Punting and front #1: Chaos in the North

Once again, I found myself spending some time at ENWorld, and once again, I find myself leaving in disgust. There's a lot of the usual pedantic wrangling over stupid trivial stuff—even given that any talking about RPGs is trivial, at least within the context of the hobby there’s trivial and then there’s trivial. But the real problem for me was the hand-wringing over the manufactured controversy over stuff Gary Gygax said in the 70s that isn’t politically correct according to woketardery. One person started a thread to talk about this, and made a comparison to J. K. Rowling. He missed, however, the most interesting and salient point about the hand-wringing about the fact that Rowling is a feminist, recognizes that men pretending to be women are not women, and including them in "the movement" takes away from women. That point being: the boycott over her ideology was a complete and utter failure. Contrast that to the high profile boycott, also over trans ideology but from the other side that was taking place at the same time with Bud Lite, these people should realize something that’s painfully obvious. Namely that:

Inside their bougie bubble, these people have cultivated bizarre boutique beliefs (all that alliteration was not really on purpose) that are cult-like. They treat them as if they’re existential givens and baseline assumptions, but they’re not; they’re strange cult-like beliefs that do not reflect reality, and do not reflect what normal people believe either. Their hand-wringing over J. K. Rowling did not result in any dent that we can tell in the sales of the video game based on her property. Nobody (of consequence or significant number) has boycotted anything Harry Potter because she says trans women are not women, they’re men (or boys) playing pretend, or dealing with literal mental illness. And more to the point, the preference cascade against their ideology is observably "cascading" as we speak. 

On top of that, I pointed out that all of this discussion on Gary Gygax is while I couldn’t find anything at all in their pretty busy "geek pop culture" forum on the currently unfolding serial sexual harassment behavior, if not actual rape, by Neil Gaiman. I guess picking on dead people about fake issues is easier than tackling real disgusting problems with live people that you happen to like and don’t want to confront that their bad behavior is actually real. Utterly disgusting. They’re enablers, as bad as Alice Munro or Marion Zimmer Bradley—the latter of whom is more than just an enabler of her pedophile husband but a co-abuser of her own children.

The same situation with Rowling is true for Gary Gygax. Nobody is really offended by the stuff he said forty years ago, and the people in the bubble who think that his behavior needs to be confronted and dealt with somehow are imaginary crusaders leading a charge against someone who isn’t even there, on an issue that isn’t real, and being followed by nobody. The fact that they are patting themselves on the back for dealing with this says a lot about them, and none of it is flattering. And, it encouraged me to leave once again.

I also didn’t see anything about Mexican orcs, which is what I initially returned hoping to see. As often happens when I do, I get caught up in a few discussions that start off interesting, but I get turned off by the strange woke bubble-people that now exclusively populate ENWorld. I’m not interested in hearing about their revolting transgender animal people characters. I think I just don’t have enough in common with any of them, and just being interested in the same game isn’t enough. Plus, I’m not really interested in the same game. I left D&D "proper" back in 3.5 and have only casually looked in on anything since. I’ve read a few 4e books, mostly settling/lore books, and the same for some 5e stuff (mostly the campaign books.) I haven’t bought, read, or played a single core rulebook for any of those editions, nor do I ever care to.

And I haven’t even read The Curse of Strahd, the purportedly most popular and best campaign book. Because I already read the 3.x version of the same (Expedition to Castle Ravenloft) and didn’t think it likely that reiterating the same adventure in another modern edition would be very interesting.

Given my complete and utter disconnect from the ENWorld crowd, I should stop making occasional forays to the place for good and just give up. Youtube commentary from people like DungeonCraft are better. He’s kinda woke too, but he mostly keeps it to himself, and at least we’re definitely on the same page about the game itself. (Other than his casual use of "safety tools" which is a major trigger for me.)

Anyway, all that aside, here’s the AI images associated with the first front. Guilbert du Vandes, the self-styled "Grand Duke" of Northumbria is one of the main villains. He’s imprisoned his wife in her tower, supposedly for heresy, treason, and witchcraft, but he doesn’t have the heart to kill her. This has been a major political scandal brewing in Garenport. Of course, it’s also a lie. He didn’t have anything to do with Josephine du Vandes being confined to her tower; it’s not her prison, it’s her panic room; she did it herself. And because she actually is a witch and another major villain, she can come and go as necessary as she pleases. Here’s the images of those two.

Marshal Hathaway is the head of the Duchess' Guard. They are, of course, incensed by the official story, which also stripped them of their office. Most of them, having sworn loyalty to the Duchess now call themselves the Queen's Guard, and seek nothing so much as the overthrow of the Grand Duke and the installation of their patroness as his replacement, and even a promotion for her to Queen! Of course, they have no real way to do that, so they're just a rabble of brigands and bandits harassing people in the countryside near Garenport. Hathawaye himself makes daring vigilante forays into the city, but it's not clear what he hopes to accomplish other than petty revenge against the Duke’s men. In Hero Forge I had a number of Queen's Guardsmen, although I got most of them out of the library. In terms of AI images, I just have Marshal himself.

The Duke also has his court of retainers; his seneschal Grigori Nicholas, a dark sorcerer and "real piece of work" as they say, and Lucien Russo, his Captain of the Guard. He's originally from Timischburg, and yes, he’s "secretly" a vampire. He also has a couple of other heavies on retainer; paid mercenaries or bounty hunters, including the exotic Blind Beckett and the pitiless Germund de Bosque. All four pictured below.

Finally, I have images of Morcant Gunderic, an important clue-giver that will help solve the mystery of what’s going on with Guilbert and Josephine, and then the Shadow Assassin, a daemon that Josephine will summon and then be unable to control, to attempt to kill her husband and his Court.