Winged Death

I just read "Winged Death", a Hazel Heald story that was clearly written almost entirely if not actually entirely by Lovecraft himself, while at lunch (sitting in my car, listening to White Bat Audio.) I was struck by this, as well as in "The Mound", that Lovecraft had oddly spelled yet obvious references to some of his  Yog-Sothothery names. "The Mound" makes numerous references to Tulu†, for instance, and is one one of the many stories Lovecraft wrote which references Tsathoggua; clearly his favorite of all the entities that he didn't create/name himself. "Winged Death" also references both of them, the the diary/narrator refers to Cyclopean ruins deep in blackest Africa that are associated with Tsadogwa and Clulu. "The Horror in the Museum" also references two elder evils that I don't believe have been used anywhere else; Noth-Yidik and K'thun. I'm not a fan of apostrophes, so if I used that name, I'd change it to Kathun or Kathuun even. Clark Ashton Smith often liked to spell Tsathoggua as Zothaqquah. He also used Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu with his own spellings; Yok-Zothoth and Kthulhut respectively.

I think it's pretty cool to have vague references to these guys, which is honestly mostly what Lovecraft does; they rarely star in any stories. Tsathoggua, Cthulhu Yog-Sothoth himself, and maybe Shub-Niggurath seem to be the ones most likely to get this treatment by Lovecraft. Smith and Howard sometimes used others. I like throwing in an obscure one now and then. Yogash the Ghoul or Yogash the Black are vaguely referenced Lovecraft creations with a cool name, as is Ghoth the Burrower. "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" references three gods worshipped by the ancient Sarnathans; Zo-Kalar, Lobon (and Tamash. Great (and obscure) names. I think I'll use Zo-Kalar as a replacement name for Zargon of B4 The Lost City fame because he's a cool Lovecraftian monster but has a bad b-movie name. Yhoundeh is another obscure one from Clark Ashton Smith.

Rhan-Tegoth and Ghatanothoa are two other more obscure entities Lovecraft created, and Chaugnar Faugn is mentioned by him, although created by Frank Belknap Long, another of the five individuals (which includes Howard and Smith as well as Robert Bloch and August Derleth) traditionally considered the Lovecraftian Circle. Gol-Goroth is one created by Howard which has a perfectly Lovecraftian name. Bokrug is another obscurish one, but I'm already using him extensively in CULT OF UNDEATH.

Other than Zargon of the profoundly bad name, D&D has actually given us some elder evils with some cooler, Lovecraftian-sounding names. Bolothamogg, Shothotugg and Y'chak, for instance. Zhudun, Prukal and Zurguth. Sertrous is—as far as I'm concerned—another name for Yig, and Dagon in Lovecraft and Dagon in D&D is essentially exactly synonymous. Paizo's gotten in on the action too; adding monsters/gods like Rovagug and Tychilarius, while their Aucturn the Stranger is a great place to put stuff if you don't want everything to come from Yuggoth. Frankly, Yuggoth works better as an extraplanar destination than a planet far out in the solar system where my scientific minded side can't get over the fact that it should be cold enough to freeze nitrogen and other gases solid; like we see in the outer solar system in reality. Seeing Yuggoth as an actual planet in the scientific sense probably is foolish. The same would be true for Cykranosh, Yaksh or Kynarth/Kinarth.

Of course; I could make up my own. But really; I'm not 100% sure what the benefit would be. Most of those entities are little more than names and vague hints as it is, and are used to fill in the gaps when you want to just make reference to occult-sounding names. For that, the familiarity of repetition from tale to tale is part of the point. 

† In "The Mound" Lovecraft also called R'lyeh Relex, which I thought was an interesting spelling. Considering it was supposed to be a transliteration into Colonial Spanish, the X is probably pronounced like the current Spanish J or the Scottish CH in loch. Which means that R'lyeh can be spelled and pronounced more "sensibly" in English, perhaps as Relyeh. Tulu and Clulu clearly show that the TH in Cthulhu is not meant to be pronounced like þ at all, which is mostly how we do pronounce it, but rather as T and H separately but jammed together. In fact, C-T-H is all supposed to be pronounced together as three separate consonants, which is of course kind of unpronounceable. That's supposed to be the point, but even Lovecraft knew that people actually using the name would wear it down to something that they could say, so he had the alternatives Tulu and Clulu in the stories I recently read. Of course, Howard, in "Skull-face," used Kathulos, so that would lean towards Cthulhu as most people actually pronounce it.

What shall I bring?

So, I'm getting ready to go on a long(ish) relaxing vacation; flight across the lower 48 from the East Coast to Seattle, then a cruise ship to Alaska for 7 days. A few days of bookending while we fly and kick around in Seattle, and it's going to be 11 days (really ten plus an evening) out. Of course, I'll be doing stuff, not just sitting around on a lounge chair on the boat for ten solid days, but I do anticipate having some time to read. Quite a bit of time, actually. What shall I bring?

My cruise ship. Maybe.

I'll want a few options, and I'll want several options, just in case I'm making better progress than I think. What I've already got in my backpack includes:

- Frostburn, the 3e era ice, snow and tundra environmental book. Given that I'm going to Alaska and will spend at least an hour or two on top of Mendenhall glacier riding a dog sled, that seemed appropriate. Stormwrack, the sea-faring environmental book would have been too. But realistically, I don't much like the environmental books; they feel more like reading textbooks than gamebooks that are interesting. I struggled a few months ago with Sandstorm. I want to get through both of those, but I don't anticipate that it'll be super thrilling to read either of them. 

- I threw the larger 3e era module Black Sails Over Freeport in the bag too. I don't remember thinking that this was the best of the big modules that I've read, but it's not the worst either. Its biggest problem, ironically, is the tongue-in-cheek gonzo lack of seriousness. Now, don't get me wrong; I don't think RPGs are serious business all the time or anything, but the original Freeport trilogy was, at least, kind of dark and played it straight. My memory of Black Sails is that it is a big slapstick satire of a pirate adventure, mostly. It's possible that I'm overplaying that angle in my memory and it's not that bad, but we'll see.

- I kind of think that I should throw at least one more gamebook in the bag, and given that I'm a bit wary based on my years-ago memories of reading the two that I have, I should probably get one that I either haven't read before, or that I anticipate actually quite liking a lot. Either that, or one that I can just pick up and sample a few pages of here and there as I feel like, like a monster book of some kind. I'm actually thinking of re-reading all six of the main hardback 3e monster books, Monster Manuals I-V and the Fiend Folio. Because I'll only skim or even skip much of the statblocks, not only will it be easily handled in small, easily digestible chunks that are much briefer than chapters, but I'll also tend to flip pages pretty quickly when I'm skipping (or skimming, more accurately) much of the code, which is a big chunk of the text. Plus, how long has it been since I've read the 3e Monster Manual? Twenty five years, probably; I think I read the original 3e one when it was new, and although I bought the 3.5 one while it was still in print, I don't think I've ever tried to sit down and read it. Come to think of it, I've never read any of the 3.5 core books. I read the 3e core books when they were new, and played with the SRD for the majority of the 3.5 game. I was always salty about having to rebuy the core books so soon after having already bought them, so I didn't. In fact, I only just bought used copies of the PHB and DMG in the last few months. So I'm leaning towards throwing the 3.5 MM in the bag. 

- Other physical gamebooks that are on my shortlist include Heroes of Horror, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss (the second one about hell is not on the shortlist, but it is on the longer list) Libris Mortis: The Book of the Undead, and Draconomicon: The Book of Dragons. All 3.5 era books, needless to say. I'd also like to read my omnibus Lulu.com copy of B/X and my 4e Basic Fantasy Roleplaying, but I those will be more like textbooks, I'm afraid. So anyway, I'm leaning towards MM, but I might change my mind at the last minute. Longer list includes re-reading the Expanded Psionics Handbook and some of the Complete books. I don't think I've ever read my copy of Complete Psionic which I'd had for twenty years. But again; that's for later; I'm not bringing those on the trip.

- I'm reading the Del Rey copy of Horror in the Museum and I'm only about halfway through (I just finished the titular story late last night, by funny coincidence. It's extremely unlikely, even if I really focus on it, that I'll finish that before I leave, unfortunately, although it's also extremely likely that I'll finish it before even getting on the boat. So I need at least one, and maybe a couple of additional fiction books to bring with me. I'll probably bring Ray Feist's Silverthorn, which I've been meaning to start for a while, and I'll probably finish it on the trip. Do I want another one? A Darkness at Sethanon is the obvious next one to read, but do I really want to read two books in the same series back to back without a break? Maybe. It'll be nice to have read them again after not doing it in several years, but I'm not quite sure where to go from there if I do. I also have a trilogy of Arkham Horror books out that I want to read and the Solomon Kane book by Del Rey. Maybe I'll pack both Solomon Kane and Silverthorn. 

- For non-fiction, I've still got the Flame Tree classic nice copy of the Greek mythology book in my bag. I'd like to finish that, but I don't need to pack another one. If I do finish it, though, I'll switch to Norse when I get back home, and Celtic (meaning really Irish, I believe, but we'll see) after that.

- I do have my phone, and I do have a Kindle app. Sometimes on vacation, that's what I use to read. I just read Seth Skorkowsky's Sea of Quills recently while flying on business travel, for instance. I didn't really start anything else yet. I do have an Eberron trilogy, the Heirs of Ash downloaded though (among a bazillion other things; but that's what I'd likely read next if I read on my phone) so that's three whole novels too. I've been wanting to reread Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood and Scaramouche as well as some Edgar Rice Burroughs and the "complete" H. P. Lovecraft, but everything I want to read, I have in hard physical copy, so I'll probably try to avoid reading those in ebook again.

- And, although I read pdfs on my desktop normally, which I'm obviously not taking with me, on a whim I downloaded the Carrion Crown adventures—all six of them—to my tablet. So I've got them to read too.

That's more than enough, even if I was literally just going on a "sit on a lounge chair and read for 14 hours a day" vacation, which I'm not. I mean, it's a cruise ship. I'll be eating for at least three hours a day, lol. I'm going with my wife. She'll want to spend time doing things together. We've got port calls and excursions. I may be lucky if, on average, I get even a couple of hours a day to sit and read. 

I also have my actual play podcasts (mentioned last post) that I'm listening to. The Hideous Laughter Carrion Crown podcast is, I think 250 or more episodes. I'm on episode 9, so I've got plenty more to listen to there too, if I want a different kind of reading. I'll probably report, just for my own benefit (I treat my blog more like a diary than an actual blog for public consumption) on how much I get done and what I've read and what I'm reading on the flipside.

Carrion Crown

So, in addition to reading Horror in the Museum, a Del Rey collection of the Lovecraft ghost written and revised stories that I've had for many years (and should have read years ago) I'm also listening to the Hideous Laughter podcast of Carrion Crown, the original horror campaign for Paizo's Pathfinder Adventure Path series. While the problems I have with Carrion Crown are legion (1. too D&D; not enough horror, 2. way too railroady, 3. too proto-woke) it's still probably my favorite of the adventure paths, at least in concept (I can't claim to be overly familiar with all of the actual details of most aps) and I think that there's a lot of good to be mined out of it. 

Although there are some specifically Cthulhu or Yog-Sothothery elements to Carrion Crown, especially the Wake of the Watcher episode, which was designed specifically to be a kind of "reverse Shadow Over Innsmouth" in concept, it's really more Gothic horror most of the time, with things like liches, vampires, Frankenstein's monsters, werewolves and, of course, especially early on, lots of ghost stories. Strange Aeons is the more explicitly Lovecraftian adventure path, and yet with its focus on the Dreamlands, it's less horror focused than Carrion Crown in most respects. I never did finish my DUNGEON YOG-SOTHOTHERY review of that adventure path, but it was, I admit, kind of a disappointing one for me. But now that I'm overtly reading much more because I stopped frittering away so much time on YouTube, I actually want to try and read these more and get more caught up on what Paizo has done. My general feel for Paizo adventure paths is that they're not really at all what I would want to play or run, but they have (some) good art, and generally some decent concepts that I can loot and raid and use in a different context where they work again.

Curiously, the very first AP, Rise of the Runelords, has quite a bit of Yog-Sothothery in it too. It features the Plateau of Leng, an earthy mountainous analog to Cthulhu himself (albeit in a kind of tangential role) and more. And two of the earlier adventures, The Skinsaw Murders, and The Hook Mountain Massacre are as overtly horror-themed as anything in Carrion Crown. In fact, in many respects, I like them better as horror-themed modules than any of the content in Carrion Crown. I love the idea of integrating them into a Carrion Crown "interpreted" campaign. Although neither of those two are the Lovecraftian ones. Lovecraftian fiction isn't always horror, to be fair. In fact, many of his most memorable and longest stories aren't really horror, although they do have something dark and macabre about them, even when they're more like science fiction or weird Dunsanian dream-fantasy. 

The first Carrion Crown story is very ghost-heavy, though, and I love a good ghost story, even if Lovecraft disparaged the type. 

The Hideous Laughter podcast version is pretty good (so far.) I listened to several episodes of it a couple of years ago, but that was when I was spending a lot more time at home (although I think it was after the lockdowns) and I don't do well listening to podcasts when I'm at my desk, because I get way too easily distracted. Downloading the episodes and playing them while commuting works much better. I'm also not a huge fan of actual play podcasts or youtube series; I've tried to get into them but few of them work for me. This one is pretty good, though. It probably helps that they keep the episodes to a reasonable length, they're well edited so that a lot of the fluff is removed, they're reasonably charismatic players to listen to, and the tone is my favorite type of tone anyway. I typically join Black Lodge Games in saying that RPGs aren't really a spectator sport, but as always, there's a few exceptions here and there, and the Hideous Laughter Carrion Crown is one.

However, I don't think that they play in a way that's wonderful. Pathfinder 1e isn't really the best game for podcasts (or for my playstyle, although they do seem to be aligned with me there, just using a bad game for it). The GM is frequently calling for rolls that he shouldn't bother with, and which usually have no impact. If he calls for a perception check and then tells them what he wants to regardless of what they roll, for instance, then why is he calling for it so often? I've decided, after some trial and error, that unless a check is opposed or obviously risky, there's no reason to call for them. Perception type checks in particular should really only be made against an opposed Stealth type check, not just passive "did you see that?" kind of things. 

One other extremely minor detail that I dislike is the pronunciation of Ravengro as Raven Grow. I read it as a Romanian/Transylvianian name, with a short ă sound an emphasis on the second syllable. And, at the beginning, he called Ustalav a "fantasy Russia" which is obviously untrue; it's clearly meant to be fantasy Transylvania. I guess the fact that Dracula speaks with a somewhat Slavic accent was the source of the confusion? Either way; odd take.

But it works for me. And the fact that it's a podcast designed for audio, not video, means that I can listen to it in the car, which means that I can actually listen to it period. Plus, I like it better than most that I've tried. Like I said earlier, RPGs aren't normally very good as a spectator sport, and this is one of the exceptions. Curiously, one of the other exceptions which I tried previously and will load up when I'm done here is Red Moon Roleplaying's Enemy Within playthrough, which is also an audio podcast... although they also loaded it up on YouTube, which is where I sampled it previously. But the video is just a still of the book's cover art.

That's a lot of actual play podcasting; an entire 250+ episode Carrion Crown followed by 120+ episode Enemy Within may well be more actual play podcast than I can stand.

Pre-Contact North American linguistic map

I've always been fascinated by this, but here's a collection of the various maps, with some commentary by me... just for fun. 

"Pre-contact" is of course somewhat arbitrary. Much of the territory covered here in the first group was actually Norse before it was any "native" language, but when the Little Ice Age started and the Norse colonies started to falter, the Eskimo seal-hunting way of life was more tenable than the Norse sheep grazing way of life.

Eskimo-Aleut family (Greenlandic in the east and Yupik in the far West are the two largest entities). This is obviously the latest arriving language family, and it's spread is pseudo-historical; they weren't in Greenland, at least, at the time of Viking settlement, although they were arriving as the Norse settlements were faltering due to the onset of the Little Ice Age.

Na-Dene is the next family, covering much of Alaska and western Canada, but languages most familiar to most Americans are Navajo and related Apache, which are geographically isolated from the rest of the family. This family has—intriguingly—been linked to the Yeniseian language family in central Siberia (which is now mostly extinct; just a handful of speakers of a handful of languages still remain.) That linkage is linguistically kind of controversial, but tentatively most people in the profession believe it likely. 

Algic Languages, which are mostly Algonquin, plus a few other smaller languages, are a large group mostly in southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States. As you can see, it spreads quite far to the west, however, and Blackfoot, Arapaho and Cheyenne belong too. There are some speculative claims that the urheimat may have been to the West, either west of the Great Lakes or even as far west as the Columbia Plateau in Washington State. It's also not clear that the majority of the Algonquin languages are actually a genetic rather than areal family.

The Iroquois languages are geographically more limited, but their impact on the early colonists was significant, and their nations were powerful and populous. Even today, these are some of the more famous Indian groups, like the Cherokee and the Mohawk.

Siouan languages are mostly Great Plains languages, although a few were located in the East in Virginia and North Carolina. My own new location, in fact, is smack dab in the Catawban range. Siouan, Caddoan and the Iroquian languages may have some primeval connection, either as distant relatives of each other, or as former neighbors who had features spread as part of a Sprachbund.

The Uto-Aztecan map, as you can probably divine from the name, is a Great Basin family north of the border, including Comanche, Shoshone, and the Ute and Piute languages. South of the border is a bundle of languages spoken in the Aztec empire. I'm otherwise a little less interested in Mexican Indian languages, but of course, the current boundary between Mexico and America didn't matter before there was a Mexico or an America, so they often straddled the border. It's usually believed to have formed as a proto-language on the southwestern Mexico/US border, but that's just based on the fact that that's where it is now; it could have formed anywhere and moved, as many of these languages obviously have done in prehistory.

The Chichimeca Languages may not have been related to each other. These central Mexican languages are the equivalent of the Greek and Roman designation of "barbarian" although even less precise, from the point of the view of the Aztecs. It's also not clear to what extent the vague, handwavy Big Bend area Texan and Mexican tribes that were not part of the Apacheria or Navajo are related to either them or other nearby groups. The Meso-American language area was famous for being somewhat areal, with features that were shared by contact rather than genetics. The map below is the same as above, but with more areal languages and families added to it. Because most of these are south of the border, I'm both less familiar and less interested in them. The Chichimeca languages are the brownish ones in the central Mexico area. The lime green Mayan family is also notable, as well as the dark gray-black Yuman family of southern California and Arizona and Baja California.

Salishan or Salish is a geographically small group of PNW tribes in modern day southwestern Canada, Washington and Idaho, etc.. Because of the richness of the natural fisheries in the region, they were quite populous for their constrained geography, however. Tillamook is one famous example.

Finally, the Muskogean family of the American southeast is the largest family of the southern colonies, and one famous for many well-known tribes and groups like the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole and Creek. While not prevalent in peninsular Florida (which was populated by isolates that are poorly known now) it otherwise made up most of the American Southeast. Some other Gulf Coast isolates that are geographically very constrained make up smaller islands here and there, especially in the "hole" noted below in southern Mississippi, Alabama and the western Florida panhandle.

In summary, the linguistic diversity of the pre-contact North American landscape is strong evidence that there is no overly simplistic migration theory, regardless of which one(s) you prefer. Genetics seems to support this as well, although many Injuns are not super keen on genetic studies, they reject genetic evidence as evidence of tribal identity and are kinda of generally skeptical of "paleface science" in general. Regardless, it's clear that multiple waves of peoples who were both genetically and linguistically distinct made up the pre-contact population. And even to the extent that we can approximate the ethno-linguistic groups on the eve of European contact, it doesn't necessarily mean that much, as its clear that there was a lot of movement among peoples both prior to and after contact, absorption, adoption of different ways of life (Plains Indian light cavalry and teepee living seems to be almost materially identical across multiple unrelated ethno-linguistic groups, for example—the pre-Columbian and early Columbian Mound Builders are also presumably assimilated from various ethno-linguistic groups) and no doubt population and cultural replacement happened a ton, just as we're starting to realize how much that happened in the Old World too. 

Megadungeons

Got an Arcane Library newsletter in my inbox this morning. It was a Q&A of sorts. Found this small gem buried within it.

1. I've always wanted to make a megadungeon based on the layout of a mega mall. Could you write some thoughts on dos and don'ts with copying existing architecture for dungeon maps?

Definitely! Existing architecture is a great place to get ideas for room shapes and how areas flow together. It's also handy to note how buildings are structured around major rooms, like temples or grand halls.

However, one thing to be cautious of is having your layout be too symmetrical or utilitarian. Dungeons are supposed to be mythical places that don't always make sense. In fact, it's that surprising and unpredictable factor of a dungeon's layout that makes it fun to explore!

If a dungeon is too symmetrical, it will be too predictable as far as a game board goes. You want to make your mega mall a bit surreal, a bit nonsensical -- something that would never receive an actual building permit. You could keep some realism by making your mega mall look like it was added to several times throughout the decades, placing things in a decidedly "non-ideal" layout.

Wow. I actually didn't even emphasize the "as far as a game board goes" line; she did that herself. At the risk of sounding like a snowflake Millennial, I "can't even" with the OSR playstyle anymore. If D&D (or ShadowDark) is a board game, then yeah, we're not even talking about the same hobby that I recognize. While I admit to seeing a fair number of smug trad folks writing articles, columns, reviews and more in the 80s with their dismissal of the dungeon as a passe, childish fad who's time had come, that overzealousness faded quickly. While I often talk about one of the two mottos of 3e, "tools, not rules" the other motto was "back to the dungeon" and people have been playing that way for a long time now. In fact, if anything, truly trad play is somewhat on the outs; we have a lot of hybrid trad dungeon play, at least in the D&D and D&D-like games sphere. The official WotC campaigns, and Paizo adventure paths all strike this pose. The only truly trad stuff that I regularly see is in other games, like WFRP or Call of Cthulhu. (Although I'm sure there's plenty more out there in other games that I'm not as familiar with.)

Maybe I'm making a false distinction between trad and "hybrid trad." What I really should say, probably, is that my rejection of dungeoneering in favor of more natural types of game play that resemble 1) almost every other non-D&D or D&D-like game, and 2) almost every story in the source material that D&D is supposedly based on (and every other type of story too, for that matter) is, curiously, a somewhat radical stance, apparently. Or at least it seems to be true that few people play that way, and maybe ever have. Maybe my time outside of D&D for pretty much all of the 90s has given me a skewed view of what the RPG hobby is and how most people engage with it. One so skewed that the 25 years since hasn't completely purged me of RPG.net think. Maybe.

Before I finished typing up this post, I found this newly posted video by Professor Dungeon Master that seems to talk, albeit in somewhat different language, about the great playstyle divide, and it's longevity. It's an interesting addition to what I said, I think, and should be watched as a different take (with similar conclusions, however) on the same concept.

Coverup is worse than you thought

https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/oil-spill-monday-may-19-2025-c-and?r=21uqse

As Childers says, prostate cancer doesn't just come out of nowhere. Either one of two things is happening:

1) The cancer risk caused by the vaxx is much worse than even the worst expectations, and turbo-cancers coming from nowhere that are suddenly terminal is a thing. I'm aware of some circumstantial, anecdotal evidence that will support the linked study in the article above, so I wouldn't be surprised.

2) More likely, they all knew he had cancer already, and not only did they cover-up his cognitive decline, but they also covered up his cancer. Harris was always the plan A after all, but they didn't want to have to show that because of her extreme unlikability. They thought that they could maintain the implausible narrative that Biden actually won—twice—and then have totter off and die like the President in Dave while the real "president" Harris, who was always as much of a bubble-headed figurehead as Biden, but potentially a little bit less obvious, could step in.

As the Z-man says, "The data in this case was our eyes. Everyone not blinded by their own models of reality saw a frail, doddering old man. Management’s model, however, showed that he was a model of fitness and virility. Now that model is being revised to show he was actually suffering from dementia and has aggressive cancer. The new model is now converging with reality." It's indicative of the crisis that managerialism has with reality in general.

Larry Elmore and Wayne Reynolds

I'd like to buy some Larry Elmore prints and frame them for when I have a study/library/office in our more permanent house. When we sell our house up north and buy one here, which may not be for a little while, because our son and his family are living in it currently. But when I do...

In the meantime, I can go much cheaper and print these Wayne Reynolds images at Walmart, which I extracted from various Paizo pdfs, and frame them, if I want to. I can just stick them in cheap store-bought picture frames rather than art frames. It's a temporary measure, but it'll work for a few years, if it takes that long. And they may be cool in their own right. Trying to decide which ones I want. Here's the potential options, with some commentary.

I really like the concept of a ghost dragon, but as is often the case, especially in the Paizo images, it's the characters that I'm a bit more hesitant on. This collection isn't the worst, but it's also not the best.

This one is probably one of the best options I've got.

This one isn't Paizo; it's Green Ronin's Black Sails Over Freeport module cover. It's a bit more lower fantasy, which is one of the things that I prefer about it.

Love the dragon. Don't really like the characters, especially the "Persian" lesbian sun cleric.

This also isn't Paizo. I think this was posted on ENWorld years ago, but it's a WotC image. 

Probably another keeper, like the black dragon one. I like that it especially focuses on the fighter, and the weird sorceress girl is slightly backstaged.

Same two characters as above, plus that weird goblin bomber. I could do without him. And I'd have preferred the wizard from the black dragon painting to the sorceress girl, but Paizo is determined to DEI up most of their images with a bunch of action-grrls. At least this one is white. There's this one sheboon character that they really like who never looks good in any image, because she's this butch paladin type.

Some more Hero Forge

I've done my Gaskarfells dark pseudomages, which my son-in-law pointed out looks quite a bit like Harry Dresden, even though I was actually imitating the necromancers from Scarred Lands Hollowfaust. But here's a few other Hero Forge items I've done lately. 

I feel like I'm no longer on the cutting edge of Hero Forge. I'm still not great at kitbashing, and I'm just getting started with body customizer. But, hey, you gotta start somewhere!

These three angles of a plague doctor "alchemist" were largely based on something Professor Dungeon Master did with his Reviled Society campaign report. He had some other plague doctor minis, but I decided to make my own criminal alchemists and this is what I came up with. Three different angles, but same mini.

I call this guy Abdul Alhazred, but he was originally based on the Darkest Dungeon Occultist. Made him even more creepy and weird and I'll call him a scary sorcerer well on his way towards corruption and insanity. Appopriate, though, since the Occultist was clearly based on Alhazred to begin with...

This was another take on the Darkest Dungeon bounty hunter, but with an eye towards not necessarily being faithful to the original so much as utilizing the new (at the time) chain mail.

I dunno; just a guy I was messing around with. Looks like a Tarushan or maybe even Terassan thief.

I was never happy with Little Beatriz, so I thought I'd start over from scratch now that I could use body customizer to shrink the hands to a realistic size. The feet still seem big, but I didn't really get the hair that I wanted. And, at the end of the day, I don't feel like my choices for her dress were quite what I wanted either. Also; I just looked at the date for that Little Beatriz post; I can't believe I came up with that in 2011. Time is really flying...

Speaking of Hollowfaust, I didn't like it as much as I remember liking it on re-reading it (which I did on my recent trip to Mexico.) I still like the main idea, but I think Eberron did it better with Karrnath. I also read the second Black Raven (of two) collected semi-linked episodic stories by Seth Skorkowsky. I'm kinda disappointed. While mostly relatively well written, there are a few things that consistently bug me:

• There's some kind of fantasy race (I think; possibly it's just a human ethnicity) called quellen, and they appear a lot. But he never describes them, or if he did, it was early on in the first book, and he never revisits the description. I have no idea what they are or what they're supposed to look like, which is a major oversight and kind of distracting when I keep reading about quellen characters.
• The Black Raven himself kind of has a dumb nickname. What other color would a raven be, and why would a supposed top tier criminal leave a distinctive calling card? At least it wasn't that he left the water running...
• For a supposed top tier criminal, we rarely see him actually being all that competent. Most of his jobs go sideways, because he just happens to bump into someone while stealing whatever.
• He's also super beta, and the girl that he seems to really like is... I guess an exciting kind of character for a gamma dude, but isn't very likeable to anyone else.
• Speaking of, his relationship with his mafia-esque organization is pretty beta too. Maybe I'm spoiled with Conan and Tarzan type stories, about men who take charge of their own destiny and don't take flak from anyone. 
• In all, after reading the entirety of Sea of Quills, I started to find the main character and his shenanigans kind of cringy. Granted, I've read pretty much all of them now; and if a new Black Raven book came out, I doubt I'd even notice (I stopped following Seth's YouTube channel a few months ago. He was kind of on the fence for me anyway, because his content isn't enough of what I want, and his presentation is kind of cringy, but when he replaced his twitter contact info on the channel with gaysky contact info, I knew I couldn't do it anymore with him.) So I will almost certainly have no idea if he produces more Black Raven content. But if it does... I think I've had enough of it anyway.

A triton duelist

Represent

I've had this shirt, plus a blue one with the expert art, for months now and I wear it regularly. But for whatever reason just in the last week or so I've had no less than four strangers approach me to comment positively on it. Three of them just in the last 24 hours curiously. Two of them were reasonably attractive younger women, which was even more surprising. I mean, young enough to be my kids (who range from 21-29 at the moment). The others were older Gen x guys. 

I don't know. I find that fact oddly... satisfying.

UPDATE: Up to five. The stewardess doing the safety demo just have me a wink and thumbs up after pointing at my shirt. But then she came up later thinking that I looked really familiar. Odd as it may be because she was a good twenty years younger than me, maybe she was just flirting with me.

UPDATE: Two more young guys freaked out over it. What a crazy weekend for this shirt! 

UPDATE: Here's my Expert shirt. At one point, I wanted to get a Companion and Master shirt too, but I couldn't find a Companion shirt that had the right color teal to represent the box. Plus, I never really played BECMI anyway. I played some LBBs, some B/X and some Holmes before we started adopting AD&D. Then I skipped ahead to 3e after leaving D&D alone for a time.

Gaskarfells pseudomage necromancer

Improved the Hero Forge image a bit and took some more shots of it. Thank goodness for the flexibility that body customizer and kitbashing allows. I'm not a great Hero Forge artist by any means, but I can still get cool results.

Gaskarfells

Every once in a while, I need to step back and take stock of where I am. Quick context aside:

• When 4e was new, WotC announced the book Open Grave focused on Undead. (I still haven't read it, but I believe I have a pdf. I think.) In the product announcement, they talked about the idea of a kingdom ruled by vampires. Without knowing anything at all on how they would develop this idea, me and an online colleague tinkered with the idea, bantered about some concepts, and I ended up with my own creation, Tarush Noptii, my vampire kingdom.
• When I did the Cult of Undeath project, adapting Paizo's Carrion Crown adventure path to something I could use, I ended up coming up with an abbreviated alternative to Ustalav, the fantasy HorrorLand part of the Golarion theme park that had obvious call-backs to a romanticized Transylvania. This became, after a few trial names that didn't work, Timischburg.
• Because Tarush Noptii had more high concept and Timischburg had more details, I decided to combine the two. Tarush Noptii became the prior name of the place, when the Tarushans ran it. After the Coming of the Timischers, it was renamed, and most of the aristocracy are now Timischers, who resemble Hapsburg Austrians. The Tarushans resemble fantasy Romanians and/or Hungarians and/or Balkan Slavs.
• Now that Cult of Undeath is getting reworked again, I'm doing significantly different things with it, but I retain my desire to utilize the Timischburg and Tarush Noptii "assets", and I'm changing somewhat what the "plot points" are of the campaign, as well as some of the geography. I'd originally had a whole column of the 5x5 take place in Vyrko Lodge, which was based on one of the old Carrion Crown adventures. This has changed significantly, but I still need the concept of a town in the forest surrounded by foresty threats and dangers. After casting around for names, I ended up—just today, in fact—with Gaskarfells.

But I don't want Gaskarfells to be just a lodge in the forest. I want it to be a unique and unusual and flavorful town. So I turned to some other older material to see if they had some concepts or ideas that I could adapt. I picked up a book that I haven't read in over twenty years, Hollowfaust: City of Necromancers and while it has a lot of ideas that I won't be using because they're way too D&Dish, or way to embedded with the Scarred Lands setting in which they take place, the kernel of the idea is right there. Eberron seems to have borrowed this same idea as pragmatic, not-necessarily-evil necromancers as a key element of their Karrnath kingdom too, although they, again, did it quite differently. 

When Tarush, the "Dark God" (who created the Primeval Vampires of Tarush Noptii out of the very champions who journeyed to where he fell from the sky to seal him away in what is now the capital city of Grozavest) fell to the earth, he brought with him a trail of cosmic detritus. One of the things that fell to the earth was a meteorite of some cosmic ore, a green, glowing rock that brings with it an affinity towards sorcerous power and ruin (as all sorcery eventually does.) This rock, superheated by its landing in the Bitterwood, created a large crater, knocked down trees for miles (like Tunguska) and lay upon the ground in vast pools and bubbling fragments in a molten state. As such, it seeped into the existing bedrock, and fused with the rock, forming the material called fellshard ore. This isn't unique; it has fallen from other meteorites and fused with other rocks in various places throughout the Three Realms and more, but the Bitterwood was the place where the largest concentration of it fell, so far known, anyway, and the quantity here is both quite potent and relatively plentiful. Over the years, the forest regrew around the crater, although flash-petrified fallen trees still linger on the ground, with newer growth—now centuries old—coming up around them. The sorcerous corruption of the purer meteoric material is the source of the name Bitterwood; causing mutations, pollution and more in the forest... but once it fused and merged with the bedrock, the corruption was stabilized and no longer had a deleterious effect on the environment. Mostly over the centuries, the corruption has been replaced with cleaner, newer growth. But not entirely...

Gaskarfells was founded on the site, later, mostly so that the fellshard could be mined. Because of it's magical nature, veiled due to its matrixed mixing with native rock, the fellshard is safe (mostly) to handle and very useful for the creation of magical items. A guild of magical artificers effectively runs Gaskarfells, although few of them are actual sorcerers and warlocks; Gaskarfells is the foremost place in the Three Realms for the propagation of pseudomagery. Although the town has gradually grown to a modest yet successful size, due to lack of resources (and personnel) in the early days of its founding as well as early concerns about the safety of handling the fellshard ore, the Guildmasters took up some limited necromancy to create both workers and security for the town. This has remained in place even to this day, and skeleton and zombie workers and guards are a common sight in the streets of Gaskarfells. Most of the citizens of the town are quite used to them, and don't much notice them anymore, but visitors often find the grotesque and morbid sight of the walking dead accompanying Guildmembers about town, patrolling the wall, after curfew openly marching through the streets to be quite disturbing. In the mines themselves, they do most of the work. Although not "high powered" sapient or free-willed undead, like vampires or wights, there are probably several hundred skeletons and zombies. And, since it's Timischburg, there are probably some vampires somewhere in the power structure of the town. Although, as elsewhere in Timischburg, the vampires keep a low enough profile to maintain plausible deniability, and while most people believe in the "secret" vampire deep state, there are plenty of people with credible reasons for not believing that they exist too.

All citizens are issued numbered tokens that they wear on their clothing. This identifies them to the undead watch patrols, especially after curfew, as citizens and therefore they are left alone. Visitors must register at the gate when entering Gaskarfells, and they are issued temporary tokens for the duration of their stay as well. The Guildmembers are automatically exempt from being harassed by the undead, and the monsters will automatically obey Guildmembers. They wear, without exception when in public, a dark uniform of leather and dyed canvas, reinforced with dark iron, that is conducive to their magical crafting profession. They are also issued a leather overcoat, brimmed hat, and they usually keep their face partially covered. Over time, their exposure to low grade magical energy leaking from the fellshard ore will turn their skin slightly darker and leathery, as well as give them "Gaskarfells eyes"; the whites turn jet black, the irises shining silver-chrome, and the pupils change over time to resemble magical runes or symbols. While one can disguise oneself as a Guildmember, their real badge of office is their staff, with a glowing lump of fellshard ore fashioned into a knob at the top. 

In the center of town, which is in the center of the remains of the crater, is the Guildhouse, which in reality isn't a house at all, but rather an entire campus with living quarters for the Guildmembers and their most trusted retainers, workshops for the crafting to magical items utilizing fellshard ore, and research laboratories... as well as rich furnishings for the Guildmasters, conference rooms, and more. The security of the Guildhouse is famous, and few who are not members of the guild, or their pre-approved retainers, have ever been invited past its gates. The Guildhouse is rumored to extend deep beneath the surface, taking up space in what were once fellshard mines that are played out. Once they're finished, they are extended and turned into additional space for laboratories, offices, storage or secret experiments and more. Most of the rest of the town is in the rest of the crater, and the outer walls are around the crater rim. As the town has grown, some neighborhoods have started to sprout outside the walls, but this is a relatively new development.

While I do have some reasons for the PCs to travel to Gaskarfells during the Cult of Undeath campaign fronts, it is also a reasonable destination for those looking to get magical items direct from the source, especially if any of the characters are interested in pseudomagery. Alpon von Lechfeld had traveled their many times (although he isn't really a pseudomage) and after the Cult of Undeath campaign, Revecca uses her father's contacts and her fortune that she inherited from him to pursue the path of a pseudomage herself.

Reading goals

2023 was a pretty decent reading year; I kind of had to force myself back in the saddle after many years of poor reading and distractions by real life, computer games, and the internet. 2024 was not a good reading year. What with my relocation and vegging to YouTube and stuff after work most nights, I didn't do great. So far, I've determined to not watch stuff on YouTube unless I really want to, and I've limited most of my consumption to a few gaming lore videos, a few pop culture things here and there and hiking and overlanding videos. Consequently, it's still early May and I'm almost at my goal of 30 completed books for the year. I should easily hit my stretch goal of 40 and maybe even my "crazy goal" of 50 without too much trouble. For 2026, if I do get close to beating my "crazy goal" of 50 this year, I probably need to bump all of my goals up by ten—base minimum of thirty, actual goal of forty, stretch goal of fifty, and crazy goal of sixty.

Here's a screenshot of the current state of my reading tracker. 

The titles to the right are either on deck or in process. Gaming books at the top and novels below. These are in a constant state of flux as I change my mind on what to read and when, although I don't always update this file with what I think I might read next, because I'll probably get around to it eventually even if I defer it for a little while. Worse comes to worst, I can migrate them to the next year if I don't read them in the current year. The titles highlighted in yellow are pdf titles.

Elder Evils and Campaigns

I mentioned in my last post that I'm about to finish the Empire in Ruins Companion tonight; I've only got about 15 pages left to read. I'll probably also finish my re-read of Elder Evils tonight; I only have the Zargon chapter to re-read. They count as different categories because the Warhammer books that I have are pdfs and most of the 3e era books that I have (including that one) are actual physical books. I'm going through them fairly quickly, but I'm concerned that what I'm going to pick up next will be slower... although I'm undecided a bit on what I'm actually going to read next. I'm considering the strange idea of reading The Book of Vile Darkness (3e) as a physical book and The Book of Vile Darkness (4e) as a pdf, and reading the two of them concurrently to see how different they actually are. Other contenders on the physical book side are Fiendish Codex 1 (the one about the demons) which will be a quick read, I think, because it's a good, easy read, or Frostburn which may well be a slow slog, like Sandstorm was. I'm also thinking of adding Libris Mortis to the list in the short term. For physical game books, I also have 1) my recent printing of the B/X Omnibus to read, 2) Basic Fantasy RPG 4e, 3) Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, and 4) Heroes of Horror all on my short list, because I bought them recently. I've got a big stack of game pdfs to review, but the 5e Iron Kingdoms setting book is probably at the top of my short list, along with a few 4e books I've never read and some 3e Forgotten Realms stuff like Unapproachable East and Serpent Kingdoms. If I like the first one, I'll read that and maybe some others. But I'm still ambivalent on 3e FR or even FR in general, so I'm on the lookout for other books to target too.

Anyway, all that said, the Elder Evils. They're a weird bunch. Some of them qualify as Lovecraftian weird entities, but some of them don't exactly. The book itself, while fascinating, offers only the barest skeleton of an outline of how to use them in a campaign. Two of the actually have entire Adventure Paths written that follow the same concept, one of them so explicitly that they even mentioned it. Sertrous is the first of these, a snake-like obyrith lord who... really isn't an Elder Evil. He's an obyrith lord. Who's already been beaten twice... and who is dead. However, an aspect of him is still kicking around, who's the same CR as the demon lords from Fiendish Codex. Mechanically, that's kind of a mess. But realistically, the obyriths kind of overlap in conceptual genesis with the Far Realm entities and Elder Evils. I don't really like the concept of overthinking and overcategorizing big monsters in D&D. But it does mean that some of what it spends precious page space telling you is either irrelevant or incoherent. 

He's still kind of a cool entity, though. Kind of a Yig, except with an outline on how to actually consider using him. And then, a few years later, Paizo wrote the Serpent's Skull adventure path. It was the 7th actual adventure path released, and the third after Paizo switched over from 3.5 to Pathfinder, so it's not exactly compatible with the material in Elder Evils, but it's pretty close. Besides, they're also not exactly the same conceptually, so you'll have to mix and match elements to make it work. The biggest problem with the adventure path is that what's actually going on isn't foreshadowed very much, so it all starts going weird and sideways without much warning near the very end. This is where utilizing some Sertrous material would actually help improve the Serpent's Skull. And for that matter, Serpent's Skull, like all Paizo adventure paths, could use some pretty judicious pruning. I've actually done a big long review of the entire thing and how I'd use it at one point in the past. 

Serpent's Skull is much more of an Indiana Jones adventure than a horror story, though, so utilizing some Yig-stuff and Sertrous stuff and—of course—all of the rest of the things that I normally do to change the tone of my D&D-like campaigns needs to be done. The Sertrous chapter of Elder Evils actually helps in that regard... but some of its other ideas are a little less useful. Trying to make Sertrous correspond to the Hebrew word nachash or nagash and the whole serpent tempter from Adam and Eve was... I guess the rationale for why he's an elder evil and not just another obyrith lord, but I don't think it really works exactly and I'm sure I'd ignore it.

I wonder if anything at all useful from the FR 3e Serpent Kingdoms can be gleaned? I hope to see shortly.

Another chapter, which I earlier hadn't flagged as "one of my favorites" is the one on Kyuss, the Worm That Walks. This one is interesting, because although it's a pretty bare bones campaign outline, it also intersect with another bare bones campaign outline from Exemplars of Evil, and the two can be combined to make a much less bare-bones outline. It also references the Age of Worms adventure path, done by Paizo before they were "independent" and it's a specifically D&D campaign in the pages of Dungeon Magazine. That probably gives you way too much material to combine with the other two, but if you look at Age of Worms as a resource to loot rather than a campaign to be run exactly as written, you're really cooking with gas.

I also was much more kindly disposed towards "Father Llymic", a weird entity that I previously had thought was kind of silly, but which now I like. I mean, I don't like the illustration of him, but that's easy enough to reskin. Taking some ideas from this and maybe Rime of the Frost Maiden, Frostburn, and even Hoth from Star Wars: Old Republic I might be able to make a really cool Hyperborean snow and ice campaign or at least mini-campaign. It doesn't hurt that swtor has a dread seed on Hoth with all its weird corruption. And while I earlier had not really grokked the Zargon chapter, realizing or remembering that he's the same dude from the old B4 The Lost City adventure makes me kind of get why he was interesting a little more; although I don't think the write-up in Elder Evils itself is all that wonderful. I like the idea of kind of blending the Zargon stuff—with a better name; Zargon sounds like a stupid 80s b-movie character—with Robert E. Howard's "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" story.

In fact, I'm really considering writing up some short stories or novelettes with Dominic Clevenger and Kim Rugova poking around in Old Night sites, but using some of these Elder Evils as seeds for those stories. Fun times! I need to stop reading so much and do something more creative, though, to make that happen.

Deadliness in RPGs

Let's talk about OSR games vs "modern" D&D games, whatever exactly that means (it's worth noting that the OSR is itself ~twenty years old, depending on exactly when you consider it to have started, and 3e is often considered a "modern" D&D game, even though it's now at least two (again, depending on how you count) editions and twenty-five years old itself, and has been out of print for over fifteen years. The OSR could maybe have been considered to have started with the publication of Castles & Crusades in 2004, but certainly by 2006-7 as Basic Fantasy, OSRIC and later Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry were published, the OSR was in full gear. No wonder there's so much confusion as to what exactly the movement even is; it's aged quite a bit, and there are people who were just little kids when it started who are now participating in it. 

One oft-referred to perception is the lethality or deadliness of old school, and the supposed occurrence of PC death. Perception isn't always reality, so it's worth exploring a few points about this.

Professor Dungeon Master made an interesting video a few years ago about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which has a reputation as a very deadly game, but he also pointed out that much of that reputation was based on the art and the tone of the text rather than on the reality of how deadly it actually was. In fact, he pointed out that B/X D&D was considerably deadlier in reality especially with Fate points and other get out of death free cards that Warhammer includes. Well... I'm not sure that there's any other such thing, other than some GM fiat in other games, but having just read the Enemy Within (Director's Cut) it's clear to me that there is at least some expectation that in in this campaigns there's character continuity. Warhammer FRPG was specifically designed to be a Call of Cthulhu in fantasy with urban investigation replacing dungeon-crawling, which was very passe in the British market in particular at the time it was published, so it is very trad style. 

But a lot of that perception of lethality in ye olden dayes could be how the games were actually played rather than anything inherent in the mechanics themselves. To some degree, early gamers, especially in the northern Midwest crowd of Arneson and Gygax, didn't particularly care about PC death, because roleplaying was a new innovation to their wargaming hobby, and they weren't really roleplaying all that much yet as we understand the concept now. Player characters were still mostly seen as game pieces in an unusual wargame where you ran a single character instead of an army or skirmish force of some kind. If your character died, well you rolled up a new one and tried again. No big deal. However, it didn't take too long for this to evolve. By the time Tom Moldvay wrote the Basic set, he said, for instance, "Sometimes I forget that [D&D] is a game and not a novel I’m reading or a movie I’m watching... A good [D&D] campaign is similar to the creation of a fantasy novel, written by the DM and the players as the adventure unfolds." The perception of the game as something other than an avant-garde spin on a wargame had set in, and it truly became a roleplaying game, at least for some groups. I'm quite sure that early gamers didn't really think too hard about lost characters, and it happened more frequently. At least, frequently relative to what came later. Not necessarily later as in "modern" rulesets, but later as in trad style gameplay, where people roleplayed their characters more, and that became the prevailing reason to play in the first place. 

I suspect that a lot of the expectations of lethality are overstated, or at least it wasn't the designers' intentions, except in some tournament or deliberately meatgrinder style modules. Many of them refer to the idea that the expectation is that the game was for a larger group than most people probably actually played in. Certainly, a module will be pretty lethal for a group of 3-5 characters if it was calibrated and designed for closer to ten.

I think once again, the OSR has taken an element that was more common in the past than it is now, taken it out of context and pinned it in opposition to "modern" games rather than to the rise of trad playstyle, which predated "modern" games by the better part of twenty years or more (depending on the group). They've also exaggerated the old school position to a caricature of what it once was in a some games and declared that this caricature is The Way Things Were and The Way Things Ought to Be™. 

It is, of course, the neo-trad style that is closer to what OSRians think "modern" games are like; the online Sims-like power-fantasy where you just noodle around with a character that's an idealized personified avatar of the player, and they don't even want to be challenged, just to experience the setting like a tourist. I've had characters die, or at least seen them, in modern games. I'm not a huge fan of plentiful character death, because I am, after all, a trad-style player who likes the whole experience to resemble a novel, like Tom Moldvay said in the intro pages of Basic, but I am old-fashioned even when I reject the precepts of "old school", and the risk of death is still important. I am, after all, also a fan of the Call of Cthulhu play paradigm. (Which also isn't as lethal as its reputation, I don't believe, but y'know. It's still considerably moreso than D&D of any version.) But as a trad player who utilizes what is, essentially, a rules-lite extreme derivation of 3e, a "modern" game, I find the neo-trad position to be just as radical and unlike what I want as the OSRians do.

I'm not sure how prevalent that style really is anyhow, or how closely tied to 5e it really is. The OSR's perception of this vast gulf of expectation between modern and old school here was, I think, pretty overstated.

As an aside, jumping back to the Warhammer reference above, I just finished reading the Enemy Within Director's Cut, including the Companion books. I have literally about 10-15 pages left in the last book, which I'll finish tonight. It's hard to take it seriously as a grim and gritty setting when they're so woke. They've obviously swapped what were originally a lot of male NPCs for female ones, who are supposed to be just as big, tough and masculine as the males. But they were a little sloppy sometimes in their editing, and occasionally the original name or pronouns will still poke through. I would never consider limiting PC choice by sex, or penalizing players for wanting to play a girl, but let's be real; women are not men, and it is really off-putting to see them treated as if they were. Just a few months ago, we had the fiasco of Olympic boxing where some men dressed like women swept the awards and actually seriously injured a few women boxers. Women are neither psychologically nor physically equivalent to men. And like I said; PCs are PCs; they're always special anyway, but if treating men and women as equivalent is prevalent throughout the setting, it seriously undermines its ability to be taken seriously. This is especially important for a setting like Warhammer which is meant to be grim, mostly serious (barring the puns) and as much of a horror/Cthulhu like setting as it is a fantasy/Tolkien like setting.

Reddit is almost as bad as ENWorld

As the title says. I need to get out of internet conversations altogether. I rarely find that people are 1) intelligent enough to follow the logical outcome of what they even say, 2) discuss in good faith, or 3) exhibit anything at all approaching common sense. In fact, as both reddit and ENWorld have become more and more liberal, they are subject to the following problem, which rather than quote in part, I'll just link to. It's a very good piece.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-involution-of-the-liberal-mind

Anyway, today's particular nonsense came from a post in, I believe r/osr where someone asked what changes to ShadowDark one would make. Houserules, etc. There was a small digression where one guy said that he strongly recommended not changing anything until the OP had played with the rules as is first, and a couple of other people chimed in to suggest that was some kind of law or something. Now, at the bottom of this page, you may notice that one of my mottos is, in part, the famous Latin phrase "Eventus stultorum magister est." And the fact that I first heard it in Tombstone doesn't negate the wisdom of this ancient proverb. That advice given on reddit is lowest common denominator advice, literally for the fools—the stulti, who can't figure anything out except by experiencing it personally. It's ridiculous advice for anyone who's been a roleplaying hobbyist for any amount of time at all. But, I guess, if you're not smart enough to extrapolate how a rule will work in play or if you're even interested in using that particular rule, I guess maybe it's decent advice. Stumble around on your own the hard way if that's the only way you can learn. Sucks to be you.

This was especially notable given the example I gave. One of the things that I don't care for in ShadowDark is carousing, wherein you can spend treasure to get bonus XP. I don't like any GP = XP equivalency rules, or rules where you can trade one for the other. There's generally two reasons for this kind of rule; 1) to motivate people to go seek out after treasure (I have no interest in motivating players to do that, but Gary Gygax did, back when the game was much more wargamey and roleplaying hadn't yet really caught on as the actual main event of the hobby, because everyone doing it was an old wargamer.) 2) to bleeds off excess treasure, because now your characters have too much. I called it a patch, in fact, to bleed off excess treasure, because due to inertia from old school treasure distribution, which has for a variety of reasons never been addressed in D&D-likes, characters get too much for most GM's taste. 

Given that this situation has literally been the case in D&D-likes for more than 50 years now, the idea that I don't know if I like how it works specifically in ShadowDark is absurd. 

And then Kelsey Dionne, writer of ShadowDark jumped in and said that carousing wasn't a patch to fix excess treasure, it was a resource to be spent. That's semantics, though. If you have treasure to spend on bonus XP, especially the really spendy bonuses, then you have too much treasure, and the bonus XP is a method to bleed off that treasure. And advance faster. Both of which are, by my tastes, not desirable. Therefore, they're easily fixed by simply giving less treasure and getting rid of the carousing stuff altogether. Don't bleed treasure (that you now don't have anyway) off to advance faster, so that you have a slower advancement schedule—which is also better. 

And... just to add some visual interest, here's another piece of Midkemia cover art, from the book that follows the Riftwar Saga and kind of starts treating with the next generation; Arutha and Anita's spoiled twin sons.

I have to wonder if the artist, Don Maitz, is familiar with Arnold Friberg's famous Book of Mormon illustrations, given the obvious resemblance here to this earlier work. His biography doesn't mention anything about his religious affiliation, or even much at all about his personal life, other than that he's married to Janny Wurts, who co-wrote the Empire trilogy with Feist, a spin-off from the Riftwar Saga. Probably how he got the gig in the first place. Of course, you don't need to be LDS to appreciate the art of Arnold Friberg; I've often thought that any sword & sorcery fan would immediately click with his weird mixture of savage Mesoamerican, Middle Eastern and Roman style aesthetic. 

Speaking of OSR weirdness, here's another reddit post I made, on a thread on "what are your OSR 'sins'?"

The thread title hardly endears to those who already see the OSR as almost cult-like in it's application of the "correct" way to play. That said, I'm a fan of the OSR mostly because I'm old, I remember when OD&D, Holmes, and B/X were what we played because they were current, and I love the DIY, garage band, indie aesthetic that the OSR has brought back to D&D-like games. I'm not, however:

• Very interested in faithful recreations of the original rules that don't fix certain things for either mechanical improvement or to change the tone of the game. I greatly dislike the overly weak thief, even though I love the archetype, I greatly dislike Vancian magic, I disbelieve the illusion that the cleric is actually an archetype and I don't like using them, etc. I've also never had problems with a shorter skill system of some kind, having also played plenty of GURPS and Cthulhu back in the day and been very comfortable with the idea of skills, etc.
• I'm also not at all interested in the so-called OSR playstyle. I don't have "adventurers" as a social class of any kind, nor do I find the implied story of dungeon-crawling for treasure to be interesting in the least. I strongly dislike dungeons, especially if they're loaded with gotcha traps, puzzles, riddles, or other things that have never existed really in reality. My playstyle is quite trad, although modified with a number of old-fashioned caveats. Maybe paleo-trad. My games tend to resemble more a combination of The Godfather, Mission: Impossible and James Bond in a dark Warhammer FRP or Cthulhu-like fantasy setting, and my motto is that while maybe I'm not old school, I certainly am old fashioned. That said, I don't mind hex-crawling as much as dungeon-crawling, but maybe that's because hiking/backpacking is another real-life hobby of mine.
• I simply cannot wrap my head around the idea that games that adhere to the "OSR as playstyle" but which don't really resemble old D&D are actually OSR. I know that I'm going to gradually lose this argument more and more as time goes on, but I've got to give credit to Yochai Gal for trying really hard to get the NSR recognized as something separate from, albeit related to, the OSR, rather than part of the OSR as a whole. Part of his failure may well have been the toxic gatekeeping, purity testing and insane overly political stance of the NSR in general, which makes it more difficult to focus on the NSR as an actual category of game and playstyle that's separate from the OSR. Or maybe the different types of rules aren't as important as I think that they are, and the OSR and the NSR, from the point of view of someone outside of either, are too similar to bother splitting.
• Similarly, I'm a little ambivalent on some aspects of weirdness and gonzo. While I incorporate a great deal of Lovecraftian influence in my fantasy gaming, it's less of the cosmic horror and semi-science fiction elements, and more of the interdimensional horror and risk of character madness. Warhammer FRP and the Darkest Dungeons video games are more the style that I'm looking at rather that mi-go and Yithians taking people to their interplanetary cities or whatever. Demons are, in fact, demons, and not intergalactic aliens, or whatever. I also dislike science fiction elements in fantasy; or rather, I don't consider it fantasy anymore when they're present, and I prefer to keep them discrete. Don't get me wrong; a Thundarr the Barbarian meets Cthulhupunk sounds amazing, but I'd have to treat it like something completely separate from whatever I'm doing in fantasy. Probably another reason that I consider the NSR so different from the OSR, given that the NSR is "more weird" than the otherwise fairly traditional OSR.

This isn't part of my post, but while I'm giving credit to Gal for that particular attempt, I also credit (blame) mostly him specifically for the NSR being such a hotbed of woke politics and cancel culture nonsense. He's specifically the one most responsible for how toxic the NSR community is. Although maybe it was inevitable given the genesis of the NSR community in the early work of weirdos like James Raggi and Zac S. to begin with. It naturally gravitated to that kind of personality, even if the games themselves (some of them, anyway) aren't necessarily woke. Some of them, in fact, I'd actually probably like. But the community... blegh.

Maybe, given that the OSR has been around for a good twenty years now (depending on when exactly you consider it to have started.) I have to stop trying to think of it as a monolithic thing. There are a lot of people in the OSR doing a lot of different (and mutually exclusive) things. It's OK to be a fan of certain elements of it and not necessarily the movement as a whole. I think a lot of people are having trouble letting go of the idea that they're part of "the OSR community" but I do think that it's clear that original B/X fans and fans of NSR stuff are two different communities... at the very least. In reality, you can break it down into being fans of all kinds of specific games and not of others; just like being fans of RPGs overall. The OSR has become something too big to just treat it as a single thing, just like being "a gamer" is too big for that mostly too.

Doesn't mean that there can't be a lot of overlap between fans of various different games or even various broader approaches to gaming, however, even while acknowledging that being a fan of this or that isn't necessarily correlated with being a fan of that or this. That's a bit of a pet peeve of mine in general; the assumption that because I play D&D, I must like any other RPG, or that I must like anime (I don't) or heavy metal (also don't.) But because the OSR was for quite some time united under a relatively singular approach and goals, it's been harder to give up the idea that it's not anymore.