Fallen Sons systems and baselines

In light of my dredging up the wreck of the abortive FALLEN SONS project and trying to make it seaworthy, I've got some very early baseline thoughts to focus on. The first major question I need to address is which of two high level models that I want to use. For lack of a better term, I'm calling them the Thundarr model and the Warhammer model. These aren't meant to be exact, more like elevator pitch type comparisons.

The Thundarr model is a post apocalyptic world of super science and magic. If you're not familiar with the early 80s post-apoc sword & sorcery cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian, you should be. Because it was the early 80s, the animation is somewhat cheap, the stories are somewhat cheesy, and the violence is toned down to an almost insulting level. But once you can get past the idea that that was an element of 80s cartoons that you simply aren't going to be able to get away from and can look past it, then Thundarr the Barbarian has a lot to offer. In old school sword & sorcery style, the villains are the sorcerers, and by sorcerers, I usually mean a weird combination of transhuman super science and bizarre magic. Sorcerers can be more or less stereotypical dark lord types, or they can be brains in a jar with robotic arms that shoot lasers. The setting is clearly post apocalyptic America, because it makes a point of always showing broken and derelict recognizable places, like Ellis Island, Las Vegas, NASA headquarters and more. There is no functioning society; small tribal villages of poor Americans who are downtrodden and oppressed by either the armies of the sorcerers, or other monstrous incursions that have taken over in the wake of the apocalypse are the damsels in distress. Thundarr himself is a kind of stock pseudo-Conan barbarian with a lightsaber, and his sidekicks are a vaguely lion-like Chewbacca analog, and a sassy sorceress who turned her back on her evil "father" and followed Thundarr because he's a good dude and pretty sexy, and she'd rather be on his side than that of evil. She's kind of like a less demanding and entitled Princess Aura, who is deliberately made to be much more likable and sympathetic.

I like the Thundarr model because it's somewhat fresh and different (despite it's age and vintage generally) and few properties have been like it over the years. That said, fresh and different is often indistinguishable from weird and different, i.e., people won't like it, including once the novelty wears off, even me. Of course, when I say the Thundarr model, I don't mean that too literally, but rather that I'm positing a post apocalyptic grimdark(ish) setting that feels like the apocalypse happened in a world much like ours. People will often look weird and Mad Max-like, and the remnants of higher technology will play a key role in the setting here and there.

On the other hand, I don't like the Thundarr model because I also fear that in having to focus on the post apocalyptic stuff, that I may end up diluting to some extent the high concept of a world over-run by daemons. It's kind of its own high concept that's similar—at least in some respects—but different in others. Even as the developer (me) I'll get often distracted by things that are not related in the least to the high concept of FALLEN SONS as its initially defined. Of course, as initially defined, if you want to be technical, includes this option, as it was initially defined as a world pretty much exactly like ours.

The Warhammer concept isn't meant to imply that it's too similar to the Warhammer setting (either the original or the bizarre Age of Sigmar reboot, merely that it would be a vaguely similar grimdark(ish) standard European Medievalist fantasy world overrun by daemons. I doubt that I'd have anything even as friendly and cozy (not that this really qualifies for those adjectives) as the Empire; rather, the Empire would be a distant memory as a polity that failed under the daemonic incursion. The "points of light" flavor would be seriously ramped up, to where the points of light are tiny islands under siege, in a sense, against the darkness without. Daemonic kingdoms or demesnes, or whatever you will want to call them aren't necessarily overtly and simplistically hostile, although they are insidiously hostile at all times. Much as Azzagrat/Zelatar, or various places in Hell or the City of Brass were—well, friendly is the wrong word, but at least possible for regular people to wander around trading, using and having activity in—these daemonic kingdoms can be visited, although various dangers are always lurking under the surface. 

I like this because it's familiar and in fact even classic without feeling retreaded or cookie cutter vanilla. The high concept makes it different from most fantasy, including the default D&D or LotR or Conan the Barbarian models. It's neither extruded fantasy product nor thud and blunder, so to speak, because it has at least some bit of a twist on them. It's easy to pick up and play without having to overthink much about the setting, which puts the focus squarely on the high concept, because everything else fades into the background.

On the other hand, I don't like it, because it just feels like it's going to be very similar to what DH5 already is, except with more daemons. I already kind of have a dark fantasy vibe to my fantasy settings in general. Is it sufficiently different from what I'm already doing that it's worth spending the time making what amounts to small tweaks and whatnot to my existing projects? Or, on the other hand, is there something about it that I can make really stand out to make it truly feel different?

That's the major decision that I'm noodling first and foremost, and the answer to it determines some of my other questions that follow, like which of my three m20 systems is the best baseline to build on; the space opera one, or the Fantasy Hack "fake" D&D one, or the DH5 custom one? Not that I expect any feedback from the peanut gallery, but if any comes in, I'll welcome it, and in the meantime I'll continue to weigh this in my own mind until I'm ready to decide and move forward.

Re-open Fallen Sons

Check out the other (and only) post on this tag, and you'll see what I meant by FALLEN SONS; a setting noodling idea that I started, and then promptly abandoned and forgot about. The Stars Were Right (or Wrong.) The End of the World happened. Instead of being overtly Lovecraftian and weird pseudo-science fictiony, though, it's more like The Abyss from D&D specifically spilled out on to the world. Daemon Lords rule demesnes on the Earth, and normal, mortal people struggle to mostly stay out of their sight as much as possible. This makes it similar in some ways to my ODD D&D project, with daemonic instead of reptilian antagonists being the main thing going on.

There's a few things I need to do to make this start to become a reality. First, I need to decide on tech level. My original post proposed that this takes place in the future, and even in a post-apocalyptic Dark Ages feel, it doesn't seem likely that firearms and rare high technology wouldn't still exist. This would feel more like a demonic Thundarr the Barbarian or Gamma World. I'd probably use my m20 Ad Astra ruleset as a base, and then make houserules and changes to that first. It would involve many more cultural callbacks and recognizably modern elements, or even futuristic elements here and there.

The other option is a more typical swords & sorcery yet much more grimdark fantasy setting; like a Warhammer World, but without even the relatively bright spot of the Empire to stand as a bulwark for humanity. If I do this, then my m20 Dark Heritage is a more appropriate baseline ruleset.

And then, regardless of which system I use as a baseline, I need to go through my monster list, prune some options and come up with some new ones. 

And then, regardless of which system I use as a baseline, I need to start on some worldbuilding. I think most of this stuff would be more or less the same regardless of which paradigm I pick, although some of the finer details will obviously differ.

Celtic from the Middle

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-alternative-to-celtic-from-the-east-and-celtic-from-the-west/4F186F087DD3BE66D535102484F8E8C3

That article is a good read. While I like the Celtic from the West hypothesis, I don't think it's as good a theory as the null hypothesis. Although I admit that the null hypothesis; the Hallstatt theory of Celtic origins, leaves a lot to be desired. (The paper itself points out some of the particulars.) One that it only mentions off-hand, but which I've come to see as pretty important independently is that while our models have large, broad areas of developing language blocks, in every case where we have actual early written records, we have a much more patchwork and confusing scene. The Italian peninsula, for instance, is not just the area where the Italic language family developed; the written records include several non-Italic Indo-European languages (Greek being the most notable, from the Magna Grecia colonies), non-Indo-European languages altogether (Etruscan being the most prominent) and a strange patchwork of very early Italic languages, and languages who's affinity is highly suspect and nobody knows what they are. Messapic and Venetic and Ligurian (and Liburnian, although technically that's outside what is today Italy) are Indo-European, but otherwise have mysterious affinities. Lepontic appears to be an early Celtic. South Picene "appears" to be related to Osco-Umbrian, but neighboring North Picene is not. The old Sicel language, which gave the island of Sicily it's name, is also Indo-European, but what it's related to is unknown. Rhaetic may have been related to Etruscan and thereby been non-Indo-European.

Anyway, the point of all that is that imagining an early proto-Celtic that stretches back thousands of years and makes up the majority language of big material cultures like the Tumulus culture or the Urnfield culture is not consistent with the spread of Italic, and then again specifically Latin over what later became known as Italy; why would we expect Celtic to have been much more monolithic than what Italic was?

We have similar reasons to believe that the Iberian peninsula on the eve of historical records was similarly linguistically diverse, and we know that Anatolia in the Bronze Age was linguistically quite diverse. The spread of Greek over Greece is also fraught with concepts like Pelasgian, the Dorian invasion, and other things that hint at more linguistic diversity than which later emerged. The Balkans is also a big fat mess of languages, who aren't well enough known to be classified, but which seem to show more linguistic diversity than we'd have thought if Dacian or Thracian were similar to the theories of Celtic development. It's quite likely that the Bronze Age of Europe was much more linguistically diverse than we give it credit for, and that the origin of the languages that we know of (as opposed to those which disappeared anonymously without ever being written down) come from smaller and more recent sources than we expect. As the article linked above says in the introduction:

This explains the endless debates about the "homelands" and dates of Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Indo-European and other postulated proto-languages—debates further complicated when simplistic assumptions are made about prehistoric populations' archaeological, linguistic, ethnic and biological homogeneity. All too often, philologists have leant on outdated archaeological models, which in turn depended on outdated philological speculations—and vice versa. Such circularity is particularly evident in the study of Celtic ethnogenesis, a topic which can hardly be approached without understanding the chequered development of "Celtic philology", "Celtic archaeology" and their respective terminologies.

The term "Celtic" has been used in many conflicting senses. In this paper, "Celtic" refers both to the peoples whom Greek and Latin writers called variously Celts, Galatians, Gauls and Celtiberians and to their related languages, as known from inscriptions or inferred from place- and personal names. Applying a single term both to a population and to a language should never be done lightly, but in the case of the Celts they do seem, at least from the middle of the first millennium BC onwards, to constitute a valid "ethno-linguistic group". No single material "culture" can be associated with them, and there is no prima facie reason why we should expect one to do so. The relevant material "cultures" are so varied as to cast doubt on the coherence of ‘Celtic archaeology’ and "Celtic art". Old attempts at archaeological definition such as "The term 'Celt' designates with certainty the La Tène cultural complex from 400 BC on" now appear arbitrary; "Celtic" is rightly regarded as a misleading label for the central European Hallstatt and La Tène material "cultures" of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. The peoples of the first millennium BC who spoke the attested languages which meet the philological criteria for Celticity—certain unique divergences from reconstructed Proto-Indo-European—corresponded encouragingly well in their distribution to the historically attested Celts, Galatians, Celtiberians, and so on, while corresponding poorly to the "archaeological Celts" deduced from Hallstatt and La Tène archaeology.

Anyway, this means little other than that we should be careful of overly simplistic and pat models that rely on assumptions more than they do on actual evidence. Yes, this means that instead of having answers, we may well have questions that cannot be answered in this lifetime. But sometimes that's better than an answer that's wrong. And sometimes, as with this elegant Celtic from the Middle hypothesis, we can eliminate what evidence tells us is very unlikely or even impossible to be true, and therefore have more likely solutions left over to pick from.

Anyway, I now present a picture of "Hallstatt peoples" from superstar artist Angus McBride. In the past, and even in the present to most people, these would be considered Bronze Age Celts. I think we now we need to more cautiously call them Hallstatt Indo-European peoples who may or may not have been Celtic, or speakers some other Indo-European language altogether. 

UPDATE: As a minor aside, if this theory is valid, then it offers up a fifth alternative to the discussion of Pictish to those listed on Infogalactic or Wikipedia. And to be fair, even the Celtic from the East default mainstream theory, allows for this proposal, since it also proposes an early Indo-Europeanization of the British Isles that is separate from the much later Celticization of the British Isles; i.e., the theory of Pictish as non-Indo-European is inferior in every way to the idea of Pictish as "anonymous pre-Celtic Indo-European" that is a local descendent of whatever Indo-European language stock the Bell Beaker invaders spoke. That doesn't mean that it rises to rival the prevailing view that Pictish was probably related to the Brythonic Celtic languages, but given that that theory is not super solid to begin with, the spectre of Pictish as non-Celtic remains viable. If it is non-Celtic, or if a hinterlands, backwater non-Celtic language still lingered, at least, then it was probably Indo-European rather than non-Indo-European. As an aside, the Rodway (2020) source from the paper linked above clarifies, the Pictish ogham script's assignment to Celtic is refuted, and it is now considered to be likely non-Celtic. It's not clear to me why non-Celtic seems to revert in most people's minds to non-Indo-European, when we also suppose that the Bell Beakers Indo-Europeanized the British Isles thousands of years before the first attestation of any Celtic languages.

R1a-Z93

We traveled recently, and my wife booked the flights, as normal. She has an anxiety reaction to being in the middle seat, but after having sat next to her in one too many times, I told that I didn't like sitting in the middle seat any more than she did, so stop putting me there. So now she sticks me next to the window and she takes the aisle (I'll have to tell her that I actually greatly prefer the aisle too, I suppose, or she'll keep doing that forever.)

I actually hate flying in every way whatsoever, and would greatly prefer never to be on an airplane or in an airport ever again in my life. But sometimes it's not too bad, when nobody else is in the middle seat. We took a there and back again flight, both were two legs each, and both had one leg with a blank seat and one leg where someone sat between us. The last leg of the last flight, late last night, I had a smelly Indian guy jammed in between us. Luckily, it was a rather short leg, but it gave me a new topic to think about. I've thought about it before, of course, but not that often. And with the recent disaster in Afghanistan, and our leaders threatening to flood our communities (unasked for by us) with a bunch of Afghan Quislings and traitors who collaborated and colluded with the invasion of Afghanistan some twenty odd years ago, it's worth reflecting on the origins of the Indo-Iranian peoples. Because some people run around saying that they're close cousins of ours. This isn't really true, but it's not entirely untrue either. The Indians and other "Iranian" peoples that exist today are a kind of "failed" white people; their ancestors were from what is today central Russia, and they spread eastward and southward deep into what is today China, India and the Middle East. There, they met demographic disaster; lacking sufficient manpower to overwhelm the locals, and in particular, having a number of single men who took local women as slaves or wives or concubines, or otherwise had issue with them. Today, we can see that legacy in particular in the male haplogroup R1a-Z93 and its related subclades, which is a European haplogroup, although it is most heavily present today in Iran, Central Asia and northern India. However, nobody will look at your typical Paki, Indian or Afghan and think that they look like close relatives of the Slavs, because their genetic profile is ~80% native rather than white. (This is more true the further south and east you get; into what is today India and China respectively) But their language, some lingering elements of their culture, and their paternal haplogroup yet reveal their ultimate origin as being closely related to the Bronze Age of Europe.

It's worth noting that before the Turkic incursions in the area, the lands to the north of the current distribution of Indo-Iranian languages were also full of Indo-Iranian speakers, like the Scythians, Sarmatians, Sakae, etc. These are the descendants of the Andronovo horizon who continued to live in a more traditional ancestral fashion than those who went through the "membrane" of the Bactria-Margiana urban centers, or ended up as far south as Pakistan and India, or as far east as the Ordos Basin in China. How are these barbarians described by the Greeks, Romans, Persians and Chinese who knew them first-hand?

• Herodotus called them red-haired and gray-eyed.
• Hippocrates called them light-skinned
• Callimachus called them fair-haired
• Zhang Qian said that they had yellow and blue eyes (probably hazel or green in the case of the first one there)
• Pliny the Elder says that they were red-haired, blue-eyed and unusually tall.
• Clement of Alexandria said that they had long, auburn hair
• Polemon says that they had red hair and blue-gray eyes
• Galen says that they had reddish hair like the Illyrians, Germans and other northern peoples
• Ammianus Marcellinus says that they were tall, blond and light-eyed.
• Gregory of Nyssa calls them fair-skinned and blond-haired
• Adamantius called them fair-haired

That's an interesting survey, because it starts in the 5th century BC and the last one to comment was a thousand years later in the 5th century AD. Ultimately, the Sarmatians and Scythians are believed to have been assimilated by Goths and later more thoroughly by the Slavs, and the Cossacks may well have been maintaining Scythian-like traditions and lifestyle, as well as maintaining a pretty Scythian-like genetic profile. Many of the varied peoples of what is today "Turkestan" have assimilated Indo-Iranian DNA, and many of them also have physical features that are relicts of this past. Heck, Genghis Khan himself is rather reliably said to have had green eyes and red hair, although of course this is considered "controversial." Given that we already know that Scythians of various tribal names like the Wu-sun, Yuezhi, and others, as well as the iconically Scythian archaeological culture from the Ordos Loop and the supposed multi-ethnic status of the Hsiung-Nu confederation certainly makes it likely that if the Dong-Hu were practicing a very Scythian like mobile economy immediately adjacent to them, that they may well have had a Scythian strata in their make-up before emerging later as the Mongols.

Anyway, regardless of that, I think it's clear that the ancestral condition for the Indo-Iranians was that they looked, dressed, and behaved much like the proto-Slavs would have at the same period. You can still look up peoples in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, or even Pakistan today, especially if they're from a somewhat isolated mountain-dwelling subset, that look extremely white and European in their features, not unlike the Russians themselves. So, what happened? Why are they nothing like the rest of the European peoples now, then?

The answer is that they were both physically and culturally dispossessed of the majority of their heritage, or willingly gave it up by marrying locals. There's strong evidence that the original Aryan invaders of Central Asia, the Iranian Plateau and northern India would have looked just like the Scythians did, being, in essence, Scythians warbands that were on the move. But after passing through Central Asian urban cultures—the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, or Oxus civilization, they lost some of their uniquely northern European physical traits. After then diving into more densely populated areas, like the Near Eastern kingdom of Mitanni, or the remnants of the Harappan civilization in northern India, the Elamites of the Persian Gulf eastern shores, etc. they lost their genetics. Curiously, in India, in some ways they maintained more of their culture—their language, at least, and the names of some of the deities in their religion—although it became increasingly bastardized with local "Dasyan" (as opposed to Aryan) concepts. In Persia and the rest of the "-stans" they suffered Islamic conquest, which saddled them with a significant cultural handicap and deference to the wild barbarism of the Arabs, and further to the north, they were either encroached upon by east Asian barbarians, ultimately being destroyed by the Mongols or the Turks or both, or even the Chinese themselves. 

While it's tempting therefore, because they're kind of gone now as a recognizable force, to see these peoples are merely failed white people, with a failed white people culture that could and should have been equivalent to a further eastern and southern extension of white Europe, with civilizations that would have been no more exotic than that of the Russians, its important to remember that they were successful for many generations; thousands of years, in some cases, before their genetic and/or cultural influences were eventually swamped by Third World hordes. Rather than look at them as pitiable remnants of the failure of our distant cousins, we should see in them an object lesson for what happens when you allow the Third World to overpower the First World demographically.

EDIT: Arguably, a similar case could be made for the Iberian peninsula, the Italian peninsula, Anatolia, and Greece, and even to some degree the Balkans prior to the arrival of the Slavs. But because they remained closer to the heartland of "Indo-European culture" and because they're more familiar to us, it doesn't feel that way. In fact, arguably all Indo-Europeans went through the same or similar processes. In Scandinavia, for instance, which is ultimately the homeland of all Germanic peoples, including the English and their offshoot cousins, us Americans, they just assimilated a physically similar people in the form of lingering Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers, like the Pit-Comb culture. And the Sintashta people, who were ancestral to the Andronovo people, who in turn were ancestral to the various Indo-Iranian peoples like the Scythians, the Persians or the Aryans of northern India, were hardly some monolithic people without any admixture or influence from their neighbors. There is some degree of subjectivity in terms of when does a people undergo too much admixture, both genetic and cultural, to be considered a white people, Indo-European culture anymore. But regardless of whether you think the Sicilians or Portuguese qualify, it's very obvious that the Hindis and Persians do not. The degree of genetic (and cultural) admixture was just an order of magnitude different than it was across much of Europe, except the southern Mediterranean fringe.

WW2 to world in commotion

And in that day shall be heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the whole earth shall be in commotion, and men’s hearts shall fail them, and they shall say that Christ delayeth his coming until the end of the earth. And the love of men shall wax cold, and iniquity shall abound.

My wife pointed out to me that the distance between 1980 when we were kids and now, 2021, is the same distance as between 1980 and 1939. While of course the math is very simple, and shouldn't be something that's amazing or wondrous, this realization kind of blew my mind. It's amazing how quickly a nation can be brought to the brink of disaster, considering that relatively speaking, 1980 was still a fairly healthy time for America. 1939, other than the disastrous implementation of New Deal policies and the imminent equally disastrous and pointless entry into WW2. But following the war, America was arguably at its healthiest since the War of Northern Aggression. Certainly throughout the late 40s, the 50s and the early 60s when my parents were growing up, there was no hint that America's decline and imminent likely destruction were right around the corner, in spite of the fear porn of the media who hoped we would abase ourselves in submission to the Soviets. 

In the 80s, because we had a Republican president, the fear porn was ramped up to the point where some people literally thought that the world would likely end in an apocalyptic nuclear firestorm. To be fair, the risk of that happening is actually much higher now than it was during the 80s, when nukes are not limited to a number of superpowers who balanced each others threats, but instead are in the hands of tin pot despots and Third World strongmen.

I've, in many ways, kinda sorta made this blog a paeon to 80s style (or even older) pop culture, in part because that's when I grew up, but also in part because that's the last time that American pop culture was relatively healthy. By "the 80s" I don't literally just mean Jan 1, 1980 through December 31, 1989. The 80s as a pop culture era lasted the better part of fifteen years, and include some of the late 70s as well as a decent chunk of the early 90s. And it's slightly different for different elements of pop culture. I think "the 80s" started in movies with the release of 1977's Star Wars and with music at probably about the same time when New Wave as a post-punk phenomena was starting to be defined. To use two metrics, I suppose. When did it end? That's a little harder to pin down for some elements; for music, I think 1992 when the impact of late 1991's surprise hit by Nirvana prompted the grunge bandwagon to ruin pop music for the next half dozen or so years.

But that's why I've focused on things that have a kind of "80s" vintage on this blog; Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, certain video games like Street Fighter (first released 1987) and 80s music, especially synthesizer New Wave like Depeche Mode or New Order. America has been on a rapid downhill slide since that era ended.

As an aside, in 1990, 90% of the people in America could trace at least some of their ancestry to Americans who were here during the Revolutionary War. That number has rapidly diminished as we've admitted tens of millions of Fake Americans and we pretend that they are Americans. The correlation between that and America's rapid decline is rather obvious.

In any case, the notable exception to my love of things that either originated or were at their peak in the 80s is the Street Fighter style games. While technically they did originate in the 80s, it was 1991 when Street Fighter II really created the genre, and it was the very late 90s and earliest 00s that the genre arguably peaked, before coming back again in the 2010s.