Dark Fantasy X Race Deep Dive: Atlanteans

If you're not in the cult, you probably have noticed, even if it's just subconscious and lingers in the back of your mind as cognitive dissonance, that racism is a hoax. White guys are the nicest, most accommodating and welcoming population, probably in the history of the human race, and yet we're constantly accused of racism. Every time anyone tries to examine a supposed incident of racism committed by white people against the poor black, brown, red and yellow people who we've (mostly) foolishly allowed to live here among us, what you find is merely a shakedown racket by an entitled, whiny, demanding narcissist. In spite of the fact that nobody ever finds any racism, we're to believe that it's all around us everywhere, invisible, yet insidiously destroying... something.

Other times, normal human behavior is retroactively described as "racist" but only if white people do it. This is the case for a lot of early pulp authors that I like to read. The early Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs are among my favorite stories ever written, and ERB didn't have any ill-will towards Africans. But we're told that they're unforgivingly racist because Africans are described as primitive... pretty much exactly the way everyone who saw them first-hand a hundred some odd years ago described them, because it was an accurate description of them. H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard are similarly cast in this dishonest mold, because they sometimes had stories in which a plot point would be a foreigner pitted in an existential struggle against the white man. In spite of this, we're to believe that the white man is in an existential struggle against everyone, but unless we lay down and grovel unceasingly while every black, brown, red or yellow person on the face of the planet has his way with us and our stuff, we're the racists. 

I bring this up, because my concept of the Atlantis in Dark Fantasy X is more akin to that described by Robert E. Howard in Skull-Face. If you haven't ever read this novella, I highly recommend it. It's quite ingenious, and well written, and has a fantastic concept; taking the idea of Cthulhu from his pen-pal H. P. Lovecraft and remixing it pretty substantially. I can't describe this without spoiling the plot of Skull-face, (it's in the public domain, and not hard to find full text copies of it) I recommend that you go read it and come back to this post afterwards. I promise; it'll still be here. In any case, Skull-face is almost always accused of being racist, merely because the story itself is clearly a Fu Manchu pastiche, and therefore it must be just because. Never mind that most Hollywood movies are constantly preaching the fake White Peril and making white men the constant villains, that's not bad, because the elites in our society define themselves by their hatred of whiteness; western Civilization, and especially Christianity. Skull-face isn't racist, and if you read it without looking for an opportunity to shriek, pretend to be offended, and run for your fainting couch, it's got much to recommend it.

Cthulhu in Skull-face is re-spelled Cathulo, and he's not a big tentacle monster asleep under the sea at R'lyeh, he's an undead Atlantean sorcerer, dredged up from the bottom of the sea by some fisherman, and awakened, and then turned into a Fu Manchu-style character, who's especially keen to destroy Western Civilization and the men who built it. Although he's singular, he's also not—there are who knows how many other undead Atlantean sorcerers who put themselves in lacquered, airtight coffins prior to the sinking of Atlantis, and went into some kind of undead hibernation until such time as they could resurface and reclaim their ancient empire. This was their plan to "survive" (in undead form) the sinking of Atlantis, and return someday to reclaim the world. This is naturally seen as racist, because anything with a Fu Manchu storyline is called racist, regardless of any facts related to it. It just is, because white men aren't allowed to have their own countries, their own culture, or their own anything. Because if they did, they'd be "white supremacists." It's all a gigantic hoax, but it actually makes Skull-face remarkably topical. Just recast the Atlanteans with cultural Marxists, who are a mix of Jews and ambitious, grasping white elites who hate their own people and their own culture, and who want to plunder it into oblivion while it still has something worth plundering left, and it could almost be a shockingly prescient portrayal of our day. It's not quite as on-the-nose as Camp of the Saints because of the intrigue, skullduggery and action sequences with what is obviously a fantasy dark lord. Frankly, you should also read at least the first Fu Manchu novel by Sax Rohmer. It's pretty good, and doesn't feel as dated as you'd think.

Anyway, in Dark Fantasy X, Atlantis hasn't existed in millennia. As noted above, that doesn't mean that they're entirely gone as a race, although they mostly are. In fact, the Mind-Wizards (of the upcoming MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTELAND are a couple of undead Atlanteans of the original ancestral stock. Because they're undead, they're thousands of years old. They could exist as statted enemies in Dark Fantasy X, they'd be equivalent to Heresiarchs; undead creatures that combine most of the strengths of both liches and vampires and few of their weaknesses.

A Mind-Wizard, a former Atlantean master sorcerer

But this isn't what I mean by the playable race Atlanteans. Those are, rather, the descendants of ancient slaves who were present on Atlantean colonies on the mainland when the cataclysm struck their homeland. Although they survived the sinking of Atlantis, they did so with great loss of life and the complete collapse of their culture. If you watch the Netflix documentary series Ancient Apocalypse which is made by (or at least strongly featuring) Graham Hancock and his theories* which have been floating around in print for decades now, you have a pretty good idea of what the Atlantean civilization befell. However, there were no benevolent Atlantean survivors to bring knowledge to the primitive people of the mainland; the Atlantean survivors "survived" by becoming undead, locking themselves in watertight coffins and going into a state of torpor until such time as they can be returned to the surface to rebuild their ancient empire, sweeping the world clean of the modern nations entirely, unless they have some use as chattel. The slaves who survived, who were of mixed race, although with some Atlantean blood, because the degenerate Atlanteans had often abused the women of their slaves until such point as a not insubstantial degree of Atlantean blood flowed through the slaves too, were also neither friendly, nor capable of maintaining the esoteric scientific and magical knowledge of their masters. In fact, a curse fell upon them because of their mingled Atlantean blood. The undead mind-wizards only escaped this curse because as undead, they have no blood flowing through their veins—they effectively evaded one curse by embracing another even worse one. 

This curse—taking another cue from Robert E. Howard—is that the Atlanteans cannot use any advanced technology, ensuring that they remain a backwards and devolved people. In fact, they are slowly regressing and devolving back towards becoming man-apes, although at different rates for different individuals. The most civilized still wear leather clothing, and can use bone, wood, or stone tools and speak normally, etc. The most devolved have only rudimentary tool use, and their language is stunted and primitive, and they live little better than the most primitive conception of cave-men.

No Atlantean can use or possess any items of metal without falling under the curse, and rapidly sickening, withering and dying in a painful way, returning as a husked undead creature who eats the living. By rapidly, I don't mean minutes or hours, though—more like weeks. If an Atlantean is in possession of a metal object, there's time to get rid of it and stop the curse from spreading. This curse is what separates them from normal men and causes them to be treated as demihumans; they are literally leaving their humanity behind, and they've already lost enough of for it to be immediately obvious to anyone who sees one. 

Because of this, Atlanteans are stuck permanently in a stone age state of society, and in fact as they devolve, they will over generations become more primitive and savage, not less. Physically, they are often small and hunched, but with rangy limbs, and a heartier, more robust build than one would expect; pound for pound, Atlanteans are often stronger than other men, although because they are usually smaller this usually levels the playing field. They have darker nut-brown skin, and brown hair, but with shockingly blue eyes. They are quite secretive and stealthy. They usually live in small bands in secretive places of the world, often deep in trackless forests, such as the Haunted Forest and the Bitterwood, where (relatively) large remaining populations of them remain, although many more such bands still linger in other lonely and isolated parts of the Three Realms. The largest—albeit widely spread—groups live in red deserts of Baal Hamazi. They are usually unremittingly hostile towards any non-Atlantean, but occasionally one will have some kind of social intercourse with one of their neighbors beyond simply attacking him.

Another group lives in the Orlock Marshes and has actual relations with their neighbors. Most overland travelers will not see any as they pass through their territory (although they will most likely themselves be seen) but they do occasionally talk, trade, and interact with the people around them in places like Innsburough. Some of the countryside swampies even consider them to be friendly, although to anyone else they're merely "not actively hostile" while still being furtive, secretive, withdrawn and aloof. 

Sometimes others leave or are forced out of their communities, and eventually find their way into the wider world. And occasionally, one finds and abandoned baby or toddler of the Atlanteans that hasn't died yet. This rarely works out well, unless the baby is somehow kept from metal, and few would know to do so, but a tiny amount have managed to be raised in human society this way, albeit usually in extremely isolated and backwards environments; nearly as much so as the society which they were abandoned by.

A successful Atlantean hunter/warrior

An Atlantean that still hearkens back to his human ancestry

A much more regressed Atlantean hunter

One of the Atlanteans' dark shamans, wielding a stone hammer and daemon-blade of bone

An Atlantean praying by firelight to his dark gods

Atlanteans call themselves Wendaks. Although their language is variable and primitive, it is obvious to scholars that it bears some resemblance to the ancient and poorly known language of Atlantis, and it is generally believes to be a debased and degenerate collection of descendants of that language. Wendak itself seems to be a much changed and eroded reflex of the old word for "slave."

Along with their general hostility towards the races who have arrived on the scene since the fall of Atlantis, the greatest danger the Wendaks pose is their daemon-worship. Their daemon-shamans have a power not unlike that of the sorcery of other peoples, yet it is completely dependent on their faith in their daemon-lords. Not only do these daemon-shamans occasionally whip up their tribes to go on the warpath at the behest of their daemonic masters, but they are also able to call daemons into the world to plague people from outside of their tribes. One that is particularly common among them, but which sometime spread from their isolated Wendak origins to plague normal people as parasitic predators, familiars to dark sorcerers and worse, or the nuzzle-rats; strange rat-like creatures with a human-like face. These are not animals, however, but a particularly vile form of small daemon, and they can speak (somewhat) and occasionally even warp reality in an effect that is similar to a sorcerous spell.

There is also often a more subtle influence left in places where the Atlanteans trod. I wrote this paragraph over three years ago about the Haunted Forest, but the same can apply to other areas as well. Keep in mind that at that time, I called the Atlanteans skraelings. I no longer do, but I decided not to edit the text. There will be some people in the setting that yet refer to them with that label.

The territory of the Hill Country, up to at least the borders of what is today Timischburg, was probably first settled by early ancestors of the skraelings.  Some few still live deep in the Haunted Forest and other remote areas of the territory, but it is here that their touch is the least disturbed.  Cursed burial grounds, sacrificial altars, barrows and more leave their lingering taint on the ground, and there is a rumor that "sympathetic magic" ties the skraelings to the land in a way that it does not for other peoples; the land itself, and some kind of genius loci favors them and occasionally actively fights against more recent interlopers.  In addition to a kind of vaguely defined genius loci haunting the region and making modern peoples uncomfortable deep in the forest, lingering semi-sentient spirits—either cursed Wendaks or those whom they summoned in ancient times—still linger, worn down to being little more than vague emotional resonances of hate and defensiveness, but which can occasionally embody themselves in bodies of earth and wood and stone, animate ill will in the animals and trees and brambles, or even appear as wraiths or wights of some kind.  These skraeling spirits are not organized by anything other than a general animus towards anything in the forest that is not skraeling, and they are usually essentially mindless, possessing no thought, but only emotions such as hate and rage.

While the Atlanteans look human enough, their curse not only makes it difficult for them to live like or among humans, but it also creates a sense of wrongness or unease about them, that most people can recognize. Animals do so even more, and Wendaks can rarely ride horses or keep dogs. A particularly nasty breed of dog-like animal, often called a grimshuck will tolerate their presence. These animals look like wiry dogs, mangy or nearly hairless except for a hyena-like mane down their neck to their back, and oversize teeth and jaws and oddly shaped faces. Nearly the size of a wolf, they serve as surly and aggressive equivalents to dogs in their society, and are just about the only animal that the Wendaks can domesticate.

Atlanteans: +1 to DEX and Stealth affinity. Atlanteans, or Wendaks in their own language, are the original inhabitants of the area where the protagonist nations are, and some of them still linger deep in the wilds and woods that are lightly settled by the other races. They look human enough, albeit exotic: short and dark, with bright blue eyes, and a primitive technological material culture. Never very common to begin with, they have not prospered in competition for the land with other more recent arrivals.

It probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway; as the Wendaks have developed in my setting, they've become an antagonist race, and those that could serve as models for PC-like behavior would be very few and far between. That said, they've been part of Dark Fantasy X ever since it was Dark”Heritage Mk. IV at least, way back in 2011 if not even earlier. I'm reluctant to excise them now as a playable option, but any playable Wendak character would probably have to have an unusual backstory (for his race) since the culture that they are embedded in makes them difficult to run as is as a player character in a (presumably) mixed race PC party that would be expected to interact with normal society. You'll need to think about why this Wendak isn't part of Wendak society, how he rejected the daemon-worship of his people, and what his whole deal really is. 

Finally, it's worth noting that there is another group that is sometimes (erroneously) associated with Atlanteans, although this is just an accident of geography. There are a few remaining fragments of the mini-continent of Atlantis that still remain above the water, and this the archipelago of Nizrekh. Nizrekh will occasionally get mentioned here and there, but it's really beyond the scope of the Dark Fantasy X setting as I intend to develop it, just as the orclings homeland of Gunaakt is. The Nizrekh people are people who live on those islands, and who occasionally find their way to the Three Realms. However, they arrived on the archipelago after Atlantis sank, and they are in no way related to the Atlanteans. They are, in fact, just a population of humans; small and brown-skinned, with dark hair and eyes, who often shave all of their hair. They have been psychologically and spiritually perverted by the lingering malice of the Mind-Wizards, many of whom slumber in the waves near the islands, and one or two of whom have managed to infiltrate the islands themselves. Their dark cults to snakes and undead make them extremely hostile to outsiders, but they do mostly remain on their islands, and seem to have little interest in leaving them.

* So, Graham Hancock is obviously a controversial figure. In defiance of the expectations of binary thinkers, just because I like certain things that he does doesn't mean that I endorse him. I like how he challenges the mainstream narrative, and points out where it's full of holes, has weaknesses, and needs either shoring up, or revision. I've long ago come to realize that most of the mainstream narratives we take for granted in most sciences, in disciplines such as history, politics, sociology, etc. are weak, if not observably fake. The mainstream archeological narratives are built more on assumptions and cult-like beliefs than they are on facts, and Hancock not only does a good job of challenging them, but he does a good job (inadvertently in this case) of demonstrating in real time exactly the personality problems with too many archaeologists, who are smug, arrogant, and dismissive of evidence, because it threatens their social status and their legacy, not because it threatens their models and theories.

That said, Hancock's alternative proposal isn't any more convincing than the mainstream one. I would hardly be happy seeing it replace the Establishment narrative, because it's at least as weak. More work to be done here all around, guys. Frankly, our forebears were on to more than we are now, because they started from the assumption that written testimony in the form of scripture, and very old history, even semi-legendary stuff, was based on reality. We're often finding that many details that had been dismissed by "modern" scientists have something to them after all in the fields of archaeogenetics, and others. I strongly suspect that looking at those kinds of sources to be our guides will be more fruitful than starting from dogmas that are literally built from thin air, like most of our mainstream archeological models are.

Paizo to the rescue? #DnDBegone

I realize that I've devoted too many posts to this issue lately, so this may be the last one for a while. Plus, I don't know that I have anything else meaningful to say after this is done or not.

I have a funny relationship with Paizo. I mean, one-sided, of course. They don't know who I am. I like some of what they've done, and I like their attitude of stepping up to "save" D&D from WotC back in the 4e and GSL debacle. Ultimately, this led to the creation of the Pathfinder game, which created enough meaningful competition for WotC that they rapidly (relatively speaking) shifted gears and produced 5e, which was—from what I gather—a crowd pleaser. It looks like Paizo are at it again, not only drawing a legal line in the sand that the OGL cannot be "deauthorized" and bringing on board their own legal counsel to assert that opinion—legal counsel who ironically was WotCs legal counsel and writer of the original OGL that WotC is now asserting that they can cancel, but also created a new, more iron-clad version of the OGL, that they're calling ORC. (I didn't ask them if ORC is supposed to represent a black guy, but what can I say? It's been a busy couple of days.)

This is pretty admirable. I don't really care about questions of "the D&D community" and I think people who get too wrapped up in using their hobbies as their identity are making poor life choices in general, but valuing that community and being willing to do stuff to protect it are admirable nonetheless. Besides, that community is Paizo's customer base and their business model depends upon its health.

That said, I don't really care for very much of Paizo's products. Not only are the adventure paths not the kind of product that I like, and I've highlighted that many times here, even facepalming when they had a side-bar that said that although railroading is bad and nobody likes it, you should do it here; just be subtle about it so your players don't know that you're railroading them. Ghastly design.

I've never been a particular fan of their systems either. I was already over 3.5 and its Byzantine over-regulated environment. Not that 4e was what I wanted either, but when Paizo decided to make Pathfinder be 3.5 except even more 3.5ish, I knew that I was going to have to part ways with them system-wise. Their more newly released 2e might be better, but I still doubt that it's gone in a direction that I'm interested in; I think their designers are just too system-junkie and tactics-minded to ever produce anything that I'd be very interested in playing. 

Whatever. The same applies to almost anyone, though. I have my own homebrew system that I'd prefer to use anyway, and I'm not going to be very pleased with running anything else ever again other than that. I really don't need any RPG product anymore, honestly, although I am still interested in stuff that inspires me with good ideas that I can borrow or adapt. The more "system agnostic" and "fluffy" a product is, the more likely I am to enjoy it. I don't think that this perspective is common, but it applies to everything for me no matter who makes it. It applies to the WotC campaigns that I've read, like Saltmarsh or Curse of Strahd, it applies to Paizo adventure paths, or Kobold Press's Midgard setting material, or anything else that I might stumble across in the RPG environment. I'm much less interested in mechanics—I literally have almost no more use for them at all at this point—and much more interested in the softer side of products, because they at least (potentially) give me something to work with. Not that the "fantasy superhero furries" vibe of a lot of this newer material is very intriguing to me, but sometimes someone manages to publish stuff that works regardless.

That said—Paizo's other big problem from a product standpoint is their egregious, incredibly obnoxious wokeness. And this, of course, makes even their softer stuff very hard to like or work with. To be fair, few products outside of the OSR don't suffer from this, however. and I'm not super interested in the OSR for other reasons. And even then, you can't get away from wokeness even in the OSR or OSR-adjacent stuff. I like a lot of Professer Dungeon Master's videos, but even he talks about "safety protocols" with a straight face and admits that most of his players are die-hard feminists. Talking about safety protocols for an activity that is inherently not in the least dangerous is stupid and obnoxious beyond all reason. This isn't a gun range or a bull-riding paddock, its your kitchen table and you're having a conversation with your friends and rolling some dice. The only safety you need to worry about is accidentally choking on a Cheetoh while laughing at something one of your players did.

Of course, WotC is full of weirdos and SJWs too. In fact, as much as gamers often bristle and get defensive at the notion that "normies" think that they're a bunch of real weirdos, I have to wonder if all those "normies" aren't right. My experience with the game is mostly that I've played with normal people all along, but I think the normal people, to the extent that many of them are left, tend to gravitate towards the OSR, or OSR-adjacency. I don't know the last time I saw an OSRian talk about his pronouns. And I don't know the last time I tried to look for a decent Pathfinder or D&D actual play podcast or videocast that had pronouns where there wasn't at least one if not multiple weirdos who couldn't figure out how the English language does pronouns, and had something strange listed. Of course... physiognomy is real. One glance and it didn't surprise me that the person in question was seriously confused about their sexuality.

I actually wonder sometimes how much I really want to be a gamer, and certainly how much I want to associate with the gamer community. I like gaming, and I like talking and blogging about gaming, but I have little in common with "the community" and less interest in knowing more about these people beyond their game. Just because I like gaming and blog about it doesn't mean that "gamer" is my identity. There are all kinds of other things more important to me with regards to my identity than my hobbies, and even if we do get down to hobbies, I think "hiker" would be at least as much a part of my identity as gamer, if not more. 

Anyway, long story short (too late!) I doubt I have anything else that needs to be said about the OGL situation. I already don't play 5e, and I only have some of the books for background reading—mostly campaigns, because I can borrow any system neutral ideas out of those, when they manage to have good ideas. And the quality of those books and how useful they would be has gone downhill over time. Heck, even Curse of Strahd, largely considered the pinnacle of 5e campaign design, was a reworking of older material that was released in (at least) 1e and 3e before being released in 5e. Paizo, as noted, isn't doing much that I love either, although at least their content is new, if not necessarily innovative or exciting. I don't really care what happens to D&D as a brand, nor do I care about any competitors to it. I'm not likely to use them for anything for the foreseeable future. 

Of course, while I'm typing this, I'm seeing more information from WotC: specifically a lying, gaslighting, much delayed response to the backlash. Surprise, surprise... they're the same as the kind of lying, gaslighting stuff that Hollywood corporations, financial corporations, and everyone else says. Nobody trusts this nonsense anymore. I'm curious to watch this play out, but it's just academic, schadenfreude kind of curiosity. I don't actually care about the resolution very much. And that just validates my approach. To heck with them all; I'm going my own way.

ENWorld... sigh

In light of the OGL debacle, I thought ENWorld would be a good place to go back to short term for up-to-date news and discussion on the issue. Boy, was that wrong. I can't get over how toxic that place is, how much the lying SJWs have thoroughly infested all aspects of discussion there, with the tacit (and maybe explicit, actually) approval of the narcissistic beta moderation staff. I absolutely hate that place and most of the people that you'll find there. I can't believe that I ever enjoyed it. Although, to be fair, most of the people I enjoyed interacting with over there seem to have been long gone themselves, and I suspect some variation on the same rationale is at least a contributing factor. I'm done. Again. Not going back. I'll get my news from the overly long-winded and self-aggrandizing pundits on YouTube, who frequently don't know anything useful but won't stop talking anyway. I don't really love most of them either, but at least they don't act like entitled, demanding, narcissistic, bratty little princesses. At least the YouTubers eventually getting around to referencing actual articles, tweets, or quotes, and sometimes they even interview people who know what they're talking about.

In any case, I'm going to do a final once-over of the current version of Dark Fantasy X and make sure that it is completely and thoroughly divorced from anything that even has the appearance of having come from the OGL, and then I'll republished it, reprint it (I mean, just with a normal InkJet or something; and then stick it in one of those fancy report covers) and then move on, not really caring except maybe in an academic sense if any of the bigger publishers like Paizo or Kobold Press come up with something else on their own. As Mr. Darcy said, "My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever." This is the third time D&D has lost my good opinion. Why do I even care what it's doing? Honestly, I don't think that I really have since the end of the 3e era. I never cared much about 4e or 5e either one except in an academic sense, and to see if the artwork was any good (surprisingly, not as good as you'd think, given the deep pockets for art budget) or the campaigns or setting material was intriguing to at least read and potentially steal from. Again; quite surprisingly, not as much as I'd have hoped. And I haven't bought a single 4e or 5e product, except some stuff I saw during garage sale week in our sub, for pennies on the dollar, and a handful of 3pp pdfs here and there. As Gary Gygax himself said years ago, "The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules." Indeed. I, like most people, get a little dopamine hit temporarily when I get new stuff, and there's always some interesting stuff to read here and there, but I have quite a few books in the RPG space that I literally haven't read even though I've owned them for years. I have no need to ever buy anything RPG-related ever again, except maybe some more fancy Q-workshop or metal dice, some dice cups to throw them with, and other peripheries like that just for the heckuvit. And no, I don't need any of those. I just can buy them, so I probably will. 

Dark Fantasy X will not be an open game at all. It's just a game in the normal, usual sense, like they used to be before 2000. I don't actually care if anyone uses it, unless they somehow make millions off it if and don't offer me a reasonable cut, but c'mon. That's not going to happen. I might get rid of the way magic works, because it seems pretty fiddly now compared to my alternative magic system, which I like more and more the more I contemplate it. We'll see, though.

I'll probably refer to the OGL debacle over the next few weeks as new news comes out—and I think it debacle will end up proving to be the correct word from Hasbro's perspective, so I'll refer to it as such until such point as I'm proven wrong. Otherwise, this blip in attention to a topical topic is probably about ready to fade into the obscurity it deserves, while I pay more attention to more useful things. Including:

• I've been promising to wrap up the CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER 5x5 top level plan with some sample stuff related to my iconic characters. In an actual game, of course, I'd have to do it with the characters I have, and nothing I'm using here would probably work, but it's just to show the process. Maybe it'll be useful for fiction efforts in the future. In fact, I have deliberate (albeit vague) plans to do exactly that.
• I need a redrawn map of the area specifically covered by this campaign, with more details which I've partially filled in as I've done the 5x5 matrix.
• To actually play, I need something beyond the high level stuff; I need a revised GM screen with material that's useful for my current version of the setting, I need some encounter lists for my travel stuff, and a few other details. 

Once those tasks are done, we're on to CULT OF UNDEATH.

Another take on Sauron's One D&D

I watched these; in hindsight, they take on more meaning than they did when I saw them the first time.

Then, of course, I looked at the stock price over time.

I think Hasbro is in trouble, and Wizards of the Coast, as the engine of Hasbro's profitability, is being looked at to solve it. They've taken on this aggressive, Microsoft and video-game inspired approach, and replaced most of their management, from the CEO of Hasbro to the heads of the WotC division and the D&D brand overall. And I think this new management team is under the gun to produce some results, and quickly.

Of course, the problems with D&D include their increasing wokeness and DEI poisoning their products. Naturally, they did absolutely nothing to address that. Strixhaven, Radiant Citadel and Spelljammer were all poorly received products, as best as we can determine, with relatively poor sales, and Magic: The Gathering (which has historically been a cash cow that dwarfs D&D anyway) has had a very rough year, as the downgrading to sell by Bank of America highlights. The structural problems with D&D means that a cash-grab is unlikely to do very much to improve their position except maybe for a single quarter. And the bigger problem is Magic: The Gathering anyway.

So, not that this makes me more sympathetic to the WotC management, because I think that the WotC staff from developers to management both are still terrible people for all of the reasons I gave in my last post, but at least it has given me a very different perspective on what's happening and why it's happening. It's not just random and arbitrary mean-spiritedness and greed; it's a desperate, panicked move meant to steal from content creators to artificially prop up their own failing bottom line. The chickens of both poor prior decisions and likely the inevitable tides of the market are coming home to roost, and Hasbro is in denial of it, and trying to bail the water out of a sinking ship. 

Given the likely short term significant downturn in the economy that we'll be facing going forward, this is a quixotic endeavor, and taking your colleagues and fans with you in a blaze of kamikaze nihilism hardly seems like an admirable way to deal with adversity, but I did mention the sociopathic nature of these people in my last post already, didn't I? Yes, I believe that I did.

One DnD to rule them all, One DnD to find them, One DnD to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

But they were all of them deceived, for another license was made. In the land of Seattle, in the headquarters of Wizards of the Coast, the Dark Lord Hasbro forged in secret a master license, to control all others. And into this license, he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life. One license to rule them all. OneD&D.

Here's Alexander Macris' take on the OGL. And my own selections from his text. I can certainly say that I'd hate to be a full-time OGL-dependent game designer right now. Your business just dies almost overnight, and you now have to find a "real" job quickly in a declining market, or take a terrible gamble on divorcing yourself from the D&D brand entirely, even as a copycat fantasy heartbreaker. As a person who just went through a layoff and rehire within the last few months, I can sympathize with having your livelihood yanked out from under you with little to no warning like that, but at least I could pivot to doing my same job for another company. I doubt many people who have been game designer entrepreneurs can do the same as easily. It's a tough spot to be in, and to make it worse, Hasbro isn't doing it because they have a legal right to, or because they have ethical or moral permission to; they're doing it knowing that they have none of that, and yet also knowing that they can get away with it anyway, most likely. What a bunch of scumbags.

What does this new license mean? Where do we go from here? Before we go further, please note that while I am a trained attorney (Harvard Law magna cum laude, in fact), I’m not a practicing intellectual property specialist. My thoughts should not be construed as legal advice about what you should do. These are just my thoughts about the situation Autarch has now found itself in, and what we need to do.

Can They Really Do That?!

When people learn that WOTC is deauthorizing the OGL, the first question they ask is “can they really do that?” It’s a fair question. After all, for more than 20 years we’ve all relied on the OGL to be irrevocable.

But the question isn’t whether they can do. They are doing it. Right now, on our watch. No, the question is “who is going to stop them from doing it?”

And the answer might be “no one.”

If you’re under the illusion that we live in a country with a court system that rewards the righteous, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. The American justice system is pay-to-play, and the amount you have to pay is unfathomable to those who haven’t gone through it. I consulted with one of New York’s top IP litigators last week to find out how much money I’d have to raise via GoFundMe to fight Wizards. When I asked him if $100,000 would be enough, he laughed. He said I’d need $500,000 to even have a chance of summary judgment, and $4 million for a trial. Wizards has a war chest measured in millions and will fight this out for 4-6 years.

Imagine if WOTC sued Autarch claiming that my game Ascendant was violating their copyright. Ascendant is a d100 superhero game that has nothing in common with D&D and uses no language from the SRD. WOTC would have legitimate claim whatsoever. If we had $4,000,000 to fight, we’d certainly win. But… we don’t have the money. So, we’d lose.

In real life courtroom dramas, the good guys don’t win. The rich guys win.

But Our Rich Guys Will Fight… Won’t They?

We do have a few “rich guys” that are affected by this situation, foremost among them the mighty Paizo. The OGL 1.1 is certainly an existential threat to Paizo’s business. But does that mean Paizo will litigate?

We can certainly hope so. They would be the greatest champions of the Open Gaming movement if they did. Lisa Stevens is a person of great integrity who has dealt with treachery from WOTC before. Erik Mona has a warriors ethos that has stood him in good stead in the struggle against WOTC. Few people can claim to have beaten WOTC at their own game!

Even so, we cannot be certain that Paizo will fight. In most cases, major companies work very hard to avoid law suits with their well-funded competitors; and even when there are lawsuits, they usually get settled privately in ways that don’t help or affect anyone else.

Imagine this hypothetical: Paizo files a lawsuit against Wizards. A year later, after about $500,000 of expense on motions, they begin to proceed to trial. Their lawyers estimate they have a 70% chance to win. At this point, WOTC now offers to settle, offering Paizo a perpetual irrevocable license for the 3.5E SRD in exchange for Paizo’s agreement not to exploit the 5.1 SRD in any way and other minor concessions. If you’re Paizo, do you spend another $3.5 million and 3 years in trial for a 70% win — or do you take that deal?

Most companies take that deal.

So we cannot rely on the hope that some rich litigator, some hero, is coming to save open gaming. We have to assume no one is coming to save us. Perhaps, given sufficient numbers, we could assemble a class action — but how many companies would still be alive after 2, 3, 4 years of being unable to safely invest in new product? Because according to Wizard, if you litigate with them, you immediately lose your license.

What Is to Be Done?

So here we are. It feels surreal. I’ve been writing OGL material for 12 years and now it’s all in jeopardy. What is to be done?

The OGL 1.1 is a non-starter. From its unconscionable claim on licensee IP to its grotesque provisions for termination, it is entirely unacceptable to us. Autarch will not agree to its terms. If that’s the hill we die on, so be it.

The OGL 1.0 is unreliable. What does being deauthorized actually do? No one knows, and only a court can say for sure. What does WOTC mean when it says that after January 13, 2023 we can’t “publish” work under the original OGL — does it mean publish new work, or publish legacy work? No one knows except Nick Mitchell, and he isn’t talking. An unreliable license is no basis to build a business on.

Therefore, the only choice is to abandon the OGL entirely. Going forward, Autarch will no longer produce material under the Open Game License. We will be launching our upcoming Adventurer Conqueror King System: Imperial Imprint (ACKS II) in May without any WOTC SRD material. We will put in place a new license - a truly open license — that will make the core rules of ACKS II available to every other OSR developer in the space. And all of our future products, on DriveThruRPG, Kickstarter, Patreon, and elsewhere, will be released to be compatible with ACKS II or Ascendant, not with anything owned or touched by WOTC.

Whether we will be able to continue to publish our existing OGL games remains to be seen. Our intent is to continue to do so until forced to stop. Whether we will be de-platformed also remains to be seen. If so, we will find or build new platforms. I’ve done it before.

To my comrades in the OSR community — I know that your situation is similar to mine, perhaps even more difficult if your game of choice is closer to TSR/WOTC’s designs. What will happen to OSE — can a perfect replica of BX be sustained without the OGL? What will happen to DCC? What will happen to LL, to LOTFP? Every developer in the OSR is endangered. I welcome any and all collaborators who would like to build on ACKS II and support any independent efforts you are making to help reclaim a space for open OSR gaming. Reach out, friend.

To my comrades in the 5E community — You deserved so much better from WOTC than you have been given. I was gratified to learn that a number of independent developers are already working on a 5E-compatible but WOTC-free SRD that will be available under the creative commons. These fine people have the right idea and I hope they will gain your support. My own work is not and has never been 5E compatible, but these efforts have my full support all the same.

With the deauthorization of OGL 1.0a and the release of OGL 1.1, Wizards of the Coast has attempted to bring an end to the open gaming movement which has made our hobby more popular than ever. But if our movement sticks together, this does not need to be the end of open gaming. This can be a new beginning.

Now, I'm not a publisher, I'm just a homebrewer. I do have my own game, which does not rely on the OGL, although as a mark of respect and whatnot, I used to include the OGL with it anyway. Even though I'm not a publisher, I'm still going through my document and removing or changing anything at all that might even give the appearance of having been based on any of the SRDs. I want to ensure that my game is completely stand-alone, and obviously so. I don't trust Hasbro, even if I'm just a guy with my personal game as a pdf on Google Drive for the heckuvit, not a publisher. 

The management at WotC are sociopaths. And frankly, I don't trust the designers either. The YouTube channel Diversity & Dragons has done a decent job of documenting much of their sociopathic behavior on twitter and elsewhere. I'm sure that there are some decent people in the WotC offices just keeping their heads down and quietly trying to keep getting a paycheck doing what they thought was going to be their dream job. But between 1) the woke developers and designers insulting and castigating their core audience because of their unmitigated hatred and bigotry, 2) the terrible developers and designers who haven't managed to put out a decent product in many years now because their focus (and even the reason that they're there at all) is DEI (otherwise known as anti-white resentment, covetousness and hatred), and 3) the terrible management who stabbed their fans and partners in the back because the brand was "under-monetized", I am determined to completely and utterly refuse to do any business with WotC anymore. They are terrible people, they produce terrible products, and they treat their customers and partners/collegues like crap. They have no ethics, no morals, and are largely motivated by hatred of normal white guys, who are their core customer base. Which implies a very toxic resentment/dependency relationship too.

Not only will I refuse to engage with them in any fashion, but I hope to see this blow up in their faces, and I hope—as we've seen with Hollywood in general and Disney in particular—to see their business fail, crash and burn because of the decisions that they have made to drive away their customers, because of their arrogance, their entitlement, and their narcissistic tendencies to think that they can get away with anything. I hope an entire ecosystem of "point and laugh" YouTubers, influencers, and amateur newshouds appears that makes the most of every single failure that WotC has, just as has happened for fantasy and science fiction pop culture more generally. Their hatred, their toxicity, and their wokeness only make it all the more easy to feel no hesitation or remorse on taking schadenfreude in watching—hopefully—their unethical and probably illegal OGL power grab be their Titanic iceberg moment.

WotC is the new Amber Heard, or Meghan Markle. And just as public opinion has turned on them and they now find themselves victims of their own hubris, I will take some amusement and satisfaction in seeing the same happen to WotC. I hope that D&D fans are as principled as Lord of the Rings fans turned out to be when Amazon created their travesty of a take on the material. But I doubt it, sadly.

Freeport vs Five Fingers

Although it's been many years since I've touched on the idea even in passing, I've long thought that the two books, The Pirates Guide to Freeport and Five Fingers: Port of Deceit are two great books to read kind of side to side and to compare and contrast, since they both deal with the idea of adapting the Golden Age of Piracy into D&D in one form or another. Both are books that came out in the midpoint of the 3.5 run, before we had any idea that 4e was waiting in the wings, but after we'd digested the somewhat bitter pill of 3e advancing to 3.5 too early and unnecessarily. EDIT: Actually, I think 4e's development might have been just announced, right as the Freeport book was coming out, although their decision to make it system-less was a coincidence that seems fortuitous in immediate hindsight. It literally has no game statistics of any kind, and is not meant to belong to any system. A number of companion pieces came out for it, giving exactly that; specific game statistics. I can think of at least 4-5 that were released, although I only really used the d20 one (later renamed the 3rd Era.) That said, even when I was actually using that system, the companion books were not nearly as evocative, fun to read or even as useful as the generic, system-less one. 

Although I say that the Freeport book is system-less—and it is—it's clearly a D&D book. Beyond the system, D&D has become a kind of meta-setting, almost its own unique subgenre of fantasy, that has a number of pretty instantly recognizable tropes and conventions, and Freeport hits all of them without fail, even without a single rule. In fact, it does so significantly better than most novels that are written specifically to be D&D novels, many of which are simply fantasy novels with some placenames and characters that sound D&Dish. This isn't just a commentary on the races and their characterization which is often the first go-to D&D identifier (although it is that), but you can even see through the text descriptions in Freeport to see the D&D classes, the magic item economy, the type and frequency of magic available, the pantheon of D&D-ish pagan gods, the prominent position of adventurers and former adventurers as a kind of very specific caste of movers and shakers, and more details both broad and specific that are shot through the book through and through. 

As a guy who has largely rejected the D&D meta-setting in many ways—and after the behavior of WotC with regards to the brand, am more and more likely to reject even more of it going forward—this is a negative of the book to me. To be fair, most of the systems that the companion volumes were written for are deliberately very D&D-ish—d20, True20, Castles & Crusades, Pathfinder, etc. (Savage Worlds and FATE being admittedly potentially very different.) Although there is much I can borrow, there's much I have to reject, or rework to be useable in the this format.

I also often have a problem with the tone. Freeport alleges to bring a horror tone, but what it really does is have a bunch of wink and nod references to Lovecraftian elements. I've come over the years to see Lovecraftian gaming as more like a Disney ride where you take comfort in seeing familiar Lovecraftian elements as you pass by in your ride-car rather than something that successfully evokes a tone of actual horror. If your Dark Lord has tentacles and the writers make gratuitous reference to madness (but otherwise do little to show it) then ultimately he's still just a Dark Lord, and by now, almost as cliché as a Sauron-like dark wizard. The writers' attempts to inject other tongue-in-cheek references and puns pretty liberally through the book strengthen this impression, and the Lovecraftian horror becomes little more than a theme park caricature of actual horror of any kind; Lovecraftian or otherwise.

Which is fine. I have my own fairly strong opinions on how to be successful with horror in a dark fantasy game, and I certainly think that playing straight up D&D (especially of the 3e or later varieties) with flippant and almost satirical references to Yig, tentacles, weird angles and other Lovecraftian buzzwords doesn't get you there. But that doesn't mean that Freeport doesn't have plenty of good material to borrow and adapt, merely that it can't be used right out of the book as is if you want to actually have the tone and themes that the book claims to be promoting.

I also think that the development of elements outside of the city of Freeport itself is rather poor. I don't just mean the chapter on "The Continent" which was a new development for this book, but also anything else on the nearby islands that are part of the Freeport orbit. The islands themselves are pretty tiny, and the idea that they are chock full of dangerous predators and monsters—especially after the somewhat silly "Great Green Fire" event is verisimilitude breaking. In an area about the size of a few housing developments together in my suburban town, there's supposed to be a bunch of predatory animals and monsters, somehow supporting themselves on... something?

The ideology of the Freeporters and their rivals in the even more ridiculous Libertyville is also laughably absurd. You're better off using the city, and ignoring everything else in the book. And that's if you want a very specifically D&D pirate city that has some of the charm and all of the flair of the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. There's very little outside of the city that I actually like.

The Five Fingers book, on the other hand, is a different creature altogether. I don't think its any more or less usable than the Freeport book as written (at least not for the purposes that I'd use it) it somehow manages to be the same level of useableness  while being the opposite of Freeport on almost all of the points mentioned above. 

Five Fingers isn't a system-less book, and was never meant to be, although to be fair, not a lot of rules are present in it either. There's some stats of a few NPC characters, a small selection of prestige classes, a handful of other things like Knowledge (local) check result tables, and stuff like that. There are a few side-bars (and by bars, I sometimes mean several pages at a time) of subsystems that D&D 3.5 doesn't have, which Five Fingers introduces, including a chase mechanic, and a detailed bribing mechanics subsystem. But even if you skim this stuff, you're only taking off about ten pages of a 200 page book, so it's hardly like that's the bulk of it.

However, where Freeport—while being system-less—was very clearly a D&D supplement, and even without rules it screamed D&D all the time, Five Fingers is curiously an actual D&D supplement that doesn't often feel like D&D. That's because its an integral part of the Iron Kingdoms setting, which by this point, and developed enough to feel quite a bit different from D&D. By this time Warmachine had been out (in its first iteration) for a couple of years, and had partially served to drive the setting away from its dark and gritty (ish) D&D roots from back in the Witchfire Trilogy days where it started. This means that I don't have to worry about dealing with D&Disms that I don't want, but it does mean that I have to work harder to make it not feel too Iron Kingdoms! Because it's heavily integrated into the setting, and the events taking place in the setting, there are a lot of elements that would be different to use if you don't have something like Cygnar just next door, an occupied Llael flooding the city with refugees, the specific intrigues between the Cathor and Mateau families, the specific intrigues between the Khador and Cygnar superpowers who stand in somewhat transparently for Soviet Russia and Cold War America respectively. You need something like Cryx, you need Thamarites, etc. to make it work without extensive remodeling. Although in some ways Iron Kingdoms fits Dark Fantasy X better than D&D, there's still an awful lot of very specific setting stuff that I need to be on the lookout for. And they don't make any effort to reduce that for greater flexibility, because unlike Freeport, Five Fingers isn't meant to be a modular and insertable into any other setting, it's specifically meant to be part of its own setting. 

That said, although both works would need quite a bit of reworking to be useable, Five Fingers probably has more material that I could use. The horror elements are more horrible than in Freeport. The organized crime stuff is tons better and is really the best element of this book. Although it still will need some adaptation to not be Iron Kingdoms specific. In addition, some of the other appendix material is really well done; stuff like the list of NPCs (I'll trawl through that to create my own list, probably—I really like Iron Kingdoms naming conventions; they sound vaguely Olde English without being exactly so.) The list of businesses is also extremely useful. I'd put customized material, drawn at least in part from both of these on the inside of my GM Screen.

I'd also utilize a lot of elements drawn very directly from the four crime lords of Five Fingers. They make the two crime lords of Freeport look like cartoon characters in comparison. I also feel like the occult/horror elements are really well done compared to the flippant rewarming of Lovecraft that Freeport gives us, but I'd probably have to rework them to not be so completely Iron Kingdoms-esque, and honestly there's not quite as much content for this in the book as you'd think anyway.

One thing that is common to both books is that while the theme is clearly "pirates", the book offers relatively little in terms of dealing with actual piracy, sailing, or anything else on the sea. Rather, they are ports that are (sorta) frequented sometimes by pirates, but they are clearly urban sourcebooks that detail a city that is rife with organized (and unorganized) crime. They both are more The Godfather in many ways than they are anything pirate-themed. This doesn't mean that they are bait and switch products, but if you really expect more piracy and find that pirates are only characters that you'd occasionally meet while in port, you might be disappointed. Personally, I prefer the urban crime more than high seas crime anyway.

Cult of Undeath 2?

I'm considering doing another adventure path conversion into a playable 5x5 Front, like I'm going to turn my original CULT OF UNDEATH project from the Carrion Crown adventure path into something that only vaguely resembles. For this new project, I'd be pillaging ideas from the Age of Worms, if I can make them work, which is a somewhat longer adventure path than Carrion Crown (12 vs 6 adventures, although the Paizo adventure paths were longer on an individual basis than the Dungeon Magazine ones.)

I'm not very certain that the Age of Worms will actually merit this much trouble, although portions of it will be salvageable. I may also, as I continue with my planned read-through of adventure paths, mix it with stuff from other paths, or just make up my own material to replace stuff from Age of Worms that I won't use. It's not like any of these adventure paths have been super innovative or clever in terms of set-up, premise, or story background, or anything like that. How many times can you run with the "evil cultists want to bring back some ancient elder evil" anyway? (Spoiler alert; apparently indefinitely.)

So I'll create a tag for this project, which I'll call ELDER EVIL, and we'll see where it goes. Nowhere too soon, I'm sure, since I'm tacking on it on the end of a long list of projects. But, since I'm reading the Age of Worms right now, I thought I'd take brief notes on it as I do, and the notes will be the first part of the tag.

A bit more context: I have three 5x5 Front proposals right now, and each one focuses primarily on one of the Three Realms. (The Hill Country, Timischburg, and Baal Hamazi.) Adding a fourth will necessarily duplicate some coverage. I'm going to put this in the northeastern portion of Timischburg, at least to start. Diamond Lake (or whatever I end up calling the town) will be north of Ubyr, upriver near the mountains from Mittermarkt, and very close to the boundary of the great Boneyard desert. When the Age of Worms starts inevitably doing things that will be out of synch with the differences I have from D&D I'll either look for or create material that fits that kind of no-man's land between the Three Realms. This may work out well; to be honest, the Free City, as I remember it, from Age of Worms, would be a better analog for Simashki than for Mittermarkt anyway.

I did actually play through the Age of Worms in it's entirety several years ago when it was still newish. I have both fond and frustrating memories of the experience. But I'm confident that I can distill the parts that I liked out of it and purge the parts that I don't. Anyway, here's my notes from reading the first part (of 12) although because this includes all the supplemental material, which tapered off as time went on, it's also the largest part.

Age of Worms conversion notes

Whispering Cairn

—Alastor Land is a ghost. You put him down like you put down any ghost; salting and burning his bones. You’re not doing a nice Caspar ghost a favor by burying him in the family plot, you’re putting down a monster by exhuming him from the family plot.

—The family plot has been disturbed. This is how you get the clues that some cult is working the area, as in the module, except that you don’t need them so you can rebury them and go back into the dungeon; you just follow them as is.

—As per usual, ignore 95% of any dungeon crawl for wilderness ambushes, and other exciting combat and intrigue activity instead.

Background: The whole Ursula the Sea Witch and her big spider backstory is pretty hoaky. I’ll use one of the Heresiarchs instead, if it actually even matters what the ancient backstory is (hint: it probably doesn't.) Actually, Jairan Neferirkare and Shimut the Flesheater are perfect… except I’ve already used Jairan a little bit. I think I’ll go with either Kefte Taraan, the Mistress of Forgotten Secrets, and a vile necromancer by trade (who could also stand in for Kyuss, come to think of it) or Seggeir Sherihum the Sangremancer, since his history of an early defeat that left him scarred and disfigured works very well. In this case, this isn't a call-back to a separate bit of setting lore; what’s the point of setting up Kyuss as the BBEG if you red herring the Queen of Chaos instead for a while? There’s just one BBEG who gets any mention at all.

I like setting Diamond Lake as a small town upriver from Ebenbach and Mittermarkt, with Mittermarkt standing in as the "Free City." This would be a bit north of Ubyr… I need to figure out what Ubyr’s like if I'm going to do that, I suppose.

Otherwise, the whole Filge business is perfect already, except maybe with less exotic creatures as his experiments. It's more horrible if done to humans, after all. And Diamond Lake is a perfectly serviceable starting town, if maybe a bit gratuitously tawdry and corrupt.

I like the idea of not allowing any players to pick any race other than human until they've encountered that race sometime during the course of the campaign, and need (or want) to replace a character. Let's keep the exoticness low for a time and really focus this first act on being a horror rather than D&D-like exploration mission. That said, the town has loads of non-humans kicking around. I'll probably convert most of them to humans, but maybe keep an orc and something else around just for kicks.

I've also read the supplemental material in the article immediately following the first adventure, as well as the "wormfood" article in Dragon Magazine. There's plenty of stuff to keep an enterprising GM busy in that material, but surprisingly little of it points towards the adventure. The adventure really kind of starts "just because" and without any coherent preamble, you're standing at the entrance to the titular dungeon.

Shackled City

I finished the second of my reading list books for 2023 (pretty good so far!) which is the Shackled City Adventure Path. I know that this was released as an all-in-one book that's 400+ pages long, but I didn't read that version; I read all of the original Dungeon Magazine adventures in order instead, and am counting it as a book. (It's a lot easier to get a hold of, for one thing. In fact, I already had most of the issues in a box up in a closet, and I just had to dig them out and find a few remaining missing issues.)

I'm not going to review everything I read; for one thing, I'm not a book review site, and for another thing, almost everything I'm reading has been in print for a long time, if not in fact now out of print. The Shackled City came out—what, seventeen or eighteen years ago? Some of the other fiction books I'll be reading are considerably older than that. But given that this is the first of the adventure path readings that I announced a few weeks ago that I'd be doing, I thought it pertinent to make some general comments. I expect that these comments will actually be relevant to all of the adventure paths as I read them. Here's a list of problems that need to be overcome, in my opinion, in order to have a successful run of these adventure paths. And by "successful" I mean one that I would enjoy. Obviously others have had success running them with other priorities where these problems may not, in fact, be problems for their group.

First, there is very little story, which is kind of funny given that many complain about the railroaded story nature of these adventure paths. If you take out the statblocks and the descriptions of the dungeon rooms and traps and monsters and treasure, etc. you could write all of the remaining content of the entire adventure path on just a couple of pages of text. While I don't necessarily have a problem with this per se; my own 5x5 Front project doesn't offer much more either, this is particularly a problem for this adventure path (and I expect the rest that I'll read) because of the following problems:

Second, the reasons to go do something are often very flimsy and contrived. This isn't terribly unusual, but in the case of my 5x5, I made considerable effort to not have many flimsy and contrived hooks, and as well, to give some thought to the fact that players will be less likely to act on hooks that are obviously flimsy and contrived, or to enjoy them if they do. In the case of Shackled City, if the PCs think the plot hook is too flimsy to follow, the adventure kind of has nowhere to go. More thought needs to be given to set-up and less to having mechanical, puzzle or trap features in the dungeon. Ultimately, nobody really cares that much about dungeon details. I especially don't care, and find them tedious, but nobody cares as much as they want you to care.

Third, loads of potentially interesting villains are introduced at... literally the moment that you roll initiative to kill them. What's the point of even having villains if that's all you're going to do with them? That's not a villain, that's a minion. Don't bother giving these characters names and personalities and a little bit of backstory (even if it's only a few sentences) if there's no chance that the PCs will actually discover it. Villains, to be memorable, need some build-up, some foreshadowing, and some role-playing opportunity; not to mention the need to be at least more recurring than a single forgettable encounter.

Fourth, the absurdity is off the charts. The idea of a bunch of monsters hanging around in a "dungeon" that's a literal death trap every few feet sitting around thinking evil thoughts and waiting for a player character to show up and kill them is just ridiculous. This is also in the height of the 3e mania for weirdness. It was bad enough to have some of the stranger monsters all sitting around, but here we had to give them all kinds of classes, templates, and other customizations to make them the most absurd creations you could imagine. And then dump them all in a blender without putting the lid on and thinking that the spray all over your ceiling is a compelling setting. I hadn't necessarily given a lot of thought to Gygaxian humanocentrism (one of the few things that he actually did lift, as he claims, from the sword & sorcery source material) at the time this was written, but reading this in retrospect years later, it seems really, really bad, and Gygax's preferences make much more sense.

Of course, I don't think that that aspect has necessarily changed. In fact, if anything, it's gotten worse. I've seen official artwork of rabbit people in wheelchairs adventuring in dungeons and equally bizarre concepts. It's like DEI, which was always just a front for hatred of normal, white, American, Western Civilizational behavior, has mutated into some kind of out of control cancer.

That said, you can see where it started, in part with just the desire to push the envelope and give us something novel. I was on that bandwagon myself for a little while, and "traditional" fantasy needed to be tweaked to be novel. So, I experimented with grimdark, steampunk(ish), Aragonese, Mars-like iterations of the setting as Dark•Heritage went through its various iterations. That's not the same kind of novelty as half-troll fiendish shadow dancer NPCs, or whatever other nonsense Shackled City served up, but was, at least in part, driven by the same ill-advised zeitgeist, which I got a bit swept up by myself. I now look back on that era—both my own efforts and others as well—as pretty cringy.

I wish there were more I could borrow from Shackled City other than the geographic concept of a town built on an old cinder cone. (Except mine is truly extinct; having the volcano erupt as an end game problem to deal with is both predictable and boring, I think—and kind of ironic given that WotC operates literally in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, which isn't even dormant, just quiet(ish) most of the time.) But the story was too flimsy and skeletal to offer much, the premise was pretty flimsy and predictable, and I have little interest in big stat blocks of weird characters or the tedious descriptions of dungeons full of traps and hazards. Luckily, I read the book fairly quickly because I skimmed over most of that, but it still reinforced to me exactly how tedious that is, how non-fun it is, and how little it resembles anything at all from any fantasy fiction. Ironically, even D&D fantasy fiction. 

UPDATE: Fifth, the leveling! OMG, y'all! It's absurd to think that this takes characters from levels 1-20. I know it takes way longer to play than to read (first-hand experience with several adventure paths, including Age of Worms from start to finish, our biggest campaign experience ever—albeit often unsatisfying in many ways.) But still; I feel like the leveling rate is too fast to be any fun at all. Let us enjoy our level before rushing us off to the next one! Another older school fetish that I've become enamored with is the very slow leveling speed expectations. I'd expect, honestly, to play a campaign the length of Shackled City and only advance a level or two. Now, obviously the campaign would have to look very different if you finish it at 3rd instead of 20th level. But that's not a bad thing. The rush to higher levels, which frankly hardly anyone enjoys playing in any edition of D&D, is a bug, not a feature.

Closed gaming

For many years, I was kind of caught up in the excitement of the OGL. Even as the excitement dimmed after many years, I still—through inertia and respect for the efforts of Ryan Dancey and Peter Adkison to create the thing in the first place—referred to the OGL for a lot of my own efforts.

It occurs to me that Dark Fantasy X no longer needs the OGL. Realistically, it never did, but because it started way back in a long bygone era as a more copycat fantasy heartbreaker utilizing heavily house-ruled D&D or d20 Modern, before taking on its current form, maybe it was a good idea at one point to refer to the OGL. Even when I jumped to Microlite20, it occurred to me that I'd essentially divorced myself from the OGL. The original m20 one-pager reads more like a house-rule document, and is pretty useless without the 3e D&D books, or at least the SRD. But Dark Heritage was always written to be completely self-contained, and every single thing was rewritten, and most were also relabeled and anything that bore an overly close resemblance to any D&D IP was completely and utterly removed. I still referred to the OGL, but again—by this time it was mostly just because of inertia and respect for the OGL founders and the Microlite pioneers. I no longer had any need to use it.

Dark Fantasy X no longer makes any reference whatsoever to the OGL. The OGL has been removed from the current version of the document and here from the blog. Anytime I talk about a D&D or Pathfinder product from now on out, I will not be using it in a manner that would require the OGL (I never actually did, honestly) and will be referring to it only in a fair use sense. Meanwhile, the mechanics and game system for Dark Fantasy X are no longer any more open than any other normal game.

Does this have to do with the most recent kerfluffle about the "Open" Gaming License 1.1, which appears if the "leaked" material is both genuine and correct, to attempt to close the old gaming license from back to 3e? Yes, of course. Do I believe that WotC can actually do that? I'm not sure. Why chance it when I have no need to anyway? Is that consistent with WotC's extremely mercenary "D&D is under-monetized" paradigm? Sure is.

Some may say that WotC can't win that battle in court. To that I say, don't count on it; our courts are horribly corrupt and therefore unpredictable. There's a reason that the label anarcho-tyranny exists to describe exactly this condition, after all. Also; they don't need to win the battle in court. They just need to intimidate anyone with the big stick of legal costs into doing what they want, even if they know that they would lose in court.

Some may say that Ryan Dancey and Peter Adkison deliberately crafted the OGL to protect D&D from exactly this type of bad actor behavior in the future (which has now arrived.) To this, the Founding Fathers look at them with a cynical, unamused grin, and say, "First time?"

I had no interest in 6e already, not having played 4e or 5e. But this is now worse than no interest. I actually have malicious, hostile interest in 6e now; I actively want to see it fail, and will gleefully dance around its corpse when it does. Not that I'm going to do anything to cause it to fail other than avoid it completely, but I hope that there is a burgeoning YouTube ecosystem of people who report on every failure of Hasbro's and WotC's the way that there is now an ecosystem of Hollywood and Disney bashers.

UPDATE: The more I think about and read about this, the more pissed off I'm getting, even though it doesn't even affect me. I've removed any OGL pages from any of my documents where I'd put it in to be polite, from my blogs, from my Google Sites, and anywhere else where I didn't need it, but I had it anyway. WOTC can burn in hell, and frankly, I hope they do. I hope to see Chris Cocks (that REALLY is his name, by the way) and Bob Iger having their faces melt Raiders of the Lost Ark style. And George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg with them, by the way.

Cauldron ~ Bucknerfeld

I've read one book so far as part of my 2023 reading plan (Pirates Guide to Freeport), but I'm also in the middle of three concurrently, and I bounce back and forth between them. The first is The Halfling's Gem, although my son accidentally took out my bookmark. Because I wasn't very far into that book and I also haven't picked it up in a few weeks, I'll probably start it over. I'm also about a third of the way through Five Fingers: Port of Deceit and when I'm done I'll do a brief compare/contrast with Freeport. And the last one is The Shackled City. This isn't really a book, per se. I'm reading the entire adventure path in its original form in the Dungeon Magazine adventures, and counting the entire adventure path as one book, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through it.

I like the concept of Cauldron, a city built on an old, dead volcanic cinder cone. I've climbed and explored a few cinder cones in real life that would make a great prototype on which to build Cauldron, including Diamond Head in Oahu, North Menan Butte (also known as R Mountain) near Rexburg, Idaho, and Capulin Volcano National Monument in northeastern New Mexico near the census designated "town" of Capulin.

Cauldron fixes one of the main problems with this type of set-up; the fact that volcano cones tend to be quite dry and well above the water table, by having a lake at the bottom of the caldera. How exactly this lake stays sealed up given that the volcano is riddled with "dungeons" and caverns is unclear, but then again, D&D is fundamentally kind of stupid sometimes. Besides, I'm less interested in replicating exactly the premise of Cauldron and more in doing so in the generic sense; a town build atop a low extinct volcano, with a road that snakes around the cone on the outside leading up to walls along the top, and concentric rings of streets and buildings going down towards the center, where a permanent source of water provides for the needs of the town. 

While conditions at all three of the volcanos of this type that I've visited are rather dry, the Idaho one in particular is interesting, because it was formed as the North American plate migrated over the Yellowstone hotspot. The hotspot is now further to the east (in Yellowstone National Park, obviously), but maybe not as far as you'd think. R Mountain is about 60 miles directly west of the Grand Teton peak, which is part of the Greater Yellowstone province, and only about 80 miles southwest of the West Yellowstone gate town to the park. The greater bulk of the Yellowstone area, like Yellowstone Lake, are quite close as the crow flies, although as the car drives, you have to go a bit out of your way quite often. It's not hard to imagine that these calderas could exist in a more forested biome not unlike Yellowstone itself, perhaps.

Although my Dark Fantasy X map has been in need of an update for some time, it's only going to be a minor refresh, and the addition of some new details that I've come up with since I drew the original. I'm not reorganizing anything significantly. Bucknerfeld, as I've talked about just a bit before, is the among the most northerly and certainly the most westerly of the Hillmen cities, at the northern terminus of the great Sabertooth Mountain range and near the salt flats of the slowly drying Indash Salt Sea. While coming up with this geographic territory, I was no doubt heavily influenced by the idea of ancient Lake Bonneville slowly drying up and turning into what today is known as the Great Salt Lake. Bucknerfeld would therefore have a geography not unlike northern Utah. While much of it is semi-arid, the Wasatch and Uinta and other mountain ranges nearby are thick with heavy forests of aspen and pine, and the valleys are often lush with plant life. Some of this is artificial; farmers have been irrigating fields and crops for well over 150 years in the area now, but much of it is natural. Even in the mountains where no crops or irrigation has happened, like the Tushars, the higher elevation gives them more rainfall and therefore more plant life, while the desert stretches on the much lower floors below. 

North of Bucknerfeld is the corridor between the Plateau of Leng and the Indash Salt Sea, and caravans passing through from the west have to travel through this route. The Wolfwood, the Vajol Downs, and eventually the rich and exotic cities of Volek Szemenok, Vuukrat and Simashki lie either northwest or west of Bucknerfeld along the Great Northern Road.

South of Bucknerfeld, on both sides of the Sabertooths, are small hamlets and settlements of hillmen. The east side is greener and heavily forested, while the west side is dry and leads into the Boneyard basin. The foothills here are called the Cactus Balds, and this is the most recent expansion of hillmen settlement. I talked about this briefly in the intro to the fifth column of the CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER 5x5 Front, so I won't belabor it here. Bucknerfeld is, however, the urban(ish) center of commerce and political power in the area.

And here's what I'd like to do with Bucknerfeld; model it, at least physically, sort of on Cauldron from the Shackled City. Now, there won't be dungeons and tunnels all underneath it, and if there are fragments of lava tubes and whatnot, they'll be completely filled with water. The "lake" at the center is more of a pond, or tank, but because it does go deep into the old lava tubes leftover from ancient eruptions, there's actually a ton of old rainwater stored there; enough to keep the town supplied effectively indefinitely. From the top of Bucknerfeld caldera, you can see Leng in the distance to the east, and the salt flats leading out to the glittering water of the Indash Salt Sea to the west. To the north are the dark eaves of the Wolfwood, at least on a clear day, and to the direct south is the great mass of the Sabertooth Mountains. You can also see several of the foothills settlements of the hillmen from the top.

The town itself is walled, but a road spirals around the caldera, and oddly built houses and buildings line the road, attempting to account for the steep slopes that they're built on by being quite tall on one end and rather short on the other. The town also spreads around the foot of the caldera, although inside the caldera, a map of Cauldron could easily be more or less substituted for one of upper Bucknerfeld. The Great Northern Road (this will be one of the small details amended in my newer version of the map) passes directly through Bucknerfeld. After the dark age associated with the fall of Baal Hamazi and the withdrawal of Kurushat from the region, this road was little used and fell into disrepair. Traffic from east to west and back is once again tentatively starting to establish itself along the road, but so far nobody has been willing to spend funds to repair the road and most of the old coach house stations have been long abandoned, so the journey isn't quite as smooth as it was in prior centuries.

Finally, as mentioned briefly in the prior post linked above, as a caravan town, although it's founded and mostly populated by hillmen, it will have a relatively large number of comers and goers; transients, and people who represent interests abroad who live here too. This is the part of the Hill Country where hillmen are most likely to run into a jann or kemling; in fact, they're almost certain to in Bucknerfeld, as quite a decent number of them live here.

2023 Hobby Goals

I have more goals than simply hobby goals, but I'm not going to talk about them here. What do I intend to do this year, hobby-wise? Let me go through a few goals, or New Year's resolutions, if you prefer.

First, my new son-in-law has expressed interest in getting a regular gaming group, including at least the two of us, going again. I'd like to do this too. Not sure yet what this will look like or who else it will include, but I'd love to run Dark Fantasy X, if it comes to that. Because I don't know what the group itself will look like, I don't know that I'll necessarily have RPers. I've decided that while I like a good action scene as much as the next guy, all combat rules from 3e on are too tedious and cumbersome for me, so I need a quick and easy way to do combat. People who really enjoy the tactical combat aspect of the hobby will be unhappy, of course.

Second, I've not played an SWTOR in about a week, and when that happens, that means that I'm likely not going to play it for a little while. But I will, actually, continue to play the game, of course. I'll likely pick it up again when the next Galactic Seasons starts, if not before. Meanwhile, I'd like to edit and post more of the videos that I've already posted in the next weeks and months too.

Third, I've made a reading tracker for 2023. At a bare minimum, I want to read 12 books, but 20 or even 30 is much more likely (I set myself a low bar on purpose, just in case.) I do have a draft list of a few books, including Five Fingers which I'm actively reading now, and Shackled City (I'm treating the entire adventure path like a single book), but I've got a stack of more than a dozen books already off the shelf and queued up to read too. The first non-gaming book on my list—an actual novel, or at least novel form book—will be Ill Met in Lankhmar. The old White Wolf compilation, that is, not just the novella, which is included within it. I've also got the Write Great Fiction series of four books on queue in the non-fiction category. I'll no doubt read much more and make many changes to this tentative list as the year goes on, and I highly expect that thirty will be easily reached before the year is over. But this time, I'm going to actually track what I'm reading and do it with a bit more planning.

Fourth, I'm giving serious consideration to using my DarkFantasyGamerX YouTube channel to come up with a podcast or video series related to gaming. I actually thought that I would have done that already, but my employment circumstances the last third of the year precluded me from really getting that off the ground. Now that I'm normally and gainfully employed again, and more quickly than I hoped, although I'm still attempting to get up to speed on the new job, I think there's a a good chance I can get this moving again. Maybe, even, if my gaming group from the first goal ends up being online, I can post actual play sessions. Although I'm certainly not promising that.

Fifth, I want to finalize my collection of gaming "stuff." By this I mean, I need to get my GM screen nailed down, get the last few sets of dice that I actually want, and just be ready to run. I got a canvas vintage-style backpack to carry all my gaming stuff in. Not that I really need, say, my DIY dice tray, or whatever, but I like having it. My GM screen needs to be re-done, though. 

Sixth, I want to finish all three of the 5x5 Fronts that I'm working on. I'm almost done with the first, but I want the other two to move much more quickly and be finished by mid-year, if not earlier.

Seventh, I've been talking vaguely about fiction writing, but I haven't done jack squat with it. I'd like to be able to create a goal for it, although I'm certainly not talking about writing a novel this year, or anything.

Eighth, on a completely different hobbyist endeavor, I have a much reduced vacation load since starting a new job, although by the fall, I will have accrued three weeks, and by the end of the year, I will have accrued another one. I'm not sure what my family responsibilities will be; I'll probably go out to Boise in the summer with my wife to watch/see the grandkids. I'd really like to make another trip out west for site-seeing/hiking, but I may not be able to squeeze the time off in order to do it. We'll see.

2022: Fantasy sux

I have a lot of things I could talk about. The Z-man hit it out of the park with at least two columns since I last posted that I'd love to highlight. I've been busy mostly with my daughter's wedding and then entertaining all of the people (mostly from my wife's side of the family) who hung around after it was over needing to be entertained. Quite honestly, it'll be weeks before we're completely done, and by that I mean, put away everything that we have and figured out where it's going to belong.

And as soon as we're done with that, we have major changes to the house to make. We're actually (sorta) empty nesters now. I still have two sons who have their permanent address here, but they don't actually live here currently, so its just me and the little old lady. What this means is that eventually we're going to do a lot of major things to several of the rooms that we're redoing to better accommodate our expected lifestyle rather than our past lifestyle as parents with kids at home. Two rooms will become guest bedrooms rather than lingering boys' rooms, and one room will become an office/library. The basement will then also need and have the opportunity to be significantly redesigned, or at least have a bunch of crap thrown out of it and moved around, at a bare minimum.

Anyway, I've been busy, and I will continue to be busy, but not too busy going forward. But there are two things that I'd like to do; some 2023 goals (relative to the hobbies that I talk about on this blog, and also elsewhere in my life, but I'll only mention the first here) and a retrospective on fantasy in particular in pop culture in 2022. And because it merits its own post, I'll only do the latter right now, and the former later today or tomorrow.

First, let me quote someone else's blog, briefly. 

I don’t think there has ever been a worse year for the genre of fantasy than the year of our Lord 2022.

There is something almost magical in the way that an entire school of storytelling has been so unrelentingly subjected to incompetence in every way available to it.  How could any studio which theoretically exists to make money, so thoroughly **** up everything they touched?  

At the end of the day, there seem to have been 5 issues:

First, everyone wanted their own Game of Thrones, (it wasn’t just Jeff Bezos). 

Second, none of these producers knew anything about fantasy and they didn’t want to learn.  They just wanted to glom on to something and tell their own version of THE MESSAGE.

Third, neither did the people who ran the studios. They were green-lighting anything that could be accused of being a fantasy franchise with an existing fanbase. And they also wanted to use it to spread THE MESSAGE.

Fourth, Woke.  All of these shows were much more interested in contemporary politics than they were ancient worlds, eerie wonders, and glories beyond imagining.  They cared more about scoring points in Hollywood than they ever could about fantasy. 

Fifth, all of these shows were the result of globalism. Oh, it was Hollywood globalism to be sure, so on top of all of their other failings, they were shallow as a mud puddle.  But it was all globalist fantasy.  It was something too hopelessly bland to be at all interesting.

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”

I don't always love The Critical Drinker, just I like I don't always love any of the other squishy Youtube critics of modern pop culture who are careful to not trip up YouTube's algorithm for demonetization by actually telling the complete truth. Of course, that assumes that they've accepted the complete truth themselves, and as I can personally attest, the red pill journey is, in fact, a journey, and sometimes it's harder to let go of certain pretty little lies that simply aren't true and never were than others. So maybe there's a reason why Geeks & Gamers, The Critical Drinker, HeelsvsBabyFace, Ryan Kinel, the Quartering, Midnight's Edge, Yellowflash, etc. are all exactly on the same side as squishy kind of sorta conservatives who go out of their way to virtue-signal their acceptance of Leftism morality before trying to then complain that Leftists are inconsistent in their own application of it. Well, duh. Yeah.

But in any case, the Critical Drinker's "THE MESSAGE" in a big echoey voice is absolutely something that's useful rhetoric, and its nice to see it replicated here. That said, his second, third and fourth points are really kind of indistinguishable. Yes, THE MESSAGE is the problem, but THE MESSAGE is wokeness. Saying that the writers wanted to spread wokeness, and the studio heads wanted to spread wokeness and then also another helping of wokeness is the problem is redundant. I mean, I get it; he's highlighting different schwerpunkts where valuing wokeness over any other quality failed these shows, but I'd do it a bit differently myself.

First, fantasy is ultimately a hopeful genre. Yes, even the dark fantasy that I have here on this blog and elsewhere is largely based on romanticizing the setting that fantasy takes place in. I would say that fantasy is by and large conservative in many ways, because what it mostly romanticizes is the past, but it also creates romanticized utopias that never existed, and that's where progressives come in. Either way, shows that do not really romanticize their environment to some degree, but rather exist to criticize it, or to create a utopia that normal people see as bizarre and dystopian rather than something to be romanticized, creates a major, off-putting disconnect right off the bat, and this was a major theme of all of the shows that failed this year. And yes, that means the wokeness, the race-swapping, the blatant misandry and anti-white hatred and bigotry, ironically in a genre created by white people to celebrate their own heritage among their own people.

Relative to the first point in the quote above, this means that I don't actually think Game of Thrones is good fantasy, because it is nihilistic and tawdry rather than hopeful or romanticized. But I will give George Rape Rape Martin credit for at least doing something different, which led to his brief moment in the sun, and those who adapted his show also did something which people hadn't seen before, and which they clearly tried to copy with little success. But it was never really a model that was going to last, because it subverts the whole purpose of fantasy to tell nihilistic rape fantasies rather than hopeful, romanticized visions of the past or societies that the author wishes could exist. It's just a critique. Of nothing in particular, mind, just life in general. Personally, I find the Rape Rape Martin and Joe Abercrombie, etc. vision of fantasy very tedious, and I'm surprised that they've had as much legs as they have managed to have. But the end is clearly in sight, I think, for that kind of fantasy. It's not sustainable.

Secondly, it's worth pointing out that biological differences are very real, and treating men and women as if they are interchangeable widgets is off-putting at best, and seriously whack at worst. Of course, the "strong female character" is more than just a woman who acts like a man, or is put in a man's role in the story; it's a spiteful, petty insult to feminism and masculinity both, and deliberately so, by people who hate the very thought of normalcy because it reminds them of how far they deviate from it and how dysfunctional they really are. Pretty much every single one of the failed shows has "strong female characters" who are actually terrible characters; they only exist to constantly heckle, belittle and put down any male characters around them, especially if the male characters are also white and the women are brown. These spiteful "message delivery units" which is probably a better label for them than characters aren't fun for anyone to watch. I can't imagine that even progressive weirdos actually enjoy them, other than a brief endorphin hit of seeing their cult-like beliefs validated in them. 

Thirdly, as an outgrowth of the need of "message delivery units" to constantly harp on their message, the plots are absurd, clumsy, and poorly executed. Nobody's motivation makes any sense, things happen for reasons that are not organic to anything that common sense, action/consequence relationships, or believable human behavior would lead you to expect. This means that the shows all have a strange disjointed feel, and they don't make a lick of sense. People who watch them who aren't engrossed in THE MESSAGE delivery can't figure out why things happen or why characters do any of the things that they do.

It's probably possible (although not desirable) to deliver the message while still writing a competent story (although it will necessarily water-down the ham-handedness of the message delivery, of course), but the writers and producers have all—with the possible exception of Blood of the Dragon (which I have not seen, but that seems to be the review consensus from those who have)—made no attempt to write plots or characters that feel real in any way whatsoever. Stuff just happens because some pre-determined plot outline demands it, but why and how it happens makes no sense to the viewer. Although this was no doubt allowed to happen because of the wokeness of the creators, it isn't directly a product of their wokeness, only indirectly. It's just a product of blatant incompetence and lack of skill on the writers' part.

Fourth, being "updated for modern audiences." This is, of course, very transparent code to let everyone know that the creators don't actually care a lick about the source material that they're adapting, but will fill the show up with woke virtue-signaling in a major, off-putting way. For no reason whatsoever, lesbian couples will show up. Even though the setting looks vaguely European, black and brown people will mysteriously appear at least as often as white people, dressing in a vaguely European style and living a vaguely European life-style, as if any sub-Saharan African were equivalent to a white European, or that if you simply picked up an African and raised him among Europeans he'd act indistinguishably from one. (Not likely.) I know, of course, that fantasy isn't the real world, and when I say European, I don't mean that the lands of Middle-earth or whatever The Witcher or Willow's setting is called is made up of actual Europeans, but fantasy is usually cast as an alternate idealized and romanticized European Medieval setting. I don't know why black, brown, yellow or red people should have any significant place in a white genre based on white heritage. Although few people have tried it, there's no reason why fantasy cast in a fantasy-analog to Africa or Asia or even Latin America couldn't exist. Heck, as long as it wasn't an excuse to bash whiteness, it'd probably be kind of cool and at least new and different, and the few attempts to have done so, such as Rokugan, Kelewan, Imaro, or a few others, have been at least moderately successful. But no; what these shows all do instead is simply insert black, brown and yellow people into a white context and then dare you to point out that it's seriously incongruous and off-putting to see them in that context. It smacks of not only laziness, but also covetousness and pettiness. Again; seriously off-putting, especially to the people who they are casually victimizing by appropriating our heritage.

And that's generically. More specifically, it's off-putting and insulting to fans of the source material being adapted. If Lord of the Rings fans are supposed to like Rings of Power; if Wheel of Time fans or Witcher fans are supposed to like the shows based on those properties, they have to actually resemble the source material. Nobody wants to see the name of a property that they're fans of attached to something that has little rapport with the material its allegedly adapting, because the writers and producers themselves don't actually like the material and really want to do something else.

Of course, I say all of this as if it's endemic to fantasy. The problems with fantasy are concurrent with the problems in pop culture, and among our soi-disant elites altogether. They all either have this woke mind-virus and actually believe these insane things, or at least they pretend to for social reasons, because their jobs, their social status, or something else depends on doing so.

Which is why all of the nebbish, bowtie-wearing conservative pundits attempting to "explain" to the leftists why they're wrong with facts will never amount to anything at all. They're either talking to wild-eyed cultists, or people who's position in society depends on pretending to believe the claims of wild-eyed cultists. Facts aren't going to sway them. In fact, they will see facts that contradict their chosen world-view as threatening. Rather than engaging with and considering those facts, they will attack them as if they are a virus that must be eradicated at all cost, hopefully before they have a chance to spread.

Eh, anyway. That's a little bit beside the point. However, it's curious to see that the oft-repeated aphorism "Go woke go broke" actually has only ever managed to come true in the entertainment industry, which is why it's somewhat fascinating to watch it happen in real-time for Netflix and Disney and others this last year. For one thing, nobody has gone broke yet because the truth is that pleasing investors is more important than pleasing customers, and investors have passively and collectively decided that the ESG score built by Blackrock is an important part of the performance of an investment. So pissing off customers by going woke has not hurt anyone until recently, because it kept investment coming in. Also, for many industries there's no alternative. If you got pissed off when a Wal-Mart executive said that she actively discriminates against white male owned suppliers, what are you going to do? Take your business to Target, who actively threatens the safety of your daughter in the bathroom by encouraging creepy perverts to go in there with her? Take it to Amazon who actively crushes American business by undercutting them with crappy Chinese products? There are no good alternatives, therefore there's no way to effectively vote with your wallet. However, in terms of entertainment, I'm find all kinds of things that I'd rather do than watch crappy movies or streaming shows that feed woke garbage to me. I can watch YouTube stuff instead. I can read an older book. I can watch an older show or movie on blu-ray or DVD. I can play board games with my family. I can take a walk outside. I can go run errands with my wife. 

So, the entertainment industry is the canary in the coal-mine that shows that the anti-American, anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-normalcy cult that has gripped our elites can't last forever. It's finally starting to really, seriously wear its way out. And if history has taught us anything, it's that once the early warning signs of collapse are apparent, the collapse happens much more quickly and suddenly and thoroughly than anyone would have predicted ahead of time. In a way, that's a good thing. While nobody loved living through the collapse of Communism, nobody really loved living under communism either, and the collapse is an inevitable part of moving on to something better.