New names

Well, it's official. CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER will become SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT, and I will officially update all of the post tags to reflect that (although not the text of the posts.) Obviously, the city of Waychester will be renamed Garenport. Dunsbury will also be renamed Barrowmere, reflecting the barrows that are part of the introductory adventure, as well as it's location on the shores of a decent-sized lake.

Barrowmere in the fall

This weekend (which for me includes Monday, in case I don't get it done tomorrow), I intend to draw the campaign map for SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT, which will feature the revised and somewhat expanded treatment of the Hill Country area, and it will feature these two names as well, for the first time.

Changing Waychester to Garenport obviously has a significant change on the whole campaign, but Dunsbury actually featured relatively little, so changing it to Barrowmere just makes it more evocative and grimdark. Grimishdarkish, at least.

I've given plenty of thought to my own embrace—or lack thereof—of grimdark, and I've come to believe that while I like dark fantasy; what I call an equal parts hybrid of fantasy and horror, and I like low fantasy; the grubbier, sword & sorcery or even more "normal" aspect of fantasy rather than larger than life superheroes saving the world, and I like other aesthetic subgenres that are near to grimdark, that grimdark itself is a bridge too far. Two quotes from the Infogalactic article on grimdark highlight why:

Adam Roberts described it as fiction "where nobody is honourable and Might is Right", and as "the standard way of referring to fantasies that turn their backs on the more uplifting, Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealized medievaliana, and instead stress how nasty, brutish, short and, er, dark life back then 'really' was". But he noted that grimdark has little to do with re-imagining an actual historic reality and more with conveying the sense that our own world is a "cynical, disillusioned, ultraviolent place".

Roberts, Adam (2014). Get Started in: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Hachette UK. p. 42. ISBN 9781444795660.

Liz Bourke considered grimdark's defining characteristic to be "a retreat into the valorisation of darkness for darkness's sake, into a kind of nihilism that portrays right action ... as either impossible or futile". This, according to her, has the effect of absolving the protagonists as well as the reader from moral responsibility.

Bourke, Liz (17 April 2015). "The Dark Defiles by Richard Morgan". Strange Horizons.

I've written before about how much I dislike the George Rape Rape Martin style of storytelling, and how much I disliked my one novel of Joe Abercrombie's that I read. (Although I do like Glen Cook's Black Company. Maybe that's not quite all the way to grimdark, though—just a neighbor of it.)