Other updates on review

So, a few other possible changes after reviewing my old Cult of Undeath material:

I created a secondary necromancer who isn't the main bad guy, Loriana Boztogonash. But I already had and had forgotten about Gregoru Stefanescu. I have images of a gypsy witch necromancer, but I'll save the Boztogonash name for later and rechristen her as Loriana Stefanescu.

I haven't decided on eyepatch or not, so here's a variant without.

I don't love the name Vyrko Lodge. Although I created it specifically for the earlier Cult of Undeath project, I'm either going to both rename and somewhat relocate it, or have a different one that's on the eastern edge of the Bitterwood called Preszov Lodge. This is part of my general shifting eastward of the whole Cult of Undeath. While ironically Timischburg was created specifically for Cult of Undeath, the new version of the campaign is taking place (mostly) in a kind of "culturo-tone" between Timischburg and the Hill Country. Anyway, here's the lodge, on a sunny day. The real action will probably be on cloudy nights, but I've images for that too... 

A cache of silver "ghostbusting" weapons is still the reward there and maybe even the incentive to go in the first place. 

In my old Cult of Undeath, von Lechfeld himself had created the flesh golem, but I'm not going to readopt that idea. Rather, he created the wards that could contain or even destroy one. Because he doesn't go to Mittermarkt much anymore, he's not going to be implicated. I'm not sure if I even need Ebenbach at all anymore. I'll need to noodle with this just a bit more.

The necromancy artifact that the cult murdered von Lechfeld in the first place is Pandallo's Preternatural Periapt. It can also suppress necromancy, which is what von Lechfeld used it for.

As soon as I find my art supplies, I intend to not only draw a second version of the whole setting in the red and black "Tolkien" style, but also draft the locations, more or less, for the campaign map, which will be slightly "distorted" from the setting map as it exists now. I can't do the whole final thing until I get the five fronts done. But this first one is starting to come together, sorta. And a working draft sketchy map wouldn't be a bad idea. 

Speaking of locations, here's Mittermarkt.

Otto von Szell

I went back over the last couple of days and reread my old Cult of Undeath project from back when it was an attempt to synthesize and utilize Paizo's Carrion Crown adventure path. I discovered that I had had some pretty good ideas that I'd forgotten about, as well as having some good names. I came up with the name Konstantin Hmayak anew, but Otto von Szell was already the name I had in mind over many years, and I'm going to go back to it. Rather than being a somewhat hapless swampie voodoo witch doctor, he's an aristocratic Timischer modeled a bit more on the old Warhammer setting's infamous necromancer Heinrich Kemmler. He can still be hapless, to a point. But I'm officially scratching the Hmayak name and readopting von Szell into that role.

Here's a few sample images, before I decide what he most looks like. Most of them are pretty similar anyway. 

Brainstorming: Cult of Undeath Front #1: The Murder of Alpon von Lechfeld

The Cult of Undeath 5x5 front has the five fronts identified at very high level. Let me brainstorm some points about the first front, which is the main Cult of Undeath front.

Alpon von Lechfeld has died, leaving his 17 year old daughter (Revecca) orphaned. The PCs have been called to be pallbearers or something, and eventually start to suspect foul play. This set-up is based on the earliest Carrion Crown set up, although very little after that will resemble that anymore. Although I might want to have some kind of haunted house scenario like Carrion Crown does. In fact, I very specifically do want to, and I want to use the haunts rules, and maybe a ghost or two, which will feel pretty different than anything that happened in Shadows Over Garenport. What’s going on here? What does the cult want and what are they doing? Von Lechfeld in his work is a paranormal researcher has acquired many unusual things, and he was murdered because some thugs from the Cult of Undeath (a better name might be nice, but whatever) came looking for one of them, after tracing it to him through one of his old dealers. These weren’t just brutish thugs, however; he was murdered in such a way that it looked like an accident.

Von Lechfeld right before his murder

These guys are now using this item to stir up spectral activity in Cockrill’s Hill, where von Lechfeld lived. I’ll continue the first half of the first adventure of Carrion Crown and assume that the town is getting riled up. Then there will be some ghosts to put down in the graveyard, or in a haunted area of some kind. Again, this is a very different kind of activity than the PCs will have done in the previous campaign, which makes it nice. 

But let’s now take the old Carrion Crown activity and flip it; instead of talking about what the PCs are “supposed” to do, let’s figure out who the villains are and what they’re doing? Bartal Roziak and Francor Torsail are the thugs, but they have a decent necromancer, Loriana Boztogonash among their number. This necromancer actually killed von Lechfeld’s dealer and friend Werner Otten in Mittermarkt first, and then got the answer for where the object was that he was looking for. What is this object, actually? I don’t know what I’ll call it, but basically it’s a necromancy amplifier, which the cult leader, Konstantin Hmayak from his hideout in the Eltdown Fens is looking for. He wants to use it to call up the dead gods of the Atlanteans, one of which, Bokrug, is a lizard-like beast said to have died in the swamp eons ago when it was wetter, and a much larger lake. Hmayak doesn’t really understand that he’s getting in over his head, but that’s OK. Evil doesn’t have to always be competent to be a threat. Look at our managerial globalist elite, for example. 

Roziak and Torsail

Boztogonash

To understand what’s happening, it will be necessary to follow up with the ghosts that are haunting Cockrill’s Hill, as well as investigate Otten and his murder. However, Otten has had body parts stolen and constructed into a zombie slash flesh golem slash Frankenstein’s monster which is running amok and causing panic in town; you can’t be in Mittermarkt and not be involved in some way. This monster will have to be stopped to find the clues about von Lechfeld’s murder, which will require some exploration of the city and the surrounding countryside, which will be further developed later (this is still a rough skeleton draft.) I have some stuff from my original Cult of Undeath outline that I could think about adapting or updating to make it fit.

Otten as flesh golem 

Another slightly less supernatural threat will be the Tarushan gypsies around Mittermarkt, who have been kidnapping people and feeding them to an undead nightmare among them who is on its way towards trying to become a vampire. I’ll probably treat it like Alys, my wight-witch, by which I mean it’ll be a wight but I’ll add a few spells that he can cast. Unlike Alys, this guy will be more savage and feral, and the day to day threat will be the sneaky no-good gypsies themselves, although it’ll end in a confrontation with the wight.

It turns out that Boztogonash made a mistake in killing von Lechfeld to get his object; he’s attuned it to himself, and nobody else can use it… except for Revecca, his daughter, and only heir of his bloodline. So, she’ll get kidnapped and dragged across the Haunted Forest in a shortcut to Eltdown and the Fens. However, the necromancy amplifier, which has been kinda sorta turned on by Boztogonash but which is out of control not only caused the rash of haunting and ghosts in Cockrill’s Hill, but has riled up the forest, making it more dangerous than ever, and has also caused the spontaneous reanimation of the swamp shamblers, ancient Atlantean bodies buried in the bogs and fens; ancestors of the Wendaks who died during the fall of Atlantis itself. 

Grendling woman

Speaking of, Wendaks in the Haunted Forest! What an obvious line of the front. Their own restless spirits and monsters are disturbed by the passage of Boztogonash and the necromancy amplifier, causing the Grendlings to go a little crazy and violent on their own. Luckily, much of this can be avoided if the PCs fail to pass through the forest, but not entirely; even going around it will get some of the impact of this.

Finally, main villain, Hmayak will attempt to resurrect or reanimate or whatever Bokrug. He’ll be a crazy swampie sorcerer, he’ll be protected somewhat inadvertently by the swamp shamblers and cultists. This could also get pretty hairy, because I have two other fronts on this 5x5 that are also based in the same Eltdown Fens; there might be more villainy going on than the PCs can possibly imagine. But, I like the idea of the Bokrug cult, the Heqet snake cult and the ghouls all interacting with each other in the swamps, and that the PCs can’t really attempt to deal with one of these fronts without getting entangled in the other two. After a very brief foray in the Shadow Realm in the last campaign to find the cure for the ratmen plague and possibly to go visit Jairan Neferirkare, I like the idea that Bokrug himself might need to be slain as a embryonic undead beast in the Shadow Realm too.

Hmayak

Punting on the iconic character fronts

The absolute final punting exercise, and then I’ll be done and be able to pivot to developing Cult of Undeath, is the stuff that I developed for my characters. As a quick reminder, the way that this works is that I prefer to develop what the NPCs will do, especially the villains, antagonists and hopefully eventually nemeses of the PCs. Exactly what THEY do about the actions of these villains is not something that I develop; at best, I will tend to make an extremely handwavey assumption about what the PCs are most likely to do, but nothing about my plan will depend on it, really, because you just never know what PCs will do, and I’m very averse to trying to force them into my paradigm of what I think that they should do. All of my preparation is on the other end, and honestly, it isn’t tons of preparation, because such preparation would be somewhat wasted when the PCs interact with my plans anyway. Best to keep everything pretty vague, high level, and a few bullet points about direction. What is useful preparation is NPC names, images, what their goals are, what the setting looks like, i.e. locations and problems that such locations have, interactions and relationships between NPCs so that when the PCs meet them they end up getting pulled into mafioso-like webs of intrigue and politics that they may not even have anticipated at all.

So, my “fronts” are five separate challenges with their own flavor, sub-theme under the campaign’s greater theme, and NPCS/villains, along with their goals and plans and relationships with each other. Within a campaign, I like to have a mixture of horror/supernatural themed challenges and more “mundane” skullduggery/intrigue themed challenges, but of course, that’s in a broad sense. It’s a dark fantasy setting, so both of those themes are kind of always present to some degree, at least.

Anyway, each of the fronts has a region associated with it too, as a starting point. The biggest “main” front deals with the entire Hill Country region, and has elements of it taking place across the entire region. I also have two reasonably large ones associated with the two biggest subdivisions in the Hill Country; Northumbria and Southumbria. Not only are they politically distinct, but they also are divided by the Umber River, hence the names. The first big front is associated with the soi-dissant nobility of Garenport and their plots, intrigues and troubles, and is pretty supernatural heavy. Northumbria is a more mundane threat; a militant cult is raiding in the region and attempting to throw the hillmen out. (Ironically, as the setting continued to evolve, rather than Northumbria, it ended up being that cult staged itself out of Northumbria but was raiding northern Southumbria. Oh, well.) While not exactly the “orc raids are increasing” type of threat, it does bear some clear parallels to that kind of semi-mundane type of thing. Southumbria a mixed one in terms of themes; thurses (not unlike Warhammer beastmen in many respects)in the Thursewood are on the rise, and war drums are beating under the trees. Part of this is that they’re riled up by a sorcerer making a play for turning himself into a lich by gathering the necessary forbidden books, rituals, etc. necessary, and part of this is the orcling migration through the forest in migrant caravans. Honestly, the various rows of this front only relate to each other by geography in many cases. The final two normal fronts are a seafaring and pirate themed front on the Darkling Sea, featuring orcling pirates and a harrowing shaman who is a favored of Dagon. This could end in a potential Clash of the Titans “release the kraken” type of scenario. The final is the far-flung North Marches stuff up in Burlharrow which involves intrigue, mystery, murder, manufactured plagues, foul ratmen and undead ghouls, with a brief foray (probably) into a Shadow Realm, a separate plane of existence altogether.

But that’s all the stuff that’s prepared regardless of who the PCs are. I also like to create fronts related to the PCs. Of course, in preparing this for the blog, I had to use surrogates, so I have my iconic PCs instead of real ones. I do now have real ones, but given that we’ve only played one session, I haven’t yet developed anything of note for them, only vague ideas.

The villains of my iconic PC fronts are Audley Hardwicke, a disgraced fallen ranger who’s now angry and eager for revenge, and now that his perfidy and corruption was outed, he’s lost any notion of trying to hide it. His sometime girlfriend is the kemling witch Merra Kuzalash, who I don’t intend to play a major role in this campaign, but I’d like to foreshadow her appearance in a future campaign by having her at least pop up. He’s the nemesis of Dominic Clevenger, and to a lesser extent his brother too.

Bethan Argavad is the former fiancé of Kimnor, another iconic PC. She fell victim to the grisling curse, and was supposedly put to death. But… somehow she was not put to death, and was transformed into a dhampir. She’s a real monster, but Kimnor has been broken and grieving in many ways over her for years, so finding out what actually happened to her is probably going to be more traumatic than what he thought happened to her.

Ragnar and his young wife Ciarin, on the other hand, were also attacked a year or so ago by a vampire, Lysander Draven. However, they were always meant to feature more in the Cult of Undeath campaign. My original intention was that the four-man iconic group for the first campaign would have Dominic, Kimnor, Shule and Oisin Dughall. Shule’s character specific thing would have been his hunt for his brother, who was press-ganged by pirates long ago. He now is thriving and serving as first mate on a sloop associated with Captain Taurak’s pirate horde. Oisin Dughall has connections to the Cherskii Mafia, and Vaspar Oksandros is the crime lord who blames him for the death of his brother. Although formerly not located in the Hill country, he’s now actually come this way. I just pictured Kemish and his pirate crew, so below is just Lysander and Vaspar. 

When I post next, I’m going to start filling out my Cult of Undeath skeleton.

Punting #5: Burlharrow and the North Marches

What is going on? Once again, there’s news that’s so big that everyone will have to make a Will save to not comment on it. I guess I kind of failed since here I am mentioning it obliquely. However, given the chaotic and confused nature of what’s happening in current events, I’m not going to attempt to predict anything except the following:

Also, this link amuses me.  https://www.livescience.com/animals/birds/nearly-half-a-million-invasive-owls-including-their-hybrid-offspring-to-be-killed-by-us

The US government is going to kill half a million owls, including hybrid owls, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. If you replace these owls, which come from another territory within the US, with migrant caravans of invasive people, or chain migration from Third Worlders who are here under dubious “legal” auspices, then for whatever reason the logic is completely turned on its head. If to protect the native population, the invasive population needs to be extirpated, well… y’know.

Let’s do our final Shadows Over Garenport punting post (well, penultimate. I guess I need to do the character specific fronts too before I’m done done.) This is the Burlharrow front, where the PCs go to the North Marches (or East Marches, as I’ve sometimes called them) which is nominally part of Northumbria, but which is also kind of new settlement, and its homesteaders and settlers are dubious about the government in Garenport, and would mostly prefer to be independent.) I’ve got a few characters; Gothbert Erhard, the lieutenant mayor and champion of the Sovereign political faction, which stressed independence from Garenport. Murchad Gibson is the Dockmaster, and champion of the Loyalist faction, which wants greater unity with Garenport. Berold Geissfalk is another figure here, a mercenary recruit from the south.

Next, we have the ratmen. I’ve included a few samples, including the scientist who’s developed the plague which is killed people in Burlharrow.

Next, we have the ghouls. I have a slightly different batch of “ancient” ghouls that are more relevant for Cult of Undeath stuff coming up; these are the “northern” ghouls associated with Burlharrow.

And finally, here’s Morcant Gunderic. I may have already posted him, because although he doesn’t actually belong to this front, he does belong to this area, and looking for him is probably the catalyst that would bring them to the North Marches in the first place.

Punting and Front #4: Piracy on the Darkling Sea

Let’s finish up my punting project. I’m actually ready to stop punting, but it seems odd to stop it before I finish it. Front #4 is the orcling pirates of the Darkling Sea. This will have some swashbuckling naval action, reconnaissance and possibly “black ops” on the Chersky Island, some tense negotiations as the innocent orcling settlers in the peaceful communities on the island are at risk of being the baby thrown out with the bathwater as the combined coastal cities are fed up with piracy and are about at the point where they want to sweep the orclings off the island get rid of them altogether, including the peaceful and friendly fishers and farmers. Exactly how the PCs will handle this is hard to say. But we’ve got a few things here to look at. First, here’s Captain Borus, a friendly NPC that they’ll likely interact with, since I can’t imagine a scenario in which the PCs take the time to get their own ship, they’ll have to book passage to cross the sea with Borus’ ship. Captain Taurak on the other hand is the most notorious pirate captain, and the one who will be a stand in for all of them, really.

I’ve also included an image of some of the crew below. Not that he’s a PC anymore, but I did create the idea that Shule was looking for his missing brother Kemish, who was press-ganged by a pirate gang, but has thrived in the environment, now serving as first mate to Charakaz Rees, a junior captain of a sloop that sails as part of Taurak’s fleet.

Guarg Dreghu is the cult leader of Dagon, and is Taurak’s partner. He’s also pictured. When the PCs (presumably) blunt the piracy threat and take out their ability to continue to wage piracy as effectively as they had been, Guarg will summon the Ketos. If you’re familiar with the legend of Perseus, you know what the Ketos is, but if you’re only familiar with him from one of the Clash of the Titans movies you probably think that it’s a kraken instead (which is actually a Scandinavian mythological/folkloric creature, not a Greek one.) So, that’ll be pretty exciting as the PCs try to deal with that, as you can imagine, without the benefit of a medusa head.

Anyway, this ended up being a little bit bigger than I expected, by which I mean I have more images than I thought. Let me do the final North Marches front as part of a separate post just to keep this from becoming too bulky of a post and having too many images.

Warming up to Cult of Undeath and even beyond

I’m reluctant to make changes to my setting based on what I can convince the AI to illustrate, but I’ve already accommodated one, and I’m considering another. First, I decided that the kemlings don’t have obligatory small Darth Maul or Graz’zt like crown of horns around their head. I had already been irritated by my inability to find surrogate illustrations even before generative AI images were a thing. I’m even more disinclined to make that obligatory now that I can’t get DALL-E 3 to generate images that have them, unless I want them to look specifically like Star Wars characters. AI isn’t really all that. But on the other hand, I do kind of like that particular feature being merely one of many potential old-school (prior to 4e) tiefling features, and most kemlings wouldn’t even sport any of them at all. The second thing that in spite of many attempts I have not been able to get a good image of is the skull-face moon that shines over Grozavest. This isn’t really all that exciting anymore as a feature, since Golarion has a moon like that too, at least in one of the outer planes or something. Plus, moons that look like skulls is an old fashioned and time honored tradition in cover art for murder mystery novels going back decades. What if the moon showing a skull aspect was not the normal state, but instead an omen that’s known to take place from time to time? I could actually make it more interesting when it happens if so. Or, even not make that unique to Grozavest, but rather something that happens across the entire world. Either way, it’s not exactly an impending problem; there’s not going to be any travel to Grozavest in Shadows Over Garenport or Cult of Undeath either one; although the unnamed proposed campaign that would take place between Cult of Undeath and Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes, and would focus on traditional vampire Timischburg stuff almost certainly will take the PCs to Grozavest, and might even have at least an entire front that doesn’t even leave the city completely. (I don’t know yet what other fronts I’ll have. Probably one in Innsborough, my sea-side version of Innsmouth, and one in Inganok and Castle Dracul… and I’d like to have a werewolf themed one. One that’s less supernatural? Maybe something to do with boats coming from Nizrekh. Oo, oo… I can foreshadow the mind-wizards!)

So, there’s an ad hoc quick draft of what themes I want to cover in a third campaign season. Before I start that, I still have to redo Cult of Undeath away from my old Carrion Crown adaptation, how it started. Instead, it will become something that’s evolved in a completely different direction that only has the initial framing device as common from that adventure path; barely enough to qualify as an influence at all.

I doubt that we’ll be done unpacking for weeks, and I’m afraid that my hobby stuff will be among the last stuff that gets found, because our movers mislabeled lots of boxes, and the ones where I suspect that my hobby stuff is (and by “hobby stuff” I mean even stuff as basic as my computer) are buried under all kinds of things in the garage. So, I’ll probably still be dilly-dallying with blog posts that tread water, but once I really get back into my groove, I’ve got a couple of new maps to draw; my “alternate version” of the entire Three Realms setting, a revised take on my old hexographer Nizrekh map (especially if Nizrekh ends up being part of the third season) and even a first draft of a map of Hyperborea.

Also, since Shadows Over Garenport is and has been done (with the exception of playing it) for some time, it’s time to buckle down and get Cult of Undeath actually moving too.

Grozavest

Mind-wizard

Timischburg vampire

Triassic part 2

A bit more on the churn of stuff in the Triassic. It was just a few years ago that Sterling Nesbitt shocked the paleontological world by publishing the biggest and best cladogram of Triassic Archosauriformes, or whatever exactly his cut-off was, that recovered phytosaurs as outside of Archosauria and as a near sister-group of it. More recently that particular question has been reevaluated, and phytosaurs are now recovered by newer cladograms as the most basal group within Archosauria. This all has a bit of the feel of inside baseball after a while. Ultimately, if you’re looking back at your family tree and you find that you had some guy who was your ancestor a thousand years ago, do you care if some other guy was his uncle or his brother? No doubt it mattered to him, but in the grander scheme of things, it makes no difference at all. And it’s not like phytosaurs and erythrosuchids or whatever were writing each other to get their family trees. This is similar in many ways to what I posted about yesterday; at the end of the day, does it really matter very much if silesaurs are the closest sister group of Dinosauria or if they’re basal Ornithischians within Dinosauria? That’s the exact same situation. Ultimately, it only matters for determining minute details of cladograms, evolutionary family trees. I’m somewhat casual about that because I like classic phylogeny for many things, and because I’m aware of the mathematical and statistical challenges to the theory of evolution as it’s currently stated, which many biologists do not understand, because they’re not mathematically or statistically astute enough, or not aware of the study of genetic fixation and other genetic research that would falsify the theory. However, as Professor Frank Tipler of Tulane University states, specifically about this situation, “If you cannot understand the mathematics, assume the mathematicians do.” This is why I don’t think that phylogeny is necessarily as important as the specialists make it out to be; if the entire basis for evolutionary cladistics is based on an evolutionary model that fails mathematically, then how interesting the results of the model are will drop accordingly. And it doesn’t change anything material about the animal; regardless of where you place Phytosaurs or Silesaurs on the cladogram, and regardless of whether you call them Archosaurs or Dinosaurs, the animals are still the exact same either way, and their role in their ecosystem is still exactly the same either way, and their interactions with the rest of their faunal assemblages are still the same either way. 

To me, that’s probably more interesting than what are relatively speaking kind of subtle shifts on the cladogram. It’s also why I prefer to use useful yet “outdated” classic phylogenetic labels. Silesaurs, for example, is a very useful label, and everyone knows what a silesaur is (well, if you’re familiar with Triassic paleontology. Maybe a label like prosauropod would be a better example.) If Silesaurs are not basal ornithischians, then they will no longer be monophyletic, but paraphyletic, and the label will become unusable by the pedantic nitpickers who run around saying “basal sauropodomorphs” instead of prosauropods. 

Regardless, the reason that the Triassic is so interesting is that there were essentially three great biological “empires” competing for who would run the show. The therapsids were the outgoing empire that took a huge hit during the Permian-Triassic extinction event, but they were still putting forward strong contenders for large and small herbivores, at least, until the very end of the Triassic. Their predator lines were kaput, but they were also innovating and becoming the mammals in the meantime… again, although from any perspective other than the (somewhat) arbitrary distinction between the later mammaliformes and actual true mammals is kind of superfluous. The Triassic is the story of their long slow defeat, although as noted, dicynodonts were still going strong up until the very end, and their takeover of the small, often nocturnal roles was impressive enough during the next two phases of the Mesozoic and set them up nicely to come into play after the much later K-T extinction event. It’s also the story of the dinosaurs growing in size, prominence in the faunal assemblages, and expanse across the terrestrial ecosystems, positioning themselves to become heavily dominant after the Tr-J extinction event that ended the Triassic. But what is often forgotten is that while the therapsid lines were turning into mammals, their “empire” was failing and ended conclusively at the Tr-J line, and while the dinosaurs were also growing out of their proto-dinosaur lineages into dominance, the real, actually successful empire during the Triassic was the Pseudosuchian Empire, a third player that had barely started during the earliest Triassic, but who quickly claimed the position of Imperial success story throughout the entire period. They ended up passing through the Tr-J line as a variety of successful forms, but their diversity and their position as the Imperial apex megafauna of the assemblages  were over, and their entire reign as the imperial juggernauts of the Triassic era was unrecognized for a long time; and even now only a few specialists and weird fans like Chinleana, CHimerasaurus, and to some degree even me, even recognize the existence of the Pseudosuchian Empire.

Or, based on my stated preference for some of the old Linnean labels, maybe I should call it the Thecodont Empire?

The Triassic

Found out an interesting thing in a paleontology YouTube video the other day. Like many, I’ve had an increasing awareness of and interest in the Triassic and all of the stuff going on during that time period which has never really been treated much in popular literature, and therefore wasn’t well known to the general public. Honestly, it wasn’t well known to specialists either; much of what we’ve learned about the Triassic is pretty new stuff discovered in the last few years, or at most the last couple of decades or so. Popular literature for kids, when I was young, pretty much just had Coelophysis, Plateosaurus, a generic phytosaur (usually Rutiodon, although they usually didn’t identify him) and “Teratosaurus”. Not that Teratosaurus isn’t a real animal, but it was a chimerical combination of a Teratosaurus skull (which is rauisuchid) and Efraasia post-cranial skeletal material (which is prosauropod), and Teratosaurus was not, as advertised fur decades, the first large carnosaurian therapod. Often, popular literature said very little about any of these animals other than that they lived in the Triassic and oh, hey, here’s an illustration of them. For many years, all I knew about phytosaurs was that they were like crocodiles but not, and the illustration of them had their nostrils up close to their eyes instead of on the end of their snouts like a crocodile. For instance.

Slowly the onion has been peeled back. I became aware of what were considered proto-dinosaurs like Lagosuchus and Lewisuchus from Greg Paul’s Predatory Dinosaurs of the World; although now Lagosuchus is usually called Marasuchus (I may have mentioned this before, but I hate seeing great well-known names get memory-holed like this, and sometimes I refuse to go along and keep using the “outdated” names anyway.) The Dinosaurs, a PBS special introduced me to herrerasaurids (or at least Herrerasaurus specifically) and animals like Scaphonyx. I started becoming more acquainted with the cynodonts, the kannemeyeriids and other dicynodontids, and started to become acquainted with the vast array of psuedosuchians who truly ruled the Triassic for the most part. But even then, the specialists didn’t know that much about a lot of stuff and it’s been a very dynamic area with lots of changes coming fast.

One of them which probably isn’t new, but it was new to me was that the Ischigualasto formation, famous for having still the earliest known dinosaurs to date, including Herrerasaurus and Eoraptor, was quite a cool ecosystem, and not tropical at all. In fact, almost all of the dinosaurs were located at relatively cooler latitudes during most of the Triassic, and the hotter more tropical areas were instead dominated by mesothermic pseudosuchians; including many that mimicked famous dinosaur morphologies in many ways; Sillosuchus looking like a prosauropod, for instance, or the bipedal rauisuchians looking very similar to much later appearing therapods, or revueltosaurs being confused for ornithischians, or aetosaurs looking like much later appearing nodosaurs, etc. Some of these also coexisted in the same ecosystems as the early dinosaurs, but the early dinosaurs clearly thrived in the cooler environments, and only spread to the tropical latitudes after the psuedosuchians had the major post-Triassic extinction event; one of the so-called Big Five extinction events and the real reason that the Age of the Dinosaurs even happened. If it hadn’t, the Mesozoic might well have been the Age of the Crocodiles instead.

Another fascinating discovery was the silesaur line; a sister-group of the dinosaurs that were obligate plant-eaters, not too unlike what we’d have expected to see for very early ornithischians. These guys were really just discovered about twenty years or so ago, and the group filled out with more specimens and species, and then, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the last couple of years or so new cladograms are now recovering them as early ornithischians. This actually makes a lot of sense for many good reasons; including that there is a long ornithischian ghost lineage throughout the Triassic until they burst on the scene in the early Jurassic as fabrosaurs and early ornithopods, etc. If the silesaurs are actually the ghost lineage, no longer ghost, then that fills in a major hole in the fossil record, and expands dramatically the scope of dinosaurs, and their variety and diversity during the Triassic. This is an interpretation that is gaining ground, but there’s still some inertia for silesaurs as sister group to dinosaurs rather than early ornithischian dinosaurs, so it hasn’t been universally adopted. In addition, there are some competing models for the structure of the dinosaur family tree, including uniting sauropods and ornithischians as “Phytodinosauria” and even uniting therapods and ornithischians (but not sauropods or their lineage) as "Ornithoscelida". These last two studies have been recovered in a few studies, but not seen as statistically very likely. The silesaurs as early ornithischians is better supported and has been recovered in several phylogenetic studies, but it’s still not seen as sufficiently definitive to replace the null hypothesis from earlier studies that recovered silesaurs just outside of Dinosauria.

In any case, for much of pop science’s coverage of the Triassic, it was seen as merely the preface to the coming of the dinosaurs, and while there were some unusual creatures kicking around, (and I haven’t even touched on drepanosaurs, nothosaurs, tanystropheids, etc.) it was treated as merely the time when somewhat mysteriously, dinosaurs, pterosaurs and mammals all first appeared, but were just setting up the stage for the Jurassic, when things were actually interesting. This isn’t true at all; the Triassic is a fascinating period and the ecosystems that it had are, to me, now among the most interesting out there.

Minor race updates

As soon as I have access to my source files, I'm going to make a few minor updates to the race descriptions:

• Kemlings do not obligatorily have weird features like the crown of horns. Mutated features like that, or scales, or a forked tongue, or cloven hooves instead of feet, etc. are not unknown among them, but are rare.
• I've struggled for years with what to call the people of Lomar. Cursed, Hyperboreans, graymen, etc. I haven't been super happy with any of them. Looking at some Old English and even Proto-Germanic roots I've found two options, and I'll almost certainly pick one: Grislings or Hoarlings. I kind of like the latter best, since I like the old fashioned words hoar and hoary, but since it sounds like whore, it might be a no-go at the table. Sadly. Grislings is based on the same root word as grizzled or grizzly, but spelling it with an [s] just looks better written and is equally authentic.
• Neanderthals never really worked because it sounded too scientific. Atlantean kind of does, but I don't love it. Wendak is a good endonym, but I kind of want a Hillmen-themed exonym too. Grendling, as in Grendel + ing (an old fashioned English term meaning, "people of". Or at least close enough for my purposes.) 
• On the other hand, although I experimented with using the same formula to create swertings or even surtings or surtlings (the first being a word Tolkien himself used at least once) it didn't sound a good as surturs.

Anyway, here's some "Grendlings" assuming I go with that. Keep in mind that they're not all equally devolved, so some look like regular humans still, if of a unique ethnic group. The worst look almost like man-apes.