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.

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.