Shadows Over Garenport Session 2 Planning

Well, as I reported earlier, my first session was a success, for the most part. We weren't able to pull it together this last weekend that just passed because of too many things going on, but we are scheduled to play again this coming weekend. What planning do I need to do?

For my outline of what I expected from the prologue, I have enough to fill about half a session. They'll probably go to Gynne's place in town, look for clues, meet Renwick Bennett, and then make their way to the barrows in the swamp outside of town, face the Master of the Pack and conclude the prologue stuff. I have two goals for this; how can I make sure that I don't rush through this stuff (which I do have a tendency to do) and maybe even see if I can bulk it out to a full session's worth (3 hours or so) of material so that the session ends on a good ending point rather than partway into something else, or early because I just got done and didn't know what else to do. 

One thing that I'm thinking of, although this will have to be done right to not deflate the tension of the game, is to have them meet with each of the four patrons. I have Sir Liamond Wrelley, the old commander of the Shadow Division of the Rangers, who is the ideal quest giver, but I've also got the old tower witch, I've got Fredegar de Vend, and I've got Shule the goblin criminal.

Who, in my son's mind, seems to have become some kind of criminal mastermind rather than a nuisance, pickpocket and possible informer and information broker of sorts. Ultimately, the question is: why are all of these guys so concerned, and how can I use that to up the stakes for the final confrontation? Because if that's not what I'm focused on doing with them, it's just filler to kill time.

Secondly, it would seem very unusual if all four of these patrons summoned them for a talk at the same time, or if they all worked together, either one. So I need to find a way to space it out. I'm thinking 

1) The tower witch's tower is on the way to the place that they're going.

2) After they meet Renwick Bennett, Shule will be on hand ready to give them some more information, and 

3) It actually makes sense that Fredegar de Vend and Liamond Wrelley might know each other and be at least friendly acquaintances and colleagues in the same business, so to speak. They can be together, and they've asked their respective agent PCs to meet with them.

What is this all about? Well, they're concerned about this murder, and some of the stuff that's come out. The City Watch, while unable to devote resources to the investigation, have given some information to Liamond Wrelley in particular, and he's cleared the way for the PCs to be able to do the investigation.

Between the discussion with the sponsors, I've got a few potential goals to accomplish:

1) Make sure the PCs have enough resources to successfully tackle the Master of the Pack. I'm not trying to send them to their deaths. They need some research assistance and some other stuff so that they can be prepared for the combat and not get killed trying.

2) Build up the danger and threat of the Master of the Pack. What I did the last session probably helped a lot there, but if people who are more experienced and worldly than they are are also worried, that should encourage them to be careful and cautious rather than reckless about how they approach him.

3) Point towards the greater threats that the main campaign will feature, or at least give some early foreshadowing of them.

4) Have some natural world-building opportunities. It's best if you dribble little things out here and there rather than big info-dumps, but this gives me a few dribble opportunities, so that the next effect is to help establish the setting and the PCs' place in it.

5) And yes, take a bit more time so that I can get to the climax of the prologue at the natural end of the session instead of too early. Pacing is an important part of running a successful session too.

I also want to make sure that the final combat is a good one. I tend to think that a really good combat has a couple of elements to make sure that it isn't just "I attack. Now I attack now he attacks, etc." 

1) A unique setting which provides some kind of flavor or challenge to be overcome, or opportunities to do something more interesting.

2) A three act structure; i.e., maybe it starts off as a regular combat in an unusual place, but it has a second act where something changes. Maybe reinforcements arrive. Maybe the setting that the combat is in changes and becomes more harrowing (catches on fire, starts flooding or collapsing, etc.) and a third act where things change again. These changes don't have to always twist the knife more; I actually think that a change that favors the PCs, at least on occasion, is a good play too.

3) It doesn't overstay its welcome. If the outcome is starting to become obvious, then it's tedious to play it out for several more rounds, for instance. Use your judgement to keep the pace and tension of the combat at its best rather than let it slip just for the sake of mechanical fidelity. "I ran it correctly, 100% by the rules" is a poor consolation prize to "I ran a great combat that the players were really jazzed about and were still talking about days later."

Here's some STL files for some ape-daemons that I could use as a description of his newest servitor daemons.

Hyenas and gnolls

I've never been a huge fan of the gnolls from the Fortress in Heroes3. Not a single gnoll hero carried forward to Heroes4 or beyond, as far as I know. But we have four gnolls and four lizardmen in Heroes3 as is. I've been tempted to replace them with humanoids, but I haven't yet done so, and may not get around to it. I am thinking about replacing (again) their portraits, however. I made a quick collage. 

The top row is the original portrait images of the four gnoll heroes, Alkin, Drakon, Merist and Rosic, in order. The second row is the ensrick replacement, which I have loaded in the game right now.

The third row our five of my potential alternates. While in general I'd say that I quite like the alternatives, I do also think that they are pretty generic, and there's nothing that causes any of them to either stand out from each other very much, or tie them back to the original hero portrait so that I can quickly recognize them. So, I'm on the fence if I like them or not. Or rather, I know that I like them, but I'm on the fence if I want to adopt them or not. I will probably. I'm finding that as I get further into this game again that I'm more bold and willing to make more drastic changes with the portraits. But for now, I'm won't load these new images, nor identify which of the new ones will be associated with which hero at this point, but I'll continue to think about it...

Shadows Over Garenport Actual Play Summary #1: Prologue Part 1

Well, we had our first Shadows Over Garenport session this last weekend. In spite of the fact that we cancelled our "Cider Mill and Bonfire" plans due to the threat of inclement weather, we actually had decent weather after all; only a few hours of very light drizzle in the later evening. Maybe it was a good call, but maybe we should have just done our original plans after all. We moved them to this next weekend, but now the weather forecast has changed.

Then again, our weather forecasts are notoriously unreliable where I live. They change multiple times during the day, and are almost always more pessimistic than reality. Not that we don't get a lot of rain; my biggest complaint about where we live is the number of days that are gray and rainy or both—compared to the West where I've always desired to live, where even in the coldest winters, most days are clear and sunny—all of which is a long way of saying that I don't know for sure when we'll play again. It doesn't actually require a lot of notice. Two of the players live in my house, and the other two are over frequently and only live about 5-10 minutes away. The only constraint is that it's difficult to start before about 8 PM because of the little kids not being in bed yet. And, of course, during the week, that only gives us 2-3 hours tops before we have to go to bed so that we can have a decent morning at work.

Anyway... The session itself was both more and less successful than I hoped. More successful in the sense that everyone seemed to really enjoy it, more even than they expected. Less successful in that I felt rusty and awkward compared to where I normally would expect to be; I had to flip through my own rulebook a few times, I forgot a few details here and there, and I didn't really feel on point with my descriptions, pacing, and the other elements of running. Not to say that I was a disaster, just that I know I've run better; I was too rusty, and maybe a little too unfamiliar with the details of what I was doing, unfortunately. I have a tendency also to rush to the next thing, and not linger as long as I'd like on stuff, so again; I could have done better. As I get more into the groove, that'll improve, so I'm not overly concerned that that's a problem. I'm just rusty. And if the players had more fun than they expected even so, then there's nowhere to go but up from there.

I am a little concerned—although maybe that's too strong of a word—about the pivot from prologue to the "actual" game. I'm also a little bit concerned that they may be a group of players that needs more direction and hand-holding; they're all Millennials, and two of them have never really played before. A third has only played a little bit, with one other GM, and the last has GMed and knows the game fairly well, but is a bit of an introvert, and not likely to really take the lead with the game. I know that offering options and leaning more towards the sandbox model is the theoretically preferred model for a lot of people, but I don't know how well that will work with this group without leading them into it gently. Their experience with games is more the directed platformers with a very railroady story, like Red Dead Redemption or the Zelda games.

I also did something interesting; I redid my contacts/patrons slightly, and required everyone to pick one. A few of the patrons allowed you to pick a different race. My son picked that patron and made an orc character. The rest were all human; one was a middle-aged guy with a tragic backstory that led him into investigating the things that go bump in the night. I'll probably tinker with Hero Forge while I still have an active Pro account and make images of them. He picked Shule the criminal goblin as his contact, and then made his character an active criminal.

Shule

My son-in-law, who also runs a Curse of Strahd 5e game for my daughter and some of her work friends, told me afterwards that he's been in talks with some of his high school buddies about gaming a bit again, and he's now leaning towards a very rules-lite system like we used, after seeing it in action and how fast and easy and smoothly it goes. So, I took that as a compliment too.

Shadows Over Garenport Session #1 Tonight

Well, we changed our plans. Due to inclement weather, all of the things we were going to do this weekend got pushed to next weekend, and the indoor things (i.e. the SOG game) got pulled ahead to this weekend. In a few hours, we'll be playing. 

I've made a few minor tweaks to what I was expecting to do. Let me go through my last minute preparations, for a record on how I run.

• Rather than the original patron list, I came up with an abbreviated contact list. Everyone will start with a contact, but they'll only take one slot on their character sheet. Some of the contacts allow you to start with an alternate race if you want, so if you don't want to be a human, you have to pick that contact to have access to that race to start. However, I did not create a contact that allows you to play a seraphim or an Atlantean skraeling. There is a contact that allows access to the two orcling races, one that allows access to the grayman race, one that allows access to the woodwose race, and one that allows kemlings and surturs, etc. In fact, here's the file of contacts to choose from right here.
• I also made the Scooby gang as pseudo-PCs that we'll play first. Before even really doing anything else, we'll start that and I'll call it the "tutorial" phase of the game. After it's done, we'll all make characters together. I've got printouts of the characters to cut out and hand out with the character sheets, which I've made. I'm quite sure that the pop culture reference will not go unnoticed.
• I think the chargen might take longer than I expected, just because I don't have a lot of veteran players, so I'll probably have to hold lots of figurative hands as we do it. Still, my estimate is that between the tutorial and the chargen, we'll be ready to take a small break and get started within 1-2 hours of starting, which will give us probably a good 2 or even more hours to actually play with the characters. I've got everything ready for the "prologue" adventure, transferred and slightly modified if needed, into my notebook so I don't have to consult a blog on my phone during the game, which would be really awkward. However, I seriously doubt that we'll finish up the prologue in one session. If we do, and we go faster than I think—and it's not impossible if the tutorial and chargen goes fast—then that's the end of the night no matter what, because it will make a natural stopping point without having to mess up the pacing. I could get started on the next phase if by some crazy twist of fate we get there way faster than I think that we will, but I don't plan to, and would much rather do that in another session. I think the tutorial and chargen will probably be on the long side of our plan. If we play for 3½-4 hours, then at best we'll get near the end of the prologue, but be very unlikely to finish it.

Anyway, I'm excited. This has been theoretical for years, and now not only am I playing, but it's my son, my daughter, my son-in-law and my daughter-in-law (I still only have the one, for at least a couple more months.) Could I ask for a better group? Well, I don't know. I don't know that our gaming tastes are entirely aligned; I guess we'll find that out as we play for a few sessions, but at least they're people that I enjoy hanging out with, needless to say.

Dominic Clevenger, my iconic protagonist

Duran Duran

I always meant to post this, but didn't get around to it; last month my wife and I went and saw Duran Duran in concert (we've also seen Air Supply, which kind of made me chuckle when my wife told me she had tickets for that, but it ended up being a good show. We didn't see very many people younger than us at either show, though. Or at Depeche Mode earlier this year.) In the wake of that concert, I discovered that the version of "The Reflex" I had on my phone was the single version, remixed/produced by Nile Rodgers of Chic (who was one of the opening bands). I had noticed this before, but always forgotten it and forgotten to update my files until after the concert. The album version is so much better, but I had that languishing... on my album, not even ripped to a mp3 where I could take it with me easily. I highly recommend that you check the two versions out side by side and let me know what you think. I think the album version is tons better than the single version, but the single version is closer to the one that gets played live most of the time.

Other than that; how was the show? Excellent! I had actually bought Duran Duran tickets for my wife (before we were even engaged) thirty years ago, but then she had to be out of town for a wedding she was in. Since I already had the ticket and nobody to take, I ended up taking her little sister, which was kinda funny. She was only about 16-17 or so, if I recall.

Little did we know, of course, back in 1983 when Seven and the Ragged Tiger came out with "The Reflex" and "Union of the Snake" and "New Moon on Monday" and whatever other singles came out to support that album, that Duran Duran were on the verge of a breakup, and the next time they went back to the studio, they'd be down two out of five members, and produce the album Notorious that is really only good for the song "Notorious" itself. I guess "Skin Trade" is OK. This state of diminished success continued until the time of the first concert I went to, which supported the recently released (at the time) so-called "Wedding Album" with hits like "Come Undone" and "Ordinary World." Some other tracks were successful at the time, although they're mostly forgotten now, like "UMF" and "Too Much Information."

For years, I wore that "Wedding Album" concert t-shirt. Finally, thirty years after the concert that my wife couldn't go to me with, we went and saw Duran Duran together. By now, they have more back catalog, but they also recognize and accept that their fans want to hear their 80s and early 90s stuff far more than anything else. The show was really good.

Sadly, the concert t-shirts weren't great, and for some bizarre reason, they had low stock, so we couldn't even get the ones that we wanted. That would probably be my only complaint. Well, that and the fact that they never play "New Moon on Monday" anymore. That was always my favorite classic line-up song, and it's kind of a forgotten one nowadays.

I've always been a big Duran Duran fan. I admit that Depeche Mode kind of hits my identity in terms of what kind of music I like more than Duran Duran does, but DD is up there in my esteem as a pop culture icon.

Plus, Roger's back. Andy probably won't come back again, and that's actually probably for the best, sadly, but the boys seem pretty classy; they don't talk bad about Andy and the drama he caused, and had a nice tribute to him when they were inducted in the Hall of Fame and he couldn't make it because of his cancer.

Poor Stephen Duffy's gotta be kickin' himself that he bailed on the band way early, and had much less to show for it. But "Kiss Me" is a great song too.

Shadows Over Garenport prep update

I'm feeling better about my preparation. My son-in-law brought me over some printouts of the character sheets, but he only brought six. I really need at least eight, and preferably twelve, so I'll probably have to pick up some printer ink this week so I can make more printouts. I'd also like to have printouts of the psuedo-PCs images from my Hero Forge collection. These were done many months ago, long before face customizer, for instance. I think that they're still fine; I actually haven't done much Hero Forge since face customizer launched, and all of my Dark Fantasy X images (well most of them; I did go and update a handful) predate it. I think having the images will make the pop cultural reference pretty obvious, but that's OK. What's the point of having a pop culture reference if your intended audience doesn't get it? Just to amuse yourself?  So, I've created a new image where I superimposed Gavin Shagford over Dog, giving me four images for four players. If I put them on a single sheet, quartered, I can print that out, cut it (or not; I don't really have to if I don't want to) and they can have a visual representation of the character that they'll be using for the initial run. I've posted all of these images here many times (including in my last post) so I won't do it again, except for the new combined image of Shaggy and Scooby.

I also started transferring notes from my blog posts to my campaign notebook, starting with the stuff I'll need for the pseudo-PC business. I'm pretty much done with that, but I won't stop until I've got the entire prologue information in the book. I don't think I want to go any further than that on principle; because a lot can happen during the prologue that may make changes to the outline—vague though it already is—for the rest of the campaign. Just because I've developed a whole 5x5 Front matrix doesn't mean that I want to start engaging it right away. The old Dungeoncraft rule, by Ray Winninger is "never force yourself to create more than you need" paired with Professer Dungeonmaster's best quote: "the most important session of your game is the next session" apply well to how I run, and I don't want to get ahead of myself on planning, just because I have a vague outline.

A few more printouts. Some characters for the PCs to use for the pseudo-PC episode. Maybe a backup couple of characters in case someone bites it midgame. And the transfer of a few more notes about names and likely activities during the prologue, and I'm good to go. I even have all of my ideal material; I've got my coke can sized blue tooth speaker, I've got notebooks for all of the players to keep notes in, I've got loads of dice (I'll have to let at least two of the players use mine, because they don't have any), dice trays, etc. I've got a hardcopy version of my campaign map. I'm truly ready to run with just another hour or two worth of minor work to go.

The only intensive thing that I'm going to do is rework the patron aspect that I came up with for this campaign into something that's more "backstory friendly." I may use a lot more of the characters from my Contacts Lists (I, II) and rework them as pickable backstory elements rather than simple patrons. I actually like the idea of the patrons as someone that they wouldn't meet for the first time until after the prologue is over, so probably a session or two (possible three) into the game. I'll see about working on that today, and post my updates when I get 'er done.

Dark Fantasy X preparation

I feel pretty good about my prep last night, even though it wasn't everything I hoped to do. I went to print a bunch of stuff off, and got everything except the character sheets. In trying to start the character sheets, I immediately got an out of black ink message from my old Canon Pixma. I think my son-in-law, if he doesn't forget, will print them for me and bring them over. I asked for ten; which gives me enough to have one for each of the four players, one for each of the four pseudo-PCs; the "Scooby Gang" lookalikes who all get killed off right away, if you recall, and two more just in case someone messes up their sheet somehow, or we want to have a few backups in case someone bites it in the game.

Because I didn't get the character sheets printed off, I didn't make the characters for the Scooby gang. That's a shame, because that will take a little bit of time to make four characters, although it will be good practice for me before I do it with the players. I know, I know—they're my rules, I shouldn't need practice. But just because I wrote them—years ago with some slight tweaks months ago—doesn't mean that I'm super familiar with the process, honestly. Going through it with Frederick von Johannes, Daphne FitzBlake, Gavin Shagford (and his large dog) and Zelda du Velmois will make sure that my memory and understanding of the nuances of chargen are fresh and sharp when I have to do it with the players.

I was also going to copy a bunch of stuff from my blog posts into the journal that I decided to use as a GM journal for the game. I didn't do that either. My journal had a sticker from the store on it that was a big pain to remove; it took the better part of 45 minutes or even an hour while I was watching a youtube video in the background. Then I went up to bed thinking I'd make some notes. When I looked at the first blog post that I needed to summarize, I found a few outdated elements in it; the MASTER OF THE PACK NPC villain that they face for the "prologue" was from an older version of the rules, and had the old funky spells that I no longer use. I'm tempted, however, to just use him as is. I have descriptions of all of the stuff that the spells do, so I can run him without needing to convert them to the new revision of the rules.

Master of the Pack

Although I said that last night was just about the only free night I could use to do this, that's not completely true. It is that it's the only free night, but the things that I have tonight, for instance, or Thursday, will only take an hour or two. Wednesday is a bit more complicated, as is possibly Friday and Saturday all day—I genuinely won't have much time to do anything those days. So I have time here and there to work on things, but the time is a bit more constrained because I either have work or personal entries on my schedule that will take precedence.

But, as long as I can get the prologue stuff transferred into my journal this week, which I should have plenty of time to do, as well as make the pseudo-PC characters, I should be good to go. Actually, I technically don't need them until next weekend, but I think I want to be prepared for this weekend, just so we can see how things go. I'm thinking that I'd like to run the pseudo-PC "adventure" this weekend, and then tell the players that "OK, now we can make your real PCs. When we start next weekend, they'll be standing at this same spot early in the morning, ready to investigate what happened here. The most important thing in terms of backstory that you can come up with is—why are you involved in this investigation? What stake do you have in it? The Watch is undermanned and unlikely to solve this case on their own, so there's an opportunity here for you. Keep in mind that your characters aren't anybody yet. They're not important. They're not well-known. They're nobodies. But by the end of this prologue adventure, they'll be somebodies—they will have been able to get the attention of a few important people, and will be able to run on the fringes of their social circles, opening up more opportunities for adventure, if you do well and don't get killed yourselves." Then we'll make characters together, and hopefully that will whet their appetite for the coming "real" start to the game. Quick and easy, I've satisfied my daughter's anxiety about the time needed for preparation, and hopefully drummed up a little hype while I'm at it.

Daphne FitzBlake

Frederick von Johannes

Zelda du Velmois

Gavin Shagford

"The Dog"

Dark Fantasy X first session

For anyone wondering why the Dark Fantasy X blog became a Heroes of Might and Magic blog the last few weeks or so, fear not! I'm actually going to swing back in a fairly big way to Dark Fantasy X, because I've scheduled my first session for it. My oldest son, his wife, and my son-in-law have had a lot of interest in D&D and have been wanting to play it. My daughter has played with my son-in-law and some work friends. She doesn't really love it, but she likes it well enough and is willing to do it because of everyone else doing it, if nothing else.

So, I've scheduled the first session for two weeks from yesterday, which is the first reasonable availability that we had. My daughter just couldn't believe that we wouldn't need 4-5 hours, especially with a starting session and chargen, so although I told her that this was different, I ended up bowing to the pressure (somewhat) of her expectations, and we'll have some pre-work done in advance. This actually works out well for me in some ways, otherwise I wouldn't have agreed to it. This coming weekend, when everyone will be together for some other things, I'll do a mini-session of sorts—if you remember, there's a nice prologue piece that I'd planned—and we can generate their real characters, with the "real" campaign start to be effective on the day that I planned, i.e. the 28th. While this isn't exactly how I meant to do it, I think it'll start off well, and doing it this way should work smoothly. And if it calms my daughter down, then that's probably worth it too—she's convinced that the 5e way of doing things that she's used to is the only way that it can be. She probably won't believe otherwise until she actually sees it.

What do I need to do to be prepared, then? I've done the work, but it may not be well enough organized to be handy. So, I have a few tasks:

• Print out the inside inserts for my custom GM screen, and insert them in the screens.
• Print out a bunch of character sheets for the players to use.
• Remake my disposable prologue characters
• Transfer my notes on what I'm doing from my blog posts to my notebook, so I have it handy at the table.

While that isn't a big deal to do any of that, it's not totally insignificant, and most of it needs to be done this week. Wednesday evening's too booked to be useful, Thursday is pretty booked, although maybe I could do some stuff late in the evening, and Friday is booked too. Saturday is pretty booked, plus that's potentially the day I'd squeeze in this "session 0", if not Sunday evening. That means I need to hit it pretty hard today and tomorrow.

But, the good news is that starting next week, I should have some actual play to talk about.

HOMM3 Modification - Caitlin the Cleric

Well, I feel foolish. I'd been running around with Caitlyn for some time, only to find out literally as I started typing this post that I'd mispelled it on all my filenames, my collage, and elsewhere. I decided not to do the collage image all over again, so you'll just have to look at Caitlyn instead of Caitlin and know who I'm talking about.

Caitlin... ahem... actually has a somewhat interesting look compared to the girl clerics. Whereas Sanya and Adela are severe monkesses (if that's even a word, which according my spellcheck it isn't) and Adelaide is the pretty one, Caitlin gets to look like a middle-aged battle-ax with a fancy Medieval headress with some gold brocade on it. While I won't say that her look is necessarily... attractive, it is at least somewhat unique (except for the Wizard Cyra who looks very similar) and individual. More of that is to be encouraged, in my opinion. So, again, I won't be looking to deviate too far from the Original vision, as long as there are options that don't deviate from it and which also look good. As it turns out, there are:

I've said before that the Stable Diffusion collections are clearly simple img2img jobs, and without taking some time to either run lots of iterations, or do some regional replacement, or manually do some work on the images, they often look funky, or lose resolution and detail. In this case, both of them lost all fo the detail from the brocaded headdress which is her most distinguishing feature. Stable Diffusion 2 arguably has a prettier (or at least smoother) face, plus she has a pleasant hint of a smile. I actually kind of like the more blank unsmiling look; if we're going to have warrior-nuns in the Castle faction, they shouldn't really be cute most of the time. That's sometimes my complaint with ensrick's girls; they almost invariably look prettier. Here, however, he captures the same stern middle-aged blank look of the original better than any, except maybe the melted butterface of the Stable Diffusion AI collection.

Her bio—not that anyone cares—makes some vague references to her being rumored to have been possessed by evil spirits, yet still making tons of money at the donations box. I have no idea what to make of that, since I see no evidence of it in her portrait. Also, she comes with the fairly boring Cure spell and the pretty useless Intelligence secondary skill. She also has the Gold specialty, though—if paired with Estates, she can be a pretty good passive money-maker. Maybe Intelligence isn't so bad for a character who may be holed up in a castle doing defense and being a passive money maker.

Curiously, given that, Pack 01 is a better choice than it otherwise might be, since I can see that face sporting that bio and weird backstory. I don't know why StrikerX looks like a belly dancer and Vallex looks like a pirate, but maybe they were both just trying to get that brocaded headdress represented somehow.

WINNER: once again, ensrick

HOMM3 Modification - Loynis the Cleric

I've already talked a lot about the male clerics on my posts on Cuthbert, Ingham and Rion. The first two are sufficiently different that they can stand out even in their original form, but Rion and Loynis almost looked like twins, so one of them had to change to something a bit more unique. That was Rion, and it was already discussed. That means, it follows, that Loynis gets to keep an aspect much closer to his original portrait, which is indeed what I've done.

As is usually the case, all of them except the three AI generated ones depart too much from the art style of the original, so they only are likely to get picked if the original is pretty terrible. What is not necessarily always true is that all three of the AI options are pretty well done. There aren't any real artifacts or funkiness going on in either of the img2img ones, and ensrick didn't depart much from the original template either. I could probably have happily picked any of the three, but I think ensrick's is slightly higher quality as a representation of a human face and otherwise as an artistic take on the Original.

WINNER: ensrick, once again

HOMM3 Modification - Sanya the Cleric

Let's continue the character collages and discussion on what I picked and why. I'm still in the basic Castle heroes, after all, and I have more than half a dozen still to get through the first faction. And honestly, what I've done with Castle is probably the least interesting of the factions. Sanya has a really boring bio and a really terrible specialty; Eagle Eye, which is usually a skill that most players aren't interested in. Visually, she's got a stern face; a kind of Medieval fantasy Karen, maybe, although that's not exactly unexpected or out of place for the faction and class.

Let's have a look at the options. I've got a little bit more to talk about with Sanya than normal.

Let's ignore, like usual, the ones that are a different art style (dtnmang and Vallex) and those that are just some other girl, cribbed from some other art source (Pack 01, Pack 02 and StrikerX.) Again; we're down to the AI generated ones. As usual, ensrick's is the best, because he didn't just slap it in img2img, but actually spent a lot of time and effort in Photoshop to make sure his AI generated alternative had some artistic merit. Although, his girl staring into space rather than looking at the player, and being prettier, softer and younger rather than more severe and impatient looking, really gives her a different feel. It's like a different girl—a much younger, teenaged girl—cosplaying a more mature hero that she idolizes or something.

The last option I had was ensrick's take on Gwenneth. She is actually a character from earlier HOMM games that was brought back by the Tides of War expansion for VCMI and WoG, but the fact that she has almost all of the same traits as Sanya—red hair, brown hood, forehead diadem, Castle background, mature stern visage—makes her a very credible alternative.

Ultimately I didn't decide to use her, though. Because many of the Castle heroes, and the girl Clerics in particular, don't really stand out to me anyway, I'd probably have trouble recognizing them if I don't hew as closely as possible to the original, including the pose and angle that you see them at. As I get more into this and have played more, I may yet decide to be a little bolder and use her portrait instead, but for now—and probably forever, because like I said, I really don't care that much about most of the cleric heroes anyway—I'm going with ensrick's original.

WINNER: ensrick's original, once again. I'm sure I've said it before, but I'll say it again, unless the Original is really bad and needs a new concept, or ensrick himself explored a new concept and I didn't like the direction he's going, he's always a contender and usually the winner. 

As an aside, that's a testament to the idea that AI art isn't as simple as pushing a button. The two Stable Diffusion collections are no doubt simple img2img conversions, and they sometimes come out OK, but there are usually strange artifacts to them, or they just came out looking funky, or something didn't quite work. Occasionally by luck they end up being a good choice, but it's a great example that an artist who uses AI but who has developed some skill at getting good results out of AI, and uses his own digital art experience and ability to improve and modify the results will always be significantly better than someone who just slaps a prompt together and has no such skill. AI assisted art is still art. The fact that ensrick is consistently better than the alternatives proves that beyond any doubt.

Elemental Fantasy X basics

I've done some reading about the backstory to the HOMM3 game, and also reminding myself of some of the stuff going on in HOMM2 and HOMM4; neither of which I've played in literally decades. It was interesting. While many—maybe even most—of the Heroes from HOMM1 carried forward into HOMM2, often with even the same or a very similar portrait, that was not true for HOMM3, which largely had a new cast of Heroes, and only a few familiar faces like Sandro or Gem or Crag Hack. (Although the name was the same, the image of the last two was not exactly familiar, though.) I had forgotten many of the characters that we used in HOMM2 that I liked to recruit based on their exotic and weird portraits, like Mandigal the gray-skinned wizard who according to at least one wiki is supposed to be a vampire, in spite of his faction affiliation. I had also forgotten, mostly because I didn't actually enjoy this game nearly as much, but HOMM4 is literally crawling with Heroes. They have so many compared to HOMM3. HOMM3 has sixteen normal heroes per faction, eight Might and eight Magic heroes, plus the campaign specific unique heroes (which not every faction has.) HOMM4's Academy faction, which happened to be the first that I looked at, has 51 normal heroes and six campaign heroes; quite a bit more. Now, granted—there are also fewer factions in HOMM4 compared to HOMM3 (six vs nine; ten when you add the pirate-themed Cove) so they naturally divide up where more are associated with a single faction than in HOMM3, but there are also more heroes objectively. 

I think that's too bad. The heroes were always the most interesting thing about the game.

When I talk about turning HOMM3 into a "D&D" setting, that isn't meant to be taken too literally. For one thing, the actual setting and plots of the Might & Magic and Heroes of Might & Magic games are not at all up my alley, especially with the weirdo science fiction background that they assume. (Kreegans are actually aliens who crash spaceships on planets to conquer them, sorta like The Brood from the old X-men comics which were current more or less at the same time of the heyday of the Might & Magic series. For instance.)

I also don't mean to imply that the PCs would be running around in pitched battles with armies of monsters. They'd actually just be typical RPG-like characters in a more personal story. The constant "world ending" plots are tiresome to me now. I'd greatly prefer the smaller scale more personal stories that are more typical of sword & sorcery instead of high fantasy. Although, in many other respects, the high fantasy tone and vibe is what I'm going for here as opposed to what Dark Fantasy X is. But that's more to imply that the game will be more diverse and colorful, with exotic fantasy races being reasonably commonplace compared to the more humanocentric Dark Fantasy X, and that the game is more overtly "superheroic" in some senses rather than grim and grubby dark fantasy that sometimes borders on just being a horror genre. Elemental Fantasy X is fantasy with a capital F, and if some of the plot elements of high fantasy may be eschewed, other trappings of that subgenre are to be embraced.

Rather, I mean that some elements of the setting as it is presented by the game engine only of the HOMM3 game, as well as many of the specific monsters and races and hero/villain types, will be heavily influenced by HOMM3. I may even attempt to use the random town names in the game engine for setting places, and many of the heroes names from the various games as NPCs. I think it'd be fun for the PCs to run into Astral the Wizard or Lord Haart the Knight (or Lord Haart the Death Knight) or Gem the Sorceress/Druid, even if not all of my players get the references. I would, and that makes it a fun Easter egg for me, at least, if nobody else. 

This might be an interesting opportunity for me to trudge out my EBBERON REMIXED setting and see how I can adapt it quickly and easily into a more HOMM3-like iteration. It probably wouldn't be terribly difficult. Eberron in general has much of exactly the right vibe that I'm going for, although there's some specific Eberron things that won't fit super well, like the Warforged or the Mournland. Maybe I can take the elements that I want and redraw them into a simplified iteration of the Khorvaire map, or something like that. I'll probably rename them too; sort of like how I turned Ustalav kinda sorta into Timischburg for the CULT OF UNDEATH project, while still deliberately attempting to give them the same feel as their Eberron prototype. In many ways, I've already done this for at least one region; Baal Hamazi ended up becoming a hybrid of my earlier lightly developed Baal Hamazi from an earlier iteration of the setting, but grafting in a large chunk of the geographical context and many ideas from the Demon Wastes of Eberron. The Shadow Marches, Q'Barra, the Lhazaar Coast, the Eldeen Reaches, Karrnath, Breland, and maybe a handful of other Eberron nations would make the cut into this new context, renamed and remixed a bit. Sigh. Maybe I need to start another wiki. Because, y'know, I've done so much with my Dark Fantasy X wiki already.

In any case, the main focus of the setting would be a magical place not unlike Sharn, where it would make sense for everyone and anyone to be found in at least small numbers. Captains and Battle Mages and Alchemists and Druids and Necromancers and Heretics could all potentially be found here doing their own things for good or for ill, and the colorful various races that make up the Heroes of HOMM3 would all feel more or less at home.

But again; I'm being "loosely inspired" by both Eberron and HOMM3, I'm not trying to specifically emulate either. Just have a similar tone and maybe some similar themes. And part of the reason for that is the shorthand; I don't need to develop nearly as much if I'm using a familiar canvas to make this on in the first place. Nor do the players need to think too hard about it, because while the setting is exotic, it's exotic in familiar ways so they can quickly connect any dots as needed. This is why Robert E. Howard came up with the Hyborian Age; he wanted to have Vikings and Romans and whatever all in the same place, but not be bound by the specific details of historical goings-on. But if readers could immediately recognize a Viking "calque", then he didn't need to write an anthropological thesis to get you up to speed on the cultural context. Stuff was quick and easy and facilitated his breezy, fast style. Warhammer did the same thing with the Old World, and to a slightly less transparent degree, people are still doing it; Paizo's Golarion has lots of references to real world cultures so you don't have to read too much about fantastic cultures to have cultural context. The Linnorm Kings are Vikings, the Taldorans are the Byzantines, etc.

One thing that needs to be addressed; HOMM3 has a whole ton of classes, although they're pretty rules light and don't do much except with modest benefits to your four primary skills, as well as behind the scenes percentages for secondary skill and primary skill advancement opportunities when you level up. At best, you can really say that there's loosely two classes with several small variations; a might and a magic that are colored somewhat to each faction. The Necropolis are perhaps just a little different here because they get Necromancy and build up the power stacks of skeletons. The same situation is true for races; the heros are all kinds of races in HOMM3, especially when they added the Conflux and had all of those elementals as heroes. One of the things that ensrick's portrait pack opened my eyes to a bit was the idea of turning characters like Monere, the Magic Elemental into Monere the .... genasi or whatever, is that that's such an incredibly better idea. I never much liked the elementals as characters, but I'm kind of embarrassed that what is in retrospect such an obvious change hadn't occurred to me. Then again, I guess I hadn't really thought much about HOMM3 in quite a long time until my son (who has been playing it off and on ever since I introduced him to it years ago) came back home and was playing it on his laptop and got me interested in it again. I've also never been a fan of some of the monstrous humanoids that make up so many of the heroes for factions like Dungeon or Fortress or Stronghold. 

Actually, the Stronghold isn't such a big deal. The non-humans are either goblins or ogres, but ogres can be interpreted as more like D&D orcs, and then they're not so far off from familiar playable races. I think the gnolls, lizardmen, troglodytes and especially minotaurs seem less so, and I'll have to think about if I even want to include them or not. The efreet and genies and devils can all be interpreted as more like genasi or tieflings or whatever.

To be honest, I kind of like the less information given in some of the earlier games. I've seen a wiki that claims that exotic-looking Wizards from HOMM2 are genies in the case of Flint and Halon, even though they look different from both, and that Mandigal is even a vampire. However, I don't know for sure what the source of that is (the manual, maybe?) when I played the game, they were just funky looking because they were wizards and therefore magical. Somebody had teal skin and someone else had gray skin? Well, they're wizards. What do you expect? That wasn't really true for HOMM3, where a typical race and class kind of thing was pretty familiar. The Warlocks, for example, from HOMM2 were pretty much all human (with one exception; a gray-skinned elf, according to the wiki), and even less exotic than the Wizards. They mostly looked like old men, and not even necessarily cranky ones. In fact, mostly they looked like the stereotype of a wizard even more than the Wizard characters did. I mean, heck—the Knights, who in HOMM3 are seen as the most normal human options in the game, are more exotic than the Warlocks in HOMM2. Tyro is... what, an orc or something? He has tusks anyway, and Maximus is some kind of orc or ogre or lizardman or something.

Finally, let's assign a few regional names. If I want to use an Eberron country as a starting point, I need an alternate name for that place. Donjon's random kingdom name generator and several pushes of the button to the rescue!

Breland = Kingdom of Rodach (protagonist state, but also designed so that anyone can be there and have it be explained. No faction from HOMM3 really is the same.)

Eldeen Reaches = Rewynhowe Frontier (Rampart)

Droaam = Realm of Nevregel (Dungeon)

Darguun = Dominion of Othlon (Stronghold)

Lhazaar Principalities = Principality of Gothrastir (Cove)

Demon Wastes = Giledzar (Inferno)

Shadow Marshes = Doloth Marches (Fortress)

Karrnath = Kingdom of Kharnimrion (Necropolis)

Aundair = Kingdom of Hombarast (Tower)

Thrane = Theocracy of Thamath (Castle)

Mror Holds = Valade Holds (Conflux)

It might be fun to make the map in the VCMI HOMM3 generator and export it to bmp. Then again; it might also be really tedious to do it that way...

HOMM3 Modification discussion

This post isn't the normal next hero approach  (I have three Clerics left among the normal clerics, and then all of the "extra" heroes that belong to Castle from the campaigns and for other reasons because Castle is the protagonist faction.) Rather, I've noticed that after making my conservative selections, I'm becoming a bit more bold and tinkering with them. First, I generally replaced the original portrait with a higher quality look-alike from the Stable Diffusion or ensrick collections, but generally one that looked very similar. The exceptions here were where the original was such a terrible design concept that higher quality still looked ugly (Aislinn or Clavius being a good example—also the Conflux elemental heroes) or ones where the original wasn't very good, but the alternatives weren't either (Tazar being the most iconic example here.) And there were a handful where I didn't love or hate the original, but an alternate presented itself that was really good that I really wanted to use (Solmyr, for example.) Otherwise, my selections were, as I said, very conservative. I picked usually the ensrick picture, but occasionally from one of the two Stable Diffusion collections, an image that looked like the original, but I decided which looked the best.

However, in tinkering, I've started to get more bold. I have a lot of alternative images, from ensrick's collection in particular, that I'm not using because I'm adapting into the regular HotA.lod rather than trying to use with VCMI stuff like Neutral Heroes or Tides of War. This automatically gave me a bunch of portraits that I didn't need, but many of which I liked. It occurred to me that while—for example—Jabarkas and Dessa's ensrick pictures look quite a bit like the original Jabarkas and Dessa, the Boragus and Saurug images do not. And that I had alternate images; ensrick's Thyroc and Oshmar images looked as good for Jabarkas and Dessa as the Boragus and Saurug images did for those characters. Wham! Bold switch. Now, my ogre characters actually all look more alike and better, but the cost of that is that a very familiar-looking image is lost. That's OK; I never much loved either of those originals anyway.

I also downloaded—literally just for the Hero portraits—all of the alternative town in VCMI, snagged the Hero portraits that I liked, and then uninstalled the mods again. Many of these alternatives weren't good, but I found probably close to two dozen that are excellent. More bold switches started happening, especially in the Necropolis faction, but also some in Tower and elsewhere from these collections.

And I got my own Midjourney images here and there, and with some modification, replaced a few other of the portraits that were lower mid in terms of my esteem. At first, I was only replacing the ones I really never liked at all or had just such a cool alternative that I could help it. Now, I'm replacing a lot more that I never actually disliked that much, but I have better options. I'm also considering replacing the minotaur and lizardmen heroes, because I don't really like minotaurs or lizardmen as heroes. I'm on the fence about the gnolls.

I'm tempted to spend some actual money on either Midjourney or DALL-E 2, and eventually create my own complete replacement portrait collection, where every portrait is unique. But I wonder if there's any value in that. As much as I like, for example, some of the Vallex or dtnmang collection material, I'm also using almost none of it, because it's too different, even when the images are good. I imagine that any collection I made of similar sort would have the same problem; it would only be of interest to me, and I'm not sure how interested even I am in doing it.

Anyway, here's a small selection and spoiler alert for some of my more bold changes; stuff that I hadn't originally intended to change, but which I've now embraced. Some of them aren't even necessarily "cool"; Grindan's portrait is now kind of a joke, for instance. But mostly, I think the new portraits look loads better than the original, or has just a better concept all around.

Fiur

Grindan

Ignissa

Inteus

Kalt

Lacus

Monere

Pasis

Dracon

Fafner

Solmyr

Yog (Wizard version)

Boragus

Dessa

Gundula

Jabarkas

Saurug

Aladar

Gem

Ufretin

Andra

Tazar

Aislinn

Clavius

Nagash

Nimbus

Tamika

Thant

Vidomina

Xsi

Ranloo

I also started taking notes for "Dark Fantasy X2", which will be a "D&D" setting with some inspiration drawn from Heroes 3 and the Hero selections in particular. I'll be honest; some of the cool hero portrait images are a big part of what inspired me to attempt this. Considering that I have a Dark Fantasy X campaign ready to run and two more in the pipeline that I'm supposed to be working on, this may seem like a major distraction. But I do like the idea of having two settings with a different tone and feel. I'm not always in the mood for the X-files or Supernatural in a fantasy setting, and sometimes I want something a bit more exotic. Still not sure how to have liches, vampires, demons and devils as PC races, but there's gotta be a way to make it work...

UPDATE: Got a better AI generated Nosferatu image to use to make a new Thant. Although I liked my original Thant, this one is clearly tons better.

New Thant

I'm also working up a complete replacement of all the genie girls from Tower. I don't actually like any of their original portraits, although they don't actively offend or anything. They're just bland and boring and they all kind of look alike. All of my alternates are pretty much slightly higher quality variations on the original too. Hoping to be able to find some more interesting replacements.

UPDATE 2: It also occurs to me that I should have been trawling through the Heroes IV portraits all along. They have a lot of the same characters, or others that have a similar look, that I could at least use in my personal game all I want. Although it's possible that the format of them won't work, it'll—if nothing else—be a great research resource for my ELEMENTAL FANTASY X.

UPDATE 3: A few other images that I did not use, but I wish I had an opportunity to use them. Oh, well.