New map

I’m doing more of my “blogging” as “vlogging” on Youtube. It’s still just as rambly and incoherent and more for my own benefit than for anyone else’s as my blog is, but it’s a different format, obviously, and I’m having a bit of fun doing dictation into my phone, and then adding some video and a backing track to it to make it look like a documentary slide-show, kinda. I even add grainy image manipulation and some VHS-like tracking effects. This is just for fun to make the whole thing look old and scratchy. It also covers up a lot of the crappy audio on my recording; by adding a scratchy record effect and visual cues that reinforce it, the whole thing looks like an old movie, and nobody expects old movies to sound super crisp. Frankly, I find the whole effort more fun than typing blog posts, although it’s more work and is more time-consuming. And my audio is even more rambly  than my typing; at least I can go back and easily edit typing!

In any case, there’s a few streams of things that I want to update and work on in the next relatively little bit:

First, I didn’t end up running my game on Friday. One guy had car trouble, and wasn’t going to be available. He was bringing his fiancé. With two of my three players out, it didn’t make sense to try and do some one on one with the other guy, and I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. So first off, I’m going to try and get caught up on what I need to read to run more smoothly. I put off re-reading The Skinsaw Murders, but I want to do that so that I’m not just completely winging it without stocking my barrel—metaphorically speaking—with enough apples to get me through the session. I’m also reading a number of other things; the Power Behind the Throne Companion from the Warhammer “remix” of The Enemy Within campaign, and Manual of the Planes from 3e. I started reading that in anticipation of my business trip, because I always bring that on business trips, but it turns out that I didn’t read it at all while away. But I’ve read it some before and since the trip. (I also finished a Simon R. Green novel; I've got two more in the same omnibus to read before I can put that back on my shelf.)

Secondly, I want to flesh out the next four Cult of Undeath fronts. That shouldn’t take too long if I can just buckle down and do it. Then I can decide what the next project is; Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes, or some of the other ones that I’ve considered adding. Cult of Undeath didn’t end up being very vampire focused after all, and is only kind of in the eastern portion of Timischburg. That’s ironic to me, because years ago I invented Timischburg specifically to be the (as then conceived) Cult of Undeath setting in toto, but as the campaign has changed focus, my game and world-building efforts have changed focus, etc… well, it is what it is.

Thirdly, I have an EFX map drawn and a new DFX map. The new DFX map is actually kind of a draft, although I didn’t necessarily intend it to be when I started it. It’s a bit more Tolkien-style, and I added some more stuff on many of the edges, although they’re not very detailed. Much like how Tolkien’s map has South Gondor and Khand and Rhûn and Forodwaith, etc. on his map but they’re not anything except labels and blank land forms, that’s what I’ve got so far too. Mostly. But I do want to talk just a little bit about the new areas that I’ve added and expand on them in the next few weeks; Gunaakt—the orcling homeland which I’ve mentioned many times, as well as Hyperborea and Nizrekh, two places that I’ve also mentioned off-hand many times. I also added a new territory Porhomok, which is really meant to be, more than anything else, a place for the current crop of Nizrekhi to have come from who aren’t actual Atlanteans, but people who come to the ruins of Atlantis in the wake of its destruction. Porhomok also gives me an opportunity to develop a more tropical seafaring center; a place for classic pirate stuff, jungles, and all that; something that otherwise the Three Realms simply didn’t offer—but which I really kind of wanted to have anyway. And then finally, I have a reason on the eastern edge of the map for the ending of the coming of more people from the Old Countries; Normaund, Carlovingia, etc. Nobody else can come. There’s a major barrier that cuts off travel, which I’ve never really talked about, but now I’ve added, so what we've got is all we're going to get. No more immigrants from the Old Countries anymore.

So I have a little bit of world-building guidance on this new map. I’m actually planning on scanning both of those maps later today, and I’ll post there here when I do. Maybe I’ll even modify this post and add them then.

I’ve also got my “solo play” experience to launch, and sadly, I’m considering yet another stream, where I detail some NPCs and villains in more detail; some backstory and background. Maybe even character sheets, although that won’t be super helpful to anyone else, I don’t think. This is stuff that I want to do because even people who aren’t at all interested in my setting or my rules could still find interesting and useful. I think I'm going to start with Alys, but I want to do more "super-villains" of the setting; the Heresiarchs and more. I'd love to talk about the mind-wizards just a bit, and Jairan Neferirkare, and Hutran Kutir and more. After I figure out for sure which ones from my original list I'm actually interested in pursuing.

UPDATE: Got one of the images OK. The librarian scanning them for me screwed up the EFX map and cut it off. And of course the files arrived a pdfs that I then had to convert to an image format, which isn't quite as easy as it should be. Sigh.

Government employees. At least she was more friendly than your typical DMV lady.

Travel and MoP (and Great Beyond, Distant Worlds)

https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2024/09/1-de-octubre-nuevo-dia-de-descanso-obligatorio

Doing business with Third World countries is obligatory, because all corporate overlords care more about skimming a few more cents of profit from the activity for the shareholders (including executive salaries and bonuses, most especially) than they do about the long-term health of their customer base, their communities, or even their own organization, which ultimately they tend to find disposable. If a corporation is no longer able to provide earnings for shareholders, it's discarded and the investment is moved to someone who does. Truly, corporate America is more like ravening plagues of locusts than the responsible capitalism that we're promised in our economics classes that describe the theory.

But to that point, we have to do business with Mexico. I was scheduled to go to Mexico next week, to visit one supplier in Ciudad Juarez, across the river from El Paso, TX on Tuesday, and then another one in Ciudad Acuña, across that same border from Del Rio, TX. This meant that I was going to travel by air on Monday, be there Monday night, have a (relatively) leisurely 6 to 6½ drive across quiet country roads in west Texas on Wednesday. Maybe a little longer, because I'd stop for a leisurely lunch in Fort Davis, which wasn't too far out of my way, and do a little site-seeing in the Davis Mountains, which I haven't seen in 15-16 years or so, and then arrive in Del Rio with plenty of time. Both evenings, it'd be easy for me to spend a couple of hours or so in the hotel reading my Manual of the Planes, or whatever other books I brought with me. As noted in my last post, I have an odd habit of bringing Manual of the Planes with me on business trips, but I'm not coincidentally re-reading it right now and utilizing some of its material for setting development; especially for EFX/Realms Traveler, but maybe even somewhat for DFX here and there too. 

However, as the link above notes, Mexico is not a super predictable place. I had already made these travel plans when the government decided that October 1st is going to be a mandatory day off for all workers, with only about a week's worth of notice. Now, I will either 1) stay home until Wednesday, and just see the second supplier, without going to El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, Fort Davis or any of that at all, or 2) fly into El Paso on Tuesday instead of Monday, see the facility in Juarez much more quickly just in the morning of Wednesday, and then have a much less leisurely drive across Texas... although I'll still probably get a late lunch or early dinner in Fort Davis, and hopefully see the Davis Mountains long before it's dark, and then get into Del Rio at or around dark thirty. It's a six and a half hour drive from El Paso to Del Rio; about fifteen minutes out of my way to stop at Fort Davis, but of course, I'll need to get gas, I'll need to eat lunch/dinner, and I can't stand going out to the west and not seeing something. Seminole Canyon State Park a little outside Del Rio and on the way is probably going to be out of the question; even if it's not dark, it'll be closed. Luckily, I'll probably get back to Del Rio again for other business, but the drive from El Paso to was an unusual if not unique opportunity. I'm quite disappointed; I can still squeeze most of what I want out of the trip, including the fun stuff for me during the traveling, but it won't be as relaxed or leisurely, and I won't have as much free time to read in the evenings either. 

And then, on Thursday, I drive from Del Rio to San Antonio, see my sister briefly, and take off the next morning to come home.

That's a whole lot of personal detail, but it may well mean that I'll read less. On the other hand, I was initially annoyed in the first place because my work trip is the same week that my wife will be out of town. When I'm no longer traveling, maybe I'll be reading more rather than less. She'll also be gone over the weekend, and although I do have some things I need to do over the weekend, I can still find, I think, lots of time to read or do other things in between doing those things.

Other than reading some old D&D books that I've already read and have owned for years (but which I'm really enjoying rediscovering, and they're still in Very Good or even Like New condition, because I'm always careful with my books), I also want to spend some time in the next couple of weeks wrapping up the Cult of Undeath fronts, and tying that whole 5x5 up before Halloween. That would be an appropriate Halloween activity to finish a 5x5 Front called Cult of Undeath, I think. And I want to create a new batch of iconics. The ones that I created previously ended up getting kind of coopted either into samples for the fronts, potential novel characters, or contacts. I now have a bunch of new races, and I'd like to turn those into more iconics.

Then, in November and December, I'd like to modify the DFX rules to have an EFX variant, and get rolling on my Solo Shadows Over Garenport stuff. Pretty ambitious, but I think that if I don't have some ambitious goals, I end up just frittering away my free time, and honestly, that kind of sucks.

Captain Borus, friendly and helpful Garenport NPC 

Manual of the Planes (EFX, Realms Traveler)

I’m often a creature of strange habits. The very first flight I ever remember doing, as a kid, my dad recommended when the drink service came by that I get a ginger ale. I don’t remember ever having ginger ale before that flight, and in my mind, ever since, ginger ale and airplanes always go together. I do also drink ginger ale frequently on other occasions, but I also always get a ginger ale on my flights. While not my first international trip, by any means, my very first international business trip, to Germany, was right after I had recently purchased the 3e Manual of the Planes. I still almost always bring that with me on business trips. Knowing that I had an upcoming business trip meant that I dug the book out and started reading it. I’m actually traveling to Texas and Mexico to visit suppliers in the border towns next week. It’s possible that I’ll finish reading Manual of the Planes before I take that trip, but not likely, since my in-laws are coming in to town to visit on Wednesday, and I probably won’t read much after that. I suppose on the off-chance that I do finish the book before I go, or if it looks like I’ll finish the book early on in the trip and need something to read in the evenings later in the week before I get home, I’ll also grab my Paizo books The Great Beyond (the little Paizo Manual of the Planes) and Distant Worlds (the Paizo Leigh Brackett space opera but turned to fantasy) books. I’ll probably want to read them both afterwards anyway. The only other one that I’m missing from this same kind of feel from my collection is Beyond Countless Doorways, but I only have that on pdf (I think. Maybe I actually printed it out and put it in a binder years ago. That might be worth checking on, if I can get to the box in my garage where it’s probably located…) In any case, the two Paizo books in particular will feel like an interesting epilogue or alternative to Manual of the Planes. I just looked up the publication date; September 2001! I’m pretty sure I took that trip to Germany in October, or possibly November. Twenty-three years ago! That’s crazy to think about now. I also read the 4e Manual of the Planes, on Scribd or from the library or something (can’t remember now) several years ago, but I don’t actually have that book; I just read it. In many ways, I think 4e made planar adventuring more accessible and make more sense; but it’s hardly necessary since I’m just cherry-picking elements out of the 3e version anyway, not exactly integrating the actual Great Wheel concept.

A forest in DFX's Shadow Realm. Yeah, Mortal Kom at did it first... 

It’s interesting that I really like Manual of the Planes as much as I do. When I first got it, it was still a relatively new book to the 3e canon. Of course, it was a remake of a book with the same title from 1e, but I’d already dropped out of playing AD&D, or even any D&D at all by the time it came out, so I wasn’t familiar with the Great Wheel except for seeing it referenced quite briefly in the 1e DMG. I found it fascinating enough that I went to DriveThruRPG, or whatever equivalent was out back in 2001-2 or so and bought pdfs of the 2e Planescape boxed set, and maybe one or two other Planescape products. I remain to this day fascinated with the concept of dimensional travel in a D&D-like milieu, and have toyed around with my Realms Traveler idea since at least 2013, although I’d been noodling with ideas along similar lines for years prior to that. I never did much with it other than set it up as a premise; a kind of combination of the M.Y.T.H. Adventures series by Robert Asprin and the old Sliders TV show from the 90s, or Quantum Leap from the latest 80s and 90s… or even from Gene Roddenberry’s possibly apocryphal sales pitch of the original Star Trek series as “Wagon Train to the Stars” modified to “Wagon Train to the Planes.” Add to that some actual Marvel cosmic stuff, the Kree-Skrull War, or Annihilation, or all that Dan Abnett stuff with the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Nova Corps and the Starjammers and Inhumans. If I’m often mocking D&D for being fantasy superheroes, this stuff leans deliberately into the superhero vibe instead of stepping away from it.

You’d think that something like this wouldn’t be my cup of tea at all, since I regularly profess to prefer fantasy that is much more grounded, “realistic” or at least verisimilitudinistic, and darker in nature. I frequently kind of sort of deride default D&D for being too much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe in tone, feel, mood and general aesthetic generally, while I prefer one that’s more fantasy setting but tone, mood, feel and general aesthetic from X-Files, Supernatural, James Bond, westerns, and the Godfather. Realms Traveler, on the other hand, if I ever got around to running it, sounds more like the Disney+ show Loki than it does Supernatural or the X-files. And yet, as an alternative to my darker fantasy, this is actually exactly up my alley. So much so, that I’m wondering if my just recently kick-off Elemental Fantasy X would be better off as just being Realms Traveler after all; I don’t know that I have any need for an Eberron/Heroes3-like setting to place these same themes, races and whatnot in when I might be able to do what I really want a little better by reviving Realms Traveler instead. Maybe instead of being connected geographically on the map that I drew (which admittedly, I do kind of like, but still. It’s just a quick drawing; I can change my mind there) the various realms in EFX could be differing planes or dimensions of existence. 

Or, perhaps, the EFX continent is the bridge that connects all of these realms, and the realms in EFX are areas where the planar conjunction, such as it is, bleeds planar traits into the EFX world, but you can also walk from those countries deeper into the alternative planes that are away from the “normal” fantasy world. Holy cow, I thought of this right as I typed it, and I think it’s the solution! EFX is now kinda sorta Sigil and the Outlands to my alternative planar cosmology. But it’s still a nice, big, expansive “home base” modest continent (about the size of the Continental US or Australia, you may possibly recall) so everything doesn’t have to be all weird and foreign all the time. 

What I do still need to do is figure out how to modify the system to accommodate this super-heroic paradigm while still being more rules-lite and non-tedious, which is what 3e, 4e and 5e have always been. And then I need to figure out what planes each of the EFX nations connect to. Anywhere that the “planar” races (which in this paradigm includes even elves and dwarves) are “native” to must have a planar connection, because that’s what created the planar races, either by magically modifying some of the human inhabitants who were already there, or because they poured through from the planar connection. I’ll worry about that fluff stuff in another post, but let me noodle real quick with system issues; I actually will probably undo some of my anti-D&Ding of the system; have regular hit dice, maybe, and change the magic system to be much less punitive to cast spells, add more spells, etc. I might go back to having a bunch of classes again, or at least greatly expand the list of available feats so that the a la carte build your own class options are much more expansive. (I actually prefer the latter option. I’m kind of thinking that I’m about done with classes in DFX/EFX.)

But... I guess I'm now officially combining the Realms Traveler idea, which never had much development anyway, and EFX. I just need to figure out which tag I'll use for it, and how much of the actual planar traveling I'd be doing in any putative EFX/RT campaigns.

A city in Kharnimrion, Blackquarter, which fades subtly into the Plane of Shadow, or Shadowfell as it was later called. Or whatever I end up calling my version of it, which I'll borrow pretty much as is, because it's one of my favorite of the planes from D&D.

But before I work on any of those campaigns, I need to sit back down and finish the Cult of Undeath campaign that I've started, but not touched in a couple of months or so. I should be able to whip that up pretty quick if I didn't always have people coming and going from our house, and a bazillion things to read. 

Final Vanze Maledictus, and backup character Codon Veile

I watched some of my old SWTOR outfit videos, in part because I was raiding my SWTOR characters for names. I do eventually need to re-up my subscription and see how it all goes with SWTOR again, but I'm not quite in the mood for it now. Mostly I enjoyed listening to the White Bat Audio, Xurious, Neon Odin and Lazy Laser synthwave music that I use for my SWTOR outfit videos. I'm almost more interested in doing more outfit videos than I am in playing the actual game, which sounds kinda dumb, but there you are.

Anyway, here's the final image I decided on for Vanze Maledictus:

Just in case he bites it soon, not that I think that that's likely, I created Codon Veile. Codon Veile in my SWTOR game is a Chiss sniper playing the trooper story. Here, he's a blue-skinned air genasi rogue. The DM did tell me that the rogue character will be leaving the game when he moves out of state to get married at the end of the year, so it'll be nice to have a backup.

I do and always have kinda liked the genasi more than I should, perhaps. I suppose that's why I found ways to incorporate them as core races in most of my settings. Maybe a second remix of Eberron, a system neutral one, that replaces many of the races already in the game with planetouched would work quite well. 

Elves > Aasimar (old style; no winged guys)

Dwarves > Earth genasi

Halflings > fire genasi?

Gnomes > tieflings (pre 4e style)

Half-elves > Air genasi

Goblinoids > Orclings

Orcs, Half-orcs > Water genasi

I dunno; it makes a few of the changes sufficient that it would almost require reworking the nation where they are the most common too; especially the Talenta Plains and the Shadow Marches (or is it Marshes? I never can remember.) Maybe I'd be better off using my EFX map after all and just toning down the HoMM3 influences a little bit and playing up the Eberron ones. Maybe using the D&D names for these elemental races rather than my cute attempts to be more HoMM3-ish and call them genies and tritons, and efreets, etc. isn't necessarily the best idea after all.

I really need to get around to scanning that map, don't I?

One advantage of using the more D&D-like names is that it would be easier and more obvious to adapt the EFX setting to D&D if I do. I'm not giving up on preferring my own system and my own setting, but if I'm playing with 5e D&D heads, and I don't yet know the degree to which they're all ingrained with that system, then it might be nice to have an option to bring the setting to them in a different system. 

I almost feel like I'm back to my old Bloodlines Geocities setting development from 2001-2003 or so, though. Truly what comes around goes around.

UPDATE: I'll confirm later, but I'm pretty sure that we're in the beginning of a Hoard of the Dragon Queen run through.