Grimdark Pathfinder 2: Rules

I want a darker, more horror-infused game full of suspicion and hard times.

Pathfinder 2E defaults to a lighthearted world mood, sort of an "everyone gets along" neutral-positive setting where no controversial subjects exist, everyone gets along, there is universal acceptance for every point of view, and controversy and conflict - in the setting - are written out of the rules. This broadens the game's age range, so eliminating many of these topics extends the game's range and longevity.

I get it; the game is a neutral base, blank sheets of paper that make no assumptions about your world. The Remaster books are much better setting-neutral rulebooks with the OGL stripped out and binned. If you don't like the presentation of a particular Remaster monster, reskin and rename it. Designing new monsters is easy, so we are back in D&D 4E, where groups were expected to develop their own monsters and build encounters that way.

And I am done with 5E; the more dungeon-focused games of 3.5E and the better experience of Pathfinder 2E are where my tactical dungeon gaming is these days. If it isn't that, then the first-edition rules speak to me the most. Also, I have tried setting-neutral 5E, and once you start mixing in 3rd-party content, things start to break down since every book attempts to rewrite the core rules to make setting-specific ideas work with the rules. Setting-neutral 5E seems to gravitate back towards "Wizards reality," and I can't get that feeling out of the game.

I am coming to see the OGL and SRD as chains, not expressions of my imagination.

Ideas and concepts that come from outside the tabletop gaming community are superior. Too often, we endlessly recycle the same dog food of "things in old games" and convert it to new rules, never ask questions, and endlessly repeat the past. When I saw the work the Paizo team did in the Monster Core Remaster book by "doing their own thing" with the monsters they supposedly "lost," I was shocked.

Then new stuff is ten times better since the team actively put their imagination into rebuilding these and, in many cases, went back to the original lore and made something more faithful to the myths and legends than a 50-year-old SRD hand-me-down.

If we enshrine the past too much, it becomes a tomb of dreams and ideas that we end up living inside.

This is the "rot" that lives within the hobby. Gygax and his team pulled ideas from "outside roleplaying" to make the first edition D&D game. The entire "Appendix N" thing comes into the discussion here. When those ideas first went in, they were new—fresh from outside sources.

Every edition of D&D past AD&D was a rewrite that included the previous edition without adding too much new. As we enter the "nostalgia era" of D&D, where they endlessly recycle a cartoon and mass-market strategy that nearly bankrupted the company in the 1980s, we get more of the same. The same 50-year-old ideas are recycled, and nothing fresh is pulled in. The game becomes a buffet of artificial and recycled foods. Nothing fresh. Nothing new. Nostalgia is recycled and repackaged. The 50-year-old mutant ideas, once the "original source derived," are seen as more authentic to the myth than the original myths themselves.

You can reprocess food so much that it turns into poison.

I am trying to fund this mythical Pathfinder 2 Grimdark game, but I must reflect deeply on my inspirations and sources. Once upon a time, I saw other horror games as inspirations. Now, I know those are false sources. They are a few times removed from the original sources of horror, fear, suspicion, and the darkness inside the human spirit.

These games also need to be stripped of their whitewashing and happy-game narrative style. As for the guardrails and safety tools, I don't need them, and they will get in the way.

This is why I like the first edition and OSRIC; they are one level removed from the original inspirations, and Appendix N is in there, so I can go back to those works and "find them for myself." Every future edition tried to hide these and present these "nostalgia pass-downs" as the original IP. Appendix N is the Rosetta Stone, so I can look those things up and find what they mean to me.

I love Dungeon Crawl Classics, but that, again, is Appendix N written through someone else's eyes when it is always better to return to the source and find meaning for yourself. My ideas, pulled from an original source and translated into any game of my choice, are always superior to a game trying to translate them for me. Or worse, going back to the SRD, which has ideas passed through hundreds of designers and now an unrecognizable blob of numbers and text that maybe has "the flavor" of the original idea but no soul and nothing else.

But Grimdark Pathfinder 2 is more than Appendix N. That is just an example and a warning to not rely on sources inside the hobby too much, to lean on nostalgia, and to ignore the truth you can only find in reading an original source and creating new ideas through that synthesis.

The goal of today's entertainment companies is to strip your imagination away, deeply plant the seeds of nostalgia, turn the past into golden calf idols, and instill a culture of dependency on them as the primary source for your imagination. D&D 5.5, with its booze-like nostalgia-infused imagery, pours those feelings down your throat and shamelessly recycles your memories into reprocessed factory food.

Parts of the OSR are just as tied to nostalgia, so this isn't just a Wall Street thing. It is a more profound idea that we don't question or submit to without thinking. Yes, I love my nostalgia, too, but I understand how it can turn into a diet of the past and never think about the future—or even the things inside myself.

Seeing OGL-free games breaks the chains in my mind.

New myths and legends exist.

You can pull in ideas from original sources, run them through your mind a few times, and create something more meaningful to your truths and feelings than this endless stream of nostalgic drool.