While before the holiday, I was talking about the likely next projects for me being something like Western Hack and Swashbuckler Hack; modular add-ons to Fantasy Hack that have rather than a Medieval European sword & sorcery, have an American Old West and Renaissance Europe or Golden Age of Piracy backdrop (although equally fantastic and meant to take place in a secondary world, not in the real world but with fantasy. Once I've got these modular rules nailed down, whatever exactly they may end up being, I have to work on some setting assumptions to go with it: Dark•Cowboys&Injuns or Dark•Pirates or whatever.
But I haven't done that. In fact, I haven't thought much about it during the holiday, and on coming back, my eye has been turned elsewhere. I've actually been somewhat captivated by the setting assumptions of 4e. 4e, as I've said before, was not my cup of tea. I never bought it, I never read it, I never played it, and I don't wish to. The game itself went he completely opposite direction from where I wanted 3.5e to move.
But, they did an awful lot of stuff correctly with the setting. I won't reiterate it here, but I was actually amazed how much they mirrored directions that I was independently going, so I've always been pretty happy with the setting assumptions of 4e, which made D&D into something that I would have liked. If only it had been paired with a ruleset I could have played! I might have lingered in D&D instead of becoming (again) the prodigal son who wanders into other fields. But, it wasn't, so I did wander. And now when 5e is several years old, I'm reading 4e fluff and getting more up to speed on it than I had been. And the similarities between the 4e cosmology and setting assumptions and my own directions are so strong that I'm feeling more inspired to work on cosmology than anything else, even though it's not really something that matters day to day with the setting.
So why do it? Well, I'd like to think that there is interesting stuff I can do with the cosmology, even if it's a bit beyond the day to day comings and goings of the setting. And the cosmology of DH5 will look fairly familiar to anyone who knows the 4e cosmology, although less overtly D&Dish. And the reasons for it are the same as they are for 4e, to wit: 1) It's more similar to familiar, mythological cosmology, so it has a kind of cultural resonance that the Great Wheel never did, 2) much of the Great Wheel (and I include the Inner Planes as part of the Great Wheel model) was created specifically to fill holes that seemed apparent because of the artificial nature of tying everything to either an element or an alignment. This meant that there was a lot of stuff that was created and sitting out there, but wasn't very interesting, and nobody actually much liked it. 3) In spite of the arbitrary difficulty in actually setting any adventures on a plane made of, say fire or negative energy, or whatever, planar adventuring was, all too often, quite frankly really boring. Vast expanses of literally nothing make up most of the planes, punctuated by something that doesn't really fit the character of the Plane, but which was at least usable. Why have a cosmology that spends so much effort on stuff that's both boring and unusable, instead of focusing on the stuff that's interesting and usable?
Now, granted, 4e was really more about pruning the Great Wheel down to its best elements and chucking the rest, whereas I'm more about borrowing from folklore and mythology and yes, occasionally gaming or fiction products too, as needed. So they're largely converging from two different ends of the creative process, but because I'm perfectly happy to borrow D&D elements that fit into my assumptions (often because they were borrowed themselves into D&D from some folklore or mythological source in the first place), that difference is probably more academic than substantive.
Anyway, this is also tied to the question posed in the post title. Dark•Heritage originally had a meaning, but now it's mostly become just a label for the current version of my setting, and the meaning that it originally had is one that was dropped many iterations ago. It also still worked when I was much more overtly a "dark fantasy", or fantasy/horror hybrid in terms of tone, and there's still plenty of echoes of that left, but it's still probably not enough to continue with the name based on that alone. But buried in the cosmological backstory it still works; now I just have to actually articulate that so the title doesn't just feel like a legacy going back to earlier iterations of the setting. So what makes Dark•Heritage Mk. V so dark? Why is heritage a thing, and why does it have to be dark, anyway?
Two things come to mind. First off, while DH5, like all DH settings, is primarily humano-centric, I have purposefully eschewed using very many traditional fantasy races such as are common in D&D and mostly come to us as bowdlerized Tolkien products. Instead of elfs and dwarfs and halflings and stuff, I've gone the same direction as I did in my now quite old Bloodlines setting, which pre-dated Dark•Heritage by some degree, and which while also humano-centric, was focused on the notion of magical or monstrous admixture with humanity to create racial variety. At that time, that meant that there would be nations of tieflings, aasimar, and the four types of genasi alongside populations of humans, but I've gradually "evolved" those concepts.
Dark•Heritage's earlier incarnations dropped most of the elemental types, with the exception of the fire genasi (probably here under influence from Freeport's azhar race) but picked up some other races that had other monstrous or cursed admixture. While my races today aren't really the same as the D&D race which prompted me to add them in the first place, and I prefer, when borrowing from D&D, to go back to the original folkloric or mythic source material (if any) and utilize as much of that as I can rather than the D&Diana version of the concept, one can still draw a line of sorts from a race that is known in D&D to one that is in DH5. Most of these are either cursed or monstrous, certainly qualifying as a dark heritage, I'd think. A few other races are indeed merely monstrous races to begin with. Let's have a quick look, shall we, at the races in the DH5 game and discuss them briefly, including how their heritage can be seen as "dark" compared to real world people.
- Human: All humans in DH5 belong to one of two groups: 1) exiles from the early medieval Europe, who's heritage is affected by the fact that they know that they don't really belong here unless they can make themselves belong by carving out and defending their place here, or 2) ancient slaves to other races who have only relatively recently come to freedom, and who struggle with a heritage where they were sources of contempt and abuse. They have no real cultural or civilizational heritage of their own to draw upon, and have to forge one anew still.
- Skraelings: Are they human? Or not quite? The debased inhabitants of the most wicked of all nations that ever existed (well, that may be arguable. Baal Hamazi certainly gives them a run for their money) these former Atlanteans have their backs against the wall, their homes in exile now overrun with the Colonists and their own numbers drastically reduced. They live a life in the shadows preying on the weak, when they can, or giving up their culture and attempting to mingle when they can't. Although represented by a different stat-block, these aren't meant to be non-human, but merely a highly divergent population.
- Orc: Much like orcs as everyone knows them, these are clearly not humans, and their origin is shrouded in shadow. Perhaps they never were human, but persistent stories of their former humanity until corrupted by a Dark Lord of unparalleled power (who came from Atlantis himself, and he may have been the cause of the sinking of that evil place) linger still. If that doesn't remind you of Sauron and the sinking of Numenor, then you can't call yourself a fan of fantasy.
- Goblin: If the origin of orcs is mysterious, the origin of goblins is even moreso. Most people believe them to be merely a much smaller, weaker morph of the same species, much as pygmies are still people in spite of their size, but some wonder if they have a completely different origin altogether.
- Cursed: As the Skraelings are the final dregs of Atlantean civilization, the Cursed are the remnants of Hyperborean civilization. Unlike those from Atlantis, they still retain some vestiges of living in their far northern home with its glorious capital city of Zobna. They are in exile, chased southwards by the advance of Inuto savages and the gradual failing of their own nation and culture, but they still linger yet. These guys retain something of the nature of the shadar-kai from D&D (although more like the Pathfinder fetchling interpretation than the 4e shadar-kai interpretation) but in origin, they were probably originally more like the dhampyr. I see them as retaining some of the tone and flavor of both still—both races that posit a cursed backstory.
- Jann: One of the few remnants from Bloodlines. Probably because of Freeport's azhar, at least in part, I always had more interest in the fire genasi than any other type of genasi, and the jann inherited that mantle; mostly human but with monstrous ifrit admixture from the City of Brass. In spite of how D&D has always done it, the ifrit (or efreet or afrit; there are various transliterations) were evil and daemonic spirits, not elemental spirits. While more overtly fiery, of course, than the kemlings (see below) and still retaining some of their origin as fire genasi originally, this is still a dark heritage to have.
- Kemling: Started out as tieflings in Bloodlines, were carried forward into the earliest versions of Dark•Heritage. Later, some of the Bael Turath lore from 4e got bowdlerized by me (mostly because I didn't know much about it other than that it was a long-lost tiefling empire, so I was working on just the concept and the name, not any details). Needless to say, the whole schtick of the tiefling race is that it has a dark heritage, which carries on to the kemlings too.
- Nephilim: While the aasimar race that my Bloodlines setting had is hardly a dark heritage, it occurred to me that the only real explanation for the existence of the aasimar in the first place is that the angels involved are fallen angels. Looking into old Second Temple Hebrew traditions of the Nephilim and Samyassa, a notorious fallen angel, that gave me the details of this race as it came to be.
- Wose: While the name comes from Tolkien, and Tolkien got it from folklore, I had to, of course, look deeply in the wood-wose or wildman of the wood folklore to work on this race. But it really started as the shifters (from Eberron); the descendants of werewolves who lost much of the potency (but not necessarily the savagery) of their curse over time.
But all of that isn't really the reason that the heritage of Dark•Heritage is dark. No, the reason for that is that the world is somewhat more challenging and difficult than most, because The Plan has been sent somewhat askew. Whereas in our world, a third of the Heavenly Host fell and were cast out, in this world, an additional third refused to participate at all, and stayed neutral. Because these were lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, they were also spewed out of Heaven, but did not become devils, but rather inhabit the near domains of the Otherworld. The most powerful of these are mighty beings like Odin or Zeus, and pagans in the past worshiped them as gods. Others took monstrous forms, like Scylla or Typhon. Lesser members of the host became smaller elfs, faeries, or other denizens of the Otherworld. Together, they were tasked, as a means of redemption, with protecting mortals from threats from outside creation, but the lukewarm have generally done a poor job of it; either because they were resentful of their fall in status and became bitter and uncooperative, or because they were poor in judgement and lost track of their task, or because they quarreled with each other, jockeying for power or influence in their Otherworld courts and domains.
Because of this, the threats from Outside creation have become a bit more emboldened here, and leak into Creation more readily than they do in any other Creation. This lends a Lovecraftian edge to the setting, on top of the mythological edge that the lukewarm former Heavenly Hosts have done. And these lukewarm Otherworld residents aren't usually very friendly to mortals anyway, even if they still remember their mission to mortals overall, they tend to see individual mortals as occasionally interesting, but usually unimportant in the long run.
These Otherworldly creatures and beings can be fought and killed, but because their substance is immortal, they will eventually reform. They won't have their memories, but they do retain their abilities, or rather, they will grow into them as they mature. In this sense, they operate much like the immortals from my MYTHS REVISITED project. Let me quote a small part of that which explains how this will work for DH5. And before I do, let me reiterate once more that this is all backstory, and doesn't really matter too much in terms of what any character, or even player, would know or need to know. It's just me noodling around with cosmology and deep backstory about how things work.
One of the great mysteries of humanity is exactly what happens to the souls of those who die, however, such is not the case with these Outsiders, as they are collectively sometimes called. While not actually immortal, and certainly capable of being slain, the souls of Outsiders eventually re-coalesce and reform to be reborn when one is slain. They will grow up to possess all of the abilities that they had before, although none of the memories of their prior lives. This does grant them a measure of immortality, but a very limited one, since if you are killed, have to be reborn a number of years later, grow up, and then still don't have any of your prior memories, death to the Outsiders is fairly final, and is certainly a viable solution to dealing with the plans of a rival or enemy.
Certain rituals can give characters random (and usually more confusing rather than helpful) glimpses into their past lives, and can be done on occasion, although they are very fearful of doing so because prolonged exposure to these glimpses leads to insanity and violent, paranoid madness.
Outsiders can often manipulate magic and exhibit Otherworldly traits, as befits their nature as Otherworlders. There are also a number of other, more exotic beasts that live in these Otherworld domains—creatures that may be semi-human like, as in centaurs or rusalka, or others that are purely monstrous, such as trolls, hydras or worse.
In the past, various populations of Outsiders usually had limited geographical exposure to Earth, but as the population of Earth has become increasingly scattered and intermingled, that is no longer true, and the various populations of Outsiders now interact not only with humanity, but also with each other quite a bit. In addition, as their wars and often brutal politics proceed, in many cases, individual heroes are reborn, or hidden after their birth, on the Earth, where they may be completely unconnected from their forebears (and in an ironic twist, may in fact grow up to later become more familiar with a rival population of Outsiders.) Also, the myths as presented show a point in time only--echoes of past upheavals are reflected in the mythology, such as in the Æsir-Vanir War or the Titanomachy--are merely past upheavals, and others of often similar scope have taken place since the time that the myths were first transmitted to "mortals."
And the following reposted text uses Greek mythology an example to show how these beings can exist in a setting that is specifically Christian in its cosmology.
Zeus, the Skyfather, Lord of Lightning and Thunder, is the King of the Olympians according to most treatises on Classical Mythology. Most treatises on Classical Mythology, however, ignore the long history and historicity of the cults of the various Greeks about the Olympians, where they came from, and what happened to them. Consequently, these details are shrouded in over-simplified myths and metaphor.
In reality, Zeus came upon the Greek pantheon as wandering Outsider prior to its identification with Mount Olympus. At the time, a loose collection of Outsiders including Artemis, Athena, Dionysos, and the Mistresses (Demeter and Persephone), Hephaestus, Hermes and Hera, along with a number of others that later became more or less forgotten—Paean, Erinya, Eileithyia, and Despoina ruled a small realm in the Otherworld that was tied to Greece on planet Earth, allowing them to occasionally roam over this circumscribed geographical area. Over this loose collection of Outsiders, Poseidon was champion and "first among equals"—a powerful force individually, but their loose collection made them vulnerable to another militaristic pantheon, the so-called Titans of Mount Othrys, who’s own realm in the Otherworld was anchored in another part of the Greek peninsula, putting them at odds because of proximity.
Zeus arrived with some of his young and untested allies: Ares, Apollo, Hades, Aphrodite, Herakles, and others, and due to his own war-like nature and off-the-charts personal magnetism and physical power, was able to unite the disparate Mycenaean pantheon into a powerful force. They set up their paradise on Mount Olympus (in reality, a pocket dimension called Olympus, which is most often accessed via a semi-permanent portal on Mount Olympus in Greece) and waged the terrible war known as the Titanomachy. This was one of the first and most terrible examples of open warfare between pantheons of Outsiders, and the triumvirate of Zeus, his "brother" Hades, and Poseidon, the champion of the region before the arrival of Zeus and his entourage, proved to be unstoppable.
The New Olympians overthrew the Titans, incorporating some few of their members who surrendered into their own growing pantheon and imprisoning the rest so that they couldn't be reborn to threaten their rule later. Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, the most powerful of the new Olympian pantheon, declared themselves brothers, retroactively declared themselves sons and heirs of Cronus, the King of Othrys and the Titans overall, and ruled Olympus jointly, with Zeus the new "King of the Gods." In truth, Zeus, Hades and Poseidon don’t always get along, or trust each other too much, and the lusts, envies and politics between them are often brutal and cruel. However, all three of them recognize that it is the power of their joint triumvirate that has led to their long dominance. Breaking their triumvirate will expose them to their enemies (of which there are many, mostly due to their own aggressive nature) and creates a situation in which as much as they may not like it, all three have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Indeed, all three of the triumvirs have at times been killed, but on being re-embodied and reborn, the other two remaining triumvirs made sure that they were raised and taught their place so that they could assume it smoothly again on reaching their full maturity of power.
The Olympian pantheon later made war against two smaller pantheons; those later known on Earth as the Etruscan gods and the Roman gods. After suffering a number of losses in lightning raids that left their forces imprisoned and depleted, the Etruscan and Roman pantheons merged, and brought a titanic battle to the Olympians. Echoes of this struggle remain in mythology in garbled form as the Gigantomachy, but the effects of the war are better illustrated in the practices of the worshipers of these pantheons. The Etruscan pantheon, as transmitted to archaeologists, adopted more and more Roman and Greek influences, and the Roman pantheon adopted the stories and personalities of the Olympians, although in most cases the names remained Roman. As with the titans, many of the original Roman and Etruscan deities were imprisoned and their places taken by Olympians, who adopted their names and titles for local worshipers, while others were integrated into the Olympian pantheon.
There were some bitter and brutal moves during this integration. Ares was slain and his reborn soul was hidden by the Romans, for example. Later, the Roman Mars took his place in Olympus, leaving Ares as an exile with no knowledge of his heritage for many centuries. Today, Ares remains a bitter outsider, unconnected with the Olympians, since Zeus and the triumvirate had to "adopt" Mars as part of the cessation of hostilities with the remaining Roman pantheon. Hades "adopted" a number of Outsiders with similar interests—Orcus, Pluto, etc. and announced that they were permanently part of his entourage.
This was the last great Outsider war in which the Olympians participated—following the naked aggression of Zeus and his brothers against the Roman and Etruscan pantheons, few other outsiders would trust or deal with the Olympians anymore, and many would rather make common cause with their rivals against the Olympians rather than give the powerful Zeus a chance to work his way into another pantheonic conquest. That said, two additional powerful Outsiders were later associated with the Olympians during the later Roman times—Isis, a princess from the Eqyptian pantheon who dallied for many years with Poseidon and had a powerful alliance with him (and him alone, not with the rest of the Olympians). Zeus also befriended Mithras, a wandering Outsider who was part of an pre-Avestan pantheon that imploded in brutal warfare and politics, and the Mithraic mysteries were an important part of Roman worship for some time. Mithras eventually wandered again, although his friendship with Zeus remains an important trump card that Zeus can pull when needed, for Mithras was a solar figure and infamously powerful warrior.
The Olympians had a long-running "Cold War" with a Celtic pantheon that was separate from the later attested Irish and Welsh mythologies, but this never erupted into full-scale war. While historically the Roman mortals did eventually conquer and assimilate most of the continental and many of the insular Celtic peoples, the pantheon of Outsiders who knew them best was able to form a temporary alliance with the up and coming Teutonic pantheon, an early incarnation of what is later known better to us as the Norse pantheon, where it was actually transmitted to archaeologists via writing. Having just come off a war of their own, in which the Æsir and Vanir merged to form a much stronger Teutonic pantheon, they were a militarily powerful group and rival for the Olympians that the Olympians were not ready to tackle. Some small part of the warfare and politics between the Teutonic—later Asgardian, Celtic—later, Avalonian, and Olympian pantheons is reflected in the complex relationships between the Celtic, Germanic, and Romano-Greek peoples, but as all three populations were eventually Christianized and became significantly intermingled culturally and ethnically over time, later events in the pantheons are not reflected in mythology or history, but in the secret history of the Outsiders, which is unknown to most peoples. Once Christianity took over these peoples, their relationship with the Outsiders waned; but the Outsiders endured nonetheless.
This later history, however, mostly coincides with that of the other pantheons—as worship of the Outsiders as gods has faded and failed their sacred sites, which were anchors between their realms in the Otherworld and earth were disturbed and the links between them became unreliable and unpredictable. This has also led to a dampening of hostilities between pantheons, as without easy access to Earth,, they don't have the means to make war on each other as easily. It also means that individuals are often stranded on Earth, and sometimes are even killed here. Re-embodied without the ability of their "home" pantheons to raise them to take the same place that they held before their deaths, many pantheons have holes missing in them, and the presence of Exile outsiders, who have little or no knowledge of who or what they are, is growing. Some believe, for example, that Samson or Beowulf (or perhaps both!) were actually lives of Herakles, who while wandering far from Olympus was slain, grew up among a foreign people when re-embodied and reborn, and became a local hero to them before being killed again.
As the Dresden Files says about Old Gods, "
It is said that most gods are the first generation scions of angels, demons, or powerful beings of the Nevernever. Some of them are derelict angels—not cast out of Heaven, but just departed on their own. Millennia ago, such beings gathered into tribes (the Olympians, the Aesir and Vanir, the Jotuns, and so on) and were eventually venerated as gods by the local mortals. The strongest, most capricious, most frightening, most helpful, or most stylish are the ones that tend to be remembered today."
