Old Adventure paths

The original adventure paths, published in the pages of Dungeon Magazine and supplemented by various side-quest adventures and Dragon Magazine articles really set the stage for Paizo's business model in the late 00s when 4e was launched. My slow-starting Adventure Path Trawl started there, although in the past I'd read some of the later Paizo subscription adventure paths. I read the Shackled City book compilation that came after the fact, and an Age of Worms fan-compilation rather than the original Dungeon articles (although I bought all of those issues back in the day when they were new) which had some supplemental material included. I've read quite a bit of Savage Tide, the next (and last) of them now, which had twelve mainline adventures—but which was supplemented in my fan-compiled pdf with a few additional adventures as well as several Dragon articles. There's a mainline adventure set in Scuttlecove (which is the next one for me to read, actually) but it's followed up by the Book of Vile Darkness tie-in adventures set in Scuttlecove. 

I didn't know that this was the reputation, but I read a reddit post too, found via simple Google search, that suggested that back in these days Paizo was known to be kind of dark and edgy, and that Savage Tide in particular (and maybe the Scuttlecove even more in particular) is seen as dark and edgy. I'm not surprised to find that Paizo isn't seen as such anymore, but the early Paizo adventure paths when on their own are still pretty edgy. Rise of the Runelords has some of the best horror elements I've read in a D&D adventure, for instance, and some of the horror is more like disturbing serial killer horror more than supernatural vampire/ghost story horror. But as Paizo has gotten more and more woke, and thereby more and more strangely both Puritan and anti-Puritan at the same time, I would expect that their edginess would have become anodyne and banal wokeness.

I guess we'll see over time as we get to those. I'm reading sufficiently fast that I expect it will only take me a couple of years or so, if even, to read these. But of course, I have an Eberron Trawl, a Forgotten Realms Trawl and a 5e Campaign Trawl and, of course, the Freeport Trawl in addition to the Adventure Path Trawl, so going back and forth between them will slow me down, no doubt.

As I read this Scuttlecove material, I wonder how well it will fit with the Freeport Trawl, and give me elements that I can borrow and remix in to any putative Freeport interpretation, like Curse of the Corsair Coast, or some such. The Isle of Dread stuff is much more King Kong on Skull Island with dungeon crawls, but I'm now back to more piratey feeling stuff, I think, for at least a few adventures to come, before I get to the Savage Tide endgame, which is all multiplanar galivanting.

In general, I think the shrinking of the later Paizo adventure paths as well as the campaign books to cut out (mostly) the higher level play was probably a good move. Almost all of the adventure paths that I'm familiar with are best in their earlier installments and get progressively more weird and difficult as the levels go up. There's other problems with the adventure path in D&D as a concept, which is exactly why I read them and regurgitate them in considerably modified format if I were to actually run them; so much so that you'd be hard pressed to even see the original adventure path in them at all, honestly. But I still have enjoyed reading them and mining them for material. 

UPDATE: Although, like I said, I have most if not all of the Dungeon and Dragon issues that are applicable (and more) in hard copy, those are still in a box in storage right now; I went and found a fan compilation as a single pdf to read Savage Tide. This fan compilation has all twelve of the original adventures, but adds nine additional adventures and/or other articles, so it's about 75% or so more material. I just read "Serpents of Scuttlecove" last night, so I have four adventures left, all of which now take place mostly in the Abyss itself, if I remember correctly, so the pirates and the King Kong Isle of Dread is all over with, I think. However, my compilation has another article from the same issue of Dungeon as "Serpents of Scuttlecove" which details the city a bit more, and then "The Porphyry House" which was the (in)famous Book of Vile Darkness tie-in module. I know it also has the "Demogorgon" article in the Demonomicon of Iggwilv which was in the last (I believe) physical copy Dragon Magazine. Man, I miss those sometimes. I have that issue in physical copy, of course; I bought it and read it when it was new, and I've read that particular article a couple of times before. I might skip it this time around; or maybe it'll be nice just to read it since it's been a little while.

That will probably also prompt me to re-prioritize reading Fiendish Codex Vol. I: Hordes of the Abyss, which I meant to read after reading the three Paizo "Book of the Damned" volumes, which I read earlier this summer, and the Green Ronin Book of Fiends which I also read this last summer, and which partially inspired me to start my trawls with the Freeport one being the first that I am officially documenting. I had put off my unofficial little fiendish trawl to read a few other things; right now I've got three physical books in my backpack that I take back and forth to work and read during lunch, but none of them are part of the fiend trawl. the original Monster Compendium softback; the second monster book released in the early 00s which is also "technically" a Forgotten Realms product, Stormwrack, which seemed appropriate given that in the last few months I've read Cityscape, Sandstorm and Frostburn, so I thought a 3e environmental book trawl, unofficial since it's a little "series" would be appropriate. The only one of that series that I've never read is Dungeonscape, which I mean to finally add to the read-through. And I've also got my copy of Heroes of Horror. I don't normally carry that many around with me; I took extra because I was going out of town recently. I had also taken Sharn: City of Towerss, but that ended up being the only one I finished of my physical copy game books, which I read a little bit less than some of my other books (I finished two novels and two pdf game books on that same trip, for instance.) So I won't add Hordes of the Abyss until I've read at least two of those three, if not honestly all three of them, to the backpack. But at the rate I'm going, it'll be a couple of weeks or so tops before I'm about ready to add it. 

I think it's really about time that I read the 5e Player's Handbook, since I do, in fact, play in a 5e game. Sigh. I've had a physical copy that I bought used for at least six months but I haven't really cracked it open at all. I don't really care for that system, and don't anticipate enjoying reading it. It'll be like reading a textbook on a subject that I'm not really very interested in. But maybe I'll actually know what I'm doing a little bit instead of just coasting on my inertia from older editions of the game after I do. 

I find that when I have all of these options open to me and so much time available to do something with them that it's hard to buckle down and do one thing at a time. Last night, I had to do some laundry, but I bounced back and forth between watching The Living Daylights on Amazon Prime, reading the adventure mentioned above from my Savage Tide trawl, and starting Shadows in Freeport, the DCC module written by Rob Schwalb, which is the next on my Freeport trawl. Needing to get up and change my laundry over, or answering a phone call, or getting up to get my dinner out of the oven were all prompts that ended up having me skip from one to another. I still have half of the movie to finish tonight, most of the Freeport module, and of course several more Savage Tide modules to read. I think my goals for this week are to stay sufficiently "buckled down" that I finish all of the rest of the Savage Tide modules and cross that one off my adventure path trawl completely, finish Living Daylights and the other Timothy Dalton James Bond movie after that, License to Kill, and read the next four Freeport modules, which will get me on that list to the "optional" Bleeding Edge modules, which I can start next week.

I also intend to finish the FR monster book and hopefully Heroes of Horror in physical gamebooks, so that I'm only carrying one around by the end of the week, as well as the audiobook At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs that I'm reading.

I should indulge some non-game physical books too; I've got the Celtic Myths and Tales book that I'm about 20-25% done with, but which is pretty slow going; I'd like to at least finish the Mabinogion section which will get me to ~50% through that book. If I still have time over the weekend and I still feel like reading after all of that, it's time to pick up Salvatore's prequel Dark Elf trilogy, which I've had on my "read soon" list for over a year. 

Sigh. So much to read. You ever see that one Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith where that cranky misanthropic dude played by Burgess Meredith just wants to read and hates people and after a nuclear holocaust is excited to just have all the time in the world to read... and then he steps on his glasses so he can't? Sometimes I relate to that guy.

Of course, I have other things that require my attention beyond just reading and watching a couple of James Bond movies. I have some church broadcasts to catch up on since I couldn't do so while driving this past weekend. I have to mow the lawn rather desperately. I was out of town and my wife has never mowed a lawn in her life; I doubt she can even start the lawn mower. Luckily, that wasn't as bad as I feared, but it still pretty desperately needs to be done. And although fall colors aren't really here quite yet, I do want to get out to Pilot Mountain maybe on Saturday morning and take a hike around the knob. As fall comes on in the next month or so, I will probably want to do that several times, actually. But the weather looks to be friendly for a small hike this Saturday.

And, of course, I haven't done much that's substantive with my setting, my 5x5s, the blog in general, or my youtube videos in many months. I want to get some new stuff done this fall while my wife is mostly out of town and I'm spending a considerable amount of time in the house by myself.

Freeport vs Five Fingers

Although it's been many years since I've touched on the idea even in passing, I've long thought that the two books, The Pirates Guide to Freeport and Five Fingers: Port of Deceit are two great books to read kind of side to side and to compare and contrast, since they both deal with the idea of adapting the Golden Age of Piracy into D&D in one form or another. Both are books that came out in the midpoint of the 3.5 run, before we had any idea that 4e was waiting in the wings, but after we'd digested the somewhat bitter pill of 3e advancing to 3.5 too early and unnecessarily. EDIT: Actually, I think 4e's development might have been just announced, right as the Freeport book was coming out, although their decision to make it system-less was a coincidence that seems fortuitous in immediate hindsight. It literally has no game statistics of any kind, and is not meant to belong to any system. A number of companion pieces came out for it, giving exactly that; specific game statistics. I can think of at least 4-5 that were released, although I only really used the d20 one (later renamed the 3rd Era.) That said, even when I was actually using that system, the companion books were not nearly as evocative, fun to read or even as useful as the generic, system-less one. 

Although I say that the Freeport book is system-less—and it is—it's clearly a D&D book. Beyond the system, D&D has become a kind of meta-setting, almost its own unique subgenre of fantasy, that has a number of pretty instantly recognizable tropes and conventions, and Freeport hits all of them without fail, even without a single rule. In fact, it does so significantly better than most novels that are written specifically to be D&D novels, many of which are simply fantasy novels with some placenames and characters that sound D&Dish. This isn't just a commentary on the races and their characterization which is often the first go-to D&D identifier (although it is that), but you can even see through the text descriptions in Freeport to see the D&D classes, the magic item economy, the type and frequency of magic available, the pantheon of D&D-ish pagan gods, the prominent position of adventurers and former adventurers as a kind of very specific caste of movers and shakers, and more details both broad and specific that are shot through the book through and through. 

As a guy who has largely rejected the D&D meta-setting in many ways—and after the behavior of WotC with regards to the brand, am more and more likely to reject even more of it going forward—this is a negative of the book to me. To be fair, most of the systems that the companion volumes were written for are deliberately very D&D-ish—d20, True20, Castles & Crusades, Pathfinder, etc. (Savage Worlds and FATE being admittedly potentially very different.) Although there is much I can borrow, there's much I have to reject, or rework to be useable in the this format.

I also often have a problem with the tone. Freeport alleges to bring a horror tone, but what it really does is have a bunch of wink and nod references to Lovecraftian elements. I've come over the years to see Lovecraftian gaming as more like a Disney ride where you take comfort in seeing familiar Lovecraftian elements as you pass by in your ride-car rather than something that successfully evokes a tone of actual horror. If your Dark Lord has tentacles and the writers make gratuitous reference to madness (but otherwise do little to show it) then ultimately he's still just a Dark Lord, and by now, almost as cliché as a Sauron-like dark wizard. The writers' attempts to inject other tongue-in-cheek references and puns pretty liberally through the book strengthen this impression, and the Lovecraftian horror becomes little more than a theme park caricature of actual horror of any kind; Lovecraftian or otherwise.

Which is fine. I have my own fairly strong opinions on how to be successful with horror in a dark fantasy game, and I certainly think that playing straight up D&D (especially of the 3e or later varieties) with flippant and almost satirical references to Yig, tentacles, weird angles and other Lovecraftian buzzwords doesn't get you there. But that doesn't mean that Freeport doesn't have plenty of good material to borrow and adapt, merely that it can't be used right out of the book as is if you want to actually have the tone and themes that the book claims to be promoting.

I also think that the development of elements outside of the city of Freeport itself is rather poor. I don't just mean the chapter on "The Continent" which was a new development for this book, but also anything else on the nearby islands that are part of the Freeport orbit. The islands themselves are pretty tiny, and the idea that they are chock full of dangerous predators and monsters—especially after the somewhat silly "Great Green Fire" event is verisimilitude breaking. In an area about the size of a few housing developments together in my suburban town, there's supposed to be a bunch of predatory animals and monsters, somehow supporting themselves on... something?

The ideology of the Freeporters and their rivals in the even more ridiculous Libertyville is also laughably absurd. You're better off using the city, and ignoring everything else in the book. And that's if you want a very specifically D&D pirate city that has some of the charm and all of the flair of the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. There's very little outside of the city that I actually like.

The Five Fingers book, on the other hand, is a different creature altogether. I don't think its any more or less usable than the Freeport book as written (at least not for the purposes that I'd use it) it somehow manages to be the same level of useableness  while being the opposite of Freeport on almost all of the points mentioned above. 

Five Fingers isn't a system-less book, and was never meant to be, although to be fair, not a lot of rules are present in it either. There's some stats of a few NPC characters, a small selection of prestige classes, a handful of other things like Knowledge (local) check result tables, and stuff like that. There are a few side-bars (and by bars, I sometimes mean several pages at a time) of subsystems that D&D 3.5 doesn't have, which Five Fingers introduces, including a chase mechanic, and a detailed bribing mechanics subsystem. But even if you skim this stuff, you're only taking off about ten pages of a 200 page book, so it's hardly like that's the bulk of it.

However, where Freeport—while being system-less—was very clearly a D&D supplement, and even without rules it screamed D&D all the time, Five Fingers is curiously an actual D&D supplement that doesn't often feel like D&D. That's because its an integral part of the Iron Kingdoms setting, which by this point, and developed enough to feel quite a bit different from D&D. By this time Warmachine had been out (in its first iteration) for a couple of years, and had partially served to drive the setting away from its dark and gritty (ish) D&D roots from back in the Witchfire Trilogy days where it started. This means that I don't have to worry about dealing with D&Disms that I don't want, but it does mean that I have to work harder to make it not feel too Iron Kingdoms! Because it's heavily integrated into the setting, and the events taking place in the setting, there are a lot of elements that would be different to use if you don't have something like Cygnar just next door, an occupied Llael flooding the city with refugees, the specific intrigues between the Cathor and Mateau families, the specific intrigues between the Khador and Cygnar superpowers who stand in somewhat transparently for Soviet Russia and Cold War America respectively. You need something like Cryx, you need Thamarites, etc. to make it work without extensive remodeling. Although in some ways Iron Kingdoms fits Dark Fantasy X better than D&D, there's still an awful lot of very specific setting stuff that I need to be on the lookout for. And they don't make any effort to reduce that for greater flexibility, because unlike Freeport, Five Fingers isn't meant to be a modular and insertable into any other setting, it's specifically meant to be part of its own setting. 

That said, although both works would need quite a bit of reworking to be useable, Five Fingers probably has more material that I could use. The horror elements are more horrible than in Freeport. The organized crime stuff is tons better and is really the best element of this book. Although it still will need some adaptation to not be Iron Kingdoms specific. In addition, some of the other appendix material is really well done; stuff like the list of NPCs (I'll trawl through that to create my own list, probably—I really like Iron Kingdoms naming conventions; they sound vaguely Olde English without being exactly so.) The list of businesses is also extremely useful. I'd put customized material, drawn at least in part from both of these on the inside of my GM Screen.

I'd also utilize a lot of elements drawn very directly from the four crime lords of Five Fingers. They make the two crime lords of Freeport look like cartoon characters in comparison. I also feel like the occult/horror elements are really well done compared to the flippant rewarming of Lovecraft that Freeport gives us, but I'd probably have to rework them to not be so completely Iron Kingdoms-esque, and honestly there's not quite as much content for this in the book as you'd think anyway.

One thing that is common to both books is that while the theme is clearly "pirates", the book offers relatively little in terms of dealing with actual piracy, sailing, or anything else on the sea. Rather, they are ports that are (sorta) frequented sometimes by pirates, but they are clearly urban sourcebooks that detail a city that is rife with organized (and unorganized) crime. They both are more The Godfather in many ways than they are anything pirate-themed. This doesn't mean that they are bait and switch products, but if you really expect more piracy and find that pirates are only characters that you'd occasionally meet while in port, you might be disappointed. Personally, I prefer the urban crime more than high seas crime anyway.