D&D:HAT

My Blu-ray copy of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves arrived this afternoon. The release date being May 30th has been known for some time, but for whatever reason until this morning, Amazon said it was going to arrive on June 20th. Surprise, surprise... here it is now. I actually probably have time to pop it in and watch it one more time tonight. In spite of the fact that fans have every reason to be unhappy with WotC, Hasbro, and even Paramount, this movie is better by far than I expected it to be. Even my wife quite liked it, and she is not a fan of D&D. My characterization of the movie as Guardians of the Galaxy meets Lord of the Rings was sufficient to get her into a mood where she wasn't just dutifully going to see it because I wanted to, but I'm sure she still wasn't expecting to actually like it very much. She did, and has in fact highly recommended the movie to all of our far-flung kids. We even went back to the theater with my daughter and son-in-law, and I'm hoping to watch it with another of my college-aged sons when he's in town in a few weeks, now that I have a copy on Blu-ray.

I do feel like D&D and I parted ways some time ago, and while we still pass each other and give each other a friendly greeting and some small talk, we're really on quite different paths. My preferred rules are very rules-lite, and should probably be called OSR adjacent, while D&D has become a game of very many rules. My settings are grim and humanocentric; a combination of old-fashioned sword & sorcery and gothic horror, like Dracula or something, complete with an X-files like conspiracy vibe and anxious tone of brooding menace. My characters are grounded and grim guys with freelance roving commissions looking to root out supernatural evil; D&D's characters are whimsical superheroes and animal people. My game has genuine risk for PCs; D&D is meant to be won, and without too much challenge, quite honestly.

I guess maybe it's fair to say that my game more closely resembles older games of D&D from the 70s and early 80s than it does D&D from now, but even that's not really accurate. It more closely resembles them in system, I suppose, but the setting, tone and themes I would explore are much more similar to something like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, or that unfortunately poorly made Van Helsing movie from a few years ago. Maybe toned down a fair bit from the over-the-top swashbuckling of that movie, but still—poorly made though it may be, it's still a close analog of the tone and theme that I shoot for in my games.

That said, there's still plenty to like about D&D-like higher fantasy. I recently re-read the original Icewind Dale trilogy by R. A. Salvatore, for instance. And the movie itself, as noted, is pretty good. Although how much it resembles the high fantasy style of D&D from the late 80s and 90s is hard to say. 

I can't be bothered to boycott every company that does something stupid or evil, since corporations, by their nature, will tend to do both routinely. Rather; I'd like to see movies like this be successful enough that more like them are made. And I'd also like to encourage people to keep their bloody opinions to themselves rather than try and foist them on their customers.

Stefan → Dominic?

I was never actually super happy with the name Stefan; I picked it as a placeholder, but then I didn't ever get back to it and revisit it. I've also rejiggered his appearance somewhat from the original look; rather than being blond and green-eyed, I had him dark-haired and blue-eyed for a while. This doesn't really matter so much for Stefan as an iconic character, but it does if Stefan is to become the protagonist of an actual story. I think it's time to settle him down, both in terms of his name, which I'm not thrilled with anymore, and his appearance. 

Here's various images from Hero Forge that I've made of him, showing off various looks.

This one gives him a "Cossack" hairstyle. I mostly just did it for fun. I won't have him with shaved sides of his head for real.

In disguise in Baal Hamazi

An alternate, albeit similar visual build

I'm thinking of possibly using the name Dominic. I don't like names to sound too "fantasy", but some old-fashioned real world names are usually my favorites. Dominic and his brother Ragnar Clevenger being the main protagonists, co-leaders of the ensemble cast, and the respective leaders when the cast splits would work. Both are old-fashioned real names that sound perfectly fine in a fantasy setting that feels like Robin Hood era English in a American Old West like context. 

Other than that; Dominic/Stefan will continue to be a good old-fashioned fantasy WASP, so to speak, dressed in Ranger leathers and wearing a coonskin cap. His cavalry saber and wrapped longbow are his signature weaspons, along with a small seax knife.

A remake as Dominic instead of Stefan, although not very different, even though it's built from scratch.

Friday Art Attack

I've totally lost the plot on my Friday Art Attack series. Let me do one today, since I actually have a few moments that I didn't expect to go through my folders and find a few nice pieces. Some of these are from the free samples given out by Printable Heroes. I can't really comment on their business model, since I'm not a fan of using miniatures and tactical combat, but I do like the art, at least. 

First off; two that I've shown before; an Orcus and a Demogorgon piece.

How about a couple more monsters from this series?

First, the balor, the D&D version of the balrog (known also in Dark Fantasy X as the baal-rog, a name borrowed from some OSR product or other. In classic and weird coloration respectively. 

A bulezau, or goat-demon

Chimera

Ghost

Hellhound

Krampus

"Major demon", whatever exactly that is.

Manticore

Wraith, Followed below by various yuan-ti snakemen images. Some of them are more humanoid than others...

Enemy Within Adaption

I've been adapting these D&D adventure paths, but none of them are really the kind of game that I'd like. One campaign that I probably could adapt to Dark Fantasy X and enjoy it as is without having to change the structure completely to a more freeing one is The Enemy Within, from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I'm not a huge fan of the system, but I really like the setting, and even more than the setting, I really like the tone and themes of WFRP. Along with the several other books that I'm reading concurrently (sigh. One on Kindle, one in physical form, an adventure path in Dungeon Magazine and an old 3e book on pdf) I decided to start reading the Cubicle 7 "directors cut" version of this campaign. I do have—or at least have access to—all five of the books of the campaign, as well as all five companion volumes. That's 10 books; not the thickest or biggest, even for RPG books, but still, which if I can read them all this year without getting distracted, sidetracked or delayed, will significantly help my reading goal for the year (I'm almost halfway through the year, by the way. I need to keep moving a little faster.) But I'm planning on doing it, and I'll briefly talk about each product after I read it in terms of how I'd adapt it to my setting. This will have a new tag, ENEMY WITHIN. I've renamed most of the other adventure paths, but this one is too iconic, and kind of a simple concept, so I'll just use the original campaign title for this thread or tag or series, or whatever you want to call it.

I do need to revise a few high level things right off the bat. The Empire from Warhammer is very much like the Holy Roman Empire of the latest Middle Ages, but Dark Fantasy X is more like the High Middle Ages combined with some other stuff, like the American frontier in the Hill Country, and classic Dracula-esque Transylvania in Timischburg—the latter being where I'm likely to set this. I can actually use the Germanic names if I want, given that the Timischburg aristocracy is meant to be similar to the Austrians of the Austrian Empire, with an underclass of Balkan others; Romanians, Serbians, Hungarians, etc. Chaos is also such an iconic Warhammer element that I may want to change it to something else. Depending on where I start the game, and one thing I'm thinking is having the PCs arrive in Timischburg from the east through the Eltdown Fens, I might have the chaos mutants that make an early appearance by corrupted reptile cultists, as described in my early CULT OF UNDEATH musings that I've made recently. Or... I could make them people slowly turning into ghouls for some reason. It's not that the chaos mutations are ever really explained other than "chaos is resurgent" or something, if I remember correctly, so I don't need to explain it here either. Certainly not right off the bat. Ubyr would be the obvious stand-in for Altdorf, at least in the first adventure, because it's a city that the PCs have to stop at if they're come from Eltdown, but Ubyr probably doesn't quite cut it when Mittermarkt is just beyond that. And neither is the capital of Timischburg.

But that's OK. I can make modification to various aspects of the campaign as I go through it, beyond just changing the names to be Dark Fantasy X friendly. I don't know what they are yet, as I just barely started reading it again (I read the first two books last year, I think, or possibly the year before, but then I never went on yet from there.)

Anyway, this post is mostly just to establish the tag and announce the project. We'll see how quickly or how often I update it, but it will be a major push going forward. I'll probably do it faster than I finish my long-delayed Paizo deconstructed adventure path, since this "adventure path", if you want to call it that, is much more up my alley than anything Paizo is likely to ever publish.

Reptile cultist bandit. Maybe a stand-in for Old Rolf. He's less obviously mutated than the Warhammer version, but I'm a more subtle kind of guy, I guess. (That's not really true, but whatever.)

A couple of socio-political points

Matthew 7.

16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

I'm always amazed when people at Church rationalize liberalism, especially corporatized liberalism, DEI and wokeness. By Christ's own words, it's a corrupt tree that brings forth evil fruit. There are more examples than I care to attempt to catalog here, but here's at least one new one brought to my attention recently. 

https://slaynews.com/news/facebook-cracks-down-christian-content-labels-hate-speech/

Quoting from the article:

Facebook has provoked a widespread backlash after the social media platform deleted Christian content and labeled it “hate speech.”

The issue was highlighted by journalist Billy Hallowell, a former Blaze writer.

Hallowell, a Christian, exercised his religious freedom by posting on Facebook: “Jesus died so you could live.”

However, despite his post reflecting one of Christianity’s core beliefs, Hallowell’s post was deleted by Facebook and he was accused of spreading “hate speech” on the Big Tech platform.

Hallowell shared about this on Twitter, backed up by screenshots, and a comment stating that the incident was “very, very bizarre.”

It's actually not bizarre at all, if you accept that Facebook's woke policing units are hateful, anti-Christian bigots and in the thrall of Satan as clearly as anyone we've ever seen in the scriptures has been. One sad side effect of our Western Civilization cult of niceness is that we are unable to effectively do what Jesus commands the believers to do, which is discern and judge between good and evil and recognize evil for what it is so we can more effectively remove it from our lives.

While such attacks against constitutional rights can sometimes be written off as an “error” or a “technical issue,” this wasn’t the case.

Hallowell followed Facebook’s appeals process, assuming the “mistake” would be corrected.

It wasn’t.

Facebook’s moderators reviewed Hallowell’s post and doubled down, accusing him of spreading “hate speech.”

That's not really a good interpretation of the law. We do not have a constitutional right to post anything at all on Facebook. Nevertheless, it's another facet of our cult of niceness that we don't recognize after all of these many, many, many times that calling this an "error" or "technical issue" is a lie and an excuse that the tech companies make after they are caught. These kinds of errors only ever happen to conservatives and Christians. 

At that point, the punishment that Facebook’s censoring machine thought fit the “crime” was to make the post invisible to anyone but the author.

After the post was reviewed by a Facebook moderator, the crackdown became more severe.

The post was deleted altogether after an “appeal.”

“Your appeal was reviewed,” claimed Facebook.

“We are unable to show content that goes against our community standards on hate speech.” 

If this is supposed to be something that we're outraged about, I suppose I'm not, nor do I recommend the thirty-second outrage that the pundits seem designed specifically to engender. In fact, especially in light of Russell M. Nelson's most recent talk in General Conference, I think getting angry and outraged is to be particularly discouraged. The prophet of God has literally warned us that such is not appropriate at this time. Will there come a time to flip over the tables of the money-changers, or wave the Title of Liberty? Maybe. Or maybe we need to be delivered by God himself after showing our patience and meekness, as the people of Alma did when enslaved by the Lamanites.

But, if not to get outraged, why do I point this out? Just so that you can know and prepare yourself accordingly. We do not live in a mostly righteous society where the rights of those who are trying to be righteous will be protected. Quite the opposite; the "morality" of our ruling caste is directly opposed to our rights and liberties, to Christianity, to Western Civilization, to white people, and to Americanism. This is part of how the Z-man interprets the famous "evil party vs stupid party" routine. The Democrats are clearly the evil party, attempting non-stop to destroy all of those things mentioned above, but the Republicans are clearly the stupid party, because they refuse to accept, in spite of all of the evidence constantly in front of our eyes, that the Democrats are, in fact, evil. Or even if they accept it, they refuse to accept that anything different needs to be done about it to keep that evil from spreading and destroying us.

It is long past time for conservatives to recognize that the decades-long pattern of evil from the left is not just political disagreement; it is enemy action, and the enemy is actually the Devil himself, who has long been resentful that Western Civilization exists which (imperfectly) perpetuates Christian doctrine, and elevates the potential of the individual as literal Sons and Daughters of God. He's resentful of America that brought those ideas sufficiently to fruition that the environment was such that the Church could be restored here, among a people striving to live up to the true standards of Christian doctrine. And because the Devil is a petty narcissistic individual, he will not forget that or let it go. He's been eating away at the foundations of our liberties and righteousness since America was founded by Divine Providence and the Church was Restored, again by Divine Providence, in both cases in the face of stiff opposition from the forces of evil.

2 Nephi 28 addresses this idea:

20 For behold, at that day shall he rage in the hearts of the children of men, and stir them up to anger against that which is good.

21 And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell.

22 And behold, others he flattereth away, and telleth them there is no hell; and he saith unto them: I am no devil, for there is none—and thus he whispereth in their ears, until he grasps them with his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance.

23 Yea, they are grasped with death, and hell; and death, and hell, and the devil, and all that have been seized therewith must stand before the throne of God, and be judged according to their works, from whence they must go into the place prepared for them, even a lake of fire and brimstone, which is endless torment.

24 Therefore, wo be unto him that is at ease in Zion!

25 Wo be unto him that crieth: All is well!

Because we do not live in an "all is well" society, society will not protect you. The government will not protect you. The courts will not protect you. The police will not protect you. Your community may not protect you. Most of those are actively hostile towards the profession and practice of free religious liberty, especially if it is Christian, and especially if it is the true, restored Christian church, i.e. the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

And if those are hostile, the corporations are even more hostile yet, especially as they have embraced the doctrines of ESG, DEI, and wokeness that are deliberately—and this can be easily and readily observed by their fruits, as Christ himself commanded us to do—designed to attack Christianity and the people who's society has allowed it to be restored in its complete form and from there grow to eventually fill all the Earth.

Anyway, I wanted to talk more about a second point, but I don't want this post to become too long. Rather, I'll simply link to it, and with extreme brevity point out what to look for. Especially because we're in the Come Follow Me personal study curriculum going over the New Testament again, which I'm not as familiar with as I should be so that many details don't immediately come to mind like they do for the Book of Mormon, but a few broad patterns have always intrigued me. 

For instance, while the New Testament talks all of the time about the casting out of devils, we don't really recognize that as a thing in modern society. Is it something that simply doesn't happen very much anymore? Personally, I don't believe so. I think that many forms of mental illness were considered possession by devils in latter days, and that honestly we should trust the wisdom of the ancients more; rather than in our hubris assuming that there are perfectly natural explanations for mental illness and we don't need to profess supernatural evil as being related to them, it probably is. 

Now don't get me wrong. I don't believe that all mental illness is because of the activity of evil spirits, nor do I believe that all activity of evil spirits results in mental illness. But it is curious, is it not, that in this article here, there is a very interesting statistical correlation between evil, liberalism (especially extremist liberalism, i.e. wokeism) and mental illness. This would suggest circumstantially that there is a link between evil spirits bringing evil into the world through, among other things, mental illness. 

I've heard people who suffer from general anxiety disorder and depression talk about feeling like they are in their heads as spectators to their own emotions; knowing full well that what they were saying and doing was not reasonable, but unable to stop it. I think that there's a line somewhere between natural struggles and trials that people must deal with and those that are facilitated and exacerbated by forces that may not be entirely natural.

Anyway, here's the article: https://vdare.com/articles/it-s-official-again-leftists-particularly-leftist-women-are-nuts

Top 10 3e/3.5 Official Products

I watched a video recently that listed the vloggers top 10 3rd edition products. Given that 3rd Edition (both original 3e and the 3.5 revision) was the edition that I spent by far the most money on and have almost the entire run of official products, I thought I could do this, and maybe should just for the heckuvit.

I should point out, however, that I do not much like 3e anymore. It's a very rules-heavy, proscriptive system. Although it has a lot of flexibility relative to some earlier versions of D&D, that flexibility comes at the cost of giving you new rules for almost everything rather than simply not requiring unique rules for most things. I also feel (although I don't think this is unique to 3e, but I only experienced it first hand with 3e) that the game doesn't work very well after the first tier and a half or so of play. Middle high and higher levels—to say nothing of epic levels—don't even feel like the same game or setting anymore, and it becomes extremely tedious to both run and play.

I'm also not at all a fan of the combat system, which is kind of a tactical grid-based miniatures game inside the game of D&D; you literally stop playing D&D to play a combat minigame within the game. So, by the time we got to the later entries in the editions life-cycle, I was pretty over the game, to be honest. However, by that point, more of the products were less about new rules and mechanics and more about new ways to play the game, and cool "fluffy" products.

Because of this, I will pick very few of the books that focus on mechanics, unless they do something so unusual that they really kind of changed the way that I played the game. I will also not pick any of the core/basic rules, or any of the monster manual type books. To be honest, although those often got better as we got up to Monster Manual V and the Fiend Folio, I was less interested in them. Monster books were often books that third party d20 publishers could do better than Wizards themselves did, and as good as Monster Manual IV or V was compared to earlier entries, they still paled compared to, say, the Monsternomicon books by Privateer Press.

It should also be noted, of course, that this list is very subjective. This is just the books that either meant the most to me, or which I liked the most. I also will point out that my taste relative to D&D "norm" are probably kind of esoteric and unusual. I almost have as favorites stuff that other people do not, and I often dislike stuff that is otherwise very popular.

The other big chunk of 3e products that I'm not really analyzing or considering for inclusion here is the large number of Forgotten Realms products. I don't have a lot of those books, and I'm just really not into the FR very much. Not only would it not be fair to the products to consider them alongside others, but I also just don't know many of these products all that well.

And finally, don't overthink the specific ranking. I don't really like forced rankings all that much, because in general a more nebulous approach is better for me, where the actual rankings may shuffle over time, and are going to be fairly arbitrary anyway.

Two Runners Up

I actually made a list of potential books to include, and I came up with 12. I had already decided to to this as a top 10 list, so two of them have to be bumped down to runners up; below the top 10, but better than anything else in the oeuvre. 

• Oriental Adventures. While I'm not actually a huge fan of Orientalism, chinoiserie, or any of the other exotica fads which we've been guilt-tripped into thinking that we're racist if we admire other cultures, I still find this one has a lot of value. I also think that if you're like me, you just don't want a pseudo-Japanese setting, and if you're really woke, you find the whole concept offensive that it even exists. But, there's a fair number of pretty cool things in this book that I enjoyed reading about and considering how I might be interested in adapting to a different setting. If nothing else, some of the alternative classes, like the wu jen or shugenja are kind of interesting, and although I don't remember for sure, I think this is the game that first introduced us to the corruption mechanic which made the rounds throughout the rest of the edition.
• Unearthed Arcana. Because I've ditched the 3e system, this just doesn't have the same punch that it did when I first picked it up, but there are tons and tons of ideas on how to houserule your game to get different results contained in this book. Some of the ideas are better than others, but the whole concept was great. If you were willing to play 3e again, then this would be my first go-to to look for ways to tailor the game. Before adapting even more radical changes, this was a real game-changer for me.

Not quite D&D, but should have been

Here's a couple of official WotC products that are not actually part of the d20 line, but which I really liked and frequently borrowed elements from in my D&D games.

• Call of Cthulhu. Lots of people had a hard time getting their arms around the idea of a d20 alternative of this game, but I really loved it. It's a beautiful book, it's fun to read (well, I kind of skim a lot of the mechanics anymore), has great GM advice, and is just a great book. Most people don't really seem to be able to wrap their heads around how to run it as CoC, which is unfortunate, but I'll be honest; I almost like the game as a supplement for D&D than as a game in its own right. Although I would have liked to see it cleaned up and improved in a revision late in the d20 product cycle, I can understand why it wasn't done. And at the time, I may not have bought it anyway.
• d20 Modern. I actually went through quite a long phase where Dark•Heritage, the setting that preceded Dark Fantasy X, was meant to be played using d20 Modern + d20 Past rather than any type of D&D, because I could do it with significantly fewer houserules. I also really quite liked the organizations section of Urban Arcana. All in all, I think d20 Modern was an under-rated attempt to take the D&D rules and do something different with them. And because I wasn't a huge fan of the D&Disms in D&D, I thought it worked quite well for fantasy too.

TOP TEN

10. The Book of Vile Darkness. This book had a number of problems, but I always liked it because it added thematic stuff that was important to me in my darker fantasy games. It also was the first time the iconic demon lords and archdevils were described in d20. They were later superseded; in fact, everything in this book just about was eventually replaced by a better revised version. Sadly, the book suffered sometimes by assuming that really banal, cartoony villainy was the same thing as "vile darkness" while it ironically also suffered from dipping its toes in gratuitous stuff that was really little more than snuff film material. There were a few other sloppy mistakes, such as Demogorgon being hyena rather than mandrill headed in the art and text. But still, this was one of the early books that actually had some interesting and not completely generic flavor to it. I tend to be glass half full with it nowadays and see more the things that it did well rather than the things that it attempted but fell flat on.

9. Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. My favorite of the Expedition series, and the only one that isn't really a dungeon crawl. Granted, this is a remake of an older 1e module, and it was probably done ever better (by all accounts; I haven't read it yet) when it was remade into 5e's Curse of Strahd. However, this is the one where I really deep-dived the Ravenloft concept, and I thought that as a big mega-adventure or small campaign, it was one of the ones that I'd be the most inclined to actually try and run. As above, what makes it stand out is the less generic feel; it's got a strong tone, theme and plenty of detail. I prefer products with a tone, theme and detail that's useful rather than much of the stuff that's pretty generic, or which offer weak offerings on a theme (like the 3e environmental books mostly do, for instance.) Go bold, or go home.

8. Drow of the Underdark. I'm not a drow fan-boy, and when 3e launched, it seemed like drow fanboyism was kind of like disco fanboyism in 1979 before "Disco Demolition Night." It had fans, they were loud, but there was a growing backlash, or tiredness with the genre too. I'm sure drow are still kicking around in D&D. D&D nowadays seems to be full of all kinds of bizarre furry races and who knows what else. But, that said, a good drow product will remind you why they were such iconic and popular villains for so many years in D&D in the first place, and this is a pretty good drow product. It did have to compete with a third party Green Ronin, which is also a good product, but that said, it certainly still holds its own against it. In fact, these deep dives into a monster or villain type are among my favorite of the books from the 3e run; you'll notice that this is the first of three (or five, depending on how you're counting) that fit that bill.

7. Exemplars of Evil. This very late stage product is more about giving the players some specific NPC villains and their plots, motivations, goals, and organizations to be used as opponents in your game. There are several at various levels, and you could use them all and probably get a decent 1-20 level campaign going. They'll be pretty shallow if you do that, but it can be done. What you should do to get the best use of this product, is to pick a couple of your favorites, and use the material here as seed corn; you'll have to do some more work fleshing it out more fully to make it really work in your campaign. And to be fair, it says that in the book; it clearly intends for you to use this ideas in your own campaign by figuring out exactly how to integrate the material that it has. And, as per all too many D&D products, it spends much more time than is prudent detailing each villains "base" as a kind of smallish dungeon. It still has better ideas and more practical, useable material than most products of its type.

6. Lords of Madness. This monster book is a deep dive on about half a dozen or so different types of aberrations; beholders, neogi, mindflayers, aboleths, etc. While this is neither my favorite type of D&D monster, nor do I care as much as most about including iconic D&D-ish elements that are unique to D&D, nor do I really love cosmic horror as much as the next guy—especially if it's not really going to be too horrible, because you're meant to just fight the cosmic horrors and shout huzzah—this is still a really good book. In many ways, its format is very similar to that of Exemplars of Evil, along with an "ecology of" kind of dealio. This book actually made me want to use aberrations a little bit more than I otherwise would have been inclined to do, which is exactly what it should have done. Sadly; I really love undead, but the undead book in this series was underwhelming and didn't make the cut. 

5. Heroes of Horror. A book specifically designed to allow you to play D&D with a stronger dark fantasy theme, this book should have been right up my alley. And... well, it is right up my alley. The only concern I have about it is that by the time I got it, I already had better products that did the same thing from third parties. It feels a bit like baby steps away from the standard D&D paradigm rather than a real embrace of a horror or grimdark theme. I had the exact same problem with Cityscape, a product I really wanted to like but only kind of did, but I feel like Heroes of Horror did a better job and actually offered stuff that I like, hadn't already thought of in some cases, and is really useable. Even in my situation where I no longer use any 3e stuff at all (to be fair, one of the main conceits of m20, which even with the changes I've made, my game is based on) is that you can use any 3e stuff you want with minimal or even no real conversion needed, so maybe that's why it helps.

4. Elder Evils. Set up very much like Exemplars of Evil (and written by the same author) but focused more on epic, world-threatening threats. There's no "captain of the orcs" villains here for low level characters; these seeds are meant to go through a campaign (that probably does other things on the side) and end with something that would literally destroy the world showing up and being fought off a la the Avengers movies. I know this kind of high fantasy save the world characters as literal superheroes stuff is pretty popular (most of the adventure paths work that way too). It's not really quite my jam, but I get it, and I really like the villains (most of them) and feel like they have either iconic mythic resonance, or some other kind of really interesting hook to them. I like this book quite a bit.

3. Manual of the Planes. When I first got this, I wasn't really super familiar with Planescape yet, but I really liked this. I actually read this from time to time just to get excited about all of the exotic ideas that it has in it. To be fair; some of the ideas aren't as exotic as others. I don't really love the Great Wheel cosmology, which this book specifically details. But there are some great ideas and some great locations here. Even Dark Fantasy X borrows more than a little from stuff that I originally read in this book (well; I may well have originally read it in some 1e book, but it was this book that really made it gel for me.)

2. Eberron Campaign Setting. Eberron is the setting that was developed specifically for this edition of D&D, and is one of my favorite of the original settings. (It remains the only one that I've remixed to be useable with the Dark Fantasy X game to date, and probably the only one that I'll actually get around to doing.) While there are plenty of mechanics in this book, unfortunately, that's not really the focus of it; the focus is exploring and describing a campaign setting that has more of a theme than many other D&D campaigns, but not one that's so weird that only people who are really into the weirdness of it really get it (like Dark Sun, for instance.) I really like the setting, and I know that not everyone does. A lot of people very oddly (and incorrectly) characterize it as steampunk or something like that, which is frankly ridiculous. It does have an old-fashioned pulp kind of vibe, translated through the medium of D&D, and honestly, that's a good look on D&D. And who really needs yet another pseudo-Medieval D&D setting at this point? If you're not going to use Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms or one of the many others already in print, you're probably just making your own. 

1. Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss. This is it. My favorite 3e book. As noted, it's a monster book, but not just a catalog of monsters, but rather a deep dive into demons specifically. It has all of the demon lords that you expect, it has all kinds of cool stuff about the Abyss, about a few new demons, about how demons operate and what you can do with them, and it even has some of the best Lovecraftian stuff in it that any D&D book ever had in the form of the Black Scrolls of Ahm and its author. There are few books of any type in the TTRPG realm that has inspired me to find some way to use its contents than this one. I said before that I really like good villainous monsters, and demons and undead certainly fit the bill better than most. I was predisposed to like this book, but what really makes it sing isn't the subject matter but rather the adroitness with which it treats it. 

Deathbringer vs Dark Fantasy X

Because I'm strongly considering expanding the list of attributes in Dark Fantasy X from three to six: Strength, Dexterity and Mind would now be the standard D&D array of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma, I thought it worthwhile to have a look at some other OSR adjacent games that play very similarly to see how they're done. I already have Deathbringer, for instance, so I looked specifically at that one right away.

Yes, I know that Deathbringer and the Death Dealer are not exactly the same. Close enough, though.

First off, Deathbringer has no skills, proficiencies or anything like that; the ability score is all the bonus you get. Perhaps because of this, the ability score range is a little higher; at character creation, you can jack it up to as high as +6, and it can rise as high as +10. In Dark Fantasy X, the ability score bonuses are going to be about half that, although the skill bonus, at higher levels, can be that high or even a bit more. (Of course, that's kind of moot; I doubt I'd ever play higher than 5th or 6th level.) The math works out pretty well at the Deathbringer level, but I like the granularity of having skills. I'll probably keep my ability score generation very similar to what I'm doing now (just with more abilities) but change the skill increase to only happening on odd numbered levels rather than every level, which will effectively cut the increase in half and make it slower as well. Even levels will be where characters get a "class" boost, or feat, although if I dismantle the classes and make them simply be an a la carte menu of "class abilities", I'll have plenty to choose from there too.

I've never been clear why OSR and many OSR adjacent people are so down on skills. I've heard their explanation, but I don't think that they are correct. People don't assume that you can't do something if you don't have the skill noted on your sheet. Plus, in m20 (and d20, for that matter) anyone could attempt anything and you had a skill bonus whether you had the skill or not, because you had an ability bonus that was part of the cumulative skill bonus. Clearly if you didn't put ranks in a skill, you weren't going to have as high a bonus as someone who did. But that hardly meant that you couldn't do it. The rationale just wasn't there. 

However, I think if I'm expanding my abilities from three to six, I should probably expand my list of skills from five to... I dunno. Still less than ten. Today, Dark Fantasy X has Athletics, Communication, Knowledge, Subterfuge and Survival. I'm thinking of deleting renaming Knowledge to Investigate, renaming Subterfuge to Stealth, and adding Tinkering for all of your "disable device" needs. I've looked over some more OSR and OSR adjacent games that do have skills (like Lamentations of the Flame Princess) and I think that a big part of the problem with the list is that its still really just "Thief Dungeoneering proficiencies." Given that I have little interest in that paradigm, much of the specialization that that game has that mine lacks is specialization that I'm not interested in. The latter game also has Bushcraft, which I think may well be a better name than Survival, although that'd also just be a name swap only—everything else about it would remain the same. I'm thinking of a few other potential new or split skills, but honestly, I'll probably leave it at that and keep the skill list down to six as well. But then I'll have a nice symmetry; six abilities and six skills, and you mix one of each for every check of pretty much every kind that you make. That'll also certainly make modifying my character sheet easier, for whatever that's worth.

Otherwise; I note that my spellcasting critical failure rates are harsher than in Deathbringer. In that game, the spell merely fizzles half of the time. In Dark Fantasy X, a natural 1 is always a more serious failure than that.

I've also talked about rejiggering some stuff with the monsters. This won't be a huge deal in terms of what it will make different, but it will probably be a more time-consuming process than I'd like. Other than that; it's just a question of spending the time to do it and making sure that I don't leave any leftover references to things that changed. Unfortunately, my schedule is a little bit overly complicated lately, so I won't have time on the weeknights this week, and at least the next two weekends will probably be too busy too. But I should be able to make time within the next three weeks tops to finally make all of these updates to the rules (assuming, again, that I don't change my mind at the last minute and not make some of them. I'm pretty sure that I won't, but I'm not 100% sold on this change still.) Then, it's draw the new map, and close the book on CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER until such time as I either run it, or use it as an outline to start up a book or two.

Fantasy Yog-Sothothery

I'm really not a fan of the Age of Sigmar setting, especially because the original Warhammer world setting was so good. It also seems like a really bizarro business decision to get rid of your classic setting and move to a new untested one literally at the same time you're launching a hit video game set in the old setting in the form of Total War. 

Although from a business perspective it's a much smaller deal, the relaunching of the Enemy Within TTRPG campaign in a "director's cut" format was also at this same time. The old Warhammer world lives on, and in fact seems to live on bigger and better than ever in some ways, during the Age of Sigmar. Which, as near as I can tell, has not really been a super big hit. Maybe I'm just missing all of the Age of Sigmar lore videos on YouTube, and whatnot, but the buzz for the rebooted setting seems to be low energy, while there's still a lot going on with the old setting.

That's neither here nor there, though. The old setting is well documented, so regardless of what you think of one or other other of the Warhammer settings, the old setting is certainly useable. Warhammer sometimes suffers from confusion of tone. When its at its best, it's dark fantasy, the literal origin of the term grimdark, and works as Yog-Sothothery; literal Lovecraftian horror. Other times, it's very tongue in cheek humor, puns and silliness. Not that that doesn't have its place too, even occasionally in a dark fantasy setting, but I'll venture to say that Warhammer as a setting is much more famous and much more beloved for its horror and darkness than it is for its humor and silliness.

Of course, Lovecraft himself wrote plenty of fantasy. Here, for the fun of it, is a Lovecraftian fantasy story from Youtube, next to a Warhammer Yog-Sothothery story, again from Youtube (with a few minutes of framing, mostly after the story is over.) You'll probably note that if anything, the Warhammer story is a more effective horror story than the Lovecraft one is. Not only that, the skaven, when not silly and goofy, are a more effective horror element than something like Deep Ones anyway. I'd venture to say that most people are more icked out by rats than by fish.

Now, I'm on record as saying Lovecraft was very influential, but it's not because he was a great writer; it's because he had innovative new ideas. It's not actually shocking to me that a Warhammer story would be better than a Lovecraft story. Of course, to be fair, "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" has a similar title and similar theme to "The Doom of Kavzar"—and even a similar plot, although the latter is clearly riffing on the Pied Piper story—but Sarnath isn't really meant to be one of the horror stories either. So there is that.

Musk and Mirsky

I have both Vox Day and The Z-man blog links on the side there. They both talk about similar things, and they tend to say similar things about them, but also not really. I tend to quote the Z-man more frequently, because I think he's more articulate and his rhetoric is more effective. Plus, his range of topics seems to be more broad. Vox is sharper than the Z-man, and has more truly innovative things to say, but that doesn't mean all of his material is of equal value. Plus, I think that Vox tends to jump to endpoints on the spectrum more easily and readily, which isn't always as helpful as he thinks it is. He's quick to point to Elon Musk, for example, and see in him a mendacious ticket taker playing us all false as a rearguard for the Establishment. The Z-man has what I suspect is a more accurate perspective of seeing him as a reformer within the system, such as Pyotr Mirsky, the Minister of the Interior for Tsarist Russia in 1904-5. He, like many others in late stage Tsarist Russia (and counterparts in late stage Monarchist France before the French Revolution) was part of the system, but that association doesn't mean that he was a villain. At least not necessarily. Mirsky saw that the system had problems, and that the complaints against it (which had already ended in the murder of both his predecessor and the tsar's own grandfather) had some merit, and that the Establishment had drifted from whatever standard of noblesse oblige that they should have practiced. More to the point, he saw that without some give, the system would face continued pressure and the situation would get worse.

Mirsky is probably not to blame for the fact that his compromise and reform strategy didn't work. Not only did he face too much opposition—from both sides—to effectively enact a reformist approach, but quite often by the time a reformer comes along to try and save the system, the system is already dead and just coasting on inertia. There aren't reforms that can save it anymore beyond a certain point.

But the fact that a reformer is both loyal to the system which produced him as well as sympathetic to those who are abused and victimized by the system, and aware of the system's problems doesn't make them party to the abuses of the system. In this sense, Vox is wrong about Musk and the Z-man is right. Vox will see through that to the inevitability of the system collapse—and therefore the desirability of the collapse happening sooner rather than later—and see any opposition to the collapse for any reason as enemy action. Which is a little ironic, as he also frequently preaches the mantra of not letting the desire for perfection stand in the way of a good angle or good ally, just because they're not perfect. Musk is a reasonably good ally in some ways. He's not a snake in the grass pretending to be an ally like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson, he's just an imperfect reformer from within the system, like Mirsky. Like Trump himself was; when he's on the right track, he should be encouraged to continue along it. When he's on the wrong one, he should be called out for such. The zeitgeist hasn't reached the point where the system is going to be torn down, and pointing out that it is inevitable that it will reach that point, or even calling to hasten our arrival to that point is not wise nor prudent. 

Anyway; some edited portion of the Z-man's comparison of Musk to Mirsky.

Mirsky was not a reformer because he had dreams of creating a liberal paradise to replace tsarist Russia. He was a reformer because he worried that the lack of reform would result in more radicalism, like the sort that had claimed the life of his predecessor and the life of the Tsar’s grandfather. For Mirsky and his supporters within the system, liberal reform was a way to address some of the issues of the people, while also maintaining the legitimacy of the tsarist system.

Uncertain times always produc[e] [sic] men like Mirsky. He was not the only reformer around Tsar Nicholas before the revolution. There were others but all of them failed to arrest the process that eventually led to revolution. Reformers were around the King Louis XVI and among the aristocracy prior to the French Revolution. They failed for the same reason Mirsky failed. There were men who feared reform would go too far and there were those who feared reform would not go far enough.

This is what should come to mind while watching Elon Musk try to navigate his way through the current crisis. Musk is a reformer at heart. He bought Twitter because he thought it was drifting away from its essential purpose which is to allow for free and open debate about the issues of the day. His inhospitable takeover of the company was driven by a genuine concern for what is happening in the West. Like all reformers, Musk fears what could happen if current trends continue.

While Musk may be the world’s richest man and the most famous of the plutocracy, he is just one voice among many. The managerial elite is thousands, and the managerial class is millions of people. This new class is analogous to the aristocratic classes that existed in 18th century France and 19th century Russia. The best Musk or any liberal reformer can do is influence the people in the system. This is what Musk is attempting with his mild reforms of Twitter.

In this illiberal age, Elon Musk has appointed himself to be the minister of speech on-line and is attempting to roll back the reactionary controls that were put in place by the ruling class over the last decade. While Twitter is not the internet of old, Musk has rolled back much of the censorship. He still bans certain accounts, mostly as a way to tell the reactionaries that his reforms will not go too far. Otherwise, he has had a light hand on the censorship of his platform.

This is where that old revolutionary vice shows its jaws. The side that fears the reforms will go too far has successfully organized an advertising boycott. State sanctioned pressure groups like Media Matters have organized other pressure groups to harass companies that were advertising on Twitter. Those companies dropped their ads, resulting in a fifty percent decline in ad revenue. Musk has been forced to hire a girl boss approved by the reactionaries to be his new CEO.

Meanwhile, the other jaw of the vice sees what is happening and assumes Musk will eventually be brought to heel. Open sites like Gab continue to flourish, building on the alternative platform model. Amusingly and a bit ironically, the hard-core censors are abandoning Twitter for the opposite reason. Mass media companies, no longer assured of artificial reach on Twitter, are also jumping ship. Musk is facing the same dilemma all reformers face when taking the middle position.

In the end, Mirsky was like all prior reformers in that he was both right and wrong about what was happening. He was correct that radicalism was spreading due to the inability of the system to address the issues of the times. He was wrong in thinking that the solutions to the problems of the system could be found in the system. Just as there was no saving King Louis XVI and the old order, there was no saving Tsar Nicholas II and the system that made him possible.

This is where liberal reformers like Musk find themselves. On the one hand, they are correct in fearing a rising tide of radicalism. He rightly sees that it is driven in part by the abuses of the ruling class, of which he is a part. The trouble is the system cannot withstand open debate. It cannot risk questioning the shibboleths that sustain the moral framework at the heart of the managerial system. In the end, reformers will be crushed by that old vice that has destroyed prior reformers.

More characters

I don't really have much of an update to make of any kind. I'm on a conference call with a couple of Japanese engineers, but when I'm done, I'm going to be tired both physically I got a lousy night's sleep last night, and I just did a bunch of yardwork an hour or two ago) and mentally from working so long. I'll probably veg with either a book or on Youtube. But I haven't made a new post in a few days, so I thought I'd send a few new Hero Forge images, just for the heckuvit.

An improved Zorro

A color and armor study

An attempt to make a replica of sorts of some artwork for a fat merchant character

An alternative model for Stefan... who may get a name change

An older character based on most of the same elements as that alternative Stefan

A selection of non-Dark Fantasy X Hero Forge models

As the title says. A selection from my collection. Some of these I found in the library, most I made myself.

A ghost astronaut

Lord of the Rings Black Riders

A musketeer. If you watch one of the many adaptations of The Three Musketeers, you may possibly be forgiven for forgetting that a musketeer is so named for his iconic use of a musket rather than a rapier. Although he probably carried a "small sword" too.

I mean, c'mon. I saw this in the library and had to have it.

Post apoc guy

Basic Gallic warrior

Ichabod Crane

Old Man Henderson, kind of a meme character

A couple more post apocs

Princess Aura of Flash Gordon fame

A Red Wizard of Thay

Skeletor, obviously

I also play Trainstation 2 as a timekiller game on my phone. The current event is a Mad Max themed one, and this is "the guy" for the Trainborn faction

My daughter's half-orc character Verity in her husband's Curse of Strahd game.

Zorro. Sadly, the way the mask was created means I can't get a hat that I like, but I may redo that with the new decal features that are available now.