Looks like D&D's back on the menu, boyz!

I promised some guys here locally that I’d run something for them coming up. Not necessarily a full-blown “this is now my group”, but that I’d at least run a 2-3 session mini-campaign, just to see how we got along, how they liked it, how I liked it, etc. It became obvious when I talked to them that they’re not really interested in stepping too far beyond D&D tropes, and that if I wasn’t running 5e, I’d be at a severe disadvantage with them. Of course, I have had little interest in 5e other than academic, so that’s not great for me. But I reviewed the SRD last night, and I think I can do it. My first thought was that I could revert to a hand-wavey style of running 3.5, like I had done years ago, but I couldn’t remember how to do it very well, honestly. I would need to review it as carefully as I would need to skim the 5e rules to run it, so why not just do 5e, is kind of what I ended up deciding. Sigh. I really had no intention of doing anything with 5e. Luckily for me, with the online SRD available for free, I don’t need to actually buy anything, which I absolutely do not intend to do anyway.

I suspect that at lower levels, 5e works relatively well as is, although there are a few changes; two of which were for tone and one of which I just like better, that I’m going to implement as house-rules. 1) The death save DC is ridiculously low. I don’t necessarily have a problem with the concept of death saves, but a DC of 10, and you have to fail three? C’mon, that’s not much risk. DC of 15. And ideally, you fail two and die, but I’ll make a concession for three. 2) There’s no such thing as a short rest. Long rest now works like short rest, except of course, that it requires overnighting to get the benefit. 3) There are no spell slots. You can cast any spell that you have as often as you like. However, just like with everything else in D&D, you have to roll to successfully cast it. 

The first two are pretty straightforward, but the last one requires just a little bit of explanation. First off, roll what? What is the DC and what is your roll? For 5e, it’d be an ability check against your Arcana skill, which presumably casting classes would have proficiency in. DC is 10 + 2 x spell level. So a 1st level spell, like Burning Hands for a sorcerer would be DC 12, while a 9th level spell like Gate would be 28. Why 9th level? If it’s just a low level game, that’s not likely to matter is it? No, I suppose not, but since there’s no slots, you can potentially have any spell in the game, assuming you can find it somewhere to learn it. If you’re a low level character, however, your likelihood of successfully casting a high level spell is very low, however. You basically need a natural 20, and even then if you, with a natural 20, still don’t meet the DC, at best, I’d give you a conditional success… it sorta worked, but there is a complication.

Also, some spells still require To Hit rolls, or the target can save, etc, making it unsuccessful even if you successfully cast the spell. That’s OK. That would be extra punitive in a spell slot system where you spend your spells and then you’re out. However here, if you either don’t successfully cast, or successfully cast but don’t successfully pull off the effect because the target saved or whatever, that’s OK. You can try again without any penalty, because you haven’t expelled one of your “spells for the day.” However, the more you cast spells, the more you risk a critical failure on a natural 1 on your spellcasting roll. What normally happens here is that the spell would backfire and you would become the target. If it’s an area effect spell, like Sleep or Fireball, you could end up targeting your entire party. That would really suck if you try to Sleep your enemies and instead you and your entire party Sleeps and become incredibly vulnerable to just being murdered in their sleep. Fireball also, obviously, would really suck in the entire party is in the area of effect. 

If it doesn’t actually make sense to have the spell backfire, if it’s not the kind of spell that harms the target for instance, what happens instead is that some kind of extradimensional magical monstrosity is ripped out of the Far Realm or whatever and attacks the spellcaster obsessively until one of the two of them is killed. If it kills the spellcaster before dying itself, then it will randomly attack the next closest target, which again, might be part of the PC party. In general, these shouldn’t be so deadly that they threaten a TPK, but it can still be dangerous, especially to the spellcaster personally. So sure, spellcasters can cast spells as much as they want, however, there may be reasons why they don’t want to cast all they want. On average, once every twenty times that they cast, they get a critical failure and have the spell backfire on them or get attacked by a hound of Tindalos or some kind of demon or elemental or whatever. 

Other than that, what exactly am I going to run? I’m considering adapting The Skinsaw Murders, which is a great Paizo adventure (one of their best, actually) as a one-shot for 1st level characters. I’ll need to also remove all of the context from the adventure path in which it comes and adapt it to a stand-alone situation, but that shouldn’t be hard. I’ve got plenty of other material to add to it potentially as well. Some of the haunted house stuff from the first Carrion Crown adventure might fit in well, and some of the stuff from their Dunwich Horror pastiche module (Carrion Hill or something like that, I think it’s called?) Again, my point isn’t to create a “campaign” but just a one-shot or mini-campaign; 2-3 sessions; maybe four at the most, and then we decide what to do after that. I’m giving no thought to what happens after I get through those few sessions.

UPDATE: Here's a few images of the scarecrow ghouls out in the farms.

Elves and Dwarves (EFX)

What exactly is a dwarf in fantasy? Dwarves (or dwarfs, which honestly is more accurate, although not much used in fantasy specifically) come from Germanic folklore. Old English had the word dweorg, which became the modern dwarf, but Old Norse had the cognate dvergr, and Old High German had twerg, for instance, all of which are meant to be the same folkloric or mythological creature. The best descriptions of them from mythology come from the Norse; the post-Viking Icelanders, and the Eddas describe the dwarves in some detail. In the Poetic Edda, for example, in the Voluspa (I’m omitting the diacritics, because they’re too much trouble) we have the description of the formation of the dwarves by the Aesir. Durin(n) and Motsognir were the first and mightiest, but the remainder of the dwarven names used to Tolkien come from here. Including, curiously, Gandalf. While listed as a dwarf, his name translates to “wand-elf”. Of course, Tolkien’s Gandalf is neither an elf nor a dwarf, nor does he use a wand, but in the Dvergatal, he’s both an elf and a dwarf, I suppose. (Thorin and Oakenshield, or Eikinskjaldi, which is Norse for Oakenshield, is listed separately, curiously.) Tolkien tried to distance his dwarves somewhat from Norse dwarves, but only a little (part of the reason he created an alternate, archaic “what if” spelling of the plural modeled after words like calves, thieves, wolves, hooves, knives, turves, elves, etc.); they clearly are very, very similar and were always meant to be. Richard Wagner also used a very mythological variation on his dwarves when he included some of them in Der Ring des Nibelungen, the Nibelungs themselves being dwarves. Originally from a singular character, probably, named Nibeling or Nyblung, although the same name refers to the royal house of the Burgundians from actual Germanic history. It also seems to be applied to a cadet branch of Pippin’s dynasty; one of the Frankish Carolingian kings; a nephew of Charles Martel himself was called Nibelungus. Dwarves in Germanic mythology were usually associated with earth or stone. They didn’t necessarily live underground, although many did. Many think this is because of their association with death (and therefore burial) however, and they were usually seen as—if not outright evil, then certainly either malicious or unconcerned about the affairs or men, unless they could take advantage of them. The seven dwarfs of the Snow White story, collected by the Grimms, for instance worked underground, and were very separated from and suspicious of men, but they lived together in a cottage in the forest, and took a shine to Snow White when she came by, becoming fiercely protective of her. Disney actually got most of the salient details right on that one. Rumpelstiltskin is another dwarf, who’s more overtly magical but also more overtly spiteful and cunning, trying to take advantage of the unnamed miller’s daughter. Here, though, Rumpelstiltskin is a name very similar to rumpelgeist or poltergeist, basically meaning a mischievous household ghost-like spirit; similar to a boggart or hob rather than to dwarves as we know them from Der Ring or Tolkien or D&D, etc.

A case has also been made among mythologists that dwarves are identical to dark-elves and black-elves, dokkalfar and svartalfar, or the less usually named myrkalfar, murk-elves. Most mythologists describe all of those as the same creatures, and most will also conflate them with with dwarves, suggesting that they were originally the same. Jakob Grimm himself wanted to separate dark-elves and black-elves and dwarves, but his view has not been much accepted in the years since. It’s worth pointing out that our primary source material for the mythology of Germanic peoples is probably quite flawed; written long after Christianization of the Germanic peoples, and focused on a far western fringe group to begin with; it’s not exactly clear how much the heathen Goths, or Alemani or Anglo-Saxons would have recognized the works of Snorri Sturleson as akin to their own beliefs. 

Regardless, dwarves in fantasy today are almost unanimously called dwarves, not dwarfs, and follow a kind of bowdlerized cartoonish reflection of what Tolkien did with them specifically with a bit of the Grimm Brothers tacked on too. They live underground, they’re master craftsman and artisans, they’re stubborn and grumpy, don’t get along with anyone very well, although they can be privately quite fond of the people that they argue with. They’re generally considered to be good rather than cunning or untrustworthy, and will hoard treasure. They’re resistant to magic as wizards and whatnot practice it; their own magic being much more subtle and usually related to their crafting skills. They’re usually seen as rivals if not even enemies of elves, although because both races are considered good, that is usually represented as grumpiness and dislike rather than outright hostility. 

In EFX, dwarves are a more modern race, as are the elves; (as are almost all non-human races, other than the orcs and goblins) formed when magical spillover from some other realm touched the EFX world and made localized changes. Elves and dwarves in EFX were actually formed at the same time in the same event; a magical realm that was like a platonic ideal of The Wilderness™ hit the area that later became the Reynhowe Frontier, which is where both elves and dwarves first appeared. They are different, but also more similar than they are different. Where elves have green coloration; skin, hair and eyes, and are especially focused on the deep forests that make up much of the Reynhowe territory, the dwarves are more focused on the mountains and the rocky hills that the forest grows on. Like dwarves everywhere, they are on the shorter side, rarely taller than five feet, although stocky enough to have the same weight average as a human. They have pointed ears, red or reddish-ochre colored skin, and dark hair, often with thick beards on the men. Their eyes are bright orange. Rather than living in carved underground “halls”, or dwarf-made caves, they tend to prefer living in semi-subterranean stone houses with turf covered roofs built into the side of mountains or hills. When they live elsewhere, such as in urban places like Cliffgate or somewhere else, they still prefer squat or half-underground houses made of sturdy stone or brick when they can get them, and turves on the roof. They actually often live in integrated communities along with elves, although their houses or even entire neighborhoods are segregated because of the style of house that they prefer to live in. Elves and dwarves, rather than being rivals who don’t get along see each other as complementary sides of the same coin. Whereas elves tend to be the explorers and huntsmen of their communities, dwarves are the artisans and traders. Both like to travel, but usually for different reasons, and they often team up accordingly. In areas where elves and dwarves live outside of the Reynhowe or Valade areas, where they are most common, they do often band together. Where they are able to have their own ethnic neighborhoods, they are in interesting mix of buildings; low stone houses for the dwarves, with the elves living in higher wooden houses, and as many trees and other plants as possible, and fountains of babbling water flowing through naturalistic rocks, etc. 

The dwarves, like the elves, at least within the Reynhowe itself, and to a lesser extent also those from Valade, are somewhat isolationist, and don’t get along super well with their neighbors. They especially dislike the necromancers and death knights of Kharnimrion to the north. However, there has been a diaspora of both elves and dwarves to many of the nations across the EFX continent, and many have no real connection whatsoever to the Reynhowe or Valade regions other that that they recognize that forgotten ancestors must have originally been from there; their loyalty is to whatever other country that they live in now; many for many generations. 

Playing with banners and fonts

I like playing with banners. Not sure why. Also, here's a list of the fonts I use for DFX and EFX projects. Most of them I got from some place like dafonts or some other online archive that's readily available. I try to use royalty free fonts as much as possible, or standard fonts that come with Windows otherwise. There are probably a few exceptions. To be fair, I don't keep track of where I get my fonts. Many of them I've had for literally decades already anyway.

JSL Blackletter has become exceptionally popular in the RPG space in the last few years. Both Labyrinth Lord and ShadowDark use it for their main title, for instance, which has really raised its profile. I've seen it used a lot recently because of that. However, I think 1492 Quadrata lim is extremely similar and just different enough to be a bit unique. 

The X in Dark Fantasy X (and Elemental Fantasy X and Space Opera X) comes from the Anglodavek font. The traditional subheading on the banner; y'know, the fantasy • horror • madness thing has been done with a lot of fonts, but I think YouMurderer BB is probably my favorite. I'll mix it up with ASTRODRAMATIC, and yes, it only has capital letters, or Bleeding Cowboys sometimes, or even Bolide. Although I haven't used Shanked there yet, for something like that is exactly the reason I keep it saved on my font list. And for at least one variant banner I used Odinson before.

That said, banner and title fonts are different from text and subtitle fonts, where you want to be a bit less decorative and a bit more readable. For labels on my character sheet, I've used Primitive, for example, and for heading titles in the rulebook, I've used Benjamin Franklin. Rapscallion, Elric or Crusades would do well there too.

For Elemental Fantasy X, I made the banner out of Advertising Gothic Demo, but I'm not 100% sure that's where I want to go with it, and I've played around with some variations, including 1742Frenchcivlite and Angel. The Angel font, at least as shown, doesn't really highlight very well what it has, because the name is too short and it doesn't have enough letters. But when I type out Elemental Fantasy all the way, it looks wonderful.

Anyway, here's the promised banner variations. Some of them are older, and use fonts that didn't make the cut of my font list, and I no longer consider them on the pre-approved list. And the Space Opera X banners play by a different rules with somewhat different fonts approved.

I've also included, at the very bottom, the Space Opera X list, as an appendix. The final font, however, Adventure, it should be noted, is a copycat font of the Raiders of the Lost Ark poster banner, and works for any kind of pulp adventure.

And both Flash Rogers and Thunderstrike have non-half tone variations, but I tend to use the half tone the most, for whatever reason.

EFX on OneNote

I went to a game store to meet up with some potential gamers that I might play with. While I don't think that they're really quite up my alley in terms of gaming, they might be close enough. Their take on a darker, grittier system than D&D really just means a few darker themes... but using D&D concepts. Their idea of character concepts was little more than a race and class combination, and in one case, a mechanical flourish of sorts that he thinks sounds interesting. This isn't terrible, nor even unexpected, but assuming that I end up running for them long-term, I won't be doing DFX or EFX either one. I don't really want to see my "babies" bastardized by people who don't really completely buy into the concept. Although maybe I'm selling them short based on our fairly quick conversation. But I doubt it. The whole meme of "my players don't want to play anything except D&D" exists for a reason, after all. I actually think Eberron with an emphasis on the noir-side might work well for them, and well enough for that matter, for me too.

Now, I have to figure out if it's worth it to me to try and learn how to run 5e or not... At a minimum, it'll mean reading the PHB and DMG. Or at least skimming it. Sigh.

I also bought the first Michael Ghelfi RPG ambience collection on Bandcamp. All of the tracks are an even 30 minutes each, and I'm playing them in the background while I type. They're not actually music, of course, they're sound effects and ambient sounds, but some of them can be combined with music, or layered with it more accurately, to give you exactly the effect that you want. And some of them don't need even that. While they're not really that expensive, I still decided that I'd keep it to one album per month, just to give me time to acclimate to what I've got and to not drop $80+ on a bunch of ambient tracks, most of which I could just play on YouTube, all at once. I'm kind of a cheapskate at heart, and while that's certainly within the budgetary constraints, I just can't justify throwing that kind of money all at once on something that I'm not even sure how much I'll use. One album a month, for $10 a pop (there are nine available, unless I also diversify into sci-fi or horror or modern or whatever) is more my speed. Plus, if I lose interest in buying them after a month or two, I'm not out very much money.

Anyway, I've also been developing EFX quite a bit on the side. I'm kind of interested in that a lot right now, and I also started using OneNote as a development tool, which is pretty handy. I might draw the map for that, or at least a draft version thereof, before I do my new DFX map. In fact, I'll probably do so today, in fact. Although even if I do, I won't scan it anytime too soon. I'll also cross-post some of the content here from my OneNote, just for the heckuvit. Here's the write-ups respectively for the Lanstall Sea and the Protectorate of Rodach in the geography section. These are pretty light, but after I draw the map, I might yet put a bit more detail into them. Probably not until I get closer to figuring out how exactly to use them, though.

Lanstall Sea

The continent of the EFX setting is roughly the size of Australia, Brazil or the Lower 48; all of which measure about 3 million square miles in area, give or take a couple hundred thousand square miles. However, the Lower 48 is its closest analog geographically. The main differences are that without the greater mass of the rest of North America in the form of Canada and Alaska attached to its north (and Mexico to it's south), the jet stream and prevailing winds and rains sweep across the country further south. Because every point in the continent is closer to the ocean, the climate is considerably milder than the Lower 48 as well; even in the north the winters are not as long and cold as they are in Montana, Minnesota or Maine, for instance, and the south is not as hot as Florida or Louisiana or southern Arizona. This also causes the continent to be kind of reversed east to west from the Lower 48; the wettest parts are in the farthest west; the kind of rain that Alaska and the Pacific Northwest gets extends to the southern border of the continent, causing the farthest southwest to be the swampiest and largest wetlands. Old mountains like the Urals or Appalachians cause the first rain shadow as you go further east. However, here is where we find another major discrepancy from the geography of the Lower 48; the Lanstall Sea is a large interior sea that keeps the middle of the continent temperate and causes localized rain to form even in the rain shadow of the mountains to the west.

Much like a super-sized Caspian Sea, the Landstall Sea is fairly temperate most of the time, except in the far north and where it borders high elevation. The lands around it are fertile and get enough rain to be very arable, but not so much as to be a hindrance to development or travel. The waters are (relatively) calm, and storms are not often too dangerous or frequent. As such, it is a highway of shipping and trade. It is also sometimes a magnet for piracy, which is the greatest danger most voyages could potentially face… most of the time. 

The nations that border the sea do have navies that patrol for piracy, but they are reluctant to venture too far beyond the shores of their sovereign nations lest they be seen as a provocation against their neighbors.  

The Protectorate of Rodach

The Protectorate of Rodach is often seen, whether fairly or not as the most cosmopolitan of the modern nations. Forged in the wake of multiple past calamities, Rodach was always a center for trade. While not the only nation to have a shoreline on the Lanstall Sea of the interior as well as the relatively clement waters of the oceans to the south, it's the most stable of them, and has never had one of the magical incursions take place within its borders. Because of this, it has built itself up as the premier place for trade. Its wealth, relative stability and pleasant climate have also made it a popular destination for emigration, which the people of Rodach, lacking a strong king who cares for the long-term prospects of his people, have encouraged due to its ability to bring short-term wealth gains, albeit often at the expense of the common people who are not sufficiently connected to profit from the comings and goings, but rather find their own employment prospects limited by the influx of other races and peoples willing to do the same jobs for less.

The center of all of this is the city of Cliffgate, perched on and around a massive mountain that overlooks a deep fjord on the shores of the Lanstall Sea. Renowned for the beauty of its architecture, it is a massively wealthy city, but with a seedy underside; the disparity between the haves and the have-nots is more stark here than almost anywhere else in all of EFX. Because of this, class, race, nationality--all are grist for factionalism and tribalism unlike anywhere else as well. Unbeknownst to the feckless leadership of Rodach and Cliffgate alike, the place is a powder keg of tensions, intrigue, skullduggery, sedition and worse, masked by the short term profits that some are able to make and the ambitions and greed of those who want to join the ranks of the prosperous, who are starting to realize slowly that the deck is stacked against them ever rising above their current station.

Although outwardly beautiful, Cliffgate is an almost noir-like city in terms of its attitude, its mood and tone, and the themes that games or stories set in Cliffgate would be likely to have. In spite of its cosmopolitanism, it is a hotbed of crime, espionage, ethnic and class-based pressure. It's reputation, whether truly justified or not, as a libertarian Mecca has many arriving believing that if they are a bit discrete and careful, they can do anything that they want here. Smuggling, black-marketeering, human trafficking, and vile cults--to say nothing of the occasional monstrous predators--haunt much of the poorer neighborhoods, where people are often angry, bitter, beaten-down or cynical. Not that the obvious upper classes know this, because they have little to no interaction with most of them, and see their lives as beneath their notice anyway.

EFX elves and dwarves

I wanted to do something just a little different with elves and dwarves if I was going to have them in EFX. Influenced just a bit by the art from Five Torches Deep, I went with this interpretation.

And dwarves. 

DALL-E 3 seems to love putting striped warpaint on all of my non human characters. I've learned to live with it...

I like the idea of dwarves with pointed ears and reddish ochre colored skin, and elves as completely green is pretty brilliant. Not that it's my idea, obviously. 

Final updates before... I start making REAL updates

Not that anyone cares, but here’s a quick personal update. On Saturday, we finally cleared out the big pieces of furniture in our garage that we stored there temporarily because we didn’t have space for them and we weren’t sure what to do about them. After moving them to the driveway, we realized that they were in worse shape than we maybe thought, so my wife just went on Facebook Marketplace and gave them away. (Facebook Marketplace is kind of flaky; we actually have one set still on the driveway; supposed to have been picked up last night, supposed to be picked up again today. Sigh.) The good news is that this cleared enough space in the garage that we could access the boxes that the movers stacked behind them, which I’ve started moving around and looking through. I’ve found the two boxes that have my personal stuff from the basement office in the old house, which includes my art suppliers, whatever RPG suppliers I hadn’t already taken with me, etc. Because I found this stuff, I’m ready to start drawing my revised maps, my draft maps of Hyperborea and Nizrekh, and my draft map of the Elemental Fantasy X (EFX) setting. I also found my computer finally, in what was literally just about the last box left to look in. Sigh. I was very tired after moving boxes and doing yard work all evening, and it was pushing 9:30 PM by this point and was pretty dark, so I didn’t get into it or set it up, but that’ll be my task for tonight. Assuming that I’m not missing any components or cables or anything, I’ll finally have that up and running this evening. If I am, I hope to still find them in another box, or I might have to order a part or two (I have had my monitor, but without its power cord since I moved in. I really hope the missing power cord is in the box with the rest of the computer stuff. I presume it is, but if it’s not…)

I still have some personal things to take care of that will take some time here and there, including another visit of more family starting next week, but we really are getting to the point, especially once I have my computer set up, where I can consider myself more or less as moved in as we’re going to be. There’s still some more garage organization to be done, and because we’ll have to move again and don’t really have a place right now, the majority of my books will remain in boxes in the garage for the time being, but at least I’ll know how to access them, even if I don’t have a better place to put them. That will remain my only one niggling frustration, and maybe once everything else is done, I’ll look around to see if there isn’t actually a place that I can find where a bookcase or two makes some sense. Maybe even a bookcase in the garage is better than a box in the garage if there isn’t a better place for it. And there may not be. We really did move into a smaller house with less room for storage. One less bedroom, no shed and no basement. It’s been a struggle to figure out what to do with all of our stuff, even with the stuff we’re getting rid of.

Anyway, the point of all of this rambling about my personal situation is that I’m now at a point where I can make some reasonably concrete plans on what I want to do for setting and campaign development over the course of the next couple of months. After better part of a quarter being reduced to making stuff with just my phone, I was pretty limited, but when my computer is once again available, I can proceed with some better plans. Let’s do this as a dotted list; easier to read:

• Update Dark Fantasy X document. For this week, getting my computer set up and then making the updates to the Dark Fantasy X document to bring it up to the level I want it to be with a few changes are on my radar. I also am thinking about adjusting the layout to be more “ShadowDark”-like, by which I mostly mean that I want to take more space, have a larger font and more white-space, and have stuff organized so that common information is available without too much flipping around. I started with a very traditional layout, focused more on trying to minimize page-count, because that used to be something that we’d do when I was younger; use the space up rather than creatively use space to make a visually easier format. Big walls of text with small subheading titles, and all of that. I also have a lot of AI art; I might integrate more of that into the book, because why not? One of the few things I could easily do with just my phone was generate hundreds of images of AI art using Bing’s DALL-E 3 access. This will probably at least double the page count of the book, but it won’t, of course, actually add anything to the word count, which matters more. Chances are I’m not going to print the book again anytime too soon anyway, after getting burned with printing and then almost immediately spotting things that needed to be fixed or updated.
• Draw Another Setting Map. Next week, I’ll have less time with family in town from Wed-Wed but before they show up, if I can make the time, I’d like to draw the second second (yes, that’s correct) draft of the setting map in the Christopher Tolkien style with black and red ink. Then, once family is gone again, I’ll have a bit more time before we head out of town for an extended Labor Day weekend trip back to Michigan to walk the Mackinac Bridge with probably the worst governor in the nation (although she’s had some decent competition, especially from Gavin Newsom) with some old friends of ours. Then I’ll come back home, but my wife will be out of town a further week watching the grandkids, so I’ll have all of the time I could want for the evenings and one weekend to pursue hobby endeavors. Not that I want my nose to the grindstone too hard; I’m sure I’ll watch some movies and do a few other things like that too. But…
• Finish Cult of Undeath fronts: I have one front more or less done, at least to the standard that I normally do them as a draft. I want to spend the time when I’ve got the house to myself drafting the next four and finishing the fronts. Then I’ll let that 5x5 rest, and come back and clean it up into a “supercut”. But in between the drafts and the supercut, I want to…
• Modify Dark Fantasy X and Save As to be an Elemental Fantasy X. We’re still talking early to mid-September for this task, but it should be pretty easy. I want to use the rules pretty much as they are, but I’ll make a few minor changes to the magic, mostly by removing the sanity mechanic altogether and possibly lessening the cost of doing magic on a failed roll. I might also make spellcasting be a class feature, and add more spells than Dark Fantasy X currently has. I’ll also need to redo the races: I’m not going to use most of the races of Dark Fantasy X (although there’s no reason why I couldn’t) in part because I might well repurpose the existing race features into a different race. EFX, vs DFX, will be more superficially D&D-like, including elves and dwarves, for instance, and a whole gaggle of elemental near human races: genies, ifrits, tritons and chthons for air, fire, water and earth elements respectively. It’ll also have orcs and goblins (which are in DFX) and vampires and liches. Those might be represented, however, by the dhampir race from DFX; the truly monstrous ones will be NPC monsters. I don’t know for sure how to do the undead races yet. But I quite like the idea of them being a playable race, not unlike how Heroes of Might & Magic had undead of various sorts (mostly liches and vampires and necromancers—the latter not being true undead, of course) as hero types you could play as.
• Start the Solo Play Shadows Over Garenport series on YouTube. By the time September is ending, I’m wanting to be done with the docs and moving on to the podcast/actual “play” stuff. 

What none of this addresses is if or when I can get an actual regular game going. Since I just relocated to a new state, I don’t know anyone who’s interested in gaming. I’ve been by a couple of local gaming stores, but all of them are considerably less focused on RPGs than what I’m used to, so I don’t know if that’s even worthwhile to attempt to scrounge anything up there. Plus, I’m not a huge fan of finding gamers through stores, honestly. I might have better luck making gamers out of friends. But again, I just moved here, so I don’t have anyone that I see as a ready target to introduce them to the hobby. 

Meanwhile, I spent a little bit of time reviewing my EFX race line-up. It’s quite lengthy, and I might yet decide to cut some of it: humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, fiends, genies, ifrits, tritons, chthonians, vampires and liches. None of them will really be quite as exotic as they sound from some other fantasy settings; I’m going to consider all them (except humans) as near humans, with a comparable racial ability scenario to humans. None of them will be more or less powerful as starting characters, none of them will be strange ethereal super long-lived, etc. To borrow a page from my own DFX, they will all be humans who have been changed many generations ago into something near human… but no longer quite human.

There’s no reason why I couldn’t have the DFX races present in EFX too except that I already have so many racial selections as it is. But then again, if I integrate an idea from my old Realms Traveler setting seed, maybe that explains where all of these exotic near humans came from and why so many of them exist in one (relatively) constrained space. Anyway, I went ahead and generated some new images of potential iconic character art for the elemental races that look a bit less like Heroes of Might & Magic art. Here’s a small selection; a male and female each of the four elemental races.

Rise of the Runelords "audiobook"

I listened to about 90% of the Burnt Offerings audiobook, but then got a new audiobook listening app on my phone which treated them as an actual audiobook instead of just chapters or files. So, I started the whole thing over. As of this morning’s commute, I’ve finished now all but about five minutes of Burnt Offerings, which I’ll finish at lunch while sitting in the car and eating, and then it will automatically continue on to the Skinsaw Murders, or whatever exactly the next part of the audiobook is called. 

There are a couple of issues with this audiobook; one of which is structural and one of which is authorial personality. By the first, I mean that it isn’t really an audiobook, it’s a radio drama format audio, which isn’t really the same as reading a book. When there’s an action scene, for instance, there’s a bunch of sound effects and dialogue, but no actual description of what is happening. So unless the dialogue kind of clunkily describes the action, you just have to take it for granted that it’s exciting because it sounds exciting, without you actually having any idea what’s happening. There are some ways in which a radio play is superior to an audiobook, namely in the presence of various voice actors doing separate voices, as well as honest-to-goodness sound Foley effects artists adding sounds; an audiobook is just one guy (or gal) reading the text of a book, and maybe, if he’s good, doing a decent job of “acting” the dialogue for all characters. But lacking a narrator, the radio play format has weaknesses relative to audiobook, in that the dialogue has to be clunky to help propel the story in a way that real dialogue wouldn’t, and all descriptions of actions are difficult to make natural.

The second issue is regarding the author. There are two things in particular that I noticed; one of which is that they often use very stilted dialogue not just for exposition, as noted above, but also because they aren’t great at characterization. (I’m saying they; I don’t know if there was a single writer or not of the radio play script. There are multiple authors credited, but at least one of them is the author of the original module.) There’s an attempt to make breezy Friends-like banter, which doesn’t really work very well because the women come across as unfeminine and unlikeable, especially whenever Valeros is saving one of them. Also, Valeros is consistently subject to snide remarks by every other character, because the authors are gammas and their resentment of the “inferior” athletic, good-looking men who have a can-do attitude and actually do stuff rather that merely sitting around complaining is pretty evident. I don’t recall noticing that as much before, but I’m not sure if I didn’t notice it or just didn’t recall it. It’s kind of an unlikeable affectation in a writer when subconscious (or conscious) resentment against normal people colors what they write a little too much. But you can almost literally see the conflict in the writer’s head happening here; the disconnect between having to make the four iconics that they use all be heroes, but their dislike of the archetype of the fighter, associating it too closely with the same high school jocks who had better luck with the girls than he did; or if the writer is a woman, who weren’t interested in her, and she’s had to cope by telling herself that she never wanted them because they are buffoons all along. Either way, it’s not a convincing pose, and is incredibly transparent. Sigh. Gammas and women.

For various reasons, I’ve long ago decided that unless recommended by someone who’s tastes I trust pretty deeply, that I won’t read any more fiction written by women. I’ve been caught in the bait and switch too often where some cool looking fantasy or science fiction story is actually a crypto-romance where the woman character sits around talking about her emotions, her feelings, her anxieties, and most especially which of the two male love interest archetypes she’ll end up with. This isn’t to say that I don’t read books written by women. C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett are among my favorite genre writers, for instance, and I bought a Flame Tree quality copy of Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen specifically because it’s actually one of my favorite non-genre books ever. I enjoy a good rom-com as much as the next guy, and I even enjoy watching Hallmark Channel movies almost more than my wife does (not that I do that often, but when a cozy rom-com sounds kinda fun, she’s rarely in the mood to watch them, so I sometimes throw on the old DVD of Notting Hill or whatever by myself.) I will note, however, that the rom-com’s that are most successful tend to be written by men, because they are successfully able to pull off the com in rom-com, whereas those written by women often have complete cyphers for the female protagonist, and cringy betas for the male love interest, so there’s no chemistry or charisma to anyone involved, and it ends up being painful to watch. The secret to “chick flicks” being watchable and even kind of fun for a guy like me is a light breezy attitude, and charismatic characters with good chemistry with each other who are fun just to “hang around with” regardless of what they’re actually even doing.  There’s a real art to writing good characters who have good relationships and are fun to read or watch or listen to, and many authors simply don’t have it. In that case, they should just stick to focusing on plot, or something else that they’re better at. Nobody has ever read Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum because of the characters, for instance. Really good authors are, of course, fairly capable in all of the dimensions necessary to craft a good story; plot, situation, tension, suspense, and of course charismatic characters that the reader cares to spend some time with in the book, movie or whatever medium the story is told in.

In this case, I kind of feel sympathetic towards Valeros, especially as he’s mistreated and miswritten by the author(s?) He should ditch all of the bratty little princesses in his group and go hang out with someone else who appreciates and respects him more.

Of course, it’s relatively easy to identify women authors and avoid them, but gammas are harder. I’ve decided to specifically avoid some of the ones that I’ve become aware of, like Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss, etc. I’ll continue with these Pathfinder Legends “audiobooks”, which again, I don’t think really describes what they are properly, but I’ll be wary because all three of the books have the same four iconic characters as the ensemble cast. I had actually thought that it would be different for each. The modules themselves recommend an iconic party as a kind of pregen group, if I remember correctly (at least these early ones did; I don’t know how long Paizo continued to do that). Curiously, I’m struggling to find which PC pregens were included online. I guess it doesn’t much matter. I do wish that honest to goodness novelizations of the adventure paths were forthcoming. I’d read them. Sure, sure; commission someone to write them after the entire adventure path of modules is published, but then they’re coming out a year to year and a half later. But I dunno. Maybe the Pathfinder fiction line faltered because there’s not enough demand for game fiction anymore. It’s a different world than the mid 80s and 90s, or even the 00s, I guess.

Then again, I don’t find that the iconics are really great characters. Ezren the wizard is Captain Obvious, Harssk the dwarf makes Grumpy look friendly and inviting, Marisiel and Emiko are typical “stronk wamman characters” which only fail to be more obnoxious than they are because their characterization and dialogue are kind of sparse anyway, and Valeros is probably my favorite, but the writer clearly sees him as a punching bag for his Revenge of the Nerds fantasy.

Time really flies. I looked up the Wayne Reynolds iconic Valeros art, and saw two versions. The original was done seventeen years ago already! Pathfinder still seems like a relatively new development to me, but I was in my mid-30s at the time. Sigh. He was redesigned for the release of Pathfinder 2e, as were about ten of the original iconics, with all new art and all, but this wasn’t necessarily an improvement; I kind of like the first one better. Like I said, the iconics of Pathfinder actually aren’t really great characters, in my opinion. But Valeros, as a pretty vanilla fighter of Cheliax ancestry actually works better than most. Pathfinder (and 3.x before that) had the unfortunate problem of encouraging a little bit too much the edge cases in character design, and people didn’t think characters were interesting unless they were some kind of really odd and idiosyncratic class or race or both. Valeros was a regular human fighter of a race that’s kinda-sorta based on the Romans (kinda-sorta) so he’s pretty “plain”, and as such, he's actually one of the more memorable and likeable of the bunch. When he was designed, Paizo hadn’t become quite so overtly freak-oriented as they have become since.

Solo DFX Shadows Over Garenport

A new small project underway for Shadows Over Garenport. I found, on accident, the Solo DM channel on YouTube, where she did about half of the Lost Mine of Phandelver. Maybe two thirds. It wasn’t ever finished. Maybe this is obvious; when I look at the views, the first video had 33k views, the final one that was done (number 6) had about 2.1k views, so talk about major dropoff. Maybe she thought it was too much effort for too little payoff. It’s kind of a shame, though, she left the PCs in a bit of a soap opera cliffhanger, and it was reasonably well done and enjoyable. Solo DMing, the activity, not the channel, is an odd thing. If you do it with a lot of randomization, it seems very little like any kind of roleplaying that I’ve ever seen. If you do it with a module, especially one of these modules that are designed specifically for solo DMing, it seems very similar if not almost identical to the old Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and some of the similar projects from the 80s (The TolkienQuest series specifically allowed for being used as Solo GM modules for Middle-Earth Roleplaying, one of their flagship systems which was a D&D head to head competitor, in fact.) If you do it in your own setting with your own campaign, it’s very similar if not identical to just writing a book or podcast radio play or something like that.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and TolkienQuest books back in the 80s, and I’ve enjoyed some radio drama style fantasy material based on D&D like the Rise of the Runelords by Pathfinder Legends which is on Spotify, and the aforementioned Solo DM stuff, which unfortunately left us hanging incomplete. So just because it doesn’t necessarily resemble the process of actually playing D&D with your friends as much as its sometimes billed doesn’t mean that it isn’t a pretty cool thing in its own right. (Also, I see that all three of the Pathfinder adventure paths that got this treatment are on Audible. Maybe I’ll have to redo Rise of the Runelords again, and then do the other two while I’m at it!)

Anyway, you can probably see where I’m going with this; I’m considering putting together something of my own like this based on my Shadows Over Garenport campaign. Now granted, I don’t have voice acting chops to really do this as well as Solo DM did, nor do I have my normal computer handy still, so depending on how long that takes me to recover and finish moving in, I won’t have ready access to sound effects or stuff like that either. I’m thinking of doing it less like an old radio play and more like an audiobook where it’s just me reading; except that it isn’t pre-written, I’m actually doing a hybrid of improvisational storytelling and rolling dice to give it some of the flavor of playing an RPG. Does this sound fun? I’m actually not sure. But right now, at least, I’m kind of motivated to give it a go.

But… I decided that I wanted new characters. My iconics aren’t right for this type of thing, I don’t think. Plus, I want this to feel a bit more game-like and less scripted storytelling like, so I rolled up new characters using actual rolls, and I also used some of the tables in Knave 2e to give them more details that were more randomized.

First character is Stilton Kingsfax. Although my system doesn’t have classes, because I made all of the class features a la carte abilities after I had already found that I was allowing customization to the point where that was effectively true anyway, Stilton is pretty much a classic fighter. In fact, given that I rolled randomly that his brief career before the game was as an acolyte, maybe he’s almost a paladin even. I also rolled that his personality traits were formal and can-do attitude. In a way, that’s almost not even interesting; it’s kind of cliché, even though it’s random. But I’ll see what I can do to make sure that his background, as it develops, is more interesting than “he went to church school for six months before picking up sword and handax to go fight evil more actively.” I also want him to still have good relations with the church generally, and not have him be disillusioned or cynical, because that’s an anti-Christian cliché amongst writers. Rather than being an acolyte in a traditional D&D sense, I’d rather interpret it as he grew up an orphan ward of the church, raised by Reverend Willes Garre, and he’s both grateful and appreciative of the church, as well as honestly believing in its mission and its doctrine. But it wasn’t actually ever his intention to make his career out of the church, it was more he was expected to work around the church as part of his upbringing. His formal personality should be interpreted more as a good old fashioned Southern politeness “yes sir, no ma’am” kinda stuff, translated into fantasy terms.

Bertram Hardmont is the next character, and he’s kind of a thiefish character, although I gave him the shadow sword feature, so he’s also a little bit mystical (plus it saves money on weapons when I went to equip him. Which is good; neither he nor Stilton rolled up a lot of money.) His randomized career was saboteur, which I’m not quite sure what to make of, but I’m going interpret it that he was part of an organized crime gang that also did mercenary work, and he was kind of on the fence whether he was more of an engineer for breaking into places, or a regular street criminal. His two character traits were love-struck and slacker. The latter is easy enough, but I have no idea who he’s love-struck for, so I’m going to interpret it as he tends to fall head over heels for every skirt that gives him a smile or a glance, kind of like Bingo Little from Jeeves & Wooster.

One possible target of his brief amorous obsessions might be the final “PC”, Tabitha Gamcott. I imagine her as gunning to become the Dark Fantasy X equivalent of a sorceress or whatever, once she can get her hands on some magic. In the meantime, she wields a quarterstaff and a bow, and will definitely focus on ranged attacks. Like most women (cf. Paris Olympics women’s boxing) she’s not as physically strong or capable in melee as the men, but I’ll find a way to make sure that she adds to the party, and not just in terms of looking pretty. Actually, the drama once she learns some magic will be pretty entertaining, I think. I kind of really like my magic system, which I can’t really take too much credit for, because the idea has been kicking around for a long time (I’ve had it ever since reading about WH40k psykers in the middle to late 90s, for instance. Five Torches Deep, Deathbringer, and Shadowdark all have roll to cast with mishaps on natural 1s too, although I’d already used the d20 Call of Cthulhu interpretation of it to come up with my own very similar interpretation).

Tabitha’s career was pirate, which I also found a little odd. I imagine that she was orphaned too, but part of a family affair of river pirates; a small boat with her uncle, some cousins, maybe a brother or two who had all turned to crime, and she was often the bait; pretty, innocent looking, etc. She hated this life, however, because she’s at heart not a bad person or a… well, y’know, a pirate by personality, so she bailed when she got the chance and left to explore the world. Curiously, even though she rolled up more money than the boys and has a free weapon, she still ended up literally completely broke; not a single copper penny to her name. She also has very few items of any kind; no way to catch food (other than her bow and arrows, I guess) and no way to cook it either. No bedroll or blanket to sleep in. No winter coat. Not even enough to buy some street food or a night at an inn. She’s financially kind of desperate as the game starts, which I think will make her kind of fun. Her two personality traits came up as gullible and humorless.

I’m actually looking forward to using her as a foil to the more straightforward antics of the boys. She may be capable in some ways, but her personality and situation look like drama waiting to happen. And, by purest coincidence of a bunch of d100 die rolls, some of it is pretty stereotypical female drama. I love it.