Shackled City

It's Sunday. My week-long vacation is almost over. Today is, in fact, a rather busy day for me, and then it's back to the grind at work tomorrow morning bright and early, sadly. People always ask after a vacation if you're refreshed and ready to get back to work; I never feel that way. Being off work always reminds me how much I hate work and wish that I could afford to retire early, i.e., right now, and not have to deal with the manufactured hassle and people that I don't like. 

That said, as vacations go, this was kind of a weird one. I was off work, certainly, but I didn't really go anywhere or do anything. My daughter and her family came and stayed with us, so mostly we sat in the living room and watched movies, talked, played a few games, and watched my grandson run around playing with toys. We went out a few places, but never very far and never for more than a couple of hours at a time. In addition to that, because he was taking naps in my office room, and went to bed much earlier than I do, I didn't even really have access to my computer at all for more than an hour max each day. Which is fine, don't get me wrong, but I didn't get to do a lot of the things that I'd normally do on either a vacation or a staycation; it was just a family hang-out week.

—( † )—

A number of years ago, I read the Shackled City adventure path, the first adventure path, at least in the modern format that we recognize today, or close to it at least. This is a level 1-20 slog, with twelve chapters (at least in its compiled format; I think it originally had only ten) and it is super-rife with late "3rd Era" D&D-isms. Hardly an opponent to be found doesn't have a bizarre concoction of templates applied to make it mechanically and otherwise unique and weird. The adventure is nominally set within the Greyhawk setting, like all official D&D material was during this era, but in reality, it spends most of its time concerned with and even located in various extra-planar destinations. 

Vhalantru, a Tarterian "Smoking Eye" beholder

I read the adventure path long enough ago that I can't remember many of the details of it, and I'm not about to re-read it just for this post, so I asked my search bar, which now—like all search bars—is most likely to give you an AI answer rather than an actual search, to summarize the adventure path for me, including "detailed" summaries with spoilers of each chapter. Otherwise, I wouldn't have remembered well enough to do this. I also re-read at least the introductory material and campaign background section of the compilation pdf. I'll copy and paste the AI answer to my query below:

The Shackled City Adventure Path is a Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in the city of Cauldron, which is built atop a dormant volcano.  The story follows player characters as they uncover a conspiracy by the Cagewrights, a secret society dedicated to freeing the Demon Prince of Madness, Adimarchus. The adventure path spans levels 1–20 and was originally published in Dungeon magazine before being collected in a hardcover edition.

Early Intrigue and City Defense

1. Life's Bazaar: The party arrives in Cauldron and investigates a series of kidnappings. The trail leads them to Underdark passages where they discover a slaver operation run by Lord Vhalantru, a beholder.  After defeating the slavers and rescuing the victims, including a Shackleborn child, the party is hailed as heroes but learns that Vhalantru is only a pawn in a larger scheme. (ed. actually, this isn't entirely true. Vhalantru is not revealed as a beholder at this point, and he remains the primary antagonist, mostly in secret, for most of the campaign. Sigh. AI. In the course of subsequent questions I asked, I caught it making numerous small errors, like calling Erik Mona Paizo's CEO and putting Eberron details into a discussion of Golarion, etc. The weirdest was a misspelling of the word mayor, which I've corrected below. I don't know what a Mayer is, but eh...)

2. Drakthar’s Way: Added for the hardcover collection, this chapter involves small bands of goblins vandalizing the city. The party tracks the goblins to a hidden cave system beneath the city, led by a vampiric bugbear named Drakthar.  This chapter serves to introduce the city's factions and the threat of the Underdark, though the goblins are largely a distraction from the main plot.

3. Flood Season: The city is threatened by massive flooding during the rainy season. The magical wands of control water, which normally prevent this disaster, have been stolen.  The party tracks the thieves to a lair below the city, where they discover the Cagewrights are behind the theft. The party recovers the wands, saving the city from destruction. 

4. Zenith Trajectory: An Umber Hulk attacks the city, after which the party is hired to find Zenith Splintershield, a dwarf who vanished into the Underdark.  They discover Zenith has been captured by kuo-toa who worship him as a prophet.  The party retrieves him, uncovering more clues about the Cagewrights' plans and the looming threat of the volcano.

5. The Demonskar Legacy: The party is sent to find a missing paladin who ventured to the nearby city of Redgorge.  Following his trail through a jungle and a giant-controlled cavern, they enter the Plane of Mirrors via the Starry Mirror. They find the paladin possessed by demons and must defeat the demonic architect behind the incursion, receiving a dying warning to "seek the sign of the Smoking Eye." 

6. Test of the Smoking Eye: Acting on the paladin's warning, the party meets a mysterious plane-wanderer who guides them to the Abyss (specifically the layer of Occipitus). They undergo a series of tests to redeem an abandoned layer of the Abyss. This chapter reveals the true nature of the Cagewrights' goal: to free Adimarchus by opening a permanent gate to Carceri. 

Escalation and Revelation

7. Secrets of the Soul Pillars: After assassination attempts trace back to the temple of Wee Jas, the party assaults the temple and fights its undead inhabitants.  They are led to an ancient frozen complex, Karran Kurral, where they defeat a Dracolich guarding the Soul Pillars. These pillars are key to the Cagewrights' ritual to open the planar gate.

8. Lords of Oblivion: An ally of the party is kidnapped by the Last Laugh, Cauldron's thieves' guild.  The party breaks into the guild's safe house and learns of a secret meeting among Cauldron’s criminal elite. They discover that the Last Laugh's beholder overlord is also involved in the Cagewrights' unholy rituals, deepening the city’s corruption. 

9. Foundation of Flame: The Cagewrights awaken the volcano beneath Cauldron, causing lava eruptions and earthquakes. The party must help evacuate the city while fighting off demodands emerging from a planar rift.  The chaos leads to the death of the Lord Mayor, leaving the city leaderless and vulnerable.

The Final Confrontation

10. Thirteen Cages: The party marches into the volcano to stop the Cagewrights' ritual before a permanent gate to Carceri opens above the city. They battle through the stronghold, destroying the Tree of Shackled Souls, an artifact used to focus the life forces of Shackleborn slaves to power the ritual.  The leader, Dyr'ryd, is slain, and the immediate threat to the city is neutralized.

11. Strike on Shatterhorn: The remaining Cagewrights flee to their jungle retreat, Shatterhorn. The party pursues them, battling through the insane remains of the cultists. They confront a crazy cleric who is attempting to free Adimarchus by sacrificing a PC to Nerull, but this fails as only Adimarchus’ successor can release him. 

12. Asylum: The party travels to the Abyss to confront the source of the Cagewrights' designs: Adimarchus, the Demon Prince of Madness, imprisoned in the asylum of Skullrot. They penetrate deep into the prison and battle Adimarchus's deranged form, finally destroying him utterly. The party returns to Cauldron, which is left in ruins but safe, to lead the city’s long recovery. 

As not a huge D&D guy myself, I'm not quite sure what I think of a campaign in which a beholder in (magical) disguise is the major antagonist, and the political interplay between various esoteric fiends (demodands, fallen angels as demon lords, etc.) is the main thrust of the story. As is often the case, I find the earlier adventures when the stakes are more down-to-earth and relatable the most interesting, and when you suddenly say screw it and take off for the Abyss, Carceri, and various other extraplanar destinations, the game feels less like the low fantasy base on which D&D was built, and more The Avengers in some of their wilder space-faring adventures, facing the Skrulls or Thanos or Galactus or whatever. Can't be helped, especially with a 1-20 level campaign. This is why I always liked E6 as soon as I came across it and honestly see it as absolutely necessary for any d20 game, including 5e, to be what I'd want it to be. I feel like in the current 5e game that I'm playing, where we're only 4th level still, we're already too super-hero-like. 

On the other hand, some of the supervillains of D&D, like the demon lords, are super iconic to the game. Graz'zt plays a minor role in this one, even though Adimarchus, a more esoteric demon lord (whom I can't find earlier references to than this adventure path, honestly) is the main one here. I wouldn't want them to be missing from the game, but I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure how to treat them in an E6 game either. Certainly you don't just shout huzzah and attack them, unless your characters are suicidal. 

The best element of the Shackled City is the city itself, Cauldron, set inside and on the slopes of a very regular-shaped caldera of an extinct volcano. What a great idea! My own city of Bucknerfeld utilizes this same idea plus memories of long-ago trips to Capulin Volcano National Monument in northern New Mexico while passing nearby from Texas to Utah. (ed. I highly recommend stopping by if you're anywhere near. It's been a good twenty-five or more years since I was there, and maybe things have changed, but when my wife and I stopped with my at the time very young oldest son, we pretty much had the place to ourselves. It was probably mid-morning on a weekday in the early summer, if I remember. I know outdoorsy locations have become more crowded over the years, but I still suspect that this one wouldn't be, especially on a weekday. It's too remote and isn't a big enough draw to get people to go too far out of their way to visit it.)

Overall, my impression of Shackled City is that it was interesting and very popular, but as the first of it's kind, it feels a little primitive nowadays, and it certainly feels very, very rooted in the late 3rd Era paradigm. There's lots of dungeon-crawling, and lots of very weird antagonists that have multiple stacked templates, extraneous class levels added on, and stuff like that, and the super-hero feel was, in some ways, more overt than even in today's D&D, where it's kind of baked into the ambient cake, but they still pretend like you're playing kinda sorta fantasy games sometimes. Here, you never forget that you're playing D&D specifically, and while it's technically set in the Greyhawk setting, I doubt it's a Greyhawk that Gary Gygax would have recognized other than a few alignments in names and geography—although he was still alive and would be for a few more years after its publication. Gygax himself died rather young at only age 69, and if I recall, he was still active and occasionally seen online still up until nearly his death in March 2008, and this was originally published in 2003-4 and reprinted and compiled in 2005. I've never seen any record of him having commented on it, and being nominally set in Greyhawk but far removed from the City of Greyhawk, or the elements of Greyhawk that Gygax was more strongly associated with in the first place means maybe there would have been no reason for him to. In fact, it's clear that the adventure path was originally designed to be setting agnostic, and was deliberately put in a remote and unexplored part of Greyhawk deliberately so as not to conflict with anything going on either there or in any other setting that the game might be run in (such as, of course, Forgotten Realms, or perhaps even Eberron, although given the extraplanar nature of much of what's going on, the latter would have been harder to pull off without changing a lot of details.) So its inclusion in Greyhawk is really more nominal rather than substantial. In fact, in the early introduction, this was itself more explicit; "The Shackled City Adventure Path is not set in any particular campaign world. It uses deities from the core D&D pantheon, and some proper names from the Greyhawk campaign setting, but the campaign itself has been designed for easy integration into any Dungeons & Dragons campaign." but partway through and certainly in the hardback reprint omnibus, if anything it actually became slightly more anchored in Greyhawk with more explicit references to stuff in the setting. But it's not like you go to the city of Greyhawk or anything like that, as you do in the next AP which I'll talk about in a different post, so it might as well not really be seen as taking place there other than that you need a Greyhawk friendly cosmology to run it without changing a lot of details about what's going on with the various fiends and demon lords and whatnot. Honestly, though, most D&D settings could pull it off OK. 

Although, it's often assumed that most DMs enjoy that kind of world-building, or at least that kind of kit-bashed approach of using material and adapting it. Eberron would be a more difficult one given it's significantly different cosmology, and no guide was ever officially released, although of course, there are fan-made suggestions, some of them quite interesting. Especially given that by "fan-made" I include blog and forum posts made by Keith Baker himself. Perhaps a more interesting approach, given that while this predates the formation of Golarion, it's done by Paizo, who were the third party contractors doing Dungeon and Dragon magazines at the time, would be putting it in Golarion. There have been numerous suggestions on how and where to do so, and the most common is that it should to be in Sargava due to jungle and ocean proximity, with the Mwangi Expanse substituting for the Amedio Jungle. 

5x5 Fronts progress... or lack thereof

In this post a couple of months or so ago, I laid out a schedule of updates, which I have slipped. I had actually forgotten that I'd even done that, and now that September is rapidly ending, I still haven't done what I said I was going to do in August. Time to recalibrate, I suppose. 

This one is done. I could run it, probably literally today. I don't want to run it in 5e, like I'm currently running, I want to run it in ideally my own Shadow of Old Night system, or as a consolation prize in my still incomplete, but I could finish it with a couple of hours tops, D&D 3.5 game which utilizes a few upgrades from PFRPG (1e).

Which I should also put as a goal; let's finish that house rule delineation, and then I have it ready to go.

This one is also complete, and I'm running a bowdlerized 5e version of it, although I don't like or really even know the 5e system. I've said many times before that I'm not sure what our current gaming scenario will look like, which is why I'm willing to do this, because it's kind of a stopgap until we figure out what we're really doing. I'd like to run this in a different way, though, again, with either of the two systems. Because this was (originally) meant to be an adaptation of Carrion Crown, I'm more friendly towards the 3.5/PFRPG hybrid system for this one, but I'd probably still prefer to run everything in Old Night.

I have a short "executive summary" style 5x5 or even 6x5 for this, but it needs to be fleshed out into a full-blown 5x5 Front before I could actually use it. I still want to do this before September is over, but the timing is getting really tight. It might more fairly be sometimes before October reaches the midpoint.

My original plan was to use the original Freeport Trilogy, plus any additional Freeport material, to make an even more overtly pirate-themed campaign than Terror In Timischburg was. I could still do that, and I've got plenty of material. I'd kind of like to read the Skull & Shackles adventure path before I commit a 5x5 down, but we'll see where it goes.

In spite of the fact that this is one of the original three campaign seeds, the other two of which are finished, I still don't have much of an idea of what exactly this one would look like other than that it's loosely based on the same concept as The Hangover. 

Originally mean to be a "mini-campaign", which I never really defined, this is really just a campaign idea set in the icy wastes of what is Hyperborea, probably at least partially inspired while playing SWTOR on Hoth and thinking that that was a cool environmental theme for a campaign. I really have no idea on an outline for it, though, honestly.

I should probably pull this one up in the timing given that I've already read Yig Snake Granddaddy and long ago I also already read Serpent's Skull. I'll probably do it after I get to my re-read of Serpent's Skull, which honestly isn't that far away. It'll come up relatively quickly in the trawl read of adventure paths, as soon as I get back to adventure paths.

Other than the high concept of this being an urban supernatural thriller, possibly as a hybrid of Curse of the Crimson Throne, Council of Thieves, and any other lingering Freeport material that I didn't use (and yes, I realize that those are technically all settings that rely on devils, not demons, but in Old Night, I don't care about that D&D-specific pedantry) this is only a vague idea and a theme so far. But after I read Council of Thieves, I think I'll have a lot of material to work with, so I'd like to start arranging it into something soon before I forget too many details of what I'd already read earlier.

I actually feel like I have a better idea of what I want this campaign to do than some of the others, although I lack source material to adapt it from... or at least, I lack source material that I've read either recently or so far at all. I have vague ideas of possibly adapting some of the material I have, like Sands of Doom, Mummies Mask, Legacy of Fire, or others, but I won't get those read for some time. Maybe I should just do this one as another original, like Darkness in the Hill Country.

Again, other than a theme; "Underdark" meets "Shadowfell", I don't have a great idea of what to do with this either, and I'm not so far really loving any of the Underdark campaigns that I've read, like Second Darkness or Out of the Abyss; or at least I'm not finding material in them that I want to adapt. I do have more material, but maybe this is another one best done as an original. 

The Silver Marches

I finished the 3e book Silver Marches last night. This was an interesting book because of the context in which it was published. Self-professed game design "rock star" Sean K. Reynolds hitched his star to this book, in a very public and kind of nasty one-sided debate, that he reported on, that he was having with management or leadership at WotC about customers wanting "fluff" instead of "crunch." It was a fundamental design difference in terms of what to do strategically with D&D products going forwards. Reynolds was championing an older 2e model that had also made a lot of hay with other companies, most notably White Wolf, where products focused more on roleplaying opportunities, setting details, and things that supported the fiction of the game, often in exactly and painstakingly tedious detail, something that Forgotten Realms had actually become somewhat infamous for over the years already by this point. He claimed that management just wanted to publish "crunch"; player facing products that offered more options for players; new feats, new prestige classes, new mechanics, etc. 

Now, I realize that that's not a very nuanced narrative about Reynolds' actual position, which matured somewhat from what he articulated expressly in 2002 in front of this book, but this book was kind of the schwerpunkt for that debate. If there really was a debate, and not just a narrative that Reynolds himself was telling. 

Unfortunately, this is the most interesting thing about Silver Marches. As a product, I didn't really find it very interesting. It did, indeed, give encyclopedic detail about social and legal customs, plants and animals that are usually just slightly recolored versions of real animals and plants, and other things that are found in the Silver Marches area of Forgotten Realms—which to be fair are one of the classic areas of the realms, adjacent to Icewind Dale (kind of) and Waterdeep, but further inland, and  big part of the territory that Wulfgar and Driz'zt traveled through in the second book of the Icewind Dale trilogy. Alustriel, the leader of the area (de facto) and leader explicitly of the big city Silverymoon, made an appearance. 

Most of this detail isn't very interesting, and I honestly struggle to see how I would have used it were I to set a game there. In fact, much of it was kind of antithetical to play as D&D is usually played. I had hoped, after finding my mind wandering and being really quite bored, that when I got to the last third or quarter or so of the book where it had "adventure sites" that it would be better, but they were honestly just pretty boring stocked site-based exploration stuff; little more than mini dungeons without much context. Somewhat ironically, because FR had become synonymous with trad-style play during 2e and into 3e, and as the nascent OSR movement, and other classic play movements started pushing back against trad, and its occasional pretentious claims like "roleplay, not rollplay" and stuff like that, because these are pretty old-school site based sandbox type stuff. Not very interesting to read, but if you like that kind of play, surprisingly (at least to me) useful for it. (Although I'm sympathetic to many of the aesthetic desires of this older school game play, which is also made up of people that I may tend to relate to more; in their 50s, played in the 80s, tend to be conservative, not impressed with the woke direction of the current industry, fans of even older sword & sorcery like Howard and Leiber, etc. I am, however, a pretty traditional trad player, and I find trad style adventures and modules, like the campaigns WotC does or Paizo's adventure paths, much more interesting and useful... even if I don't necessarily run them straight as is. As I've said many times before, I'm not old school, but I am old-fashioned. And I don't know that the play customs like OSR, Classic, Trad, Neo-trad, etc. are the best way to describe my playstyle. I prefer the GM merit badges. But if I have to have a label, I claim paleo-trad for how I play. It's trad, but with a lot of old-fashioned things that some other trad players may find somewhat exotic.)

Not that we were told, but I was always intrigued by the result of Reynolds gauntlet throwing exercise. I'm sure that if he'd been right, we'd have heard about it non-stop. I doubt that he was, and Silver Marches probably didn't sell so well as to make his case a slam dunk. Only a few months later, he was no longer working at WotC; in a so-called "amiable lay-off" by which he means, "sure I was laid off, but I was about to quit anyway." Sure. That may have even been sorta true, and he seems to have done OK for himself, working in the video game industry for a time, and doing plenty of freelance projects in the RPG sphere, including even for WotC (I think) for many years thereafter. I tend to think that that was more likely a face-saving narrative, but it did, no doubt, work out for him in the long run. WotC did, also, in fact focus much more on player facing crunch books following this. Which, in the long run, may have choked out the d20 era when all was said and done and contributed a lot to the growing dissatisfaction that many people had with the system which contributed significantly to the noisy and dramatic birth of the OSR movement as a whole, which was a rejection of much of what d20 was doing. 

There's some more context to be had here, of course. When d20 ended, it was replaced with the polarizing 4e, and many players were not interested in it. Pathfinder made a lot of hay by essentially making some slight modifications to "clean up" d20, although it's arguable to the extent that they actually improved it, and continued the 3e style of play for many more years. I also noticed in that era that 3e books never came down in price on the used market. I strongly suspect that while the narrative was that Pathfinder outsold, or at least rivaled D&D during the 4e era, that an equal order of magnitude of players just kept playing d20, and finally, the OSR was fully birthed with the launch of the first retro-clones at about this same time, and it became a fourth pole in this industry of multipolarity. It also didn't escape my notice that 5e, which changed this dynamic significantly, was essentially what Pathfinder should have been, i.e., d20 but actually cleaned up, made easier to run and play, and arguably better. (I say as a person who still prefers 3e to 5e in most respects, but.... y'know. My own preferences aren't really on trial here. I also recognize a lot of d20's flaws even though I use it partially because I'm familiar enough with it to easily work around them. Some of what 5e made "simpler" wasn't actually stuff that was a pain point, like character customization options.)

What all of this means, I'm not sure of. 5e was certainly popular, but there's a lot of good circumstantial and anecdotal evidence (as well as a lot of reactionary denials of this) that it's getting long in the tooth, its welcome has faded dramatically, and that 5.5 wasn't as well received as WotC would have hoped. I personally think that that's obvious given the very public and obvious attempts by WotC to change course with the game right now; they're obviously trying to woo back customers who have left in the relatively recent past. But some of that may be part of the greater cultural correction going on in corporate and customer facing industries all over. Heck, even my company really dialed back the DEI rhetoric the last couple of years; it's almost invisible or non-existent now, and I work for a Scandinavian-owned corporation that lemming-like followed all of the corporate trends. As do most corporations. I feel like customer-focused entertainment industries are the real canaries in the coal-mine for these kinds of cultural trends, and the wholesale rejection of wokeness, which probably had its most dramatic breakthrough with the Bud Light nonsense a couple of years ago has impacted the entertainment industry the hardest. So part of what WotC is doing is backtracking from the heavy-handed woke preaching, while still trying to quietly and less overtly remain woke for the really loud, obnoxious portion of their audience who remains woke. But the overtness of woke themes is really toned down, and WotC in particular is going on, in Dan Ayoub's own words, an "apology tour" to backtrack for the benefit of offended former customers. Again, I think that this is obvious because sales are down, 5.5 was soft, and people are losing interest in general. But I think that they're going to anyway, no matter what WotC does. I think another thing that few have recognized (shout out to Black Lodge Games for being the first to point it out, as far as I know) is that the "nerd moment" which has been going on for a number of years now seems to have peaked. Comic book movies peaked. Star Wars peaked. Science fiction in general peaked. And, consistent with that, D&D peaked. All of them are in decline. Part of that is due to their crappy slop content and woke nonsense, which turned off most people, but part of it was just that the moment peaked and now people are looking for something else now. D&D will never again be what it was in 2020-2024 or so. Or, at least it won't be again until another big turn of events. This big wave was maybe sort of like the big wave of the late 70s through the middle to later 80s when D&D had its first big boom. That kind of boom town cycle just doesn't last forever, and if WotC thinks that D&D is still possible to be put into a growth phase when it's clearly (I think) in a contraction period and probably will be for some time, then WotC's hope is vain and foolish.

Anyway, I'm now wandered rather far afield from just the Silver Marches discussion, but I think that the greater trends in how WotC strategically tries to position D&D is still very relevant, and in many ways, in the last nearly two and a half decades since this book came out, the strategy hasn't really matured very much in most respects. And the book itself was decidedly "meh" at best, and boring and pointless at worst. Next up is the Eberron sourcebook Five Nations, and then the next SPCM campaign, and then finally on to the next Paizo adventure path. Lots to read. Don't know for sure how much of it I'll do this week, though, with family being in town.

The Strange Affairs of the Unseen Beyond

Creating a new tag based on what I said as an update at the bottom of my last post: THE STRANGE AFFAIRS OF THE UNSEEN BEYOND. This will be a more targeted world-building effort that is not part of Old Night. It will use the same D&D 3.5 and PFRPG hybrid rules, but there will be some pretty limiting house-rules to ensure that it is very targeted in terms of mood and tone. Not everything that PFRPG has would fit in this game and it's going to use PFRPG rules, which are essentially a slight modification to an older version of D&D, of course, but I want it to NOT feel really very much like D&D at all. 

Up front, let me be clear what the mechanical baseline is. I like a D&D 3.5 and PFRPG hybrid; mostly D&D 3.5, but using the classes and truncated skill list of PFRPG, plus, if it matters, the CMB/CMD, which is a lot easier than the combat maneuvers of 3.5, where it was a long-running joke that nobody knew how to do grapple, for instance, without stopping and looking it up. I'll also add The Elephant In the Room houserules and E6 as a default, which I won't link to in this post, but which I have many times in the past. That's just default for me using a d20 system these days. What really matters is the next part, which are mostly limitations, i.e., I'm cutting a bunch of stuff out to change specifically the tone, theme and feel of the game. And mostly this means races and classes. I'm not actually sure yet what to do with races, but I'm a huge fan of humano-centrism, and it's entirely possible that I'll only use humans as selectable races. If I do add some others back again, I haven't yet decided what they'll be. Maybe some of the Old Night races can be applied here, or adapted, or maybe not. I'll get to that later. Classes, however, is where the real "magic" happens in changing the game to not feel like D&D even if I'm using what are, essentially, D&D rules. 

And before I talk about the specific classes that I'm OK with using, it's important to note; what is this setting like? It's going to be fantasy, and it's going to be medieval fantasy, but it's not going to really be D&D fantasy. In fact, it's going to specifically lean in to a kind of early pulp, penny dreadful, city mytery, Gothic horror and supernatural sensationalism kind of thing. It's not Victorian, but in some ways, it'll feel more Victorian than D&D-ish. Kind of a hybrid of D&D and Call of Cthulhu, or even Candela Obscura (at least as I understand that game) in tone. So, there'll be adventurous classes, but not overly magical classes.

From the core classes, only the fighter, barbarian and rogue will fly.

From the "base classes", I think I could use the alchemist and vigilante are good fits.

From the "hybrid classes" the brawler, investigator, and slayer are ones I really like. I love the concept of the swashbuckler, but there's actually a better class for it, so I'm not going to expressly disallow it, but I'm going to suggest instead that... well, see below.

I'm not very familiar with them, but if you wanted the Unchained barbarian or rogue, I'd say knock yourself out.

And then, the Occult classes are all on the table. In fact, this is specifically where the "f/x" classes will come from. But, you can't take them at 1st level; however, given that it's E6, you can take the first five levels as character levels 2-6 with an occult class. psychic, spiritualist, medium, occultist, mesmerist, and kineticist. I might reconsider and say you can't take them for your first two levels, but let me read them again more carefully first. On the other hand, all of the occult classes are "half-casters" so probably giving them five levels is fine. Maybe even all six. I'll think on that.

And then from third party stuff, you can use the noble and freebooter from Freeport. 

While I'm not quite ready to assign classes to these characters, here's the iconics that I'll end up developing.

From left to right:

• Beatrice Holloway, a mesmerist who insists that she is not really a mesmerist.
• Ambrose Harrow, gentleman adventurer and monster hunter
• Lady Victoria Nightingale, society lady with an unsettling talent for communicating with the dead
• Silas Blackwood, retired surgeon and occult investigator
• Amelia Vexley, scholar of witchcraft and the occult, publishes anonymously under a pen name
• Gideon Marlowe, disgraced former clergyman and exorcist

Pathfinder Occult

In my Paizo Iconics series, which I would like to finish off this week, I'm smack dab in the middle of the Occult classes, which launched as part of the Occult line in 2015 in the summer (at GenCon, I believe, which is when the first book debuted.) I'm also thinking of pulling these titles ahead and reading them, and even of getting physical copies of at least some of them. The occult titles were launched with Occult Adventures, which is the main system book, followed by Occult Bestiary and Occult Realms in the Pathfinder Setting line, and Occult Origins in the Pathfinder Companion series. Occult Mysteries actually predates the "Occult" subline by over a year, and was a part of the Setting series, but it's hard not to see it as connected via foreshadowing if, for no other reason, because of the title. It also works fairly well in tandem with the later Horror Adventures and Horror Realms books, although technically they are not the same thing and could be used independently. 

I've long thought the idea of replacing regular D&D magic with psionics would make for a fun alternative campaign type; something that felt very different while still using (essentially) the same rules. The way that I've posited that this would work, in a 3.5 environment, is that any class with a spellcasting progression would either be removed entirely (if that was its sole purpose) or modified to replace the spellcasting with something else (appropriate for the ranger and paladin, for example.) Of the core classes from 3.5, that means that you basically only still have the fighter, rogue and barbarian and ... maybe the monk, although I don't like it's Hong Kong theatre mumbo-jumbo very much. Bard, cleric, druid, wizard, sorcerer are all completely off-limits, and the ranger and paladin need to be somewhat reworked according to principles that are found in Complete Warrior I believe. (Or maybe Complete Adventurer. I can't remember anymore.) Or, if you've got a 3pp alt.ranger, of which there were many, that doesn't have any magical abilities or spellcasting, you could of course use that. Instead of all of this magic, you'd use psionics. The psion, psychic warrior, soulknife and wilder from the Expanded Psionic Handbook as well as the ardent, divine mind and lurk from Complete Psionic would replace these classes. They're not necessarily 1:1 replacements, of course, but among the seven psionic classes, you'd be able to accomplish everything that you'd need a more traditional "magical" D&D party to do well enough, but it would just feel very different. 

When 3.5 was updated to PFRPG, of course, the same core races and classes carried through, and EPH was in the SRD, but Complete Psionic was not. Paizo never addressed psionics officially, but they had some kind of partnership with Dreamscarred Press where they made semi-official psionics material for PFRPG in the Ultimate Psionics book (the compiled and revised version of several earlier products) that added ten new classes to the game, including updates from the 3.5 SRD to the four EPH classes, and then six other unique classes that rounded out the roster. You could, using this, do the same thing for PFRPG that I was thinking of doing for D&D. I say thinking of doing; I actually did it once, but nobody ended up taking a "psion" type character; I had a barbarian, a swashbuckler, a fighter/rogue, and two soulknives in that party. And something else, although now I can't remember what the 6th character was, but I think he might have also been a rogue or something similar. 

Paizo did eventually add psychic magic to the official stuff through these Occult books, but psionics and psychics are not really the same thing, and they don't really have the same theme and tone. Whereas Dreamscarred Press' PFRPG psionics, heavily based on the D&D 3.5 psionics, is often compared more to the X-men, Paizo's occult psychic powers are more compared to the psychic occultism of fiction like penny dreadfuls and gothic horror. But, if I could replace magic with psionics and like the result, I obviously would like replacing "regular" magic with "occult" or "psychic" magic and like the result even moreso. Making magic more magical, mysterious and edgy, focusing on mysticism of a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago occultism makes it even more significantly less like D&D than even replacing magic with psionics does, in many respects, but it also makes magic much more like what I'd want it to look like. Keep it relatively low level, (E6) so that the magic doesn't get out of hand, and this would be a fascinating exercise in creative limiting being used to build a very different type of setting, tone and mood out of the same mechanical base. The image above was just a prompt to Nano Banana 2 to create a fantasy ensemble cast of psychic investigators like mediums, psychics, occultists, etc.; i.e., exactly what the Paizo stuff does, and that's what it came back with. That works for me.

So, I've already announced (although done very little with) EMPIRE OF THE MIND WIZARDS to create a subsetting based on psionics, but now I feel like I need another one based on psychic/occult magic.

UPDATE: I tried to get grok to give me an image, and Nano Banana 2. Grok shut me down entirely until this morning, and then gave me something that I didn't really love; way too "fantasy = 5e" vibe. The latter screwed around not following my instructions for one generation after another after another. I finally had to stop asking it to edit it's original one, and just start from scratch every time, and that's where I ended up with the image above, on the third or fourth "from scratch" generation on the same prompt. 

The more I look at that image, though, the more I find that I really like it. I think I'm going to take each of the characters there and turn them into "iconic" seeds. Not fully fleshed out iconic characters, but seeds of iconic characters, and then I'll figure out where to use them. I don't know that I can make them fit in the Old Night setting or not, but maybe I can. And if not, that's OK. I always like world-building, and while I prefer—generally—to stay more focused, having a few other worlds for occasional side show is still fun. And maybe this one would be a minor campaign seed rather than campaign setting; one based on E6 Pathfinder with limited access to character classes, using the "occult magic" to replace entirely the regular "D&D magic" that the game defaults to. I doubt I'll spend tons of time filling out that seed, but we'll see. Maybe it becomes so interesting to me that I end up doing more with it than I think right now that I will.

Reading updates

Council of Thieves... coming soon!

Some of the personal life issues that were really, really stressing me out are finally resolving, and reasonably satisfactorily. I'll be busy; I have my daughter and her family in town on Friday for a week, but otherwise, I'll probably start doing a little better on reading. Thought it might be a good time for a little update on my reading plans. I always do these as a kind of freeform brainstorming session, where I talk about my plans as as I write, they mature, develop and evolve. As noted recently, I just had a couple of big finishes; I finished the 250+ page Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting and decided that GOLARION REMIXED is going to be less systemic than EBERRON REMIXED was, and I might utilize it as part of my efforts reading their adventure paths rather than working through the setting book, as I did with Eberron. I'll talk about modifications that I'd make more in the context of how I'd use the adventure paths as I read them. Speaking of which, of course, that's the single biggest and most "intimidating" trawl in my reads. But I'm taking a brief break from it to finish some other stuff before I dive into the next adventure path, Legacy of Fire. Also, as I read Legacy, I'm going to leapfrog adventure path modules with stand-alone modules, and I'll finish the D&D 3.5 compatible adventures in both trawls at the same time. Of course, since PFRPG is almost identical to 3.5 except for a slight power scaling upwards and a few other minor details, I doubt I'll really even notice the difference. 

But before I read that, I'm reading Silver Marches. This is a hard one to read. Way too much detail, and little of the detail is super useful; I read the chapter on cities last night, and found my attention wandering; I'd look at a page I just read and realize that I had no idea what it just said. When I get to later chapters that have small adventures in them, I think I'll do better, but I'm not really loving this product. In fact, I'm not really loving the 3e FR at all. It's very much living up to exactly what my expectations were for it, i.e., there's some good stuff, but it's couched in a context of cozy, Canadian liberal high fantasy that I don't care for, meaning that I'm just not really digging it, honestly. Also, before I turn to Legacy of Fire, I want to finish that book, the next (very similar sized) book in the Eberron Trawl, Five Nations, which I haven't ever read before and I didn't buy when it was new because it sounded like it kind of retreaded a lot of the same material that the campaign setting had already done (although I'm sure that that won't actually end up having been true when I read it.) I'm also reading "Bastion of Broken Souls" which is the last of the pseudo-adventure path adventures for 3e. There are, of course, more adventures for 3e, but up to this point, they had been level set so that they could in theory have been played back to back. That will no longer be true with the remining 3e and 3.5 adventures, which are more explicitly stand-alone after this. The little free adventure "Caves of Shadow" and the Level 1 adventure "Fight at Tristor" are both short and will come next after the pseudo-adventure path. But finishing the pseudo-adventure path will certainly feel like the end of a chapter, and I'll probably "rest" that whole trawl for a little while after I do. 

I'm not really close to finishing off any of the trawls, but I do have some trawls where I'm close to hitting a major milestone and finishing off a "chapter" if you will of the trawl, so I'm kind of looking forward to that. 

Meanwhile, I've been doing so many gaming books that I haven't been reading any of my novels or other fiction books, which I kind of miss. I've got the next three of the Death Dealer James Silke series queued up. I've got the three Timothy Zahn old-fashioned post Return of the Jedi Star Wars trilogy. I've got Dracula. I've got the first five John Carter books in an omnibus. I've got three Robert Ludlum classics in an omnibus. I've got the Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft (not actually complete, as it doesn't show the stuff that was credited to someone else but he ghost wrote. But I recently read a compilation of all of that stuff anyway.) Ever since I read the Dark Elf Trilogy earlier this year, I've been kind of in the mood to read Icewind Dale trilogy again too, even though I did about three years ago. I've got the Von Carsten trilogy in an omnibus. I've got the Mathias Thulman trilogy queued up and haven't read that in sixteen or more years. I've also still got the rest of the "T. H. Lain" D&D 3e iconics novels to read. 

Trying to decide which physical game books to read in the nearish term too. Like I said yesterday, I've already got three in my backpack, Monster Manual III, Into the Darklands and Dark Markets: Guide to Katapesh. I also want to read Horror Adventures and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft in the relatively near term, as part of a "Halloween read" if you will. After that, I still have, of course, Monster Manual IV and V and the Draconomicon for monstrous books, and the full complete series to read, as well as the psionics stuff. Those are all relatively short term 3.5 books that I've got targeted to read, but by short term, I mean between now and the end of the year and maybe even a little bit beyond.

I see that Occult Adventures is priced pretty low; less than $20. I'm tempted to scare up a hard copy of that book too.

Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting

It was a little bit of a slow slog, but I finished Paizo's Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting last night. This is a book that was the big 250+ hardcover version of their setting, but written before the PFRPG, so it's D&D 3.5 compatible, and meant as a campaign sourcebook for that. It also repeats a lot of the information from the Gazetteer, which I read not that long ago, although I never read that the first time around, so when I bought and read the Campaign Setting when it was new, I didn't realize that. Of course, I bought this when it was new, which was August 2008. I know for sure that I had it within a couple of months tops of when it was released, so sometimes early Fall 2008. That's now, of course, nearly twenty years ago, and until now, I don't think I'd read it cover to cover again since I first got it. Although I do know that I read portions of it here and there, but it had been many years since I'd picked it up and really looked through it seriously until now. I struggled just a bit because I felt like the material was either two repetitive of what I'd just read, or was too mechanical and not really what I was interested in anymore. That's still mostly, or at least partly, true. 

I had also thought that going through this it would make sense to do my Golarion Remixed project. That's how I did Eberron Remixed, after all, going through the campaign setting book and noting where I'd make changes. I didn't do that, and I don't think that I want to go through the setting book again after just having read it. I'm not sure if that means Golarion Remixed is on hiatus, or if it means that I just do it while flipping through the book to remind myself of what the content is. Mostly the changes are either really big more fairly minor, and for the really big ones, most of them are merely that I'm going to ignore that area. For instance, with Eberron Remixed, there are a lot fewer countries, so for something like Breland, for instance, I could tinker with the details of it. Golarion has a ton more countries, and they're designed so that they're much more modular; each one is almost a campaign setting in its own right with its own theme and tone, i.e., Ustalav is the horror (especially Gothic horror) setting heavily based on a Hammer Horror version of Transylvania translated into fantasy, whereas Varisia is the frontier region, Taldor is the decayed old late Byzantine Empire, Osirion is a resurgent ancient Egypt, etc. For many of the nations, I don't need to really change very much, because they're already fairly well situated as they are. A few others have too strong of a theme, and it needs to be toned down, because it's a little bit ridiculous how monolithic the theme comes across. Much of the "Greater Old Taldor" for instance, where Andoran, Galt and even Cheliax to some degree is a little too on the nose with their themes.

But a bunch of other areas, honestly, I don't know what I'd do with them. The theme doesn't really work for me, and there isn't enough detail to modify it, so I'd essentially just ignore that part of the map, except possibly the physical features and city names, but otherwise treat it as just either white space on the map, or generic fantasy countries, if for whatever reason PCs found themselves there. Which I can't imagine that I would, except possibly in a "passing through" situation, but even then, mostly what it means that I essentially excise that component from my Golarion Remixed, and it simply doesn't exist. Nations like Rahadoum, Thuvia, Druma, Razmiran, probably Hermia and a few others get this treatment. Others like Numeria, Irrisen, Nex, Geb, etc. I don't really have any changes in mind to make to them, but I also don't really have a ton of interest in that setting (or module, if you like) either, so there's no reason to list it and then not actually have any compelling changes to make to them either. In fact, I think that the whole idea that I could remix Golarion the same way I remixed Eberron may not be workable. Given that Golarian is essentially a whole bunch of modular smaller campaign settings hung together in a geography that isn't really relevant in most cases, because few campaigns cross from one "module" to another. If for some reason you want to create a campaign that does cross from one to another, you can modify the geography as needed. If I wanted to put Osirion adjacent to Taldor, for instance, I could, and why not? There's no reason to worry about going around through Qadira, or sailing by Absalom, or whatever. Sure, sure, I could, but there's no reason why I need to. That's the beauty of setting elements that are essentially modular.

Now, me calling them modular might be a little bit controversial. I don't know that Paizo themselves necessarily saw them that way when they created them. They did, after all, put them in a specific geography, and there are at least some adventure paths (although honestly not that many) that cross multiple modules. Heck, even the early Curse of the Crimson Throne technically dips its toe outside of Varisia into the Hold of Belkzen. Strange Aeons starts in Ustalav, but has a long bit of travel through Taldor, into various parts of Qadira and even Katapesh (and, of course, also the Dreamlands and Carcosa.) But those are the exceptions. Given that, maybe my Remix project needs to also be modular. For the Cult of Undeath, I essentially remixed Ustalav with my older Tarush Noptii modular setting element and ended up with Timischburg. While it's not exactly a 1:1 comparison to Ustalav, Timischburg does everything that Ustalav needs to do, at least, and I consider it "effectively" a remix, or at least a setting module that covers all of the same territory. In some respects, the Hill Country, or Humberland as I've started calling it, does something similar with Varisia; it also isn't meant to be a 1:1 comparison, but if you see Barrowmere as similar in many respects to Magnimar and Garenport as similar in many respects to Korvosa, and you can even use Burlharrow if needed as a kind of Sandpoint, then you can do anything in Varisia in Humberland instead without too much fuss. If anything, that remixing might be going the opposite direction; rather than attempting to make my elements match exactly the Paizo element, or whatever, I'm looking at the Paizo element and seeing if there's some part of the module that would make an interesting addition to my own. Do I want a Mushfens, or something similar in Humberland? Well, I've already got the Eltdown Fens, so probably not, but you get the idea. Something more like the Storval Plateau would be maybe a better element to borrow, but with the Tazitta Badlands, I've already got an area that can effectively offer the same kinds of things. I hadn't yet decided if I wanted to try and put my Curse of the Crimson Throne in Humberland, given that I've got a pretty different Grand Duke and Duchess situation compared to Ileosa and her nonsense, but I can either make an alternate version of it where I change the nature of the Grand Duke and his wife, or I set it after the events of Darkness in the Hill Country have already played out, and the both of them are now gone to be replaced with whatever new characters that can play the role of Eodred and Ileosa. Or, of course, since the AP takes place almost completely in the city, I can just set it somewhere else in my own setting, too. I kind of like maybe having it be a city-state on the Corsair Coast... with travel into Porhomok for the out of town stuff, but I'm not necessarily sold on any of these ideas yet. Doing it somewhere maybe a little more unexpected like Lomar or Volek Szemenok would be interesting too.

Actually, the more I think of it, the more I like Lomar. I can work in the Zobnan vs Nyxian culture clash as part of the drama while I'm at it, and maybe the problems with "Ileosa" can actually be the bigger problem that helps resolve that one way or another.

Next up on the Paizo Chronicles trawl is Gods and Magic which is pdf (although I have two physical books in a row on that trawl after that) and next up in physical game book reading is Monster Manual III from the 3.5 era. After kicking around Campaign Setting book for as long as I did, it's nice to move on.

Of course, it also occurs to me that there's no need to read the trawls completely in order. Lacking a compelling reason to pull them out of order, I'd rather not, but I can move stuff around if I have a need or desire to read something down-trawl earlier. I got a physical copy recently of Horror Adventures, which at the rate I'm going, I won't have scheduled to read for many months, but I'll probably read it in October, because .... because October, honestly. While I'm at it, I'd like to read Curse of Strahd and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft in October too. Of those, only Curse of Strahd is actually next in its trawl; the other two won't come up for many months. I especially don't want to read the Paizo Adventure Paths or Stand-Alone modules out of order (the first even more than the latter) but the other trawls I don't care nearly as much. I'll almost certainly also not read the Eberron or FR trawls out of order, and probably not the 5e campaigns. Everything else is subject to my whim, honestly.

Lovecraftian entities and demon lords

I've said many times over many years that Lovecraftian entities are basically equivalent, in D&D, to Demon Lords or other similar archfiends. But especially demon lords. Several months ago, I asked ChatGPT to generate some unique Lovecraftian entities for me so that I didn't feel the need to always just focus on Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Shub-Niggurath, etc. I had no idea if it was going to be any good or not, but I did it, and I had some results that weren't terrible, after I ignored a bunch of the results. They're not necessarily great either, but I had at least a few usable entities. 

More recently, I asked it to create demon lords for me, and the results were similar. In fact, they were so similar, that I'm honestly kind of hard pressed to see where one list begins and the other ends, honestly.

Let me document both lists here. I'm also using an AI rendering of an old Wayne Reynolds image of a famine spirit to represent one of the consumptive demon lords, even though it was described slightly differently in the text.

🜏 THE COSMIC AND PRIMAL ENTITIES — The Iron Idols

Name	Epithet / Aspect	Summary
Kholgorath	The Beast Beyond the Mountains	Primal earth-force, embodiment of strength, fertility, and slumbering hunger beneath mountains.
Urzathoon	The Devourer of Suns	Vast cosmic fire that consumes light and creation; analog of destructive solar energy.
Velkraith	Lord of the Red Obelisk	Titan of war and stone; represents violence fossilized into monuments.
Thunorak	Serpent of the Hollow Earth	Wyrm of the deep earth and gold veins; symbol of buried greed and endless burrowing.
Yraggul	Wolf Without Shadow	Predator-void of darkness; cycles of winter and death.
Zaltharion	Black Crowned King	God of dominion and necrotic kingship; lord of rulership through decay.
Mornath-Gul	Horned Flame	Living fire of transformation, renewal through destruction.

---

☿ THE EARTHBOUND EMANATIONS — The Ashen Circle of Veyrholm Vale

Name	Epithet / Aspect	Parent Idol	Summary
Orridathis	The Watcher Beneath Clay	Zaltharion	Guardian of memory and death; buried awareness beneath soil.
Elythagar	The Brine That Walks	Urzathoon	Cold inverse of solar fire; sea-born hunger and tidal rot.
Voruzethis	The Feast in Dust	Velkraith	Endless consumption of decay and war’s remnants.
Khaltheron	The Smoldering Veil	Mornath-Gul	Smoke-spirit of ruin; the ghost left behind after fire.
Drovanyth	The Crooked Root	Thunorak	Serpentine hunger turned vegetal; corruption within the soil.
Seryvokath	The Ashen Host	Yraggul	The wolf’s breath dispersed into a swarm of moths; silent consumption.
Ghorthalyx	The Carrion Crown	Zaltharion	Manifestation of death’s kingship; rot enthroned.
Zhulgrithan	The Mire That Breathes	Kholgorath	Living bog, respiration of the earth.
Throzkivar	The Ember-Womb	Mornath-Gul	Creation through destruction; new fire birthed from ashes.
Vraggonith	The Horn in Hollow Hills	Velkraith	Sound of petrified war echoing through caverns.
Khar-Ghoryn	The Silt That Devours	Urzathoon	Devouring darkness of rivers and estuaries; light drowned.
Vruz-Kathor	The Ashen Maw	Kholgorath	Subterranean hunger that persists after death of flesh.
Zhar-Khuneth	The Mourning Mire	Thunorak	The sorrow of the earth; decay felt as grief.

---

Original Demon Lords of the Abyss

1. XAL'GOROTH, THE KING IN THE LAST MIRROR

Demon Lord of Shadow, False Selves, Identity, and the Darkness Between

The mirror imagery has long since been abandoned. Xal'goroth is a tall, imposing humanoid figure formed entirely from absolute blackness—not black flesh, smoke, or stone, but something resembling solidified shadow and anti-light. His body seems to swallow illumination rather than merely block it, and the eye instinctively struggles to determine exactly where his form ends.

His entire body is bound in heavy, ancient chains, wrapped around his torso, arms, legs, and throat in layer upon layer. Some chains disappear into his shadowy flesh and emerge somewhere else, as though ordinary physical space does not quite apply to them.

Two enormous glowing red eyes burn from his otherwise featureless face. There are no visible pupils.

A jagged crown of black iron rests upon his head.

The longer one looks at Xal'goroth, the more difficult it becomes to remember what one's own face looks like.

Symbol: A pair of glowing red eyes surrounded by blackness and crossed chains.

Realm: The Shattered Dark, a lightless realm of enormous black monoliths, bottomless chasms, and impossible shadows that sometimes move independently of the objects casting them.

---

2. MORVATH, THE CROWN OF WORMS

Demon Lord of Parasites, Rot, Infestation, and Consumption

Morvath is an enormous, bloated humanoid corpse with gray-green flesh stretched tightly over his swollen body. His abdomen has split open into a deep cavity, within which countless pale worms writhe.

His face is vaguely human but horribly distended, with sunken yellow eyes, a flattened nose, and a mouth filled with small, irregular teeth. His scalp is completely hairless, except for thin pale worms that emerge from the skin like living hair.

A corroded golden crown has grown through his skull.

His body constantly produces parasites that crawl across him and disappear beneath his skin. Occasionally, one seems to emerge from a place where no opening exists.

Morvath does not represent death. He represents the refusal of living matter to remain properly dead.

Symbol: A worm coiled beneath a corroded crown.

Realm: The Feast Eternal, an immense swamp filled with rotting forests, drowned cities, fossilized bones, and stagnant waters beneath which enormous things occasionally move.

---

3. THE VELVET MAW

Demon Lord of Addiction, Obsession, Pleasure, and Hunger

The Velvet Maw is a gigantic, grotesquely corpulent humanoid demon seated upon an extravagant throne of gold, bone, and accumulated treasures.

Its body is enormous, but its head is strangely small and almost delicate by comparison. Six jeweled eyes stare from its pale, hairless face.

Its defining feature is the enormous vertical mouth running down the front of its torso, stretching from its lower abdomen almost to its throat. Thick crimson lips surround several rows of narrow teeth, while the interior disappears into an apparently bottomless darkness.

It has only two arms, both long and elegant, ending in delicate hands. It uses them to offer food, jewels, beautiful objects, intoxicants, and other temptations.

It wears magnificent crimson and purple velvet robes, though portions of the garment disappear into the darkness of its great mouth.

Those who spend too long in its presence begin to experience a disturbing certainty that the mouth is looking at them, even when its eyes are facing elsewhere.

Symbol: A crimson vertical mouth.

Realm: The Palace of Every Desire, a vast and beautiful city where every conceivable pleasure can be obtained, yet nothing ever satisfies its inhabitants for long.

---

4. KHARZUN, THE ASHEN GENERAL

Demon Lord of Conquest, War, Military Glory, and Betrayal

Kharzun is an immense, powerfully built humanoid demon with six arms, an exception to the otherwise predominantly humanoid anatomy of the Demon Lords.

His skin is dark charcoal gray, cracked like cooled volcanic stone. His head resembles a stern, elongated human skull covered in blackened flesh, with six swept-back horns forming a crown around his head.

He wears the armor of countless defeated civilizations, each piece bearing unfamiliar heraldry. Some symbols are recognizable as the insignia of kingdoms that never existed in the mortal world.

Each of his six hands carries a different weapon: spear, sword, axe, mace, whip, and a black war-banner mounted on a lance.

Kharzun does not fight like a beast. He fights like a perfect general, studying the movements of his enemies with an unsettling patience.

Sometimes, his six weapons move before he has consciously decided to strike.

Symbol: Six crossed weapons beneath a burning crown.

Realm: The Thousand Battlefields, an endless continent where armies of demons, mortals, and stranger things wage wars whose causes have been forgotten for ages.

---

5. ULMOG, THE SLEEPING MOUNTAIN

Demon Lord of Earthquakes, Collapse, Ruins, and Buried Things

Ulmog is a colossal humanoid demon whose body is composed of black volcanic stone.

He is so enormous that mountains rise from his shoulders and back. Rivers of molten rock flow through cracks in his body. Ancient ruins are buried within his flesh.

His enormous head rests among the mountains. His face is broad and primitive, almost resembling a weathered statue of some forgotten god.

At the center of his forehead is one colossal closed eye.

It has never been seen open.

Or, at least, no surviving mortal remembers seeing it open.

Entire civilizations have unknowingly built temples and cities upon his sleeping body.

Symbol: A closed eye beneath a mountain.

Realm: The Fallen Deep, a subterranean world of collapsed civilizations, buried temples, shifting mountains, and enormous fossilized bones whose owners are unknown.

---

6. SYRAXIS, THE WIDOW OF STARS

Demon Lord of Darkness, Isolation, Lost Travelers, and Cosmic Terror

Syraxis is a towering, skeletal humanoid woman with jet-black bones and unnaturally elongated limbs.

Her rib cage is enormous, and within it floats a tiny but complete galaxy, slowly rotating inside her chest.

Her skull is smooth and almost featureless except for two brilliant white stars burning within its eye sockets.

Behind her hangs a vast cloak resembling a spiderweb woven from darkness and silver threads. Eight long, skeletal spider limbs emerge from beneath it.

Syraxis hunts the lost—not simply those who have lost their way, but those who have become separated from reality itself.

Her victims sometimes see familiar stars in her realm.

They are always in the wrong places.

Symbol: A black star caught in a silver web.

Realm: The Lightless Expanse, an infinite darkness scattered with drifting ruins, dead worlds, wrecked vessels, and enormous shapes moving far beyond the visible stars.

---

7. GRINN, THE LAUGHING PLAGUE

Demon Lord of Madness, Cruelty, Mockery, and Maniacal Laughter

Grinn is a tall, lean humanoid with an unnerving combination of human and alien characteristics.

His skin is a strange blue-violet coloration, mottled with patches of pale gray. Beneath it, faint luminous patterns occasionally pulse like bioluminescent organs.

His limbs and proportions are mostly human, although his fingers are slightly too long and his joints bend just a little farther than they should.

His face is unmistakably humanoid but grotesquely exaggerated.

His mouth is far too wide, extending almost to his ears, and contains numerous rows of thin, sharp teeth.

His eyes are large, yellow-green, and slightly too far apart.

He is almost always smiling.

He is almost always laughing.

And he finds absolutely everything funny.

Grinn's laughter is contagious, but the true horror is psychological: people exposed to him gradually lose the ability to distinguish something being funny from something being horrible.

Symbol: A wide, tooth-filled smile.

Realm: The House of Laughter, an immense, decaying city where every building contains theaters, banquet halls, and chambers filled with people laughing at things that happened long ago.

---

8. VORGATHA, THE IRON MOTHER

Demon Lord of Tyranny, Slavery, Oppression, and Obedience

Vorgatha is a colossal female humanoid demon clad in heavy black iron.

Her body remains fundamentally humanoid, though her lower legs gradually become tangled masses of living chains that trail behind her.

Her face is severe and almost beautiful, but her eyes are narrow vertical openings glowing with white furnace-light.

Long iron chains emerge from her scalp and hang around her shoulders like hair.

Her abdomen contains a visible furnace-like cavity, glowing with an intense white heat.

She wears no crown.

She needs none.

Those who serve her eventually begin to find themselves instinctively kneeling whenever they hear her approaching footsteps.

Symbol: An iron fist wrapped in chains.

Realm: The Iron Dominion, an endless landscape of fortresses, mines, prisons, and enormous industrial structures whose architecture seems designed according to geometries that are uncomfortable for the human eye.

---

9. THAUMRAX, THE EATER OF MAGIC

Demon Lord of Arcane Hunger, Forbidden Knowledge, Magical Corruption, and the Destruction of Magic

Thaumrax is an enormous serpentine humanoid, roughly twenty feet tall when fully reared.

His lower body is a powerful serpent's tail, while his upper body is muscular and humanoid.

His skin is matte black with subtle iridescent blue and violet highlights, as though it absorbs the colors around him.

His elongated humanoid face has four glowing violet eyes, with two smaller eyes positioned above the primary pair.

Six enormous horns grow backward from his skull. They resemble blackened, petrified magical crystals, with faint violet light moving through cracks within them.

His mouth appears normal when closed.

When he opens it, however, there is no tongue, throat, or anatomy inside. There is only an endless starless void.

He wears the tattered robes of an impossibly ancient sorcerer, covered with arcane writing in languages both forgotten and unknown.

Thaumrax consumes spells.

He does not merely dispel them. He feeds upon the magic itself.

Symbol: A black serpent coiled around a blank spellbook.

Realm: The Library That Devours, an endless labyrinth of forbidden books, impossible manuscripts, and libraries built within the fossilized remains of creatures larger than mountains.

---

10. NEMETHRA, THE BRIDE OF THE GALLOWS

Demon Lord of Murder, Execution, Betrayal, and Ritual Death

Nemethra is a towering, corpse-pale humanoid woman wearing a once-beautiful white wedding gown that has become ancient, filthy, and severely tattered.

The gown hangs from her body in shredded layers.

Her head is covered by a stark white executioner's hood, weathered and stained, with dark openings through which two faintly glowing eyes can be seen.

Her arms are long and unnaturally elegant, ending in enormous hands tipped with elongated black claws.

She carries a gigantic headsman's axe, its broad blade almost absurdly large even for her imposing stature.

Her neck is visibly broken, permanently twisted at an unnatural angle.

Behind her head floats a rusted iron halo shaped like a gallows.

Nemethra considers execution a sacred ceremony. To her, murder without ritual is merely wasteful.

Symbol: A noose arranged like a wedding ring.

Realm: The Hanging Gardens, beautiful gardens of pale flowers growing among endless forests of gallows and ruined wedding chapels.

---

11. BUL-KARAK, THE GOD BELOW THE SKIN

Demon Lord of Mutation, Transformation, Alien Flesh, and Bodily Horror

Bul-Karak is a massive, vaguely humanoid creature with an extraordinarily muscular body.

His skin is almost entirely absent, exposing dark red and violet musculature beneath.

His anatomy is disturbingly incomplete. Bones occasionally shift visibly beneath his muscles, and organs appear to move into different positions while he stands.

His head is vaguely human but elongated, with a completely exposed brain visible beneath a translucent membrane.

Several additional eyes have grown irregularly along his shoulders and chest.

None of them blink at the same time.

His hands remain humanoid, but his fingers can lengthen, divide, and rejoin.

Bul-Karak does not simply mutate living things.

He believes that the human body is itself an unfinished mistake.

Symbol: A hand emerging from beneath stretched skin.

Realm: The Living Crucible, where forests grow from bone, mountains pulse like organs, and the landscape continually changes its anatomy.

---

12. NIVARAK, THE PALE HUNGER

Demon Lord of Starvation, Winter, Famine, and Cannibalism

Nivarak is a gigantic, skeletal humanoid covered in tightly stretched white skin.

His body is gaunt almost beyond comprehension, yet he possesses enormous physical strength.

His ribs protrude from his chest, while his abdomen is a hollow cavity containing a small blue-white flame.

His head is essentially human in shape but stretched and narrow, crowned by enormous antlers made from translucent ice.

His jaw can split into four sections when he feeds.

He wears the remnants of ancient fur garments and carries no weapon.

He does not need one.

The cold follows him.

Symbol: A skeletal mouth containing a snowflake.

Realm: The White Silence, an endless frozen wilderness where nothing grows and distant shapes sometimes move beneath the ice.

---

13. KETHRIEL, THE THIEF OF TOMORROW

Demon Lord of Stolen Futures, Ruined Destiny, and Broken Prophecy

Kethriel is a tall, elegant humanoid demon with pale bronze skin covered in faint patterns resembling cracks in ancient marble.

His face is almost beautiful but completely expressionless.

He has no eyes.

Instead, two narrow vertical black slits occupy the places where his eyes should be.

Six enormous ivory horns grow from the back of his skull, curving around his head like a broken halo.

Kethriel has two arms, each ending in long, elegant claws.

From his hands trail countless strands of luminous golden thread.

Each thread represents a possible future.

Some are beautiful.

Some are terrible.

Some end abruptly.

Kethriel carries a long ceremonial blade with which he cuts futures away from living creatures.

Behind him hangs an enormous, ghostly tapestry depicting possible histories that never occurred.

Symbol: A golden thread severed by a black blade.

Realm: The Unhappened, a landscape filled with cities that were never built, graves of people who were never born, and ruins belonging to civilizations that exist only as possibilities.

---

14. DRAKAROS, THE BLACK ADMIRAL

Demon Lord of Piracy, Shipwrecks, Mutiny, and Drowned Treasure

Drakaros is a gigantic humanoid demon with the lower body of an enormous squid.

His upper body resembles that of an immensely powerful, weather-beaten pirate captain.

His skin is dark blue-gray and covered in scars and barnacles.

His head has a long, predatory shape, somewhere between human and shark.

He has rows of sharp teeth, one glowing green eye resembling a lantern, and one completely black eye.

A battered black admiral's coat hangs from his shoulders.

A cracked crown is incorporated into his old black tricorn hat.

His tentacles coil around an enormous rusted anchor.

Sometimes, sailors hear bells ringing from beneath the water before Drakaros appears.

There are no bells in his ships.

Symbol: A black anchor beneath a broken crown.

Realm: The Drowned Fleet, an endless black ocean filled with wrecked ships, drowned cities, and vast shapes moving beneath the waves.

---

15. YSSARAK, THE CRAWLING TYRANT

Demon Lord of Civilization, Urban Corruption, Decay, Greed, and Collective Horror

Yssarak is a gigantic humanoid rat demon, approximately fifteen feet tall.

He has a massively muscular humanoid body covered in mangy charcoal-gray and black fur.

His face is distinctly rat-like, with a long muzzle, enormous pointed ears, black whiskers, glowing yellow-orange eyes, and huge rodent incisors.

Two twisted horns curve backward from his skull.

His hands end in long black claws, and his long hairless tail drags behind him.

He wears heavy, scavenged armor assembled from rusted iron, broken gates, chains, pieces of weapons, and fragments of ceremonial objects stolen from conquered civilizations.

Upon his head rests a massive, crooked iron crown, decorated with tiny representations of towers and gates.

Yssarak represents civilization at its ugliest: greed, overcrowding, disease, corruption, violence, and the endless hunger of cities that consume everything around them.

Symbol: A horned rat beneath a crooked iron crown.

Realm: The Crawling Metropolis, an enormous Abyssal landscape of filthy streets, leaning towers, ruined districts, overflowing sewers, and labyrinthine structures whose inhabitants have forgotten who built them.

Tarzan cover art (Friday Art Attack)

I've been looking in to some of the brands and trade dress and cover artists who were popular in the field when I was a kid and teenager, really getting in to fantasy and science fiction (but especially fantasy. Although keep in mind that through the 80s, they were not actually branded as two different things yet.) The traditional publishing industry has become incredibly cancerous; it can't seem to publish anything that I really want to save its life--literally; the industry is dying on the vine--but in the 80s that was not true. Not only was it publishing a lot of stuff that I liked, but in the used book market, I was still finding stuff that had been published in the 60s and 70s. Not to mention the fact that some of what I bought in the 80s were second (or more) printings of what has originally came out in the 70s. Some of my favorites:

TSR was a surprisingly prolific, or at least it was surprising to me, of fantasy novels in the 80s, and some of their novels, like the original Icewind Dale trilogy by R. A. Salvatore and the original Dragonlance trilogy by Weis and Hickman, were genuine best-sellers. Because of this, the TSR in house artists became very well-known in the fantasy world; Larry Elmore did the Dragonlance covers, as well as the first Icewind Dale book, although Clyde Caldwell and Jeff Easley did the third. Elmore did all of the Dragonlance books.

Tor Books published the Conan pastiches during the 80s, including by many of them written by Robert Jordan. Jordan later turned Tor into a real fantasy powerhouse, of course, in the 90s with his Wheel of Time series. Wheel of Time, of course, had the Darrell K. Sweet covers. He was one of the most important fantasy cover artists of the 70s and 80s, and you could hardly pick up a random half dozen or so fantasy books during those decades without getting a Sweet cover or two. He was so prolific, that estimates of how many of his pieces ended up in print are over 1,000 and up to nearly 3,000. Not only these, but he did the 80s versions of Lord of the Rings, Thomas Covenant, and many more; some of the most popular and well-known works in print. The only cover artist who may challenge him for recognizability is Michael Whelan, but even then, I think Sweet was more easily recognizable and iconic, and the books he did were bigger than ones Whelan did. Not that that's a slight on Whelan; he did the 80s prints of the John Carter books, which I love, for instance, and he did the Pern books, which while kind of forgotten today (it seems) were extremely popular in the 80s.

Ballantine Books, which was owned by Random House but operated as a more or less independent brand since the early 70s, published a lot of my favorite books in the 80s. They also developed the Del Rey brand specifically for genre works, but not everything I have was Del Rey. Lord of the Rings was, at least the version that I grew up with. But the Tarzan books were notably published by Ballantine.

That's what I'm warming up to, actually; The black label Tarzan reprints by Ballantine, which started in the mid to late 70s and remained in print throughout the 80s are some of my favorite "fantasy" covers, and I absolutely love them. I don't have the full set, but I have many of them. Neal Adams was originally contracted to do all twenty-four Tarzan covers, but it became clear that the deadlines were too aggressive, so they split the series, and Adams ended up doing twelve and Boris Vallejo--another very prolific 80s artist--did the other twelve. Today, I'm going to post all twelve Adams covers as a Friday Art Attack. Wow, these were just great. I miss the trade dress and branding of the 80s. I don't feel like modern books really sell their content with the same gusto. Which I wouldn't do either if I were trying to sell that kind of woke slop that is much of what's getting published. I find that I'm honestly more interested in chasing older books in older printings most of the time. The time where publishers, cover artists, and to some degree even authors are strong brands in their own right seems to be over, and it's all a sea of sludge nowadays.