Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Fixing Cult of Undeath

Yeah, yeah—I know.  I've been done with my CULT OF UNDEATH project for a long time.  But I'm revisiting it, for a variety of reasons, including the notion of updating it to DH5, of converting it into a novel outline, and, of course, trying to get the whole shebang into a set-up that I could really run; I'm not quite sure that the project ended with something that I'd be very inclined to use as is, to be honest with you, although it's certainly a lot closer than the actual Paizo Adventure paths on which they are (increasingly loosely) based.  So, let me take a few posts to discuss how I'd polish this off and actually use it, maybe for DH5 now.

First, let's back up just a bit and discuss some of the latest developments.  DH5 is, now, only vaguely going to spell out any territory beyond two adjacent areas (at least for now); Timischburg itself, which originates in the CULT OF UNDEATH project, and the Hill Country.  This one takes place in the former, kinda by force; the setting was developed specifically for this and vice versa, and the whole fantasy Transylvania vibe is a hugely important part of the whole tone and theme.  Timischburg, then, has to have a similar appearance to Transylvania during the late 1890s when Stoker wrote Dracula (except transposed somehow into Medieval European fantasy.)  Let's review briefly; the population of Transylvania was about 60-70% or so Romanian, or Vlach, with 10-15% Austrian/German, and the remainder Hungarian.  The Hungarian and German percentages of the population fluctuated over time; during the specific years Dracula was written, the Hungarian population reached its highest percentage; just over 30%, but about 20% as an average is more typical.  After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following World War I, the Austrian/German population dwindled rapidly (today it is less than half of one percent) and the Hungarian population also went into decline versus the Romanian population.


For simplicity's sake, Timischburg doesn't have three main ethnic groups (with a smattering of others); it has only two; the alt.Magyars in my setting don't exist.  I've got Romanian common people (mostly, with a few landed gentry here and there) mostly ruled over by a superstrate of Germanic/Austrian nobility.  Although I'm handwaving away the details of the greater area, the notion is that the Timischer nobility is related to the population of Carlovingia, which of course makes sense.

Briefly; what exactly is a Romanian and how does an alt.Romanian in the form of my Tarushan ethnicity even fit?  I dunno.  Quite honestly, nobody knows what a Romanian is; they are clearly a "native" Balkan people, which means among other things, that they've been washed over by wave after wave of conquerors; Indo-Europeans (probably in multiple waves) in prehistory; the region emerges at the beginning of recorded history as Dacian (but it was probably some other Indo-European culture before the Dacians and Thracians were displaced from the steppe by the expanding Cimmerians and proto-Sintashta and Andronovo cultures that eventually emerged as the Scythians.

Dacia was famously conquered by the Romans, and one theory is that the Romanians are descendants of the mixed native Dacian and Roman colonists before the area was again washed over by various Germanic tribes, Avars, Magyars, several Slavic tribes, Ottomans, and more.  Without the complex real world history of this region, how do I get Tarushans?  Dunno.  Don't really care, honestly.  They're there, and there's a German Timischer aristocracy that makes up most of the upper class in Timischburg.

All that said; the Timischer aristocracy is both related to and relatively friendly with (most of the time) the peoples of Carlovingia and the Six Colonists.  Whatever political rivalries they have, they aren't really cultural rivalries.  This makes different groups of human more likely to be seen in Timischburg than otherwise might be, because they all more or less get along, at least today.  Of course, anyone who comes from the Hill Country (the primary vector to the rest of the Six Colonists) would have to pass through the Knifetop Mountains, which are surrounded by (respectively) the Thursewood and the Haunted Forest.  No doubt, anyone who makes that trip will have some interesting stories to tell, and not as many people make it as you'd think.  This leads to the whole notion that Timischburg has become an isolated nation, separated and if not exactly cut off from the rest of the nations on the continent.  For some, this manifests as a suspicious and surly distrust of any outsiders, but others see themselves somewhat like a nation under siege, who welcome friendly faces as potential allies.

Of course, DH5 isn't just a human setting, and although based on Transylvania (loosely), Timischburg isn't just a human nation either.  Woses lurk in the wild places of Timischburg.  The cursed make up a sizable ethnic block on the coast, adjacent, probably, to their own homeland of Lomar.  The other side of the country borders on Gunaakt.  This means that woses, cursed, orcs and goblins can all be expected to be seen in low numbers, but without raising eyebrows, because while they're obviously foreigners to some degree, they're not so exotic to the natives that they haven't seen them many times before traveling through, and even living among them in small numbers. (The exceptions being the small areas in which the cursed and woses dominate the local population, of course.)

Kemlings, jann and skraelings are all probably more exotic, and nephilim are meant to be exotic everywhere, by nature, but all of them can probably travel in more or less safety and security assuming that they don't cause trouble when they roll through town.

The revised population figures are roughly 70% Tarushan (alt.Romanian), 10% Timischer (alt.Austrian), 7% each wose and cursed, 2% orc, 3% goblin, and 1% other (a few kemlings and jann, mostly.  Anything else is too small of a population to register.)  This population does not include "monsters" like the thurses in the Thursewood, for instance, or vampires in Grozavest.  Nor does it include travelers and visitors; these are actual inhabitants of the country on a regular, sustained basis.

Also given that vampires are native to this area and make up an important part of the theme (if not the population, of course) it's probably wise to discuss them briefly. Although Stoker did of course describe the Count as having a number of unusual physical features that if not exactly monstrous, were certainly unusual bordering on freakish, he also spelled out the current interpretation of vampires as sophisticated and suave predators.  Sexy even. As bored housewives got a hold of this archetype, they took it to bizarrely exaggerated levels; notably Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer.  On the other hand, I find myself more inclined to focus on the vampire's monstrous origin.  Their pretensions at sophistication are usually just pretensions after all; vampires are monsters.  If you're at all familiar with the clans of Vampire: the Masquerade, they'd be mostly a combination of the Nosferatu, Gangrel and Malkavian clans all in one.  In Warhammer Vampire Counts terms, they'd be a fusion of Nosferatu and the Ghoul Kings.  Or, more fairly and accurately, they're a melange of sorts of all of those specific influences, but the urbane, sophisticated vampire archetype is deliberately de-emphasized.

In this, I'm curiously paralleling some developments that Age of Sigmar is doing to Warhammer.  They seem to have actually completely normalized Strigoi to a great degree with the release of the Flesh-Eater Courts.  Sure, they do still claim that Soulblight vampires exist and they're part of the Legions of Nagash army book, but they're become much more inhuman in general, and even the miniatures for characters like Mannfred von Carstein now show him as bald, gray, possessing a ridged row of lumps along the top of his head, and generally looking less human and more monstrous than ever.

While shape-changing was always part of traditional vampire lore, I like the idea explored in the otherwise really quite mediocre movie Van Helsing that suggests that the form to which they shapeshift is a bat-like semi-humanoid monster; curiously, not at all unlike the Warhammer vargheists, varghulfs, crypt flayer, and even their winged vampire lord models.  Unlike in Warhammer, these shape-shifts are not permanent, but ones that the vampires can go back and forth between, but at no point can they now pass as aristocratic humans, except under very heavy disguise.

In general, Van Helsing, in spite of the fact that it really wasn't a very good movie, did an absolutely perfect job of highlighting the mood, the theme, the visuals, and the general vibe of Timischburg.  Same for the James Purefoy Solomon Kane.  Come to think of it, all of Solomon Kane is a decent fit, even though the stories and the movie don't exactly have the same vibe.

Anyway, coming soon to this CULT OF UNDEATH tag will be an update and reorganization of the "plot" of the adventure path—something that I was never quite happy with as originally done, maybe over the course of two or three more posts.  I might also add a few optional new monster stat lines as part of the whole affair, although if I do, they will not be added to the official monster list, with the probably exception of the update to the vampire entry.  After that, we'll see where we go, and if there's any reason to continue to use this tag for new posts or not.

No comments: