Some images before going out of town. And a brief movie review.

Someone else's image; all I did was brighten it up, because ChatGPT tends to make stuff too dark and murky. I love this demon monster lady. I'd totally use this as a BBEG NPC.

The Highwayman from Darkest Dungeon made more realistic looking. 

An older image I had, but it had old fashioned explorers with pith helmets and stuff, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" kind of vibes. I asked ChatGPT to replace them with a D&D party, and this is what I got.

Another Revecca in her action girl pseudomage pose, but with her "vacation" outfit. Just for fun. I'm about done making Revecca variations, I think. 

A conceptopolis aboleth modified and placed in a murky underwater setting.

Three more variations of my Gloomwrought requests, although for the final one, I was kind of over the dark and foggy look and wanted a brighter variation.

Master of Vermin; one of my own Hero Forge images converted by ChatGPT to a supposedly "realistic" look. It still looks like a Hero Forge image to me, I'll admit.

Deep Ones. 

I found this on a reddit AI post, took the image, and had ChatGPT give him a different hat.

Another one of my favorite old generations.

Reading something horrible in the section of the library that he should stay out of.

Someone else's mindflayer, or illithid.

I also saw The Odyssey with my wife. I wasn't really very excited to see it, but she was, so I went. It wasn't as bad as I feared, which I kind of expected. It was even good, at least on a first pass. But it certainly wasn't great. And I think that the things that I didn't like are exactly what I expected to not like; the diversity stunt casting was annoying, and turning around and suggesting that their roles were small; little more than cameos, doesn't make that less so. The changes specifically to the character of Odysseus to make him more sad, serious, guilty, etc. was annoying. The themes Nolan added about war or whatever were unwelcome. The suggestion that Odysseus somehow "accidentally" caused the entire Bronze Age collapse was laughable. The historical Trojan War, if it happened, was at least a couple of generations before the Bronze Age collapse and the advent of the Sea Peoples, so to have Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus and Menelaus all talking about them was silly.

So, I dunno. I'm not actually a big Christopher Nolan fan. I think he's an over-rated film maker. I like Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception quite a bit. I don't really care about the rest of his movies. Interstellar is his most over-rated movie, but y'know. He's over-rated in general. That said, this isn't his worst movie. I can't exactly recommend it, but I can't exactly tell you that you shouldn't see it either.

People love to talk about the Rotten Tomatoes audience score, but as it says in this video; Rotten Tomatoes isn't to be trusted. The Metacritic audience score is 5.2. That feels much more real.

Back to gaming; it looks like I am being asked to run at least some short term stuff, for this group that's losing it's GM. He's hopeful that he can continue the campaign online, at least in a month or two, but I'm skeptical, honestly, that that's going to work out. Either way, my big disconnect, of course, is that 5e is a combination of The Avengers and The Muppets, and I don't want my fantasy to resemble either. But this is a 5e group, and while, sure, I could say, "I'm running, you play what I'm running or don't play," I'm looking to be a bit more accommodating to that. Not quite sure how I'll do this, but I want a more traditional game, and I'll almost certainly offer up one of two options; a dark pirate campaign, with material drawn from the Freeport modules, or a Gothic horror campaign with material drawn (mostly) from the Carrion Crown adventure path.

Which I may need to pull ahead in my reading schedule...

Both Gothic horror and pirates in one image

The (New) Odyssey

A selection from the transcript of Critical Drinker's take on The Odyssey (by Christopher Nolan, not by Homer.)

The Odyssey was pretty much exactly what I expected from a late stage Christopher Nolan film. Technically impressive and commendably ambitious. Visually dark and bleak. Emotionally sterile and weirdly lacking in pace, urgency or satisfying payoffs. Populated by cold, distant characters that give nothing away and invite no empathy from the audience. Dialogue that's jarringly clunky and on the nose, often delivered by talented but miscast actors, and ultimately an ending that fails to capitalize on its incredible buildup. It's a movie about love, yearning, adventure, wonder, mysticism, and epic mythology woven together by a man who either can't or won't understand any of those things.

I haven't seen it yet, but I suspect that that's pretty much what I'd feel. I already understand that it's most likely that Odysseus in particular has been completely rewritten as a tired, guilt-ridden, depressed, PTSD veteran struggling with the after-effects of the Trojan War, which would be completely alien to ancient Heroic characters, and not particularly interested in pursuing getting home, which is completely alien to his character as written. Odysseus was curious, adventurous, bold, kind of cheeky, and Nolan has turned him into a sad-sack, broken old man, by all accounts.

I'm not surprised. Every Christopher Nolan movie tends to be that way, because those are Nolan's greatest weaknesses as a film-maker. He's big into high concept and bold ideas, but piss-poor on human emotion, empathy, character, and the day-to-day issues of craftsmanship that make a movie fun and interesting to watch. Like James Cameron's Avatar series, people go see it for the spectacle and because of the buzz around it, but they rarely tend to come away thinking that they saw something magnificent, and they tend to have already forgotten what they saw by the time they get back home and rarely think about it again. My wife wants to go see it this weekend, but I already am pretty confident that I know what I'll see. Eh, maybe with Nolan, they think about the big ideas afterwards. But not about the craftsmanship, the characters, or anything else. Just the big ideas. But the Odyssey doesn't give him that luxury. It's already been written. Thousands of years ago, even.

I also think Nolan is too in love with his own inserted symbolism and messaging, which isn't exactly woke, but also isn't at all the messaging and symbolism of, y'know, The Odyssey, which is one of the oldest works of fiction and at the bedrock of art and literature for Western Civilization. One of my sons, who is a bit of a history and literature buff (but who's also a film buff and likes Nolan more than I do) quite liked the movie, but part of what he liked was that it had a lot of literary and historical easter eggs that your typical "chud" viewer wouldn't even recognize. That may be kind of interesting the first time around, but isn't really a recipe, in my opinion, for a good or memorable movie. And, like I said, changing the nature of the titular character and the themes of the original work seems like a major mistake to me. Although it's not a great movie, Troy has been seen in a much better light lately because of it. 

To be fair, while I also didn't love Troy, I did like it. It's pretty cool. 

Old Movies

I recently watched Singin' In the Rain again, one of my favorite old movies. I hadn't realized that Donald O'Connor was 27 when he did the famous "Make 'em Laugh" routine. My daughter, the only one of my kids who likes that movie too, is 27 right now. Crazy. Debbie Reynolds was 20. Gene Kelly, her love interest, was 40. Somehow that doesn't come across as too creepy. Gene Kelly was a pretty good looking 40, and Debbie Reynolds didn't necessarily look that young in this movie... although she did in The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, which came out a whole year later. I guess maybe pairing her opposite Bobby Van somehow made her look younger even though she's actually a year older. Those two movies are also curious in that both feature one of the same songs, although performed very differently, "All I Do is Dream of You." As much as I love the Singin' In the Rain version, the slower, more romantic Dobie Gillis version is my favorite. Including Bobby Van in duet form, and he's strummin' a ukulele. Like most songs in Singin' in the Rain, it actually comes from a much older movie, Sadie McKee, which came out 18 years earlier, and which is also slow and romantic in nature. 

Not that it's a Debbie Reynolds exclusive, of course (she would have been a toddler when Sadie McKee came out); Judy Garland also has a nice version of it from a Andy Hardy movie from 1940. I've even got a jaunty Dean Martin version of the song too. It's a great song. Seriously; I really, really like it.

I watched another video a while ago called something like "why do old movie stars look so old compared to modern stars at the same age?" The opening comparison is Carrol O'Connor (Archie Bunker from All in the Family, which everyone's thinking about now after Meathead's recent murder.) He was 46 in that show, whereas... Paul Rudd is 56 right now and looks at least 15 if not 20 years younger than Archie. I don't know that I look like I'm 53 right now, but I am, and I do at least have pretty graying hair. I'm the same age the actor who plays Mr. Roper was during the first season of Three's Company! The actor who played Grandpa Munster was obviously wearing a lot of makeup, but he was only 41!

Anyway, I don't know that it's that we've uncovered the secrets of anti-aging, although there is some truth to that. Cary Grant was 60 when he filmed Father Goose and he looks at least as good as I do now. If I dyed my hair to get the gray out, I'm sure I'd look way younger. Reportedly, Grant was a bit uncomfortable being cast as the romantic lead against Leslie Caron, who was only 33, and next time he made a movie, Walk, Don't Run, which was his final one, actually, he refused to play a romantic lead and instead set himself up as a businessman and amateur matchmaker. Although he doesn't come across as he's supposed to be 62 in that movie, and he doesn't look it either. 

Then again, Tom Cruise is 63 right now, and Brad Pitt is 61. If you've recently watched the latest Mission Impossible movie or F1, Pitt's recent racing movie, you wouldn't think that they were that old either. Bradley Cooper is 50; all three look about the same age to me. 

I don't know where I'm going with this. Age is hard to guess, I suppose. As I've gotten older, what I consider young and middle-aged has migrated over time, no doubt. In the 80s, I thought that the 40s or even the 50s was so long ago that it was basically a foreign country; we're now even further on the other side of the 80s than those decades were in front of them. 

A Tale of Three Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grab bag; and new Paizo format

I have a few topics, but only one of them is both lengthy enough to justify a post, or at least most of a post, and on topic for this blog... even given the pretty loose definition of what I consider on topic. 

First off, the one I want to speak about probably the least, but which is the more important one. I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I lived for many years in Michigan. I am in fact visiting Michigan right now, and I was at church when the church shooting happened in Grand Blanc. I wasn't in Grand Blanc; I was at church with my daughter in Monroe, but they sent us home. My son, who's also in another congregation in Michigan, was sent home, but because his church start time is later, he got sent home basically while on the way to church. He pulled up in the parking lot, turned around and went back home. This was no doubt a precaution, because nobody yet knew what was going on in Grand Blanc. I think that we still don't. There are reports that the guy hated the Church and had some kind of personal grudge against it, although that's just a comment from the White House press secretary without any background that I know of. 

I don't trust official narratives very much. There's usually a lot that they don't want to tell us that's actually quite salient. There's also a bunch of stuff that they tell us that is pretty suss, as the kids say. But I'd have already guessed that this is someone who has a grudge against the church. Most people who do are people who are in the LBGT community, but not necessarily. It's a bit grotesque that I've seen liberals online desperate to jump on board the narrative that he was a MAGA guy, because they desperately want there to be a violent crazy person who isn't a member of their rabid animal cult of violent extremists. Even if this guy doesn't turn out to be liberal at all, it looks very unlikely that his attack was politically motivated anyway, so like I said, the impetus to assign a MAGA political identity to the guy is at best grotesque... but also very revealing of the desperation that they feel, because they know the score. Democrats are the party who romanticizes hatred of normal life and violent revolutionary overthrow of the stable order for anarchy wherein they imagine that they will be free of... something. Or perhaps they imagine that they will be at the top of the order that they imagine will replace the one today in their new dystopia. An ideology based on resentment, entitlement and frustrated narcissism always has those kinds of stupid delusions at its heart.

In any case, as someone who is relatively close to this event, it had an interesting psychological effect on me and my family. I'd been to the building that burned down at least half a dozen times when we did bigger, broader activities that involved multiple congregations, and while I didn't know anyone in Grand Blanc, I'd likely met at least one of the victims briefly in the past. I do have a good friend here in Michigan who was part of that congregation for a while before moving to my neck of the woods and still retains friends there, I believe. He's also a professional federal law enforcement officer, and we're supposed to meet for dinner tonight. His perspective will no doubt be closer to it than even mine.

Secondly, to the side there is a picture of Rafael Sabatini. In spite of his name, he was half English and raised in many places, including England, where he settled as an adult. Although English was his sixth language, it's the language he wrote in, and he was a brilliant writer; one of my favorites, in fact. I'm not really much into forced rankings, but it's not hard for me to say that The Lord of the Rings is my favorite "book" (described by its author and original publisher as one book published in three volumes), A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs as next in line after that, and quite possibly Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini after that. I found my old copy and started reading it a little while ago, but my copy was pretty beat up (it's 100 years old next year) so I decided to get an audiobook version from Librivox and listen to it instead. I just finished it today, after starting over once I had the audio files.  After listening to a few Ron Unz podcasts, I'm going to listen to his Captain Blood next—a book nearly as good. Then on to a few ERB books; A Princess of Mars, Tarzan of the Apes and At the Earth's Core. I have physical copies of all of them, but I'm going to do the Librivox audiobooks for all three this time around.

It was also nice, I must admit, to hear the French names pronounced correctly, or at least I presume correctly. The book was, of course, as good as I remember it. It's at least the fourth time I've read it, probably more like the sixth, but I haven't really been counting. 

Although not nearly as good as the novel, the 1952 film adaptation with Stewart Granger, Mel Ferrer, Eleanor Parker and Janet Leigh is still a fantastic old swashbuckling movie of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and the duel fought between Granger and Ferrer is one of the most famous old school swordfights from Hollywood. I love the voiceover during the old trailer: "The hot-blooded adventures of masterful men! The bold intrigues of seductive women! The pageantry of a great novel! A fabulous swashbuckling era comes to life!" Yeah, that's what I'm talking about! Man, it is so good! But the novel is at least an order of magnitude better still. There's a reason that it easily hits my top five books of all time.

Also, in the wake of the socio-sexual hierarchy articles I've read, and I've read a lot, it's curious. Sabatini was probably a Sigma himself, based on the fact that his characters seem to be very clearly Sigmas themselves, not to mention what I know of his biography. Andre-Louis Moreau, Mr. Scaramouche himself, is perhaps one of the most iconic Sigma protagonists I know of in literature, although placed in a somewhat conventional swashbuckling romance. I haven't read them super recently, but I certainly remember thinking that Peter Blood and Charles de Bernis, the protagonists of Captain Blood and The Black Swan respectively give off very strong Sigma vibes too.

Third, The Living Daylights is a criminally under-rated James Bond movie. The first (of only two) to star Timothy Dalton, it's famous for it's more grounded, darker and edgier approach that wouldn't come into vogue again until the Daniel Craig era, in the wake of the wildly successful Bourne movies. I might actually like it better than most of the Craig Bond films; it's possible that it's my favorite of the entire series. The follow up was even darker, License to Kill, but Living Daylights was always my personal favorite. I love the Cold War vibes to it in particular, and honestly I think James Bond beyond the Cold War is a bit of a fish out of water anyway. 

I also really love the soundtrack. Of course, it's got a great a-ha song, when they were still a kind of 80s new wave slash synthpop band. (As an aside, their second album, Scoundrel Days is actually better than their first one, Hunting High and Low, even though it lacks the big hits. The first album is wonderful; one of my favorites of the 80s as a pop album especially, but the second one as an "alternative" New Wave style album, a little bit rockier but still very synthesizer 80s sounding. Absolutely recommended.) It's also got a great "other" song by The Pretenders, which becomes the de facto theme of the KGB assassin dude. I didn't realize this until just recently, but it's also the last James Bond soundtrack composed by John Barry. The orchestral score soundtrack is really, really good. But again; everything about the whole movie is under-rated. If you haven't seen it, or haven't seen it recently, I highly recommend that you watch it. It's pretty cheap, actually, which is nice. I also think you can get streaming James Bond on Amazon Prime of the entire run for a decent price. Which, I mean, why wouldn't you?

I did see a funny exchange online recently about this movie in particular: someone called it gritty and realistic; someone else sarcastically remarked that it was especially realistic when they were sledding down the mountainside under a hail of bullets sitting in a cello case. 

The final part of this post is my belated notice of a major change in the strategy of Paizo "adventure paths." Adventure paths started as linked modules in Dungeon Magazine during the later 3e era. Dungeon Magazine had been outsourced to Paizo by this point, so in theory, Paizo invented the Adventure Path as it has been known the last nearly twenty years. WotC at the time released at least a few large mega-modules, what they now call campaigns. The one that sticks out most to me is Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, an expansion of the old Ravenloft 1e module into the size and scope of the modern WotC campaigns, such as Curse of Strahd which is the latest iteration of the same adventure. But for whatever reason, the adventure path seemed to have captured the market's imagination in a way that these hardback ~250-350 page "campaigns" did not, at least at the time. When 4e was to launch and WotC canceled their agreement with Paizo to do Dungeon and Dragon Magazines, Paizo decided to (among other things) create their own subscription model to continue adventure paths, and they came out with their popular adventure path subscription, starting with the classic Rise of the Runelords, and then the more than 40 or so adventure paths. They were especially popular during the 4e era, but when 5e came out, WotC was able to regain their king of the hill approach to system. They also started issuing big loads of campaign books. They released enough of them that they started to compete credibly with the adventure paths. They are, after all, quite a big cheaper.

The "classic" adventure path was a 90+ or so page paperback book with a big module, and a few appendices, including a small bestiary, some setting info, and even often some short stories, which sold for about $20. Maybe more; the current price is $20 for a digital copy, and $30 for a physical copy, but I think that there's been inflation since 2008 or so. And classically, you had to get six of them to have the whole campaign. At a minimum, the adventure path cost $120, and at a maximum, $180. And they generally went from levels 1 to about 14-15 or so. 

In recent years, they experimented with different lengths of campaigns and different ranges of levels, but the "classic" line-up is by far the majority of the Adventure Paths. In fact, three volume more condensed adventure paths that cover ten levels seem to have been the intermediate step that they've been doing the last couple of years. But I'm way behind on collecting and reading them, so I'm not as familiar with the newer stuff.

The WotC campaigns, and they varied somewhat, were levels 1-10 in a single hardback volume that cost $50. (And the price hasn't really changed; the most recent one is listed on Amazon at $48 and change.) Needless to say, this is a better deal financially. Sure, sure... you don't get as much content, but the fact is that Paizo buffed up their content with stuff that people didn't really need. What you really needed was the adventures, not the fiction, not the setting essays, not even the bestiaries (much of which was more or less reprinted in the actual Bestiary books, and few of the animals within actually appeared in the adventures. I believe, although I haven't actually checked, that the actual adventure page count is probably more or less equivalent (more or less) to the WotC campaigns. 

Mike Mearls in a podcast interview, I think the one with Questing Beast, mentioned that the campaigns were a direct attack on the adventure paths, and given the most recent announcement from Paizo, I have to assume that they have been successful enough to have Paizo adjust their business model to one much more like WotC. Their "adventure paths" will now be basically equivalent to WotC campaign books in page count and format, and they'll issue one every quarter, I think they said. However, they will charge a fair bit more than WotC; $80 vs ~$50.

Of course, all of that assumes a consistent quality if you're going to assume the same value for price, and that's hardly a given. Some of the WotC campaigns are pretty good—reportedly—while many of them are largely considered ridiculous jokes. At least by the kind of people who's taste I trust. I think with Paizo, the quality is more even, but not necessarily anything super either. They're less obnoxiously woke, but it's still there in the ambient background, and slowly building like the temperature of the boiling frog analogy. Not that that's the only quality problem, but it's the biggest one in much of the entertainment industries, including RPGs.

Music, movies, books and Eberron

In spite of the fact that my daughter, son-in-law and grandson were visiting all of last week, and that my wife was going through a bit of a professional crisis (at least it felt like it to her) and needed to spend some time talking to me and watching some shows to take her mind of things that were stressing her out, I still managed to do some reading. And, as I mentioned earlier, I'd been listening to some classic John Williams music too as part of a retrospective. Mostly during my commutes and then when I go out to my car during lunch, but still, it's something. A few things happened.

First, although I posted earlier that I'd been pretty soured on both Star Wars and Indiana Jones by the actions of Disney and even George Lucas himself, I still found myself feeling nostalgic, especially while going through the Special Edition expanded soundtrack albums for Empire and Jedi. When my wife goes out of town in a month or two to help my other son with his coming twins and I'm stuck at home alone most evenings and weekends, I think it likely that I'll pull out my old laserdisc rips of the theatrical original versions of the original trilogy and watch it again, and maybe the original Indy trilogy too. In spite of my fickle moodiness about the two series, they were good movies, which is why I loved them for so long. I don't have to have a relationship with the movies, and they don't have to be perfect to still be enjoyable. I also don't have to like the creator to enjoy the creation. 

I literally just finished the Special Edition soundtrack end titles for Jedi—as I'm writing the last few notes are playing in my earbuds (quieter day at work. Or at least fewer meetings.) Next up are some of the incidental songs, like the ewok village music, "Lapti Nek", the original version which was replaced (foolishly) in the Special Edition by "Jedi Rocks" and then the original "Yub Nub" version of the end titles. My own folder is better than the soundtracks that I bought years ago in some ways, because I prefer the original versions there. That's also why when I watch them, I'll watch my laser disc rips rather than my Special Edition discs, or stream it from Disney+ or whatever.

I may also end up watching "Andor" while my wife is gone. I've been trying to get her to watch it with me, but she has been kind of reluctant. I guess I'm not "completely" over Star Wars after all. Like I said, it's not an ex-girlfriend. It's a few movies from my childhood, as well as various additional titles and media projects, of wildly varying quality. I can appreciate those that are decent and roll my eyes and avoid those that aren't. 

Secondly, by funny coincidence, one of the things I watched with my wife when she needed to distract herself from being stressed about work was The Big Bang Theory, and we saw the episode where Amy Farrah Fowler "ruins" Raiders of the Lost Ark for the guys by pointing out that Indiana Jones himself was completely incidental to the plot. Nothing he did made any effect on anything; the Nazis would literally have found the ark with or without him, they would have taken it to their island, they would have opened it, and they would have all died. Indy brought it back, just so it could get stuffed in a warehouse and forgotten. That's his only actual accomplishment in the movie, according to her. This isn't entirely true; Marian would probably have been killed by the Nazis, and arguably, Indiana Jones reconnecting with Marian was a more important plot point than finding the ark even. So it made a difference to her. There's even a line in the movie where this is acknowledged, but whether this was a nod by the screenwriter Kasdan that he recognized this or not is unclear; when Indy has the bazooka trained on the ark before the Nazis open it, he tells the Nazis that all he cares about is the girl. 

Anyway, shortly I'll listen to a Wandering DMs podcast, then the Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones soundtracks. I don't have the same nostalgia for the prequel trilogy as younger Millennials do, so I don't expect anything to come of that other than my original intention; hear the John Williams soundtracks and appreciate them for their own sake in spite of the movies. Then another podcast, followed by Revenge of the Sith and The Force Awakens, etc. until I run out of Star Wars soundtracks to listen to. I've got plenty of other music, of course, after that, to keep the same basic pattern going. 

Thirdly, on our side of the social spectrum, there's obviously been a lot of disappointment in more recent Star Wars offerings, and a desire to have a good swashbuckling space opera that recreates what was good about Star Wars while excising the stuff that sucks about it. This is especially relevant, because Star Wars was just a grab-bag of copied elements from a bunch of older space opera anyway; it's almost as if the setting was a hybrid of Dune and the Lensmen, and the plot was a hybrid of Where Eagles Dare in space with The Dam Busters Anyone can do essentially the same thing; take a bunch of old space opera elements and rather transparently put them all together and rip them off. I've even done so myself. For a while, I hoped that the Galaxy's Edge series would be the replacement Star Wars I was hoping for, but it's not. Cole and Anspach said that's what they were doing, but only one of the novels actually felt like Star Wars; the rest of it was overtly military science fiction, written for former military science fiction fans. Not bad, but not Star Wars, and not my cup of tea either. I also thought that maybe John C. Wright, who's well regarded in "our" sphere might be the guy. He's got a four-book space opera that claims to be exactly the kind of old fashioned Star Wars rip-off space opera that I'm looking for. My daughter bought me the first book in the series (off my Amazon wish list) a while ago (for Christmas I think) and just finished the first title, Space Pirates of Andromeda. Honestly, I didn't really love it, and based on my now a couple of different experiences with John C. Wright's work, I think he's a over-rated. He's a great prose stylist, I'll give him that, but that's one of the author skills that I care about the least. I didn't think his character or plot development was anything special at all, and his world-building kind of actively turned me off on occasion. Apparently the space-faring races of his space opera Andromeda galaxy are just animal people, and their species names are the scientific names of the animal families that they resemble; deer people are Cervidae, weasel people are Mustelidae, fox people are Vulpinae, etc. 

He also shares, to some degree, with Lucas himself, a somewhat beta (delta?) approach to girls in his fiction. The somewhat bratty space princess teenager with the special magical powers that nobody else has has to save the hapless hero several times through her astral projection. That kind of turned me off too. In fact, in general, he didn't really get the old-fashioned vibe of capable men who just jump in there, roll up their sleeves and make things happen. There's considerably too much reliance and technology and magical powers (of someone else, no less) and considerably too little on his own competence, resilience and innovation. And I literally groaned and rolled my eyes when he referenced Asian-morph humans as the most attractive. Nerds with yellow fever are particularly cringe.

And his Christian references were too on-the-nose for my taste. I prefer Tolkien to Lewis, but Wright is writing the Narnia of space opera, not the Lord of the Rings of space opera. I feel like... eh. I do think that I'll get around to ordering the next three books of the series—eventually—but I'm not in any particular hurry to do so. Especially because, see below:

Fourth, I finally found a lot of the books that I'd been looking for in boxes in my garage, which I didn't have space to unpack after relocating (yet) so they were kind of "lost" in storage. That brings a bunch of stuff back to the reading list, including an omnibus of the Drizzt prequel series (I read the original Halfling Gem trilogy a year or two ago, and meant to read this shortly after, but then when I relocated, it's been lost in storage for just over a year), an omnibus of the first five Barsoom books, the original Timothy Zahn sequel trilogy of novels for Star Wars, and maybe some of the M.Y.T.H. and Thieves World books by Robert Asprin (et al.) I also have plenty on my novel list already; a trilogy of Arkham Horror novels, The Mad King, the James Silke Horned Helmet four-book series, Dracula, and another dive after several years into Lovecraft, etc. Before any of that, I want to finish the Riftwar Saga and read the last book there, A Darkness at Sethanon. Man, I've got so much to read. But that's novels. In terms of game books:

Fifth, I'm only a few pages away from finishing the original Eberron book. I actually just need to read the Forgotten Forge adventure included at the end, at which point I'll be done. I'll be picking up the next Eberron book, which is the first module, on pdf next, as well as the next Freeport book, which is "Black Sails" in physical gamebooks, so my "what I'm reading" is A Darkness at Sethanon, Black Sails Over Freeport and Shadows of the Last War by this afternoon. I don't want this Eberron (and other) trawl projects to start muscling out Freeport, but some of them were ideas that I had in mind for what to read for a long time before I started the Freeport Trawl anyway. The Freeport Trawl, for instance, is going to eventually feed my Curse of the Corsair Coast 5x5 Front, so of the bunch, it's the slighter higher priority. But I also don't want to lose momentum on my Eberron Remixed 2e project, which now has a page created on the Eberron Remixed site (although not yet any content on it) and reading the products that I haven't in many years is the best way to keep up my motivation to do that.

And to end, here's a ChatGPT image of ghostly pirates; a theme of Black Sails if I remember correctly. Although, again; I'm expecting Black Sails to be silly, it mostly takes place in weird pocket dimensions, and it probably isn't really very appropriate for Old Night use. I hope that after I get past this product, though, that most of the rest of what Freeport offers will be more appropriate for my use.

UPDATE: Finally, I picked up Black Sails to start reading it this evening, and right there in the very first paragraph, it makes mention of Tales of Freeport already being out when it came out, so my order is a little wrong. Sigh. It probably doesn't matter, but I'm going to pull that one ahead and read it first now. I was thrown off by a typo somewhere, because I thought it was released in 2005, which was... obviously not correct.

Shotgun post—movies and movie music, 5x5 campaigns, Eberron and Freeport

A bunch of small updates for this morning, none of which justifies its own post, so they're all bundled together and shot out like buckshot.

First, because listening to podcasts and actual plays becomes an endurance challenge, at least with my low attention span personality, I've recently interspersed every episode with two movie soundtracks. One thing that I'd been meaning to do for a long time was a complete playthrough of the Indiana Jones and Star Wars soundtracks. Even the movies that I don't like, like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and movies that I never watched like Dial of Destiny had John Williams soundtracks. I'd thought years ago that Crystal Skull had a kind of phoned in soundtrack; everything that was memorable came from past movies. On the other hand, I thought the profoundly mediocre and disappointing movie The Force Awakens still had a good soundtrack, so I was willing to give it all a go.

I haven't gotten too far yet; I finished all five Indiana Jones movies and am near to finishing the first 1977 Star Wars movie. Lots more Star Wars to go. The music is, of course, good as its always been. But I find that I don't have quite the same happy associations with it that I did for years and years. I'm not saying that the music is ruined for me; that's too far. But its also not the same. I almost find that I quite enjoy listening to soundtracks for movies that I haven't even watched, if they're good soundtracks, because I have no association with them other than whatever I'm using them for. So, movie soundtracks like Slenderman or Alien: Covenant to me just sound like Shadows of Old Night. 

And I can't even just blame Iger and the modern Disney corporation. Raiders has been significantly impacted by my discovering the audio of the brainstorming sessions between Lucas, Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan to work out the screenplay.

Kasdan: I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don't have to build it.

Lucas: I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

Kasdan: And he was forty-two.

Lucas: He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship.

Spielberg: She had better be older than twenty-two.

Lucas: He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.

Lucas: It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

Spielberg: And promiscuous. She came onto him.

Lucas: Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he...

Spielberg: She has pictures of him.

Other than one bit of sanity from Spielberg questioning the age, nobody batted an eye, and Lucas himself comes across as the really creepy one. Karen Allen doesn't look young enough to have been a kid when she had her affair with Jones, but the actors are nine years apart in real life. Although they fixed the worst of that problem with casting, I still can't not think about what they were about to do when they meet each other again in Marian's bar in Nepal. Something is seriously wrong with George Lucas, and that makes even the older Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies look suspect. Of course the bad movies that came out later than the original good ones have tainted the older ones; I'm now much more jaded about their flaws, and I see them as interesting but not necessarily great after all. What a change from what I thought twenty or so years ago!

Second, I didn't put my campaigns in order! I just grabbed all of the images with the Shift key and they loaded in whatever order they loaded in, and that's how I described them. Cult of Undeath is indeed the original one I worked on, before I even had this methodology, but Darkness In the Hill Country is the first one that I built with the 5x5 Front methodology, and it was specifically built to "go first." If I were to run these campaigns back to back (to back to back, etc.) for the same or at least some returning PCs, which would be fun but unlikely, I'd do them in the following order:

1. Darkness In the Hill Country
2. Cult of Undeath
3. Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes
4. Icy Graves of Hyperborea
5. Terror in Timischburg
6. Curse of the Corsair Coast

The advantage of doing it that way is that there is (with one little side-trip campaign; the Hyperborean one) a general movement west and south. They kind of link; Darkness In the Hill Country naturally takes place in the Hill Country, Cult of Undeath starts in the Hill Country and migrates slowly westward into western Timischburg near the southern edge of the Boneyard. A week or two caravan ride across the Boneyard from where that finishes put's the PCs in Simashki for Mind-Wizards; not that they know how they got there, which is the whole point of Mind-Wizards. From there, they're close to Lower Kurushat, and can do the side trip to Hyperborea and back. And then, once they're back, they just have to move across the peninsula a little bit to the coastal cities of Baal Hamazi to start Terror in Timischburg, which gradually pulls them south to the Corsair Coast and Port Liure, where they can do Curse of the Corsair Coast. 

The one that really stands out there, of course, is the Hyperborean one, which has the PCs travel from Lower Kurushat to Hyperborea and back; a much longer trip than any of the other campaigns offers. More travel, even than all of the others combined (with the possible exception of Terror In Timischburg because of all the sailing, which makes travel easier.) I may rethink that one, and make Hyperborea be a spin-off meant to use other characters entirely, or something, that starts somewhere closer like Burlharrow. We'll see. I haven't developed much of anything at all yet on that one anyway, so there's time to modify my thoughts on it.

Third, I've been reading Eberron pretty quickly. I'm now at least half way through it, and I'm in the actual setting stuff now; the descriptions of the nations. The next chapter is organizations, and then tips for running a campaign the way the designers envisioned. But then there's still two chapters of mostly mechanics; magic items and monsters, respectively, and then the little introductory adventure, "The Forgotten Forge." I created an Eberron Trawl page too, although I'm going to be a little bit less aggressive about those than I am about Freeport. I did notice that if I placed the products in order that they were released, though, that two modules follow the setting before anything else came out. And, that the original module series was supposed to follow up as a "sequel" of sorts to the included mini-module. I suspect that they're much more stand-alone, but we'll see; it's been a really long time since I looked at the Eberron modules. I even played in at least the first one, although I don't remember how long that campaign lasted before falling apart due to GM losing interest in running (his attention span was worse than mine, especially when it came to this kind of follow-through.) Anyway, I'm kind of curious how this will go. There are several Eberron products that I never did get around to reading, so maybe they'll be really interesting to pick up now, years after the fact. I had thought some of them seemed redundant, so I didn't buy them when they were new, but we'll see now.

Finally, I finished "Denizens of Freeport" last night, the latest in the Freeport Trawl. I can't read the next until I finish Eberron, since the next one is "Black Sails" which I have in physical copy. I think I'd never actually read this one before, or if I did, I didn't remember it hardly at all, which is odd because I've had it for a good twenty years. I probably just forgot that I read it years ago. While it does include NPC statblocks, as most d20 products were prone to do in 2003, this luckily didn't take too much space (except when applied to spellcasters) and it instead focused on presenting the character as someone, not that you'd fight with or interact with mechanically necessarily, but as actual characters in the city that you could meet, and all of them have at least a few "hooks" associated with them; adventure seeds that could be used to get the characters doing something. The format here is very familiar to me from my multiple re-reads of 2007's "Pirates Guide to Freeport", with the exception of the statblocks of course. There are one or two repeat characters from other sources (like whathisface, the Dented Helm dwarf brewer), and another one or two that are repeat characters but their status changed (like Torya Ironoak, etc.) but mostly, this is new stuff.

Some of it is hoaky, of course. There's a few ridiculous pop culture or literary references here and there. There's a few concepts that are absurd. There's several that are way too D&D to be useable by me. Woke didn't exist as a concept in 2003 of course, but the ideas did and Chris Pramas was all about the proto-woke just like he's all about woke now. That ruins a few characters here too. But really; I didn't expect anything different. This is still a good book, a useful book, and because each "chapter", i.e., each NPC, is only a page or two long, it's an easy one to pick up and read at your leisure in short bursts when you have time. I—unfortunately—don't expect "Black Sails" to be nearly as fun and easy and relaxing to read, because I remember it; it's got long chapters full of silliness, and I'm kind of expecting it to be a bit tedious. But maybe going in with low expectations I'll find that it's not as bad as I remember, and there'll be stuff that I can use after all.

Finally, check out that cover art! It's a great example of why Wayne Reynolds catapulted very quickly to becoming one of the most popular D&D and D&D-adjacent artists of the 00s and 10s. I don't see his work nearly as often anymore as I did back then, and I think he's slowed down either because he's just not as young and hungry as he used to be, or he's working more in some other venues where I just don't see his stuff anymore (I personally believe he probably made enough money that he could slow down and relax.) But man, he used to really be all over the place. Not everything he did was golden (the Black Company cover he did, also for Green Ronin, is particularly bad), but most of it was excellent. This was always one of my favorites of his. He's associated with a lot of companies, but I associated him with Freeport earlier than most. If you count the Fantasy AGE 2e cover, which obviously is set in Freeport, he did eight covers for the line. Oddly, the later ones would be among the best, but they feature (at Green Ronin's request, no doubt) too much Diversity, Inc. action grrl pox characters on them to really work for me anymore. Sadly. 

Tired....

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been exceptionally tired this last weekend. I got home from work, my wife was already hitting the wall because of her travel earlier in the week, and I simply could barely keep my eyes open an hour or so after getting home. I managed to force myself to stay awake by watching cheesy fail videos and stuff on YouTube, just so I didn’t throw my sleep schedule completely off, but it was pretty bad. Saturday and Sunday I was still pretty tired. I didn’t do the house cleaning chores that I meant to do and I didn’t do my taxes, so those are still hanging over me. I did, however, get to do a little bit of work on High Fantasy X, HFX, my lingering project that started out as Elemental Fantasy X, and then kinda took a back seat. 

I’m not 100% sure what prompted me to look at this again, but something reminded me of my Eberron Remixed project, and that led me to HFX. I was able to determine, as noted in my last post, how to change the rules to accommodate the HFX vs DFX setting, and I was able to do so with relatively little actual change. There’s still the task to fill out the fluff, such as it is, but that’s not a big deal, and then I’ll have a skeleton outline of a setting, ready to go. That’s usually the degree of detail that I like to do anyway.

Other than that, I recently finished the pdf game book I’m reading and queued up some new ones. However, most of the ones I queued up are freakin’ gigantic; more than 500 pages; almost 900 pages on the longest one. I’ve had many of these pdfs for many years, but I’ve not read them. I may not, if they’re that intimidating. I kind of threw up my hands in frustration at lunch today and didn’t even pick up a game book at all, and started the novel that I’d been carrying around in my backpack instead. I also started listening (again) to the Dune soundtracks. You’d think that there’d be two soundtracks; one for Dune part one and another for part two, but the first movie actually had three soundtracks for some reason, although two of them seem like mood music rearranged specifically to be a soundtrack album rather than the actual movie soundtrack, which is something different. It was kind of moodier and more melancholy than I remembered, with a lot of slow, sad saxophone melody lines. (I’m always amused to see sax again. Saxophone used to be common in the 80s, and gradually it kind of faded from popular music. I didn’t really notice until someone pointed it out that it was gone.) I wonder if Hans Zimmer was unconsciously (or consciously) influenced by the old Vangelis Blade Runner love theme. I’m not saying that they sounded alike, but I am saying that they kinda sounded like part of the same family of music, if that makes any sense. 

To be fair, it was a little too moody and melancholy for the Arkham Horror novel I was reading. It wasn’t really quite the right mood. Oh, well. I’ll finish the Dune stuff soon enough, and then I can switch to some Graham Plowman or something for the rest of the read-throughs. I’ve got four more Arkham Horror novels after this one that I’m on; although I might not read them all right away.

Next up, besides reading, I’ve been trying to watch some older movies again that I haven’t watched in a long time. I enjoyed the two Predators a weekend or so ago; I’m kinda thinking I need to watch Aliens, The Untouchables, and Solomon Kane again. I barely even remember the last one, and it’s been enough time since I saw the first two that I could use a refresher. And then, I’ll also want to make the next video in my 5x5 Shadows Over Garenport vlog series on YouTube, and draw a new, more detailed map of the HFX continent… which I could probably stand to name, while I’m at it. I’ve got a good first map, but it’s a little small, and has too many unnamed features. As I start filling out the space on the new Google Sites for HFX, I’ll need more names, which means… I’ll need a new map.

As an aside, I'm amused that the main continent of Eberron is named Khorvaire. Maybe I should name my continent Stuuddabhacre or something?

UPDATE: A curious note. ShadowDark was one of the most successful RPG kickstarters of all time a couple of years ago managed by someone not named Brandon Sanderson. When it went live, it reached $1.365M, I think, and was considered by everyone involved (or even just observing) as a phenomenal success. It had a part 2 launch just yesterday, a setting and more material. It's currently sitting at $1.227M as a write this, but at less than 48 hours in, it has continued to trickle upward after it's initial $1M, which it reached in less than 12 hours. It should reach at least the total of the first kickstarter before finishing, and maybe will edge up closer to $1.5M. I did notice, however, that it's reached almost the same total with less than half the number of backers (so far.) The pledge tiers are all considerably more expensive than they were the first time. The least expensive pledge level, pdfs of the three new zines, is still $45, and the most expensive, premium hardcopies of everything new, is $349. I currently only own a pdf copy of the game, which I bought long after the original kickstarter was over. If I were to get into it and want hard copies, I'd probably have get the ShadowDark Newcomer package, which is $199, or perhaps the premium versions which are higher quality, and come with a few accessories, for $269.

Not sure what that means. If it makes the same money, or even better, does it matter if it's fewer backers, but who are individually bigger spenders? Or is that a sign that ShadowDark is on the decline? Or is the fact that I wondered that merely a sign that I'm a pessimistic black-piller who should shut up?

UPDATE 2: Physiognomy is real. I'm not shocked by, say, the mannerisms of Sly Flourish or Matt Glicker. Professor DM and Baron de Roppe, on the other hand, are actually in many ways more charismatic when unscripted and not in "performative" mode. 

As for my own take on the questions?

1. I would love to play my own game, but I never will. As a player, I'd probably say something like Call of Cthulhu, I suppose. But I love fantasy; if I could get the same vibe as Call of Cthulhu but in fantasy, and without the d100 system, which I don't much care for, that'd be perfect for me. Of course, that's pretty much exactly what my game, Dark Fantasy X is, which is my favorite to run.
2. I have plenty of other interests, but what I'd most be interested in branching out of (to the extent that I don't already) would be hiking slash camping slash overlanding. I'd love to have a second channel where I do pretty much what SUV RVing does. Except I'm older, more out of shape and slower than him, so my adventures would necessarily be quite a bit more sedate.
3. Not sure. I used to really like a lot of definition in the system for players to use to customize their characters, but I liked it because it led to roleplaying hooks. I now realize that most games that offer that are really geared towards power gamers and character builds, so I'm less likely to prefer them. But not because I don't have the same tastes; ironically its because my tastes are now more aligned with mechanics I prefer. 

I think that last point is kind of interesting. When I started playing, there were other games, of course. D&D was out, as was AD&D, and a few others. Gamma World was out already. Top Secret was just releasing, Star Frontiers and Call of Cthulhu were about to be released, Traveller was out, etc. And I played around with most of those, although it's also fair to say that everyone played D&D, at least some of the time, and that was the common language that all gamers knew. We took it for granted more that different people wanted different things out of the game, and that the game didn't parcel them out automatically to each playstyle; it was up to a good GM to make sure everyone got enough of what they liked that they kept playing, and balanced the competing priorities of different people with different tastes at the same table.

I think that's kind of been lost over the years, and honestly, I've kind of lost it myself. As I've gotten older, I've lost patience with stuff that I'm not interested in being a significant portion of my game, and I'm much more interested in finding like-minded people to game with rather than gaming with anyone just because, hey, it's a game, or hey, they're the only friends I've got who game, etc. I want games to be good, and I've become much more hardened in my opinion on what is good for me and what isn't. I've taken it on the chin too many times to think otherwise, and played in mediocre or even bad games, or with people that I didn't rally enjoy gaming with, or even sometimes hanging around with. I'm over that. But yeah; the idea of a game perfectly suited to your tastes? I'm not sure I could delineate what my tastes were when I was younger (although in retrospect, they haven't really meaningfully changed at their core). But it never occurred to me that a game could actually be crafted specifically to match them.

Movies and Books

I had to spend almost the entirety of the work week out of town for work last week. Flight home was delayed, so I didn't get home until late Friday evening; bedtime really. I was supposed to intercept my wife on her way out of town and take her to the airport, but because of my delay, she had to go on her own. Now, her flight is delayed and I'll be in bed when she gets home, because otherwise I'll start the week off already short on sleep. Not a good plan; I've been pretty tired all weekend because of the travel. Sigh.

So, when I have a week in a hotel (in the evenings, anyway) and a weekend at home by myself, what do I do?

In my case, I:

• Reread the original 3e version of Privateer Press's Monsternomicon vol. 1. Still one of my favorite game books. It's just a joy to read. Even the boring monsters, like the moon moths and stuff give you a reason to potentially care about them.
• Started reading The Game Master's Book of Instant Towns and Cities. I think this one may take me a little while to read. It's a little cringy. It's very 5e cozy weird high fantasy in feel, with a kind of "ambient wokeness" that you can kind of feel intuitively moreso than point to anything super substantial (other than all of the girlboss "mayors" and whatnot). It's got lots of pop culture cringy in-jokes too; a seaside town called Inz which is kind of a silly joke version of Innsmouth, for instance, or the place that literally has a talk like a pirate day. Nothing's actively offensive or too ridiculous much, at least not so far, but I'm glad I got it for half price. Even so, I imagine I'll feel ripped off when I'm done.
• Pondered that with the "vibe shift" that lots of people are talking about since the election, that kind of stuff has become very low status. I mean, people like me always felt at least a kind of quiet contempt for wokeness, but because woke was in the halls of power, they could delude themselves about their status and popularity. Now, it seems not only like super loser and beta, but also cringy and legitimately creepy. People who haven't caught on and are still talking about woke topics like everyone else takes them seriously, or even pretends to, are outing themselves as really low status. It's hard not to look at people like that and wonder where they went really, really wrong and how they lost their complete and total sense of situational awareness. That was probably overthinking a book that's only "ambiently" rather than overtly woke, at least so far. But I saw a stream that mentioned the whole "low status" label of wokeness, and that probably primed the pump as soon as I picked up a D&D book that has even hints of wokeness.
• Read about half of a pdf copy of Exemplars of Evil, which I'd heard really good things about. Had a crazy sense of deja vu after a while. At one point halfway through, was convinced I'd read it already. Looked at my reading log, which I started keeping in 2023, and saw that I'd already read it back then. Sigh. I guess the book wasn't all that, since I had to read it again halfway through to remember that I even had read it at all. Gave up and took if off my Sumatra pdf reader history.
• Was about to read Paizo's Villain Codex. Just a few pages in, thought it looked really familiar too. I read it before I kept a log, but I did find an old blog post or two where I referenced having just read it, from about six years ago. Actually, some of the basic framework of the SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT campaign, or at least the eponymous column, were clearly built on ideas that I was inspired by from here. Stopped reading that one too. I do actually plan on re-reading two books that I read in 2023 though; The Pirate's Guide to Freeport and Five Fingers: Port of Deceit. But I have way more gaming books on my docket than actual fiction books, so I need to read some novels here too. Many of mine are still in boxes in the garage from my move, though.
• I had not read Paizo's Horror Realms before, but I have a pdf copy of that too, so I started that. Already have a couple of ideas of things to use, although they're just minor little details. Signal to noise ratio with a lot of modern RPG products isn't super great, but there are good ideas in them. Sometimes you just have to pan for them for quite a while before you get enough flakes of good ideas to get something really useable.
• Read Arthur Machen's novella "The Great God Pan" as part of a gigantic ebook collection of all his work (it's all public domain.) Pretty sure I've read this before a while ago, but it's still interesting. Apparently, in 1894 when it was first published, it was considered pretty racy, and wasn't a great start to his reputation as a writer, which is kinda funny given that anything that may have happened in the plot was innuendo-ized so strongly that you almost aren't even sure what you're supposed to infer happened (I suppose the late Victorian and Edwardian era Brits who read it might have had more context to see it than I do). Also, of course, in the 130 or so years since then, we've become so decadent that it seems tame anyway, even if it had been spelled out literally and explicitly. But it's since become a real classic of horror, and many horror writers consider it one of the best early horror stories, before the genre had really crystalized. Stephen King certainly said so specifically, and Lovecraft's own "The Dunwich Horror" borrows so much from it in some ways that it's almost a pastiche.
• Watched Predator and Predator 2, which I have owned for many years. But I hadn't watched either of them in some time, so it was nice to put them back in and go through them. For various reasons, I've had Predator themed stuff pop up at me off and on repeatedly over the last few weeks, including the soundtrack of the second one on YouTube, some reaction videos (again on YouTube) of people watching the whole Dillon/Dutch arm thing, etc. Even Black Lodge Games talked about Schwarzenegger movies in a recent stream, and of course they mentioned that Predator is probably his best movie (although they were particularly fond of Commando and Total Recall. Poor Running Man gets no love. It's a good one too, though). Predator 2 is one I remember quite liking when it came out (I saw it in theaters) but apparently it took some time to find its audience. Too different from the first one, and no Arnie, I guess. But it's since become a well-regarded "cult classic", so quality always outs eventually. Predator 2 also seems to accidentally—in retrospect—look like a cautionary tale against mass immigration of third world savages.
• Listened to some hardtrance, early hardstyle and even a bit of hardcore and gabber, which I don't normally listen to.
• Listened to some Darkest Dungeon and Graham Plowman Lovecraftian soundtracks, as well as some classical music.
• Took a nap on Saturday. Tried to take one on Sunday, but didn't actually do more than doze for a few minutes. Ultimately, that was probably for the best. 
• Was supposed to have a D&D session. Our DM was burned out after only a few sessions, really (perils of DMing 5e. But I don't know that he knows any better; apparently, he's only ever played 4e and 5e.) His wife was going to take over on the same campaign, and he'd either play his wife's character, or make his own replacement to take her character's place. But she got kinda sick or something, and they canceled kinda last minute. Honestly, after a week out of town, having an excuse to just stay at home wasn't so bad, so I wasn't too broken up about the cancelation. The only time I left the house all weekend was 1) walk to the mailbox and get the mail, 2) take a couple of trash bags out to the trash, 3) go to church on Sunday. I'm not really read to go in to work tomorrow. Especially since my wife probably won't be awake yet. I will have just missed her several times over the weekend, and will finally be able to see here again on Monday after work. Sigh. 

Where Eagles Dare and Star Wars

I've said before that the middle section of Star Wars is very similar, probably on purpose, to the plot and situation of the popular 1968 WW2-spy movie Where Eagles Dare. I've always liked Eagles, but I hadn't watched it in a while. I own it on DVD, so it was just a question of making some time and doing it. My youngest son likes to watch movies with me, and this was one where we were both in alignment that we wanted to see it, so we watched it this weekend. Because the movie is long and we started it late, we actually watched half of it on Saturday (up to the end of the interrogation scene in the Great Hall of the Schloss Adler. Then we watched the second part last night, which is the escape from the castle, and by far the best part of the movie, with the thrilling murder of a gazillion Nazis, as well as the iconic cable car fight scene. This is the part that especially reminds one of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and the rest of the bunch being stuck on the Death Star. I'm not the only person to have noted this similarity over time; I did a quick search, and found that many other people had remarked on it (some of them also remarked that the part that followed the escape from the castle; the flight to the airport, etc. could easily be a prototype for the truck chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think it's fair to say that Lucas liked Where Eagles Dare. The biggest tell, which I hadn't recognized until now, was the Clint Eastwood's character says to Richard Burton's character, more than once in fact, that "we've got company", a line which Lucas adopts pretty closely when Han shouts to Luke that "we're gonna have company."

He used some other WWII action movies from the 60s; 633 Squadron and The Dam Busters (actually, that one's a little older; from 1955); this is even less secret; he showed this films to his special effects guys saying specifically that that's what he wanted the X-wing fight scene to look like. Of course, the plot and situation is lifted right from those movies, both of which had a very similar scenario.

Dumb virtue-signaling people like to say that Star Wars was a reworking or even a remake of The Hidden Fortress, but in reality, the movie bears very little resemblance to it, in favor of the movies listed above, except for maybe the opening act, and the concept of the bickering droids mirroring the bickering peasants, and some of the other set-up. Where Eagles Dare also doesn't feature the rescue of a princess, which The Hidden Fortress does, but it does feature the rescue of a downed American general who has access to secret plans. Given that princess-rescuing is a pretty time-honored scène à faire, pegging that to A Hidden Fortress is dubious. Certainly, however, the earliest drafts of Star Wars more closely resembled The Hidden Fortress but by the time we get to the movie as filmed, it's at best the source of the first act only, if even that. 

Of course, by saying that Star Wars used these elements, I don't mean to say that they were the Tragedy of Darth Plagiarism the Wise or anything, just that they clearly form the inspiration core that was adapted and adopted to fit into the screenplay as it emerged. There's nothing wrong with doing that, and hardy any writer, even one much better than George Lucas, will fail to honestly admit that writers to that all the time; take an element from some other work, and then adopt and adapt it to fit into their narrative. Assuming that they also adopt and adapt other elements too and mingle them, and twist what's left to be unique somewhat so that it's not an obvious copy-paste routine, then why not?

I always say that writers and game-masters too, for that matter, should be familiar with lots of different fiction traditions and genres, and what makes them work and not work. I've heard of D&D players that not only only read fantasy, but they even only read D&D fiction! I doubt that's true anymore for this guy, since he said that years ago, and I don't think WotC publishes many novels anymore. And even if it was literally true and not some weird exaggerated claim, then that suggests that he probably just doesn't read much at all; I doubt that he doesn't watch TV, movies or play video games of various genres, at the very least.

As Lucas himself proved, his greatest inspiration for the setting of Star Wars was almost certainly stuff like Dune and the Lensman series, and the old Flash Gordon Republic serials, but when it came to plot, his greatest inspiration wasn't science fiction at all, but a Japanese historical swasbuckling film, a WWII spy-thriller, and some WWII war movies.

Switching gears, I watched a YouTube video recently about Star Wars and Dune, and it claims that Brian Herbert called his dad in late May of 1977 telling him that he needed to see Star Wars because it copied so many elements of Dune that it was scary. Then he specifically mentioned the desert planet and the evil empire. If that's really all he could think of, he was really reaching. Evil empires are a stock plot element from all kinds of fiction, and in any case, the most obvious proximal source for the Empire was the caricature of the Nazis that our propagandists have foisted on us to justify our involvement in WW2, not anything out of Dune. It's not clear that the Empire is even necessarily evil in Dune, or if it is, that Paul Atreides and his Fremen jihad aren't even more evil. And a desert planet? That's a little easier sell, but then again, desert planets are hardly unique to Dune, especially given the prolific subgenre of science fiction set on Mars. In fact, Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark double book The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman offers a more Tatooine-like experience, I think, than Dune does. Dune isn't anything all that interesting or unique without the context of spice, the worms and the Fremen, all of which Tatooine lacks. Although the offhand shot of C-3PO walking by a long giant skeleton is maybe supposed to be a veiled Dune reference, and certainly his fear of being shipped to the spice mines of Kessel is a veiled Dune reference. It's a little unfortunate that Star Wars used the word spice at all in any context other than something you put on your food to make it taste more interesting, although it was just an off-hand reference in the one movie until the EU and then the Disney movies (Solo in particular) made it more mainstream again. Of course, Star Wars spice has developed in ways that bear little resemblance at all to Dune spice.

I don't actually like Dune that much as a novel, which I think I mentioned recently in reference to the new movies. I think the movies are better then the book, but they still aren't great. A lot of people think that Dune is to sci-fi what Lord of the Rings is to fantasy. I completely disagree. It's epic in scope, but lacks epic themes. Dune is A Song of Ice & Fire, a disappointing and nihilistic critique of humanity and Western civilization in particular, a dark and cynical downer where there are no heroes, no good guys even, and no good even at all. Everything is dark, tawdry and cynical. 

Also, Dune hasn't had the effect on the genre that Lord of the Rings has, although there it at least comes closer. Rather, I suspect Star Wars is itself the Lord of the Rings of science fiction, or at least it was when we only had the original trilogy. It's the work that's the most imitated and has done the most to make the genre mainstream. Like Lord of the Rings, it also synthesizes older, familiar tropes and puts them in a new context; in Lord of the Rings case, it hangs mythology and old Germanic sagas on an epic good vs evil struggle, where Star Wars takes an even broader selection of genre tropes and also hangs them on an epic struggle of good vs evil, even going so far as trying to justify its seriousness by appeal to Joseph Campbell's debunked and out of favor "monomyth" theories.

Yes, that's another tell of someone who isn't very educated but is trying to appear so; if you refer to Joseph Campbell without even knowing that his work is largely discounted, discredited and not taken seriously at all by academics, then you're just a parrot trying to appear intelligent by referring to an academic thesis that you've heard about vaguely but don't understand at all. Please just stop. Nobody is impressed by the fact that you've heard the name Joseph Campbell and might even know the name of his most famous book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The more you try to summarize the Wikipedia summary of it, the deeper the hole you're digging for yourself for anyone who actually knows the status of Joseph Campbell's credibility to see.

Anyway, here's Johnn and his common law wife Raina Temple on Tatooine, which isn't really very much like Arrakis. In fact, here it specifically has a Lovecraftian vibe to it, although I think that was mostly made up for the Old Republic material, rather than something that is otherwise very present in the Star Wars franchise overall.

Here's a better view of the outfit. It's based on the Intelligence Agent's Armor, with a secondary black (IIRC) dye module, and the Crimson Raider helmet.