Who are the Dacians?

I said earlier that along with the Cossacks, my new interpretation of the Drylander ethnicity would be influenced also by the Dacians. That begs a question, since they obviously don't exist as a discrete people anymore; who were the Dacians? And that question is more difficult to answer than on might think. The Dacians don't appear to have written very much down on their own, other than a few glosses here and there in Greek or Roman texts, and one single possible text. While the Dacians, also sometimes called the Getae by Greek and Roman writers (although others made a distinction between them) were clearly up there north of Greece centered on what is now Romania and Moldova, and spilling across modern borders into Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ukraine and other bordering modern countries, it's not clear that they'd always been there, since the region has been washed over by invasions over and over again in recorded history, and if they weren't, it's not clear where they came from or who they were most closely related to.

Because it's simpler to assume so, many researchers believe that Dacian formed in situ after the Kurganization of the Old European farmers in the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age. I suspect that this may not be true; what we have seen in the recent archaeogenetic data is that people were coming and going and superimposing or replacing each other all through this period. Lacking any better detail, its probably a better null hypothesis that the original Kurganized Balkan people were either replaced or admixed with someone else from the Bell Beaker or Tumulus or Unetice (or all three, perhaps) or even someone else leading up to the formation of historically recognizable ethnic groups in the latest Bronze Age and more particularly in the Greek historical Iron Age and Roman periods. This, unfortunately, leaves us pretty wide open to all kinds of interpretations on who the Dacians were, who they were related to, and who they were influenced by.

We do know from the historical record that they were at least influenced by the Celts, since the Boii tried to invade that territory, and there was a lot of interaction between them. Two Dacian plant names that are known from glosses are also, according to at least one linguist, clearly Celtic in origin. I don't think it likely that the Dacians were Celtic or para-Celtic, but they may have absorbed and been influenced relatively late by Celtic people on the move during the Golden Age of Celtic Europe. But probably no moreso than the Germanic people were. We also know that the Dacians were influenced by steppe peoples to the east; Scythians and Sarmatians, and Sarmatian allies fought with them against Rome in the first centuries AD. This may have been an even deeper relationship, though—a number of people have talked about tantalizing links between "Iranian" nomads of the Iron Age and the Thracians for years, and the Thracians have often been considered close kindred to the Dacians, if not the same people.

However, although that's kind of the null hypothesis—that Thracian and Dacian are either closely related languages and peoples, or even two different dialects of the same language—there are reasons to doubt or at least challenge that assumption, and it's not clear that it's true. They've also been linked at various times to many other paleo-Balkan ethno-linguistic entities; the Phrygians, the Moesians, the Illyrians—but lacking convincing evidence, these ideas all have to remain possible, maybe even probable, but tantalizingly speculative.

There was even a theory a while ago that equated the Getae with the Goths, who during the Migration Period, before the Huns chased them further westward, lived in the steppes to their immediate east. But any connections with any Germanic peoples seem to be relatively late and not part of any Dacian ethnogenesis.

Because the territory of the Dacians is centered on modern day Romania and Moldova, naturally there's been a strong push to identify a Dacian substrate in the Romanian language, along with the assumption that many Romanized Dacians would have been part of the genesis of the Romanian people. However, this entirely reasonable assumption has been stubbornly resistant to proof, and attempts to wring Dacian etymologies out of Romanian words have been challenging. (Not surprisingly, Slavic has an easily identified influence on Romanian, probably dating back to the Migration Era too. 10-15% of the vocabulary, numerous grammatical features, the majority of the place-names and many of the personal names are clearly Slavic in origin.) Curiously, there is pretty decent evidence for some kind of either long-term contact link or possibly an earlier genetic link between Dacian and Baltic languages, which now exist in a small area, but which earlier extended further east, west and south. A number of linguists believe that this evidence is strong enough to call Dacian (and Thracian, if the two were closely related) a southern Baltic branch, or at least para-Baltic.

This of course, touches on another significant hypothesis; the Baltic and Slavic were united at some point between Proto-Indo-European and the development of the various Baltic and Slavic languages. While this theory has broad agreement amongst many, there are plenty of detractors who point out conflicting or contradicting evidence. Some even suggest that Baltic had closer (or at least earlier) ties linguistically with the Nordic Bronze Age and the Germanic languages than with the Slavic languages, and only adjacency of the two groups has led to their apparent close connections now. Others, of course, suggest that Slavic was a specific branch coeval with Eastern and Western Baltic, and it's just an accident of history that Baltic is nearly extinct except for the relatively geographically confined Lithuanian and Latvian today, while Slavic is widespread. Keep in mind that Slavic is supposed to have existed as a single mutually intelligible Common Slavonic into the early Middle Ages, and only started really breaking up around the 6th century AD.

Anyway, when I suggest that the Drylanders could be seen as similar to Cossacks and Dacians, I don't mean that I'd be borrowing very many specific details of culture or language, since the Dacians are relatively unknown to us in ways that matter. Rather, I'm suggesting that some of the material culture and look of the Dacians could be important. The Romans, talking about the Dacian Wars, mentioned that the Dacian gentry wore corselets of mail or scale, the unique forward curving Dacian variation on the Phrygian cap style helmet (which I could exactly replicate in Hero Forge, but I did my best to find a good analog) but that the more common infantry was unarmored. The Dacians were also well known for their successful and effective guerilla style warfare, which made the conquest of Dacia only ever half completed (the Roman province of Dacia was established, but truculent "Free Dacians" continued to exist beyond its borders.) Other than the helmet, the most iconic element of Dacian warfare was the falx, a huge curved blade, sharp on the inside of the curve, that had a relatively long handle and was often used two-handed. This weapon was so devastating that it actually prompted the Romans to alter their armor, something that happened very infrequently, especially as the result of a single war against a singular people with a singular weapon.

Like the Celts, and frankly like many Indo-European peoples, plaid twill woolen cloth seems to have been in use amongst the Dacians at times, and my Hero Forge Dacian has them as well. The Dacians were also described by both Greeks and Romans as being physically alike the other "northern barbarians"; tall, light skinned, with straight hair, and "ruddy or tawny" coloration and light colored eyes, meaning brown or reddish or blondish hair. This was probably the ancestral condition of the steppe people, and is today still common to modern Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic peoples. The Germanic peoples seem to have the most common occurrence of blondism, but that may be a boosted signal from the Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers that the earliest pre-proto-Germanic Corded Ware peoples absorbed. Another alternative is that while blondism was inherently possible within the genetic matrix of the European peoples (including the EEFs from Anatolia that preceded the steppe migration) it wasn't very common until a Bronze Age selective breeding bias event caused it to spread rapidly amongst the northern Corded War derivative cultures. This may be true, although I think it unusual that Homer's description of the Mycenean Greeks is typically Nordic in nature, and the Mycenean Greeks are among the Indo-Europeans that probably are not derived from the Corded Ware, but rather from the closely related Pannonian Yamnaya. In reality, it's neither here nor there, but I personally believe that the WSH genetic cluster already had a pretty high incidence of tallness, light eyes and light hair, and if anything, it's probably become more diluted over time because of intermingling with the darker EEF peoples.

Here's my Hero Forge Dacian, which could represent a Drylander too. Like I said, I had to use an older Bronze Age Mycenean-like helmet as the closest I could find to the distinct Dacian helmet, and I had to use a katana to model a falx. In reality, the handles of the falces should have been longer and the blade more curved, as well as sharp on the inside of the curve rather than the outside. But I didn't have a lot of luck finding anything that looked any better in the Hero Forge library. There's a big chonky sickle in the library that looks OK. If they release a slimmer, updated version of it, it might do the job better.

Dark Fantasy X Race Deep Dive: The Kemlings

Many fantasy settings have outlines, or even full treatises, that explain the history of the setting going back thousands—or even tens of thousands—of years. A quick glance at two settings that I happen to have nearby: the original 3.5 iterations of Golarion and Eberron, show that they have outlines going back at least 5,000 years and 10,000+ respectively.

Part of the problem is that Tolkien did this, to some degree. And for Tolkien it was somewhat justified, as he had elves that had lifespans of at least thousands of years still kicking around, with living memory of times that should have been so far back that they were mythological rather than verified history anyway. As has often been the case, people following in Tolkien's footsteps have slavishly tried to imitate him without necessarily really understanding why Tolkien did something, or why he was able to make it work. The past works best when it's kind of mysterious—like it is in the real world. Although a number of smug academics firmly believe that they understand the past, I'm not convinced. In part, because I see how callously most of them treat primary sources, and how dogmatic they are about narratives constructed second-hand many years after the fact to try and explain history. But that's neither here nor there, except to point out that in Dark Fantasy X, I have no intention of explaining really any history of any kind that's older than a couple hundred years, and even then, only infrequently. (The same is mostly true for Space Opera X, to be honest with you. I actually think it's a feature of good design, unless you have extraordinary circumstances, to leave the past alone unless something in the past is a major plot point, and even then, treat it only as much as you must.)

So, the kemlings. Where did they come from, and how long ago? There are many indications that they are actually a young race, and may only have existed for ~400-500 years or so. However, because they appeared in a savage area of the setting where records were not really kept, and most people didn't even read or write, and because there are a lot of propagandistic and jingoistic narratives that the kemlings have told about themselves and others have told about them in retaliation, the truth is probably impossible to divine without maybe asking one of the older Heresiarchs about it. Which would be an absolutely terrible idea, by the way. Like most of the non-human races, the kemlings are demihumans; their ancestors were human, but some kind of event happened to their genetics; either the introduction of some supernatural bloodline, or a curse, or something else that changed them into something that's mostly human-like, but not exactly human anymore. In the case of the kemlings, they have charcoal like skin that ranges in hue from that of medium ashy gray to jet black obsidian. At the lightest, they still don't really converge with the darkest of Hyperboreans, but many have wondered at the generally colorlessness of both races, and attempted to tie them together somehow. This seems fundamentally unlikely; the base human stock that the kemlings come from is probably the Drylander barbarians that live in the Baal Hamazi area where the kemlings first appeared.

In addition to their dark skin and black hair, the kemlings tend to have intense yellow or red irises, and most iconically, their heads are ringed with a number of small horns, often forming a crown-like pattern. According to the beliefs of the ruling class of Baal Hamazi before its collapse, this was in direct imitation of their mythological supernatural ancestor, the Daemon-Lord Chernavog, and his direct descendant, the half-daemon Hutran Kutir, the first Emperor of Baal Hamazi. Kutir is often claimed as the first kemling, and he had hundreds of sons and a like number of daughters, all pureblood kemlings, and from them the race propagated, as their descendants, even when mingled with humans, came out as pureblood kemlings. Whether this is literally true or not hardly matters; many kemlings themselves no longer believe it, and think that Chernavog and possibly even Hutran Kutir himself are merely mythical figures who's tangible existence should be doubted. They also often express some degree of embarrassment to be a bloodline saddled with what may well be a daemonic taint, not to mention the stigma of having ruled an empire that is now seen by most as the epitome of evil and degeneracy. Many feel that they have more to live down rather than live up to with regards to their dark heritage (the original source of the name, I might add). 

A pretty typical kemling adventuring fellow from Baal Hamazi. Many kemlings have left the city-states and now live in the wilderness, often in tribes, where they often mingle heavily with Drylander savages.

Many kemlings, perhaps as a result of their dark heritage, seem to be drawn to careers that they should avoid. The consorting with daemons and witchcraft and dark cults that was a hallmark of the Empire still lingers here and there, but it has often translated in to a more mundane focus on organized crime. This infiltrator is an expert assassin, spy and cat burglar, who probably works as a free agent across the city-states for various crime lords.

This kemling lord is one who's family managed to weather the falling of the empire and retain a privileged position in the new order that replaced it, although that makes him an exceptional individual indeed.

Like among the Hyperboreans, the shadow sword career is one that seems to have a long history in Baal Hamazi, and kemling shadow swords—while not common—are at least common enough to be a folk tale told around the Three Realms.

Like the Hyperboreans, and like most demihuman races, the kemlings have a curse that manifests in their bloodline from time to time. They do not speak of this curse to outsiders, and many do not know of its existence, or do not believe it if they have heard of it. In terms of the game (as opposed to the setting as a place for potential fiction) I'd suggest that unless a player wants to roleplay out the effects of this curse, that it be seen as not affecting PC characters.  I suggest, in fact, that they not affect major NPCs either, unless it's a theme or something that you want to explore deliberately.  I'd additionally suggest that if you needed a statistical number for how likely it is to occur, that number is quite a bit less than 0.1%.  However... there are considerably more than a thousand kemling individuals so if this is something that you want to use for whatever reason, you can.  

The kemling curse is inextricably tangled in their mythological origin. In spite of the skepticism that many kemlings and non-kemlings exhibit towards the story of Chernavog and Hutran Kutir, their curse is a circumstantial proof, if you will, of genuine daemonic ancestry in the kemlings, even if not necessarily exactly as told in the myths.  It is possible that their ancestor was a Daemon-Lord named Chernavog, who lived for a time among mortals and fathered seed who's daemonic traits are now watered down to represent their own race.  It is also possible that Chernavog's son Hutran Kutir, the Hex-King, is the founder of Baal Hamazi, their glorious empire of the past, although any other detail about is life other than that is vague and to be distrusted.  The kemlings are more likely than any other race to fall victim to the Black Choler, a kind of violent madness.  Such victims are usually quietly locked away or even put down entirely for the good of the community.  In fact, the latter is often preferred, although family members sometimes object. In the worst case scenario, someone afflicted by the Black Choler may burst open when the condition is fully ripe, and a daemon (usually merely an imp or servitor daemon, but sometimes more powerful ones are able to latch on to the bloodline and follow it to the mortal world) will claw its way out of the bloody corpse to afflict everyone around.

In the past, it was seen as a glorious evidence of being touched by Chernavog, and victims of the Black Choler were given pampered existences in peacetime, and turned on their enemies as berserker shock troops in times of war. The inherent unreliability of this strategy, as well as the burden of maintaining them in peacetime, even when there were very few of them, made this practice fall out of favor before the ending of the Empire and its dissolution into various city-states, and someone falling victim to the Black Choler in this time of post-Empire is seen as a disaster and tragedy for the individual involved, as well as his family and community.

The scholars of Simashki have a more grounded theory for the origin of the kemling race and its curse, and teach that Hutran Kutir, if he actually existed at all, was probably born a kemling the same as all of the rest of them. Because this was a time when the kemling race wasn't common or true breeding, but rather an atavistic or recessive trait for humans with a touch of daemon blood in them, this was usually seen as a great curse on the family that birthed a kemling, but Kutir was born in a position of some power and influence as the chief's son and heir of the Awan tribe of Old Drylanders. He probably learned complex architecture, social structure and writing from some of the early neighbors of the region, and most scholars actually favor time spent in Tarush Noptii, the predecessor kingdom of Timischburg. Possibly Kutir returning to the region with a vampiric advisor, even. Kutir was able to quickly conquer and marshal the resources of the Awan tribe, as well as many neighbors, forging them into the force that would found the Baal Hamazi empire, and using imported or captured slave labor to build the first city in the region, Baal Hamazi, deep in the Gorgelands.

From its newly constructed heartland in the Gorgelands, his rule spread throughout the old drylander tribes, founding other outposts which grew into major urban centers: Nashur, Baal Hishutash, Tahrah, Simashki, Ishkur, Baal Ngirsu, Shushun and Isin. Between these urban centers, much of the wilderness that separated them was also pacified: the legendary Pax Hamazi.  As the empire grew, so too did the population of the kemlings. It became fashionable to remove all hair from the head to show off these horns at one point, and that style remains in some of the successor states where kemling heritage is still seen as prestigious. 

Ultimately, some believe that the growth of the kemling population in such a cluster was what foundered the empire. After nearly four hundred years of relative peace and growth, there grew to be too many kemlings living in indolence, and the resources of the empire started to become strained. The old drylander slaves and serfs of the region were forced to live in poverty supporting their kemling overlords. Rebellions were becoming commonplace, and the bloody reactions to them only led to further seething tension and hatred. Nomadic drylander braves and the dark Atlanteans became a major thorn in the side of the administration, waging guerilla warfare from the desert that consumed the coffers of the empire at an accelerated rate. Diabolists of various types had also always been tolerated, and sorcery was not illegal (at least not for kemlings). Their rule was, as a result, often somewhat chaotic as having those with significant power go dangerously insane from time to time; not to mention the consorting with daemons, meant that the stability of their society was limited. This, combined with massive unrest created a situation ripe for collapse.

The sequence of events about 150 years ago that caused the fall of Baal Hamazi is confused and fraught with a number of obviously false theories, conspiracy theories, and wild speculation, but fall it did, and in the process, the land was wracked with arcane storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other earth-shattering impacts that left much of it uninhabited and temporarily uninhabitable. The capital city of Baal Hamazi itself was buried under a sandstorm.  The rest of the area erupted into full-scale revolt. Nearly every major city was under siege, much of the army had deserted, and even the heir to the king was unable to muster enough support to unite more than a small area under his banner. The capital city was abandoned, and the heir moved his court to nearby Nashur, where his descendants still claim sovereignty over the entire region, and they still claim to rule in "the Old Ways" as Baal Hamazi did in the golden age. This is just posturing, though, and the kings and queens of Nashur have seen a gradual erosion of their power to mere figure-head status. Today, a militaristic warlord rules openly, and is the fourth such warlord to openly run the government.

A few of the rest of the major urban centers eventually emerged intact, although independent. Few kings or chiefs of any stripe have managed to hold onto any power that wasn't local for long. Today, most urban centers are effectively city-states; ruling within their walls, and the surrounding fields and lands, but no further. Most of the territory between the city-states is desolate land, thinly inhabited by tribes who scorn any claims of sovereignty pressed by the city-states. Throughout most of the area, the kemlings have been forced to integrate more with the human castes as well; no longer can they be supported by humans kept in slavery. That was the one nearly universal outcome of the many rebellions. Only Nashur in the far north has managed to keep its old drylander population firmly under the thumb of the kemlings. Given the disaster that befell the capital itself, many kemlings have also consciously reverted to the "uncivilized" state, living as their ancestors in hunter-gatherer tribes. Some  of them have relocated to the inhospitable Gorgelands, where they guard the ruins of Baal Hamazi as cursed and forbid anyone to enter. It's a hard life, but they are trying to reconnect with the ways of their ancestors in the hope that they can win back the favor of their daemonic patron.

Many others live in smaller villages, attempting to put the past behind them. They are, in fact, somewhat embarrassed or even openly ashamed of the daemonic and sorcerous excesses of their forebears, like they have something to live down. They are not very centralized, but live in fortified towns and villages in the more fertile parts of the steppes, hunting semi-domesticated antelope, deer, buffalo, and horses as well as growing what crops they can; often shrubby little things like huckleberries and very hardy grains. Those close enough to the coast also fish and hunt seals and walruses as well as the occasional whale. The reality is, though, that the kemling population has suffered a massive diaspora, and while they still make up a significant plurality in the region, they no longer control it. They barely even control themselves, and there are many individuals who quietly pick up and leave the town life either to join one of the barbarian tribes, if they can make themselves be accepted, or just leave the area altogether, looking for greener pastures elsewhere. And the call of their daemonic blood occasionally means that an entire village, town or even larger area falls prey to the sway of some charismatic cult leader who leads them into strange evil practices.

A kemling making a new life for herself by being as unfeminine as possible and trying to learn knife-fighting.

An expatriate kemling adventurer who trawls the Three Realms as a combination mercenary and treasure hunter.

Another expatriate kemling who's fallen victim to the temptation of sorcery to make her way through the world.

An ancient lingering kemling lich from the days of Empire

The Chersky Mafia is the name that outsiders give to what was once called Наший Вешъ (Nashii Vyesh), "Our Thing." The roots of the kemling mafia go back to the fall of the grand empire of Baal Hamazi itself. When the empire fractured into several independent and quarrelsome city-states and smaller statelets, most kemlings incurred a significant loss of quality of life. Their life of indolence as the privileged overlords of drylander slaves was over, and they now had to work or fight for a standard of living very much below what it had been. While many kemlings shrugged and moved on, and several philosophically minded kemlings even saw the development as inevitable and to be welcomed, most harbored a lingering regret for the glory days of Baal Hamazi.

For most kemlings, this was channeled into trying to either build their more local utopias as best they could within the boundaries of their new city-states, or they fled the area entirely, foregoing their heritage as much as possible, in an attempt to make new lives for themselves in new lands, free of the violence and anarchy that gripped much of their former homelands. But some saw it as their divine mission to restore the kemlings to a place of power and prestige no less glorious than that of the past, and hopefully even much more than before. These individuals in some cases formed organizations dedicated to this mission. Most of them were little more than fanatical race-based supremacy cults, and many fell victim to infighting. One, however, became a powerhouse. Kašku Sarruma was a former military man, hard of personality and competent, not one of the more indolent civilians, and when he called the now leaderless soldiers that fought with him to his side, they answered.

These violent and pitiless men, seeing their society fall to pieces all around them still lacked the resources and manpower to impose order, stability and the type of government that they desired over the mobs, the revolting slaves, the incalcitrant natives, and others. In a bold yet desperate move, Sarruma engaged in a number of actions at once, all designed to forge the organization he needed to attempt multiple coups over the regional independent governments that were springing up all through the territory of the former Baal Hamazi. First, he needed troops. Aggressive yet very selective recruitment drives coupled with indoctrination gave him a core of elite fighters, perhaps more suited to subterfuge, assassination and other "black ops" type activities than to the more overt military action that they were used to. In addition, Sarruma kidnapped young kemling women and girls—never too many from one location, and never any that were important enough to be aggressively missed—and enslaved them, forcing them to serve as little more than brood mares for a new generation of indoctrinated warriors. While treated as well as they could be, these poor women and girls lived a life almost constantly pregnant, in an attempt to grow an army the old-fashioned way as quickly as possible for his fledgling organization.

But all of this distracted Nashii Vyesh's attention away from its original goals, and Sarruma had to admit that he would not be able to establish his glorious kemling rebirth in his lifetime, or probably even for several generations. It also required capital. For that, Sarruma picked some of his most trusted lieutenants to go into other lands and raise money through organized crime, and funnel it back to Nashii Vyesh coffers.

Now, several generations after the fall of Baal Hamazi and the formation of Nashii Vyesh, most of its leadership has forgotten or ignored the mandate of Kašku Sarruma, abandoning even the very name and adopting the title Chersky Mafia that outsiders have given it. The organized crime gig is simply too profitable to put it aside for empire building, and the crime lords covet their positions too much to sacrifice them for patriotic ends. The only interest the Mafia has in politics now is in corrupting politicians to turn a blind eye towards their activities, or giving them heads-up of lucrative opportunities that they can exploit. The leadership remains strictly kemling, but they also don't have any qualms about hiring, exploiting, or even partnering with other gangs, as long as they remain in control. In fact, throughout much of the cities outside of Baal Hamazi proper, the Chersky Mafia—the black mob, referring to the obsidian-like skin color of the kemlings—are notoriously partnered up with the small populations of urban woodwoses to the point that it's almost safe to assume that half of the urban woodwoses that you see are gangsters affiliated with the Chersky Mafia in some cities.

A prosperous Chersky Mafia crime boss

A Cherski Mafia criminal watching a safehouse

And finally, the rules for a kemling from the rulebook. As with my earlier entry, this may need some adjustment to account for the world-building that this post did; although in the case of the kemlings, much of my world-building is of older vintage than it was for the Hyperboreans, and little of it is genuinely new, much of it adapted from Dark•Heritage Mks. IV and V.

Kemling: Like the jann, the kemlings are demihumans, in this case with a daemonic twist to their ancestry.  In the past, they had powerful Imperial polities in the mountains to the West.  Those days are past, and the old kemling empire, Baal Hamazi, is now a Balkanized land of warring city-states and primitive villages and tribes.  In many of these societies, the kemlings no longer hold social and political sway as much as they did in the past, as the formerly oppressed human underclasses have wrested power from them.  Many kemlings have fled the turmoil in their homeland and now live elsewhere as part of a massive kemling diaspora.  Kemlings have soot-dark skin, tiny horns poking up through their hair, and yellow "predator" eyes (think of Nightcrawler from the X-men with Darth Maul horns poking through his hair).  Kemlings gain +1 to DEX, a racial affinity for Stealth, and the ability to see in the dark with a biological equivalent to night vision goggles.

A relatively normal prosperous kemling women in a relatively normal situation. I sometimes don't feel like I do enough "regular everyday" images in my samples sometimes.

 

Possible expansion of the Dark Fantasy X setting

Let me give some context. Where did the Dark Fantasy X setting come from, and what are its direct antecedents? This is a brief summary of my history, which I've documented here, if you want a more long-winded version.

Back in 2002 I was already tired (again) of the D&Disms and started experimenting with settings that were obviously sword & sorcery fantasy settings, but not D&D-like settings, with elves, dwarves, dragons, etc. featuring prominently. Bloodlines was the first setting that I worked on that diverged significantly from D&D basic. The setting was a kind of analog to prehistoric Lake Bonneville with Rancholabrean fauna, and the non-human races were the aasimar, tieflings and the four genasi as they were presented in the 3e era of the game. This fairly early moved into a version of Dark•Heritage that was a kind of "steampunk Barsoom" overlay on the same idea. The giant lake disappeared in favor of more desert features, and the genasi and other planetouched races evolved into races that were superficially similar, but had a very different genesis. 

By 2004-5 or so, I'd gotten rid of the desert and resurrected an old floating islands idea that I'd had (which isn't unique; I've seen plenty of other people dabble with this concept) and I abandoned much of the steampunk aesthetic. This was now Dark•Heritage Mk. II. Although I actually ran this version of the setting for a while,  it was Mk. III that had the most development (up to this point) when I ditched the floating islands and went more with a Medieval Tarim Basin geography model. This version of the setting was fairly well developed, and I even had novel outlines for it. I did find, however, that I was a little too prone to moving in to esoteric purity spirals of certain setting elements that really didn't need as much development as I was giving them. In fact, the development was starting to hurt the setting rather than help it.

Meanwhile, I was doing some other stuff outside of the direct line of Dark•Heritage. I toyed with a big ole Jupiter-sized setting  (obviously I didn't develop that much surface area, but that was the idea) that used some ideas I had that probably fit a little better with a more traditional D&D-like setting, rather than the more esoteric desert environment that DH had become. I later reskinned some of these elements and the basic geography for another D&D-like game that I ran called Pirates of the Mezzovian Main, around a fantasy Mediterranean of sorts, but with Golden Age of Piracy like stuff from the Caribbean. And, noticing that I was re-using a lot of setting elements from my Jupiter-sized Leng Calling setting, I created a Modular DND Setting wikispaces.  What were originally meant to be drag and drop modules eventually started to coalesce into a setting that would deliberately be based around them being in more or less fixed geographical areas.

All of these threads combined; using Modular elements hung on a Mezzovian Main geography eventually became DH Mk. IV. I developed this quite a lot too; a lot of that development is still here on this blog, for instance. I drew a big map of the setting on a poster board (which I still have stuck behind my dresser and the bedroom wall; I occasionally pull it out and look at it even now.) Mks. III and IV got a lot of development compared to I and II, but ultimately, they weren't exactly what I wanted. Also, things were changing in the pop culture landscape, as well as my reaction to the pop culture landscape. While in the early 00s I was probably tired of traditional fantasy and experimenting with using another cultural baseline (14th and 15th century Crown of Aragon thalassocracy being a notable influence) and steampunk and whatnot all playing big roles for a time—until I decided that I didn't want to do exotica for its own sake anymore. In addition, I feel that maybe I was inadvertently getting caught up in movements that I didn't agree with; while maybe I was ready to  move on from overly traditional Anglo-Saxon, Norse or Celtic influenced fantasy after having been steeped in it for so many years, the fantasy zeitgeist was doing the same thing, but for different reasons. Not because they were caught up in novelty, like I was, but because they hated Western Civilization and deliberately wanted to avoid it. In other words, the seeds of what would become blatant wokeism were starting to infect the genre, and I guess maybe I was a little bit on the early side of detecting it and getting turned off.

So I started tinkering with stuff that would combine Old Country England and Viking nations (mostly) with either colonial or frontier American geography. These were separate activities from Mk. IV, but I gradually started to believe that I needed to leave behind the Crown of Aragon Mk. IV with its pseudo-Spanish "protagonist" nation and replace it with one that was more in line with the majority of my heritage; British-American. I settled on the protagonist nations being essentially calques of Robin Hood like Anglo-Saxons, except in an American Old West like frontier setting. Then, I jammed some other settings that I'd developed into it, notably the Timischburg "fantasy Transylvania" setting that I'd developed for my CULT OF UNDEATH project, and Mk. V was born.

But Mk. V actually was stuck at a fairly high level without much real development for quite a long time. I had a sketchy map and talked a bit about stuff, but mostly I was still referring to Mk. IV stuff in a new geographical setting. By the time I really buckled down and drew a good map, started updating the rules for the game that it was meant to support, and really doing some unique new setting development, I was on the verge of converting Mk. V to DH5, which quickly evolved into Dark Fantasy X. Dark Fantasy X could therefore be seen as either a second draft of Mk. V, which only got minimalist unique development in its first draft, or possible Mk. VI of Dark•Heritage. But it's instead been rebranded as it's own new thing, Dark Fantasy X. Dark•Heritage, while it remains the name of this blog, is now officially a dead brand otherwise in my mind; the setting has now moved on and turned in to something fairly different than what Dark•Heritage in any iteration had ever been. 

It's still probably kind of weird and esoteric in terms of fantasy, but also it represents a focus on my own heritage coming through instead of being de-valued, and as such, is probably in part a reaction to all of the wokeness in our entertainment. I've decided that I'm now more tired of looking for something that's not "lily white" than I ever was of fantasy that is clearly based on the Northwestern European Medieval baseline that was the foundation of most of the fantasy I read from the 80s and earlier. The experiment with experimentation, if you will, was played out and I found I didn't like it as much as I thought I would when I started it years earlier.

Anyway, the Dark Fantasy X setting is mostly made up of three large constituent areas; not by coincidence, the three campaign 5x5s that I'm proposing are each centered on one of these, giving me the full coverage of all three areas when they're all done. It was my original intention to have a lot of discipline about not going beyond these, and for a long time that's exactly what I did. I'm kinda sorta rethinking that premise... but let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet. These three Realms are:

• The Hill Country; the most Anglo-Saxon frontier America part of the setting.
• Timischburg, the Austrian Empire hinterlands that is fantasy Transylvania.
• Baal Hamazi, the most exotic of them, where the kemlings are from. Although it's also heavily based on my love of the geography of the American West.

While I'd made vague references to areas beyond these three realms, I'd never intended to do any real development of them. However, I may want to make some smaller "satellite" mini-settings that are associated with the main setting. These won't receive the same level of detail as the main Three Realms—at least that's not what I'm planning now—but we'll see how much development they do or don't get. These elements include:

• Nizrekh, a kind of island nation that's the stub of ancient, sunken Atlantis, which has a combination Yog-Sothothery snake cult and ancient Egypt vibe to it. The people living there aren't the descendants of Atlanteans; there's already a race for that, but rather some group that arrived and developed in isolation.
• The wreckage of old Hyperborea; a kind of Ice Age glacier and snow-socked analog to Kadath.
• Lower Kurushat, which actually does appear on my map, but which I haven't given much thought to yet.

Of course, I doubt I'll do any of these until I finish my racial deep dives and my 5x5s, because that will lay the seeds for this to be done by really expanding the material on the races and the main three areas before I start haring after the afterthought areas.  This makes some sense; although Nizrekh has been floating around on the periphery of the setting for a long time, Hyperborea was never meant to make any appearance at all until I did the Hyperborean Racial Deep Dive and "discovered" that there was potentially interesting material still lingering in Hyperborea. (It probably doesn't hurt that I got back into SWTOR again and did some stuff wandering around on Hoth, and that I've been very slowly going through a youtube zoom playthrough that some guys did of the Icewind Dale campaign of D&D.)

A mapmaker's nightmare

After spending most of an evening drawing a map only to ink in a couple of features that look terrible, out of scale, or otherwise not pretty. Sigh. And then apply liquid paper to it, only to find out that your liquid paper is a bit old and clumpy rather than smooth, not to mention blueish and discolored compared to the paper that it's sitting on. I was ~85% or so finished with this map, and now I'm wondering if I should just go ahead knowing that I can fix it in post (i.e. digitally) but I'll always hate the paper version, or start over (what's a few hours?) knowing that I've learned my lesson about sketching in pencil first?

The map in question was a re-doing of the Baal Hamazi region of my map; i.e., about a third in the northwest of the main map. I was pretty happy with it, although to be honest with you, the Gorgelands wasn't turning out ideal either. I'm just not good at those canyons yet. Maybe I should bust out some scratch paper and practice more, and do the whole thing over again. Sigh.

That said, I was quite happy with the forests. I'd returned to a less belabored version of them, more like how I drew them years ago on the big posterboard Dark•Heritage Mk. IV map. But a few minor tweaks to the process were added, mostly because with the varied width tips of the Pixma Micron pen set, I could. In fact, I need to really remember to only use the Pixma pens; I had used my gel pen for some of it, gotten an icon that I'd drawn transferred to the side of my little finger because the gel pens bleed, and then retransferred that same icon back on the map at a place I didn't want it! That was easily enough fixed; I guess I'm just adding another ruins site or something. But again, I think I want to just start over. Kind of a shame; I spend a good three-four hours on this, and the only reason that I didn't spend more was because I already knew the layout of the map, mostly. Sigh again.

The map was capable of standing in for either a regional focus on the Baal Hamazi (+ Boneyard  + the edge of Kurushat up there at the far north) or for the MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTELAND campaign either one. The replacement will as well, I presume. I'd also added a few new features to the Boneyard specifically. While I said earlier that the majority of it would be represented by a rough pinyon-juniper woodland biome—a relatively high altitude semi-desert semi-forest eocsystem with loads of red rock formations—that's pretty difficult to represent in this kind of map, so I'm mostly just putting in my "rolling terrain" hash marks with a few Monument Valley style rock formations. I did, however, have the forest actually turn into a legitimate, thick forest for part of the map. This forest was going to be filled with bandits and cannibals. In my mind it was Cannibal Forest, although that's just the first thought that came to me, not exactly what I expected to end up with. Maneater Forest? Long Pork Forest? I dunno. Do I really need to make this forest so unfriendly? The DH5 setting doesn't have any lack of forests that are seriously bad news. The Bitterwood further south in Timischburg is famous for xenophobic woses and even werewolves, the Thursewood further east is obviously full of maneating thurses. The Haunted Forest has angry Skraelings, Lovecraftian horrors and necromancers and other undead. The Wolfwood further north is the closest thing to a friendly forest; it "only" has bandits and loads of natural predators like wolves, bears, sabertooths and giant red-furred lions. Yeah, well. Land of adventure, right? I'm also thinking of putting a society of intelligent apes and baboons in this forest. It'll be a little cooler than their habitat normally is, but they'll manage. After all, they're intelligent; they can wear additional furs in the winter months or something.

I had also added a thin, snaky mountain range I was going to call the Dragon's Spine or maybe the Serpent's Spine (after I checked to see if that totally obvious name had already been used somewhere or not first.) It is meant to be less like a normal mountain range and more like an enormous and curiously curving dike that stretches for many leagues. And I thought a big solo mountain somewhere in that region, like a Mount Shasta or Mount Hood or something like that (or a Lonely Mountain, for that matter)

Mapmaker mapmaker

It's been a little while since I've talked about my setting and its map, but I did make a youtube video discussing it, which I thought I'd link. I actually just rewatched this earlier today, and doing so made me think... I need to revise it slightly again. A few changes I wanted to make are cosmetic, but others are a bit more substantive. An example of the former is that I dislike the marshmallow look of the Plateau of Leng. It needs to be less "squishy" looking, and the Vale of Pnath on top of it probably needs to look more like my sharp canyon or gorge visual. An example of the latter is that I want to have the coastline of Timischburg swell out and maybe eliminate Vampyr Bay altogether to give a bigger coastal plain territory so I can fit more of my older Timischburg territory on it without it feeling cramped or that I have to cut material because there just isn't space. I'd like to find a way to make Baal Hamazi a bit bigger too, and maybe more explicitly point ouf that the top section up there is part of Kurushat, which otherwise isn't labeled at all. Here's the map reproduced again.

Anyway, I'l also looking forward to doing what I initially intended to do, although in the video below I specifically seemed to be leaning towards not doing this; redrawing the map, incorporating these (and other) minor updates. Maybe I even do it as two maps; an eastern and a western half that would nominally be "attached" to each other. Although I don't love that, because it's hard create the seams in analog drawing. But it gives me more space, and there are things about the idea that I like. I dunno. I'll play around in my mind for a few days or weeks before deciding how to proceed.

Revised map

Because the file is now large enough that I can't even upload it to blogger without loss of quality, so I've put the most recent version on Google Drive instead. Unless I somehow screwed it up, it should be viewable to anyone with a link. The thumbnal will give you the blogger version of the file if you enlarge it, but it's also a link to the full resolution version.

A few changes are cosmetic. I normalized the font to a single font, and got all of the city/town names at the same size (some of them were just a step off, but it started to get noticeable to me.) I added the wave painting on land to represent furrows and tilled fields. Not sure that that looks super great, but I don't really have any other options, sadly, that look any better. Is there really nothing in the asset library for large stretches of farmland on world-scale maps? That is kind of odd.  (Honestly, in a hand drawn version, I'd prefer just straight hatch lines over the waves anyway, which would work equally well on water or land for what I want. But we get these wave forms with peaks and troughs that look like water, and I have to live with it until I can think of something else. Maybe I can upload textures as an asset to paint with?) Oh, and I decided to change the little square icons representing towns and cities to little hand-drawn icons. I don't really like doing that in hand drawn maps that I make, but I think it works fine for this kind of map. Plus, I'd never do it on any other style map, so it was kind of fun to make use of a tool that I otherwise don't use. I did forget still to add one thing; a scale. So I guess a little bit more tweaking is in order. I imagine the scale to be on the order of magnitude as the Middle-earth map, although a bit smaller.

The other changes are a bit more substantive, and mostly include filling in some stuff where there were overly large, overly blank areas before, which I didn't like. In particular, the Goldenwolds area was a really big blank area with nothing to do except travel across it, and south of the Haunted Forest in that prairie there wasn't much going on. Let's talk briefly about what was added:

1) The strip along the Copper Hills sandwiched between the Haunted Forest and the Goldenwolds had a bunch of farmland added. I now see that as a bit more densely populated; not with villages and towns, necessarily (although a few are marked) but with much more settled farmland. In a way, I guess I see it as a slightly less utopian Shire. Or maybe it's just as utopian, but my version of a utopian, agrarian society is a bit different than Tolkien's.

2) The Plateau of Leng and Unknown Kadath are added as a big landform right there in the northern Goldenwolds. I realize that this makes its location not at all a secret; in fact, there's a road that gets a decent amount of travel between Lomar and Bucknerfeld that passes within sight of the plateau for days, and another road from Bucknerfeld to Pineytop has it visible from the other side as well. That said, it's extremely difficult to climb up the steep cliffs of the plateau which are very tall; probably moreso than is obvious from this representation here. On top, it is high enough elevation to always be cold, and most of it is above the elevation snow line. Not only is climbing it difficult, but the evil reputation of the place has spread far and wide, and people know to avoid it. Most prefer to not even look at it as they pass, if they can help it.

3) On the western shore of the Darkling Sea I've added the Tazitta Death Cult lands. This is a savage people that I made up, initially for the Baal Hamazi section of Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, but given that the area I put them in is similar ecologically to the Goldenwolds, I think this is a good place for them. Imagine, again, a combination of the Comanche and the headhunters of the East Indies. On top of that, they paint or tattoo themselves to resemble skeletons; black with white bone markings, and they kill and behead (and sometimes eat) people who pass through their lands. They are considered an insane cult of daemon worshippers by most, but then again, nobody has ever really managed to document their societal practices and live, so nobody knows for sure what they believe. They are within a very hard days ride of Leng's eastern edge (more like two to three days of long travel otherwise) and that's one of the few practices known for sure; several times a year, young bands of Tazitta braves make a pilgrimage to Leng. What exactly they do there is unclear. They make travel through this section of the prairie very hazardous, and as you can see anyway, the settlement patterns and roads take great pains to avoid getting even very close to their lands. Even moreso than the avoidance of Leng. Leng may be a malignant tumor on the surface of the earth, but it doesn't aggressive go hunt you down; you have to go to it to be harmed by it. Not so with the Tazitta. In this respect, they resemble the Comancheria, and the pains with which famous drover trails, like the Goodnight-Loving, went out of their way to stay away from them.

4) Further south, I added the  ruins of Rabb's Hill as well as a large section of burn on the northern fringe of the Thursewood. This small town was about halfway between the much larger regional capital of Dunsbury on the edge of Lake Byewick, and the towns of Roanstead and Burham's Landing, which are keys to reaching Waychester by boat through the Waychester Bay. (Waychester is otherwise unreachable, which is unusual being such a major regional center. I see it as not unlike the Euxhine Sea holdings of the Greeks during their age of colonization, though—they didn't follow land routes to get around, but almost exclusively sailed.) Rabb's Hill was attacked and destroyed overnight by a vicious surge of violence from the thurses of the Thursewood. Luckily, thurses are savage and unorganized, so they were unable to capitalize on their quick victory by marching elsewhere before armies from Waychester and Dunsbury converged on them. Although often called the Battle of Rabb's Hill that drove them off, it was really more like an extended engagement across a wide area. The thurses lit fires in the forest to smoke out the hillmen, but this was turned against them when the hillmen proved disciplined enough to drive them back to the fireline with their shieldwalls. In the end, thousands of thurses were pushed into the fire and burned to death, and the population has been decimated and quiet in the generation or so since that battle. (Although scouts are reporting signs that the population may have rebounded somewhat and the Thursewood may yet again be a danger full of the furious thurses.) The old burn area is still fairly barren; the black skeletons of trees stand out from the low-growing, quick-sprouting shrubs that have moved in in the meantime; new trees are still small. The forest isn't expected to return to its original state (or something like it) in the burn area for at least another two or three generations.

5) Although this wasn't a new change that I just made, I think it's worth pointing out that I've extended Timischburg eastward, as can be seen by the Timischer village of Dragomiresti all the way out on the Chatterwash River. This puts Eltdown more firmly in the Timischer camp, although it's still one that has a fair number of hillmen living there, and it does have a hillmen name. At the peak of their past expansion, the hillmen went all the way to the Knifetop Mountains and through the Haunted Forest, although the dangers of the forest eventually led them to abandon their efforts to expand up the Chatterwash watershed and avoid the Haunted Forest and its environs.

Inkarnate Dark Heritage Mk. V

Well... I spent $5 to get a subscription. I probably won't keep it more than a month or two, because I won't be mapping much (if anything) after doing this, but I was amazed... it took me about an hour or so to get the hang of the interface. After which, it only took me about three hours to make my map!

Granted, it's probably not perfect (I already spotted one label I left off) and I'll likely make minor tweaks to it for the next couple of weeks. But I can't believe how quickly it all came together, and honestly, how good the result turned out. Inkarnate really is cool to use! If you want a really nice, full-color, hi-def map of your setting, and you really only need to do the one map, I highly recommend springing for the subscription, spending some time making the map, and then canceling the subscription if you don't think you'll still use it, with your really nice map as a product that you spent a few days on, or so, and $5. If you think you'll want to tinker with the thing, though, or make encounter maps or other things like that, spring for the yearly subscription (you save more than 50%) and play around with it for longer. Since it's browser based, it doesn't even install anything on your computer, although you'll probably want a decent graphics card or it will lag when you start getting lots of elements together on your bigger maps.

The other thing I didn't label was the Timischburg counties, even though my draft map had those labels. I might still mess around with the labeling, or even redo it altogether. I couldn't figure out a way to fit those labels on without them getting in the way of other labels, so I didn't. 

Other than that; compared to my draft, quite a few things were relocated a fair bit, and the geography overall was a bit stretched and distorted. I knew that was going to happen, both for things I moved deliberately, and because I knew I couldn't possibly use a mouse to draw the same outline for the map on  a large file that I couldn't even see all of on my screen at the same time, except in the vaguest, roughest sense. That doesn't bother me at all; in fact, I think the new set-up is better. Some of the changes are deliberate, though.

Another thing that occurred to me after putting it together is that although my Hill Country original draft didn't feel big and empty, it kind of did here. That's not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, I think it's part of the character of the Hill Country that it has a kind of Old West wilderness feel to it where settlements are fewer, sparser and farther apart. Timischburg and Baal Hamazi feel, relatively, kind of cramped with lots of stuff closer together, even though those aren't exactly meant to be the fantasy version of  urban blight either. While I'm still going with a subscription, I might work up some more stuff to fill in the Hill Country area with a few more different features. There is meant to be lots of ruins and stuff; the equivalent of old Indian graveyards (although the remnant Atlantean skraelings aren't really Indians), the remnants of the old Hamazin and Kurushat expansions that are now reduced to rump states in the north and northwest... but who left stuff behind in the territory that was later colonized by the Hillmen. Not sure yet what any of it will be, and I don't really need more little settlements or anything like that; what I really want is something a bit more interesting and unique to put in that area, if I can think of what will fit the bill.

Anyway, here's the map as it stands now. It's complete... at least until I think of tweaks and changes to make to it. But those will likely be minor, and some of them merely cosmetic.

Another note; few things inspire setting development like a pretty map. Now that I've placed this stuff, I'm feeling much more motivated to start making posts about some if the listed items and, even if I'm posted about them before, updating it to be in harmony with the whole DH5 vibe.

Presenting DH5's geography

Well, of course no sooner do I make a post talking about how I'm struggling to just sit down and draw out my drafty, sketchy new map, then I feel immediately motivated to sit down and... draw out my drafty, sketchy new map.

I'm quite happy with how it turned out. It is a little busy from squeezing so much content into a single sheet of regular typing paper with a ballpoint pen, but it works, and more importantly; it gives me a reference for when I sit down, hopefully later this week or at worst early next week, with my newly arrived art pens which I ordered to make a much better looking map.

Now, my scanner here at home was a bit on the fritz. Luckily, I live really close to the public library. Unluckily, it scanned my document to a pdf. (Maybe it'll scan to jpg and I just didn't take the time to figure it out. They were trying to hurry up and close when I was there, so I felt kinda rushed.) I was able to convert it to jpg, of course, but that's not the best on the quality, and it isn't good news for my high quality scan of my high quality map when it's done. I may need to either buy a better scanner, or go somewhere and pay a couple of bucks to get it done right. Anyway, that's part of what the draft process was about; not just drafting the map, but also drafting the process, right? I think so.

Anyway, before I get too rambly, let's talk a bit about the map itself. Blogger doesn't show these kinds of things super great, but you should be able to open in another tab and save it, or zoom it to full size, or whatever.

I played around just a bit with some of the techniques I'll be using in the main map, just to get a little bit more used to them, and also to see what they'd look like (sorta) in context. Part of that you'll see is my grassland hashes, which helps with the dead space. The two west corners have a tiny bit of dead space, and then the southeast corner didn't have too much going on, but that's where I'll insert my compass rose and scale on the main map. Mostly there isn't much because there was a lot I needed to fit in, but some of this stuff can't be too small; if a forest is supposed to be vast and forboding, I can't draw it as a handful of trees about half an inch square.

I was worried about fitting everything, and while I did cut some names and features from my Baal Hamazi and Timischburg sections, I actually had to dig up a few new names for the Hill Country section, just because I needed a few more smaller towns than I had.

You'll see most of my old Baal Hamazi material (I've actually resurrected that old tag from the DH4 version of the setting, since I'm going to be reusing a bunch of that material, once I finish out exactly how) has been stuck on a hammerhead shaped peninsula that is reminiscent of the Demon Wastes section of Khorvaire from Eberron. This is deliberate; I at first started by making it my Eberron Remixed version of the Daemon Wastes, but it ended up settling down quite a bit more towards reusing my old Baal Hamazi material, with some borrowings from the Daemon Wastes. I'll probably retire the Daemon Wastes tag after this post because of that evolution. This is the section where I had more names than I could use, and it was a bit of a shame to have to cut some, but I really didn't need all of that material anymore. And a few names were repurposed; I know at least one city name became a river, one river became a lake, one county became a small town, etc. Whatever. A name is a name is a name, right?

This territory also spills out along the northern edge of the map, north of the Boneyard to the Wolfwood. I still need to figure out exactly what old Baal Hamazi material I'm going to use, and what names I'm now going to match it with, because that may change a bit as I develop this stuff over the next little bit, but I tried to sketch in a few unusual features, like an active volcano down in the southern lobe of the peninsula, and extremely unique looking Shatur Rock (the old  version was just a solitary mountain, inspired in part by Ayers Rock). I'm not terribly happy with my sketchy version of the Hamazin Gorgelands. I'll need to practice making forked gorges in this style until I'm happy with how they turn out before I make my "real" map. I also spent a little bit more time than a sketch would normally warrant working on the Rudmont Escarpment, and I'm not completely thrilled with that either. Will warrant more practice and experimentation with the gel pen in the meantime until I get something that I'm happy with.

I tried out using some of that grassy hatching to fill up space, mostly in what would, of course, be grassland, but I'm not 100% sure that I like that better than my uplands stuff that I showed in my last post. I'll need to think about and decide which of the two I like better before I get to my real map, again.

I know it was just sketchy, but I'm not super happy with my desert either, especially in the Boneyard, where I have the biggest area of it. I'm not finding a lot of examples of things I can import as ideas, so I think I mostly need to just keep working on improving this basic concept. I like the idea (and I have one over by the volcano I mentioned earlier too) of putting in one of the Monument Valley style rock formations. Those are extremely unique, but they're also extremely iconic, and if you see one, you know exactly what it's trying to represent. I tried drawing a few saguaro cactuses, which I've seen other people do as well, and both mine and most others that I've seen tend to look more like crosses than cactuses. I know the Boneyard sounds like a graveyard, and in a lot of ways it is, but I want it represented as a desert, not as a gigantic cemetery. My attempts to suggest creosote bushes or sagebrush needs maybe just a bit more work to be convincing.

Anyway, even though I had to do some cutting and plenty of rearranging, I'm happy with how everything turned out. Frankly, a lot of the stuff that I cut was just a cool name with nothing behind it; just Potemkin setting, as it were, so it doesn't hurt much to have a little less of it. I think the Timischburg section works well as the southern edge spilling out into and just beyond the Knifetop Mountains, and I like the Hill Country locations reimagined as a kind of top-heavy trapezoid that's a little bit more tightly sutured to the Timischburg and Baal Hamazi material (except for the Boneyard, which is mostly removed from the Hill Country section and is now kind of its own little region that acts as a buffer in the center of the area between them; you have to kind of go around it to get from one to the other.) Some of the stuff that I had previously thought would be flush up against the Plateau of Leng (another alternate name for what is now Baal Hamazi) are actually on opposite sides of the map from each other now, like the Rudmont Escarpment and the Darkling Sea. 

Anyway, I'm excited enough about drawing the map, that I kind of almost want to start now, even though I have material literally on order from Amazon that will improve the outcome. I probably won't, because I can use the draft itself to start thinking about how the setting all fits together, and do whatever new development is needed to get it into workable form again. So, I'll practice and experiment with some of the stuff that I'll end up wanting to put on the map to make sure it really is going to look like something that I'll be happy with for a long time, and meanwhile, I'll use this draft to start making an annotated list of what these place names actually correspond to and a quick summary of what they mean over the next few days or so.

Although I might redraw it as a slightly less sketchy version, because on looking longer at it, I do get the impression that most of the physical features are all too close to the same size... A little bit of more slight rearrangement might help with that.

List of Kings

While I'm not actually a fan of the notion that you should develop long histories for your fantasy settings, I have to admit, that I like a good map and chronology as much as the next guy.  While trawling some other blogs, I saw the idea of a d12 table for determining what happened to the rule of kings that allows one to create, without the effort really, a chronology not unlike the Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings.  I've decided to bulk up the chart with a few more ideas and make it a d20 table, and make it more fitted to my setting.

The following isn't meant to be canonical, but I decided to use the system to generate a quick and dirty list of kings for Baal Hamazi, starting at year 1 of the A.S. through year 522--45 years before the present time, when the Empire fell into its current state of Balkanized city-states.

How long do rulers rule?  According to the list of Windsor Kings, the longest reigns were 63 years, but most were much shorter.  I've whipped up yet another quick and dirty chart (keep in mind; although a fantasy setting, I don't have any long-lived races like elves or dwarves to contend with.)

Roll	Result
1	d100 weeks
2	d4 years
3	d6+2 years
4	d6+4 years
5	d6+8 years
6	d10+10 years
7	d10+15 years
8	d10+20 years
9	d10+25 years
10	d10+30 years

The cumulative of all of the reigns of all of the rulers I generate needs to add up to 522, so it may require some manual adjustment on at least one or two of the entries (I'm thinking both the first and second will be manual; the rest will be randomly generated.)

The next thing I need is a list of names--Bingo, I've already got one for the Hamazin language, with almost 140 entries on it.  Ideally I'd pick names randomly too, but I'm not going to, just because I don't want to mess around with figuring out a new way to do that with the resources I already have.

And finally, my bulked out "events" table, to give each ruler's reign just a bit of personality:

Roll	Result
1	Ruler is the founder of a new dynasty.
2	Ruler has the same name as a previous ruler.
3	Ruler's reign is marked by political turmoil that itself has been given a name.
4	Ruler was converted to a new religion and made his conversion official for the entire kingdom.
5	Ruler supervised a fundamentalist religious revival.
6	Ruler is known as a political or military reformer.
7	Reign ended with the assassination of the ruler.
8	Ruler founded a cadet branch (or more) via his many children of potential future claimants to the throne.
9	Ruler married into another dynasty, growing the realm via dynastic union.
10	Reign ends in scandal.
11	Reign ends in abdication.
12	Ruler supervised significant growth via conquest or other means of the realm.
13	Ruler supervised significant decline and contraction of the realm.
14	Ruler's reign split by a Usurper or Pretender to the throne.
15	Ruler's reign marked by prolonged warfare.
16	Ruler known by an epithet.
17	Rule was notable for a series of natural (or supernatural) disasters.
18	Ruler was revealed to have been an imposter.
19	Ruler spent the majority of his reign ruling in exile.
20	On ruler's death, the realm was split into multiple kingdoms.

The Hex-King

Baal Hishutash in the far north of the Kindattu Mountains, and nearby Tahrah at the mouth of the Mundu River, have apparently lost contact with the rest of the Baal Hamazi cultural area.  Refugees have been streaming southward, and they refer, in vague and garbled rumor, to the return of the first Priest-King; someone claiming to be Hutran Kutir, the semi-mythical founder of the Baal Hamazi Empire.  He's not happy that his empire has fallen apart to squabbling city-states and hordes of nomadic tribal barbarians, and he's dead-set on reestablishing his empire again by force of the sword--and he's not interested in anyone's stories of competing claims to the throne, appeals to freedom and equality, or excuses that this is nothing more than a somewhat prolonged interregnal break.  This empire is his, and he wants it back.  Now.

Of course, those rumors are garbled.  What exactly is going on up north in the last few months, and why?  Although my idea for this predates the rise of ISIS by some years, I see this as a similar phenomena; an idealogue appealing to romantic and nationalistic notions to swiftly conquer and establish a new state in the area, and a threat to the somewhat steady and stable city-states that already exist, as well as any border regions, since this new state is fiercely and violently expansionist.  But, so far it's only taken on an area of rather uninhabitable wilderness; the Hamazi Canyonlands, a large area that today resembles parts of the Colorado plateau, specifically the Canyonlands National Park and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and the northern Kindattu Mountains, a range of alpine peaks that runs north-south just to the east of the Canyonlands, and the very north of the Indash Salt Sea; a large endorheic sea that would be equivalent to Lake Bonneville.  Because this area is so desolate and inhospitable, in general, this newly established and conquered state has to expand.  The lands of Baal Hishutash can not support a much higher population than already exists there, and Tahrah exists mostly on fishing and trade; it is surrounded by salt flats that are completely non-arable.

Rather than answer directly what the story is with this Hex-King, as he's called, let me explore some possibilities, and then we'll see which of them I like better at some future date when I need to define it.  I see basically three main ideas, although all of them have subtle shades of nuance that can also be applied.

1) Hutran Kutir really did return.  It was prophesied, according to some (although nobody can find where this prophecy was documented, and it may be propaganda generated after the fact) that he would return in the Empire's darkest hour to save it--a. la King Arthur.  The current state of the Empire certainly supports this interpretation, as the Empire has essentially ceased to be entirely, and it would take a new conquering of the now independent city-states to reestablish it.  The mechanism of this return would be unknown, but Hutran Kutir had powerful sorcerous allies, the equivalent of a member of the Heresiarchy, and he may have been able to access magic that enabled him to live indefinitely.  Of course, if that's the case, then where has he been the last several centuries since his reign?

2) Hutrain Kutir has been brought back from the dead.  This is significantly different in scope from the option above; it posits that essentially Hutran Kutir is some kind of revenant, ghost, or other type of undead returned from his tomb in the sand-buried ancient capital of Baal Hamazi.  This isn't necessarily a stretch either; at least one of his rumored advisers during his life was a vampire from Tarush Noptii.

Not that Hutran Kutir even in his normal living state wouldn't be a nightmare tyranny run amok, but this is, of course, significantly worse; an empire of the Undead ruled by an undead Hex-King wouldn't just be a nightmare for the oppressed, it would be a nightmare to any who live.

As an aside, either of the first two means a new, major sorcerer appeared on the scene essentially out of the blue.  This will no doubt significantly impact the delicate balance of power and tense, Cold War-style peace that exists today between the members of the Heresiarchy.

3) A more prosaic option, of course, is that "Hutran Kutir" is an impostor; someone else who merely is using his legacy and his legend to claim power.  This doesn't mean that this impostor is some chump; in fact, if this is the case, most likely it's one of the Heresiarchy posing for the time being as Kutir in an attempt to quickly amass an army of fanatical soldiers and a mortal kingdom of some means.  This will also, needless to say, spark the rest of the Heresiarchy into action once it becomes known what's going on.

T is for the Tether

Deep in the wilderness territory that once made up the Baal Hamazi empire is the Tether.  Located in a thickly wooded hanging valley on the edge of the Kindattu Mountains, overloooking the much drier grasslands of the Hallashu Basin, the Tether is not a destination for many.  Too far away, and bounded by mountains that are difficult to cross, or a vast savanna where the availability of water is uncertain, the large hanging valley is also infamous for its savage tribes of head-hunting and man-eating changelings; the most barbaric and violent enclave of a race that is not known for its peaceful interactions with others in most cases.  In this case, the Hallashu changelings, as they are sometimes called, make even the dangerous woses of the Shifting Forest seem tame.  Legend holds that the curse of lycanthropy itself originated in this very hanging valley (called the Wose Basin) and that even today genuine werewolves sometimes lead hunting bands of woses.

Despite this, sometimes people do want to reach the Wose Basin, to see the Tether.  The Tether is the unofficial name for a large city built on a floating rock.  It is believed that the city itself would float completely away except that it is tethered (hence the name) by four gigantic chains that are rooted in the bedrock of the mountains.  Nobody except legendary, or at least semi-legendary, characters have ever managed to climb the chains to reach the city, so nobody is for sure who lives in it.  It is apparent that someone does, as occasionally litter falls from the waterfalls that course off the floating rock, and lights can be seen in the windows at night.  Occasionally sounds, as of celebrations or clashes of arms can be heard from high above.

The inhabitants of the Tether interact very little with the world below, although clearly they can see it and know of some of the other nearby cities amongst the hamazin and elsewhere.  The city is known to them as Mael Aaru.  About 2,000 individuals live there.  A few of them are regular humans, although it is unknown of what original racial stock they originate, or how they got on the city.  There is also a very small number of embodied spirits of various types, who call themselves either angels or djinn.  The majority of the inhabitants are mostly human, with a touch of angelic or djinnic blood in them (i.e., nephilim.)

In reality, the inhabitants of Mael Aaru interact much more with various inhabitants of beings who live in "Nearby Outside"; i.e., in otherworldly realms that are similar in many ways to the world itself, and populated by creatures that are not terribly alien.  This cosmology is too complicated to be summarized too quickly here (besides, it surely deserves its own post at some future point, assuming I get around to defining it--in reality, DARK•HERITAGE is not meant to be a "planes-hopping" setting anyway.) King Semyaza of Mael Aaru self-identifies as an angel, although he is extremely lustful and cruel in his personal life, if not necessarily to his subjects overall.  He maintains relationships with other polities from the Near Realms, such as the City of Brass.  Because of his, the Tether is a fairly cosmopolitan place, and can be a nexus by which Outsiders from the Near Realms make their way into the world--much as the Plateau of Leng is a nexus by which much more alien Outsiders from the Far Realms make their way into the world.

Despite the fact that Outsiders from the Near Realms are less alien than some Outsiders, they are not often friendly to humanity or their closely related sister-races, such as woses, neanderthals, hellspawn or jann.  In reality, the Tether, if one were to make their way up the chains to the city, is not a hospitable or safe place for any mortal of any kind except perhaps those who are native to it and know how to navigate its intricacies.  On very rare occasions, semi-legendary heroes have climbed the chains, and even more rarely won the favor of a citizen of Mael Aaru and been allowed to stay, or travel from there to the Near Realms.  Powerful sorcerers occasionally frequent its streets, but as they are equally strange, nearly inhuman due to their exposure to eldritch witchery, and able to hold their own against powerful deity-like entities, they don't really count.  It is rumored that the Heresiarchy meet on occasion for conference on Mael Aaru.