Aurelian Veyne and Ilyra Solenne

I didn't really have any ideas for the iconics that I needed to add to fill out the roster of a male and female (eventually) of every race, so I turned to ChatGPT, who gave me the image, and after multiple rounds of editing iterations, I got a decent backstory for Aurelian Veyne and Ilyra Solenne out of it. I'll probably keep tinkering with this off of AI, but AI can be a decent tool to give me something to start with.

Suck it, AI haters. I'm not interested.

Aurelian Veyne

Aurelian Veyne was born to a minor noblewoman in the northern marches. His metallic silver hair, luminous golden eyes, and unusual beauty marked him as a seraph, a rare mortal lineage believed to carry the blood of celestial beings. His family regarded this ancestry as a divine blessing, and he was raised with the expectation that he would serve the Church. He has recently been appointed a junior inquisitor, possessing a good education, a talent for investigation, and considerable skill with the sword.

His first assignment took him to the remote village of Wulfham, where reports of disappearances and strange religious gatherings had attracted the Church's attention. His investigation uncovered a small cult worshipping an entity known as the Sleeper Beneath the World. More disturbing were the ancient scriptures and ritual documents discovered beneath an abandoned chapel, suggesting that certain elements within the Church had long maintained secret dealings with the very powers they claimed to oppose. When his supervising inquisitor, Father Malrec, ordered the evidence destroyed and the surviving villagers executed, Aurelian refused and fled with several of the documents. Malrec denounced him as a heretic and has since been working to discredit him, recover the stolen writings, and ensure that his former pupil does not expose what happened at Wulfham.

Now separated from the Church, Aurelian travels in search of answers, uncertain how far the corruption extends or whom he can trust. He is courteous, well-spoken, and capable of genuine compassion, but also spoiled, vain, and accustomed to being treated as someone exceptional. He has a rather inflated sense of his own importance and can be condescending toward those he considers beneath him. Although he sincerely believes in justice and the protection of the innocent, he has little understanding of the hardships faced by ordinary people and sometimes mistakes his own good intentions for wisdom. His noble upbringing has left him with a great deal to learn about the world beyond the drawing rooms and ecclesiastical libraries in which he was raised.

Lately, he has suffered strange dreams of a black ocean beneath a starless sky, where immense shapes move beneath the water. Sometimes he awakens with unfamiliar words on his lips, or with the peculiar sensation that something has been watching him from just beyond the boundaries of his dreams. Certain occult symbols also seem strangely familiar, particularly those associated with the oldest and most forbidden religious texts. He has not yet connected these experiences to his ancestry, but some passages in the documents from Wulfham suggest that the origins of the seraphic bloodlines may be considerably less glorious than the Church teaches. Perhaps Father Malrec knows more about this than he has let on; Aurelian has begun to suspect that his former mentor's interest in him was never entirely religious.

Ilyra Solenne

Ilyra Solenne was born to an unremarkable family in a provincial town, but she was hardly an unremarkable child. Her birth as a seraph was an extraordinary occurrence, and her parents regarded her with a mixture of wonder, pride, and apprehension. Her unusual beauty and golden eyes made her the subject of considerable local fascination, while her father, an itinerant scholar of folklore and the supernatural, became convinced that she was destined for something extraordinary.

His suspicions seemed justified when Ilyra began hearing the voices of the dead. As a child, she spoke to invisible companions, described people buried decades before her birth, and occasionally recounted the final moments of strangers whose deaths had gone unexplained. Her father introduced her to spiritualism, teaching her to conduct séances and communicate with departed souls. Ilyra proved exceptionally gifted, but where her father sought to understand the dead, she wanted to know them. She eventually discovered that personal objects could serve as anchors for spirits, allowing them to remain in the world of the living. She began collecting such objects, each associated with a ghost she had persuaded to stay.

At nineteen, she followed her father to an abandoned monastery where he had been investigating a series of mysterious disappearances. Beneath its ruined chapel, he had encountered something that communicated through the dead, borrowing their faces and voices to lure the living. When Ilyra arrived, he begged her to flee. Instead, she attempted a great séance, calling the spirits in the monastery and binding them to herself to sever the entity's connection to the living. The ritual succeeded, but her father died and the monastery collapsed around them. Ilyra escaped with his books, her collection, and two spectral guardians who have remained at her side ever since. She never learned whether the thing beneath the monastery was destroyed or merely driven away.

Since then, Ilyra has wandered as a medium and ghost collector, offering her services to those troubled by hauntings and restless dead. She has also discovered that wealthy clients are considerably more profitable than poor villagers. An accomplished confidence woman, she embellishes her genuine abilities with theatrical séances, fabricated credentials, and carefully cultivated airs of refinement. Her natural beauty helps, as does her talent for making people believe they are in the presence of someone quite important. Her magnificent wardrobe and apparent wealth are largely financed by the credulous and the superstitious.

Her most treasured possession is an elaborate golden lantern whose subdued violet light reveals nearby spirits and facilitates communication with the departed. Her two silent guardians, pale and terrible apparitions, hover protectively behind her.

Outwardly, Ilyra is gracious, charming, and compassionate. Yet she has an unhealthy inability to accept death or relinquish those she loves. She considers the spirits in her keeping friends and companions, never possessions, and is genuinely distressed by the suggestion that they might wish to leave. She cannot always distinguish between protecting a soul and imprisoning it.

She does not consider herself cruel. She simply believes she knows what is best for them.

Aurelian and Ilyra know each other

Ilyra first encountered Aurelian Veyne in Mittermarkt where she had been engaged by a wealthy merchant family to investigate a series of hauntings. The family's recently deceased patriarch had apparently returned to disturb the household, appearing in locked rooms and leaving strange messages for the living. Ilyra, never one to turn down a lucrative commission, had begun investigating when Aurelian arrived pursuing an entirely separate inquiry involving the acquisition of old church records, baptismal registers, and genealogical documents.

Their first impressions of one another were less than flattering. Aurelian regarded Ilyra as an excessively theatrical charlatan, while she found him humorless, suspicious, and altogether too serious. Nevertheless, their investigations soon brought them together. During a séance, the spirit of the deceased merchant addressed them both as the returned children. A moment later, something appeared in the doorway: a tall, impossibly thin figure with a face obscured by a veil of golden light. Ilyra's two spectral guardians reacted with extraordinary violence, and the apparition vanished.

The encounter led them to discover that someone had been quietly searching for individuals of unusual ancestry. Their investigations uncovered scattered evidence of a clandestine organization known as the Household, whose members were gathering genealogical records and seeking out people born with peculiar characteristics. Neither understood the organization's ultimate purpose, but they suspected that its interest in them was more than coincidental.

Despite their initially awkward acquaintance, Aurelian and Ilyra discovered an unexpected kinship. Both were seraphs, an uncommon enough circumstance that meeting another of their kind was remarkable in itself. They developed a genuine affection, eventually coming to regard one another as something like brother and sister. Though their respective pursuits keep them traveling separately, they make an effort to maintain correspondence.

Neither yet knows the full truth: they share a distant fallen celestial ancestor, and the Household is attempting to gather that ancestor's scattered descendants and bring them back to a place its members call Home. Whatever awaits them there, it is not quite the reunion its followers imagine. Something ancient is calling its children back, and it has no intention of allowing them to remain what they are.

What it all means

This is all pretty good stuff, and certainly with a little bit of additional massaging, I can use it. However, I definitely don't want to keep all of my racial iconics together in little cliques. I like the fact that seraphs are unusual enough that there is actually a connection between these two, but that wouldn't be true for any other characters. And I definitely don't want them being part of the same "PC party" if you will, as I eventually construct additional backstories for additional iconics. The idea of different groups of iconics being connected to each other was always part of the fun, though; back when Dominic and Ragnar Clevenger were the effective "leaders" of two completely different 4-character groups, I still had them meant to always be brothers. I kind of like the idea of 2-3 character groups now, though, so Ragnar is with Cailin, his wife, and Dominic is with Kimnor, and they sometimes do stuff together, but are apt to split up frequently into their respective two person groups. I don't yet know who I'd pair these two with, but I can work that kind of stuff out after I've got a few more characters ready to roll.

I probably need to "unretire" some of my contacts who were formerly iconics, like Oisin Dughall and Shule at a minimum, and mix them up with some of these characters too. Not necessarily with either of these, but y'know. If I'm going to have ChatGPT work up some of the characters that I haven't thought of any ideas for yet, I probably also need to create a chat where I spell out the details of a lot of these other characters that I already have so that the AI can use that information without me having to correct it all the time.

The difference between iconics and contacts is a little bit fungible, and any of the contacts can be seen as an iconic of sorts, even if I don't intend to really use them as "PCs" as such. Then again, none of the iconics are really going to be used as a PC, they're just stand-ins as if they were sample PCs. I mean, is Drancent Hewe an iconic grisling scholar? If not, what's really the difference anyway? For example. I could do the same with most other contact NPCs, although some of them are more... stationary, I should say. While they're important and can be considered iconic NPCs, they don't really "adventure" like a PC would, for instance. Someone like Sir Liamond Wreldane or Brythe Armeld, for instance.

Races of Old Night

OK, OK, I know that I'm not trying to just post AI generated images from my setting all of the time. But I need to work out my races and what they look like. Some of these images are of established NPCs, or even former iconics, in some cases, but others I didn't have that, so I had to just create "generic" versions of them. Let's go through them, shall we? Click on each image for a larger version. I want to keep this relatively small.

Humans: I'll do a separate post for the different ethnicities of humans. For now, let's skip them.

Grislings: the second most iconic race, because they're from Lomar mostly, which is smack dab in the northern Humberland Hill Country area. They're also probably the most integrated and commonly seen non-human race in the Hill Country. The male is an established NPC sage or expert, Drancent Hewe, the female is just a generic Grisling adventuring scholar or whatever.

Kemlings: Kemlings are the second unique race I developed, and so are important, but I don't necessarily think of them as super common until you get further west. The female version is Merra Kuzulash, an NPC "anti-PC" so definitely a villain. But that's the stereotype of kemlings, given that they are supposedly saddled with a daemonic taint or admixture in their genetics.

The elementalists come next, in four parts, so I'll break them up. I have a few images of each.

Surturs: The fiery surturs are one of my original races too, based on the fire genasi of D&D and encouraged by the azhar of Freeport. The woman is an image that I've used for actual NPCs; Vanisse Maledict, the bad girl twin sister of my D&D PC Vanze Maledict, but I also used it as a replacement image for even worse girl Javaira Khanwar, one of the anti-PCs, because I didn't like the look of her otherwise.

The male is just a big tough bruiser, but Javaira also has a twin brother. I have images of him too, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. In general, of the elementalists, surturs are the best represented in my images.

After fire, why not water? Here's the tritons. These are both generics. I have no iconic tritons or triton NPCs yet.

I'm sure I will when I get to some of the later campaigns. I expect that they're relatively common on the Corsair Coast, for example.

Sylphs are the air elementalists. I don't have any iconics or NPCs of them yet either, so both of these characters are generic. The images have names, but that isn't meant to mean anything, and they may well change. I gave them names but nothing else yet. Sylphs have a bit more color variation than tritons or even surturs, with hair sometimes pure white like clouds and sometimes darker blue.

Dvergs are the earth elementalists, and have the most variation in their looks, so I generated a few images to get a few variations. I shouldn't post four images, but I have them, and they're sufficiently different that I feel like I need to. Their skin can be somewhat metallic (iron or copper being most common) or rocky (a grayish granite or red sandstone most common) and they tend to either have pale platinum blond hair or dark hair, and usually have dark eyes like obsidian.

Orcs are non-humans, but more human-like than they are in some other settings. This is kind of not actually true, however, as they are most definitely genetically a different "species" which the other races are not. The other races have a magical or supernatural admixture; the orcs and goblins are just different. 

Since I just mentioned them as the other morph of the orcling race, here's goblins too. Both sexes dressed in this case very similarly to each other. I do kind of like an almost pirate-like aesthetic, if you haven't noticed. I prefer swashbucklers to knights, I suppose.

Dhampyrs are the next race, but they're an expansion extra race, not a core race. That said, I have an iconic and another NPC that's pretty important to another iconic that both are one, so... yeah.

Seraphs are also an expansion extra race, and I'm not sure what to do with them. I've been on the fence, honestly, about eliminating them entirely. The one with the ghosts is because I was thinking of using the "ghost collector" medium idea and making her a seraph, but these aren't really characters yet with any background.

Finally, woodwoses are next. The female version is really me just asking for another iteration of one of Oisin's prompt, but saying make it a female and with blonder hair, so she's definitely generic.

Draconia Malfoy

I've been fascinated while traveling for work with the "Malfoid" meme, which I heard about on various YouTube channels that I occasionally watch. Real fake wizard and Shad talked about it, it was a major topic of one of the Friday Night Tights group discussion, and Jon Del Arroz made several videos of it. Even WDW Pro, Clownfish TV and That Park Place were forced to mention it—and they're pretty mainstream. Heck, even Variety made a mention of it.

What is it, you may be wondering? Basically it's a "meme" running rampant through fan fiction, fan art, and now fan AI animation of the concept of "what if Draco Malfoy had always been a girl?" The concept itself isn't super interesting just because, but what it says about the culture is fascinating. The general gist of these fan fiction rewrites is that Draco (or Draconia, as she's often called, although other alternative names have been made too) is still an arrogant, spoiled, aristocratic Slytherin princess, but because Potter, famous in his own right already, rejected her offer of friendship, she got mad at him and became his rival, just like Draco really did. The difference, of course, is that when a bratty little princess finds a guy who blows her off, she's immediately fascinated with him. Secretly underneath the barbs, rivalry, and sometimes outright bullying, she slowly starts to fall in love with him... and to a lesser or at least slower degree, he with her. This usually culminates in them going together to the Yule Ball in book four as normal.

However, the complication comes up when Voldemort returns later in that book, since the Malfoy family is heavily embedded in his inner circle, and Draconia (or whatever name they use) gets put in an impossible situation. Her true love and what she knows is right means sacrificing like she cannot believe; her family, her position, possibly even her life, as she becomes an obvious easy target if her true sympathies are known. And... of course, what are her true sympathies? What she grew up with and was indoctrinated in, or what she is slowly coming to understand is really right?

And, she eventually makes the right choice, at incredible cost to herself, proving herself to be the worthy love interest that Ginny Weasley never does.

Much of this is pretty cliché, but it's a story that people really yearn for; in fact, the hashtag #yearn or #yearning is heavily associated with this theme. This is definitely the boy's fantasy; a girl who really is worthy. But it's hardly new. In fact, Edgar Rice Burroughs perfected essentially this same story back in 1911 with A Princess of Mars (my second favorite book of all time, I might add) where John Carter goes to Mars, meets an aristocratic princess, immediately offends her, manages to kind of claw himself back into a brief friend-zoned relationship where he discovers that he's falling in love with her, only to quickly offend her even worse than before, engender all kinds of rude and dismissive behavior, even though part of this is because she has fallen for him, but is terrified of the consequences of it. After a series of incredible misadventures worthy of a true hero, he saves her from whatever dire fate is in store for her, which means that not only does she prove herself worthy of him, but he proves himself worthy of her too.

It's also worth pointing out that the plot of Pride and Prejudice is essentially exactly this too (without chases, swordfights, aliens and naked beautiful people on Mars) although Malfoy has many of the personality traits of Mr Darcy, and having the roles gender reversed has obvious changes on how it develops unless you want Harry Potter himself to come across as an unlikeable beta who acts like a woman. Which, in some versions, he does.

What is the interesting cultural discussion around this? Multiple things. Here's several in a dot point format.

• A big part of this is being associated with dissatisfaction of the new "Black Snape" streaming show. Also, the fact that a very traditional romance, but a "guy's romance" plot is at the heart of this complaint, especially after years of gay romance, race mixing, and girlbosses being pushed on us in spite of their unpopularity. This is being associated by Hollywood as a frightening thing; due to the timing, it's seen like a fan uprising of sorts against their new interpretation of the IP.
• In fact, that's become such a thing, that this is anti-Blake Snape, anti gay romance, very traditional, etc. means that Malfoid has become, at least in the twisted and ridiculously broken minds of the BlueSky Left, that Malfoid is a MAGA character that appeals to chuds or something stupid like that. Although it's making the rounds among the West just recently (relatively) and is, probably, mostly associated with boys and men who wish that this had been the original plot all along, that's not where the root of this actually is. It really started mostly in Asia, and most of the purveyors of the art, fan fiction and AI short movies are from Asia still.
• Sadly, this has a downside to what otherwise sounds like a good thing, and which mostly is. The most common interpretation of the characters is very anime/manga, or that the plot is a typical "k-drama". Although the story beats and character tropes have a long English language tradition, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jane Austen, and William Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew was basically a riff on a stock story and stock characters in his time, so it's not like he invented them either) a lot of people call this a Japanese tradition, and casually drop some anime Japanese stock plot label (borrowed from Western literature) in conversation about it. This is... sadly cringe. Actually anyone with any form of Yellow Fever is kind of cringe unless you're Asian yourself and it's your culture and your people, I think, but people who are unaware of how cringe it is and drop anime terms in discussions about other fandoms with the expectation that people will get the reference are the cringiest betas I know.
• As mentioned briefly above, the fact that many betas find this fantasy very appealing means that a lot of iterations of it are kind of beta. Harry is often a passive victim, an object with no real personality or agency, and the plot is just what happens to girl Draco and her emotions. Why exactly is Harry supposed to be the object of this burning love in girl Draco if he's not masculine, decisive, or in any way likeable or attractive really? Just because? That's part of the beta fantasy, and its one that mimics the girl fantasy, of being some mid nobody who for no reason whatsoever is suddenly the object of intense pursuit by a bunch of hyper-high status rich powerful guys, or even rich powerful but sexy brooding monsters like vampires or whatever. It's kind of an entitled fantasy; the idea that all you have to do is show up and not be anything really likeable or special, but somehow you're treated is if you are in fact both of those things for no reason whatsoever. 
• Of course, the better ones have Harry being Harry, much as he's written in the books. He's famous, he's mostly a nice guy, and he's likeable, but he also gets angry and doesn't take that much crap from Malfoy before he decides he can give it back just as hard. Harry starts falling for Malfoy too, because he sees that there's more there than initially meets the eye, but he sees that there's more there than meets the eye, he doesn't see something that isn't actually there, like in the fantasy version that is unrealistic. And, of course, Malfoy's character development has her turn into the kind of woman that any man would be happy to have at his side; she earns the right for Harry to love her; she isn't just entitled to it.
• In fact, this last development, which would typically happen in the "typical" Malfoid arc to a small degree before the Yule Ball and kinda sorta reconciliation and early attraction/dating vibe, but most especially after Voldemort returns and Malfoy has to make the hard decisions on what she's going to stand for kind of makes it somewhat different than the Edgar Rice Burroughs prototype of the story arc... although similar themes are certainly explored in Pride and Prejudice. In an Edgar Rice Burroughs story there is less character development and more characters actually just understanding that their counterpart actually was worthy all along. They don't become worthy, they already were and just need to prove it. Girl Draco has to become it in order to prove it. Part of that, of course, is that the characters are young. Teenagers, of course.
• It's also interesting to me that so much of it is AI generated, which is deflating a lot of the "moral panic" around AI. Lots of people who a month or two ago thought AI was the worst thing ever are now literally saying, bring on the data centers if they're going to give us Malfoid content!

Anyway, I don't know. I like the idea. If a really good novel, animated movie or whatever is out there, I'd be happy to consume it. When the first Harry Potter movie was imminent, I decided I ought to read the book first, and I ended up reading all four of them that were in print at the time several times over.  When the movie wasn't really all that good, and then that was followed by the fifth book, which also wasn't that good, it lost me a lot. It never recovered the book 3 and 4 glory that it briefly had. And while I can't deny the cultural touchstone that it's largely become, I'm also ambivalent to what it's largely become. Plus, it's YA anyway, even to an extent that stuff like The Hobbit or the pulp stories never were; its a little cringe for adults to be too into Harry Potter, although adults who are my kids age and who grew up with it the same way my generation grew up with the original trilogy Star Wars movies get a bit of a pass there. Like I said, while I like some of what it's doing, and I don't mind seeing more of it if it can avoid the beta poseurs, what I think is ultimately much more fascinating about it is what it's saying and doing to the culture wars and the cultural landscape. It's indicative of a massive shift back to normalcy. Many long-time younger Millennial or Gen-Z fans are saying that this story arc is significantly better than the original with much more potential. Because of its roots in traditional romance and characters who earn and deserve an iteration of the greatest love story ever told, it is a fundamental rejection of years and years of indoctrination, which ultimately proves that Leftist dogma is incapable—in spite of many structural advantages in our culture that have lasted for many, many decades—of overcoming the core of human nature and what people yearn for.

And it's not really right wing. That's kind of silly. The reality is that Leftism is so alien and strange that anything that is normal and usual about human nature is called "right wing" because it's opposed to Leftism. I guess, if that's what you mean right wing is, and lots of people do, then sure, I guess we can call normal human behavior and human nature right wing. All that that really does is indict Leftism with demonstrating how anti-human and dysfunctional it really is, though.

My favorites are the cheeky ones probably made in the West, however. Sure, sure; they're almost more like skits than stories, but they're pretty hilarious and show that, even with AI generation, these characters have humanity, chemistry and charisma than anything that the Left can manage to create, and that is super engaging. Hence the Left's rage at the meme, I presume.

And speaking of not being too beta and passive...

Shule

When I make a character be different than it is in "common" fantasy (i.e., D&D) the AI often struggles to understand what I want. I had a really hard time with Shule and getting him to look like a more realistic version of what I'd made in Hero Forge. But, with the weird sudden unlimited ChatGPT images I managed to get what I wanted. First, my unsatisfactory early versions. These are almost a couple of years old now, so the AI is quite a bit better now.

Even with more modern AI generators, it was a struggle. I guess I needed to work on my prompts.

This final batch is what i pretty much always envisioned; however. 

The last one might be too thin. It makes him look taller, which makes him look proportioned less like a goblin.

Darkness in the Hill Country as a pdf product

I enjoyed spending the evening last night putting together that string of blog posts, but on re-reading them, they feel like... stream of consciousness blog posts. They need a lot of editing; there are typo and errors, and there is just poorly written stuff. I'd actually really like to make Darkness in the Hill Country an actual campaign; a product. That means a rewrite and reorganization of sorts, but it's less work than it sounds like, because I have all of the raw materials that mostly just need editing rather than complete writing from scratch. What do I need to do to make this work? Let me make a list! I still need to figure out the order and organization of how I want to do this, but that can come later after I make a solid list of everything that I want to actually include.

• 

  Lysander Draven

  I need to update the map. I found that it had some outdated names and a few other problems. I really like the hand-drawn Tolkien style map in black and white (and red), so I'm going to go with that format. It will not be a map of the entire setting, but just of the area associated with the campaign, just like the map that I'm replacing. I've been wanting to do this anyway, although not with much urgency. Seeing the state of my current map makes it clear that this needs to be one of the first things to do. I'll include the map in basically the facing page material, or at least at the very beginning of the pdf. You know, just like all of the fantasy novels do.
• I then want to take the annotated map text that I wrote a few years ago, update and flesh it out, mostly with other text from other posts that I've already done, so that I've got more details on the various races and places. This means that anyone could run the campaign in a pretty good facsimile of the setting as I myself imagine it, even though the sheer volume of text about the setting is still pretty low. What this will have, though, will be heavily concentrated on the stuff that's relevant to this specific campaign, and won't go in to stuff that is beyond it. This material will also help with character creation, since players will have a better handle on what all of the races actually are.
• Although I envision, of course, that people will make their own characters, I do want to include pre-gens at 1st level that would be not only example iconic characters, but could be used if you wanted to instead of home-made characters. I want to expand my current list of iconics beyond what I currently have so that I have at least one example of every race, including the Appendix extra races. This means that I can use the four basic iconics already; Ragnar and Dominic Clevenger (humans), Kimnor Rugova (grisling), Cailin Clevenger (dhampyr) and I'll need more. I can dust off a few of my other characters, like Shule (goblin) or Marshall Kazar Thorn (orc), Oisin Dughall (woodwose), and I can even convert my D&D 5e character Vanze Maledict (surtur) to the system, and his twin sister (Vanisse), which I'll probably make a different type of elementalist, because that's how that race works. That leaves me short an iconic kemling, two other types of elementalist, and a seraph. Each character would have a one page character sheet, and a facing page description, and for thirteen characters, that adds twenty six pages. It's a luxury; I don't really need to do that, but it's a pdf. Who cares how many pages it is? There's a good chance that I'll put them in the back as Appendix material anyway.
• I'll need to describe the 5x5 Fronts method of running a game, so that the material I have makes some sense. Although I'll flesh out the matrix with more detail than it currently has (including adding stat blocks for monsters and NPCs as needed), the basic format will remain more or less the same, so I'll need to explain how to actually use it and how it's meant to be interpreted.
• Then, like I said, I need to further flesh out and add a bit to some of the weaker or more vague parts of the my current supercut write-up. I do not intend to add anything like maps of buildings or anything like that; I will remain clear that even with the more fleshed out format, this will remain a framework that can't be used without some finishing polish to make it fit your actual situation with your actual group. But honestly, given how 5e campaigns are written, I'm not that far off from their format in terms of providing useable stuff right off the page. I know a lot of gamers really want their campaigns and modules and adventures to be ready to run right away, but that's just not how I roll. Customization, both to each individual group, and to developments within the campaign as it is being played.
• Also, if I'm adding some specific "blasphemous tomes" and other items, I should add specific stats or rules for them as well.

I don't want to think too far ahead, but there isn't any reason not to do Cult of Undeath after I'm done with this one. After that, Terror in Timischburg and the other campaigns aren't ready enough to even start this project; I need to do the 5x5 workup here on the blog first.

Darkness in the Hill Country Epilogue: Character fronts!

I created the 5x5 matrix plan for the campaign, but in reality, of course, I also really like to have details related to the characters, and challenges, nemeses, etc. from their past feature. Of course, because this is a plan in search of an actual game, I don't have any characters yet, but what I do have is iconics that are stand-ins! I'll create this epilogue post to talk about what I'd do with the iconics, and use that as an example, I guess, of what I'd do with the actual PCs when I have them. I added the iconics images to the Part 0 post, so I won't repost them here.

First, my lead iconic is Dominic Clevenger, a Humbrian ranger. He's in his mid to upper 20s; still young, but has been around enough to be skilled and experienced. He spent time not only as a Hillman Ranger, but as part of the infamous Shadow Division, which the Ranger Corps does not officially admit exists, and some people don't believe in. As such, his task was specifically to hunt down supernatural threats, as well as support the general Ranger Corps mission of blunting other threats to the people of the Hill Country. The Ranger Corps is an interesting organization, in that it ignores any of the political nonsense that goes on between the two largest rival city-states, Barrowmere and Garenport, as well as between the East Marches section and the West Marches (where Cayminster and Bucknerfeld are the most important city-states respectively, and which have tried to extricate themselves from the politics of Garenport, at least, as much as is reasonably possible.) The commission of the Ranger Corps is to the people of the Hill Country as a whole, and while various politicians and would-be tyrants have sometimes tried to lean on the Rangers for their own purposes, the Rangers have staunchly resisted being coopted as such, and the current crop of leaders of the various locations are loath to try again.

In any case, this post isn't meant to be about background on the Ranger Corps. Dominic is a former Shadow, but now is a freelance supernatural bounty hunter of sorts. He is often supported (and hired) by his old commander (Sir Liamond Wreldane) who appreciates having talented and trusted freelancers that he can work with "off the books." Dominic "retired" early after tussling with a corrupted ranger (Audrey Hardwicke). Hardwicke's corruption was exposed, but he fled from facing justice. He still has lots of supporters in the Ranger Corps (some of whom simply don't know the particulars) as he was a popular figure among them, and well respected before his corruption was outed to the leadership of the group. They decided, for better or for worse, not to make the cause of Hardwicke's fall public. What was Hardwicke involved in? Kidnapping women and children (mostly) for occult sacrifices. Hardwicke was no cultist; just a mercenary who was paid to not only look the other way, but even enable and assist with gathering "resources" for various cults. Now that he's been exposed, he's still doing the same thing, but he has to be more discrete, and he no longer has his wages from his Ranger Corps day job. He's gotten more involved with various crimes to pay the bills and has had to lay considerably lower than he's used to. In fact, he's mostly relocated out of the Hill Country entirely to Simashki. He's also consorted even more intimately with various shady characters, including taking as a lover the kemling witch Merra Kuzulash. (Who is actually another anti-iconic; I have one group of anti-PCs who are all bad guys, and she's in that group normally.)

Since I never came up with an origin for the voodoo dolls from the Tazitta Death Cults section, let's have Audrey and Merra be the source. Rangers, or former rangers, still loyal to Hardwicke keep him informed from time to time on the comings and goings of their organization and the Clevenger brothers specifically. He'll have a few ambushes set up for Dominic and his gang of meddling kids, although they'll just be lackeys, not Hardwicke or Merra themselves. When the campaign gets closer to its endgame, Hardwicke will himself make an appearance in an urban setting—probably Garenport itself—for a cat and mouse hunt at the worst possible time. 

It'll be nice for Merra to at least get a nod, although I don't intend to feature her much, or probably even have her make an in-person appearance at all. I intend for whole entire group of "anti-PCs" to be part of a future campaign when I get there. Some foreshadowing through this vector is cool. 

Audley Hardwicke

Merra Kuzulash

Second, Dominic's best friend and blood-brother is Kimnor "Kim" Rugova, an expatriate shadow sword from Lomar. As described in the background on Lomar and the racial description of the grislings, his people are cursed so that a small percentage of them fall victim to a cannibalism curse where they must eat the flesh of a human or demihuman or slowly turn in to a ghoul (damned if they do and damned if they don't, when the curse manifests.) A younger and more idealistic Kimnor was engaged to a pretty girl from his neighborhood, who later contracted this curse by pure blasted bad luck. Vowing to find a way to beat it, Kinnor tried to hide her in a Nyxian neighborhood. She was captured and lynched by a mob, and Kimnor fled in grief, disavowing his entire people and race and homeland in his despair. However... his fiancé (Bethan Arghavad) was actually not lynched, or at least not terminally, and was taken by a Nyxian cult and protected from the law which mandated her death. She was prevented from devolving into a ghoul by being transformed into a dhampir—but she now gleefully hunts, kills, and eats her own people as per her curse, but does so with enhanced physical abilities and lucidity. Kim is going to have to discover and face this when circumstances bring him back to Lomar over the course of the game.

In the meantime, Kim has been hiding from both the terror of facing the supernatural, and his grief over Bethan (as well as his fear that it could come to him too) by being loud, boisterous, boastful—a hard partier, basically. But he also has a small pseudodragon as a pet. Kim's arc is rife with potential for really good character development as he faces his past and shows himself to be a much more serious person than he pretends to be.

Bethan Arghavad

I actually decided to turn the next two iconics into contacts, rather than continue to use them as iconics. But, since I already wrote this, I'll just repeat it here. I actually need to write the corresponding stuff about Ragnar and Cailin Clevenger, so I'll do that as part of the next campaign supercut, maybe.

Thirdly, Shule is an itinerant goblin thief. One of the main reasons Shule is wandering around the Three Realms with Dominic and Kim is because he's looking for his brother, who disappeared mysteriously. He occasionally runs into an old orcling pal who claims to have seen him, but the clues are always vague, often second-hand, and they've pointed to little other than the fact that he's still alive somewhere. As the party gets closer and closer to Garenport, the sightings and rumors increase. Turns out, his brother (Kemish) was press-ganged by orcling pirates on the Darkling Sea, but has done well with them and embraced their lifestyle. He's now first mate to an orc pirate (Charakaz Rees) who runs a sloop associated with Captain Taurak (of earlier campaign infamy). I'm not a huge fan of contrived moral dilemmas, but even I'm curious what happens when Shule's brother doesn't want or need to be "rescued." Or, at least he doesn't think that he does.

Shule

Fourthly, we have Oisin Dughall, a woodwose outdoorsman. He spent some time in his youth running with a bad crowd, and was an enforcer for a Chersky Mafia-type in Simashki (the true wretched hive of scum and villainy in the Three Realms, if you haven't gathered that already.) Because Oisin was fundamentally too principled to be successful as a mafia tough guy, he bailed on an operation that was a bridge too far. The operation proceeded anyway, but was a total mess because Oisin wasn't there doing his part. The boss's (Vaspar Oksandros) brother was killed and others of his organization were snatched by the Watch, necessitating expensive bribes to free the most important ones. Assuming Oisin had betrayed him on behalf of one of his rivals, Vaspar put a death mark on his head. Vaspar's rivals would also like to get their hands on him to find out what he knows. Oisin fled to the Hill Country, hoping that beyond the Sabertooth Mountains he'd be free to the gangster turf wars of Simashki. For a few years, this was true, especially as Oisin stayed in the rural areas. Vaspar himself has fled east as Simashki started to get too hot for him, and now operates a "startup" in Lomar, although he's got agents and spies throughout the Humberland Hill Country looking for opportunities. Oisin's ability to hide from his past is likely to take a turn for the worst, since Vaspar still blames him for not only his brother's death, but now even his entire fall from his perch in Simashki.

Oisin Dughall

Vaspar Oksandros

Darkness in the Hill Country Supercut Part V: Scourge of the East Marches

Last one! If you haven't, read the others in order first. Well... there will probably be an epilogue one that follows this, actually.

The northern shore of the Darkling Sea is disconnected from the rest of the Humberland Hill Country; although you can travel by land to this area, you will pass through the separate polity of Lomar to do so (discussed in the past), and most people arrive from Garenport or elsewhere by ship. Cayminster is the largest town here, and while it has strong commercial, political and cultural ties to Garenport, the hinterlands beyond is much more independent and has, at best, a kind of resentful dependency for some things from the bigger cities. They prefer to be left alone and not get involved in anything from the cities; from commercialism, to politics to even fashion, where they are stubbornly and in fact defiantly rustic. 

There are, again, many smaller communities which the map does not show, but Burlharrow is the largest of those that does show up on the current iteration of the map. (By large, I mean a few thousand people, though. Burlharrow in size should be comparable to some of the classic D&D and Pathfinder small starting towns like Hommlet, Sandpoint or Saltmarsh, etc.)

North of the Darkling Sea, the land is mostly clear of trees, except for relatively small stands, copses, or riparian stretches of forest. It mostly looks like shrub savanna with rolling hills, occasional lakes, streams or other waterways where thicker vegetation and trees grow, and small buttes, mesas and other rock formations that pop up too. The ground slopes steadily yet slowly upwards too, and once you hit high enough elevation, you get to the southern eaves of the Wolfwood, the great boreal forest that separates the Three Realms from whatever lies to the north (Old Hyperborea, Kurushat proper, etc.) This region is called the East Marches, and is kind of an expansion region for the Humbrians, as more and more of them are seeking new lands to settle away from the hustle and bustle of Garenport in particular.

Burlharrow also specifically lies in the floor of a shallow valley, and small lakes and marshes surround the town, but make for good irrigation for farming and the watering of herds; it's much drier in the rolling hills around town. The lieutenant-mayor of Burlharrow, one Gothbert Erhard, is determined to make Burlharrow independent. The mayor himself (Gunne Woodrow) is weak, indecisive and self-indulgent, and has become moreso over the years, so his advisors and other powerful people in town have taken to ignoring him and attempting to enact their own agendas, for good or ill. As rumors of the nonsense happening in Garenport that makes up the first post here about the Grand Duke and Duchess reaches his town, Erhard is even more committed than ever to this independence-minded course of action for the good of the region. However, other relatively wealthy and powerful players in town make a lot of their money with trade through Cayminster, much of it ultimately destined for or coming from Garenport. As this difference in opinion becomes more rancorous over time, the two factions have even acquired labels: the Loyalists, who favor closer ties with the cities to the south and west, and the Sovereigns who see Burlharrow as culturally but not politically allied with any of the greater powers with their intrigues and ambitions on the entire Hill Country region. In this, they are more similar to the Southumbrians, who also resist Garenport dominance and the Grand Duke's ambition to turn the Humberland Hill Country into the Hill Kingdom with himself as the first king, but South Humberland is far away and has its own local concerns rather than ambitions on bringing Burlharrow into its orbit. That said, Lieutenant-Mayor Erhard looks to Barrowmere as a model for how to create an independent political axis as long as you have enough geography between yourself and Garenport, and has even recruited a few Southumbrian advisors and others to support him; the militia captain of Burlharrow (Berold Geissfalk) was a successful soldier in his youth in the Rabb's Hill campaign in the south, and then retired from the Rangers. Erhard has also started an aggressive plan to lure homesteaders to the countryside around Burlharrow. There is plenty of open and empty (well.. empty-ish. You know how it goes) land to the south, along the eastern edge of the Darkling Sea. This is still an initiative in its infancy. Of course, the Loyalists, led by Dockmaster Murchad Gibson is alarmed by the attempt to grow his opposition by migration of people who have every reason to be Sovereigns and oppose the Loyalist agenda. 

Gothbert Erhard

Berold Geissfalk

Murchad Gibson

Anyway, this is the context in which the Burlharrow part of the campaign will be set. First, assuming that the PCs are playing along and biting on the hooks that I've set up for them, the first column would have them going to Burlharrow anyway to look for Morcant, the Duchess' former huntsman, who's got important clues about the whole "who's actually got a canopic talisman and who doesn't" affair. If they don't, however, someone they trust, like a Ranger, or someone else can set more hooks that there's urgent trouble up there that needs some attention right away. In reality, the town is beset with a plague, but it's not a natural plague, and the townspeople suspect that it isn't. Rats are all over the town, staring at people unnaturally, showing little timidity, and generally being creepy. Reports of rats the size of dogs attacking people are starting to make their way around town. This is true. The plague is man-made. Or... well, ratman-made. And the rats are the delivery vehicle for it. Why is some ratman trying to depopulate Burlharrow? Actually, the ratmen don't really care about Burlharrow at all; it's just a dry run of a new plague that they've developed. Of course, ultimately, they want to depopulate much of the rest of the Hill Country and spread from their home on Leng in the lands where humans once lived. (Wow, this could be a whole 'nother column by itself. But I'm not developing it for now.)

Secondly, the rats need to be stopped before they can spread more of the plague. While they've gotten bold enough to wander the streets by day, they can be traced to a nest outside of town which they normally enter through the sewer systems. Here the PCs will not find the absolute source of the plague, but they will discover lots of swarms of rats, some giant rats, and a handful of ratmen and maybe even a rat brute (see monster list.) This confirms that the plague wasn't natural. They'll find some clues here, though, that with a little effort and investigation will lead them back in to town (maybe not right away; other problems will also be pressing on them; see below) where they will discover that the mayor himself had something to do with the ratmen; they have his signet right in their possession among the detritus of the nest.

Ratman plague sorcerer

Rat brute

Thirdly, because so many of the townsfolk died so quickly, the graveyard outside of town hasn't really been properly tended to; many of the townsfolk have been buried hurriedly in shallow graves. As sometimes happens when graveyards are poorly tended, necromancy seems to coalesce almost of its own will, as if a malignant force with its own sentience, and ghouls are starting to plague the town; also stealing victims, eating them, or otherwise turning them into ghouls in their own right. While fighting off ghouls who have also become too emboldened to be left alone (I imagine, possibly an attack on the inn at night; which I'll conveniently locate kind of on the edge of town near the graveyard.) Curiously, through much of this trouble, the mayor has been seen very infrequently.

They'll find that there are quite a few more ghouls and bodies than they would expect from the townsfolk, and through a series of clues which I haven't yet invented, they could eventually be able to discover that many of the recently arrived settlers and homesteaders who have set off to establish and build homes in the hinterlands have been murdered and brought here. This is a major black eye on Erhard's plan to grow the region into an independent place that doesn't need Garenport, but even more so because it turns out that Geissfalk has been murdering them. He's brought in a number of mercenaries to stiffen the militia, who are actually little more than brigands, pirates and other murderers and criminals, and he did it because he was paid off by the mayor himself to blunt Erhard's plans, in spite of the fact that he showed up (publicly) at Erhard's request in the first place!

Of course, I imagine that everyone will want to confront the mayor when they discover this, but if they attempt to, they will find that the mayor has been dead for two weeks, and he's been Weekend at Bernie's-ified around town while mostly being holed up in the mayor's mansion. There are more ratmen there, as well as the ratmen mad scientist who created the plague, and rat brutes eating the flesh of the mayor's dead household and servants. The PCs can eventually discover two important things at the mayor's place: 1) the mayor was actually murdered and had nothing to do with the plague; it was Gibson who murdered the mayor, offered Burlharrow to the rats for their experiment, and paid off Geissfalk to murder the settlers and homesteaders, and 2) there is a horrible black book made of dried and withered human skin with the remnants of a face on the front cover. It will take the PCs some time to decipher and read this book, and it will have many of the same problems as a magical tome or grimoire, save with a study time in days instead of weeks and its not really about spells (although if any PCs are in to that, they could find a couple); it does have a cure for the plague detailed in it, though. In a pinch, the dried leather human face on the cover could even whisper the hints to the PCs.

I imagine that many sanity checks could be made as a result of what's found in the mayor's mansion. I love it.

Fourthly, hopefully the PCs are willing to bite on that hook all its own, but while they're perusing the book, the plague's real diabolical nature starts to make itself manifest; some of the townsfolk who survived contracting the plague are now turning into plague-zombies on their way towards becoming ghouls as a secondary set of symptoms, and have to be put down, probably. The situation is now quite dire, as they can probably deduce that the experiment has been going on longer than they thought and that's the source of the ghouls in the graveyard that they faced earlier.

Unfortunately, and fifthly, the cure isn't exactly easy to get. It involves, in fact, finding a rotted fairy ring in the woods nearby (referenced or whispered by the Book) and traveling to the Shadowlands, a parallel realm similar to the Plane of Shadow or the Upside-down, to use two references that most will probably get. I'm a little hazy on what exactly they'll need to do here, and maybe I can play it by ear as I get closer. I'm thinking that they need to find one of the shadow rosebushes with black roses and bring back enough of the flowers to brew a cure, but fighting off undead and minor daemons, and avoiding daemons that are probably over their heads to defeat, like a nosoi daemon might be involved. 

I also like the idea that having traveled to the Shadowlands and partaken of a black rose draught, that they will be marked going forward in some subtle way that will be plot hooky in the future, although again; need to determine exactly how that will play out as I get closer to it actually happening. I'm thinking of giving them a benefit/cost; something that's a cool thing to have, but also there's a cost to it. Shadowy animal companion for the group, and an improved resistance to any disease or poison, but their shadows now occasionally move independently of them. It takes them a while to realize out of the corners of their eyes, and they start to suspect that they've brought back something with them that they can't identify and confront, but which was not invited...