Freeport, actual plays and music

A number of updates, some personal, some just hobby:

First, we've had several months of family drama involving my oldest son and his wife. Despite years of probably denial on my part, it took a real catastrophe in his life for me to connect the dots and admit that the two of them probably have some kind of clinical personality disorder. In any case, not only have we had tons of stress and anxiety for the last several months, but I've also been worried about our house, which they've been living in, up in Michigan where we used to live. Now, we heard finally that they decided to get out, stop paying us rent, and we've got about two weeks notice. In July, we'll have to spend some time (and luckily we have some friends to help us with that) fixing up a few cosmetic things as cheaply and quickly as we can and putting the house on the market. Everything that we're hearing is that it's a seller's market right now, and we can hope to make off relatively well, sell very quickly, unload the burden and make enough over and above what we still owe that we can put a nice down payment on another house for us, finally. Although... we literally just signed another year lease on the house we're renting, so we won't be moving right away. But if we can get the house sold, and get our finances a little bit more organized, then we should be able to get into a house again about this time next year, with a hopefully significantly lower payment, much shorter term, and a plan to get completely out of debt entirely so that I can actually afford to retire when I'm old enough to do so. I mean, I'd love to retire now, while I'm still young and healthy enough to enjoy my retirement, but after the drama and worry that I've been through the last few years, this is a good outcome for me. Still have to actually manage to sell the house, of course, but every indicator I can see looks good on that front. With at least one significant long-term worry looking to be resolved in the near term, I'm looking good going into the second half of the year.

Second, I've been listening to a few actual play podcasts. The Red Moon Roleplaying rendition of The Enemy Within, the Hideous Laughter rendition of Carrion Crown, and alongside that one, there's The Zone of Truth; a kind of OOC supplement to Carrion Crown, and Evil Interlude, a kind of weird prequel mini campaign running alongside it as well. I try to alternate these, and then in between them, I listen to my hardtrance megamixes. However, those are too long. Those are all 20 songs long, which gives them an average length of about two hours or so. I'm thinking about redoing them and instead of ten mixes two hours long each, I'll have twenty mixes about an hour long each, with ten tracks each. This will be better as interludes between my podcasts, which are also about an hour to an hour fifteen or so in length (although I play them at 1.5x speed.) That will also give me the chance to clean up some of my older mixes, which are a little bit more clumsy, sometimes. If I do it quick and dirty, I just split the files and mix in the ends and beginnings of the tracks right in the middle, but I'd like to actually redo the mixes from scratch. I might even reshuffle a bit what tracks are in which mix. We'll see.

On that, though, I'm enjoying these podcasts. I tend to say that RPGs are not a spectator sport, and I simply could not get in to Critical Role. However, I think the combination of making them shorter (about an hour rather than four) and having them be audio so I mostly only listen to them when driving, when I'm not going to be distracted by my phone, my computer or something else sitting around close at hand works. When I try to watch video actual plays, I find that my mind wanders and I get really distracted by... well, really by pretty much anything else around me. Podcasts work much better than video actual plays, at least for me. Video actual plays rarely, rarely work out for me. The only exception, although I never finished this, was wasd20's Rime of the Frostmaiden actual play.

Third, I'm about to finish the big fat Freeport book. I've only got 25-30 pages left, and I'll finish it for sure tonight. In fact, I'll make sure that I do, even if I have to stay up late to do so. In any case, that means that I'm on page 512 or whatever exactly I'm on of 540 or whatever exactly it is, and I think that I can effectively review it, or at least make a comparison to earlier products that it kind of replaces. Compared to The Pirate's Guide to Freeport, it advances the timeline and makes a few changes. I like that they took the time to make these changes, but most of them I don't actually care for or at least care about. I'm not a fan of the fact that they 1) greatly increased the population of orcs and goblinoids and made them a kind of obvious metaphor for black people and/or immigrants. Although, because they're orcs and goblinoids, they inadvertently make the conservatives' case for them, on accident without realizing that they've done so. They also play right into the hands of the narrative that it's liberals who are racist trolls who think that black people are like orcs. The whole thing is a somewhat amusing charlie foxtrot on the allegory that they kind of obviously were trying to make. 2) created new races, like the island trolls, which I have no use for and don't know why they suddenly came to prominence out of nowhere, 3) created this odd Salt Curse thing, but then it's almost just an offhand kind of thing with no explanation, and it's easily (and probably prudently) ignored. I feel like the city sections are just a bit lighter, but I really need to compare them again to see if some of the details were changes or are missing.

The mechanics stuff was substantially updated from the Pathfinder Freeport Companion, and I'd say improved significantly. Every prestige class and some of the base classes were changed to archetypes, and the Freebooter base class is all new, and is honestly one of my favorite 3.x classes, serving as a great alt.swashbuckler.

Mostly the presentation is improved; it's all color, for instance, and most of the art is new. I do miss some of the old art... but then again, I also have the old book, so "miss" isn't really the right word. There's a new adventure module at the end of the book, which is what I'm finishing up right now. It's actually quite long; 50-60 pages worth, but it's curiously kind of poorly organized, and it's not at all my type of adventure, being a scavenger hunt where you go all over town solving puzzles. It's probably my least favorite, or close to, of the modules/adventures for Freeport that I've read as part of this trawl.

It's gratifying to be (almost) finished with this. I'll only have to read the Pathfinder Bestiary, and I may skim that because I imagine that much of the material has already covered in earlier products. Then there's the Shadow of the Demon Lord Freeport Companion, which I can probably skim because, again, the companions are all pretty repetitive. The only thing really to read is the combined Return to Freeport since I'll probably skim rather than read cover to cover the remaining two titles. I expect that mostly that's repeating material. 

Once I'm done with the Freeport trawl, I'll do a big wrap-up post and maybe a high level 5x5 adaptation of it into my Curse of the Corsair Coast. And then, I'll pivot, I think, to the Eberron and Forgotten Realms trawls—although first I'm trying to finish reading the SPCM second saga about Yig and time travel, and read the next Paizo adventure path, Second Darkness. I actually brought Races of Eberron with me to work in my backpack today, although I didn't end up getting it out at lunch because I was listening to a podcast instead. I've already read a fair bit into it, so it's been started. Getting whole trawls finished and taken off of my page list (although I won't delete the pages, just the link to them.)

UPDATE: Yeah, I finished the book early. The final adventure was disappointing. The adventure included with the companions is way better. Heck, most of the adventures in Tales of Freeport were way better. Actually, most adventures period are way better. There are some good Freeport adventures. A poorly conceived scavenger hunt who's main purpose is really just to give you excuses to go to a lot of the writer's favorite haunts in the setting isn't one, though. Maybe I'll do a palate cleanser and read a short 32-page module or something before diving into whatever is next. It's Races of Eberron in physical books, although I also added the next short Pathfinder Companion book, which is Taldor, Echoes of Glory. As with the Osirion book I recently read, there's a larger, more fleshed out Pathfinder Setting book that came out later, but y'know. It was nice to have something to start with in the meantime. I'll be honest with you, though—by far my favorite parts of Golarion are Varisia and Ustalav. Most of the rest of the setting could get bent as far as I care. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I doubt I'd use it for much. I really need to start the next adventure path.

But not tonight. I'm tired.

Erasure

As I've added a bunch of stuff to my playlist queue on Pulsar, my Android mp3 player app, I've gone through most of what I have of Erasure. I was unpleasantly surprised to see that some tracks that I have were not on my phone. I didn't realize that, of course, until I was out of town listening to it on the road trip. I'm almost done with the list of Erasure songs... sorta. Certainly now that I'm home and will be listening only on half of my commute, mostly, it could take the rest of the week to get through all the tracks, but shouldn't take any longer than that. 

As I pulled up to the office parking lot this morning, I was about halfway through "Take a Chance on Me" from their "Abba-esque" EP from the early 90s. My mp3s of these were stripped of their album listing, so they, along with much of the more "modern" Erasure tracks are not sorted by album, but rather part of a large big mass of songs that are just playing in order of file name under the album heading of <no album>. I'm almost done with that large bag of tracks, and I do have one more Abba cover in the form of "Voulez-vous". 

Now, I can unironically like Abba (or ABBA, if that's how you're supposed to type it.) They are, admittedly, somewhat cheesy at times, and the late stage disco era of pop that they represent isn't my type of music really. That said, ABBA were incredibly talented song-writers, and while their style may not be my favorite, that doesn't actually diminish how great I think that there songs actually are. In fact, if anything, it focuses on it; I can't snooze through the songs just based on the style being my style; the songs have to be great or I wouldn't have any interest in them. In any case, ABBA hardly needs me to defend them; they're widely highly regarded, and are one of the most commercially successful pop bands of all time. Their influence is undeniable too. I'm an Abba fan, and I don't mind saying so. I'm also an Erasure fan, and I don't mind saying so, although in Erasure's case, it was easier because they do make music that's my style. But this means that I can coast and snooze through the songs; even mediocre ones will sound OK to me, because I do like the style of music. Mostly. When it isn't too flaming gay, which sadly, it occasionally is. Which is why it's a little bit sad to report—admittedly many years or even decades after it matters, I think, that "Abba-esque" is frankly kind of boring, and Erasure didn't do anything to what are generally pretty great tracks to make them interesting. I remember thinking that in the 90s, of course, after I picked it up. "Abba-esque" is the second EP Erasure released (if you don't count the odd "Am I Right?" remix EP/single) after the excellent "Crackers International" in 1988, and it follows fairly closely on the heels of the excellent Chorus album. It's a little weird, honestly, that it feels so hollow. Erasure were a great band, at the peak of their "power" if you will in 1992, and they were covering great songs by one of the greatest pop acts of all time. And yet, the thing just has no energy. 

Maybe I'm wrong. Abba-esque seems to have been popular enough, at least in Britain, and it's reasonably well reviewed by the music press. But I always thought it was oddly disappointing. I mean, heck—Information Society did a much better cover of "Lay All Your Love On Me" just a few years earlier in 1988, and in general, Information Society was not Erasure's equal... although they have a few fun tracks too, and in the mid-90s, at least, they put on a decent live show. And the same year Abba-esque came out, they were putting out Peace and Love, Inc. which sadly was not well-promoted by the label, and which was probably too late to really benefit from the electronic music heyday by that time. Eh, we'll catch them some other time.

I can also say that as much as there are some decent tracks here and there in the post-eponymous album era, that whole group kind of blends together in a vaguely acceptable sludge. Chorus was the last truly great album by Erasure, in my estimation, and they only had occasional moments of brilliance on some tracks here and there in the post-1991 phase. I  should probably queue up the full albums on YouTube or Spotify and give them a fairer chance than I have so far, but I don't anticipate changing my mind on that. 

They're not the only one of my favorite 80s bands that kind of petered out in the early 90s, though. Depeche Mode still had a great album in form of 1990's Violator, but I was disappointed in its direction, and I haven't liked anything that they've done since even as much as I liked even Violator. Playing the Angel and Memento Mori are reasonably bright spots in their subsequent repertoire, but they aren't as good as they were in the 80s. The Pet Show Boys had a few great tracks on Behavior (1990) and Very (1993) was actually quite good, but I kind of lost interest in them too.

Part of that was, no doubt, me and the musical landscape in general. I was no longer a teenager, I was a young married man by 1994, and young father by 1996, and grad student by 1998, and a young professional in a professional career by 2000. I had a lot on my mind other than pop music, and my concerns and what I thought was interesting or insightful had no doubt changed. And the rise of the Seattle Sound, grunge movement, and the general pop culture rejection of the late 80s sound was both very disappointing to me, but probably also had other subconscious impact on what I was listening to. I think the "big names" of the later 80s felt tired to me by then, not edgy and slick like they did in the 80s. This is especially true for Depeche Mode, who rejected the slick electronic sound to become a weird bluesy and noisy 90s band, but I lost interest in all of them, and got more involved in more indie-bands that were treading the same territory, like De/Vision, Mesh, Cosmicity, B! Machine and many others. I think that that indie aesthetic made them more appealing to me than the guys who'd already made it big and were now retreading, or abandoning, neither of which I liked, the sound that I had originally loved them for. 

Some of these bands later did stuff that I really liked. Like I said, Depeche Mode's Playing the Angel and more recently Memento Mori were pretty decent. Not as good as Black Celebration or Music for the Masses or even Violator, but maybe as good as Songs of Faith And Devotion or Ultra. Camouflage's 2003 album Sensor was probably actually their very best, much better even than their brilliant freshman release Voices & Images. Real Life sounded very 90s in Happy, but did a great cover album in 2009, which included a re-recorded "Send Me An Angel" which is also really good (although still not quite as good as the 1989 version.) Red Flag had some good 90s and 00s releases, but their initial offering is still their best. There's something about the dark reverb of the extended mix of "If I Ever" that I just really love, and although mislabeled on my 1989 CD version, it was still present that far back.

What can I say? For whatever reason, when the 80s ended, the 80s music ended too. What remained may have been "80s-like" in some ways, even in my own personal esteem, but it wasn't really truly the exact same thing. Erasure were, sadly, one of the casualties. I still like their early stuff; the same stuff that I liked as a teenager many decades ago, honestly, but otherwise I don't really care anymore. 

Erasure

Man, they're getting old. And this is from 2024.

I put a bunch of music that I haven't listened to in a while on my phone's queue in my mp3 player (I refuse to stream music. This is why I need an Android; I need to be able to plug in my microSD card with all my music on it into my phone.) I listened over the last few weeks to several of my 90s and beyond synthpop bands, like Cosmicity, etc. I earlier had put all of my Red Flag on tap. Most recently I finished all of my tracks by the Pet Shop Boys, and moved into Erasure. A few years ago I got all of the "modern" albums (at the time) that I didn't have and added them to my phone, but I'm not even sure that I've listened to them more than once since then. I suspect that I have a bunch of tracks that I don't even care about, but I don't know them well enough to say. I have a more curated list of the tracks from the era when I was more into Erasure, i.e., from the 80s and early 90s. 

I was a big fan of theirs at that time. I kind of saw them as the anti-Depeche Mode; where Depeche were dark and pensive, Erasure were more light and whimsical, offering a different side of the same coin of synthpop music. Not that I used the label at the time; I called it synthesizer New Wave. And that's not exactly true; Erasure certainly had some serious and even somber tracks, but speaking in generalizations, their vibe was very different than that of Depeche Mode's. Yes, in spite of Speak & Spell and Vince Clark's original founding of that band as well. But in the 90s, I kind of lost the plot with Erasure. At some point after their eponymous album released in 1995, I didn't pay attention to them for a while. So, from my perspective, older albums like Cowboy and Loveboat were "modern" albums, by which I mean that they came out during the winter of my discontent with Erasure and I hadn't heard them before. I don't remember how far I got at the time, because the tracks are mostly all mixed without their album tags retained, but I've got a lot to listen to. But I haven't (yet) heard any songs that I didn't already know very well.

I first heard of Erasure when "Chains of Love" hit the radio airwaves in 1988, and I fairly quickly bought The Innocents. It took probably a year or so before I bought the two earlier albums, and I bought Wild! when it was new in late 1989, during my senior year of high school. Chorus came out when I was on my mission, but I saw it in a store on a p-day and bought it, even though I didn't have a CD player and couldn't listen to it until I got home, so I think my release might be a South American release. Not that that matters anymore; I haven't even unpacked my CDs, and rarely listened to any of them for the last ten to fifteen years anyway. Just a small note. I Say I Say I Say came out shortly before I got married, and I think I bought that new too; although I didn't love that one. And, as I said, the eponymous Erasure came out a year later, which I also bought new and which was the last I bought for years.

Some friends of mine and I, who were into the same kinds of music, all agreed that Erasure tended to be really good on every other album. Wonderland was wonderful, and I was surprised to discover later that it had not been a commercial hit for them, since I  always liked it a lot, and found it to have some really iconic tracks. Especially "Oh L'amour" which has become one of their signature songs, and had a top ten run on a re-release in 2003, of all things, nearly twenty years after its initial release (and now over twenty years ago too. Man, getting old kind of sucks. But I'm not as old as these artists who all predate me by about a decade.) The Circus, on the other hand, was their first hit album, but I was always kind of skeptical of it, and other than the hit "Sometimes" and a few moody album tracks like "Spiraling" and "The Circus" itself, and the uncomfortably lyrics of the otherwise interesting song "Hideaway" I never loved that album. The Innocents, on the other hand, was a brilliant album in every way, and deserved all of the success that it got. And, of course, its lead track "A Little Respect" is probably also one of their most signature tracks too, maybe even more than "Oh L'amour."

Wild! was again disappointing. It has some good tracks; "Blue Savanna", "Drama" and a few others, and I even have 12" singles from that era, for instance. It wasn't a bad album, just like The Circus wasn't a bad album, but it wasn't wonderful either. It was... a bit disappointing after seeing how great Wonderland and The Innocents were. Chorus was new and fresh sounding, and very good, while I Say I Say I Say is, again, mediocre. When they broke the pattern and Erasure was also mediocre... at the same time that "mainstream" synthpop was pretty much over. This is when I lost the plot; I didn't buy the next albums for many years after the fact. 

Anyway, I don't talk about my 80s New Wave music that much anymore. I honestly think that maybe I'm a little over 80s pop music of all kinds. I still enjoy it, but I don't really enjoy just sitting and listening to it anymore. I don't care about it as much as I used to. In spite of my pretentiousness about music when I was younger, all pop music is essentially meant to be disposable and generational, and what can I say? My generation is getting older, and our songs are too. I don't want to be like the predictably narcissistic boomers and assume that the music of my teenaged years is so iconic that everyone must recognize how great that it is... although I will point out that 80s music has had a bit of a revival, and even with people my kids' age. But the same thing happened briefly to 50s style music when I was a teenager. I don't think that that's anything that will really last. The music that I think does last is classical, especially the more accessible Romantic era classical. That I can still listen to and enjoy. And I listen to a lot of forgettable instrumental music, but I honestly admit that it's background music while I'm reading or otherwise doing something else most of the time.

Crisis in Freeport

I probably read "Gangs" and "Crisis" out of order in my Freeport Trawl. "Crisis in Freeport" was the official Green Ronin adventure that came out that year (2006), while "Gangs of Freeport" was a 3PP module produced by Adamant. In a quick summary of "Gangs" I see that Commissioner Xander Williams is still the commissioner, whereas his death was a major plot point in "Crisis." Whoops! Oh, well. I still believe that I'll find "Gangs" to be an unconnected one-shot, and that kind of weird issue shouldn't be one that I'm subject to anymore. After I read "Gangs" I have a relatively lengthy stint where I read 7-8 or so "pseudo-Freeport" modules; the entirety, I believe, of the Bleeding Edge line, in fact. All of these are nominally set in the Freeport setting, although mostly on the Continent, and only the last of them is actually set in Freeport. But I thought it odd to read the last of the Bleeding Edge series without reading the rest of them first, so I said, what the heck and added the entire series to the Freeport Trawl. Most of these modules aren't that long; I'll probably get through them relatively quickly, I think. 

The Bleeding Edge modules also started coming out in 2006 and all of them came out in either 2006 or 2007—although because they're numbered, I don't have to worry about accidentally reading them out of order. I've actually read the first few a long time ago, but I don't remember them very well, and I never finished the whole series. I do recall thinking that they were much more serious, dark and edgy compared to much of what Freeport had been prior to that. Long gone were any hints of silly puns and dad-jokes, and the modules had the feel almost of horror modules rather than high fantasy ones. Robert J. Schwalb was either the writer or co-designers of most of these; he'd been working at Green Ronin for a couple of years or so at this point on other dark, edgy products like Black Company, WFRP and stuff like that. I think he's just the guy to bring darker, edgier and more serious vibe to products. After all, his signature product is Shadow of the Demon Lord and its fairly hefty line of products. 

"Crisis in Freeport" is also in that same vein, as was the DCC module "Shadows in Freeport" which I read prior to that (also authored by Schwalb.) I'd read some dude's review of "Crisis" where he accused it of being grimdark and "squicky", full of gratuitous nastiness and rape and stuff. (I don't think he used the term grimdark. It's an older review, and I don't think that term had become mainstream yet.) So I wasn't quite sure what to expect; I don't like that kind of gratuitous nastiness for shock value and nihilistic despair that's a feature of famous grimdark like Joe Abercromby and George "Rape Rape" Martin at all. But in spite of this review, "Crisis" isn't like that at all either. While the reviewer obviously read the module, because he references some details of it, I don't know how in the world he came to that conclusion. "Crisis" is more serious, more dark, more edgy, and it doesn't pretend like pirates are "Arr, talk like a pirate day, matey!" DisneyWorld employees hanging around AdventureLand in pirate costumes. Yeah, they're actual pirates, and therefore pretty bad people. That said, if there was any rape, it's alluded to in such an indirect way that you can be forgiven for thinking that there wasn't actually any at all (although if not, then there's certainly plenty of torture—also alluded to indirectly at best). It's not any more "squicky" than Captain Blood, a novel written a hundred years ago when overt references to that kind of thing would have been disqualifying for publication entirely—although allusions to it happening off screen or women being menaced by the threat of it was certainly OK. That said, I've read a lot of other essays and reviews by that reviewer off an on over the years. I'm not surprised that he saw stuff that literally wasn't there, and was kind of offended by it, even though it literally wasn't there. Now, the fact that there's a succubus in the form of a 13 year old cabin boy on the pirates' ship is a little less easy to ignore, but again, the allusions to what happens to him are pretty veiled. But hardly shocking, all things considered; the famous quote about the British Navy attributed to Winston Churchill was that the British Navy was famous for "rum, sodomy and the lash" and they weren't even pirates. Officially, at least. In any case, alluding discretely to what happens and outright wallowing in it are two different things. I don't mean to suggest that you don't get the drift—although given the fact that the "cabin boy" isn't a cabin boy at all and is a succubus demon in disguise, I'm not sure who is really victimizing whom in this scenario—but I guess after reading talien's review on RPGNet, I expected something pretty different from what I got. The illusions to "squickiness" were hardly more explicit than they are in Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth" which has people mating with freaky fish people, after all. "Crisis in Freeport" is less AdventureLand Pirates of the Caribbean the ride and more a darker, edgier module that skirts the line between a hard PG-13 and a light R rating. Which, in my opinion, is where it should be. If this is the direction the line is going to take for a while, and I think it kind of does, then I'm excited to continue. The idea that a semi-horror game who's two main pillars are lawless piracy and Lovecraftian horror wouldn't be somewhere on the line between PG-13 and R is kind of ridiculous. I hear Pirate Borg is even darker, fer cryin' out loud. Anyway, maybe I'm belaboring the point, but the review I read belabored it and it wasn't even accurate, so it kind of set my expectations and I felt that mentally I needed to respond to those expectations.

If there is something to complain about about "Crisis" it's more the occasional ham-handed railroading. Although it tries to discuss briefly what happens if the PCs don't do what the author expects them to do for whatever reason, it does still install Maerilise Maeorgan, or however you spell her name, as the next Sea Lord (Lady?) no matter what, and without much explanation for why that's a sensible result. Just because. Green Ronin weren't full on woke (yet) in 2006, but they were still determined to get their grrlboss Sea Lord no matter what. I actually liked that talien, in his review, which was a playtest review, discussed some ways in which his playthrough deviated from the module, and that's one that he called out and did differently too. In any case, she's the Sea Lord in 2007's Pirates Guide to Freeport (or was it 2008?) and they make sure that it happened that way no matter what in this module. Unfortunately. However, I think, although I don't know because I haven't read it yet, but in the Pathfinder update to the Pirate's Guide, I believe they advanced the timeline yet again, and I think she had already been replaced. I guess I'll find out when I get to that point in the trawl. I don't necessarily have problems accepting that a woman could have inherited the mantle of leadership, or that through conniving lies, manipulation and whatnot she could have installed herself in such a role. But that's a realistic take on it; the idea of the girlboss leader who is better than a man at things that require masculine psychology to do well is a major turn-off for me, both because it's a weird time capsule of this insane woke age that seems to be (hopefully) coming to a close on us, but also because it's simply unrealistic. Women weren't "held back" from behaving like men because men held them back; they were "held back" because they were women and are both physically and psychologically generally unfit to compete in a hypercompetitive masculine arena. And more power to them for actually being feminine and applauding that instead of trying to pretend like they're masculine and making a complete disaster out of it. 

Anyway, while reading it I was also listening to the soundtrack for last year's Nosferatu movie. I didn't really love that movie for a variety of reasons, but unfortunately, that meant that I ignored the soundtrack for far too long. Heck; some of my favorite soundtracks to use for reading, writing and RPGing are movies that I haven't even seen; certainly a flawed movie that I did see can have a great soundtrack. And it does. I should have been on top of that one months ago. Anyway, I'm definitely adding it to my shortlist of the Old Night unofficial soundtrack. Another movie that hasn't even had a US release yet does have a soundtrack you can hear; Dracula: A Love Tale. It's a Luc Besson movie. I don't even know if I'm interested in watching it when it comes to our shores next year, but with an excellent Danny Elfman score, well... it's an excellent Danny Elfman score and not to be missed if you like that kind of thing.

Woman in Black 

Woman in Black 2 (minus the first track with the weird nursery rhyme, which would be very distracting)

Woman in the Yard (take out the track with the singing. The rest is great ghost story soundtrack stuff)

End of Days 

Slenderman 

Death of a Unicorn (there's a few lounge lizard tracks; three or four, that you need to remove. Otherwise this gets just enough of the fantasy wonder in, while still maintaining a nice dark horror vibe. Occasionally a few tracks have almost a synthwave beat to them. This one is probably the most divergent in sound, but I like to add it for a little diversity. Plus the synthwave gives just tiny bit of the Stranger Things 80s player vibe, which as a confirmed Gen-X guy, is right up my alley anyway. Even before Stranger Things made it faddish again) 

Alien: Covenant (the best of the soundtracks from this series, and as it was (reportedly; I haven't bothered to watch it yet) a disappointing movie, your players may have seen it but almost certainly won't recognize the tracks)

Wolfman (the Benicio del Toro one with the Danny Elfman soundtrack. He deliberately imitated the Bram Stoker's Dracula soundtrack by Wojciech Kilar, but I actually like this pastiche better. 

Dracula: A Love Tale 

Nosferatu

I don't know yet, because I don't remember it very well, but I queued up the soundtrack for Dracula Untold and that might be a good one too.

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. 

Soundtrack updates

What kind of music does the Shadow of Old Night need? Spooky, moody, atmospheric; more of a sense of creeping dread than action-packed combat music; although a few moments of wonder, whimsy or excitement here and there are not, of course, inappropriate. 

I like Graham Plowman's Cthulhu soundtracks; especially At the Mountains of Madness, but not exclusively that one. But mostly I think the best soundtracks are from movies; they're readily available, and that's the old fashioned way to get this kind of music in the days before semi-professional YouTube and Spotify musicians releasing gaming soundtracks and ambiances and stuff like that.

I prefer movies that are 

1) heavy on tone and theme, so that the variety of moods and sounds aren't too varied to be useable. I'm a GM, not a DJ. I want to put stuff on in the background and not worry too much about it clashing with what's going on.

2) dark and creepy. Honestly, horror movie soundtracks work better for me than fantasy soundtracks. Plus, there aren't a ton of fantasy soundtrack options, and most of them are pretty recognizable. I like Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings and Hobbit themed soundtracks as much as the next guy, but unless I'm explicitly playing a Middle-earth game, or one that's supposed to have almost the exact same vibes and theme, I wouldn't consider using it in game. Same for most other soundtracks that are too recognizable, no matter how good they are.

3) which brings me to the last point; I want stuff that's kind of obscure but good as a soundtrack. One way to do this is to pick soundtracks for bad movies. It's much less likely that your players will actually recognize it, because even if they saw the movie, it's unlikely that they'd listened to the soundtrack or given the movie any thought after watching it. I actually have a lot of soundtracks to movies that I haven't even seen, because I suspected that the soundtracks would be good and I listened to them on Spotify or YouTube, confirmed that I wanted them, and then bought the mp3s.

I've added a few newer movie soundtracks, including two that came out this year to my preferred playlist. This is a living list of stuff, so in six months or a year from now, it'll likely be different, but maybe not that much. This does require the pruning of a few tracks that don't quite work, but otherwise, just play these soundtracks (preferably ripped into a single playlist and shuffled):

• Woman in Black
• Woman in Black 2 (minus the first track with the weird nursery rhyme, which would be very distracting)
• Woman in the Yard (take out the track with the singing. The rest is great ghost story soundtrack stuff)
• End of Days
• Slenderman
• Death of a Unicorn (there's a few lounge lizard tracks; three or four, that you need to remove. Otherwise this gets just enough of the fantasy wonder in, while still maintaining a nice dark horror vibe. Occasionally a few tracks have almost a synthwave beat to them. This one is probably the most divergent, but I like to add it for a little diversity. Plus the synthwave gives just tiny bit of the Stranger Things 80s player vibe, which as a confirmed Gen-X guy, is right up my alley anyway. Even before Stranger Things made it faddish again)
• Alien: Covenant (the best of the soundtracks from this series, and as it was a disappointing movie, your players may have seen it but almost certainly won't recognize the tracks)
• Wolfman (the Benicio del Toro one with the Danny Elfman soundtrack. He deliberately imitated the Bram Stoker's Dracula soundtrack by Wojciech Kilar, but I actually like this pastiche better)

Do I even like music anymore?

Weird question, but hear me out. I haven't been in the mood to listen to anything much lately. I don't get excited about any of the music that I used to listen to. I kind of was tired of most pop music lately, and I got tired of the EDM I listened to too. I tried a big synthwave playlist; got bored partway through. I listened to a bunch of orchestral "soundtrack" style music. It's fine as long as it's kind of quiet and I'm doing something else too. I listened to some classical music. That's what I'm enjoying probably the most right now, but I feel like I need to pay attention to it more than I can afford to do, so I've found that I'm not actually doing it as much as I'd like. 

Recently, I loaded up my Duran Duran stuff on my phone, mostly for when driving. And then I had to take a business road trip where I spent six hours or so on the road. Between that and a day or two of commuting, I finished off the entire playlist. What I enjoyed probably the most, though, was actually just turning it off and not playing anything at all. What used to be my favorite tracks ("Hungry Like the Wolf", "New Moon on Monday" and probably "View to a Kill" were all still cool, but I wasn't really paying close attention to them. I also found that I wanted to think more and playing music while driving interfered. I preferred just quiet. This isn't the first time I've had that vibe, but I feel like it's been a noticeably longer and more severe than in the past. Maybe I won't listen to much of anything lately, unless I just need quiet background music in the background while reading, writing or working. And if that's what I'm doing, then "listening" is kind of a misnomer. But, y'know.

Maybe while driving when I'm not thinking and talking to myself, I'll call my folks or my siblings and catch up. And maybe I'll track down some audiobooks or something too.

Meanwhile, like I said, I traveled and spent the night for work the next state and about three hours over last night. I'm also traveling pretty much all of next week; I'll have Monday and Tuesday in a hotel, Wednesday at my sister's house near the airport, and then Monday and Thursday will mostly be travel, so I'll probably read and listen to background music. Get caught up on a couple of books. And I'd also like to spend some time in the hotel, or even before I go, making at least one more YouTube video, maybe two. The next racial deep dive video to make is the kemlings, and the next 5x5 video to make is the Southumbrian one, much of it in the Thursewood Forest. It's called Terrors in the Thursewood, in fact. It's a little bit of an unusual one in that all of the rows of the 5x5 column are mostly unrelated to each other and in fact represent smaller discrete items to investigate that are united only by being geographically close to each other rather than anything else. If I can't get those done before heading out of town, I'll do them while out of town and sitting quietly in my room. Beats having to socialize with work people at night after already spending the whole day with them.

I'm also expecting my B/X combined POD to arrive from Lulu tomorrow. Assuming that's on time, I'll take it with me as an extra book (hardly like I need it) but mostly so I can inspect the quality of the print, and make sure that the Lulu service is what I want for my printed version of Shadows of Old Night. I imagine that it'll be fine, but I'll have to run it and see after getting the "prototype" of another book that someone else already did the work to make a printable version of. If everything pans out as planned, I'll have a printed version of my rules before the end of May.

UPDATE: For whatever reason, I've commuted the last day or two with the Ultra Street Fighter IV 5-disc soundtrack on my playlist. I'm about halfway through it. For whatever reason, I've enjoyed listening to that, but with the volume down a bit. I'm also considering loading up an Erasure and then a Pet Shop Boys playlist for while I travel. But if I'm reading, I might want instrumental. But I have to fly, and then I have to drive. You can't fly directly to the town I'm going to, so I need to drive at least three hours on both Monday and then again on Wednesday.

Busy night with phone calls last night, so I didn't get any YouTube videos done. But I still think I'll do at least one of them this weekend, and maybe another one in the hotel. I should remember to pack my little lavalier microphone. It does help my sound quality a bit.

YouTube and Classical. No relation.

I've found that as I've stepped away from spending so much time on YouTube that what I'm actually interested in on YouTube is changing. I went through a phase where I quite liked background watching livestreams from Diversity & Dragons and Black Lodge Games; I now find that I have little interest in doing so. They spend at least an hour before they really "start" just chatting with the regulars in the comments, and then they say stuff that I'm either not that interested in, or already know and agree with. I don't want to spend hours just validating my tastes; they need to do something more for me. Since they don't, I don't think I'm their target anymore. And I'm not as validated in my tastes as I used to be anyway. I think the BLG guys are more interested in system for its own sake than I have been in years (if ever) and although they come across as very similar in what they want a game to do—very paleo-trad, if I can use my own term. But then again, maybe not really. They rave on that channel about ACKSII, which is exactly the kind of game that I abandoned in the mid-80s precisely because it wasn't very trad-focused, and was all about domain management and other rulsey minigames that I have little to no interest in. They're also insistent that Mythras doing high fantasy is completely different than anything d20-based, and you can't convert from one to another. I fundamentally disagree that you can't play any given game in one system vs another. Sure, sure, there are a lot of implicit things in the mechanics, but those are the details, which are swappable and easy to modify; the actual core mechanics; who cares? If Pathfinder can be run successfully in Savage Worlds, if Traveller can be run successfully in GURPS or even d20, if Star Wars can have three completely different systems that all work well, if Rokugan... well, you get my drift. You can work any setting, tone, and theme into any system. It's not that hard. Their insistence that you can't is completely contrary to my experience and desire.

Anyway, this is an increasingly long-winded way of saying that I'm not watching a lot of this stuff anymore, and I might even unsubscribe. No offense to them, but I'm just not getting much of what I personally want out of their content anymore. Even as they do seem to be growing their channel and finding more of their audience, it's becoming more clear that it's not me as much as I thought it might be. Oh, well. I'm actually feeling that way about a lot of D&D content on YouTube; either they're repetitive and I don't care what they're saying anymore, or they're too OSR for my taste, or they're too 5e for my taste, or their too... just reading fluff straight outta the books (AJ Pickett, I'm looking at you) or their just too long-winded in general, and they're making 45 minute to hour-long videos on topics that don't need more than 10-15 minutes.

All in all, I'm enjoying spending much less time on YouTube and much more time with my books. Like I used to. That's the real Old School Revolution, right there. 

I didn't get to read as much as I hoped last night, because I had to do my taxes (I don't think I've waited this long since I was a teenager. If I'd known I was actually due a big refund, I would have done it weeks ago. I was worried I'd have to pay! Luckily, my new company kicked in a fair bit to counter the value of the relocation package, which counted as income, so I was due much more money back than I expected. I ordered two new sets of metal dice from Amazon to celebrate.) But I'm making progress in Darkness & Dread, which I have read before, but not in many years. It's always good to revisit how to play the way that you want to. I have some upcoming work travel, which is usually good for reading too. And this coming weekend, my wife will be traveling without me. Also good for reading. I hope to finish two books by the end of the week; Darkness & Dread and the novel which I'm technically reading but haven't actually started yet. Maybe the pdf Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (3e) that I'm reading too; I'm more than a third through that.

I'm also hoping to pop into Seminole Canyon for a couple of hours for my work trip, since I'll be nearby. Now that we're in daylight savings time, I can probably do it. It's late enough already in the season that it'll be hot, but hopefully not crazily so. I can already get a forecast for the day of the 28th, although I don't trust it that far ahead, but it has a high of 87°. Not terrible. If I have sunglasses and a water bottle or two, I'll be good.

Next up to read, in all four categories: 1) Elder Evils (game book), 2) Magician: Apprentice  Raymond Feist (novel), 3) Epic Tales: Greek Myths & Tales (actually what I'm currently reading, but I just started it. It won't be done anytime soon) (non-fiction), 4) 5e Iron Kingdoms Requiem (pdf). By the time I travel, I hope to have both the gamebook and the novel listed next both finished and I can read... I dunno, Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and Magician: Master. 

Finally, music. The last several months, I've hardly listened to more than a few pop songs at all, mostly older ones from the 80s that popped up on my YouTube recommendations list. I haven't listened to any on my phone at all. Maybe I've finally grown up or something, but I have been significantly less interested in pop music lately. I've listened to some synthwave; the closest to pop music, but mostly I've been listening to "orchestral" (sometimes synthesized) stuff, and of course lots of movie soundtracks and classical music.

I've always liked classical music, even as a teenager. Because I had just enough of a musical background that I could appreciate the musicality and artistry about it, I presume, but also because a lot of it is, in my opinion, objectively beautiful. My favorites have always been "Romantic" rather than strictly "Classical" but by and large, orchestral art music is always called classical regardless of the time period or style. My favorites for many years have included a lot of Russian Imperial composers; Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, even Mussorsky. I've also liked a lot of German/Austrian composers: Liszt, lots of Wagner (especially Der Ring without words arrangements, so which I have many) and Tannhäuser pieces, and yeah; I know Liszt claims to have been a Magyar rather than an Austrian, but... y'know. I love Les Préludes and Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and have several recordings in particular of the latter, both as a piano piece and orchestral. And of course, I like Beethoven, although I'm a bit less interested in his more famous 5th and 9th symphonies; my favorite by far is the 6th. And plenty of other Italians, French other composers; Vivaldi, Von Suppe, Ponchielli, Grieg, Dvorak, Bizet, Berlioz, etc.

I do sometimes find classical music catches my attention more than I'd like, and it makes it poor background music for reading or writing. It really—usually—deserves to be listened to more attentively. That's why the movie soundtracks, and other amateur soundtracks get more attention from me than they deserve on pure musicality alone; I don't feel like I'm missing too much if my mind is otherwise occupied. Not that they aren't worth listening to as well; I don't like purely boring ambient stuff, I do like music that has enough musicality that I can listen to it. But the classical masters are true masters and few of their modern follow-ups are doing anything as interesting as they were.

As an aside, I've had the Tannhäuser Overture "stuck" in my head all day long. I think the version that I'm listening to is the Szell recording. There's a couple of other really nice classic ones too; Stokowski, I think, did one, and Karajan.

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.