Top Ten (or so) Non-D&D Games

I saw this topic on someone else's blog, and I thought it looked fun. I don't pretend to have played or be familiar with all of the major games that have been in print over the years, but I have played or read or at least am familiar with an awful lot. However, I'm also less and less attracted to mechanics and systems as time goes on. I mostly play D&Ds (with a pretty broad definition of what counts as a D&D) these days just because I don't care to mess around with different systems. And even the games that I'm going to list, if I were to play them again, I'd probably use them in a different system than the one that they've been originally written in. Maybe, anyway.

Let's start with a few fantasy games. I'm even more inclined to use a D&D for fantasy. Anything that's clearly derivative of D&D, like an OSR game or a d20 game, etc. counts as a D&D to me. That would include Pathfinder, Tales of the Valiant, 13th Age, ShadowDark and Knave 2e, and even my own DIY game, for that matter. So none of those count here; I'm looking a little bit beyond that for what I'm considering a "non-D&D" game.

1. WFRP: Warhammer is an interesting game. As mentioned above, I don't really much like complex or fiddly systems, and this is one that qualifies as too complex and too fiddly for me. However, the tone, the mood and the setting is what makes this one a winner. In general, I don't love games that are too closely tied to the setting, because I almost always tinker and modify it. WFRP is right up my alley in tone and mood, and there's a lot about the setting to use as is. The Enemy Within campaign is largely seen as one of the best written long-term campaigns out there; a real precursor to the adventure path methodology, written much like them, and one that really prioritizes investigation and intrigue over straight up combat. I'd even be willing to suffer through the system to play in this campaign... although I wouldn't run it personally myself.

2. Shadow of the Demon Lord: This game honestly does offer some pretty cool mechanics; kind of similar to D&D, but sufficiently cleaned up and streamlined that it doesn't feel like "a D&D." Like the above game, the tone and mood, as well as the implied setting is also a draw, although like with Warhammer, there are elements of the setting that I don't like (the countdown to the demon apocalypse being the main one.) If a game were to replace various versions of rules-light D&D variants for my fantasy gaming, this would probably be the one that I'd pick.

3. MERP: This is another system that I don't really love; and frankly, it's been replaced twice since it went out of print; once by a Decipher game based on the movie licenses, and one by a Cubicle 7 (now reverted to Free League) game that came out after that. Of the three, Middle-earth Roleplaying is both the most primitive in terms of mechanics and in terms of look and presentation, but it's also the most imaginative of the bunch. It's certainly quirky, and by quirky I mean that it often frustrated me by not really attempting to hit the tone and feel of Middle-earth and trending too often to "generic" D&D-like stuff. Then again, if I were to run Middle-earth again, I'd probably deliberately make it an alt.Middle-earth that's more sword & sorcery and was based on Tolkien's own brief discourse in the forward where he described what the story would be like if it were an allegory of WW2; i.e., Gandalf took the Ring from Bilbo and set himself up as a rival to Sauron and Saruman.

"Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Númenor and the gleaming cities, and the years of the Fourth Age, there was an Age undreamed of, when realms of Man lay spread across the world alongside those of fey Elves and sullen Dwarves like blue mantles beneath the stars. . . Hither came Aragorn of the Dúnedain, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a ranger, a wanderer, a chieftain, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the thrones of Arda under his feet."  

- The Red Book of Westmarch

But I still found plenty to like reading all kinds of MERP books over the years, and I do still have an older copy of it in my stuff that I don't intend on getting rid of. I also have an art book that Iron Crown put out with all of their Angus MacBride Middle-earth art. Although honestly much of his historical art is higher quality, I still wouldn't get rid of that for the world. 

4. Savage Worlds: Savage Worlds + Fantasy Companion would be fun; I actually think it would be better for certain settings like Eberron than D&D is—even though Eberron was specifically designed to be the 3.5 D&D setting, it feels like it really wants to be a Savage Worlds setting in some ways. And clearly, the Savage Pathfinder stuff seems to have been reasonably popular more recently. There's some other Savage World settings, like Totems of the Dead, for instance, that I really quite like. Maybe Savage Worlds would be another good alternative for any game, except that it's still a little rules-heavy and jargony for me for every day usage these days. I've lost my appetite for more mechanics and system that I used to have twenty years or so ago. There would have been a time when Savage Worlds could have replaced d20 maybe as my go-to "universal" system of choice, but it didn't quite happen, and now it's too late; that ship done sailed.

But rather than mention Savage Worlds below for modern and for space opera, I'll mention here that one of its big attractions is that as long as you mean a reasonably action-oriented or swashbucklery tone, Savage Worlds is a credible universal system that I could use for any genre. I'm actually going to be rereading it plus some of the companions here in a little bit, thinking about how I could still find a place for it in my gaming, potentially.

Honorable mentions: These games I'm not familiar enough to say. They look nice, but I've neither read them all the way through nor played them, although I'm somewhat familiar with how they play... a little, at least... and I'd potentially give them another whirl. These include EZD6 and Index Card RPG. The latter, in particular, seems great based on how I've had the game described to me, but I struggle to read it; it's written in a somewhat strange style, and is maybe a bit too radical for my taste. I dislike anything that uses cards or other "props" on principle. I've also played some BRP Cthulhu before, so I'd be willing to try another BRP or BRP-like game, such as RuneQuest or Mythras, although I'm not in any kind of hurry to do so. 

Let's next have a look at modern games. This is actually a multi-genre designation, as broad as fantasy is, if not even moreso, and would include everything from 1920s-30s pulp, Westerns, Lovecraftian horror, modern spy thrillers, alternative history, or near future hard(ish) sci-fi, and everything in between. For here, I'm only going to pick three games, and all are games that I've played before and still own copies of.

5. Top Secret S.I.: I still quite like this game, although after I played it twice, I ran it, and realized that the game that I'd played was pretty heavily modified/streamlined by the GM... in exactly the way that I'd have done it, honestly. It's been many, many years, and I'd probably need to start from scratch remembering how to run the game... and I'd probably not bother, because I have other options (see Savage Worlds above, and the two coming up below) but I had a lot of fun with this system back in the day.

6. Call of Cthulhu: This is probably my absolute favorite, although I wouldn't use it for anything other than horror. And I like it better for past; but not too long in the past. ~100 years; back in the 20s—y'know, when Lovecraft actually wrote the stories (and he set them in what was for him at the time his "today"). I have an older version of the BRP game, 3rd edition, in good shape. I see Professor Dungeon Master of the Dungeon Craft channel is selling that same book in probably about the same condition for $100... maybe I should see what I can get for it! The d20 book, on the other hand, is probably my single favorite game book. I don't think that it's a great system, but it works well enough. And it's still both a beautiful book to look at, to read, and to peruse for GMing advice. I'll never get rid of that one.

Delta Green was the setting published by a third party (and now republished again for a different system) that was more modern and X-files/spies take on Lovecraftian horror. Super popular, and quite interesting, but I admit to preferring a more classic Lovecraftian time-period for Call of Cthulhu, and modern games being more like Dresden Files or Supernatural.

7. d20 Modern: The first attempt at a universal system that I took seriously (GURPS was never up my alley—not actiony or swashbuckling enough. Although I think it worked better for more investigative or horror genres, it still wasn't likely to ever be my go-to option. And the Hero System was always way too crunchy). I'd probably prefer Savage Worlds if I needed one now, but I had a lot of fun using this for a variety of games, and entertaining it for games that I didn't actually run or play. I even created a fantasy equivalent to try and get away from the D&Disms... after I did that, WotC released d20 Past which covered much of the same ground. Dark•Heritage, the predecessor to Dark Fantasy X was actually "meant" to be run with d20 Modern + d20 Past Shadow Stalkers campaign model rules for a time. They were options that I could "turn on" as is without many house-rules that did the job credibly well, until I decided that d20 was too rules-heavy for my taste after all. Although, with a group that didn't have any power-gamers or rules-lawyers, I could still have tons of fun running d20 Modern. 

Some of my favorite d20 Modern games were convention one-shots where I adapted "Exit 23", the scenario included in Alternity's Dark•Matter campaign setting (where I got the affectation for years that I wrote Dark•Heritage with a • —because Dark•Matter did it first, and Dark•Matter was cool! In fact all of the old Alternity settings were kinda sorta adapted into d20 Modern, as well as plenty of other older TSR properties, such as Star Frontiers, etc. which was another pretty cool point in its favor. Although they didn't go much with these; you'd still need your original material to effectively run them. d20 Modern was also the mechanical chassis for all, or at least most, of the Polyhedron mini-games, quite a few of which were really pretty awesome, like Hi-jinks, the Scooby-doo game (kinda), Iron Lords of Jupiter, a Barsoom-like game, Omega World, a Gamma World rip-off, etc. And Dark•Matter was cool enough that it got published as only one of two full-blown campaign settings for d20 Modern; the other was Urban Arcana, which was D&D in the modern age; probably the literally least interesting concept that they did. Sigh.

I still have a lot of really fond memories of d20 Modern and could probably pretty easily be prevailed upon to use it to run all kinds of different things... but again, only if the people I'm playing with don't mind me playing pretty fast and loose with the rules, because there's way too many.

Honestly, Savage Worlds would probably do everything d20 Modern can do, and probably better, but I'm very familiar with d20 Modern, and not as familiar with Savage Worlds, which I've only played a few times and don't remember very well.

Lastly, science fiction, futuristic, specifically space opera would be next. As an aside, I could easily use d20 Modern for this, and d20 Modern in fact published several books that supported this, including d20 Future, d20 Apocalypse and d20 Cyberscape and an equipment book called d20 Future Tech. However, because I already picked d20 Modern above, I'll just mention that here and move on to other games:

8. Star Wars: There's been a lot of different Star Wars games. the old West End Games d6 system Star Wars game actually contributed a lot of material that was eventually "canonized" such as it is. Any of the Star Wars games would probably work relatively well, but what I'm most familiar with is the d20 Star Wars. In fact, I have two (of three that were released) versions of it; the original and the Revised. It was later revised again to the "Saga" version, which is generally believed to be the best one, but I wasn't interested in buying a third copy of a game that I still hadn't actually played. 

Now, I did play quite a bit of d20 Star Wars, but it wasn't the "official" d20 Star Wars; some guy in our group just modified D&D to be Star Wars. It was very similar, and I didn't see the point, since it wasn't that hard to just go buy the official d20 Star Wars, but maybe he just really didn't want to spend the money, so he reinvented the wheel to get almost the exact same result. I also spent a fair bit of time creating a Star Wars Remixed setting that was set a thousand years after Return of the Jedi and ignored a lot of stuff from the EU, and the sequel movies as they started coming out. Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't be interested anymore in doing that. I eventually even took the "serial numbers" off of my version of the Star Wars setting, and as I did, it became much less tethered to anything specifically Star Warsy. I could even run the Space Opera X setting happily, but I haven't given a ton of thought as to what system I'd prefer to do that with anymore. My old m20 adaptation should be brought up to date as modern and future universal games based on DFX, actually. 

Wow, there's a whole big project that I just thought of. Ooof.

9. Traveller: I actually have three versions of this game too, although there are more than three or four times that many that have actually been in print. I have the old Classic Traveller black book (plus some supplemental stuff), I have the MegaTraveller boxed set (plus some other MegaTraveller stuff) and I bought T20, the d20 version of it, as well. Again; after owning three versions of a game that I still haven't played, I wasn't interested in buying any more, but the Mongoose Traveller was well received. I doubt I'd play Traveller again anymore, but even in Space Opera X I did take a lot of ideas from the game, especially the method of space-mapping and the system data sheets (mine are streamlined, of course. Actual Traveller has had a lot of detail that is nerdy and nobody cares about.)

10. Stars Without Number: A relatively newer entry, this is a tremendous toolkit. I wouldn't be interested in actually playing it, but no matter what game you actually play, it has stuff that you can use. Anyone who does any kind of space opera gaming should own a copy.

Honorable Mentions for Modern and Future: I've enjoyed reading games like Hollow Earth Expedition (HEX). Evil Hat seems to do decent work, or at least pretty work. Their Spirit of the Century is still one of my favorite RPG covers. Who doesn't love a gorilla flying a bi-plane and fighting a Dr. Doom lookalike on the wing while a flaming dirigible looms directly overhead? The Dresden Files game was a fun read, but I've never tried to run it. I have fond memories of Star Frontiers and Gamma World, and Alternity's Star*Drive. I was for a few years pretty invested in the Storyteller system, and still own a bunch of Werewolf books in particular, although I wouldn't have any interest in either the system or the settings either one today. White Wolf is the company that turned me forever against pretentiousness in gaming, against metaplot, and against games that are too tightly bound to a setting. 

There's no doubt many other one-offs that I could possibly be prevailed upon to play, or even systems or settings that were relatively big in their day, but which are kind of forgotten anymore, like Legend of the Five Rings or 7th Sea. If I ever want to play superheroes, Mutants & Masterminds would be my go-to, but again, I have the first version; it's been revised multiple times, I believe. Obviously, I don't really play supers...

But now I'm lingering in the long tail, way past the ten (or so) games that I'd call any kind of favorite, so it's probably time to wrap this one up.

Reading and the Corsair Coast

Just a weird post. I've had out of my boxes my four books that make up the Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist. After "losing" three of the four, it took me quite a long time to reacquire them, because I wanted to have the original edited versions of them rather than the "author's cut" which have been in print for quite some time, and which honestly aren't as good (a few of the scenes that were cut were kind of cringy or weird, honestly. And all of them are unnecessary.) Also, not that long ago I reread the Belgariad novels by David Eddings, and was favorably disposed towards them. They were better than I remembered, in spite of their obvious flaws, which have been pointed out and honestly exaggerated online since the early days of Usenet. Most of those flaws are really more concerned with later works by Eddings, and don't make the Belgariad itself any worse. 

This kind of prompted me to look at a bunch of older 80s-90s series that I have but haven't read in a long time. I reread the Halfling Jewel trilogy by R. A. Salvatore, for example. It was also better than I remembered, in many respects. I bought the Dark Elf Trilogy in omnibus format, although it's still in a box somewhere, so I probably won't read it this year. But I did find my Raymond Feist books, rebought all of the ones that were missing, and now I'm ready to read them shortly. I'm in the middle of reading a lot of game books right now, but that's not as exciting as novels in some ways, so I want to make sure to force time for novels. 

I'm also rereading some Robert E. Howard and Simon R. Green Hawk & Fisher books. My biggest challenge to this is getting distracted by YouTube, and frittering away time on the internet. I hate doing that, but it seems to easy to do. That seems to be the biggest hurdle to reinvigorating my love of reading. It's also probably wreaked havoc with my attention span. I often find myself getting bored reading too long at a stretch now unless the book I'm reading is really fascinating... which, rereading old favorites or gamebooks isn't likely to be. Sigh. I know, a lot of this is my own fault, right? Why don't I read something else that's more likely to grab my attention?

Well, part of it is that I noticed that books were going downhill before I noticed that movies and TV was going downhill. Due to the nature of the market, they went woke and bad first; movies, given the huge budget and investment of all kinds of stakeholders involved, were slower to pick up woke and terrible trends that affected books earlier.

Which probably also contributed to my disillusionment with the hobby and my retreat to old favorites. 

I'm finally going to read and evaluate some new systems for the first time in a long time, including Basic Fantasy, Savage Worlds and Shadow of the Demon Lord. I also bought, years and years ago, Decipher's Lord of the Rings game and never even read that, much less the more recent game first published by Cubicle 7 and later Free League. I'm also thinking of reading the Cubicle 7 Warhammer ruleset. About time; I've been reading the Enemy Within remixed off and on for over a year. I've been just breezing over the mechanics, because I haven't read the rulebook, although I'm kinda sorta familiar enough with the system to understand what I'm reading anyway.

I'm not sure that reading all of these game textbooks is the best way to handle my ongoing malaise with reading, but at least for now, reading adventures and campaigns and setting material has been entertaining enough for me. 

Ah, well. If it's not good, I'll stop and do something else.

Just to not make this a completely useless post, I'll add some Corsair Coast names to a list here, so as I start developing them, I'll have material to work with. Much of these will come from either earlier versions of Dark•Heritage, or Western Hack.

Terrasa

Razina

Tolosa

Castellet

Enguerrand

Guiscard

Vaquelin

Alcassar

Sarabasca

Salvatez

Perestrello

Bara Gairo

Baix Pallars

Haltash

Untash (?)

Gandesa

Durenga

and, of course... Porto Liure! This is obviously the obvious place to put it.

I've already got name lists for characters to trawl through. This isn't urgent, but it gives me an excuse to create a Corsair Coast tag.

Stilton, Bertram, and Tabitha

I made actual character sheets, as opposed to just notes in my little notebook, for Stilton Kingsfax, Bertram Hardmont and Tabitha Gamcott, the three characters that I envisioned using instead of my iconics for the solo play campaign of Shadows Over Garenport, assuming that I actually do it. Which I'm not sure that I'll ever get around to doing, or how successful or fun it'll actually be if I do. But I haven't written it off, and in theory at least I'm still planning on doing it. 

If you're not interested in this kind of thing, feel free to ignore this post, but if you are, the rules are available there as a link in the Games tab, and give the character sheets their proper context. Not that anyone familiar with D&D-style play across various editions will find anything on these sheets very hard to parse.

Rules Light vs Crunch

The only thing I like about crunchy games is character generation. Having lots of options is legitimately kind of fun. In theory, of course, you have all of those options in a rules light game, but in actual practice, you probably can't think of them on the fly when creating a character. I often like to browse prestige classes or other character options from very rules heavy systems like 3.5 or Pathfinder archetypes, etc. skim what they're all about, and then take that idea and concept and the idea and concept only and turn that into a rules light character. My last post about supervillains was done this way. Amrruk the Ancient, the Oozemaster, has nothing to do with the actual Oozemaster prestige class as found in whatever 3e book it was in (Masters of the Wild, I think? or possibly Tome and Blood.) I just took the idea of a powerful sorcerer (lich, as it turned out) who had a focus on slime and shoggoth-like shapelessness. It amuses me somewhat that the AI generative art seems to want to put a soggy Gandalf-style hat on him most of the time too.

Rules light works for me (and for Professor Dungeon Master) because we both prioritize and enjoy the same thing in the game; immersive role-playing. Stopping to play a reasonably complex mathematics based mini-game inside the game of D&D (or whatever) has become much less attractive to me over the years. And not even because the mini-game might not be fun; in general, I've had fun playing 3.5 combat. But it is not immersive roleplaying, and in fact it is just a tactical minigame, and you care much more about the rules of the minigame than you do about immersing yourself in the experience from the point of view of your character as if it were real. Naturally, if that's not your priority, than rules-light may well be unsatisfying to you. This is why who you game with, and making sure that you actually have compatible goals for the whole endeavor is the number one way to make sure you have a good roleplaying experience. A roleplayer playing with a powergamer or a beer and pretzels goof-off is probably going to be frustrated with the experience, or at best, it won't live up to his expectations even if it's still fun enough, because he's just not out for the same thing.

I've also never understood the idea of "rules light games are great for one-shots, but I don't know how you get a long-term campaign out of them" which I inevitably see repeatedly. This is one of those weird cases where someone believes something in spite of black and white empirical evidence that they're running into like a brick wall, and yet somehow refusing to change their opinion that they can go that way. In every version of D&D, but especially AD&D, and 3e, 4e and 5e, the game breaks down at higher level under the weight of its own complexity and poor scaling. Hardly anyone, according to data released by Wizards, actually plays the game over about 7th or 8th level or so, because it isn't fun anymore, so they stop those campaigns and start over when everything is fresh and fun again at lower level; y'know, when the game is less complex. Few consider that if they prolonged the sweet spot, made leveling slower, or even capped it completely, that they could in theory play that same campaign indefinitely. The amount of obtuseness necessary to make that claim is boggling to me; it's like claiming that Dr. No was fine and all, but James Bond doesn't have a complex enough character arc to be a franchise; he's a one and done. In theory yes, but, well... clearly not.

Anyway, here's the older Dungeon Craft video that I'm referring to.

That super tactical, slow-moving combat mini-game also isn't really very tense or exciting, ironically, in almost every version of D&D. Nor is it very tactically interesting, except in the context of the game rules, which bear very little relationship to anything that feels realistic about actual fighting. Not that I'm an expert or anything. I have two sons who do MMA, and I did a fair bit of fencing (the sport, with the white suits and mesh facemasks, not HEMA or anything) but even so. It doesn't take a genius to understand that the rules of D&D combat encourage tactics, because they're successful in the game, that have little to do with real life. Plus, they're kind of repetitive and boring after a while.

This is exactly why I have a weird fascination with the OSR. Not that I stand with or for many of the principles of OSR play, but because they've embraced, to a greater or lesser degree, two principles that are super important to my play: 1) DIY. If the rules aren't working for you, replace them with some that do. My embrace of Lovecraftian vs. Vancian magic was the single biggest change that could make an OSR-style game actually work for me but it requires some pretty significant house-ruling to the nature of spellcasting, and 2) rulings, not rules, and a rules-light structure, but one still based on a D&D chassis. It's curious to me that in the 90s and 00s, indie-games were rules-light and often positioned themselves in contrast to D&D and D&D-like games, yet with the OSR, the two have come together. And frankly, I like the D&D-like chassis. Doing all kinds of things differently for the same of being different is kind of obnoxious. (As an aside, I'm kind of gratified and maybe even vindicated to see that rules that are much less Vancian and much more Lovecraftian are really gaining steam in the OSR. By which I mean mostly the roll to cast and some kind of mishap table for failures. My own rules are even more Lovecraftian than that, particularly in how you acquire spells, but that's OK.)

That said, I've rambled about the OSR many times before, and determined that although I actually have a game that's more or less compatible with modules, spells, monsters, etc. from OSR sources, that's just a coincidence. My game is based on 3.5, but codified in exactly how to ignore most of the rules and just keep the underlying structure of it. In this respect, it's most similar to Microlite, or m20. Which isn't surprising, since earlier versions of the game were literally Microlite variants. And I was gradually drawn into the concepts of Lovecraftian magic from other compatible magic systems, particularly the spells in the d20 Call of Cthulhu book and the Incantations from the Urban Arcana book in the d20 Modern line. DIY doesn't have to mean innovative creation; it can also—and often does—mean creative kit-bashing more than scratch-building. To use modeling terms. Another hobby that I never quite had but had an interest in for a long time.

Anyway, yeah, I'm absolutely in the rules-light camp, and I have little patience with rules-heavy games anymore. I never really did; even when playing or running them, I usually did so in a pretty handwavey manner. It helps that games like 3e and above D&D had a pretty sensible and simple universal task resolution mechanic, and the rules heaviness was mostly about running feats, spells, and other edge cases that distorted or broke the basic rules. Those can be socialized or delegated to the player that's using them, for the most part, and ignored otherwise. 

Heresiarchs and other DFX "supervillains"

I’m not a huge redditer, but I’ve spent a little bit of time there lately. I had a weird warning, that my account had been flagged for breaking Rule 1; threatening physical violence. This is, of course, absurd, but there was no link that worked to where I supposedly did this. I can only imagine that they think my “threat” to PLONK someone was a threat of physical violence, which is course ridiculous, because PLONKing is old Usenet slang for “adding to my ignore list.” On top of that, my most recent Youtube video, where I just rambled on about worldbuilding changes in my setting got a few rando comments; one guy asked what this was for, and another guy answered him saying that he hadn’t watched the video, but he imagined that it was beginner worldbuilding advice. This of course is not true; I’m actually doing my worldbuilding via my blog and Youtube channel sometimes. It’s a rambly exposition of my actual worldbuilding, not a discussion on worldbuilding generally. 

The biggest takeaway here is to reinforce my beliefs that 1) most people are idiots, 2) people are the worst, and 3) I’m entirely justified in posting on my blog and channel entirely for my own benefit and my own benefit alone and ignoring everyone else. I shouldn’t even post on reddit at all, because it’s full of idiots and snowflakes. Especially in r/DnD which literally has a gayed up version of the D&D logo as its group banner, but r/osr is only marginally better. And I’m not even going to address those dumb youtuber comments. Just watch the video if you wonder what its about! Or don’t, I don’t care. If you’re asking whether or not you should watch the video: I don’t care! I’m not going to spend time explaining what it is for you. Yes, yes… I probably should have put an actual description in the description field, which I couldn’t be bothered with this time around. That may have contributed. But again; this is really just for my own benefit. Stream of consciousness rambling about my worldbuilding activities isn’t really meant for anyone else, and I put it out there in public just because that way its easier for me to find and reference. Plus, at least my son-in-law watches those. Although I don’t know for sure how interested he is either, honestly.

Anyway, that slight venting out of the way, let me come up with a quick and dirty outline for what I want to do with my “supervillains”. These mostly used to be the Heresiarchs of good ole Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, heavily based on Glen Cook’s The Ten Who Were Taken from The Black Company series of novels. However, there isn’t really any significant difference between them and iconic D&D villains like Vecna or Strahd or Acererak or even Iggwilv. However, rather than being singular villains, as those guys tend to be, I presume that there’s a complicated web of relationships between these guys. Unlike D&D villains, however, the PCs will never get into the league where they can face them in a fair one on one fight. These guys will always be in a completely different league to the PCs, who only can rise to tenth level in my game at most. Plus, they’re lower power anyway. Why have villains that the PCs can’t fight, you may ask? Well, again, you should read The Black Company books. I mentioned that already, but it’s the perfect model for them. These villains are powerful, but they’re also paranoid and sociopathic. They can be outmaneuvered and defeated, but not in a straight up fair fight. There’s a careful balance between them and the rest of their crowd; if someone new comes along, then they usually want to stop him from joining their club, so to speak.

Many years ago, a gaming friend of mine wrote something that I think resonates quite well. I was able to find it with a Google search, so here it is:

My PCs recently had a sit-down with nasty old [supervillain] and in getting tidbits of information about assorted bad guys they asked, "What do these guys want?" [Her] answer: "They want to save the world. We all want to save the world. From each other."

My thinking is that when you perceive a threat, and you want to counter it, you need to increase your own power to the point where you can face that threat. And of course, in doing so, you become perceived as a threat by others. So many of my "bad guys" became bad in order to defeat something terrible -- and in the process became terrible themselves. So now there's a variety of individuals who are near demi-gods in power, all of whom consider (and rightly, it seems) each other to be terrible threats to the world. So now they're all jockeying for position, trying to eliminate each other.

They don't see themselves as bad guys -- they think they're saving the world. Which they are, because unless these other nasties are stopped, things are going to be very uncomfortable. The problem is that they're just as nasty as the others.

I don't know that I accept that literally. These villains probably know quite well that they're terrible. But now they're just spiteful, miserable pricks who think burning the world down is preferable to just being miserable on their own. 

Anyway, the rest of this post will be fairly art heavy, because I’ll highlight some of my supervillains with a very brief description, and then have them also illustrated via DALL-E 3. Exactly their role in the setting NOW and where they are is usually TBD.

Amrruk the Ancient was based on an old prestige class from an early 3e splatbook, the Oozemaster. To be honest, he’s more based on the word “oozemaster” than on any details of the prestige class, which I probably haven’t read in the better part of twenty years. He’s a lich, covered in slime; a kind of slightly humanoid Juiblex, maybe, or a combination of a lich and a shoggoth. Curiously, I haven’t yet determined if Juiblex is the typo or Jubilex, since I see both versions out there in the wild. 

Bernat Haspar de Ruze is a more “normal” lich, associated with traveling on the Flying Dutchman-like haunted ship. He’s been bound to the ship, which from the perspective of the other big bad guys keeps him more or less neutralized, but that doesn’t mean that he still isn’t amazingly dangerous to anyone else out there sailing that he comes across. And secretly, of course, he’s working on releasing himself from being bound to his ship, and is quite close to that goal.

Hutran Kutir is the Hex-King and founder of Baal Hamazi; the semi-mythical father of all kemlings. He was killed many generations ago, but he yet lingers, because like The Ten Who Were Taken and the rest of these bad guys, death isn’t necessarily as final as one would like to hope. There are rumors of his stirring in Baal Hamazi from a long slumber (or death) which is causing waves among the other bad guys.

Jairan Neferirkare is a dark, Gothic necromancer and daemonologist; unlike many of these bad guys, she retains a human-like beauty. She’s more of a super-vampire than a lich, perhaps, although for these guys, the distinction is usually more cosmetic rather than significant.

Kadashman, He Who Peers Into the Void. Another character who’s concept was taken from an old 3e splatbook prestige class, in this case the original printing of the Alienist. If Kadashman was once human, he certainly isn’t anymore.

Kefte Taran, the Fate-spinner, the Witch-Lich. I think the Fatespinner might also have been an early 3e prestige class, but if so, I remember nothing about it anymore. The most cautious, the most paranoid, and with Madame Web (the original, not the stupid newer movie from a couple of years ago) of the entire bunch.

Master of Vermin. I know for sure that the Verminlord was an old prestige class, but I doubt that anything other than the name and my own interpretation of what the concept would be based on that name survive. I see him as the patron and maybe even creator (via corruption and chaos warping, not ex nihilo, of course) of the ratling race and a plague themed villain. Almost like Nurgle (Nergal) from Warhammer and The Horned Rat… except that he looks more humanoid still.

Seggeir Sherihum is Kathulos from Robert E. Howard’s Skull-face. Please; if you read this, be sure you find an original unedited and unexpurgated copy. There’s a lot of bowdlerized for woke political correct nonsense masquerading as this original story. Anyway, Kathulos was himself a somewhat derivative villain; an undead, Atlantean Fu Manchu, with all of the Yellow Peril themes incorporated, but made much more fantastic and much more exotic. Although not actually confirmed, it seems pretty obvious that Kathulos was at least somewhat based on Cthulhu; he’s a specifically undersea menace, dredged up from the bottom of the ocean, and the name is almost identical. Plus, Howard and Lovecraft of course wrote back and forth and Howard is on record as calling “Call of Cthulhu” a masterpiece.

Porhomok and more

A minor update has caused me to reevaluate my worldbuilding/development schedule. The campaign I was going to start on Friday (right after literally touching down from my work trip to Texas/Mexico an hour before) got cancelled last minute, as two of my three players were having car trouble and weren’t going to be able to arrive. I rescheduled tentatively for this coming week, but now it’s been pushed back one more week due to the two of three players’ availability again. I need to reread The Skinsaw Murders, since I’m hoping to adopt some of it for the session, but just for my own sake, I thought that if I’m going to reread that, I should reread Burnt Offerings, the module that precedes it before I do. I’m kinda inclined to reread the entire Rise of the Runelords campaign of six modules, honestly. Last time I read it, I read the Anniversary Edition where it was updated to the Pathfinder rules, with new art and a few expanded elements, but this time, I’m going through in the OG 3.5 version in the individual “magazine”-like format. There’s some really bad “cubist anime” art in this version that they didn’t carry forward, and I might actually miss stuff (not that I’ll remember or notice it) that was filled out in the revised version.

Anyway, that’s rambly. The point is, What am I going to do next? First, before the end of the week, I want to make two new videos; one will be an explanation of the new areas I’ve added on my newest version of the map: Porhomok, Nizrekh, Hyperborea, Gunaakt, and “Easternesse”, a neologism I created from Tolkien’s usage of Westernesse, which is also his own neologism based on Middle English from words like Lyonesse and Elvenesse. However, Easternesse isn’t meant to be a setting element that anyone actually goes and explores; that would be silly. It’s more a just-so story that explains why certain things in the setting are the way that they are. Gunaakt is also not going to be an element that I want to develop, other than to mention that it exists and it’s the source of the orcling race. Like Khand on the Middle-earth map, it’s just a label, and the Variags that come from it, while the source of a lot of intriguing and hot speculation from fans, never got any development in its own right. Gunaakt will be the same. It’s just there as a reference, and a place where the orclings come from, but I have no intention of adding more to the development of Gunaakt itself than I have already done.

I’ll also revisit what I’ve already said about Nizrekh, and possibly add to it, although I certainly don’t have any immediate plans for anything to ever be set in Nizrekh. However, I do want to talk briefly about some minor changes to the Leng and Pnath area up north of the Goldenwolds, and targets for future development include my newly added Hyperborean region (located up above Burlharrow, outside of the scope of the original map, but closer than I originally intended it to be. I may yet move it further north yet before I’m done with hit…) and Porhomok. Porhomok is a brand newly defined region. Hyperborea has been around for a long time, albeit undeveloped, and Nizrekh and Gunaakt too, but Porhomok is new. The word is a combination of some stuff I looked up in a Hungarian dictionary, and I expect, which makes sense given its location, that the people of Porhomok are distantly related in some way or another to the Tarushans. The main reason for the introduction of Porhomok as a region, however, is to allow myself to have classical pirate themed stuff in a classic Golden Age of piracy tropical, or at least subtropical, environment. I may well call the coastline the Corsair Coast, and it’ll have a bunch of anarchic city-states, maybe even of more northerly based peoples. Timischer and hillmen foreigners with their Tortuga-like settlements; the natives of Porhomok being more like savages in the interior swamps, bayous and maybe even outright jungles. The people of Porhomok could be seen, at least deep in the boonies, as the classic adventure story savage; headhunters, cannibals, and the like, like you see in old 50s movies like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, for instance.

Then, I’ll make a different video also hopefully later this week, where I start talking about some of my setting’s ”supervillains.” I’m not sure if I want to start with a summary of all of them first, or do them one video at a time, but the characters I intend to cover include:

• Amrruk the Ancient, the “Oozemaster” who almost certainly belongs in the swamps either around Innsborough in Timischburg, or near the Corsair Coast.
• The Flying Dutchman (who obviously needs a new name), and undead pirate captain
• Hutran Kutir, the Hex-King and “founder” of Baal Hamazi, who still lingers as an undead lich
• Jairan Neferirkare, kind of Soul-catcher or The Lady from The Black Company is the main inspiration.
• Kadashman, He Who Peers Into the Void, based on the alienist concept from old 3e material; a strange and disturbing transhuman creature of some kind.
• Kefte Taran, the Witch-lich. Not her real name; I just like it as a catchy rhyme
• Master of Vermin, an unnamed disturbing individual, probably the creator in some way or other of the ratmen
• Seggeir Sherihum, the Mind-Wizard. Same concept as Kathulos, the villain of Robert E. Howard’s Skull-face

Speaking of that last guy, the Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes will almost certainly not end up being of the Daemon Wastes after all, but related more to the south, Nizrekh or the Corsair Coast. I’ll probably do something else, or at least feature a different villain (and therefore title).

Undead pirate ship at Port

OSR

I'm not above swiping some good content. Here's a couple of comments on a reddit post that I thought were both pretty interesting. I'll add my own commentary below, or maybe embedded within:

[The OSR] started out with retro clones. That is less of a focus now. Part of that is with the release of all the original TSR material on One Bookshelf, with PDFs of everything, and even print-on-demand of many of the early TSR books. As a result, there is less need now for something like OSRIC, since much of the purpose in 2007 was to provide the ability to play AD&D at a time when AD&D was not being published. But retro clones still come out, often with an intent to streamline, or to publish a heartbreaker that distills the rules according to certain guidelines. Black Hack and White Hack are popular rulesets. Old School Essentials has replaced Labyrinth Lord as a leading retro clone. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is still a popular ruleset, though controversial (see below). Shadowdark is a new popular ruleset that mixes Basic with 5e (see below). Stars Without Number/Worlds Without Number is a fully developed rules set and toolkit for building a setting. You have Dungeon Crawl Classics which is a few steps away from classic D&D, and then Cairn, Knave, and Mork Borg as well (see below), which aren't retro clones at all, but rather new systems influenced by the OSR.

I love a good fantasy heartbreaker. I wrote my own! And I have a fondness for collecting them, for whatever reason. Although I'm not necessarily interested in too many of the ones listed above, in part because their whole thing is that they're trying to emulate the OSR game principles. Most of which, I'm not necessarily super interested in. My interest in the OSR is not based on recreating the gaming environment of 1970-something or even 1980-something, but rather taking what was good about that era, but abandoning what was not. (Recognizing, of course, that what I mean by "good" is "aligned with my tastes.")

It branched out pretty early into a number of adventures and settings that provided an aesthetic or theme that was unsupported by mainstream rpgs. Labyrinth Lord started with B/X gaming, but then branched quickly into the post-apocalyptic Metamorphosis Alpha/Gamma World space. Barbarians of Lemuria focused on Sword & Sorcery. Lamentations of the Flame Princess created weird horror, historical, and/or heavy metal style adventures, with an emphasis on production values and high quality art. Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics was a new system with an emphasis on gonzo weird adventures. Kevin Crawford created a very popular scifi space setting toolkit, Stars Without Number and then later fantasy and other adaptations. Beyond the Wall was a quaint English village storybook style game. Hydra Cooperative's central-European Hill Cantons have a whimsical slavic flavor pulled together by the artwork of Luka Rejec. Necrotic Gnome created the fairy tale world of Dolmenwood. Yoon Suin, the Purple Land, is a weird setting in fantasy east Asia. Mork Borg is a heavy metal themed system with a very tight aesthetic look. Kickstarter has allowed many different publishers to put out very specific books that matched a specific theme. Far too many to list them all.

I don't know for sure that that's true. A lot of these diverse themes and aesthetics were supported by the "modern" OGL back in the early 2000s, and there's no reason why they couldn't be still, except that they're cottage industry niche aesthetics and themes. The ruleset that they use is immaterial; there's no reason why d20 or 5e couldn't have supported them just as well as B/X. But maybe the OSR and cottage industry niche kind of just go together, somehow. Of course, see below; some of those aren't really OSR products at all. But let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet...

The influence of D&D 5e has been huge, first in the attempt to embrace the OSR community at the beginning, and then later primarily in pushing gamers more familiar with modern D&D into the OSR. As a result, there is a lot of conversation about 5e rules, and Hasbro and WotC as companies, and framing of games in reference or opposition to the current edition, as well as Pathfinder and 4e. Into the Unknown, Five Torches Deep, and ShadowDark are all systems that bridge the OSR to 5e, to varying degrees and popularity. Also major publishers and kickstarters created content for both 5e and OSR rules.

This is certainly true; while the OSR's stated early goals were to recreate the older, then out of print versions of the games that the OSRians wanted to play but couldn't easily get their hands on, given that the products were out of print (or that they wanted to expand on, but still definitely within that aesthetic and mold of ~19-early-80s-something gaming), but it really was a reaction to what was going on in gaming rather than a "true" recreation of something old. Finch's Primer and other documents, Grognardia's blog, discussions on Dragonsfoot, etc. calcified an interpretation of the OSR that such and such was how it was played back in the day and how it was "supposed" to be played, but more astute gamers, and those who actually still remembered the 70s and 80s often pointed out that such a monolithic and simplistic interpretation of the past doesn't actually match the experience "on the ground" at the time. All of the various "styles" of gaming existed almost from the very beginning... even if we didn't yet have the vocabulary to define and describe them, or games that catered more specifically to them yet.

Theories of game design and other RPG systems have heavily influenced the OSR. Powered by the Apocalypse, Burning Wheel, and other narrative games have had an effect, DCC of course has their own take that creates a new system, but games like Into the Odd, Cairn, Knave, and Maze Rats introduce other concepts. GLOG has a system that encourages hacking. Mork Borg is a heavy metal aesthetic and free-flowing open rules anti-canon game. The idea of NSR has been introduced as a label for games that bring principles they identify with OSR, but apply new mechanics and systems that depart from retro games.

While the NSR, of course, spun off out of the OSR, it really is in opposition to what the OSR was. The idea that you can flip something's principles on its head and yet still call it the same thing is fallacious. Regardless of the history of the NSR as nested within the OSR, I think that it's not helpful to consider them the same anymore. (Just like it's not helpful to call birds dinosaurs. Another pet peeve.) If I have a complicated relationship with the OSR, I have an even more complicated relationship with the NSR. I kind of like where it is in principle, yet I don't actually like much, if anything, of what it actually produces. (Depending on what you consider an NSR product. I like Knave 2e, for instance. If I bothered to check out Black Hack, White Hack or some of those other similar games, I probably wouldn't mind them. Although I probably wouldn't care either about them.) It's like it has the right idea; to take the OSR and go somewhere new with it, but it's the wrong people with the wrong notions of what gaming should be coming up with stuff that I don't actually want. But I keep thinking that the right person is going to stumble across the right thing one of these days within that movement.

There has always been a strong emphasis on DIY adventures. Some of the bigger names have gotten more polished and slick, but there are still many blogs, zines, and free one-page dungeons. Some blogs that started in the DIY zine space have had successful kickstarters and become more polished systems of their own. Old School Essentials is an example of this. Gavin Norman started with a blog and his weird DIY Dolmenwood setting, but his development of an organized and streamlined version of the D&D B/X rules eventually became a polished rulebook.

DIY and blogs, zines and free one-page dungeons are not the same thing, except by example. DIY shouldn't be confused with a kind of pseudo-crowd-sourced approach. That would contradict the Y in DIY, right?

I do think, and I can kind of see this in many of his comments, that Gary Gygax himself was often kind of frustrated and mystified that people didn't just do stuff themselves, because that's clearly what he envisioned, and he clearly thought everyone would enjoy it more. On the other hand, calls for more material that was "official" created and opportunity for him to write and sell more product, so he was obviously conflicted here.

There has been a fragmenting of the community over political opinions and claims about the personal lives of some creators. Some works have been censored and creators blacklisted, while others have said controversial things, or had rumors spread about them and their reputations affected. See Rule 6. Publishers have had to decide on how they react to these controversies. There have been conversations around the Me Too movement, BLM and White vs BIPOC diversity, LGBTQ inclusion, cultural appropriation, and themes around indigenous culture influencing art and writing from the early 20th century and before, and the various viewpoints and opinions held by Lovecraft, Howard, Tolkien, Gygax, etc. The increased presence and popularity of right-wing politics across the globe has influenced tabletop and wargaming, and some of that influence, and the reaction to it, has affected the OSR community. Some have attempted to curate based on these topics, others react to those decisions, some just want content they view as problematic to be labeled as such, while some people chafe at the idea of censorship, or narrowing content creation to match a moving target of non-controversial community-approved guidelines.

As in every other sphere. I actually think that the OSR has been less influenced by this than many other areas, in part because the OSR is more on the same page than much of the rest of our culture. Or rather, there may be a political/social split between the "true" OSR and the NSR to some degree, which is why I'm conflicted in many ways. I think the NSR is on the right track with regards to gaming, or at least they could be if the right people got involved, but the wrong people with the wrong ideas are instead leading the NSR off a cliff. Yes, some of this is social/political. How could it not be? While the OSR proper is much closer to where I am socially and politically (sorta) in some ways that stifles the opportunity to do something different in gaming. There's too much of an attempt to stay where they're comfortable and familiar. And the NSR is willing to get out of that zone, but they want to go somewhere I have no interest in. I have to kind of wend my own way, because neither on its own is trending my direction.

Anyway, that's an annotated version of one big comment. Here's another one:

Well, from where I stand, the acronym works in a few different ways these days.

Those who think of it as Old School Revival view only the original TSR editions and clones thereof to be OSR.

Those who think of it as Old School Renaissance accept the Revival and expand it to include systems that branch off in some distinct fashions from the originals.

And then there are those who take it as Old School Revolution and view systems built from the ground up as fitting, as long as they adhere to principles found in the original systems and the OSR (while others see these as OSR-adjacent).

So, there are strict traditionalists and reformers who both use the term. The divisions I described aren't used by the people involved, of course, as it's entirely my taxonomy. 

I'm a taxonomist by nature, so I like things to fit into neat little categories. In reality, they don't, of course. Rather than branching flowcharts, it's more like fuzzy, soft-edge Venn diagrams. But here I think he's got it right. The "actual" or "original" or "true" OSR  is what he calls the Old School Revival. I would call the Old School Renaissance, depending on degree, either a fringe of the OSR, or OSR-adjacent, whereas I don't think what he calls the Old School Revolution is actually Old School at all. By definition, even, and really shouldn't be considered part of the same movement.

I've linked before to other taxonimist-type posts written by others, and they'd use the labels OSR, OSR Adjacent and maybe NSR or simply non-OSR for the last group, depending on the details. There's a point where simply being an indie garage band game with a rules-light approach isn't sufficient to call itself OSR. It's hard for me to call The Black Hack or Mork Borg an OSR game when they differ in such fundamental ways from D&D, for instance. In most respects, they're more different from "OSR" D&D than d20 or even 4e or 5e is. Just being rules-light and having a few aesthetic cues from the OSR, as well as being fantasy games that tread much of the same conceptual territory as D&D albeit with very different rules disagree make you OSR. Although it might make you appeal to the same crowd. 

Of course, this isn't a value judgement. If it were, it would be a higher value judgement, probably, given that I've always looked for something other than D&D in most respects. Fidelity to the original D&D experience of the 70s or early 80s isn't something I personally value except in the sense of not fixing the elements that ain't broken. 

Anyway... Here's an image. I'll probably do a setting video tonight and stop talking specifying about D&D. 

Imagine Annie Lennox singing Into the West... 

Another post:

The NSR is a strange and unpleasant collection of individuals that arose from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess fandom, beginning with Troika and Into the Odd, but has now been expanded to encompass all manner of derivative remixes. The defining characteristic of the NSR is that they don't really have an interest in DnD and thus are disqualified from being OSR, yet claim to abide by OSR principles. Although there are certainly exceptions, and plenty of well-intentioned newcomers in their ranks, they are most famous for their aggressive gatekeeping and deplatforming strategies, paranoia, infighting and the toxicity of their communities.

NSR games tend to be extremely rules light, involve inexplicable remixes of already extant rules-light games, have limited long term potential, and are characterized by a short lifespan.

Sadly, that's probably quite true, because the OSR is mostly Ben Shapiro style "conservatives" and the NSR is mostly bohemian culturally radical socialists and freaks. Sigh. At least the Ben Shapiro style conservatives are OK to hang with as long as you don't talk too much about politics or the JQ or something like that. 

New map

I’m doing more of my “blogging” as “vlogging” on Youtube. It’s still just as rambly and incoherent and more for my own benefit than for anyone else’s as my blog is, but it’s a different format, obviously, and I’m having a bit of fun doing dictation into my phone, and then adding some video and a backing track to it to make it look like a documentary slide-show, kinda. I even add grainy image manipulation and some VHS-like tracking effects. This is just for fun to make the whole thing look old and scratchy. It also covers up a lot of the crappy audio on my recording; by adding a scratchy record effect and visual cues that reinforce it, the whole thing looks like an old movie, and nobody expects old movies to sound super crisp. Frankly, I find the whole effort more fun than typing blog posts, although it’s more work and is more time-consuming. And my audio is even more rambly  than my typing; at least I can go back and easily edit typing!

In any case, there’s a few streams of things that I want to update and work on in the next relatively little bit:

First, I didn’t end up running my game on Friday. One guy had car trouble, and wasn’t going to be available. He was bringing his fiancé. With two of my three players out, it didn’t make sense to try and do some one on one with the other guy, and I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. So first off, I’m going to try and get caught up on what I need to read to run more smoothly. I put off re-reading The Skinsaw Murders, but I want to do that so that I’m not just completely winging it without stocking my barrel—metaphorically speaking—with enough apples to get me through the session. I’m also reading a number of other things; the Power Behind the Throne Companion from the Warhammer “remix” of The Enemy Within campaign, and Manual of the Planes from 3e. I started reading that in anticipation of my business trip, because I always bring that on business trips, but it turns out that I didn’t read it at all while away. But I’ve read it some before and since the trip. (I also finished a Simon R. Green novel; I've got two more in the same omnibus to read before I can put that back on my shelf.)

Secondly, I want to flesh out the next four Cult of Undeath fronts. That shouldn’t take too long if I can just buckle down and do it. Then I can decide what the next project is; Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes, or some of the other ones that I’ve considered adding. Cult of Undeath didn’t end up being very vampire focused after all, and is only kind of in the eastern portion of Timischburg. That’s ironic to me, because years ago I invented Timischburg specifically to be the (as then conceived) Cult of Undeath setting in toto, but as the campaign has changed focus, my game and world-building efforts have changed focus, etc… well, it is what it is.

Thirdly, I have an EFX map drawn and a new DFX map. The new DFX map is actually kind of a draft, although I didn’t necessarily intend it to be when I started it. It’s a bit more Tolkien-style, and I added some more stuff on many of the edges, although they’re not very detailed. Much like how Tolkien’s map has South Gondor and Khand and Rhûn and Forodwaith, etc. on his map but they’re not anything except labels and blank land forms, that’s what I’ve got so far too. Mostly. But I do want to talk just a little bit about the new areas that I’ve added and expand on them in the next few weeks; Gunaakt—the orcling homeland which I’ve mentioned many times, as well as Hyperborea and Nizrekh, two places that I’ve also mentioned off-hand many times. I also added a new territory Porhomok, which is really meant to be, more than anything else, a place for the current crop of Nizrekhi to have come from who aren’t actual Atlanteans, but people who come to the ruins of Atlantis in the wake of its destruction. Porhomok also gives me an opportunity to develop a more tropical seafaring center; a place for classic pirate stuff, jungles, and all that; something that otherwise the Three Realms simply didn’t offer—but which I really kind of wanted to have anyway. And then finally, I have a reason on the eastern edge of the map for the ending of the coming of more people from the Old Countries; Normaund, Carlovingia, etc. Nobody else can come. There’s a major barrier that cuts off travel, which I’ve never really talked about, but now I’ve added, so what we've got is all we're going to get. No more immigrants from the Old Countries anymore.

So I have a little bit of world-building guidance on this new map. I’m actually planning on scanning both of those maps later today, and I’ll post there here when I do. Maybe I’ll even modify this post and add them then.

I’ve also got my “solo play” experience to launch, and sadly, I’m considering yet another stream, where I detail some NPCs and villains in more detail; some backstory and background. Maybe even character sheets, although that won’t be super helpful to anyone else, I don’t think. This is stuff that I want to do because even people who aren’t at all interested in my setting or my rules could still find interesting and useful. I think I'm going to start with Alys, but I want to do more "super-villains" of the setting; the Heresiarchs and more. I'd love to talk about the mind-wizards just a bit, and Jairan Neferirkare, and Hutran Kutir and more. After I figure out for sure which ones from my original list I'm actually interested in pursuing.

UPDATE: Got one of the images OK. The librarian scanning them for me screwed up the EFX map and cut it off. And of course the files arrived a pdfs that I then had to convert to an image format, which isn't quite as easy as it should be. Sigh.

Government employees. At least she was more friendly than your typical DMV lady.

Trans-Pecos

Got to see just a bit of fun stuff driving across the Trans-Pecos region of west Texas. In particular, I spent time in the Davis Mountains.

The coming week, and running 5e (sigh)

Things are a little crazy, so I’m not buckling down to do a real meaty post just yet. My in-laws are in town, we’re getting tons of bad weather because of Helene, so now they’re just sitting at the house driving my wife crazy, work is very busy right now, I’m going to travel (business) to Texas this week to visit some suppliers just across the border, my wife is getting ready to go to DisneyWorld with a friend of hers, so when I get back from Texas I’ll be on my own for a little while, etc. I doubt that I’ll make Front #2 and more on my Cult of Undeath 5x5 until I get back at the end of the week, but maybe after that I’ll be good to do quite a bit of updating, actually.

In addition to all of that, I’m running for this reddit/game store group that I came up with. Two guys, and one of their fiancés, is what I hear. They’re interested in D&D 5e, so I agreed to run that for them as a quick “mini-campaign” trial run. Friday when I get back will be our first session. I have no idea what the fiancé is playing, but one guy is a mountain dwarf barbarian, and the other guy is a halfling rogue. At least, I think he’s a rogue. He never actually told me that, but the backstory sure sounds rogue-like. They seemed to be all into the idea of fantasy X-files, when I described that, but then the barbarian asked if they could all start with bags of holding. That kinda threw me for a loop. Is that a common thing that groups do? I’ve never heard of anything like that before. That seems kinda like; hey, can I start the game with some cheat codes on? Needless to say, I said no. I’m not actually anticipating having a great time, but maybe it’ll be good enough that we’ll all want to continue after the mini campaign is over. And I don’t really know the system very well, so I’ll be pretty handwavey and run it the way I used to run 3.5. It’ll be close enough, but unless they know what they’re doing systemwise, it could be a little rough. Actually, it might be better if they don’t; then I can just make sensible rules-light style rulings like I prefer to run anyway, and not worry much about it. 

I’m not quite sure what I’m going to be doing for the session, to be honest with you. Finalize any character creation and start them off outside of a large city, in fact, outside of a small town that’s outside of a large city, and there’s ghouls up on crosses kinda like scarecrows that will immediately be a threat to them. Or modified zombies or wights or something; it doesn’t actually matter exactly what kind of undead they are. They’ll be recruited to help out the small town with a rash of murders that are undead related, and then have to deal with a haunted house of some kind. I’m thinking of loosely running the first half (or maybe two thirds?) of The Skinsaw Murders, at least as a general concept, but winging anything that isn’t fleshed out or that I don’t’ remember very well in the moment. I guess I need to reread that again very soon to make sure that I’m good to run it! I also need to make sure that I have an outline that will get me past a couple of sessions or so, at least, and then I can figure out what (if anything) will follow.

But I’m not really thrilled to run 5e. I’m also playing now in a 5e game, so I went ahead and bought a like-new copy of the book for less than $20, but I wasn’t thrilled with that session either. Or rather, the group seemed fine; the system isn’t anything wonderful, though. Had almost all of the problems that I had gotten tired of with 3e, except that I wasn’t as familiar with the system, so I was more confused about a few basic things instead. I’d honestly rather just be playing 3e at this point. Not that I’d be excited to do that either.

So, let me talk very briefly about what I foresee in this session. Which, I think, we’ve only got 2½-3 hours to do before the store closes anyway. 

• The three characters all meet, after I get the rest of their backstories and backgrounds enough so that I can do something with this, at a crossroads outside of town. The small town of Brackwater (which will stand in for Sandpoint from the module, except without all that context from the earlier module, so it makes sense to change the name and not even pretend that it’s the same place), a coastal town near big tidal marshes, as you can guess, is where they’re headed, but they’re all coming from three different directions. They first get attacked by some kid of crazed wild animals or rabid feral dogs or something. Something is seriously wrong with these animals. Nearly zombified, or diseased, or blighted, or something. Not clear exactly.
• Head into town. It’s pretty subdued; but normalish. People are maybe a little extra suspicious or unfriendly, but once they get going in taverns or whatever, they find them normal. People are upset because there have been reports of deaths and strange behavior by farm animals, and a few local country boys have been injured. They’re worried about some kind of animal plague or something.
• Local sheriff or constable type guy is in the tavern. Yeah, yeah… this is pretty cliché, but he asks the PCs for help, because he’s heard something about them from someone (again, need to create some kind of tie to whatever backstories I end up finally getting) and he doesn’t want to involve the locals. There’s been a double murder at the local sawmill. It’s bad, looks occult, and he’s worried about getting the locals in a panic. The murders out in the boonies are starting to come to town. But they don't know much about the murders out of town until below...
• It looks like the murderer has come out of the swamp. There’ll be some clues to suggest as much, if I can think of them ahead of time.
• There will be calls, if they can’t figure out where to go, to help some farmers, who are showing up in town reporting strange things afoot (at their Circle K. Heh.)
• This is where they get into running battles with ghoul scarecrows. Or rather; like I said, ghouls are what the Pathfinder module originally wrote but a kind of ad hoc wight kind of thing might be more appropriate. Or even modified zombies. I’m actually thinking of making them more like the barrow-wights from Tolkien than the D&D wights of… well, of the Monster Manual. Strong, and have a freezing touch which stuns (as per the condition) save DC 15. Wights in D&D have some kind of life-drain, which I don’t want to mess with. Stunning attacks, or even dropping characters into the unconscious condition would be more Tolkien-like. 
• The ghouls/wights/whatever are taking their victims into a well, which is mostly dry, and connects via a short tunnel to the basement of a haunted house.  Here, I can use the haunted house section of the Skinsaw Murders module, maybe combined somewhat with The Haunting of Harrowstone, the first module of the Carrion Crown adventure path. 

I’m not going to worry about detailing the haunted house yet; that will absolutely not be part of the first evening’s game, no matter what else happens. So I’ll worry about detailing exactly what will happen there later—including what was the point of it all. Meanwhile, depending on how much time I have in the evenings while traveling, or when I get back from traveling, I’ll mostly be reading, but I might make another YouTube video; it’s been a good two weeks I think since I did an updated one describing the updates to my races for DFX. But first priority is the game I need to run, and second priority is the copy of Manual of the Planes as well as my second Hawk & Fisher Omnibus, which I'll be bringing with.

Travel and MoP (and Great Beyond, Distant Worlds)

https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2024/09/1-de-octubre-nuevo-dia-de-descanso-obligatorio

Doing business with Third World countries is obligatory, because all corporate overlords care more about skimming a few more cents of profit from the activity for the shareholders (including executive salaries and bonuses, most especially) than they do about the long-term health of their customer base, their communities, or even their own organization, which ultimately they tend to find disposable. If a corporation is no longer able to provide earnings for shareholders, it's discarded and the investment is moved to someone who does. Truly, corporate America is more like ravening plagues of locusts than the responsible capitalism that we're promised in our economics classes that describe the theory.

But to that point, we have to do business with Mexico. I was scheduled to go to Mexico next week, to visit one supplier in Ciudad Juarez, across the river from El Paso, TX on Tuesday, and then another one in Ciudad Acuña, across that same border from Del Rio, TX. This meant that I was going to travel by air on Monday, be there Monday night, have a (relatively) leisurely 6 to 6½ drive across quiet country roads in west Texas on Wednesday. Maybe a little longer, because I'd stop for a leisurely lunch in Fort Davis, which wasn't too far out of my way, and do a little site-seeing in the Davis Mountains, which I haven't seen in 15-16 years or so, and then arrive in Del Rio with plenty of time. Both evenings, it'd be easy for me to spend a couple of hours or so in the hotel reading my Manual of the Planes, or whatever other books I brought with me. As noted in my last post, I have an odd habit of bringing Manual of the Planes with me on business trips, but I'm not coincidentally re-reading it right now and utilizing some of its material for setting development; especially for EFX/Realms Traveler, but maybe even somewhat for DFX here and there too. 

However, as the link above notes, Mexico is not a super predictable place. I had already made these travel plans when the government decided that October 1st is going to be a mandatory day off for all workers, with only about a week's worth of notice. Now, I will either 1) stay home until Wednesday, and just see the second supplier, without going to El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, Fort Davis or any of that at all, or 2) fly into El Paso on Tuesday instead of Monday, see the facility in Juarez much more quickly just in the morning of Wednesday, and then have a much less leisurely drive across Texas... although I'll still probably get a late lunch or early dinner in Fort Davis, and hopefully see the Davis Mountains long before it's dark, and then get into Del Rio at or around dark thirty. It's a six and a half hour drive from El Paso to Del Rio; about fifteen minutes out of my way to stop at Fort Davis, but of course, I'll need to get gas, I'll need to eat lunch/dinner, and I can't stand going out to the west and not seeing something. Seminole Canyon State Park a little outside Del Rio and on the way is probably going to be out of the question; even if it's not dark, it'll be closed. Luckily, I'll probably get back to Del Rio again for other business, but the drive from El Paso to was an unusual if not unique opportunity. I'm quite disappointed; I can still squeeze most of what I want out of the trip, including the fun stuff for me during the traveling, but it won't be as relaxed or leisurely, and I won't have as much free time to read in the evenings either. 

And then, on Thursday, I drive from Del Rio to San Antonio, see my sister briefly, and take off the next morning to come home.

That's a whole lot of personal detail, but it may well mean that I'll read less. On the other hand, I was initially annoyed in the first place because my work trip is the same week that my wife will be out of town. When I'm no longer traveling, maybe I'll be reading more rather than less. She'll also be gone over the weekend, and although I do have some things I need to do over the weekend, I can still find, I think, lots of time to read or do other things in between doing those things.

Other than reading some old D&D books that I've already read and have owned for years (but which I'm really enjoying rediscovering, and they're still in Very Good or even Like New condition, because I'm always careful with my books), I also want to spend some time in the next couple of weeks wrapping up the Cult of Undeath fronts, and tying that whole 5x5 up before Halloween. That would be an appropriate Halloween activity to finish a 5x5 Front called Cult of Undeath, I think. And I want to create a new batch of iconics. The ones that I created previously ended up getting kind of coopted either into samples for the fronts, potential novel characters, or contacts. I now have a bunch of new races, and I'd like to turn those into more iconics.

Then, in November and December, I'd like to modify the DFX rules to have an EFX variant, and get rolling on my Solo Shadows Over Garenport stuff. Pretty ambitious, but I think that if I don't have some ambitious goals, I end up just frittering away my free time, and honestly, that kind of sucks.

Captain Borus, friendly and helpful Garenport NPC