Possible expansion of the Dark Fantasy X setting

Let me give some context. Where did the Dark Fantasy X setting come from, and what are its direct antecedents? This is a brief summary of my history, which I've documented here, if you want a more long-winded version.

Back in 2002 I was already tired (again) of the D&Disms and started experimenting with settings that were obviously sword & sorcery fantasy settings, but not D&D-like settings, with elves, dwarves, dragons, etc. featuring prominently. Bloodlines was the first setting that I worked on that diverged significantly from D&D basic. The setting was a kind of analog to prehistoric Lake Bonneville with Rancholabrean fauna, and the non-human races were the aasimar, tieflings and the four genasi as they were presented in the 3e era of the game. This fairly early moved into a version of Dark•Heritage that was a kind of "steampunk Barsoom" overlay on the same idea. The giant lake disappeared in favor of more desert features, and the genasi and other planetouched races evolved into races that were superficially similar, but had a very different genesis. 

By 2004-5 or so, I'd gotten rid of the desert and resurrected an old floating islands idea that I'd had (which isn't unique; I've seen plenty of other people dabble with this concept) and I abandoned much of the steampunk aesthetic. This was now Dark•Heritage Mk. II. Although I actually ran this version of the setting for a while,  it was Mk. III that had the most development (up to this point) when I ditched the floating islands and went more with a Medieval Tarim Basin geography model. This version of the setting was fairly well developed, and I even had novel outlines for it. I did find, however, that I was a little too prone to moving in to esoteric purity spirals of certain setting elements that really didn't need as much development as I was giving them. In fact, the development was starting to hurt the setting rather than help it.

Meanwhile, I was doing some other stuff outside of the direct line of Dark•Heritage. I toyed with a big ole Jupiter-sized setting  (obviously I didn't develop that much surface area, but that was the idea) that used some ideas I had that probably fit a little better with a more traditional D&D-like setting, rather than the more esoteric desert environment that DH had become. I later reskinned some of these elements and the basic geography for another D&D-like game that I ran called Pirates of the Mezzovian Main, around a fantasy Mediterranean of sorts, but with Golden Age of Piracy like stuff from the Caribbean. And, noticing that I was re-using a lot of setting elements from my Jupiter-sized Leng Calling setting, I created a Modular DND Setting wikispaces.  What were originally meant to be drag and drop modules eventually started to coalesce into a setting that would deliberately be based around them being in more or less fixed geographical areas.

All of these threads combined; using Modular elements hung on a Mezzovian Main geography eventually became DH Mk. IV. I developed this quite a lot too; a lot of that development is still here on this blog, for instance. I drew a big map of the setting on a poster board (which I still have stuck behind my dresser and the bedroom wall; I occasionally pull it out and look at it even now.) Mks. III and IV got a lot of development compared to I and II, but ultimately, they weren't exactly what I wanted. Also, things were changing in the pop culture landscape, as well as my reaction to the pop culture landscape. While in the early 00s I was probably tired of traditional fantasy and experimenting with using another cultural baseline (14th and 15th century Crown of Aragon thalassocracy being a notable influence) and steampunk and whatnot all playing big roles for a time—until I decided that I didn't want to do exotica for its own sake anymore. In addition, I feel that maybe I was inadvertently getting caught up in movements that I didn't agree with; while maybe I was ready to  move on from overly traditional Anglo-Saxon, Norse or Celtic influenced fantasy after having been steeped in it for so many years, the fantasy zeitgeist was doing the same thing, but for different reasons. Not because they were caught up in novelty, like I was, but because they hated Western Civilization and deliberately wanted to avoid it. In other words, the seeds of what would become blatant wokeism were starting to infect the genre, and I guess maybe I was a little bit on the early side of detecting it and getting turned off.

So I started tinkering with stuff that would combine Old Country England and Viking nations (mostly) with either colonial or frontier American geography. These were separate activities from Mk. IV, but I gradually started to believe that I needed to leave behind the Crown of Aragon Mk. IV with its pseudo-Spanish "protagonist" nation and replace it with one that was more in line with the majority of my heritage; British-American. I settled on the protagonist nations being essentially calques of Robin Hood like Anglo-Saxons, except in an American Old West like frontier setting. Then, I jammed some other settings that I'd developed into it, notably the Timischburg "fantasy Transylvania" setting that I'd developed for my CULT OF UNDEATH project, and Mk. V was born.

But Mk. V actually was stuck at a fairly high level without much real development for quite a long time. I had a sketchy map and talked a bit about stuff, but mostly I was still referring to Mk. IV stuff in a new geographical setting. By the time I really buckled down and drew a good map, started updating the rules for the game that it was meant to support, and really doing some unique new setting development, I was on the verge of converting Mk. V to DH5, which quickly evolved into Dark Fantasy X. Dark Fantasy X could therefore be seen as either a second draft of Mk. V, which only got minimalist unique development in its first draft, or possible Mk. VI of Dark•Heritage. But it's instead been rebranded as it's own new thing, Dark Fantasy X. Dark•Heritage, while it remains the name of this blog, is now officially a dead brand otherwise in my mind; the setting has now moved on and turned in to something fairly different than what Dark•Heritage in any iteration had ever been. 

It's still probably kind of weird and esoteric in terms of fantasy, but also it represents a focus on my own heritage coming through instead of being de-valued, and as such, is probably in part a reaction to all of the wokeness in our entertainment. I've decided that I'm now more tired of looking for something that's not "lily white" than I ever was of fantasy that is clearly based on the Northwestern European Medieval baseline that was the foundation of most of the fantasy I read from the 80s and earlier. The experiment with experimentation, if you will, was played out and I found I didn't like it as much as I thought I would when I started it years earlier.

Anyway, the Dark Fantasy X setting is mostly made up of three large constituent areas; not by coincidence, the three campaign 5x5s that I'm proposing are each centered on one of these, giving me the full coverage of all three areas when they're all done. It was my original intention to have a lot of discipline about not going beyond these, and for a long time that's exactly what I did. I'm kinda sorta rethinking that premise... but let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet. These three Realms are:

• The Hill Country; the most Anglo-Saxon frontier America part of the setting.
• Timischburg, the Austrian Empire hinterlands that is fantasy Transylvania.
• Baal Hamazi, the most exotic of them, where the kemlings are from. Although it's also heavily based on my love of the geography of the American West.

While I'd made vague references to areas beyond these three realms, I'd never intended to do any real development of them. However, I may want to make some smaller "satellite" mini-settings that are associated with the main setting. These won't receive the same level of detail as the main Three Realms—at least that's not what I'm planning now—but we'll see how much development they do or don't get. These elements include:

• Nizrekh, a kind of island nation that's the stub of ancient, sunken Atlantis, which has a combination Yog-Sothothery snake cult and ancient Egypt vibe to it. The people living there aren't the descendants of Atlanteans; there's already a race for that, but rather some group that arrived and developed in isolation.
• The wreckage of old Hyperborea; a kind of Ice Age glacier and snow-socked analog to Kadath.
• Lower Kurushat, which actually does appear on my map, but which I haven't given much thought to yet.

Of course, I doubt I'll do any of these until I finish my racial deep dives and my 5x5s, because that will lay the seeds for this to be done by really expanding the material on the races and the main three areas before I start haring after the afterthought areas.  This makes some sense; although Nizrekh has been floating around on the periphery of the setting for a long time, Hyperborea was never meant to make any appearance at all until I did the Hyperborean Racial Deep Dive and "discovered" that there was potentially interesting material still lingering in Hyperborea. (It probably doesn't hurt that I got back into SWTOR again and did some stuff wandering around on Hoth, and that I've been very slowly going through a youtube zoom playthrough that some guys did of the Icewind Dale campaign of D&D.)