Fiction reading

I've talked a lot about my reading trawls lately, which are all gamebooks of a certain theme; I've also been trying to read a lot of fiction. Some of this is audiobooks; older stuff from Librivox that I listen to while driving (recently did Scaramouche and Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, and just yesterday finished At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I've actually read read those, so doing them as audiobooks was a reminder rather than a new one.) In fact, I haven't even remembered to put the latter on my read list yet.

Here's the cover of my physical copy. Of course, it's not nearly as cool as the Frazetta cover, but y'know. It's the one that I have. I think I bought it at Half Price Books back in the later 80s. It was obviously a reprint to tie-in with the release of the movie in the 70s.

I also have the next book in the Pellucidar series, Pellucidar, queued up to play in the near future, but probably not until I listen to A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes. The Mars book was ERB's first big hit, published under the alternate title as serialized stories as Under the Moons of Mars. The first Tarzan book was published in 1912, and the first Pellucidar book was published in 1914. I should also throw The Mad King on, although I do have a recently acquired paperback copy of that too. And, incredibly, I haven't ever read the Moon series, I don't think, so I should get that too. Probably as audiobook. Older public domain books on audiobook are great, because you can get them, and usually for free. I've also got Polidori's The Vampyre downloaded, and some of the longer Lovecraft stories: "Call of Cthulhu," "At the Mountains of Madness," "The Dunwich Horror," and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Before I'm done with him, I might also get a few more, but maybe not. I have a new physical copy omnibus of his stuff to read anyway.

I'm still undecided what else to "read" in audiobook format for the remainder of the year, but since I'll continue to commute to and from the office most days, and I'll have to do at least three out of state road trips before the end of the year, I've got plenty of time to listen to plenty of audiobooks.

My Kindle app is one that I don't necessarily spend lots of time on, but I'll still read, I hope, the last book of Rich Wulf's Ashen Legacy trilogy; I've read the first two earlier this year. I'd also like to read Lin Carter's Pellucidar Pastiche; I bought a Zanthodon megapack years ago and still haven't read it. It has all five books of the series included. I have lots more to read, but I doubt I'll get beyond those before the end of the year.

In physical books, I just started my omnibus copy of the Dark Elf prequel trilogy which followed the Halfling Gem trilogy, which I read a couple of years ago again. I haven't ever re-read the Dark Elf prequel trilogy, but I've had a copy for a couple of years or more that I've been meaning to read. I just started last night, and I'm at about 60 pages in, or almost 20% of the first novel. I should finish the first novel this week easily, and all three of them within a couple of weeks tops, even while also reading other stuff. I also have a Black Library Von Carstein trilogy, which I've had for quite a bit longer but also still haven't read, other than the new segments that preceded the actual novels. And then I also have the Arkham Horror Dark Waters trilogy, which I've had out of my boxes for a while and meaning to read, and the original Timothy Zahn Star Wars trilogy too. And then I have the four-book James Silke Horned Helmet series. Although some of those are bundled in anthologies, that's still sixteen novels just by itself, not counting some of the other material, like Dracula, The Mad King and my Solomon Kane collection, which I also want to read this year.

In non-fiction, I have a few books here and there I'd like to read too, so I continue to be quite busy. With my wife out of town between now and the end of the year helping with the birth of my son's twin daughters (she's mostly helping with the three existing small kids) I've got more free time for reading than I'm used to, so I should get a lot of this done. But my to-read list is certainly longer than my likely capability, even so. For one thing, I can only read so much before I get antsy and have to stop and do something. Even if it's just watch a TV show or a movie or something, or get out and take a walk around the neighborhood. 

And let's not even get started on movies I want to watch or TV shows. At least the first seasons of Supernatural and The X-Files. And more. Sigh.

I've also been asked, after I soft-volunteered, to run a Halloween themed one-shot for some guys. I'm not even sure who it will be participating, or what I'll run. I'm seriously thinking of adapting "Exit 23" because, of course, I've run that at least three times in the past, and I know it pretty well. Even though it's been years since I've run it. But a haunted house D&D-like game might go well too, or even the opening to Darkness in the Hill Country. Or something out of my d20 Call of Cthulhu book; it has two interesting one-shot adventures included. Or a Dread game. I've run that before as a Halloween one-shot before.

It'll probably "Exit 23", maybe fleshed out and made a bit longer.

Israel

As an aside, I think the Gaza peace announced today is good news, of course. I don't, however, think it's an issue of overwhelming national or global interest; it's a regional story for the Middle Eastern region. It's telling to see how many news aggregators and commentators talk about it like it's the most substantial thing that's happened in the news for years. Now, its no mystery why Breitbart, for instance, is all about it. Breitbart is significantly more interested in Israel than in America. But it really raises the question. If antifa is being pursued specifically as a foreign interference in domestic affairs, then how can you ignore the Israeli elephant in the room?

And yet stupid Boomer conservatives do exactly that.

Also, check out this take. I have no idea if it's true or not, but it certainly seems reasonable to me.

https://charlesjohnson.substack.com/p/is-qatar-in-nato-now-qatar-and-turkiye?r=lp6h7

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.

Savage Tide Adventure Path

I finished the Savage Tide adventure path. I've said before, my Dungeon and Dragon magazines are all in boxes in storage right now, but I found a fan compiled version on Scribd and read it there. The fan compilation has not only the twelve adventures of the adventure path, but about nine or ten additional articles; either related side-quest adventures from Dungeon or related articles from Dragon. In all, it was over 650 pages, so it's probably the longest single game product that I've ever read. (Not counting the Iron Kingdoms setting books, since they were split into two books.)

Of course it's a totally different kind of product. What do I think about these early adventure paths, especially this one, now that I've read all three of them and played a fair bit of them too; all of Age of Worms in fact. First off, I think a campaign that goes from level 1 to level 20+ over the course of 10-12 modules is way too fast. In Savage Tide, we're told in every module that you should start at one level and gain two levels during the course of the adventure. How can you even settle into your new levels at that rate before you've barreled off into the next level already? With the scaling issues that high level D&D has, I can understand the theory of wanting to play high level D&D, but I honestly don't understand the practical reality of attempting to enjoy it. 

The Savage Tide in particular struggles with this. The last four adventures are all planes-hopping strike force into the Abyss and dealing with iconic supervillains with a storied D&D history (some of them, anyway—others are more recent creations.) Want to fight Saint Kargoth the Betrayer? Orcus? Charon? Demogorgon? Iggwilv? Well... actually, as it turns out, these adventures are really frustrating railroads where these iconic characters will dick you around and you're supposed to just take it because you kind of have to by fiat in order to progress in the adventure. I have to admit; I didn't even enoy reading these very much and I can't imagine playing them without being extremely frustrated and looking for any alternative at all to the plot that the writers wanted me to accept. What a shame, really. The opportunity to have adventures with these guys was a great concept; the reality didn't—and maybe couldn't—possibly have lived up to the promise. 

I also felt like the premise of the modules was a little all over the place. The twelve modules can be more or less divided into three "acts", which shows that whomever was in charge of overall planning of the arc (Erik Mona? James Jacobs?) has at least remembered some rudimentary middle school English lessons. The first two modules are my favorites, taking place in the (sadly abandoned after this) wretched hive of scum and villainy town Sasserine. With pirates and organized crime, and some pretty edgy stuff with the Vanderborens, this stuff is right up my alley. Would have fit in well to a Freeport-style game. 

The third module is the connective tissues between this and the next act; you have to take a long sea voyage to the Isle of Dread. They try to come up with stuff to make the journey interesting, but honestly, it felt way too much like it was filler that had to be done to get you to the next part, which takes the next four adventures. Five, maybe, depending on how you count them, where you are shipwrecked and have to explore the King Kong Isle of Dread and deal with demonic-themed pirates. In the last (if you count this section as five modules long) you leave the Isle of Dread to put an end to the pirates once and for all in their own headquarters near Scuttlecove, the town from the (in)famous Book of Vile Darkness tie-in module from a few years earlier. This section is way too much dungeon-crawling for me, but I admit that that probably doesn't bother most players. The last section, as I said earlier, is going to the Abyss (and a few other places, but mostly the Abyss) meeting, greeting (and occasionally fighting) famous D&D characters from the 70s and early 80s. 

Of course, this was the end of Paizo's run on Dungeon and Dragon, and so while they invented the concept of the Adventure Path, which seems to have been a big hit, they had to do it on their own format and in their own publications after this. They did this to great success (for a while, at least—famously, they allegedly outsold D&D 4e during much of the late 00s and the 20-teens.) In my experience, they continued to have many of the problems of the original run, but one thing that they did was drop the higher levels, and have adventure paths that only went from levels 1-14 instead of to over 20. It was still too many and too high and too fast, but it was a marked improvement, since without fail the final highest level adventures in the original adventure paths were the hardest to write, run, and play. 

I've read the next adventure path, the first "independent one" at least twice, I think, and I played at least half of it as well. This time I'm going to read the original modules in 3.5 format rather than the compilation for the Pathfinder system that was released later. Sometimes updates aren't better, or at least, I want to experience it in its original form this time around. I remember thinking that the first module, "Burnt Offerings" was a pretty decent low level module; kind of a classic really, but it's the second two horror-themed modules; "The Skinsaw Man" and "The Hook Mountain Massacre" that really are the stand-outs of this adventure path. They're better horror modules, in fact, than any of the entries in Carrion Crown which I won't get back to for some time, but which is the explicitly horror-themed adventure path. 

Anyway, I'm over the initial Adventure Path hump, and now Paizo, freed of their ties to WotC, is starting to settle into the Adventure Path routine. Prior to this, the format was still an experiment. A profitable one, I believe, and successful, but they still hadn't until after Savage Tide, stopped to think about what is really the best way to do this anyway. They feel like it too; like I said, the adventure paths struggle a bit at the higher levels, and bounce around a little too much thematically. Not going to suggest that they were perfected; honestly, I think the one-book campaign structure of WotC was a better format in the end, which is why now, belatedly, Paizo is going to adopt that too. 

New Great Old Ones

With the help of ChatGPT and some very judicious editing of my own, here's some new Great Old Ones. I don't mind making offhand references to Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Gol-Goroth and The Necronomicon or The Book of Eibon, but I really want my own references that are unique. Not all of these will make the cut, and I've already modified them quite a bit. But it's still something from which to work...

• Kholgorath—The Beast Beyond the Mountains: primal earth-force, embodiment of strength, fertility, and slumbering hunger beneath mountains.
• Urzathon—The Devourer of Suns: vast cosmic fire that consumes light and creation; analog of destructive solar energy.
• Velkraith—Lord of the Red Obelisk: titan of war and stone; represents violence fossilized into monuments.
• Thunorak—Serpent of the Hollow Earth: wyrm of the deep earth and gold veins; symbol of buried greed and endless burrowing.
• Tulushoth—Wolf Without Shadow: predator-void of darkness; cycles of winter and death.
• Zaltharion—Black Crowned King: god of dominion and necrotic kingship; lord of rulership through decay.
• Mornath-Gul—Horned Flame: living fire of transformation, renewal through destruction.
• Orridathis—The Watcher Beneath the Clay: guardian of memory and death; buried awareness beneath soil.
• Elythagar—The Brine That Walks: cold inverse of solar fire; sea-born hunger and tidal rot.
• Voruzethis—The Feast in the Dust: endless consumption of decay and war’s remnants.
• Khaltheron—The Smoldering Veil: smoke-spirit of ruin; the ghost left behind after fire.
• Drovanyth—The Crooked Root: serpentine hunger turned vegetal; corruption within the soil.
• Seryvokath—The Ashen Host: the wolf’s breath dispersed into a swarm of moths; silent consumption.
• Ghorthalyx—The Carrion Crown: manifestation of death’s kingship; rot enthroned.
• Zhulgrithan—The Mire That Breathes: living bog, respiration of the earth.
• Throzkivar—The Ember-Womb: creation through destruction; new fire birthed from ashes.
• Vraggonith—The Horn in Hollow Hills: sound of petrified war echoing through caverns.
• Khar-Ghoryn—The Silt That Devours: devouring darkness of rivers and estuaries; light drowned.
• Vruz-Kathor—The Ashen Maw: subterranean hunger that persists after death of flesh.
• Zhar-Khuneth—The Mourning Mire: the sorrow of the earth; decay felt as grief.
• Thoryxith—The Maw Between Pulses: exists between instants of time; possibly voice or fragment of Kholgorath.
• Bran-Golath—The Horned Sun: found on the Altenburg Stelae and Brandberg charcoal figurine deep in the hills near Ubyr.
• Veyrholm Circle (collective)—The Echo Cult: human sorcerers serving as vessels for multiple Ashen entities.
• Iron Idols (collective)—The Seven That Sleep Beneath the Ash: term used in the Necronomicon for the original pre-human deities.
• De Idolis Ferris—Mentions the Seven Iron Kings; first reference to Kholgorath.
• Zycran Testament—Describes molten thrones of the Iron Idols.
• Annals of the Ashen Circle—Chronicles Vale of Veyrholm cult activity.
• Treatise of the Smoldering Veil—Early occult synthesis linking idol worship to alchemy.
• Veyrholm Catechism—Contains inverted prayers to the Ashen Circle.
• Codex Ferrum-Astrix—Jothan Mallory’s forbidden reconstruction of the cosmology.

Trawling

So, I've read a few more books recently and not mentioned it here. I finished "Shadows in Freeport", a Goodman Games module written by Rob Schwalb and set in Freeport from back in the 00s, "Vengeance in Freeport" also written by a third party, Ronin Arts, but which is a direct sequel, or coda, to "Madness in Freeport". I've also read Monster Compendium: Monsters of Faerun and I've almost finished the Savage Tide adventure path. It's my intention that, if not today then certainly tomorrow, I'll finish Savage Tide. 

I wasn't sure what to think of the Goodman Games module. It clearly wears on its sleeve the old school dungeon-crawl style, which I don't usually have much interest in, so I didn't expect to love it. However... I actually do. Although the format wasn't a great one for reading, I'll admit, the actual module looks like it's fantastic. Although structured as an old-fashioned dungeon-crawler, which it mostly is, it's actually quite a clever and well-done expression of a haunted house experience. It lacks (mostly) silly and hoaky dungeon-crawl staples like tons of unbelievable traps and puzzles—there's one of the latter, but it can simply be written out, I'm sure, and while there are a few traps, they mostly represent regular hazards rather than actual traps; weakened and structurally unsound floors, and stuff like that. It also shows that you don't need fancy new monsters; for the most part, the memorable encounters are with pretty standard stuff that's in the SRD; ghosts, allips, babau demons, etc. It goes to show you; it's about how they're used. Execution trumps innovation every single time. And this is excellently executed. If the module kind of springs fully formed without any backstory to speak of like Minerva from the forehead of Jupiter†, that's OK; you can find reasons within your own game to actually engage the module. 

I do like reading adventure paths and more modern modules that propose hooks and backgrounds, but I find that it's hardly necessary, it's just mostly to make the module a bit more readable for the GM. This is a perfect example of how that isn't really needed though. You go to the haunted house because people have been going missing. They're all ghosts and they attack you once you're inside. Put the monster down at the end to stop the disappearances. Beyond that; any GM worth his salt can work that in. As much as I like the stuff that the writers' come up with for modules, I admit that I frequently have to change what they wrote anyway if I intend to actually use their material. 

Next up on the Freeport Trawl would be "Crisis in Freeport." I've often complained that Freeport is often too silly; although I don't think I've ever read Crisis, my understanding is that it swung perhaps too far in the other direction; very dark, serious and edgy, or at least attempting to be, with gratuitous rape and crap like that. Pendulum's are often like that; when they go too far in one direction, the correction is an over-correction. But I'll read it before I judge it. 

(This paragraph is a rambly aside. Feel free to skip.) Because so many of my books on my trawl are books that I have in pdf form, my Sumatra (I prefer it to Acrobat for simple reading) is pre-loaded up with the next one or two for each of my trawls, and I think that I'll continue to do that. So, I've got at least two more Freeport books loaded up; Crisis and "Gangs of Freeport", I've got the next Eberron module, which is next for that trawl, I've still got my Savage Tide fan compilation (it was easier than finding all of my old Dungeon magazines in whatever box they're stacked in in storage), Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Magic of Faerun and The Voyage to Farzeen. But just because I have the next chapter of each trawl loaded doesn't mean that I'm going to read them all equally. For one thing, I'm also reading other things besides my trawl books, and for another, I want to prioritize some over others. Of the books currently on deck or in process, I want to finish (in physical copies) Heroes of Horror, Tales from Celtic Mythology, and the Driz'zt prequel trilogy in the next days (or weeks for the last one; I'll start it when I finish Celtic) and I've got other physical books to add to the list. I'm also listening to audiobooks; I'm probably going to finish At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs (I've read it before, of course, but this is my first time in audio) early next week, if not this weekend. I'll also finish Savage Tide within the next 24 hours or so, as I mentioned, and then I'll load up the first of the Rise of the Runelords adventures again. I've read that at least twice before, and played it at least once, but never as part of the trawl, so it gets to go again. Freeport and the Adventure paths are kind of the priority to read first, with Eberron and the Sandy Petersen Sagas next; the 5e campaigns and the 3e Forgotten Realms books are at the bottom. In addition, on the physical book side, I've had a lot of stuff in mind to read, including an undocumented mini-trawl of the 3e monster books (my recent finishing of Monster Compendium: Monsters of Faerun thus killed two birds with one stone, and I'm almost done with the environmental books too; only two left to read.)

Anyway; the two Freeport modules I just read could be used in an Old Night game easily enough without major alteration, although both of them are kind of non-essential. "Shadows in Freeport" was absolutely stand-alone and had nothing to do with anything else going on in Freeport. It could easily have been set anywhere, and tying it to Freeport in the first place seems kind of superfluous and unnecessary, and "Vengeance in Freeport" was tied very much to the story of Milton Drac; although it could easily be run as a stand alone without that backstory, and the backstory linkages aren't actually important. It's a superfluous coda rather than one that adds or contributes to the ongoing "Freeport meta-narrative" if you will. Neither of those are surprising, given that both are third party additions to the Freeport thread.

† I don't often talk about this kind of thing, but because for some reason I used the Roman rather than Greek version of this story, it sparked in my mind some thoughts. Jupiter, Juno and Minerva are the Capitoline Triad, seen as among the most important three gods worshipped on Capitoline Hill in Rome in the later Roman period, after the Hellenization of many aspects of their culture. That said, it appears that Minerva was borrowed from the Etruscans rather than the Greeks, only later "merging" with Athena. She seems to come almost exactly as is from Etruscan Menrva and the coming out of the forehead story was adopted from the Greeks, as well as (sometimes) imagery associated with Medusa's head shields, but her essential character and her place in the Triad predates the Hellenization of the Romans, and comes directly from the Etruscans instead. In spite of the Hellenization of Roman mythology, it still always retained a lot of its own original character. Mars was never really seen as having the character of Ares, for instance, even though they were often conflated—Ares was an entitled villain to the Greeks, while Mars was a heroic ideal. The Archaic Triad, which predates the Capitoline Triad, was Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus, where Quirinus may have originally been a Sabine equivalent of sorts to Mars who was adopted into the early Roman pantheon when the Sabines joined the early Romans politically and culturally. 

My favorite god of Roman specific mythology is Sol Invictus, however, not only because what a cool name, but... well, mostly because it's such a cool name. Sol was an old Roman god, which should be obvious given that his name is a clear cognate with the word for Sun in all kinds of other Indo-European languages, but his worship largely faded during the early Republican times. Aurelian, the Emperor who ended the Crisis of the Third Century and revived Rome's flagging fortunes is the most responsible for bringing the worship of Sol back, now with the subtitle Invictus (he was occasionally called Sol Indiges previously.) There's even some discussion among modern students of Rome's religious practices and mythology if Sol Indiges, or "Old Sol" is even the same deity as Sol Invictus or not.

I don't have pagan pantheons in my fantasy anymore, but if I were to ever decide to use that for a setting, I'd probably use real life mythological gods rather than making them up, and Sol Invictus would absolutely be part of my pantheon, probably replacing Pelor in the D&D pantheon. (4e and 5e did a real number of the specific pantheons of specific settings, and mixed them all up. Pelor seems to have made the cut in the 5e DMG, if I recall, however.) Borrowing other gods from Celtic, Slavic Germanic and Roman and/or Greek pantheons, to the degree we can recreate them, I'd make my own mishmash pantheon. Or better yet, I simply wouldn't define any pantheon at all, and just let players pick whatever gods they want from whatever source that they want. 

But my own characters would be most interested in worshipping Sol Invictus, Cernnunos the Horned King, Perun the Thunderer, (or maybe Taranis the Thunderer instead), Mithras, a martial god, Chernovog, a dark underworld style god, and Veles, a trickster god associated with magic. 

Heck, that's at least 75% of a workable pantheon right there. Add a couple of goddesses; some kind of nurturing/healing chick like Nerthus or an equivalent and maybe a moon goddess like Artemis or Selene or something, and you're mostly good to go. Some tripartite witch/oracle goddess trio like the Norns, the Fates or the Morrigan would fit (I like the Graeae or the Gray Sisters for them) and Nodens, the Silver-handed, who is a god of seas, hunting and fishing. Of course, I could also use Dagon as god of the sea, but that makes the sea altogether much more unfriendly. There would be other gods, but they'd be unlikely to be selectable as "PC gods"; Dagon and other monstrous or "demon lord" inspired gods who inspire dangerous cults would be the equivalents here. Heck, I'll probably lay out this alternate pantheon in a separate post—I don't need it for Old Night, but whenever I actually get back to work on whatever name I come up with for High Fantasy Hack; well, pagan pantheons seem to go pretty hand in hand with high fantasy. 

Regions of the Hill Country

I've tossed around several labels for some time for regions of the Hill Country, but I don't think that I've always been super consistent with my usage of them. I thought it would be good to document what I think that "latest" is. Originally, the Hill Country was just a region in itself, but of course, it's big enough to have more than one region; at least as large as a Western European country of the past, like France or Old Germany or the Austrian Empire, etc. or as big as one of the big western states of the US like Wyoming or Montana. 

This isn't meant to be a list of details of the map, but rather of higher level "regions" within the Hill Country, most of which I've already developed many smaller details already.

The "core" of the Hill Country is the two regions Northumbria and Southumbria, both so named because of their relation to the Umber River, which runs through the southern part of the Goldenwold. Northumbria is driven, in large part, by the major urban settlement Garenport, which is the most important city in the region, and a real city and a powerhouse financially, militarily and in every other sense. 

Southumbria, on the other hand, has Barrowmere in somewhat the same situation; by far the most important urban center; really the only truly urban center. Barrowmere and Garenport are rivals, both commercially and politically—and even philosophically, as the self-styled Grand Duke of Garenport wants to unite the two regions more intimately and set himself up as the king of the newly christened Hill Kingdom instead of Hill Country. Luckily for the other regions, he's got lots of problems at home that are distracting him from pursuing that agenda too hard.

Both regions have subregions. Northumbria's Garenkarst Peninsula is east of the Waychester Bay and therefore unrelated to the Umber River, and the Northwoodshire region is between the Umber River and the large forests to the south. Technically it belongs to Southumbria, and it looks to Barrowmere for leadership, but only a little; the region is really kind of autonomous and independent in many ways.

There are two more recent expansion regions, where settlement from Hillmen is relatively new, and has opened up new frontiers for the Hill Country. The so-called East Marches are really more to the north even of Northumbria, and stretch from the territory of Cayminster (which is definitely in the Northumbrian orbit) across the northeastern edge of the Darkling Sea, and have now started to spread southwards across the eastern edge of the sea a bit in the form of Woodrow's Hamlets, a small subregion that's considered part of the Marches. Burlharrow is the largest urban (using the term somewhat loosely) area here, and they have both some commercial dependency still on Garenport, but also a great deal of resentment about it, and it is largely made up of common folk who urge for breaking with Garenport more explicitly, at least politically. Regardless of its politics, it's far enough away from the remainder of the regular Hill Country to be an afterthought in many ways to them, but as more and more settlement is moving into this area, that will probably not be true forever.

The West Marches on the other hand are truly separated from the rest of the Hill Country, and far enough away from it to be independent. Settlement of Hillmen in the region also is shared with some few peoples who were already in the area, although much of the West Marches is ranchland or other depopulated wilderness. Bucknerfeld is the largest city in the area, and it thrives on trade across the Great Northern Road with distant destinations in Lower Kurushat, Baal Hamazi and places like Simashki. But Hillmen have also spread recently down into the so-called Cactus Balds, and homesteads, ranches and more are now common in these relatively dry hills—in spite of their names, they're not necessarily completely bald nor covered with tons of cactus, although to the Hillmen, the prickly pear and other cactuses were a unique element that caught their attention. Mostly they are lightly covered in pinyon-juniper savanna, gray oak and even mesquite, interspersed with lots of tough grasses and the iconic cactuses which so caught the imagination of the Hillmen who otherwise weren't familiar with them. If you want a real world analog, go check out the Davis Mountains in western Texas—but then moderate the climate a bit. The summers aren't so miserably hot.

I'll probably draw up a quick map that's specifically focused on labeling these regions, and otherwise sparse on more detailed labels, and post it when I get a chance.

Journalists can't do math

https://thatparkplace.com/amazon-cant-cancel-rings-of-power-without-hefty-financial-kill-fee-to-tolkien-estate/

I really wanted to say women can't do math, but the image and name and biography of the writer says he's a seasoned journalist. But it's ridiculous to suggest, as he does, that Amazon can't cancel without it costing more than it's worth.

According to The Ankler, the first season alone cost north of $465 million, not even counting the $250 million Amazon paid for the global rights to Tolkien’s works or the hundreds of millions spent on marketing. By the time viewers at home were tallying their impressions, Amazon had spent well over three quarters of a billion dollars just to get the show on the air. 

And then this, of course:

The cruel truth is that Amazon may not be able to cancel Rings of Power even if it wants to. The Tolkien estate’s kill fee ensures every unfinished season costs the company another $20 million just to walk away. With season three already in production and five seasons originally committed, the company is boxed in.

So, the first season cost $465 million, but they have no choice but to spend that four more times or it will cost them.... $60 million! Granted, I'm sure that they're spending less on season 2, and can again on seasons 3-5, but there's no way that it's less than $20 million each. So no... it's clearly cheaper for them to just cancel it: pay the "kill fee" and stop hemorrhaging money.

Anyway, the joke I kind of wanted to make, but couldn't. Oh, well.

Nizrekh capsule review; updated

Nizrekh has become more and more part of the Three Realms+; where it was originally just a reference, it's now a probable destination in two of the 5x5 Fronts; Curse of the Corsair Coast and Terror in Timischburg both, and the Mind-Wizards—especially Gothan, the Mind-Wizard, one of the Heresiarchs, is meant specifically to be an ancient Atlantean. Although I don't know that Gothan is the Mind-wizard of Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes, but if he is, then heck; they could go to Nizrekh in that one too. That said, my old capsule review is woefully out of date. I don't necessarily mean to expand on it, but I do want to at least update it. The expansion can come later.

What is Nizrekh? In short, it's a part of the Old Night setting that is an island nation off the coast (to the south and a bit to the west) of Timischburg itself. An archipelago nation, Nizrekh was once a much larger island nearly the size of Greenland, and the very first High Civilization of Mankind lived on it. Atlantis, it was called, and they ruled with an iron fist over the continent that is now the Three Realms, although they were little interested in the people there except to take them occasionally as slaves, or to exploit the natural resources of their lands. Mighty in technology and in magic, the Atlanteans were unchallenged for centuries. When their Doom came, it came because of the curse that befell one of their own.

A princess of Atlantis named Medusa brought a curse down on the people for reasons that are now forgotten. The ancient, heathen chthonic entities that the Atlanteans worshipped turned her into a horrifying monster for her crimes, her body below the waist transformed into that of the thick snake, her hair turned into a nest of vipers, and her malicious gaze would turn those who beheld her to stone. Full of hatred and bitterness for what happened to her she took her revenge on her people, and waged war against them. Although it's not clear how this happened, she did in fact bear children after her transformation, and these are called the lesser medusae, or sometimes the gorgons. Their own petrification abilities were similar to that of their monstrous mother, although less potent, and those of sufficiently strong will could resist it. Medusa herself was finally killed by the Atlanteans, but her vile progeny, which now included even more debased warlike serpent men continued a bitter war of attrition.

Disgusted with the behavior of the Atlanteans in the wake of this chaos, who had fallen into bitter rejection of their gods, a massive sea monster known as Megaketos destroyed their island, killing most Atlanteans and snake-men both. There are disturbing rumors that Megaketos was not related to Ketos, but was rather Cthulhu itself, awakened for a short time by the gods. If so, the devastation to Atlantis makes more sense; the majority of the land was sunk and only the current sun-bleached archipelago as fragments of it remain. A single structure, the great pyramid of Halkatash is the only vestige of ancient Atlantean culture that is widely recognized and which somehow remains relatively undamaged and above sea level on the archipelago.

New peoples came to these islands many generations later. These were mostly simple fishermen and other coastal types, but they grew in power and influence as well, becoming wealthy traders and sailors. Occasionally, they would find nests of snake-men still lingering in the islands, but mostly the survivors of that Pyrrhic war had fled for foreign parts. But at the height of their power, they discovered that not all of the Atlanteans were dead. Some of the wisest and most powerful (and the most blasphemous and corrupt) knew that their destruction was imminent. Sacrificing many of their lesser brethren's lives and souls in foul rituals, they turned themselves into the so-called Mind-Wizards—arch undead that combine the strengths of both vampires and liches with few of their weaknesses—and sealed themselves in thick sarcophagi that would be able to survive the sinking of their land, slumbering for centuries or even millennia on the bottom of the sea.

Nobody knows how many of these there are, but at least one, Gothan, returned to his former lands (or what was left of them) and quickly conquered it with his foul and powerful magic, establishing himself as a new undead Pharaoh over the Nizrekhs who lived here now. He has been content to rule openly yet quietly. The world is not as primitive as it was in his time, and much of the old Atlantean science (if not their magic) was lost in the destruction of their world, so Gothan bides his time, attempting to locate and raise the rest of his lost brethren and fortify his power base with them  before they make any attempt to expand their influence through conquest yet again.

Today, his foul influence has warped even the Nizrekhs who rebel against his rule. He maintains one city-state on the island, a strange place where necromantic magic rules and Immortal soldiers (mummies) patrol the streets. But along the coasts are lawless communities of savage cannibals; and the Nizrekhs have gradually been corrupted and transformed into Tcho-tcho. Few foreigners visit these anarchic, violent tribes and fewer still leave them, but they are even less welcome in the urban centers ruled by the Heresiarchs. In addition to these savage natives who occasionally raid coastlines nearby in their war outrigger pirogues, other tribes of natives who live in rebellion against Gothan wander the plains and other inland rural areas of the islands. For some reason they are tolerated, to a point, probably because they cause very little actual harm. However, unknown (presumably, at least) to Gothan, these nomadic rebels have made contact with a cell of medusae and their snake-men soldiers, and may have found a means to wage a more successful rebellion—even if the cost is what little is left of their own humanity, ultimately.

Anyway; that's Nizrekh in a nutshell. The advent of Gothan spawned a new "Golden Age" of necromancy among the people, and a recognition of the Atlanteans' past dealings with the snake-men has also spawned numerous odd details, including the worship of many snakes and snake-like entities, even as actual snake-men and their medusae rulers gather to threaten them yet again.

Some Nizrekh have ethnic enclaves in some other cities, especially on the west coast of the Three Realms+, like Grozavest, Port Liure (and all of the Corsair city-states of Baix Pallar), etc. These expat Tcho-tcho belong to equally vile cults of Shugoran, Rhan-Tegoth and others, and see humans as—at best—prey to be subject to their cannibal feasts. Although they are mostly unfriendly to Gothan, his spies are certainly among them. The Nizrekh Tcho-tcho are sufficiently repugnant on their own right whether part of Gothan's contingent or someone else's.

Don't listen to the fakes

Charlie Kirk seemed like, mostly, a decent guy. His schtick of going on campuses and having polite discourse with people was a cool idea, sure. But he was also a fake. I never understood why this guy who I had literally never heard of one day was suddenly propped up as a literal teenager as the next big thing in political commentary. It was clear from the beginning that he was manufactured. Watching some of the things that he promulgated change in front of my eyes was also instructive. Seeing him and Jack Posobiec and Matt Walsh, or whomever the other one was, post almost the exact same message, nearly word for word, one day was another.

Being a (probably) decent, nice guy doesn't mean that I trusted him or paid much attention to what he said, or thought that he was someone that I should have given much attention to. Vox Day found the following quotes. Along with some of his commentary: Selling Out is NOT Success

This is why one should never, ever, trust any “influencer” or “opinion leader” or “activist” who rapidly goes from nothing to hundreds of thousands of “followers”. It’s also why I pay no attention to the likes of Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and every other shill who sells opinions for donor cash.

CHARLIE KIRK: Just lost another huge Jewish donor. $2 million a year because we won’t cancel Tucker. I’m thinking of inviting Candace.

CHARLIE KIRK: Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes. I cannot and will not be bullied like this.

CHARLIE KIRK: Leaving me no choice but to leave the pro Israel cause.

Now, there are a lot of things that can be gleaned from these three texts written by Charlie Kirk. But first and foremost, mark that he was being propped up to the tune of $2 million per year from just one of his “donors”. It doesn’t matter by whom, it doesn’t matter for what, the salient point is that all of these guys are fake.

All of these characters are quite literally manufactured. Their opinions aren’t real, they are purchased and directed by their donors and investors.

If someone isn’t actually selling an actual product or service, then what he is selling, unbeknownst to most of those who listen to him, is his voice and his words.

Of course, this was shortly before he was assassinated in a kind of suspicious manner in a way that looks shockingly pro for a mincing weirdo who is unlikely to have been any good at being a professional hit man. And, as Ron Unz has pointed out repeatedly, who's most notorious for assassinating their critics?

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.

Sigma

I finished Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche not too long ago, via audiobook, and because I didn't have my hardcopy of Captain Blood handy, I downloaded the librivox version of it. Surprisingly, because Scaramouche was read by a single reader, Captain Blood was not, and sometimes almost chapter to chapter the reader would change. There were at least half a dozen different readers going back and forth, but I think it might have been significantly more. I wasn't really counting. 

As much as the free audiobook is kinda nice, it wasn't actually the best. You sometimes get what you pay for. Often the biggest problem is that the volume was low; in my car, I had the volume turned up almost all the way and still couldn't always hear super well—although to be fair, that was often because my stupid maps app was trying to talk, which lowered the audio volume. Sometimes pronunciation is bad. Actual read quality is not always great. Some of them are quite good at what they do; some of them have annoying nasally voices. Now that I'm back home, I picked up my hard copy. It's in considerably better shape than my copy of Scaramouche, so I kind of wish that I'd just read it rather than listen to it, but y'know. Now I'm almost done and will surely finish it today. I think I only have three and a half chapters left.

I had earlier said that I thought Sabatini was himself probably a sigma, and his main characters tended to be sigmas. I said that without necessarily tons of remembrance of the details of Blood's story in particular, but now that I'm about done, I think it's still true. Blood does pine with a great deal of oneitis for Arabella Bishop. While that does seem like a bit of a non-sigma thing, you never know. Sigmas can fall in love too, after all, and Sabatini (as well as Burroughs, who I'll try some of his audio books next) specifically wrote female love interests that were superlative. These aren't just disposable female conquests. Plus, both wrote what can be considered to be the male version of a romance. Very different from the female version of a romance, which has coopted the name, but these were truly considered romances in a swashbuckling masculine way at the time (just over a hundred years ago that they were published); the subtitle of Scaramouche is literally "A Romance of the French Revolution." Plus, keep in mind that there was considerable moral inertia against lauding heroic characters who were womanizing philanderers. They weren't even considered with indulgent yet disapproving fondness; they were merely considered bad people. The French pirate Levasseur is a great example of this; when he "rescues" the smitten daughter of Tortuga's French governor, whatsername d'Ogeron, and then threatens to rape her, it's meant to be considered one of the most terrifying aspects of piracy in the book. In reality, in today's environment, he wouldn't have had to threaten to rape her, because she was basically throwing herself at him anyway. 

In that bygone (sadly) age, this kind of thing was not seen the same way, of course, and personal morality was expected to be held to a higher standard. That said, Blood's naming of his ship the Arabella and his pining for Arabella Bishop is a bit sappy, at best. But we forgive him, because as depicted, she actually does kind of deserve it. The same is true for Aline de Kercadieau in Scaramouche, or Dejah Thoris in A Princess of Mars, who also are thwarted in their desire to be with their girl. That tension is what drives the narrative a great deal rather than them simply shrugging and looking for another girl, which would be a much more realistic reaction. But what's the fun in that? Even I consider myself sufficiently moved by the romanticism of falling in love with a woman who deserves it that the striving to be together makes for a wonderful story. 

Ignore Peter Blood's handful of chapters where he broods over his apparent failure to capture the heart of Arabella Bishop (even as we, as readers, come to realize that he has in fact captured her heart, but due to circumstances, neither can act on it yet, and he doesn't realize it for a time.) That circumstances conspiring to keep a couple apart until the peak of the story is a fiction of the romance genre; whether the modern girl-focused rom-com or the older boy-focused swashbuckling romance either one. Instead, I think the behavior of Sabatini's characters are a great study in what a sigma is actually like. The guy from The Black Swan is similarly endowed, although I forget his name at the moment. And it's been way too long since I've read The Sea Hawk for me to remember. My brothers also tell me that St. Martin's Summer is really good, and Bellarion the Fortunate is another of his bestsellers. Based on quick summaries I've read, they look like they also feature very sigma-like protagonists. 

I wouldn't have considered that when I was younger, of course, but since reading about the SSH directly from the source for many years now, it's curious to see that it's so dominant in the works of one author. Probably because being a likely sigma himself, that's how he saw the world.

It's worth noting that the Captain Blood movie made over a decade later with Errol Flynn is an excellent movie. It was Flynn's first starring role, and his first big collaboration with Olivia de Havilland, who plays Arabella Bishop. She was only nineteen when the movie was released, which is also kind of insane. Given that she lived to be one hundred and four, she obviously outlived all of her co-stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Three years later when mostly the same cast made the famous Robin Hood movie, she was even more beautiful in glorious technicolor. She was quite well cast as both Arabella Bishop and Maid Marian. I'm less enamored of her role the next year in Gone With the Wind, which is a terrible movie romanticizing terrible people. Although she was lauded at the time for her roles in the 40s, its her roles in the 30s when she was especially young and beautiful that are remembered today. Like I said, I highly recommend the movie. Its plot is abbreviated relative to the book, but it's otherwise quite faithful in general thrust, and even has some direct dialogue from the book. If you've never seen that movie, you absolutely should. 

As great as Flynn was in this, his first starring role, I'm not sure how much he actually looks like Peter Blood as described by Sabatini. But I can forgive that, I suppose. I like them both for what they are. 

Traitor Joe

Traitor Joe was conceived as a joke, really. The world's worst henchman, who would no doubt be misheard by my players as Trader Joe, since the homonym would make for a pun on the bougie grocery store. In reality, it's a much more sinister yet direct double entendre; Traitor Joe is meant, of course, to betray the PCs.

But I didn't have a place for him explicitly in the 5x5s. But I wonder if I can make Eoman Gast into Traitor Joe, or have Traitor Joe be Gast's companion, valet or partner, or something. 

If Traitor Joe delivers the PCs directly into the hands of the thurses, or Jareth Grym, or Eigyr Gwynn or even the Erlking. It doesn't really matter which. Or, maybe he's an independent. I had originally planned for the volume that they're recovering to be Unaussprechlichen Kulten, written I presume in Old Timischer, although maybe it's a translation Nameless Cults, or maybe it's a different book altogether, like the Parchments of Pnom or something.

Here's a ChatGPT generated list of unique alternatives... which I kind of prefer to using more Lovecraftian ones, honestly.

Grimoires & Black Manuscripts

• The Chalyth Codex
• 
  Supposedly bound in plates of green bronze recovered from a drowned city.
• Concerns the rites of beings “older than salt” who dwell beneath oceans.
• The Nargoth Fragments
• Scraps of vellum written in an angular, half-pictographic script.
• Said to predate human tongues, perhaps copied from the glyphs of subterranean races.
• Xylographica Obscura
• A block-printed work from Old Normaund, destroyed in inquisitorial burnings; only a few impressions survive.
• Its woodcuts depict monstrous geometries that induce vertigo in the viewer.
• The Golothic Seraphron
• Written in spidery Kinzassal by an unnamed scholar of Drabeskos, the city that later became Mittermarkt.
• Describes angelic beings whose wings are formed of knives and shadows, likely not of Heaven.
• Zycran’s Testament
• Purportedly found near Burlharrow by the half-mad magus Zycran before the downfall of the culture that used to be there.
• Contains invocations to “the Sleeper Beneath the Clay” — perhaps Orridathis under another name.
• The Veyrholm Catechism (regional to your Ashen Circle)
• A cycle of heretical hymns and questions, preserved in charcoal-stained folios.
• Local legends insist the book rearranges itself when read aloud.
• Phoridex Maleficarum
• A 400 year old treatise, ostensibly on witchcraft, but rife with sigils not found in any known tradition.
• The name “Phoridex” may refer to a demon or an author — no one knows.
• The Scoriac Palimpsest
• Layers of overwritten parchment, each scraped thin and written upon anew.
• The older layers bleed faintly through, so readers glimpse multiple texts at once, none wholly legible.
• Annals of the Ashen Circle
• A folkloric compilation by the antiquarian Jothan Wraike (burned at the stake, 350 years ago).
• Interweaves rural customs with invocations that may be more than metaphor.
• Canticles of Zhulgrithan
• A set of damp, mildew-rotted scrolls preserved in reed cases.
• Their chants, when sounded, create bubbles in stagnant water even when no wind stirs.

At least half of those are useable to me. And here's Traitor Joe again off to the side...

Few more Old Night updates

 

Old Night images

A few images; both Hero Forge and AI, of places, peoples and creatures of the Old Night setting.

Another tcho-tcho image. Same image, really; different pose and facial expression. Plus, the knives are out.

Although I built a Drancent Hewe from scratch, I actually think that I kind of like the original (modified) library model better. I modified it recently, but I also swapped his "familiar" from the weird winged lemur to a pseudodragon. Given that Kim Rugova also had a pseudodragon in some versions of his Hero Forge representations, I wonder if I've accidentally stumbled on some world-building; Lomar has fleets? flocks? wings? of pseudodragons living in the rafters and chimneys or something. They're at least as intelligent as a smart dog, so sometimes they're domesticated.

I made this on a whim to try and look like a digital model I saw of some kind of fantasy guys. It's not perfect, and I didn't necessarily care to try and make it so; it's an impressionistic take.

Because it has the Puritan witch hunter hat, I guess this is some kind of monster hunter, or whatever.

ChatGPT isn't always the best at generating images. I asked for a D&D version of The Man With No Name from Clint Eastwood's spaghetti westerns. After a few iterations, where I had to tell it; no, didn't you even notice what I typed? I finally got this as probably the best.

Shugoran, from the excellent "modern" expanded Lovecraftian story "The Black Man With a Horn" by T."E."D. Klein.

"Traitor" Joe (misheard by unfortunate players as Trader Joe; they think it's just a pun on the name, without realizing that it's a sinister double entendre); my first ever experiment with face customizer. Nothing else about this model is particularly memorable, so I wonder if it's not due for some sprucing up.

Here's an alternate Traitor Joe too.

"The Strangers", the fantasy "aliens" that I have yet to figure out exactly how to make work, but which I'd like to work into the Cult of Undeath 5x5 Front. If not, I guess I can make them part of the Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes.