Reading and writing

What a terrible, terrible week. But it's over. Luckily, or I don't know if this is lucky, but it was convenient for me at least today, my wife has had a terrible time too. Both of us had little energy to spend on anything, emotionally or physically. Other than mowing the lawn, I spent most of the day today (Saturday) just reading, because that's all I had the will to do. Of course, that meant that I made some pretty good progress on my reading trawls.

Curse of the Crimson Throne: I finished volumes five and six, so the last, of this adventure path. ("Skeletons of Scarwall" and "Crown of Fangs.") I read the original 3.5 version, but I also have kicking around the consolidated and updated Pathfinder 1e pdf too. But I thought reading the original versions of these was the way to go. I've now have read five complete 3.5 adventure paths: Shackled City, Age of Worms, Savage Tide, Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne. There are only two 3.5 adventure paths left, unless there's some third party adventure path that I'm not aware of floating around out there: Second Darkness and Legacy of Fire. After that, of course, it switches to Pathfinder 1e, but the systems are so similar that I don't expect to even notice the difference (I mostly only skim the stats anyway.) I've read some of those before, and they read exactly like 3.5 adventure paths. It actually feels nice to be making a lot of progress on these. While I don't actually love any of the adventure paths explicitly as written, they all have plenty of good ideas, and the scope and scale of them is pretty impressive. There's lots to borrow from. Of course, the ones that I've read are considered among the most highly regarded. The next one to read is one of the... less highly regarded, let's just say. 

After reading that, I picked up the relatively slim Elves of Golarion from the Pathfinder Companion series. These are all 36 pages, in theory, although in reality they have less pages than that of actual reading. The Companion series focuses on player stuff, so how to roleplay an elf and here's some extra rules for flavor, etc. It was... OK. I don't generally have a ton of use for that kind of book, and I only bought a few of them in their original physical release; I did go back eventually and fill out my collection with pdfs, though. (That said, the next three or so in the series are ones that I did buy. But they're regional books. Of course, they were later updated/replaced with the lengthier Pathfinder Chronicles, later Pathfinder Campaign Setting book on the same topic. Anyway.) Elves in Golarion are a bit different than what you see in most other D&D settings, but not too different, so they feel familiar with just a few minor twists. Although only vaguely hinted at here, it is vaguely hinted at that the elves come from another world, which it turns out is actually Castrovel, the Pathfinder version of pulp science fiction Venus. So yeah. Elves are actually aliens from a science-fictiony version of Venus as it was imagined in the 40s and 50s by authors like Leigh Brackett. But other than that, they're surprisingly similar to D&D elves, or whatever. Anyway, I don't know if I think that this twist is really clever and interesting, or a bit too clever to be interesting.

I also read the similarly slim module "Blood of Freeport". Like most of the other third party Freeport modules that I've read so far (Vengeance in, and Gangs of) it wasn't very D&D like; your antagonists were all humans, and the set-up was simple thriller or crime style stories. Very little that was magical or fantastic was introduced; in this one, the only element was a few magical portions of a trap (that could be easily replaced or ignored) and some dinosaurs that were smuggled in crates to cause trouble (any other dangerous wild animal could accomplish the same thing, though.) This isn't a complaint; too much of the official Freeport stuff is too gonzo and fantastic to fit the tone that Freeport claims to have, in my opinion, so having some stuff that is deliberately kept free of that to mix in works quite well. This module was also somewhat railroady, although I suspect that the author wouldn't think so since he went out of his way to describe more than one optional result after giving you some choices. But this just made it feel like a computer game flowchart or Choose Your Own Adventure book rather than the real freedom that a module can provide. Again, that's not really a complaint either, just something to be aware of. I'd like to take stock of all of the Freeport stuff once I'm done reading it and see what I'd potentially use in my Curse of the Corsair Coast campaign, assuming I can remember the details of some of the adventures and adventure seeds that I've read. This one can get a note as a potential scenario to use, but I'd almost certainly have to modify it to work the way that I run anyway.

I feel like this makes it sound like I didn't like this module. That isn't true, I thought it was fine for what it was; a relatively small, slim scenario to be run in between some other stuff. When I'm reading, however, full campaign adventure paths around it, it's brevity is both refreshing but limiting. But it does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Also, oh, ChatGPT. Is it just me or do all four of those guys look like they have the same face, and are some of those rapiers really pointing in the wrong direction relative to their hilts? You get what you pay for, I suppose. 

What I have not read this weekend was any more of Prisoner of the Horned Helmet or Oath of Nerull the physical and Kindle novels that I'm reading respectively, or Fiend Folio (3e) the physical gamebook that I've been carrying around for a few weeks. I guess there's still tomorrow. Maybe I'll end up finishing at least one more book before the weekend is over and I have to go back to the increasingly intolerable grind. I really don't know what's happened with work. I've been in my current job for two years. For a year and a half, it was a big improvement over the job that I left to come here in terms of quality of life and stress, etc. But now, it's been considerably worse than the one I left for the better part of six months. It's really time to win the lottery or something. If I'd been smarter when I was younger, I'd feel more confident in just retiring now, but I feel like I need to keep working. I'm only 54, and my savings isn't great, it's just adequate, and my mortgage isn't paid down like at all. If I can afford to retire in ten more years, I think I'll be lucky. Sigh.

Of course, retirement can take many forms, and may include, at least for a while, some part time work too. Less stress and keeping enough of paycheck coming in that living off of my leaner than I'd like 401(k), leaner than I'd like pension and social security might not be a drop in quality of life financially at all.

UPDATE: I didn't say everything about reading and nothing about writing; I kind of got sidetracked. Well, it's my blog, and it's easy to add an update. I also skimmed most of the Freeport Companions, and as expected, there's no reason to read more of them after having read the d20 one. The Pathfinder (1e) one in particular feels like it hardly is different from the d20 one, which honestly, it shouldn't be anyway. 

Speaking of which, the next book on my Freeport Trawl is "Peril in Freeport" a 69 page pdf by Adamant that's the first product (other than the companions) that's explicitly written to be Pathfinder compatible. Every other product so far has been either system neutral or 3.5. I knew it was coming, but here we are. I'm almost at the monstrously huge Freeport: City of Adventure; the Pathfinder compatible update to the systemless Pirate's Guide. I've had this on pdf for many years, but never read it. I think I assumed that it was mostly just a combination of the Pirate's Guide and the Pathfinder companion in a single volume, but we'll see. I kind of think that they may have forwarded the timeline a bit and updated the setting. Just a tad, anyway. We'll see. After I read that, I mostly just have the Adventure Path to read, which I'm quite excited about. I bought the single volume in pdf from DriveThru just a few months or so ago, and I kind of am a little bit sad that I don't have all of the individual releases, but it didn't make sense to track those down when Return to Freeport was on sale at a huge discount when I got it. I still listed them individually, though, and I will probably mark them as separate books on my read count as I finish the sections that were originally published as separate books. I usually do the same when reading any omnibus.

I've also written three of the six campaign briefs as brief pages here on the blog. The next three... well, I'd have to build them from scratch. Which I probably can do, of course, but it's more work. They'll be a little slower to get added. Complete are Cult of Undeath, Darkness In the Hill Country and Terror in Timischburg (complete as briefs, I mean. More work required before I can actually run any of them except Darkness In the Hill Country which is ready to go right now.) Curse of the Corsair Coast (which will borrow heavily from the Freeport stuff, by design) probably won't be done until I finish the Freeport Trawl, but Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes and Icy Graves of Hyperborea may be easier to do. Keep an eye open for those in the next few weeks... if work doesn't kill me first.

Next wave of banners, and new pages

Because I had banners for it, I created a permanent "page" on the blog for Cult of Undeath, the original campaign brief. I'll do one for each of the campaigns that I've thought of eventually, but first let me noodle with potential banners to include. I want to update the Darkness in the Hill Country banner, so here's some alternatives to that, with the fonts included. The decorative runes or script is the R'lyehian font, and the initial main font is 1492 Quadrata lim, one of my favorited "alternative ShadowDark" fonts. (ShadowDark and before that Labyrinth Lord use JSL Blackletter. While I like that well enough, I want to have something similar but not identical, so I tend to avoid it.)

I'll probably keep the same decorative script along the bottom and just mess with some alternatives for the main text. This next one uses the Backbone font. Slightly less decorative, and one that I've been using for the Old Night and Shadow of Old Night labels already.

This next one is simply called Blackletter. I also have a similar Blackletter HPLHS, made by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, but I think I'll just run an option with this one for now. I wish it were just a little bit "messier" looking, instead of having clean lines. I like the letters better than the Quadrata lim, but I like how Quadrata lim looks... eroded, for lack of a better descriptor.

I'm on the fence about this one. The font is called MonksWriting. It's similar, but a little less decorative, and yet.. somehow maybe even harder to read.

It helps to know more or less what I want so I can trial similar fonts and see what I like. This one is called Older Dictator. It's pretty "fat" looking, but I otherwise kind of like it. I doubt it's my favorite, but it looked better than I expected, so I'll let it sit and stew for a while and see what I think of it later.

This one is Dioszeghiensis Regular, which is a mouthful of a font name. I like it a lot, and it is messier looking, but maybe almost too messy looking for the color and shadow effects that I'm putting on it. If these banners were just black on white, some of these fonts would work better, I have to admit. The color scheme works well for this blog, though, which is what I need these pages to do. I can always adapt them later to cleaner black on white with no drop shadow, or more muted drop shadow, if I want to.

Another attempt at a messy Medieval blackletter font, this time Fran Sancisco Hilton. Same commentary applies here as above.

For the final one, I'm going to try Sovereign, or Sovereign Regular, as it seems to be labeled differently depending on how you look at it.

UPDATE: The more I look at these, the more convinced I am that actually, I think I do want simpler without the effects, i.e., if I do a gradiant font, it will just be dark gray to black and fairly subtle, and I'll get rid of the drop shadow effect which is cool looking, but which doesnt' help readability in complex blackletter decorative fonts, I don't think.

Here's three options for Terror In Timischburg. All of them are B&W (or grayscale, at least). Lovecraft's Diary is the name of the runic font. The first one is Guerra_Santa for the main title, which is one where I often can't resist using the underscores, which look like those shields. The second one is the Blackletter HPLHS, which is nearly identical but a little bigger and broader than Blackletter, another font that I got somewhere. The last one is Sovereign, which I'm determined to find a place to use, because I quite like it. This might be the one where it comes in first.

Campaign Banners and Briefs

I'm going to write up some new campaign briefs, even though I don't yet have a solid idea on what exactly each of the potential Old Night campaigns will look like yet. But first, I want to have some solid banners for them, because I like having them. I'm going to go a little more with my current banner style, so let's see how these work. I may have more than one option for each.

Cult of Undeath A uses the Necrofonticon runes on the top, JungleSlang runes on the bottom, and the Kothika font for the main title. Add some drop and inner shadow and extra outline on the main title, and it looks pretty good. I made it transparent so I can use it over background images, but that might make it hard to read on a black background.

This next one simply swaps the Kothika for LLPaladin. I also noticed that I accidentally outlined the drop shadow, so I didn't do it this time. Let me try the Kothika one more time with the outline and drop shadow applications reversed.

Huh. That doesn't look quite as different as I'd thought. Rather subtle. Of course, I also increased the opacity of the drop shadow a bit. I'm not sure that I have a favorite between them, or care even about the difference. Let's try one more Cult of Undeath main font, and then I'll switch to another campaign.

This one uses Season of the Witch Black, which is a relatively chunky looking font. I think that's enough for this one. I might need alternative color schemes too, depending on where I want to use it. But I like this one for now, and it looks good with the blog, at least.

This Curse of the Corsair Coast banner uses CybertronianFinal for the runes and Treasure Map Deadhand for the text. For the one below, I swapped the main text to Treasure Hunt PERSONAL USE, which is just slightly more ragged looking than the very similar Treasure Hunt. I'm obviously going for a bit of a Pirates of the Caribbean look on this one. Let me try a couple more options. I have a lot of piratey fonts, although many of them are actually quite similar to each other.

This one is called The Rum is Gone. I like how the lower case Os are skulls. Given that it's an all caps style font, I probably should have had some upper case Os to mix it up. Let's try one more that's a bit of a different style...

This one is Sovereign, and it's surprisingly not quite as legible.

This is a lot of banners, even though I've got several more campaigns to do. I'm only a third of the way done! I'll continue to think about it, #3 for Cult of Undeath and #1 for Curse of the Corsair Coast, at least right now. Let's see if I decide late to change my mind. 

Polycrisis

I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of a "polycrisis" or not. If not, it's a pretty self-explanatory word, really. I heard it recently in the political commentary sphere, where it's being used to refer to the state of the current Democrat party. But as expected, it refers to a kind of perfect storm; multiple crises converging at the same time where the impact of the total is more than just the sum of the impacts of the individual crises. I kind of feel like that's what my life has been like the last few weeks. A family crisis of surprising magnitude. A short term financial crisis. Two separate work crises. I've been completely unable to even think much about my hobbies, much less accomplish anything useful. About a week or so ago, I did finish the d20 Freeport Companion, so I'll talk just a little bit about that before I forget the details.

I don't actually play d20 anymore, of course (or 3.5) but I could, as I've mentioned in some of my low fantasy posts recently. Because of that, and because of my additional more charitable feelings towards the system due to my rereading of much of it, I found the Companion as interesting to read this time as it was when I first read it nearly twenty years ago. (When it was new. I got it while it was still the d20 Freeport Companion, but once 4e launched in 2008 and the d20 license was canceled, it was renamed the 3rd Era Freeport Companion and the old d20 licensing image was replaced with an OGL Compatible unofficial alternative. That one is still available, I believe, on DrivethruRPG or the Green Ronin store. Albeit, in my opinion, at a pretty overblown price point. ~$15 for a pdf for a system that it's not clear how many people are even still using? ~$30 for a POD softcover? I mean, I know this was nearly twenty years ago now, but a book this size shouldn't have sold more for than $20 as a softbound book when it was new, I wouldn't think, and if PDF is half of that, that's a more reasonable.

Too much of the book is new feats, no skills or skill uses and new spells. That's pretty par for the course for this kind of product, but it takes up a lot of space and you're not likely to use much of it. There are, however, a number of pretty cool classes, including several new base classes; a corsair (like a swashbuckling duelist), a survivalist (a less supernatural and less Kung Fu monk. I had forgotten how big a deal Kung Fu was on TV, but it started in 1972 and ran through 1975, right when D&D was first being released. I watched it myself in syndication in either the late 70s or early 80s, so it was fresh to me when I discovered D&D just as it was to Gygax when he wrote it.) There's also a full 20-level assassin, and a few others... some of them are even quite good. There's a shorter (shorter than the earlier d20 Call of Cthulhu ones, which were replicated in Unearthed Arcana at least) madness/sanity ruleset, which I still think is probably a bit overblown, but which is mercifully shorter than what was otherwise in print. There's a bunch of monsters, almost all if not all (I didn't check) were from the Creatures of Freeport book. There's a brief discussion of why they didn't include naval combat rules, and referred to you one of three already otherwise in print at the time, and there's a decent little adventure. 

It's mostly interesting to you, unsurprisingly, if you play D&D 3.5, or d20 as the license called it. Which, of course, I did for many, many years (2000-2018 or so) but even though I probably wouldn't use it again, I still found it interesting to review and refresh myself on it. I'm still not sure exactly how I'll do the other Companions, but I'll at least skim them. I think I got them on some Humble Bundle or some other kind of deal years and years ago.

That ChatGPT image is a little too DEI for my taste, but what the heck. You get what you pay for.

Banners

Thinking about swapping my banner again. I get tired and want to switch it up every so often. I also just got a load of new fonts, so I'm trying some of them out. I'm also going to put the current banner; the three new options are similar.

The original up top is pretty good. I obviously faded the background more; (I didn't realize that when I was making the new ones) and used a different, and additionally faded glyphic font in the background. The Backbone font, which I used, is kind of a classic for Old Night now.

The next one is pretty cool, but probably too flowery for what I'm looking for. The third one is pretty good, but I think the fourth one, with the slight splattery effect, is probably my favorite of the bunch. I think maybe I need a more faded background so that the title itself stands out more, though. Maybe I'll rework it before adopting it. I'll think about it.

Here's another alternate using that same font. It has a bit more going on in the background, but it's also more faded, so it just looks like background noise a bit more.

Reading

My whole world has caught on fire the last month or so. I will end up spending less than 48 hours at home in four weeks total when I'm finally done traveling for work emergencies and extended family emergencies. I have not been able to read as much as I'd like, and I've pretty much given up on trying to play SWTOR for the time being. It's been a catastrophe. I've been busy, very, very stressed, very frustrated, and simply not in a good mood for a long time. But I have managed to at least read a little. I finished Buccaneers of Freeport and have read about a third so far of the d20 Freeport Companion. Which you can't exactly buy under that title anymore, but you can get a pdf at least of the 3rd Era Freeport Companion which is the same book, just retitled and slightly modified on the cover. I bought it years and years ago before the old d20 license went caput, so I have the older, original title. 

I found, or remember, more accurately, that the rules are very specific to d20/D&D of the 3.5 edition. I suspect that the other companions are significantly different after all, although I've never really read them in detail, although also that they're so ingrained with the system that they're almost meaningless to someone who doesn't play that system. But now I'm concerned that I might possibly miss something if I don't at least do a (relatively) thorough skimming of the books, so I'll probably do that. Sigh. Let me load those pdfs on my tablet before I go out of town again later this week. I'm really determined to finish reading the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path while traveling too, so two more adventures to read. I haven't, on the other hand, touched my novels, but I have a lot of those in my backpack too right now.

All of this is a big pain. I'm getting hit up to run my "piratey" themed game by some of my gaming group, and I've had to tell them to wait for a while... after I've been hoping to get a chance to run it for a couple of months now. My plan for that is to run a very loosely adapted version of the Freeport Trilogy, followed by possibly some other Freeport modules or other related type of modules or adventures or just stuff that I come up with, if necessary. The Freeport official modules are pretty hit or miss; I'm excited about half of them, more or less, and I'd never run the other half. And even the stuff that I would run would be heavily modified.

I've got other seafaring material too, of course, like the Savage Tide adventure path that I read last year, or the Serpent's Skull adventure path that I read several years ago. Heck, I've still for the Pathfinder regular 6-part style Green Ronin adventure path, Return to Freeport. Actually, getting to that, even though it's at the end of the Trawl, was what I was probably most excited about reading. I needed, of course, to get there by getting the context of reading the other material, including some that I'd never read to date, before reading it, but I now have the final goal in sight. 

UPDATE: That's a crappy looking image. Maybe I'll replace it shortly. UPDATE II: Screw it. I'll use an old Eberron image from my blog history. UPDATE III: OK, got a better ChatGTP image.

What is "dark fantasy?"

First off, I'm actually having a little bit better luck reading than I thought. Not nearly as much as I'd like, but slightly better than I thought. I'll likely be able to finish Buccaneers of Freeport today, and hopefully finish "Skeletons of Scarwall" before heading back home at the end of the weekend. Not a bad showing for having to travel for a very specific and very busy task that has occupied my free time a lot. I feel like the Freeport Trawl is actually getting close to finishing, although I still have some big chunks to swallow coming up. After I finish Buccaneers, I've got the companions to read. In theory, they should all be more or less the same, as they are about adapting the systemless Freeport setting book to various systems. I'll read the d20 one in detail, but probably skim all of the rest to ensure that I'm not missing anything. They also come with an included small adventure, but again, I believe it's the same for all companions. 

Then I've got I think three small Adamant Press third party adventures, the extremely thick Pathfinder update to the Freeport setting book, and the Pathfinder 1e adventure path. I've not read any of those before, but of course, much of the text of the big setting book should be lifted from the Pirates' Guide, which I've read many times. And once I finish the adventure path, I'm kinda done. Weird to think about.

I might well remove the page that marks the Freeport Trawl once I finish the trawl, since tracking progress will be moot once I'm done. There's a few other products here and there that I think are largely repeats updated to different systems, but I'll skim them to make sure. But that's about it. I have a pdf of the Pathfinder book and I always thought that it was just the Pirates' Guide plus the d20 Companion updated to Pathfinder 1e and mashed together into a single book, but I'm not sure that that's the case. I think the timeline was updated at least, as well as a few other changes that that made, such as a new Sea Lord. I don't know that that justifies me spending quite a bit of money to get a hardcover copy, but maybe it does. I can order one from the Green Ronin store, although it's $75. Quite a lot for a book that no doubt mostly reiterates stuff that I already own in hardcopy. But we'll see. If I really enjoy it and find it to be sufficiently updated to make it worthwhile, maybe I'll order up a copy for future use.

After I finish the Freeport Trawl, maybe I'll try and concentrate a bit harder on the 3e Eberron Trawl to get that one done too, since it's relatively short and finishable. Stuff like the Pathfinder Adventure Paths trawl is not; it's huge and will no doubt take me many years to finish. But I'll continue to at least finish the Adventure Path that I'm in before I turn away from it. 

<  †  >

One thing that Freeport always brings to mind, however, is the inevitable questions on tone, theme, mood and horror. While I like Freeport, and kind of always have, it also isn't really exactly what I want it to be. Nothing that I don't create myself is ever going to be exactly what I want it to be, but Freeport has some relatively big misses, and it's in the form of the words I just used. Chris Pramas, the creator of Freeport, used to work on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, and it shows. He clearly was trying to recreate in a Dungeons & Dragons milieu the same tone and themes as WHFRP, more or less. But even that wasn't always perfect. I never can tell, with either of them, if they're a darker, edgier fantasy that I'm supposed to take more or less straight, or if it's all a big in-joke full of bad puns and silly pop culture references. It's easier with the Warhammer stuff, as the Brits seem to be better at straddling the line between serious and parody and making something that kind of sort of works as both at once, depending on what aspects of it you're actually looking at. Pramas was much less subtle, and his editorial hand is all over the place, not to mention the specific products that he himself wrote. Sometimes, especially the Rob Schwalb pieces, are pretty straight at being horror-themed fantasy with a dark edginess that's pretty straightforward. Other stuff is so silly that I can't imagine it being present in any game that isn't selling itself as an overt parody a la Epic Movie or the Scary Movie series. The other problem Freeport specifically has in terms of tone is that it's so overtly D&D. In spite of the twist of adding pirates and some Lovecraft, it feels much more overtly D&D in every particular than explicitly D&D settings like Dark Sun or Eberron, or Planescape, etc. even though many of those have that same problem; i.e., they feel like D&D first, and their twist is often a distant second. And finally, of course, is the problem that all Lovecraft interpretations have, in that it usually tends to feel like a Disneyland ride through a Lovecraft country greatest hits rather than an actual horror story. Most of the Lovecraft-themed gaming material feels like this because its trying to too faithfully reproduce elements from the actual stories rather than creating new ideas, new monsters, new entities, etc. like Lovecraft and his circle actually did. Using well-known entities makes them feel like pop culture references more than anything else, and it doesn't work very well. Warhammer, perhaps ironically, does Lovecraftian fantasy better than actual Lovecraftian fantasy because while nothing is overtly Lovecraftian, it has much greater fidelity to the the tone and themes of Lovecraftian horror stories. Albeit, admittedly, without the sciencey angle that often undercuts Lovecrafts' own purposes. 

And maybe that's where I need to take a step back too and talk about what I mean by "dark fantasy"; exactly what themes and tone I want to look into and what I don't, how dark do I mean, how does this relate to the fad of grimdark (which from my perspective seems to be a spent force coasting on inertia, which I predicted would happen soon years ago already anyway.) Let me start by quoting a few of my past posts, in reverse order.

From June 2023: 

I've given plenty of thought to my own embrace—or lack thereof—of grimdark, and I've come to believe that while I like dark fantasy; what I call an equal parts hybrid of fantasy and horror, and I like low fantasy; the grubbier, sword & sorcery or even more "normal" aspect of fantasy rather than larger than life superheroes saving the world, and I like other aesthetic subgenres that are near to grimdark, that grimdark itself is a bridge too far. Two quotes from the Infogalactic article on grimdark highlight why:

Adam Roberts described it as fiction "where nobody is honourable and Might is Right", and as "the standard way of referring to fantasies that turn their backs on the more uplifting, Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealized medievaliana, and instead stress how nasty, brutish, short and, er, dark life back then 'really' was". But he noted that grimdark has little to do with re-imagining an actual historic reality and more with conveying the sense that our own world is a "cynical, disillusioned, ultraviolent place".

Roberts, Adam (2014). Get Started in: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Hachette UK. p. 42. ISBN 9781444795660.

Liz Bourke considered grimdark's defining characteristic to be "a retreat into the valorisation of darkness for darkness's sake, into a kind of nihilism that portrays right action ... as either impossible or futile". This, according to her, has the effect of absolving the protagonists as well as the reader from moral responsibility.

Bourke, Liz (17 April 2015). "The Dark Defiles by Richard Morgan". Strange Horizons.

I've written before about how much I dislike the George Rape Rape Martin style of storytelling, and how much I disliked my one novel of Joe Abercrombie's that I read. (Although I do like Glen Cook's Black Company. Maybe that's not quite all the way to grimdark, though—just a neighbor of it.)

From two separate posts just a couple of days apart in July 2014:

For much of its existence, the setting has been, to borrow an overly trite term from TV Tropes, basically a crapsack world. I've gradually lost my enthusiasm for that mode of thinking. I guess I've read a little too much of it, and now find the intellectual underpinnings of the notion unappealing. Or maybe I've just hit a few too many who are a few too free with their crapsackiness. When Glen Cook pioneered the notion in The Black Company, and with a bit of Lovecraftian flair to it, it sounded attractive. After reading a bit too much George Martin and Joe Abercrombie (and it's not actually like I read that much of either) I find the crapsack world nihilistic, dreary, and frankly... kinda whiny.

Now granted, horror fiction is still a major influence on [Old Night] and I suspect always will be. But the notion that being heroic, of doing what's right is always the wrong choice... I can't support that kind of paradigm anymore. Not sure that I ever really could, without playing it off for laughs eventually.

[,,,] 

[I]f this bleak, nihilistic, "crapsack" world fantasy is in opposition to "real" fantasy as we have known it, as we grew up on, and as we think of the genre, why is it relatively prevalent?  And why is (at least some of) it relatively popular?  

I think it's perceived by some to be more sophisticated, more mature, etc.  I think this perception is false, however.  Bleakness, nihilism, hopelessness, despair—these are not mature emotions.  This is not the perspective of an adult, it's the perspective of a whiny, angsty, bratty adolescent.  It's not sophisticated and deep, it's merely empty and soul-less.  [Besides,] is it really that popular?  Sure, GRRM is a pretty big deal, and guys like Joe Abercrombie and a few others.  But how much room for more is there?  Is there any nihilistic work that is still read 100 years after being written?  And how much of it can you stand, even if you can stand it, without needing to break for something more light, anyway?

Keep in mind, I'm referring specifically to nihilism, not tragedy.  Although they may resemble each other superficially in many respects, they are not the same.  There's no catharsis at the end of a nihilistic work.  The same is also true of most works of horror fiction—they're not nihilistic (well, some of them are) although certainly they are dark and the end is not usually happy for the protagonists.

[Old Night] is fantasy and horror, not nihilism.  The world is bleak, there are certainly issues that resemble that of a horror fiction story, but characters meet them like horror fiction protagonists. They may not triumph, they certainly don't "win" in a traditional sense, but their heroism can be seen and it has meaning.  Like the bleak fatalism of the Norse sagas, which Tolkien reflected in many ways, it's not purposeless.  It's not senseless.  It's not nihilistic.  This is part of the reason why fantasy is so fundamentally rooted in a romanticized Medievalism.  My own setting has looked in many ways to other romanticized adventurous periods; pirates and Westerns, in particular, but the end result is the same—without that romanticized adventure story baseline, the horror is just bleak nihilism.  It doesn't ring as profound as that of Norse sagas, Shakespearean tragedies, or even more modern works like Dracula or Lord of the Rings.  It would just feel like a tawdry snuff piece.

Old Night should basically have the exact same tone and feel and themes of shows like The X-files and Supernatural, or movies like The Mummy (1999) or Van Helsing. It's sword & sorcery in a kind of old-fashioned way, except modified slightly so that the protagonists aren't such superlative swashbuckling heroes and are a bit more investigative, like the Winchester brothers and Mulder and Scully. Just... set in a fantasy setting rather than the real world of the 90s (X-files) or the 00s/10s (Supernatural). Maybe my labels aren't really the right labels. Grimdark it clearly isn't, although it mingles with some of the same acquaintances. Dark Fantasy is often more or less synonymous with grimdark, but I've used it to refer to something more specifically horror-leaning but without the specific themes of grimdark. But the heroes are, in fact, heroic. They're not superheroes, and it's not a given that they'll win, or that they're better than anyone else in the setting, but they are at least heroic in their attitude, and they're doing the right things for the right reasons, even as it costs them. It's not bright, polite, overly fantastical or overly magical, and never really very whimsical. The differences to modern ideas of high fantasy are going to be pretty obvious, although the differences to older high fantasy like Lord of the Rings will be more subtle. Similarly, the differences to good old fashioned sword & sorcery are more subtle and more a case of how superlative the main characters are in their abilities, as well as more leaning into the tenseness and horror elements rather than gratuitous adventure. 

Ironically, it's more like what the OSR claims to want to be, but since it doesn't focus on dungeon-crawling and I do usually have characters who are meant to be likeable and relatable rather than narcissistic sociopaths it gets there in a way that's quite a bit different. I also think that it's much closer to what Call of Cthulhu games actually are, especially campaigns as opposed to one-shots. Honestly, the idea that many people have of PCs flaming out dying or going insane doesn't really happen all that much in campaign form CoC. It's just an investigative adventure game with some mystery and horror elements bolted in and made integral to the experience. Is "dark fantasy" the correct label for this kind of thing?

I'm honestly not sure anymore. Labels tend to be rather plastic things, especially for concepts that go viral or turn faddish, like dark fantasy and grimdark did. Maybe trying to tie my star to a faddish label was never the right approach, since I was never really completely aligned with it anyway. That's especially true now. Now that the zeitgeist is turning against dark fantasy, maybe you are saying, which would make me look like a bandwaggoner. David Sylvian, the lead singer for the UK 70s and 80s band Japan once said of the New Romantic movement, "There's a period going past at the moment that may make us look as though we're in fashion." Implying that it was just a coincidence that they were trendy in the earliest 80s. Kinda suss, as the kids say. So yeah, I could point to my posts from twelve years ago predicting the decline of grimdark because it went way too far, and reports of grimdark's death are, of course, premature and exaggerated. What can I say? I may be doing the same thing; jumping ship as a faddish label seems to be losing its steam. Then again, regardless of label or my association with or without one, I'm still doing basically the same thing that I've been doing since about 2001 or so in terms of my gaming and fantasy tastes. I've honed in more clearly on what exactly that looks like, but from a higher level, it's always been the same.

The Four Horsemen of TSR art

I'm a Gen X guy who remembers the 80s like it was yesterday sometimes. I have a fruitful albeit complicated relationship with the OSR, but mostly fruitful and friendly. The OSR and I are friendly acquaintances at least, if not close friends. One of the ways in which I'm sympathetic to the OSR is in preferring older style art to the technically adept but completely bland, soulless and very bright, polite, colorful and child-like stuff that is common today. D&D illustrations have, at the very least, lost their edge, look like DEI nonsense, and are generally not as good as older 80s and even 90s style illustrations; the only improvement is that the move to full color books for most things, which happened under WotC starting with 3e in 2000 is, well, obviously a technical improvement from the B&W interiors of the earlier material. 

That said, my relationship with the earlier artwork is also complicated. There were four big in-house artists during the heyday of TSR, Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, Keith Parkinson and Clyde Caldwell. Prior to that, we had the likes of Dave Trampier, Erol Otus, Jeff Dee, and others. But the previous four were usually considered the Four Horsemen, or the Big Four, or whatever. Larry Elmore did the covers for the BECMI line of D&D boxed sets. While those aren't my favorite boxed sets, those definitely are my favorite covers! He also did the covers for the original Dragonlance trilogy novels. That means that to me, of course, he's the most iconic of all the TSR artists, and my favorite. I also particularly like how he painted dragons, like the ones in the BECMI art, so yeah. I bought an older D&D novel specifically and only because it had the same image as the Companion set as the cover, and I liked that cover so much that I wanted a novel based on it.

I also currently have t-shirts with the Basic and Expert cover art on them too. Elmore is super iconic to D&D and to fantasy as I envisioned it as a kid as a whole. I'm now less likely to go for the high fantasy image of fighters or knights fighting dragons with oversized magical swords, but I still love the imagery of it. Elmore also did, for what it's worth, the cover art for the Star Frontiers game, so he was equally iconic in the (admittedly much smaller) world of space opera gaming as he was in fantasy.

Clyde Caldwell is another great illustrator of the Big Four. He did a lot of stuff, including a bunch of novel and module covers. What I think of him most as, however, is the covers for the Gazetteer series of Known World (Mystara) setting material. But this piece, which is cropped, and which was the original cover for an early Forgotten Realms novel called Spellfire is probably my favorite Caldwell piece.

Keith Parkinson also did some stellar work. I wasn't as much a fan of his iconic dragons, like the cover to Dragon Magazine #1, but he did some other really great stuff. His work "Lord Soth's Charge" might be one of his most iconic pieces, and deservedly so. It's excellent. Undead may have been his specialty even. 

Parkinson also did some pretty iconic work outside of D&D, like the covers for the EverQuest boxes, some iconic other work for trading cards, other novels (he did one version of the iconically stupid but also bestselling Sword of Truth for instance). He also died relatively young (47) of cancer over twenty years ago.

Jeff Easley was the last of the Four Horsemen, and the one that I never could really get in to. He had some good art, I suppose, but he had a lot of stuff that I never liked. I especially associate him with the covers for late 1e books, like Manual of the Planes and others of that same vintage, the 2e covers, and other D&D-line products of the same vintage, like the various "Classic Dungeons & Dragons" boxed sets from the early 90s and the Rules Cyclopedia version. His monsters in particular looked weird and fleshy. His style was much more distinct from the other three, and his work is easier to spot, for the most part. I don't want to dog on him, but I just don't like his style as much.

Now, one of these days, I'd like to outfit a home office with prints of some of the best artwork available from this era. I've long thought that I'd like to have five or six pieces. Four of them would be the first four from the BECMI line; Basic, Expert, Companion and Master. Master I could possibly do without, but the other three are super, super iconic to me. What else to round off the list with is up for grabs still. Maybe even something more modern, like this Wayne Reynolds one. I have a high resolution image that I grabbed back when it was available (probably off of ENWorld or the WotC website, but maybe Waybe Reynold's own before he converted it to lower res versions) that I could literally make my own high quality print of if I wanted to.

Add to that my equally high resolution Pathfinder 1e cover art, which is similar in style, and I'd be cooking with gas.

My relationship with Pathfinder is even more complicated still. I've never actually played it, technically, but of course, it's a relatively modest revision of the 3.5 rules. At least, on the same level of modest changes as 3.0 had to 3.5. Because I played a lot of 3e and 3.5, I feel like Pathfinder 1e is very, very familiar to me. I have a lot of products from that line. Most of them, in fact, at least in digital form, and quite a few in physical form. But I probably wouldn't want to play or run them in their own native system; I'd convert them to whatever D&D-like system that I'd otherwise be running. Probably, if it were really all that D&D-like, an E6 3.5, or even something less D&D-like, like my own Old Night system. But that's no different than my attitude towards any version of D&D or it's product, and for all intents and purposes, I consider Pathfinder (all versions, but especially 1e) to merely be a slight variation on D&D anyway.

In the case of that artwork, it's less about it being super iconic and more about it being a good piece of art that I happen to already have in high resolution format, though, because I could extract it from my copy of the PDF.

Environment books

I finished Dungeonscape before heading out of town for a work trip, so last Sunday evening, I guess. It's the last of the environmental books in my somewhat extended re-read of the environmental books, both in terms of when it was released (if I remember correctly) and definitely last in my read-through. It's also the last that I actually read; I was never very excited about the concept of it to begin with, and I don't think I ever actually read the whole thing before now. It's also the only one that I don't have physically; I had to go buy a pdf several years ago, but my track record for reading pdfs that I own is even worse than reading books that I own; they can sit for many years without me every once thinking about them before I finally remember that I have it and pull it back down. 

While I'm in a more forgiving mood to 3e's obvious flaws these days, they are still incredibly prevalent and blatantly obvious in these books. While many who played, and most who designed for 3e forgot the early motto "tools, not rules", the marketing drive to create player facing resources, which presumably had a bigger market than GM facing ones, which in turn created—perhaps unintentionally at first, but later I think the designers embraced the idea—of the power-gamer's optimized build with all kinds of rules that gave him an edge rather than a few ideas that made him interesting. What I really wanted these books to do was to provide interesting design ideas and adventure seeds that I could use to run more interesting adventures. Instead, what I got was mostly a whole bunch of rules to give monsters, NPCs and most especially players ways to build more powerful characters with a slight focus on an environmental theme. Which, unless the GM specifically telegraphs that he's going to focus on, probably isn't all that attractive to many players. Who wants to play a character focused on the frozen northern environments in a campaign that's going to be set on the Isle of Dread or in Undermountain or the Temple of Elemental Evil? This doesn't mean that these books are useless, just that they disappointed me; I wanted really interesting campaign or adventure hooks based on the environments, and most of the flavor, customization options, and adventure hooks that I got were kind of an afterthought, and usually not really all that compelling. I'd say that in general, the books had about 20% good, interesting material, 20% "what were they thinking" useless material, and about 60% mediocre, average material that I didn't really care for, but at least it didn't actively make me roll my eyes about how stupid it was. It just wasn't really all that useful. 

The monster focus books, like Drow of the Underdark, Lords of Madness or the two volumes of the Fiendish Codex and the rest of that series were significantly better. While they still focused way too much on mechanical gimmicks and dubious player-centric options, their ratios of good/bad/meh material was probably more like 50%/15%/35%. On average. These are all averages. 

Dungeonscapes at their best

Dungeonscape was always the one I was the least interested in, and I was sure that of the environmental books, it is the one that I would like the least. This is because I'm a confirmed non-fan of the activity of dungeon-crawling. It's one of my earliest and deepest dissatisfactions with D&D, dating at least back to the early/mid 80s... and I only played my first game of OD&D in 1980, and really only got "into" the hobby in 1982-3 or so. By 1985, I was already over a lot of the D&Disms, like magical superheroes that broke any verisimilitude in a setting that was familiar to me from my reading of the genre, and dungeon-crawling. Those still, over forty years later, are the very things that I don't like about D&D and am always trying to minimize. When it gets too unwieldy trying to minimize them, I get tired of D&D and look for other alternatives that do what I want better, or more recently, I just freakin' design my own.

Anyway, Dungeonscape is, as I said, both the last one published and by far the last one that I acquired and the last one I read. While all of the others were re-read recently for the first time in nearly 20 years, Dungeonscape is the only one that I read completely for the first time just now. As I expected, it was probably the one that I liked the least, but it's not without its charms. For someone who actually likes dungeon-crawling much more than I do, it might possibly be the best of the bunch, because it offers lots and lots of text about how to dungeon-crawl and create dungeons specifically for crawling. But my rankings of the environment books are probably Cityscape at the top, although still disappointing, Frostburn, Stormwrack and Sandstorm about equal in the middle and Dungeonscape at the bottom. I'm curious how well this book pairs with the 3e Forgotten Realms title Underdark, but I'm not very close to that in my FR trawl, and I'm not willing to go out of order to explore it. In general, Dungeonscape was more about focused dungeons, not mega-dungeons, and not crawling something like the Underdark, where literally the entire environment is effectively a dungeon of sorts, although maybe one less focused on gimmicks, puzzles and traps and more like "hexcrawling" through a wilderness that looks more like a dungeon. I'll see when I read it if that's the direction they took or not, though. 

Dungeonscape doesn't have any environmental races. Neither did Cityscape but both of those were shorter than the other three, and that was clearly one of the main features to be cut from both. Maybe that makes sense. It also is a little light on prestige classes, and the Dungeon Lord was clearly a villain-oriented option, and the Trap Smith makes more sense as a cohort or other NPC specialist rather than a PC. The new base class, the Factotum is pretty cool. Other than the name. Which is a perfectly serviceable word, of course, except that it's a Latin word that hasn't really been adopted into English, so it sounds really weird and not in harmony with the oeuvre of D&D generally. It looks like someone picked the word out of a thesaurus list and ran with it. At least, they do appear to have used it correctly as a jack of all trades. It's actually kind of a neat class. They also give it a little bit of an (optional) flavor spin to suggest that factotums are kind of academic, intellectual, adventuring scholars, and they explicitly suggest that Indiana Jones is the archetypal character that the class is meant to emulate in the D&D milieu. I hadn't really remembered the class very well, and was always put off by its name, but on re-reading it (I had read portions of the book previously) it was a much better and more interesting class than I remembered. It also offers another option to add some magical f/x to the game without having a dedicated magic-using class, so my earlier efforts to make D&D more sword & sorcery would actually work quite well with the factotum. 

(I'd also highly recommend the Occultist advanced class from d20 Modern as a 1-10 levels, at most, D&D class in a pinch. All you'd have to do is make sure that there's no modern skills associated with it, and do something about the Defense bonus that all d20 Modern classes have that has no real equivalent in D&D. Probably simply ignore it.)

I didn't expect to like anything from the very lengthy traps chapter, since I dislike traps on general principle in role-playing games as a artifact of dungeon-crawling that makes little sense in any other context, but they did have this concept called traps as encounters. Again, making an Indiana Jones reference, if you remember the room in Temple of Doom where the spiked ceiling booby trap nearly crushes Indy and Short Round, that's a good example of what a trap as encounter would play like. Much to my surprise, I actually thought this concept sounded pretty fun, and I could imagine myself using traps as encounters to actually add some traps to my adventures. At least from time to time. 

Traps as encounter... with a "factotum".

But overall, Dungeonscape was mostly exactly what I expected it to be. I'm about to head out of town for another week, but it's not business travel this time, and I don't know how much free time I'll have. I'm bringing the 3e Fiend Folio with me, and I also have the last two Curse of the Crimson Throne adventures on my tablet to read. I also have the second Sandy Petersen 5e campaign (in four parts), the one focused on Yig and time traveling back to dinosaurs or something like that. I wasn't all that impressed with the ghoul themed tropical island one which started the series, so I've put off reading the next one, but I'm determined to power through and read it after I finish Crimson Throne. I've also started reading Buccaneers of Freeport. Freeport was the first official "trawl" that I started, and I could conceivably finish it within a couple of months if I stay focused on it. I'm actually a little bit excited, although also wary, to do the Pathfinder style adventure path that is at the end of it, which I now own all of the books of, but which have never read before. 

I've also finished two of the ten "T. H. Lain" iconic characters novels from the 3e era. They were... OK. I'll keep trudging through them, I suppose. And I'm bringing a few other novels with me, the first two of the Horned Helmet quadrilogy, the first Gor book, and The Mad King by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Not really very fantastic, it's a Ruritanian romance, but still one of my favorite of ERB's stories. The Gor series is infamous for being weird and misogynistic, even before feminists got so out of control that they called normal behavior misogynistic. I think that they were probably right to put that label on Gor. But the first book or two hardly had any of that, it always just came across to me like a reasonably good pastiche of Barsoom or Flash Gordon. The love interest was a little bratty and she had more of a character development arc than the main character, because she became submissive and more pleasant... although... a little too submissive. I found that just a little bit off-putting, but it's such a muted theme in this book compared to what it—apparently—develops into, that I still remember liking this book in spite of it.

So yeah, there's my near-term reading prospects. And here's one more dungeoneering image, just for the heck of it.

Racial Deep Dive: Humans

My understanding of history, prehistory and archaeology is intimately tied up with my understanding of linguistics and archaeogenetics, all topics that interest me greatly. Because of this, I've defaulted to a structure of human populations in Old Night that are also closely tied to ancient genetics and linguistics. Let me, therefore, go back to a post from several months ago about languages, and reiterate and slightly rewrite or edit it, and from that base, let me talk about the various populations of humans that you could find in the Old Night setting, as well as ones that you could potentially pick from if creating a character that's human in the RPG.

<  †  >

Common. I like the use of the word Common, because it's understood by all and is used by both D&D and Tolkien both. For all intents and purposes, Common is the language of the Hill Country or Humberland, and is also called Humbrian. For our purposes, it is equivalent to English. Because of the presence of Humbrian colonists, traders and more throughout the region, Humbrian has become... well, Common. There have been significant inroads of the language as the native language (albeit with different accents, perhaps) throughout much of the region. While clearly not everyone speaks Common fluently, or in some remote places at all, throughout the entirety of the Three Realms+, you can usually get by pretty good if it's the only language you speak.

Anstal Tane, a classic Humbrian

Humbrian is closely associated with the Humbrians, of course, and their country, the Hill Country or Humberland. For purposes of comparison, the Humbrians should be like British Americans; essentially the same as the British, but in a newly settled frontier territory. Unlike in the real world, the Humbrians don't have access to return home, however; Humberland is their new home and there's no going back even if they wanted to, nor can they be supplemented by new arrivals or settlers from the old homeland of Culmerland (et al.) Except more Medieval rather than Colonial in dress and manners, etc.

Old Culmerian. The original language of the majority of the hillmen settlers, and the direct ancestor of Common. Hasn't been spoken in many centuries, but old texts are still around, and there's a vigorous academic interest in old Humbrian languages and languages from the Old Country before the Colonists came to the Three Realms+. Real world analog: Old English.

Normaund. While not directly closely related to Old Culmerian, a strata of Normaundish aristocrats ruled Culmer for a time. While they were eventually assimilated and integrated (mostly) their language was distinct for many years, and many old texts in this language still exist too. It also added greatly to the vocabulary and structure of Common, and the dividing line between Old Culmerian and Common is somewhat arbitrarily pinned to the start of the Normaundish influence. Real world analog: Norman French.

Brynach. A language that existed alongside Old Culmerian, and predates it in what was later called Culmer. In spite of its age and lower prestige, this stubbornly didn't die for a long time; there are still a few older people in rural parts of the Hill Country who speak or read this language, although there's not nearly enough of them to maintain a viable speaking base, and nobody speaks this as their every day language. Real world analog: Gaelic and other British Celtic languages. 

Skellish. Distantly related to Culmer, but from a neighboring Old Country kingdom called Skelldale, some of the Colonists spoke this language. While all have assimilated linguistically to Common, literature in this language is important because it maintains elements of history and myth that were analogous to what the Old Culmers would have believed, but which they themselves lost. Real world analog: Old Norse.

Timischer. The native language of the aristocracy of Timischburg. Most of them still learn it, but for various social reasons, their Tarushan subjects have resisted using it natively, and the utility of the language has faded. As more and more trade with the Hill Country has penetrated the region the last several hundred years, most people in Timischburg have learned Common, and because the Tarushans and Timischers have largely resisted using each others languages to a large degree, Common (with a German accent) has largely emerged as the consensus language that both groups already knew and were willing to use to speak to each other. Timischer is on its way to becoming a dead language; well known by the scholarly, but spoken very infrequently, even in the homes of the native Timischer nobles as of the last few generations. However, it retains prestige legal status in Timischburg; signs are written in it, and many documents, especially older ones, are written in Timischer. Timischer nobles also use it to speak with each other when they want to separate themselves by language from those around them. Many Timischers of lower social class use it as well as a kind of insider language; Timischer mercenary companies push it as the official language of their companies (although most speak it as a second language) and some Timischer criminal groups outside of Timischburg have cultivated it as a way to keep their communications more secret.

Similarly, Old Timischer, as it sounds, the language of the Timischers, but archaic. As Old Culmerian is to Common, Old Timischer is to modern Timischer. Real world analog: continental early Medieval Germanic languages, such as Low Franconian (Old Dutch) and High Franconian (Old German) which makes sense given the analog of the Timischer Old Country homeland of Carlovingia with the early Medieval Frankish kingdoms of the Carolingian dynasty.

Alpon von Lechfeld, a famous Timischer scholar, enjoying retirement in his private library.

Tarushan. Tarushan is the native language of the "aboriginal" people of Timischburg, which largely corresponds geographically with the old kingdom of Tarush Noptii. As noted above, it has no official status, but the Tarushan people still cling to it stubbornly, and many of the old Tarushan people refuse to learn or speak or read Timischer. Tarushan has less official status, but more actual use, and there are people in the rural areas, or among the Tarushan Gypsies who only speak Tarushan, with at best a smattering of Common. There are a number of older documents in a slightly archaic version of Tarushan that predate the arrival of the Timischers as well. Tarushan is clearly related to some of the other older languages in the region, although distantly, and has cultural, linguistic and presumably also genetic ties to the ancient kingdom of Kinzassal, which we'll cover later.

Claud Lupescu, a Tarushan young man

Tazittan. This is a minority language, distantly related to Tarushan but not mutually intelligible, of a number of primitive, rustic and hostile peoples deep in the wildernesses of Humberland, like the Haunted Forest, especially on the eastern slopes of the Sabertooth Mountains, and the Tazitta Badlands, of course. Although it descends from a literate society, there is no written Tazittan that anyone really uses today. For a social analog, you could consider Tazitta to be not unlike the Sioux language spoken in the 1860s or 1870s—except that there is less open conflict between the Hill-men and the Tazitta, mostly due to no resources in Tazitta territory tempting Hillmen settlement at the moment. The geographical and social limitations of this language make it one that's unlikely to be of much use for PCs, except in a campaign that features this isolated population of Tazittans, however. Although much more primitive in their dress and equipment, as befits a xenophobic and isolated population living in a hazardous and forsaken place like the Haunted Forest, physically and genetically, the Tazittans more or less resemble the Tarushans in their build and coloration; the original phenotype of the Kinzassal people who were ancestral to both.

Drylander. Spoken mostly on the Baal Hamazi peninsula, this is the native language of the area, and while not related to Tarushan and Tazittan, etc. it does seem to have borrowed from it, and some of the Drylanders have genetics that appear similar to those of Old Kinzassal. Today, as Baal Hamazi is a broken, Balkanized land of tribes and city-states, the language's status is questionable. Still spoken in many remote tribes as the only language, and the official language of some city-states such as Baal Hishutash—one of the most conservative of the city-states, or Baal Ngirsu, one of the most isolated. Otherwise, as traders and travelers from beyond have come to the land, their lingua franca, i.e., Common, has largely replaced Drylander in most of the more cosmopolitan or connected city-states, and even among many of the more nomadic Drylander tribes. 

Their language also seems to be unique, although with some odd similarities with some of the very old Humbrian Old Country languages, like Old Culmer and Skellish—some have posited that there's a link. That said, this idea is sketchy and not widely accepted. The Drylanders are usually seen as their own people, and if there is some distant connection with any other people, it's distant enough to not matter. The Drylanders are usually tall, and have pale eyes, with extremely pale gray being more common than elsewhere, although blue, hazel and lighter brown are not unusual. Their hair is usually dark, but often with a reddish tint, and their skin is ruddy, even for those who don't spend most of their time outside like the nomadic ones to.

Pretty typical nomadic Drylander

Kurushan. The language of the Kurushans and their Northlander cousins. Like Timischer or Drylander, it is more associated with past glories than the current situation; Lower Kurushat is more and more disconnected from "regular" Kurushat to the north, and the Kurushans are left to their own devices in a land where they are not the majority population. While still spoken in some northern cities, especially in old Kurushan noble houses, few indeed could function if this is the only language you speak. It still remains an important administrative language in Lower Kurushan cities, but most people on the street will be speaking Common instead. The Elementalists came out of the Kurushan population, and before they manifest their elemental natures as young teenagers, they tend to look like Kurushans; who are very similar in many ways to the Drylanders physically, although with slightly flatter faces, higher cheekbones and often epicanthic folds.

Pallaran. The final language related to old Kinzassal is Pallaran, the language of the Corsair Coast. Unlike most other regions in which a Tarushan-related language exists, Pallaran is still a pretty active language, and many people along the Corsair Coast speak it as a first and only language. That said, Common has made inroads here as well, as many traders and adventurers have come to this area, or the corsairs—and legitimate traders—from this region have sailed northwards. It is also the most divergent of the various "Tarushan" languages, as the people themselves are heavily admixed with some other population that is now anonymous other than the linguistic and genetic trace that they once existed.

A Pallaran man off of the Corsair Coast

Kinzassal. The language that stands at the heart of the Tarushan language family. While it only briefly belonged to a single political entity, and always had a variety of dialects, its importance in the romance of the Kin Twilight, and the semi-imagined legendary Golden Age of all of the splintered kin that later broke off from this brief period of near unity is hard to describe; even the Humbrians, who are not themselves descended from the Kin, are drawn to this romance. That said, although it would seem to be like Latin, and it's various descendants variously like Spanish, Romanian, Italian, French, etc. in reality there's not nearly as much textual evidence for this language as there is for Latin, and Kinzassal was a much more savage and primitive place than Rome anyway—more like the Bronze Age society; further removed and very foreign to the inhabitants of the Three Realms+ today. Most of the "texts" of this language come from weathered carvings on standing stones and other ruined places rather than from actual texts. That said, because of the various things that happened in this time, there's intense academic interest in the period of Kinzassal and its artifacts.

Nizrekh. The language of the island chain off the west coast that is the remainder of Atlantis; although Nizrekh is an unrelated language spoken by people who arrived after the fall of Atlantis. It is not related to any other language, and since the Nizrekhi are isolationist and remote, few others speak their language either.

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This next batch is made up of languages that native to demihuman populations, but since this is both a deep dive into the various human populations but also into the languages of the Three Realms+, they have to at least be noted.

Grendling. The language of the Grendlings, or Wendaks, the actual descendants of Atlanteans who were on the mainland when Atlantis fell. Because the Grendlings are themselves a debased and rapidly devolving population, super xenophobic and isolationist, few speak this language other than them, and they teach it to no one. It is—presumably—a distant descendant itself of the language of high Atlantean civilization, but even that is not for sure, and certainly they don't resemble each other much now. The Atlanteans relationship to humanity is dubious. The Grendlings are not exactly human anymore, and the Atlanteans, their direct ancestors, probably were, but were very different than any human population around today.

Thurse. The bestial language of the thurses, at least of Thursewood. Because the anatomy of thurses is very different than that of humans and demihumans, it is widely considered impossible to learn to speak this language, although it is possible to learn to understand it... assuming you can do so without being killed and eaten. 

Orcling. The language of the orcs and goblins from Gunaakt. Still widely spoken amongst that race, especially the most recent arrivals in the area, but not by much of anyone else. There are few written texts in this language, and many orclings who have been in the Three Realms+ for more than a couple of generations have lost this language and only speak it haltingly if at all. While obviously not a human language, it needs to be mentioned because it's not an insignificant one, and some scholars are taking an interest in it as the Orcling population becomes more important.

Nyxian. The language of the minority population in Hyperborean Lomar. The majority Zobnans who founded the city no longer speak their original language, and only speak Common, or whatever other trade language they've learned. The Zobnans mostly speak Common, and have no records of their former language, but it was probably a dialect of Nyxian.

Infernal. This is the primary language spoken by those from the Realms Outside such as daemons and elemental-like creatures like ifrit, although myriad other tongues exist amongst this diverse breed as well. In addition, this is the language of magic, so a smattering of it, at least, is known by any practitioner of the arcane arts. Perfect fluency in this language, on the other hand, is almost impossible for any mortal to achieve. Despite that, it was very fashionable in old Baal Hamazi, where the demonic taint of their bloodline was a source of pride to the ruling caste, to speak Infernal natively, and many noble houses took great pains to ensure that their children didn't hear any other language until they were five years of age. Some households still speak Infernal in the home, and it is still a pseudo-living language in some of the successor states to Baal Hamazi, but native speakers are few, and fewer every day.

Dagonic. This is a bizarre pre-human language, remnants of which float around on isolated and moldy standing stones and other areas. Intriguingly, it appears to have originally been a underwater language. Few people on the surface can even make an attempt to learn it, due to the challenges of speech that an underwater language had to have overcome, and the language itself is only known from very scanty and fragmentary remains, making fluency all but impossible for even the most dedicated scholar. For all intents and purposes, it is a written language only, not a spoken language, since there are no speakers that anyone knows of at all, and how to pronounce the language is anyone's guess.

Atlantean. Very little is known of this language, which was presumably the distant ancestor of the modern disappearing Grendling (Wendak) language. Because most documents, archives or carvings in this language disappeared under the sea, scholars are forced to try and interpret a very limited corpus of texts that remain, and their interpretations of what is represented is divisive and wildly divergent from each other. Really curious and foolhardy linguists could find living memory of spoken Atlantean from the Mind-wizards, like Gothan from the Heresiarchy... if they survive the experience.

Because I'm deliberately running a game that is sorta D&D-like mechanically, but which is meant to be played much more like Call of Cthulhu is played, these old languages can be very important when researching the blasphemous secret history of the Three Realms+, but unless the characters are Lovecraftian also in the sense that they are academics, sages, and professors, it's unlikely that they'd know any of those languages; it is more likely that they'd have to utilize the services of an academic contact, such as Drancent Hewe or even Professor Alpon von Lechfeld to help translate anything that they find. Or... in a really, really bad pinch, one of the ancient Heresiarchs.