Hamster, Savage Giant                               CR 5/MR 2
XP 800
N Large animal (mythic)
Init +1; Senses low-light vision; Perception +9
–———–
AC 17, touch 10, flat-footed 16 (+1 Dex, +7 natural, -1 size)
hp 46 (4d8+28)
Fort +7, Ref +5, Will +2
Resist acid 5, cold 5, electricity 5, fire 5; Immune disease
–———–
Speed 20 ft., burrow 10 ft.
Melee bite +7 (1d8+7 plus bleed 1 plus grab)
Space 10 ft.; Reach 5 ft.
Special Attacks cheek pouch
–———–
Str 21, Dex 13, Con 16, Int 1, Wis 12, Cha 6
Base Atk +3; CMB +8 (+12 grapple); CMD 19 (23 vs. trip)
Feats Endurance, Mythic Paragon^M, Skill Focus (Perception)
Skills Climb +10, Perception +9
SQ always a chance, to the death
–———–
Always a Chance (Ex) Whenever the savage giant hamster makes an attack roll that results in a natural 1 on the die, the attack is not automatically a miss.
Cheek Pouch (Ex) A giant hamster can try to stuff a grabbed opponent of two sizes smaller than itself into its cheek pouch by making a successful grapple check. A creature stuffed into the giant hamster’s cheek pouch takes no damage, and can escape by making a successful DC 16 Strength check or can cut its way out by using a light slashing or piercing weapon to deal 10 points of damage to the cheek (AC 11). Once the creature exits, muscular action closes the hole; another trapped opponent must cut its own way out.
A Large hamster’s cheek can hold 1 Small, 2 Tiny, or 8 Diminutive or smaller opponents. The check DC is Strength-based.
To the Death (Ex) When below 0 hit points, the savage giant hamster does not fall unconscious or take damage from acting normally. It does not die until its negative hit points are equal to or greater than three times its Constitution score.

I took some liberties tinkering with the rules. For instance, the savage template would give our adorable little ball of epic violence the vicious assault special attack, which it would not actually benefit from. I substituted the to the death special quality instead. Also, the Mythic Paragon feat doesn’t benefit it in any way either, but it’s the only mythic feat the damn thing meets the prerequisites for. Oh well.

Also, someone floated the idea that I’d be kidnapped and bodily transported to the next installment of the Ysaria larp saga. I decided that it was a prudent idea to pre-empt that plan and sign up for a larp on my own accord. Also, the bastards at Alter Ego set me up a trap. Back when they were planning the larp conference Solmukohta, someone else came up with the idea of a sitsit larp. As is well known, I have a hard time turning down a sitsit invitation, and I foolishly made the promise that if they do that, I shall willingly relinquish my larp virginity. Alcohol was involved.

Thus, last Friday, I played my first larp, the 300th Anniversary of the Pan-Ugric Nation. What follows is an exacting and explicit description of it all.

Key Concepts

Before I continue, I should probably explain some key concepts about the larp’s setting that are peculiar to the Finnish student tradition, such as sitsit and nations. To foreigners, the concepts will probably be… foreign, and to be honest, the layers of tradition, history and inside jokes are laid so thick that they’re generally impenetrable to anyone not immersed in the environment. Those readers familiar with the culture may feel free to skip down to the next header.

First of all, sitsit, or “sittning” as Wikipedia knows it, is an academic dinner party in the Finnish and Swedish tradition. A typical sitsit includes a three-course meal, a great deal of singing and often a lot of drinking. The level of formality varies, and the framework is very flexible and allows for a lot of interesting variation. The most formal ones tend to be the anniversary parties of university student unions and nations, which would typically have a white tie dress code, an invited guest speaker and very rigid take on rules. There are rules for everything, such as how to toast after a song, what songs you are allowed to sing at which parts of the proceedings, under what circumstances is it acceptable to leave the table and so forth. Those are pretty rare, though, and even I’ve never been to one. Most sitsit are rather less strict and I’ve never been invited anyplace with a dress code above formal. Usually, you can get by with a dark suit (or the female equivalent), or in the case of theme sitsit, whatever the theme requires.

Personally, I have an unhealthy affection for sitsit and by a quick count have 37 of them under my belt, two as a master of ceremonies and a few where I’ve given speeches. Last year, I edited a songbook. The biggest sitsit I’ve been to had 207 guests, including Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Finland, Matthew Lodge, and the smallest had just six people. I’ve been to sitsit wearing a suit, a tuxedo, a tailcoat, elf ears, a kilt, a monk’s robe, a Czechoslovakian PVC overcoat and an East German gas mask, and my red student overalls. One, a couple of years ago, was on a bus that went around Pirkanmaa (less fun than it sounds – the food was bad, a bus has no acoustics for this kind of thing and one of the MCs laboured under the mistaken impression that racism is funny), and another was on a boat. Thus, I can speak with some authority when I state that Alter Ego, the roleplaying club of Helsinki University, are among the masters of the craft. I could go on at length about the topic and differences in traditions, but this is not a blog about my drinking habits, and so I’ll just summarize: at sitsit, you sit at a table, usually in formalwear. There will be food, and people will sing a lot. During a song, you are not allowed to eat, and it is a generally held truth that if you get to eat your main course while it’s still warm, it’s a bad sitsit. After a song, you toast the people sitting adjacent to you. Unless you ordered the nonalcoholic option, you will usually be rather tipsy towards the end. The songs are generally easy drinking songs that sound decent even when sung by a bunch of people who aren’t too good at it and may also be pretty sloshed. A student, it is said, sings rather than well.

The other key concept is the nations. They are a type of student organization peculiar to Finland and Sweden, and the oldest students’ clubs in the country. The nations have a specific legal status outlined in the university law, and to my understanding, you can’t found a new nation. Of course, there would not be much point to doing so, since the nations are organized according to the old provinces of Finland. You have the Uusimaa Nation (actually two of them, the other being Swedish-language). The idea was that a student would join the nation of his home region. The oldest of them track their history to the mid-17th century, and most of them have quite a bit of property.

Actually, if you count them as belonging to the student unions, the Helsinki University Student Union is one of the wealthiest in the world with assets measured in hundreds of millions of euros, because of a quirk of city planning. Way back when they were building Helsinki and had established the university there, the students were given some worthless land that was basically a marsh somewhere at the edge of town. Fast-forward a couple of centuries and the economic and social centre of the city tiptoed westward, resulting in the current situation where the central point of Helsinki is considered to be at the doorstep of the Old Student House and the students own something like half of central Helsinki. For instance, there’s a block next door to the Parliament that belongs to the Ostrobothnian Nation.

So, basically, the nations are something of a big deal. The Pan-Ugric Nation, upon which our tale focuses, is of course completely fictional. We now conclude our brief introduction to Finnish student tradition and get on with the game.

Occasionally, the tradition requires you to stand on your chair. © Tuomas Puikkonen

Who Am I?

My character, mailed to me the week before the game, was the first-year chemistry student Jaakko Nevalainen. He was a bit of a thief, which had resulted in some unfortunate tension at his apartment, where his roommate Sauli was angry because someone had nicked his milk from the fridge and some records. This tension motivated Jaakko to get a new apartment and see if perhaps the apartment liaison of the nation could do something for him. Another thing he had recently stolen was a folder containing details of some rather shady financial transactions between the nation’s curator Aleksi Stjernvall (chairman, basically) and Laura Välske, a representative in the student union’s general assembly. Other characters mostly viewed him as a promising new recruit for… various things. Also, he’d showed up at the party well ahead of time and noticed this weird bag in the foyer.  He’d checked it out and found some old bones. However, he heard voices approaching and chucked it into some random box he spotted so he could investigate things later, but when he returned, the box was gone.

Also present were his contacts: his roommates Daniel and Sauli, and a friend of his in the nation, the theology student Aapeli Ullakko. Due to late registration, absent was Joel, a drug-dealing musician who’d already graduated and was my character’s second cousin. I did not find this out until after the game and was rather perturbed by his insistence in offering me the nose candy in the gents’.

The first-year student attending his first big academic dinner party pretty much mirrored the game as my first larping experience. Another player described the character writing process as (freely translating) “piss-take writing”, where characters had an aspect or two caricaturing the players they were tailored for. In good humour, I might note. I had trouble keeping a straight face when I realized that a player active in the politics of the Left Alliance was playing a right-wing nationalist character. In the registration form, we also got to pick some preferences for what kind of plots we would prefer to have. I no longer recall accurately the sliding scales they had, but I think “intrigue” was one and “relationship drama” another. I also don’t rightly remember where I placed my sliders, but I think I opted for moderation. First larp and everything, didn’t want to jump in the deep end and find I can’t swim. After all is said and done, I’m not that good a roleplayer. I was nervous as all hell despite knowing nearly all of the other players and considering most of them good friends, but I figure a first-year student at his first big formal dinner would also be nervous. Especially when he found out who he’d be sitting with.

Seating order is another significant thing at sitsit, since they’re the people you’ll be spending the next four, five or even six hours with. Tradition states that one should be flanked and opposed at the table by people of the opposite sex, one of whom will be your avec (or designated avec if you didn’t bring your own). In practice, you almost never have an equal mix of sexes so you do the best you can. I had my roommate Daniel at my left. To my right, Professor of Mathematics, Ville Kovanen (oh dear), and opposite Kaarlo Susimetsä, the nation’s photographer, incidentally played by Tuomas Puikkonen, who graciously gave permission to use his work to show in addition to telling here. Also, made me look good in a tailcoat. There were also the aforementioned Laura Välske and the apartment liaison, Mirjami Kiuru, in close proximity. Plot-significant characters for me.

Jönssi’s toast. On the left, Jaakko Nevalainen and on the right, Daniel Haanperä. © Tuomas Puikkonen

What Happened?

The larp began with a short cocktail event before moving on to the dinner party part. This was good for socializing and mingling and meeting people, and included the welcoming toasts (It should be noted that in the interests of maintaining a proper 360° illusion, alcohol in the game was represented with alcohol. If the game sucked for you, you could always just get hammered.), as well as the unveiling of a new painting commissioned to honour this, the 300th anniversary of the Pan-Ugric Nation. It was very modern and might be described as a less than aesthetically pleasing experience, which was good for giving people something to talk about as they eased into character.

As a side note, the artist was named as Aldous Kohl, who was a vampire prince in another Alter Ego larp a couple of years ago.

Sauli was on my case from the beginning, suspecting me of nicking his records. I owned up to throwing away the milk, claiming it’d smelled funny and as a chemist, I’d know when organic matter has gone off. He went off to gather witnesses against me and apparently found some, but because of reasons I never found out more about them.

Another major plot point in the larp’s background was a legal row between the Pan-Ugric Nation and the Ural Nation, who’d together built a brand new building for the two of them that now lay unused because they could not agree on who had the rights to which parts of it. There were three representatives from the Ural Nation, including their curator, Henrik Mäyränen, at the party. They brought a gift. In a box. You can see where this is going. Our curator, of course, went to accept it, leading to pretty much the funniest moment in the game.

Curator Mäyränen first gave his speech about how this gorgeous vase would look quite magnificent in the lesser hall of mirrors at the new student house. Curator Stjernvall: “Oh, it’s fragile?”

How to make a lasting impression on your guests. Not to mention the floor. © Tuomas Puikkonen

The bones, incidentally, were quickly gathered up from the wreckage by Aapeli, at the command of Professor Kovanen. Interesting, that.

Soon after, Mr Susimetsä and Miss Välske recruited me to portray myself as an ardent fan of Curator Mäyränen and obtain his autograph on this blank piece of paper. Despite being transparent as all hell, it pretty much succeeded, except that the original paper got torn and stepped on and possibly eaten, and I had to settle for something scrawled on notebook paper, complete with a dedication “To Jaakko”. Not quite as useful for forging legal documents, but Susimetsä and Välske seemed happy enough with it.

Those bones, then, were the bones of Jönssi, the war hero dog mascot of the Pan-Ugric Nation, who held an important place in the Nation’s tradition. Toasts were drunk in his memory. Or her, as the hardline feminist culture admin of the Nation pointed out. The bones had also some mystic significance, as I found out after the main course, when Aapeli, Professor Kovanen, and the movie club’s chairman Vladimir Tikkanen requested that I join them in the smoking room. There, the Professor conducted some sort of mystic ritual and suddenly I realized I’d had the genre all wrong. I’d thought it was college comedy, while in fact we were operating in urban fantasy.

Soon after the ritual, a GM approached me and told me that from that point on, I was Ville Kovanen, Professor of Mathematics, and would be offended when people treated me as a first-year student. In a not completely unrelated bit of trivia, said GM’s own character in the game was also his Hunter: the Vigil character from a campaign set in the University of Helsinki, a connection I only made afterwards. Their quote page is hilarious.

Hijinks ensued and I caused great confusion with the other professors present. I think most believed I had partaken of the devil’s dandruff that my second cousin Joel was semi-secretly distributing in the men’s room. Professor Kovanen, the real McCoy, of course knew what had happened and ran some interference and damage control while I fought to keep a poker face of righteous indignation. For one thing, at this point Sauli came to confront me with his witnesses, unaware that Jaakko Nevalainen was no longer on the premises, and the Prof led him away and quietly paid him off. Aapeli, it later turned out, had also become a Kovanen clone, but in a more subtle fashion. Vladimir had been included in the ritual but had either made his save or he was a vampire and immune to such mortal magics. If there’s ever a sequel (which was discussed and not dismissed out of hand), there will probably be several Professors Kovanen among the characters.

Among the faux pas committed were taking the Professor’s seat and rising up to drink the toast of those who started their university career in 1986, as well as barging into a position unbecoming of my lowly station in the group shot at the end. The great thing about larping the sitsit was that you could break the etiquette and decorum in ways that would never fly at a normal sitsit.

There were, of course, also drinks thrown around, Curator Stjernvall receiving one from his fiancée. There were speeches, including one particularly impassioned and fiercely patriotic one extolling the virtues of Jönssi, by the Nation’s host, Teijo Tulervo, that caused in me a paralyzing uncertainty of whether I was supposed to take it seriously or laugh at its brilliant, full-throated absurdity. There were break-ups, and the knighting of the new Knights of the Karelian Pine.

Curator Stjernvall and another Kodak moment. © Tuomas Puikkonen

At the end, there was a group photo and it was over.

What I Took Away From All This

No, not that way. My character was the kleptomaniac, not me. Was being the operative word, since I think he sorta died.

To answer the obvious questions: yeah, I had fun. Yeah, I’m willing to do this again.

What I could’ve done better: I should’ve pursued that shady dealings plotline more aggressively and right from the start. I figure it would’ve been pretty juicy if I’d managed to get it activated. I also should’ve realized I might need the folder and acquired a suitable prop for myself. Part of my timidity with it was inexperience, part an attempt to gather more info about the situation, and part my inability to figure out how I should really approach it. Then, poof, I was Professor Kovanen and that plotline was gone. The Professor transition sort of terminated all my plots that relied on me being proactive in advancing them. With the others, such as Sauli’s accusations, it intersected and went in weird directions, which at least created content.

Another thing I need to work on is my poker face. While the alcohol did have some effect, I probably grinned far too much, especially when I should have been offended and indignant. Deeply in character I was not.

What I think I did well: when I became Professor Kovanen, I went with it and damn the decorum. There’s no need to worry about consequences beyond the immediate when you’re playing a one-shot, which I find liberating. Also, a game of this type contrasts strongly with my usual fare of Pathfinder Society. There, you essentially play to win, while here we played to have fun, keeping in mind that even losing can have entertainment value. It’s the kind of game that I should play more often. There’s also the fact that there wasn’t much in the way of game mechanics to get in the way, which was refreshing.

It seems I’m a larper now, then. Huh.

On a more general level, I think that the university is an underutilized game setting. I know there’s Alma Mater, and GURPS: IOU and that one playset for Fiasco, but there could be more, and good luck trying to find that first one. In your average a bit older university, you have a load of really ancient tradition that most people no longer understand but is adhered to because of TRADITION, DAMMIT! This intersects with a student body of young, modern people who form their own cliques and social groupings and clubs with their own in-jokes and weirdo traditions. Half the faculty in any given university seems deranged and the other half is. There are real, honest-to-goodness secret societies. In German universities, they still practice the art of academic fencing, where the goal is to get spiffy scars. In Oxford and Cambridge, the traditions are so arcane and inscrutable that they could pass for magical rituals. The politics of both the faculty and the students council can be amazingly backstabby and, of course, they are good breeding ground for political radicalism (my university spent most of the 1960s and 70s being full of Communists). Especially in smaller cities, there’s tension between the university, populated mostly by young people from out of town, and the locals. In Tampere, there’s still a sizable population that thinks it’s still a factory town. It’s a grievously underutilized setting.

One big, happy family. Note the portraits of former curators in the background. © Tuomas Puikkonen

Oh dear. Now they’re trying to cajole me into some weird game in Latvia, of all places.

This is a laudable deed. The old editions are basically abandonware at this point and with a language area as small as Swedish there’s not much to be gained even by PDF sales. This kind of accessibility makes things easier for us ludologists, chroniclers and historians of games, collectors and geeks.

For the record, my have some Swedish, but the most that can be said about it is that it’s there. It’s much the same thing as with my French, really. By the way, hi there Reddit. With time, effort and a dictionary, I can make sense of things.

I also own one Drakar och demoner rulebook in hardcover (sixth edition, I believe), but have never gone to the bother of trying to decipher it. Gorgeous book, though.

Thank you, Riotminds.

Quag Keep is a book of many mysteries. The chief of them, to my mind, is the question of how did Andre Norton turn out something so deeply disappointing. At the time of its publication in 1978, she’d been writing professionally for over

forty years. The World Science Fiction Society had awarded her the Gandalf Grand Master a year previously, the SFWA would name her Grand Master five years in the future. She’d been already nominated twice for the Hugo. These are not honours lightly bestowed and put her amongst names like Tolkien, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Moorcock, Le Guin, Leiber, and a dozen other undisputed masters of the craft. To pick up something from an author of such singular credentials and receive this was somewhat jarring.

The original cover

I think it just goes to show that every author had their off days. Moorcock has his Jerry Cornelius tales, Heinlein his Lazarus Longs. Norton, apparently, has this.

The story of Quag Keep is… I’m not actually sure there’s a story. There’s a plot, certainly, but there’s no real tension. The main characters are seven adventurers in the world of Greyhawk, who are also player characters in a role-playing game, who get somehow melded with their players. The players’ memories are subsumed for more or less the entire time, so this is just a device to get them to meet in a tavern and go upon the most railroaded adventure in the history of gaming.

They also each have been given unremovable bracers with sets of dice on them that rule their fate. Additionally, a wizard places a geas upon them to go and solve this thing lest the world be beset by some cataclysm or other.

The prose starts out purple and overwrought, but somehow becomes simpler and easier to read towards the end, possibly as the author got as fed up with the tale as I did. At the start, we get lines like this:

“His pale face above the high-standing collar of his cloak marked him as one who dwelt much indoors by reason of necessity or choice. And, though his features were human enough in their cast, still Milo, seeing their impassivity, the thinness of his bloodless lips, the sharp-beak curve of his nose, hesitated to claim him as a brother man.”

As we near the end, run-on sentences are still the order of the day, but they are more straightforward:

This was no axe-swinging berserker but the were-boar, near as tall as the orc at the massive shoulder, grunting and squealing in a rage that only the death of an enemy might assuage. Milo leaped quickly to one side, lest the animal in battle madness turn on him also, as had been known to happen when friend and foe were pinned in narrow compass.

Likewise, dialogue fluctuates between such florid phrasing and the occasional out-of-place modern idiom.

The characterization is also weak, and especially the focal character, the swordsman Milo Jagon, is boring and his dominant, pretty much only, character trait seems to be insecurity. The story keeps a distance from its characters and they end up having little in the way of personality. This only really works in the case of Gulth, the lizardman, who is inscrutable and difficult for mortals to understand. This works less well for, say, the elf Ingrge, though once you’ve named a character Ingrge, there’s not much you can do to save him.

The lizardman character has some other problems in his depiction. The novel makes a big point of his cold-bloodedness and he nearly dies of the cold in the mountains. He is saved by wrapping him in blankets. Ectothermy does not work that way. It’s the bloody definition of the concept. A blanket, which basically insulates heat, is good for a warm-blooded creature like a human, whose body generates warmth, but will do jack for a reptile who relies nearly entirely on outside heat sources.

The world is… well, sort of there. Though the book is ostensibly based on the World of Greyhawk, this only holds for some of the nomenclature. There’s the free city of Greyhawk, but the world through which our intrepid heroes traverses is all but unrecognizable to one familiar with the more recent and fleshed-out depictions of the setting. According to a Q&A forum thread with Gary Gygax, Andre Norton made most of it up herself, and it cannot be taken as a representation of some sort of proto-Greyhawk.

This brings us to the inclusion of game elements. The novels of Margaret Weis or R.A. Salvatore are often criticized for the reader “being able to hear the dice roll”, for wearing their game system origins on their sleeves. Well, Dragonlance ain’t got nothing on Quag Keep, where the dice really do roll. The characters also seem aware of rules concepts. The party’s cleric is described as a cleric of “the third rank”, and Milo Jagon is explicitly and repeatedly titled “a swordsman”, which was the level title for a 3rd-level fighter. Therefore, we may determine that the party is about third-level. This doesn’t really jive with the stuff that they accomplish, but I’ll let that slide since there is a limit to how much I am willing to

The reprint

complain about the depiction of game rules in a work of fiction. But if you’re going to use them, get them right, dammit!

Quag Keep is also remarkably didactic in its depiction of the alignment system. We are told how all swordsmen cleave to the side of Law and how orcs are servants of Chaos. On the face of it, it looks like the Moorcockian Law–Chaos thing, but it’s really just good and evil by different names. The narration is remarkably contemptuous of neutrals, for some reason. Seriously, The Dark Elf Trilogy had more subtlety in its treatment of alignment.

So, all in all, we have a third-rate fantasy novel with some remarkably stilted prose. Or do we?

As a gamer, I can tease out another reading. It does not really make the book any better, but hear me out. Read as a critique of a bad gaming session, the book becomes quite interesting (and we also run into the problem of deliberately bad literature, which I’ve tackled in the past). The geas and the cursed dice are a depiction of heavy-handed railroading. Much like the player characters in such a campaign, the adventurers of Quag Keep have no agency and little control over their fates. The partial and controllable nature of the dice in their cursed bracers is a metaphor of this lack of freedom, and the resolution of the story, where they have defeated the Game Master and Milo rolls the GM’s dice symbolizes how they have wrested narrative control of the game from their Viking hat GM.

The characters have no personality because they are poorly roleplayed and are more or less extensions of their teenage players’ developing personalities. Milo is insecure because he’s played by a teenage guy with a crush on the only girl in the group. The game terminology leaks into the story because the players keep talking rules during the game and the Law–Chaos conflict is brought front and centre because of its connection with a simplistic playstyle w

here all orcs are evil and therefore free game and a character’s alignment is all the nuance their moral outlook requires. The modern idioms in the dialogue are because the players don’t quite handle the elevated style they’re going for in their in-character interaction.

So, Quag Keep is not completely irredeemable and does indeed display the mastery that Andre Norton is known for.

I just think it would’ve worked way better as a short story.

The website doesn’t look like much, but in a back corner of the store, there was a treasure trove of old gaming material. I use the past tense because I bought most of it. My timing could not have been more perfect. The shopkeeper told me he had just that very morning bought in a pile of his own old gaming stuff for sale, in order to clear some shelf space. There was Teenagers from Outer Space. There was Dream Park. There were old Cyberpunk 2020 supplements. Some of them were in German. Additionally, and most interestingly, there were these 1980s French RPG boxed sets. Especially this one called Laborinthus, made in Switzerland, has production values to die for. I picked it up for 20 francs and later, after checking the prices online, concluded the price essentially amounts to theft on my part. He even threw in a Pendragon novel, Kinsmen of the Grail by Dorothy James Roberts (itself an interesting work in the field of gaming tie-in fiction, but more on that later).

It is a beautiful piece of work. Now, my French, much like my German, is enough for survival but not quite sufficient for deciphering a rulebook, at least not in any intelligent time frame. In all likelihood, I will never play this game and as far as I can tell, it’s not the most elegant of designs. However, as an artifact, the box makes me weep. They don’t make stuff like this anymore.

But don’t just take my word for it. Since I don’t grok French, there wouldn’t be a lot of purpose in me telling you about it, so I figured what I’d do is show you. I present to thee Laborinthus, released in 1988 by Éditions ECG.

The box itself.

Here’s the box. Big, black and pretty. It reads “Laborinthus – Engins, Créatures & Gibier – jeu de rôles”, which translates as “Laborinthus – Gear, Creatures and Game – role-playing game”. I’m not entirely certain how “engins” should be translated in this context, since it can mean more or less any kind of equipment but also machines and is also the specific legal term for hunting equipment. “Gibier” translates as “game” as in the animals you hunt, while “jeu” is “game” as in the thing you play.

Lift the lid and…

Inside, there are books! This first one actually isn’t a book, it’s a folder with loose papers inside. Like it says on the top, “Scénarium pour Laborinthus”, it’s a scenario. For Laborinthus. The title “Marrouques ou Le Roi Rospeux” translates as “Marrouques, or King Rospeux”, as far as I can understand. I get the sense that “Rospeux” is more than just a proper noun, since the term is not explained anywhere. I just can’t translate it, my dictionaries are little help and the French Wikipedia isn’t much help, either. It is the first volume of a tetralogy, which means there are three more of these, somewhere out there in the world…

There’s more!

The next item after the scenario is the rulebook, all 36 pages of it. There’s also an intimidating piece of folded cardboard in there that brings back bad memories from trying to learn Excel. Incidentally, the rulebook is numbered. I neglected to photograph it, but apparently a thousand copies of the game were made and they are individually numbered. The first 100 are special in various ways. Mine is #281.

This looks… intimidating.

When you unfold that cardboard, you get… this. “Tables de la Parque”. I think it means “Tables of Fate”, which seems to amount to a combat chart of some description. You can see the game operates on six-sided dice alone.

On the left, you can see a pad of character sheets. On top, there’s the level, then name, then “filiation”, which I think means ancestry or parentage or something to that effect. The example character in the rulebook, Boisisias the Lame (Boisias dit le boiteux), is the son of the fairy Tabitha, for instance. This seems to be a big deal in the game, and the scenario seems to assume that the PCs are the the offspring of King Abraxas. The little boxes on either side of the sheet after that are “Puissance” and “Habileté”, or “Power” and “Skill”. “Sauvegarde” and “Armes” are “Armour” and “Weapons”, respectively. “Gibecière” I’m not entirely certain on, but seems to be for tracking the character’s food stores. “Engins” is their other equipment and “Bourse” is, of course, the purse. I didn’t quite get what the “Curriculum” is, but I think “actions d’Eclat” is a listing of deeds and accomplishments, which seems to be how this game handles tracking experience.

Oooh, pretty pictures!

Let’s open up “Marrouques”, then. The presentation of this adventure is interesting. Instead of a book, we get a booklet that gives the Game Master (or Maître du Jeu) an overview of the adventure’s background and the encounters, but the actual content of the encounters is presented in the photographs, all ten of them.

More pictures!

They’re apparently from the collections of the University of Lausanne.

The flipside

On the flipside of the pictures, there’s encounter information, maps, whatever you need to run the encounter. It’s certainly an interesting way to present an adventure module, and though I’ve seen modules with picture cards or appendices of illustrations before, I’ve never seen it done like this.

Page spread from the rulebook

Here’s what the rulebook looks like on the inside. The illustrator has a very distinctive style.

Uh… okay…

This is another chart. I think it’s for hunting. I don’t quite get what it is with this game and hunting, or if it’s just my lack of language skills.

I wonder what’s in these…

Beneath the papers and booklets lie these three slipcases. They’re titled Engins, Créatures and Gibier.

Créatures

And they contain these illustrated cards. I think collecting these cards, presumably by defeating the creatures therein, is a method of character advancement. “Porte-musc” means musk deer, by the way.

Créatures backsides

On the flipsides of the cards, we get explanatory text and what are presumably combat stats.

Gibier

Engins

Funky game. Very strange but cool, in that pre-internet 1980′s style. In the end, there’s not all that much text in the game and it seems designed to be run straight out of the box, so I could see myself actually taking the time to figure out and run it. It has a quirky visual style and I’d like to see how that method of presenting the scenario works in practice. I just can’t quite make out what the tone of the game is supposed to be. Is it straight-up, serious dark fantasy or low fantasy and does it have an ironic sensibility (the “egg of Cargue” or whatever that is seems to suggest that)?

If anyone knows either anything more about this game or alternatively enough French to decipher the text in the photos, please comment and share your wisdom.

I may also have demanded an apology for the travesty, but I understand if that’s not forthcoming. I was pretty mad at the time.

Now they’ve finally decided to rejoin the rest of us in the 21st century. The PDFs are back at OneBookShelf, and even people who’d originally bought them got their purchases returned to their downloads, which I thought was nice. They’re now available at D&D Classics, as subset of the same webstore that operates under the titles of DriveThruRPG and RPG Now. They’re not all there yet, but it isn’t a bad selection for a start. Also, if the free B1 In Search of the Unknown they’ve got up is any indication of the quality we may look forward to, it’ll be worth the wait.

It’s a professionally-done PDF. Clean scan, quality OCR, fully copypastable. The pagination matches up and the bookmarks are all there. The text comes with some unnecessary line breaks, but I can live with that. Commendable job, all around. I can’t really fault the pricing, either. As a nice touch, most of the product pages have a product history, which are written by Shannon Appelcline and Kevin Kulp.

Like said, the selection isn’t comprehensive yet and they lack stuff like all of Dragonlance, but what’s there is the good stuff. For instance, they have one of my favourite gaming products of all time, Uncaged: Faces of Sigil, which is how NPC accessories should be done. Unfortunately, their Deities & Demigods doesn’t appear to be the original, with Cthulhu and Melnibonéan mythos. Then there’s the historical reference series, which, like most things 2E that didn’t have to do with the ruleset, are awesome. There’s The Sunless Citadel, whence comes the only lovable kobold in the history of the game, Meepo; often imitated, never bettered. Craploads of 1st-edition and basic D&D adventures, too.

So, here’s me saying something nice about WotC for the first time since December 2007, when I first playtested Dungeons & Dragons 4E.

Incidentally, WotC also sells novels as ebooks on Amazon, nowadays.

Rock’n Loud at IndieGoGo

There’s a new Finnish RPG project on IndieGoGo. It’s called Rock’n Loud, and it’s about the life of a rock band, exploring themes like power chords, drug addiction, groupies and black leather. I don’t yet have a really good feel of the content, but pledged for the PDF copy just on the merit of it being Finnish, and music being an underexplored theme in roleplaying games (the only other RPGs about musicians that I can think up now are Umlaut, Tähti and the d20 minigame published in Polyhedron, “Hi-Jinx”).

There’s not much out about the game yet, but I am optimistic.

Me, D&D Novels, on LOKI

I just started an article series on LOKI about gaming tie-in fiction. It’s in Finnish, which may not be overly helpful for most of you, but if you want, I can recommend a good self-studying package. I foresee writing quite a few followups to it. Despite the picture, I am not condemning them all, but seeking the about 100 good books that according to Sturgeon’s Law should exist underneath the mound of crap.

In other news, I spent a few days in Zurich a couple of weeks ago and picked up some fascinating gaming products in strange and foreign tongues. There will be at least one photoessay forthcoming once I can wrangle the time to do something about it.

2012 was an interesting year to be a gamer, at least from my point of view. My personal list of most interesting things from last year:

Finnish Games Released in English

Not one but two Finnish role-playing games saw their release in English. The first one, translated by yours truly, was Burger Games’ Stalker. It combines an elegant diceless system with a setting packed with a remarkable amount of Soviet dystopianism, considering it’s set in present-day France. I’ve yet to see a negative review online and I’m not sure I’ve yet seen one that didn’t give it top score. Had I been asked to pick one Finnish RPG to see release in English, this would’ve been it, even before I got contracted to translate it.

The second one, which looked like vapourware for the longest time, is Valley of Eternity from Vagrant Workshop, a game about heroic penguins and mystical antipenguins fighting for survival in the harsh Antarctic, inspired by spaghetti westerns an Conan the Barbarian. It’s a weird game, but it takes itself seriously and manages to carry it off, keeping its themes of heroism and tragedy to the end. The rules are lightweight and pretty traditional. Here’s my review.

PhD in RPGs

It was also a fascinating year for those of us who pay attention to the academic side of things. The University of Tampere has been a hotbed for that this year. First of all, the Hypermedia Lab hosted the Role-Playing in Games seminar in the spring. I was fortunate to attend and though to my knowledge – and I’ll admit I haven’t been paying as close attention as I should – none of the papers presented have yet seen publication, some of them will eventually make it to the International Journal of Role-Playing.

Incidentally, its third issue was released just on New Year’s Eve, making it also 2012′s news. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to read it, but there’s one article by Karl Bergström, “Creativity Rules. How rules impact player creativity in three tabletop role-playing games” that focuses on D&D 3.5, Pathfinder RPG, FATE and World of Darkness, and looks very interesting.

The main event of the year, though, were the PhD defences of Markus Montola and J. Tuomas Harviainen in the autumn. Despite being highly theoretical and academic, they are surprisingly accessible to a layperson (Montola’s probably more than Harviainen’s), and I recommend taking a look.

D&D Next Announced

Well, that happened. I still haven’t had the opportunity to play it, but I’m not going to deny being mildly interested.

Promotion to Venture-Captain

This also happened. Last May, I got an e-mail from Mike Brock, the Pathfinder Society campaign coordinator, asking why am I not volunteering as a Venture-Captain already. My explanations were brushed aside and I was given a load of PDFs and four bright red polo shirts, and have been coordinating Pathfinder Society in Finland with my trusty Venture-Lieutenant Jussi Leinonen ever since. We had a “state of the nation” post up on Paizo.com last month, and play numbers are at an all-time high.

The campaign is now well into its fourth season, and developing in interesting ways. With the newest batch of scenarios, player actions will have an effect on the storyline, and there’s a promise of more on the way. Exciting times. The scenario quality has also taken a jump since the early days and I haven’t found a single stinker in the third or fourth seasons.

Crowdfunding Madness

Kickstarter and IndieGoGo look like they’ve changed the game for good on how RPGs can be published. Mike Pohjola’s Myrskyn sankarit, Jim Raggi’s enormous crowdfunding efforts, Hillfolk, Pathfinder Online, Reaper Miniatures’ Bones project, the list goes on. I’ve received a pile of fascinating games that I otherwise might not have found or might not even have been made through crowdfunding services. Incidentally, the second kickstarter for Pathfinder Online is still running. Regardless of one’s interest in the MMO (I’ve already given my soul to World of Warcraft), one should note that as a side offering, they’re producing The Emerald Spire, a megadungeon with levels written by such esteemed authors as Erik Mona, James Jacobs, Frank Mentzer and Mark Rein·Hagen. MMOs come and go, but books like that are seldom seen.

So, 2013

I find myself in the same position I did a year ago. There are few things in the pipeline that I’m really excited about at this time, but I expect that such things will roll around in due time. . The industry seems to be doing pretty well, and I know that cool stuff will pop up sooner or later. There is, of course, the Vihan lapset project from Myrrysmiehet, the promise of another doctoral dissertation on RPGs, a Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars RPG. Then, of course, there’s Ropecon 2013, the 20th of its name, which ought to be good. Awesome, in fact. There’s also a Tracon coming up in the late summer, where I’m serving as a RPG consultant.

So, let’s see what the year will bring.

The final two modules of the adventure path mostly take place in the subterranean city of Ilmurea, built by the serpentfolk millennia ago in the caverns of the Darklands. Saventh-Yhi was eventually built above Ilmurea, first as a staging point for an assault upon the serpentfolk and then as a monument to the heroine Saavith, who first defeated the serpent god Ydersius.

The Thousand Fangs Below

In the fifth part, the party has just reclaimed the crystals that allow them to activate the portal to enter Ilmurea in order to find and rescue the Pathfinder Eando Kline who can tell them about the serpentfolk’s plans to resurrect Ydersius. The city of Ilmurea is an interesting place. There are a number of power groups in there. The first the party will likely stumble upon are the morlocks, who are chaotic evil but revere Eando Kline as a god, because the Pathfinder Society doesn’t come equipped with the Prime Directive. With the help of Juliver or any Pathfinders of their own, the party can leverage this to get the little bastards on their side.

Then there are the urdefhan. They’re also evil, a species of Darklands-dwellers related to daemons. They also sort of occupy a similar niche as the githyanki do in brand-name D&D and wield very strange swords with two-pronged blades, like a humongous fork. They’re scheming bastards who want the party to take out a defector who’s lairing with the serpentfolk. This is a way to get them on your side.

There are also some drow hanging about and a neothelid that the party can run into if they’re too nosy. Mine was. Curiosity killed the half-elf oracle, who was replaced by an elf fighter disguised as a half-orc.

Finally, the main event of the adventure is a serpentfolk stronghold where Eando Kline is held captive. It is a good dungeon – presents a variety of foes while remaining logical, interacts with itself and reacts to the player characters if they figure out they’re under assault. Importantly, it’s also manageable in size and length. There are also a bunch of very challenging enemies whose tactics are effective, make sense, and take all sorts of contingencies into account. The BBEG of the adventure ended up being a torturer in the deep dungeons whom the party could not take out and opted instead to flee. First time for everything.

So yeah, I like The Thousand Fangs Below. It’s not perfect, since I think it’s sort of a middle part where the entire plot is about the party doing something in order to be able to do something else instead of doing is because it must be done. To put it in terms of philosophy, their primary goal has a primarily instrumental value instead of an intrinsic value, which I think is also one of the problems in Vaults of Madness. Same goes for Sins of the Saviours in Rise of the Runelords, really. While such an adventure can be fun, I’d prefer each part of an adventure path to be more meaningful than that.

Your mileage may vary, of course. If your players are familiar with the Eando Kline stories from the first three adventure paths, they may be keen indeed on rescuing him, but for my players (and me) he was just some guy out there. Personally, I remember having read them but cannot for the life of me remember what happened. At least he’s not as annoying as Drizzt was.

Sanctum of the Serpent God

It may actually be fruitful to think of The Thousand Fangs Below and Sanctum of the Serpent God as the two halves of the same adventure. They blend together pretty well, seeing as all the really interesting stuff you get to do in The Thousand Fangs Below actually has its payback in Sanctum of the Serpent God. Befriended the morlocks? Good, you now have underground infantry for your army. Get along well with the urdefhans? You’ll have their sword. It’s time to march against some serpentfolk.

In Sanctum of the Serpent God, the party finally has enough information to know what to do and the allies to make it happen. Out of the different factions and tribes still left in Saventh-Yhi and the different power groups that are not directly hostile to them down in Ilmurea, they shall build an army, and drop the spears of Saventh-Yhi through the very bedrock of Mwangi itself, deep into the Darklands, to penetrate Ilmurea’s ceiling and give their troops a way to invade en masse. While the army draws out most of the serpentfolk from their main fortress, the party does the commando thing, goes in through a side door and takes out the officer core, the high priest, and the god.

Well, it’s not quite that straightforward. There’s first a dungeon crawl where they take out a bunch of urdefhans and daemons to rescue a cyclops general who has spent the last ten millennia in stasis, because he’s the only one who knows what the damn spears are for. There’s also a series of assassination attempts on the party that I ended up skipping since I was rather tired of it all at this point and with the stable of one-trick ponies I has, half to three quarters of the party would have died.

The final dungeon is not quite as nifty as in The Thousand Fangs Below, but the endboss, avatar of Ydersius himself, makes up for it. He’s a legitimately tough solo adversary. Usually, a single enemy in Pathfinder RPG gets screwed over by action economy. Four heroes against one enemy means four times more actions directed against the bad guy than the bad guy can wield against the heroes. Simple math. Karzoug the Claimer, back in the 3.5 version of Rise of the Runelords, was victim to this and went down quickly. However, Ydersius is tough. He can withstand a lot of punishment, is immune to a whole lot of interesting tricks and has ways of removing heroes from the field for a few rounds at a time. The final combat was challenging and tense. At the end, the heroes triumphed and cut off the serpent god’s head, but it was close.

In Conclusion

Would I recommend the Serpent’s Skull adventure path? No. Not as the whole it is now, and not as written. Adventures two through four have a number of issues and little to make up for their flaws, The Thousand Fangs Below is uninteresting plot-wise, and at the end the whole campaign just feels like it is overstaying its welcome. Much like some its adventures feel more like ways to pass the time until the PCs are high-enough level to take on the next big adversary, the whole campaign feels like it mainly exists to be a traditional campaign between the nation-building sandbox of Kingmaker and the horror extravaganza that is Carrion Crown.

It is not, I must hasten to add, a total loss. Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv is one of the best published adventures I’ve ever seen. The campaign itself, with some heavy rewriting, can be made into a pretty great work. The potential is all there, it’s just the execution that’s wanting. Add a local Mwangi faction, perhaps as a replacement for the Free Captains (the devil are they doing inland, anyway?), squeeze The City of Seven Spears and Vaults of Madness together, add some heavier foreshadowing of Sanctum of the Serpent God into The Thousand Fangs Below to make it feel less like a keycard hunt, and you’re golden.

Of course, the amount of work involved in all that probably defeats the purpose of using a pre-written adventure path in the first place, but it is my hope that after reading this and the preceding installments, you should be equipped to decide on your own whether it’s worth it for you.

It’s probably already the most widely-read blog post I’ve ever written. So it goes.

Mind you, it’s also the best-illustrated, with Daren Bader’s awesome cover for Irrisen – Land of Eternal Winter.

Yeah, Finland at winter. Captures it perfectly.

The next two scenarios of the adventure path take place in Saventh-Yhi, as the party first explores and tames the city in The City of the Seven Spears and then roots out its secrets with a purpose in Vaults of Madness.

Before I delve into the details of these works, I should note a few things that I neglected to mention in the previous post. As with other adventure paths, there is a wealth of third-party and fan-created content created to support the campaign. One that I made much use of was the line of paper miniatures. I love the work done on the Serpent’s Skull line, which includes a miniature set for each of the adventure modules and one more for the compiled bestiaries of the series. The art has character, and I especially like the vivid use of colour. Excellent work, there.

Another thing I’d like to point out is Wayfinder #4, a compilation of fan-created game articles and fiction. The fourth issue’s theme was the Mwangi, making it useful for GMs running Serpent’s Skull or Skull & Shackles. I must confess that I did not actually utilize any of the material in it, but there’s a lot of it and someone else might find stuff more to their liking.

There are also a couple of Paizo-produced things appropriate for use with the adventure path. The most obvious ones are the sourcebook on the Mwangi Expanse, Heart of the Jungle, and the player-oriented sourcebook on the colony of Sargava, named Sargava, the Lost Colony. There’s also one thing I used in Vaults of Madness from the Rival Guide, a Mwangi-based party of evil adventurers (complete with an awakened dire ape antipaladin!) that was good for one challenging and interesting combat encounter.

Finally, here there be SPOILERS.

The City of Seven Spears

The City of Seven Spears has an interesting story. No, not in the module – it’s a practically plotless sandbox. The story is about how the module came to look like it does.

Unfortunately, I don’t know all the particulars, but as far as I can tell, someone didn’t quite deliver and some other people were called in for rescue and that’s why there are three names on the cover and not much interesting between them. The problem with Saventh-Yhi is that it’s a huge city with seven distinct, discrete districts that have all their own hotspots and plot points, and all this has been crammed into about 50 pages. The party is not given a lot of guidance on what they should do besides “explore”. There are some tools for managing conflict between the different expeditions (because regardless of whom the PCs picked as their backer, the other four will also show up eventually), but not much. The emphasis is on the city and its encounters – and boy are there a lot of those, for a city supposedly lost for ten thousand years.

Saventh-Yhi is an old Azlanti city, so the underlying concept of magic operates on a system similar to the sin magic of ancient Thassilon (which was a corruption of the Azlanti system). This may seem familiar to those who have played Rise of the Runelords or Shattered Star. Each of the seven districts is dedicated to one of the Azlanti virtues of rule (which in Thassilon were corrupted into the sins), and has a purpose in accordance with that virtue. The military district is dedicated to righteous anger, the government district is dedicated to honest pride, and so forth. This is all relevant, because each of the districts also has a Spear, a tall obelisk atop a ziggurat, which has a magical aura that it spreads over its district. With a specific ritual, the spears can also be activated to grant an empowered aura.

To get to do any of these rituals, the party should also do something about the tribe occupying the district. Six of the seven are occupied by tribes. Charau-ka in the military district, degenerate serpentfolk ruled over by a rakshasa in the government district, and so on. Most of them are hostile from the beginning and from the kind of monstrous races that the PCs will probably set about exterminating from the start, but there’s a tribe of Garundi humans who may be negotiated with. Actually, one of the possible conditions for “conquering” a district is killing a crapload of the local mooks. Who, I ask of you, has the time or the inclination to run combats against 100 mook vegepygmies who are not quite mooky enough that you can just handwave their deaths? It really gets my goat that there are a lot of combat encounters in here, such as practically all of the patrol encounters, which present no threat or challenge whatsoever to the party, yet are still there to take up space with their stats.

The adventure picks up with plot again once the PCs hit level 10. In our game, this took seven sessions and frankly, we were starting to get bored. Also, the level limit on the final event of the book highlights what the exploration of Saventh-Yhi essentially is – grinding for XP. It could have been made interesting, but I think it would have taken a smaller city so there’d have been more material to make it interesting and to run the archaeology and exploration stuff.

Anyway, at the end there’s a feebleminded Pathfinder who shows up through a portal, with an undead serpentfolk necromancer and his cronies in pursuit. There is a fight and once she’s cured of her affliction, she will a tale unfold that will harrow up thy very soul – the next adventure is also about exploring Saventh-Yhi.

Vaults of Madness

Yeah, you heard that right. The Pathfinder, Juliver, came to Saventh-Yhi through a portal from the serpentfolk city of Ilmurea, which has been slumbering for as long as Saventh-Yhi, except now it’s stirring in its sleep. She was part of an expedition led by the disgraced Pathfinder Eando Kline (hero of the short fiction pieces in the first three adventure paths). The rest of the party were captured by serpentfolk and only Juliver managed to get away. The portal required these crystals to activate, and she broke the crystals on the portal she came through in order to deter pursuit.

So now it falls to the party to scour the city for more crystals so they can activate the portal and head into Ilmurea to rescue Eando Kline.

They need six crystals, of course, so counting the vault with the portal in it, that makes for seven vaults. There’s once in each district, naturally. For some reason, they are not mentioned in The City of Seven Spears, so the party will likely not be aware of their existence regardless of how careful about mapping they have been.

And why are they called the vaults of madness? They’re all infected with a madness-inducing fungal spore, which was good for some role-playing. Of course, once the party figures out what’s up, they take the appropriate precautions and the affliction can be safely forgotten. The vaults are a series of seven mini-dungeons. One of them is flooded, one of them is the battleground between two tribes of evil humanoids, and so on. They’re not, honestly, the interesting thing in this adventure. The interesting thing is that there’s actual plot! There are events! There’s stuff to do besides go down a hole in the ground and kick someone’s undead ass!

One of these is a battle against the Aspis Consortium, whose boss gets taken over by an intellect devourer. The intellect devourers, incidentally, occupy much the same niche in Pathfinder RPG as the WotC-product-identity mind flayers do in brand-name D&D. Then there’s the centrepiece of the adventure, the visit from Ruthazek, the Gorilla King of Usaro. He is one of the more interesting NPCs around, and he’s there with his retinue to find out about the city and the heroes and to test them. There’s a feast, which I’ve written more extensively about before, and if done well, the encounter can be one of the most memorable in the campaign. He’s also evil and powerful enough to stand a chance of taking out the entire party all by himself.

By this time, I was so thoroughly fed up with the vaults and the endless grind that I also had Ruthazek award the party the last crystal they needed, having dug it up himself from the vault.

Fixing Saventh-Yhi

So, what could have been done differently?

I think the entire premise of having two scenarios, meant to be played back-to-back, in the same area and relying largely on exploration and sandbox-play, is faulty. You’re going over the same ground twice, which is not interesting and the verisimilitude suffers when suddenly there are these vaults that are honestly not hidden well enough that they wouldn’t have stumbled upon one before the plot dictated that they could.

There’s also the issue that The City of Seven Spears has no proper motivation for the party beyond the acquisition of treasure, which is in conflict with the serpentfolk plotline introduced in the previous parts and pretty weak on its own. There are elements of plot present in these two books and Vaults of Madness is quite good about it, but the third module of the campaign is nearly void of it. The campaign is in danger of stalling, here.

So, what I suggest as the solution is to combine the two adventures into one. This would require some significant rewriting of stuff for the appropriate levels, but moving the introduction of Juliver forward and dropping the vaults in where the PCs may stumble upon them from day one would do a lot to make the adventures more interesting. Another aspect that could do with more writing are the factions themselves and the faction conflict. I’m afraid there’s not a terrible lot of material on that beyond what’s suggested on the forums, but highlighting that the PCs are not alone in their exploration and giving the other expeditions a more active part in the adventures as rivals, not necessarily enemies, would make for more interesting gaming. The adventure would also benefit from a system to determine what the other expeditions are up to and how their explorations and conquests are going.

Yeah, it’d be a crapload of work. I am not convinced it’s less work than writing something from scratch, but there is cool stuff in here, and it’s no use throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so my first instinct would be to fix what is broken instead of scrap whole modules.

Next time, the grand finale.