Wizards Presents

I've always liked the Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters quote in the ramp-up to 4e that detailed setting assumptions and conceits. Now, I don't like 4e, never did, and never really played it. But... I've read a number of their fluffier sourcebooks and found them adequate, and often even quite clever. Often more so than what preceded them. I've done this before, years ago, and probably my answers will be very similar to what I did back in 2018 or whenever it was that I did it last, but I think it's nice to review and "fisk" the list every so often and compare it to my own conceits and assumptions.

The World Is More Fantastic: D&D cultures should blend real-world cultures and fantastic elements, not merely elements of medieval and Renaissance Europe. It's okay for D&D environments to have no realistic analog. 

While I don't disagree with any of the words said here, in reality I'm not sure how this is something that can be done effectively. Most D&D settings give vague nods to real world cultures in most respects, because it's easier to ground the audience in the familiar, and purity spiraling into an anthropological treatise about a fake culture isn't usually very fun (I'm looking at you M.A.R. Barker; yes, Tekumel was too weird to be anything other than gratuitous.) Also, in reality, in D&D at least, "different than real world cultures" tends to mean reflecting some kind of hippy woke dystopia presented as if it were utopian with a superficial fantasy twist. 

My mantra would be; sure—add some fantasy to your cultures, but unless you have a real compelling reason—and if you think you do, take a step back and second and even third guess it before determining that it really is a compelling reason—familiar should trump non-familiar. 

The World Is Ancient: Empires rise and empires crumble, leaving few places that have not been touched by their grandeur. Ruin, time, and natural forces eventually claim all, leaving the D&D world rich with places of adventure and mystery. Ancient civilizations and their knowledge survive in legends, magic items, and the ruins they left behind, but chaos and darkness inevitably follow an empire's collapse. Each new realm must carve its own place out of the world rather than build on the efforts of past civilizations. 

This is more an excuse to have dungeons than anything else, I suspect. It's also got a very Old World feel to it, which isn't exactly the Old Night way (it's as much inspired by the American Frontier and the Old West as by Medievalist fantasy.) That said, things like Indian graveyards and other superstitious stuff leftover from past peoples are definitely part of that tradition, and require ancient peoples who are gone.

Also, I like the Lovecraftian and Howardian idea of ancient cultures and secret histories that are monstrous or otherwise horror-tinged. I mean, that's the original sword & sorcery model, even though D&D never really embraced it too cleanly—ironically, my dissatisfaction with how well D&D embraces this trope from its own source material is part of my disconnect with how to play D&D which led to Old Night in the first place.

The World Is Mysterious: Wild, uncontrolled regions abound and cover most of the world. City-states of various races dot the darkness, bastions in the wilderness and amid the ruins of the past. Some of these settlements are "points of light" where adventurers can expect peaceful relations, but many more are dangerous. No one race lords over the world, and vast kingdoms are rare. People know the area they live in well, and they've heard stories of other places from merchants and travelers, but few really understand what's beyond the mountains or in the depth of the great forest unless they've been there personally. 

This conceit is why many people consider D&D to be post-apocalyptic, Dark Ages style fantasy. I think rather, or at least equally valid, is the equating of this conceit with the Western and its tropes. Which I've leaned into even more; I explicitly have as much frontier Old Western social and environmental influence as I do Medieval European. "Adventurers" aren't really like D&D adventurers, they're more like mountain men, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Indian fighters, prospectors, bounty hunters, etc. or wandering US Marshals, in the case of the Ranger Corps in particular. Cities are as much like western towns as Medieval towns, and the affairs of salt of the earth homesteaders and settlers to take and claw out a place in a hostile environment are front and center.

And then, of course, I add the supernatural and monstrous horror elements. 

Monsters Exist All Over: Most monsters of the world are as natural as bears or horses are on Earth, and monsters are everywhere, both in civilized sections and in the wilderness. Griffon riders patrol the skies over dwarf cities, behemoth beasts carry merchants' goods long distances, yuan-ti have an empire a few hundred miles from a human kingdom, and efreet in their City of Brass appear in the mountains suddenly like Brigadoon emerging from the mists. 

Yes and no. Mostly no. I don't ever want any monsters, or for that matter almost any of the fantastic elements (other than the PC races, which are kinda sorta fantastic, I guess) to be routine. But the PCs, being extraordinary, encounter them much more often than normal people. The PCs are like Mulder and Scully; they're hip deep in monsters and magic, but "normal" people might not even believe in the existence of monsters. Most do, but not from personal experience; rather because they're superstitious. 

I actually like the idea that is common to "modern" urban fantasy that the world itself is pretty mundane, and is more or less what you expect it to be, but there is a "secret" world of fantasy overlaid on top of that which the PCs interact with but which most other people don't even know of at all. Maybe the Dresden Files in a fantasy world is a good model, as much so as Supernatural or The X-Files, which is what I usually refer to.

Creatures Need a Place in the World: Creatures shouldn’t be introduced into a vacuum. Any monster or player character race we make in the game should occupy a unique space in the D&D world. We need to make sure that new creatures have a new and compelling role in the world, in addition to an interesting mechanical purpose. 

Sometimes the place in the world is just to be a threat. Not everything needs to be explained (c.f. the watcher in the water in Fellowship of the Ring.) I personally don't find mechanical threats to be all that interesting, but I'm less interested in tactics and mechanics than some players; I'm much more of an artsy-fartsy guy who approaches the game from an author slash method actor stance more than from a wargamer stance or a fantasy world simulationist stance. But I see their point; D&D specifically is chock full of monsters, creatures, or other hazards that have been created simply to be a mechanical threat or resource drain, and yeah—they're boring as all get-out.

Adventurers are Exceptional: The adventurers created by the players are the pioneers, explorers, trailblazers, thrill seekers, and heroes of the D&D world. Although some nonplayer characters might have a class and gain power, they do not necessarily advance as the PCs do, and they exist for a different purpose. Not everyone in the world gains levels like PCs. An NPC might be a veteran of many battles and still not become a 3rd-level fighter; an army of elves is largely made up of nonclassed soldiers. 

In more ways that just mechanics. This was something that in the context of the change from 3e to 4e was very important, but which otherwise is kind of a moot point. Yes, PCs don't act like NPCs mechanically. That matters less than the fact the PCs are different than (most) NPCs in a meta sense of the setting.

Magic Is not Everyday, but it Is Natural: No one is superstitious about magic, but neither is the use of magic trivial. Practitioners of magic are as rare as classed fighters. Magic should never cross over into the silly or replicate modern conveniences: We don’t want “magitech” such as arcane elevators and air conditioners, or flying sea serpents to put out fires. At the same time, we don’t want a real-world medieval fear of magic that gets wizards burned at the stake. There might be minor magic that is relatively commonplace; for example, a wealthy farmer might have a magically sharpened plow, but not an animated combine. People might see evidence of magic almost every day, but it’s usually quite minor—a fantastic monster, a visibly answered prayer, a wizard flying by on a griffon—but powerful and experienced practitioners of magic are far from everyday. 

I completely disagree with this for Old Night, although I do like it for something more like Eberron Remixed, or whatever. (Which does explicitly have arcane elevators in Sharn, for instance.) Magic is fundamentally unnatural, and that's a key conceit of Old Night; if PCs dabble in it, they're playing with fire, or playing arcane Russian Roulette. They'll probably do so, because that's how PCs tend to roll, but with explicitly Lovecraftian magic, this 4e conceit absolutely doesn't work at all, and I completely reject it.

Plus, a "magically sharpened plow?" How banal. Why even bother?

UPDATE (ed note): I cut out a number of ones that are contextual, i.e., unless you care about specific D&Disms and things that were going on specifically in D&D as opposed to mainstream fantasy or any other game—or even in D&D since, in many ways—they simply don't have any relevance. 

One Sun, One Moon: The world assumes what will be most easily accepted by players without imposing unfamiliar calendars and phenomena. 

That's a weird label for it. It is true that unfamiliar calendars or other things are more obnoxious and tedious to deal with than they are useful. Even Tolkien used regular days of the week and months of the year, for instance, or familiar-enough coinage. On the other hand, having only one moon is not important to that idea. Plenty of settings have multiple moons, and that is often a useful thing to have happen. Warhammer has Morrslieb, the Chaos Moon, for instance. I've got Grozavest, which has a very unfamiliar phenomena (albeit localized.) There's no reason not to do so, as long as it doesn't replace something banal with something equally banal but unfamiliar, like different names for days of the week, or months of the year. 

Fantastic Locations: D&D adventures should take place in fantastic settings—no more 10-by-10 rooms with two orcs. Encounters should occur in areas with interesting threats—from encounter traps that activate every round to hazards that were formerly considered monsters, such as assassin vines or gray ooze. 

It's good advice to make encounters more interesting, but honestly the problem was with the paradigm of D&D in the first place. Why were there two orcs in a 10x10 room? Because D&D is a fundamentally stupid game in many ways that has as its premise a fundamentally stupid activity (dungeon crawling.) Eliminate that, and this doesn't matter very much anymore. But it's not just a negative bit of advice; making combat encounters specifically more interesting is something that everyone should think of, in my opinion, and much more frequently.

Grab bag; and new Paizo format

I have a few topics, but only one of them is both lengthy enough to justify a post, or at least most of a post, and on topic for this blog... even given the pretty loose definition of what I consider on topic. 

First off, the one I want to speak about probably the least, but which is the more important one. I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I lived for many years in Michigan. I am in fact visiting Michigan right now, and I was at church when the church shooting happened in Grand Blanc. I wasn't in Grand Blanc; I was at church with my daughter in Monroe, but they sent us home. My son, who's also in another congregation in Michigan, was sent home, but because his church start time is later, he got sent home basically while on the way to church. He pulled up in the parking lot, turned around and went back home. This was no doubt a precaution, because nobody yet knew what was going on in Grand Blanc. I think that we still don't. There are reports that the guy hated the Church and had some kind of personal grudge against it, although that's just a comment from the White House press secretary without any background that I know of. 

I don't trust official narratives very much. There's usually a lot that they don't want to tell us that's actually quite salient. There's also a bunch of stuff that they tell us that is pretty suss, as the kids say. But I'd have already guessed that this is someone who has a grudge against the church. Most people who do are people who are in the LBGT community, but not necessarily. It's a bit grotesque that I've seen liberals online desperate to jump on board the narrative that he was a MAGA guy, because they desperately want there to be a violent crazy person who isn't a member of their rabid animal cult of violent extremists. Even if this guy doesn't turn out to be liberal at all, it looks very unlikely that his attack was politically motivated anyway, so like I said, the impetus to assign a MAGA political identity to the guy is at best grotesque... but also very revealing of the desperation that they feel, because they know the score. Democrats are the party who romanticizes hatred of normal life and violent revolutionary overthrow of the stable order for anarchy wherein they imagine that they will be free of... something. Or perhaps they imagine that they will be at the top of the order that they imagine will replace the one today in their new dystopia. An ideology based on resentment, entitlement and frustrated narcissism always has those kinds of stupid delusions at its heart.

In any case, as someone who is relatively close to this event, it had an interesting psychological effect on me and my family. I'd been to the building that burned down at least half a dozen times when we did bigger, broader activities that involved multiple congregations, and while I didn't know anyone in Grand Blanc, I'd likely met at least one of the victims briefly in the past. I do have a good friend here in Michigan who was part of that congregation for a while before moving to my neck of the woods and still retains friends there, I believe. He's also a professional federal law enforcement officer, and we're supposed to meet for dinner tonight. His perspective will no doubt be closer to it than even mine.

Secondly, to the side there is a picture of Rafael Sabatini. In spite of his name, he was half English and raised in many places, including England, where he settled as an adult. Although English was his sixth language, it's the language he wrote in, and he was a brilliant writer; one of my favorites, in fact. I'm not really much into forced rankings, but it's not hard for me to say that The Lord of the Rings is my favorite "book" (described by its author and original publisher as one book published in three volumes), A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs as next in line after that, and quite possibly Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini after that. I found my old copy and started reading it a little while ago, but my copy was pretty beat up (it's 100 years old next year) so I decided to get an audiobook version from Librivox and listen to it instead. I just finished it today, after starting over once I had the audio files.  After listening to a few Ron Unz podcasts, I'm going to listen to his Captain Blood next—a book nearly as good. Then on to a few ERB books; A Princess of Mars, Tarzan of the Apes and At the Earth's Core. I have physical copies of all of them, but I'm going to do the Librivox audiobooks for all three this time around.

It was also nice, I must admit, to hear the French names pronounced correctly, or at least I presume correctly. The book was, of course, as good as I remember it. It's at least the fourth time I've read it, probably more like the sixth, but I haven't really been counting. 

Although not nearly as good as the novel, the 1952 film adaptation with Stewart Granger, Mel Ferrer, Eleanor Parker and Janet Leigh is still a fantastic old swashbuckling movie of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and the duel fought between Granger and Ferrer is one of the most famous old school swordfights from Hollywood. I love the voiceover during the old trailer: "The hot-blooded adventures of masterful men! The bold intrigues of seductive women! The pageantry of a great novel! A fabulous swashbuckling era comes to life!" Yeah, that's what I'm talking about! Man, it is so good! But the novel is at least an order of magnitude better still. There's a reason that it easily hits my top five books of all time.

Also, in the wake of the socio-sexual hierarchy articles I've read, and I've read a lot, it's curious. Sabatini was probably a Sigma himself, based on the fact that his characters seem to be very clearly Sigmas themselves, not to mention what I know of his biography. Andre-Louis Moreau, Mr. Scaramouche himself, is perhaps one of the most iconic Sigma protagonists I know of in literature, although placed in a somewhat conventional swashbuckling romance. I haven't read them super recently, but I certainly remember thinking that Peter Blood and Charles de Bernis, the protagonists of Captain Blood and The Black Swan respectively give off very strong Sigma vibes too.

Third, The Living Daylights is a criminally under-rated James Bond movie. The first (of only two) to star Timothy Dalton, it's famous for it's more grounded, darker and edgier approach that wouldn't come into vogue again until the Daniel Craig era, in the wake of the wildly successful Bourne movies. I might actually like it better than most of the Craig Bond films; it's possible that it's my favorite of the entire series. The follow up was even darker, License to Kill, but Living Daylights was always my personal favorite. I love the Cold War vibes to it in particular, and honestly I think James Bond beyond the Cold War is a bit of a fish out of water anyway. 

I also really love the soundtrack. Of course, it's got a great a-ha song, when they were still a kind of 80s new wave slash synthpop band. (As an aside, their second album, Scoundrel Days is actually better than their first one, Hunting High and Low, even though it lacks the big hits. The first album is wonderful; one of my favorites of the 80s as a pop album especially, but the second one as an "alternative" New Wave style album, a little bit rockier but still very synthesizer 80s sounding. Absolutely recommended.) It's also got a great "other" song by The Pretenders, which becomes the de facto theme of the KGB assassin dude. I didn't realize this until just recently, but it's also the last James Bond soundtrack composed by John Barry. The orchestral score soundtrack is really, really good. But again; everything about the whole movie is under-rated. If you haven't seen it, or haven't seen it recently, I highly recommend that you watch it. It's pretty cheap, actually, which is nice. I also think you can get streaming James Bond on Amazon Prime of the entire run for a decent price. Which, I mean, why wouldn't you?

I did see a funny exchange online recently about this movie in particular: someone called it gritty and realistic; someone else sarcastically remarked that it was especially realistic when they were sledding down the mountainside under a hail of bullets sitting in a cello case. 

The final part of this post is my belated notice of a major change in the strategy of Paizo "adventure paths." Adventure paths started as linked modules in Dungeon Magazine during the later 3e era. Dungeon Magazine had been outsourced to Paizo by this point, so in theory, Paizo invented the Adventure Path as it has been known the last nearly twenty years. WotC at the time released at least a few large mega-modules, what they now call campaigns. The one that sticks out most to me is Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, an expansion of the old Ravenloft 1e module into the size and scope of the modern WotC campaigns, such as Curse of Strahd which is the latest iteration of the same adventure. But for whatever reason, the adventure path seemed to have captured the market's imagination in a way that these hardback ~250-350 page "campaigns" did not, at least at the time. When 4e was to launch and WotC canceled their agreement with Paizo to do Dungeon and Dragon Magazines, Paizo decided to (among other things) create their own subscription model to continue adventure paths, and they came out with their popular adventure path subscription, starting with the classic Rise of the Runelords, and then the more than 40 or so adventure paths. They were especially popular during the 4e era, but when 5e came out, WotC was able to regain their king of the hill approach to system. They also started issuing big loads of campaign books. They released enough of them that they started to compete credibly with the adventure paths. They are, after all, quite a big cheaper.

The "classic" adventure path was a 90+ or so page paperback book with a big module, and a few appendices, including a small bestiary, some setting info, and even often some short stories, which sold for about $20. Maybe more; the current price is $20 for a digital copy, and $30 for a physical copy, but I think that there's been inflation since 2008 or so. And classically, you had to get six of them to have the whole campaign. At a minimum, the adventure path cost $120, and at a maximum, $180. And they generally went from levels 1 to about 14-15 or so. 

In recent years, they experimented with different lengths of campaigns and different ranges of levels, but the "classic" line-up is by far the majority of the Adventure Paths. In fact, three volume more condensed adventure paths that cover ten levels seem to have been the intermediate step that they've been doing the last couple of years. But I'm way behind on collecting and reading them, so I'm not as familiar with the newer stuff.

The WotC campaigns, and they varied somewhat, were levels 1-10 in a single hardback volume that cost $50. (And the price hasn't really changed; the most recent one is listed on Amazon at $48 and change.) Needless to say, this is a better deal financially. Sure, sure... you don't get as much content, but the fact is that Paizo buffed up their content with stuff that people didn't really need. What you really needed was the adventures, not the fiction, not the setting essays, not even the bestiaries (much of which was more or less reprinted in the actual Bestiary books, and few of the animals within actually appeared in the adventures. I believe, although I haven't actually checked, that the actual adventure page count is probably more or less equivalent (more or less) to the WotC campaigns. 

Mike Mearls in a podcast interview, I think the one with Questing Beast, mentioned that the campaigns were a direct attack on the adventure paths, and given the most recent announcement from Paizo, I have to assume that they have been successful enough to have Paizo adjust their business model to one much more like WotC. Their "adventure paths" will now be basically equivalent to WotC campaign books in page count and format, and they'll issue one every quarter, I think they said. However, they will charge a fair bit more than WotC; $80 vs ~$50.

Of course, all of that assumes a consistent quality if you're going to assume the same value for price, and that's hardly a given. Some of the WotC campaigns are pretty good—reportedly—while many of them are largely considered ridiculous jokes. At least by the kind of people who's taste I trust. I think with Paizo, the quality is more even, but not necessarily anything super either. They're less obnoxiously woke, but it's still there in the ambient background, and slowly building like the temperature of the boiling frog analogy. Not that that's the only quality problem, but it's the biggest one in much of the entertainment industries, including RPGs.

Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos

I just finished reading this book, which I really didn't even intend to read (yet), and it ends up being an almost singular object lesson of how sometimes when you want something so much, and then you get it, you find out that you didn't actually want it after all.

By this I mean that combining explicit Yog-Sothothery, Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraftian elements with D&D sounds like exactly what I want... but after reading this, I don't end up thinking it's all that compelling after all. To be fair, I said singular above, but it's not exactly true. The "Strange Aeons" adventure path, which I have only read half of (but will read as part of my Adventure Path trawl now) is also explicitly Lovecraftian D&D, and it's not that exciting either. And I also just finished Mike Mearls' Cthulhu by Torchlight supplement from D&D Beyond, but that one is oddly mechanical, so it feels even less like what I want than the SPCM book; it's just new subclasses, feats, spells, mechanics and monsters.

Part of that is that the D&D game isn't really meant to mesh well with these themes, at least not the modern, 5e D&D game. Although there are a lot of house rules in this book, like a dread mechanic that replaces Sanity checks, and works like an exhaustion ladder, and a few other things, but a few house rules on a complex system don't quite manage to change the feel of the system. Now, I'm not one of those guys who believes that D&D can't be modified to fit different themes and tones, but here they're specifically trying not to change the basic management of the game. You can play with regular characters who aren't really using any house rules to speak of. I'm a little skeptical on how well that will really work. And granted, you could integrate Lovecraftian elements without Lovecraftian themes, but they're not actually trying to do that here, they're trying to layer Lovecraft on top of D&D without changing D&D, and expecting them to both work alongside each other seamlessly. I don't think that's likely to be very satisfying. 

Secondly, I just don't think it works very well because too many of the Lovecraftian themes are too repetitive, and too many of the elements feel like rehashed warmed up leftovers. How many monsters that are made up of pseudopods and tentacles who are aliens and don't obey the normal laws of physics (or magic) do we really need before it starts to feel very tedious? Less than we got here, I'd venture to say. It also reiterated to me (even more than reading a bunch of Lovecraft himself) how trite the notion that Lovecraft promoted can often be. He famously said that the greatest fear is fear of the unknown, and then decided to pursue writing horror with stuff that made no sense, with only the "OoooOOO, aliens and unknowableness!" was supposed to stand in for actual horror. Stories like "Call of Cthulhu" are effective for reasons that have nothing to do with Cthulhu-'s gelatinous dismissal of physics and weird references to non-Euclidean geometry. The rather vulgar references to backwoods swampie cults, global conspiracies, and secret histories—long before The X-files made those two ideas mainstream—are what make the story compelling. The part about the brief exploration of R'lyeh and the confrontation with Cthulhu itself is actually in most respects, the weakest part of the story. 

In any case, that's what SPCM—Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos attempts to do; just stat up every obscure reference to anything that one of the Lovecraft Circle ever mentioned. It... well, it got old before I got done with it.

The best part of the book, I think, was the idea of using Mythos entities as a kind of Elder Evil campaign threat that didn't work exactly like a monster, but mostly so—frankly, I think any kind of darkish fantasy should use something similar. And archfiends and demon lords, etc. should be treated the exact same way. The stuff that I found least interesting, although I think it was a brave go, was the attempt to create Lovecrafian races, mostly cribbed from "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath." In fact, like "Strange Aeons" there's altogether too much leaning into the Dreamlands, which is a concept that doesn't really fit with D&D very well. And playing as a cat-person is ridiculous enough in "regular" modern D&D, but playing as literally an actual housecat? It's really weird. 

That said, now that I'm done, I'm thinking that my trawl of the six Cthulhu Mythos Saga campaigns can proceed smoothly. I was concerned that without having read the SPCM book first, I'd find too many things in the Sagas that begged questions because it was supposed that I'd read the SPCM book first. I think, in retrospect, that that's probably not going to be true. I have, after all, read pretty much everything Lovecraft ever wrote, so I can refer to ideas directly from the source. I'm not interested in the mechanics of the adventure paths and camapigns I'm reading anyway, after all. If I actually use them at all, I'm not going to use them in the native mechanical system that any of them were written for.

As an aside; one unexpected side effect of reading the last few pages of the SPCM; the tcho-tcho monster entry is, I think, pretty much what I want my Nizrekhi population to be like. I had only given pretty vague thought to exactly what a Nizrekh population was like, but now if I can borrow any missing holes from the tcho-tcho—like Jurassic Park scientists borrowing missing genetic holes from frogs, maybe—they're suddenly much more fleshed out and ready to run than they were. So, I present—because lately I always do—a very old Nizrekh cultist Hero Forge model and next to that a very newly made tcho-tcho barbarian. Yeah, close enough, I think.

I also suspect that there are minor ethnic tcho-tcho enclaves in at least Port Liure, Simashki, and maybe some other of the Corsair Coast cities. Maybe Grozavest has them as well; the tcho-tcho would like the darkness, but not appreciate the competition from even better predators on humanity in the form of the vampires. I wonder if using the tcho-tcho kinda sorta in the role of the goblinoids from Freeport in Port Liure would work. Rivals to the orclings in the neighborhood of Bloodsalt or something? I dunno. I'll worry about that in the future. 

Heresiarchs and the named campaigns

Many of the 5x5 Fronts naturally would feature a Heresiarch as an archvillain manipulating the scene throughout the campaign. It's not my intention that Heresiarchs can be defeated. They are more like the Elder Evils of Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos; i.e., they can be stopped, slowed down, or put back into torpor, but you don't just shout huzzah and kill them. In reality, you may not even meet or see them; merely the effects of their Machiavellian manipulation of events. 

Anyway, I thought it nice to go and decide which of the Heresiarchs might belong to which of the various campaigns, and how. So far, only DARKNESS IN THE HILL COUNTRY has a confirmed Heresiarch presence; although CULT OF UNDEATH has it's own Elder Evil.

Jairan Neferirkare, the Soulless is explicitly referenced as a background patron of some of the villains here. There's even a chance that reckless PCs will travel to her refuge in the Shadow Realm, an alternate reality much like Stranger Things' Upside-down, or D&D's Plane of Shadow (or Shadowfell as it was rebranded starting with 4e). This could be extremely foolish, especially if it's a head-long assault, but I like the idea, maybe, of a sneaking infiltration of some kind. 

We'll see. Maybe she's just a shadowy (no pun intended) figure in the background, however. In fact, that is probably the best way to use these supervillains in the first place.

I have an AI image of Jairan handy, but not a Hero Forge one, so I'll skip her for now, and tag her as needing an updated Hero Forge approach.

While this was initially going to be more of a "against the vampires" campaign, it's kind of evolved into something else. It does have the Elder Evil Bokrug the Water-lizard in it, but he's probably going to be "downgraded" from Elder Evil to "merely" end-boss monster. However, I want to at least reference a Heresiarch as a vague shadowy threat looming in the background of every campaign. Given that three of the five (or even six, possibly) fronts of Cult of Undeath take the PCs to the Eltdown Fens, a vast bosky wetland where they can rummage around for multiple birds with the one stone that is the visit to the area, I think it interesting to think that one of the hidden dangers deep in the swamp is Amrruk the Ancient. He's in his torpor, as normal, but maybe even Otto von Szell is trying to take advantage of his power while he slumbers, and the threat of him coming awake is maybe more compelling than Bokrug the Water-lizard, who honestly is a little bit forced just for the Lovecraft reference. 

The third of my original three campaigns doesn't have much development yet, other than it will be loosely inspired by The Hangover and will take place in, or at least on the fringes of, Baal Hamazi, with Glittering Simashki, the borderlands wretched hive of scum and villainy city on the bottom of the Rudmont Escarpment. Hutran Kutir, and his machinations in Baal Hamazi is an obvious Heresiarch to be used here, but the Mind-Wizards would include Gothan, the Mind-wizard. Maybe they both have a role? I don't have any of the fronts really developed for this one yeet.

This one will likely be a "small" campaign 5x5, maybe only a 3x5, as it happens. Jairan Neferirkare is an obvious one as the former "Queen" of Hyperborea before its collapse. Arzana, Clad in Black is the alleged weapon of mass destruction that she used, and Seggeir, the Hoarfell King is also an obvious one as a cold-themed Heresiarch. I have no idea what the fronts will look like yet, but those are the ones I think are likely to make a cameo.

This is the one that has privateer action, vampires, undead savages, etc. Although Curse of the Corsair Coast (see below) seems like an obvious one to feature Bernat Haspar de Ruze, I think I want him on this one, actually. The next one will be more based on Freeport stuff. I hadn't actually necessarily meant him to be a ghost pirate, but it just started to be more interesting to me than a lich pirate, and now I've got this Hero Forge model. 

Finally, 

Given that it's specifically meant to be a seriously truncated and modified, yet hopefully still slightly recognizable adaptation of a whole bunch of Freeport modules, I should probably use a Heresiarch that fits that theme. And the one that best does is the one that I said the other day isn't actually one of my heresiarchs, but who should be; some kind of analog to the King in Yellow. I had, in a much earlier version of the setting, called Charon the King in Yellow, but I wonder if Culsans the Judge is a better King in Yellow than Charon. Charun is the Etruscan name for a similar figure, probably borrowed linguistically from the Greeks. I don't know yet. I'll noodle around with that some more for some time. The King in Yellow isn't actually a name, and I want a name. But I don't want Hastur. So, I'll keep poking around with ideas until I find one that I like. 

Iconics and Contacts

I know I'm going a little crazy with Hero Forge posts lately. I've been going in and fixing and modifying several of my older (or even not so old) models. In particular, some of the clothing options don't really work very well together; the big scarfs, for instance, get insane when paired with certain chest pieces. However, if you kitbash the scarfs in, then they are the base size and shape, like they're supposed to be.

But that's not the only single thing; I was also learning about "snapping", which allows for parts to be kitbashed to the clothing or body, so you can repose the model and not have them all go crazy and float out there.

So, I've modified some old models, and improved some recent ones too. Here's a few images captured from these new models.

Old Drancent Hewe; I had to modify his face, so I gave him a ridiculous cocky, smarmy face, since I kind of imagine his personality that way. I've also modified the new Drancent Hewe, which I built from scratch. I got the original from the library, so I prefer generally to make my own, but I do still like the old one, so I'm not sure which one (yet) I consider the "canonical" Drancent Hewe.

Although I rather like the library shifter use for Oisin, I prefer to have my own models, and the library version had all kinds of weird fox tails and stuff like that kitbashed in to make tufts of hair. The new ape bodies are already sufficiently hairy, and with boots on, you don't even see their weird ape feet anyway. Frankly, the old furry bodies are sufficiently hairy too, but the new ape bodies have more detail, and generally look better.

Not that it matters, because my woodwoses tend to wear clothes like normal people anyway. I do admit that the combination of weird kilt and tailed coat make his hips look wide. I might yet kitbash some of the elements in. I've found (and been told by real experts) that kitbashing leg pieces of clothing in instead of having them wear them tends to make both the boots and the hips look much more realistically proportioned, whereas "wearing" them makes them all look extra thick and unrealistic. That said, maybe I just need one more tracking pose for good ole Oisin, and it won't matter anyway. It doesn't look great in the standard "stand here and have your portrait taken" pose.

I also wondered; what if I remade Fitzhugh completely? The AI generated images of him looked a lot like Dominic, because in many ways, he was the same character. I want them to diverge and not be the same, though. This more "Gaulish" version of Fitzhugh with a different type of "ranger leather" outfit works well. Plus, it was pretty easy to do; I actually got both the outfit and the "adventuring belt" out of the library where they were snapped kitbashed combos.

A sorta older model, Vrakmar Korr the "pirate cultist assassin" and a really old model, Hutran Kutir, the Hex-King, both slightly modified to fix issues of swelling on the scarf on the former, as well as a few details of his face, and a few other details generally for the latter. Nothing too radical, just fine-tuning for a better look.

I also never liked my Tabitha model, but I had a good model for my daughter's character hanging out there. That game never got very far, and it turns out that her character was literally taken from a book she liked, so I made a few minor changes to her appearance and renamed the model as Tabitha. I think this will be the new version of her going forward.

Last minute add; another Oisin pose

Hero Forge Heresiarchs

I'm interested in doing all new Heresiarch models. I have no idea what I'm even going to do with some of these, but a few of them are, actually, unique models of my own. Most are not. Here's a new Kadashman, He Who Peers Into the Void, looking more Lovecraftian than my AI images kind of did. It's also an experimentation with kitbashing run amok, so maybe it'll last, and maybe it won't. 

Here's the King in Yellow, who isn't a Heresiarch today, but is essentially the same thing as one.

Two more Heresiarchs; Hutran Kutir (token version) and Master of Vermin. I'll make more in the future.

For the token versions, I'm giving all of the Heresiarchs a starry background. They're all Elder Evils, essentially, and better seen as something like a D&D demon lord or a Call of Cthulhu Great Old One kind of entity than as a monster or NPC exactly.

And finally, one of my favorite of the Heresiarchs; Amrruk the Ancient. Based (loosely) on the name and concept of the Oozemaster, a forgotten early prestige class from Masters of the Wild. 

More Hero Forge Updates

A few more updates. I usually do Hero Forge on my phone, because my desktop doesn't have a good graphics card. But my laptop does; I'm finding that kitbashing on the phone is fiddly and incredibly difficult, while not so at all with a mouse. I should have been doing this this way months ago. But the next two weeks it's easier than normal.

Anyway, my thought that Fitzhugh and Dominic were too similar in appearance to each other was helped by the swapping of Fitzhugh's hat. Now, he's got a waxed canvas brimmed hat, and Dominic is the coonskin cap guy.

Yeah, both are a bit modern relative to the pseudo-Medieval feel of your typical fantasy setting. But my fantasy setting is deliberately—in select ways—the American West frontier as much as it is the High Middle Ages. Anyway, I made a few kitbash modifications to both Dominic and Ragnar, because I'm frustrated that the leather coat that they wear is an outer coat only, meaning I can't put something on top of it otherwise. And then, so they don't look exactly alike, I put an additional strap on Ragnar.

Most iconic Hero Forge Dominic

Ragnar

Fitzhugh Grimwatch

And, another King in Yellow concept. Just because I had fun using kitbashing to add rags.

Dominic, as you can see, is most well-known, i.e., these are character tags that will be brought up repeatedly, for his sandy colored hair, green eyes, and coonskin cap. He's tall and broad, wears leather and a wolf fur cloak, and uses an old cavalry saber as his primary weapon, as well as being an excellent shot with a composite bow.

Fitzhugh lacks the wolf pelt, wears a brimmed hat and rather than being scruffy, wears an actual beard. His hair is lighter than sandy. He's also a great shot with a longbow (I know, it's the same bow in the model) and wears a thin arming sword. 

Ragnar is taller than Dominic, although a bit less broad. The sides of his head are shaved and his hair is short on top, but he wears a beard. His hair is blonder than his brother's and his eyes are blue. His leather outfit is similar, although weathered differently, and he wears a Brynach half-kilt over his breeches. He carries a crossbow (on his pack horse) and fights with two weapons; a thick shorter sword like a cruciform gladius as well as a tomahawk or francisca, which can be thrown or used in melee. The three scars that just missed his eye on the right side is his most distinguishing facial feature.

His boots are tall and black. His leather is more faded and dusty, because of time spent more in the west (Cactus Balds and the Bosky Hills) whereas Dominic has spent more time in the east. His clothing is weathered more darkly rather than faded and dusty. 

For the Solo Iconics, which includes Fitzhugh Grimwatch, I have less detailed backstory in mind, because I haven't worked on fronts that are character specific focused on some major element of the backstory coming back to cause drama. I've imagined him as a bit more Celtic rather than Nordic, compared to Dominic and Ragnar, and his AI generated images tend to have him in more alpine environments. I see him more as a "normal" hunter rather than like the Winchester brothers from Supernatural. Not that Ragnar and Dominic aren't capable outdoorsmen, but Fitzhugh is specifically and explicitly an outdoorsman, and they are not. Fitzhugh's background, such as it is, is that he's from a former noble family that's fallen from fortune somewhat, and he has a condescending better-than-thou attitude somewhat, which Dominic also does not. He's not unjustified, however; he rolled up so well on stats that he's really better than anyone else in the Solo Iconics group at most tasks, just based on his stats alone. At least at 1st level, until a bit of experience allows the others to somewhat catch up with him. So, in spite of their similar appearance, Fitzhugh has a pretty different background and personality to Dominic and Ragnar, and a different focus as an outdoorsy scout and spy rather than a hunter of the supernatural. 

And here's the revised Oisin in another pose.

Hero Forge Updates

Drancent Hewe is a contract, an important NPC, and is been using a modified library model for him. I've created my own from scratch.

I've made some minor updates to some of the iconics as well, particularly the "Solo game iconics." In fact, I'd never made a Hero Forge model for Fitzhugh Grimwatch at all, although of course he looks quite a bit like Dominic Clevenger from the "regular iconics" group. Especially if I put a coonskin cap on him, which sometimes I do. Maybe I should do a version without that, and have a hood or something instead.

Updated Dominic. Note the new belt.

Fitzhugh Grimwatch

Updated Stilton Kingsfax

Updated Bertram Hardmont

Updated Tabitha Gamcott

Finally, an update to another contact, Oisin Dughall. Contrary to appearances, this is not the Irish name pronounced oo-SHEEN; it's rather pronounced like it looks: OY-zinn DOUG-hall.

This is the fourth attempt at getting an Oisin that looks right. I actually still quite like the last one especially, but it's a library creation, not one of my own, so I prefer this one for that reason, if for no other.