Old Night historical timeline

I've decided to create a new tag, OLD NIGHT which will refer specifically to setting stuff, as opposed to the mechanics of the game Shadow of Old Night. That name is kind of long, and I don't like using the acronym SoON because it looks silly. I'll also use THREE REALMS+ since I can't just use Three Realms anymore after deciding that Lower Kurushat wasn't just a "part" of Baal Hamazi, Hyperborea might get some development after all, and the Corsair Coast and even Nizrekh will all be brought in to scope for development.

Anyway, I've said before that I dislike long detailed timelines of settings; I don't find them all that interesting and even more to the point, I don't find them useful. But abbreviated, brief timelines have neither of these problems, and they just kind of articulate in a vague, handwavey fashion what happened in what order. So, here's my first stab at making one for Old Night, using the new tag for the first time.

I don't want to put dates, even approximate ones; just an order.

• The Three Realms+ are settled by Atlanteans. Vast hordes of Atlantean slaves harvest lumber, work mines, and farm the territory. Thurses and orclings are here in small numbers, but are barely more civilized than animals; most are killed off. Orclings are pushed southwards, and thurses survive only in the deepest forests.
• Atlantis is destroyed. The slaves rebel. Most are killed, but their masters are all killed. The handful of remaining people are cursed and gradually sink into stone age barbarism. The descendants of the Atlantean slaves become the Grendling people, and continue to diminish.
• Hunter-gatherers from the southeast push into the area. Their population is most dense in what is now Southumbria, but they spread across the entire region. Their descendants eventually found the Kin Twilight kingdoms of Halych, Permia, Pezhek, Vuronezh, Leszek, and more. 
• Most of the east is combined into the single kingdom of Kinzassal. 
• In the far western reaches of Kinzassal, Tarush falls from the sky. This leads, eventually, the downfall of the kingdom. New, darker kingdoms with vampires ruling openly form in the southwest. This is the foundation of Tarush Noptii. Others flee north and become the Drylanders. Some few remain in the east but diminish and sink into barbarism, their numbers greatly reduced. These are the Tazitta tribes. Some go south; they mingle with indigenous people on the coast and become the Pallaran people of the Corsair Coast. 
• The kemlings are born among the Drylanders on the far northwest peninsula. Over the course of a few generations, they conquer the northland, extending to the borders of Tarush Noptii and eastward to the Darkling Sea.
• Nomadic war bands of Northerners start to filter into what later becomes Lower Kurushat. These war bands are later followed by the Imperial might of the Kurushans. Kurushat and Baal Hamazi go to war. Baal Hamazi retreats from the far east, where they only lightly settled. 
• The great wars of the Indash Basin exhaust the strength of both empires. Kurushat retreats, although some remain, to become the orphan petty city-states of Lower Kurushat, and Baal Hamazi retreats completely to the west of the Rudmont Escarpment.
• The Indash Salt Sea had been retreating and drying out for years; the land to the south but north of Tarush Noptii is renamed the Boneyard due to the unburied soldiers from Baal Hamazi and Kurushat who's bones litter the ground. The Indash retreat accelerates; the Boneyard turns into pinyon-juniper dry forest, or even drier full-blown desert, and the northern part of the area becomes a vast salt flat. Baal Hamazi and Lower Kurushat are somewhat cut off from the rest of the Three Realms, and the Great Northern Road falls into disrepair. 
• The earliest Colonists come from farther east. Carlovingian settlers mostly pass over the Hill Country (although they shed a few homesteaders, ranchers, etc.) and go to war with the weakened aristocracy of decadent Tarush Noptii. 
• New waves of Colonists settle the Hill Country, establishing the Hill Country that we know today; the Carlovingians topple the Tarushan government and establish themselves as an aristocratic conquerer class, calling themselves the Timischers. But Zobnans come into the northern part of the area from Hyperborea, and settle the city-state of Lomar. They have friendly relations with the early Hill-men of the north.
• Final (smaller) wave of Colonists join the Hill Country, mostly from Culmerland, Normaund and Skeldale. The route is blocked by supernatural nevernding raging dust storms and other hazards that remain to this day and more colonial travel is stopped.
• Baal Hamazi collapses into its current anarchic tribelands and city-states status.
• Due to prosperous and relatively peaceful years, the population of the Hill Country continues to increase, leading to the settlement of formerly abandoned or empty regions on its borders. The East Marches and Burlharrow are first established. The first orclings start to come up from the south in small numbers.
• Bucknerfeld is established. Hill-men start to spread into the Cactus Balds, forming the West Marches region. The East Marches continue to grow. The Great Northern Road is extended between Bucknerfeld and the East Marches, passing through Lomar, although it is still in disrepair to the west.
• The Hill-men continue to make commercial contacts with Baal Hamazi and Lower Kurushat; the first steps to re-establish the Great Northern Road westward are taken. Larger migration of orclings; the Chersky Island colony is established.
• Current day. None of the Three Realms+ are truly isolated from each other, although big distances of mostly empty land still separate all of them from each other.

Pallaran corsair

You'll notice that many of the Old Folk of all three of the Three Realms+ are ethnically related, but so long ago that most semblance of relatedness between them have been lost. The Drylanders certainly don't look at the Tazitta tribes, the Tarushans or the Pallarans and see themselves as distant cousins, nor are their languages very similar anymore (this is especially true for the Pallarans—the rest of them have a kind of Balkan Romanian and Slavic vibe, whereas the Pallarans are Romance language like Romanian without the Slavic influence.) The Northlanders are a completely different ethnic group altogether. The Colonists are also different groups, but more related ones, and their languages and cultures are more similar to each other. They recognize their distant relatedness, although see themselves as separate (the Brynach are the exception, but they are pretty heavily integrated into the Hill-men ethnicity. Most of them are Germanic; the Culmers (Hill-men) are like Medieval English, the Timischers like Medieval Austrians or Germans, the men of Skeldale like Medieval Scandinavians, the Normaunds like Medieval Normans, etc. The Brynach are Medieval Scottish, mostly. But that's more on where I get their names and how I describe them than anything else.

What languages would be actually spoken somewhere? Hamazi, which is a Drylander language with many dialects varying by tribe, Northlander which is from Kurushat, Tarushan (in small numbers as a minority language), Pallaran, Tazittan, Nyxian (in Lomar; the Zobnans lost their own language and much of their original culture, but the Nyxians are more ethnically aware), Orcling, and of course, Common, which is the language of the Hill-men. The thurses have their own savage tongue as well, although few outside of their race know it or are even capable of speaking it even if they do because of their vocal anatomy.

In Timischburg, the official language and the most that you'll hear is also Common, but with an accent. In both Baal Hamazi and Lower Kurushat, as the original Imperial powers have disappeared and left anarchic tribes and lower city-states left, they've largely embraced Common too, and it's still the most common language in those areas too. Mostly only the tribesmen in Baal Hamazi refuse to speak it. In Baix Pallars, along the Corsair Coast, Common is also becoming more ... well, common, because people from the north have been moving into it in large numbers, and even without that, maritime trade has brought the language as the language of trade to the area. 

UPDATE: I don't know if I did this subconsciously or not, but the people who later split and became the Tazitta tribesmen, the Tarushans, the Drylanders, and the Pallarans are analogs to the way Tolkien did it too; the Haladin and their kin east of Beleriand, like the men of Enedwaith, Minhiriath, Bree, the White Mountains, Dunland, etc. The Colonists are like the second and third houses of the Edain; Beor and Marach (later renamed to Hador) who were closely related to each other, but sundered in speech and culture a bit. To the extent that Middle-earth during the Second Age still made a distinction between relatives of those two houses, Beor's cousins were mostly in Eriador west of the Misty Mountains, whereas Marach's distant cousins were the ancestors of the northmen who later emerged as the men of Dale, Mirkwood, the Beornings, and most especially the Rohirrim. These could be seen as analogs to the Timischers and the Hill-men respectively.

Of course, I didn't do this on purpose, but it occurs to me that I did it on accident regardless. Maybe it's just too ingrained in my subconscious. Or maybe we're both looking at the same ethnogeneses of the European peoples. I thought of the first group as like until the EEF people, (Early European Farmers; descendants of Anatolian Hunter Gatherers who spread across Europe during the Neolithic) and the Colonists as not unlike the Indo-Europeans coming from the eastern steppes during the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age. Of course, in my case, it happened much more recently, but it's still the same movement. Curious that Tolkien did the same thing; during his time, our understanding of the archaeology wasn't as strong. Then again, archaeogenetics is largely confirming what people in the early 20th century thought anyway and disproving the theories of the 60s and 70s that replaced those earlier theories. 

Master of the Pack

One of the great things about Hero Forge, especially if you have a Pro subscription, which I do, and I mostly maintain because I use it enough, is that even when I got cool (or so I thought at the time) models out of the library made by talented users, with just a little bit of experience and the much better tools and assets that are available now, I can often do better even than what those library models are, and without too much effort or work.  

Here's my old library "Master of the Pack", and important figure in the opening gambit of Darkness In the Hill Country. And below that is my new made from scratch alternative to him.

I admit that the mask is partially "informed" by my AI generated images of the guy too.

Another take on the mask. 

Black Sails Over Freeport... and languages in Old Night

I finished Black Sails last night. Yes, it had a lot of very silly stuff in the pirates themed islands. The ape island had, and I'd forgotten this, not only gratuitous references to Planet of the Apes, but a sequence where apes are throwing flaming barrels at you on the scaffolding. Not only are you supposed to jump over the barrels, or hammer them, but you also can climb up and down mechanical cables. You get to play not only the old Donkey Kong game, but also Donkey Kong Jr. at the same time. Sigh. Relatively little of the islands and their dungeons is useable for anything other than a silly Freeport game specifically. I'd never run this module.

That said... That's Act II, and is only about half of the content. (Not counting the stat blocks at the end.) The other half is split about ⅔ to ⅓ between Act I and Act III, and the good news there is that with some modification to make it fit and make it less railroady and make it perhaps less D&Dish, I could actually use this material. In fact, I even got on Hero Forge and made an orc cultist assassin (and found a goblin assassin that I'd use here too) based specifically on the idea of the Yarash cultists running around in Act I. The trope of the big dark lord appearing after being summoned and having to be defeated or banished back again, which is the finale in Act III is maybe a bit tired, but it is a classic. And there's other stuff going on in Act III, like the attack of the city simultaneously by a barbarian raiding force and an orc race riot are both interesting things that can be adapted. I was also pleased to see the option of an incursion of snakemen during this too; down with the dumb idea of friendly, nice snakemen! They're freakin' snakemen. They're bad!

But Act I was what I liked the best, and which I can find material to adapt most readily to my Curse of the Corsair Coast when I get down to it. I'm less likely to enjoy the multi-part McGuffin quest, but a race around town against murderous cultists to figure something out before they do, where you feel like they're often one step ahead of you, is a good thing.

I spent just a few minutes after finishing it getting my next pdfs in order to read, so I started the next on the Freeport Trawl, Creatures of Freeport, already. But I'm going out of town tomorrow, so I won't be doing anything with that for a while. I decided to ditch the trawls in the short term, and picked up Libris Mortis to take with me on my trip, along with Scaramouche. I was going to read that before I started my trawls, so I'm still going to go ahead and do so. And I do still want to finish my Kindle novel on this trip too. Those go fast if I just spend time reading it. The book is probably only about 300 pages if I had the physical copy. 

I'm also continuing to listen to some of these Wandering DM podcasts. I'll probably listen to quite a bit more while road-tripping this long weekend. Right now I'm wrapping up one on languages, which I picked because it's a topic that I'm interested in. My current D&D character, Vantz Maledictus, speaks Common, Draconic, Primordial and Undercommon. Draconic because he's a sorcerer, Primordial (which in 5e, has four "dialects" which used to be the old Elemental languages from 3e) and Undercommon just because I've always liked that language.

Not that it comes up very often, but I've always liked the idea of these fantasy languages, and not everyone can simply understand everyone. It also means that sometimes one guy who speaks the one language that you need gets his moment to step up here and there. It doesn't come up a lot, but when it does, it's interesting. It can interesting, but it's still important, I think, for there to be a "Common" or something like that, because it can also be frustrating if it's too big of a deal in game. 

Anyway, I'd never thought of languages for Old Night, but I did give some thought to them back when I was in the Dark•Heritage Mk. IV and Mk. V versions of the setting years ago, based just a little bit around ideas from D&D. D&D, especially in its many expansions, has way too many languages, but if you look at the "basic" stuff in the SRD, you get a manageable list. 3e had twenty listed languages, as below:

Language	Typical Speakers	Alphabet
Abyssal	Demons, chaotic evil outsiders	Infernal
Aquan	Water-based creatures	Elven
Auran	Air-based creatures	Draconic
Celestial	Good outsiders	Celestial
Common	Humans, halflings, half-elves, half-orcs	Common
Draconic	Kobolds, troglodytes, lizardfolk, dragons	Draconic
Druidic	Druids (only)	Druidic
Dwarven	Dwarves	Dwarven
Elven	Elves	Elven
Giant	Ogres, giants	Dwarven
Gnome	Gnomes	Dwarven
Goblin	Goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears	Dwarven
Gnoll	Gnolls	Common
Halfling	Halflings	Common
Ignan	Fire-based creatures	Draconic
Infernal	Devils, lawful evil outsiders	Infernal
Orc	Orcs	Dwarven
Sylvan	Dryads, brownies, leprechauns	Elven
Terran	Xorns and other earth-based creatures	Dwarven
Undercommon	Drow	Elven

The 5e list is similar, although they note that Aquan, Auran, Ignan and Terran are all now "dialects" of Primordial; this makes the list shorter, but otherwise similar.

Standard Languages

Language	Typical Speakers	Script
Common	Humans	Common
Dwarvish	Dwarves	Dwarvish
Elvish	Elves	Elvish
Giant	Ogres, Giants	Dwarvish
Gnomish	Gnomes	Dwarvish
Goblin	Goblinoids	Dwarvish
Halfling	Halflings	Common
Orc	Orcs	Dwarvish

Exotic Languages

Language	Typical Speakers	Script
Abyssal	Demons	Infernal
Celestial	Celestials	Celestial
Draconic	Dragons, dragonborn	Draconic
Deep Speech	Aboleths, cloakers	-
Infernal	Devils	Infernal
Primordial	Elementals	Dwarvish
Sylvan	Fey creatures	Elvish
Undercommon	Underworld traders	Elvish

I actually like the 5e list better than the 3e list, I think.

That said, in the past, I've used languages more as a source for names than as something that really matters in the setting. I need to give some thought to how they work in Old Night. This post right now is just the first noodling of thought; I'll have another one where I actually finalize languages that are relevant. I think it likely that "Common" will be the language of the Hill Country. While the hill-men don't necessarily all come from the exact same ethnic origin, (just like the Medieval British could be Celtic, Saxon, Norman or Dane, etc.) they've all settled on a single language in the generations that they've been in the Hill Country, and only a few still have any academic knowledge of older tongues that are out of vogue and no longer used. There are still traces of accents that are social class based; higher classes, especially in Garenport and Northumbria in particular, may have a Normaund-like accent and use Normaund names, and frontier country folk may still have Brynachian names and accents (Scottish) but they no longer speak those languages. "Common" is a descendant of Old Culmerian, which would be represented by Old English if it needed to be represented at all. That said, Old Culmerian, Normaund and Brynach, Skellish, or Carlovingian (Old English, as I said, plus Norman French, Scottish or other British Celtic, Old Norse and Old Franconian or some other German language) may be important for research into old documents. But only dedicated academics will still have any ability to decipher any of those languages.

The Timischers originally spoke a different, although related language, and more of them still remember it, but I'm going to rule that most of them also speak "Common" by now, although with a different (German) accent. The Tarushans do have their own language, which they stubbornly hold on to, but most of them speak common. Tarushan would be like the indigenous languages in Mexico; still with plenty of speakers, but almost anyone who speaks one is bilingual with Spanish, and the use of Nahuatl or Mixtec or whatever is low prestige and not acknowledged by anyone with any political or social power. Related, but not mutually intelligible with Tarushan is Kinzassalian dialects of the Tazitta tribes and other indigenous Old Folk of the Hill Country—but these people are so outside of the social and political structure of the Hill Country that they mostly only rarely acknowledge that they even exist, and it's only in vast wilderness areas that the Hill-men claim but haven't settled in, like the Haunted and Chokewater Forests. While not mutually intelligible, Old Kinzassalian was mutually intelligible (although markedly different) from Old Tarushan, if we're getting back into documents that are centuries old. And I should point out; that kind of research is an important part of the use of languages in my type of game. It's not just "can anyone speak to the bugbears here?" like in D&D, but the Call of Cthulhu-like attempts to research weird, ancient and foreign documents that might have knowledge that's forbidden, but necessary for what's going on.

Anyway, I'll also figure out what's going on the the Baal Hamazi and Kurushat and Corsair Coast region when it comes to languages, as well as what languages come with the orclings from Gunaakt. But I do also want to point out this text from my older treatment on languages:

Infernal: This is the primary language spoken by those from the Realms Outside, although myriad other tongues exist amongst this diverse breed as well. In addition, this is the language of magic, so a smattering of it, at least, is known by any practitioner of the arcane arts. Perfect fluency in this language, on the other hand, is almost impossible for any mortal to achieve. Because of this, it takes two skill points to earn this language, not one.

Despite that, it was always very fashionable in Baal Hamazi, where the demonic taint of their bloodline was a source of pride to the ruling caste, to speak Infernal natively, and many noble houses took great pains to ensure that their children didn't hear any other language until they were five years of age. Some households still speak Infernal in the home, and it is still a living language of some importance in some of the successor states to Baal Hamazi, and amongst the hamazin in particular.

Dagonic: This is a bizarre pre-human language, remnants of which float around on isolated and moldy standing stones and other areas. Intriguingly, it appears to have originally been a underwater language. Few people on the surface can even make an attempt to learn it, due to the challenges of speech that an underwater language had to have overcome, and the language itself is only known from very scanty and fragmentary remains, making fluency all but impossible for even the most dedicated scholar. Roleplaying note: Because of the difficulty in learning this language, it takes three skill points rather than one to do so. Also, for all intents and purposes, it is a written language only, not a spoken language, since there are no speakers that anyone knows of at all, and how to pronounce the language is anyone's guess.

Spending skill points is obviously an old leftover from my d20 days, so I also need to figure out how characters learn languages in Old Night's system now. I also had this old text, which I've slightly edited to include my new names, and this will probably be what I do.

I think for Old Night, at least, at character creation, I'd let characters roll a d4, modified by INT score (but never able to go lower than 1 or higher than 5) be the number of languages you know, and you can pick them from the list. I wouldn't adapt the colorful rules about how many skill points it takes to learn Infernal or Dagonic, if someone wanted to do so, but I would insist that each player who picked one of those languages explain how they learned it, since you can't just go buy the Rosetta Stone program for Dagonic or Infernal. What about learning languages after character creation? TBD still... but I'll give it some thought.

Yog-Sothothery and D&D

Read this post here. I've tried to say some of the same things about how people misinterpret Lovecraft, but he did so quite eloquently, and with more of a focus on RPGs than I might have expected.

First let me quote a different dead fantasy writer of greater talent than I (in this case Terry Pratchett) and his famous thoughts on Tolkien (who published The Hobbit about 6 months after Lovecraft died):

J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.

I think this is an incredibly apt point about Tolkien's impact on modern fantasy authors. It is so omnipresent that it influences all future fantasy writing. C.S. Lewis was his famous contemporary, and you'll find a lot of comparisons of their two styles of worldbuilding (some thoughtful and some just pop-psych garbage). As a pair they have an immense impact on all modern fantasy literature.

I think it is appropriate to note that that Mt. Fuji metaphor could apply to Lovecraft in regards to the structures of roleplaying games. People often talk about a "Lovecraftian game" as being different than the structure Arneson and Gygax used for D&D, as one of bleak horror and a downward spiral. "Lovecraftian" tales are those of unprepared everyday people (or bookish academics) trying to stop the unstoppable.

That is horse[crap] added on after the fact being used to retroactively change the tenor of his stories. To continue the Tolkien metaphor, that is allowing the series "The Rings of Power" to alter your view about the events taking place in "The Lord of the Rings". It's [a] different author's interpretation and isn't part of the original works.

Some of my own past commentary

https://dark-fantasy-x.blogspot.com/2014/02/cthulhu-in-popular-culture.html

Who says that defeat of the Cosmic Horror is not in line with Lovecraft's writings?  This leads to some of the same inane problems that Cthulhu games inevitably have—unskilled or inexperienced Keepers (or whatever they call Cthulhu GMs) think that if they're not chewing through characters 2-3 or more per session, then they're somehow doing it wrong.  This means that, in my experience, Cthulhu is often viewed as a campy one-shot or convention type game, completely unsuitable for campaign style play.  What a sad state of affairs!  Cthulhu can and should provide some of the best campaigns you can get.  But not if the GM and players don't really "get it."  And part of "getting it" is 1) actually understanding Lovecraft's writings, and not going on a half-baked, second hand interpretation of them, and 2) recognizing the nature of Yog-Sothothery and what it is supposed to be.  Heck, Lovecraft himself expected that his Yog-Sothothery circle would do different things with the themes and memes of the Mythos.  Robert E. Howard wrote all kinds of Mythos stories in which the Mythos was rather heroically handed its rear end by a two-fisted, gung-ho type guy (like Solomon Kane, for instance.)  And Lovecraft thoroughly approved.

The idea that Lovecraft wrote only about shy, retiring characters who were doomed to failure is not supported by "the primary sources."  It's really an artifact of what's come after—long after, in many cases—Lovecraft himself had died.

https://dark-fantasy-x.blogspot.com/2010/12/stages-of-lovecraftiana.html

Lovecraft's stories frequently fall into three "camps" or classes, if you will—his Dream-lands fantasy stories, his cosmic horror stories, and his weird science fiction stories. Many later commentators, collectors, publishers (and gamers) blur these distinctions and don't recognize them at all, resulting in the unfortunate mix-up of science fiction elements and black magic occult elements in the same body of work when really they don't belong together very well at all.

In a way, Lovecraft enabled this somewhat, by utilizing a lot of familiar backdrop details. This is the so-called "Cthulhu Mythos." In reality, it wasn't anything like a Mythos at all; it was a bunch of evocative names that Lovecraft recycled frequently, but not in any way consistently—for example, is the dreaded Plateau of Leng in Tibet, Antarctica, or not even on this earth at all? Some have tried to reconcile these three locations via bizarre theories, but really best (and in fact only reasonable) solution is that Lovecraft didn't really care where it was; it was a recycleable element that could be wherever he needed it to be for any given story.

Later Mythos writers—at least some of them—exacerbated this problem by trying to create fixed categories, organization, and logic to the "mythos." August Derleth was the first to try this quixotic attempt, which arguably misses the whole point, and since Derleth was also the co-founder of Arkham House, the publishing arm that kept Lovecraft in print over the years, his view waxed and the point of view of other mythos writers, who gradually moved on to other things, was eclipsed. Lin Carter's additions to the Mythos via the Xothic legend cycle even further bastardized Lovecraft's original intention, creating bizarre familial relationships between Great Old Ones (Hastur and Cthulhu are brothers? What?!)

Sandy Petersen, much as I love the guy, inadvertently didn't help at all either with the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game which attempted to fit various entities that showed up in some of the mythos stories (confusingly, using anything that came along written by nearly anyone that mentioned a Great Old One or used the word blasphemous or eldritch too many times in its text, regardless of how tenuous its connection to actual Lovecraftiana sometimes was) into categories, like servitor races, Great Old Ones (which were opposed to Elder Gods, etc.)

Somewhere in this rush to categorize and systematize was lost the original vision of Lovecraft's Yog-Sothothery; that it was really just a bit of an in-joke to him; a chance to recycle and re-use names that he liked that gave his stories an air and tone that he was trying to cultivate. Not that it's necessarily lost; Stephen King certainly got it when he referred obliquely to the plateau of Leng, rats in the walls, and other bits of esoterica, Neil Gaiman and Mike Mignola certainly know how to play along in the original "Lovecraft circle" way of doing things. But for whatever reason, gamers have tended to do the opposite; to take August Derleth and Lin Carter's direction and magnify it, almost.

"Dying" Trump

 https://voxday.net/2025/08/26/fake-trump-exit-incoming/

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this lately, but a lot of shills are suddenly pushing the idea that Trump’s short, puffy hands are an indication that he’s in poor health and will die soon, even though the diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency and its treatment was announced more than a month ago, on July 17th.

President Donald Trump underwent medical testing after he had been seen with deep bruises on his hand and swollen legs in recent days, and was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.

My opinion is that Clown World’s play of the double card is now deemed to have failed, and now they’re going to dispose of their puppet with the announcement that President Trump has died and JD Vance is succeeding him. This, I think, would be a belated attempt to force the white hats out in the open, presumably before they are prepared to make their case to the global public. It’s a move that smacks of desperation, but given how the balance of power has been gradually, but decisively, shifting toward Clown World’s enemies and away from their servants, it might be one of their last chances to escape the inevitable by overturning the table and trying to find some leverage in the chaos.

Now, for those of you who are binary thinkers, please just ignore all of this. I’m not interested in hearing your retarded attempts to declare “Vox believes this” or “Vox believes that” or “Vox is Q-tarded”. I’m a game designer, remember? I write 900-page fantasy novels with 9 different storylines running simultaneously. Unlike most people, I’m capable of following a logical line of thought all the way through to completion without getting attached to it or emotionally committing to a conclusion. I’m just looking at the observable facts, paying attention to reported events, and contemplating various possible explanations, always with the caveat that nothing reported by the media is ever what it seems.

But it is interesting to see that shills all over social media are suddenly hinting at Trump’s death by natural causes. They’re doing this for a reason. If you’ve got a better explanation, feel free to share it.

My opinion is that the left isn't any more immune to spreading wishful thinking than people on the right who got into Q-Anon a few years ago. These "journalists" and shills are no different than the online posters and amplifiers who told us confidently what was going to happen, and how we could easily see the signs of it being about to break in the Q-Anon phenomena.

And then they didn't. So someone saw something that could have, if you squinted really hard and assumed the worst, mean something that they wanted to be true. They said it online. Next thing you know, people are repeating and amplifying it, because they hope it's true too. It's not. It's not a conspiracy either. It's just a school of fish, of overly emotional, dramatic, ridiculous fish, acting out their wishful thinking delusions in a bit of mass group therapy.

Reading update

I don't necessarily like making short little posts where I update on my status for something like "what I'm reading", but it's my blog, and when I feel like doing so, I'll do so because this is only really for me anyway. My reading has been a little bit behind, because my last few evenings have been busier than I expected, but I've still finished A Darkness at Sethanon and therefore the Riftwar Saga. I'm also halfway through Black Sails Over Freeport, and it's my goal to finish that before Thursday night is over, because Friday I'm going out of town and I want to bring some different books to read.

I'm actually not reading a pdf book at the moment, but once I finish Black Sails, I'll pick up the next Freeport book in my trawl, which is Creatures of Freeport, curiously co-written by Graeme Davis (the Warhammer Enemy Within guy) and Keith Baker (the Eberron guy.) I've read that before, but not in many years. I also won't pick it up until I get back in town.

I'm also about a third of the way through my Kindle book, Flight of the Dying Sun, a Heirs of Ash novel (second in the trilogy.) I'll probably finish that while I'm away too. If I do, next Kindle book will certainly be the third book in that trilogy.

What should I pick up in physical gamebooks and novels? I'd like to pack one of each for my trip. For novels, I think it will be one of three options: Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini (I attached a picture of the same version I have, although my lettering is more faded and harder to read. It's a print from the 1920s.) Second would be Ghouls of the Miskatonic by Graham McNeill, an Arkham Horror novel and first part of the Dark Waters trilogy. If I pick that one up, I'm committed to reading the whole trilogy before I break, but they're pretty quick and fast novels. Although they're game novels based on a board game, the board game is, of course, directly based on Lovecraft fiction, so these are really just Lovecraft stories, literally set in Lovecraft's own Arkham setting and Miskatonic University, as you can probably glean from the title. I've read them before, but a while ago now. I'll read this this year, even if it's not next, and I doubt it will take more than a week and a half or two to finish all three novels. They're all about 300 pages each. Pretty quick and easy. The third option is my long-delayed read of the Solomon Kane collection by Robert E. Howard. Holy cow, I see that that's extremely expensive on the used market now; I'm glad I bought it when it was pretty new and recently in print... although I feel kind of embarrassed that I still haven't read it. I'd love to get the big batch of books by the REH Foundation Press that isn't Conan, Kull or Solomon Kane (because I already have all those stories from Del Rey). I've got most of them, I think, on my Amazon wishlist: Tales of Weird Menace, Adventures in Science Fantasy, Western Tales, The Early Adventures of El Borak, Pirate Adventures, Spicy Adventures (he wrote in the 30s for a mainstream audience; I doubt that they're really that spicy), Swords of the North, and Steve Harrison's Casebook. These average probably a little over $20 each, so that's the better part of $200. I won't be buying them all at once, I don't think, unless I can convince someone to give them to me for Christmas or my birthday. 

The other novels that I have on my shortlist to read soon include the James Silke Horned Helmet series, four books. I've read the first two, years ago, but I only just got the last one a month or two ago; it's been out of print and hard to find at a reasonable price for years. Now that I have all four, I'll re-read the first two followed by the next two which I haven't read before. Also, I have a copy of The Mad King by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which I really liked and I'd like to read again. I've also got a good omnibus of the first five Barsoom books, a nice copy of Dracula that my daughter gave me for my birthday a couple of years go, and another series that I read probably in the 90s but never since; the so-called Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn, the books that put Star Wars novels on the map. But those are mostly after the ones above are done, I think. 

I think Scaramouche is going to be the one that I bring, but we'll see. I may change my mind at the last minute. 

For physical gamebooks, Sharn: City of Towers is next up on my Eberron Trawl, and one that I wanted to read even before I started my Eberron Trawl anyway. But other shortlist books from my 3e collection include Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss, Libris Mortis and maybe a couple of others (I need to look at my list at home to confirm if there's something else that I had my eye on for short term). I was also going to do a Monster Manual trawl; I recently read the first 3.5 version of the Monster Manual, so if I continue with that, Monster Manual II would be next, followed by Fiend Folio and then Monster Manual III, IV and V. I'm going to read the Monster Compendium: Monsters of Faerun as part of the Forgotten Realms trawl rather than as part of an unofficial monster manual trawl. Not sure which of those I'll feel like packing up for my trip yet, but probably either Sharn or the Demon book. 

I don't know how fast I'll be reading any of this. I'll be traveling starting on Friday, but it's not a business trip or anything like that; I'm going with my son-in-law and one of my sons to go hiking in the Uintas again (unless the Beulah fire gets worse; it looks like that's not the case, though). I have vague thoughts of sitting on a camp chair or log and reading with a beautiful mountain view in front of me, but we'll see. That's probably naive. Maybe I can at least read a bit in the evenings on driving days.  

Horror subgenres and Old Night

It's right there in the name; The Shadow of Old Night. My game is as much horror as fantasy, maybe even more so. It takes place in a secondary world fantasy setting, but otherwise should come across more like a Call of Cthulhu game than a D&D game (in spite of its superficial mechanical similarity to D&D.) It's definitely dark fantasy at least, which blends fantasy and horror themes and tones, probably leaning more towards the horror.

In spite of myself, I find myself using Google's AI search results quite often instead of actually looking at the search returns (probably because for years, the search returns have been sponsored or otherwise pretty useless. What in the world happened to the Internet where search engines don't do what they're supposed to because they're either monetized or ideological? I miss the days of Webcrawler in the 90s sometimes; it just gave you results and that was that.) Anyway, here's what it says about Dark Fantasy and Grimdark Fantasy, which I think is useful to distinguish between the two.

Dark Fantasy: Incorporates darker, more disturbing, and frightening themes into the narrative. 

Grimdark Fantasy: A subgenre of dark fantasy that features a cynical, amoral, violent, and dystopian tone. 

I'm not grimdark, nor do I like grimdark really. But I'm definitely dark fantasy. One could argue that grimdark is a natural evolution of dark fantasy, and that something like Glen Cook's The Black Company kinda straddles the line between the two. But I think grimdark went too far into themes that I dislike, so when I use the term, it shouldn't be seen as overly taxonomic, and just a handwavey adjective. 

I used the same thing to come up with a list of horror subgenres, and I'll suggest which of them would or could be applicable to Old Night.

Supernatural or Paranormal Horror: Features ghosts, demons, and other spiritual entities that aren't physically present. 

Absolutely yes. This is, in fact, the core theme of Old Night. That said, it's also the core theme of a lot of fantasy. This is pretty broad.

Psychological Horror: Focuses on the mental and emotional states of characters, exploring themes of reality, sanity, and dread rather than a tangible monster. 

Much less so. I think of Stephen King's Misery or The Shining as one of the most iconic examples of this, and I just don't really care for it much.

Slasher: A classic subgenre featuring a psychopathic human killer who hunts and murders a group of people, often with a bloody and violent approach. 

I won't actually focus on this, but it isn't necessarily much different than many supernatural horrors. Was Michael Myers a supernatural entity? In many respects, he seems to be.

Body Horror: Explores visceral fears related to physical violation, grotesque transformations, and mutilation of the human body. 

I'm less interested in this subgenre, but not completely so. Mutation, corruption and stuff like that is more interesting to me than torture and maiming, of course. 

Found Footage: The narrative is presented from the perspective of discovered video recordings, often through a camera. 

Ironically, I do use some of this as my preludes to most campaigns, when the transparently Scooby gang analogs are killed off to kick off every campaign. But otherwise this is specifically a film genre and can't be replicated in any other medium very well. Maybe the classic story "Call of Cthulhu" is an early example of a prototype of it.

Lovecraftian/Cosmic Horror: Focuses on vast, incomprehensible cosmic entities and the futility of humanity against them. 

This is definitely true, but I think Cosmic horror has become a kind of silly in-joke in many cases. You have to be careful with your Lovecraftian references and make sure that you do it right. Just making allusions to well-known Lovecraftian entities does not actually make anything into cosmic horror.

Folk Horror: Features elements of folklore and local traditions, with horror often arising from rural settings and isolation. 

Sure, although I think this might be too esoteric of a label. Is supernatural horror taking place in the country using a folkloric supernatural entity folk horror, just just supernatural horror? I'd consider it the latter, really.

Gothic Horror: A classic style, often set in vaguely Victorian times, with themes of romance, death, and the supernatural within decaying settings. 

Romance not in the sense of the romance genre, but in the sense of romanticizing the past. That's part and parcel of fantasy already. If Dracula is the iconic gothic horror, or Jekyll and Hyde, or Frankenstein, or even the classic haunted house of The Castle of Otranto, then this is absolutely one of the key elements of horror to show up in Old Night.

Action Horror: Blends horror elements with action-packed sequences and thrilling fight scenes. 

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Aliens in fantasy, maybe. Or The Mummy (the Brendan Frasier one) or Van Helsing with Hugh Jackman. Even the under-rated and sometimes difficult to find Solomon Kane movie. This is probably one of the elements that most makes Old Night dark fantasy rather than straight up horror; not only the secondary world fantasy setting, but also the focus on action as a theme.

Horror Comedy: Attempts to balance scary and humorous elements, though it can be challenging to find the right mix. 

I mean, this happens by default, I think, because players tend to be silly sometimes at the table. I'd never try to purposefully do this, because as the AI text notes, it tends to fall flat if not perfectly executed.

Orcs in Old Night

I've talked a bit about orcs before. For whatever reason, I kind of like orcs, but I'm always tinkering just a little bit with how I present them. This post is still more or less the last word on orcs (and goblins) in Shadow of Old Night. I have two YouTube videos on them too, but they add very little that the post doesn't; in fact, one of them is literally me reading that post and adding more images from my AI orc collection or my Hero Forge models to the mix.

https://youtu.be/f5GENXzbPn8?si=WOPomPN5rpWaoSLp

https://youtu.be/L4Ol5SBAB7g?si=yw_JFxiih4seXpvZ

I've made some minor updates to some of those images since that post and those videos, especially the Hero Forge ones, but that's just minor cosmetic improvement, not substantive change. 

I didn't want to give all of them the same face, which even with face customizer ends up being a real problem in Hero Forge sometimes, so I've started looking for shortcuts to make more orcs that look like orcs but don't just use the orc face. One of the things I've done is use the orc face but try to modify the nose a bit and use a bit of other modifications to give them a little bit of variation, but still look very orc-like. 

The following is my attempt to combine the new ape model with a few orc elements; I replaced the hairy body with a normal one, and put the orc nose on an ape, and a different hair style. I used just the basic orc theme as a shortcut, but then modified some of the colors from my library of colors. I'd say this is a pretty good example of a "typical" orc male; maybe I'll go update a few of my example orc characters to show this. Maybe. I like the look of this guy.

And not every orc needs to be scowling all the time. Maybe I can make one who's more cocky, and happy-go-lucky.

Here's an old and outdated early attempt to make an orc in Hero Forge that matched my orcs, but I've updated him at least a little, using some of the same elements.

I will say that the first one is probably a bit too green for my taste. I like my orcs to be more khaki; they're green, but it's a very brownish, more realistic green. They're not bright like aspen leaves.

I made this orc laborer; probably the most likely encounter with an orc in the Three Realms that most will have... other than the pirates on the Darkling Sea which actually make a major component of the Darkness In the Hill Country 5x5 Front. This is heavily based on the quick and dirty profile face image I made above, but expanded and remade to be a whole character. Also, he's got a serious face, but less overtly scowling.

Splitting the party

I'm listening to a podcast about splitting the party, and it brings up a few thoughts for me. These aren't new thoughts, but this particular issue is one that brings them into focus.

First, do I actually play D&D? Well, that depends on the context. I tend to think all fantasy RPGs are "D&D" as shorthand just as all facial tissues are Kleenex, even if they're actually Wal-Mart brand facial tissue. In that sense, yes, of course, I play D&D. In light of something Professor DungeonMaster has often said; do you have broad compatibility with D&D material? Yeah, sure, my game is a radical reinvention of the 3e SRD, and is ~95% compatible as written with 3e material as well as OSR material equally. In that sense also, yes, I'm playing D&D. Do I play games that are pseudo-wargame dungeon exploration with wandering monsters, traps, puzzles, etc.? No, absolutely not. In that sense, I don't play D&D at all. With regards to this specific question, i.e., splitting the party, that third one is the one that's relevant. If I'm not playing D&D, i.e., the story of D&D with dungeon-crawling as the main activity, then any commentary on splitting the part is mostly completely irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter in any other form of play.

Second, this gets back to much of what I've said before about the vector by which many people came into D&D, especially the people who created the big trad mainstream approach to the game in the early to mid 80s. If, like me, these people started gaming because they were already fans of reading fantasy fiction or watching fantasy movies, or whatever, then the classic wargamey dungeon-crawl was kind of strange. Most gamers, I'd suggest, did eventually adapt to it to some degree, but the whole trad gameplay style emerged because they did so reluctantly and only partially. I'm maybe a bit more radical than most; I didn't adapt to it at all, and in fact openly reject that style of play. I simply don't enjoy it very much, and I'm absolutely never going to run a game like that. 

I was amazed in the podcast, which has two guys, where one talked about the other guy running a game where he cutting back and forth between two groups of a split party, and the first guy says that he had never thought of doing things that way, found the whole idea remarkably innovative, and wondered where he got the idea. I was in turn mystified by his confusion; isn't that a common practice in all kinds of stories? I've seen it all over the place. One notable example from my childhood is the Battle of Endor sequence in Return of the Jedi, where we cut back and forth between Luke and Vader on the Death Star with the Emperor to Han and Leia and the ewoks in the forest to Lando and "It's a trap!" Ackbar in space. You're telling me that you couldn't think of a procedure from one of the most prominent movies of your childhood (I don't know the age of these podcasters, but they look like Gen-Xers roughly my age, and they talk about playing old versions of the game from back in the day. I looked him up; he lists The Empire Strikes Back as among his three favorite movies.) C'mon, what do you mean you never would have thought of that?!

The reasons to do this are obvious, not from gaming discussion, but from writing discussion; the back and forth cuts create tension. You don't spend a lot of time with any one group in a split scenario, and you have the capability of leaving each of them on a minor cliff-hanger of sorts. Everyone is engaged with what everyone else is doing, because it's interesting and potentially tense for everyone. (If it's not, that's kind of on you as GM.) To me, the process was intuitive, because I approach the game from an attitude of wanting the game to resemble what's best of fantasy stories; but interactive and improvisational based on PC input, and not just in a minor way. 

Someone asked me in an online discussion what that means if it doesn't mean plot, and this is a good example. You take a technique from good storytelling and apply it to the game, even if you don't have a plot. Because ultimately, whether you're doing the game improv or working from a pseudo-script (which I don't recommend, but lots of people do) either way the techniques of telling a good story apply. You can also manage pacing during the session, you can do lots of things to manage tension, you can use techniques like foreshadowing of dangers, etc. In other words, you can use storytelling techniques even if you're not running a story-game—sometimes people get a little too hung up on the terminology and don't recognize that context matters when you're using the word "story" in an RPG context. These techniques make even a strict sandbox game more enjoyable at the actual table. 

In conclusion, I absolutely reject the "don't split the party" narrative. I never have any problem splitting the party. As a GM, I enjoy split parties. As a player, I think it works well. The other guy, in the podcast, mostly articulated some of why this works, because he's done it, especially in "harrer" games, as these weird Brooklyn folks pronounce it. One of the best ways to engineer tension, which was heavily used and promoted in John Carpenter's Halloween from the late 70s, was the audience knowing things that the characters didn't, like seeing Michael Myers in the background behind the players. This always works. And it's not just horror games, because any game needs tension. Action, adventure, mystery; the same techniques apply just as much as they do in horror. And that's exactly what the intercutting does; players know stuff that their characters don't, much makes them anxious, but the fun kind of anxious

UPDATE: This is a WanderingDM podcast. I said earlier that I was a bit skeptical about the podcast, but I decided to give it a bit more of a go and downloaded all of the episodes that I think I might be interested in listening to at once. They also run the Ten Dead Rates WH FRPG game as part of their podcast, so I'm going to try that out too. Like I need another actual play podcast, but... I'll try. Both Red Moon Roleplaying and Hideous Laughter have elements that disappoint me a lot and make me question my ongoing support for hearing their stuff. It may be, simply, as I've said before, actual plays just isn't a good spectator sport.