Undead for Halloween

Six years ago, I wrote this Halloween themed post, describing all of the Undead troop types in the Warhammer setting (at the time) and thinking about how I could adapt them to Dark Heritage. Most of them are iconic creatures from folklore and horror stories, but a few were original and unique, especially among the Tomb Kings army.

Dark Heritage is now Dark Fantasy X, and the Warhammer setting was blown up and replaced with a much less compelling High Fantasy setting about gods and heroes that has only vague echoes of its Dark Fantasy roots. (I'm not a fan, if you can't tell. I find it incoherent and bizarre, and I actually really kind of liked the original Warhammer setting, so I'm maybe a bit resentful that it was taken away.) Of course, it's not quite as simple as this; even if its out of print, the old Warhammer stuff is still around and not hard to get. The old Warhammer world is the setting of the Total War Warhammer games, and I wonder sometimes if Games Workshop is kicking themselves that they blew up the setting and took it away only to have it be the central element of a popular computer game franchise. But despite my dislike of the Age of Sigmar setting, I do admit that it has some good ideas. (Good ideas that would have been equally good if integrated into the original Warhammer setting. But I promise... I won't mention that again.) I've, over the years, collected a lot of Warhammer army books, even though I don't actually play the game. A lot of them I got either free or cheap; my brother used to play, for instance, and I'd buy them for the fluff in outgoing editions when new editions were on their way out, or at used bookstores, ebay, etc. I have all of the old Undead army books going back to 4th edition, and I have access to the Age of Sigmar army books on Scribd. I decided that for the approaching Halloween season, I'm going to read all of these books and then make a big post over on the new Dark Fantasy X blog about what (if anything) I want to do with that, and what my impressions generally are. I can tell you already that turning Nagash into the God of Death and making him this gigantic mover and shaker in a godlike rather than sorcerer-king like way was a major downgrade in terms of accessibility and interest to the setting. I just don't think Dark Fantasy can have a High Fantasy "Gods Among Us" vibe, and that's the major disconnect that will make the newer books seem inferior to the older, even when they have really great ideas in them. Which many of them, to be fair, seem to do.)

Anyway, I'll update this post as I finish the books, and then make my analysis post over on the other blog. In the meantime, I'll add quick notes after each title as I finish it.

Undead (4e) - A phenomenal book of setting lore. The rules are relatively short, and the lore is well written, fascinating and plentiful. To be fair, much of it was repeated in the old White Dwarf 166 (or whatever exactly issue number that it was) that I read years and years ago, so it's not like it was really new. But it's really good.

Vampire Counts (5e) - The creation of the Vampire Counts (and later Tomb Kings) out of the old Undead army list was a brilliant move, but unfortunately here, the lore is rather light, and most of it is repeated, often literally word for word, from the earlier book. This means that the new vampire bloodlines get almost no lore, just rules, which is disappointing. You do have to go through the army list, though—a decent number of new troop types were added in this book that weren't in the other book, and some lore about each is present in the entries.

Vampire Counts (6e) - This book adds a fair bit more; more of the text is rewritten rather than just replicated (although plenty of that's here too); it adds a lot more lore about the four bloodlines from the 5e book, and introduces a 5th bloodline, the Strigoi Ghoul Kings. It adds another character or two as well. All in all, a good read. It seems to have more rules and modeling advice than the prior book, in spite of its increased lore as well, without being a longer book. I think the lore was written more economically, if less aesthetically. The models, by the way, are often still the same ones that the old 4e Undead era had. By the time 6e rolled around, they were looking very primitive and unsightly. That's one thing I've got to give Warhammer. Whatever else you may or may not think of it today, you've got to admit that the models are really good looking now, especially compared to what they looked like even earlier in the 2000s.

Tomb Kings (6e) - The first pass at the skeletal army of ancient "Egypt," cursed into eternal Undeath by the treachery of Nagash. (As an aside, Nagash is not a name Games Workshop came up with; it's a slightly different spelling of the Hebrew word Nachash, which means serpent and often refers to Satan.) This book adds a fair bit to the lore of the Undead and the Nehekhara region specifically. The army itself, at least at this stage, is a bit anemic, though. The later edition will add more interesting character and monster types to make it more alluring to players.

Vampire Counts (7e) - More of the text is rewritten or added to for this version, although there's still some smaller amount that is still copy/pasted. I should also point out that the art has been evolving as much as the models have; back in the 90s when 4e was coming out, the models were cartoonish and the art was often weird and bizarre, depending on the artist. 5e had a much more "tonal" consistency and looked really good, but most of the art was re-done for 6e. 7e went back to a lot of John Blanche weirdness, which has a certain appeal to grognards, but which I thought was intrinsically much less interesting than that of guys like Adrian Smith. That said, this is easily the best version since the 4e book in terms of text, even if 5e and 6e were probably a bit better in terms of art and visual design.

Vampire Counts (8e) - The first book to be all in color, instead of mostly black and white. It's interesting to see much of the same art as 7e, now in color. Several new troop types and a mostly completely renovated line of miniatures makes this certainly the most attractive of the Old World undead army books. Y'know, except for the bizarrely ugly cover art. Most of the text is very similar to the 7e version, although a few new things were written in here and there. To get the "full" experience, you don't actually need to read all of these books. The 4e Undead plus the 8e Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings will do you for the Old World.

Tomb Kings (8e) - While the original Tomb Kings book for 6e was a bit anemic, lacking very many interesting models, for 8e they obviously made an attempt to give them more. That said, I suspect that the army was never super popular until it became the focus of a DLC for the Total War: Warhammer game series. A real shame, isn't it? Sega, of all people, did more for the Old World setting than Games Workshop remained willing to do, who abandoned it in favor of attempting a new setting that has no gravitas, no resonance, and no coherence. Anyhoo... these 8e books were prettier than the previous editions, no doubt, being among other things, in full color for the first time. That said, other than a few new troop types, this book adds little that the 6e book didn't have already if you'd already read or bought that one. The design and layout is also greatly improved, making it easier to read, however.

Liber Necris - This book is nothing but fluff; from the Black Library, not Games Workshop the main company per se. There was a whole series of these; I have this one, the four Chaos books, and the Skaven book. All are excellent; they're written and presented as if they were actual tomes of lore to be found in the Old World rather than books in our world written about the Old World. After reading all of the army books of all editions of the old Warhammer setting, I thought this a fitting summary of them all before I turned to the End Times Nagash book and start the process of turning the setting from a larger than life dark fantasy with very strong horror undertones to a kind of fake mythological comic book setting. This book is highly recommended as an entertaining setting book read. I'll admit that sometimes the philosophy of souls in the Old World is a bit over-wrought, being that it was supposedly written by Mannfred von Carstein himself, it seems appropriate that he'd obsess over that a bit. And it does include some repeated text from the old 4e army book that still is a running thread through all of these books. I wonder if it predates the 4e book entirely? I don't know; I don't have anything earlier than that.

The End Times: Nagash - While I already disagree with the very premise of this book as something that should be done, the implementation and execution of it is even worse. There's a ridiculous amount of name-dropping of famous Warhammer characters, and much of what happens is bizarrely off-screen (apparently, Kislev, Estalia and Tilea are all destroyed off screen, for instance. Perhaps it happens on screen in the Skaven or Chaos books?) Most egregiously, the tone which was always the Old World's true claim to fame, is completely ignored. Characters don't act anything at all like they used to, and they are converted into comic book superheroes with absurd over-the-top nonsense. To use just two related examples: Mannfredd von Carstein is always portrayed as the most subtle and devious of the von Carstein vampires, yet here he's a chump, easily manipulated over and over again to bring Nagash back. Nagash, who was an interesting villain with a fascinating story told way back in the 4e book (see above) if not even earlier, is now ridiculously overpowered; he goes to Nehekhara, defeats the entire Tomb Kings faction by himself, eats the "Egyptian" god of the dead, even though up to this point nobody has ever suggested that mortals could interact directly with gods at all, and then flies off in his gigantic black pyramid like it's the Stargate alien space ship or something. On top of this kind of nonsense, most of the narratives read like they are poorly written expansions on battle reports of Warhammer games that the staff played against each other.

I suppose that the book did the job it was meant to, however. It destroyed the Tomb Kings faction, folding what still makes sense to use of their units into the now recombined Undead army list, led by the superhero Thanos version of Nagash, got rid of a bunch of famous characters that had been around in the setting for decades but with which the writers had no idea what to do, so throwing them away seemed like a good idea, and mangled the setting so badly that it was adequately set up for destruction, certainly. Even though the event that cascaded into the End Times in the first place was poorly explained, inadequately followed through, and poorly implemented. I really can't recommend this book for any reason at all. Even if you have no vested interest in the setting whatsoever, and don't care if it's destroyed, this is such a poorly done telling of a poorly thought out sequence of events that I can't imagine you'd enjoy it. 

Keep in mind that both the Old World as a setting and the Age of Sigmar that replaced it were both developed as the backstory for a game of miniatures warfare. The movement of armies and stuff was always at the heart of the setting, and although there were some really good Black Library novels that were a bit more traditional fantasy type plots and characters in their execution (I'm especially fond of the Matthias Thulmann witch hunter omnibus, for instance) that was kind of a spin-off or even afterthought to the setting. The same is true of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, which is a better analog in most respects for what I'm doing than the Fantasy Battles game. So I shouldn't be surprised when the setting does things that aren't optimized for me, because it was developed for a totally different kind of game than what I play. Ironically, that same focus was exactly what led to the better part of three decades of the setting being static; the developers wanted to keep their factions intact so they could still be used as army lists to drive the sales of miniatures. If as a business decision they decided that the old setting was no longer effective for that role, then it makes sense to replace it. But the slapdash, poorly organized way that they did it that took no account of the attributes of the setting itself was phenomenally unsatisfying.

At this point, we move on to the last five books in my series to review, the army books (or Battle Tomes or whatever they call them now) for the Age of Sigmar setting. These are incredibly attractive books; full color, better art than we've seen in the past, better miniatures photography of better sculpts than we've seen in the past, etc. But they also serve a high fantasy setting that I can't seem to really get my arms around, in which Nagash looms in a way that's different than he did in the old setting. Whereas before, it was his historical legacy more than anything else that made him important, now everything has to be his literal creation, forged for a specific purpose for whatever convoluted master 4-D chess plan he's got going on. This is fundamentally a much less compelling concept than the idea of the vampires or the Tomb Kings doing their own things for their own reasons. That said, the books have a ton of fantastic ideas, even if they are wed to a setting that I can't connect to and are part of a vaguely hinted at plot that I don't like. I haven't actually read all of them in advance of this review, but I have read two of the five, so I expect to find plenty to like in these books. Then, over on the Dark Fantasy X blog, as noted above, I'll digest everything that I've read and see how it might apply to the development of Undead in Dark Fantasy X. The rules I have now are basically just carryover from "regular" m20, so they are carryover from D&D. There's a few exceptions, but based in part on my review of how undead are handled by Games Workshop, I may more radically redo the undead in Dark Fantasy X as well.

Legions of Nagash (AoS) - The army list here is nothing at all new. It's basically the 8e Vampire Counts list plus the handful of new troops (elites and heroes, really) and minus the ghouls and Strigoi (which make up the Flesh-eater Courts book) introduced in the End Times rulebook. Seeing them again, without anything new, except divorced from the setting in which they belonged, is kind of jarring. The authors tried to anchor them into the new setting, but this is mostly just offhand references—name dropping—of places that are never explained and about which we never learn anything. I'm hardly suggesting that we know Nehekhara or Sylvania in detail in the Old World, but we do have maps, we have characters, we have plenty of stuff—especially if you aggregate the sources over all of the rulebooks—that grounds the monsters and characters in the setting. Here, they lack that. Plus, Nagash looms over everything; it's like nobody and nothing else is allowed to be interesting. Which, conversely, makes Nagash much less interesting than he used to be. I thought Nagash was a fascinating figure when I read the 4e material way back in the 90s (in the pages of White Dwarf magazine). Here, in spite of the best efforts—or sadly, maybe because of them—of the writers, he comes across as a kind of generic fantasy supervillain. The book is also a good deal more rulesey than most prior army books. There's not even much intent to detail a setting or how they fit into it, and there's a lot more discussion on scenarios, army construction variations, etc. There's also more artwork, or at least bigger artwork that takes up more space, as well as more full-page spreads of photography of painted miniatures. This, of course, makes everything look really cool, and the book is prettier even than the 8e book (even though many of the miniatures are the exact same) but sadly, the content doesn't measure up.

Flesh-eater Courts (AoS) - The army book of the ghouls and Strigoi, basically, who are now combined into a single army of pseudo-Undead. Other debased forms of vampires from previous editions are included, like varghulfs and vargheists, although the latter are now renamed and come in two power levels, normal and advanced. These seem to draw a blurry line between being debased vampires vs enhanced ghouls, and its not quite clear which they are. The crypt horrors are similarly "hulked out" ghouls. The defining feature of these guys is that they are all insane, although they have exactly the same insanity where they are reliving the fantasy that they are the regal court of the first Carrion King, the first Strigoi vampire (well... in the new setting, they never call them that, although a vague handwavy reference to Ushoran is given) and they don't see themselves as horrible carrion eaters but rather as noble knights and soldiers. The terrorgheist and zombie dragon are also associated with this group. There's little here that's new, other than the division of them into this particular army, the madness, the disconnect from their original Strigoi and ghoul links to the Old World, and some fine distinctions being made between power levels of the same kinds of troops. Much like the first pass at the Tomb Kings army back in 6e, this army list feels a bit impoverished, like it needs just a bit more to be a "full" list. I do like the concept of the flesh-eaters as a faction that's associated with the undead without really being strictly speaking, mostly made up of actual undead creatures, and I do like drawing a more explicit line between ghouls and vampires, so as to keep vampires from being too pretty and romanticized, however. 

Nighthaunt (AoS) - The army book for the ghost army. This is one of the first really new armies that AoS came up with that, while borrowing a few items from past Undead armies, is still really a very unique army (according to the "What's Next?" splash page at the back was the next truly new army book for the line, the Little Mermaid elves. Not as cool, even if they did try to put sharks all over them.) There's a lot of good ideas for different kinds of ghosts, phantoms, specters and haunts here. Of course... the essence of a ghost story is not a pitched battle of fantasy armies. The miniatures themselves are awesome. The idea of Nagash being personally behind the tragedy of every single miniature in the army, using them in a vast Soul War where he's fighting the forces of the other gods in the millions to claim the souls that they have is exactly the problem I have with the setting of the Age of Sigmar. Lots of names are dropped in this book, but none of them really do much to develop the setting, because they obviously come up with these names just to be a super high concept off-hand reference. I also find the oppressive, nihilistic attitude trying at times. I'm certainly a fan of dark fantasy and horror, but horror and nihilism are too different things. I find that all too many people can't tell the difference anymore, and just throw nihilism out there expecting it to be horrifying. It's not, really, it's actually kind of banal and petty. One thing that I noticed in rereading this book, which would be obvious if I played Warhammer, of course, is that this army has no monsters really; the closest thing to a monster is the winged nightmare that a couple of the generals ride. Given that that's just a winged spectral horse, that's not really in the same league as the terrorgheist or zombie dragons from the last book in terms of being big, intimidating monsters.

Ossiarch Bonereapers (AoS) - Another unique army, or at least unusual. The Ossiarchs are really almost as much constructs as they are undead, although of course, the Tomb Kings already established the idea that there isn't much difference between them. That said, they only "coincidentally" look like the bodies of dead creatures. Either way, these guys have an alien appearance that is reminiscent of the Undead, but also different. Kind of like their 40k siblings the Necrons, in a way. (Is that still an army in 40K? I'm a bit out of touch with what's going on on that side of the hobby these days.) The biggest issue I have with what is otherwise kind of a cool, or at least new and novel, idea is that, of course, these are really tied very heavily to the war of gods between Sigmar, Nagash and Archaeon. It's a shame that the backstory for these guys has to be so tightly tied to the superhero absurdly over-the-top direction that the game has taken since the end of the "world that was."

Soulblight Gravelords (AoS) - Right away, the name is an issue. What?! What the heck is a soulblight gravelord? Oh, it's just a vampire and this army book is basically the migration of the old Vampire Counts into the new, high level, throw names around randomly setting. That said, it even recreates much of the old vampire bloodlines from the past, although often with new names. The von Carsteins and Lahmians and Blood Knights are all brought back (basically). The Necrarchs get the shaft and don't appear, and Strigoi are already the focus of the Flesh-eater Courts. Two new bloodlines make their appearance, including the Vyrkos werewolf-like vampires (I used that name too, sadly, for a werewolf place in Timischburg. That's what I get for using a name that's just a translation from an Eastern European language for werewolf, I guess). The Avengorii are the newest line, and they are weird bat-like abominations, like the strange model for Lauka Vai. I had said earlier that the vargheists were renamed and adapted to the Flesh-eater courts army, but I was wrong, sorta. The actual models were, but they're still used in this army with a different paint job, different name and different stats. That's possibly even more lame than when Games Workshop releases stats for creatures or troop types but never gets around to releasing miniatures for them, like the Tomb Kings Hierotitan. So lame.

Retirement home

Not that I'm in a position (or of an age) to retire anytime soon, but I found where I want to retire to.

https://www.mirrranchgroup.com/ranches/owl-creek-ranch/

I mean, sure... I don't really want to move into a 1-room trapper's cabin, so it will also require building a house on the site. But that's not an overly difficult complication. Assuming I could afford the $6.5 million price tag on the ranch itself, spending even as much as another million bucks on the house shouldn't be tricky.

Now I just need the ~$7 million. Maybe another million to buy my wife the beach house on the Emerald Coast that she wants so we can snowbird between the two locations. Sigh.

Critical Role

For whatever reason, I started watching a bit of Critical Role again. I'm still not very far in, relatively speaking, although by hours in, I've seen more than an entire season of TV show. On episode nine. That's what happens when they tend to average over three hours each, I guess.

I probably said this before, but I'll say it again: they're not playing with the right system for the kind of show that they're trying to make. It really needs to be a system that's a bit more unobtrusive, so that they can just keep the narrative moving without constantly stopping to check rules, check character sheets, discuss how a spell or class ability or feat or whatever works, etc. I've never played 5e. I've never even read 5e. But I can see how it's not really different enough from 3e to make play more smooth. Especially when you have a number of players who aren't really the serious gamer types who really know the rules well and know how to play their characters well. And I don't give them any grief for that; I actually think being actors and actresses makes them better at what they're doing than if they were just gamers. They're much more charismatic to watch—mostly—and they have a better instinctual (as well as trained, I'd wager) feel for what makes for entertaining showmanship to watch. But if they were playing a much more rules-lite, narrative approach to the game, where mechanics were able to sink into the background and combats weren't long, drawn out rules-lookup affairs, it'd be a lot smoother. I can barely imagine what it was like when they were doing it with the Pathfinder system.

And some of the players are better than others at keeping it moving and fast-paced and entertaining. Travis, who plays Grog, is by far the most charismatic person of the bunch (I mean actual Travis, not his character) so on the episodes where he's missing, he's sorely missed. The game isn't nearly as fun nor as funny without him. Laura, his real-life wife, is probably the most charismatic of the girls; her over emotional reactions to everything actually come across (most of the time) as kind of charming and likable. Orion's character, as a kind of almost C-3PO-like, stuffy sorcerer is mostly fun, when he's engaged in the game enough to be acting a bit more than he sometimes does, and I know that he'll eventually part ways with the group as the actor goes on to do other things and can't commit to continuing with the group. Sam's the one who I'm less sure about; sometimes he's kind of funny, sometimes he's too try-hard, and sometimes he comes across as downright creepy or cringey, and I wish that he'd keep his mouth shut. Marisha sometimes comes across as pushy or too try-hard, but it's not likely she'll miss much, since she was the DM's girlfriend (now wife) throughout the show. Part of that may be the character too, but we'll see if I ever make it to season 2. Liam and Taliesin are both quieter; I don't really have a grip on what their characters are actually like. As players, they tend to be the ones who know the rules the best, but play low-key characters who kind of fade into the background a bit, or if they do do stuff, it's kind of metagamey pushing the game forward a bit here and there. Ashley's character is also a bit more on the quiet side, but Ashley herself comes across as quite likable, so there's that.

But they'll all have a chance to grow on me (or not, as the case might happen to be) because there's a lot more to watch. Whether I'll actually watch it all or not, I don't know.

I guess my point is, as a GM, I really appreciate a character like Travis'. From my perspective, he's the ideal roleplayer. He makes the game fun without turning it into an outright farce. He's got a sense for pacing and keeping the game moving, and when the rest of the group gets bogged down in debate or indecision, he's often the natural leader who takes them out of it. Not because of his character, who he plays as a pretty stereotypical dumb jock archetype, but because of the player just being that kind of guy. It's probably no wonder that when they organized into an actual corporation and started doing Critical Role really professionally that they chose him to be the CEO. He's got charismatic, natural leader written all over him, and you can see that just in the way that he plays the game. 

Laura doesn't really do that, but she's so into it all the time that it's hard not to find her enthusiasm for the game as kind of infectious, which makes her a desirable player type to have in one's group if you can have one. Liam and Taliesin are also solid. Honestly, I prefer smaller groups than 7-8 anyway, but you've got to admit that more characters equals more roleplaying opportunities for the kind of group that does them. Not saying that I'd ditch the others, but in an ideal world, I'd get maybe one or two more players, actually, and then divide them into two groups of 4-5. Like a Monday and a Wednesday night group who roleplayed in parallel in the same setting. Chris Perkins did that in the Io'mandra games he ran which he discussed in his DM Experience column when he was writing that, and I admit that I've found the concept intriguing ever since.

I admit, I like the use of that one track by Midnight Syndicate over and over again during combat. It's just unobtrusive enough to not get on your nerves, even with the constant repeats. And it's probably better than what I often do with movie soundtracks, which come in many themes, tones, moods and whatnot, not always what you want when gaming. I've gotten a little bit turned on to the RPG ambient sounds concept, by guys like Michael Ghelfi, but I haven't actually used them in a game. (Yet.)

UPDATE: Some of Keyleth's unlikableness appears to actually be in character, I've now discovered, as some character development has come out. Well... that's good, I suppose. It makes Marisha herself more likeable compared to what I'd previously interpreted. 

My biggest problem with Critical Role is how self-referential it is with regards to D&Disms. Everything is D&D jargon all the time, which is funny because clearly many of the players are new gamers and this is their first campaign. Yet more reason that I suggest an old school, rules-lite, narrative game which allowed for players to just describe natural things to do in naturalistic language rather than always and constantly referring to special abilities on their character sheet by jargon specific labels would have not only made the game itself better for most of the players, but it would have done so for most of the audience as well.

Shang-Chi

What do you get if you start with the 80s version of Oriental Adventures and add to it a reluctant superhero story with a plank of wood protagonist, give him an occasionally amusing sidekick, and throw in some gratuitous grrrrrl power, but just shy of being actively obnoxious? Shang-Chi the movie, of course.

I know that it's been out for a couple of weeks now, but I refuse to give Disney the satisfaction of a full price ticket on opening weekend. $5 tickets and free popcorn is what our theater does on Tuesdays to try and put a few more butts in a few more seats, and I'm game even to see a Disney movie under those conditions, even though Disney is one of the most evil and hateful companies in existence right now (which is saying a lot). Mostly because my wife really loves to go see movies and is determined to look past the hateful, anti-white, anti-male wokeness agenda unless it's way too in your face to ignore. So, while I'm tempted to simply dog on the movie for featuring a white-hating, ungrateful, entitled, bratty little princess as its star—who also happens to think pedophiles are just misunderstood—who can feel free to go back home to China like all of the other Fake Americans anytime now, or even Canada if they'll take him—I don't think I will. He's not a very interesting character in the movie. But then again, since when was Shang-Chi ever an interesting character anyway? The guy was created as a copycat Bruce Lee during the height of the Bruce Lee Hong Kong theatre and the Kung Fu television show with David Carradine, but which technically was an adaptation or spin-off of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories. Since the ridiculous school of fish mentality of the SJWs now suggests that Fu Manchu is racist—because, of course it is. It's just such a go-to complaint. It's like the ketchup of SJW condiments; you put it on everything—Shang-Chi's father is no longer Fu Manchu, so they had to invent another group of Chinese ninja/Yakuza (yes, I know) with another guy to run it to be his father. And they had to give him a sister who, despite the fact that she's a tiny little girl and her "training" involved watching her brother during the day, and going out by herself in the training yard at night, is actually a better fighter than he is.

Sigh. So, yeah—the premise is beyond silly, and the steps to get there are worse than what most D&D campaigns have as their McGuffin multipart quests. But that hasn't stopped a Marvel movie before. And yes, the character is beyond D-lister. And the actor who plays him isn't really all that charismatic (plus, he sympathizes with pedophiles, remember). And his comic sidekick is Awkwafina, who is only occasionally charming. She once characterized herself as "Asian Ellen" but that was back when people in Hollywood, at least, as well as woke, bored, virtue-signaling housewives were still pretending that Ellen was charming and likeable (spoiler alert: no, she wasn't.) When they get to D&D Oriental Adventures land, I seriously thought that they got Jeff Easley to do concept art for the movie. I'm not even kidding here. 

All in all, while I've heard Marvel's Phase Four characterized as Phase Bore, I don't think it's been terrible yet. In fact, I've now seen a handful of Disney movies, including Marvel's belated Black Widow movie and the Jungle Cruise movie, which were both... OK. Shang-Chi's kind of right there with them; it's got just enough charisma to make it worth seeing... if the tickets are $5 each and the popcorn is free and it's a couple of weekends after opening so that you're not really giving Disney anything that they can brag to their investors about. But otherwise, just wait a few months, and it'll be on your Disney+ subscription for free soon enough. (Did I mention that my wife was a long time Disney fan since the 80s? She's been to DisneyWorld I think twenty times so far in her lifetime. Of course we have Disney+, even though I'd drop it in a heartbeat if it were only me to consider.) Better yet, just wait, and see it for free sometime soon, or rent it from Redbox or whatever. It's not a great movie.

But, if you listen to the usual suspects who peddle Disney doom and gloom pr0n, you'd think the movie was absolutely terrible and was bombing big time. It may be doing the latter for all I know, but it isn't really terrible. Just mediocre.

And, like I said, if you were a fan of the 80s Oriental Adventures supplement at all, then you'll probably get a kick out of the last third or so of the movie, at least.

Dark Fantasy X

Sometimes thought and action are quick and decisive with me, while other times I just sit around indecisive. In this case, I'm being decisive. I had already created a new YouTube channel for my D&D discussions specifically, DarkFantasyGamerX. I decided to create a new blog, DarkFantasyX, and I'll amend my Dark Heritage 2 game to be called Dark Fantasy X. I was never super happy with the name Ad Astra for my space opera, because it was a little too obvious and too many other people had also just used the Latin phrase for various spacey related things, so maybe I'll call that Dark Space Opera X too. That blog will be devoted specifically to my gaming related discussion once I get it running with some actual content, in the next weeks. I've also created a new blog Archaeoeuropean, to talk about archaeology, history, genetics and linguistics of the Indo-European peoples. All of them will get fewer posts than Dark Heritage, but all of the blogs will be much more focused on a particular topic rather than bouncing around between topics that may or may not be related to each other at all.

I'll probably also migrate some of my older series of posts to the new blog, particularly with regards to Remixing/Revisiting posts. And because I'm renaming and possibly reformatting the documents, I'll probably go ahead and finally synchronize the rules systems for Ad Astra, Dark Fantasy X (formerly Dark Heritage 2) and Fantasy Hack. I'll also talk more in depth about why I made the decisions I made with regards to those design details. 

I'll also go back and forth between YouTube videos (eventually; I may need to get more gear and stuff to make better YouTube videos than I do now) and blog posts in talking about my games and gaming projects. Don't expect this change to be immediate, but I doubt I'll spend much time getting this set up and ready to move.

What will I continue to do with this blog in the meantime? I'm not sure. Probably random and pop culture related posts will be here. Mostly, though, this blog will start getting quieter over time as more and more posts are relegated to the blogs to which they really should belong in a set up where I have a more focused family of blogs.

Thinking thoughts

I'm considering a very radical notion. Part of it is that this blog has become a bit scattershot, and I don't routinely talk about the actual topic that I originally designed it for (my own very rambly personality is partly to blame here and that won't change no matter what I do). Also, the title is kind of obsolete, and for many years now I've felt a bit "saddled" with an obsolete title that I had to keep using because I had it.

Of course, that's not literally true. Both of those problems have solutions, but they are rather radical. What is the solution to them? Here's a few ideas:

-- Create a new blog for my gaming interests, and leave this blog up for all of my other interests that are not already better represented by one of my other blogs. The more blogs I have, the more each one can be focused on a single topic, or related family of topics. Of course, the more blogs I have the less attention each of them gets individually. Many blogs will only ever have updates on a semi-regular basis as my rotating interest comes around to wanting to talk about that topic again, and then will go back to "sleep" for months at a time.

-- Rename this blog, and change the blog address. Blogger allows for this. This solves the second problem better than the first, but as noted above, solving the first problem introduces another problem that's probably just as thorny in its own right. A related problem is when I have short "twitter" like or random topics on my mind that don't really belong to any blog; they have to go somewhere which probably lowers the quality and focus of any of the blogs that I allow this to happen to.

-- Maybe some combination of the two; rename this blog so I can get rid of the legacy title that no longer has the same meaning to me, and also create more blogs to have more narrower focus. One topic that probably merits its own blog because I talk about it often enough that it will likely have more activity from me than some of my other existing separate blogs is the combined discussions on archaeology, linguistics, and archaeogenetics related to the Indo-Europeans, their origins and dispersals. This option, for example means creating at least one more additional blog, and then also renaming this blog. It also means keeping a tighter focus. I often allow myself to blog here on topics that probably belong more honestly to another blog, but I sometimes just get lazy and don't "blog hop" as much as I should.

The problem with any of these? I lose traffic and visibility. The solution? I'm doing this for my own benefit more like a journal that happens to be publicly available to anyone who wants to read it, but it's not actually meant for public consumption. So why do I care about traffic and visibility? How about just don't actually care, and do what you want to do because you want to do it, and the rest of the world can go jump in a lake? I already don't care very much, so that's not really such a radical state for me.

Am I an OSRian?!

I've made several somewhat tongue-in-cheek responses to this basic question over the years. I've also "defined" OSR in a way that is mostly based on Matthew Finch's OSR Primer. Because that primer focuses a bit on proscriptive rules or at least rules-types, it's a bit easier to pick it apart and say, "No, that's not me."

I've recently discovered the Principia Apocrypha document, which is a "new" version of the Old School Primer, written by someone else. I don't know him, but he heavily quotes two other people, one of whom I I do know, or at least, I've watched a lot of his videos on YouTube. This is Ben Milton, the Questing Beast, and author of Maze Rats and Knave, two old school rules-lite games. Milton seems like an unlikely champion for the OSR. He's a relatively new guy to the hobby. He wasn't even alive during the heyday of the old school phase of D&D that the OSR is attempting to recreate. I don't know if he's ever said exactly how old he is, but he looks like a Gen Y kind of guy, who's childhood and youth would have spanned the 80s and 90s. He might even be an older Millennial. Anyway, he's clearly younger than me and older than my oldest son. :shrug:

Perhaps its exactly this facet about him that makes him an ideal person to discuss the OSR; an enthusiastic supporter who comes at it as (initially) an outsider, without all of the barnacles and mossy growths that us hoarier, older guys accumulated due to too much exposure over too many years; he was able to cut right to the chase and see through the cruft to understand what about the OSR is actually appealing. Spoiler alert, it isn't really anything specific about the mechanics or details of the setting. That whole kind of thing has been excised from the discussion, and it's much more about the playstyle. (The exception is a somewhat off-handed reference to the gold = XP model.)

This shifts the discussion along the paradigm a bit from the Matt Finch document, which had too many overly specific things about what to do and how to do it, to one that focuses more on "the whole point of the OSR is do things your own way." Or at least one of the whole points. As the document itself, the single biggest guiding principle is: Your table is YOUR table. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks you should do, even the game's designers; only you can decide what is best for your game (plural you in this case, probably). The game itself can only provide tools and suggestions, not hard and fast rules.

I've "fisked" some of the OSR themed "this is old school" type documents in the past before, and found mostly broad areas of disagreement about the implementation, even if I agreed with the higher level principles. (See here and here and here, for instance.) When I read this Principia Apocrypha, on the other hand, I could quibble with a few minor details where I'd mumble a little bit that I'm not really interested in that, but otherwise, there's nothing really substantive to which I can disagree. At all.

So when I say that I'm not old school but I am old fashioned, this is what I mean; I enjoy the way the games were assumed to have been run (minus the dungeoneering idea, which I never bought into. But even that wasn't necessarily assumed in old school, although obviously most people did it that way) but I disliked the systems and rules. This document redefines the OSR as more focused on the former and not really at all on the latter. If that's really true, then I suppose I'm kind of an OSRian too, although an unusual one who prefers a rule-set that's not really based on the iconic B/X or other early iteration of the game. Which I would have put as a hard-stop qualifying factor to be considered OSR previously.

Maybe this is inevitable. It was one thing when the OSR was attempting mostly just to clone the rules and clean up a few minor issues with them. I'd still suggest that an awful lot of the movement is still devoted exactly to that. I think a lot has happened in the years since OSRIC first was released which kicked off this whole concept, but current generation cloning seems to have settled (I'd suggest) most strongly on Old School Essentials as the go-to clone; the "perfect" iteration of the B/X rules, or whatever. The other thing that's happened outside of the cloning, however, is the proliferation of "OSR Heartbreakers"; games that are loosely old school in their mechanics, but which attempt to actually do something different; kind of offer an alternative to simply playing cloned old D&D.

Because honestly; if all I really wanted was to play B/X into infinity, it's not like it's hard to pick up B/X. About five or six years ago (or maybe more. The years fly by sometimes.) I spent $20 to get my "B/X package" as pdfs. $5 each for the Basic and Expert sets, and then another $5 each for Keep on the Borderlands and Isle of Dread, the modules that were originally packaged with the games. Most of the rest of the old content is pretty readily available too. I could literally play for the rest of my life with content that's already available. And I can houserule a few things like ability score generation, or ascending AC without having to buy anything. Even if I wanted a system that did that for me, Labyrinth Lord was free for years. Old School Essentials may beat all of these options when it comes to presentation and organization, but it's still the same game (mostly) at the end of the day. 

Where the OSR got interesting was in the cottage industry, indie-game-like DIY aesthetic of people creating fantasy heartbreakers that did something different, but shamelessly didn't care that they were fantasy heartbreakers. They weren't really about offering new systems as much as they were about doing something different with tone, feel, style, or something else. I mean, I know the label is often used pejoratively, but from a purely objective sense, is Lamentations of the Flame Princess any different than a fantasy heartbreaker? And does it fail to be cool because it is? In fact, the notion of the OGL allowing people to riff off of the rules without having to reinvent them every time is a major part of the reason the OSR is successful, because the focus can be elsewhere. That said, most of these "OSR heartbreakers" do, in fact, do something different with the rules, and this is where the current indie-game scene is starting to mingle somewhat with the OSR. Does anyone really think that Whitehack or Blackhack or Neoclassical Geek Revival play like B/X anymore at some point? In many ways yes... but in many ways very prominently and drastically no.

My own tastes are more towards games that are even more different; although very distinct from d20/3e, that's the actual baseline for m20, for instance. But what if being OSR isn't really about the rules as much as it has been in the past? What if, as Milton says, being old school is about: "The more of the following a campaign has, the more old school it is: high lethality, an open world, a lack of pre-written plot, an emphasis on creative problem solving, an exploration-centered reward system (usually XP for treasure), a disregard for "encounter balance", and the use of random tables to generate world elements that surprise both players and referees. Also, a strong do-it-yourself attitude and a willingness to share your work and use the creativity of others in your game."

If that's true, then I'm pretty old school. I'm not 100% aligned with everything he lists there, but that's still a pretty decent summary of how I like games to be. I tend to find in general the less the OSR is self-congratulatory and snide towards modern games and gamers, and the less that they try to encode specific system elements into the definition, the more I agree with them. As the voice of the OSR has changed, matured and moved somewhat over the years, I'm definitely mellowed in my opposition to them, because I was always sympathetic to a lot of what they were doing, but I hated their implementation. Have we now arrived at the point where the OSR is defined in such a way that what I'm doing qualifies?

Dark Heritage 2 update needed

I'm on version 2.7, but I looked at my copy and actually read through much of it just recently. I found a number of errors, some of them minor, but others of them a bit more substantial. The source of this is mostly changes to the rules themselves that I've made over time, but forgot to go change everything that was impacted by them; for example the MND damage for reading blasphemous tomes and learning spells was based on a 3-18 MND score instead of the -3 to 4 MND score. In other words, when I got rid of hte extraneous 3d6 step and turned the modifiers into the score, I didn't make all of the cascading changes that I had needed to. I found a number of other minor errors, typos, and a few formatting issues, so I'll be updating the document to 2.8 once I've finished.

I know this is a moot point, since this document is really only here for my own sake, and I doubt anyone else reads it. But if for some reason you do use it, then hold off and wait for the updated, patched version in the next day or so.

EDIT: Done. Go check out the new document in the Games tab to your hearts' content now.

Ability scores

In one of my recent posts, I made an offhand comment about the "3d6 in order" affectation of many OSRians. I decided to look up exactly how many "old school" games did ability score generation that way, just out of curiousity.

• OD&D (LBB): 3d6 in order. Yep, as I'd suspected, although I had no direct memory of that. I scanned through the first three supplements, and I didn't see any other alternatives offered, although maybe there are in some of the additional supplements that I didn't look at.
• BD&D (Holmes): 3d6 in order.
• B/X (Moldvay/Cook): 3d6 in order. I had thought for sure that by now, it would have changed, but it had not yet.
• BECMI (Mentzer): Still 3d6 in order, but there's explicitly listed a caveat that extremely poor characters can be discarded, at the DM's discretion. In reality, I suspect most players kept on rolling until they got the character that they wanted to play anyway, and discarded many dozens before they found one that was "suitable." I know that my group did it that way.
• AD&D (Gygax): Mister EGG himself wrote the following quite interesting quotes in the AD&D PHB and DMG respectively.

"The premise of the game is that each player character is above average—at least in some respects—and has superior potential. Furthermore, it is usually essential to the characters' survival to be exceptional (with a rating of 15 or above) in no fewer than two ability characteristics."

So... I don't know if you've done any of the math, or even just tried to roll 3d6 in order and get 15+ on at least two scores, but you'll find that you get very few. I know, I know... technically AD&D and D&D were two different games. But that was always more about legal propaganda than anything else, so royalties for D&D owed to Arneson wouldn't have to be paid on AD&D sales. The reality is that everyone I knew at the time played some kind of hybrid where you mixed and matched rules freely between them, because the basic system was exactly the same either way. Anyway, the DMG gives four methods for generating ability scores. One of them is obviously very familiar, but the other methods seem to have fallen by the wayside over the years. You'll note that 3d6 in order is not one of them.

"As AD&D is an ongoing game of fantasy adventuring, it is important to allow participants to generate a viable character of the race and profession which he or she desires. (ed. keep in mind that many races and classes had ability score minimums in those days, and the 3d6 in order would disallow many races and classes from being played by that character.) While it is possible to generate some fairly playable characters by rolling 3d6, there is often an extended period of attempts at finding a suitable one due to quirks of the dice. Furthermore, these marginal characters tend to have a short life expectancy—which tends to discourage new players, as does having to make do with some character of a race and/or class which he or she can't or won't identify with. Character generation, then, is a serious matter, and it is recommended that the following systems be used. Four alternatives are offered for player characters:

Method I: All scores are recorded and arranged in the order the player desires. 4d6 are rolled and the lowest die (or one of the lower) is discarded.

Method II: All scores are recorded and arranged as in Method I. 3d6 are rolled 12 times and the highest 6 scores are retained.

Method III: Scores rolled are according to each ability category, in order, STRENGTH, INTELLIGENCE, WISDOM, DEXTERITY, CONSTITUION, CHARISMA. 3d6 are rolled six times for each ability, and the highest score in each category is retained for that category.

Method IV: 3d6 are rolled sufficient times to generate the 6 ability scores, in order, for 12 characters. The player then selects the single set of scores which he or she finds most desirable and these scores are noted on the character sheet." 

Wow, what a change of pace from the early D&D rules! I wonder sometimes if EGG did this somewhat under duress without actually favoring this, because he recognized that it was the opposite of a surprise and delight feature for his customers; it was something that they generally found frustrating and obnoxious. Tim Kask, the literal first employee of TSR, has also said, and I quote:

"Gary had very distinct ideas on how he thought his game should be played. One quirk? He found it intellectually incomprehensible why anyone would wish to play anything but a human Player Character (PC). He found the idea of “half-breeds” to be repugnant, and not just half-orcs, either. He simply could not wrap his head around it at first. However, he knew there were some battles he could win and some not worth fighting, especially if they drove sales. [...] Another of Gary’s quirks was that he really did not like wizards and that human fighters should be the heroes of the campaign."

So he clearly allowed for features in the game that he didn't favor himself.

Anyway, old timey players probably know all this stuff already. I'm an old timey player, but I didn't own any of the old timey books for many years, so I couldn't remember the details, and we played with a hybridized house-ruled version of the game anyway. I especially find interesting some of the alternative methods to generate abilities that people don't use anymore. I mean, I understand why not I suppose; they're more tedious and time-consuming, certainly. But they seem kind of interesting in the sense that I've never actually used those methods before.

But what is most interesting is how Gary throws some serious shade on his own past method, clearly knowing what really happened is that people spent a lot of time rolling up characters until they got an ability score spread that they felt that they could use to play the character that they wanted to play. The old wargamey idea of just playing the hand that you're dealt—guy will probably die in the first half hour of play anyway on some kind of weird trap—was just obviously not doing it for the audience, even way back in the 70s. Although I'm also surprised, because I didn't remember this, and I'm confident that my gang never played this way, at least not after AD&D came out, that the old 3d6 in order method was current in D&D (as opposed to AD&D) all the way up through Mentzer at least (I didn't check the Rules Compendium.) I don't remember what method we used, but probably Method I whether playing "D&D" or "AD&D."

As an aside, the first character I remember creating was Elrohir, the half-elven fighter/magic-user. Yes, 12-year old me had been extremely piqued by the off-hand reference to Elrond's twin sons in Fellowship, where I imagined them as these beautiful yet cold and deadly bad-ass orc hunters. I had to roll a lot of ability score spreads before I got ones that I could use for that combo, and I may well have even fudged a score or two when I got frustrated with the process. Nowadays, I'm more sympathetic to Gygax's quirks; I prefer non-magical rangers, fighters, swashbucklers and rogues to magic-users of any stripe, and while I don't find demihumans "repugnant" at least ¾ of my characters are simply human fighters or rangers or barbarians or rogues or some other similar class. Often house-ruled; I've had non-spell-casting ranger variants going on since early 2001 at least, if not earlier. I also greatly prefer that the setting itself be much more humano-centric than most D&D settings today tend to be. I think he was on to something, and not just because he's aping the stylings of Leiber and Howard and how sword & sorcery worked in general. Keep in mind that Gygax was at least as much a fan of Moorcock and de Camp, the anti-sword & sorcery guys who preferred toxic, entitled, beta-male wizards as protagonists.

Replace session zero

I said not that long ago, the following:

I favored a so-called "session zero" before play actually started; we'd get together like for a session, but the main goal would be to create characters and get them primed and ready to go; if we actually played very much at that session zero, that would be a bonus.

I suppose if I was playing D&D as written, I might still have [that preference], but most of them are no longer necessary in my current context, and since it's not the most exciting way to kick off a campaign and my stripped down rules-lite game doesn't require nearly as much of an investment in time to get ready to play, I no longer favor the session zero at all. The "session zero" will take forty-five minutes to an hour—and that's if the players are chatty and unfocused, but realistically they probably will be—and then we're ready to play. My habit has always been 4-5 hour sessions.

Professor Dungeon Master addresses this as well, and his take is very similar to mine. There are a few interesting details; his questions vs. my player connectedness exercise, although I think many of his questions are unlikely to ever come up, and I think they focus on individuals thinking about their characters in isolation, which I'd rather not. I think I still like my system better.

I also like his idea of creating a back-up character, and having the backup character level up in synch with your main character. That's a great idea, and makes the concept of creating higher player lethality much more palatable.

 

Dice inventory

I'm just doing this for my own benefit. Everyone else please feel free to ignore this post. For some reason, some of my sets are missing a few dice. This is after I started my playing furlough, so I'm not sure why I'm missing anything. They're probably up in my office room somewhere and fell off the desk or something. Anyway...

First, non-sets.

• Big baseball sized d20
• Golf ball sized d20
• Four d30s
• 4 regular white pipped d6s
• NC Game Day pirate d6
• Strange metal octagonal pipe d6
• "Dark Lord ivory d20
• Black d10 with red numbers

Sets

• Clear with white numbers (missing 10s d10)
• Frosted clear with white numbers
• Blue and purple "glitter" set with gold numbers
• Purple and green swirl set with gold numbers
• Copper and green swirl with white numbers
• Black and red swirl with gold numbers
• Basic ivory color with black letters (missing d6)
• Decorative (elven-like runes) red on black
• Decorative (rings) brown on ivory
• Decorate (webs and skulls) brown on amber
• Decorative (snake scales) dark green on dark yellow

I keep thinking that I want more dice, and I like the Q-workshop ones; I think that they're really pretty. But I really have way more than I need. Even if I discount the ones that are mising a piece, I have... nine other complete dice sets already? That's a lot. Eleven if I make do with the ones that are missing something.

Just ordered the Strange Aeons dice set, along with a batch of piratey metal coins to add to my counters, so "Decorative yellow on olive green should probably be added to the list too. At this point I'm less about the theme of the adventure path that the dice are made for and more about the color combinations; does it offer something different? I have no problem imaging that a perusal of the Q Workshop store online would give me at least half a dozen more sets that I'd like to have, but at some point I need to accept that I simply don't need any of them anymore.

UPDATE: I've got enough small bags to do some better sorting now. I took my clear with white letters set, which was missing one of the d10s, and the ivory with black letters set, which was missing the d6, and stuck it in a very small bag along with a random d8 and d6 that I also had, as well as a strange novelty metal d6 that isn't square but rather a hexagonal rod. Those are now isolated in a small bag.

The other complete Chessex sets I have include a frosted clear with white numerals, a black and red swirl with gold numberals, a copper and green swirl with white numerals, a glitter-infused purple with gold numbers, and a purple and dark green swirl with gold numerals. All five of these dice sets are fully complete.

I also have five complete Q Workshop dice sets; a runic one that's black with red numbers, brown on ivory with ring-like designs, brown on amber with skulls and webs, green on goldenrod with lizard-scale designs, and yellow on green with vaguely Lovecraftian designs. All ten of these are in a single smaller bag, although not as small as the one mentioned above. Both of these smaller bags do into my larger dice bag, along with a few other random dice, including a golf-ball sized d20, four d30s, my unique bone-colored d20 that I used to use almost exclusively, and four regular d6s with pips like you'd find in any other non-RPG game.

Twelve sets of dice, albeit two of them are missing a piece, but I can either sub in a non-matching piece or do without in the case of the missing d10. What do I conclude from this? I need several more sets of dice and a much larger bag, of course! I'm a bit over the Chessex style dice. They are the first I got because they're the cheapest. I had seven of them. I've bought the five decorative Q Workshop sets in the time since the last time I played, which is funny and ironic. I don't have any metal dice sets, though! Sigh. 

My favorite "dice bag" is a fully leather, decent sized bag; even the drawstrings are leather. However, I don't keep dice in it. The bag came with a set of metal fantasy coins; I keep those, plus more fantasy coins that I've bought since in there. I'd actually like to buy probably another two sets of fantasy coins. When I do, I'll have probably 350 or so metal fantasy coins, which is about 15 times more than I need, but I love the heft of a leather bag filled with metal coins. 

My wife made my original dice bag, and I love it. However, she didn't really ask me about proportions, and I now find it a little stubby; it's wide, but not very deep. As I'm kind of running out of room in it sometimes, especially when it's stuffed with two other small bags of dice, I'd love if I could convince her to remake it, but make it about 4 inches taller this time. It's made of a black cloth that has a snake-skin like texture, with a lining that has pirate skulls on it, and there's a skull and crossbones patch on the front. 

I've browsed a lot of alternatives on Amazon because I don't think she'll get to it for months, but I'm hesitating just a bit on pulling the trigger on some really nice leather pouches, some of which are built as belt pouches, so that they have a very different construction. I dunno yet. Still trying to decide what to do. I've also targeted a good fifteen additional dice sets that I'd like to get.

People are the worst

I made one of my three or four times a year pilgrimages to ENWorld to see what was going on there the other day. Curiously, the beta fascism of Umbran wasn't in sight, or at least not in anything I was looking at.

But there's another curiosity. Again; I don't know what "always" happens, because I'll pop in for a week or two and then disappear for months at a time. But every single time I pop in, and I do mean EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. there's a thread where someone tries to talk about character, roleplaying or playstyle in a D&D context, and after a few pages it turns into a strange argument about indie games like Burning Wheel, Dogs in the Vinyard, or whatever other fashy indie game du jour is making the rounds. (But mostly Burning Wheel.) It's the same half a dozen (or less) usual suspects who do it. This shift doesn't happen in a context of, "Oh, if you're interested in that kind of thing, then here's something from a very different kind of game with very different design parameters that you might find interesting, because it'll expand your repertoire beyond what you'll see in D&D."

No, rather it's in the context of "No. What you said about characters in D&D is wrong because in Burning Wheel you do this." These posts are often also written in some kind of cipher, where they look like English words, but the meaning is strangely scrambled. It always takes several pages for people, who are trying to engage with this tangent in good faith, to actually figure out what the indie-gamer guys are even talking about, because they don't use words in the common sense common parlance that everyone else is using them in. By the time this Alice in Wonderland bizarro-conversation has matured enough that enough people are finally on the same page to be able to actually talk to each other as opposed to at each other (several pages worth of posts later) then nobody remembers to point out that this entire thing is a non sequitur that has nothing to do with the discussion that was being had, which has now been choked out. And then the thread carries on for many more pages talking about indie-game character mechanics, that have little to no connection to the context in which the conversation was started.

I'm not sure why I see this pattern repeated. Is it as common as it seems, or do I just happen to coincidentally show up when these kinds of threads are popping up? I suspect, because of the statistical laws of sampling populations, that there's almost always a thread of this type on the first page of ENWorld since there always is every time I sample the list of threads at ENWorld. What drives it? Monomania? Fanatical system evangelism? Is it just pretentious name-dropping to try and impress everyone else with the gamers' sophistication?

At least it's a little better then back in the day when these same topics would be subject to thread vandalization by proto-OSRians saying something to the effect of "When I started playing, the peak of roleplaying was dealing with 3d6 in order. And we didn't have any skill system, we just ROLEPLAYED it. You duchess tea party mamby-pamby method actors aren't playing real D&D (1974), the one true game. All others are a pale imitation." Cuz I remember when that was a thing. At least with this indie discussion, there's at least the slim chance that someone will inadvertently be tipped off to something that they find interesting outside of the D&D mainstream.

Technically I'm an indie-game guy, since m20 is certainly an indie-game, and I've borrowed other indie-game mechanics, like from FATE and stuff. I used to play The Window, and Red Box Hack, and other indie-games, although I'd suggest that much of the indie-game stuff that I dabble in is JV league compared to what they're talking about, at least in terms of being significantly or drastically different in terms of its approach to mechanics. But when I go to ENWorld, and people are talking about D&D specifically, I don't go all preachy on them about why I don't play D&D and they shouldn't either, because other things "do it better." And I certainly don't just talk to them as if its a given that they're not playing D&D when they're clearly talking in a D&D context, which is a very odd thing that some of these guys do.

I also found that a guy that I know who I recall as normally being pretty sensible in these types of discussions, who knows about indie-games and plays them, but hadn't ever exhibited any of this cult-like behavior, because he was socially astute enough to actually hold normal conversations with other people, has now gone to the dark side and is acting as bizarrely as some of the other more notorious posters.

I kind of bailed on this conversation mid-stream and left ENWorld again in disgust, as usually happens after a week or two of hanging around ENWorld anymore. But this was a little different this time, as it wasn't the toxic beta mod who disgusted me this time, but just kind of the general gamma environment. Sigh. Which of course I was aware of, but there were always a few lights in the darkness that still occasionally drew me in. Now... I don't feel that. My already infrequent perambulations back to ENWorld may become even more infrequent following this latest disappointment. People. They just always let you down. They really are the worst.

However, given that I'm back in the RPG saddle, so to speak, with regards to my blogging, I've got a few more topics in the batting order that I'll hit here shortly. In fact, yesterday I re-read The Forgotten Forge for my Eberron Remixed project, and I'll be talking about that shortly as well.

What else to do with Eberron Remixed

Although I said earlier on this tag to put a fork in this project, because I'd done everything other than just simply run it... I actually think I could review the adventures published for the setting and see what (if anything) I could use them for. This will be probably much like what I did for some of my deconstructed stuff, and what I suspect that I'd end up with after I'm done is something like the campaign briefs plus some notes. What I need to do is make a quick list of the official adventures—not counting the Dungeon Magazine ones, in order, that I can go through. The first one is actually included in the campaign setting book, and I did discuss it briefly in my remix project already. After that there's a four part series, and then an unconnected fifth (or sixth, if you count the campaign setting short module) module. That gives me six adventures to review; about equivalent to an adventure path, even though these books are a little slimmer. So, this epilogue to the Eberron Remixed project will be much like my Deconstructed projects, like Cult of Undeath or Isles of Terror, etc.

I realize that I'm in the middle of one of those projects already, that I haven't done anything with since before the summer started. But I can still put a bookmark post in where I want to come back and do something later, right?

Here's the list of modules. I've also put this on my Eberron Remixed page.

• The Forgotten Forge
• Shadows of the Last War
• Whispers of the Vampire's Blade
• Grasp of the Emerald Claw
• Voyage of the Golden Dragon
• Eyes of the Lich Queen

Don't see color

Paraphrasing something I saw on Vox Day, which is true. Last generation, conservatives cared about preserving America's traditions and way of life. Today's generation of "conservatives" brag that they don't see color. What is next? Conservatives who "don't see sex?" "Conservatives" who don't see age as they justify pedophilia?

I don't always agree with the Z-man, because he's a bit of a nihilist, probably related to his atheism. But he's completely right about one thing; the great divide in our society isn't "conservatives" vs "liberals." It's those who recognize the reality of human biodiversity, i.e. racial realists, vs those who live in a world of imaginary, delusional wishful thinking.

Vox added another thought to this, which I think is worth repeating, although it's just restating the same premise to some extent.

The Equalitarian Road to Hell:

I don’t see religion or nation.

I don’t see race or color.

I don’t see sex or gender.

I don’t see age.

Pedophilia is the end game of Equality. It always was.

And every single conservative who proudly embraced “judeochristianity” and every single liberal who preened about how he only judged people by the content of their character bears their share of the blame for walking down this road.

Ötzi the Iceman

Ötzi the iceman (herein spelled as Otzi so I don't have to try and figure out the diacritics every time I type it) is one of the oldest naturally occurring human mummies, and curiously, is from Europe in the Alps, so presumably he has some connection to modern Europeans and diaspora Europeans like ourselves here in America and elsewhere. He dates to the Chalcolithic, about 3300 BC. Otzi was a reasonably elderly man for the Chalcolithic, about 45, and appears to have been killed; an arrow wound in his shoulder, as well as other wounds, look to have been inflicted shortly before his death. Because he was high in what are today the Italian/Austrian border in the Alps, his body froze shortly after his death, and stayed there in a glacier for five thousand years, to be discovered by hiking tourists, of all people.

Other hints from his body suggest that he may have been involved in copper smelting; relatively high levels of copper and arsenic (to make arsenical bronze?) were found on and around his body. He predates the intrusion of the Western Steppe Herder ancestry, so is unlikely to have anything to do with the Indo-Europeanization of Europe at all. In fact, his Y-DNA haplogroup is uncommon in Europe today, but was common among the Early European Farmers, and probably arrived with them earlier in the Neolithic. His specific clade is especially uncommon, but is found in isolated places to the south like Corsica and Sardinia in better numbers than it can be found elsewhere, so he probably was a descendant of the early Cardial Ware spread of Neolithic peoples into Europe. Other lingering clades of related G2a lineages can also be found in the mountains of the Italic peninsula, and presumably it was very common across southern Europe at the time. His maternal haplogroup is also extremely rare; in fact, it was named after him, because it was a unique expression. 

In that limited sense, no—Otzi is not an ancestor of anyone in Europe; only somewhat more distantly related clades to him are even present in Europe at all, and they are found in extremely low numbers and extremely isolated geographies. Of course, it's not quite that simple, as as fair bit of EEF DNA is present in all Europeans, but most of it comes from female, rather than male lines. What likely happened is that men from other cultures took EEF girls as wives (or concubines, or slaves even) and that's how their ancestry came into our lineages. Because of this transmission process, it's unlikely that you can draw a lineal line to any cultures or languages of Europe today from the Neolithic EEF people. Their cultures and languages probably completely disappeared (with the possible exception of Basque) and even their genetics and physical type were somewhat marginalized across most of Europe, including the Tyrolean region where Otzi was found, except along the actual Mediterranean coastline. 

In fact, while I said earlier that the steppe peoples had yet to come to Europe, a mirror image process to this appears to have already been happening with old Mesolithic Western Hunter Gatherer lineages. In the years prior to the Chalcolithic, there was a resurgence of WHG Y-DNA haplogroups across Central Europe. The recent Papac et al. paper on Bohemian genetics over time strongly suggests that what happened was waves of new people from the west, who were a different sect of EEF people, but who had incorporated more WHG DNA, and whom especially had had male DNA resurgences, came into the area and largely replaced the other EEF peoples who were already living there. Now, granted, the Tyrolean Alps are not Bohemia, but Bohemia shouldn't be seen as somehow different than the rest of what was going on in Europe. New cultures, likely speaking new languages (although possibly related to Otzi's) and with male lines that came from the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had probably already marginalized Otzi's people by the time Otzi came along. The Indo-Europeans when they came, did so again, although even more thoroughly. He seems to have led a pretty hard life. He had tons of tattoos. Possibly somewhat romanticized accounts by scientists who have examined him and his gear suggest that he had killed several different people recently and still had their blood in and around his stuff (on one of his arrows, even) and that he may have carried a wounded and bleeding comrade over his shoulder for some time. He was probably killed by the arrow, but other injuries suggest that it didn't put him down right away, or that he had already been involved in fighting before being shot, and was pretty beat up other than the arrow wound, including a relatively serious head wound and a deep cut on his hand. In fact, one scientific team presented evidence that he was on the run, and had been fleeing up and down the mountains for days before being killed, bringing mossy plant remains from lower elevations with him as he desperately scrambled for an escape in the higher altitudes. To prove this, they say pollen embedded (from the air) in the food in his stomach suggests that he had eaten a meal at least 4,000 feet lower just a day or so before fleeing to the heights, where he ate a final meal just an hour or so before being killed right near the tree-line. Take this romanticized narrative with a grain of salt, however. The pollen could well have gotten on his food in any number of other settings, and before this narrative came out, the idea of him being a high altitude shepherd was common—and still quite plausible. As is the idea of him being a copper smelter of some kind, going into the mountains in search of ore.

So who were Otzi's people, then? We're not actually sure. Pinning him to a material culture is difficult. The museum where he is displayed claims he belongs to the Tamins-Carasso-Isera 5 group. I have no idea what this cultural group is; and searching it is circular; it appears to be referenced only with regards to Otzi. Their cultural artefacts seem to be similar to those of the Remedello culture of the Po Valley, however. This is further to the south, but loads of studies suggest that Otzi had been moving northwards in the weeks prior to his death, and probably grew up in the southern area of the Alps, nearer to Remedello. Whether or not that means he was from that culture, or simply traded with and was familiar with them we don't know, but likely if he wasn't from the Remedello culture, then he was from a neighboring and closely related one. Who these people were is unclear, but there is at least some evidence, although it's disputed, that the Etruscans and neighboring Rhaetic people may have been autochthonous (the other proposal is that they crossed the Alps from the north prior to the historical period.) If the former proposal turns out to be true, the Remedello people might be distant ancestors of the Etruscans. It is worth pointing out, however, that the Etruscans, when they emerge, have a fair amount of steppe ancestry, and are often associated with the Villanova culture, which was itself an offshoot (so it's supposed) of the northern Urnfield culture. This is confusing, as both Villanova and Urnfield are also often associated with Indo-European languages, but it's just a reminder that language, genetics, archaeological cultures and historically attested peoples may not all line up as nicely as we'd wish them to. Perhaps the language was associated with autochthonous peoples, but other aspects of the culture and genetics come from the north, making the Etruscans a hybrid of Indo-Europeanized Neolithic holdovers speaking an old Neolithic language still. Sadly, one can only speculate.

Physically, Otzi appears to be a typical Neolithic EEF type guy. He's fairly small and slight; about 5'5" and estimated to have weighed about 110 lbs. Even if he'd been on the run and eating lean for several weeks, that's really thin. My wife (sometimes) weighs 110-120 lbs. at 5'4" and from the perspective of an American, she's a small, thin woman. (Even if she's now older than Otzi was when he died.) Otzi must have looked like a runt. But that's not unusual for the EEF people; it was only the addition of hunter-gatherer genetics that Europeans started getting taller and more robust again after the EEF settlement of the continent. The WSH admixture brought more tallness and robustness. The hunter-gatherers, whether lingering western ones coming from the Atlantic, or Scandinavian ones coming down south during the Chalcolithic, or as a principle component of the western steppe herders coming from the Pontic-Caspian would have all been pretty manly, good-looking chads compared to the spindly EEF men. It's not necessarily necessary to propose all kinds of massacre and rapine scenarios to see EEF women falling into the arms of the various newcomers who's paternal DNA replaced the EEF men's during the late Neolithic, Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age.

There's a lot of confusing and contradictory information about the physical appearance of the various population groups of Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Europe. Some people propose that the EEF peoples were early carriers of the alleles for blond hair, blue eyes and light skin. However, other studies contradict that, and certainly every population that today has elevated levels of EEF genetics is dark-haired, brown-eyed and dark-skinned (from a European context, of course. Those who suggest that any ancestral European population were as dark as sub-Saharan Africans have some kind of ideological ax to grind, and the science does not actually support that, as has been pointed out repeatedly by the actual authors of the papers who are sometimes mortified to find their conclusions misrepresented.) It appears Otzi had brown hair (probably with plenty of gray by this point in his life) and brown eyes. I'm personally of the opinion that the modern Sardinians are the best phenotypal analogs to what the EEF population of the Neolithic looked like, by virtue of parsimony. It's possible, of course, that "whiteness" is a relatively recent genetic innovation that spread rapidly at some time after the arrival of the current genotypes that make up modern Europe, but it appears more likely that the hunter-gatherer and western steppe-herder DNA (the latter very heavy in Eastern Hunter-Gatherer already) is the better source of brown/reddish hair, blond hair and light colored eyes. That's a more parsimonious interpretation of the data, at any rate. Otzi was probably rather dark, thin and short, and would have looked like a somewhat malnourished yet physically lean and tough mountain man version of an Italian.

Of course, all of this discussion about whether or not you can draw a lineal straight arrow between modern Europeans and Otzi's people is kind of moot. Even if you could, although it looks like we cannot, it's fair to say that if he were a pre-Corded Ware individual closely related to the formation of the Nordic Bronze Age and the Germanic peoples, of whom the Anglo-Saxons (and eventually the Americans) are an off-shoot of, that his life would still be completely alien and foreign to us. Regardless of the fact that his culture, language and genetics would have been directly ancestral to ours. He probably would have even looked kind of foreign, and he certainly would have acted it and dressed it. If he'd practiced skull deformation, he might have really looked alien. It's hard to imagine how alien it would have been, and we'd be tempted to try and fit the familiar into it when it doesn't really fit. The excellent work by Dan Davis, for example, takes this Chalcolithic setting where the Pitted Ware culture (the last lingering Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherer culture), the Battle Axe Culture (a Scandinavian Corded Ware variant) and the Funnelbeaker culture (a northern variant of the EEF horizon, with elevated WHG ancestry, as was common in northern and central Europe of the twilight of the EEF cultures) are all coexistent—it's a great setting idea for a fantasy novel, but without any frame of reference to how these people might have thought, believed or acted, he has been adopting Greek mythology into this setting, with analogs to Perseus and Heracles specifically. 

Anyway, I'll end there on a plug for Davis' work. Go check it out. It's pretty interesting stuff, and he's a great guy. I've interacted with him a bit in the comments section of various YouTube channels related to Indo-European archaeology, like Genos Historia, Survive the Jive and his own channel as well. I like him.

https://dandavisauthor.com/

Dark Heritage, mapmaking and post summer update

Because I made a YouTube video, rather than recreating it in text, I'll just link to it here.

Actually, I've already talked about some of these issues here, although even then it's been a couple of months.

Best timeline

Being born in the early 70s suburbia was the best. Although many of the sicknesses that will most likely prove terminal to America (and certainly to America as we knew it) had already set in, they had not yet metastasized, so we didn't really know it. I got to grow up during the 80s, a kind of last gasp of our culture from when it was confident in who it was and its place in the world, and honestly--we didn't worry too much about "the world" anyway.

I mean, sure--the BEST timeline would have been something like the 80s, but one in which the Yankees didn't win their mean-spirited and hateful war of conquest against the rest of the country in the 1860s, so we really had America in the 1980s, not the Yankee parody of America that most of the twentieth century ended up being. But that said, the 80s that we did get was pretty special most of the time, and it carried forward for a time into the 90s. 

This is especially true for fans of fantasy, of course. While fantasy has its roots in the very earliest myths of Western civilizations foundational pillars--from what we know now, going back into the Neolithic at least, and the spread of the Corded Ware culture and it's various "children" which gives us our various pre-Christian pagan mythologies of gods and monsters, the reality of course is that fantasy is also a thoroughly modern genre. J. R. R. Tolkien and even E. R. Eddison and William Morris may well have been trying to channel aspects of this early era in our history, but they did so by writing thoroughly modern novels, incorporating in many respects thoroughly modern ideas and perspectives. Much has been made of how Tolkien's experience in the Great War colored his views of Middle-earth as it developed for example. The reality is that all art and literature is a product of the time in which it is made, no matter how much it may attempt to "call back" to earlier times and places. In fact, the very desire to call back to a more fantastic, simpler time of clear-cut heroes, feminine damsels in distress and exciting, colorful adventure in the way that fantasy does is itself a product of the times in which it was written.

Of course, Morris, Eddison and even Tolkien were "old news" by the 80s, and by then fantasy had been even more thoroughly modernized, in particular by the grand pastiche nature of Dungeons & Dragons, which created something which has sometimes disparagingly been called "extruded fantasy product." This was "dumbed down" even more at the actual tables of most people who played, who often churned out nearly plotless hack and slash as the distillation of what had been a proud and grand literary tradition when it started. But that's fine; in fact--it was kinda cool in most respects.

Personally, I always felt that hack and slash was better suited to a different medium than face to face tabletop roleplaying games, because using those for hack and slash was not only kind of boring, but also squandered the potential of face to face gaming anyway. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought so, as hack and slash D&D-like video games reached a peak in the years immediately after the 80s. Some will say that the Diablo games of the late 90s were the ultimate expression of this, and it's hard to argue that. But we had pretty good stuff in the 80s and 90s already. 1985's arcade game Gauntlet was already exploring what hack and slash D&D could look like in a visual medium, which was honestly probably more in line with what hack and slash is suited for anyway. But for my money, it wasn't until the beat em up genre appeared that a really good type of hack and slash that wasn't so gonzo that it was a parody of the concept really appeared. The first of these was Sega's 1989 Golden Axe which later morphed into a series that has, depending on how you counted them, between three and eight entries. Capcom got into the action with King of Dragons in 1991, but probably produced the best D&D inspired hack and slash beat em ups when they made the two D&D licensed games: Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara. 

The entire beat em up genre went underground shortly after these games came out, until their modern resurgence as people tire of "modern" consumer dreck and have found that indie developers digging into the 80s and 90s can actually provide a much better experience than many (if not most) modern struggle sessions masquerading as entertainment. 

It may seem odd that Japanese developers created these classics of Western fantasy, but keep in mind that during the 80s "cultural appropriation" wasn't a dirty word; in fact, if someone liked aspects of our culture enough to copy it and provide us something back in return based on it, we considered that flattering rather than insulting, as normal healthy people should. Of course, with the case of Golden Axe, it was developed by a guy who loved the Conan the Barbarian movie; in the case of the D&D license, it was developed as it was because of the protectionism of TSR of their brand, and their insistence that someone who knew the territory oversee some aspects of the development to make sure that what came back would be recognizably D&D to American audiences, and not some weird Japanification of it. Not that that would have been terrible necessarily; keep in mind that during the 80s and 90s in particular we were at peak Japanophilia in America. Icons of Japanese culture like samurai and ninjas were ubiquitous in American pop culture by this point, and Americans were taking karate and judo classes at probably their highest rates. The myth of ancient Asian wisdom was flying pretty high at this point, and Americans thought even fortune cookies offered a profound exegesis on life. A Japanified D&D wouldn't have necessarily been bad. But getting very recognizably western D&D was obviously, I think, much better. And this is the kind of environment where hack and slash can thrive, in my opinion, much better than an actual tabletop experience, which just begs for more because the environment allows for it so easily.

Most of these games are available relatively cheaply as part of some collection or other; the D&D games are available together as a bundle on Steam, the Beat em Up bundle by Capcom also has King of Dragons as well as several other classics of the genre (including Final Fight, arguably one of the best examples of it ever made) and I believe that there are Golden Axe compilations as well. In fact, I believe that until recently you could get Golden Axe on iOS even.

If you search Tower of Doom longplay on Youtube, you'll get loads of examples of someone playing the full game all the way through. Edited and with continues and whatnot, most of these take about an hour to watch; it probably would take you or I a little bit longer than that to play through ourselves. But it's worth checking out. Shadow over Mystara is a better game in almost every respect, but I don't believe you should do that one without doing Tower of Doom first.

And I do recommend picking up Chronicles of Mystara on Steam. It has both games, edited and tweaked slightly from the arcade originals to be better suited to todays audience and hardware and playing experience (I doubt most people are actually inserting quarters into their computers, for example.) It's only $15. At that price, it's about the same as getting a new streaming movie from Disney+ or Amazon Prime, and yet offers a better experience that most of what those guys are offering. And if you can get online with a few buddies and play it cooperatively, the way it was originally intended, holy cow, now you're talking fun. Plus because of the choices, there's some replayability. You get totally different levels with your choices. Here's one example. Look up more; I don't know that this is the best one. It's the best advertisement if you still don't believe you should buy your own copy and play it yourself.

(In fact, actually the guy playing this isn't very good. Chances are you would do at least as well picking it up cold with no experience. Which makes it even more interesting as a possible sales tool, I guess.)

More on Celtic from the Middle

A few days ago, I posted this on the concept of "Celtic from the Centre", a linguistic hypothesis by Peter Schrijver. Coincidentally, I've seen a number of people referring to ancient material cultures, like Unetice as "Celtic" or at least "proto-Celtic" which is, in my opinion and the opinion of most linguists, quite absurd. As part of some of this discussion, I had pointed out to me in the Eurogenes comments by user "Romulus" that 

1) The earliest Celtiberians might lack material culture ties to the Urnfield/Hallstatt area, as Schrijver points out, but they do have obvious genetic ties to that culture, and seem to come from them in a genetic sense.

2) There's a genetic discontinuity in the British Isles ~1200 BC or so that's not as marked as the Bell Beaker transition, but still represents a significant population turnover of ~40-50%. The newcomers look like early Urnfield/Hallstatt people genetically, and seem to have the same general time depth as well.

Of course, none of this means that Celtic from the Centre is unworkable. Even Celtic from the Centre proposes that Celtic arises out of the Urnfield/Hallstatt group, just not out of the whole group, and not out of the eastern group either. The rest of the Urnfield peoples who didn't specifically give rise to Celtic may well have spoken some kind of para-Celtic language; an eastwards equivalent to Lusitanian. Ligurian is already proposed by some to be just such a para-Celtic language, for instance.

The latest Papac paper, which is making all kinds of buzz in the archaeogenetics community lately, suggests something similar by inference. Without major autosomal changes to the DNA of a population, there was still wave after wave of ascendant haplogroups over-riding previously ascendant haplogroups, etc. Not only did this happen after the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, but it was happening before it too, in the later Neolithic farmer cultures of Central Europe. This is also inferred from what we do know of regions for which written records exist, or written accounts by their neighbors, at least. I.e., the Iberian peninsula, the Balkans, the Italic peninsula, Anatolia, etc.--all show a higher level of linguistic diversity in the Bronze Age than expected. Rather than big, broad, ethnolinguistically united cultural horizons, we have a patchwork of related, unrelated and lesser related in a region, that only later acquires a common linguistic approach.

To be honest, the same state of affairs existed to a great degree right up until the advent of mass communication and the modern age. I mean, only a hundred and fifty years ago, French wasn't even spoken by the majority of the inhabitants of France still. Occitan represented by itself nearly 39% of what "Frenchmen" spoke, and "Franco-Provencal" dialects made up another significant portion of the eastern part of the country, etc. 

There's a tendency where if we know of a modern language, we want to push its immediate antecedents back to unrealistic time depths and assign very broad material cultures to these purported proto-languages.

Much more likely is that the linguistic situation of the Bronze Age and even Iron Age of Europe was much more diverse than we'd like to think, and the languages that we know of spread much more recently and from a smaller nucleus than we're previously proposed.

So, yeah. Celtic came from Urnfield, probably. But that doesn't mean that Urnfield was totally Celtic. Heck, even the Hallstatt = Celtic theory proposes that Hallstatt may well also have been Illyric in the east. And that's the default, overly broad model.