Old Night as Darkest Dungeon

The video game Darkest Dungeon, in two versions (I and II) plus its various DLC add-ons is a pretty iconic D&D-like setting with a grimdark, overtly Lovecraftian overlay, and a small amount of primitive firearms. Darkest Dungeon (I'm not going to keep italicizing it, even though it's a title and that would be correct. Too much trouble.) is very much a dungeon-crawler, which I'm not interested in, but otherwise, it sits very well alongside similar darker, Lovecraftian games with a slightly more "modern", i.e. Late Middle Ages or even earliest post-Middle Ages social and technological take; kind of a 1400s-early 1500s instead of classical High Medieval, like the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, which is also not really focused on dungeon-crawling. When WFRP was developed in the middle 80s, dungeon-crawling was considered very passé in the British market that it was initially developed for. It's odd to see Darkest Dungeon feel quite a bit like Warhammer FRP, but re-focused again on dungeon-crawling, when Warhammer FRP explicitly rejected that model of play. Then again, for an indie computer game, dungeon-crawling is an easier model than anything else to utilize. You just go through levels fighting monsters, after all. The Solomon Kane stories that I'm reading right now are kind of the late end of this period too, supposedly taking place more or less in the late 1500s or early 1600s. The Three Musketeers also takes place in the early 1600s. To give a couple more examples of similar vibe properties.

However, if firearms are quite rare for social or cultural reasons rather than common among soldiers, then Medieval style equipment could linger alongside early firearms, making a feel that's slightly anachronistic, yet exactly what I want. All it takes is a blackout on knowledge of how to make them; if very few can actually do so, then there's no way to replenish stocks quickly, so firearms by default become quite rare. And maintenance of them, or even availability of new powder, can also be limited. This is the model I want for Old Night. Heck, I even have a strange manufacturing center that can be the source of all firearms and powder; Gaskarfells. If only one place and one power group within said place understands the secret of gunpowder, and it's a closely guarded state secret not unlike Greek Fire (except "state" secret isn't quite right; more like a powerful semi-freelance guild secret), then I get exactly what I want; common soldiers don't have access to firearms. The Rangers, maybe, and a few other eccentric or wealthy adventuresome types might have them, but they only. Everyone else still has to use Medieval style equipment as their default. But with them being "out there" they can occasionally fall into unusual hands, such as the iconic Darkest Dungeon Highwayman. For what it's worth, the era of the Romanticized English Highwayman is a little bit later than the era of Solomon Kane and the Musketeers, being more late 1600s and early 1700s. It actually overlaps with the so-called "Golden Age of Piracy" if that's something that means more to most people. I want, simply, a Gothic, dungeon-punk aesthetic over a grimdark fantasy setting that's less like the Hanseatic League or Holy Roman Empire of the 1500-1600s and more like a combination of Medieval England and frontier America, but before the advent of repeating weapons, which was a force multiplier for the Americans, and the cause of the Old West cowboy age being a thing that could happen. 

Now, I'm not trying to make Old Night into a Darkest Dungeon table-top simulator, but I do want to have a quick look at the classes for Darkest Dungeon, and do a quick "would they fit in Old Night, and can I build them in Old Night" kind of analysis real quick. Not necessarily trying to model all of their specific abilities in the Darkest Dungeon game, but certainly the more high level archetype. 

In alphabetical order:

• Abomination: I actually have a pseudo-iconic, Claud Lupescu, who kind of fits this Jekyll/Hyde archetype. But he's special, and not actually very iconic, because I'm not 100% sure that I can build him as is as a PC with the rules. In fact, I'm quite sure that I cannot, so I removed him from being considered "iconic"; he's rather a a unique monster/NPC. So, this is an unusual situation to start the list off with; I literally have a character that fits this archetype, but he's exceptional and shouldn't be necessarily replicatable with the rules like normal. 
• Antiquarian: The antiquarian is not good in combat, either for offense or defense, but is optimized for detecting treasure. You can easily create a simulacrum of this archetype by focusing on skills, research and scholarship.
• Arbalest: An arbalest is actually a heavy crossbow, not a character class, at least outside of Darkest Dungeon, but the arbalest character class is a sniper who focuses on using an arbalest of sorts, or even almost a ballista being carried as a personal weapon like Jesse Ventura carried a minigun in Predator. The arbalest also uses a bola, so it's an interesting type of build. I don't have a bola in the equipment list, but I could easily whip one up if I wanted to.
• Bounty Hunter: This archetype can be easily modeled and feels right at home already in Old Night.
• Crusader: The crusader is really just a classic knight, with a touch of Paladin. Nothing too fancy, and can easily be modeled "close enough" in Old Night. 
• Grave Robber: Really just a thief or rogue in the D&D sense; a versatile fighterish type who isn't super tanky, but can do ranged and melee and some independent support quite well. 
• Hellion: Similar to the D&D Barbarian, this can be done reasonably well already in Old Night. It's a pretty basic archetype, or at least it would be if they didn't make her a girl, which is odd and anti-archetypal. Very "modern audiences" friendly, though. Ugh.
• Highwayman: A pretty basic fighter type, but without the focus on melee. More of a striker/DPS type in terms of video game terminology. You give him a pistol and a short sword or dagger, and you've got the Highwayman already in Old Night.
• Houndmaster: You create something like a fighter, but give him an animal companion, and you're good to go. This isn't a complicated archetype to create either.
• Jester: I'm not sure that this archetype even fits, honestly, in Old Night. He's kind of a weird one. You could cobble together something that looks a bit like him, I suppose. 
• Leper: This is mostly just a tweak to the heavy fighter archetype.
• Man-at-Arms: Another tweak to the heavy fighter archetype. A little more defense oriented than the Crusader, but that's not important in the Old Night context as much. 
• Musketeer: A clone mechanically to the arbalest, so it works the exact same way. In Old Night, obviously, this archetype would carry a blunderbuss rather than a big, heavy crossbow.
• Occultist: Although the occultist has some weird mechanics, it's really just an expression of the darker sorcerer type archetype, exactly the same as any magic-using characters in Old Night.
• Plague Doctor: A bit of an unusual archetype, who uses some area effect "bleed" attacks (plagues) with some healing. I might need to come up with some area effect type attacks that a PC could access if I wanted to do this guy.
• Vestal: a healer. I don't really have normal magical healing, because Old Night doesn't use that paradigm.

For the DLC only classes, there's a few more, although how "archetypal" they are is questionable, even moreso than some of the ones above:

• Flagellant: Not sure that I need to have this; as he takes damage, he gets tougher, although of course, closer to death. It's a bit of a mechanical gimmick rather than an archetype, so I'm not worried about trying to recreate him.
• Shieldbreaker: A flexible glass cannon fighter type. Just another slight tweak to the fighter. 

I've also create a Hero Forge model, and then loaded my image of it into ChatGPT and then Grok to get an iteration of it that looks more realistic. Not sure I got exactly what I wanted, but it's not bad. In high and lower contrast versions.

I also got some other images, not based on my Hero Forge original; just based on the prompt. These are OK too.