Porto Liure on the Corsair Coast... and RATS!

I was poking around old posts of mine, and discovered this one, from almost five years ago. The point of it was reimaging past assets that no longer quite fit into the DFX setting (which, at the time, was still at the DH5 level). Porto Liure had been a major asset that I'd done quite a bit with, and with some supplemental help from stuff like the Green Ronin Freeport book or the Privateer Press Five Fingers book (or even a few other products of pirate-like cities in various D&D products over the years), but it really belonged quite strongly to the DH4 version of the setting, and never really completely found any kind of place in DH5, which became the DFX setting after an effort in rebranding. Now that the Corsair Coast is going to be officially "Terassan" in ethnicity, Porto Liure, of course, has a new home in DFX, bringing one of my older assets back into play. I feel like I'm gradually getting there with all kinds of stuff. Baal Hamazi was incorporated as a third region, when DFX was originally supposed to be Timischburg + The Hill Country. Kurushat kinda sorta makes an appearance in the form of Lower Kurushat, although exactly how much of this will actually be renewed details from DH4 is unknown still. The Plateau of Leng has been back, and has some of the Forbidden Lands vibes... and details. Although many of them were shameless pastiches of Lovecraft to begin with.

I do need to spend some time deciding how the various cities of the old Terassan Empire can figure in the new Corsair Coast paradigm. Most of them can be converted to Barbary-style city-states easily enough, by removing any lingering Imperial trappings from them, I suppose. In some ways, this makes them all analogs to Porto Liure, but I want Porto Liure to stand out still. I actually doubt that I'll do too much with the other city-states, or have much interest in utilizing them. Calça was probably the only one that I still had a lot of interest in, and possibly Baix Pallars, but everything interesting from Calça has largely already been pilfered and added to the Hill Country. Baix Pallars as a pseudo-civilized place falling into colonial ruin, like the waning years of the Crusader States or European colonial empires amongst Third World savages could possibly still restore this as an idea, but I'm not entirely sure how. Maybe, as I start to work out exactly how the Terassans are related to the Tarushans, and I'm sure that it is somehow, means that I can sandwich the part of the Terassans between the Hill Country and Timischburg on the southern part of their border, with the Terassans stretching further south from there into the Corsair Coast; and maybe that's where Baix Pallars can still fit. Maybe Eltdown is the northernmost outpost of the Pallarans, even; a kind of Bree farther removed from the more southerly bastions of their distant relatives like the mountainfolk of Gondor or the Dunlendings. 

Anyway more to come on that. But speaking of shameless pastiches of Lovecraft (and Warhammer) I want to discuss briefly the Master of Vermin, one of the more notorious Heresiarchs of my setting, and his greatest (or worst) creations in the setting, which seethe outwards from Leng at times, the ratmen. Starting with wererats, an already rare monster in the setting, Master of Vermin experimented on ways to "mass produce" more of them. This didn't work out exactly as planned, but from his perspective, it no doubt is actually better. In trying to create "mass produced" wererats, he got, instead, two varieties of man-rat hybrids, as noted below:

Ratmen are about four feet tall, and look like hunched humanoids with rat tails, rat heads, rat fur and clawed hands and feet. For those of you familiar with skaven, they are basically exactly that, except without some of the specifically skaven clan politics and stuff. But there was an unusual side-effect of the creation of the ratmen; whereas the ratmen are mostly human-like with rat heads, for each ratman created, there was also a rat thing, ratling, or brown jenkin, named after (allegedly) the first one. These are like large rats who have human-like faces and hands. Not really intelligent, ratlings or rat things, are, at best, somewhere between smart dogs and toddlers at their most intelligent; they can understand simple commands and even communicate extremely simple concepts, but they aren't really able to rise much above that. They do have their uses, however, as spies, and as familiars. And even, to the ratmen, as a food source. Mostly ratlings, if they can do so, like to leave the communities of ratmen, and create their own packs somewhere else, but they are still rare and horrifying when found in human or near human lands. 

I don't think that I actually have rat thing or ratling stats in the game, although I did find them on a blog post, where I think I just took regular giant rat stats, maybe made a minor modification or two, and called them nuzzle rats, based on H. P. Lovecraft's own repeated description of Brown Jenkin "nuzzling horribly". I don't like that name anymore, so I won't reuse it, but giant rat stats are good. Even though giant rats are described as the size of a large dog, the stats are still fine for a rat-sized, but more dangerous than a rat like creature. 

Speaking of familiars, I do briefly talk about the animal companion player feat as a way to get familiars, but that doesn't really explain much of what they are. I imagine that the player (and only the player) that has a familiar or animal companion can communicate with it, more or less like a person, although simpler (unless the GM allows you to take, say, a person as an animal companion) and it acts kinda sorta like an NPC that's semi under the control of the player that has it as a class feature. From a "cosmological" perspective, familiars aren't exactly just the animal that they were before they were picked as a familiar; they get "augmented" by some kind of spirit from beyond which is what makes them familiars.

Keep in mind; I don't have cozy, nice wizards in DFX. Magic is witchcraft, pure and simple, or transhuman scary sorcery. Familiar spirits that take over and possess the bodies of some animal are evil creatures, and for the most part, people who use magic are evil as well. Occasionally there is a "good" sorcerer who tries to use the tools of the enemy against him, which is where PCs using magic comes in, but that's usually a pretty iffy bargain to make, and the sorcerers who do this are usually biding their time, using it as little as possible, hoping to get through life before corruption catches up to them. 

But given that PCs are often reckless or desperate or both, I imagine that plenty of characters can use magic and even have familiars without being "evil"... but it's a slippery slope and they're already sliding on it.

Revival - Renaissance - Revolution

I was rooting around on my hard drive, and found this image. I can't remember why I created it now; probably for a blog post that never actually happened. Or maybe I originally meant it to belong with this post and didn't add the image?

I'll copy/paste and edit the relevant portions of that post here:

I've read some more OSR theory discussions, and it seems that most people who pay attention to this kind of thing have all come to similar conclusions, although the labels differ somewhat. That is, that there are effectively three groups that are all somewhat associated with the OSR, and a least sometimes take on that label. The labels that I used to prefer are OSR, OSR adjacent, and NSR. However, given that the OSR adjacent and NSR believe themselves to be part of the OSR too, and identify as such, I haven't found that those are as likely to stick. I've seen a clever way of differentiating between the three main camps by utilizing three different interpretations of what the R in OSR stands for, which maybe would work a little better. I've mentioned them briefly before, but there they are again:

Old School Revival: the "original" OSR, focused on getting the retroclones out so that the original rules could still b used (albeit in rewritten "cloned" form) and new modules utilizing those rules could be published by referring to these clones. Although initially focused on 1e AD&D stuff, i.e. OSRIC, in short order Sword & Wizardry (OD&D) and later Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord (B/X) were developments here too, bringing the full gamut of retroclines, more or less, into prominence. Once these four were out, the retroclone "need" was largely filled, and this original branch of what the OSR was gradually faded from prominence. Subsequently, two things happened: 1) WotC, recognizing the demand, made older materials available for sale as relatively reasonably priced pdfs or PODs, and 2) OSE (and to a lesser extent the Hyperborea AD&D clone) swept in and seems to have largely sucked the wind out of the sails of every other retroclone. By 2012, this movement within the OSR largely got everything that it wanted, and therefore is not a major movement anymore in the community. No doubt many people who associate more with this idea still play in the OSR space, and buy OSR products, especially new modules and adventures, but there is little talk of exciting new retroclones, and little effort that I'm aware of in pursuing the goals of the Revival portion of the OSR. Many online commentators speaking ~2012, called the OSR "dead" meaning that the community, having gotten what it wanted, went quiet and had no more need to discuss already achieved goals anymore.

Old School Renaissance: As the OSR got more and more into things beyond just the retroclones, it started to coalesce into a number of "this is how you play OSR style" philosophies. As many have pointed out, this is not a faithful recreation of how everyone played in the 70s and early 80s, but it is perhaps a romanticized recreation of at least one playstyle that had been underserved since, oh, probably the early to mid-80s, in many ways. The OSR community started focusing in on the simpler, older games, deliberately cultivated contempt for game balance, mechanical vs diagetic solutions, and a number of other things that would have been pretty seriously at odds with how most people played in in the 70s and 80s, and then also started diverging in tone and theme. This is the origin of the OSR playstyle, which differs, as noted, from classic playstyle or the more hegemonic trad style that's been in vogue since the early to mid-80s. But with the collapse of the OSR blogosphere (largely) around where the OSR was going, the pulling of the plug on Google+ where a lot of this activity was, and the collapse and cancellation of at least one of the most prominent purveyors of this version of the OSR, a lot of people considered this to be yet another "death of the OSR" or rather, that this briefly faddish phase of the OSR became much more quiet and no longer dominates the headlines, such as they are, in the OSR community. "Dead" of course, doesn't mean that lots of people don't play retroclones in the OSR playstyle, just that there isn't anything really new or exciting that is dominating the headlines online anymore.

Old School Revolution: One perhaps inevitable side effect of changing the OSR from a discussion on the mechanics, i.e., the old rules and retroclones which replicated them, to a playstyle and philosophy on how to game, is that eventually, OSR started to become—ironically—divorced from the very rules and mechanics that it was created to champion and bring back. While I like the idea of calling this the NSR, the label has had limited currency, and most OSR communities continue to talk about OSR products of this category as if they were actually the OSR. I kind of disagree, but since I don't identify as any kind of OSRian, just a sympathetic para-OSRian who's more old-fashioned than old skool, maybe it's a little cheeky of me to play gatekeeper to the label. I'm not sure exactly at what point this launched, but there are a lot of games, most of them very niche, and very... "why bother" quite honestly, alongside a handful of games that have become tentpoles, if you will, of this subcommunity within the OSR. All of these are defined by their adherence to the OSR philosophy, to the extent that that's really a well codified and accepted philosophy, while simultaneously deviating significantly from the mechanics and rules of older D&D and the retroclones. Many of them, ironically, bring in a great number of "storygame" affectations, like player-facing rules, meta-currencies to allow players to influence the emerging narrative, etc. Some of the tentpole properties include Into the Odd, or Morg Borg, Black Hack, Cairn and maybe Knave. There's many others, but I'm putting forward just a handful of the more prominent ones. It's also possible that OSR-themed games that hew closer to 5e (deliberately) like ShadowDark or Five Torches Deep also fit here, although I think many OSRians would be more comfortable suggesting that they like a lot about those games, but don't really consider them OSR. But that gets to the final group, for which I have no label.

Other: This group is games that may not have any connection to the OSR at all other than that OSR fans may also like them, or that their creators hope that OSR fans like them and hope to sell to them. While the former is fine; maybe games like Dragonbane fit here, the latter is just a cheap marketing gimmick, and definitely cause for more than usual caveat emptor on the part of the OSR fans looking at such a product. 

Maybe its a good thing if the OSR "dies". As a community, it doesn't seem particularly innovative anymore; even the NSR or OSRevolution's innovations are mostly overstated. And that community is particularly toxic too. Then again, most online communities are.

As I've said many times before, I'm not old school, but I am old-fashioned. None of the OSR communities are really doing what I'd want them to do, in theory, but I am sympathetic and somewhat adjacent to what they're doing. I've never really loved the old rules, and I do have a number of quibbles about them; I'd want them to be significantly modified, so I'm not really on the Revival camp. However, the Renaissance camp goes a lot into gaming philosophies that I disagree with, and the Revolution camp builds on those principles that I disagree with.

However, if you ditch the principles, then you can potentially end up with systems that I kind of like in the NSR or Revolution side. So I guess my preferred game is parallel to all of the three OSRs. But in terms of community, I find that the revival folks are the ones I'm most likely to get a long with, and the renaissance guys have some interesting ideas. The revolution might be more interesting from a system standpoint, but I find that community pretty intolerable, even when I might find some of their ideas for mechanics interesting, here and there. And honestly, they're not doing as much that's interesting as I'd like.

Dragonlance goes to the dogs

While I'm not going to claim that Larry Elmore is a real classic of the fine art tradition, he is a great commercial artist, and some of his D&D artwork from the 80s is rightly considered classic pieces of the fantasy genre. In particular, I think his BECMI covers and the original Dragonlance novel covers are landmark pieces. 

Apparently, he volunteered to do the art for the new Dragonlance trilogy written by Weiss and Hickman, but was basically told by WotC that they don't want any white male artists doing their work. So, instead, we got this:

Like I said, again, Elmore may not be Raphael, Rembrandt or Michelangelo, but c'mon. That crap is terrible. Not only is it technically poor, with only vaguely anatomically correct proportions or faces, but it's also objectively kind of ugly and deliberately so in many ways. It isn't terrible from a landscape perspective, although nothing special, but the characters and the dragon, and the posing and the composition is all pretty bad. As commercial art it also fails, because it's neither exciting, attractive nor even memorable.

And frankly, the dragon's head only looks cool because the artist copied the design pioneered by Sam Wood and Todd Lockwood in the 2000 Monster Manual. 

Although not super high resolution, this triptych style approach to the three covers shows art that is attractive, interesting, and commercially looks really good; it was an important part of turning the Dragonlance Chronicles into the bestselling landmark trilogy of novels that it was.

Yog-Sothothery = Elder Evils

This is hardly any kind of astonishing revelation, but let me spell this out explicitly anyway, because if you don't think of it this way, you can tend to migrate away from making this true. Maybe that's your intent, and that's great, but maybe it's not, and explicitly linking elements of D&D to Yog-Sothothery and Lovecraftian Mythos maybe something that you want to do. Let's first spell out the context:

First, most of the foundational works of sword & sorcery was fairly heavily steeped in the Weird Tales Yog-Sothothery (or very similar) traditions. Robert E. Howard wrote some explicitly Lovecraftian stories set in the modern day, like "The Fires of Asshurbanipul" and "The Black Stone" as well as historical Lovecraftian stories, like "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth" or "Worms of the Earth", but even his explicitly sword & sorcery creations, which really kind of created the genre as we know it were Lovecraftian, like "The Tower of the Elephant" or "Vale of the Lost Women." Fritz Leiber also had a lot of Weird Tales like stuff in his works, and he's also considered perhaps another founding pillar of the genre, as did Michael Moorcock.

Second, D&D started off with many of those same vibes. However, in part because of Gygax's personality, and in part because of things that had been happening to Yog-Sothothery since Lovecraft's death, much of the Yog-Sothothery became too categorized, too burdened with lore and game statistics, and too neat and... well, explainable. The "monster(s)" in "The Fires of Asshurbanipal" or "The Black Stone" or "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth" are barely even physically described, much less burdened with histories, personalities and lore. They're just weird monsters that cause the characters to fail a sanity check. Because Howard wrote those stories instead of Lovecraft, they were more prone to a fight response rather than a flight response to a failed sanity check, but still... what happened is pretty clear. What the monsters actually are is less so. This was present even from the beginning; Demogorgon is a great Lovecrafitan monstrous foe in the original Monster Manual, or even in the Eldritch Wizardry book a little bit earlier. However, by making him the "Prince of Demons" and associating him with a hierarchy of demons, even as vaguely defined as it was, and giving him rivalries and personality, he became less of a Lovecraftian monster and more of a monstrous Fu Manchu or Professor Moriarty. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but the two tend to work at cross purposes, and Demogorgon was a better Lovecraftian monster than he was a Fu Manchu manipulator who just happens to look like a monster.

Third, many of the monsters later characterized as aberrations have this same problem; they started off as pretty good Lovecraftian-like entities, but when they were saddled with a culture, a society, and all-too-human-like personalities, they became, by default, less like Lovecraftian monsters and more like just really ugly bad guys. They simply haven't been used like Lovecraftian monsters, as they could be, which greatly dilutes their Yog-Sothothery vibe. Lots of monsters could apply here, but beholders, mind-flayers and aboleths strike me as the most obviously Lovecraftian inspired yet not very Lovecraft-like in their actual appearances and usage by the game.

So... obviously, they needed a way to kind of roll back all of that burden of lore and bucketing of monsters to make them more mysterious and monstrous again. "Elder Evils" is a semi-category that they created late in the 3.5 era that did part of it. Chris Perkins has even confirmed, in a brief clip of an interview I saw, that elder evils is a semi-category that just means old, powerful and not part of some other fiend or aberration category... although many of them are associated with aberrations. But back in the middle-late 00s when 3.5 was getting a little long in the tooth, there were three works that all kinda sorta did this, and Elder Evils was only one of them. Although it did pretty good for what it was, it didn't always have that really Lovecraftian vibe to all of the elder evils, just some of them.

The Lords of Madness was the aberrations specialty book, and while it didn't exactly do the same thing, it did open the doors for some additional Yog-Sothothery within D&D, especially for those that are races, that could be seen as equivalent to the mi-go or the elder things. Not every Elder Evil needs to be Cthulhu himself!

And Hordes of the Abyss also was a really Lovecraftian book in many ways, and it was fascinating to see them claw back demons into a Lovecraftian paradigm in many ways. The obyrith stuff was straight-up Lovecraftian, and the Black Scrolls of Ahm fictional book was pretty much exactly like the infamous Necronomicon itself, including an author who died under equally mysterious and sinister circumstances as Abdul Alhazred did. Well done. Dagon became the "face" if you will of the obyriths in many ways, and of course, he's basically exactly the same as the Lovecraft Dagon from the stories "Dagon" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

But by and large, the ability of D&D to tread into true Yog-Sothothery has been limited. And maybe that's OK. Maybe, even though Yog-Sothothery was a crucial component of early sword & sorcery, it simply doesn't fit what D&D has become. And honestly, maybe Yog-Sothothery has become to much of a pop culture in-joke to work super well anyway. But I do feel like occasionally D&D got it right, and in a way that I would have really enjoyed. One of those, ironically, because it stumbles in many ways, is with Zargon, the monster of B4 The Lost City and various other iterations of it. It is one of the elder evils mentioned in Elder Evils, although it comes across there as... well, as too D&Dish to really feel Lovecraftian. And it was unfortunately saddled with a very stylized Wayne England illustration that didn't really do the old guy any favors. And honestly, Zargon is a pretty corny name anyway. But just based on his description, and some of the really good illustrations of him, Zargon would have been great if "cast" as the monstrous villain of "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth", "The Fire of Asshurbanipul", "The Black Stone" or many other Lovecraftian tales—and yes, I know I specifically picked three Robert E. Howard Lovecraftian tales. But I've read those recently and they fit very well.

While I'm not a huge fan of 5e, and I only play (occasionally) in it somewhat reluctantly, they do occasionally have some really cool illustrations, when they're not trying to be too cozy or too DEI. These two Zargon illustrations are fantastic. But I'd rename him to something like Zo-Kalar or something (an offhand name dropped by Lovecraft in The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath), and do away with all of the weird lore; he's a monster in a remote place that really only becomes a problem if you disturb him... although the place is foreshadowed for a long time as a place that's cursed. And it probably needs some reference to Xuthltan or his (possible) alternate spelling Xaltotun from the Conan story.

Sigh. I wish D&D did what I wanted a little better sometimes. But I've said that for 45 years now, so I've made my peace with it, more or less. But it's sometimes harder when they come so close and yet... still manage to not quite get there.

I'm finishing up the Enemy Within "director's cut" books shortly. I'll still have the last companion to read, but before that, I think I'm going to take a break and read those three late 3.5 era D&D books: Elder Evils, Lords of Madness and Hordes of the Abyss. I miss that kind of stuff.

Not old school... but old fashioned

That's been one of my mottos for a long time. I've always been frustrated with D&D as it was written in the 70s and 80s. But in the end, I realized that these were details of the rules, not the core of them. I mean, sure, there were a lot of rules that I didn't love, like non-weapon proficiencies, and weird saving throws, and THAC0 and crap like that, but as a whole, with minor changes, the core of the games were pretty good. Especially as the modern retroclones have cleaned up some of the worst problems that they had. This is where I align, I suppose with the OSR.

However, the flavor was all wrong. The thief should be a much more useful class, and the mechanics of it were always terrible. The magic system, spells, and magic items were all unlike anything I'd really read in fantasy before, and I never liked magic (although to be fair, apparently Gary Gygax didn't really like it much either. That said, his design for magic-users was always bad.) Clerics were not actually much of a fantasy archetype, and the way healing was handled by "divine magic" was always unsatisfying. Many tropes were obviously cribbed from high fantasy, especially The Lord of the Rings, and some others had obvious influences in sword & sorcery, but because Gygax's background was wargames, neither of those influences felt very much like the fiction; they were too "gamified" if that makes sense. D&D quickly turned the wrong direction; the rules and mechanics of OD&D were blundering through trial and error into figuring out what worked, but it was on the right track in terms of what the game was about and how to play it, for the most part, but as it accreted more and more rules, edge cases, and the focus on dungeon crawling, not to mention the detritus from wargaming that it still couldn't conceive of leaving behind, I got more and more disillusioned with D&D specifically. It failed to deliver on the implicit promise inherent in the hobby that a fantasy literature fan like myself saw in it. I didn't want to play a tactical wargame, I wanted to collaboratively and improvisationally go through something that resembled the fantasy literature that I loved. By the mid-80s, ironically as the Hickman Revolution was remaking the hobby in some ways into something that better matched my stated goals, I got tired of D&D and wondered what else going on in the hobby would better suit my interests. Well, to be fair, I was also busy doing other things a lot in the second half of the 80s, as I was in high school and gaming was one of those things that I had a fringe interest in, but didn't really spend time or energy on anymore at that point. But I did keep track of a few other things going on in the hobby, or in adjacent hobbies. I checked out MERP and the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, for instance, and spent at least some time looking at Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Top Secret S.I. and a few other games (mostly the other TSR games, because they were the most readily available.) I was passingly familiar with Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, Champions, and more, although passingly familiar and actually familiar were probably miles apart. It was later in the early/mid 90s that I came back to gaming, and at that time, I was deliberately avoiding D&D. Instead, I got interested in what White Wolf was doing, I discovered a college friend who had Top Secret SI kicking around, and I got into some older Traveller stuff. I didn't regain any interest in D&D until 3rd edition in 2000.

I was always a bit skeptical of the Hickman Revolution and the switch from Classic to Trad style which seemed to have happened. Although I consider myself a trad guy, it was immediately obvious what the excesses of trad would be and how they could be extremely detrimental to a game. Player agency is still paramount, and pre-written campaigns or even modules with plots would easily devolve into railroads that nobody wanted to play, because just write it as a freakin' book and let me read that instead, already. The improvisational and collaborative elements of RPGs were always core to their appeal, and minimizing those was never going to go well. The risk inherent to the characters was also part of the appeal, and what made it exciting; another excess of the trad style is crafting stories or at least potential stories around the characters, which makes everyone much less willing to see them put in any significant risk. A perhaps unintended side effect of this is that the primacy of "my precious character" from a plot standpoint, also, or perhaps in parallel, draws them inexorably towards power fantasies and over-powered superhero characters. 

Meanwhile, as the style changed, the mechanics did not, which only frustrated me all the more, as what I wanted D&D to do and what it actually managed to do were all the more divorced, in many ways.

Although the flexibility inherent in the WotC editions of D&D, starting with 3e which I played the heck out of it for many, many years allowed me to get more of what I wanted from the game, it was also not designed with what I wanted in mind, and I gradually got more and more frustrated yet again with the game. The strategy of player-facing products was interesting for a while, because it allowed for a great deal of setting development through mechanics... at least when it was done well, although it didn't take long for that to become quite boring and focused on mechanical dickering and build strategies rather than actual "fluff" concerns that were interesting.

When 4e came out, I didn't have any interest in adopting it, even though from a lore standpoint, it actually did more of what I wanted... it's just that by that time, it didn't do enough. I was clearly ready to move on from the D&Disms, and D&D was still quite conservative, at least in the sense that it failed to be anything terribly different than it used to be. Ironically, many conservative (and I mean this in regards to lore and expectations of the game; not socially or politically, of course—although I do think that there is at least some correlation between the two) thought 4e was a step too far; to me, it wasn't enough to interest me. And many of the other things it did, like focusing on character builds and long, drawn out combats, were exactly the opposite of where I wanted to go. Pathfinder, although different mechanically, also followed that same directive. 5e too, as near as I can tell; the idea that it's considerably streamlined compared to 3e or 4e only makes sense if you operate in a world where D&D is the totality of the RPG market. 5e is full of compromises; it's basically a slightly streamlined 3e, in terms of character builds, at least, but with pretty much the same unlikeable combat system, and plenty of additional complexity in areas that don't interest me.

So, I've finally come around to being more positive towards the OSR, which for many years—quite honestly—kind of irritated me, due to the spergy behavior of some of its most vocal adherents, and it's trumpeting of classic playstyle (which gradually evolved into the OSR playstyle, which has some similarities, but also some significant differences). I still don't really want to play an OSR game, but I think starting with an OSR chassis, or OSR-adjacent chassis, at least, and modifying it to be less overtly D&D-ish and more able to replicate the kind of implied setting that I want is where I am, in most respects. It's also very much worth pointing out that I'm still an old-fashioned guy, but firmly in the trad camp, although as noted above, with some long-standing skepticism of its excesses. Systems that are designed with trad style in mind rather than classic could do some things differently than the OSR did, which went from being specifically to cloning the old systems, to furthering the OSR playstyle. Maybe you could call me paleo-trad; trad but with a firm grounding in old fashioned classic play. I left classic because I didn't like it and trad promised what I always wanted RPGs to do, but classic also created many of my tastes, or at least strongly informed them.

So, I'm old-fashioned, but not old school. I'm more comfortable going back to an old school chassis and modifying it to be more what I want than I am starting with a modern chassis. Not that there hasn't been some pretty cool and interesting developments system-wise, because there absolutely have been. All three of the modern editions of the game brought some cool new innovations to the table. But mostly, I'm not happy playing in an OSR style, even when I prefer to modify OSR mechanics. There are still things about most OSR systems that I don't love, but getting the mechanics into a more "cleaned up" OSR baseline and then variancing based on taste and flavor from there is where I'm at now. 

And speaking of being conservative in terms of what I want; holy cow, has fantasy become weird, apparently, in the last couple of decades. Since when is fantasy some weird diversity utopia with animal people and superheroes all over the place?

Western Marches

Arcane Library's follow-up ShadowDark Kickstarter, ongoing now, has passed the funding of the original Kickstarter, which by itself is pretty interesting, as that bucks the pattern, and it's done so in only about 5 days. However, it also bucks the pattern in that its done so with just over half the number of backers as before. Granted, most of the rewards tiers are much more expensive than the original Kickstarter, for whatever reason, so maybe it's whale fans of the original game getting premium copies of the same stuff, to some degree. There's a lot of interest, surely, in what she's doing, however (even if looking at the number of backers, there's less interest than in the original game). But it's interesting; people tend to say that follow-up Kickstarter campaigns with additional supplemental material added to an initially successful RPG offering don't do as well. ShadowDark found a way around this; while the interest level (in terms of backers) is lower, the take from the Kickstarter is (so far; it'll continue to grow, although the rate at which it does so will be slow from this point on, I believe) higher. This was done by making premium offerings; a premium reprint of the original books, premium versions of the zines (half of which were part of the original Kickstarter) and premium versions of the new books, as well as other premium add-ons, like a cloth players map, etc. 

That's why I say maybe this is the whale Kickstarter, whales being a gaming term referring to gamers who are big spenders. The business model of catering to fewer but bigger spenders rather than more numerous but thriftier spenders is usually seen as a phase in the cycle of a computer game. It can last for a while, but it is the second stage of a computer game business model; the first being "hey, we're popular and lots of people are spending subscriptions or whatever they're spending"; whale's being "we've lost most of those spenders, so we need to milk the ones that remain by offering a premium something or other that they can spend on. The third phase after that is, "we can't get people to spend money anymore at all."

Does this model apply to RPGs, though? That's an interesting question. The problem with the RPG business is that it doesn't encourage long-term spending very well, to be honest with you. That's something that even back when Gygax was still running the show that they struggled with. Once you have a popular product, how do you keep sales up, when it's the kind of thing that people have bought and don't really need anything else? If you're pretty saturated in terms of having met demand, you can't sell much more, because people who want the game already have it now. So, you come up with supplemental material. But how much of that can you continue to do? People don't need supplements, and while many people enjoy them, the take-rate is obviously going to be quite a bit smaller than the original. And at some point, the returns on supplements greatly diminish. Which is why games tend to go through edition revisions; an attempt to juice their sale by getting people on board to a whole new version of the game. But that's a diminishing return too; what does a new revision or edition offer that you don't already have in the original version? Well, probably something if there's a perception that the newer version is better, or that you will struggle to find players for the old one because of the new one just being out there, but again; less than the first time around. Plus, if you do it too many times, people stop caring. I bought the d20 Star Wars game in 2000, and I bought the revised book in 2002 or 2003 (not sure if I bought it when it was brand new.) When they came out with the Saga edition in 2007, I wasn't interested. Everyone said it was quite a bit better. But I wasn't willing to buy a third version of a game that I already had two versions of and honestly still hadn't even used once.

So, to some degree, whatever pattern you're seeing with ShadowDark is inevitable. The game seems to still be fairly healthy; in fact, I wonder if being an indie game, this second Kickstarter will juice its profile in the scene even more, honestly. But eventually you get to the point where mostly everyone who wants it has it. And then what do you sell and who do you sell it to? The answer is; you don't. You pivot to something else. There's no more money to be made here.

This long story is played out in the recent interview Questing Beast did of Mike Mearls, which is one of the best industry discussions I've seen in a really long time, so I'll link the whole thing below.

The whole thing is excellent. What I really need to do eventually is watch it again, taking notes about various points I want to talk about, and then commenting on them. Although anything I could add pales in comparison to what it already provides. It's just a great discussion all around.

Tired....

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been exceptionally tired this last weekend. I got home from work, my wife was already hitting the wall because of her travel earlier in the week, and I simply could barely keep my eyes open an hour or so after getting home. I managed to force myself to stay awake by watching cheesy fail videos and stuff on YouTube, just so I didn’t throw my sleep schedule completely off, but it was pretty bad. Saturday and Sunday I was still pretty tired. I didn’t do the house cleaning chores that I meant to do and I didn’t do my taxes, so those are still hanging over me. I did, however, get to do a little bit of work on High Fantasy X, HFX, my lingering project that started out as Elemental Fantasy X, and then kinda took a back seat. 

I’m not 100% sure what prompted me to look at this again, but something reminded me of my Eberron Remixed project, and that led me to HFX. I was able to determine, as noted in my last post, how to change the rules to accommodate the HFX vs DFX setting, and I was able to do so with relatively little actual change. There’s still the task to fill out the fluff, such as it is, but that’s not a big deal, and then I’ll have a skeleton outline of a setting, ready to go. That’s usually the degree of detail that I like to do anyway.

Other than that, I recently finished the pdf game book I’m reading and queued up some new ones. However, most of the ones I queued up are freakin’ gigantic; more than 500 pages; almost 900 pages on the longest one. I’ve had many of these pdfs for many years, but I’ve not read them. I may not, if they’re that intimidating. I kind of threw up my hands in frustration at lunch today and didn’t even pick up a game book at all, and started the novel that I’d been carrying around in my backpack instead. I also started listening (again) to the Dune soundtracks. You’d think that there’d be two soundtracks; one for Dune part one and another for part two, but the first movie actually had three soundtracks for some reason, although two of them seem like mood music rearranged specifically to be a soundtrack album rather than the actual movie soundtrack, which is something different. It was kind of moodier and more melancholy than I remembered, with a lot of slow, sad saxophone melody lines. (I’m always amused to see sax again. Saxophone used to be common in the 80s, and gradually it kind of faded from popular music. I didn’t really notice until someone pointed it out that it was gone.) I wonder if Hans Zimmer was unconsciously (or consciously) influenced by the old Vangelis Blade Runner love theme. I’m not saying that they sounded alike, but I am saying that they kinda sounded like part of the same family of music, if that makes any sense. 

To be fair, it was a little too moody and melancholy for the Arkham Horror novel I was reading. It wasn’t really quite the right mood. Oh, well. I’ll finish the Dune stuff soon enough, and then I can switch to some Graham Plowman or something for the rest of the read-throughs. I’ve got four more Arkham Horror novels after this one that I’m on; although I might not read them all right away.

Next up, besides reading, I’ve been trying to watch some older movies again that I haven’t watched in a long time. I enjoyed the two Predators a weekend or so ago; I’m kinda thinking I need to watch Aliens, The Untouchables, and Solomon Kane again. I barely even remember the last one, and it’s been enough time since I saw the first two that I could use a refresher. And then, I’ll also want to make the next video in my 5x5 Shadows Over Garenport vlog series on YouTube, and draw a new, more detailed map of the HFX continent… which I could probably stand to name, while I’m at it. I’ve got a good first map, but it’s a little small, and has too many unnamed features. As I start filling out the space on the new Google Sites for HFX, I’ll need more names, which means… I’ll need a new map.

As an aside, I'm amused that the main continent of Eberron is named Khorvaire. Maybe I should name my continent Stuuddabhacre or something?

UPDATE: A curious note. ShadowDark was one of the most successful RPG kickstarters of all time a couple of years ago managed by someone not named Brandon Sanderson. When it went live, it reached $1.365M, I think, and was considered by everyone involved (or even just observing) as a phenomenal success. It had a part 2 launch just yesterday, a setting and more material. It's currently sitting at $1.227M as a write this, but at less than 48 hours in, it has continued to trickle upward after it's initial $1M, which it reached in less than 12 hours. It should reach at least the total of the first kickstarter before finishing, and maybe will edge up closer to $1.5M. I did notice, however, that it's reached almost the same total with less than half the number of backers (so far.) The pledge tiers are all considerably more expensive than they were the first time. The least expensive pledge level, pdfs of the three new zines, is still $45, and the most expensive, premium hardcopies of everything new, is $349. I currently only own a pdf copy of the game, which I bought long after the original kickstarter was over. If I were to get into it and want hard copies, I'd probably have get the ShadowDark Newcomer package, which is $199, or perhaps the premium versions which are higher quality, and come with a few accessories, for $269.

Not sure what that means. If it makes the same money, or even better, does it matter if it's fewer backers, but who are individually bigger spenders? Or is that a sign that ShadowDark is on the decline? Or is the fact that I wondered that merely a sign that I'm a pessimistic black-piller who should shut up?

UPDATE 2: Physiognomy is real. I'm not shocked by, say, the mannerisms of Sly Flourish or Matt Glicker. Professor DM and Baron de Roppe, on the other hand, are actually in many ways more charismatic when unscripted and not in "performative" mode. 

As for my own take on the questions?

1. I would love to play my own game, but I never will. As a player, I'd probably say something like Call of Cthulhu, I suppose. But I love fantasy; if I could get the same vibe as Call of Cthulhu but in fantasy, and without the d100 system, which I don't much care for, that'd be perfect for me. Of course, that's pretty much exactly what my game, Dark Fantasy X is, which is my favorite to run.
2. I have plenty of other interests, but what I'd most be interested in branching out of (to the extent that I don't already) would be hiking slash camping slash overlanding. I'd love to have a second channel where I do pretty much what SUV RVing does. Except I'm older, more out of shape and slower than him, so my adventures would necessarily be quite a bit more sedate.
3. Not sure. I used to really like a lot of definition in the system for players to use to customize their characters, but I liked it because it led to roleplaying hooks. I now realize that most games that offer that are really geared towards power gamers and character builds, so I'm less likely to prefer them. But not because I don't have the same tastes; ironically its because my tastes are now more aligned with mechanics I prefer. 

I think that last point is kind of interesting. When I started playing, there were other games, of course. D&D was out, as was AD&D, and a few others. Gamma World was out already. Top Secret was just releasing, Star Frontiers and Call of Cthulhu were about to be released, Traveller was out, etc. And I played around with most of those, although it's also fair to say that everyone played D&D, at least some of the time, and that was the common language that all gamers knew. We took it for granted more that different people wanted different things out of the game, and that the game didn't parcel them out automatically to each playstyle; it was up to a good GM to make sure everyone got enough of what they liked that they kept playing, and balanced the competing priorities of different people with different tastes at the same table.

I think that's kind of been lost over the years, and honestly, I've kind of lost it myself. As I've gotten older, I've lost patience with stuff that I'm not interested in being a significant portion of my game, and I'm much more interested in finding like-minded people to game with rather than gaming with anyone just because, hey, it's a game, or hey, they're the only friends I've got who game, etc. I want games to be good, and I've become much more hardened in my opinion on what is good for me and what isn't. I've taken it on the chin too many times to think otherwise, and played in mediocre or even bad games, or with people that I didn't rally enjoy gaming with, or even sometimes hanging around with. I'm over that. But yeah; the idea of a game perfectly suited to your tastes? I'm not sure I could delineate what my tastes were when I was younger (although in retrospect, they haven't really meaningfully changed at their core). But it never occurred to me that a game could actually be crafted specifically to match them.

High Fantasy X

Well, my old Elemental Fantasy X has been converted to High Fantasy X. However, I wasn't doing anything actively with it. I stumbled across my old Eberron Remixed stuff, which reminded me of it, and I found that I was having problems signing in to my Microsoft Account (because of--supposedly--to many failed sign-ins. This is completely a problem that they caused, and then have not even attempted to fix; I remember when I was trying to sign in (after not ever having signed out) and getting locked out. And then my recovery email is one that I no longer have, because I don't use my Microsoft account for much of anything. I'm very frustrated with Microsoft right now, and decided to stop using OneNote entirely.)

In order to make it more useable, although I preferred an offline copy, like OneNote kind of would be, I also liked that I could synch OneNote manually if I wanted to use it on more than one computer, or my phone or tablet, etc. Instead, I transferred my OneNote status, such as it was, to a Google Site. I don't know that I trust Google Sites to be out there forever, but in the meantime, it's doing what I actually wanted OneNote to do, and because my Microsoft account got borked, OneNote isn't. 

Here's the link: https://sites.google.com/view/highfantasyx/home

It still has a lot of holes in it, but I did make some updates, and I'm pretty happy with its current status as a WIP that admittedly needs quite a bit more work to be useable. But I can do that fairly quickly, and then we'll see where it goes from there.

HFX was originally meant to be one of the modules for the Modular adaptation, but instead of actually proceeding (at least right now) with creating a base that can be modularized, I just have it as a handful of house-rules and a slightly revised race line-up for DFX. Because the two are quite similar, that works better than attempting to rewrite the core and make DFX a module, with HFX a separate module.

The rules changes are pretty modest, and listed below (not counting the races)

• Characters start with two Heroism tokens instead of one each session. (as an aside, you can still get more during the session as normal.)
• Sanity works as described, however the rules for a permanent Sanity check penalty do not apply, and that risk is eliminated entirely.
• When casting spells, if a character roles a natural 1, it is not automatically a critical failure; it is a critical failure risk. Roll another check at the same DC as casting the spell, and it is only a critical failure if this second check is also a failure. It is, however, still a regular failure.

Although not a rule, it's worth noting that using magic isn't illegal and a risk of lynching as it is in DFX. Mages (or sorcerers or wizards or warlocks or witches or whatever they call themselves) aren't seen as any more dangerous, necessarily, than any other expert with a deadly weapon, and a heavily armed and armored stranger strolling into town would be seen as potentially just as dangerous as a mage. Both are noted for their ability to be extremely dangerous, of course, but that's little different than a man with a gun on his belt walking confidently into an Old West town. Sure, sure... you don't make trouble with him, but you don't run away from him just because he showed up either.

However, a mage who uses his spells to bully, threaten or harm the populace will be immediately treated as a danger; but then again, so would a warrior doing the same thing with his sword. This change in the perception of magic is probably more important even than the slight change in the rules for using magic; although the fact that mages don't eventually all go insane despite their best intentions is a big deal too. They are still kind of Russian roulette situations, although with a notably lower probability of problems than in DFX.

A few things

I need to get back to blogging about gaming, and I will soon (or if not, I'll make another YouTube video about it, which I'm also behind on) but for today, here's some interesting data that I stumbled across by accident. First, a "perception of corruption by country" map that was presented to me in some work training, but which is distributed by some third party research group. I find it interesting, although not surprising, that it completely validates the Z-man's assertion that the war between Russia and the Ukraine is a war between the two most corrupt white nations... if you ignore Byelorussia, which is pedantically listed as a hair more corrupt than Ukraine (although I have my doubts. Besides, this is a list of perception of corruption, not necessarily actual corruption, which is certainly harder to measure.)

Mexico is also abysmally low and falling fast every time the data is refreshed. Because so many Americans do business with Mexico, our compliance training at work obviously focused heavily on dealing with Mexico. But it's also extremely relevant in our current political discussions about the Trump administration's grief with Mexico in general. It also of course is extremely relevant with regards to the expected behavior of large blocks of Mexicans living in the United States. As Vox Day has said for years, there's nothing magical about the dirt of America, where if foreigners set foot on it it magically turns them into Americans. They will continue to be Mexicans, or whatever it is that they were before they came. Therefore, patterns of behavior, genetics, and human capital by nation should be expected to continue to hold true (minus a mass admixture event, or something) regardless of geographic location. Mexicans are still Mexicans, even if they get American paperwork, and their behavior will continue to be Mexican, even in America, for the most part. Expecting anything other than that is wishful thinking, delusional, and ridiculous.

https://transparency.org/cpi is the link. The redder the color, the more corrupt the country is perceived to be. 

On another note, a lot of Canadians are bent out of shape by the tariffs, calling them unfair, and getting mad at America. Screw you, Canada! If you don't like tariffs, here's a sampling of tariffs that Canada has charged on American goods for decades (rounded to the nearest whole number):

Milk 270%

Cheese 245%

Butter 298%

Chicken 238%

Sausages 69%

Barley seed 58%

Beef 27%

Cars 25%

HVAC 45%

Vacuums 36^

Cable boxes 35%

TVs 45%

Steel 25%

Aluminum 45%

Copper 48%

I'm not impressed with their complaining, and much less impressed by their threats. The reality is that Canada's economy is extremely vulnerable, and they know it. Their tariffs are a blip on our economy. Our tariffs would be devastating to theirs. That's what happens when you have a gigantic trade surplus with much larger country that has a great many natural resources, and the capability to not need any of your imports at all. The US has funded a lot of Canada's nonsense; they have no real military to speak of, because they rely on ours. They engage in plenty of protectionism because it funds their economy at our expense, but they are a relatively small trading partner with us. On the other hand, we are a HUGE trading partner for them. 

Trudeau is, of course, a liar and an idiot, but even so-called conservative star Pierre Poilievre is sounding kinda whiny, calling Canada America's best friend because they sent a handful of soldiers to Afghanistan years ago or something like that. He says we stabbed them in the back (by reciprocating their own behavior?) and saying that we're already paying higher gas prices (my local gas price is down at least $0.25 in the last couple of days).

Canada isn't America's best friend. I've known too many Canadians to believe that, even regardless of the policies of their government. Canadians are smug and arrogant, and look at Americans with contempt, for the most part. Canada is the leftover New French, who resent the rest of Canada and the British Canadians, even as they rely on them financially, and the rest of Canada are Americans who do the same to America. They were afraid of freedom in 1776, were comfortable with living under tyranny, and continue to do so. But they have the same dynamic with America; they resent us and dislike us even as they are completely dependent on us financially. Their threats to sell their oil to China or India ring pretty hollow; they're pretty much allowed themselves to be invaded and purchased by China and India anyway.

Rather than being our best friend, Canada is our toxic, narcissistic ex-girlfriend, who still depends on us, but hates us in part because of that financial dependence. I have little sympathy for what could potentially happen to their economy if they continue to attempt to exploit and tweak us. You asked for it, sweet-cheeks. If you don't like it, you should have had a much better pattern of behavior in how you treated us. We're completely and utterly justified in putting the screws to you until you shape up, because you still haven't moved out of our basement and set yourself up as a legitimately independent country.

Must see TV

Or rather not. I didn't watch it, and now that I've seen summaries and reviews, I almost certainly won't. I wasn't the target audience. People who are really paying attention and are pretty current events savvy and politically/socially aware weren't the target audience. There literally wasn't anything for them in this speech. As Vox Day says, (who apparently didn't watch it either—but he lives in Italy now, so it would have been quite late local time for him):

Reading the reviews of the God-Emperor 2.0’s speech to Congress proved to be a bit deflating. While it was a good summary of what has been accomplished so far, it didn’t really provide us with any new information. Still no arrests. Still members of NATO. There is still a Department of Education, an Internal Revenue Service, and a Federal Reserve.

No one cares about a mineral deal with Ukraine. Everyone wants the US military out of Ukraine, out of Europe, and out of Japan.

There’s nothing wrong with a victories lap. There are certainly more victories to celebrate than anyone was expecting so soon. But everyone was expecting something more, something big, last night. And that speech was nothing big. Frankly, reading his executive orders is more exciting and encouraging.

Yeah, we were certainly hoping for some big announcements along the lines of pulling out of NATO, major arrests, the FBI files on Epstein, or something like that. But I wasn't really expecting it. (I think it's funny and kinda irritating that in Spanish there's only one word that means both hope and expect. Personally, I think they mean quite different things, and as highlighted here, the contrast between what I hope for and what I expect can be quite large.) 

Frankly, although the accomplishments of the speech itself were pretty modest, I think it still had some value. Cementing for a new audience who isn't paying enough attention what he's actually done, which the American people generally want him to do, in the faces of the mainstream media who're desperate to spin his presidency so far as something terrible, was valuable. Trashing the Democrat and progressive brands publicly and thoroughly is valuable. Allowing the petulant, entitled bratty little princesses of the Democrat party, like Al Green or whatsherface Slotkin to own goal and trash the Democrat brand publicly and inadvertently because they mistakenly thought that they'd be hailed as "stunning and brave" was even more valuable. 

But it was a bit deflating. I felt like I was bait and switched just a bit, being told to tune in for something amazing, and then being told stuff that I already knew. But, like I said, I wasn't really the target audience after all. Apparently the approval rating of the speech was quite high.

I suppose that's probably sufficient justification to do it on its own, in spite of what people like me think of it.

Sigh

Work is crazy this morning. The tariffs went into effect effective today after all, in spite of my hopes that Mexico et al would come to an agreement with the administration. Specifically because... I do Procurement professionally and because everything that I buy currently is pretty labor intensive, it's all located in the maquiladora region of Mexico. While I'm in support of the tariffs, and recognize that after China, Mexico is the country that will most lose if it engages in a trade war with the US; they simply absolutely cannot afford to do so because of the value of the trade deficit.

That said, just because I'm in favor of the tariff strategy from a big picture standpoint, it is certainly a major headache for my current work situation. One guy, who clearly isn't an economist, is really dropping a lot of passive aggressive crap in our group IM. It's been hard to ignore it, but that's the best approach. At his age in his 60s, he's not going to be interested in a dialectical discussion about it. He just clearly wants to snipe at the Trump administration, as if people agree with him. And maybe most people do, I don't know. I certainly know that I don't. I'm willing to put up with some frustration at work for long term benefit for my country, my people and my posterity. Putting Mexico in its place is one of the most important foreign policy initiatives that America can do; they've been waging de facto war and invasion against us for decades.

So, instead I'll leave with a portion of the Z-man's latest post for the day.

[I]it is fair to wonder if what we are seeing and have been seeing for the last few decades is the death of the last remaining ideology, progressivism. Populism seems to be an end of cycle phenomenon. It is, after all, a disorganized revolt against the current order, which has reached its maturity and is entering decline. What follows a populist uprising is either a replacement of the old order, a reform that replaces the old elite or a reform effort by the elites themselves.

The assault on the Blob by the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, is clearly an assault on the old managerial order. Elon Musk is the face of the new technological elite, so it is fitting that he is the point man for this task. Managerialism is the traveling partner of ideology. It was a feature of both fascism and communism. Its looming demise at the hands of the Trump administration, which was powered by a populist uprising against it, fits the historical pattern.

Progressivism has had a long run, but for most of the 20th century it served as a bulwark against fascism and then communism. Its social reforms stopped making any sense by the latter half of the 20th century and either disappeared from the agenda entirely or morphed into bizarre sexual fetishes. Its main reason to exist was to fight communism, but once communism was gone, it was left without a devil, so it has gone insane over the last decades in search of Old Scratch.

The populism that brought Trump to the White House in 2016, sustained him in his wilderness years and then returned him the White House was driven by the excesses and insanity of progressives. Populism is usually framed as the people versus elites, but in this case, it was normal people versus crazy people. The best way to describe the first weeks of the Trump administration is the return of normalcy, unless you are a member of the hive we call the left.

In the fullness of time, what this period may be known for is the death of the last ideology, knocked off by the same forces that spawned it. American populism has always been a check on the excesses of the elite, not as a physical or even political force, but as a cultural force. Ideology is always about changing culture, so it is ironic that the last ideology will be vanquished by a cultural phenomenon. The ghost of the People’s Party has finally called progressivism home.

Also, how about this?

https://x.com/realdogeusa/status/1896395104937476110

Wouldn't it be interesting if it turns out that they're Mexicans? Or Israelis? Who are your friends, and who has been waging covert war against you while pretending to be your friend, and guilt tripping you anytime you get close to noticing?

And how about this?

https://x.com/Real_RobN/status/1888722651893694672

The 80s still surprises me sometimes

This last weekend, for whatever reason while I was browsing my YouTube homepage on my TV, and it started showing me some 80s music videos. First, it showed me a quiz, a "name that tune" kind of thing. I did very well. 80s pop culture, especially 80s pop music, is really kinda my thing, and there are very few songs that I don't know. Out of a good 50 or so songs, I missed one, although I know both the one that I should have picked and the one that I did pick; I just don't really care for either so I didn't recognize them on just a deliberately vague five second sample. And I completely whiffed a Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers duet that I don't remember ever hearing, but I had little to no interest in Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers or anything country during the 80s. Although I'm sure this was a crossover on the charts. 

I listened to some Wang Chung and The Cars, including the entirety of the Hearbeat City album, by far the Cars' best work. Then I got a recommendation for The Hooters "And We Danced." I didn't think that the Hooters were an 80s band at all; I probably was mixing them up with Hootie and the Blowfish. But for whatever reason, I played it, and the song seemed quite familiar, and certainly very 80s. I was shocked to find that, even at this point, there are still 80s bands who actually had genuine hits even, that were kind of not on my radar. 

Coincidentally, they're originally from Philadephia, and I spent the week last week in Lehigh Valley myself, having flown into Philly and traveled by rental car to Macungie.

I listened to a number of their songs, and "And We Danced" was the only one that sounded familiar to me, and the only one that I thought good enough to make sure that I grabbed and and added to my collection. What a great song! I doubt that I actually missed this one, but it had fallen through the cracks and I forgot about it in the meantime. The nostalgic, even at the time it was filmed in 1985 or so, music video, with its kind of pseudo-50s Americana at the drive-in vibe is also fantastic. Just a great song all around. I can't believe that didn't already know about it and didn't know who the Hooters were, even... even though I recognized the song when I heard it.

Another great song that I think has been overlooked, although at least I hadn't forgotten it, because I had it on an old Rhino collection, is Charlie Sexton's "Beat So Lonely", which has a similar kind of sound to me, even though it's not really the same kind of song. You can hear it in Some Kind of Wonderful even though it's not on the soundtrack album released for the movie, oddly. He recorded that thing when he was 16, co-written by him, sung by him, and great guitar licks performed by him too. Talented guy. And a fellow Texan! I won't even gripe about his Austin upbringing; it was early enough that Austin wasn't too crazy yet in the 70s and early 80s, and he wouldn't have been in the music industry if he hadn't been in Austin, no doubt.

Movies and Books

I had to spend almost the entirety of the work week out of town for work last week. Flight home was delayed, so I didn't get home until late Friday evening; bedtime really. I was supposed to intercept my wife on her way out of town and take her to the airport, but because of my delay, she had to go on her own. Now, her flight is delayed and I'll be in bed when she gets home, because otherwise I'll start the week off already short on sleep. Not a good plan; I've been pretty tired all weekend because of the travel. Sigh.

So, when I have a week in a hotel (in the evenings, anyway) and a weekend at home by myself, what do I do?

In my case, I:

• Reread the original 3e version of Privateer Press's Monsternomicon vol. 1. Still one of my favorite game books. It's just a joy to read. Even the boring monsters, like the moon moths and stuff give you a reason to potentially care about them.
• Started reading The Game Master's Book of Instant Towns and Cities. I think this one may take me a little while to read. It's a little cringy. It's very 5e cozy weird high fantasy in feel, with a kind of "ambient wokeness" that you can kind of feel intuitively moreso than point to anything super substantial (other than all of the girlboss "mayors" and whatnot). It's got lots of pop culture cringy in-jokes too; a seaside town called Inz which is kind of a silly joke version of Innsmouth, for instance, or the place that literally has a talk like a pirate day. Nothing's actively offensive or too ridiculous much, at least not so far, but I'm glad I got it for half price. Even so, I imagine I'll feel ripped off when I'm done.
• Pondered that with the "vibe shift" that lots of people are talking about since the election, that kind of stuff has become very low status. I mean, people like me always felt at least a kind of quiet contempt for wokeness, but because woke was in the halls of power, they could delude themselves about their status and popularity. Now, it seems not only like super loser and beta, but also cringy and legitimately creepy. People who haven't caught on and are still talking about woke topics like everyone else takes them seriously, or even pretends to, are outing themselves as really low status. It's hard not to look at people like that and wonder where they went really, really wrong and how they lost their complete and total sense of situational awareness. That was probably overthinking a book that's only "ambiently" rather than overtly woke, at least so far. But I saw a stream that mentioned the whole "low status" label of wokeness, and that probably primed the pump as soon as I picked up a D&D book that has even hints of wokeness.
• Read about half of a pdf copy of Exemplars of Evil, which I'd heard really good things about. Had a crazy sense of deja vu after a while. At one point halfway through, was convinced I'd read it already. Looked at my reading log, which I started keeping in 2023, and saw that I'd already read it back then. Sigh. I guess the book wasn't all that, since I had to read it again halfway through to remember that I even had read it at all. Gave up and took if off my Sumatra pdf reader history.
• Was about to read Paizo's Villain Codex. Just a few pages in, thought it looked really familiar too. I read it before I kept a log, but I did find an old blog post or two where I referenced having just read it, from about six years ago. Actually, some of the basic framework of the SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT campaign, or at least the eponymous column, were clearly built on ideas that I was inspired by from here. Stopped reading that one too. I do actually plan on re-reading two books that I read in 2023 though; The Pirate's Guide to Freeport and Five Fingers: Port of Deceit. But I have way more gaming books on my docket than actual fiction books, so I need to read some novels here too. Many of mine are still in boxes in the garage from my move, though.
• I had not read Paizo's Horror Realms before, but I have a pdf copy of that too, so I started that. Already have a couple of ideas of things to use, although they're just minor little details. Signal to noise ratio with a lot of modern RPG products isn't super great, but there are good ideas in them. Sometimes you just have to pan for them for quite a while before you get enough flakes of good ideas to get something really useable.
• Read Arthur Machen's novella "The Great God Pan" as part of a gigantic ebook collection of all his work (it's all public domain.) Pretty sure I've read this before a while ago, but it's still interesting. Apparently, in 1894 when it was first published, it was considered pretty racy, and wasn't a great start to his reputation as a writer, which is kinda funny given that anything that may have happened in the plot was innuendo-ized so strongly that you almost aren't even sure what you're supposed to infer happened (I suppose the late Victorian and Edwardian era Brits who read it might have had more context to see it than I do). Also, of course, in the 130 or so years since then, we've become so decadent that it seems tame anyway, even if it had been spelled out literally and explicitly. But it's since become a real classic of horror, and many horror writers consider it one of the best early horror stories, before the genre had really crystalized. Stephen King certainly said so specifically, and Lovecraft's own "The Dunwich Horror" borrows so much from it in some ways that it's almost a pastiche.
• Watched Predator and Predator 2, which I have owned for many years. But I hadn't watched either of them in some time, so it was nice to put them back in and go through them. For various reasons, I've had Predator themed stuff pop up at me off and on repeatedly over the last few weeks, including the soundtrack of the second one on YouTube, some reaction videos (again on YouTube) of people watching the whole Dillon/Dutch arm thing, etc. Even Black Lodge Games talked about Schwarzenegger movies in a recent stream, and of course they mentioned that Predator is probably his best movie (although they were particularly fond of Commando and Total Recall. Poor Running Man gets no love. It's a good one too, though). Predator 2 is one I remember quite liking when it came out (I saw it in theaters) but apparently it took some time to find its audience. Too different from the first one, and no Arnie, I guess. But it's since become a well-regarded "cult classic", so quality always outs eventually. Predator 2 also seems to accidentally—in retrospect—look like a cautionary tale against mass immigration of third world savages.
• Listened to some hardtrance, early hardstyle and even a bit of hardcore and gabber, which I don't normally listen to.
• Listened to some Darkest Dungeon and Graham Plowman Lovecraftian soundtracks, as well as some classical music.
• Took a nap on Saturday. Tried to take one on Sunday, but didn't actually do more than doze for a few minutes. Ultimately, that was probably for the best. 
• Was supposed to have a D&D session. Our DM was burned out after only a few sessions, really (perils of DMing 5e. But I don't know that he knows any better; apparently, he's only ever played 4e and 5e.) His wife was going to take over on the same campaign, and he'd either play his wife's character, or make his own replacement to take her character's place. But she got kinda sick or something, and they canceled kinda last minute. Honestly, after a week out of town, having an excuse to just stay at home wasn't so bad, so I wasn't too broken up about the cancelation. The only time I left the house all weekend was 1) walk to the mailbox and get the mail, 2) take a couple of trash bags out to the trash, 3) go to church on Sunday. I'm not really read to go in to work tomorrow. Especially since my wife probably won't be awake yet. I will have just missed her several times over the weekend, and will finally be able to see here again on Monday after work. Sigh.