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.

Old Night name changes

I'm seriously considering renaming the Hill Country. I have a Northumbria and a Southumbria on either side of the Umber river. What if I change Northumbria to North Humberland and Southumbria to South Humberland, and the entire Hill Country as Humberland? I'll think about it, but I probably will go for it.

The image is a grok generated image of Torkertown, a fictional town in the public domain that's part of the Solomon Kane mythos. It's a cool name, and it's public domain. Why not go for it?

Combat as...

From a post at ENWorld, of all places. ENWorld is one of the worst places on the internet; worse even than reddit, but there are only so many places to talk about RPGs, and all of them are dysfunctional woke cesspits, or have too little traffic or too tight of a focus to be useful. Sometimes, you have to just deal with it. This post, however, I thought was interesting. I've edited it mostly just for formatting, but occasional word choice to be more explicit in what I think is accurate:

I've seen the "Combat as War vs. Combat as Sport" framework come up a lot in RPG discussions, and I think it's a very useful distinction. It captures two very different priorities:

* Combat as War: asymmetric, player-driven, where preparation, avoidance, and clever tactics matter more than balance.

* Combat as Sport: balanced encounters, challenge ratings, tactical puzzle-solving, and fair challenges designed for engagement within a defined ruleset.

This comparison was frequently used by the OSR community to demonstrate a difference between OSR and 5e D&D approaches to combat. However, I think there's a third mode that often gets left out of the conversation, even though many tables quietly prioritize it: Combat as Theater.

By "Combat as Theater," I mean treating combat primarily as a performance or scene rather than an asymmetric test of survival or a challenging tactical puzzle. The focus shifts toward narrative/character expression, pacing, and dramatic impact. 

In combat as theater combat becomes a vehicle for expression: showing who a character is under pressure, how relationships evolve, or how themes emerge in action. Outcomes are often appreciated not just for success/failure, but for how they feel in the unfolding narrative. Players and GMs emphasize vivid descriptions, cinematic moments, and dramatic choices. Turns and actions are framed to highlight character identity, tone, and story beats.

Where War asks, "How do we win (and survive) this through preparation, tactics, and asymmetry?" and Sport asks, "How do we win this fair encounter efficiently using our abilities?", Theater asks, "How do we make this scene compelling while expressing character and drama?" (These questions may vary but are meant to be more illustrative of general ideas.)

I don't think these three modes are mutually exclusive. In practice, most tables blend them. A group might use sport-like mechanics, war-like caution, and theater-like narration all at once. But explicitly recognizing "theater" as a distinct lens can help explain why different groups sometimes talk past each other when discussing combat expectations. It helps clarify disagreements that aren’t really about rules, but about what combat is for at the table. What is sometimes called "Combat as Sport" may not actually be "Sport." It may actually be "Theater."

I think that this was a pretty insightful and compelling new nugget to the vocabulary of RPG philosophy. Posting it in the forums at ENWorld is searchable, sure, but it's pretty ephemeral. I wanted to give it a place where I can find it again as needed. I do also think that he's correct; tables don't really cluster too often at the actual endpoints, although to some degree, rulesets can and sometimes do. It's also yet another brick in the wall of "philosophical points that the OSR people either don't understand, refuse to understand, or lump together because they don't actually care about the differences." While a lot of interesting RPG philosophy comes from OSR thinkers, it's true that they are kind of blinkered in terms of what they allow themselves to see about playstyles that vary too much from either OSR or at most Classic.

Erasure

As I've added a bunch of stuff to my playlist queue on Pulsar, my Android mp3 player app, I've gone through most of what I have of Erasure. I was unpleasantly surprised to see that some tracks that I have were not on my phone. I didn't realize that, of course, until I was out of town listening to it on the road trip. I'm almost done with the list of Erasure songs... sorta. Certainly now that I'm home and will be listening only on half of my commute, mostly, it could take the rest of the week to get through all the tracks, but shouldn't take any longer than that. 

As I pulled up to the office parking lot this morning, I was about halfway through "Take a Chance on Me" from their "Abba-esque" EP from the early 90s. My mp3s of these were stripped of their album listing, so they, along with much of the more "modern" Erasure tracks are not sorted by album, but rather part of a large big mass of songs that are just playing in order of file name under the album heading of <no album>. I'm almost done with that large bag of tracks, and I do have one more Abba cover in the form of "Voulez-vous". 

Now, I can unironically like Abba (or ABBA, if that's how you're supposed to type it.) They are, admittedly, somewhat cheesy at times, and the late stage disco era of pop that they represent isn't my type of music really. That said, ABBA were incredibly talented song-writers, and while their style may not be my favorite, that doesn't actually diminish how great I think that there songs actually are. In fact, if anything, it focuses on it; I can't snooze through the songs just based on the style being my style; the songs have to be great or I wouldn't have any interest in them. In any case, ABBA hardly needs me to defend them; they're widely highly regarded, and are one of the most commercially successful pop bands of all time. Their influence is undeniable too. I'm an Abba fan, and I don't mind saying so. I'm also an Erasure fan, and I don't mind saying so, although in Erasure's case, it was easier because they do make music that's my style. But this means that I can coast and snooze through the songs; even mediocre ones will sound OK to me, because I do like the style of music. Mostly. When it isn't too flaming gay, which sadly, it occasionally is. Which is why it's a little bit sad to report—admittedly many years or even decades after it matters, I think, that "Abba-esque" is frankly kind of boring, and Erasure didn't do anything to what are generally pretty great tracks to make them interesting. I remember thinking that in the 90s, of course, after I picked it up. "Abba-esque" is the second EP Erasure released (if you don't count the odd "Am I Right?" remix EP/single) after the excellent "Crackers International" in 1988, and it follows fairly closely on the heels of the excellent Chorus album. It's a little weird, honestly, that it feels so hollow. Erasure were a great band, at the peak of their "power" if you will in 1992, and they were covering great songs by one of the greatest pop acts of all time. And yet, the thing just has no energy. 

Maybe I'm wrong. Abba-esque seems to have been popular enough, at least in Britain, and it's reasonably well reviewed by the music press. But I always thought it was oddly disappointing. I mean, heck—Information Society did a much better cover of "Lay All Your Love On Me" just a few years earlier in 1988, and in general, Information Society was not Erasure's equal... although they have a few fun tracks too, and in the mid-90s, at least, they put on a decent live show. And the same year Abba-esque came out, they were putting out Peace and Love, Inc. which sadly was not well-promoted by the label, and which was probably too late to really benefit from the electronic music heyday by that time. Eh, we'll catch them some other time.

I can also say that as much as there are some decent tracks here and there in the post-eponymous album era, that whole group kind of blends together in a vaguely acceptable sludge. Chorus was the last truly great album by Erasure, in my estimation, and they only had occasional moments of brilliance on some tracks here and there in the post-1991 phase. I  should probably queue up the full albums on YouTube or Spotify and give them a fairer chance than I have so far, but I don't anticipate changing my mind on that. 

They're not the only one of my favorite 80s bands that kind of petered out in the early 90s, though. Depeche Mode still had a great album in form of 1990's Violator, but I was disappointed in its direction, and I haven't liked anything that they've done since even as much as I liked even Violator. Playing the Angel and Memento Mori are reasonably bright spots in their subsequent repertoire, but they aren't as good as they were in the 80s. The Pet Show Boys had a few great tracks on Behavior (1990) and Very (1993) was actually quite good, but I kind of lost interest in them too.

Part of that was, no doubt, me and the musical landscape in general. I was no longer a teenager, I was a young married man by 1994, and young father by 1996, and grad student by 1998, and a young professional in a professional career by 2000. I had a lot on my mind other than pop music, and my concerns and what I thought was interesting or insightful had no doubt changed. And the rise of the Seattle Sound, grunge movement, and the general pop culture rejection of the late 80s sound was both very disappointing to me, but probably also had other subconscious impact on what I was listening to. I think the "big names" of the later 80s felt tired to me by then, not edgy and slick like they did in the 80s. This is especially true for Depeche Mode, who rejected the slick electronic sound to become a weird bluesy and noisy 90s band, but I lost interest in all of them, and got more involved in more indie-bands that were treading the same territory, like De/Vision, Mesh, Cosmicity, B! Machine and many others. I think that that indie aesthetic made them more appealing to me than the guys who'd already made it big and were now retreading, or abandoning, neither of which I liked, the sound that I had originally loved them for. 

Some of these bands later did stuff that I really liked. Like I said, Depeche Mode's Playing the Angel and more recently Memento Mori were pretty decent. Not as good as Black Celebration or Music for the Masses or even Violator, but maybe as good as Songs of Faith And Devotion or Ultra. Camouflage's 2003 album Sensor was probably actually their very best, much better even than their brilliant freshman release Voices & Images. Real Life sounded very 90s in Happy, but did a great cover album in 2009, which included a re-recorded "Send Me An Angel" which is also really good (although still not quite as good as the 1989 version.) Red Flag had some good 90s and 00s releases, but their initial offering is still their best. There's something about the dark reverb of the extended mix of "If I Ever" that I just really love, and although mislabeled on my 1989 CD version, it was still present that far back.

What can I say? For whatever reason, when the 80s ended, the 80s music ended too. What remained may have been "80s-like" in some ways, even in my own personal esteem, but it wasn't really truly the exact same thing. Erasure were, sadly, one of the casualties. I still like their early stuff; the same stuff that I liked as a teenager many decades ago, honestly, but otherwise I don't really care anymore. 

Dire "wolves"

Another option of what a dire "wolf" may have looked like. They've got a pretty wolf-like form, but I made them tawny-colored and kind of shaggy compared to a wolf.

I've long had the idea of tawny, shaggy, heavier wolf-like canines. Here's a few "browner" options, where I tried to get it to make them less wolf-like in form. Honestly, though, this is less about actual dire "wolves" from the Rancholabrean fossil record and more about "bone dogs" from the old Dark•Heritage setting, revitalized and reintroduced into Old Night.

Although, ironically, the D&D "dire wolf" would probably fit them fairly well, or something more like the Middle-earth warg or D&D worg, perhaps.

UPDATE: I'll not as an update that just since yesterday when I generated these, grok stopped allowing me to generate more updates and Imagine stuff. I'm not going to be subscribing just to generate a few images here and there.

Over-used RPG buzzwords

I'm not a fan of faddish buzzwords at the best of times, but having them intrude into my hobbies is especially a pet peeve. Here's some of my observed over-used buzzwords.

This is just a minor rant for amusement value. None of this should be taken too seriously. I mean, these buzzwords really are pet peeves of mine, but whatever. Pet peeves, by definition, aren't really important.

• OSR - OK, this first one is a little tongue in cheek. But given that nobody knows what the OSR really is anymore, and there are at least two overlapping yet also conflicting camps on what the definition really refers to, it's actually not a super useful label anymore.
• Cinematic - this one is another one that gets tossed around all the time, but I'm not very clear on what people mean by it. I'm not sure that they are either.
• -punk - this has been a pet peeve of mine for years. Unless it's related to a dystopian worldview and an anti-establishment youth street movement, it's not -punk. Steampunk gets a grudging pass because it's obviously a derivative evolution of cyberpunk, where -punk was actually used correctly. People who think that they're clever talking about hope-punk, or calling Eberron magi-punk do not.
• Liminal - I know that it's a pretty cool word, but c'mon. Horror in hallways and doorways? People use this all of the time to describe horror themes that are just... regular horror themes. It's either over-used now, or it's been under-used for decades. You could say that the original dungeon-crawling activity was liminal horror, and it'd be a mostly correct usage of the term. And yet for decades nobody felt the need to do so. There's really no need to do so now either; nine times out of ten, it's just a signal; "look at me; I use fancy vocabulary to describe regular things."
• Diagetic - what was wrong with in-game and meta, like we used for decades? Was the hobby over-run by a bunch of sound engineers from the movie business who brought their vocabulary with them to replace words that were already in use? More likely, as above, it's a "more intelligent sounding" word, so people like it because they feel like they sound more intelligent by using it.
• TTRPG - I feel like there's no need ninety-nine times out of a hundred to specify the context where an RPG is a TTRPG as opposed to a CRPG or ... I dunno, some other kind of RPG. (LARPG? Bedroom RPG? What other kinds even are there anyway?) Leave the TT off. It's superfluous. And a new, faddish addition to something that worked just fine for decades and still works fine. In fact, the more people play online, the less accurate rather than more accurate it becomes.

It's a Jeep thing...

I've long been a fan of Jeeps. Even as a kid, I loved the old CJ Jeeps, which were still being made up until 1986; four decades of them! The CJ-7s were relatively modern compared to the ones from the 40s, of course. All of these years, I've always kind of wanted a Jeep, but never gotten one; it was never a vehicle that it made sense for me to buy, and I still have never owned a car that I thought, hey, this is a fun car that I actually want as opposed to just a cheap and practical car that I need in order to commute and get around. Some day, maybe. Sigh.

Anyway, the shine on Jeeps has worn off on me. I was talking to a couple of people at church on Sunday about Jeeps, and I realized that I simply don't even want one anymore. They were both former Jeep owners and one was clearly a Jeep cultist. They were talking about the "ducking" practice, which I said I thought was really dumb and is a great example of how the brand has lost its way. The reason I always liked Jeeps is because it had a rugged outdoorsy masculine vibe to it. When they started embracing soccer mommification and Barbie Jeeps for daddy's little princess, they diluted the main appeal of the Jeeps in the first place. And yes, the sale figures back me up. From a peak of over 240k units moved in 2018, they fell to about 151k in 2024. There's a slight uptick in 2025, but something happened to the Jeep brand. And yes, the marketing focused on weird cult rituals like "ducking" which undercuts the whole Jeep thing and appeals to soccer moms, bratty princesses, and weird cultists who do dumb things just to be different; the dumber the better. The ducks are now a key part of Jeep's marketing strategy. It's weird. And when I said I thought it was weird, I got the rote "It's a Jeep thing, you wouldn't understand." Actually, I think I understand quite well. People like behaviors that are in effect "positional goods". Why would I not understand that? I'm fairly intelligent, and my initial training before getting into something more practical is in economics as an academic discipline. It's a cult signal, essentially. I understand it exactly. Which is exactly why I'm not impressed by it.

Sure, sure, other problems have plagued the brand, and I can't discount those. Price has gone to an average of ~$60k for a Jeep, which is insane. Meanwhile, the always crappy reputation of quality has taken even more of a beating, and Ford finally (I have no idea why they didn't do this years ago) launched a genuine competitor in the form of the Bronco, and even Toyota got back into the game with a new Land Cruiser, and the 4runner is always a possibility. A few others have entered the competitive landscape, although I'd love to see even more players, honestly. I'd love to see Nissan come out with a revamped Xterra, for instance.

In any case, I think that my love of Jeeps has turned into a love of "jeeps" lowercase, and that I'd really prefer something else altogether anymore rather than an actual modern Jeep. The real interesting, although even more unaffordable than a Jeep, movement is in restomods, and three vehicles in particular get a lot of attention there; old Dodge Power Wagons, old Ford Bronco Is, and old International Harvester Scouts. These can cost as much as a house, which is obviously too much, but they're way cooler than even the best Jeep Rubicon.

On another note, I recently was able to acquire for a decent price a used copy of the ten book D&D Iconics collection of novels that came out in the early 00s. While I certainly don't expect them to be great, reviews on Goodreads are that they're actually relatively fun. And the relatively more negative reviews talked about stupid stuff, like "implicit sexism" demonstrated, according to the review author, by Regdar noticing a some village girl looks good from behind. Ooookay. I think I'm going to like these more than I expected if that's the case. We'll see. I've already started the first one, and they're slim little books like the kind published in the 60s and 70s before bigger fantasy became the norm. Should be quick and easy reads, if the quality holds up.

Which it may not. Although all credited to the same author, T. H. Lain, that's not a real person; it's a pen name that applied to at least nine different authors. Only the first and last books in the ten book "series", which I use kind of loosely, were written by the same author; every other book was a different author. 

I'm exhausted...

Everyone at work is running around with their hair on fire. It's exhausting. To make matters worse, the same thing is going on at home right now. And even church is adding to the flame. It's been this way for weeks, at least. More accurately it's approaching months status. I'm just exhausted. No wonder my reading is so down this year. Four books so far, and we're more than halfway through March. Last year by this time, I'd read at least twenty or thirty, I think (I must have to have topped one hundred in the year. If not technically, then by smoothing out the averages.)

I can't keep up this pace for long. 

Bad news; sometimes when I'm really stressed and frustrated, I end up becoming more argumentative in "real life." I'm trying to keep it under wraps as best I can, but sometimes I get in more stupid arguments online that I'd otherwise ignore when I'm in a bad mood.

Luckily, my wife stepped in and stayed on the line with one of our issues while I was doing work stuff and couldn't spend all that time on my phone. At least that will be one issue checked off.

UPDATE: My wife's been on the phone for over three hours, I think. It wasn't quite as easy as she assumed it'd be. But, she had the time to do that and I didn't. We'll see how she feels about stepping in to do it after I get back. I think she already thinks that I somehow could have done it on the weekend or the evening... y'know, after they were closed. I love her, but she doesn't always understand how things work because she usually doesn't do them, so in her mind it's much simpler than it actually is. UPDATE ADD-ON: She got it done. She was on the phone for five hours. She said I could have done that on evenings or weekends, but that's not true. They aren't open evenings or weekends, and until this morning, we didn't know that that's what would need to be done. I'm glad that that's done, but the way she's acting like she came in and did something that I couldn't do because I'm just not persistent enough rather than because I don't have time to do it honestly makes me even more tired. Sigh.

UPDATE 2: While I was in a meeting and the agenda wandered for a moment from my stuff, I got my crappy profile pic from LinkedIn, uploaded it to Grok and told it to make me a resume photo out of it. First it tried to change my greenish hazel eyes to brown, and I said that it was wrong and it gave me Fremen blue eyes. Luckily, I just resized it so you couldn't really tell and reuploaded it on LinkedIn in low resolution. It mostly looks like a good picture of me after all. I hate LinkedIn. It's the worst of the social medias, but it's also the one that I don't feel like I can get rid of as long as I'm working and potentially will be looking for another job again someday. Ugh. 

Genetic history

So... I have a blog that I usually forget about all about archaeology, history and archaeogenetics. Sadly, my own genetic profile didn't give me my haplogroup, and I'd have to have paid quite a bit extra to get my ancient genetic contribution, so I have to guess. But here's some graphs.

This first one is a simplified Mesolithic Europe. The yellow part is where Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers were found, the green hatching is the spread of farming... which in Europe came later when the EEF ancestry, or Anatolian Neolithic farmers, as they are labeled here, started to spread through Europe. There aren't any yet, except some small contributions in the Balkans and north of the Black Sea.

The classic WHG ancestry is here called the Oberkassel cluster, or also the Villabruna cluster. This is the source of "native" Mesolithic people, and their ancestors come from further East, it is believed, in the Paleolithic. There were actually other Paoleolithic peoples here earlier, in two clusters, the Fournal and Věstonice clusters, who were themselves distantly related. The last lingering impact of that population is shown in the map below as the Goyet Q2 ancestry (the orange), also known as El Mirón, or the Fournal Cluster. Ancient paleolithic populations like the Solutreans or Aurignacian Cro-Magnon populations, but they are essentially gone now, with only trace amounts in the DNA of modern Europeans. Even in the Mesolithic, nobody has more than half of this ancestry of those plotted here.

The blue, then, is the WHG Mesolithic population, which as the Paleolithic turned into the Mesolithic, they kind of took over. Much hay is made by diversitarians of the apparent lack of light-skinned alelles in the WHG population; they appear to have been relatively dark-skinned and blue-eyed, unlike any population today. The modern populations that have the highest concentration of their ancestry, however, are the whitest people in the world; from Scandinavia and the Baltic shore. I kind of like the idea of a population of blue-eyed, but slightly brown-skinned people with brown hair that look like a long lost ancestor of modern white people without being really white people themselves, but I'm a little skeptical of the narrative. Some bad faith actors have seized upon the flimsiest of evidence to suggest that they were as dark as Africans, in an attempt to delegitimize the claims of Europeans to their own ancestral lands. 

The red is the Eastern Hunter Gatherer ancestry, which probably shouldn't be seen so much as a separate ancestry, but as a cline of sorts, separated by distance, but ultimate from the same origin. T EHG ancestry came to central and western Europe early in mixed form in the Scandinavian Hunter-gatherers, and later as a large component of the Western Steppe Herder ancestry, i.e. with the Indo-Europeanization of Europe. Of course, prior to that, the Neolithic Revolution saw the spread of a vast population of farmers out of Anatolia through the Balkans in two trajectories; one that went northwards and one that went westwards and then much later, came back east bringing WHG genetics with it that were otherwise mostly missing from the Balkans and Central/Eastern Europe. 

This later map is the end of the Mesolithic and start of the Neolithic. The Green Cross-hatching is, again, where EEF populations essentially took over. Most of the population is considerably more mixed, as you can see, and the Goyet Q2 cluster is mostly bred out. Samples from within the green cross-hatch would be mostly green, with a relatively small sliver of blue. But, as you can see, the more western portion of the Neolithic area always had a fair bit of blue, and there was a resurgence of sorts of "blue" ancestry which moved eastwards. We tend to see the Neolithic as a big wave, but in reality, there were always much smaller waves as a closely related people mostly replaced another; we now have high enough resolution to recognize the waves that came with the Funnelbeaker culture, for instance which replaced the Linear Pottery Culture before it, or the next wave that came with the Globular Amphora in the eve of the Indo-Europeanization of western and Central Europe as the earliest Corded Ware burst out of the eastern forest steppes across the entire continent. 

I strongly suspect that the history of Europe... and probably everywhere else too... has much more population replacement and waves of migration than we suspect. It does take high enough resolution to see it, though; not every wave of new population is genetically super distinct from the one that it's primarily replacing. This is why the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon migrations into Britain were both invisible to genetics until higher resolution sampling became available; they were simply too similar to the earlier Bell Beaker migration to show up. Now we can tell that they were a significant population movement, but from a low resolution genetic profile, the invaders were very similar to the people already there, so the movement wasn't transparent. 

Of course, when the Bell Beakers showed up, that was easier to see. They were more significantly different than the Neolithic megalith builders that they mostly replaced, so the population movement was easier to see. 

This PCA also shows the clusters of the older groups, and how far apart they are. Interesting stuff.

Its discouraging to think of all of these genetic clusters that, as far as we can tell, just completely disappeared. Whomever the original Paleolithic people of Europe would have been, it looks like their genetics were completely swamped or replaced; at most there is a small percentage of El Mirón ancestry in the Basques, for instance. Heck, even the WHG Villabruna and Oberkassel clusters are pretty dilute in modern Europeans. I think it'd be fascinating if there were a population that resembled them and were closely genetically affiliated with them still, like the Sardinians are to the original EEF people, for instance. Especially as they appear to have likely been visually fairly distinct. 

As a purely cosmetic aside, my original SWTOR character, Graggory is deliberately designed on similar principles; fairly dark skin, brown (but not dark/black hair) and blue eyes. At the time, my thought was more along the old sci-fi chestnut of the "spacer's tan" but more and more I was drawn to the idea of him being an example of the alleged WHF phenotype.