What is "dark fantasy?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

From June 2023: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[,,,] 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Four Horsemen of TSR art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Environment books

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

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

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

Dungeonscapes at their best

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racial Deep Dive: Humans

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

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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.

<  †  >

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. Ironically, 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 complaint 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. Although everything I say here would apply equally well to 5e and probably to any edition of D&D. 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 for most. 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. Some other editions don't have the feat progression posited for 3e, but you can always just have slower leveling and shorter campaigns that never get above 6th level anyway. 
• 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 (kind of smug-sounding 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 they're OK as is. 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, 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 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'd really 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 2000-2001 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. Most 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 their 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 system 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" relative to elves and dwarves. 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 based on the Mezzovian Sea of Leng Calling. 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.