Back from out of state

I'm back home now from an extended out of state trip. While I took my work laptop with me, and did work many of the days that I was away, I didn't do anything else hobby related, because I do all that on my personal computer instead. In fact, although I took a few vacation days, this was not a vacation at all; I drove out to Boise, where my oldest son and his little family were living, and helped them move back into our house temporarily so he can finish his masters degree, keep interviewing for new jobs, and not get sucked into another year contract for rent in one of the most expensive real estate markets around. 

I'll get back into the swing of things tonight or tomorrow, a little bit, but here's a quickie. I'm order to celebrate black culture, you first need to accept what black culture actually is and means. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-12463059/NANA-AKUA-call-Notting-Hill-Carnival-celebration-black-culture-insult.html

What does humanocentrism mean?

From a setting perspective, I've long said that Dark Fantasy X, and its predecessor Dark•Heritage (or at least some of the iterations of it) are deliberately humanocentric. In fact, not just humanocentric, but "American-like" in a way that only people my age or older will remember; i.e. Eurocentric. The humans will really be running the show, and the other races are just there for some gratuitous exotica here and there. I think gamers (and me, for that matter) do want options racially, just to give them something new to latch on to from time to time while roleplaying, but the exotic races, i.e., non-human or demihuman races, don't play a super major role in the setting or campaign. At best, the fact that there's a small number of them in an area, possibly creating conflict because of their presence, would be one of many potential plot points in a campaign.

This is very much at odds with how the 4e and beyond design direction of the game has gone, where they want to minimize conflicts between races, because it makes SJWs sad, and maximize diversity because that makes SJWs feel smug and superior. Even my human races represent about four or five "real world" human races: British/American colonists that are like Robin Hood or Ivanhoe era people in an American frontier-like environment (Hillmen), Austrians/Germans as an upper class in a Transylvania-like country (Timischers), a Balkan/Romanian-like race that's the lower class in the same Transylvania-like country (Tarushans) (and a more Dark Ages post apocalyptic-like tribal long-lost cousins of the same in the Hill Country(Tazitta Tribes)), and a Cossack-like race in the steppes and sage prairies (Drylanders). There may be a handful of other races that come from "off map" that play minor roles in the game from time to time; the Mediterranean Nizrekh people, the Northlanders, the savage Inutos, etc. but I won't detail them, and I wouldn't support them as PCs until after quite some time into the using the setting in game. Just acknowledging that they exist is as far as I'm willing to go now, and none of them play any role whatsoever in the first campaign, SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT, although there's a possibility that one leg of the 5x5 for the third campaign, MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTES will at least make reference to the Nizrekhs. And if I get around to a 4th 5x5, I do have some Hyperborean ideas in mind, where the savage Inutos, at least, would play a role.

Drylander Cossack

Tazitta ruffian

Tarushan thief

Timischer merchant

Hillman militia

So how does that jive really, with the presence of the other races in the setting, other than what I said above? No game is going to feel very humanocentric if no PCs are human, regardless of what the rest of the setting is doing. In fact, the PCs will look like a traveling circus relative to the more familiar setting around them.

I've mentioned this before, but this is part of what I've decided to do to address this:

• Nobody can start a game with any race other than human. Other races can only be "unlocked" down the line once the players have had a chance to become acquainted with them in game.
• I originally had nine races in the game and one in the appendix; I now have five and five. There are only four other races besides human in the main game itself: grayman, kemling, surtur, and woodwose. The dhampir, orcs, goblins, seraphs and wendaks are all appendix races. Realistically, being in the main game or the appendix is still in the game, but this should hopefully continue to push the idea that most of these races are fringe options, not mainstream ones.
• I do, however, still have some important iconics that are non-human; Kimnor the blood brother of Dominic is a grayman from Lomar, and Cailin, Ragnar's young wife, was turned into a dhampir after being attacked by a vampire—but the attack was thwarted before she was either killed or turned into a vampire herself, and she was transformed into a dhampir instead. The whole dhampir thing is a plot point; the whole race exists to be a plot point rather than a "normal" race. The same is also pretty much true for the seraph race.

In other words, humanocentric means humans are at the center of pretty much every question, but they're not literally the only races in the game. My level of humanocentrism is greater than The Lord of the Rings, but less than Howard's Conan stories.

The reason I bring this up, and it's not the first time I've mentioned it, is because it seems to me that the RPG crowd isn't going that same direction. The recent D&D movie had cat people and bird people prominently featured. It almost seems like they don't want to have humans at all, unless of course they can be "diverse" humans, by which they mean excluding white people. But I just saw a funny video of Kyle Brink's infamous "white people can't leave fast enough (but I'm not quitting my job)" audio overlaid over a video of people coming and going through the doors of the main halls of GenCon. Out of a good couple hundred people I saw, there were maybe a dozen women and girls (all white), two guys who looked Hispanic, and one guy who looked Asian. Literally everyone else was a white guy. That's still the audience for D&D. In spite of whatever "sexy" (and that's in some very serious air quotes) diverse players you may see online or even in Stranger Things, the reality is what it's always been; D&D is primarily a white guy hobby, with a few nerdy girls, most of whom probably enjoy it, but also most play it because their boyfriend or husband does. Any product that pretends that that fact isn't actually true is going to be a harder sell going forward. If there's anything 2023 has taught us is that woke has peaked, and normal people are pushing back against it.

Of course, it'll be quite a while before that zeitgeist picks up enough steam to be noticeable in everyday stuff, like the makeup of characters in art in D&D products. If it ever goes back to normal. But you know. After the flop after flop of woke movies, TV shows, streaming shows, Bud Light, Target and more, it's clear that ESG needs to rebrand itself because it has become toxic as it is. But make no mistake; the people who pushed it won't go away or learn from their mistakes. In their mind, the only mistake is that they need to rebrand it and try again, doubling down as SJWs always do.

Anyway, I didn't mean to wander into this kind of territory, but on the other hand, it's probably a little bit inevitable. I think my appreciation for humanocentrism and Eurocentrism is my rejection of wokeness. I was never woke, of course—far from it. I started off life with the Conservative Lite worldview that conservatives in Generation X typically had, and rapidly during the Obama years started realizing and accepting more and more red pill narratives as fundamentally more true than any other narratives, because they fit both my experience and actual real data. Maybe in the 90s and early 00s I thought fantasy based on Merry Olde England, Norse or Celtic baselines had become a bit boring because almost everything I'd read up to that point had been so, but my reasons for looking away from white, Eurocentric fantasy had nothing to do with the reasons wokesters did so, and ultimately I discovered that fantasy that is mostly based on the cultures of my own heritage is vastly to be preferred to something else after all. 

Also, although I'd always read a lot of older pulp era and other fantasy and science fiction, and always appreciated it, I've almost come to the realization that it's just about the only fantasy and science fiction that is really great, and the secondary wave of stuff in the 60s-90s or so had some high points too. Fantasy and science fiction today is absolutely terrible today, with a few notable independent or at least pseudo-independent authors. I'm mostly reading old stuff, and Kindle authors these days.

Sigh. The wreck of the SJWs cultural vandalism will take a long time to repair, assuming that there's anything like an America left when we get around to that.

Dark Fantasy X Race Deep Dive: Woodwoses

The woodwoses, or 'woses (or simply woses) as they are sometimes called, are an unusual demihuman race in the Dark Fantasy X setting that are the descendants of ancient werewolves. Today, the curse of lycanthropy is very diluted, and isn't really a "curse" per se to most of them; rather, they are simply a race of human-like people that have some unusual characteristics because of the ancestry that they have. This lycanthropic heritage makes them slightly more animalistic; they tend to be somewhat hairy, occasionally bordering on furry, walk with a stoop, but they are strong, have sharp teeth and eyes and ears, a keen sense of smell, and are very adept at the wilderness. In fact, most of them feel uncomfortable spending too much time in urban settings, and they often wander as part of that uncomfortableness.

Woodwoses have no real homelands of their own. By nature, they are unlikely to band together in organizations larger than a modest sized tribe or clan. Maybe of these clans live quiet lives far away from humans or other demihumans in the deep forests that stretch across the Three Realms; the Wolfwood in particular is fairly thick with them, but they also live in the Chokewater Forest, the Garenkarst Woods, and the Bitterwood. Not all of them live in the forests, though—there are tribes in the pinyon/juniper scrublands of the Boneyard. Of course, not all woodwoses live in tribes in the wilderness; the ones that you're actually most likely to encounter are the homesteaders who live in the rural areas, mingled with humanity. The Copper Hills and the Garen Hills in particular have many such woodwose homesteaders, and for the most part they reject the clan life, and are welcomed by their farmer and homesteader neighbors, who value their greater skill in the wilderness when it comes to hunting and providing.

Woodwose homesteader couple

The tribal woodwoses aren't necessarily as friendly, of course. They are rather insulated, by choice, and when they do interact with the outside world, they're often viewed with suspicion or even hostility because of their tendency towards banditry or other hostility towards anyone traveling through their territory. In addition to this, woodwoses are often associated with organized crime in urban areas; there is a long tradition of woodwoses being the "muscle" for cells or pockets of the Chersky Mafia.

This tendency towards wandering and crime means that unknown woodwoses are often looked at askance in communities where they are not known, sometimes most especially by any more settled woodwoses already in the community. They tend to feel that they have worked very hard to integrate themselves into their communities, in spite of being outsiders by race, and don't want anyone coming along and jeopardizing it with bad behavior. However, what many wandering woodwoses do is follow a pretty routine route, and while they may not stay in one place, they are well known by the various communities that they pass through, and their ability to bring news and reports of conditions outside of the community is valued, and their judgement is often trusted.

Deep in the Wolfwood and (allegedly) in the Bitterwood are tribes of woodwoses that have full-blown werewolves as their chiefs or shamans, and they practice strange cults to the Moon and to lycanthropy generally. These are the most feared woodwoses, and some believe that they will kidnap isolated farmers and homesteaders, and those that they don't kill may become infected with werewolfism themselves. Because of this, in Timischburg in particular, and farther to the north, woodwoses are much less likely to be seen positively than in the Hill Country.

Below is a selection of woodwose characters, just to give a better example of what their physical appearance is like

While of course there are many personality types among the woodwoses, there are three stereotypes, and the majority of woodwoses seem to belong to one of these three personalities:

— loners and introverts who have few friends, are quiet and stoic, and prefer to spend their time on isolated homesteads, or even in the wilderness.

— koryos packs, who model their behavior on wolf packs. Somewhat jingoistic and often hostile, these will be drawn to other woodwoses, and see most other people as marks or prey. Many of the urban thugs who work with the Mafia belong to this personality type.

— the final, and most likely to be encountered frequently by hillmen in particular are the loyal seconds; they don't crave leadership, but they crave integration into a community, where they are extraordinarily loyal to the community and strive to be seen as trusted and useful members.

Like all of the demihuman races, woodwoses have a curse that occasionally manifests. In this case, it is a lingering trace of their lycanthropy. During full or nearly full moons, their behavior can occasionally become erratic. They will be at -1 on all d20 checks, except for in combat where they will be a +1. They will also get sick and have further penalties if exposed to (or wounded by) silver. This isn't meant to be a penalty applied universally; in fact, it shouldn't be a factor at all unless you (as GM or player) decide that you want that to be a plot point or conflict to explore; it otherwise happens so infrequently as to not be something that would otherwise need to be defined.

This is maybe a little bit shorter than most of the other Race Deep Dives. In reality, the woodwoses have always lacked the same kind of history as most other races. They aren't a discrete population group, except for some of the tribes deep in the wilderness, but have rather been always drawn out of regular human communities during their origin as werewolves, and even as their werewolf curse started fading, they tended to reintegrate, or remain integrated, as the case might have been, with other human communities. While not always trusted or welcomes, especially in the early days when their association with werewolves made them much more dangerous, they're never had their own homelands, or been completely disassociated with human communities, which means that in many ways there is less to say about them. Even now, their relationship, although maybe not quite as tight as they would like, with the human communities around them defines the woodwoses more than their connection to other woodwoses.

What would you do if your wife died?

Not that long ago, my wife and I were out with some friends of ours (we retroactively discovered that the husband of that couple is my wife's 4th cousin, actually, so they're relatives too—but they were friends first) who, like us, are facultative empty nesters. And as we were eating or hiking or whatever else we were doing, we were talking, of course. The question somehow came up; what would you do if your spouse died? The scenario being, that it happened relatively quickly and suddenly, with the surviving widow or widower not being really enough older than we are now to make that a variable to consider. So, we're in our early or even very early 50s, our kids are out of the house and (mostly) out of the state, and we're suddenly on our own. Maybe even with a nice chunk of life insurance or some other cash payment as a result of the death of our spouse, giving us exactly enough freedom to quit our jobs early and go do... whatever it is that we're going to do.

When it came my turn to say, I decided that I'd embrace something, at least in the short term, that I know my wife has no interest in; getting a trailer or tiny house, and traveling the country for a few years, seeing places that I want to see, and just hanging around sightseeing and getting acquainted with the country—especially the Rocky Mountain west and desert southwest, where my true love is—in a much more intimate fashion than I've been able to when I live east of the Mississippi and work a regular full-time salaried job still. I'd probably get tired of that after 2-3 years tops, though, and then what?

Then, maybe I'd buy a little plot of land in the country near some nice town like Sheridan or Thermopolis or even Riverton (maybe; there's a lot of anti-white bigotry from the Indians nearby) and camp my trailer there. With a shed onsite, I could store the rest of my stuff, and live indefinitely a quiet, retiring life. I'd be close enough to my kids out West that I can go see them pretty easily whenever I want to, and know my grandkids quite well and my daughters- and son-in-law, but far enough away that I'm not in their hair all the time (or vice versa). I can spend as much time as I like outdoors, hiking and exploring, I can write, I can live a quiet, modest life doing things that I love; maybe get into gardening with a little greenhouse, picking up fishing and hunting as hobbies to support myself without needing to worry about money, the infrastructure, the distribution networks of the grocery stores, etc. I can live near people who are friendly and helpful when needed, mostly, but who will also respect my privacy and let me do things on my own my own way without trying to drag me into the longhouse, since that is not really at all the Wyoming way. 

I might even find some low-paying but also low stress part time job that I could do to have a little bit of socialization outside of going to Church on Sunday and calling my kids, as well as to make sure that I don't have to worry about my modest bills catching up to me before my 401(k) and social security can kick in. That's still many years away, after all. Better yet if I can pay the bills with YouTube revenue or book sale royalties... but first I have to build a successful van life YouTube channel, or something like that, and actually write books that sell.

Would I be lonely and bored sometimes? No doubt. I get lonely and bored when my wife goes out of town for a few days. Earlier this summer, she spent two weeks unexpectedly and with little warning out west helping my son, who broke his leg and couldn't drive, couldn't walk, couldn't go to work, couldn't go to class, couldn't go much of anywhere, really. There were some nice things about having the house to myself for two weeks, sure—but mostly I was kind of lonely and bored and called her a lot, when I wasn't stressed out about craziness going on at work. (I'd much rather have been lonely and bored than stressed about work.) But given the circumstances, I think that's probably how I'd shake out. And given the circumstances, I'd probably be fairly happy with that outcome.

Hopefully I could find a good gaming group, though. Even if it's just online. That's one thing that I miss right now. It'd be even more important if I'm on my own.

Dark Fantasy X on Youtube

For Youtube; more faces

I spent just a small amount of time yesterday further customizing my Hero Forge model of myself a little bit. I think it's a bit better now than it was, and is a reasonably good approximation of what I really look like. Then, I played around with all of the face poses. I kind of liked the sliders that Hero Forge used to have rather than these face poses, but I believe that there are ways to further customize the face poses; I just haven't quite played around with it enough to figure out the best way to do so.

In any case, I have all of these now; they'll work well for YouTube thumbnails and other tasks of that ilk. I might use them off and on for visual interest in blog posts too. Maybe.

(In retrospect, my eyebrows are probably too big. I do keep them trimmed; this is more what they would look like if I didn't, however. But at this point, I'm not interested in making further updates, now that I've generated all of these images.)

Men and Women

I've been reading a collection that I bought on Kindle for super cheap called Swords Against Cthulhu that purports to be  "old-fashioned" sword & sorcery fiction, but newly written by new writers, that focuses on Lovecraftian horrors in particular.  I actually got a compilation of three volumes of it for the discount price of $3.99, I think. As such, so far (59% into the first volume) I think I might still have been ripped off. Some of this stuff is among the worst fiction I've read in decades. I actually think when I was young, stupid, and the internet itself was young and stupid that I routinely read better fanfic of stuff in the 90s on Usenet and in other collections.

That may not be entirely fair. Not all of the stories are terrible. But I've yet to read one that I would recommend bothering with too, and some of them are extremely bad. The one I read most recently was called "Sword of Lomar". It wasn't the worst of the bunch by far, but it does indulge one of the worst trends of modern fiction; treating women as if they're interchangeable widgets with men, and casting them as superheroic action-grrls. Action-grrls, and their close ideological cousins, smug grrlbosses, rate among the absolute worst tropes of recent years. Not only is almost every single one of them insufferable, unlikeable, and off-putting, but it's also starting to become a bit of a joke how woke writers are inserting them everywhere where it makes no sense for them to exist. The superheroic action grrlboss character in "Swords of Lomar" seemed to  have been deliberately written and described to fit the imagery of the flame princess, from the B/X clone Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Although for all I know, that might be a coincidence; lots of nerdy guys have a major hard-on for redheads. I don't pretend to know much about that game other than a few second-hand reports I've had of it that it's actually mechanically not very different from B/X, but that its claim to fame is a kind of "grindhouse" gratuitously grimdark tone. And that its mascot is a superheroic pale-skinned red-headed action grrl.

In any case, in "Sword of Lomar" the fact that the main character was a woman was inconsequential, because at no point was her sex important; it just was because. She was written exactly like a man, and a Mary Sue man at that. So, it was kind of a silly affectation, but didn't really make the story any worse or better in a significant way.  The story was pretty mid.  It was just an excuse to write action scenes, but there was little if anything beyond that that was consequential.

However, the other night I also watched Disney's 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty. In addition to its artistic value (the tapestry-esque backgrounds are really, truly stunning works of visual art, and the adapted Tchaikovsky score is a brilliant example of Romantic era classical music) there are other reasons to praise this movie as well. Curiously, it was very expensive for the time, and didn't make back its budget in its initial release; although decades of re-releases have turned a tidy profit for Disney on the project, and it has really come to be appreciated for its artistic merit. One of the reasons I love it is that the titular character, Princess Aurora (also known by her "witness protection" alias of Briar Rose) is so incredibly charming and feminine. It's simply impossible not to like this girl. My wife, who briefly walked by while I was watching it on her way out to meet with one of her girlfriends for an "eat dinner and talk for hours" dates made a sarcastic remark about the improbability of falling in love at first sight because that's the scene I was on as she briefly walked by, but the reality is that Princess Aurora effortlessly makes the audience fall in love with her in moments. It's not unbelievable that Prince Phillip would do so as well after just watching her sing and dance for a few minutes. Maybe I'm just letting myself go because it's a Disney fairytale adaptation, so my inner romantic is coming out. I don't expect it to have deep, realistic relationships between characters.

Phillip himself is a charming fellow, as far as Disney princes go. Most of them are just passive cameos; the princess's reward for being so virtuous and feminine, but Phillip, as my daughter is fond of saying, actually goes out and earns his place at the princess’s side. Something Cinderella and Snow White's princes notably did not do. Then again, they were already princes. They brought plenty to the table without doing a darn thing in terms of marriageable collateral. But again; yet another reason to prefer this movie to any other classic Disney fairy tale princess movie. (Tangled has a totally different vibe, but is another one that is at least pretty recommendable. Again, in part because of the charming main characters and their chemistry together.)

In any case, Aurora’s femininity and virtue is in stark contrast with modern characters' feminism which is off-putting, unlikeable, smug, arrogant, and more importantly, unrealistic in every way. She is absolutely not anything like a Rey or a Captain Marvel, or any of the other forgettable (at best) and unappealing characters that have vandalized our current crop of pop culture. Reading the one story and watching the other within a short 12-hour or less window really put in context for me the contrast between the two tropes. And for some data from another interesting angle; the popularity of the Barbie movie, in spite of its toxic feminism, is based on the fact that it gives women something that they want, which all of the "strong female characters", i.e. women pretending to be third rate men, don't do. It gives them a movie which at least treats them like women. And then it tells them to be demanding, obnoxious, smug, self-absorbed, narcissistic, bratty little princesses. But at least its not coming from an angle of telling them that they need to be Fake Men.

There's a lesson here for writers, especially those in Hollywood, if they could get off their entitled butts, stop striking, and start working again: stop trying to pretend that men and women are the same. Stop trying to pretend that women are only "good" if they’re acting like petty, demanding, third rate fake men and men are only good if they act like simpy betas and third rate fake women. The sooner you stop trying to rewrite reality, the sooner you'll be able to actually produce something that people will want to consume again.

In a related note, Vox Day recently made a post about the nature of women and men and the relationships between them. He quoted extensively from Florence Nightingale, and made the point that too many men are foolish romantics who expect something from their women that most of them won't get: unconditional love. Nightingale's quote, while accurate, is also pessimistic and focuses on the worst.

In reality, nobody—men or women—are likely to give very much unconditional love. Relationships are like contracts in a way; both parties expect to get something that they need out of the affair. I've been married for almost thirty years now (next summer) and it is abundantly clear to me that our relationship was strongest and best when we made substantial efforts to give each other what the other person needed. It was weakest and shakiest when we didn't care or know what the other person needed, and tried to do what we wanted, and then expected appreciation for things that the other person didn't want or need. I expect to continue in our marriage for another thirty years and beyond, but that's because we've learned that endless self-sacrifice without "compensation", for lack of a better word, of what we need as well, is a recipe for failure. So it's not exactly fair to single women out for wanting something out of a marriage or relationship, and being dissatisfied if they don't get it. I'm confident that that's a two-way street. And it's not that Vox said otherwise, either, but what he left unsaid can beg questions by those unwilling or unable to put together the rest of the puzzle. I have no doubt that false binary folks are having a conniption over that post on his social media platform.

Also, women—just like men—can and often do try to be better people. Just because many angles of our society give women the message that they should indulge their most selfish desires doesn't mean that all of them do, or that they don't strive to be better.

The real challenge, as I've told my sons, is that as generations go, young women of today are among the worst. Certainly the worst in Western Civilization's long history. Isaiah 3:16 and 2 Timothy 3 describe today's conditions, and women are at the heart of it, sadly. Finding those who rise above the expectations of today's society is challenging, but they exist, and they're not that rare if you look in the right places. (Hint: the bar scene and the careerist women single scene is not the right place for the most part. Church is.)

There's a reason why "don't be judgy" is today's secular commandment of most import. The people who preach that the most are those who know deep down that men with good judgement will pass them over, so they try and shame them into exercising poor judgement and picking poorly. Don't fall victim to that temptation. It's a virtue-signaling philosophy of men, not one of God. Even in the famous chapter when Jesus himself said to judge not, he then—just half a dozen verses later—gave us specific instructions on how to judge correctly, so clearly our records are missing something there. Indeed, I think making righteous, but not hasty or overly harsh judgements is one of the most important things as Christians that we need to do. Our judgement should most often encourage us to help and support rather than condemn and throw stones, but at the same time, we can't do either effectively if we are unwilling to even correctly judge what the situation is in the first place.

Anyway, enough ranting about women and men. It's a favorite although sometimes bitter topic of mine to discuss, in large part because I believe our culture has given generations worth of false messages about the nature of men and women, and people have bad expectations, which leads them to failure in their relationships all too often. Too much of what I've learned I've had to learn through trial and error rather than because someone really taught it to me properly. And I also discovered as I got older that my mother and my sister are very unusual for women in terms of many aspects of their personality, so they didn't even give me a model to follow that was all that useful. But, through trial and error, I've arrived at a place where I think things work pretty well, and I'm trying to do a better job of distilling what I've learned to my kids so they don't have to stumble and struggle in the ways that I did when I was young. They'll stumble and struggle in other ways that I don't anticipate, no doubt, just as I did in ways that my parents probably didn't anticipate, but that's life and not to be feared or avoided.

UPDATE: Although I didn't see it right away, all around good guy Shad posted a video saying some of these same things, and plenty of other things that I didn't say too. Good stuff!

Hero Forge; more face customizer beta

I thought it would be fun last night to do a new mini of myself with the new face customizer. I'm not sure that the face actually looks any more like me than the standard one that I used previously, but at least it's more detailed. Eh.

Curiously, that sport coat looks too small, and the boots look way too big. I also don't really wear sport coats all that often; it's supposed to represent a smarter casual leather jacket, or something. I do, however, have dark circles under my eyes (and always have; it's a genetic feature, not a commentary on my sleep or stress—although they're probably exaggerated here), and the grayness of my hair is probably about right. Although I tried to make the jawline look softer, it is probably still too chiseled looking. When I was younger and thinner, I had a pretty chiseled jaw, but it doesn't look as much like that now! And although I tried to pull my chin in a bit and make it narrower, it still looks too broad and prominent to really look like mine. I got the sloping Neanderthal forehead right, although the angles don't really show it much here. They also didn't really have glasses that look my my glasses, so I had to go with the oversized round ones because... that's kind of all that they had, really. Still; I'm happy with the overall appearance, even if I tinker with a few minor details still in the future.

Also, I've been making more "thurses" in a vaguely Warhammer Beastmen of Chaos mold lately. Those faces actually aren't customizable; only the human-ish faces. For now, anyway.

Hero Forge face customizer beta

Just a bit of playing around with the beta. First, a fully "played around with" face.

It'll no doubt take a while before I figure out how to get them looking the way I want. But it was fun just to play around. I'm also very glad that they finally separated the beards and moustaches into two separate categories. About time!

Does this mean I'll want to go modify and update all of my iconic characters?

Well, no... probably not. Not only would that be an incredibly time consuming and tedious endeavor, but again; I'm not sure that I can actually improve much on the defaults yet, without some more experimentation and experience.

But I did mess around with my main protagonist Dominic Clevenger, to give him just a bit of a harder look. Not 100% sure that I like it better or not. It's more subtle; the experiment above was deliberately over-doing many of the sliders.

What is a thurse?

Thurse is, of course, my own transliteration and Anglicization of what was once an old Germanic word. Old English refers to the orc-þyrs in Beowulf, which Tolkien used to create orcs as we know it in the fantasy genre. The second half of that is þyrs, however, which was obviously an Anglo-Saxon word and a cognate to the Norse word þurs, or thurse, which was an alternate word for jotunn or monster. Thurse, therefore, has an ancient pedigree as a mythological and folkloric monster that somehow got "missed" by the fantastists who over-used every word from every northern European language that they could think of (Gary Gygax, I'm looking at you) to create minor variations on new monsters that are all conceptually the same and which all come from the same common source. Happily for me, however, I'm aware of the word and Gary wasn't, so it doesn't seem to have had common usage; I get to claim it as my own. Sorta.

Anyway, I've deliberately advanced the idea that thurses can represent a wide variety of monsters. Ogres, bugbears, yetis, sasquatches, gnoph-kehs, or more from more familiar fantasy settings can all be thurses. But I do sometimes ask myself what exactly is a thurse in my setting, and what would they look like? One of the oldest ideas I had for this was to use the imagery of the Warhammer Beastmen as thurses—and I probably like that the best. At least for the SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT campaign. No promises that if I use thurses in subsequent campaigns that they'll be the same visualization, though.

Warhammer has developed imagery and lore around beastmen that probably eclipses any of the alternatives or predecessors that came before it. Beastmen are essentially identical to trollocs from The Wheel of Time, for instance, they're not significantly different from schir demons or even the older style orcs and hobgoblins of D&D, or for that matter, even the diminutive foot soldiers of Maleficent in the 1959 Sleeping Beauty animated film by Disney; one of the genuine true works of art by that studio (due to the high quality tapestry inspired background paintings and the Tchaikovsky ballet being used as the actual soundtrack.) Even Orcus from old D&D and Baphomet from old occult writings and illustrations from the 1800s and earlier all have the same imagery of animal/people hybrids, especially goat-people hybrids; humans with goat legs and goat-like heads and an evil disposition. 

I've also modified my Morghox and Gorthos Hero Forge to match this iconography; adding the curling horns and a more muzzle-like face.

In fact, I've got all of my current thurse models below, including those that won't actually work for this campaign, just for comparison.

This model turned out so well, I'll probably call it Gorthos instead of the modified library model below.

My original (now modified) "bog beast" version of Gorthos.

Morghox

A too-human-like thurse

An older Beastman-style thurse attempt

A slightly reposed too-human-like thurse

My very original thurse model

Actually, a fantasy Chewbacca from the library

A very specifically gnoph-keh interpretation of a thurse, based on some gnoph-keh fan art

First playing around with face customizer beta. Still too Neanderthal for me, though.

Friday Art Attack

I've been pretty bad at keeping this long-running series going. Let's hit it today, at least.

One of my favorite themes. I've posted a lot of art from this artist, and I'm almost out of them, but here's another great retro near future image of a happy-go-lucky American future that never happened. Sadly.

An Old Republic poster. I haven't played this game in months, and I may not care to come back again, but it was really good for a really long time for me.

A nice 80s book cover. It's kinda generic for the 80s, but still; the 80s were cooler than today.

You can tell from that guy's face that he's a bad guy. Nice to see him getting what's coming to him.

Lucasfilm is dropping the ball over and over and over again, yet keeping Doug Chiang for concept art is one at least good move.

Dwarf and hydra

Strange undead court. By the ever exciting WAR.

A novel cover from the late 3e days. I read this book, but I can't remember the name of it, and I don't think I kept my copy.

War adapts Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman to fantasy.

If not for the action-grrls, this would be a great piece of work.

Nice to see WAR do something quiet and pretty, and not just WHAM! BANG! Action! all the time.

Can't remember what this is. I may actually have posted this before and forgotten to move it to my Used folder.

Another typically 80s looking science fiction piece.

I think more artists could stand to imitate Howard