JordanCon Interview

 Check out this interview I did with the gaming track for JordanCon!

I think it came out pretty well.  Anytime I listen to myself in an interview or on a podcast, I worry about whether I sounded competent and put-together.  I'm way past worrying about how my voice sounds or anything like that, but I do wince at every "um" that manages to make its way in.

Ryan and I discussed a number of things, including the perennial favorite "what is old-school gaming".  My answers are probably middle-of-the-road satisfactory; maybe not hardcore enough to please an old-school zealot, but that's the way it is.

We also talked about Lumberlands a bit, and how zines are a recent fashion in tabletop gaming.  Then we brainstormed an adventure.  Fifty-four minutes of unbridled brilliance.

If you click through on the link above to check out the JordanCon website - they're all virtual this year of course - you'll see they're having an adventure-writing contest.

Most importantly, I made it through the interview without Ryan asking me anything about Robert Jordan...since the only Jordan I've ever read was one of his Conan novels, and I don't even remember which one it was.

I have a couple more "talk about Lumberlands" appearances coming up, but as always I welcome your feedback and questions about anything gaming-related.  I often consider recording a video or stream to talk about Wampus Country, then think better of it, assuming nobody's particularly interesting in that sort of rambling or Q&A.  If I'm wrong on that, let me know.

Into the Mearlsverse

 We sometimes talk about what a Gygax module is like; there are commonalities of structure and theme throughout.  And we commonly hear about Tom Moldvay's pulp inspirations in his adventures.  I'm wondering what thematic through-lines we might find in the works of other adventure-writers.

In this case, I'm thinking about Mike Mearls, who I didn't really think of as an adventure writer.  I thought of him as a rules guy primarily, and a developer.  Some time ago when raiding my collection for low-level content to rob, I came across my copy of The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho - by Mike Mearls.  That rediscovery led me to consider "what's a Mearls adventure like?" and consider some kind of blogpost like this one.

I'd thought it would be easy - just a handful of adventures to look through.  I was dead wrong.  Mearls has quite a list of adventures to his (full or partial) credit, including stuff for the World of Darkness and Feng Shui.  I had no idea.  But there were a ton of fantasy adventures from across the years.  I wondered, did they resemble each other like siblings?  Were there elements Mearls used over and over?  And could you staple some of these together into a single campaign or hexmap?  A Mearlsverse, if you will.

Looking at the overall output, I needed to limit myself, so I had some parameters for the experiment:

* Adventures where Mearls is 50%+ of the design team
* Fantasy only, no World of Darkness or Feng Shui
* Shied away from Iron Heroes and Arcana Evolved stuff generally

The guiding spirit was "stuff you could easily steal for a standard-ish D&D game", which is why I left out the non-fantasy and the "rather non-vanilla" fantasy. I looked at the following adventures, listed with their level ranges, and themes. (Levels are going to be a little variant in meaning by edition, but this is close enough for our leitmotif-seeking purposes). The italicized works were produced by Mearls and a co-writer - no idea who had majority lift on these, so if you're looking for the Purest of Mearlsverses, drop these selections.

Hammerfast  (1st-10th)      dwarves, orcs, undead
Aerial Adventure Guide (cities of Sellaine and Dreadfall)  elves, undead
Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho (1st)   kobolds, ogre, evil wizard
Scalegloom Hall (1st)  kobolds
Fear the Worst (1-2)   mutants (WFRP adventure)
Keep on the Shadowfell (1-3)     kobolds, undead, Orcus
In the Belly of the Beast (2-4)  slavers, orcs, necromancers, nasty outsider
Death in the Skyfire Wastes (3rd)  undead
Darwell’s Tower (3-4)   necromancer
Daggers at Midnight (3-5)  urban, human foes
Looking-Glass Deep (4th lvl)  wizard’s abode, hobgoblins
Thunderspire Labyrinth (4-6) evil wizards
Return to the Moathouse (5th)  orcs, undead
Forge of the Dawn Titan (5th)  deviltry & hellfire
Folnar’s Dagger (5 to 7)  demon cultists
Siege of Durgam’s Folly (5-8)    ogres, clockworks, Orcus
Swords Through The Ice Gate  (6th)   bugbears, dragon
Prison City of Hell’s Reach human foes
Lost Menagerie (7-9) extreme wizardry, dinosaurs
Pyramid of Shadows (7-10)    evil wizard
Swords Against Deception  (10th) cult, undead
Demon Queen’s Enclave (14-17) demons, drow, Orcus
Beyond the Door (18th) extreme wizardry, time travel

The Mearlsverse is:
* A fairly standard ‘vanilla’ D&D realm, as you’d expect
* Big movers are wizards and their use/seeking of powerful unique artifacts
* Orcus everywhere you look.

What do we see here? Plenty of humanoids. I hesitate to say "Mearls loves kobolds" or similar, because many of those selections are kind of pre-made for an author when you're writing D&D jazz for a certain level, with vanilla-world expectations. But even controlling for that sort of baseline, I think we see some themes that tell us something about the Mearlsverse.

There's some sword-and-sorcery influence here, chiefly in the form of What Evil Wizards Do. Mearlsian wizard-antagonists seem to always be in possession of, or on the hunt for, a unique magic item. The macguffin is the raison d'etre. There are a couple dimensional portals. Note Mearls' use of Lieber-homage titles here and there.

Mearls digs Orcus. Plain fact. Fourth edition's code-name during development was 'Orcus', and you can see why here. Even if you filter out the Official 4e Product - which had an Orcus theme to much of the overall adventure path - Orcus still sticks his horns in at several points, and there are plenty of undead around. Undead are a D&D standard of course, but we see some interesting usages (as in Hammerfast).

Most of it is generic-temperate-Europe, as you'd expect. Death in the Skyfire Wastes is a Calimshan adventure, but not overly desert-y. Forge of the Dawn Titan, being a 'Lair Assault', doesn't have much to it, and I wonder if the "fire" themes therein were something Mearls would've picked for himself or if it was just his turn to write a Lair Assault. Swords Through the Ice Gate uses a "portal to frozen world" gimmick but you could use it in your Dope Rhymes of the Ice, Ice Maiden campaign.

Not a ton of dragon presence here, which is interesting. Plenty of dungeons, of course, and above-the-surface places to explore. There's also a bit of a hole in the level 10-15 space, so Mike, if you're reading this, that's the gap in the Mearlsverse. Send me an outline about an Orcus-aligned kobold wizard, I'll finish it, we'll make tens of dollars.

Were I trying to cobble these together into a campaign or hexmap, I'd probably steal the hexmap that comes with Hammerfast, plop another city on the coast, and then start dropping seeds in hexes.

I also note that I couldn't get my hands on the Feng Shui adventures to look at them for adaptation suitability, but one of them did have a time travel gimmick, so maybe it would fit in after all. Speaking of time travel, if I were to run the Mearlsverse experiment myself, I would make sure that the long-forgotten wizard referred to at the low levels (Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho) was the same long-forgotten wizard trapped in a time anomaly in Beyond the Door at 18th level. Symmetry, people! Furthermore, I'd look into linking the demonic presences that are sprinkled throughout so there's a through-line there.

Fear The Worst is actually a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay adventure featuring lots of human types and some chaos mutants, but it has a tasty pun title and a sausage festival set-piece, so I love it.

I'm still really reading through most of these beyond skim-level, so I can't/won't speak to how they might run. I haven't come across any stunningly clever bits that made me exclaim "Great Arneson's Ghost, I must Steal This Thing" yet, but they might be in there, hiding. The overall vibe is workmanlike, functional-seeming adventures, ready for customization to your game.

Gun to head today I'd choose Fear the Worst to run. Lost Menagerie looks good, as a lost world thing with dinosaurs. No idea if this exercise had any real lasting value, but my curiosity was sated. I would consider doing this again with Mentzer (I've run several of his R-series adventures) or digging out some older Chris Perkins stuff or something. Suggestions/revelations welcome.

*slaps cover of adventure*  You can fit so many kobolds in there.

What's Broken: Reviews

 On a regular cycle, someone complains about the death of the OSR (whether it was 2013 or 2017 or yesterday or tomorrow), and inevitably somebody chimes in talking about how things got “too commercial” and everybody in the “scene” wanted to make a buck and crank out a product.  That’s worth talking about, but there are some other issues that dovetail with it that I think I need to discuss first so we get a complete picture of where I’m headed with all this.

One core issues I see - and I’ve occasionally complained about it on social media, I suppose - is our lack of a review culture.  We don’t have meaningful reviews to consult and compare.  We have shilling and we have tear-down rants, and very little in-between.

There are two large classes of OSR “reviews”:

• THIS IS BAD AND I HATE IT

• “This is not written the way I would write it” (fair enough, but diminishing returns as to usefulness of this sort of review)

• “This classic product sucks/can’t-be-run” (often with a side dish of “I’m much cleverer than these 70s-80s people”, which is distasteful even when true)

• THIS IS AWESOME AND I LOVE IT

• “Everything this guy/company does is equally great”  (usually not true, and how could it be?)

• “This looks really high-quality doesn’t it”  (so?)

• “This is super-innovative, subversive, artsy and I love it.  Also, my friend made it.  No, I haven’t run it LOL who actually plays games?”

• “I used parts of this, twisted to meet my needs under a different ruleset, and I changed most of it” (interesting reading, and a standard byproduct of the way we hobby, but perhaps less useful to some readers)

With most of both of these written without ever having run the product.  Imagine how different our discourse might be if we had the expectation that once you ran an adventure, you actually talked about how it went.  Instead, we’re stuck in a rut where we have a “balance” between rants and stroking.  Bryce Lynch writes reviews which are sometimes amusing to read, but have become so repetitive as to be much less useful than they used to seem (whether this is Bryce’s fault or that of the endless stream of mediocre adventures he dares to read is a separate question).  Fear of a Black Dragon produces interesting reviews much of the time, although often they take a larger work and bang it into a rules-light shape.  Questing Beast usually does “reviews” that are more about the paper quality and the art than about using the material at the table.  Some old-school bloggers go in-depth into “what’s wrong” with a TSR module - and maybe even attempt to provide solutions - but never bother to run the adventure, even WITH the proposed fixes.  

Can’t we have reviews by people who ran the product?  Answer: perhaps not if we want reviews to appear during the main sales push cycle for a product.  Yet if everything’s available forever, I’d happily take a robust long-tail review culture over what we have now.

Here’s a call to action: if you haven’t actually used the product, don’t call it a review.  Have some dignity.  Call it a “first look”, a “preview”, an “impressions”, whatever.  Let’s make words have some meaning?  And if you do a preview and later run the adventure or the game, come back and do an actual review!  Compare your first thoughts to your eventual conclusions!

So here we are without a review culture to guide consumers (ooh, he said the “c” word!).  We have tastemakers and influencers but not reviewers.  Consumers - potential buyers of an adventure or a game - will see some guidance.  They are hungry for information to help them make a good decision about how to spend their money and time.  Without any reliable source of guidance to distinguish between products, we’re going to fall back on a) known producers of good reputation (be it writers or companies), b) impressive visuals (be it artwork or production values).  See where this leaves the independent producer?  In the mud.  If you’re a newish writer with a small budget, you will very quickly feel like you cannot compete.  And you can’t. 

Why can’t we talk like adults about products?  Why can’t we talk like adults about art?  There’s a gulf between “being courteous in criticism” and “avoiding all negativity”.  It’s nonsense.  We’ve gone beyond courtesy to cultishness.  You can’t criticize modern (postmodern?) works without being dogpiled.  (You can, of course, criticize things from before 2000 with impunity, and are encouraged to do so, because obviously they’re all Neanderthal crap.)  In OSR/indie circles, it’s perfectly acceptable to say “80% of what’s on DM’s Guild is hastily-produced shovelware that nobody will actually use at the table”. Dare I say it about the arthouse/indie OSR?  I suppose I do: “80% of what the OSR produces is farty shovelware that nobody will actually use at the table.”  Does that make it valueless?  Maybe, maybe not.  But we’re at the point where we’re afraid to express opinions and to disagree civilly.  It’s silly.  (Leave aside for the moment the idea that “proper” OSR mindset doesn’t really need anybody else’s product, as that’s a can of purple worms for a different time.)  Meanwhile, we have also somehow decided that we should only “review” products we like (because our time is valuable, and criticism is mean?), so we’re not learning anything from our (collective) mistakes because we aren’t talking about them.

While we’re at it: social media folks and YouTube types, please stop pretending that vagueposting about a problem you had with a product you refuse to name is helpful to the hobby.  It makes me want to call you and tell you there’s a small leak in your basement; no, I won’t tell you where.

We gave up criticizing “scene” products because it felt dirty.  It’s fine to yell at WotC, or TSR, or whoever.  Publicly criticizing another scenester, however, that’s backstabbing for triple damage, and completely verboten.  Unless you have a full-on beef, of course, in which case we’ll all gladly drink in the drama.  But actually talking about someone else’s work in a civil way?  Nope, can’t have it.  Not only do we have a layer of “you’re fine just as you are and shouldn’t be goaded into self-improvement”, but we have the scenester layer of “we’re all in this together and we don’t talk crap about each other”.  It’s nonsense, because it doesn’t improve the products, the people, the hobby, or the games.  It encourages everybody to try to be an unassailable auteur (“artiste”) and then get depressed when their macaroni-art high-concept adventure doesn’t sell five hundred copies.  You think rpgs are a community?  What functioning community sets its own members up for failure like that?  That isn’t a guild of artisans who teach one another, that’s a giant crab bucket.

I’ll come back to OSR marketing in another post and try to keep this one to the topic at hand - reviews are broken.

How do we fix it?  We reverse course.  We establish that it’s okay to talk about products and what you didn’t like about them.  What didn’t work for you, what didn’t work at the table.  We place the focus of the hobby back on the DOING - the actual playing of the games, and the discussion about what worked and didn’t.  We normalize accepting civil criticism civilly.

Play the games.  Talk about playing the games.

(Side-note: watch the interaction numbers on the post climb, since it's "Drama". And that's precisely the problem...)

Strawberry Fields Forever

Something terrifying is growing near the village of Snailshingle; something other that threatens to consume the town...

The Situation

On the southern shore of Shining Lake sits Snailshingle, a picturesque village known only for the beautiful and tasty abalone found in their waters.  Locals harvest the plentiful snails for meat, and to use their iridescent lavender shells in jewelry-making.  There was a small problem a few years ago when one of the snails grew quite large and intelligent, but rather than let him start to think of himself as king of the snails, the savvy villagers taught him about adventuring and barrow-delving, equipped him with top-notch gear, and sent him on his way, apprenticed to a group of mercenaries that were passing through. Today, the charismatic whelk called Lawrence of the Lute is considered a local hero, and he even owns a stake in the pub that overlooks the beach.

Beyond the pink stucco walls of the tiny homes of Snailshingle are a series of gentle hills which were once host to surprisingly soft fescue that bore a faint cinnamon scent.  Today, however, those hills smell chiefly of strawberry - for they are covered with massive strawberry plants which seemingly came out of nowhere, sprouting and spreading over several weeks last Spring.

The folk of Wampus Country are a food-focused people, so you can imagine that the Snailshinglers rapidly descended on the newly-grown strawberry plants, seeking to harvest the succulent, sweet fruit the moment it was suitably large and red.  Tragically, the harvest went the other direction.  First, several villagers were found passed out at the edge of the strawberry patch; a few days later, the first corpse was discovered.  Word spread quickly - the strawberries were not to be plucked.  A party was dispatched to burn the strawberry field, but they retreated back to the town after two of their number started to bleed from their ears and collapsed.  One thing was certain: something was protecting the strawberries.  After a town meeting, a fence was erected some distance from the edge of the field, surrounding it.  The local priests march to the field each day and hurl blessings over the fence, in hopes of stemming the tide of the strawberry plants.

The Truth

The strawberries now grow plump and crimson year-round.  Those who touch the fruit immediately lose 2d4 hit points via blood loss, as the flesh of the hungry vampire strawberries rapidly exsanguinates them.  Hostile movements toward the plants invite psychic attack from the hive-consciousness among the strawberry plants.

The interconnected plant colony is - or perhaps was - a visitor from another plane or timeline, an intelligent strawberry plant of considerable psychic power.  Arriving in Wampus Country by unknown means, it planted itself and began to spawn... resulting in the current situation outside Snailshingle.  The underlying intelligence can probably be contacted via speak with plants - it can no longer utter humanoid tongues.  If contacted and negotiated with, the genius-intelligence plant may be convinced to be less dangerous to the villagers, but in exchange it will want assistance in investigating this world, reproducing peacefully, and achieving its own goals.  The strawberry-creature is capable of growing a pseudo-humanoid body in a matter of days, and investing it with a portion of its life force and mind.  This creature may make a fair sidekick for the right frontiersman.  Alternately, the plant-creature might be convinced, cajoled, or bullied into calving off a piece of itself into the shape of some other animal - a steed, a wolf, or even a hawk - to serve as a mount, companion, or familiar.

Creation notes: To give an impression of how we come up with things around here, this blogpost has its origin in the five-year-old saying something random about a 'vampire strawberry'.  The fifteen-year-old riffed on this, musing that a vampire strawberry would better be deemed a 'suckleberry'.  Fair point.  Contemplating this, I remembered a mutant strawberry plant I played in a Metamorphosis Alpha game at North Texas RPGCon... and thus we have a blogpost.

A Myriad of Goats

 In antiquity, much of what is today called the Wampus Country was the subject of contention between several on-again-off-again empires, known to us as the Peacock Throne and the Great Eye.  As the battle lines - and lines of cultural influence - shifted back and forth across centuries, the relics and influence of both empires remain throughout Wampus, dotting the landscape here and there with barrows, mounds, crumbled ruins reclaimed by the forest, and so forth.

One legacy of the Great Eye culture is the presence, and influence, of goats.  We know from illustrations on stelae that the warriors of the Great Eye rode massive dire goats into battle, and it seems the literal and figurative descendants of these proud goats are still with us today.

Who doesn't like goats, after all?

The Gunkey

In the north of Wampus Country, there exists a breed of creature called the gunkey.  Whether it truly contains the blood of both goat and donkey, as its name implies, is arguable; what is not up for debate is that the gunkey is perhaps the most intelligent non-talking goat-creature in Wampus Country.  Renown for their hardiness and loyalty, the gunkey is favored as a mount and pack animal throughout the Lumberlands and points north in the Snowdeeps (where long-furred gunkies have been successfully crossbred to have "a smidge of aurochs" in them).  The gunkey may even be distantly related to the "something between a ram and a mountain goat" animals the ice dwarves use as mounts and working-animals in the region around Rimespire.

Guard-Goats

Goats bred for intelligence in Thistlemarch have, in the past few years, made their way further afield, and have become a favored accessory of some frontiersmen and explorers.  Smarter than a dog, and willing to eat basically anything, the guard-goat pays for itself very quickly.  It's possible that goats in general were once much smarter than they are today, and this particular breeding program woke up slumbering talents.

Sarcophagoats

Tombs of the Great Eye culture sometimes feature massive stone goats, intricately carved and glyphed, in which are entombed warriors of repute or members of royal lineages.  While Professor Goldthimble refers to such constructions as "cabraform burial statuary" in his monograph Fascinating Distasteful Funereal Practices Of Our Antecedents, the tomb-robbing community knows them simply as "sarcophagoats".  These stone goats sometimes house the restless dead, or are magically-animated statues.  On occasion, they are both, with a hinged lid popping open to grant the entombed armored wight within the ability to hop out and ride the stone-golem goat in bloody pursuit of vengeance against those who disturbed its rest.  I am told there is a small tomb on the southern shore of Shining Lake which contains similar ancient constructions in the shape of a goose, but I have not visited that site yet myself to independently confirm.

Chimerae

Less numerous than they once were, three-headed monsters remain a threat in the wilderness.  The wizards of the Peacock Throne knew them as chimerae, and described in more than one codex the combination of heads common during their period (lion, snollygoster, goat).  Some scholars today presume such passages are metaphorical and describe a political alliance between three other kingdoms (with the goat representing the Great Eye, perhaps), but it is a well known fact that scholars today lack imagination, and spend their days competing for institutional grant money by inventing novel facts which they hope are less interesting (and therefore more prestigious) than those crafted by their rivals.  Regardless, we know three-headed, flying predator critters to be real because we occasionally see them in flight or terrorizing a farm.  It seems far more likely that these chimera are critters of chaotic bloodline, and their heads need not be heritable or even sensical.  A wizard of Dropfinger Pass, in the far north, reports having a tussle with a white-furred chimera which bore the heads of a polar bear, a mountain goat, and a cross-eyed ermine.  If accounts such as this one are to be believed, then the chimera likely manifests heads based on its place of birth (or hatching), or conception.  We might presume a desert-welling chimera could have the heads of a jackal, gila monster, and serval.  The premier newspaper out of Thistlemarch published a story several years back about a chimera with three turkey-heads, but we may attribute that strange mutation to the fact that the turkimera's belly contained an enchanted purple chicken, doubtless the cause of the beast's poultrification. 

Goat-Men

Once thought a threat of a bygone era, in recent years we have heard more new reports of goat-man activity in the east.  These barbaric, goat-headed, cloven-hoofed bipeds are considered dangerous servants of Chaos and Death.  Goat-folk are sometimes found in league with cruel and evil minotaurs, cannibal porcs (pig-men), and other nefarious humanoids which ought to be edible domesticated farm animals but which are most certainly not.  One of the holy texts of the Scorpion Church speaks of a time under the Peacock Throne when these species were slave-races, who rose up against their human masters and embraced the service of a dark god.  The pig-men think this deity to be pig-headed and call him Porcus; you can imagine the goats and minotaurs have similar biases toward their own kine.  At any rate, the hoof-cults of the sub-men believe their time for empire is nigh, and some cells have begun to act toward that end.  It is further rumored that advanced goat-men of particular psychic talent can speak to and command any creature bearing a goat-head (cf. chimerae, above).  The enduring variety of the hoof-cults suggests that somewhere, right now, there are evil sheep-men sharpening weapons and contemplating our extinction.

Ghouts (Horned Ghouls)

No less a respected personage than the explorer-wizard Unctuous Rambunctious tells us one further secret of the death-cults of the sub-men: the existence of a class of ghouls who serve the Hoofed God, and have the heads and/or horns of goats.  The aforementioned magic-user tangled with a pack of these "ghouts" last year in a barrow-mound near Saltvale whilst he was giving chase to a rapscallion who owed the wizard money and thought a barrow might be a safe place to hide.  More the fool, he, for he was torn apart by ghouts, and now serves out his time as a legless ghoul chained to Rambunctious' tower wall.  Ghouts, we are told, may look like undead goat-folk, or more like the standard fanged ghoul, with tiny 'button' horns the only clue as to their allegiance.  Rambunctious has vowed to continue researching the topic, but is currently of the opinion that the ghouts are neither ghouls gone goat nor goats gone ghoul, instead being something in-between, existing in the middle of the goat-ghoul continuum.  The wizard has exchanged several letters with another sorcerer in Dawn Valley who claims to be an expert on thouls, but the two have not yet had the chance to confer in person.

Wild goats of the mountains have been known to deliberately sharpen their horns against rocks, making them in to wicked scythes.  Wild goats also like angry music.

Full credit to Chris (player of Go-Boom) for coining the word 'sarcophagoat'.

Critter Gitters: Housekeeping

CHARACTERS

Pips Mulligan, halfling gunslinger

Umber-Hulk Hogan, beetle-man wrestler

Go-Boom, turtle tinkerer

Josshua, lizard wizard 

Pips, Hulk, Go-Boom, and Josshua, after working together to build/install the wrestling ring Hulk wanted in their new subterranean digs, realize there are some loose ends down there.  It's Go-Boom and Josshua's first time in the chambers beneath the tower, and they are very quickly appalled at the fact that the Gitters left the place insecure.

First, the quartet investigates the rat tunnels, encountering some giant ("Baltimore-sized") rats which are quickly dispatched.  The tunnels seem to go on a long way, it's quite a maze and probably a significant nest, so rather than try to fit further into rapidly-shrinking rat tunnels, Josshua uses magic to collapse the tunnels.  The group spends a day cleaning up some of the major rooms to prep them for regular habitation.  There's a lot of talk about using the immense room as a wrestling arena (with an audience), and the adjacent room as a bar.  Go-Boom suggests pushing together all the sarcophagi to use as a fashionable bartop.  Note that the Gitters are wary about opening the sarcophagi, and have yet to do so.  The last time I used this module, that group was afraid to open them as well.  What gives, modern player?

Next they investigate the underground lake.  I'm using The Ruined Tower of Zenopus here, but rather than have the edge of the map poke out into a sea cave, since we're definitely inland it is instead a large cavern with an subterranean lake, leading to a system of underground rivers.  Plenty of opportunity for spelunking, and they have the map in Lord Halitosis' spellbook to intrigue them...

They lack a boat, so rather than getting a boat before investigating, Josshua uses shape water to make an ice bridge so they can walk out a good ways into the dark lake and see what's what.  Doing so, they learn of the underground river, then return to the beach.  A mystery for another time, perhaps, but they aren't 100% certain where they are on the map as a starting point.  The original Critter Gitters have forgotten that they were told the old tower was the 'Tower of Zenopus'...

They resolve to ask the enchanted Brazen Head in the dungeon, and the Head confirms that this, indeed, is what remains of the Tower of Zenopus.  So now they know generally where they are on the map, and they resolve to get a boat in time, but they start to get worried about that 'Citadel of the Ghouls' entry so close to their current position.

It dawns on them that on the original sortie into the dungeon, they did engage some ghouls in one room, and heading over there they are reminded of the door that led to an earthen tunnel (which they had noped out of previously).  Probable ghouls?  They gird their loins and head in, and almost immediately they are hit with the scent of rotting meat.

The tunnel descends and they find themselves in a new part of the complex (I scrambled to grab a Dyson Logos map!), where they can hear ritual chanting up ahead.  Comprehend languages tells them the chant has something to do with 'rising' and 'conquest' - always good to know. The prospect of a dozen voices did not frighten them, but they did jaunt down a side passage first, encountering a lone ghoul who was wearing some mismatched armor and carrying weapons.  He was easily dealt with but they knew now these were no ordinary ghouls, perhaps.  

In an instant they can hear the chanting has stopped, and realize that the reports from Pips' pistols has alerted the complex to their presence.  The Gitters move to the next room, trying to throw a magic earthen barricade behind them.  In a moment, they have a pack of ghouls charging at them from around one tunnel-corner, and another group trying to claw through their earthworks behind them.

Comment: ghouls in 5e are either really scary (ie you have a low-level, crap-AC party) or not scary at all (you have a low-to-mid-level, high-AC party).  We have the latter.  Go-Boom and Hulk stand shoulder-to-shoulder as a bulwark against the eight ghouls at the south end, take almost no damage, and supported by Josshua's magic, destroy those ghouls.  The remaining ghouls at the north end retreat, scurrying into the darkness. At the south door, something heavy is dragged to block it from the other side as the ghouls pull back, but Go-Boom isn't having it - he uses his considerable strength to force that door open, and three more ghouls are destroyed as the combat continues.

A voice rasps out from the shadows, offering a chest (really a foot locker) the ghouls have left over by the stairs in exchange for the interlopers' departure.  The Critter Gitters aren't buying it, and resolve to push onward into the Citadel of the Ghouls...meanwhile the voice that was leading the ritual chant previously maneuvers around to a different room to fetch the [REDACTED] for the coming violence...

Trident Bay: Glittering In A Starless Sea

 Carrying the Eye of the Leviathan with them, the Company of the Black Pearl (now joined by ranger Little Crow) set out into the wilderness to seek fortune and glory.  I'd thought the campaign might have a more maritime bent, but these cats were determined to avoid even the beach.

The four companions find their way to a ruined keep, and quickly deduce that it is held by some of the rapacious goat-men that have been sighted in the region.  Welcome to Sailors on the Starless Sea, adventurers...   They scout the grounds, do the usual, and eventually end up in the subterranean chambers beneath the keep, where the chaotic goat-men are attempting - nay, succeeding - in raising a lesser daemon-type chaos champion-thing.  There's even a convenient ziggurat for a climactic battle, which the Company wins.  I think Sailors is well-enough known that I don't need to go into it too much - it's a fine adventure (a bit linear once you hit the underground, but so be it).

Of note, since I was running the adventure modified for these 5e characters - now 3rd level or something - there were some consequences of my choices in play.  First, for this run I kept the goat-folk's original hp, despite the PCs not being zero or first level.  I call this the "paper people" implementation, and it definitely lets PCs mow through minion-like baddies when it's appropriate.  I also use this gimmick pretty extensively in the duet campaign I run for my son.  On top of this, you have 5e spellcasters in the party, so by the time we were doing the ziggurat encounter, one of the casters - I presume Viktor - threw an enlarge on Big Derek so he could step easily up the step-pyramid and powerfully bat goatboys into the water.  Pretty neat scene that I wouldn't have predicted - and that's why we play, right?

At the end of that session, the Company is in a dragon-headed boat being pushed out into a subterranean lake - the eponymous sea.  I had them went their way through various tunnels on an underground river until they could sail no more in a ship of that size.  The PCs were beached, with two obvious choices (besides try to head back, of course): on the left, a boarded-up tunnel with warning signs about danger and certain death.  On the right, what looked to be the remains of the entrance to a probably-dwarven mining facility, long-abandoned.  Electing to explore the abandoned mining facility, the Company of the Black Pearl walked into Glitterdoom, albeit on a lower level instead of at the surface, and they proceed to explore that location sort-of backward.

Glitterdoom is a Goodman Games 5e adventure by Michael Curtis that involves ghost-dwarves and greed.  It's straightforward in setup but there are definitely options to explore in playing it.  It's the only one of the Goodman 5e modules I've run, so I can't much compare it to the others, but I think it's a good 5e adventure overall.

By they time they escape the haunted mine, they're a little roughed up and have actually missed the Medium Bad in the adventure...although they do come back later.  And they return to that keep again later, as well, since they deliberately skipped the Scary Devil Church upon the surface.  This is an aspect of the player-driven campaign that perhaps we don't see much in a forced narrative game - the players have the ability to return to previously-explored places at any time.  And when the Company of the Black Pearl returns to the keep, they make it their own... but that's a tale for another time.

Can I take a moment to whine about the Goodman 5e adventure covers?  I hate them.  It's not a technical thing, it's the fact that someone chose to make them all NPC (or PC) headshots instead of action shots.  The first handful of covers don't necessarily have much to do with the adventure within, so I was definitely convinced that Goodman was using up headshot paintings to which he already had the rights.  Later covers are obviously painted based on the content of the module, but they're still...headshots.  I just don't get it.  Why doesn't Glitterdoom have a badass ghost dwarf on the cover?