Dragonborn, tieflings, and what is D&D?

Couple of things percolating in my head like a hot drink. First thing; I finished reading last night a pdf that I got as part of a DCC humble bundle a little while ago. The pdf was the Gazetteer of the Known Realms, and is basically a 120 or so page campaign setting for the DCC adventures. It was written before the DCC game, but it is part of the 3.5 OGL releases, and if you recall, the first DCC adventures were all 3.5 adventures. There's also a second part, another pdf that's part of the same "boxed set", which is Gamemaster's Guide. This was an interesting setting, to me at least. Not because it necessarily did anything that I really thought was exciting, or that I wanted to borrow or use, but because of what it represents. While a number of "3e-isms" were pretty obvious, especially with regards to psionics whenever they were mentioned, it was obviously and deliberately written to be a very "proto-OSR" setting, and I've heard it described online as what a Mystara boxed set would have looked like had the old D&D line ever released one (apparently, they didn't. Just the gazetteers. No doubt why they also used that name.) This is both its strength and its weakness; it's cool that it's such an old-school campaign setting, that it fits nicely next to Greyhawk or Mystara and even feels very similar in most respects to those settings. But it curiously is very, very D&Dish in the old school way; the way the setting is set up, the races and their arrangement and relationships, etc. As cool as that is, it doesn't do much that hasn't already been done many times, and as such, it hurts it as a product; it simply doesn't offer anything that we don't already have, therefore, it becomes completely superfluous and unnecessary. I'm still trying to decide if I think it was a waste of my time to have read it (and to turn to the second book in the boxed set) or not. 

One way in which it was just a little different than older settings like gray box Forgotten Realms, or the older Greyhawk gazetteers, or whatever—it has some proto-wokeness. The whole white colonialism bad vibe, which is understated but present, is one that we probably wouldn't even have thought of at all in the 80s, so I'm not sure that that can count, but the presence of all kinds of female knights and heroes is something that's always jarring to me; I've known too many women and I've known to many men to think of them as interchangeable widgets. The people who push that kind of nonsense come across as very bizarre to me. Like they don't know enough real people to understand human behavior, or something. I don't mine female NPCs, especially when played by women. But acting like women who act like men is common across the history of the campaign setting, and common across the setting overall is weird. DCC's setting Aereth, or whatever exactly it's called, does this.

That said, I came across this old post by Rob Schwalb from the lead-up to 5e. I think it's interesting, so I'll quote it (mostly) in full.

A few years ago, I woke up and realized what I thought was fantasy wasn't the same for everyone else. Sure, people have had worlds with winged cats that could talk, elves with red cloaks, and all sorts of tweaks and twists to the basic fantasy tropes for years. And I've always known that things such as the Empire of the Petal Throne and Jorune lurked on the fringes, but they were strange things wholly alien to my sensibilities. You see I cut my teeth on Tolkien, Homer, Mallory, Howard, Alexander, and the rest. The old red box D&D let me play in a version of fantasy with which I was most familiar. It let me tell my own stories set in Middle-Earth or wherever because the fundamental concepts about fantasy ranged from "one ring to rule them all" to forbidden dealings with Arioch to scaling the Tower of the Elephant. I knew elves didn't hang out in Hyborian Age and you would never find dwarves drinking with Gawaine, but in my youthful mind I could reconcile these differences because it was all fantasy to me.

By the time 2nd Edition D&D hit the shelves, I had already solidified my views and, with the frustrating absence of assassins, half-orcs, and monks aside, the game remained true to that vision. But over the next few years, the game began to change. TSR published settings that presented different ways to play D&D. Some, such as Birthright and Mystara, weren't that far from my tastes, while others challenged what I believed was true about D&D, notably Spelljammer, Red Steel, and Dark Sun. In some cases I embraced these visions; in others I rejected them. Thinking back, we never said we were playing D&D when we played Dark Sun. Instead, we said we were playing Dark Sun. (The same was true for Ravenloft now that I think on it.) I enjoyed those settings as games in themselves—games that just so happened to use the rules I knew so well. They weren't D&D; to me, but that was okay because they never spilled too far into the core (though the MC Appendixes would eventually chunk together all sorts of monsters from across a wide range of worlds).

The weird psychological game I played continued into 3rd Edition. The racial assortment stayed more or less the same as it had in previous editions. The game retained the core tone I had embraced years ago. Things would change. Supplements introduced new races, some expected (half-ogres and minotaurs) and some completely unexpected such as dusklings (Magic of Incarnum), illumians (Races of Destiny), and the hadozee (Stormwrack). Since these races lived in supplements, I could ignore them or use them at my discretion.

Fourth Edition, however, shocked me. I never imagined I would find dragonborn and tieflings in the Player’s Handbook. What about the gnome? Where did the half-orc go? D&D had gone and reinvented itself without consulting me! Imagine my horror. Why did the marshal deserve to be in the Player's Handbook in place of the druid or the bard? Everything I knew to be true about D&D had been shaken up, and I was left puzzled and a bit upset—not enough to explode in nerdrage, but enough that I was uneasy.

I was so certain and so confident the dragonborn didn't belong in D&D, I figured my players would reject the race as I did and choose something more in line with the D&D we'd always played. Imagine my surprise when one of my younger players, who was 19 at the time, immediately latched onto the dragonborn and warlord. Imagine my continued surprise when game after game my players ventured further afield than the classic array of classes and races. What I realized was that although dragonborn seemed ridiculous to me, the race had a great deal of appeal to my gaming group—the cantankerous, vulgar, twinkie group of players that they are. And if these old dudes could climb on board the tiefling, drow, dragonborn, wilden, shardmind train, then there must be people for whom these elements are fantasy for them. In the end, I made my peace with the weirder races and classes that have snuck into the game and broadened my horizons to at least not be offended that they exist. (I would use an emoticon to soften the last sentence but I won't stoop to that sort of nonsense here.)

We've talked a lot about what races and classes we would include in the next core player book. I've argued at great length about how editions never fall at break points in people's campaigns and that often an edition change means invalidating a choice a player has made about the character he or she is playing. I can imagine some folks were upset not to have a monk class when 1st Edition shifted to 2nd, just as I'm pretty sure some folks were upset when they couldn't play a barbarian right out of the gate when 4E landed. We've tentatively agreed that D&D; is big enough to accommodate the various Player's Handbook classes and races, and we want to make sure these options are available when the next version comes out. Although this move will certainly appeal to the audience who think dragonborn and tieflings kick ass, I wonder if their inclusion will offend people with opinions that matched mine a few years ago. I'd love to say that we're all reasonable people and finding a tiefling in the next version of the game doesn't mean they have to appear in every world or campaign, but, being an unreasonable person myself, I can understand how such a thing might be upsetting to people who have a clear vision of what D&D ought to be. Likewise, I think people who dig the Nentir Vale and the 4E cosmology would be livid if we ripped out the dragonborn and tieflings, whose fallen empires are so important to shaping the land. Is this a no-win situation?

I mean, he's not wrong, necessarily. D&D isn't just whatever the owner of the brand says that it is. At some point, it's not recognizable to people who played D&D in the past. People who don't seem to get that, and tell "conservative" gamers to suck it up because sexually ambiguous bird, rabbit or turtle people running bakeries is what D&D is are wrong; that's not D&D to me, or anyone my age, and arguably its so far away from what D&D was that even people who play 5e and have only played 5e, in a neo-trad playstyle, have got to see that as something severely removed from what D&D was. 

Of course, my perspective is that I don't also care very much what D&D is, because I've always been somewhat ambivalent to exactly what D&D is. My own perspective has changed away from the more "vanilla" approach of what fantasy is, from the mostly high fantasy stuff like Tolkien, Alexander, and even Salvatore and Weiss/Hickman of my teenaged years to something a bit different, and more weird tales (not that I didn't read pulp stories in my teenage years too, but at the time, I was more likely to read Tarzan and John Carter than Conan, honestly.)

UPDATE: Spotted on ENWorld. Why of why am I still going there? Anyway...

Sadly, it wouldn't be appropriate in that venue for me to respond "It's still super gay." Well, maybe appropriate isn't the right word. But it wouldn't be seen as funny. ENWorld is super woke. They make reddit seem sane.

New economics

I'm not necessarily surprised, but I am disappointed by the vast expression of economic illiteracy and the belief in obviously false narratives that I see in the wake of the Trumpian trade policy. Here's a redacted quote of today's Z-man post.

Last week, Trump stunned the world by following through on what he has been promising since he came down the escalator in 2015. This set off the Great Trump Stock Market Crash, which promises to continue this week as the rest of the world responds to the new world order. The yesterday men and the crazies are sure this is the Great Depression, because their history of the world starts in the 1930s. It is a stylized history, such that every modern event can be jammed into the 1930s, the 1960s, or the 1980s. Since they are sure Trump is secretly Hitler, this must be the 1930s—even though we have witnessed many stock market corrections in the last thirty years. The COVID crash, the mortgage bubble, and the dot-com bubble are easy examples.

In reality, what we are seeing is the long-overdue return to normalcy, where American economic policy is aimed at benefiting the American people, rather than abstract concepts from economics departments. If Canada has tariffs on American goods, then the United States should have tariffs on Canadian goods—unless it can be shown that the American people benefit in some way from the imbalance. The same is true for every other country in the world.

Of course, the reality is that the market isn't the economy, and isn't the only indicator of its health. As many have pointed out, not only is this a correction to normalcy, but jobs have come back significantly more than expected and projected. Wall Street may be struggling, but that's only fair, because Main Street is finally rebounding after decades of being stifled to prop up Wall Street. 

One of the weird things about decades of American trade policy is that it has created the same sense of entitlement as government racial policy. Just as nonwhites think they are entitled to be near white people without conditions, the world thinks it has a right to access the American market without conditions. This is most obvious in Europe, which has taken this lopsided arrangement for granted. They have also assumed they are entitled to American defense, while doing nothing in return.

The logic behind this arrangement has always been nonsense—but people love to believe in nonsense, especially their own. We see this with the free trade crowd, who are claiming tariffs will only harm the American people. If that were true, then the rest of the world should have been miserable for the last thirty years. Further, if that were true, then the rest of the world now has a chance to usher in a golden age for their people by eliminating their tariffs instead of raising them.

As he says, and I'll not quote this part, the reduction in the scope of the government, and in the tax burden on the American people is integral to this process as well. Main Street, i.e., regular Americans, have been subsidizing Wall Street and the globalists for decades. This is the scope of the realignment. So yeah, Wall Street will take a hit. But the only people who should really fear that are people who make their money in unproductive, globalist investments. Mitt Romney's income is at risk. Mine isn't. 

More important are the changes in how we think and talk about the economy. For the longest time, the economy has been treated as a god. Americans were expected to tolerate anything to please it. If the economy demanded Haitian cannibals in your town, you had to accept it. If the economy demanded that the quality of your hand tools decline, you just lived with it. If the economy required you to work two jobs to make ends meet, then you did it. The economy was a remorseless god.

This sort of thinking makes sense to an alien overclass that sees the United States as an opportunity to be exploited. It does not make sense if the ruling elite feels a connection and obligation to the people. Shifting from the old transactional model of economics to a nationalistic model requires a new language. Simply pointing at a graph that trends upward is no longer enough. The political class will now have to possess some economic literacy.

Bingo!

In the end, Bessent is correct. America cannot continue to create credit in the financial system and borrow trillions to hire government workers. We either have an orderly transition back to a normal economy, or we have a disorderly transition. The name for that is collapse—and that is vastly worse than a stock market correction. This is the reason the economic elites are backing this move. They know that the people who suffer the most from failure are the elites.

And bingo again!

If Trump hadn't come along and eased the transition, the current trend would have simply led to a Soviet-style collapse and the anarchy that followed... at best. At worst, it would have been more like a Roman-style collapse where the Romans essentially ceased to exist entirely, their impoverished and decidedly smaller in numbers mixed descendants emerging many generations later as something else. Arguably, either of those could still happen. But the fact that Trump has shoved the Overton window wide open on these kinds of topics makes both of them less likely then they had been even a year or so ago.

UPDATE: And a brief quote from today's post (the next day) because it reads like an extension of the same topic.

The reason regular people feel so much economic angst, despite the appearance of material prosperity, is that we have reached the end of the line for this model, where costs are socialized but profits are privatized. If you look closely, you will see this dynamic everywhere. The offset to those cheap products at big-box stores is the collapse of American manufacturing, and the social capital that came with it. The offset to cheap labor via immigration has been stagnant wages and emergency rooms that resemble Tijuana bus stops. The offset to a rising stock market is endless financial insecurity. The hidden costs have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored.

The reason Trump is trying to usher in a new economic model is that the old one, the financialized economy, is running out of places to hide the costs of endless credit creation and the auctioning off of social capital. It is not just that we cannot borrow more money. It is that we cannot continue to socialize the costs of creating more credit money. Just as critically, we can no longer tolerate an oligarchy built on privatizing the profits of this system.

UPDATE 2: And another one, to add to it: Much of the politics of the right for the last 8+ years has been a continual battle against those who, when faced with a divergence between the model and observed reality, define "principle" as continuing to choose the model. Don't really need to add anything to that observation, do I?

My game vs OSR... a few comments

Before I begin, a quick summary of what I hope to accomplish—hobby-wise—this week. I have a busy week. I've put off my taxes, so they have to be done very soon. Probably that's a couple hours one night. I am busy Tuesday and Thursday, probably most of the evening. Saturday is a busy day. Monday I'm going to the store with my wife to make sure that I have stuff to eat this week. (Because I'm relatively recently diagnosed type II diabetes; along with almost my entire immediate family of my generation, I've discovered, and her schedule is kinda funky, we don't eat dinner together every night or even most nights. I cook something low carb on my own.) So, yeah... it'll be tough to do much. I doubt I'm whipping up a YouTube video or anything like that, because that takes at least a couple of hours to do. Maybe I can do a text only YouTube video on the four characters, but if so, that'll be all that I can likely do. I'm also really focused on reading lately, instead of frittering away my evenings. I'm almost done with Goodman Games' Gazetteer of the Known Realms, which I got on a humble bundle as a pdf a while ago. It's an interesting case study; I'll probably blog about it briefly when I'm done. I've also got a few other gaming books that I'm trying to get read in the shortish term, although two of them I've read before years ago. And I want to pivot to some non-gaming books, which I'm not reading all that much of, but I have quite a few of them on my docket right now. I had also thought maybe I'd draw another version of my map this weekend. It was six months ago that I drew the last one that I wasn't super happy with. But I didn't get to that. I probably won't, at least not right away. And I expect a few gaming things that I ordered to arrive this week. A new set of metal dice is supposed to show up tonight, and sometime this week two older 3e products that I've wanted physical copies of for a long time should be arriving; Heroes of Horror (used) and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (POD). Both will go on the list to read shortly after, although I've read both as pdfs in the past. I'm even considering ordering the original Curse of Strahd, (not the "remixed" version, or whatever they're calling it) to compare it to EtCR for the heckuvit. Actually, I think even if you don't care to play 5e, some of the campaigns are decent reads that can be readily raided for good material. If I get CoS, I might also shortlist Rime of the Frost Maiden and Ghosts of Saltmarsh as ones to pick up too. (I will say, though, of the various Ravenloft products, the very first module from 1983 still has by far the best cover art, which I'll include here.)

Honestly; that's about it this week. Reading. If I can finish the Gazetteer, the non-fiction book that I'm reading and if I get really lucky, one more gaming book, I'll consider that a fantastically successful week this time around, even if I don't do anything else. Next week, on the other hand, I'll expect to do more. 

To the topic of the post, looking over the character sheets I posted earlier this weekend, I had a few thoughts. Three immediate points of contrast between my 1st level characters and your typical OSR 1st level characters come to mind, which I think are interesting. I actually greatly prefer what I do, but then again, I've said many times that I'm old-fashioned without being old-school, and the OSR rules and OSR playstyle; well, I'm sympathetic to what they're doing in some ways, but I'm not interested in doing it myself.

First, my characters clearly have a much higher hit point total. The lowest hp character I have has 10 hit points; the rest are 14 or 15. OSR characters at 1st level will almost certainly have single digit hit points, even in the best case scenario. I watched a small segment of some ShadowDark solo play where the guy had a 1st level fighter with 1 hit point. Even when he leveled up, he rolled low, so he was a 2nd level fighter with 3 hit points. I don't have fighters per se, but my "fighter" has 14 hit points, and my "ranger" has 15. Even my expert/sorceress has 14, although she took a feat that specifically gave her a few more hit points. Now, granted, arguably ShadowDark isn't really OSR, because it doesn't use OSR rules, but it certainly does the OSR playstyle, maybe even better than some more overtly OSR games, honestly. So, my 1st level characters are considerably less fragile than OSR 1st level characters. However, by probably 4th level or so, they've caught up; OSR games have characters get hit dice as they level up, my game has them get 2 hit points. My hit point progression is much flatter than OSR games; it starts out better, but pivots after a few levels to being less so. After 4th or 5th level, my characters will be considerably weaker than OSR characters, if hit points are your guide, at least. But I've never been a fan of the overt change in genre of the game from a dark parody of a fantasy game with frequent character death with disposable low level characters that turns into super-heroes after a few levels. 3e, 4e and 5e characters arguably are always super heroes at every level. I found that the low level survivability of those games is desirable, however. The rapid increase in power level after a few levels is not. Bounded accuracy was a nice concept when 5e brought it around, but it only a little bit actually did what it said that it would. But 5e was constrained, in my opinion, by having to be too D&Dish. It couldn't do anything too radical without jeopardizing its appeal to the broader market. So I've actually taken the concept to where it really was "wanting" to be all along. Which, to be fair, many other games have done for years, if not decades. But D&D wasn't ever one of them.

Second, as briefly referred to above, I have feats instead of classes. While you can kinda sorta create classes by bundling feats in such a way that they emulate classes, you have the flexibility to do it any other way you like as well. These feats aren't really like the feats of 3e, 4e and 5e; they're more like class features decoupled from any class. You can call my four iconic characters that I created for this putative solo outing as a "fighter", a "thief", a "ranger" and a "sorcerer" if you like, but most of them have one or two surprising features built in, like my "sorcerer" having pretty high hit points, for instance.

Third, in OSR circles, it's often cited that ability scores don't matter very much. In fact, in OD&D, they really only impacted your XP progression (oddly.) In my case, that's clearly not true, since almost every roll will have an ability score component to it; attack rolls are based on an ability score, all checks and "saving throws" are ability score and skill score plus a d20, etc. Ability scores are probably more important than anything else going on with the character, especially at lower levels (after a while, skill and feats starts to matter more; the consequence of experience.) Fitzhugh, my "ranger", is arguably my best character, because I got extremely lucky on his ability score, or stat rolls. Had I not done so, he would have been significantly less capable at combat, and would have been more likely to be good only for outdoorsy stuff; very useful for traveling, but not in combat.

It should be noted, that I like the traveling "minigame" quite a bit. As an avid hiker, as one of my other hobbies, the overland travel stuff is as interesting to me as arriving where you're going, and exploring "dungeons" is banal and I've never liked it. Even back in the 80s I disliked it. I read a fair bit of the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks as a kid (the original "solo play" paradigm) but while The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is considered a bit of a classic, and was probably the third one that I got, the ones that I liked best were Forest of Doom, Scorpion Swamp and City of Thieves. The first two in particular were heavily focused on overland travel challenges, and the last was, of course, an urban intrigue kind of thing. I also really enjoyed the TolkienQuest Night of the Nazgûl for exactly the same reason; it was heavily focused on overland travel and exploration. Firetop Mountain is the iconic dungeon-crawl, it was always one of my least favorite. 

Maybe that can be fourth referring back again to my character selection, I don't consider the cleric to be archetypal. It's been important because from the beginning, D&D has been set up to require a cleric. Having largely eliminated the need for magical healing to counter injuries in combat for other reasons, I don't consider the iconic 4-man party to be a lead singer, lead guitar, bass guitar and drummer... er, sorry, I mean a fighting man, magic-user, thief and cleric. I consider it to be fighter, thief, magic-user and outdoorsman. And even then, magic-user and thief are only weakly iconic compared to D&D, and aren't necessarily meant to play the exact same role either. People who are good at fighting, and someone who's reasonably good outdoors are the most important roles for a game where travel is important; any magic you get is supplemental and support rather than a core role, and thief-types are as likely to be con-men and fast-talkers as they are to be sneaky lockpickers and trap-disarmers.

But of course, anyone can be good at the Bushcraft skill if they want to. Affinity and skill focus both would be ideal (my "ranger" only has one of those so far). The rules do dictate, to some extent, what activities the game will focus on. Since exploration/travel is important to me and topping of your resources after combat isn't dependent on clerical magic like it is in D&D, the cleric simply isn't nearly as important a role as an outdoorsman or ranger archetype.

All four Solo play characters

While I had previously only had three "iconics" for the solo play exercise, since I hadn't actually started it yet, I thought creating a fourth one wasn't a bad idea. Here's all four of them.

I found that I'd made an error on the older three. Actually, it was probably correct when I made them, but I've tinkered slightly with a few rules.

I also decided to give everyone a contact. Because Tabitha's contact is Brythe Aermeld, I also gave her two spells, although as part of the solo exercise, I'm probably going to run a little solo solo, i.e., a solo play with just the one character as a short intro, and she'll actually get the spells in that exercise; she won't have them before. Plus, that allows me to show the spell acquisition rules.

Anyway, here's the four character sheets. The new one is Fitzhugh Grimwatch. I rolled very well for stats for him, so he's actually pretty good at all kinds of things for a 1st level character (from a range, if you remember, of +4 to -3 for stats, I got +4, +4, +4, +4, +2, and +1. Although his focus is on being an outdoorsman, he's nearly as good a fighter as the "fighter", Stilton Kingsfax.)

Coinage in DFX

Many years ago now, I created a complicated system of coins and exchange. While this is probably kind of realistic—different nations have different coins, of differing weights and purities—it didn't make the game any more fun to worry about it. Today, of course, we use fiat money, but when we actually had real money with intrinsic value in its own right because it was made of precious metals, this is how it worked.

But realistic or not, this created complexity that isn't really very fun at the table, so I am today against the concept of doing anything like that. Plus, it's super out of date. At the time I did that, I was pretty deep into the Mk. IV version of the Dark•Heritage setting, which later migrated to Mk. V, which later migrated to Dark Fantasy X. Significant changes to the setting happened as a result of those two migrations. Some of the nations (like Qizmir) don't even exist in the setting at all anymore, and Kurushat sorta exists, but in a completely different format than it did then. Baal Hamazi is also significantly different, and the idea that there would be a common coinage for Baal Hamazi doesn't make sense anymore anyway. And Terassa and Porto Liure technically exist (recently re-added, in fact!) but are still kind of periphery fringe elements rather than core elements of the setting. All in all, the whole thing is now, no longer, relevant or useful.

I do, after looking for something different to do for dubious reasons, agree with Gary Gygax's fairly simply scheme after all of a gold standard. Gold coins are the basic unit of measure, like a fantasy dollar, with finer gradations of silver (dimes) and copper (pennies.) Stuff is cheaper in general, so pennies are still useful for a lot of things. Because we live in an extremely inflated currency regime, we tend to think of them as useless, but in the middle ages, copper coins could still buy you things like meals, etc. The 3e SRD also has platinum, which is a ten-note, and the 5e SRD not only has platinum but also electrum, which is like a 50¢ piece. In my experience, however, these are rarely used unless modules toss them in for the heckuvit, and when they do, players pretty much just convert them to gp's, because they clearly are on a gold standard. I think the reason for the higher value (platinum) is probably related to encumbrance, a rule that few people actually ever liked using, as near as I can tell (nobody I ever played with did.)

That said, the reason I wanted to be a little bit more than just D&D's "gp's" is because it isn't evocative at all. So, I split the difference; I'm using the same money scheme, but I'm giving the coins actual names rather than simply "gold pieces."

I've decided that "gold pieces" will be called nobles (nb), silver pieces will be called shillings (sh) and copper pieces will be called... er... pennies (pn). Yeah, that last one isn't super original, but the linguistic trappings of the word penny is pretty legit, with cognates in all Germanic languages and first attested as long ago as the late 1300s. If I want to sound a little fancier than pennies, I can use pence as the plural; as an American, it sounds more British, obviously, and therefore more old-fashioned. 

As an aside, for my tokens, which are fake coins made of metal that look vaguely Medieval or piratey, I have them in a few sizes and colors, but they track pretty well to the nb, sh and pn, or gold, silver and copper pieces. Not that there's any value in one token over another; they're all equal, but still—it's fun to have an actual prop that I need for one reason in game that looks like something else that is actually significant in game in a different place too.

Now, those are the English names, and apply to the Hill Country of course. While I'm going to use that as the default, it's worth pointing out that the various other regions mint their own coins (of the same value and metal, for simplicity's sake, but with different images and slogans, etc.) that have different names, which I can use on occasion for color. In Timischburg, for instance, the gold pieces are called ducats, the silver are called thalers, and the copper pfennigs. In Baal Hamazi the golds are called denarii (denarius single), silver are called a argenteus and the copper is called a quadrans. And in the south, along the Corsair Coast, gold coins are doubloons, silver are pieces of eight or royals, and copper is called cobs. 

But I wouldn't expect anyone to remember all that. It's mostly just for some local color on the rare occasion I want to use it. Besides, because for simplicity's sake I'm assuming all types of coins are of equal value to their counterparts across the entire region, there's no reason not to have them circulate freely across the region.

An "oracle" for solo play

I've talked in the past about possibly doing some kind of solo Shadows Over Garenport; taking my outline with some characters, and using randomizers to influence what actually happens, in a manner not at all unlike solo play, and then reacting to those randomized actions. It's not quite as random as some guys' solo play is, where they randomize pretty much everything; I do already have a map and an outline, for instance, but still. My travel rules in the Appendix will work pretty well. I have several random table books, including ShadowDark's pretty extensive random tables, Knave 2e's pretty extensive random tables, two different books titled "Book of Random Tables" and of course, access to plenty of others online. Even going through an outline, I want there to be unpredictability and I want the process to surprise me from time to time.

When I'm done, maybe I can convert some of that into linked short stories or something too.

I've got three characters prepared already, although I think I'm going to make it a group of four and add one more with an outdoorsy specialty. So, that's one more task that I'll need to do. Although I don't really have classes per se, that'll give me (sorta) a fighter, a thief, and a sorcerer plus a ranger. Clerics don't make sense in my setting, but someone who really specializes in outdoor travel really does; especially if I'm using my optional appendix travel rules as the source of a lot of my randomization.

But mostly what I really need is what has come to be called an Oracle. I don't know where this term came from (well, other than Delphi, of course) or how it came to be applied, but what it really means is if you're solo-playing and there's a question about how something will shake out, and you need a randomizer to ask, you have some process to follow to determine it. If you walk in the tavern, will you see the person that you're hoping to find in town? Roll for it to see. Is the person you just fought and killed a member of the cult, or did you just make a terrible mistake in attacking him? Roll and see. Is the monster waiting in the swamp to ambush you when you find its soggy lair, or did someone beat you to the punch and you find only its rotting corpse and a loot-less lair? Roll for it. But roll what exactly?

I think I'm going to do my Oracle as follows:

Firstly, you need three sets of dice, hopefully that are very visually distinct and different color so that they can be easily distinguished at a glance. You can use whatever you want for normal rolls, but for Oracle rolls, you need one of each set. For ease of description, I'll assume that you have a Red, a White and a Blue set of dice. When you need an answer to one of those yes/no questions, you roll one of all three. The Red dice means yes, the Blue dice means no. The White dice? We'll get to that in a minute. Whichever has the highest roll wins. If you roll three d6s, and get a Red 5, a White 2 and a Blue 4, then Red beats blue and the answer to your Oracle question is Yes. If you rolled Red 2, White 6 and Blue 6, then the answer is No. But, is it a d6 you roll? You don't need a whole set of dice for that. Well...

Secondly, you can use the dice to influence probability. If you think one answer is more likely than the other, you can use a dice with more sides. You can roll a Red d8 and a Blue d4, for instance, if you think that it's quite a bit more likely to be Yes than No.

Thirdly, what if you get a tie? Well, there are two things to address that. First off, if you don't want many ties, roll higher dice. A d2 (flipping a coin) only has two sides, so you're much more likely to get ties very frequently. A d20 has twenty sides, so the likelihood of you rolling the same number on both d20s is very low. I'll probably roll d6s most of the time, but if you don't like ties, you can influence your likelihood to get them. But very low probability is not no probability. That's what the white dice is for. Or at least one of the things the White die is for. In case of a tie, the white d6 (and it is always a d6) determines who wins. A 1, 2, or 3 result goes to the No, and a 4, 5, or 6 result goes to the Yes. 

Fourth, the white die can also be a qualifier. If there's not a tie, the White die is still important. On a roll of 1 or 2, then whichever result you get is actually even worse for the characters than a simple yes/no result would be. If it's 3 or 4, then there's no qualifier, and if it's 5 or 6, then the answer is even better for the characters than it looks like. If the roll was a bad one but you get a 5 or 6, then there's a mitigating factor that makes it not so bad. If it was a good result for the characters but you get a 1 or a 2, then there's a complication that they have to deal with as part of the good result. However, if the result was bad for the characters but they roll a 1 or a 2, then there's an additional complication besides the already bad result. If it's good for the characters and they roll a 5 or 6 on the White die, then they get an extra benefit in addition to what they were hoping for on a simple result. 

Reading

Just a stream of consciousness "journal" type post right now. I had a hard time falling asleep for some reason last night, so I'm quite tired, maybe a little delirious or punch drunk as a result, and will probably call my work day early today to go take a nap at home or something. 

First off, I just finished reading The Game Master's Guide to Instant Towns and Cities which I'm doing by memory, so I think that the title is correct, by Jeff Ashworth et al. I saw this at Barnes & Noble on Christmas break. It was listed at $24.99, but was on sale at 50% off. I'm still not sure that I'm happy with the purchase at that price. The book is a great example of everything wrong with 5e; while it does indeed have the bare bones of a large number of potential cities and towns in all kinds of environments, with all kinds of details, few of them are very interesting. It feels very much like a YA theme park version of a very Harry Potter-esque D&D, most of the names of people and places are puns or cultural or pop cultural references and in-jokes, everything is really bohemian and bougie; it feels like the entire thing was written by a cadre of authors who simply can't imagine a world outside of Greenwich Village or Portland. I'm actually quite disappointed.

Other than that, I'm also reading The Lords of Madness, my old 3e aberration book, and I'll probably finish this week, I think. On deck I have also Darkness & Dread and Monsternomicon vol. 2 in the 3 sphere, and beyond on deck, Elder Evils, Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and later Heroes of Horror.

But I don't want to just read gaming books, so I've got the second and third "Lord of Nightmares" novels, part of an Arkham Horror trilogy published by FFG, I believe. I have to reread the second one (recently reread the first) so that I can remember what the devil it's all about before I read the third one, which is new to me. Sadly I didn't buy it when it was in print, and it was unavailable or prohibitively expensive for a long time.

Then I'm going to turn to the four novels of the Riftwar Saga. I haven't had these novels for a long time either, because I had a guy move while he was borrowing three of the four of them. (To be fair, he left a few things with me too. We're probably even.) I rebought them in the original printing, because the so-called "director's cut" or whatever were the only ones available for a long time, and I didn't actually like them quite as much. I have read this before several times, but it's been many years.

Then I've got something actually new to read after that, the Flame Tree Epic Tales Greek Myths & Legends book. Eventually I'll also read the Norse and Celtic (i.e. Irish) ones, since I now own all three, but not immediately.

I also bought a B&N exclusive Lovecraft mega compilation that is his complete fiction (minus the stuff that he wrote or collaborated on but wasn't published under his name, like stuff for Hazel Heald or Zealia Bishop—but I've got a collection for that too) that I'd like to read. 

Still need to find my last box of books from my move; I think I know where they are in the garage where all the stuff we couldn't fit is waiting, but it's not easily accessible, sadly. But in there, I've got the Dark Elf trilogy in omnibus format, the Solomon Kane complete collection, and the first five Barsoom books in omnibus format that I'd been planning on reading. I also have more Lovecraft collections, but now I don't really need it, I guess. And my daughter bought me a super nice leather-bound copy of Dracula omnibused with some other Bram Stoker works, although I doubt I have any interest in reading anything other than Dracula itself.

And I've got further out gaming books to read; Sharn: City of Towers, Five Fingers: Port of Deceit, Freeport: City of Adventure and... well, that's enough stuff; let's see how well I do on that big list, and how long it takes me to get through it before I worry too much about what comes next. 

I've decided to make a concerted effort to not fritter away evenings and weekends on YouTube very much like I have been, and buckle down on reading like I used to always like to do. But still; that's a lot to chew on and if I've read all of that before the year's over, I'll consider myself to have done fairly well. Most of these are, of course, books that I've read before, and only a few of them are genuinely new to me, which is... I dunno. I feel like I should be disappointed in that, but I'm not really. I've read way too many books taht are disappointing; reading books that I already know that I'm going to enjoy; at my age, I kind of prefer that these days.

"Little People" of Leng

There's too many weird peoples in the Mythos who all kind of "mean" the same thing. Some judicious pruning for importation into DFX is... well, judicious. The following three "races" of subhumans can all be combined into a single group, instead of three separate ones.

• The "Little People", also known as the Worms of the Earth (from the story of the same name by Robert E. Howard) and several other REH stories. They seem to also be the same people that he refers to in "People of the Dark" and "The Children of the Night" as well as (probably) "The Black Stone." These guys also may be the same, or meant to be referring to the same beings as mentioned by Lovecraft briefly in "The Whisperer in Darkness" and Arthur Maachen's "The Novel of the Black Seal." They don't seem to have a common name, other than perhaps the Worms of the Earth themselves, but they are described the same way in all cases. 
• The Tcho-tcho (and possibly also the tchortcha) mentioned in "The Horror at the Museum" as well as being a major component of the T.E.D. Klein story "Black Man With a Horn" (highly recommended, by the way.) These guys are more human-like, perhaps, than the Worms, or at least they seem to be be able to pass as an unsettling and alien human race whereas REH always describes the Worms as subhuman, but their cannibalistic tendencies alone make them horrifying. 
• The satyr-like "Men of Leng" which are most prominently featured in The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath both in their native environment on Leng and as the black galley sailors that come to Dylath-Leen with weird moon rubies, and who take slaves from the lands of men. 

Honestly, conceptually all of these people are similar to my own Wendaks or Grendlings; the Children of Grendel, the Lingering Atlanteans; in that they are an ancient, subhuman (and devolving even more as time goes on) race that is on the outs, hostile to humanity, and kind of horrifying. Maybe I can simply use the race that I already have, but borrow elements (as needed/desired) from the races above. In particular, I like the fact that they live in very remote places, possibly even underground in very remote places to make them even more remote... but that lingering relics and ruins of their past worship of monsters like Tsathoggua, Ghoth the Burrower, Yogash the Ghoul, Chaugnar Faugn, Gol-goroth, Shugoran, or whomever. (REH specifically mentions Cthulhu and Dagon, I believe, too, in "Worms of the Earth".)

However, if I do that, and I'm leaning strongly towards so doing, I need to establish some kind of connection between the Grendlings and Leng that doesn't currently exist. For the remainder of this post, I'll be noodling with some ideas. 

First off, of course, it's worth level-setting; the Grendlings are degenerate and continuously degenerating descendants of Atlanteans who were on the main continent for whatever reason (mostly as soldiers, slaves or somesuch) when Atlantis sank. Although the curse of Atlantis still fell on them, they didn't (obviously) sink into the sea, since they weren't on Atlantis, so they didn't just drown in a watery cataclysm like the majority of their race. The curse that they inherited was, however, more insidious and delayed. I'm not sure how long ago Atlantis sank. A long time ago, but it doesn't have to be tens of thousands of years, or anything. The tendency of fantasy creators to overly prolong their timelines and histories into ridiculously long periods is unnecessary. Besides, if the curse still hasn't caught up to them after tens of thousands of years, it really wasn't all that terrible. I'm thinking the sinking of Atlantis can't be more than about a thousand years ago at most.

Secondly, Leng is much more ancient than Atlantis. Leng, like Amrruk the Ancient probably predates the world as we know it; it goes back to whatever pre-Adamite world existed here before it was wiped clean and reset with the current race of men.  The plateau of Leng is difficult to reach, nearly impossible to climb, and extremely uninviting, just from an environmental perspective.  Very little grows on its cold, windswept surface, which is littered with ancient menhirs, standing stones, and crumbling ruins of ancient walls and structures who's purpose can only be guessed at today.  The few creatures that eke out a living on the plateau of Leng are carnivorous giant spiders and cannibalistic Grendlings who are darker in nature, and more mystical and sorcerous than those who live in the Haunted Forest or Orlok Marshes, or other pockets of Grendling population.

Despite this, there appear to be other inhabitants of some kind as well.  Eerie howls of unknown provenance echo across the vast table-land, and the scratching and digging of some kind of creature that is rarely glimpsed but frequently heard can be picked out by keen listeners as well.  These glimpses seem to be of pale, lumpish creatures that are not even vaguely humanoid, being instead hunched, toad-like creatures, like Deep Ones who have lived for generations in caves and become pale and eyeless.

This bleakness is broken by a few landmarks:

Carcosa. Located on the edge of the plateau, with sheer cliffs that fall along with a tall, thin waterfall from the dark, silent waters of Lake Hali from which nearly constant mist rises, this abandoned and cursed city has no inhabitants that can be seen, but there is always an eerie feel of watchfulness and menace.  A strange flapping sound, as of rags hung out in a strong wind, echoes through the deserted stone.  According to patchy myths and legends, the King in Yellow himself might haunt Carcosa at times. Carcosa, apparently, predates the current age of mankind.

Sarkomand. A city of the Grendlings, where they have some measure of culture.  Ruled over by the Elder Heirophant (also known as the Tcho Tcho Lama, or the High Priest Not to Be Described), a mysterious figure who also hides himself behind yellow robes, this is a sinister city where peoples of the Three Realms might come as slaves—possibly—but they don't live long.  Rumors are that vast caverns called the Vaults of Zin lurk underneath the city.

Hsan. A city near the center of the plateau, peopled by carnivorous and intelligent (yet barbaric) hairy creatures (withered and emaciated ape-like carnivores called wijikos adapted to the cold, windswept environment on top of the plateau) They also have a subject relationship of sorts with the Heirophant, and provide many of the goods that the Heirophants people need to live—although they also have a fractious relationship, since the wijikos cannot live with anyone, and frequently bring violence to the people of Sarkomand and anyone else that they can reach. Exiled Grendlings do live among them, especially the most degenerated individuals, that are little more than apes themselves.

Atlantis apparently was enchanted by the ruins and eerie mystique of Leng, and heedless of the danger. They established an ancient city at its foot called Mnar, from which expeditions to Carcosa and elsewhere were launched. Although it's impossible to know now, it is likely that whatever the Atlanteans found on Leng was instrumental in their own degeneracy and cursing, and the destruction of their nation; a poison pill more thorough is hard to imagine.

The ruins of Mnar are known to seekers of esoteric and forbidden knowledge, but they are difficult to explore, as they are half buried in thick, viscous, mud and cold fens with reeking, tall grasses, thick although scattered trees, and near constant fog. Most believe that the entire area is haunted, and strange sounds are frequently heard when in the area, but there is no reliable information on what is actually there.

Porto Liure on the Corsair Coast... and RATS!

I was poking around old posts of mine, and discovered this one, from almost five years ago. The point of it was reimaging past assets that no longer quite fit into the DFX setting (which, at the time, was still at the DH5 level). Porto Liure had been a major asset that I'd done quite a bit with, and with some supplemental help from stuff like the Green Ronin Freeport book or the Privateer Press Five Fingers book (or even a few other products of pirate-like cities in various D&D products over the years), but it really belonged quite strongly to the DH4 version of the setting, and never really completely found any kind of place in DH5, which became the DFX setting after an effort in rebranding. Now that the Corsair Coast is going to be officially "Terassan" in ethnicity, Porto Liure, of course, has a new home in DFX, bringing one of my older assets back into play. I feel like I'm gradually getting there with all kinds of stuff. Baal Hamazi was incorporated as a third region, when DFX was originally supposed to be Timischburg + The Hill Country. Kurushat kinda sorta makes an appearance in the form of Lower Kurushat, although exactly how much of this will actually be renewed details from DH4 is unknown still. The Plateau of Leng has been back, and has some of the Forbidden Lands vibes... and details. Although many of them were shameless pastiches of Lovecraft to begin with.

I do need to spend some time deciding how the various cities of the old Terassan Empire can figure in the new Corsair Coast paradigm. Most of them can be converted to Barbary-style city-states easily enough, by removing any lingering Imperial trappings from them, I suppose. In some ways, this makes them all analogs to Porto Liure, but I want Porto Liure to stand out still. I actually doubt that I'll do too much with the other city-states, or have much interest in utilizing them. Calça was probably the only one that I still had a lot of interest in, and possibly Baix Pallars, but everything interesting from Calça has largely already been pilfered and added to the Hill Country. Baix Pallars as a pseudo-civilized place falling into colonial ruin, like the waning years of the Crusader States or European colonial empires amongst Third World savages could possibly still restore this as an idea, but I'm not entirely sure how. Maybe, as I start to work out exactly how the Terassans are related to the Tarushans, and I'm sure that it is somehow, means that I can sandwich the part of the Terassans between the Hill Country and Timischburg on the southern part of their border, with the Terassans stretching further south from there into the Corsair Coast; and maybe that's where Baix Pallars can still fit. Maybe Eltdown is the northernmost outpost of the Pallarans, even; a kind of Bree farther removed from the more southerly bastions of their distant relatives like the mountainfolk of Gondor or the Dunlendings. 

Anyway more to come on that. But speaking of shameless pastiches of Lovecraft (and Warhammer) I want to discuss briefly the Master of Vermin, one of the more notorious Heresiarchs of my setting, and his greatest (or worst) creations in the setting, which seethe outwards from Leng at times, the ratmen. Starting with wererats, an already rare monster in the setting, Master of Vermin experimented on ways to "mass produce" more of them. This didn't work out exactly as planned, but from his perspective, it no doubt is actually better. In trying to create "mass produced" wererats, he got, instead, two varieties of man-rat hybrids, as noted below:

Ratmen are about four feet tall, and look like hunched humanoids with rat tails, rat heads, rat fur and clawed hands and feet. For those of you familiar with skaven, they are basically exactly that, except without some of the specifically skaven clan politics and stuff. But there was an unusual side-effect of the creation of the ratmen; whereas the ratmen are mostly human-like with rat heads, for each ratman created, there was also a rat thing, ratling, or brown jenkin, named after (allegedly) the first one. These are like large rats who have human-like faces and hands. Not really intelligent, ratlings or rat things, are, at best, somewhere between smart dogs and toddlers at their most intelligent; they can understand simple commands and even communicate extremely simple concepts, but they aren't really able to rise much above that. They do have their uses, however, as spies, and as familiars. And even, to the ratmen, as a food source. Mostly ratlings, if they can do so, like to leave the communities of ratmen, and create their own packs somewhere else, but they are still rare and horrifying when found in human or near human lands. 

I don't think that I actually have rat thing or ratling stats in the game, although I did find them on a blog post, where I think I just took regular giant rat stats, maybe made a minor modification or two, and called them nuzzle rats, based on H. P. Lovecraft's own repeated description of Brown Jenkin "nuzzling horribly". I don't like that name anymore, so I won't reuse it, but giant rat stats are good. Even though giant rats are described as the size of a large dog, the stats are still fine for a rat-sized, but more dangerous than a rat like creature. 

Speaking of familiars, I do briefly talk about the animal companion player feat as a way to get familiars, but that doesn't really explain much of what they are. I imagine that the player (and only the player) that has a familiar or animal companion can communicate with it, more or less like a person, although simpler (unless the GM allows you to take, say, a person as an animal companion) and it acts kinda sorta like an NPC that's semi under the control of the player that has it as a class feature. From a "cosmological" perspective, familiars aren't exactly just the animal that they were before they were picked as a familiar; they get "augmented" by some kind of spirit from beyond which is what makes them familiars.

Keep in mind; I don't have cozy, nice wizards in DFX. Magic is witchcraft, pure and simple, or transhuman scary sorcery. Familiar spirits that take over and possess the bodies of some animal are evil creatures, and for the most part, people who use magic are evil as well. Occasionally there is a "good" sorcerer who tries to use the tools of the enemy against him, which is where PCs using magic comes in, but that's usually a pretty iffy bargain to make, and the sorcerers who do this are usually biding their time, using it as little as possible, hoping to get through life before corruption catches up to them. 

But given that PCs are often reckless or desperate or both, I imagine that plenty of characters can use magic and even have familiars without being "evil"... but it's a slippery slope and they're already sliding on it.

Revival - Renaissance - Revolution

I was rooting around on my hard drive, and found this image. I can't remember why I created it now; probably for a blog post that never actually happened. Or maybe I originally meant it to belong with this post and didn't add the image?

I'll copy/paste and edit the relevant portions of that post here:

I've read some more OSR theory discussions, and it seems that most people who pay attention to this kind of thing have all come to similar conclusions, although the labels differ somewhat. That is, that there are effectively three groups that are all somewhat associated with the OSR, and a least sometimes take on that label. The labels that I used to prefer are OSR, OSR adjacent, and NSR. However, given that the OSR adjacent and NSR believe themselves to be part of the OSR too, and identify as such, I haven't found that those are as likely to stick. I've seen a clever way of differentiating between the three main camps by utilizing three different interpretations of what the R in OSR stands for, which maybe would work a little better. I've mentioned them briefly before, but there they are again:

Old School Revival: the "original" OSR, focused on getting the retroclones out so that the original rules could still b used (albeit in rewritten "cloned" form) and new modules utilizing those rules could be published by referring to these clones. Although initially focused on 1e AD&D stuff, i.e. OSRIC, in short order Sword & Wizardry (OD&D) and later Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord (B/X) were developments here too, bringing the full gamut of retroclines, more or less, into prominence. Once these four were out, the retroclone "need" was largely filled, and this original branch of what the OSR was gradually faded from prominence. Subsequently, two things happened: 1) WotC, recognizing the demand, made older materials available for sale as relatively reasonably priced pdfs or PODs, and 2) OSE (and to a lesser extent the Hyperborea AD&D clone) swept in and seems to have largely sucked the wind out of the sails of every other retroclone. By 2012, this movement within the OSR largely got everything that it wanted, and therefore is not a major movement anymore in the community. No doubt many people who associate more with this idea still play in the OSR space, and buy OSR products, especially new modules and adventures, but there is little talk of exciting new retroclones, and little effort that I'm aware of in pursuing the goals of the Revival portion of the OSR. Many online commentators speaking ~2012, called the OSR "dead" meaning that the community, having gotten what it wanted, went quiet and had no more need to discuss already achieved goals anymore.

Old School Renaissance: As the OSR got more and more into things beyond just the retroclones, it started to coalesce into a number of "this is how you play OSR style" philosophies. As many have pointed out, this is not a faithful recreation of how everyone played in the 70s and early 80s, but it is perhaps a romanticized recreation of at least one playstyle that had been underserved since, oh, probably the early to mid-80s, in many ways. The OSR community started focusing in on the simpler, older games, deliberately cultivated contempt for game balance, mechanical vs diagetic solutions, and a number of other things that would have been pretty seriously at odds with how most people played in in the 70s and 80s, and then also started diverging in tone and theme. This is the origin of the OSR playstyle, which differs, as noted, from classic playstyle or the more hegemonic trad style that's been in vogue since the early to mid-80s. But with the collapse of the OSR blogosphere (largely) around where the OSR was going, the pulling of the plug on Google+ where a lot of this activity was, and the collapse and cancellation of at least one of the most prominent purveyors of this version of the OSR, a lot of people considered this to be yet another "death of the OSR" or rather, that this briefly faddish phase of the OSR became much more quiet and no longer dominates the headlines, such as they are, in the OSR community. "Dead" of course, doesn't mean that lots of people don't play retroclones in the OSR playstyle, just that there isn't anything really new or exciting that is dominating the headlines online anymore.

Old School Revolution: One perhaps inevitable side effect of changing the OSR from a discussion on the mechanics, i.e., the old rules and retroclones which replicated them, to a playstyle and philosophy on how to game, is that eventually, OSR started to become—ironically—divorced from the very rules and mechanics that it was created to champion and bring back. While I like the idea of calling this the NSR, the label has had limited currency, and most OSR communities continue to talk about OSR products of this category as if they were actually the OSR. I kind of disagree, but since I don't identify as any kind of OSRian, just a sympathetic para-OSRian who's more old-fashioned than old skool, maybe it's a little cheeky of me to play gatekeeper to the label. I'm not sure exactly at what point this launched, but there are a lot of games, most of them very niche, and very... "why bother" quite honestly, alongside a handful of games that have become tentpoles, if you will, of this subcommunity within the OSR. All of these are defined by their adherence to the OSR philosophy, to the extent that that's really a well codified and accepted philosophy, while simultaneously deviating significantly from the mechanics and rules of older D&D and the retroclones. Many of them, ironically, bring in a great number of "storygame" affectations, like player-facing rules, meta-currencies to allow players to influence the emerging narrative, etc. Some of the tentpole properties include Into the Odd, or Morg Borg, Black Hack, Cairn and maybe Knave. There's many others, but I'm putting forward just a handful of the more prominent ones. It's also possible that OSR-themed games that hew closer to 5e (deliberately) like ShadowDark or Five Torches Deep also fit here, although I think many OSRians would be more comfortable suggesting that they like a lot about those games, but don't really consider them OSR. But that gets to the final group, for which I have no label.

Other: This group is games that may not have any connection to the OSR at all other than that OSR fans may also like them, or that their creators hope that OSR fans like them and hope to sell to them. While the former is fine; maybe games like Dragonbane fit here, the latter is just a cheap marketing gimmick, and definitely cause for more than usual caveat emptor on the part of the OSR fans looking at such a product. 

Maybe its a good thing if the OSR "dies". As a community, it doesn't seem particularly innovative anymore; even the NSR or OSRevolution's innovations are mostly overstated. And that community is particularly toxic too. Then again, most online communities are.

As I've said many times before, I'm not old school, but I am old-fashioned. None of the OSR communities are really doing what I'd want them to do, in theory, but I am sympathetic and somewhat adjacent to what they're doing. I've never really loved the old rules, and I do have a number of quibbles about them; I'd want them to be significantly modified, so I'm not really on the Revival camp. However, the Renaissance camp goes a lot into gaming philosophies that I disagree with, and the Revolution camp builds on those principles that I disagree with.

However, if you ditch the principles, then you can potentially end up with systems that I kind of like in the NSR or Revolution side. So I guess my preferred game is parallel to all of the three OSRs. But in terms of community, I find that the revival folks are the ones I'm most likely to get a long with, and the renaissance guys have some interesting ideas. The revolution might be more interesting from a system standpoint, but I find that community pretty intolerable, even when I might find some of their ideas for mechanics interesting, here and there. And honestly, they're not doing as much that's interesting as I'd like.

Dragonlance goes to the dogs

While I'm not going to claim that Larry Elmore is a real classic of the fine art tradition, he is a great commercial artist, and some of his D&D artwork from the 80s is rightly considered classic pieces of the fantasy genre. In particular, I think his BECMI covers and the original Dragonlance novel covers are landmark pieces. 

Apparently, he volunteered to do the art for the new Dragonlance trilogy written by Weiss and Hickman, but was basically told by WotC that they don't want any white male artists doing their work. So, instead, we got this:

Like I said, again, Elmore may not be Raphael, Rembrandt or Michelangelo, but c'mon. That crap is terrible. Not only is it technically poor, with only vaguely anatomically correct proportions or faces, but it's also objectively kind of ugly and deliberately so in many ways. It isn't terrible from a landscape perspective, although nothing special, but the characters and the dragon, and the posing and the composition is all pretty bad. As commercial art it also fails, because it's neither exciting, attractive nor even memorable.

And frankly, the dragon's head only looks cool because the artist copied the design pioneered by Sam Wood and Todd Lockwood in the 2000 Monster Manual. 

Although not super high resolution, this triptych style approach to the three covers shows art that is attractive, interesting, and commercially looks really good; it was an important part of turning the Dragonlance Chronicles into the bestselling landmark trilogy of novels that it was.

Yog-Sothothery = Elder Evils

This is hardly any kind of astonishing revelation, but let me spell this out explicitly anyway, because if you don't think of it this way, you can tend to migrate away from making this true. Maybe that's your intent, and that's great, but maybe it's not, and explicitly linking elements of D&D to Yog-Sothothery and Lovecraftian Mythos maybe something that you want to do. Let's first spell out the context:

First, most of the foundational works of sword & sorcery was fairly heavily steeped in the Weird Tales Yog-Sothothery (or very similar) traditions. Robert E. Howard wrote some explicitly Lovecraftian stories set in the modern day, like "The Fires of Asshurbanipul" and "The Black Stone" as well as historical Lovecraftian stories, like "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth" or "Worms of the Earth", but even his explicitly sword & sorcery creations, which really kind of created the genre as we know it were Lovecraftian, like "The Tower of the Elephant" or "Vale of the Lost Women." Fritz Leiber also had a lot of Weird Tales like stuff in his works, and he's also considered perhaps another founding pillar of the genre, as did Michael Moorcock.

Second, D&D started off with many of those same vibes. However, in part because of Gygax's personality, and in part because of things that had been happening to Yog-Sothothery since Lovecraft's death, much of the Yog-Sothothery became too categorized, too burdened with lore and game statistics, and too neat and... well, explainable. The "monster(s)" in "The Fires of Asshurbanipal" or "The Black Stone" or "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth" are barely even physically described, much less burdened with histories, personalities and lore. They're just weird monsters that cause the characters to fail a sanity check. Because Howard wrote those stories instead of Lovecraft, they were more prone to a fight response rather than a flight response to a failed sanity check, but still... what happened is pretty clear. What the monsters actually are is less so. This was present even from the beginning; Demogorgon is a great Lovecrafitan monstrous foe in the original Monster Manual, or even in the Eldritch Wizardry book a little bit earlier. However, by making him the "Prince of Demons" and associating him with a hierarchy of demons, even as vaguely defined as it was, and giving him rivalries and personality, he became less of a Lovecraftian monster and more of a monstrous Fu Manchu or Professor Moriarty. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but the two tend to work at cross purposes, and Demogorgon was a better Lovecraftian monster than he was a Fu Manchu manipulator who just happens to look like a monster.

Third, many of the monsters later characterized as aberrations have this same problem; they started off as pretty good Lovecraftian-like entities, but when they were saddled with a culture, a society, and all-too-human-like personalities, they became, by default, less like Lovecraftian monsters and more like just really ugly bad guys. They simply haven't been used like Lovecraftian monsters, as they could be, which greatly dilutes their Yog-Sothothery vibe. Lots of monsters could apply here, but beholders, mind-flayers and aboleths strike me as the most obviously Lovecraftian inspired yet not very Lovecraft-like in their actual appearances and usage by the game.

So... obviously, they needed a way to kind of roll back all of that burden of lore and bucketing of monsters to make them more mysterious and monstrous again. "Elder Evils" is a semi-category that they created late in the 3.5 era that did part of it. Chris Perkins has even confirmed, in a brief clip of an interview I saw, that elder evils is a semi-category that just means old, powerful and not part of some other fiend or aberration category... although many of them are associated with aberrations. But back in the middle-late 00s when 3.5 was getting a little long in the tooth, there were three works that all kinda sorta did this, and Elder Evils was only one of them. Although it did pretty good for what it was, it didn't always have that really Lovecraftian vibe to all of the elder evils, just some of them.

The Lords of Madness was the aberrations specialty book, and while it didn't exactly do the same thing, it did open the doors for some additional Yog-Sothothery within D&D, especially for those that are races, that could be seen as equivalent to the mi-go or the elder things. Not every Elder Evil needs to be Cthulhu himself!

And Hordes of the Abyss also was a really Lovecraftian book in many ways, and it was fascinating to see them claw back demons into a Lovecraftian paradigm in many ways. The obyrith stuff was straight-up Lovecraftian, and the Black Scrolls of Ahm fictional book was pretty much exactly like the infamous Necronomicon itself, including an author who died under equally mysterious and sinister circumstances as Abdul Alhazred did. Well done. Dagon became the "face" if you will of the obyriths in many ways, and of course, he's basically exactly the same as the Lovecraft Dagon from the stories "Dagon" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

But by and large, the ability of D&D to tread into true Yog-Sothothery has been limited. And maybe that's OK. Maybe, even though Yog-Sothothery was a crucial component of early sword & sorcery, it simply doesn't fit what D&D has become. And honestly, maybe Yog-Sothothery has become to much of a pop culture in-joke to work super well anyway. But I do feel like occasionally D&D got it right, and in a way that I would have really enjoyed. One of those, ironically, because it stumbles in many ways, is with Zargon, the monster of B4 The Lost City and various other iterations of it. It is one of the elder evils mentioned in Elder Evils, although it comes across there as... well, as too D&Dish to really feel Lovecraftian. And it was unfortunately saddled with a very stylized Wayne England illustration that didn't really do the old guy any favors. And honestly, Zargon is a pretty corny name anyway. But just based on his description, and some of the really good illustrations of him, Zargon would have been great if "cast" as the monstrous villain of "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth", "The Fire of Asshurbanipul", "The Black Stone" or many other Lovecraftian tales—and yes, I know I specifically picked three Robert E. Howard Lovecraftian tales. But I've read those recently and they fit very well.

While I'm not a huge fan of 5e, and I only play (occasionally) in it somewhat reluctantly, they do occasionally have some really cool illustrations, when they're not trying to be too cozy or too DEI. These two Zargon illustrations are fantastic. But I'd rename him to something like Zo-Kalar or something (an offhand name dropped by Lovecraft in The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath), and do away with all of the weird lore; he's a monster in a remote place that really only becomes a problem if you disturb him... although the place is foreshadowed for a long time as a place that's cursed. And it probably needs some reference to Xuthltan or his (possible) alternate spelling Xaltotun from the Conan story.

Sigh. I wish D&D did what I wanted a little better sometimes. But I've said that for 45 years now, so I've made my peace with it, more or less. But it's sometimes harder when they come so close and yet... still manage to not quite get there.

I'm finishing up the Enemy Within "director's cut" books shortly. I'll still have the last companion to read, but before that, I think I'm going to take a break and read those three late 3.5 era D&D books: Elder Evils, Lords of Madness and Hordes of the Abyss. I miss that kind of stuff.

Not old school... but old fashioned

That's been one of my mottos for a long time. I've always been frustrated with D&D as it was written in the 70s and 80s. But in the end, I realized that these were details of the rules, not the core of them. I mean, sure, there were a lot of rules that I didn't love, like non-weapon proficiencies, and weird saving throws, and THAC0 and crap like that, but as a whole, with minor changes, the core of the games were pretty good. Especially as the modern retroclones have cleaned up some of the worst problems that they had. This is where I align, I suppose with the OSR.

However, the flavor was all wrong. The thief should be a much more useful class, and the mechanics of it were always terrible. The magic system, spells, and magic items were all unlike anything I'd really read in fantasy before, and I never liked magic (although to be fair, apparently Gary Gygax didn't really like it much either. That said, his design for magic-users was always bad.) Clerics were not actually much of a fantasy archetype, and the way healing was handled by "divine magic" was always unsatisfying. Many tropes were obviously cribbed from high fantasy, especially The Lord of the Rings, and some others had obvious influences in sword & sorcery, but because Gygax's background was wargames, neither of those influences felt very much like the fiction; they were too "gamified" if that makes sense. D&D quickly turned the wrong direction; the rules and mechanics of OD&D were blundering through trial and error into figuring out what worked, but it was on the right track in terms of what the game was about and how to play it, for the most part, but as it accreted more and more rules, edge cases, and the focus on dungeon crawling, not to mention the detritus from wargaming that it still couldn't conceive of leaving behind, I got more and more disillusioned with D&D specifically. It failed to deliver on the implicit promise inherent in the hobby that a fantasy literature fan like myself saw in it. I didn't want to play a tactical wargame, I wanted to collaboratively and improvisationally go through something that resembled the fantasy literature that I loved. By the mid-80s, ironically as the Hickman Revolution was remaking the hobby in some ways into something that better matched my stated goals, I got tired of D&D and wondered what else going on in the hobby would better suit my interests. Well, to be fair, I was also busy doing other things a lot in the second half of the 80s, as I was in high school and gaming was one of those things that I had a fringe interest in, but didn't really spend time or energy on anymore at that point. But I did keep track of a few other things going on in the hobby, or in adjacent hobbies. I checked out MERP and the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, for instance, and spent at least some time looking at Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Top Secret S.I. and a few other games (mostly the other TSR games, because they were the most readily available.) I was passingly familiar with Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, Champions, and more, although passingly familiar and actually familiar were probably miles apart. It was later in the early/mid 90s that I came back to gaming, and at that time, I was deliberately avoiding D&D. Instead, I got interested in what White Wolf was doing, I discovered a college friend who had Top Secret SI kicking around, and I got into some older Traveller stuff. I didn't regain any interest in D&D until 3rd edition in 2000.

I was always a bit skeptical of the Hickman Revolution and the switch from Classic to Trad style which seemed to have happened. Although I consider myself a trad guy, it was immediately obvious what the excesses of trad would be and how they could be extremely detrimental to a game. Player agency is still paramount, and pre-written campaigns or even modules with plots would easily devolve into railroads that nobody wanted to play, because just write it as a freakin' book and let me read that instead, already. The improvisational and collaborative elements of RPGs were always core to their appeal, and minimizing those was never going to go well. The risk inherent to the characters was also part of the appeal, and what made it exciting; another excess of the trad style is crafting stories or at least potential stories around the characters, which makes everyone much less willing to see them put in any significant risk. A perhaps unintended side effect of this is that the primacy of "my precious character" from a plot standpoint, also, or perhaps in parallel, draws them inexorably towards power fantasies and over-powered superhero characters. 

Meanwhile, as the style changed, the mechanics did not, which only frustrated me all the more, as what I wanted D&D to do and what it actually managed to do were all the more divorced, in many ways.

Although the flexibility inherent in the WotC editions of D&D, starting with 3e which I played the heck out of it for many, many years allowed me to get more of what I wanted from the game, it was also not designed with what I wanted in mind, and I gradually got more and more frustrated yet again with the game. The strategy of player-facing products was interesting for a while, because it allowed for a great deal of setting development through mechanics... at least when it was done well, although it didn't take long for that to become quite boring and focused on mechanical dickering and build strategies rather than actual "fluff" concerns that were interesting.

When 4e came out, I didn't have any interest in adopting it, even though from a lore standpoint, it actually did more of what I wanted... it's just that by that time, it didn't do enough. I was clearly ready to move on from the D&Disms, and D&D was still quite conservative, at least in the sense that it failed to be anything terribly different than it used to be. Ironically, many conservative (and I mean this in regards to lore and expectations of the game; not socially or politically, of course—although I do think that there is at least some correlation between the two) thought 4e was a step too far; to me, it wasn't enough to interest me. And many of the other things it did, like focusing on character builds and long, drawn out combats, were exactly the opposite of where I wanted to go. Pathfinder, although different mechanically, also followed that same directive. 5e too, as near as I can tell; the idea that it's considerably streamlined compared to 3e or 4e only makes sense if you operate in a world where D&D is the totality of the RPG market. 5e is full of compromises; it's basically a slightly streamlined 3e, in terms of character builds, at least, but with pretty much the same unlikeable combat system, and plenty of additional complexity in areas that don't interest me.

So, I've finally come around to being more positive towards the OSR, which for many years—quite honestly—kind of irritated me, due to the spergy behavior of some of its most vocal adherents, and it's trumpeting of classic playstyle (which gradually evolved into the OSR playstyle, which has some similarities, but also some significant differences). I still don't really want to play an OSR game, but I think starting with an OSR chassis, or OSR-adjacent chassis, at least, and modifying it to be less overtly D&D-ish and more able to replicate the kind of implied setting that I want is where I am, in most respects. It's also very much worth pointing out that I'm still an old-fashioned guy, but firmly in the trad camp, although as noted above, with some long-standing skepticism of its excesses. Systems that are designed with trad style in mind rather than classic could do some things differently than the OSR did, which went from being specifically to cloning the old systems, to furthering the OSR playstyle. Maybe you could call me paleo-trad; trad but with a firm grounding in old fashioned classic play. I left classic because I didn't like it and trad promised what I always wanted RPGs to do, but classic also created many of my tastes, or at least strongly informed them.

So, I'm old-fashioned, but not old school. I'm more comfortable going back to an old school chassis and modifying it to be more what I want than I am starting with a modern chassis. Not that there hasn't been some pretty cool and interesting developments system-wise, because there absolutely have been. All three of the modern editions of the game brought some cool new innovations to the table. But mostly, I'm not happy playing in an OSR style, even when I prefer to modify OSR mechanics. There are still things about most OSR systems that I don't love, but getting the mechanics into a more "cleaned up" OSR baseline and then variancing based on taste and flavor from there is where I'm at now. 

And speaking of being conservative in terms of what I want; holy cow, has fantasy become weird, apparently, in the last couple of decades. Since when is fantasy some weird diversity utopia with animal people and superheroes all over the place?