A few more updated portraits

A few more:

Audley Hardwicke, the nemesis of the Clevenger brothers, especially Dominic

Balogh, the only heroic orc shown in the campaign. Well, that's not really true, but he's the face of "good orcs" and represents them.

Captain Taurak, on the other hand, is the worst stereotype of the worst orcs. And now he looks a little more sophisticated and mean rather than being a primitive mini made when there were few resources available.

I've been farting around with Dominic's look for a long time, and I have a few alternates out there just for the heckuvit. I'm trying to harmonize all of those on the "correct" description, though.

I would have loved to use this guy in my last video, but I didn't have a screenshot of him with a transparent background.

Another Dominic; this one still labeled Stefan, his old name. Above he has a thin rapier, here he has a cavalry saber. I like the latter more, but the resource is not very realistic.

Kimnor, grayman shadow sword, remade from scratch

A few Hero Forge updates

I had let my subscription lapse and hadn't done anything with Hero Forge in months, but I just re-upped, since it's pretty cheap, and made some modified versions of some of my older models that didn't look as good as they seemed to when I first made them, my skill wasn't as high, and the assets weren't as plentiful. I tried to keep most of the updates relatively minor, but one or two of the characters does actually look pretty different. One or two I merely "reshot" because I didn't have the right color in background, or something like that.

This does include at least the two main characters of SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT; Dominic and his brother Ragnar Clevenger.

I think maybe Kimnor is up for another remake too, but I haven't done him yet.

Alpon von Lechfeld, now looking a little harder and older

Ampelius Pictor, with more sunken eyes from using too much sorcery.

Bethan, Kimnor's one-time near fiance. Better shot and better knife, and the face is marginally more innocent looking. Not that she is innocent, mind you. But she looks more innocent.

Dominic Clevenger; my most modified character, unfortunately. I need to stick with one, and I think this'll be it.

Ragnar's face, hair and beard slightly redone, and a few minor changes to his clothes to give him a somewhat different look than his brother.

Still known as Dominic Schneider in some old saved copies of older images; a slightly redone face and radically redone outfit. He'd already been renamed Reginald. He's kind of the iconic Timischer, even though he's no longer an iconic character.

Some ghouls with redone faces

D&D and genre over time (1985-1999)

Let's keep striking while I have a moment and the iron is hot. I quoted James Maliszewski's Hesiod-like "ages of D&D" post in describing the "Golden Age" earlier using the 50th tag. I don't personally think that the "Golden Age" is Golden nor do I think that a Hesiod-like descent really applies, but Maliszewski's descriptions, even if his labels are not apt, are still valid. He also oversplits; I don't see any reason to put 1985 or so through 1999 into three distinct ages, but rather one, that did at least have some trends that waxed and waned a bit. Let me start by quoting his descriptions, and then edit them so much that they're essentially unrecognizable, with many additions by me. I'm not noting what I'm editing and adding, so you'll have to read the original if you're so inclined to see what he said in detail. (Note: it's less detail than I'm using even so.)

1985-1999 is an age that marries a sophisticated (some might say "decadent") interpretation of Gygaxian naturalism with a growing concern for "dramatic" coherence. It is one of "fantastic realism" and the construction of believable worlds and stories is its great concern. It's also the age where the Great Wyrm begins to eat its own tail, being influenced not just by epic fantasy generally but more specifically by second or third order epic fantasies that were themselves influenced by D&D. The mass marketing of the game begun in the earlier 80s reaches its fullest flower. In 1983 or so, TSR had released a boxed set that detailed the Greyhawk campaign setting; during this later phase, partially possibly influenced by wanting to replace Greyhawk and stop paying royalties to Gygax as much as possible, this model was expanded on and boxed campaign sets seem to have been a popular item; TSR in fact produced a very large number of campaign boxed sets during this era, especially as the edition rolled over from "1.5" to 2e, and it became a hallmark of the era. Most are exhaustively detailed through many products—a result of the simulationist idea that in order to properly run a game, you needed to know what all of the NPCs and monsters and the weather, climate patterns, etc. were doing independently of the PCs. Even before the boxed sets, the Dungeoneer's Survivalist Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide expressed this trend by giving you all kinds of details that it's hard to imagine most players were very interested in, like how much warmth a campfire provided, modified by its size and how close you're sitting to it, or how long it took packed food to spoil depending on temperature.

One of the fascinating things about the this period is that it was heavily focused on commenting upon and embellishing the works of the earlier canon. This is very evident in the pages of Dragon from the period, which, if looked at today, would no doubt seem unduly obsessed with minutiae, such as a "realistic" method of calculating a character's height and weight based on his ability scores or determining how far a character could jump up or across based on the same. "Realism" was a watchword of products from this sage. This concern about realism is why issue 88 could, for example, boast not one but two different articles on the physics of falling damage (and a further article on the subject by Gygax himself a few issues later). To some, arguing over whether falling forty feet causes 4d6 damage or 10d6 damage might seem like needless nitpicking and, honestly, it is. This is a consequence of the maturity of D&D. The game had been out for ten years by this point and was so firmly established in its essentials that all that was left to do was gild the lily, so to speak. In short, there's a hint of decadence even amidst the enormous creativity.

D&D also came increasingly to be seen as a generic vehicle for the publication of a wide variety of "fantasy" settings, almost none of which bore much resemblance to the game's literary roots in the earlier phase, and many were indeed detailed as much in a very successful line of extruded fantasy product novels that is another hallmark of this phase of the game. These were less concerned with the game itself frequently, even though written by gamers in many cases, and sometimes the events of the novels had to be shoe-horned awkwardly into the rules to satisfy this perceived need to show verisimilitude. 

This didn't just impact the newer rulebooks, but it became a hallmark of the Dragon articles of the time; the "Ecology of..." series being a barometer of the publisher's focus on this kind of fantasy realism. It also crept into the D&D line (as opposed to the AD&D line) and by the time it was retired after the Rules Cyclopedia it wasn't really all that rules lite of a game anymore that still hewed to the original pre-AD&D paradigm of "rulings, not rules" and referee (now called DM) authority. TSR established itself as the authority on how the game was "supposed" to be played and what stuff meant.

Module design had changed considerably too, as I noted earlier, but this wasn't just about moving from site exploration to plotted pseudo-stories—although that did certainly happen. The meme of the "failed novelist module writer" was born in this era as boxed text was first created and then expanded, and in the worst excesses would literally sometimes last for pages. There was a whole lot of expectation of what the PCs would do ingrained here; sometimes literally spelled out in boxed text, but more subtly, the idea that the writers couldn't conceive of the PCs doing anything other than the most liberal busybody "heroic" thing possible was born in this age. I don't know what the politics of employees of TSR was like during the 80s and 90s because we rarely cared about that kind of thing in those days and the internet wasn't around to virtue signal anyway. That said, these all laid the foundation for a great deal of wokeness that was inevitably going to follow eventually, because virtue-signaling morality became a marketing line as 1e rolled over to 2e. Demons and devils were removed from the game, for instance (although they eventually crept back in renamed with funky fantasy names). The garage band feel of the art and presentation had long ago been replaced, by "1.5"'s reprinting of the original books and in anything else that came out, but they still had a kind of edgy Heavy Metal magazine feel to them that was replaced by what—in the case of some artists—literally looked like children's books illustrations. Assassins were also removed as a player class, and a focus on good PR, moral marketing was introduced to the game, much to its detriment. Rather than recognizing that D&D's slight edginess was part of what led to its faddish brief semi-mainstream popularity (the same happened to a lot of metal music genres during the same era; contrary to the beliefs of many of my Gen X cohort peers, metal came as close to mainstream as it was ever going to get because of that perceived edginess, and its popularity faded quickly to a niche. If you like metal, that's fine, but if you just assume that everyone else your age will too, or everyone else who plays D&D or whatever, then you're a victim of perception bias; metal went through a brief period of faddish popularity when Ozzy Osbourne was allegedly biting heads off of bats onstage and bands courted a kind of Satanic edgy look, but when the fad faded, very few people really cared all that much about the music after all.)

Of course, chasing supposed marketing trends is a bad way to do business in most respects, and I have my doubts that people disconnected from the hobby really understand what hobbyists want. (Ryan Dancey's article describing the acquisition of TSR by WotC indeed lays that out as the main factor in TSR's failure.) But that's also part of the story of what happened to D&D in this era. It wasn't just that Gygax was forced out in favor of a non-gamer "generic CEO" figure, although that did happen, but that the direction of the company was pulled away from gamers in general and in favor of a kind of proto C-suite management. This is, of course, considerably worse since WotC was bought by Hasbro, but we're a long way from worrying about that yet... hold tight. Then again, the gamers had also run the company into the ground. At the start of this era, TSR was deeply in debt, and the publication of Unearthed Arcana and the eventually rollover to second edition was largely prompted by the need to generate revenue to cover debts. Gygax had spent the better part of a year in a largely fruitless attempt to get Hollywood to invest in the brand, the only result that I'm aware of being the brief D&D Saturday morning cartoon.

Of course, by the end of the era, most of this had turned to ashes in the hands of these "businesmen" (and women; Lorraine Williams being one of the most prominent figures of the era.) Chasing after marketing trends that never materialized, too much material that cannibalized the sales of each other, and general poor business practices that led to the inability to even capitalize on material that was produced led to TSR eventually in the throes of bankruptcy. Luckily for gamers everywhere, some genuine gamers—who also happened to be successful businessmen, with a juggernaut entertainment company called Wizards of the Coast, but make no mistake; they were gamers first—made it their mandate to save D&D. And they did. In fact, they did so well that the hobby grew tremendously; to levels undreamed of even in the heady days of D&D's faddishness of the 80s. It was still shepherded, sadly, by clueless C-suite woketards, or at least is certainly is today, and lots of decisions made throughout the last 20+ some odd years since WotC was acquired by Hasbro still indicate that they don't really get it, but the gamers who saved D&D made it evergreen, in spite of Hasbro's best efforts. 

I don't want to get too into the details of what comes in the next three eras, which tend to be more tightly correlated to specific editions of the game (i.e., 2000-2008 3e, 2009-2013 4e and 2014-present 5e, and soon 6e—although Hasbro is anxious to not call it that) but now not only is D&D a successful brand and successful product, but it is also synonymous to a certain degree with the hobby itself. Loads of people since 2008 or so at least have been playing "D&D" that doesn't even bear the D&D brand name, but which are more similar to older D&D than the current holder of the brand is. While that isn't necessarily great news for the owner of the brand (although they've been making plenty of money and sales of actual D&D are very high), it is great news for the hobby, which probably will remain until the last old grognard finally dies with his books and dice in his hands.

Anyway, although from the very earliest transition into this age, I still think that Larry Elmore and his cohorts are kind of the artistic face of this era. Here's one of my favorites of his, which if I remember correctly, was a module cover art from the Dragonlance series.

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus, EGG

I've blogged a bit about my general busy-ness. Work the last year has been pretty killer for me. However... I just finished the job that was so killer; my technical last day was earlier this week, and bright and early on Monday, I'll start a new job. I will also be forced, however, to relocate within the next month or so, so my blogging will still be delayed. However, I imagine that once I'm actually moved, my new job will be more chill than the one I'm leaving. Plus, since I won't really know anyone and I'm kind of antisocial anyway, when I'm not out hiking or exploring our new area with my wife, I'll be homebodying at home, which is good for blogging. In fact, I can look forward to a greatly improved set-up from which to do my computer stuff, reading, music, etc. as we'll use one room as an office-slash-library "for my own particular use" to quote Charlotte from Pride & Prejudice. Heck, with a purchase of a slightly better rig and a new microphone, it could even be a credible studio for me to record much better youtube videos in, if I'm inclined to do so.

Anyway, I'm taking a moment now to blog, because I haven't in a while, and I remembered a tag I created that I intended to use off and on all year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the RPG hobby, which was kicked off by the publication of the original D&D booklets in June or so of 1974. In my last post, I "debunked" or at least said that I don't really buy the premise that D&D was really all that based on sword & sorcery. What it was really based on was Gary Gygax's love of Medieval historical wargaming, which is why people looking back at older D&D works written by EGG scratch their heads wondering what glaive-guisarmes and fauchard-forks are or what they have to do with Conan or the Gray Mouser or even Aragorn. Not to say that Gary didn't enjoy sword & sorcery, because I think that's one of the things that we can take him at his word on, but he didn't actually incorporate nearly as much of that into the game as people tend to think. It's much more based on actual history, actual mythology, and the self-contained and unique game loop of D&D of "go into a dungeon for loot, return to town, sell it, level up, and then go to tougher dungeons to repeat"; a loop that has, again, nothing to do with sword & sorcery, or any kind of fiction at all up to that point, for that matter.

But that actually brings me to the point of today's post: Gary Gygax is not actually a reliable witness and what he says can't be taken at face value very often. As the legal doctrine represented by the Latin phrase that the post's title ascribes, once Gary Gygax is shown to be blatantly contradicting himself and using a disingenuous "certain point of view" to justify it, you learn to be pretty wary of taking any of his other claims too seriously. One of which was what I talked about in the last post on the 50th tag, but it's not unique. Sure, Gary Gygax probably wasn't as sold on Tolkien as some of his audience was, but the idea that he wasn't pilfering bleeding chunks, as the saying goes, straight out of Tolkien more frequently, or at least as frequently, as he was pulpish sword & sorcery tropes is laughably absurd, and his claims to how it doesn't resemble Tolkien at all are so clearly untrue that you almost are stuck with a double take when he makes them; does he really have a straight face while he's typing that column? Well, yeah, because the threat of legal action by the Tolkien estate was still relatively fresh on his mind. But that also gives a blatantly obvious ulterior motive for him to dissemble about how closely D&D resembled Tolkien too. A kind of 70s van art Brothers Hildebrandt interpretation of Tolkien, but Tolkien nonetheless.

There are a number of other claims that seem to cover up pretty shady practices too, that can be pinned to Gygax, and while I'm not attempting to cast aspersions or judgements on the guy, I'm saying that again, just because he said something doesn't mean that he is really a reliable witness. Dave Arneson did have to sue TSR when Gygax was running it because they weren't paying him the royalties due. TSR made the shady decision to replace some of the elements of the old BD&D set with a module B1 In Search of the Unknown, which was supposed to discourage Arneson because the author of B1 was a friend of Arneson's and now instead of taking royalties away from Gygax, he'd be taking them away from Mike Carr. Of course, as soon as the Basic set took off due to the notoriety of D&D after the "steam tunnels" incident from about 5,000 sales monthly to roughly 30,000 sales monthly, Gygax decided that he didn't want to keep paying royalties to Carr, so he replaced the module with one that he wrote, B2 Keep on the Borderlands so that he could pocket the royalties instead.

Gygax used to famously say that there was no right or wrong way to play D&D; the whole point was that the referee had the authority and explicit mandate to make the game work for his players, and neither Gygax nor anyone else knew what was best for any other given group other than their own. But then, he later recanted and said that AD&D was the only correct way to play and explicitly said that unless you followed every rule as written, you were playing the game so wrong that you couldn't even be considered to be playing AD&D. Also in spite of the clear similarities and cross compatibility, he made the dubious yet "protesting too much" claim that D&D and AD&D were completely separate games that had no real relationship to each other. Again, when anyone in the know knew that he had clear legal reasons to do so to drive sales towards the game that he was trying to box Arneson's royalties out of. 

Gamers in general are sympathetic to Gygax when the Blumes (or more specifically Lorraine Williams, acting in behalf of the Blumes' share in the company) essentially forced him out of his own company in 85 or 86 or so and took over everything that he built (with mostly their money, it should be noted) but I tend to look at it as the classic case of "live by the sword, die by the sword." It wasn't much worse than what Gary himself had done most notably to Arneson to also to the Tolkien estate, the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, Michael Carr, arguably Grenadier Miniatures, and plenty of other people if he thought he could take advantage of them for his own benefit and hide behind legalese and belabored justifications such as the above that are clearly not true, especially when the clear ulterior motive is plain for all to see.

And there shall also be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God—he will justify in committing a little sin; yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; and do all these things, for tomorrow we die; and if it so be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God. (Of course, this is followed by the following...)

Yea, and there shall be many which shall teach after this manner, false and vain and foolish doctrines, and shall be puffed up in their hearts, and shall seek deep to hide their counsels from the Lord; and their works shall be in the dark. 

Anyway, lest this be merely a personal complaint about a specific person, and one who's passed on and can hardly defend himself even if he wanted to, I'll quit here; most of these items are public record (many of them even available on various Wikipedia articles) with little independent interpretation by me, other than my general lack of empathy for someone who played a bit heavy-handed with his business colleagues and supposed friends getting the same treatment himself a few years later. Let it be said that Gygax's departure by coincidence (or maybe not) was timed more or less with a number of other things that were happening in the game and at the company, which reinforces my earlier benchmark of 1984-5 or so being the change into something different. Much of the original staff and crew at TSR was gone or would soon themselves leave, and most of the employees were newer hires who had not grown up in the Wisconsin wargaming crowd, and therefore had in many cases very different ideas for what the game should be like. It seemed to be, for a time at least, that they were sorta right, as the types of products (modules at first) that were written under different design parameters to be less games-like and more story-like were quite popular, and found a ready market who seemed to be inclined towards the same things. Reviewers started talking about the dungeon-crawl as if it were a passé thing; an immature phase that the hobby had to go through to get to where it really "wanted" to be. The original Ravenloft module is often hailed as a landmark in this new direction, but the reality is that the game, the designers and the audience to a large degree, had been heading that way already for a long time, and if Ravenloft hadn't come along, shortly something else would have accomplished the same goal. Tracy Hickman gets either the credit or the blame, depending on how you think his influence has changed the hobby because he was in the right place at the right time, but if he hadn't been, there are plenty of other candidates who could have played the same role in more or less the same time frame, because they were already working towards similar design parameters and expectations out of the game.

While in retrospect the hubris of this second wave who wanted to transform the hobby to something that it hadn't previously ever been is kind of obvious, However, I'm sympathetic to their opinions because honestly; I was never in love with the paradigm of the D&D loop of play or its obvious wargaming roots, and Gygax's own insistence that the game be firmly rooted in gamist design philosophy and that role-playing was merely an adjective, not the whole point... but in their efforts to remake the hobby they probably created more problems than they really solved. Even today, the majority of most product out there, and Paizo's long adventure paths and WotC's "campaign novels" are prime examples of this; aren't really very well suited to be just freakin' played. My own struggles to wrangle some of the Paizo adventure paths into something that I could run are a perfect example of this, but its a common refrain among players of many different playstyles. I've had to take just the kernels of ideas from Paizo or WotC and completely rework them so that they are hardly recognizable at all anymore in even a generous interpretation. The "best" style of play, for me at least, was just as poorly served in most respects by "modern" 1985+ game design philosophies as it was by 1974-1984 "classic" design philosophies.

But those were all things that had little to do with the actual rules of the game, which remained largely unchanged even as this completely different philosophy of module design and how the game would actually be played percolated through the designers and from them obviously eventually to the players. Of course, there were many changes coming to the rules too; 1985 or so is also the advent of Unearthed Arcana, and more ominously, least for old school players, the publication of Oriental Adventures which produced the first "skill system" of sorts for D&D. It was followed shortly by a much more detailed and codified version of the same in the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide. But let's cross that bridge in the next post in the 50th tag, shall we?

Map styles (and new Dark Fantasy X map incoming?)

Looking at some old maps, because I'm thinking of drawing another version of the setting map. I currently have three versions of the setting map. By setting map, I mean general overviews of all of the DFX setting as a whole, as opposed to maps that I'm making specifically for campaigns. One of the maps was never meant to be more than a sketchy first draft, though, and the other was a one-off electronically generated map because I had a one month subscription to Inkarnate. But I still refer to them from time to time, and not just the later draft that replaced the sketchy draft. This new one will be a second "second draft" when I draw it.

This is an interesting approach, because rather than there being one, "canonical" map of the setting, I end up with various maps, all of which offer differences, some of them fairly significant, and I refuse to take a stand on the canonicity of any of them. The campaign specific maps are canonical for the campaigns that I'd be running, but once in another context, they would no longer be. Why would I do such a thing? Well, I like maps for their own sake so it's always fun to draw more, it's nearly impossible to get them to match up as well as I'd like anyway, so I embrace the differences, and I like having a variety of interpretations. In real life, prior to modern surveying being readily available, maps were not exact, although the mapmakers did their best to capture what they saw and measured and observed. These differences and variations offer an interesting approach, where perception of distance and scale and size could vary by the observer and the effect of having differing choices to go to could be a feature rather than a bug. Plus, my current maps prioritize a little too much the Hill Country, and I feel like Timischburg and Baal Hamazi have become somewhat shrunk from their original incarnations on the sketchy map, or even from the material that they made up before. The Boneyard and the Goldenwolds are fairly open and empty and yet take up loads of space that I kind of need for other features, which are in contrast, too crowded. 

That said, as I've said many times before, my conception of how to draw fantasy maps was hugely influenced by the Christopher Tolkien maps of Middle-earth, as I saw them in the old Ballantine copies that I first had, printed in the 80s, with the Darrell K. Sweet cover art. Although it was obvious that there were some differences between that map and the larger one in the hardcover version of Unfinished Tales, I never gave much thought to the difference until recently. Let me go through a variety of Middle-earth maps that I'm familiar with and discuss where they came from.

This is the original Christopher Tolkien map, first done in 1953 for the first edition printings, and as I said, printed in color (such as it is) with Unfinished Tales. This is often called "The General Map of Middle-earth". At some point after 1970 it was slightly modified and a few river names and other features that didn't originally feature on the first version were added to the map as it was printed subsequently.

In 1980, Christopher Tolkien redrew the map, cropped a few portions off (especially in the south) and added more features that hadn't been present in the original version of the map. Because it was completely redrawn, it has some additional stylistic changes, but otherwise looks quite similar. This was what was included in, for example, my first printings of the books that I had, and is therefore the most familiar to me. The image below is that version, although obviously my version didn't have any red ink since it was printed in a mass market paperback. This one is often called "The West of Middle-earth" and it replaced the above map as the de facto standard. Few, if any, subsequent maps don't treat this version as the canonical version to follow. Not only had a few features been added in, but a few other errors were corrected, such as the spelling of Nan Curunir, for instance.

In 1994, Stephen Raw was hired to redraw the maps yet again, although he follows this "The West of Middle-earth" prototype extremely closely, and the main difference is that this new map was formulated for clearer printing in the mass market paperback environment; Christopher's maps didn't always print well when miniaturized and printed on cheap paper with cheap ink. The point wasn't at all to change anything, just to make them technologically a little easier to deal with. I'm also not aware of Raw having used any red ink, so it appears that that iconic affectation came to an end here.

This is what you are most likely to see in any modern printing of the books, but as noted and as you can see yourself, it's similar enough to the 1980 Christopher Tolkien redrawing that you could be forgiven for not even noticing that it's not the same map.

Finally, for Peter Jackson's movies, the map was redrawn yet again, color was added, and it is perhaps a bit more decorative, but is also so similar that other than the fancy fonts and few other decorative flourishes, you could be forgiven for thinking that is merely a digital edit of the Christopher Tolkien map. 

Which, actually, I can't confirm that it isn't. I can't find any credit for who drew it. I'll throw it out there. Obviously it arrived too late on the scene to have impacted my own map drawing techniques, which were mostly crystalized in the 80s, but which I've tinkered with a little bit here and there, but there are a few things that it does well enough that I've kind of adapted them more recently in place of what I was doing. This is especially true for the coastlines. I've seen this style of coastline spread throughout the fantasy mapmaking internet in general, and I presume that this is ultimately the source for it.

There are also a couple of other maps that I have, one or two of which I'll post here, that are noteworthy. One of them is a scan of the Pauline Baynes map, which was made in the 1960s, while Tolkien was still alive. It's a poster map, made as a promotional item, and it's pretty nifty, but other than color and the little illustrations in the bubbles, doesn't add anything that the Christopher Tolkien 1980s map didn't do just as well.

The next two, I'm not sure of the provenance of them, but they're in my folder and I found them online somewhere. I highlight them merely because I want to talk about a few minor stylistic differences, not because the content is, of course, really any different.

This looks to merely be an edit of the Stephen Raw map, with a border added, some parchment looking color layer put on as well, and most of the water lines removed.

First off; again, not focusing on the content but the stylistic differences between them, let's look at what they choose to do for some of the elements.

Mountains. In almost all of them, mountains are stylized and drawn; illustrative more than cartographic. This is now the default for almost all fantasy maps; they looks like little isometric mountains with shading and stuff on them. While many fantasy maps have the light source to the West (i.e., shadows on the right) Christopher did it the other way, and that's always been my default too. The mountains are also quite exaggerated and pointy, and have a fair bit of variety. Although my own drawings of them had simple black shading, that's probably because that's all that I could see in the shrunken and cheap printings of the mass market paperbacks. I've since been a bit more detailed and "pretty" with my mountains and shading, and that actually looks more like the originals than I thought.

Hills. While largely similar to mountains except lower, some of the hills have much less defined shading; in fact, in the original Christopher Tolkien map from the 50s, many of the hills don't have any shading at all. My own hills have often been too moundlike and boring, but as I've gotten older and more experienced, they became more like some of the later versions of the mountains—just smaller and lower.

Forests. I never really liked the approach Christopher Tolkien took of drawing massive clumps of stylized individual trees. Not that it doesn't look fine; I did that on some early maps when I was in junior high, and I quickly found the process time-consuming, tedious and frustrating. I think I may be more open to it now, as my "cloud forest" approach has become fairly tedious too, just in order to get it that leafy look instead of a puffy cloudy look. I also really like the approach taken in the movie version of the map, although I've never tried to do that one myself. It doesn't look hard, and it looks pretty good. Christopher Tolkien seems to have used a similar style in a map of Beleriand that he drew, so that's probably why it was used again here. It actually has more of an old J. R. R. Tolkien drawn The Hobbit map look to it as well, so it's an interesting callback. The final version shown above has a more "dispersed tree" forest look.. Lots of maps use a similar style, but I've never been a huge fan unless your trees are dispersed but close enough together that they don't look like it, so it's very tedious with lots of trees needing to be drawn.

Coastlines. I also did coastlines like the 1980 Christopher Tolkien map for a little while until I thought that all of these extraneous lines were... well, extraneous. I didn't really pay attention before, but the original Christopher Tolkien map didn't have those, so it was an artifact of a relatively brief window of time, I suppose. But I really like the coastline approach that the movie version of the map does, which is also similar to what the bottom "wrinkled parchment" version looks like. 

Rivers, settlements and roads. All versions are pretty similar here. Rivers are thick lines, getting thicker as they get wider, settlements are usually just little icons; squares, although occasionally a triangle or little tower-like icon, and roads are dotted lines. In the movie version of the map, roads are dashed lines and done in red ink like the lettering., and each settlement is an individualized little icon... but I like the little squares or circles just fine.

Lettering. In all versions of the map, the lettering has a hand drawn look, although in the more "professional" versions below, they probably aren't actually hand drawn. The red lettering is also a unique affectation, so much so that black hand drawn maps with red lettering gives a map a distinctive Tolkienesque look.

Negative space. All of the versions of the map also make considerable use of white space, and don't overdo decorative or other details; many entire regions are detailed by nothing so much as a label, like Minhiriath, Enedwaith, Forodwaith, Harondar, etc. I've actually started filling in more of these with at least some small details, just to give the map more of a "full" feel, but I understand the appeal of the blank space map. The Lord of the Rings maps were specifically designed to showcase areas that were part of the plot of either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings or were mentioned in the appendices or in offhand references in the text. This isn't necessarily meant to imply that there wasn't anything in the empty spaces of the map, merely that there wasn't anything that was mentioned. My maps don't quite serve the same purpose, so large blank spots isn't really what I'm going for.

Very briefly, because this is already a longish post with a lot of images, here's a map of the Warhammer Old World, or at least a portion of it. I found this online, but I have the majority of this same area in an old White Dwarf from the early/mid 90s, and the vintage of the map has to be late 80s or early 90s, although I don't know who drew it or exactly when it first appeared in print. As you can see, it clearly follows most of the drawing conventions of Christopher Tolkien. A few notable comments or exceptions:

• It uses the original Christopher Tolkien coastlines style, without lines going out all the way into the water, although otherwise the redrawn 1980 map is closer in style.
• Forests are drawn a bit differently, but honestly it looks nearly as tedious regardless.
• The lettering isn't red. The khaki land and light blue water color was added, I presume, later; the original version in my White Dwarf is just black and white. The lettering is also typeface, not hand drawn in appearance. I presume the original is just black and white.
• The map is a bit fuller in general than the Middle-earth maps, with much less white space.
• The map is also more illustrative. A lot more features are drawn, not necessarily with labels, and the features are also more decorative. Look at the big ledge east of the mountains in the south, or the Plain of Bones, for example. Or even just features scattered throughout the Dark Lands in general, like the Sentinels, or the Flayed Rock.
• The images in the ocean are clearly copied and pasted from other illustrations that Warhammer had already commissioned elsewhere, and don't originally belong to the map at all. 

My redrawn setting map will probably be mostly like this Warhammer map. I'll try and do forests like they are in the movie version of LotR, as well as coastlines that way, but otherwise, the Warhammer map is the closest analog. Keeping in mind that the Warhammer map is deliberately and obviously attempting to do things like they were done by Christopher Tolkien in the first place.

I do also have a couple of 05 Pixma Micron red pens, so I'm thinking of doing the lettering in red, and everything else in black, a la Christopher Tolkien as well. 

Converting SOG to a novel outline

Because I'll be moving several states over shortly, my "D&D" game will be on hold probably permanently, although we are talking about possibly playing over Teams or Google Meet or something similar. But I'm getting kind of motivated to revisit it regardless right now, so I'm thinking what else I can do. The first thing, and one that I've literally been talking about for years but never really done much with, is trying to put together a story, book, or even full-on novel based on the SOG outline. Honestly, it might be more than one novel, given that there are more than five fronts in SOG, especially if I keep my novel length to modest novel lengths before High Fantasy doorstoppers from the likes of Robert Jordan changed the landscape of fantasy publishing forever. Although its funny to think about, the Lord of the Rings volumes are only about 350 pages each, which was considered a long novel at the time. Heck, the entire LotR saga has less than half a million words. Even when you add The Hobbit to the count, it's still only 550,147 (according to the internet.) There are single books in Erikson, Jordan, Sanderson or Martin sagas that are nearly as long as the entire LotR. Sometimes truly less is more.

I think, although I wouldn't run the game this way, that it would make the most sense to split the plot points between two groups of characters who are only occasionally in contact with each other. The obvious choices here are one group with Dominic and Kimnor and the second group with Ragnar and Cailin. 

I also, as pointed out in an earlier post, need to tamp down the urgency of the main front so that it doesn't seem "irresponsible" for the characters to spend more time doing other things rather than focusing on it. I think it makes sense for the groups to start out in Barrowmere together, and then travel together towards Burham's Landing. As they pass Rabb's Hill, they'll meet Eoman Gast on the Savages of the Thursewood front, and that will be the impetus that causes them to split up. Ragnar and Cailin will therefore handle the Savages of the Thursewood and then bring Joan Wilmore back to the Northwoods region where they also run into The Tazitta Death Cults front. Dominic and Kimnor will board a ship and immediately start running into The Pirates of Chersky Island problems, and handle the original Chaos in the North front too. Because Ratling Scourge of the North Shore is a natural outgrowth of Chaos in the North, they'll handle it too.

I need to figure out how they can have a meet-up partway through; maybe in Lomar, and then how to get Ragnar and Cailin to Garenport for the big finale. My outline currently doesn't tie up Chaos in the North and the Tazitta Death Cults very well together, because they're independent, but I've got to get Jairan involved in the Chaos in the North somehow, or at least make the way to reach her in Garenport.

Dominic Clevenger. His iconic look is the traveler's leathers and the coonskin cap

Kimnor Rugosa, grayman shadow sword with a pet psueodragon

Ragnar Clevenger also has the leathers, but uses an axe in his left hand, and has "Viking" hair.

Cailin Clevenger, Ragnar's young wife, turned into a dhampyr

Dark Fantasy X and Shadows Over Garenport and Cult of Undeath

OK, I'm done with HOMM3 posts. I'm done with SWTOR posts. I haven't done much of anything else in several months, but it's time to start working again on DFX and the campaigns.

DFX as a game, of course, is done. I'm not doing anything else with it anymore. Here's the link, just for reference:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i6SlE8bF1mmGmgMKtkj2OHoP_-FrtKAo/view?usp=drive_link

And the character sheet:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ols2sEepL5KwkiqoapwgiVYEKMfSymqC/view?usp=drive_link

But I've posted those before, and when I say that I'm working on DFX, I don't mean on the rules, I mean on the setting and campaign discussion.

I think that I've done everything I need to for SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT, and I don't have anything else needed to run. In fact, I've already started running, although for various reasons unrelated to the game itself, I never made it an ongoing thing. I'm actually more interested, in light of my pending relocation, in converting that campaign outline into a novel outline (or more than one, possibly) and start writing it in my spare time rather than imagining TTRPGs that aren't happening.

But what I really want to do is start migrating into working on my revised CULT OF UNDEATH. As a refresher for people who haven't been reading for years, I originally did CULT OF UNDEATH years ago as an attempt to summarize and adapt the Carrion Crown adventure path by Paizo into a game that I could run. That was a fun project to go through, but what I realized fairly quickly was that I couldn't really do it. There were too many ideas and too many concepts that didn't work for me, and while there were certainly some ideas that I could borrow, there were also a great many that would have to change so much that the whole project would be pretty unrecognizable as an adaptation of the original source material in any way whatsoever except maybe the set up of the story. This sat in this state for a long time until I started doing these campaign briefs, and this 5x5 FRONTS exercise, where I thought I'd dust off the idea and rebuild it from the ground up. I think that I'm ready now to talk about how I'd move from SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT to CULT OF UNDEATH, and how they'd differ. (Lets start calling them SOG and COU to avoid me typing that out over and over again.)

First, whereas my original idea was that I'd propose all three campaigns to the players and let them choose which to do, I'm now going to assume that COU will follow SOG and that if I'm running COU that the players playing it will have first already played SOG (this will carry on when I get to MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTES (MWotDW) too; to play that, you will have needed to already completed COU. But that's not going to be something to talk about for likely months to come.

Before I begin, although you never know until you run it, of course, I have to make some plans, and in order to do so, I have to make some assumptions. I'm going to assume the following about the resolution of SOG:

• The PCs played all five fronts to completion.
• For the Garenport front, the Grand Duke and Duchess as well as their supernatural supporters all ended up dead. This leads to a political vacuum and a great deal of chaos, but that's not the PCs problem, and in fact they probably have plenty of incentive to stay away from Garenport for the short term, hence their decampment to the Northwoodshire countryside, where they pick up the COU thread.
• Since I'm using my sample iconics as stand-ins for the PCs, I am also using the fronts I developed for them. Dominic's is the most developed at this point, having confronted Audrey Hardwicke in Garenport. That was resolved for now, but Hardwicke will have escaped or at least his death can't be verified, so when he eventually comes back again, it won't be shocking. I also believe that Kimnor would have discovered that Bethan is still alive, and while I don't believe that that will have been resolved either, he's not going to be going anywhere near Lomar in the near term, so that will also hibernate. Ragnar and Cailin's story will be the star of the COU portion of the longer meta-campaign. Hardwicke will reappear more in the West, however, and even Bethan will find a reason to eventually leave Lomar. If Kimnor decides to try and find her again, she won't be found until I am ready for her to be found, and she's no longer in town, giving him no reason to stay.
• Joan was rescued. Grym was defeated permanently, and the thurses were pacified one way or another. Southumbria is going to be relatively quiet for the time being.
• The Tazitta threat will have been redirected. The Prophetess was killed and her movement unraveled, but not all of the Tazitta just slunk back into the wilderness; many were stirred up, relocated, and are now running around being a nuisance. The Northwoodshire area was saved, but is still in commotion of sorts, and it is a bit more dangerous now than it was.
• Guarg and Taurek were defeated, but as above; some of the individual pirates now remain on the sea, perhaps more desperate now that they no longer have a haven in Calak or powerful patrons uniting them.
• Burlharrow and the East Marches were rescued, Gothbert has become the new mayor, and if anything he's seeing more influx of homesteaders and settlers who are fed up with what's happened at Garenport.
• There is no chance that the PCs went to the Shadowlands and killed Jairan the Soulless, but whatever machinations she was attempting with the Nyxians and Tazitta cults is done for for now. I do have a thought; what if somehow the PCs were able to redirect Guarg's Ketos to the Shadowlands? Kind of like in Thor: Ragnarok when Thor defeated Hel by siccing Surtur on her, I suppose. I don't think that that means either Ketos of Jairan is defeated for good, but they should be out of the picture for the duration of the meta-camaign, at least, unless I want to have Jairan make a play for revenge later on. I probably won't; I see her as more likely impressed and amused rather than overly put out by their efforts, even if it stalled her plans for the time being. 
• I also believe that the PCs will have strengthened or created relationships with potential patrons that will have them hopping around with stuff to do for a long time to come.

For COU, the PCs will start out in a familiar setting, Cockrill's Hill in the Northwoodshire, but will be inevitably pulled westward towards and eventually in to Timischburg. Timischburg is a kind of Transylvania analog, created by me to take the place of Paizo's own horror subregion, Ustalav, which is also kind of a Transylvania analog. Most of their concerns in the east, in the Hill Country proper, will be left behind except those that specifically pertain to the COU campaign (maybe I should see these campaigns like seasons of a TV show; SOG was the first season, COU would be the second. If it gets that far without being cancelled, then we're on to MWotDW as the third, and I don't have any visibility to what I'd do after that yet. Not only does each season focus more on a different main core area of the Three Realms, but they'll also have different main villains and problems. COU's main front will be undead related and focus heavily on vampires in particular, as is appropriate for something set in Timischburg, the fantasy analog to Transylvania of the movies that I've created.

Anyway, here's the library version of Jairan that I decided replaces my original image. Clearly based on the drow goddess Kiaransalee or however you spell that, which wreaked havoc on the Forgotten Realms many years ago (in actual years I mean, not in setting years)

Relocation

It seems very likely, in the upper 90% likely, that in the next month or so I will change jobs and relocate to a new state, where I'll be in the northern Southeast. Not too far from where my original Colonial ancestors arrived in America in the latest few years of the 1600s or the earliest few years of the 1700s. Although that's neither here nor there, as they didn't stay on the shores of South Carolina for long, and I consider my more immediate ancestors to be backwoods Georgia people, because they moved out west. 

"My people" are therefore pretty solid backwoods Dukes of Hazzard southerners on my father's side, and I tend to favor that culture and personality in my own personality, in other words. My mother's side, on the other hand, were Massachusetts natives who had gone west with the pioneers and grew up as rural farmers in the Rocky Mountain west for generations. My mom still lived in tiny little towns in the countryside of the intermountain West region. I did not grow up rural, although the modest sized town that I grew up in in Texas could probably best be described as suburbia-like, except not attached at the time to any major metropolitan urban area (I think as urban sprawl has grown, that's arguably not true anymore. But I haven't lived in the town I grew up in for ~25 years now. I've felt pretty fish out of water in many ways living in the suburban northern Midwest; this relocation will bring me closer to home in one way; into the South (although I wonder how culturally or even genetically the South still remains the South these days) but farther away from the West, which is my other half of heritage.

I've said before that I feel in many ways more at home culturally in the rural south but more at home geographically in the west. I like the cooler, drier, sunnier weather and the beautiful mountains, valleys, and deserts of the American West. Of course, as noted above, the South isn't necessarily the South anymore as the whole nation has been in commotion and people have moved all over, so I've kind of decided that a solid mostly rural red state like Wyoming or Montana is my preferred place to live, with even western South Dakota or Nebraska or some place like that being an acceptable alternative. But moving someplace like western (but not West) Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, etc. would still be seen as an improvement from my current situation, at least in terms of "feeling at home."

Where am I going with this? My "D&D" game, which only ever had one session before we got too busy and it never seemed to happen again, will be unlikely to have any success in the future. We'll be too dispersed. However, maybe there's an opportunity to find new players in my new location. Regardless, I'm starting to have some new thoughts and stuff going on with regards to DFX, so look for some new content related to that setting later in the summer. 

I'm always hesitant to open up more new areas, but I do kind of like the idea of what's left of abandoned Hyperborea is a Hoth-like mammoth tundra with many glaciers and year-round snow cover.