I imagine it in game. Reading blasphemous tomes remains hazardous to your mental health, of course... but there are certain reasons to do it regardless.

UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more I think I'm less likely to change it in the main rules or the name of the skill, although I may elaborate on usages of Knowledge for Research / Cthulhu Mythos type activities in the Appendix. Before I run a printable version for Lulu I need to modify the appendix anyway and take the color pictures of all of the races out. I want to print in B/W and save money, after all!

UPDATE II: Because I use my blog as a stream of consciousness rambling for my own benefit as much as for anything else, I thought it would be interesting to put a little about my upcoming Easter weekend. Due to some spectacular crossed wires early in the week when both my wife and I were too busy to really touch base with each other, she canceled my flight back to our house up north, because I casually mentioned that I wasn't sure it was a good idea for me to go. I actually was going to go anyway, and then the exact thing that I was concerned about turned out to be a red herring too, but by that time, the flight was already canceled, and I decided; what the heck; a weekend at home by myself isn't the worst thing ever. 

Of course, it's not entirely just to myself. I have to drive my wife to a different airport on Friday evening that's an hour and a half one way away, and then pick her up again at the same airport on Sunday evening. Two of the three evenings, I have to spend a minimum of three hours on the road. Of course, half of both of those drives will be by myself, so I can plug in some music and relax and enjoy the drive. The other half of both times, I'll be with my wife, and we can catch up on all of the crazy things that we've both got going on this week, including her downloading all the stuff that happened on her brief trip to see some of our kids. 

For some context, my daughter has a delayed baby shower this weekend. She already had her baby a good two months or so ago, but he came quite early; the shower is, by coincidence, his original due date. Because they were in the hospital and early, the shower never happened. Most people have already given her whatever presents they were going to, but this is more like an open house, come see the baby, hang out and chat like women-centric social situations like to be. My thought was that if there wasn't anything for me to do other than hang out at the other house with the other grandkids, then maybe I shouldn't spend the money just for a quick weekend trip; we've got lots of other travel that we need to do in the next couple of months, and while flights aren't that pricey, they're pricey enough. Plus, I hadn't done my taxes yet, and I was concerned that we might actually owe money. (We don't. Should have done them two months ago; big refund. Oh, well.)

Anyway, for a variety of reasons, I'm not going. I have to drive my wife to and from the airport. I also have a D&D session Saturday 10 am for three hours. I'm also thinking of going on an afternoon hiking trip Saturday afternoon, since spring has nearly fully sprung, the trees leaves are pretty full, and it's still not too hot yet. Although Saturday's high is the highest it'll have been all week. Highs in the mid-60s will give me to a high in the mid-80s. Oh, well. Too bad I had to work Tuesday and yesterday; those would have been the perfect days to hike. Bright and sunny, but relatively cool, even in the height of the afternoon. Sigh. And Sunday we have abbreviated church to give us more time to spend with family (ironically.) Although it seems like I have most of Sunday free until I have to go pick up my wife, I don't really because I'm sure all my kids will call.

So I don't have as much free time as I really think, unless I postpone the hiking trip, which I'd really rather not do. (Although maybe I can work a half-day Monday and do it then? Let me think about that...) And I'm hoping to finish three of the four books that I'm reading... one of which I haven't even started yet. Then again, I've got nothing going on tonight, and I try to read a fair bit during my lunch hour. I shouldn't have any trouble finishing Darkness & Dread today even, before the weekend starts, because I'm down to about fifty pages or so left. Then I'll start the novel, The Hungering God, which I should read pretty quickly. The real challenge will be finishing the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting pdf; I've got close to 200 pages left on that one. That probably won't actually happen, and I'll fall a little short of my goal after all. But if I get the other two done, I'll feel like it was a successful week for reading, and if I'm closer to 100 pages left than 200, I'll be happy enough. If, by some miracle, I actually end up finishing it after all before the weekend's over, it'll be a triumph.