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.

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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.

D&D as low fantasy

Given what I said yesterday about D&D never really emulating the sword & sorcery low fantasy that OSR fans claim to be such fans of. Iironically, some of the non-D&D OSR games actually do so in terms of mechanics vis-à-vis magic and what-not. But, of course, the OSR playstyle is heavily focused on dungeon-crawling, which is my other main complain about the disconnect between D&D and sword & sorcery fiction. I saw someone (on ENWorld, of all places) once say that the first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark has more dungeon-crawling than the entire oeuvre of sword & sorcery fiction. That was meant to be hyperbole, but it's also not really incorrect. The best rhetoric might not be true from a literal, dialectical perspective, but it's still "true" if you know what I mean.

Anyway, what I want to talk about, as a tangent from my normal topics (not that my normal topics have been very focused for quite a long time lately anyway) is: how would I actually play D&D if I wanted it to have that kind of low magic low fantasy vibe that I do, actually, want it to have? What modifications would I make? And because 3e is the version of D&D that I know by far the best, played the most, and has the most modifications already floating out there, that's the edition that I'm going to focus on. So, if I want that low magic, low fantasy swashbuckling dark adventure feel—and I definitely do—what changes would I make? Let me list them:

• Use E6. This is the single most important overlay or house rule to implement, as it keeps the game from ever getting out of the lower fantasy quadrants to begin with. Read the post in the link, if you need to (maybe I'll copy and paste to have my own post that "archives" it as a page, just in case, here on the blog.) But I don't think that this is sufficient by itself. WotC have reported in the past that their research indicates most "campaigns" only last seven sessions and hardly anyone plays higher than level 6-8 anyway. Higher level D&D may be aspirational gameplay for a lot of players, but it's not reality. If most campaigns start at level 1 and fizzle before getting more than a few levels under its belt anyway, then there's no reason to worry about it too much.
• No PC can start at first level with a spellcasting class. That is, if the class gives you a spellcasting ability at 1st level, then you have a take a level of something else first that does not. Wizards, sorcerers, clerics, etc. have to take a level of fighter, or rogue or something else like that before they can advance into their spellcasting class. Ignore the multiclassing penalty, if you use XP, for purposes of this requirement. In fact, ignore multiclassing penalties and favored class altogether. It's kind of a stupid rule anyway, and with only 6 levels to play with, just let people take levels in whatever class that they want. Note that classes like ranger or paladin that have a spellcasting progression, but one that doesn't start at 1st level aren't affected by this rule, since their spell progression doesn't come in until nearly the level cap anyway.
• Higher level spells can be at DM's discretion, converted to Incantations, which greatly limits their tactical utility, but which does allow for magic-users, especially villains, who can do all kinds of weird things with enough time and will. 5e has done something similar with Rituals, although I'm a little less familiar with them. But if you're unsure how to do this, or uncomfortable house-ruling spells as Incantations, look to the 5e Rituals rules to see if they can be used. (5e is really just a streamlined version of 3e, for the most part. Many systems work very similarly, and those that don't can usually be ported as is without any problem.)
• Higher level class abilities can be converted, if needed, into feat chains that can be accessed via the ongoing feat access of E6.
• While normally, prestige classes wouldn't really work in E6, at the DM's discretion, characters can start at 1st level of a prestige class and take it as if it were a normal class, ignoring the prerequisites. Emphasis on at the DM's discretion, and if a prestige class is too powerful for this to work (honestly, most are not, but you know your group and how they play better than I do, and power-gamers can't be given a free hand to screw up your game) the DM can either disallow it or work with you to modify it.
• Full utilization of optional classes from other sources, like the Factotum (dumb name, but cool class) from Dungeonscape, the Complete series classes, etc. should be allowed and explicitly encouraged.
• Full utilization of alternate class features from PHB II and other books should be encouraged. If more are desired, Pathfinder 1e archetypes are exactly the same thing, and since Pathfinder 1e was built off of the SRD, much of the archetypes for Pathfinder can be used as is in D&D 3.5.
• I don't remember the psionics rules very well, honestly, so I'm a little hesitant to comment on their use, but the same concept as with spellcasting classes should be applied to "full time" psionic classes like the psion or wilder. Whether it applies to "part time" psionic classes like the soulknife or the lurk is up to the DM. I'd probably say OK. But again, my caveat is that I don't remember how psionics works very well because I haven't played or even seen played a psionic character in many, many years.
• Not strictly speaking necessary, since low fantasy is not necessarily equivalent to pseudo-horror dark fantasy, but there are a lot of fear checks, sanity systems, etc. for d20 games, and you could use one, if desired, to further mute the superhero feel of D&D vs. the low fantasy source material that you're trying to engage with. If you do, finding some way to apply it to the use of magic is desirable too, because it makes magic less utilitarian and more dangerous and edgy. I've completely changed the way magic works in my game where this is already baked into how it works. I'm not entirely sure how to do this with a modified D&D game without it drastically challenging the utility of even taking spellcasters at all, but one quick and dirty method would be to make the character roll a d20 every time they cast a spell. On a critical failure, i.e, a natural 1, the spell would fail and whatever sanity system you're using would come into play. I like this rule a lot, but that's because I want to push even further into dark fantasy rather than simply S&S low fantasy, so this isn't strictly speaking necessary for my project. 

A low fantasy party of adventurers. Although DALL-E 3 thinks that they're all Millennials, I think.

I think those things would make the game feel much more low fantasy, but in reality, the rules changes are probably less important than what you do at the table anyway. Do you have bizarre animal-people characters playing weirdo superheroes, or do you have much more grounded characters? What kinds of adventures are your ensemble cast of characters getting up to? Stuff that feels gamist and D&D like dungeon-crawling, or stuff that feels similar to what characters in low fantasy S&S stories are doing? Do you have grounded realistic settings mostly full of normal people, or do magic and monsters appear on your daily commute and are commonplace? High magic and highly monstrous elements can and should certainly appear, but it's a question of context; are they routine because the game is highly fantastic, or are they stand-out set pieces because the game is more grounded and realistic?

Anyway, I did this just because it is of interest to me at the moment, and because I've been revisiting a lot of my 3e collection lately, I'm feeling more charitable towards that system than I otherwise might. It's still not my ideal way to play, but this is a method that I could happily run. As long as I also get to be handwavey about rulings, play theatre of the mind style, and tell players to avoid feats and other choices that maximize their tactical grid options, because I'm not very interested in the tactical grid style of play. If I can get rid of the tactical grid, get rid of the scourge of D&D's higher level scaling problem (which honestly applies to every edition of D&D and many D&D-like games equally) and reduce the higher magic D&Disms in favor of a more muted, grounded approach, then the game works for me, and I actually probably enjoy the many options for character customization. 

3e, and it's associated family (I really mostly mean 3.5 and even Pathfinder 1e, but I genericize the entire era into one label) is infamous as a power-gamer's paradise with all kinds of optimization combination to explore, but if you don't play with power-gamers, it can be a role-players paradise as well with all kinds of customization options to explore. But once again, what goes on at your actual table is the real deciding factor, much more important than the rules. I don't think power-gamers have a lot to work with with E6, so they'll probably stay away anyway. Which is exactly what you want to have happen.

Contrary to OSR claims, D&D was never very low fantasy

I generated an image of Conan standing with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Or, if you like, Fafnir and the Black Rat, two characters from the Marvel Comics line of Conan who were obviously meant to be Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stand-ins. Marvel Comics Conan ran from 1970 to 1993 and was one of Marvel's best selling titles through the 70s... although because it was licensed, it may not have been necessarily one of their most profitable. (As an aside, I find it curious that G. I. Joe was Marvel's top selling title through much of the 80s. Neither, of course, is in the Marvel Universe, nor are they superhero related at all. It's funny to me that superheroes are so closely associated with comic books to learn later that a sword and sorcery comic and a military action soap opera were the, or at least among the best selling Marvel titles throughout my entire childhood and youth.) I like a lot of that good old-fashioned sword & sorcery. I'm reading, for the first time although I've owned the book for probably fifteen years, the Solomon Kane collection, and I've got the Del Rey Conan and Kull collections out again. I read the Conan ones years ago, and I dabbled with Kull, but never finished the whole collection. I'm also reading some other sword & sorcery in short order; the James Silke Horned Helmet series. James Silke just died last year at the age of 93. but he was famous for his work in Hollywood and comics. He was a co-writer for The Wild Bunch, for instance, and wrote the screenplay for the Raiders of the Lost Ark semi-parodic rip-off King Solomon's Mines loosely based off of H. Rider Haggard's character Allan Quatermain and played by Richard Chamberlain. Who also just died last year at the age of 90. I didn't realize that until looking it up. I also didn't realize that he was gay. Sigh.

Anyway, tangent aside, sword & sorcery is great. The OSR and old-school D&D players in general talk it up a lot and claim that D&D of the OSR variety, or at least prior to WotC takeover of the brand in the latest 90s and the launch of their new, derivative version in 2000, resembled sword & sorcery quite a bit. I don't think so. Gary Gygax may have famously thought that everyone should want to play a human fighter like Conan or Aragorn or something like that, but the rules of even early D&D didn't work that way. TV Tropes, discussing the long-acknowledged "linear fighter, quadratic (or even exponential) wizard" problem in D&D and many other RPGs too, for that matter, says the following, slightly edited for format and clarity by me:

This isn't just a sour grapes complaint against weak wizards or a lack of competitive balance throughout the game, but can be a deliberate thematic choice.First off, is the idea that warriors hit a development ceiling at some point. They hit the limits of human (or near-human) ability and can't bend physics any farther. If you don't have magic, how can you hope to defeat, say, an intangible ghost or a Master of Illusion? Basically, warriors can only be so fantastic, so even as they improve, those improvements mean less.

Secondly, in such a setting, it may be very difficult to even get started as a mage, requiring some sort of inherent gift or immense study. Additionally your novice talents may not save you if trouble comes too soon, further thinning the herd. Meanwhile, billions of people throughout history have learned how to use weapons, and conscription armies are based on the theory that any able-bodied person could do it. Thus, the Conans and Beowulfs have the run of the place through both numbers and ease of recruitment, while the mages are fewer and take longer to achieve results, but aim for greater profits.

Thirdly, there's more than a bit of wish fulfillment here. Gamers, and by extension game designers, tend to be nerds. The notion that a wizard (generally something of a brainy bookworm) may start out weaker than the "dumb muscle", but surpass them entirely in the endgame, proving that knowledge is the ultimate power? This account holds a lot of inherent appeal to them.

If this trope is not desired by the game designers, or enough complaints convince them to change things, there are ways to limit the awesomeness of wizards. These include restrictions on magic itself, the two classic examples being the Mana mechanic or the more restrictive Vancian Magic. Both of these serve to cap how often a wizard can cast spells. Preventing casting spells while wearing armor is another, though this is often partially countered by providing a range of protective magics that work much like normal armor only better, but of course for a limited time. Other restrictions also exist; a common one is simply to make the wizard fragile. Others involve sanity and corruption systems, or making the casting of a spell a tactically debilitating act.

Yeah, I never bought into this. I may have been a bit of a nerd myself growing up, and less inclined towards athletic pursuits, but that doesn't mean that I was just a bookworm. (Just that I liked to read!) I also played outside a lot and hiking, camping and backpacking became big hobbies of mine even at a relatively young age. I never felt that kind of resentment that a lot of bookish types do when young against the popular, athletic guys, because I could kinda sorta hold my own socially with them, and I didn't care about trying to be like them, or feel much jealousy towards their own social status vs my own. In addition, I was always a fan of swashbuckling historical action that didn't even have wizards, of course. I like Captain Blood, Robin Hood, Scaramouche and The Three Musketeers, especially the one that has Richard Chamberlain as Aramis, of course (see how I pulled him back in there?) I always thought these swashbuckling duelists and fighters were more interesting characters than smug, gamma-like magic-users. And people who claim to really like Howard and Leiber, but who like to play wizards, sorcerers or other varieties of magic-users kind of confuse me like they allegedly confused Gary Gygax. Magic-users were either villains and enemies to Conan, like Thoth-Amon or Kulan Gath, or they were mysterious and creepy plot devices to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, like Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face. Gandalf is maybe the closest archetype to a regular "PC Wizard" in the foundational literature, but he doesn't really work either, because of course, he's not even a mortal. Wizard isn't a profession, like character class is supposed to be, it was a class of being. 

Other works maybe have wizards that are more down to earth, like The Face in the Frost, which is an under-rated story that many forget from the Appendix N, which is the only place that I've ever seen it mentioned; either directly there, or in discussions of the Appendix N. While Leiber, Howard and Tolkien obviously have vast fandoms that are unrelated to D&D, I don't think The Face in the Frost would be remembered at all if it hadn't been listed by Gygax, and I'm not sure how much it's remembered even now even though he did. 

Other foundational works had more jockish, athletic fighter types as the iconic characters to be based on. Poul Anderson's works cited in the Appendix N usually feature typical warrior-heroes. Fletcher Pratt and Michael Moorcock, of course, wrote differently, but even Elric's supposed sorcerous ways are usually overstated. He had a bunch of deals with demons and gods, but especially after acquiring Stormbringer, he was mostly a sword-wielding warrior-anti-hero himself. 

In any case, the fact that D&D didn't replicate that kind of setting, and put magic-users (the title that it preferred for many years) front and center kind of belies the idea that it replicates the stories that its fans say that it replicates. My earliest complaint about D&D, and I made this complaint as early as the mid-80s, is that it didn't feel anything much at all like the stories that I was reading, especially stuff by Lloyd Alexander, J. R R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the ones that I was most familiar with at that age. Not only that, the quote above from TV Tropes, about wizards being a kind of wish fulfillment Mary Sue. That kind of stuff pings on some kind of cringe radar that I have, and makes me dislike it automatically. I have a subconscious aversion to that kind of ego-stroking, and it bugs me. One could argue that characters like Conan, John Carter or Tarzan are a different kind of wish-fulfilment Mary Sue, I suppose, but they don't feel like it to me. And characters more like Aragorn are heroic but believable. Conan and Tarzan are superlative; prototypes for superheroes in a sense, whereas Aragorn is a much more traditional hero. But in any case, it's a combination of their background and their dedication to the perfection of their craft that makes them superlative, not just the "just because" secret king special boy fantasy of women and gammas. I suppose that's the root of my dissatisfaction with the trope, although I wouldn't have even had the vocabulary to analyze or diagnose it for many, many years. And that's where the wizard character classes, and the implications of wizards in the setting turn me off; they feel like gamma secret king fantasies.

So yeah; one of the key developments that I always lean into when designing my own settings is making magic less predictable, less powerful, and less morally neutral—it's creepy, scary, and usually evil, as well as dangerous. Heroes may dabble, especially if they're darker, more compromised heroes or anti-heroes, but the only really truly powerful wizards are villains, or even supervillains in the setting. Why? Well, as noted above, I dislike the whole trope of powerful, heroic mages as a gamma Mary Sue fantasy, but also because it's the only paradigm that matches the actual sword & sorcery low fantasy source material that D&D was supposedly built on. The older editions of D&D didn't do it. Most OSR games don't do it, and if they do, they do so by rejecting original D&D paradigms that were common for decades. If anything, more modern versions of D&D have tried to introduce more parity between the power of martial and magic classes. That doesn't mean that they're better low fantasy emulators than older D&D, but it does mean that they at least recognize and mitigate one of the many reasons that D&D of any version was never really a very good low fantasy game in the first place.

Genesis of Old Night

Every few years, I like to type up a retrospective of my homebrewing efforts, and how I got to where I am now. It helps me to focus to step back every three, four or five years or so and type it up again. There's not exactly a straight thru-line from my earliest homebrewing attempts to where I am today, but with a few twists and turns, you can get there starting from around 2002-2001 or so. Whatever homebrew I did before that was not organized and not preserved; I don't have any record of it, and it wasn't very systemic. It was more just me doodling with names, maps and concepts. My first homebrew attempts, therefore, probably date back to the earliest 1980s when I used to sit in middle school doodling out Tolkien-like fantasy maps and thinking about writing stories in those settings, or putting D&D or other RPG characters in them. But alas! Whatever I did back then is long lost. Must of my earlier 2000s work is also lost, since I did a lot of that work on Geocities, which went defunct years ago and I didn't archive it. But at least I have a record of having done them!

Anyway, this will tell how we got from my more systemic homebrewing, at the very beginning of the 3e era, until now, where not only the settings, but the entire game is homebrewed and it's not really very D&D-like at all in some ways.

I'm also leaving off any dead-end setting developments. I doodled with lots of concepts and ideas, but this list only has those that ended up contributing in some way to where I am today with Old Night.

Dungeon Craft - The very first systemically organized homebrew I did was me following the methodology of Ray Winninger's old Dungeon Craft articles in Dragon Magazine. They used to be available on the WotC website, so I could read the entire run, including articles that I didn't actually own the issue. Most of them were written late in the 2e period, but they continued into the 3e era, so people coming back to D&D, like me, with 3e, found them. This was a pretty vanilla D&D setting, not terribly unlike Nentir Vale in retrospect, except without the 4e elements like dragonborn and tieflings, which I hadn't even heard of yet. I might yet have a little town map somewhere of this, but it doesn't matter; it was where I started, and nothing here is really my speed anymore. The only thing that I'd say about it is that it reminded me that I wasn't really all that into the D&Disms, and was already leaning into a much more overtly sword & sorcery, lower fantasy kind of vibe. Not exactly grimdark, but looking that direction, at least.

Faerytale - the first setting where I made significant changes to the rules and fluff; elves were now seasonal and more heavily based on faerytales (hence the name) and there were blue-skinned winter elves with white hair, golden-skinned autumn elves with red or orange hair, gold skinned summer elves with dark green hair, and paler skinned elves with pale green hair for spring, etc. The setting didn't necessarily turn into anything too different, other than the fact that it was deliberately starting to step away from D&D vanilla into something else. 

Faerytale II - I decided partway through to revise the Faerytale setting, and do something a little more dramatic in terms of stepping away from D&D, and make more drastic changes. This is also where I decided that the PCs having a roving commission to investigate supernatural threats came in, where I first explicitly linked them to Fox and Mulder of The X-Files TV show, which was still on in the early 00s, but getting ready to end shortly. That, naturally, turned my setting more towards low fantasy and a darker tone. Specifically, the idea that monsters and magic might not really be believed in by "normal" people in the setting, just as they aren't in the real world, although of course the PCs would come across both much more frequently because it was there job to protect normal people from them. 

This ended the first phase, as I gradually stepped out of just being "a D&D setting" because I was already starting to feel like D&D wasn't going to cut it to realize my vision. It just wasn't the right system for what I wanted. Of course, I continued to dabble in D&D or D&D-like systems for many years. It wasn't until fairly recently that I found a way to divorce myself from setting assumptions that are explicitly baked into the system of D&D, honestly. 

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Bloodlines - While still working on Faerytale II, I came up with this idea. From a aystem standpoint, it used d20 Modern. d20 Past hadn't even been released yet, but I approximated it with a few house-rules. I also specifically didn't have any of the normal D&D races, although I did have all six types of planetouched races, which were new to me and kind of interesting still, as "exotic demihumans" instead. I also had geography that was heavily inspired by prehistoric Lake Bonneville, including perhistoric Rancholabrean fauna. It's surprising how much Bloodlines actually ended up being Old Night in many ways, just early and primitive. In spite of all of the development in the settings listed below, in many ways I just came back to Bloodlines in the end.

Dark•Heritage Mk. I - Building on the ideas of bloodlines and weird tainted heritages, I came up with the first Dark•Heritage in, oh, 2002-2003 or so. I'd just watched the DVD of Attack of the Clones and its sequence on Geonosis, which was clearly meant to look a lot like Barsoom and John Carter, given that Lucas was known to know about it and be a fan, and that was my inspiration. What if instead of a science-fiction-like tone, I'd taken the same ideas of Barsoom, Leigh Brackett's Mars, Flash Gordon, Star Wars, etc. but more fantasy. I was also influenced by what I thought steampunk was, before I realized that it was really just a cringier and nerdier version of Goth dress-up. China Miéville was probably an influence here too; I'd just read Perdido Street Station, and while it disappointed me, I liked the idea of it, at least, especially the idea of a novel, steampunk influenced Lovecraftian fantasy setting. I literally had features on my map that were inspired by Mars, though; a gigantic canyon a la Valles Marinaris and gigantic shield volcanos like Olympus Mons and the Tharsis region. 

Dark•Heritage Mk. II - Mk. II went a different direction; I had a different "origin story" for the various races (although I still used the same ones) and rather than being a desert, the setting was now a shattered world with fragments floating in the aether (which was really just air that you could breathe) and you traveled around in airships. This was a radical departure, but it also was a cul-de-sac; after actually running the game for a little while, I decided that I didn't like those ideas and went back to something much more like what I was doing. I was heavily influenced, however, by darker fantasy, Cthulhu-like stuff, and all that, as the last one had been. I was firmly in the headed towards grimdark camp. (I will point out that when I actually read some real grimdark fantasy, like George "Rape Rape" Martin and Joe Abercrombie, I didn't really like it. Glen Cook's Black Company is as far in that direction as I enjoyed stuff, and honestly, I'm not sure that even then I want to go even that dark most of the time. But clearly, my direction was firmly established by now, and none of my setting development has been high magic high fantasy since at least the Faerytale II paradigm. By this point, I was much more explicitly calling out low fantasy horror-tinged alternatives in the systems and tone. 

Dark•Heritage Mk. III - I had recently read the (new in 2000) book Tarim Mummies by J. P Mallory and Victor Mair, and when I abandoned the floating chunks of rock idea of Mk. II and went back to the Mk. I pseudo-Mars desert, but the maps that I drew were inspired by the Tarim Basin of the Medieval Silk Road, as described in the book. This version of the setting got quite a bit of development, and a novel outline that I never actually wrote, but it also devolved into me sperging about cultural details. I realized, at some point, that it wasn't fun anymore, so I let it sit and looked at some other things instead. Meanwhile, some tinkering in specifically non-D•H stuff ended up getting rolled into the next iteration of Dark•Heritage, so now's a good time to add a break and talk about some of the other stuff that I was also doing.

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Leng Calling - Deliberately doing something more D&D-ish, just as a break from my non-D&D design that I'd spent a lot of time with. This was just slumming for fun, but I ended up really liking it. The basic idea of the setting was that it was a gigantic Jupiter-sized planet, but the density was such that it had Earth-like gravity. This was just to give me space to do whatever I wanted, but I didn't develop the entire planet by any means. I actually had a Mediterrean-like sea in the middle of the map, with land on all sides, kind of like the Roman Empire geographically. 

Demons in the Mist - Another game where I basically made it up as I was running it. The gag here was that none of the standard D&D races (except human) or any magical classes were allowed, so I had some psionics, and lots of swashbuckling types. Two characters in particular stood out, because the players gravitated towards a darker Odd Couple kind of relationship between them. One was a womanizing human swashbuckler, and the other was a hobgoblin rogue/fighter, who wanted an airship by hook or by crook. The two ended up constantly sabotaging each others efforts, but couldn't imagine life without the other. The setting was based on a weird idea that someone else was also doing at the time; that the lowlands had a cursed mist full of demons and stuff, so people had to live on mountains, plateaus, tepuis, and the like. I found a map of the British Isles if the sea level were higher, put some labels on it, and decided that the "sea" was demon-haunted misty lowlands. People traveled by long bridges, airships and the link between the island plateaus. It was fun. I made up the setting literally as I was going; I hardly had anything set before I started. 

I'm not sure what I exactly borrowed from this setting other than a willingnes to be silly and gonzo, other than orcs/goblins as a mainline PC race, and the psionic soulknife as a kind of Psylocke or Jedi-like character class. I loved both ideas. And the one was, while kind of sillier than I normally run, still very much related to the darker demon-haunted stuff that I like to do.

Modular DND Setting - I found that I was reborrowing lots of setting elements in more than one setting, so I decided to archive them as modular setting elements that were, in theory, stand-alone but which I could use in any setting. This included the first iteration of Baal Hamazi, which was fairly similar to what it still is, Kurushat, which was also similar to what it is now, although based initially on being something like Eberron's Darguun and later something like the Iron Kingdon's Skorne Empire. I didn't keep it that way for long, the Kurushans became an exotic human ethnicity fairly quickly. I also had Tarush Noptii first developed here, which later became Timischburg, the Vampire Kingdom. This actually was the seed for a lot of elements that I—eventually—stopped treating as modular and just incorporated them into the developing Dark•Heritage setting when it came around to its next iteration.

Pirates of the Mezzovian Main - I also ran this for my regular home group right around the same time. I took the idea of Leng Calling (which was a tongue in cheek reference to the Falco song "Vienna Calling". I also made this up, to a great degree, as I was running it, just taking broad ideas like Cryx from Iron Kingdoms, Kurushat from my Modular stuff, etc. and throwing it into a new geography. This was a lot of fun to run too, and between that and Demons in the Mist, I felt like I was softening my approach to the D&Disms a little bit, and was less interested in going out into a spergy "realistic" fantasy setting, like Dark•Heritage Mk. III was becoming. The fact that I was actually having more fun running and tinkering with Modular-DND, Leng Calling, Demons in the Mist and Pirates of the Mezzovian Main convinced me that my approach to Dark•Heritage was the wrong one and I needed to step back, take stock, reevaluate, and come up with a new Mk. IV that was significantly different than what I was doing. 

Freeport Fan - The final "I threw it together literally while running it" campaign of this period was "Freeport Fan". I took Freeport, the Green Ronin city-setting, and whipped up a vaguely East Indies like geography, plopped Freeport in the middle of it, and ran this based on the same premise as The Hangover, which was pretty new at the time, so this must have been 2010 or 2011 or so, I think. It was many of the same players as Demons in the Mist, but sadly, lightning did not strike twice, and this didn't really pick up as well, and ended up fizzling before finishing. But between "Mezzovian Main" and this one, I became 100% convinced that pirates and sailing needed to be an element of Dark•Heritage, which meant, of course, that a Dune, Barsoom or Mars-like geography wasn't going to work anymore. 

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Dark•Heritage Mk. IV - This version of the setting had a Mezzovian Sea, yes, taken from both the Leng Calling and the Pirates game and imported directly, into the Dark•Heritage model, surrounded by the faltering Terrasan Empire, but with a Kurushat, a Baal Hamazi, an al-Qazmiri, and a few other things all thrown in as well. This model lasted for quite a while, a drew a big map on a piece of posterboard, and I had a lot of fun developing this version of the setting. This is also the first time that I started adopting Microlite as the system of choice for the game, which, alongside the major disruption in setting assumptions, is a big part of the reason that this version of the setting required the break above. Much of this was developed online, although I did it more on these blogs than in Geocities or Wikispaces, or offline in notebooks like much of my earlier work. Most of the posts on this blog with the Dark•Heritage tag belong to this Mk. IV vintage, so the material, while not well organized in that regard, is all available literally right here. Which is a long way of saying that I eventually got around to something that resembled Bloodlines above, except almost by accident rather than on purpose. 

Cult of Undeath - At one point long ago I decided that I wanted to convert the Carrion Crown adventure path by Paizo into something that I would use. When it was done, I had a campaign that had very little resemblance anymore to the original that it was supposedly based on other than a focus on Gothic horror in a fantasy setting, a new version of m20 that was a D&D knock-off rather than something more explicitly for my own setting, and a more fully developed evolution of Tarush Noptii into Timischburg, the Gothic horror setting element, now more fully realized and capable of supporting an entire campaign, just like Ustalav, which it kinda sorta was meant to replace. This is the same Timischburg that later was "eaten" by DH5—but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's just say that this is became an integral part of my current campaign setting. 

Timischburg - Although originally named just for the country of Timischburg around which it was based, this was really the rest of the setting; Timischburg itself was already pretty detailed in the past phase. I added numerous new elements, although many of them were reworkings of stuff from my Modular-DND days or elsewhere. Some of these elements were later shed, but they also were the core of what would later become Old Night too. Many of them were, admittedly, peripheral parts of Old Night, like Gunaakt, which is referenced but never meant to be visited. But such is life. 

Mammoth Lords - A side project meant to be Vikings in North America, but fantasy; this eventually, after a bit of mapping, and converting the "Vikings" into various European cultures like Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Celts and ... of course, also Vikings, was the geographical core of what would later become the Hill Country. Which is kind of ironic, because it started off specifically meant to be a side project unrelated to the Dark•Heritage stuff, but as I started to tire of the Mk. IV version and think that I needed a fresh take on the setting, this is what I eventually ended up looking towards. 

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Dark•Heritage Mk. V (DH5) - It took a little while before I really started sketching out what this version of the setting would look like, and I have a lot of noodling around with foundational ideas before I finally settled down and started doing stuff with this. The old Mammoth Lords sketchy draft map was revised and expanded and became the Hill Country. After I had this roughed out for a little while, I decided to add Timischburg to it, and then eventually Baal Hamazi, and it became the Three Realms. Near the end of this phase, I also added the Corsair Coast, Lower Kurushat, and Nizrekh, although with less detail (so far.) Although the name changed, in reality this is just the not fully developed Old Night setting; by the time I added those last elements to the setting, it really doesn't have anything that Old Night doesn't except for the name. I also continued to develop the system from its original m20 base into basically what it is now. 

Old Night - Current state. Everything was already there, but when I codified it officially, I changed the name, and that's all that differs really from DH5. It went through a bridge label, DFX, or Dark Fantasy X for a while, but again, nothing changed. Old Night crystalized a few things from DH5 and added to them but it's still essentially the same setting.

Old Night as Darkest Dungeon

The video game Darkest Dungeon, in two versions (I and II) plus its various DLC add-ons is a pretty iconic D&D-like setting with a grimdark, overtly Lovecraftian overlay, and a small amount of primitive firearms. Darkest Dungeon (I'm not going to keep italicizing it, even though it's a title and that would be correct. Too much trouble.) is very much a dungeon-crawler, which I'm not interested in, but otherwise, it sits very well alongside similar darker, Lovecraftian games with a slightly more "modern", i.e. Late Middle Ages or even earliest post-Middle Ages social and technological take; kind of a 1400s-early 1500s instead of classical High Medieval, like the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, which is also not really focused on dungeon-crawling. When WFRP was developed in the middle 80s, dungeon-crawling was considered very passé in the British market that it was initially developed for. It's odd to see Darkest Dungeon feel quite a bit like Warhammer FRP, but re-focused again on dungeon-crawling, when Warhammer FRP explicitly rejected that model of play. Then again, for an indie computer game, dungeon-crawling is an easier model than anything else to utilize. You just go through levels fighting monsters, after all. The Solomon Kane stories that I'm reading right now are kind of the late end of this period too, supposedly taking place more or less in the late 1500s or early 1600s. The Three Musketeers also takes place in the early 1600s. To give a couple more examples of similar vibe properties.

However, if firearms are quite rare for social or cultural reasons rather than common among soldiers, then Medieval style equipment could linger alongside early firearms, making a feel that's slightly anachronistic, yet exactly what I want. All it takes is a blackout on knowledge of how to make them; if very few can actually do so, then there's no way to replenish stocks quickly, so firearms by default become quite rare. And maintenance of them, or even availability of new powder, can also be limited. This is the model I want for Old Night. Heck, I even have a strange manufacturing center that can be the source of all firearms and powder; Gaskarfells. If only one place and one power group within said place understands the secret of gunpowder, and it's a closely guarded state secret not unlike Greek Fire (except "state" secret isn't quite right; more like a powerful semi-freelance guild secret), then I get exactly what I want; common soldiers don't have access to firearms. The Rangers, maybe, and a few other eccentric or wealthy adventuresome types might have them, but they only. Everyone else still has to use Medieval style equipment as their default. But with them being "out there" they can occasionally fall into unusual hands, such as the iconic Darkest Dungeon Highwayman. For what it's worth, the era of the Romanticized English Highwayman is a little bit later than the era of Solomon Kane and the Musketeers, being more late 1600s and early 1700s. It actually overlaps with the so-called "Golden Age of Piracy" if that's something that means more to most people. I want, simply, a Gothic, dungeon-punk aesthetic over a grimdark fantasy setting that's less like the Hanseatic League or Holy Roman Empire of the 1500-1600s and more like a combination of Medieval England and frontier America, but before the advent of repeating weapons, which was a force multiplier for the Americans, and the cause of the Old West cowboy age being a thing that could happen. 

Now, I'm not trying to make Old Night into a Darkest Dungeon table-top simulator, but I do want to have a quick look at the classes for Darkest Dungeon, and do a quick "would they fit in Old Night, and can I build them in Old Night" kind of analysis real quick. Not necessarily trying to model all of their specific abilities in the Darkest Dungeon game, but certainly the more high level archetype. 

In alphabetical order:

• Abomination: I actually have a pseudo-iconic, Claud Lupescu, who kind of fits this Jekyll/Hyde archetype. But he's special, and not actually very iconic, because I'm not 100% sure that I can build him as is as a PC with the rules. In fact, I'm quite sure that I cannot, so I removed him from being considered "iconic"; he's rather a a unique monster/NPC. So, this is an unusual situation to start the list off with; I literally have a character that fits this archetype, but he's exceptional and shouldn't be necessarily replicatable with the rules like normal. 
• Antiquarian: The antiquarian is not good in combat, either for offense or defense, but is optimized for detecting treasure. You can easily create a simulacrum of this archetype by focusing on skills, research and scholarship.
• Arbalest: An arbalest is actually a heavy crossbow, not a character class, at least outside of Darkest Dungeon, but the arbalest character class is a sniper who focuses on using an arbalest of sorts, or even almost a ballista being carried as a personal weapon like Jesse Ventura carried a minigun in Predator. The arbalest also uses a bola, so it's an interesting type of build. I don't have a bola in the equipment list, but I could easily whip one up if I wanted to.
• Bounty Hunter: This archetype can be easily modeled and feels right at home already in Old Night.
• Crusader: The crusader is really just a classic knight, with a touch of Paladin. Nothing too fancy, and can easily be modeled "close enough" in Old Night. 
• Grave Robber: Really just a thief or rogue in the D&D sense; a versatile fighterish type who isn't super tanky, but can do ranged and melee and some independent support quite well. 
• Hellion: Similar to the D&D Barbarian, this can be done reasonably well already in Old Night. It's a pretty basic archetype, or at least it would be if they didn't make her a girl, which is odd and anti-archetypal. Very "modern audiences" friendly, though. Ugh.
• Highwayman: A pretty basic fighter type, but without the focus on melee. More of a striker/DPS type in terms of video game terminology. You give him a pistol and a short sword or dagger, and you've got the Highwayman already in Old Night.
• Houndmaster: You create something like a fighter, but give him an animal companion, and you're good to go. This isn't a complicated archetype to create either.
• Jester: I'm not sure that this archetype even fits, honestly, in Old Night. He's kind of a weird one. You could cobble together something that looks a bit like him, I suppose. 
• Leper: This is mostly just a tweak to the heavy fighter archetype.
• Man-at-Arms: Another tweak to the heavy fighter archetype. A little more defense oriented than the Crusader, but that's not important in the Old Night context as much. 
• Musketeer: A clone mechanically to the arbalest, so it works the exact same way. In Old Night, obviously, this archetype would carry a blunderbuss rather than a big, heavy crossbow.
• Occultist: Although the occultist has some weird mechanics, it's really just an expression of the darker sorcerer type archetype, exactly the same as any magic-using characters in Old Night.
• Plague Doctor: A bit of an unusual archetype, who uses some area effect "bleed" attacks (plagues) with some healing. I might need to come up with some area effect type attacks that a PC could access if I wanted to do this guy.
• Vestal: a healer. I don't really have normal magical healing, because Old Night doesn't use that paradigm.

For the DLC only classes, there's a few more, although how "archetypal" they are is questionable, even moreso than some of the ones above:

• Flagellant: Not sure that I need to have this; as he takes damage, he gets tougher, although of course, closer to death. It's a bit of a mechanical gimmick rather than an archetype, so I'm not worried about trying to recreate him.
• Shieldbreaker: A flexible glass cannon fighter type. Just another slight tweak to the fighter. 

I've also create a Hero Forge model, and then loaded my image of it into ChatGPT and then Grok to get an iteration of it that looks more realistic. Not sure I got exactly what I wanted, but it's not bad. In high and lower contrast versions.

I also got some other images, not based on my Hero Forge original; just based on the prompt. These are OK too.

AI Panickans will never lear

Here's an interesting article: https://aicentral.substack.com/p/verified-human

And here's another: https://sigmagame.substack.com/p/why-deltas-hate-ai

And here's one of my AI generated character portraits for Dominic Clevenger, using a Hero Forge model that I made as a reference. I'll make another post sometime later showing all of the variants. Clearly I'm not afraid of using AI. I have used it to generate images of ... OK quality for my campaign setting. I've used it to help generate first (poor) drafts of fiction text. I haven't even gotten around to really seeing if they're sufficiently decent to be used as a basis for editing it into something workable, or if I should just ignore what it generated and write it the old-fashioned way. I'm not one of those AI panickans who is terrified that AI will make me obsolete. My job is unlikely to be successfully rendered obsolete by AI, and while AI can be a shortcut to some of my hobby endeavors, it's not likely to be a suitable replacement for a person there either, except in limited manner, like I can get mediocre images to use on my blog posts and in my pdfs. I could possibly get a passable book cover from AI. With a lot of effort. The propaganda that AI is going to replace people's jobs really only applies if your job is a make-work busy work job that... honestly, probably doesn't need to be done at all. There's a lot of those. SWFs hardest hit. 

To get any good results out of AI, you still need a lot of human shepherding. Those who are capable in their fields will inevitably find that AI can be a useful shortcut and time-saver, but that it won't literally replace their need to manually intervene in the results. Those who are fearful of all of the propaganda about AI coming for their jobs will—mostly—discover that propaganda is just propaganda, I'd guess. They're either adapt what or how they work a bit, or the whole thing will fizzle anyway. 

Because I also read Ed Zitron. Here's one example: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/ The AI bubble is just like every other bubble; a lot of hype, a lot of shady claims by shady people, leading to a lot of transfer of money to said shady people, leading to an inevitable failure to be able to deliver on the shady promises. AI isn't completely a scam, of course. It can do a lot of pretty cool things. But I'm pretty skeptical about a lot of the narratives that we're being fed about it at the same time. 

Anyway, the main point of all of this is that I find the AI panickans at places like reddit and ENWorld extremely tiresome. Of course, people at those places are tiresome about almost everything that they say, do, believe, claim, and worry about. But their visceral reactions anytime the trigger word AI is posted in any context is becoming a particular pet peeve of mine. AI Slop, which usually accompanies AI, isn't any worse than human-created slop, of which there's way too much. I'd honestly rather read an AI slop replica of some old-fashioned pulp stories than human-created woke garbage. Hollywood in particular has been banging the "AI is scary" drum for a few years. But Hollywood produces tons of slop that people don't like, and their livelihood is directly threatened by AI democratizing the ability of normal people to get past their gatekeepers and produce content that competes directly with them. Average writers  of all kinds of slop, which sells as ebooks on Amazon are also worried... but that's because fundamentally their business model is to try and monetize slop, and AI slop is faster, more prolific, and unlikely to really be much worse than what they're producing, causing them to inevitably get lost in the crowd. 

I recently read the following passage, which I think sums up my perspective on AI. It's about AI being used to write fiction, but it really applies to almost any usage of AI:

Writing fiction isn't like riding a bicycle. You don't just figure it out once and coast forever. It's more like learning to play piano, where your first attempts produce noise instead of music, and only through deliberate practice do you develop the skills to create something worth hearing. This reality becomes even more important when you're working with AI. You can't edit what you don't understand. You can't guide AI toward quality output if you don't know what quality looks like. You can't maintain consistency across a novel if you don't grasp the fundamental elements that need to remain consistent. The writers producing AI slop aren't failing because they chose the wrong tool—they're failing because they never learned their craft. The writers succeeding with AI assistance aren't lucky—they're skilled enough to make informed creative decisions regardless of their tools.

Ripping off the mask

Not shocking. But this Breitbart article is still interesting. I'm copying and pasting most of the text.

Given their voluminous schedule of speaking engagements and media appearances, politicians often suffer slips of the tongue, though most are of little consequence.

But while ordinary gaffes are daily occurrences, witnessing a lawmaker commit an infamous Kinsley Gaffe is extraordinarily rare. The term, coined by political journalist Michael Kinsley, refers to when a politician accidentally tells the truth, specifically one they are not supposed to say publicly. Unlike a simple slip of the tongue, it’s an inadvertent and major reveal of a politician’s genuine thoughts, or an admission of their party’s undisclosed positions or motivations.

Such was the case in 2024 when Democrat Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut appeared on MSNBC and committed a classic Kinsley Gaffe while responding to a question about the status of his party’s longstanding push for illegal alien amnesty. “Well, I mean, Chris, that’s been a failed play for 20 years. So you are right that that has been the Democratic strategy for 30 years, maybe, and it has failed to deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country.”

Inasmuch as the senator attempted to euphemize “illegal aliens” as “undocumented Americans,” the message was loud and clear; those are the people his party cares most about.

The clip resurfaced recently in the context of the ongoing debate over Department of Homeland Security funding, and while it justifiably sparked conservative outrage, Sen. Murphy’s disclosure shouldn’t be surprising given the Democrat’s decades-long advocacy on behalf of illegal aliens.

Their opposition to enforcement and support of illegal aliens is well documented and extensive. While hundreds of immigration-related bills have come and gone, a few highlight the Left’s consistent advocacy of illegal aliens over time. In 2005, the Sensenbrenner bill sought to criminalize unlawful presence as a felony. It was opposed by 82 percent of House Democrats, who argued it would “criminalize” millions and militarize the border without offering a legal path forward. In 2013-2014, Democrats opposed the Gang of 8 bill. Even though it included a path to citizenship, the party rejected House Republican efforts to add enforcement elements to it. And in 2023, Democrats opposed the Secure the Border Act, criticizing it for wasting billions on a border wall, ending certain parole programs, and limiting asylum grounds, calling it an “ineffective” strategy that ignored broader reform (amnesty).

At the state and local levels in mostly blue areas, Democrats have demonstrated their affinity for illegal aliens even more robustly over many years. Sanctuary policies now exist in 1,003 jurisdictions; 19 states and the District of Columbia issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens; and 20 states grant them in-state tuition subsidies. The net result is that 18.6 million illegal aliens now reside in the U.S., costing taxpayers $151 billion, clear evidence of the accuracy in Senator Murphy’s admission that his party elevates the interests of illegal aliens over Americans.

Senator Murphy unwittingly revealed who the Democrats prioritize, but he stopped short of revealing why. No matter; others have. In 2009, Eliseo Medina, Secretary-Treasurer of the far-left Service Employees International Union (and an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America) unabashedly stated, “We can create a governing coalition for the long term … if we can get immigrants on a path to citizenship, we can create a governing coalition for the long term that will allow us to win on all the issues that we care about.”

Medina was well connected to the Obama White House as a surrogate voice pushing “immigration reform” (amnesty) yet not a single Democrat at the time objected to his audacious statement, likely because most agreed with his comments suggesting that illegal immigration serves their electoral needs.

That is, of course, why Democrats have rallied in opposition to today’s SAVE Act (H.R.22) which imposes stronger identification requirements that would prevent illegal aliens from voting.

Based on the Left’s words and actions over many years, it’s clear that mass migration is their tactic to incubate future voters and solidify party dominance for all perpetuity. This explains why Senator Murphy wants to “deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country.”

To be fair though, others also corrupt immigration for their narrow self-interests. Industry favors mass immigration to replace American workers and suppress wages; Third World nations rely on porous borders as a safety valve to export citizens they cannot support or do not want; churches, charities, and NGOs depend on flows of migrants to fuel their virtue-signaling and fundraising initiatives; socialists, communists, and anarchists promote mass migration as means to achieve a disorderly, non-consensual make-over of the U.S.

In the end, Senator Murphy shouldn’t fret too much about having committed that Kinsley Gaffe. Sure, he spilled the beans by revealing that Democrats favor the interests of illegal aliens over Americans. And sure, he violated his party’s Sacred Veil of Secrecy that cloaks their true immigration motives, but it really was no big deal because here’s the thing:

Americans have known it all along.

Renwick Bennett

I created a Hero Forge character for one of my NPCs, but I decided to see if Grok could make a better image of him based on my Hero Forge original. Here's a bit of the process...

This is the original. My Hero Forge model with an AI generated background The AI didn't do anything to make the model more realistic yet.

These three were attempts by me to get it more realistic. They... kinda worked, but Grok was very conservative in terms of making changes to my original model.

I finally convinced it to be a little bit more daring and make some more substantive changes, and I got these two versions.

For some reason, it turned the pouch into a pocket, but that's OK I also got the face a little bit more exaggerated and more like the original in terms of tone.

Then I asked for a few other changes, including adding the pouch that he was holding back again and having him put his foot up on the chest. But for some reason, it switched which side everything was on.

I asked it to switch sides again, and got these two nearly identical versions. The lighting is just a little bit different, but hardly enough to bother with.

Anyway, that's Renwick Bennett, a crime lord in Barrowmere and a character that the PCs would interact with in the first phase of a DARKNESS IN THE HILL COUNTRY campaign; the intro that precedes the 5x5 Fronts. 

I'm not actually 100% sure that the iterations really even improved the image, to be honest with you. Maybe. The background certainly looks good. I'll do similar things for both my iconic characters, and some other important NPCs.