Dark Fantasy X blog and banner

At one point, I had decided to create a new blog to talk specifically about Dark Fantasy X, and I created the blog https://darkfantasygamerx.blogspot.com. My thought at the time was, I guess, that I hadn't been talking about it much here and why not separate it? However, whatever I was planning on using this my original main blog for never materialized, so I'm talking about Dark Fantasy X here. In spite of the fact that the title doesn't really work anymore, after my renaming of the setting and game, I still feel like this is the most sensible place to talk about it. I won't delete the darkfantasygamerx blog, but I probably will use it very infrequently, and I may even migrate it to a discussion on Space Opera X and SWTOR, since I have more posts about that there than here recently. 

I also don't think that I can rename this blog without it being a pain in the butt and causing all kinds of confusion, so I don't want the URL to change.

But I thought a tongue-in-cheek banner chance highlighting the hostile takeover of the blog by subject manner originally slated to go elsewhere would be fun. I have the original Dark•Heritage text, which was no longer accurate or relevant, and I slapped "Fantasy X" over the "•Heritage Mk. V" stuff. However, rather than just taking the old file, I thought I'd retype it to make it more clear. 

I had a pleasant surprise when I did; the • symbol in the font that I choose renders as a big "Cthulhu Lives" banner, like so:

While that's not what my original banner looked like, I didn't care; that was pretty cool, and appropriately topical, honestly. If I'd known that, I might well have used that font from the get-go for my banner for Dark•Heritage. 

Anyway, you can see it up top, but here's the new banner here too:

And for reference, here's the original Dark•Heritage and Dark Fantasy X banners. I might yet re-add the subtag: fantasy - horror - madness. Or I might not. 

Dark Heritage 2 update needed

I'm on version 2.7, but I looked at my copy and actually read through much of it just recently. I found a number of errors, some of them minor, but others of them a bit more substantial. The source of this is mostly changes to the rules themselves that I've made over time, but forgot to go change everything that was impacted by them; for example the MND damage for reading blasphemous tomes and learning spells was based on a 3-18 MND score instead of the -3 to 4 MND score. In other words, when I got rid of hte extraneous 3d6 step and turned the modifiers into the score, I didn't make all of the cascading changes that I had needed to. I found a number of other minor errors, typos, and a few formatting issues, so I'll be updating the document to 2.8 once I've finished.

I know this is a moot point, since this document is really only here for my own sake, and I doubt anyone else reads it. But if for some reason you do use it, then hold off and wait for the updated, patched version in the next day or so.

EDIT: Done. Go check out the new document in the Games tab to your hearts' content now.

On second thought...

Yesterday, I started a new series; how would I actually approach setting up a campaign?  I discussed my campaign brief (and wrote one) and what I'd do before and during the first session before play actually began. But then, this morning another thought occurred to me: I've already talked about potential campaigns for some time. (Heck, although I haven't updated it in a few weeks, I'm in the middle of one right now!) While I ultimately decided that I wasn't terribly happy with the final result of CULT OF UNDEATH project, because even trying to trim and rework published adventures just isn't my style of running the game; how can I have this material prepared if I have no idea that the PCs will ever get to that direction anyway? It's just not my style to prepare games very far ahead of time. But... if I did want to run Cult of Undeath, focusing more on the set-up and less on the plot beats that the adventure path that it's very loosely based on (Paizo's Carrion Crown), how would I do it? And for that matter, wouldn't that be a fitting ending or finale or epilogue or whatever you want to call it to the Cult of Undeath? Finding out that I'd never run an adventure path, even heavily reworked, because it still implies a level of pre-written expectations for the campaign that is out of synch with how I work—but how would I take the same material and actually use it, then? Well, now we're cooking with gas!

I do like the campaign brief that I wrote yesterday, but I've whipped up a second one focused on this newest idea. I could potentially run both of these campaigns in my setting, seriously. But let's shift from the first idea to this resurrected Cult of Undeath project. If I'm not going to relying on the actual modules that I read, because modules are nothing more than raw material that is only useful to someone who runs like I do if taken completely out of context. Even then, I can't plan too far ahead on using any of that raw material, because it depends on the direction the campaign goes as driven by the players. But what I would prepare is the following campaign brief, then I'd dedicate the first hour or so of the first session to being a kind of "session zero" phase, as described yesterday. Following the link, I'll rework the details of how I'd do that.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GJJsv0l-7RN1YIv5tdIyQGAgxP5TXDK-/view?usp=sharing

I also yesterday said that I'd send the rules system out with the brief. I've actually changed my mind. Because the rules are easy to explain and I can help anyone play the game, I'd rather just say that the rules are available upon request. It'd be great if my players read them thoroughly before the game, but I don't want to ask that of them; I want them to want to do so, otherwise, we'll do without, and we won't miss a beat doing so.

The number one task to do when sitting down and getting everybody settled in and ready to go is to have them build characters. You'll notice that in my prior campaign brief, I had them choose from patrons that may be their reason for being involved; in this case, I have instead a brief background sketch that would connect the PC to the deceased Professor Lechfeld that they can choose from instead. As before, I'd go through the character ties exercise, which will make for an immediate hook for roleplaying and investment on the players' part with the group. 

I do want to keep the initial set-up, which is based on a pretty heavily reworking of the first two modules though, and maybe create out of them the "fronts" that I want the game to eventually focus on. The haunted house that makes up much of the first adventure should be a "Grim Portent" from the first Front, which will be around Grigore Stefanescu and his attempt to unlock one of the Primogenitors. More on that in my next post on this topic when I create the fronts.

The second module, which is about the murders associated with a Frankenstein monster can be tied to the second front, and will be a "Grim Portent" for that one, which also highlights that things are moving before the PCs even know much about the nature of the threats facing them. This will be where I rework Otto von Szell, who will be the former protégé mentioned in the new campaign brief. Here, I'll decide that he was a Timischer noble, who has since become a vampire. In the past, he worked with Prof. Lechfeld on an exciting yet forbidden project that became the monster. Once it came to unholy life, and von Szell let slip his ambitions to become undead, Lechfeld cut off communication with him, and eventually fled Timischburg entirely to set up here in Cockrill's Hill. However, the professor had a crucial piece of the research that made the monster experiment successful, and von Szell has finally felt confident to come for it in a more direct fashion. I like this front, because not only is it important to the story of the campaign, but it would be a pretty big (and dark) twist if any of the characters picked the background that they were related to von Szell, and thought they were coming on a peaceful mission of reconciliation. If nobody picks that, I'll almost certainly still use it, but I hope that they do, because I love that connection.

Although too vague for me to tell you how I'm going to end up working these, I'd like to have two additional, albeit somewhat smaller in scope and threat, fronts based on geography. The Tazitta Death Cult lands are located nearby, and I'd love to find a way to use them. I did mention in my old Cult of Undeath outline that there could be signs of ghoulish activity in the cemetery where the Professor is to be buried, and maybe that can be the first clue that points towards these sinister tribesmen. Secondly, you can't get from Cockrill's Hill to Mittermarkt (unless you go way out of your way) without going through the Eltdown Pass, including the foreboding small town of Eltdown itself, and the Eltdown Fens where the lost, sunken city dedicated to Bokrug is hidden. And the malevolent Eltdown Shards themselves should make at least a cameo appearance! I haven't yet determined what this front would look like, but it seems pretty obvious to include it somehow since it begs the question otherwise; the PCs will almost certainly have to travel right past it. Plus, it gives me the opportunity to potentially use some of the thematically similar Deep Ones stuff from the adventure path.

A final thought that's noodling around in my head; of course, I expect this to be limited in scope relative to the campaign setting's full geography, but it's a bit unusual in that it pulls from a Hill Country hinterlands village towards Timischburg. I wonder if I shouldn't use the "main" setting map as a template, but then draw entirely new, more regionally relevant maps for each campaign? Huh. Lots of work, but then again, I like drawing maps anyway, and I've got loads of sheets of sketch paper and few immediate plans to use them. Why not, other than that I might get tired of doing it before I'm done? When has that ever stopped any of my hobby endeavors before, though?

The Whys

Got a few links with my own commentary for today. This is mostly on "why" I do certain things the way that I do them in my games. This is particularly focused on the fact that after years and years of doing so, I dislike using miniatures, battle mats, combat grids and all that jazz in my roleplaying games. In my case, this probably goes all the way back to the vector by which I came into the hobby; as a fan of fantasy fiction rather than of wargames. This is somewhat in contrast to the development of the game itself. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson certainly seem to have been fans of fantasy fiction, but their hobby was wargames, and D&D grew out of an adaptation of wargaming into a novel approach of playing the game.

Now, I don't dislike wargames, although I will admit that it's a hobby that I've only dabbled in, not embraced. However, I dislike wargames and roleplaying games mixing tropes and mechanics. Having your roleplaying game "stop" while you indulge in a mini-game that's of a completely different nature has never facilitated the kind of experience that I want, which is more like an interactive and impromptu fiction created by a group. I've always wanted the RPG experience to resemble as much as is reasonably possible, the medium that was my vector into it in the first place, namely fantasy novels, stories and occasionally movies (because of the sucess of the Conan the Barbarian movie, fantasy movies were a thing when I was a kid in the 80s. Most of them were pretty dang cheesy, but still. It was a source of inspiration, and not every 80s fantasy movie was terrible. Dragonslayer for instance is really quite good, and I've got a fond nostalgia for Willow. And more recently, of course, we've got the Lord of the Rings movies as better inspiration. Albeit still secondary to the Lord of the Rings texts.)

I recognize that most people play modern versions of the game with terrain or at least a battlemat of some kind. In part, this is because it's very difficult to run combat "correctly" without it. How do you do flanking, for instance, without a grid? I wonder if, if given better "theater of the mind" options in the base rules themselves, if more people would prefer to run their combats that way, however. I believe that they would, although naturally I can't prove it at all. Anyway, rather than attempt to describe all of the reasons that I prefer "theater of the mind" combat, and systems that enable it, I'll link to "Sly Flourish's" page that already does so quite capably. This link is especially focused on the why, although it links to a "how." This how is really only particularly useful to you if you're in a 5e milieu. Since I am not, the why is the more interesting and useful link for me.

https://slyflourish.com/tyranny_of_the_grid.html

Now, from all that I hear, 5e has been a good direction to take "3e-ish" D&D mechanics and make them both easier and more fun to use. But because I'd already accepted a much more drastic take on modifying "3e-ish" mechanics by using Microlite, or m20. There's a buttload of options in m20. Here's the big collection: https://microlite20.org/

But my specific versions are my specific versions, and are devised specifically for my own tastes and my own settings and the tone that they're supposed to represent. I am finally at a point where I think I've been convinced that there's a 5e rule that I should import. My first thought on understanding this rule is that I wasn't interested, but I've been gradually convinced over time, including by the essays linked to below, also from Sly Flourish. While some of those essays are written in a 5e context, it also shows that the subsystem works. In fact, it's a much better motivator than the old action points mechanic which Eberron thought would encourage more swashbuckling action. It didn't. This does, however, because it isn't just a mechanic, it's also a player motivator. The mechanic in question is advantage/disadvantage. And it can be used to improvise combat to become much more dynamic, interesting and fun without making it more mechanically complex. I'm really coming around to the idea that it will make combat much better.

https://slyflourish.com/improvising_combat_with_advantage.html

I talked about this in my last post, although I didn't link to it, but it's a slight iteration on the same idea.

https://slyflourish.com/cinematic_advantage.html

Anyway, I'll think about exactly how to implement in m20. I'll probably take most of the advice from the articles linked just above, but keep in mind that those are from a more typical D&D paradigm, and a specifically D&D 5e paradigm, so there may be a few things it lists which I find in context don't make sense for Dark Heritage. And I have to decide if adding advantage/disadvantage means that my Heroism points are now something that I no longer need. Sigh. Cascading effects are a minor deal with rules lite games, but occasionally they're still a thing.

But I do find it likely that this is the missing piece I was looking for to draw out interesting, swashbucklery combat more reliably.

A possible new rule...

Although Fantasy Hack and Dark Heritage 2 have diverged, and I'm not really making updates to Fantasy Hack anymore, I am still making minor tweaks to the rules of Dark Heritage 2. I'm a little unsure how to proceed if I ever decide I want to use Fantasy Hack instead of Dark Heritage 2 again; probably just use Dark Heritage 2, update the races, and maybe a few of the appendixes to be the same as the current iteration of Dark Heritage. There are two rules tweaks that I've either already implemented in one case or am seriously entertaining implementing in the other, thanks to the convincing videos provided by Dungeon Craft below. Dungeon Craft is a curious guy, who plays 5e, but who uses a lot of old school paradigms and old school themed house rules in his game. Naturally, as a player of m20, which is based off of d20, my game is somewhat different, but then again, I'm perfectly happy to adopt a houserule from any system whatsoever, if it works better than what I'm already doing. 

The first change is to initiative, and the Dungeon Craft guy proposes a number of scenarios all the way from "there is no initiative at all" to team iniative, to just straight, static DEX score as your initiative. I'm leaning more towards team initiative with a d6 (in fact, I'm actually updated the document to include that as of its latest revision, but I might yet tweak it a bit more after further thought). Anyway, I'll let you watch the following video and decide for yourself what you think would work best for your game, however.

The second change I'm considering doesn't replace anything that I'm currently doing. I have the same problem with "griddy" combat that he refers to, but I dislike representational combat at all, and lean heavily towards "narrative" combat. I don't need miniatures, terrain, battle mats, or any other physical representation for combat, nor do I want to explicitly encourage it with rules that make that seem more likely to be used than not. Now, this doesn't mean that I think those things are bad, or that you shouldn't use them. Although I will admit that I like to draw perhaps a harder, brighter line than most between role-playing games and tactical miniatures games. I do, however, want to make sure that any games I dabble with are perfectly and comfortably usable without them, although if you wish to, you certainly could.

This video talks about replacing a rule from 3e on (flanking) that I don't use in my m20 game with a 5e rule for advantage. In other words, it adds a rule, but as he says, it's a rule that I think encourages the game to play out much more like how I'd like it to play out. And the advantage of advantage (ahem) is that it's incredibly simple to implement.

Anyway, I'm fairly certain that I'll be adopting these two systems into the game. As I think about and write up the text that explains my use of cinematic advantage, I'll also revisit my initiative system and make sure that I'm happy with the implementation of it that I have.

Am I too generous?

Y'know, after watching that "how to grimdark your games" I wonder if my mechanics are too generous. I'd never really given it much thought before, but I'd mostly "grimdarked" my game by what happens in game and how I present stuff rather than having the kind of harsh rules that Call of Cthulhu or Warhammer FRP is noted for, for instance. Now, granted—although I did say "D&D rules, Call of Cthulhu play experience" for some time, but I've also purposefully moved to a more swashbuckling action paradigm in the rules, to give that kind of Brendan Frasier The Mummy kind of experience rather than that kind of survival horror experience. 

I actually think that I'm going to take some time to modify the game rules again. This isn't a major revision. I'm at version 2.5.0 right now, but it's not just fixing typos either; I think I'll bump it to 2.6. I'm planning on getting rid of the legacy weapon, armor and shield proficiencies, because those are kinda dumb and I just included them because it didn't occur to me to not do so until recently. I'll also maybe modify the default rules for hit point generation and a few other things, but the major change will be the addition in a few parts of a paragraph marked by bold headings called DARK•HERITAGE HARDCORE MODE where I offer different alternatives to the default rules. I think the Hardcore mode will offer options in just a few places:

1) First, in ability score generation. Regular mode allows you to roll four ability scores and toss the worst one, as well as assign them as you please. Hardcore mode will be roll them in order and take what you get.

2) Hit points; instead of STR score +10 and then add an additional +2 for each character level (excluding level 1), it'll just be your STR score +1 per level. Even in the default, I think I'm going to change that +10 to +5... I want a much flatter hp progression, so I need more at the beginning and much slower progression than D&D offers, but I'm starting to feel more and more like it's too generous even in the default with +10. 

3) Death and dying. You die at 0 hit points. Even in default, you get one chance to make a death save, not indefinate chances (assuming you pass them).

4) Starting budget. Hardcore mode characters will get just 3d6 gp to outfit themselves, and honestly, that's not even all that hardcore. I think the budget might be too generous for default too; 3d6 x 5 + 20 is probably better than 3d6 x 5 + 120. That gives an average starting equipment buying budget of about 175 or so (I didn't actually do the math in my head just now; just swagged it.) With that kind of budget, most starting characters can have all the equipment that they'll ever need, or at least most of it, before they even start play. That's not such a bad idea, given the action movie vibe that I want to go for here, but it removes there being any challenge about finding gear that you want. I'll tone it down for the default too.

5) Heroism points. Hardcore mode, you start each session with 0 heroism points, and can only get them by earning them in play through the session. In default mode, rather than starting with three and still earning them through play, you'll only get 1 per session plus whatever you earn. 

These aren't big changes, but I think that they'll offer a significant difference between the default and hardcore experience. The default with still have that more Brendan Frasier The Mummy type of horror going on, while the hardcore mode will be more like the true Call of Cthulhu in D&D experience.

While the jargon sounds a bit like upping the difficulty level on a computer game, it's not actually about changing how difficult the game is (although I imagine Hardcore Mode will have a significantly higher number of player deaths.) It's really more about changing the tone and the mood of the experience than it is about just upping the difficulty. Again; you don't actually try to "win" a role-playing game. You just play it and the experience itself is the reward, mostly.

The Dark•Heritage "Mks"

Every so often, especially as this blog starts to really age now (just over 14 years old now! I wish I'd kept my original blog that I had before this one, but in a fit of spring cleaning years ago, I deleted it entirely) I need to do a retrospective of sorts. Dark•Heritage first got its start on that earlier blog, though, and on old wikispaces pages that aren't available anymore, and other freeware stuff (I did a bunch of homebrewing with Geocities back in the day, if you remember that place.)

In any case, although I've always been a tinkerer with world-building; often thinking that I would use it in a game or for stories, the reality is that I rarely did either, and if I do world-building just for its own sake, that's a satisfying enough hobby for me on occasion. I like drawing maps. I like thinking about interesting fantasy places and locales and arrangements of places and locales, and I can't remember a time, at least after reading Lord of the Rings and discovering D&D (the former technically took place in the very latest 70s or early 80s, but for all practical purposes, it's better pinned to about 1984 where it really flooded into my interest in a big way) where I haven't been tinkering in my head and on paper with worldbuilding.

But I never really paid attention to "tracking" my efforts until the release of D&D third edition, when I got specifically back into dabbling in D&D and D&D-like worldbuilding, because my efforts at that point were a bit more organized and focused and targeted, often for use in roleplaying games that I did actually run, or at the very least concievably thought that I very well might. Plus, that coincides (mostly) with my use of the internet for development rather than old moldy notebooks that I stuff in a drawer and forget about for years, like I used to do as a teenager.

I often call the current version of my setting "Dark•Heritage Mk. V", or more casually, DH5, to give it a specific name and distinguish it from other stuff that I've done with the title in the past. Of course, that's just a name that's a convenience for me. Nobody living in the setting would ever use that name, or even Dark•Heritage without a Mk. number. I'm not even sure that players or readers would use that; if I run the game again, will I use that as a title for it? Probably not. I'd probably come up with something that sounded like a show or movie title. "Waychester Vice." "Dunsbury 5-O." "The Hill Country A-Team". I dunno. Those are not ones that I've given a lot of thought to, quite obviously. 

But if I'm referring to a Mk. V, then that presumes that there was a Mk. IV, III, II, and an original that was retroactively called Mk. I. This is true. I'm going to discuss them briefly in this post. I've also going to have to reference four other settings that I did some development on, because they were the pioneers of some idea that later got gobbled up by Dark•Heritage, and usually the gobbling up of an idea from another setting was an important part of it advancing to a new Mk. 

Back in 2002, I'd already gotten a little tired of dabbling in overtly D&D-like settings again, even though 3e was still pretty new. Prior to this, I'd already gradually gone further and further into hombrewing not just the setting, but also the actual system (kitbashing, really, more than actual design of my own) and by this point, I was ready to leave D&D entirely and embrace what was a newer, sexier (to me at the time, at least) paradigm; that of using d20 Modern... but without the Modern. d20 Past hadn't been released yet—I later embraced that specifically—but I kind of kitbashed and homebrewed my own alternative to d20 Past before it came out. The result was surprisingly (or maybe it's not, I dunno) similar to what d20 Past did. Of course, I'm not really all that much of a systems guy, so I wasn't homebrewing the system because I had specific system goals in mind; rather, I had specific world-building goals in mind. Specifically, I wanted to alter quite dramatically the default D&D racial spread, and not have things like elves and dwarves and halflings and gnomes at all. The second goal was to have magic in this fantasy setting that didn't feel very much like D&D magic. I had the d20 Call of Cthulhu book already by this point (it came out in 2001) and already I was leaning towards using those rules, or something like them, to emulate the type of magic that I thought most appropriate for my tastes. You can see that very early on in this process, I was already creating the kind of dark fantasy stuff that I've been doing ever since. It's a little funny; when I actually run games, they often tend to come out very silly and comical and gonzo and absurd—in an incredibly entertaining and good way, normally—even though on paper, they are obviously "very serious business." I suppose the tone that I tend to get is most like the Brendan Frasier Mummy; plenty of horror, but also plenty of swashbuckling over-the-top action and dark comedy too. Often, I've said that I'm deliberately aiming for that, but I think it's more accurate that I know the dark comedy and swashbuckling action is going to happen anyway, so I adjust my aim to make sure that the horror gets enough spotlight too.

Anyway, this setting I'm talking about was called Bloodlines. I'd missed D&D entirely through much of the later 80s and 90s, and I knew nothing about 2e other than a few novels from that time period that I read (R. A. Salvatore, often). Even earlier in the 80s, I don't think I'd read any D&D book all the way through except the Holmes BD&D and the Moldvay/Cook B/X books. And I'd read most of the two Monster Manuals and the Fiend Folio, I think. I was captivated by the idea of the tieflings and the genasi races, which were new to me, and Bloodlines featured populations of these living alongside humans in a setting that was reminiscent of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, including the Stone Age megafauna. The two races that I was probably most interested in, and therefore developed the most, were the tieflings and fire genasi, with the aasimar being a third-place race in my development. It's amazing to me that most of the aspects of DH, as it developed through the years, were already present in Bloodlines. Ironic, even. I re-use stuff at a tremendous rate, but this is the most notable; without anything specifically being re-used, the entire set-up is almost exactly the same as my DH4, and not really all that different from DH5 either (I do focus less on the big western pluvial "Great Lake" idea, although... I do have two of them in DH5.

By late 2003, I'd migrated to the very first Dark•Heritage setting (including the •. I'm pretty sure I took that idea from Dark•Matter, which was stylized the same way in print. Or at least in title fonts.) It grew out of development on Bloodlines; I had toyed with other more exotic wildlife, including late Permian gorgonopsids and stuff to replace my mammoths and saber-tooths. Luckily, I realized fairly quickly that I was indulging an esoteric interest that only I had, and didn't pursue it for long, but a semi-desert with exotic races, including one with red skin, and exotic and dangerous wildlife, clearly reminded me of Barsoom. The Lord of the Rings is my favorite book (I count it as one book, even though obviously I know that it's three as published) but A Princess of Mars is my second favorite. I changed the geography to include some features that are actually on Mars, such as the Tarsis volcanos region an the Vallis Marinaris, got rid of the sea, turned the semi-desert into Barsoomian desert, etc. I changed the races somewhat, although superficially (and mechanically) they were still very similar. Rather than being planetouched in a D&D sense, they were bred my some ancient, alien race of slavers, who had since disappeared. This was the original meaning of the term Dark Heritage and the reason for the title; the peoples of this world were literally slaves bred like breeds of dogs or horses for particular purposes, and nobody knew exactly how or why they now had their freedom; the old masters just up and disappeared. This didn't happen just a generation or two ago, but it wasn't so long ago that it was distant and semi-legendary either; more like the order of time since the founding of America. I had also recently read Perdido Street Station, and while I'm not a huge fan of that book or Mr. Mieville's ouevre in general, some of the concepts of that "Lovecraftian steampunk" gonzo-ness were deliberately borrowed and integrated into the setting. I also borrowed a fair bit from my friend's Barsoom setting (name borrowed from Burroughs, but the setting was mostly quite different.) You can read his stuff here and here to see what I was specifically borrowing. This is where I got into the idea, that I entertained for years, of a kind of picaresque immediately post-Medieval Spanish kind of flair and a Mediterranean vibe in general for some of the early settings I did.

By late 2004 or 2005, I briefly resurrected a very old homebrew concept I'd had about layers of floating islands of a shattered world replacing the Mars geography, and I roped this into Dark Heritage, making Mk. II a reality. I actually ran a decent-length mini-campaign in this version of the setting. I had dabbled with some online gaming on Mk. I, but it never really got off the ground. This time, I ran it for my regular gaming group that I had at the time. Interestingly, I tired fairly quickly of the floating islands idea, but because I was running the game, it was "petrified" in place for longer than I'd have liked. But I was already rethinking that idea, and rethinking the breeder-slavers idea too, so after that game came to an end, I dived into reinventing the setting again as Mk. III. This would have been around 2007, I think. I was heavily influenced or inspired this time around by having read Victor Mair and J. P. Mallory's book on the Tarim Mummies, and my geography was loosely similar to the Tarim and Junggar basins, with a kind of Leng-like Tibet below that, and a kinda sorta Imperial China off stage to the east, but exerting lots of influence on the region. Which was made up of oasis city-states along a kinda sorta eastern Silk Road, I suppose. By this time, I'd discovered Wikispaces, and I used it extensively to develop this setting, but I got kind of sidetracked into developing increasingly esoteric cultural details; after a while, even I started thinking that they were weird and what was I doing? I had, however come up with a novel outline (for a novel I never wrote, of course) and I was happy with other aspects of the setting. I didn't know for sure what to do with it, though, as I was increasingly getting called to do a few other things that had a less esoteric vibe and more familiar vibe for the D&D players in my group—which was now expanded with some new additions that were less willing to play around in outre settings.

So Dark Heritage of any mark took a back seat for a time while I developed some other stuff on the side. First, I created another D&D-like setting. I couldn't think what to call it, and somehow I ended up going with Leng Calling. I had a Wikispaces for that too (it was free, so I created tons of wikispaces once upon a time). The concept here was a huge world—like Jupiter sized, but less dense so that the surface area was huge but the gravity was familiar. This was mostly just so I had a big enough tapestry to do whatever I could concievably want to do later. My idea was that I'd do some development here and write D&D-like "fan fiction" short stories set in this Leng Calling setting. (The name is a bit of an in-joke; I doubt many people remember Falco's minor hit "Vienna Calling" anymore these days. If you do, I'm impressed by your knowledge of 80s pop culture trivia.) I had a few character sketches, and the beginnings of some plot outlines, but I never actually wrote much here. I reskinned some of my Dark Heritage nations, put them around a Mediterranean-like sea, and went to town developing. I created a number of other new elements, like a hobgoblin nation, and some others. Realizing that I was often utilizing and reskinning elements that I'd developed in another context, I created another wikispaces, which I called Modular DND Setting. It wasn't actually meant initially to be a setting, but rather modular elements that could be dropped into any other homebrew I was tinkering with as needed. The initial modules were Kurushat, the hobgoblin nation, Tarush Noptii, the vampire-ruled pseudo-Transylvania nation, and Baal Hamazi, a nation of tieflings.

While not officially retired, Leng Calling kind of ran out of steam when I was asked by my gaming group to run for them. Utilizing the same geographical concept, albeit a bit simplified, and adding more new elements, including some of my incipient modular elements, I called it Pirates of the Mezzovian Main. This was a rather successful, if I don't say so myself, little mini-campaign that ran for a few months with my group, and provided a number of very memorable moments that I still look back on fondly. Although at the time, I felt like I was compromising my vision by making this seafaring D&D game and that it couldn't possibly be anything other than something I did on the side, I found that I liked the idea of pirates a lot still (this was 2008-9. I'd always liked pirates, of course—Captain Blood was one of my favorite old movies and favorite old novels since I was a much younger kid. But the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were still kind of fresh, which reminded me that I needed to like pirates. Plus, Green Ronin had put out their Freeport book by then, and Privateer Press and finally released Five Fingers, my other favorite published setting element. Pirates were front and center of my consciousness at the time.) I started thinking about how I could incorporate seafaring pirates in Dark Heritage, which was obviously a problem, because the development had all been set in a desert to date. Borrowing again from planetary romance or space opera, I envisioned something maybe like Leigh Brackett's Mars with drying seas and decadent, picaresque cities on the edges that continually had to migrate to keep up with the retreating shorelines over the years. But by the time I finished running Pirates, I decided that I should get rid of the desert conceit and just redo the geography altogether to more closely resemble Leng Calling and Pirates of the Mezzovian Main. I also decided not to try too hard to explain all kinds of deep time, pseudo-scientific origins for stuff like I had previously been prone to do, and just grabbed a handful of non-traditional D&D races that I liked and threw them in after giving them a once-over and a new name. (I was probably again inspired a bit by Freeport's inclusion of fire genasi lookalikes and the recently released 4th edition's Bael Turath; although I had my own modular campaign elements based loosely on Bael Turath and a concept in the web enhancement for Open Graves for a vampire-led country already). By sometime around 2010-2011, this had metastasized into a full blown major revision of Dark Heritage and Mk. IV was born.

I went back to my original idea from all the way back in Bloodlines of wanting to have 1) totally different magic, and 2) a totally different spread of races, and like Bloodlines, the alternative versions I'd come up with for tieflings and fire genasi (now kemlings and jann in my setting, and slightly different, although conceptually very similar) as well as "aasimar" (nephilim) and shifters from Eberron (or Tharn from Iron Kingdoms if I wanted to really savage up the vibe of them); all with new names and backstories, were put into a geography that was more or less a slight redrawing of Leng Calling or Pirates of the Mezzovian Main (including the Mezzovian Sea) and other modular elements tacked on where they could fit. The modular elements were, by this point, not really being kept as separate modules so much as that I was seeing continuity between them and a shared geography. This didn't really coalesce completely until Mk. IV, but by that point almost everything that I'd worked on (at least that I've mentioned in this post) had all been gobbled up and become part of Mk. IV. Bloodlines was in there, Pirates, Leng Calling, the Modular stuff, and of course all previous versions of Dark Heritage itself had contributed. Mk. IV had a wikispaces for a time, but that went away when Wikispaces became not-free anymore, but most of the development that didn't actually happen here on this blog was cross-posted here anyway. 

Mk. IV had a deliberately kind of "Old West fantasy" approach rather than a "Medieval fantasy" approach, although that was sometimes unevenly applied, and I don't want to give the impression that it's any more faithful to the Old West than something like Forgetten Realms is to the actual Middle Ages. While this idea fascinated me for many years, I think coming to the conclusion that I'd overplayed that hand is a big part of what made me eventually tire of the Mk. IV version of the setting, and start looking for a new context in which to hang some of the elements that I was most happy with from its development. It's interesting that major changes to Dark Heritage tend to coincide with other stuff I'm doing on the side that more closely resemble traditional fantasy in some way, and which keeps me from wandering too far afield. Usually by the time Dark Heritage is evolved into something a bit too esoteric and weird, some side development in something more overtly D&D-like reins it in, and I bump the Mk revision and redo the context of Dark Heritage all over again. The culprit here was probably the Cult of Undeath project. Initially meant to be a way to modify a Pathfinder adventure path into something that I'd be more likely to run, it ended up being the genesis for a major revision of my system, once and for all getting rid of any possibility that I'd use actual D&D rules for anything ever again (at least, anything that I'm running. I could concievably play in someone else's D&D game. Although I don't know any rules more recently printed than 2007 or so.) I needed to redo the setting a bit too, because I didn't want this project to be actually dependent on Paizo, even though it was kinda sorta an adaptation of their stuff. Tarush Noptii, my vampire slash ancient Egypt except not in the desert kingdom was a decent enough starting point to be a stand-in for Ustalav. I renamed it to Timischburg to get a more overtly Transylvanian vibe and toned down any ancient Egypt stuff in the setting, and went to town. Of course, I started getting really enamored of this, and decided to give Timischburg some context. New kingdoms nearby started popping up. Some of them were simple calques of real-life cultures of the past, kind of like the Hyborian model. Some of them were other things that I'd developed before. As I spent more time on this, I found the somewhat more traditionalist (but not too much more traditionalist) approach that it had better than I was liking what I was doing on Mk. IV. That's usually a good sign that it's time to revise Dark Heritage again, and that I'd wandered too far afield again, getting carried away and spiraling into territory that was out in the weeds. It took me a while to figure out exactly how to merge the Cult of Undeath expanded setting and Dark•Heritage, and I tried a bunch of stuff with it before finally kind of figuring it out. 

Anyway, every few years, I think it's good to do a retrospective and remind myself of how I got to where I am and evaluate that crap. I'd actually spent the better part of two years not super interested in fantasy RPG worldbuilding, as I was caught up in other hobbies that were waxing to fantasy RPG waning. My blog was initially launched to talk about, specifically, fantasy RPG roleplaying, but let's be honest; it's little more than my "Dear Diary" online nowadays, where I talk more about hobbies than anything else, but I still talk about... anything else too, when I feel like it.

Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark

In reality, the "vs" referenced in the post title is merely a semantic one. I stumbled across this YouTube video, and the points that he makes are among many that I've made under a different label; how to do horror in RPGs, how to make dark fantasy, how to make "sword & sanity", etc. He calls it how to "grimdark" up your D&D game. I present it here for your edification, if you don't already watch this channel. It's pretty good stuff. He's probably a much better presenter than me (his hair is better than mine, and the tie and vest that he normally wears; good presentation, bro! I also have a tendency to struggle to describe what I'm talking about without wandering into tangents, getting overly rambly and repeating myself. I think his video is probably better than anything I could do on the same topic, even if I talk about most of the same points.

I'll make a list of the points, and my own commentary on them.

1. Use human opponents whenever possible. I'd add wild animals to the list. Keep our monsters closer to the vest, and use them more sparingly. My more detailed exegesis on this topic is here, from more than ten years ago now: https://dark-fantasy-x.blogspot.com/2010/11/making-monsters-scary.html Neither that nor this video really talk about how humanocentrism in your settings grounds it much better for "grimdark" or "dark fantasy" by subtlely influencing how your players see the world than one that's crawling with monsters and even widespread demihumans, for that matter, but it does. I think it's probably a question of heightened contrast.
2. Never use monsters straight out of the monster manual. I have a weird relationship with the monster manuals; I do prefer to, as he also says, reskin a monster or simply make it more difficult to identify if you have the kind of players who know all of the monsters and see identifying them to tactical challenges. But I also have always loved the monster manuals, and I'd never go so far as to say never use monsters straight out of it. Luckily, because I love monster manuals, I also have a lot of alternative monster manuals. The two Monsternomicon's from the 3e era are probably my favorites. This gives me a deeper well to dip into, of course. Anyway, my post linked above also addresses this idea.
3. Humanize the adversaries... including the monsters. This is one that I'm a bit more ambivalent on. I can see it's advantages, but I don't always do it, or see it as necessary except in some cases. Especially in the case of cosmic horror, this has actually caused stuff to fall flat; keep your monsters strange and unknowable, not humanized!
4. Make your NPCs morally gray or give them a flaw. This is part of the skulduggery vibe that I always tend to revert to, but this can be overdone quite easily if you're not careful! Players need to have NPCs that they can trust. At least some of the NPCs. Maybe they don't trust that the NPC has their best interest at heart, but there need to be some NPCs that they can at least trust what his predicted behavior will be most of the time. And if everyone is gray, you end up with a sludge of a world; grayscale is fine, but without some contrast, the dark in grimdark isn't going to be very impactful, so you need to have some pretty light gray, if not actual white, here and there too. Many times the flaw doesn't have to be a moral one, of course, as well. That isn't to imply that I disagree with this advice, of course. I agree with it completely. I just caution against binary thinking and doing it all of the time with every NPC.
5. The PCs themselves have to be vulnerable. True, very true. Plot armor ruins any game, in my opinion, but it especially ruins dark fantasy or grimdark games. My homebrew system has also eliminated much of the healing magic, as he recommends (although its replaced it with what I flippantly call "action movie healing" to faciliate play without long delays or gaps.) I can't imagine playing without taking that step. Even if you prefer PC continuity to disposible PCs, and there are a lot of very good reasons for prefering that, the players have to always feel the sense of risk. If they sense that there isn't any risk, any grimdark, horror or dark fantasy vibe is instantly ruined.
6. Start the PCs with nothing. This is an interesting idea. I've never actually done this. I probably wouldn't, except as a one-off idea just to try it for ambience once or twice. But I like the idea. And the idea of keeping hit point escalation from proliferating, and maybe even allowing PCs to start without more than a couple of hit points... that's certainly an interesting perspective, and I'm obviously familiar with it, but I doubt I'd be interested in that either.
7. Magic is rare and dangerous. Yep, yep, yep. I redid the entire magic system for my "alt.D&D" system to be overtly Lovecraftian in its mechanics (including sanity loss) rather than "Vancian" precisely for this reason. (Don't get me started on whether or not D&D magic is ever or ever has been actually Vancian. Maybe another time.) Magic-users should never be modeled, even loosely, on Gandalf or Merlin. The Ten Who Were Taken is a much better source for how to see them.
8. Travel is dangerous and should never be taken for granted. By the same token, I think giving thought to making overland trips harrowing (and interesting) is much better than "random encounters." Even if you use the random encounter tables at some point, you should probably do it before the session starts and give some thought to how to use what you rolled up and make it fit into what's going on the game so it doesn't just feel like random "it's time for some combat." Not that there isn't a place for that, and I'm fond of quoting Raymond Chandler's advice of when in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand, and adopting that idea into fantasy. But I do prefer more planned and useful rather than simply random encounters, because in reality the latter is kind of stalling because you don't know what else to do at that moment. Any encounter is an opportunity to reinforce the tone and mood, and should be taken advantage of accordingly. In addition to that, make travel dangerous for other reasons besides just bandits and monsters and wild animals. You ever been out overland in a terrible storm? I have. It's scary, especially if you're up in the mountains with sleet, lighting strikes hitting peaks all around you, and strong winds nearly blowing you off of your feet. You ever tried to figure out how to cross a rushing river that's running high because of recent rains without a bridge or reliable ford? Anyway, yeah—this should be a given. Travel should be a big deal, unless for reasons of pacing you want to do the Indiana Jones red-line across the overland map and fast forward to the next destination. Which, again, should be done to service the tone, the atmosphere and the mood; especially if you've got a tense, break-neck pace going on.
9. No fairytale endings. I dunno. Is The Lord of the Rings a fairytale ending? Maybe, but everything was also bittersweet for everyone, even Frodo and Aragorn (and Arwen) and others. (And nobody calls The Lord of the Rings a grimdark book; although in many ways it is more so than people give it credit for.) This is a good idea, but it can also be overdone too. You want to give the impression that the world is dark and somewhat grim, but you don't want to give the impression that you're just screwing over your players all the time for no reason other than to mess with them. It's a fine line, but you have to know your players to land on the right side of it. Which, leads to the last point...
10. Don't overdo it. This is pretty key, and he says everything on it that needs to be said. Do enough of this kind of tone and attitude stuff, but don't do too much. How much is enough? Depends on the group. This is exactly why one of the most crucial GM skills, that rarely gets mentioned, but is, in my opinion, the most important one, is knowing how to read the table and react quickly accordingly. How do you learn that skill? Some people do it naturally more easily than others, but mostly it comes with practice and keeping an eye open for social cues.

Eberron Remixed vs Dark•Heritage 2

I've spent a fair bit of time the last few days fleshing out the content of my Eberron Remixed wiki page. Much of that is material that I otherwise might have explored on my blog, and I will likely cross-post a good deal of it later once things slow down just a bit. But one thing that I noticed; while going through the mechanics, I thought of a few minor updates that I will almost certainly get around to adding to my Dark•Heritage 2 document, changing the revision from 2.4.1 to 2.5. The changes aren't huge, but they did kind of beg themselves and when I thought of them, I kind of wish that I had thought of them earlier.

The first one is that I realized that an important element of adventuring had been left off; how to deal with suffocating and drowning! I've added a section for that in the Other Hazards part of adventuring.

I also added a new twist to the spellcasting rules for a natural 1 where there is a risk of a permanent decrease of 1 to your Sanity score when you fail a roll badly. You get another chance to not lose the Sanity; i.e., you have to fail a second check to have your Sanity score permanently reduced, but still—it kinda seemed obvious. 

And I modified the Shadow Sword class, making it pretty much exactly the same as the Jedi class that I had originally based it on; i.e., instead of a sneaky minor ability, I gave it a modest suite of psionic powers heavily influenced by the stuff you see Jedi do in the movies. Viola! Although based on the Jedi, it's kind of a combination of the soulknife and the psion in terms of its role in the game, and the only way to bring psionics in at all.

Anyway, I recommend you again to my Eberron Remixed site if you have any interest in that project, because I'm advancing material faster there than here, although I will eventually get around to crossposting my Remixed discussions here too. I'm not 100% sure which of all of these changes will for sure make it to Dark•Heritage 2.5, but probably all of them except the change to the Shadow Sword. And I'm considering even that.

Funny how activity in one area seems to always cross-polinate in another for me. 

History of m20

I was poking around a bit while waiting for roadside assistance to come unlock my daughter's car so the keys could get picked up out of the passenger seat (long story and not very interesting; don't ask) yesterday, and re-read some of my older blog posts.  I thought one was ripe for some updating, which explained my history (at the time) of using m20.  Let me start with the ordered list that I originally had and then add some new line items at the bottom.

1. I'd been running around house-ruling d20 Modern and D&D 3.5 to be used with my DARK•HERITAGE setting for years.  I'd also played with other systems, but never really settled on anything.  Until...
2. In early 2013 I belatedly discovered the Microlite system (amazingly, by then it had already been around for almost 7 years!)
3. In May of 2013, I created my own adaptation of m20 for use with DARK•HERITAGE.  I also took the two existing Star Wars iterations of m20, combined them into a single one, and added my own elements.  I think this was a great adaptation of the m20 rules to an existing setting that works well with the premise of an old-fashioned game like m20 anyway.  Even if it's just me saying so.
4. These systems underwent periodic revision and fixing of minor elements for some time.  Most of these changes were minor, but they didn't really completely settle down until 2015, at which point both the Star Wars m20 and DARK•HERITAGE m20 were considered complete.
5. Also in 2015, I was confronted with the possibility of needing to pick up where our group had left off; in a campaign that was faltering.  We ended up doing something else (Call of Cthulhu—a campaign that also ended up faltering, as it happens.)  I decided to start the CULT OF UNDEATH project; a thorough pruning and adaptation of Paizo's Carrion Crown adventure path.  For whatever reason, I decided to adapt m20 to do this.  This was the genesis of the m20 CULT OF UNDEATH game; I basically took the DARK•HERITAGE game and replaced the DARK•HERITAGE races with some that more closely resemble standard D&D.  I could, of course, simply have used an existing m20 D&D version, including the original 2006 m20, or maybe the Purest Essence.  But, for whatever reason, I wanted to do my own thing.  
6. In June of 2016, I decided to expand the CULT OF UNDEATH system into a full-blown "My D&D"—i.e., my own take on what I think the D&D system should look like to best emulate my ideal game of it.  This became, of course, FANTASY HACK.
7. By this time, The Force Awakens is already out and of course it's disappointing, although not nearly as much so as The Last Jedi was going to be.  About a quarter into 2016, I started to think that my STAR WARS REVISITED was played out.  I was very happy with the system, but less happy than I hoped to be with the setting, because it was irrevocably tied to an IP that I was more and more unhappy with.  Although this predates CULT OF UNDEATH, I did some early exploration of what it would mean to turn STAR WARS REMIXED into AD ASTRA in April of 2016, that really wasn't a full blown initiative yet, and it wasn't until March of 2017 that I really released AD ASTRA as its own stand-alone game; although by this time, with a setting that was off to a good start.
8. Almost a year ago, I had really started getting excited about developing the CULT OF UNDEATH setting more (under the draft name of TIMISCHBURG), but as I was doing so, I found I was turning repeatedly to ideas that were in DARK•HERITAGE; many of which had actually been cribbed from some other setting I'd developed before being put into DARK•HERITAGE itself.  When it became clear that the two settings were converging, I decided to make it official and bump Dark•Heritage from it's current version 4 to DH5; still a substantially similar setting in many respects, but with a substantially altered geography and more a focus on Medieval familiar pseudo-British nations rather than the pseudo-Renaissance Spanish nations that were more the protagonist race of DH4.
9. With substantial updates to both settings, I had a look at all three rulesets and harmonized and updated all of them a small amount.  This led to other ideas, and the updates were slightly more thorough than I had originally expected.  This especially applied to the two fantasy games.  I added a small section to enable FANTASY HACK in particular to serve as a fantasy Western, mostly because I'd gotten into Red Dead Redemption 2, but also because I'd had the idea of doing so a couple of years ago anyway.  It was just a small add-on appendix anyway.
10. Other than that update, though, I don't really have any additional plans for FANTASY HACK, and DARK•HERITAGE in its current format is basically the same game, except optimized for the setting (all that really means is that the monster lists differ slightly as do the player races spotlighted.  FANTASY HACK therefore is officially a "dead" although still obviously quite playable game, and the DH5 specific version of the rules is really my preferred fantasy game.  I might yet dust off FANTASY HACK sometime for a D&D game, and I've got a few random elements floating around (EBERRON REMIXED, for instance) that could be added to it, but I'd actually prefer not to and as of right now, I'm not planning to.  I have therefore two real games; DARK•HERITAGE which is fantasy and AD ASTRA which is space opera, along with their attendant settings.  Although both are 100% usable as is, I do intend to continue setting development for both; especially DARK•HERITAGE, which after the major structural change is actually less developed now than the space opera, although over the next year or so that will probably change.
11. For the heck of it, here's a picture of spaghetti western era Clint Eastwood interpreted as a fantasy character.  I could see him in the Hill Country as a fairly typical PC.  Sweet.  Onward with more development!

Anyway, stepping back, here's a copy and paste of Microlite's own description of what it is.

What is Microlite20? 

Do you remember when the gaming table was full of pizza and soda, not rulebooks, miniatures and dungeon tiles? Do you yearn for a role-playing game that doesn’t require weight training to carry all the books? Do you want to be able to hold all the rules in your head - or in your back pocket? And do you still want to use all those lovely monsters, adventures and game worlds too? So do we!! 

--  Greywulf 

Microlite20 is a minimalist role-playing game designed to be usable with the majority of the OGL/d20 supplements, rules and adventures with little or no advance preparation. The basic rules for character generation, combat, magic and level advancement take up a single sheet of paper, meaning it is perfect for introducing role-playing to new players, gaming oneshot adventures or tailoring into your own game system. 

History of Microlite20  

Microlite20 was designed by Robin V. Stacey (aka Greywulf) in 2006. The purpose of the rules were to strip the OGL/D20 system down to its bare minimum so that the world’s most popular fantasy system could be played quickly and without thousands of pages of rules, but still be usable with all the adventures, campaign settings, and supplements that had been published for the 3.x edition of the world’s most popular fantasy RPG. 

Amazing, one page of basic rules (coupled with the Fantasy SRD for spells and monsters) really did allow for fast-playing games with just about every adventure and supplement published for the 3.x edition. 

Microlite20 was an immediate hit with players who liked the 3.x edition of the world’s most popular fantasy RPG but did not like the complex and time-consuming (both to GM for and to play out combats) beast it had become. Microlite20 was a rules-light way to play that brought fun back to many game tables. 

The Microlite20 rules were entirely open game content. Only the names “Microlite20” and “Robin V. Stacey” were listed as product identity. Having the entire system open game content sparked a flurry of gamer creativity. Simple variant rules and basic expansions came first – for example, lists of limited spells and monsters so Microlite20 could be played without lugging the huge SRD around. However, customized rule sets and complete games based on Microlite20 soon followed.

As an interesting aside, I've been looking over the big Microlite Compendium, and although there are tons of alternate and variant m20 games included, almost none of them bothered to include anything whatsoever to explain what they are, what they're doing differently, or why you should look at them instead of just basic Microlite20.  Even the ones that included an Introduction just copied and pasted the introductory text to Microlite20.  Sigh. 

More thoughts on speed stat

Well, with a minimum of changes, (some of it fixing grammar and clarity more than actually changing anything) I've made sure that my chase rules are sufficiently functional in print right now today.  The way that this works is this:

• I made sure that the monster section of the rulebook refers to using the monsters' HD for all skill stats required if any checks are made.  It does.  It did already, actually, but I had to double check that that was clearly integrated.
• Second, I slightly modified the description of the chase rules to say that +10 for being mounted was a point of reference based on a standard horse.
• Third, I added another sentence in the chase rules suggesting that GMs can use that point of reference to come up with other bonuses to the chase check as required to account for monster speed.

This is a stop-gap, though.  It works just fine, but realistically, if I think chase scenes are going to be a significant portion of the game, then monsters should have a chase bonus score, or speed stat, or something like that.  For a typical D&D-like game, chase scenes are relatively uncommon, so that's probably OK, and having the GM decide when one comes up if there's a bonus to one party, and what it is, is perfectly fine.  It can be done on the fly, without any significant workload or stress on the GM's part.

For Western Hack, and for any other game where being mounted, and running around chasing each other is likely to happen more frequently, a bonus for every monster is probably required.  And honestly; just because I don't need one for Fantasy Hack or Dark•Heritage 2 as it is, that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be a nice addition to actually have a chase bonus score for every monster, actually.  It doesn't add any significant rules bloat, and if anything, maybe it encourages a different type of action scene to happen more often.  Sure, sure—everyone loves combat, but chases are just as common in action movies as fights for a reason; they're equally exciting!

But that means I need to go through both rules sets making sure that I add the same speed bonus or chase bonus (or speed category, or whatever it is that I end up settling on; probably an actual numeric score) is the same for all monsters which are in both sets, which is most of them.  Sigh.  That sounds a little bit tedious, so don't hold your breath that I'm going to hurry up and do it in the next day or two.

Updated Chase Rules (Fantasy Hack and Dark•Heritage 2.1) BETA

I'm a little concerned, especially as I've now got the monster list in two places, that I don't want to rewrite both of them with a new stat for each monster, and then make sure that I've replicated the entire list properly between the two games (I'm actually pretty sure that a handful of monsters aren't on both lists for various reasons, so I'd have to go through them line item by line item to figure out which.)  Plus, I don't really want to add a new stat.  I may end up going that way before I'm done, but I want this to first be a modular add-on that doesn't require any actual changes to the rules as written before it gets integrated into the main rules.  Future state probably has it integrated in, however.

Chase rules in my m20 games are pretty straightforward... an "action scene" normally means combat, but if one party elects to try to run away, he makes a Athletics + DEX check vs his opponent, and if he wins, he gets to run without taking a hit (if he loses, he still runs, but the opponent gets a free attack on him first.  Then, each round of chasing, they continue to make opposed Athletics + DEX checks.  In most situations, if one of the two wins the check by 10 or more, then he has won the chase; i.e., if he's the one running away, he manages to get away (unless circumstances preclude this, i.e., a chase across a featureless open prairie, or something; if the one chasing wins, the scene becomes a combat scene again, and the guy running will have to attempt to run away all over again.)  Either way, five rounds into this type of scene, you start to have to make DC 15 Athletics + DEX checks to avoid becoming fatigues at having a negative modifier (-5 to the chase; -2 to any subsequent combat, until the action scene is over and it resets.)

You can use the GM Ruling system to come up with modifiers based on player actions, i.e. trying to jump over something, knock over obstacles, etc. to hinder pursuit, or whatever.  And the rules refer to a flat +10 bonus to any participant in a chase that is mounted.  But this defaults to being mounted on a horse; not all animals would be equally fast.  And besides, mounted opponents might want to chase other monsters, or be chased by them.  See the terror bird entry earlier today, for example; they can chase you across the savanna, and they can even be mounts, sometimes.

So how do I see this playing out?  Monsters don't even have an Athletics score, because monsters don't have skill scores (the idea is that GMs, if they need one, can whip one up on the fly.  I have a few options:

1. Give all monsters skill scores.  Faster monsters can be assumed to have a high Athletics score.
2. Change the chase rules to have a Speed score or speed factor rather than an Athletics + DEX check.  
3. Give each monster a generic speed rating, which creates a bonus or penalty to chase results.  This is similar to the horse +10 mentioned in the basic rules, but it would be a bit more nuances; horses might have different ratings, and other animals might have additional modifiers.  I'd probably go with broad categories rather than discrete numbers; something like:
1. Very slow: penalty of -5 to -10 Anything slower than this automatically loses chase checks
2. Slow: penalty of -2 to -4
3. Average: no penalty, but for a bit of minor variation, I suppose you could give them a range of -1 to +1.
4. Fast: +2 to +4
5. Very fast: +5 to +10
6. Extremely fast: Anything over +10

I probably like the last option best, and it's also easiest to implement without changing the way the game works too much.  GMs would still have to assign a speed to any monster, but I'd eventually update the file to include a chase modifier for all of them, because honestly, I probably should have from the get-go.  But with those categories, you'd have a benchmark to use when assigning chase scores.

This also works well for difficult assessments.  Is a bear a fast animal, for instance?  The general consensus is that no, not really, but it can rush pretty darn fast over a short space.  If you confronted a grizzly in the wild and tried to run away from it, it would probably have a hefty bonus to the chase check result for the first few rounds, but if it didn't catch you in 3-4 rounds, it would quit and let you just go.  Well, this way I don't have to try and portray that in the monster profile; the GM just rules it as such.

Dark•Heritage 2.0

As one may imagine, my week is about to get interestingly different than most weeks; I'll be celebrating a slightly extra lengthy Thanksgiving holiday starting... later today, actually, is when it will start.  While one would think that the extra free time would make it easier for me to make blog updates, I don't actually know that just because I'm spending no time at work over a 5-day weekend means that I'll actually have extra free time, or that if I do, I won't have other alternatives to fill it with besides blog updates.  So, it's likely that this will be my last post until Monday sometime.  So, I'd better make it count for something other than marking time.

First off, I've adapted the changes that I've been talking about, and which have been surging, evolving, and percolating for a number of months into Dark•Heritage 2.0.  This is the official update to the ruleset for Dark•Heritage, and it much more closely matches the format that I'd developed for Fantasy Hack after finishing Dark•Heritage version 1.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GDpZaQrEeZ6i8ggHAIep92ucgdrmEfxu/view?usp=sharing

If you've already got the first Dark•Heritage, or Fantasy Hack either one, you'll find a very strong sense of deja vu.  Which is OK.  Although I've spent a lot of time on these rules and whatnot, I don't honestly see Dark•Heritage as primarily a setting for roleplaying, although obviously it could be, since I have a roleplaying game of my own design (well, kitbashed, at least) to go with it.  No, rather I see it as the setting for fantasy stories that I just haven't told yet.  Which I've been meaning to get around to telling for a long time now. 

Sigh.

When I come back, I'll maybe talk briefly about some movies I've seen over the break, hiking plans, and plans for the further developments of Western Hack, Swashbuckling Hack, and DH5.

Dark•Heritage and Timischburg

OK, yeah.  I'm going to do it.  Officially, DARK•HERITAGE (Mk. V) and TIMISCHBURG are being merged.  Because the DARK•HERITAGE tag on this blog refers to material developed for Mk. IV, I'm going to retire the TIMISCHBURG tag and the DARK•HERITAGE tag, and in common usage in posts (and to prevent me from having to format the text all the time, I'm probably going to just call it DH5 as a shorthand. (With a corresponding DH5 tag on the tags field.) That is the reference to the actual setting, though—when referring to the country of Timischburg within the setting of TIMISCHBURG, I'm just going to type Timischburg, of course.  And yes, I will (probably shortly) draw up a draft map.  And I already created a Google site for it (although there's not much, if anything, there yet.)  I used the Timischburg name, because although outdated, I like the sound it it better than DH5 when read, but DH5 is more accurate and useful, really.  Oh, well.  By the time I thought of using that, I'd already created the site anyway.

So, what is necessary to pull this off?  Other than rearranging the already admittedly rather sketchy geography to make the two settings fit together, I mean, which is obvious?  The biggest problem is that Timischburg was meant to be a kind of FANTASY HACK (FH) alternative to the Grand Duchy of Karameikos; i.e., if FH is my version of D&D, then TIMISCHBURG was my version of a default setting for it, using all of the elements of FH.  DH4 as a setting was, however, deliberately not too close to D&D in terms of assumptions about how magic worked, what races existed, etc.  If D&D is fantasy based loosely on a Medieval Europe, then DH4 was fantasy based loosely on the Old West and the Golden Age of Piracy.  So, by merging, am I losing the ties to a D&D-like setting, or am I losing the specific flavor of DH4?

Actually, the question isn't quite as relevant as it seems because DH5 is actually more "Dark Ages Europe creates Eastern Seaboard colonies in a planetary romance alternative to "America" some 500-600 years earlier than it actually does and then gets cut off."   DH5 just has a different flavor then DH4 or D&D either one, although not so different that much of the material can't still be used more or less as is (or was) unless I specifically decide that I want it to change and evolve. I guess what I really mean, though, is "is there a place for elfs and dwarfs and whatnot in DH5? Let's go through all of the races of FH and DH4 and see how they line up with DH5, shall we?

FH Core Races

• Human—naturally, humans are still integral to both settings.
• Halfling—I envision that the halflings could linger in DH5 in quiet little hamlets here and there mostly in the Six Colonist nations and Carlovingia if you really wanted to use them, but I would personally completely ignore them and for all intents and purposes they wouldn't exist.  Although, I think that I may well use the stats to represent the native WHG remnants throughout the Eastern Seaboard.
• Orc—I'm going to have orcs in Gunaakt, which will carry forward from TIMISCHBURG to DH5.  Seeing them outside of their homeland would be very unusual, though.
• Elf—secluded and isolationist enclaves of elfs could exist, mostly if you really decide for whatever reason that you need them.  But I wouldn't utilize them for anything except maybe as villains.
• Dwarf—these would be more like semi-legendary "spirits" of the mountains, and could be found there if you needed them, but again, I wouldn't use them myself.
• Cursed—the Hyperboreans of Lomar are Cursed.

So, of the core races, three—elf, dwarf and halfling have places that they could exist if you wanted them to, but I'm going to assume going forward that they don't, and I won't treat them at all except (maybe) a brief discussion down the line about where they could go if you wanted to use them.  The human, orc and cursed, however, most definitely have prominent places in the setting.

FH Optional Races

• Goblin—I can see using them as a variant phenotype of orc; i.e., as in Tolkien, the Snagas and the Uruks coexist in the same country.
• Jann—are going to be a native race of the planet of New Earth.
• Kemlings—same as jann.
• Nephilim—should be very rare; I haven't yet decided if there's a "homeland" for these guys, or if they're just isolated individuals here and there yet.
• Wose—same as jann and kemling.

Keep in mind that most of those races are DH4 races (except goblin.)  Granted, I've changed the names around just a little bit, and "shifters" and Neanderthals have been combined into the wose race.

All in all, I'd say that the racial picture looks more like DH4 than FH, although there are options to add the D&D-like FH races in if you really must.  In general, because New Earth is kind of Mongo-like in some ways, people are much less phased by exotic people in general, so if you really wanted to introduce an elf or a orc player characters, you could assume that people are curious, but not necessarily overly so about his presence anywhere that you go.

The race builder rules, then, could also be used, although I wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you deliberately want a weird traveling circus approach to your PC party.  Again; what the setting will support as an RPG construct doesn't necessarily represent the setting in it's "Platonic" form, as it would or could be used in fiction.

What else was expanded when I moved from DH4 to FH?  I added a lot more spells, but the magic system is still more or less as is.  I do have flintlock and whatnot firearms in DH4, of course, but I'm not sure if I'll use them as native weapons that have dispersed to the Colonists or not yet.  I added a lot of new monsters, many of them very traditional monsters (although sometimes with new names); in fact, much more traditional than D&D's wont, quite honestly.  If there isn't a folklore or mythology source for the monster (or one of the Lovecraftian monsters, which really made the core of what I was doing from the get-go) or they aren't a real or prehistoric animal of some kind, then it's not likely that I have them.

But, again, given that New Earth is as much like Mongo in terms of tone, you can keep all of the FH additions without any problem, although the chances of any particular line item making an appearance is not necessarily high.  But how true is that for D&D anyway, amirite?  And in unusual circumstances, a monster race could be a protagonist character of some kind or another; a thurse as Chewbacca, for example, or an imp daemon as someone's familiar, etc.

In general, I'd suggest that that's another thing that changes a fair bit.  While DH4 was started to have a dark fantasy swashbuckling tone, the dark/horror elements are somewhat muted in DH5 in comparison, and it instead is a sword & sorcery meets planetary romance with some elements of horror still lingering here and there.

Timischburg and Dark•Heritage

http://darkheritage.blogspot.com/2018/10/do-i-really-want-timischburg-map.html

I was thinking a few days ago of not even bothering with a TIMISCHBURG map.  I'm now thinking of something even more radical (although if I do this, I'll almost certainly eventually put a map together after all.)  What if I combine TIMISCHBURG and DARK•HERITAGE, Mk. V, where I am right now?  First off; what would be the advantages of doing something like this?

Well, first, both settings are at a stage of relative non-development.  TIMISCHBURG has been developed in one country only, with a few handwavey attempts to describe what else is out there in the setting beyond that country.  DARK•HERITAGE is, if anything, even less developed in its current Mk. V version; it's got a bit of development on the East Coast and very handwavey expressions of what else is out there.  Since both focus on different areas and are handwavey about everything else, it would hardly be difficult to combine them.

It also gives me the benefit that I can utilize more of what I developed in DARK•HERITAGE Mk. IV than I can currently.  Because the country Timischburg is the evolution of Tarush Noptii, I can fit it in.  I was already hoping to figure out where to use Terassa, although it would be "demoted" from protagonist country to alternate, southern "New Spain".  In step the old balshatoi, who were renamed Kozaky and renamed again Scramasaxons; none of which really hit it off quite right to me.  They are now the new protagonist nations, and they're actually refugees or Crusaders, or whatever you want to call them, from Earth, come to the New World across a mystical bridge or portal a hundred (or so) years ago, which would have been pretty much the time of Richard I The Lionheart.  This gives me a kind of Ivanhoe and Robin Hood vibe to my pseudo Saxon, Celtic, etc. nations which make up the protagonist countries.

The disadvantages of course being that TIMISCHBURG was created specifically to be a more D&D-like setting than DARK•HERITAGE was ever supposed to be.  The former is supposed to have room for elfs and dwarfs and orcs and whatnot, while the latter doesn't really.  Of course, this may be a bit of a moot point, as I've found that I don't really like the D&D elements enough to try very hard to preserve them, and even as TIMISCHBURG has continued to develop, I've completely ignored them.

Although I'm leaning heavily towards doing this, and drawing up a map showing my nations, such as they are, and Weird Tales-ing it all up a fair bit to be more Hyborian Age and Hyperborea and whatnot, I need to give it some more thought before I decide for sure.  But I am leaning heavily towards doing it.

If so, how would I integrate stuff, and what would I integrate exactly?

• My protagonist northern European nations would still be on an ersatz east coast, mostly.
• The Six Colonist Nations: Westry (English, ruled by Normans), the Archenlands (English, ruled by Anglo-Saxons), Brochwel (Welsh and Cornish), Dun Nechtain (Scottish), Trondmark (a kind of hybrid of English, Scottish and Viking), and Vingulfold (actual Viking.)
• Immediately to the south of that is Timischburg.  Their immediate source is unclear, but they claim to have come from the Holy Roman Empire, or at least the aristocracy does, although no record of them having left the Holy Roman Empire in the past is known.
• To the immediate west of them would be frontier mountain ranges not unlike the Appalachians geographically, although more like the Rockies or the Alps physically.  These are mostly uninhabited, but protagonist settlers and homesteaders are moving into the area, and some lingering Wendaks (WHG type natives) still lurk about too.
• To the immediate west of that is the Prairie-Sea.  Untash, Haltash and Tazitta tribes roam here, as a kind of analog of Comanches (the first), Scythians (the second) and Huns (the latter) in the vague way that the Aesir and Vanir of Howard's Hyborian Age were Vikings.
• North of the Prairie-Sea is the vast Cerenarean Sea; actually kind of all of the Great Lakes rolled up into one super-great lake.  North of that is mostly boreal forest, inhabited by savage relatives of the Wendaks and the Lomar.  The latter are descendants of old Hyperboreans; pale and degenerate, and fleeing the advances of the savage Inutos even further north.  
• The eastern coast between the Cerenarean Sea and the ocean (immediately north of the Six Colonists) is home to the Carlovingians, who claim to be the descendants of old Franks who came several centuries before the Six Colonists arrived.  Quite honestly, the origin of these guys is mysterious, and scholars among the Six Colonists find it very curious to have found them at all.
• West of that are the foothills of the Massive Mountains, and in these foothills is where Baal Hamazi still lies.  It's now more a region than a polity.
• South of the Prairie-Sea is the Hill Country; another settlement of homesteaders and pioneers and others who chafe for whatever reason under the governments of the Six Colonists.  This is a mixture of all Colonist ethnicities, but especially Anglo-Saxon and Scottish.  It has no real central government, which is just the way the people like it.
• Southwest and West of the Hill Country is the Great Escarpment, and the High Desert above that.  The High Desert is home to the degenerate descendants of old Mu, and the High Desert still holds that name for some.  These are the red-skinned jann, more like a savage and degenerate Red Men of Barsoom in most respects than the Qazmiri of DARK•HERITAGE Mk. IV.
• South of the High Desert and Hill Country is Terassa.  The geography will be somewhat swapped; the Mezzovian Sea now being an ersatz Gulf of Mexico in most respects.  Porto Liure will still be on some analog of Hispaniola or Cuba.  Nizrekh is here as well.
• South of Terassa will be Kurushat, similar to how it is, mostly, from the older DARK•HERITAGE.  Here, they're the descendants of old Lemuria.
• If you can imagine in this ersatz New World that some part of eastern Brazil came up as a massive peninsula closing off the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea, that's where Tesculum and Gunaakt are. 

Well; now that I've done that, I feel even more confident that I'll eventually decide to actually go with this.  But still; I'm going to let it sit before I decide for sure.