Indo-European language spread (part 1)

Archaeogenetics is rapidly rewriting many of the details of what we thought about history and para-history and pre-history, although if you take a step back from the details, what is also quite notable is that it is confirming that much of what the archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists said a century ago was right all along. Even though subsequent work, which in hindsight is now clearly exhibiting socio-political bias of a type that can only fairly be termed "proto-Woke" has been working hard to erase those theories for decades. And it is still important to approach this from a multidisciplinary angle. If genetic data is saying something very different than archaeology, linguistics and physical anthropology, then let's be careful not to assume that archaeogenetics trumps other lines of evidence. The best and most likely true narratives of the past are those in which data from many disciplines all converge on a single null hypothesis.

That said, where are we right now with regards to the formation of Europe, and specifically the prehistoric spread of the Indo-European languages? Because let's face it; although there has been some jostling here and there (like the spread of Anglo-Saxon over Celtic Britain, for example) the reality is that from a cultural and genetic perspective, the Anglo-Saxons and the Celtic Britons were already very similar, and once the Indo-Europeanization of Europe happened in the Stone Age and early Bronze Age, that really truly was the formation of a modern Europe that culturally, linguistically and genetically resembles Europe of today—minus the ridiculous influx of middle eastern and African and Asian DNA and culture that is the hallmark of the very last few years of Europe's history. That isn't to say that there haven't been significant changes here and there; the intrusion of the Turks into our sphere (and I'm American, but that means that my heritage is European, and I consider Europe to me part of "our" civilization) being a notable example, but by and large, the Indo-Europeanization of Europe was the creation of Europe as we know it. And because it happened in the prehistoric era, then Europe has always been known to us in the form that it is now. More or less.

By and large, the earliest peopling of Europe by anatomically modern (i.e., not Neanderthal) people that has an impact on today's population was the spread of people from Ice Age refugia back into the now glacially free territory of the continent. I personally believe that any thoughts on where the people who made up the refugia in the first place came from to be particularly handwavy and not very useful, so I'll skip ahead. 

As one might expect, being confined by climate to small and disconnected refugia, the genetic signatures tend to run in clusters that are significantly different to each other. One of the post-glacial population clusters that persisted through the Mesolithic and which was still important (although probably significantly admixed) in the Neolithic is the Western Hunter Gatherer, or WHG cluster. The origins of the WHG can be modeled by blending the old Ice Age El Mirón cluster from the Franco-Cantabrian refuge and Ancient North Eurasian from the Mal'ta cluster (a much more distant Siberian/Lake Baikal area refuge). Some classic examples of skeletons that belong to this genetic cluster include Cheddar Man, La Brana man, and Loschbour man. There's some controversy which remains unresolved about the phenotype of the WHG, although it's certainly possible that because nobody alive today has a preponderance of this genetic cluster, that they don't resemble anyone alive today. The "classic" image of the WHG is that he has brown skin and hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones and a wide face, and a rather stocky, robust build. However, some studies suggest that lighter skin swept through Europe as a breeding bias event at some point, maybe as early as the middle to early Mesolithic. (As an aside, the highest concentration today of WHG ancestry corresponds to peoples of the Baltic, which are among the whitest on Earth.) While the WHG cluster seems to have been prevalent through much of western, southern, and central Europe, as well as making up a significant element in Fennoscandia as well, it does seem to have some distinguishable structure. The I2 paternal haplogroup, for instance, is most heavily associated with the Balkan Dinaric population, and that haplogroup falls off rapidly as one enters central Europe heading towards either Northern or Western Europe, while it does seem to have spread northeastward, probably with the heavily WHG-centered Narva and Kunda cultures. Northern Europe, on the other hand, seems to be strongly associated with the I1 haplogroup, which is still a major Germanic genetic marker today (although they obviously didn't speak Germanic in the Mesolithic.) Although it's important to keep in mind that the prevalence of a haplogroup can spread rapidly without altering the autosomal sequence very much, i.e., one needs to be careful about assuming that a haplogroup spread means a change in population; it often does not. It can have much more to do with the success of a single individual and his family, sometimes, within a continuous population.

Today, almost everyone in Europe shares at least some WHG genetics, although no population is majority WHG anymore. No doubt the spread of the WHG peoples from the various Ice Age refugia had languages associated with them, but we have no idea what languages they may have been, and if any non-Indo-European language spoken today or in the historical period may have belonged to them. Given the El Mirón refugia played a role in the spread of the WHG genetic cluster, and that's smack dab in the middle of Basque country, there is at least a handwavy connection based on geography that might suggest that Basque is a lingering WHG language. But take that with not just a grain of salt, but a whole freakin' bag. After all, the Balkans and Italy were probably connected during the LGM, and the Villabruna cluster is another major contributor to pre-WHG Europe. By the same logic that would call Basque a possible WHG language, we could call Etruscan one as well. Both are speculative handwavy efforts either way, though.

Speaking of which, there's some potentially interesting structure going on with three of the five major refugia genetic clusters and the associated archaeological cultures. But like I said, while the WHG population didn't spring from the Earth out of nowhere, I think the details of Paleolithic migration and admixing that led to the formation of the group is difficult to recover with a lot of confidence, at least until more and better data is available. The Villabruna cluster seems to be associated with a rare and early R1b (V88) haplogroup in Europe, and may have also used a "Green Sahara" corridor to spread the haplogroup to the Chad Lake area of Africa, where it sticks out like a somewhat confusing and odd discontinuity. Nobody thinks of Europeans colonizing Africa in the Stone Age, but apparently that did, in fact, happen.

Anyhoo, the next Mesolithic population cluster we need to discuss is the Eastern Hunter Gatherers (EHG). This group was distinct from the WHG group, and formed a pretty hard and fast geographic boundary from the western Black Sea and lower reaches of the Danube River, up along the Dniester valley, to the western Baltic, with the only discontinuity being that a blob of WHG genetics seems to have penetrated the line and been more prevalent in the Eastern Baltic, at least for a time (the aforementioned Kunda and Narva cultures.) This didn't last forever, as the later Pit-Comb Culture, which had a much higher percentage of EHG genetics. The EHGs were predominantly Ancient North Eurasian (from the Mal'ta LGM cluster) with some degree of admixture from a population that while not exactly WHG, was probably descended from the same ancestors as WHG; part of the old Paleolithic Gravettian culture, most likely. The genetics for blue eyes are not as prominent among the EHG as among the WHG, so they were more likely to have had brown eyes. There isn't any controversy about skin color as with the WHG, and they are presumed to have been light skinned. Whether or not blondism had spread through this population or not is still an open question as well, as some of them seem to have had alleles that suggest it, and the case is growing over time that it was present among them. The haplogroups associated with the WHG group seem to be heavily biased towards I1 and I2, whereas the EHG favors haplogroups R1a and R1b. The spread of this haplogroup to becoming the most common in Europe (and elsewhere) today are closely associated with the spread of Indo-European languages, although of course, it's nonsense to talk about Indo-European existing in the Mesolithic. There is, however, a better than handwavy reason to believe that the ancient ancestor of the Proto-Indo-European language was originally native to an EHG group. By the time we get to the Neolithic and later, there are no groups that truly can be called an "EHG" population, although certainly some groups had high percentages of EHG genetics still.

The Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers (SHG) are the only Mesolithic group that appears to be a hybrid. Now, don't get me wrong; along the contact zone between WHG and EHG there are a number of cultures that show signs of admixture between the two, but the SHG group is one that hybridized very early and then remained in place, subject to its own genetic drift separate from trends going on specifically in the greater WHG and EHG populations. Also, pretty unadmixed SHG cultures remained in Scandinavia into the late Neolithic or even Chalcolithic or Early Bronze Age, like the Pitted Ware culture that coexisted without significant admixture with the Funnelbeaker culture and later with the Battle Axe culture (and even far enough south to border the Single Grave culture), before finally being absorbed by them as recently as 2300 BC. In any case, the origin of the SHGs is presumed to be WHG migration up the Danish peninsula and across into southern Sweden/Norway meeting EHGs who were migrating southward along the Norwegian coastline. These two populations merged and then displayed a remarkably long continuity. Phenotypically, the SHGs are believed to have already developed high percentages of blue eyes, light skin and blonde hair. Today, modern Scandinavians have a notable degree of SHG still, from the Pitted Ware Culture, presumably, which was their last hurrah before merging with other groups to become something much more similar to modern Scandinavians. The Lapplander people to their north do not have any of this ancestry, and seem to be a much more recent intrusion into the area. This is a reversal of what we thought even just a relatively few years ago, where the Lapplanders and other Finno-Ugric groups of Scandinavia were assumed to be the autochthonous people of the peninsula. Incorrectly, as it turns out, as the intrusion of their languages is more recent even than the Indo-European spread, and is associated with genetic haplogroups originating far to the east in Siberia. 

The Caucasian Hunter Gatherers is the next group we need to discuss (CHG) associated with the Satsurblia cluster from the Upper Paleolithic and the Kotias Cave from the Mesolithic. Apparently while the Caucasus Mountains were themselves likely glaciated, the area in between and/or around them was one of the population refugia, associated with the J haplogroup (itself a descendent of IJ.) Because of this, the CHG are assumed to have been related to the ancestors of the WHG as well from some point in the Paleolithic, although they had a long degree of separation between them. Either less work has been done on this group, or I'm just not aware of it and unable to find it, but there doesn't seem to be good info on the phenotype alelles of the CHG population, nor really good fits to them and modern Caucasian populations, although presumably some of the native Caucasian groups that are unrelated to the Indo-Europeans or other groups had their genesis somewhere with this group. CHGs make up a significant portion of the Western Steppe Herders population group that seems to be mostly although not completely made up of EHG male lines and CHG female lines. (But more on that in part 2). There's also a linguistic theory by Bomhardt that mimics this genetic evidence, suggesting that early Indo-European developed as a Eurasian EHG language with a Caucasian (CHG) linguistic substrate, which pulled the character of primordial pre-Indo-European into certain correspondences and resemblances with a primordial pre-Northwest Caucasian (Abkhaz and Circassian languages, among others.) Of course, plenty was going on throughout history in the Caucasus, and linking the CHG to various later attested cultural and/or linguistic groups, to say nothing to currently attested cultural and/or linguistic groups, is a tricky proposition. Figuring out the tangle of the culturo-linguistic situation in the Caucasus is extraordinarily tricky. And clearly a number of peoples have come and gone, bringing with them a number of languages. Where does Kura-Araxes fit into the picture, or Maikop? How does Hurrian or Hattic relate to any languages that we know from other sources? Etc. See at least one proposal at the end of this post, however.

The final group is usually called Early European Farmers (EEF), and are strongly associated with the spread of Neolithic farming technology. But they weren't just teachers of new ways of making a living; the spread of the Neolithic economy happened with the spread of new people with new genetics, and there was relatively little mixing (at the Mesolithic to Neolithic transition, at least) of these newcomers with the hunter gatherers that were already there. For that matter, I'm talking about the eve of the expansion of Neolithic farmers, so this group maybe should be called Anatolian Hunter Gatherers still at this stage (AHG) although technically that term is usually used for an Epipaleolithic group, although to be fair, they are the same people. The map below shows them as stretching into the Levant, but that's an older, and out of date map—the AHG/EEF were not the same people as the Neolithic peoples of the Levant like the Natufians. (It's got other problems too, but they're minor compared to what it does offer. Even if a bit out of date, it's the only map I know of that actually shows these stocks more or less correct. Albeit without SHG.) Their ancestry reflects deep, Paleolithic splits from the CHG and WHG populations, as well as paleolithic gene flow of Iron Gates and Villabruna Europeans into Anatolia. I know, of course, that Anatolia is considered part of Asia—in fact, the very name Asia comes from a Greek name for Anatolia probably based on the Assuwa Confederation—and while Anatolia is in some ways a cross-roads of the Near East and Europe, for the most part, Anatolia has been culturally and genetically and linguistically more closely associated with Europe than with the Near East, at least up until the Moslem conquests, the destruction of the Byzantine Greek Christians, and ultimately the arrival of the Ottoman Turks. The EEF peoples seem to be shorter and more gracile than the European hunter gatherers. Their phenotype otherwise seems to be a bit unclear. There are hints of blue eyes, blond hair and light skin among them from some studies, and yet all of the places where their genetics is strongest are "Mediterranean" in appearance; darker skin, dark hair, and brown eyes; like most Spaniards, Greeks or Italians. The Sardinians in particular are the population today that has the highest percentage of EEF ancestry, to the point that they can almost be called a relict EEF population still, and if you've ever been to Sardinia, you'll notice that tall, blonde, blue-eyed Nordic looking Europeans aren't really consistent with the natives. For now, let's keep the EEF in Anatolia, but we'll note that as they spread throughout Europe, they will dramatically change the cultural and genetic footprint of the continent—and almost certainly its linguistic footprint as well, although nobody knows what languages the EEF people brought with them.

Let's have a look at that, shall we, very briefly. A lot of proposals over the years presume that the Anatolian hunter gatherers come from the Levant and therefore have Middle Eastern languages, like an early Afro-Asiatic language. They, then, presume that the European language of the EEF cultures was probably Afro-Asiatic. This isn't actually correct, although it's not impossible, it's unlikely that the Anatolians spoke an Afro-Asiatic language, or were very closely related to the Levantine early agriculture. What genetic studies we do have suggest that the Anatolian Neolithic was the adoption of farming techniques by the locals rather than demic diffusion of Levantine/Natufian farmers into Anatolia. Let's first look at what the genetic clusters are, which most likely had unique languages at one point in time, and then look at what historically attested languages we know of that are non-Indo-European, and then see if we can, by working from both ends, narrow down possibilities.

There are six genetic clusters from the LGM that presumably had wholly unique languages. These clusters/stocks may have split as well, and given the time depth, it would be hard to recover any hint of that in anything surviving today. These clusters are:

1. The Franco-Cantabrian El Mirón cluster associated with the Magdalenian culture, smack dab in the middle of what is Basque country today. (19-14k years ago.) This lineage is also associated with an even older paleolithic lineage called Goyet. It seems to have shrunk in area at some point, and then re-expanded. Magdalenian supercedes the Solutrean in time and space, although I'm not sure what—if any—relationship has been posited between the two.
2. The Villabruna cluster (14k-7k years ago) from northern Italy, which spread across the Adriatic into the Balkans as well. Associated with the Epigravettian culture.
3. The Vestonice cluster (34-26k years ago), which is older than any lineages except the Goyet culture (see above) and is associated with what are extremely rare haplogroups today, like CT and with the Gravettian culture. Given its extreme age, I'm not sure what actually happened to it and if there's really any relevance to it from a linguistic standpoint; i.e., could it be the source of a linguistic stock that survived into the eve of the historical era? Probably not.
4. The Mal'ta cluster (24-17k) associated with the Mal'ta Buret' culture and the Ancient North Eurasian genetic profile. In spite of its age, we can actually draw a likely line between this and languages that we know of today. The ANE genetics makes up 14-38% (depending on the specific population) of the genetics of the Injuns, for instance, and significant portions of the Siberians. The EHG cluster, mentioned above, is highly ANE; up to 90+% in some studies, and more like 75% in others. (They also make up about a third of the CHG ancestry, however.) This cluster no doubt had its own language at one time, but given its extreme age, it's the more derived languages that EHG peoples may have spoken, descended over many, many generations from a more pure ANE cluster, that command our attention. Handwavy though the idea may be, it is usually assumed as likely that the most ancient earliest form of something that could be considered an immediate ancestor of proto-Indo-European is a descendant of some kind of EHG language that ultimately came from this refugia.
5. The Satsurblia cluster (13k-10k) is directly associated with the CHG population. Here there is a lot of action for potential linguistic origins; there is a popular (albeit by no means universally accepted) theory that a CHG substrate applied to an EHG superstrate is what caused the Indo-European languages to look the way that they did in their earliest form. Certainly as the groups formed that later emerged as the first speakers of Indo-European, EHG and CHG genetics make up by far the most prevalent genetic profiles (more on that in part 2). It is also believed likely that one or more of the unique language families of the Caucasus is descended from a CHG language as well, but that's just because of the convenience of geography and no other alternatives that are better rather than because of any particularly strong evidence.
6. The Anatolian Farmers (8.3-6k) who are the descendants of the earlier Anatolian Hunter Gatherers and the immediate ancestors of the EEF group is the last cluster. The seem to have split from the WHG a long time ago (~45k) and from the CHG also a long time ago although not nearly as much so (~25k). They also cluster on PCAs in an intermediate position between WHGs and Natufian Levantine farmers—although this isn't meant to imply that they had Natufian ancestry. That's been claimed in the past, but more recent studies seem to suggest that the Anatolian farming revolution happened without demic diffusion from the Middle East, as mentioned above. In any case, the single point of origin of all of the Neolithic farmers would imply that at least initially they probably spoke a closely related cluster of languages, although as they spread through the continent, diverged into multiple archaeological cultures and remained separated from each other for thousands of years, that was probably no longer the case that they all spoke languages with easily discernable similarities anymore by the time the Indo-Europeans arrived on the scene. That said, easily discernable and "recoverable if specialists actually had the data" are two different things, and it's likely that the EEF language family was at least a single family, albeit one that would have branched out into multiple distinct languages.
7. This last one is a bonus, and I'm just throwing it out there not because we have any evidence for it, but because we can't rule it out. There was probably some gene flow between the Maghreb and Europe, i.e., the part of North Africa that's just on the other side of southern Spain. Given that sea levels were lower during the Ice Age, if there wasn't an actual land bridge connecting the two, then it would still have been visible from one coast to another at certain points, and it's unlikely that some north African gene flow didn't make its way into southern Europe. We're already talking about an R1b-V88 flow from the Villabruna, through the Green Sahara and to prehistoric Lake Mega Chad (that's really its name; I know. If I ever decide to change my online pen name, Mega Chad has gotta be an option, although not because of the African connection, which I don't care about at all.) There's no reason to assume that the reverse couldn't have happened. So again, although we have no direct evidence for this, because we can't rule it out, the arrival of yet another completely separate language family from North Africa into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic or Neolithic isn't impossible and can't said not to have happened for sure.

So, now that we've determined a few potential fonts for completely unrelated language families prior to the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, let's talk about what we know about languages that are or were in Europe that are non-Indo-European.

1. Uralic. Uralic is probably the most obvious, being that the national languages of Hungary, Estonian, Finland, and the Lapplanders and some other minor tribes of northern Russia all belong to this family. That said, it does not quality nor will it lead us anywhere. While it was once thought that it was the native, pre-Indo-European language of northern Europe (minus Hungarian, who's arrival in the Middle Ages is a matter of historical record). The Uralic languages can now confidently be traced as a relatively late arrival to the Baltic and Fennoscandia region; no earlier than the Iron Age, in fact. A genetic haplogroup is strongly associated with the spread of Uralic languages, N1C-Tat, and its origins is in western Siberia, or thereabouts. There are some potential links to even more ancient populations, such as the Keltiminar culture of the Karakum desert, the even older Botai culture (of more or less the same region) and more probably, the Seima-Turbino archaeological horizon, which may actually represent the spread of the languages. That said, in northern Europe, the Uralic speaking people obviously don't have a very Siberian phenotype anymore, and autosomally are similar to other Scandinavian, Baltic and Slavic peoples who are their neighbors; the Hungarians are genetically identical to their neighbors as well. We'll have to look elsewhere for pre-Indo-European languages of Europe.
2. Basque. The other extant non-Indo-European native language is Basque. It has been spoken in the Cantabrian region, the Pyrenees, and nearby Gascony since the beginning of recorded history (Gascony is actually named for this people) and is related to the historically attested Aquitanian language. Whether Aquitanian is a direct ancestor or a sister language to paleo-Basque of some kind if unknown, but probably more likely the former. While no evidence has ever amounted to a convincing connection between Basque and any other language, it is likely that it's a lingering remnant of a group of languages that was once more widespread. Whether this is full-blown Vasconic Substrate Theory of Theo Vennemen or something more constrained is unknown. Vennemen's theory doesn't have widespread acceptance, but not because anybody thinks that it's unlikely really that there was a Vasconic substrate to parts of the Atlantic coast of Western Europe—just that there isn't any evidence to prove it in the format that he's presented it. If it is a remnant EEF language, then it's pretty compelling evidence that the EEF's didn't bring anything at all similar to Afro-Asiatic, but then again, nobody knows who originally brought Basque to Europe. Given that it overlaps geographically with the El Mirón refugia, I kind of like the idea that it may be the last evidence of the languages spoken by the El Mirón genetic cluster; stretching all the way back to the Ice Age. If that's true, then the "golden age" of Vasconic territorial expanse would have been way back in the Aurignacian culture of Europe. But that's a major handwavy bit of speculation. 
3. While we're in the same general vicinity, two Paleohispanic languages other than Basque and various Indo-European tongues are known, but completely unclassified, or only classified in a very controversial way: Tartessian and Iberian. Some scholars prefer to see Tartessian as an Indo-European language, or even a specifically Celtiberian language, but the majority suggest that it cannot be so interpreted with confidence, and there are good reasons to reject it. They would suggest that Tartessian is probably a language isolate, although the script is sometimes seen as compatible with a Basque or Iberian-like structure. This means that Tartessian might be Indo-European, a Vasconic language, or something else unique. Unfortunately, none of that is very usable in interpreting the pre-Indo-European landscape of Europe. Iberian, on the other hand, "feels" more likely to be linked with Basque, although hardly anyone would assert that we can say that with confidence. Rather, it's at best a "this could be likely, but we don't know" kind of situation. Personally, I kind of like the idea of both Iberian and Tartessian being part of a Vasconic family. We also know that later in the Neolithic, WHG genetics increased across Europe due to demic diffusion of new cultures like Globular Amphora, which had a very elevated percentage of WHG DNA compared to the cultures that they replaced, and that it seems to have come from the west. Of course, genes don't speak languages exactly—although we do find that language replacement does tend to coincide with an influx of new genetic markers even so. I kind of like the idea of all three of these being Vasconic, and originating with the old WHG population of the peninsula, but I admit that that's just a pet bit of speculation that I would never propose seriously. Keep in mind that even in historical records we're aware of plenty of other peoples in the peninsula while the early Greeks and Romans were making records of it; Hispania was a stronghold of the Carthiginians before the end of the Punic Wars, and presumably plenty of people from North Africa or even the Levant could have had an imprint on the peninsula before it was even Latinized. Also; by the time the Greeks and Romans entered the picture, Iberia had been largely Celticised as well; Celtiberian tribes being widespread across the territory, and they had been there since the early Bronze Age expansion of Bell Beakers across whatever was there before that.
4. We don't know too much about the Italic peninsula linguistically prior to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans with the major exception of the Etruscan language, which is deciphered and can be read. It's possible that this is also a language family of once broader distribution; Rhaetic in the Alps, Lemnian in the Aegean and a few others (like Calumnian and North Picene) are proposed as possible members of this family, although it's doubtful that we'll ever have enough material to say that confidently. That said, linguists are often fond of throwing ideas out there without necessarily having the confidence that they should, so this so-called Tyrsenian language family is often proposed. Some even link it with the Aegean languages (see below) which may or may not be a family in their own right. In my opinion, Etruscan is most likely seen as an ancient EEF language that spread through the initial Cardial Ware expansion, diversified in southern Europe, and was still kicking around to be documented by literate civilizations like the Greeks, Romans and Phoenicians. Although I also think that the Aegean languages (again, see below) are a good candidate for that, and given that there is little reason to see those two groups as related, most likely only one of the two is true. Now, this isn't necessarily true. Etruscans might well be intrusive from further north. Ancient authors offered several hypotheses: Dionysius of Halikarnassus suggests that the Etruscans were truly autochthonous, but Herodotus and a few other Greek historians suggested that they were related to the Pelasgians and had migrated to Etruria from the Aegean. Roman historians Livy and Pliny the Elder—who may have had more first-hand experience with the Etruscans than the Greeks did—believed that their origin was in the North. DNA evidence suggests that they are genetically extremely similar to the Latins and has most in common with Central European Urnfield peoples, including a fair bit of steppe-related ancestry, so it's no help either. Maybe if we knew a bit more, we could assert that Etruscan was a descendent of the northern expansion of the EEF rather than the southern one, and was intrusive into the Italian sphere. That way we could salvage an eastern Mediterranean and Aegean group of languages associated with the Cardian Ware expansion along the northern coastline of the Med, while Etruscan might represent a long-separated EEF language of the other fork that went through the Balkans to Central Europe all the way up to lower Scandinavia. While ultimately originating from the same source, their separation since the very beginning of the Neolithic might well make that common ancestry difficult if not impossible to spot. Of course, all of this is just speculation.
5. OK, I've referred to it a number of times; time for the entrance of the Aegean languages. On the other hand, although we certainly know that they existed, we know, sadly, very little about any of them. The Greeks had a long habit of referring to the Pelasgians as an autochthonous people of Greece who were nevertheless very notably not Greeks. However, they seem to have made no effort to document much if anything about their language, so theories run wild as to what Pelasgian was. There's not even any widespread agreement that it was non-Indo-European, given that our models suggest Anatolian languages spread over the Balkans and other nearby areas before the Greeks arrived, and were still speaking their languages just on the eastern and northern edges of the Aegean into the historical era. The reality is that even though many of these peoples are known to us from history, and maybe even some of their kings and some of the things that they did, we don't know much at all about them culturally or linguistically, so identified who they were related to is difficult. The Assuwa League, including Troy itself, likely spoke some kind of Anatolian Indo-European, and Lycian/Lydian branches of the same family ran down the coast further south, while Luwian and Hittite itself were more in the interior and further east. Regardless of the difficulties with Pelasgian or any other specifically Aegean language, one nearby language that is known for sure to be non-Indo-European, and to have been the native tongue of a successful maritime trading civilization is Minoan, and it's possible descendent Eteocretan, both of which on the island of Crete. Their language is attested, but untranslatable, and other than the fact that it's not related to anything that we know if, we don't know much about it. I think it likely that Minoan along with Etruscan represent our best bets at recovering a late EEF language and culture that we can talk about in terms other than about their pots, cemeteries and the ruins of their houses and villages.
6. If the EEF peoples originally came from Anatolia in the early Neolithic, then the likely place to look for languages that might be related to theirs would, naturally by the non-Indo-European languages of Anatolia. Duh. As it happens, Anatolia is mostly known for its various Indo-European languages from the Anatolian family, to later appearing Phrygian, Greek, Latin and others. The Semitic language of the Assyrian and later Aramean traders were obviously intrusive (and late, at that) in small doses from the south. That said, there are three languages or language families that demand our attention, starting first with Hattic. Hattic has the same place among the Hittites that Pelasgian has among the Greeks; the supposed language of the autochthonous people. A little bit more is known about it than we know of Pelasgian, but certainly not enough that anyone could write a Hattic text or anything like that. The conservative view is that Hattic is simply another isolate, but there are attempts to connect it various other nearby languages, including the Northeast Caucasian languages (mentioned above in the CHG section; sometimes called the Circassian languages) or the Kartvelian language family (the family to which Georgian belongs; Stalin's native language.) If anything comes of those proposed connections, which seems unlikely, then it makes it more likely that Hattic is an example of spreading from the Caucasus, and would make it less likely to be related to an EEF language. However, if it turned out that the EEF and CHG languages actually had a very distant genetic link, that would sure be something else, wouldn't it?
7. Kaskian is another non-Indo-European language of the southern Black Sea shore. Although very little is known of it, it's been suggested that it might be related to Hattic, and that it might be related to Circassian. In fact, it's been suggested that Kaskian and Circassian are reflexes of the same word over time. 
8. A third major Anatolian language known from the Bronze Age is Hurrian and the closely related Urartian language. The Hurrians seem to have been kicking around in the region for some time, and it's likely that the Kura-Araxes culture is a proto-Hurrian speaking culture, and that they may well have been early traders of viticulture, or even the inventors of it. There are suggestions that their language, which is known, by the way, has connections to the Northeast Caucasian languages, i.e., the family which contains Chechyan, for example. There are also genetic links between the two groups/areas, which makes this even more likely

Although these aren't linguistic theories, there are some new genetic theories that might have bearing on linguistics, even if they can't be proven. One noted here, suggests that there was a third major, expansionary family from the general area; not Indo-European, not Semitic but something else entirely. That paper proposes as a hypothesis in need of more work that a family consisting of Pre-Greek (Pelasgian), Minoan, Hattic, Hurro-Urartian and both the Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages (which some linguists link together with each other, although other more conservative ones do not.) If this language family, which has no label that I'm aware of, has any currency at all, then it's a prime candidate for the language family of the Anatolian Farmers and their migratory brethren, the EEF people. There are hints that the pre-Greek substrate has some similarities to pre-Germanic substrates, which would actually bolster that idea; the idea of a Hatto-Hurrian-Pelasgian-Minoan-etc. language family being the EEF language family that spread across most of Europe with the spread of the clearly related Neolithic invasion of Europe from Anatolia makes all kinds of sense.

This likely leaves Etruscan/Tyrsenian and Vasconic as unrelated to this EEF language family, making it slightly more likely that their roots go back to the Mesolithic WHG peoples and whatever languages they may have spoken.

It's also important to keep in mind that there could well have been more than one substrate in Pre-Greek; there's evidence to suggest gene flow from the Chalcolithic Iranian highlands south of the Caspian Sea, for instance. And while I've said I don't favor an Afro-Asiatic affiliation as being the affiliation for EEF languages, it is clear that at least some likely Afro-Asiatic peoples interacted with the EEF peoples of Anatolia, the Aegean and Crete, Cyprus, etc. 

Anyway, more questions than answers here, but we at least have put most of the cards on the table (all that will fit in a reasonably long blog post, anyway) of what we know of the linguistic/cultural situation of Europe before the Indo-European languages erupt on it. In part 2 I'll talk a bit about the cultures of EEF Europe and the genesis within the Neolithic of the Indo-Europeans, before we talk about how they spread, which will probably end up being a part 3.

Friday Art Attack

Another week, another art attack post.

This is a strange, although technically well done piece. Making the nymph a dude and the representative of modern civilization a weird, pseudo-Gothic steampunk gal is strange, but I still like the line work.

Fantastic landscapes has been a major part of the genre since Tolkien at least. Tolkien was supposedly heavily inspired by hiking trips he took when young in Switzerland; Rivendell in particular is often compared to Lauterbrunnen.

Wayne Reynolds' output seems to have slowed in the last few years, but if anything he's getting more dynamic and arguably better over time. Now, his anatomy isn't so hot on those two ridiculous girl characters, although he can't be blamed for them, and anatomy wasn't ever what anyone came to him for anyway.

A couple of good old fashioned space opera images.

I often neglect classic art, but for the most part, it's so much better than anything being done today that one can seriously make the case that our culture is regressing into primitivism. There's actually plenty of evidence for that beyond our art, but anyway... This is an illustration of Brennus' sacking of Rome. Vae victis, baby!

Part of a series, a story told only in images, of a knight who goes to a witch to get a cure for a princess, but who is in turn cursed. The princess then dons his red cape, goes to the same witch and saves the knight. Egh; not exactly the most classic, timeless narrative out there, but I liked the art nonetheless.

I have no idea what this is or where I got it, but what the heck; it's pretty cool.

Pellucidar has to vie with the Carson Napier of Venus series as a distant third to Tarzan and Barsoom in Edgar Rice Burroughs' canon. Nonetheless, both have plenty to offer.

Yeah, I dunno. Pretty cool, though, whatever the devil is supposed to be going on.

An imitation of classic art style... sorta, and at least a classic moment to capture in art. Perseus saving Andromeda from Ketos (not the Kraken) at the last minute.

Back when Orientalism was still cool.  Y'know, before we got to know all to well the subjects of our Orientalist fascination and found them a pale shadow of what we imagined they were. There's a lesson there for the oikophobes, not that they'll learn it, because their condition isn't exactly rational.

And let's end today with some Warhammer undead.

Consent in Gaming

Although this was all the rage before people decided to flip out and act hysterical about the "election year flu season", I don't really pay attention to trends in RPGs very much, so I only saw a few off-hand mentions of it. I've now figured out what this whole consent in gaming thing is all about. I've seen YouTube videos arguing for and against it, and I've even read the document and the checklist itself. Sure, it was painfully cringy and entitled, but also free and only about a dozen pages.

In spite of the fact that it seems like a really retarded April Fool's prank or poor taste joke, it's actually not (although the people who defend it are.) There are people who think that this is an actual serious thing, and that it should be promoted. By "promoted" I mostly mean, that they will call you a terrible person if you disagree. Maybe alt right (the official position and statement by the cuck-in-chief at ENWorld on the issue, for instance. Surprise, surprise.) Maybe a racist. But before you actually respond to those kinds of allegations, I want to remind you of two things.

The first is the three rules of the SJW. 1) SJWs Always Lie. Don't listen to their defense of this indefensible ridiculousness. It's not meant to be taken seriously, because it's not honest. 2) SJWs Always Double Down. If they continue to beat the drum of inclusivity, don't allow that to wear down your opposition to their lunacy. They count on that. In fact, they get even more lunatic, with the expectation that you'll cave just to shut them up. Don't fall for it. 3) SJWs Always Project. Remember this one in particular, and the appropriate reactions to the first two rules of the SJW make more sense and are easier to implement. SJWs are terrible people, and they know it, somewhere deep down in their psyche. That's why they're filled with such nihilism and toxic narcissism that they want to ruin, destroy and burn down everything else around them that's normal; because it reminds them of how terrible they really are inside.

Is Consent In Gaming written by SJWs? Of course you already know that from the title. But just in case you're stubborn and willfully obtuse, look at what they thought cool interior art would be...

At least we know where the New Warriors proposal for Marvel got their ideas for Safespace and Snowflake...

The second thing to remember is Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. This is the toxic behavior that SJWs—even long before they had that pejorative label—use to subvert, infest and destroy small groups. It may seem odd that it would be applied to your D&D gaming group, when it was initially meant for stuff like city councils, home owner associations, corporate HR departments, etc. But SJWs apply it to everything, because they have absolutely no boundaries between their evil ideology and anything else in their life. The only thing that brings a temporary salve to the SJW's sucking vacuum that is the place where a soul would be in a normal person is the destruction of anything normal, healthy or beautiful and the replacement of it with a profane effigy of their false idols like inclusivity, diversity, tolerance, and everything else that they're lying about (1) SJWs Always Lie.) If you can see what they're doing, you are much less likely to fall for it. SJWs couch this kind of crap in prettied up terms, yet what their only real purpose is is to bully everyone around them and mold them into plague-zombies of their cult, or hollow them out and devour them trying. Just like Codes of Conduct in corporations or other organizations inevitably and in fact almost immediately get coopted into forcing out normal, healthy, effective, or useful behavior and replacing it with a continual struggle session about intersectional identity politics, this consent in gaming has no real aim other than to destroy normal people's gaming groups and replace them with continual struggle sessions for the mangled psyches of the mentally unwell.

There's two other observations that seem obvious to me but which don't really seem to get mentioned, lurking just between the lines of this document. First, why is it that what is acceptable or not has to be explicitly spelled out in some kind of pseudo-contract form? Are the people who wrote this really that socially inept that they are constantly intruding into genuinely inappropriate behavior? (3) SJWs Always Project.) Normal, healthy people who aren't blazingly psychologically dysfunctional can hold conversations without blundering into topics and positions that insult and offend the people that they're talking to. Except for very small children and the mentally unfit, people don't need to be told to avoid topics that are inappropriate most of the time. Conversation really isn't that really hard of a skill to be proficient in. And let's face it; although more focused in a particular direction, game sessions really are little more than group conversations. 

Secondly, if we were take this fraudulent document full of dishonest, bad faith intentions and motivations at face value—clearly a foolish thing to do, but let's for the sake of argument, assume that it's doable—then it implies that this document is for gamers who are so emotionally incontinent, so psychologically defective, so mentally crippled, that their very presence would be intolerable to anyone over time, even their own mothers. They are "triggered" into idiotic panic attacks because their naked malice and unfit psychologies are laid bare by the very existence of normal reality. If you can hold other conversations without this imbecilic pseudo-contract approach, then you can hold a game session without it too. If you can't, then the problem isn't everyone else around you, it's you.

Dramatic illustration of an SJW on the back of a cuck.

Between these two observations, I can at least find one pragmatic use for the Consent in Gaming document and its associated checklist. Anyone who refers to it in any tone other than withering contempt is automatically disqualified from gaming with me. They're probably automatically disqualified from having any social relationship with me at all, if I can help it, but sometimes family, friends of friends, coworkers, etc. can't entirely be helped. But the document is a useful filter. Anytime anyone invokes it, you pull a soup nazi on them, tell them "no game for you!" and make them know in no uncertain terms that they're no longer welcome. Hopefully you didn't invite them to your actual house and give them your address.

Seriously; normal people are used to giving people the benefit of the doubt. Of discussing things with them in good faith. Of being reasonable and accommodating. None of that works on the kind of locust people who make up the SJW hordes and who think crap like this is a good idea. They aren't reasonable. They don't want to game with you; they want to reform you in their twisted and perverse image, or destroy you by trying. The only acceptable response to them is to immediately cut them out of your life, or at least participation in the hobby with you. Don't get suckered into thinking that you can "just this one time" or "surely they're not that unreasonable" finesse your way into some kind of accommodation with them. SJWs, like the Huns, are always either at your feet or at your throat. They're the scorpion in the animal fable. It's their nature. They aren't normal people. They can't be dealt with like normal people. Don't be the frog and give them a ride across this river. 

UPDATE: I've actually converted this post into a page. Let's filter the SJWs away from the blog while we're at it. Can't hurt to take a few extra precautions to keep them out of your life.

UPDATE 2: I don't consider my game to be inclusive. It's exclusive. I'm a pretty decent GM; not the best out there, but pretty good, and I play with good players that I enjoy being around. My free time to spend on my hobby is much too valuable to spend it on enabling and coddling self-important, toxic narcissists and their multitude of issues. Inclusivity is a cult by-word. It's not a good thing, just because we've had it bleated in our faces for a long time that it is. Exclusivity is a good thing.

The Whys

Got a few links with my own commentary for today. This is mostly on "why" I do certain things the way that I do them in my games. This is particularly focused on the fact that after years and years of doing so, I dislike using miniatures, battle mats, combat grids and all that jazz in my roleplaying games. In my case, this probably goes all the way back to the vector by which I came into the hobby; as a fan of fantasy fiction rather than of wargames. This is somewhat in contrast to the development of the game itself. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson certainly seem to have been fans of fantasy fiction, but their hobby was wargames, and D&D grew out of an adaptation of wargaming into a novel approach of playing the game.

Now, I don't dislike wargames, although I will admit that it's a hobby that I've only dabbled in, not embraced. However, I dislike wargames and roleplaying games mixing tropes and mechanics. Having your roleplaying game "stop" while you indulge in a mini-game that's of a completely different nature has never facilitated the kind of experience that I want, which is more like an interactive and impromptu fiction created by a group. I've always wanted the RPG experience to resemble as much as is reasonably possible, the medium that was my vector into it in the first place, namely fantasy novels, stories and occasionally movies (because of the sucess of the Conan the Barbarian movie, fantasy movies were a thing when I was a kid in the 80s. Most of them were pretty dang cheesy, but still. It was a source of inspiration, and not every 80s fantasy movie was terrible. Dragonslayer for instance is really quite good, and I've got a fond nostalgia for Willow. And more recently, of course, we've got the Lord of the Rings movies as better inspiration. Albeit still secondary to the Lord of the Rings texts.)

I recognize that most people play modern versions of the game with terrain or at least a battlemat of some kind. In part, this is because it's very difficult to run combat "correctly" without it. How do you do flanking, for instance, without a grid? I wonder if, if given better "theater of the mind" options in the base rules themselves, if more people would prefer to run their combats that way, however. I believe that they would, although naturally I can't prove it at all. Anyway, rather than attempt to describe all of the reasons that I prefer "theater of the mind" combat, and systems that enable it, I'll link to "Sly Flourish's" page that already does so quite capably. This link is especially focused on the why, although it links to a "how." This how is really only particularly useful to you if you're in a 5e milieu. Since I am not, the why is the more interesting and useful link for me.

https://slyflourish.com/tyranny_of_the_grid.html

Now, from all that I hear, 5e has been a good direction to take "3e-ish" D&D mechanics and make them both easier and more fun to use. But because I'd already accepted a much more drastic take on modifying "3e-ish" mechanics by using Microlite, or m20. There's a buttload of options in m20. Here's the big collection: https://microlite20.org/

But my specific versions are my specific versions, and are devised specifically for my own tastes and my own settings and the tone that they're supposed to represent. I am finally at a point where I think I've been convinced that there's a 5e rule that I should import. My first thought on understanding this rule is that I wasn't interested, but I've been gradually convinced over time, including by the essays linked to below, also from Sly Flourish. While some of those essays are written in a 5e context, it also shows that the subsystem works. In fact, it's a much better motivator than the old action points mechanic which Eberron thought would encourage more swashbuckling action. It didn't. This does, however, because it isn't just a mechanic, it's also a player motivator. The mechanic in question is advantage/disadvantage. And it can be used to improvise combat to become much more dynamic, interesting and fun without making it more mechanically complex. I'm really coming around to the idea that it will make combat much better.

https://slyflourish.com/improvising_combat_with_advantage.html

I talked about this in my last post, although I didn't link to it, but it's a slight iteration on the same idea.

https://slyflourish.com/cinematic_advantage.html

Anyway, I'll think about exactly how to implement in m20. I'll probably take most of the advice from the articles linked just above, but keep in mind that those are from a more typical D&D paradigm, and a specifically D&D 5e paradigm, so there may be a few things it lists which I find in context don't make sense for Dark Heritage. And I have to decide if adding advantage/disadvantage means that my Heroism points are now something that I no longer need. Sigh. Cascading effects are a minor deal with rules lite games, but occasionally they're still a thing.

But I do find it likely that this is the missing piece I was looking for to draw out interesting, swashbucklery combat more reliably.

A possible new rule...

Although Fantasy Hack and Dark Heritage 2 have diverged, and I'm not really making updates to Fantasy Hack anymore, I am still making minor tweaks to the rules of Dark Heritage 2. I'm a little unsure how to proceed if I ever decide I want to use Fantasy Hack instead of Dark Heritage 2 again; probably just use Dark Heritage 2, update the races, and maybe a few of the appendixes to be the same as the current iteration of Dark Heritage. There are two rules tweaks that I've either already implemented in one case or am seriously entertaining implementing in the other, thanks to the convincing videos provided by Dungeon Craft below. Dungeon Craft is a curious guy, who plays 5e, but who uses a lot of old school paradigms and old school themed house rules in his game. Naturally, as a player of m20, which is based off of d20, my game is somewhat different, but then again, I'm perfectly happy to adopt a houserule from any system whatsoever, if it works better than what I'm already doing. 

The first change is to initiative, and the Dungeon Craft guy proposes a number of scenarios all the way from "there is no initiative at all" to team iniative, to just straight, static DEX score as your initiative. I'm leaning more towards team initiative with a d6 (in fact, I'm actually updated the document to include that as of its latest revision, but I might yet tweak it a bit more after further thought). Anyway, I'll let you watch the following video and decide for yourself what you think would work best for your game, however.

The second change I'm considering doesn't replace anything that I'm currently doing. I have the same problem with "griddy" combat that he refers to, but I dislike representational combat at all, and lean heavily towards "narrative" combat. I don't need miniatures, terrain, battle mats, or any other physical representation for combat, nor do I want to explicitly encourage it with rules that make that seem more likely to be used than not. Now, this doesn't mean that I think those things are bad, or that you shouldn't use them. Although I will admit that I like to draw perhaps a harder, brighter line than most between role-playing games and tactical miniatures games. I do, however, want to make sure that any games I dabble with are perfectly and comfortably usable without them, although if you wish to, you certainly could.

This video talks about replacing a rule from 3e on (flanking) that I don't use in my m20 game with a 5e rule for advantage. In other words, it adds a rule, but as he says, it's a rule that I think encourages the game to play out much more like how I'd like it to play out. And the advantage of advantage (ahem) is that it's incredibly simple to implement.

Anyway, I'm fairly certain that I'll be adopting these two systems into the game. As I think about and write up the text that explains my use of cinematic advantage, I'll also revisit my initiative system and make sure that I'm happy with the implementation of it that I have.

Pathfinder Society Scenarios Season #1 Part 5

Wow, it's been a long time since I worked on this project. Let's see if I can breathe some life back into it...

51. The City of Strangers Part I: The Shadow Gambit. There's a lot of reasons not to like this scenario. For one, it takes place in what is probably the worst single setting element of the entire Golarion setting: the Burning Man fantasy city of Kaer Maga. Although most of these are by necessity somewhat railroady, given that they're meant to get players into the action as quickly as possible in a convention type setting, this one is one the worst, and requires players to accept several things that most players would be very unlikely to accept, like the assassins who jump them cheekily telling them that they'll just have to figure out where the person who hired them is, after they told them that they need to talk to him, or that they need to ride around town for an hour with bags over their heads before meeting with a guy who demands that the PCs owe him a favor if he tells them what they need so that they can do what is already a favor for him. You have to do this, though, because the entire plot of this (and even more especially the next one) hinge on it. Anyway, this is mostly just a module of wandering around a rather stupidly designed high concept town asking questions and fighting criminals. At the very end, they get to finally go take out a sub-boss, at least. Blegh.
52. The City of Strangers Part II: The Twofold Demise. The attitude that makes Kaer Maga so intolerable a location for normal people to play in comes forward again; the guy who demanded that the PCs owed him a favor so that he could help them do him a favor (don't try to figure it out. Just remember r-strategy and accept that you'll never undestand this mentality) is even more demandy and absurd here. While the PCs are wandering around aimlessly because there are no clues at all to give them any direction on how to accomplish the scenario's goals, they're attacked by exactly the people that they need to be, of course. This leads them to... of course, a little dungeoncrawl lower in the city. Once they complete it, they conveniently find all of the evidence of Shadow Lodge skulduggery that they're looking for. One small upside; because of the scenario length restrictions, the dungeon is actually what normal people would call a dungeon, and is mercifully small and short. Enough so, in fact, that it doesn't bother me too much the way dungeoncrawls normally do.
53. Echoes of Everwar IV: The Faithless Dead. Presuming that you've played the other three parts of this series, you can do this finale. It has a kind of The Mummy feel to it; trying to restore a powerful sorcerer of sorts from the past; or rather, trying to stop the restoration of such which the events of the prior scenarios put into play. In spite of the fact that like most of these scenarios, it just jumps right in without preamble, it kind of tries to make up for it by offering a bit more roleplaying opportunities than most of these; you're to riddle with a sphinx, coax the spirits of "the mummy's" concubines out of magical items that they're stored in, and then go do a pseudo-Egyptian themed small dungeon. All in all, this is far from the worst of these types of scenarios I've reviewed.
54. Eyes of the Ten Part II: The Maze of the Open Road. This scenario is way too precious for its own good; it's only 23 pages long, fer cryin' out loud, and something like 8-9 pages of that at least are set-up, summary, and the faction stuff that they always throw into these things. In spite of that, you're whisked all over Golarion, from a demiplane where you talk to a medusa, to a Chelaxian manor where you fight devils and uncover a guy who's actually dead and being impersonated by a rogue Pathfinder, to the jungles of the Mwangi Expanse where you encounter a weird lich intelligent ape who runs a heretical cult—which you'll defeat almost as soon as you hear about it, assuming that you do actually hear anything about who they are and what their goals are before just fighting and killing them, which is hardly a given. This would all be relatively interesting—if esoterically D&Dish—for a long campaign, but as part two of a two-part very short module, it simply is trying to do way too much.
55. The Infernal Vault. This is an interesting scenario. I mean, the scenario itself is a pretty bog-standard small little dungeoncrawl with some dumb traps, human mercenaries, a few devils and undead and a stronk wamman boss at the end. Nothing to see here that's worth seeing. But there's a backstory, which again, the PCs probably aren't really in a position to get unless the GM just flat out tells it to them. And it illuminates a major problem that I have with a lot of the Pathfinder material. In their effort to be a bid "edgy" or "mature" and "shades of gray" they simply have a nihilistic, nothing matters because everything gives way to entropy of evil anyway kind of vibe to them that is seriously off-putting. I can kinda see what they're trying to do, and I detect this vibe a lot in a lot of their other material too, but they are not at all subtle, and where a little bit goes a long way, they give us a firehose of it. I dunno; while in good circumstances the broken psychology of entertainers shouldn't really be too much an issue to their customers, in Paizo's case it's been bleeding through for some time and poisoning much of their output. This scenario in particular made it noticeable again.
56. The Jester's Fraud. This is a curious scenario to end the season on, because it has none of the feel of a "season finale" and is just a pretty standard "adventure of the week" kind of feel. It involves a little bit of skulduggery, but mostly just tracking and fighting. It starts almost in media res, as most of these do, as the person that you've been sent after a super brief briefing himself stumbles into the inn that you're staying in and is being pursued by annis hags that you have to fight. He then gives you what you want, but asks for additional help. You go out into the backcountry to find a stolen evil artifact, and other than an optional encounter with some giant slugs, you just fight humans—bandits, mercenaries and bosses. There's a centaur too, depending on your level, but this is a curiously rather unfanastic adventure in many respects. Even the evil McGuffin is underwhelming, because we're never given an opportunity to understand what it's capable of or what's supposed to be so evil about it; it's just a McGuffin that might as well be a plain ole block of wood for all the scenario writers care.

So, I've now done two full seasons, Season #0 and Season #1. There are 11 (but the count is off because of Season #0) full seasons for First Edition Pathfinder. I haven't been able to get my hands on anything from Second Edition, and probably won't get around to it. But that leaves me plenty of little mini-modules to review here yet, assuming I don't lose interest like I did for a long stretch there earlier.

Quoting the Z-man

I talk enough here and there about political and social issues that I probably should actually come up with a tag for it other than RANDOM. But I try to convince myself that I don't really want to talk about it much, and so I cling to using a very poorly concieved tag. Let me quote part of a post by the Z-man on Taki's.

The defining feature of this age is that the people in charge are certain about things that are imaginary. The government, for example, has denied Christians a permit to assemble for the National Day of Prayer, because they fear invisible White Nationalists will launch a revolution.

They think this because they are sure the January protest at the Capitol was part of a plot to overthrow the government. The nation saw mostly flag-waving boomers taking selfies and laughing with the cops. The political class is told it was cover for an invisible army of white supremacists. These white supremacists are lurking out there on the other side of the razor wire, waiting for the chance to pounce. [...]

This starts with Joe Biden, a man who has spent his adult life in government. His “private sector experience” was at a political law firm for a year fifty years ago. Now, of course, his brain is scrambled eggs, but even if he were still in control of his faculties, he would have no reason to question the claims about invisible Nazis hiding around the capital. Why would he? Everything he knows comes from government.

His second-in-command and future leader of the free world (stop laughing) is Kamala Harris, who has never sullied herself in the dreaded private sector. She spent the first four years of her “work life” making sure Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown was feeling groovy. Then she ran for office and it has been twenty years of uninterrupted life in one elected office after another. [...]

It is not just Democrats who are allergic to honest labor. The top Republican in the House is Kevin McCarthy. His first job out of college was as a staffer for Congressman Bill Thomas of California. Then he was chairman of the Young Republican National Federation. He was elected to the California State Assembly in 2002 and then won a House seat in 2006. He has been in Congress ever since.

The GOP’s second-in-command in the House is Steve Scalise, a man who appears to have started out in life with the hope of making himself a productive citizen. He majored in computer science at LSU. He must have fallen in with a bad crowd along the way, as he never made it to the dreaded private sector. Instead, it was time in the Louisiana state legislature and then off to his current spot in Washington.

The No. 3 Republican is the most amusing. Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, is the Republican Conference Chair. Unlike her bosses, she technically had a job in the dreaded private sector. She worked at a law firm that is called White & Case LLP. Granted, it is just a cat’s paw for the American empire, but it technically counts as the private sector. After that short run, she was on the dole in one government job after another before landing in Congress. [...]

This is why these people sound so weird. How could Liz Cheney know anything about the concerns of the people she is supposed to represent? Wyoming is just a place she has read about and visited on vacation. The people of the state would be better off hiring a Frenchman who once went on holiday to Jackson Hole. That Frenchman would know he knows nothing about Wyoming and would maybe hire some locals to help him out. Liz Cheney’s staff is all pod people from the Washington hack-a-rama.

This phenomenon is not exclusive to politics. The media is stocked with carnies who maybe waited tables once, but otherwise have no contact with present reality. Their life is on stage, playing the role written for them by equally obtuse and ignorant people. The mass media is a circus, but the audience is out of sight from the performers. The media carnies cannot hear the laughter and jeering. It is nothing but piped-in applause, which they assume is the real thing. [...]

This is why they are so certain of these crackpot theories. They have barricaded themselves behind razor wire and armed men because they are absolutely sure the crackpot theories are true. Again, people are most certain of the things they least understand. The Cloud People know so little of the Dirt People, they will believe anything about them, because they have no way to know otherwise. It is why we find ourselves ruled by increasingly foreign fanatics spouting bizarre conspiracy theories.

History says that when the gap between the reality of the ruling class and actual reality gets too wide, there is a break. The French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution are two examples. The ruling class became detached from the people they ruled, so they could not see what was coming. Similarly, the credentialed naïfs of the managerial class are blind to present reality. They do not know what they do not know, but they are absolutely certain of it and it will not end well.

Feminism hot take

Saw this somewhere and thought it was a fascinating and insightful comment. In answer to the question of "why are women unhappy and more and more on anti-depressants than ever before?"

"The cost of having it all was everything that you had."

Broad reading (personal Appendix N)

I recorded a YouTube video—or rather, I recorded the audio for it (the video will take longer to do, so probably sometime next week. I'll amend this post when it's available and include it.)

It talks a bit about my own personal Appendix N, something that I've blogged about here before, although not in many years. My own influences are perhaps a bit more broad than that of the Appendix N, which is mostly limited to heroic fantasy and a few other weird tales type things. I think fantasy fans who expect to have a creative outlet, even if it's just as a table-top roleplaying gamer, would be well served by having much broader influences and tastes, and being familiar with how a great many other genres work and why they work as well as they do. I recall hearing in some authorship advice books for would-be science fiction writers long ago that many of the better and more successful science fiction writers say that all good stories are about people, not science. That's not to say that science isn't an important and in fact integral component of a science fiction story, just as magic and the fantastic is an integral and important component of fantasy, but at the end of the day, if you want a good story, it has to be a story about characters who are relatable in some way or another. 

In any case, there's just a few "honorary mention" works that I'd like to add here on the blog as an appendix of sorts to the Appendix N list of the youtube video. For the most part, these types of works either offer similar influences (even though they're different kinds of works) than ones already listed, or the influences are subtle and a bit more difficult to pick out, so they don't really rate being listed as primary "Appendix N" sources.

The first are an array of swashbuckling "romances" of various types. I think my reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs already covers this type of stuff quite well, both in terms of the plot, the general tone and theme of the stories, and the types of characters that it offers. However, I think in some ways, the following works do those things a bit better than Edgar Rice Burroughs does. However, because there is no hint of fantasy or science fiction to any of them, they probably rate as second place behind him. That said, I do not in the least hesitate to recommend that you add the following to your repertoire. Most of these are public domain works that you can get digitally for free anyway, with the exception of the one movie. But you can probably check that out from your public library, or rent it pretty easily (I see you can buy it on Amazon on DVD or blu-ray at a relatively reasonable price.) Anyway, here's the full list, and then I'll discuss them all in the annotated text below:

• The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
• Scaramouche and Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini
• The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers by Richard Lester et al.
• Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen

First: The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson. This War of the Roses themed adventure story is fantastic. You'll have to get used to his deliberately old-fashioned language, but once you do, you're in for a real delight. The characters are all quite charming and likable, except those who you're not supposed to like, of course, and the plot moves along quite briskly for a novel from the era in which it was written. Much more exciting than the novels from the same era that my literature teachers always made me read. Like many of these stories, it showcases human nature much better than modern stories do. Joanna Sedley is feminine and delightful, although a bit demure and even sassy at the beginning—as a scared young girl trying to protect her virtue from people who she doesn't yet know should be—and young Dick is everything a young likely hero is supposed to be. Unlike sappy and whiny Luke Skywalker, he's decisive, action-oriented in his outlook, charmingly impetuous and stubborn, yet humble enough to know when he needs to take advice or help from friendly folks who are willing to offer it. 

As an aside, there's a decent film adaptation of it dating from 1985 that Disney did as a made for TV movie, starring Oliver Reed as the villain. I say decent in the sense that it's a decent Medieval romance action movie, not decent in the sense that its a great adaptation of the novel's plot exactly. I'm not 100% sure where you can find it; I don't think it's on Disney+, unfortunately, but you can probably find an old DVD copy of it somewhere. I actually had to rip an old VHS copy that I had, since I'm not in the habit of keeping working VCRs around anymore.

Although it's not written in as deliberately archaic a format, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe was actually published a full 68 years earlier, and it is my next recommendation for a swashbuckling adventure story. It's hard to discuss the superlatives of this novel without sounding like I'm gushing or exaggerating. As proof of concept, note that my online nom de plume is taken from this novel. The nature of the characters like Ivanhoe himself, his angry, stubborn father, the jealousy of Rowena, the tragic unrequited love of Rebecca, the sinister designs of Brian de Bois-Guilbert—all are done with a keen eye towards the observations of real human nature, but with also a keen eye towards using, and yet modernizing the themes of the chivalric romance genre. There are also little moments of keen insight; although the Jews in the story, who play a particularly prominent role, are treated very sympathetically (Rebecca being largely seen as the most virtuous and praiseworthy character of all that make an appearance, for instance) are still shown in such a way that it makes it clear that Scott isn't unaware of their nature. When Isaac of York is seen haggling over the price of the ransom of his daughter with exaggerated bitterness, for instance, comes across as based on behavior he probably witnessed personally. It ends on an overly happy note, as if the overthrow of Prince John's ambitions means that the English would truly form peacefully out of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman ingredients, as if Prince John wasn't due to become King John himself in just a few short years, and that a specific English Identity wouldn't forge itself until the time of King Edward III and the Hundred Years War several centuries still in the future from the point of view of the characters. Desdichado also doesn't mean "disinherited" in Spanish, it means unhappy. And the Anglo-Saxons weren't still making references to pagan gods half a millennium after converting to Christianity, and Zernabock was a Slavic pagan god, not an Anglo-Saxon one. In the most ironic of mistakes here, Scott mispelled the Anglo-Saxon name Cerdic as Cedric—and now Cedric is a much more recognized name than Cerdic is, even though it was just an accidental creation of a novel-writer's. Oh, well. Nobody reads Ivanhoe to get a true account of the life and times of John and Richard. There are at least three decent adaptations to the screen that I'm aware of, although I know for sure that more exist, including several from the silent film era. The 1952 one is the best, although it follows the plot of the novel the least. Plus, you'll never have a better Rebecca than a young Elizabeth Taylor. Wowza. A 1982 adaptation as a TV movie is closer to the original, and works quite well. Plus, it has Sam Neill as de Bois-Guilbert, which is a fun shout-out for Jurassic Park fans. The 1997 joint A&E and BBC miniseries is probably the most accurate in terms of costume and set design, and follows the novel fairly closely. Ciaran Hinds is a great de Bois-Guilbert, but unfortunately Steve Waddington as Ivanhoe himself is kind of a boring plank of wood, and Susan Lynch's Rebecca isn't a fraction of the attractiveness, femininity and innocent likeableness of Elizabeth Taylor's. In fact, those traits being key to the development of the plot, one could certainly say that abandoning them in favor of modernish proto-woke sensibilites of a strong, sassy Rebecca who certainly looks stereotypically Jewish, but not exactly super attractive, was probably a poor move. The whole story hinges on Rebecca being of superlative worthiness and virtue in pretty much every regard.

As an aside, although it's a different story in most respects, Ivanhoe overlaps in many ways with the story of Robin Hood, being centered as it is on the arrival of Richard the Lionhearted to overthrow the ambitions of his treacherous brother John. Although not named exactly, the character of Locksley from Ivanhoe is clearly meant to be Robin Hood. I don't know that I have a particular Robin Hood book to recommend and it's not on the list except as an aside, although I have fond albeit vague memories of the Howard Pyle one from my childhood. I can absolutely recommend the Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland film adaptation from 1938, though. It's still one of the best things Hollywood has ever managed to produce, even now. But I'll just add it as an addendum on this discussion of Ivanhoe rather than as its own thing. My Ivanhoe recommendation is really for the novel itself above and beyond any of the visual adaptations of it.

Next, the best two novels by Rafael Sabatini need to get a shout out. These are Captain Blood and Scaramouche respectively. They're more recent than any of the other novels listed here; my printed copies come from the early 1920s, and I wouldn't give them up for anything—although I also have Kindle versions that I got for free (because public domain) of both. Sabatini was an interesting fellow. He obviously has an Italian name and an Italian father, but an English mother, and he grew up partly in England, Italy, Portugal and Switzerland. English was actually one of the later languages added to his impressive linguistic repertoire, but he wrote with a proficiency in it that few others have manged before or since; in fact, for those not used to reading "difficult" texts, they may come across as a bit dense and florid. Personally, I love them, and think some of his dialogue is among the best I've ever read in any type of work period. As with Edgar Rice Burroughs, he shows us incredibly virtuous and desireable women, and the type of man who is worthy of them. In fact, he does this better than Burroughs, honestly. 

In addition to those two novels, it's probably worth checking out his novels The Black Swan, The Sea Hawk and St. Martin's Summer. Both of the two I first mentioned have Hollywood adaptations which are considered excellent examples of the output of classic Hollywood, although both pale in comparison to the books on which they are somewhat loosely based. Captain Blood even has basically the same cast and crew as The Adventures of Robin Hood, including director Michael Curtiz, Errol Flynn as the leading man and Olivia de Haviland as the love interest, and Basil Rathbone as the swordfighting rival. But really; do yourself a favor and read the books before you try and watch the movies.

I've made off-hand references to movies that are good adaptations of books I recommend that you read, but my next recommenation is actually a movie that I like better than the book on which it is based. Alexandre Dumas is often called the last word in swasbuckling action, and while I can see that, I've always preferred Sabatini; the death of Constance and therefore of a satisfying romantic conclusion to D'Artagnan's story arc was always a bit unhappy to me, and I've not liked The Man in the Iron Mask or The Count of Monte Cristo quite as much either, although I don't hesitate to offer them up as great stories regardless. The double film The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974) leisurely takes two full movies to adapt the novel, and is supremely well done (plus they are usually packaged together and can be bought on blu-ray or DVD at a pretty reasonable price.) The cast is wildly impressive; Michael York plays D'Artagnan, with Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay and Oliver Reed as the musketeers, Raquel Welch as Constance, Faye Dunaway as Milady de Winter, Charleton Heston as Cardinal Richeleu, Christopher Lee as Rochefort, etc. There's a lot of little additions of humor in this version of the movie, but it's also deadly serious, especially in the second movie, which is a fair bit darker than the first one. (My favorite comic line comes from when D'Artagnan is trying to take a ship across the channel to England. The guard tells him that is pass is for just one person. Michael York, as D'Artagnan indignantly says that he is just one person. His servant doesn't count.) I've always appreciated it as much for its incredibly well-done swordfights and action scenes as for anything else; so many action scenes today look so fake and honestly mostly boring in comparison (Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm looking squarely at you.)

Finally, although this has very little applicability to RPGs or the type of stuff that we're likely to do in fantasy, you'll be hard-pressed to find a keener or more astute observer of human nature than Jane Austen. Her novel Pride & Prejudice may turn up the noses of some RPG fans. It shouldn't. It's not the model on which the entire gigantic genre of chick-lit and its medium-jumping genre of rom-coms and chick-flicks is based on because she's a hack; it's genuinely one of the classics of English literature, and nobody should consider himself educated if he hasn't read it, in my opinion. And it has much more applicability than most recognize because of Austen's superb observations leading to her fantastic characterizations. In fact, I read exactly this passage to my youngest son not long ago, from near the end of the novel because of it's applicability right now still: "I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son, I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves, allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family circle; to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. ... You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretentions to please a woman worthy of being pleased." A woman worthy of being pleased! Such a rare commodity, and yet Elizabeth Bennet certainly qualifies, and any man who wants to find one such himself had better not approach her with pretentions!

Mr. Darcy got a lot of attention from all of the girls because of his proud, entitled demeanor, his rugged good looks, and his obvious wealth, but he didn't have what it took to transform that marked attention into a successful relationship. Something my charming, good-looking, and flirty son doesn't really get. He's got the alpha attitude, but no idea how to turn all of the girls who look his way into a genuine girlfriend prospects. I'm not too concerned about that yet; he's only 17 after all, but sometimes that man-o-sphere MGTOW-friendly crap he reads on the internet gives him what it takes to be attractive, but not to be successful in the long-run. And to be fair, women who aren't worthless, entitled, pushy, and unacceptable anyway are few and far between, relatively speaking, but all the more reason to know how to deal with them when you do actually find them. You can't treat them like the floozies that you're used to day in and day out and expect to have a successful reaction from them. (Not that kids his age say floozies. I think ho's is his preferred vernacular, or maybe thots.)

On the other hand, when Austen writes the following, it's all projection: "Did you admire me for my impertinence? ... You may as well call it impertinence at once. It was very little less. The fact is that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking, and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them. Had you not been really amiable, you would have hated me for it; but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and just; and in your heart, you thoroughly despised the persons who so assiduously courted you. There—I have saved you the trouble of accounting for it; and really, all things considered, I begin to think it perfectly reasonable."

I'm not sure if the projection is on the part of the character (Lizzie Bennett, the protagonist) or the author herself, but that's a woman projecting her own attitude on to men laid out pretty bare and blatantly. Men don't really think that of women, and don't want women who are constantly challenging them. Regardless of whether it is Austen the author or Elizabeth the character who's doing the projection, it should be eye-opening to the kind of hapless, beta try-hard who acts like that how much women despise that kind of behavior in a man, and encourage them to knock it off before they become objects of friend-zoned contempt. When they do that, they are in turn projecting what would be pleasing female behavior and doing that themselves, expecting women to appreciate it the same way a man would. They don't.

All of this discussion from this and the other works thus-far mentioned had already previously engendered in me in my setting design a desire to more faithfully reproduce human nature. Women and men are not the same, at a basic psychological level. Pretending that they are is super off-putting to me in fantasy nowadays, after taking a bit of a red-pill on this. Of course, it wasn't a hard red-pill for me to swallow, because I actually know some real women, and have read these kinds of works that took those differences for granted all my life. But when I had it specifically spelled out for me, in spite of decades of indoctrination to the contrary, it resolved cognitive dissonance in my mind and I abandoned the indoctrination as delusional wishful thinking at best, and destructive lies meant to destroy our civilization at worst. At the very least, I can pass that knowledge on to my children better and more clearly than I had it passed on to me, and reflect reality in my fantasy rather than reject it, as so much modern fantasy does.

The following is a C. E. Brock illustration from the first printing of Pride & Prejudice, which has been colorized. Although the two best visual adaptations of it; the one starring Colin Firth as Darcy from 1995 and the one staring Kiera Knightly as Elizabeth from 2005 have her has dark haired, the original illustrations pictured her as a more stereotypical blonde English Rose. Both films are quite good, and are recommended; the former for it's more complete and well done adaptation, the latter for it's emotional insistence and drama. Although cut in length in comparison, it's still pretty faithful and what it does do in its shorter runtime, it does quite well.

You may think it odd that I'd recommend something like this. I've actually publicly stated that I won't read a novel written by a woman unless it's a classic by an author I already know, or comes recommended by someone I trust, and the people I trust for recommendations are few and far between. I've been burned too many times by fantasy or science fiction novels that turned out to be sappy romance novels in fantasy or science fiction drag, and I'm just not interested anymore. But when I know that I'm reading the mother of all romance novels, written by one of the best woman writers that the English language has ever produced, that's OK. In fact, in my effort to encourage broader influences, I highly recommend it.