My conceits vs 4e conceits

After posting this the other day, I thought I'd see how they align with my own setting conceits.  I agree with most of them, but not all of them.  The originals are from Wizards Presents Worlds and Monsters.

The World Is More Fantastic: D&D cultures should blend real-world cultures and fantastic elements, not merely elements of medieval and Renaissance Europe. It’s okay for D&D environments to have no realistic analog. 

While this is technically true, especially with stuff like my Baal Hamazi and Kurushat regions, I actually prefer a more familiar feel.  It gives players (and readers, if we're talking about fiction) something familiar to anchor themselves to before you start getting into the fantastic elements.

The World Is Ancient: Empires rise and empires crumble, leaving few places that have not been touched by their grandeur. Ruin, time, and natural forces eventually claim all, leaving the D&D world rich with places of adventure and mystery. Ancient civilizations and their knowledge survive in legends, magic items, and the ruins they left behind, but chaos and darkness inevitably follow an empire’s collapse. Each new realm must carve its own place out of the world rather than build on the efforts of past civilizations. 

Yes.  I like everything about this idea.  Everything.

The World Is Mysterious: Wild, uncontrolled regions abound and cover most of the world. City-states of various races dot the darkness, bastions in the wilderness and amid the ruins of the past. Some of these settlements are “points of light” where adventurers can expect peaceful relations, but many more are dangerous. No one race lords over the world, and vast kingdoms are rare. People know the area they live in well, and they’ve heard stories of other places from merchants and travelers, but few really understand what’s beyond the mountains or in the depth of the great forest unless they’ve been there personally. 

This is another one that I'd independently come around to the same idea before the SCRAMJET team articulated it more clearly than I had.  I agree completely.

Monsters Exist All Over: Most monsters of the world are as natural as bears or horses are on Earth, and monsters are everywhere, both in civilized sections and in the wilderness. Griffon riders patrol the skies over dwarf cities, behemoth beasts carry merchants’ goods long distances, yuan-ti have an empire a few hundred miles from a human kingdom, and efreet in their City of Brass appear in the mountains suddenly like Brigadoon emerging from the mists. 

Yeah, here not so much.  Monsters are fundamentally unnatural.  Now, granted, some things that we consider monsters might be natural on a foreign, fantastic world, but by and large, monsters should be unique, set piece encounters, not a routine part of your daily commute to work.  I've expounded on this idea in the past, and made reference to it many times since; I really haven't changed my opinion at all since then.

Creatures Need a Place in the World: Creatures shouldn’t be introduced into a vacuum. Any monster or player character race we make in the game should occupy a unique space in the D&D world. We need to make sure that new creatures have a new and compelling role in the world, in addition to an interesting mechanical purpose. 

I'm actually not sure that this is relevant to me.  I don't have to deal with a vast catalog of D&Disms, which is what the SCRAMJET team was specifically trying to prune into something more useful, so I don't have to make hard decisions about how much of a "unique space" a monster or race occupies before deciding to cut it or not.  That said; there's not much point in creating new monsters or races that are redundant either, so I guess I agree.  It just doesn't matter nearly as much to me.

Adventurers are Exceptional: The adventurers created by the players are the pioneers, explorers, trailblazers, thrill seekers, and heroes of the D&D world. Although some nonplayer characters might have a class and gain power, they do not necessarily advance as the PCs do, and they exist for a different purpose. Not everyone in the world gains levels like PCs. An NPC might be a veteran of many battles and still not become a 3rd-level fighter; an army of elves is largely made up of nonclassed soldiers. 

I don't know that this is relevant to me either.  I suppose it's true, but this was more a reaction against a design conceit of the mechanics of 3e than it is anything else, so I don't really care one way or another about this point.  I've always felt that the role NPCs and PCs play is different, so there's no reason to treat the setting like a simulation where everybody has to follow the same mechanical rules.  NPCs and monsters are what I need them to be to be fun for the game; nothing more and nothing less.

Magic Is not Everyday, but it Is Natural: No one is superstitious about magic, but neither is the use of magic trivial. Practitioners of magic are as rare as classed fighters. Magic should never cross over into the silly or replicate modern conveniences: We don’t want “magitech” such as arcane elevators and air conditioners, or flying sea serpents to put out fires. At the same time, we don’t want a real-world medieval fear of magic that gets wizards burned at the stake. There might be minor magic that is relatively commonplace; for example, a wealthy farmer might have a magically sharpened plow, but not an animated combine. People might see evidence of magic almost every day, but it’s usually quite minor—a fantastic monster, a visibly answered prayer, a wizard flying by on a griffon—but powerful and experienced practitioners of magic are far from everyday. 

While this makes perfect sense for D&D, it's not the direction I'm going, because I've been for many, many years in a kind of dark fantasy horror hybrid mode with my preferred settings.  Magic is fundamentally unnatural, and although the PCs are more exposed to it than most, it's not even close to everyday.   I see the PCs as more like Mulder and Scully (from the X-files) or Sam and Dean (from Supernatural); they are among the few who understand the threat that the supernatural brings and they deal with it more than most, but that's part of what makes them unique rather than it being a setting conceit that magic is somewhat ubiquitous.  Another good example would be the YA series The Spook's Apprentice or the Jim Butcher series The Dresden Files.  It posits that the world is much as we know it, especially to the perception of most people, but the PCs inhabit a kind of secret world on top of the world as we know it where magic and the supernatural are much more common, albeit still dangerous and unnatural, and it's part of the PCs job to keep this secret world from spilling out and disrupting the normal world.

I do admit, though, that that's a personal conceit of mine and my settings that wouldn't be relevant to most standard D&D-like settings, nor should it be.

“Good” and “Evil” Mean More: Being aligned toward good means being a champion who actively fights for what is right, not merely someone who supports such ideals. Being good is a defense against evil, never a vulnerability to evil. Likewise, evil is more than just bad thoughts. Most average people aren’t aligned one way or the other. You can’t use magic to know whether or not a creature is evil or good: You must judge it by its actions or know its nature (demons, for example, are always evil). 

This was justification for the changes that they made to alignment.  It means less in most respects to me, because there's no such thing as alignment in my game already.  But it also means even more, because it's not a team jersey; you're good by your actions, not by your alignment, etc.  Anyway, that's not a relevant concern to me either.

Remote Gods: Gods are largely distant and detached from the world (with some exceptions, particularly evil gods). Most don’t take an active part in worldly affairs, but they have exarchs and angels who act on their behalf. Gods can be encountered, fought, and killed (although some might be too powerful to challenge). They aren’t omniscient or omnipotent, but they do grant spells to clerics and hear the prayers of their faithful. 

I've actually made the decision (one that would have surprised me to think I'd have made a few years ago) that Christianity is the baseline for all of my settings from here on out.  It just reflects reality, and God is precisely as involved in the world as he actually is in the world.  I don't expect to see PCs praying for miracles and the Red Sea parting for them very often, just like such a thing happening in our world is unusual.  God is usually much more subtle and depends on us using our own God-given wits and talents to solve problems ourselves rather than stepping in and doing everything for us.

That said, there are also powerful non-human beings that bear a resemblance to creatures from Greek and Germanic myth, so while they're not worshiped and don't have churches or prophets or even oracles most of the time, our own pre-Christian pagan heritage has an analog of sorts in my settings.  I don't know how remote they are exactly, because they're not as powerful as gods in D&D sometimes are.  They're fightable, although winning against a "god" is unusual, to say the least.  For that matter, even interacting with one in any capacity is probably extremely rare.

One Sun, One Moon: The world assumes what will be most easily accepted by players without imposing unfamiliar calendars and phenomena. 

I don't see this as necessarily having to do with one sun and one moon and more to do with "let's not create esoteric setting details that players are expected to figure out, like complex monetary systems or calendars with month, day and week names that don't mean anything to anybody in the real world, because that's not fun, it's tedious."  In that respect, I agree completely.  That doesn't mean that there needs to literally just be one moon, though.

No Forced Race Relations: The settlements of the PC races are usually points of light but aren’t necessarily goodaligned. They are places where people can share shelter from the dangers of the wild wide world. There is no inherent racial enmity between PC races, and hostile attitudes do not generally go beyond fear or lack of respect. 

This is another one that requires some context.  For instance, both elves and dwarves are playable races in D&D, but as a nod to Tolkien-influenced setting design, elves and dwarves rarely actually get along.  This means that you have to either simply ignore that aspect of the race relations when it comes to your characters, or have all kinds of tedious interactions that maybe you're interested in and maybe you're not.  In other words, this is a concession to making the "typical" D&D party more playable without causing meta-issues in game about relationships between races.  It's not something that I particularly care about, but I can see where they're coming from.  I wouldn't go nearly as far as they did to create en environment that removes the need to solve a problem that's rather easily solved or ignored by every GM since the history of the game started, though.

Death Matters Differently: It’s generally harder to die than in previous editions, particularly at low level. When a heroic-tier player character dies, the player creates a new character. A paragon PC can come back from the dead at a significant cost. For epic-tier characters, death is a speed bump. Being raised from the dead is available only to heroes, and it’s more than just a spell and a financial transaction. NPCs, both good and evil, don’t normally come back to life unless the DM has a good reason. Monsters and NPCs shouldn’t use the same rules for death as PCs. When they’re down, they’re out—PCs don’t have to slit every monster’s throat after the battle and burn the corpses (except maybe for trolls). 

This isn't really a fluff consideration, it's a legacy mechanics consideration.  Again, not actually playing D&D per se means that it's probably not even relevant to me at all.  D&D style resurrection and how it fits into the setting is only a concern in actual D&D for the most part.

Fantastic Locations: D&D adventures should take place in fantastic settings—no more 10-by-10 rooms with two orcs. Encounters should occur in areas with interesting threats—from encounter traps that activate every round to hazards that were formerly considered monsters, such as assassin vines or gray ooze. 

I tend to agree, although I'd be a little careful about making everything gratuitously fantastical to the point where it starts to become absurd.

Less Evil Fighting Evil: Too much in previous editions deals with evil fighting itself: Demon lords and archdevils war on each other rather than threatening the PCs. We don’t want to waste space on things players can’t use. Make sure conflicts are important and useful to making the game fun.

There's no reason all that can't be fun, but that has to do with a trend that started way back in 2e and just watered down villains until they were silly.  I suspect that had much less relevance or importance to most peoples' actual gaming table than it did to writers and developers.

Indo-Europeans over Indo-Europeans

If you read the Wikipedia article on some of this stuff, it's still kind of out of date with current thinking. For instance, it still says that the Corded Ware is super-closely related to Yamnaya genetically; up to 75% the same.  This isn't really true; there's mostly a totally different population of Y-DNA heritages; an R1a with Corded Ware and R1b with Yamnaya.  In fact, it's probable that this represents one of the first cases of displacement and superimposition of one group of Indo-Europeans over another.  The Sredni Stog culture that predated Yamnaya in the more westerly portion of the Pontic/Caspian steppes picked up a ton of cultural elements from the Khvalynsk to the east.  Most likely, Khvalysnk peoples of some kind superimposed their culture to some degree over the Sredni Stog.  When Khvalynsk evolved into Yamnaya, it literally replaced and displaced the Sredni Stog peoples, who were the probable ancestors of the Corded Ware.

But most likely both already spoke proto-Indo-European of some kind.  Most likely, that had actually already been the case for a long time, so that when the Anatolians broke off prior to the last phase of common Indo-European unity, they actually came from an area that was on its way towards being Indo-European rather than an area that still needed to be Indo-Europeanized.  It's not very clear exactly what the relation between the R1a and R1b lineages on the steppe were, but it's clear that they maintained some distinctiveness for quite some time.

That superimposition of the Yamnaya guys over the proto-Corded Ware guys is a type of things to come.  Later Yamnaya derived cultures imposed themselves over Corded Ware cultures later as they spread westward into more of Europe.  The Eastern Bell Beaker and Unetice complexes and their successor, the Tumulus culture were Yamnaya derived groups, and probably represent developing proto-languages that would lead to Italic, Celtic and Germanic languages still.  Over much of northern Central Europe and southern Scandinavia, they came to dominate what was earlier Corded Ware territory.  Some commentators I've seen suggest that these Corded Ware people spoke Proto-Balto-Slavic, but that's actually kind of ridiculous linguistically.  While the Baltic languages almost certainly developed from a Corded Ware people (and the exact relationship between Slavic and Baltic is still a bit unclear), it's absurd to talk about the entire Corded Ware horizon as if it spoke some kind of proto-Balto-Slavic; almost as absurd in fact, as suggesting that the Yamnaya culture spoke proto-English.  At best, the Corded Ware substrate that was integrated into, say, the Nordic Bronze Age spoke what was a cousin of a distant ancestor of Balto-Slavic.  Enough so that some features that are common in Balto-Slavic and Germanic can be explained by both this substrate as well as subsequent contact zones, which explains why Germanic deviated more significantly from the Italo-Celtic branches when they had earlier been more closely related fellow travelers.

But it's not always the case that Corded Ware lost out.  The Catacomb and Poltavka guys who remained in the steppes for a time as later evolution of the Yamnaya people seem to have at least partially been converted back into a Corded Ware language; Yamnaya derived Poltavka merged (at least in some ways, although the Y-DNA doesn't contribute as much as material culture and mtDNA) with Corded Ware-Abashevo to become the Indo-Iranian languages when their merged culture became Sintashta-Andronovo.  This explains a few other linguistic things that are interesting: 1) the apparent similarities between Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian; they both are derived linguistically (and with the R1a Y-DNA lineages) from Corded Ware populations rather than Yamnaya populations, and 2) apparent similarities between Indo-Iranian and the big southern branch of often poorly known languages who's relationships are a bit speculative; Greek, Armenian, Thracian, Cimmerian, Phrygian, etc.  While Italic, Celtic and Germanic are the descendants of Yamnaya peoples who pressed westwards fairly early to become the eastern Bell Beaker, Unetice and Tumulus cultures, before breaking up into more specific groups like Villanova, Urnfield, Nordic Bronze Age, etc., the Balkan peoples were the descendants of Yamnaya peoples who remained on the steppes longer only to have been later displaced by reflux immigration of Corded Ware peoples back into the Steppes.  This contact zone between those languages that later emerged as paleo-Balkan and Indo-Iranian explain the similarities that they have, while also explaining their significant differences (centum vs satem, for instance); it's borrowings and contact that explain the similarities, and a deeper genetic division between Corded Ware and Yamnaya that explain their differences.

Historically, of course, we know of all kinds of superimpositions of one group over another.  The Romans and Germanic peoples over the Celts.  The Celts and the Romans over the Thracians and Dacians.  The Scythians over the Srubna (probably proto-Thracians.)  The Goths over the Scythians.  The Slavs over much of the above listed groups in eastern Europe, etc., etc.

But the jockeying and movement of peoples and languages in prehistory is what's fascinating, because for the first time we have enough multi-discipline data to actually say something intelligent about it and create somewhat speculative, yet likely, scenarios about how things ended up the way they ended up.  It's an exciting time to be following this kind of stuff.

2018: How I got Here

I think maybe it's time for another retrospective.  Although I've been a fan of D&D and RPGs more generally for quite a long time; since the early or mid 80s at least (I think the first RPG that I actually paid a lot of attention to was in 5th grade, so 1982 or so, and it was the Moldvay set.  I'd played some brown box OD&D prior to that, and been fascinated by a quick look-through of the AD&D Monster Manual at a nearby bookstore.  Sometime around here, or maybe even earlier, I also got my mitts on a copy of the official AD&D coloring book, which was (and actually still is) loads of fun.

Not long after this, I read the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, and soon after, Tolkien.  Between D&D and my love of Tolkien especially, I started spending my free time (or time when my mind wandered; much of this was in class) drawing homebrew Christopher Tolkien style maps.  To me, D&D and homebrewing go hand in hand.  You don't play D&D without homebrewing, and if you aren't homebrewing, you aren't playing D&D.  I recognize, of course, that this isn't literally true, but the two activities are so cemented together in my mind that it's hard to envision one without the other.

Anyway, I don't really recall too much what homebrew settings I've tinkered with prior to 2000 and the release of 3e.  Often because that was because I took no notes and kept no maps and just fudged around in my head with them, or ran them without really spending much time thinking through the implications of the setting.  But 3e launched at a time when, among other things, Geocities was active (followed by Wikispaces, followed by Google Sites, etc.) so every setting I've worked on since the launch of 3e was at least a little bit more documented than the ones prior to that.  Although Geocities and now Wikispaces are gone (or at least no longer free to use) I've still got archives of some sort of them, and I at least know what the settings were and what I developed for them.  Let's talk briefly about the settings I've worked on, and put them in streams; i.e., one evolved into another into another, before that stream "went extinct" and was replaced by another.  This isn't exactly true, because one stream may have borrowed substantially from another (in fact, they always do) or become a hybrid of another two, or areal features may have spread across multiple streams, etc.  But it's still useful to think of in terms of how we got to where we are today.

Dungeon Craft Setting: The very first setting I developed for 3e was based on Ray Winninger's Dungeon Craft series of articles, that actually started well before 3e came out, and can be seen maybe as a last hurrah of setting design methodology for 2e.  The series didn't finish until after 3e was out, and of course, setting development rarely requires mechanics too much anyway; or at least, his methodology didn't really make too much reference to them.

In any case, because this was my first foray back into D&D setting design, or "regular" fantasy at all, for that matter, it was pretty standard and even rather vanilla.  This was also influenced by the fact that I think Ray Winninger's own sample world of Aris was kind of that way too; it wasn't too divergent in terms of high concept.  This one I'm not sure what I still have, because I quickly grew dissatisfied with its bog-standardness and evolved it into the next chapter in setting design.

Faerytale: This one was based more on a high concept; that the "faery" races were from an alternate plane, and were much more fey in nature.  Elves were associated with a season, for instance, and there were winter elves and summer elves and fall and spring elves, etc.  Anyway, this was my first (since 3e anyway) attempt to break away a bit from D&D itself, even though D&D was still the tool I was using.  I wanted to mess around with the assumptions and not have the exact same assumptions that D&D itself had.  I don't remember what else changed (nor how to find the correct Geocities archive) anymore, although I'm positive that either the link is kicking around in some folder in my email, or the files are archived somewhere on my old desktop hard drive, or something.  In any case, I was happy enough with the results; so happy, in fact, that I didn't take too long before evolving this into an even more divergent situation; one specifically in which what the PCs do was going to be quite contrary to D&D normally, as well as further evolution of the mechanics.

Faerytale II: This was actually the exact same high concept as Faerytale, but I did two things that were notably different: 1) started replacing core classes with alternate classes, and other more obvious and significant house-rules (at this point, most of the alternate classes came from the Wheel of Time d20 game; because I didn't have anything else yet to borrow them from) and I decided that the core concept was that the PCs were supposed to be a kind of fantasy version of Mulder and Scully; secret agents of the king rooting out secret supernatural threats that most normal people didn't even believe in.

Because one of these evolved fairly seamlessly into the other, none of them were ever really finished, and I didn't ever actually use any of these except as an exercise to stretch out my home-brewing muscles.  I also didn't really retain much, if anything, from these settings, other than maybe the idea of secret skulduggery and espionage as a major theme in a game that's nominally based on D&D; not normally themes associated with that game (although keep in mind that as a kid, I played as much Top Secret S.I. as D&D, and arguably liked it better in many ways anyway.)  I do still kind of like the idea of the seasonal elfs; it makes them seem more fey and inhuman, but I don't really care for elfs of any kind most of the time these days, so even that good idea hasn't really had any traction.  This stream finally died without issue, mostly because I was more distracted by other, sexier streams that were coming up on the side.

Bloodlines: If you keep in mind that I never really experienced 2e or Planescape until long after they were gone, it might make sense that at some point here I got really excited about the plane-touched races.  Y'know, the fire genasi, the tieflings, etc.  Excited enough that I wanted to create a setting where the six plane-touched races largely replaced all of the non-human racial options entirely.  Based on that idea, that the PCs heritage was a driving high concept and the racial palette was driven in large part by otherworldly (or magically altered) heritage, I came up with Bloodlines.  It's amazing, looking back at this, how much this predates Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, although that's not necessarily deliberate.  But this is the setting that laid the foundation for much of what was to follow.  For geography, I decided that there was a fantasy Lake Bonneville, complete with southern Utah-like deserts and Columbian mammoths and saber-tooths, etc.  Again; very much like DH4.  I used d20 Modern as the rules.  d20 Past wasn't out yet, but I house-ruled d20 Modern to basically do the same thing (if I were to run this using d20 rules again, which I almost certainly wouldn't, I'd use the Shadow Stalkers campaign model from d20 Past to be the way things worked.)  Magic was dangerous.  Probably borrowing from a concept I'd read in a battle report in those old White Dwarf magazines, which I still used to buy and read back then, even though I never really got into Warhammer as a hobby, if you had a bad enough mishap trying to cast a spell, daemons from the Warp would appear and attack you.  I think I may have even finally adopted the d20 Call of Cthulhu magic system before I was done.

Dark•Heritage Mk. I: At some point during this phase, I was at home, my wife was out with some girlfriends, and I popped Attack of the Clones in the DVD player, skipped ahead to the actual attack of the clone troopers, and found myself really caught up in the idea of this Mars-like environment as a setting.  Hey, southern Utah-esque Bloodlines was already mostly there, right; what if I renamed it, and made it a bit more overtly Barsoom-like?  That's where the first Dark•Heritage came from.  My geography changed quite a bit; I actually had gigantic Tarsis-like volcanos, and a gigantic Valles Marinaris feature.  But this was basically just Bloodlines with a new geography.  It gradually got more and more alien and I made it more and more like Barsoom and Leigh Brackett's Mars in terms of wildlife, monsters, etc.  It gradually started to take on some steampunk-like elements, mostly borrowed from Iron Kingdoms (I liked steampunk for a while exactly right up until I saw what the steampunk dress-up movement was like, and read a few romance novels disguised as steampunk fantasy.  At that point, I decided I had no interest in the genre anymore.)  Although I never really liked China Mieville all that much, some aspects of his world-building from Perdido Street Station made their way in.  Finally, at some point, I got to the point where the setting had to be rebooted because my ideas were diverging too much from where I started.  I actually ran this briefly.

Dark•Heritage Mk. II:  I ran this one slightly less briefly; in fact, I think we had a rather successful little campaign here with my old group which has all fallen apart and gone our separate ways now.  Two significant high concept ideas inform this version of the setting, which differed from what came before and after.  Rather than plane-touched races, I modified the races to be Bred; they were former slaves who were bred like breeds of dog, sheep or horse into what they were.  The old slave-masters were long gone, but their legacy remained.  This actually borrowed some secret history that wasn't terribly different from Warhammer 40k and Tolkien's Silmarillion-stage stuff.  The other major high concept change was that for some reason I revisited an old idea I had long had for creating a sundered world of floating islands that had to be traveled to via flying ships.  The world was divided into "zones" separated by persistent cloud-layer or other features that made them distinct; at the very top were cold, high altitude islands where the aasimar lived, below that was a sunny jungle continent, below that was an overcast zone of smaller, sorta Medieval like kingdoms, and below a persistent storm layer and below everything else was the Night Zone; a terrifying zone of darkness and vampires.

I obviously am not using that any more, but I do still like it, and one of these days, I'll probably figure out what to do with that idea.  Anyway, I got kind of stuck on those ideas, because they happened to be current when I started running the game.  Before I was done, I had decided that these ideas were too weird to be my "main" area of setting development, so I was ready to drop them as soon as I had the chance.

Dark•Heritage Mk. III: Borrowing now the geography of the Tarim Basin during the heyday of the Silk Road, this was back to Barsoom-like desert stuff, although now I wasn't trying too hard to be all pseudo-science fictiony and was happy to simply be fantastic.  This version of the setting actually got really significant development; I had a wiki, drew maps, wrote thousands of words, etc.  In the end, I finally decided that I was getting caught up too much in weird, esoteric questions of world-building and was focusing on stuff that had no bearing on whether or not the game would be fun.  Trying to decide what certain cultural touchstones would be like is fun, sometimes, but I wasn't there to write some kind of weird ethnographic anthropological report.  This version finally just kind of faded away as I remembered that I needed to just be fun again. Ironically—or I dunno, maybe this isn't ironic—this happened because while I was doing all this, I needed some actual D&D settings, and working on those brought my Dark•Heritage stuff around.  But by this point, I think we need to explore another stream; those D&D-like streams, which then became the foundation of the next phase of Dark•Heritage.

Leng Calling: Somewhat tongue-in-cheek reference to a cheesy Falco song, this was another setting that I started noodling around with just for the heck of it that was deliberately meant to be more D&D and generic fantasy like; probably because even before I gave up on the direction Dark•Heritage was going, I was subconsciously aware that it was becoming too weird.  Originally developed for me to noodle around with fiction writing, this setting featured more familiar type locations, a big sea surrounded by a pseudo-Spanish nation, etc.  In reality, it was the first real Dark•Heritage Mk IV geography, although it wasn't designed as such, and it wasn't meant to be.  It was meant to deliberately stand in contrast to Dark•Heritage as it was at the time, where I was neck-deep into Mk. III.

Demons in the Mist: Another tongue-in-cheek setting title, this was based on me shamelessly stealing the high concept from a friend of mine and coming up with this setting in which a toxic, demon-infested mist had flooded the world, and only the tops of mountains, tepuis and plateaus stood above the mist.  Airships and tunnels and other things connected the various islands that rose above the mists, but going into the mists itself was seen as tantamount to suicide.  The only reason I did this was because some friends of mine wanted me to run something.  I whipped up a few geographical features and started running this before I'd even really developed very much, so much of the setting development happened literally on the fly.  I also had decided for whatever reason that this was doing to be "D&D without the iconic D&D elements" so most of the races (except human and half-orc) were replaced with humanoid creatures from the monster manual (we had a shifter, two humans, two hobgoblins and a half-orc, if I recall when the campaign started) and instead of magic, there was only psionics.

The game was pretty wacky.  One impetuous guy ended up pledging service to a demon lord because it was using the appearance of a super hot chick at the time.  They ended up getting involved in a war between hot, naked Amazon chicks who rode dinosaurs into battle and who were fighting sentient gorillas.  Two characters got their bodies switched; the lothario was stuck in the body of Fast Times era Phoebe Cates, and the hobgoblin pirate who was his best friend got stuck in the body of a gorilla.  In the end, they destroyed the setting, and nonchalantly walked off, too narcissistic to believe that it would have any real impact on them personally.  At one point, I actually introduced (temporarily) a mechanism by which you could get extra action points by quoting 80s pop songs and making them sound like they fit.

Although I don't think I really borrowed much directly from this game into my future setting developments, one thing that it definitely did was remind me to stop taking myself so seriously and just freaking run a fun game already.

Pirates of the Mezzovian Main: For another group, I needed to run a D&D-like game, and this is the one I came up with.  It was also pretty crazy; I had a character who was a tall, skinny Ichabod Crane-looking moron who thought he was a dwarf born in the wrong body.  I had a character who snuck out while the other PCs were asleep and did some anthropomancy in the guts of a reedy, cheap slave that he bought (the faces on the other players when they realized how he had these clues on what to do next!)  Anyway, for this game I also developed what ended up being the geography for Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, although I didn't know it at the time, because that's not why I developed it.  This was driven by two things; reinforcing the lessons of Demons in the Mist to just roll with crap, not take myself too seriously, and just have fun (I actually had one of my most successful moments of gaming horror in this game too; just because we didn't take ourselves too seriously didn't mean that it was all gonzo whackiness all the time either.)  And secondly, that pirates was too fun of a concept to do away with because I was stuck in some desert paradigm.  But before I jump into the next stream, let's talk about some epilogues that this stream managed to generate before it was done with.

Modular Setting Elements: This wasn't meant to be a setting per se, but rather a place where I could archive ideas that I liked that tended to make appearances in more than one setting; starting with Tarush Noptii and the original hobgoblin version of Kurushat.  Some of these started out way back in the Leng Calling setting, made appearances in Pirates of the Mezzovian Main, and I knew that they'd make appearances again.  In fact, most of them ended up getting integrated directly into Dark•Heritage Mk IV.  This didn't end so much as it just became less modular, and I actually integrated them into the setting.  So, I put a lot of work into this, but that work poured seamlessly into the next stream.

Freeport Fan: And finally, I used them in one more brief game before I left this setting behind completely; using an East Indies inspired geography, I threw Freeport into a new setting, using modular elements like Kurushat, Terassa, etc. and made this a kinda sorta sequel to Demons in the Mist.  Even though it was in a different setting, it featured several of the same characters, and a very similar vibe; I started off with a Hangover-like high concept; the PCs had woken up one day missing a fair bit of their memories of the last few weeks, and had to figure out what kind of crazy hijinks they'd got up to in the meantime (one of them was married to a half-demon seductress with all kinds of corrupt political ambitions, for instance.)

Anyway, this was a post-ending hurrah; I'd already really kind of moved on.  The game itself also kind of died with a whimper as scheduling and real life issues forced it to end earlier than I would have wished it to.

Finally, we get to the several years in which I worked in Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, which used the Pirates of the Mezzovian Main geography (mostly) with a bunch of Modular Setting Elements thrown on top of it, and, of course, I was back to something more like my standard racial selection.  I also dabbled in a lot of other ideas, many of which actually eventually led to the evolution of DH4 to DH5, and I also finally got involved in the m20 system.

During this phase, I also spent considerable effort and capital in some space opera setting design, based, of course, originally on Star Wars, but I'm only talking about my fantasy homebrew, so I'm not really going to mention those.

Dark•Heritage Mk. IV: This is the setting that this blog was really mostly about developing for many years.  As I said above, it gradually settled into the recognizable Mark IV setting, with the racial selection, the nations and geography, etc. that I'd been using for years.  Although it originally started as both heavily house-ruled d20 D&D and equally heavily house-ruled d20 Past, I eventually used both house-ruled Old School Hack and house-ruled m20 to represent this, and the basis of my current m20 games starts here.

Cult of Undeath: Cult of Undeath was my attempt to see how I could run a Paizo adventure path, but mutilated, mutated, clipped and otherwise made more up my alley.  I ended up developing an alt.Ustalav so I could run the setting there without feeling like I was stepping on their intellectual toes while talking about all of the changes I was making to it here, and I even ended up modifying my Dark•Heritage m20 game into something more D&D like.  This eventually evolved into Fantasy Hack, my full-blown alt-D&D.

Timischburg: As Cult of Undeath was more successful than even I thought it might be, I decided to actually develop that setting more fully.  It was originally meant to be little more than a slightly deeper dive into what was essentially one of the modular setting elements from way back when I still was doing Modular Setting Elements, but it ended up expanding considerably.  But I didn't really put too much flesh on these bones, because although I liked the direction it was going, I liked it enough that it was eclipsing the ideas I had for DH4; in fact, I thought these were better ideas.  But instead of being separate, the two were converging in many ways as I was bringing DH ideas into Timischburg.  Finally, I decided to formally combine them, and do so with a few other significant borrowings while I was at it, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves yet...

Dreamlands Remixed: One of just many abortive setting high concept ideas that I spelled out here over the years, this one at least had one major element developed a bit; the country of Lomar, borrowed from Lovecraft's Dreamlands series, and combined in many ways with CAS's Hyperborean Cycle (as both Lovecraft and CAS themselves joked about at times.)  While it's too much to say that this was really a setting per se, this Lomar development did, at least, get swallowed up and integrated into DH5.

Mammoth Lords: I didn't really talk too much about this here, but I did do more development on it than on many other ideas; I had a wikispaces page, I had a notebook full of maps I sketched and notes I'd jotted down.  This needed some work to be usable, but it was also further along than a lot of other high concept lines I'd thrown out there and then not done much with.  It ended up lending the majority of its geography to DH5, so it's a significant element of where we went next.

Before I get to DH5, based on these elements, I should probably point out two other setting design noodlings that I've done that I'm still trying to figure out how to integrate, because I kind of want to in some respect.

Odd D&D: This initially had one of the same conceits as Demons in the Mist; D&D, but with none of the basic, iconic D&D elements, focusing instead on some more esoteric options for classes and races.  What will probably make the cut from the stuff I developed for it is the concept of the lizard and snake-men kingdoms.  The rest of it was specific to that mini-setting, rather than something that can become a modular add-on to DH5.  I don't know for sure how much the lizardmen and snakemen kingdoms will really feature in DH5, but then again, I don't know how much Baal Hamazi or Kurushat or Gunaakt will feature either, or even Lomar, even though they're all explicitly part of the setting.  For the most part, to include any of those, I'll have to actually expand the map, or leave their specific location undefined and just have them feature as spies, visitors, or other weirdos who are from beyond the borders of known territory.

Realms Traveler: I talked a bit about the 4e cosmology and how I always liked it; in point of fact, I'd actually developed (vaguely) some similar ideas with regards to Leng Calling, and while extradimensional travel isn't really something that I'm all that interested in because presumably your actual setting is interesting enough that it isn't necessary, I'd still kept those ideas in the back of my mind, as an even more optional modular element.  I had, however, spent a little bit of time thinking about what it might look like if I specifically desired to have a game that traveled the realms of gods and demons and weirdo aliens; kind of the high concept of Planescape, but without all of the D&Disms (not to suggest that I wouldn't borrow tons of realms from my 3e Manual of the Planes book, as well as Monte Cook's Beyond Countless Doorways and Paizo's Distant Worlds all rolled up into a single cosmology that played out like "Wagon Train to the Planes" (a kind of pun on the phrase that allegedly Gene Roddenberry used during his pitch for Star Trek to the studio; Wagon Train to the Stars.)

Like I said, I don't know how much planar travel (I don't even like the term plane or planar, because it sounds too specifically D&Dish, although I know Blavatsky and the theosophists used similar language, and it was therefore picked up a bit by Lovecraft and Moorcock and others.  Maybe I should call them exoworlds?) will feature in DH5, but if it does, I want to keep this concept in my back pocket for how to actually do so.  Echoes of Asprin's Myth Adventures will probably inform this from a tone perspective moreso than anything like Planescape, but that's a somewhat more distant concern right now anyway.

Dark•Heritage Mk. V: And that gets us to where we are now; the already fairly highly derived DH4 gets smashed together with the geographies of Timischburg and Mammoth Lords, and a few other elements bolted on, and we've got DH5.  Something that I don't actually spend tons of time developing, because so many of the smaller elements of it are long-lived already and can be adopted without much change, but which I expect to be my homebrew go-to for many years to come still.

Where 4e succeeded

Well, I'm here after all, making posts.  I wasn't sure I would be until after the New Year, and I don't know how much I'll be doing now, even.  But something occurred to me that I want to talk about.

Now, I never played 4e.  I never really even did more than skim the core books.  But I did look a fair bit at some of the supplemental material, skipping or skimming over the mechanics and focusing on the fluff.  See, at a micro level I think 4e got some stuff right with the mechanics here and there—minions, healing surges, etc. are all great ideas in an otherwise unpalatable sea of mechanics that I don't like.  But at a macro level, it was the setting that they got right, not the mechanics.  In fact, this was only hindered by the micro level; at some point, they had to still try too hard to be recognizably D&D to too much of the audience who were too invested into the weirdness that D&D had evolved into.

By this I mean that when people say that D&D is generic, vanilla fantasy, that's absurd.  D&D has evolved into a very specific type of fantasy: D&D-fantasy, that bears only superficial resemblances to its own sources, even.  Gary Gygax was specifically a fan of sword & sorcery, and even moreso of the smug, post-sword & sorcery stuff of the likes of Michael Moorcock and L. Sprague de Camp.  One of these days, maybe I can talk in more detail about how this "deconstruction" of sword & sorcery of the type these pencil-necks (quite literally in the case of de Camp) produced bears little other than superficial resemblance to real sword & sorcery, as pioneered by Robert E. Howard and expanded more faithfully by naturally alpha-like folks like Fritz Leiber, but for now suffice it to say that the influences of D&D are both sword & sorcery and anti-sword & sorcery, and Gygax actually seems to have been more a fan of the latter than the former.  D&D was also "hijacked" maybe you could say by high fantasy fans at some point in the early 80s and never looked back (probably because most of the players were high fantasy fans over sword & sorcery or even anti-sword & sorcery fans by then.)  That's not to suggest that D&D bears more than a superficial resemblance to high fantasy normally either.  While something like the Forgotten Realms appears on the surface to be high fantasy, it's not in actual play, for the most part.  Imagining Gandalf and Frodo "delving" a megadungeon is absurd.  While some suggest that the Mines of Moria is the prototype of the modern D&D dungeon, that's ridiculous, again except in a big superficial sense.  The Mines of Moria only take; what, two chapters in Fellowship, and for at least the first chapter, literally nothing happens except travel and character development.  Then there's a brief combat scene or two and an extended chase scene (a form of action scene that D&D didn't even bother trying to model for decades) and then they're out.  The whole time, the characters didn't want to go into Moria, and their only goal was to pass through it as quickly and quietly as possible.  It bears literally no resemblance to the concept of the dungeon in D&D.  There's no treasure hunt.  There's no "level clearing."

Anyway, D&D is its own thing.  And the longer its been around, the more esoteric and inbred it becomes.  As we saw with the launch of 4e, there are even people who didn't think it could be D&D without the esoteric details that have grown up around the Great Wheel being kept intact.  The notion that 4e introduced things like Graz'zt being a corrupted devil who became a demon lord and may still secretly be colluding with Asmodeus made D&D purists howl.  But this is the kind of stuff that actually made 4e great; the willingness to change these kinds of details with an eye for "instead of just keeping this as a sacred cow just because, let's see how we can make this concept more useful for players and DMs."  So, in general, there were two things that D&D 4e got very, very right at the setting level.

Cosmological changes
First off, they posited a major change to the cosmology.  Gone was the Great Wheel, and in was a duology based on the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos, with the other planes as domains within those vast extradimensional seas.  The whole thing is set up against a backdrop that rings with mythic resonance; as well it should, because it echoes concepts like the Titanomachy or the Gigantomachy; the primordials and the gods (basically equivalent beings from the Elemental Chaos and the Astral Sea respectively) warred in the distant past, and while the gods won, the primordials are not completely gone, and there's echoes of a future Ragnarok (or maybe just the return of the Titans) lingering as a potential threat to the multiversal order.

This drove lots of changes, both great and small. As Yakk, a poster online said about it, "An essential feature of 4e cosmology is that it is presented as legends and stories rather than facts. These legends/stoeies may not perfectly agree with each other: and this is intended.  The effect is that even if Players read it, the fact that they disagree means that the DM gets to decide which variant is true, and even if none are. While this does fall under rule 0, the presentation makes it very clear. The events and structure of the cosmolgy are left vague and legendary, so it is easier to warp them." Let me quote some of the text at the DriveThruRPG description of the 4e Manual of the Planes.  The best sources for what was actually going on in the cosmology here are that aforementioned book, and Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters.  I've snipped portions that are more descriptive of the book rather than the cosmology without ellipses.

D&D 4e massively changed D&D's worldview, and part of that was a revamped cosmology. The new World Axis had actually originated with the Forgotten Realms, which was planning a view of the heavens as early as 2005 or 2006. It was then co-opted by the SCRAMJET world design team for D&D 4e.  

A new cosmology meant that D&D's classic Great Wheel was being thrown out. The main complaint? "Needless symmetry". The Great Wheel required planes for every alignment and every element … whether they were useful in games or not. The World Axis was instead built for "maximum playability", where there was "no 'dead' space". As the designers explained, the Great Wheel had contained good-aligned planes that were never used and elemental planes that were too deadly. Now there was the opportunity for adventure everywhere. 

The World Axis also moved D&D's cosmology toward the "points of light" model that was at the heart of the new game. This was particularly obvious in Astral Sea, where goodly home bases were now points of light in a rugged, ruined environment … but the same model could be found in all the new planes of the D&D multiverse.  Richard Baker described the new World Axis as a "bobbin or wire spool", with the mortal world dwelling between two great seas: the Astral Sea above and the Elemental Chaos below. This cosmology is given a rich (and symmetrical) mythical background, where the Primordials (of the Elemental Chaos) long ago battled against the Gods (of the Astral Sea). This history links the entire World Axis cosmology, something that had been missing from the Great Wheel; it's also what gives the Astral Sea its post-apocalyptic, "points of light" feel. 

The Elemental Chaos, which was called "Primordial Chaos" in early drafts, is a conglomeration of the elemental planes of previous editions. The new blended plane is intended to be more accessible (and less deadly) for adventuring than the stark, undifferentiated elemental planes of old. Surprisingly, the classic plane of the Abyss is now connected to the Elemental Chaos. A few classic layers get detailed here, including Lolth's Demonweb, Baphomet's Endless Maze, and Orcus' Thanatos — all of which had appeared in adventures in days past. 

The Astral Sea is what had once been the Outer Planes, home to all the gods. Like the Elemental Chaos, it's now more accessible to adventurers. In fact, it now pays homage to the Spelljammer (1989) setting, because magical ships can sail the Astral Sea, traveling from one island domain to another. The Nine Hells gets special attention as one of the Sea's domains. They've been totally revamped. Rather than being a stack of layers — the common model for planes in the Great Wheel — the Nine Hells is now a mighty planet, with all of the layers except Avernus being underground caverns.  

Demons and devils are widely differentiated, and that starts with the revelation that Demons are now corrupted elementals — explaining the placement of the Abyss in the Elemental Chaos. Beyond that, the designers envision demons as "merciless, savage, hateful destroyers", disorganized and self-destructive, but eager to "destroy the creations of the gods. Devils are the rebellious servants of the gods. They're organized instead of chaotic; subversive instead of murderous; and slippery instead of tough. 

The Eladrin perhaps underwent the largest changes. The race dated back to Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix II (1998), where they were strange fey native to Arborea. They moved to the Feywild in the new cosmology, but more importantly, the eldarin of previous books were just the powerful lords of the Feywild; the race now also included less powerful entities who were available as player characters — essentially turning them into the "high elves" of previous D&D games. 

Finally the Primordials were a new race of mythic beings, as powerful as the gods. They would be extensively featured throughout D&D 4e's run and would be enumerated in some later volumes.

This isn't all necessarily bad from the point of view of a D&D traditionalist, though.  Among other things that it made actually make more sense, the Temple of Elemental Evil with this Primordial/Deity split actually makes some sense.  Imix, Ogremoch, etc. and the rest of the Princes of Elemental Evil are clearly Primordials.  For that matter, so are many of the Demon Lords.  If you read the Demonomicon book, it even explains how the obyrith fit.  I mean, all of this stuff actually fits together into a cosmology that makes some sense without just feeling artificial like the standard D&D cosmology always did.

Points of Light
Secondly, is the concept of the Points of Light and the setting of Nentir Vale.  Now, when you and I hear the word Vale, we think of a valley, and while something like the Yosemite Valley comes to mind, but Nentir Vale is obviously quite a bit bigger than that.  A more comparable geographic feature would be something like the Bighorn or Pannonian Basins, though—big enough to be an entire (modestly sized) country, but small enough that you can get around easily enough without feeling like you have to use travel magic or really long trips.

More to the point, however, is the idea that the D&D game is set during a Dark Age.  There's no great empires of the present, although echoes of great empires of the past have a profound effect on the world.  There's not a lot of interconnectedness, because Nentir Vale has been depopulated after the waning of empires, and overrun by monsters and barbarians to the extent that anything lives there at all.  Ruins of greater empires of the past dot the landscape, smaller settlements eke out a living, and fend of various threats, and there's really a lot of space for a player character group to go and find pretty significant adventure not far away.  There's a large town or even a city or two, but they operate as fairly independent city-states in a world under siege, that are only tenuously connected with each other.

While the implications for making the game playable are obvious, this is also important, quite frankly, from the implications of storytelling too.  Almost every genre of historical adventure fiction is in the frontiers, or in the aftermath of a Dark Age, or otherwise where there are lots of open activities for conflict.  The only notable examples are picaresque tales in the decadent cities of corrupt and flawed empires, or cold war type intrigue and skulduggery between rival Great Powers.

From Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters here's a summary of the core conceits of setting design.

The design of the world of 4th Edition DUNGEONS & DRAGONS operated under certain shared assumptions about what is cool about D&D and what would make the game more fun. These key conceits do not apply to a specific setting; rather, they should be true for anyone creating a D&D world, leaving as much of the fine detail as possible to the individual Dungeon Master. 

As the game developed, some of these ideas shifted as well, but they remain the basic guidelines for world design.

The World Is More Fantastic: D&D cultures should blend real-world cultures and fantastic elements, not merely elements of medieval and Renaissance Europe. It’s okay for D&D environments to have no realistic analog. 

The World Is Ancient: Empires rise and empires crumble, leaving few places that have not been touched by their grandeur. Ruin, time, and natural forces eventually claim all, leaving the D&D world rich with places of adventure and mystery. Ancient civilizations and their knowledge survive in legends, magic items, and the ruins they left behind, but chaos and darkness inevitably follow an empire’s collapse. Each new realm must carve its own place out of the world rather than build on the efforts of past civilizations. 

The World Is Mysterious: Wild, uncontrolled regions abound and cover most of the world. City-states of various races dot the darkness, bastions in the wilderness and amid the ruins of the past. Some of these settlements are “points of light” where adventurers can expect peaceful relations, but many more are dangerous. No one race lords over the world, and vast kingdoms are rare. People know the area they live in well, and they’ve heard stories of other places from merchants and travelers, but few really understand what’s beyond the mountains or in the depth of the great forest unless they’ve been there personally. 

Monsters Exist All Over: Most monsters of the world are as natural as bears or horses are on Earth, and monsters are everywhere, both in civilized sections and in the wilderness. Griffon riders patrol the skies over dwarf cities, behemoth beasts carry merchants’ goods long distances, yuan-ti have an empire a few hundred miles from a human kingdom, and efreet in their City of Brass appear in the mountains suddenly like Brigadoon emerging from the mists. 

Creatures Need a Place in the World: Creatures shouldn’t be introduced into a vacuum. Any monster or player character race we make in the game should occupy a unique space in the D&D world. We need to make sure that new creatures have a new and compelling role in the world, in addition to an interesting mechanical purpose. 

Adventurers are Exceptional: The adventurers created by the players are the pioneers, explorers, trailblazers, thrill seekers, and heroes of the D&D world. Although some nonplayer characters might have a class and gain power, they do not necessarily advance as the PCs do, and they exist for a different purpose. Not everyone in the world gains levels like PCs. An NPC might be a veteran of many battles and still not become a 3rd-level fighter; an army of elves is largely made up of nonclassed soldiers. 

Magic Is not Everyday, but it Is Natural: No one is superstitious about magic, but neither is the use of magic trivial. Practitioners of magic are as rare as classed fighters. Magic should never cross over into the silly or replicate modern conveniences: We don’t want “magitech” such as arcane elevators and air conditioners, or flying sea serpents to put out fires. At the same time, we don’t want a real-world medieval fear of magic that gets wizards burned at the stake. There might be minor magic that is relatively commonplace; for example, a wealthy farmer might have a magically sharpened plow, but not an animated combine. People might see evidence of magic almost every day, but it’s usually quite minor—a fantastic monster, a visibly answered prayer, a wizard flying by on a griffon—but powerful and experienced practitioners of magic are far from everyday. 

“Good” and “Evil” Mean More: Being aligned toward good means being a champion who actively fights for what is right, not merely someone who supports such ideals. Being good is a defense against evil, never a vulnerability to evil. Likewise, evil is more than just bad thoughts. Most average people aren’t aligned one way or the other. You can’t use magic to know whether or not a creature is evil or good: You must judge it by its actions or know its nature (demons, for example, are always evil). 

Remote Gods: Gods are largely distant and detached from the world (with some exceptions, particularly evil gods). Most don’t take an active part in worldly affairs, but they have exarchs and angels who act on their behalf. Gods can be encountered, fought, and killed (although some might be too powerful to challenge). They aren’t omniscient or omnipotent, but they do grant spells to clerics and hear the prayers of their faithful. 

One Sun, One Moon: The world assumes what will be most easily accepted by players without imposing unfamiliar calendars and phenomena. 

No Forced Race Relations: The settlements of the PC races are usually points of light but aren’t necessarily goodaligned. They are places where people can share shelter from the dangers of the wild wide world. There is no inherent racial enmity between PC races, and hostile attitudes do not generally go beyond fear or lack of respect. 

Death Matters Differently: It’s generally harder to die than in previous editions, particularly at low level. When a heroic-tier player character dies, the player creates a new character. A paragon PC can come back from the dead at a significant cost. For epic-tier characters, death is a speed bump. Being raised from the dead is available only to heroes, and it’s more than just a spell and a financial transaction. NPCs, both good and evil, don’t normally come back to life unless the DM has a good reason. Monsters and NPCs shouldn’t use the same rules for death as PCs. When they’re down, they’re out—PCs don’t have to slit every monster’s throat after the battle and burn the corpses (except maybe for trolls). 

Fantastic Locations: D&D adventures should take place in fantastic settings—no more 10-by-10 rooms with two orcs. Encounters should occur in areas with interesting threats—from encounter traps that activate every round to hazards that were formerly considered monsters, such as assassin vines or gray ooze. 

Less Evil Fighting Evil: Too much in previous editions deals with evil fighting itself: Demon lords and archdevils war on each other rather than threatening the PCs. We don’t want to waste space on things players can’t use. Make sure conflicts are important and useful to making the game fun.

Now, obviously I don't agree with everything that that says, but all in all, it's a great place to start talking about how to set up your setting.  And frankly, some of those conceits led even further into cul-de-sacs that I'm not interested in, but having a list of conceits about how your setting will work is a good place to start.  As always, I can't ever play anything exactly as written, because there's always at least small, micro level details that I want to change.  But overall, I think the direction 4e went with regards to setting design was the right direction.

Sadly, I suspect that by and large, it was too much for some fans, and the design team took a step back from the scale of the changes.  For me, it was the mechanics changes that drove me away, the setting changes tended to draw me back.

Of course, I'd already independently come up with many similar ideas, and even gone further with them than the R&D team was willing to do, but then again, it wasn't a requirement of mine that my game resemble "standard" D&D or be marketed to anyone other than my group, so the constraints were obviously different.  I"m impressed how even many elements of the planar cosmology seem very much in line with things I had done with some of the settings that predated Dark•Heritage, like Leng Calling specifically, which led to Pirates of the Mezzovian Main, which ended up being the model which I adopted when I graduated Dark•Heritage Mk. III to Mk. IV.

Which reminds me; I haven't really given much thought to planar conceits in DH5.  I'm also not sure that I necessarily want to think too hard about it; if I go back to something like my Leng Calling, which would make the most sense, it'll feel derivative of 4e now, even though I actually developed it earlier.  Oh, well.  Such is the fate of the procrastinator who doesn't do anything with his homebrew except noodle around with it.

Merry Christmas

I don't know what kind of posting I'll be doing for the next week or two, but on the fairly good chance that I don't actually post again at all, I'll say it now—Merry Christmas!

Cave lions

As an aside; those American lion pictures reminded me that some recent papers that have done DNA research on the fossils of various specimens (as well as morphological studies, which work together and come to the same conclusion) suggest that the "primitive cave lion", Eurasian (and Berengian) cave lion, and the American cave lion are all sufficiently distinct that they are unique species not only from each other but more to the point, from the lion itself.  In other words; they're not lions.  They are very big cats, like super-sized jaguars or like tigers, but they are not lions.  The tendency to depict them as looking like wintry, grayish lions is probably not correct (the largest concentration of American lion fossils comes from La Brea in southern California where, even during the Ice Age, the climate was mild and Mediterranean-like, although somewhat more wooded and less sere than it is today.)

Another interesting find; there's no indication that the American "lion" made it further south than northern Mexico after all, and habitat differences seem to have kept it from overlapping in territories where the jaguar was extant.  What were believed to have been lion fossils in South America are now reinterpreted as exceptionally large jaguars.

And, of course, Asiatic lions, which are today isolated to a tiny strip of land in a national park in India, were once widespread across much of Asia and even eastern/southern Europe.  They may have been well-known to the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and it's not for nothing that the Greeks had loads of legends about lions; they probably knew them in person.  (Of course, the Greeks weren't confined to Greece either.  Magna Grecia had colonies all along the Black Sea, the southern half of the Italian peninsula, parts of coastal France and the Iberian peninsula and north Africa, and they probably traded not a small amount with the Carthiginians, and others on the Levant, and Egypt.)  I do wonder, sometimes, if maybe the cave lion didn't survive in Europe longer than people think, though. Like the aurochs, maybe it's an "Ice Age" animal that survived until just barely before the advent of recorded history in the area.

What does all this mean?  I don't know if it really means anything much other than that paleoartists should be careful not to model Panthera atrox, spelaea and fossilis too closely on the lion, since they weren't lions.  And, of course, more to miss.  Someday, in Heaven, I expect to really deep dive prehistoric life and learn all kinds of things about it that we can't know today, since clearly I was born with a natural affinity for it.

UPDATE: I should point out that those conclusions I mentioned on Friday aren't necessarily universally accepted.  Although there is evidence that Panthera atrox never got to South America after all, there is other evidence that it did, including some cave art and some preserved skin from Patagonian locations.  This, if it is indeed what it seems to be, would suggest that the American lion was reddish in color.

The European lion, Panthera spelaea, which the American lion is supposed to be an isolated descendant population of, on the other hand, has tawny hair, but lighter than that of the extant lion, much as it is illustrated in the more modern illustrations I've shown so far, with a warm underfur, not unlike that of Arctic animals today.  Cave paintings in France and elsewhere suggest that it was pretty much mane-less, too—which may mean that it didn't exhibit pride behavior, since pride behavior and the mane go hand in hand; i.e., the mane is an adaptation that male lions have so that they can fight with each other for control of the prides.

On the other other hand, pride behavior and cooperative hunting is seen as highly advantageous on the open country that both leo, atrox and spelaea are believed to have inhabited.  Solitary ambush predators among the cats, like the tiger, the puma, the jaguar, the leopard, etc. take advantage of cover to approach their prey; cover which is considerably harder to come by in the savannas of Africa or Pleistocene North America, the pampas and Patagonian pampas and desert, or the mammoth steppes of northern Europe and Siberia and Berengia, etc.  Not saying it's impossible; the cheetah makes a living as a solitary hunter, although its approach is considerably different.  Or that cooperative hunting is limited to open country; wolves certainly prove that false.  But there is evidence to suggest that pride behavior and open country do go hand in hand at least with lions, and probably with derived relatives of leo like spelaea and atrox, if they inhabited similar country as leo, probably exhibited similar behavior too.

Friday Art Attack

I'm fascinated by the concept of Panthera atrox; or perhaps Panthera leo atrox.  In fact, the notion that we can't for sure figure out which is more accurate is part of the fascination.  The largest (or at least tied for that honor) cat that ever lived was the "American lion" which may not have actually been a lion.  Here it is, probably stealing this buffalo kill from the wolves who made it first.

An interesting D&D map.  Althogh you can't tell from the map, those islands are supposed to be floating in the air over the river, although having them simply be in the river is cool enough.

Some concept art for an Alien 5 movie that never got made (because we got Prometheus and Covenant instead.)

I don't really like the concept of "tough chick" warrior women who act like men, because it's very off-putting to both men and women.  Plus, biology proves that it's inherently unlikely anyway.  But speaking of aliens, it looks like her whip thingy is an alien queen's tail.

A gnoll captain, or something.  I don't really go in for cannon fodder races either, because every race has to have champions and heroes equivalent to the PCs, right?

Some Old Republic concept art.

Amazon boarding party.  Yeah, not bad, even if it is the problem I mentioned earlier.  Amazons are at least a mythological precedent.

Speaking of extinct megafauna again, here's Miracinonyx trumani, the "American cheetah" chasing a pronghorn.

And here two "American lions" in South America with a Toxodon.

Big, nasty dragons are the stuff of nightmares.  We tend to forget that and see them as a romanticized aspect of adventure, but they'd be terrible in real life.

Why not throw in some faux 80s synthwave art?  How often do you get to see that?

Wayne Reynold's anorexic take on Baphomet; who I otherwise see as a more muscular type dude.  Although to be fair, this does borrow a bit from Eliphas Levi and the Sabbatical Goat iconography which was the downfall of the Templars.

More thoughts on speed stat

Well, with a minimum of changes, (some of it fixing grammar and clarity more than actually changing anything) I've made sure that my chase rules are sufficiently functional in print right now today.  The way that this works is this:

• I made sure that the monster section of the rulebook refers to using the monsters' HD for all skill stats required if any checks are made.  It does.  It did already, actually, but I had to double check that that was clearly integrated.
• Second, I slightly modified the description of the chase rules to say that +10 for being mounted was a point of reference based on a standard horse.
• Third, I added another sentence in the chase rules suggesting that GMs can use that point of reference to come up with other bonuses to the chase check as required to account for monster speed.

This is a stop-gap, though.  It works just fine, but realistically, if I think chase scenes are going to be a significant portion of the game, then monsters should have a chase bonus score, or speed stat, or something like that.  For a typical D&D-like game, chase scenes are relatively uncommon, so that's probably OK, and having the GM decide when one comes up if there's a bonus to one party, and what it is, is perfectly fine.  It can be done on the fly, without any significant workload or stress on the GM's part.

For Western Hack, and for any other game where being mounted, and running around chasing each other is likely to happen more frequently, a bonus for every monster is probably required.  And honestly; just because I don't need one for Fantasy Hack or Dark•Heritage 2 as it is, that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be a nice addition to actually have a chase bonus score for every monster, actually.  It doesn't add any significant rules bloat, and if anything, maybe it encourages a different type of action scene to happen more often.  Sure, sure—everyone loves combat, but chases are just as common in action movies as fights for a reason; they're equally exciting!

But that means I need to go through both rules sets making sure that I add the same speed bonus or chase bonus (or speed category, or whatever it is that I end up settling on; probably an actual numeric score) is the same for all monsters which are in both sets, which is most of them.  Sigh.  That sounds a little bit tedious, so don't hold your breath that I'm going to hurry up and do it in the next day or two.

Updated Chase Rules (Fantasy Hack and Dark•Heritage 2.1) BETA

I'm a little concerned, especially as I've now got the monster list in two places, that I don't want to rewrite both of them with a new stat for each monster, and then make sure that I've replicated the entire list properly between the two games (I'm actually pretty sure that a handful of monsters aren't on both lists for various reasons, so I'd have to go through them line item by line item to figure out which.)  Plus, I don't really want to add a new stat.  I may end up going that way before I'm done, but I want this to first be a modular add-on that doesn't require any actual changes to the rules as written before it gets integrated into the main rules.  Future state probably has it integrated in, however.

Chase rules in my m20 games are pretty straightforward... an "action scene" normally means combat, but if one party elects to try to run away, he makes a Athletics + DEX check vs his opponent, and if he wins, he gets to run without taking a hit (if he loses, he still runs, but the opponent gets a free attack on him first.  Then, each round of chasing, they continue to make opposed Athletics + DEX checks.  In most situations, if one of the two wins the check by 10 or more, then he has won the chase; i.e., if he's the one running away, he manages to get away (unless circumstances preclude this, i.e., a chase across a featureless open prairie, or something; if the one chasing wins, the scene becomes a combat scene again, and the guy running will have to attempt to run away all over again.)  Either way, five rounds into this type of scene, you start to have to make DC 15 Athletics + DEX checks to avoid becoming fatigues at having a negative modifier (-5 to the chase; -2 to any subsequent combat, until the action scene is over and it resets.)

You can use the GM Ruling system to come up with modifiers based on player actions, i.e. trying to jump over something, knock over obstacles, etc. to hinder pursuit, or whatever.  And the rules refer to a flat +10 bonus to any participant in a chase that is mounted.  But this defaults to being mounted on a horse; not all animals would be equally fast.  And besides, mounted opponents might want to chase other monsters, or be chased by them.  See the terror bird entry earlier today, for example; they can chase you across the savanna, and they can even be mounts, sometimes.

So how do I see this playing out?  Monsters don't even have an Athletics score, because monsters don't have skill scores (the idea is that GMs, if they need one, can whip one up on the fly.  I have a few options:

1. Give all monsters skill scores.  Faster monsters can be assumed to have a high Athletics score.
2. Change the chase rules to have a Speed score or speed factor rather than an Athletics + DEX check.  
3. Give each monster a generic speed rating, which creates a bonus or penalty to chase results.  This is similar to the horse +10 mentioned in the basic rules, but it would be a bit more nuances; horses might have different ratings, and other animals might have additional modifiers.  I'd probably go with broad categories rather than discrete numbers; something like:
1. Very slow: penalty of -5 to -10 Anything slower than this automatically loses chase checks
2. Slow: penalty of -2 to -4
3. Average: no penalty, but for a bit of minor variation, I suppose you could give them a range of -1 to +1.
4. Fast: +2 to +4
5. Very fast: +5 to +10
6. Extremely fast: Anything over +10

I probably like the last option best, and it's also easiest to implement without changing the way the game works too much.  GMs would still have to assign a speed to any monster, but I'd eventually update the file to include a chase modifier for all of them, because honestly, I probably should have from the get-go.  But with those categories, you'd have a benchmark to use when assigning chase scores.

This also works well for difficult assessments.  Is a bear a fast animal, for instance?  The general consensus is that no, not really, but it can rush pretty darn fast over a short space.  If you confronted a grizzly in the wild and tried to run away from it, it would probably have a hefty bonus to the chase check result for the first few rounds, but if it didn't catch you in 3-4 rounds, it would quit and let you just go.  Well, this way I don't have to try and portray that in the monster profile; the GM just rules it as such.