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We finished our Strange Aeons campaign after about 35 sessions spread over 8 months and probably over ~160h of gameplay. This is the eighth AP that I more or less finish (after half of Rise of the Runelord, Legacy of Fire, Kingmaker, Shattered Star, 2 thirds of Mummy’s Mask, Hell’s Rebels, Return of the Runelords), mainly with the same group of players and all using Pathfinder 1st edition rules. It’s always a pleasure to reflect back on the path traveled, what worked and what didn’t. It’s a little different this time around because it took about half the time it usually takes us to go through an AP (thanks pandemic…) and everything is still quite fresh in our minds. Even though the AP didn’t last as long as usual in real life, it’s still quite a commitment to run an AP all the way through and it’s always a joy to wrap one up!
I GM’d a group of 4 players through the AP. It’s really enjoyable to have such a nice group of gamers and we’re able to have a lot of fun through these stories despite our sometimes different playstyles. The 4 characters went from from level 1 up to level 16 for the final session, with a group consisting of an android teleportation conjurator, a halfling shadow sorcerer, a human cleric of Horus within an animal companion, and a human grappling fighter. The characters were created with a 15-point buy, the players are very experienced, and the characters were quite optimized. The campaign was fairly tensed at times (as I like it to be) with a few deaths but nothing permanent (as I like it to be). And also with quite a bit of insanity as you would expect for the "lovecraftian AP."
So a huge thank you to Adam Daigle for developing this AP, and to the authors Wes Schneider, Tito Leati, Ron Lundeen, Richard Pett, John Compton, and Jim Groves for writing those adventures! There were some very high notes and some more frustrating times but, overall, this is an AP that is worthy of being played, especially because it’s quite different from most other APs because of its cosmic horror theme. It’s not my favorite AP of those I GM’d (that would probably be Kingmaker and Return of the Runelords) but it’s still an excellent AP and of the very high Paizo standard.
So let’s go straight to what frustrated me: since I know and love Call of Cthulhu as well as what is now commonly called Lovecraftian horror, I came into this AP with expectations (fighting unbeatable odds, cosmic, incomprehensible horror, etc) that don’t always play well with the Pathfinder rules in which character become super-heroes very quickly and in which dungeons sometimes overstay their welcome. While the Chulhu set up worked really well in the first chapter, and towards the end in the spooky lost city of Nerazuvin or in Carcosa, I felt very frustrated in the dungeons of The Whipser Out of Time. The sudden power change inherent to the Pathfinder rules also create some particularly jarring discontinuities in the flow of the story. The most egregious one is that, after spending all of chapter 3 journeying on the Sellen over 6 sessions and 1-2 months of game time, then the PCs reach level 9, have access to teleport, and the AP drops any focus on traveling, assuming the PCs just teleport to the next step. It’s so frustrating, especially since traveling and what happens during the travel times is an intrinsic part of the most famous Call of Cthulhu campaigns that Strange Aeons at times tries to emulate.
Among the changes I made to the AP, I was very happy with myself in the way I used a (less codified) version of the corruption rules instead of the insanity rules that quickly seemed too mechanical to me. When PCs were failing at their "SAN" checks in front of incomprehensible horror, I would give them some corruption effect, based on the one corruption theme each character had. I kept the rules fuzzy and it worked really well to represent the PC’s minds unravelling as they were in fugue state. That also gave them a very strong incentive to figure out what had happened to them. And it created some really good role-play opportunities that, I thought, were way more fun than just slapping crippling phobias on the PCs.
Towards the end, in the last two chapters, I also removed a lot of what I consider padding ("random-ish" encounters in Nerazuvin or in Carcosa) to focus more on the role-play of the alienness of these places and the impression to be in front of unfathomable beings/places/events. I find myself doing this more and more often at high level and it worked very, very well here because it avoids the issue of trying to scare the players but being undermined by a bunch of supposedly scary encounters that the characters beat in 2-3 rounds. Cosmic horror is best left to the thriving imagination of every player rather that put in stats to be fought!
Overall, here’s what I really enjoyed in the AP:
- The cosmic horror. When it worked (most of the time), it worked really well.
- As usual with Paizo APs, the encounters and role-play with interesting, lively, and lovely NPCs: Winter, Skywin Freeling, Upianshe, Queen Cassilda. There are fewer than in most APs but at least these four are very memorable.
- The start, in the asylum, without memories, surrounded by doppelgangers and ghouls. Wow, talk about unsettling!
- The fact that Lowls is present more or less from the start, grows into the villain quickly and gets stopped at the end, even if it’s not really him anymore.
- The exploration of the Dreamlands; the trip to the moon in the Dreamlands.
- The fight against the PCs own selves!
- The alien decor and locations towards the end (Nerazuvin and Carcosa).
- The story that becomes very meta if the players know of the play the King in Yellow, Chambers’ writing, or Chaosium’s Beyond the Mountain of Madness, etc. It’s so appropriate to have NPCs (or the PCs!) quote parts of the Chambers novel in Paris! And it’s very much in tradition with how the writing of these many authors (Chambers, Bierce, Lovecraft, Willis, …) combined to build the "lovecraftian" universe over more than a century.
And what I enjoyed less:
- As mentioned above the disconnect between the basis of the Pathfinder rules and the tenets of cosmic/lovecraftian horror. As a player put it: proto-shoggoths are supposed to be scary, not hit on the head until they die.
- The annoyance of confusion and frightening effects that dispossess the players of their characters. Insanity and fear are an intrinsic part of the Cthulhu mythos but, in Pathfinder terms, they are really punishing to the players of PCs with low Will saves.
- The high-level padding (the generic encounters described for Nerazuvin, the Shantaks in Paris, the Larvae of the Gods, the Shrike Worms at the end, all of which without much agency and requirement from a story point of view) that eat many pages of AP, especially at high level. These could have been better used to provide many more details about the alienness of Nerazuvin, of the Elder Thing city, or of Paris.
- The fact that Paris feels like an afterthought when it could have been the opportunity to go full meta and, for instance, do a set piece with a representation of the King in Yellow in 1923 Paris. Quite a missed opportunity.
Of course, it’s always the GM’s job to tailor any AP to their needs and those of their groups. It’s just like it felt that there were more of those frustrations than in other APs. But it’s a high quality campaign nevertheless: epic, alien, full of emotional moments, weirdness, and heroic moments!
As for specific details on the six chapter…
In Search of Sanity (4.5/5.0) That beginning in media res is very, very, very good. And the PCs having no memories of the last few years, with no idea of where they are, with monstrosities all around, bleeding doors, rats in the walls, a society of asylum patients, etc. That was a huge amount of fun to play through. It may be a little long and unnecessarily deadly once the PCs make it to the ghoul section of the asylum but that’s a minor complaint. The Tatterman that first appears in the PCs dreams at the very start before being the final encounter was a cool arc. And this sickly yellow fog, seeping everywhere, preventing any exit… That chapter was hugely exciting to play through.
It Came From Hollow Mountain (4.5/5.0) This one worked surprisingly well. I was originally skeptical when I read it but the many smalls encounters in Trushmoor with the locals who dislike the PCs while these don’t know why was very fun to play through and make the PCs discovery the horrible people they were before. The dungeon-y parts of the AP, with the fort and the manor are quite optional and the group only quickly explored Lowl’s manor, which was a bit of a relief to not bog the story down. It also gave me the opportunity to stage a takeover of Thrushmoor by the skums and the zombies who didn’t stay idly put in the fort. That was quite a classic Call of Cthuthlu move, with the skums taking the inhabitants prisoner to lead them into the lake while the zombies attacks the temple where the refugees from the asylum had settled it. It was much more dynamic than a simple dungeon exploration and a much better fit to the story.
Dreams of the Yellow King (4.5/5.0) One of these memorable modules because of both the well-crafted journey along the Sellen and the forays into the Dreamlands. Journeys are an integral part of the mythic Call of Cthulhu campaigns (the Masks of Nyarlathotep, Beyond the Mountain of Madness, Horror on the Orient Express, etc) and this volume was a nice tip of the hat in this direction. The Dreamlands adventures were also very enjoyable because of their quirkiness, because they threw the PCs of balance and allowed for very inappropriate encounters without consequences that were too severe (the shopkeeper, Bokrug). Searching for 7 gifts was a little too much, though, especially since I dislike this structure for modules (go fetch many things to advance the plots, sigh). The trip to the moon to rescue the Yellow King was quite something, though. And this final encounter, with the PCs fighting themselves! What a mess of an encounter for the GM, but that was a very fun mess!
The Whisper Out of Time (2.0/5.0) That was a real letdown for me because of the reasons I developed above (jarring change in the rhythm of the story with 3 disjoined locations separated by 100s of kilometers after a whole chapter spent traveling over the Sellen; basically 3 dungeons with things to bash to advance the story). I think this part of the story should have focused on a reckless chase after Lowls that would end in Nerazuvin rather than having these three set pieces. The set pieces aren’t bad but I felt I needed to edit them heavily to make them more interesting: in the Old Infirmary, I dropped everything related to the derros, which transformed the place into a spooky abandoned local with drying skins, stitched up monstrosities, etc. I removed a few encounters in the Nethys Library to go more quickly through it (and, really, Proto-Shoggoths shouldn’t be filler encounters…). I removed the small investigation in Katapesh that I felt had little purpose and, luckily, the PCs assaulted the Blossoming Thorn from the top, which allowed us to run it into a single protracted encounter. I was particularly disappointed by this chapter because I usually adore Richard Pett’s chapters and he seemed a very good fit for a Cthulhu campaign. A missed opportunity; it happens!
What Grows Within (4.0/5.0) The journey to Nerazuvin and the few encounters until the group reaches the city are weird enough that it helps setting up a strange atmosphere that blooms nicely with the exploration of the alien city itself. The literal alien Kaklatath helps to set up the mood. I felt the exploration of the city itself required quite a bit of work to remove the unnecessary bits ("random" encounters, the 8-room, dungeon-style exploration of the undercity that is supposed to be huge but empty) and make the rest creepy (no fighting encounter in the Snarl but entities that have been here for aeons). I think the work payed off, though, and there were some memorably moments: Upianshe, the battle with Kaklatath against the waking Polyps and the promised army of millions if the PCs failed, the Husk of Xhamen-Dor attacking the PCs as they are conducting the final ritual, etc.
Black Stars Beckon (5.0/5.0) I amped up the alienness of Carcosa throughout this book and it really worked. It was spooky, dangerous (a house full of vampires, slithering shoggoths in the dead city of the Elder Things, crazed humans in Paris, etc.), and this chapter provides a glimpse of Lovecraft’s, Chambers’, or Bierce’s writings. There’s ample opportunities to go meta and present scenes, encounters that resonate with the players who know that universe while their PCs don’t. It’s pretty damn cool! I thought Paris could have been more developed.
One part I changed and I’m very happy I did is to replace the Briarstone Witch with the Pallid Mask in the final encounter. The PCs haven’t heard about the Witch for 5 AP volumes and, even then, only as a vague legend, so I don’t think she makes for a satisfactory final encounter. On the other hand, having the Pallid Mask as a recurring villain who comes back here to try and thwart the PCs is much more interesting. The PCs know him, the players hate him from their first encounter, and he is a clear minion of Hastur, so why not use him again? That worked perfectly.
Thinking about the details of what I liked and disliked, it’s very clear that it was globally a great story, despite the sometimes discordant expectations between the Pathfinder and lovecraftian setups. I’m really glad we played this one and I’ll fondly remember many cool moments of this AP! The fact that it ended with one of the character betraying the others and fleeing with the Necronomicon is an added bonus!
The next stop should be Kenabres and the Worldwound for Wrath of the Righteous!
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A few thoughts from the player perspective.
I hate the horror genre in general, and even though I loathe Lovecraftian cosmic horror less than, say, slasher horror, it's still not my cup of tea by a long shot. As such, I had vetoed Strange Æons as a possible campaign for our table for years. I had a change of mind when I realized it was going to be a campaign about a much more personal struggle than is usual for Pathfinder, with personal rather than global stakes, and with deeply troubled and flawed main characters. That paid off very nicely, and I greatly enjoyed how it turned out, especially in the first three books, which are just brilliant. In the later books, the scope turns from personal back to global, and the Lovecraftian themes push through harder than before, which was apparently great for the players familiar with the Cthulhu epos but completely lost on me. Still, by then I'd come to enjoy the characters and their story enough to tide me through to the satisfying ending.
It’s not my favorite AP of those I GM’d (that would probably be Kingmaker and Return of the Runelords) but it’s still an excellent AP and of the very high Paizo standard.
Agreed on both accounts. It was a very intense and memorable game.
Overall, here’s what I really enjoyed in the AP:
- The cosmic horror. When it worked (most of the time), it worked really well.
- As usual with Paizo APs, the encounters and role-play with interesting, lively, and lovely NPCs: Winter, Skywin Freeling, Upianshe, Queen Cassilda. There are fewer than in most APs but at least these four are very memorable.
- The start, in the asylum, without memories, surrounded by doppelgangers and ghouls. Wow, talk about unsettling!
- The fact that Lowls is present more or less from the start, grows into the villain quickly and gets stopped at the end, even if it’s not really him anymore.
- The exploration of the Dreamlands; the trip to the moon in the Dreamlands.
- The fight against the PCs own selves!
- The alien decor and locations towards the end (Nerazuvin and Carcosa).
All of these were awesome aspects of the campaign. Looking back, I'm amazed we survived the first book with our minds and bodies even halfways intact — it was a tour de force in every way. I also have the third book in vivid memory, with all those great set pieces in the Dreamworld, feeling your character's mind deteriorate more and more and wondering how it could all possibly end well. It was no doubt the best first book of the Paizo adventures I've played so far. The second book wasn't bad either, with the PCs being faced with hatred at every turn by the town folk and dreading each new revelation on the PCs' forgotten misdeeds, but its challenges were overall much more mundane compared to the mind-bending weirdness of the other two.
Reclaiming our memories and souls at the middle of the campaign was a very rewarding closure — perhaps too much so, since the game's focus reverted from the unique and riveting «save your soul before it comes undone at the seams» driver to the much more conventional «save the world». Even though the stakes are objectively speaking infinitely higher in the second case, my sense of urgency relaxed once the ticking time-bomb in my head was defused, and it never got back to the same level of existential dread that dominated the first three books.
In the fourth book, I didn't understand why we had to follow in Lowls' footsteps and clean up his messes when we knew exactly what his itinerary was, and could have traveled ahead and intercepted him. The book clearly wanted to railroad us through these encounters and always stay one step behind Lowls, but there was no in-game rationale to do so. It could easily have been fixed if the itinerary we found in the manor was incomplete and we had to piece together Lowls' next step from clues we found along the way. I did rather enjoy the three set pieces (more than Olwen and Mrriaál did at any rate), but no doubt Olwen's editing did a lot of good there. Pity the archon couldn't be swayed or saved. Killing Biting Lash, Mrriaál's former owner, was a very rewarding plot point.
Neruzavin was appropriately weird, and very deadly indeed, if at times a bit desolate and thus contributing to a certain sense of detachment (Why do we have to go down that shaft where the millions of deadly polyps live again? Why do we have to attune these stelae to bring Carcosa and Golarion together; isn't that exactly what we're trying to avoid? Why is this our job, of all people?). At this point, I also started to get tired of NPCs spouting relentless propaganda of hopelessness and doom. I personally found this book the weakest link in the campaign, even if Olwen did an admirable job at fleshing out the empty canvas of the city with colorful details. The fight with the husk of Xhamen-Dor in the end was appropriately terrifying.
Carcosa was a mixed bag. I found the arrival jarring: After so much foreshadowing and nightmarish visions of that supposedly madness-inducing world, we finally arrived there and... it was a giant suburb? With depressed and gloomy people just... living there in resignation? And we're supposed to attend the third ball in this campaign? Very anticlimactic after the utter weirdness of Neruzavin. It got better, though. The chapter in the city of the Elder things was appropriately alien, terrifying and atmospheric, and delivered in spades what I had expected of Carcosa. I found it rather annoying that the third chapter played in a ruined version of real-world Paris (nothing breaks immersion for me like mixing the real world into a fantasy world), and the whole Lovecraft references (it sounds more like wholesale copying) were lost on me. The three chapters felt accordingly disjointed from each other. The third chapter was mercifully short, though, and the encounter with the tower-sized worm was appropriately terrifying and Cthulhuesque when it swallowed one of our PCs and instantly digested it into slime. Overall, I greatly appreciated Olwen's philosophy of reducing unnecessary encounters in the final chapter and replacing them with more atmospheric exploration and roleplaying. Combat is tedious, unpredictable, and deadly at these high levels, and that doesn't lend itself to grinding through dungeons. As it was, we often only had a single fight in a session, but that one felt monumentous, thrilling and crucial to the story. A very fitting way of resolving the end-game for such a campaign in my opinion.
I appreciated that the heroes were shunted back into Golarion after they killed Xhamen-Lowls. It would have been in tune with Lovecraftian horror to leave them to die in Carcosa for their trouble, but I for one appreciated a happy ending after all we'd been through. It made sense for Lowls to be kept for the final encounter (well, second-to-last, since we had a run-in with the betrayed archons after that...), but given his transformed state, we never got to face him as a person and talk to him. I'm surprised to read that the Briarstone Witch was going to show up in the final encounter — I think she makes more sense as the boogieman of the superstitious town folk than as a real player in this game. It was a brilliant choice by Olwen to replace her by the Pallid Mask, whom we'd already learned to hate and fear!
- As usual with Paizo APs, the encounters and role-play with interesting, lively, and lovely NPCs: Winter, Skywin Freeling, Upianshe, Queen Cassilda. There are fewer than in most APs but at least these four are very memorable.
One more thing on that note: I did notice how most of the NPCs in responsible leadership roles were women (Lowls obviously not counting as responsible), in particular in the early half of the game. I thought that was a nice statement about Golarion's take on gender roles as opposed to our contemporary literature and movie world's fixation on male characters...
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Another player in this campaign here.
The standouts for me were also Book 1 and Book 3. Waking up without your memories in a creepy asylum is a heck of a start, and the book maintained a creepy, disturbing, and truly frightening tone throughout. As for book 3, the combination of the dreamlands and the players racing to keep their own minds from collapsing were both great.
The last two books contained a lot of nice touches for fans of cosmic horror literature, which I appreciated, and the whole finding-out-the-person-you-don't-remember-you-were-was-awful in Book 2 also worked well. But neither ever quite equalled the tension and terror of 1 and 3. One reason is that, as has been mentioned, high-level D&D and terror are hard to pull off. I agree Book 4 was the weakest of the set, although the Old Infirmary as adjusted by our GM was suitably creepy.
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This has made me think about what the standout modules for me were in each adventure path I've played most or all of the way through, and why. They were (with some spoilers, but nothing, I think, that gives a lot away):
RISE OF THE RUNELORDS
Book 1 (Burnt Offerings) and Book 2 (The Skinsaw Murders)
Reasons: The many interactions with a colorful cast of NPCs in Sandpoint made it feel like a real home (when we were given the opportunity to move away in Book 3, we didn't take it; why on earth would we want to leave all our friends in Sandpoint?) This sequence also culminated with a fantasically memorable final battle against the original, unrevised Xanesha, which our (overpowered, house-ruled) characters managed to bring to a desperate draw. Book 3 and Book 4 were also good, but we bogged down in Book 5 and did not play Book 6.
COUNCIL OF THIEVES
Maybe Book 2 (The Sixfold Trial)
Reasons: The play. But not a lot of this AP stands out in my memory; my character kind of lost interest in the overarching plot and eventually spent a lot of time and money trying to turn her Westcrown townhouse into a dungeon she could lure unwary adventurers into.
KINGMAKER
Book 1 (The Stolen Lands) and Book 6 (Sound of a Thousand Screams)
Reasons: Book 1 is one the better sandbox adventures I've played, and introduced a number of memorable NPCs who ended up being key features throughout the entire AP. In Book 6, the devastating Blooms hugely raise the emotional stakes as it looks like all our hard work building the kingdom is about to collapse; then the final boss fight against Nyrissa was one of the closest (and longest) battles I've ever fought in Pathfinder. Books 2 and 3 were also good, and I think Book 5 struck me as the weakest, although the tournament was pretty fun.
JADE REGENT
Book 3 (The Hungry Storm)
Reasons: Another great cast of NPCs, slowly accumulated through the first two books, meets the fantastic setting of a winter arctic crossing. A good villain adds a lot here, too. Books 1 and 2 were also all kinds of fun. (We bogged down in the later game, although that partly had to do with Life Issues outside the game itself, and did not play Book 6.)
SHATTERED STAR
Book 2 (Curse of the Lady's Light) and Book 4 (Beyond the Doomsday Door)
Reasons: Great enemies made both of these books ... as well as THAT TRAP in Book 2, which much to my delight caught my character. Curse of the Lady's Light ended with a running battle throughout the whole dungeon with an enemy we just. could. not. defeat (and vice versa), while Beyond the Doomsday Door finished with an enormous bang of an impossible fight. Books 1 and 5 were also good, the GM replaced Book 3 so I can't really comment, and Book 6, although it started with a bang, was probably the weakest here.
STRANGE AEONS
Book 1 (In Search of Sanity) and Book 3 (Dreams of the Yellow King)
Reasons: For both of them, the overwhelming sense of dread, terror, and real fear for the characters' minds, couple with great settings in both. Books 2, 5, and 6 were also fun, and Book 4 was the weakest.
RETURN OF THE RUNELORDS
Book 6 (Rise of New Thassilon)
Reasons: The real sense that the whole world was collapsing gave this one supremely high stakes, and then the time travel setpieces as we raced to undo the damage were fantastic. I also very much liked Books 1, 2, 3, and 4, but felt Book 5 had a bit too much irrelevant side-action unrelated to the real plot. (This was also a problem in Book 6, honestly, but the better aspects of Book 6 overcame that.)
Also of note: I have played just over halfway through Iron Gods but it's on hiatus for the moment; so far, I've liked Book 1 (Fires of Creation) best. I've just started Wrath of the Righteous, and between the inciting incident, the cast of NPCs, and the setting, it's hard to imagine that Book 1 (The Worldwound Incursion) isn't going to be up there with my favorites.
So, looking it over and not for the moment counting Iron Gods and Wrath of the Righteous, my distribution of favorite books have been: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6. It looks like I have somewhat of a preference for earlier books (this doesn't surprise me; I find high-level play bogs down sometimes), and I seems not to like Book Fives.
I seem to like:
Memorable casts of NPCs, especially ones who stick around for a while
Vivid settings
Epic battles against memorable villains
Emotional investment (which can include such things as the dread and terror of Strange Aeons, the hometown fondness of Rise of the Runelords, or the sense that we are truly fighting a high-stakes war to save things that matter to us in Kingmaker and Return of the Runelords)
I am less fond of:
Sideplots in the late game when things should be coming together for the ultimate finale (this may be why I seem to have an issue with Book Fives)
I'm also not a fan of find-it-kill-it-move-to-the-next-monster dungeons, and there are always a few of these (sometimes even in my favorites), but my GMs have usually done a good job of upping the interest level in these
(I also hate TPKs, but so far that hasn't been a major issue. Not a huge fan of character-dying-and-being-brought-back either, but I've come to accept it as part of Pathfinder.)