The Dark•Heritage "Mks"

Every so often, especially as this blog starts to really age now (just over 14 years old now! I wish I'd kept my original blog that I had before this one, but in a fit of spring cleaning years ago, I deleted it entirely) I need to do a retrospective of sorts. Dark•Heritage first got its start on that earlier blog, though, and on old wikispaces pages that aren't available anymore, and other freeware stuff (I did a bunch of homebrewing with Geocities back in the day, if you remember that place.)

In any case, although I've always been a tinkerer with world-building; often thinking that I would use it in a game or for stories, the reality is that I rarely did either, and if I do world-building just for its own sake, that's a satisfying enough hobby for me on occasion. I like drawing maps. I like thinking about interesting fantasy places and locales and arrangements of places and locales, and I can't remember a time, at least after reading Lord of the Rings and discovering D&D (the former technically took place in the very latest 70s or early 80s, but for all practical purposes, it's better pinned to about 1984 where it really flooded into my interest in a big way) where I haven't been tinkering in my head and on paper with worldbuilding.

But I never really paid attention to "tracking" my efforts until the release of D&D third edition, when I got specifically back into dabbling in D&D and D&D-like worldbuilding, because my efforts at that point were a bit more organized and focused and targeted, often for use in roleplaying games that I did actually run, or at the very least concievably thought that I very well might. Plus, that coincides (mostly) with my use of the internet for development rather than old moldy notebooks that I stuff in a drawer and forget about for years, like I used to do as a teenager.

I often call the current version of my setting "Dark•Heritage Mk. V", or more casually, DH5, to give it a specific name and distinguish it from other stuff that I've done with the title in the past. Of course, that's just a name that's a convenience for me. Nobody living in the setting would ever use that name, or even Dark•Heritage without a Mk. number. I'm not even sure that players or readers would use that; if I run the game again, will I use that as a title for it? Probably not. I'd probably come up with something that sounded like a show or movie title. "Waychester Vice." "Dunsbury 5-O." "The Hill Country A-Team". I dunno. Those are not ones that I've given a lot of thought to, quite obviously. 

But if I'm referring to a Mk. V, then that presumes that there was a Mk. IV, III, II, and an original that was retroactively called Mk. I. This is true. I'm going to discuss them briefly in this post. I've also going to have to reference four other settings that I did some development on, because they were the pioneers of some idea that later got gobbled up by Dark•Heritage, and usually the gobbling up of an idea from another setting was an important part of it advancing to a new Mk. 

Back in 2002, I'd already gotten a little tired of dabbling in overtly D&D-like settings again, even though 3e was still pretty new. Prior to this, I'd already gradually gone further and further into hombrewing not just the setting, but also the actual system (kitbashing, really, more than actual design of my own) and by this point, I was ready to leave D&D entirely and embrace what was a newer, sexier (to me at the time, at least) paradigm; that of using d20 Modern... but without the Modern. d20 Past hadn't been released yet—I later embraced that specifically—but I kind of kitbashed and homebrewed my own alternative to d20 Past before it came out. The result was surprisingly (or maybe it's not, I dunno) similar to what d20 Past did. Of course, I'm not really all that much of a systems guy, so I wasn't homebrewing the system because I had specific system goals in mind; rather, I had specific world-building goals in mind. Specifically, I wanted to alter quite dramatically the default D&D racial spread, and not have things like elves and dwarves and halflings and gnomes at all. The second goal was to have magic in this fantasy setting that didn't feel very much like D&D magic. I had the d20 Call of Cthulhu book already by this point (it came out in 2001) and already I was leaning towards using those rules, or something like them, to emulate the type of magic that I thought most appropriate for my tastes. You can see that very early on in this process, I was already creating the kind of dark fantasy stuff that I've been doing ever since. It's a little funny; when I actually run games, they often tend to come out very silly and comical and gonzo and absurd—in an incredibly entertaining and good way, normally—even though on paper, they are obviously "very serious business." I suppose the tone that I tend to get is most like the Brendan Frasier Mummy; plenty of horror, but also plenty of swashbuckling over-the-top action and dark comedy too. Often, I've said that I'm deliberately aiming for that, but I think it's more accurate that I know the dark comedy and swashbuckling action is going to happen anyway, so I adjust my aim to make sure that the horror gets enough spotlight too.

Anyway, this setting I'm talking about was called Bloodlines. I'd missed D&D entirely through much of the later 80s and 90s, and I knew nothing about 2e other than a few novels from that time period that I read (R. A. Salvatore, often). Even earlier in the 80s, I don't think I'd read any D&D book all the way through except the Holmes BD&D and the Moldvay/Cook B/X books. And I'd read most of the two Monster Manuals and the Fiend Folio, I think. I was captivated by the idea of the tieflings and the genasi races, which were new to me, and Bloodlines featured populations of these living alongside humans in a setting that was reminiscent of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, including the Stone Age megafauna. The two races that I was probably most interested in, and therefore developed the most, were the tieflings and fire genasi, with the aasimar being a third-place race in my development. It's amazing to me that most of the aspects of DH, as it developed through the years, were already present in Bloodlines. Ironic, even. I re-use stuff at a tremendous rate, but this is the most notable; without anything specifically being re-used, the entire set-up is almost exactly the same as my DH4, and not really all that different from DH5 either (I do focus less on the big western pluvial "Great Lake" idea, although... I do have two of them in DH5.

By late 2003, I'd migrated to the very first Dark•Heritage setting (including the •. I'm pretty sure I took that idea from Dark•Matter, which was stylized the same way in print. Or at least in title fonts.) It grew out of development on Bloodlines; I had toyed with other more exotic wildlife, including late Permian gorgonopsids and stuff to replace my mammoths and saber-tooths. Luckily, I realized fairly quickly that I was indulging an esoteric interest that only I had, and didn't pursue it for long, but a semi-desert with exotic races, including one with red skin, and exotic and dangerous wildlife, clearly reminded me of Barsoom. The Lord of the Rings is my favorite book (I count it as one book, even though obviously I know that it's three as published) but A Princess of Mars is my second favorite. I changed the geography to include some features that are actually on Mars, such as the Tarsis volcanos region an the Vallis Marinaris, got rid of the sea, turned the semi-desert into Barsoomian desert, etc. I changed the races somewhat, although superficially (and mechanically) they were still very similar. Rather than being planetouched in a D&D sense, they were bred my some ancient, alien race of slavers, who had since disappeared. This was the original meaning of the term Dark Heritage and the reason for the title; the peoples of this world were literally slaves bred like breeds of dogs or horses for particular purposes, and nobody knew exactly how or why they now had their freedom; the old masters just up and disappeared. This didn't happen just a generation or two ago, but it wasn't so long ago that it was distant and semi-legendary either; more like the order of time since the founding of America. I had also recently read Perdido Street Station, and while I'm not a huge fan of that book or Mr. Mieville's ouevre in general, some of the concepts of that "Lovecraftian steampunk" gonzo-ness were deliberately borrowed and integrated into the setting. I also borrowed a fair bit from my friend's Barsoom setting (name borrowed from Burroughs, but the setting was mostly quite different.) You can read his stuff here and here to see what I was specifically borrowing. This is where I got into the idea, that I entertained for years, of a kind of picaresque immediately post-Medieval Spanish kind of flair and a Mediterranean vibe in general for some of the early settings I did.

By late 2004 or 2005, I briefly resurrected a very old homebrew concept I'd had about layers of floating islands of a shattered world replacing the Mars geography, and I roped this into Dark Heritage, making Mk. II a reality. I actually ran a decent-length mini-campaign in this version of the setting. I had dabbled with some online gaming on Mk. I, but it never really got off the ground. This time, I ran it for my regular gaming group that I had at the time. Interestingly, I tired fairly quickly of the floating islands idea, but because I was running the game, it was "petrified" in place for longer than I'd have liked. But I was already rethinking that idea, and rethinking the breeder-slavers idea too, so after that game came to an end, I dived into reinventing the setting again as Mk. III. This would have been around 2007, I think. I was heavily influenced or inspired this time around by having read Victor Mair and J. P. Mallory's book on the Tarim Mummies, and my geography was loosely similar to the Tarim and Junggar basins, with a kind of Leng-like Tibet below that, and a kinda sorta Imperial China off stage to the east, but exerting lots of influence on the region. Which was made up of oasis city-states along a kinda sorta eastern Silk Road, I suppose. By this time, I'd discovered Wikispaces, and I used it extensively to develop this setting, but I got kind of sidetracked into developing increasingly esoteric cultural details; after a while, even I started thinking that they were weird and what was I doing? I had, however come up with a novel outline (for a novel I never wrote, of course) and I was happy with other aspects of the setting. I didn't know for sure what to do with it, though, as I was increasingly getting called to do a few other things that had a less esoteric vibe and more familiar vibe for the D&D players in my group—which was now expanded with some new additions that were less willing to play around in outre settings.

So Dark Heritage of any mark took a back seat for a time while I developed some other stuff on the side. First, I created another D&D-like setting. I couldn't think what to call it, and somehow I ended up going with Leng Calling. I had a Wikispaces for that too (it was free, so I created tons of wikispaces once upon a time). The concept here was a huge world—like Jupiter sized, but less dense so that the surface area was huge but the gravity was familiar. This was mostly just so I had a big enough tapestry to do whatever I could concievably want to do later. My idea was that I'd do some development here and write D&D-like "fan fiction" short stories set in this Leng Calling setting. (The name is a bit of an in-joke; I doubt many people remember Falco's minor hit "Vienna Calling" anymore these days. If you do, I'm impressed by your knowledge of 80s pop culture trivia.) I had a few character sketches, and the beginnings of some plot outlines, but I never actually wrote much here. I reskinned some of my Dark Heritage nations, put them around a Mediterranean-like sea, and went to town developing. I created a number of other new elements, like a hobgoblin nation, and some others. Realizing that I was often utilizing and reskinning elements that I'd developed in another context, I created another wikispaces, which I called Modular DND Setting. It wasn't actually meant initially to be a setting, but rather modular elements that could be dropped into any other homebrew I was tinkering with as needed. The initial modules were Kurushat, the hobgoblin nation, Tarush Noptii, the vampire-ruled pseudo-Transylvania nation, and Baal Hamazi, a nation of tieflings.

While not officially retired, Leng Calling kind of ran out of steam when I was asked by my gaming group to run for them. Utilizing the same geographical concept, albeit a bit simplified, and adding more new elements, including some of my incipient modular elements, I called it Pirates of the Mezzovian Main. This was a rather successful, if I don't say so myself, little mini-campaign that ran for a few months with my group, and provided a number of very memorable moments that I still look back on fondly. Although at the time, I felt like I was compromising my vision by making this seafaring D&D game and that it couldn't possibly be anything other than something I did on the side, I found that I liked the idea of pirates a lot still (this was 2008-9. I'd always liked pirates, of course—Captain Blood was one of my favorite old movies and favorite old novels since I was a much younger kid. But the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were still kind of fresh, which reminded me that I needed to like pirates. Plus, Green Ronin had put out their Freeport book by then, and Privateer Press and finally released Five Fingers, my other favorite published setting element. Pirates were front and center of my consciousness at the time.) I started thinking about how I could incorporate seafaring pirates in Dark Heritage, which was obviously a problem, because the development had all been set in a desert to date. Borrowing again from planetary romance or space opera, I envisioned something maybe like Leigh Brackett's Mars with drying seas and decadent, picaresque cities on the edges that continually had to migrate to keep up with the retreating shorelines over the years. But by the time I finished running Pirates, I decided that I should get rid of the desert conceit and just redo the geography altogether to more closely resemble Leng Calling and Pirates of the Mezzovian Main. I also decided not to try too hard to explain all kinds of deep time, pseudo-scientific origins for stuff like I had previously been prone to do, and just grabbed a handful of non-traditional D&D races that I liked and threw them in after giving them a once-over and a new name. (I was probably again inspired a bit by Freeport's inclusion of fire genasi lookalikes and the recently released 4th edition's Bael Turath; although I had my own modular campaign elements based loosely on Bael Turath and a concept in the web enhancement for Open Graves for a vampire-led country already). By sometime around 2010-2011, this had metastasized into a full blown major revision of Dark Heritage and Mk. IV was born.

I went back to my original idea from all the way back in Bloodlines of wanting to have 1) totally different magic, and 2) a totally different spread of races, and like Bloodlines, the alternative versions I'd come up with for tieflings and fire genasi (now kemlings and jann in my setting, and slightly different, although conceptually very similar) as well as "aasimar" (nephilim) and shifters from Eberron (or Tharn from Iron Kingdoms if I wanted to really savage up the vibe of them); all with new names and backstories, were put into a geography that was more or less a slight redrawing of Leng Calling or Pirates of the Mezzovian Main (including the Mezzovian Sea) and other modular elements tacked on where they could fit. The modular elements were, by this point, not really being kept as separate modules so much as that I was seeing continuity between them and a shared geography. This didn't really coalesce completely until Mk. IV, but by that point almost everything that I'd worked on (at least that I've mentioned in this post) had all been gobbled up and become part of Mk. IV. Bloodlines was in there, Pirates, Leng Calling, the Modular stuff, and of course all previous versions of Dark Heritage itself had contributed. Mk. IV had a wikispaces for a time, but that went away when Wikispaces became not-free anymore, but most of the development that didn't actually happen here on this blog was cross-posted here anyway. 

Mk. IV had a deliberately kind of "Old West fantasy" approach rather than a "Medieval fantasy" approach, although that was sometimes unevenly applied, and I don't want to give the impression that it's any more faithful to the Old West than something like Forgetten Realms is to the actual Middle Ages. While this idea fascinated me for many years, I think coming to the conclusion that I'd overplayed that hand is a big part of what made me eventually tire of the Mk. IV version of the setting, and start looking for a new context in which to hang some of the elements that I was most happy with from its development. It's interesting that major changes to Dark Heritage tend to coincide with other stuff I'm doing on the side that more closely resemble traditional fantasy in some way, and which keeps me from wandering too far afield. Usually by the time Dark Heritage is evolved into something a bit too esoteric and weird, some side development in something more overtly D&D-like reins it in, and I bump the Mk revision and redo the context of Dark Heritage all over again. The culprit here was probably the Cult of Undeath project. Initially meant to be a way to modify a Pathfinder adventure path into something that I'd be more likely to run, it ended up being the genesis for a major revision of my system, once and for all getting rid of any possibility that I'd use actual D&D rules for anything ever again (at least, anything that I'm running. I could concievably play in someone else's D&D game. Although I don't know any rules more recently printed than 2007 or so.) I needed to redo the setting a bit too, because I didn't want this project to be actually dependent on Paizo, even though it was kinda sorta an adaptation of their stuff. Tarush Noptii, my vampire slash ancient Egypt except not in the desert kingdom was a decent enough starting point to be a stand-in for Ustalav. I renamed it to Timischburg to get a more overtly Transylvanian vibe and toned down any ancient Egypt stuff in the setting, and went to town. Of course, I started getting really enamored of this, and decided to give Timischburg some context. New kingdoms nearby started popping up. Some of them were simple calques of real-life cultures of the past, kind of like the Hyborian model. Some of them were other things that I'd developed before. As I spent more time on this, I found the somewhat more traditionalist (but not too much more traditionalist) approach that it had better than I was liking what I was doing on Mk. IV. That's usually a good sign that it's time to revise Dark Heritage again, and that I'd wandered too far afield again, getting carried away and spiraling into territory that was out in the weeds. It took me a while to figure out exactly how to merge the Cult of Undeath expanded setting and Dark•Heritage, and I tried a bunch of stuff with it before finally kind of figuring it out. 

Anyway, every few years, I think it's good to do a retrospective and remind myself of how I got to where I am and evaluate that crap. I'd actually spent the better part of two years not super interested in fantasy RPG worldbuilding, as I was caught up in other hobbies that were waxing to fantasy RPG waning. My blog was initially launched to talk about, specifically, fantasy RPG roleplaying, but let's be honest; it's little more than my "Dear Diary" online nowadays, where I talk more about hobbies than anything else, but I still talk about... anything else too, when I feel like it.