Old Night as Darkest Dungeon

The video game Darkest Dungeon, in two versions (I and II) plus its various DLC add-ons is a pretty iconic D&D-like setting with a grimdark, overtly Lovecraftian overlay, and a small amount of primitive firearms. Darkest Dungeon (I'm not going to keep italicizing it, even though it's a title and that would be correct. Too much trouble.) is very much a dungeon-crawler, which I'm not interested in, but otherwise, it sits very well alongside similar darker, Lovecraftian games with a slightly more "modern", i.e. Late Middle Ages or even earliest post-Middle Ages social and technological take; kind of a 1400s-early 1500s instead of classical High Medieval, like the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, which is also not really focused on dungeon-crawling. When WFRP was developed in the middle 80s, dungeon-crawling was considered very passé in the British market that it was initially developed for. It's odd to see Darkest Dungeon feel quite a bit like Warhammer FRP, but re-focused again on dungeon-crawling, when Warhammer FRP explicitly rejected that model of play. Then again, for an indie computer game, dungeon-crawling is an easier model than anything else to utilize. You just go through levels fighting monsters, after all. The Solomon Kane stories that I'm reading right now are kind of the late end of this period too, supposedly taking place more or less in the late 1500s or early 1600s. The Three Musketeers also takes place in the early 1600s. To give a couple more examples of similar vibe properties.

However, if firearms are quite rare for social or cultural reasons rather than common among soldiers, then Medieval style equipment could linger alongside early firearms, making a feel that's slightly anachronistic, yet exactly what I want. All it takes is a blackout on knowledge of how to make them; if very few can actually do so, then there's no way to replenish stocks quickly, so firearms by default become quite rare. And maintenance of them, or even availability of new powder, can also be limited. This is the model I want for Old Night. Heck, I even have a strange manufacturing center that can be the source of all firearms and powder; Gaskarfells. If only one place and one power group within said place understands the secret of gunpowder, and it's a closely guarded state secret not unlike Greek Fire (except "state" secret isn't quite right; more like a powerful semi-freelance guild secret), then I get exactly what I want; common soldiers don't have access to firearms. The Rangers, maybe, and a few other eccentric or wealthy adventuresome types might have them, but they only. Everyone else still has to use Medieval style equipment as their default. But with them being "out there" they can occasionally fall into unusual hands, such as the iconic Darkest Dungeon Highwayman. For what it's worth, the era of the Romanticized English Highwayman is a little bit later than the era of Solomon Kane and the Musketeers, being more late 1600s and early 1700s. It actually overlaps with the so-called "Golden Age of Piracy" if that's something that means more to most people. I want, simply, a Gothic, dungeon-punk aesthetic over a grimdark fantasy setting that's less like the Hanseatic League or Holy Roman Empire of the 1500-1600s and more like a combination of Medieval England and frontier America, but before the advent of repeating weapons, which was a force multiplier for the Americans, and the cause of the Old West cowboy age being a thing that could happen. 

Now, I'm not trying to make Old Night into a Darkest Dungeon table-top simulator, but I do want to have a quick look at the classes for Darkest Dungeon, and do a quick "would they fit in Old Night, and can I build them in Old Night" kind of analysis real quick. Not necessarily trying to model all of their specific abilities in the Darkest Dungeon game, but certainly the more high level archetype. 

In alphabetical order:

• Abomination: I actually have a pseudo-iconic, Claud Lupescu, who kind of fits this Jekyll/Hyde archetype. But he's special, and not actually very iconic, because I'm not 100% sure that I can build him as is as a PC with the rules. In fact, I'm quite sure that I cannot, so I removed him from being considered "iconic"; he's rather a a unique monster/NPC. So, this is an unusual situation to start the list off with; I literally have a character that fits this archetype, but he's exceptional and shouldn't be necessarily replicatable with the rules like normal. 
• Antiquarian: The antiquarian is not good in combat, either for offense or defense, but is optimized for detecting treasure. You can easily create a simulacrum of this archetype by focusing on skills, research and scholarship.
• Arbalest: An arbalest is actually a heavy crossbow, not a character class, at least outside of Darkest Dungeon, but the arbalest character class is a sniper who focuses on using an arbalest of sorts, or even almost a ballista being carried as a personal weapon like Jesse Ventura carried a minigun in Predator. The arbalest also uses a bola, so it's an interesting type of build. I don't have a bola in the equipment list, but I could easily whip one up if I wanted to.
• Bounty Hunter: This archetype can be easily modeled and feels right at home already in Old Night.
• Crusader: The crusader is really just a classic knight, with a touch of Paladin. Nothing too fancy, and can easily be modeled "close enough" in Old Night. 
• Grave Robber: Really just a thief or rogue in the D&D sense; a versatile fighterish type who isn't super tanky, but can do ranged and melee and some independent support quite well. 
• Hellion: Similar to the D&D Barbarian, this can be done reasonably well already in Old Night. It's a pretty basic archetype, or at least it would be if they didn't make her a girl, which is odd and anti-archetypal. Very "modern audiences" friendly, though. Ugh.
• Highwayman: A pretty basic fighter type, but without the focus on melee. More of a striker/DPS type in terms of video game terminology. You give him a pistol and a short sword or dagger, and you've got the Highwayman already in Old Night.
• Houndmaster: You create something like a fighter, but give him an animal companion, and you're good to go. This isn't a complicated archetype to create either.
• Jester: I'm not sure that this archetype even fits, honestly, in Old Night. He's kind of a weird one. You could cobble together something that looks a bit like him, I suppose. 
• Leper: This is mostly just a tweak to the heavy fighter archetype.
• Man-at-Arms: Another tweak to the heavy fighter archetype. A little more defense oriented than the Crusader, but that's not important in the Old Night context as much. 
• Musketeer: A clone mechanically to the arbalest, so it works the exact same way. In Old Night, obviously, this archetype would carry a blunderbuss rather than a big, heavy crossbow.
• Occultist: Although the occultist has some weird mechanics, it's really just an expression of the darker sorcerer type archetype, exactly the same as any magic-using characters in Old Night.
• Plague Doctor: A bit of an unusual archetype, who uses some area effect "bleed" attacks (plagues) with some healing. I might need to come up with some area effect type attacks that a PC could access if I wanted to do this guy.
• Vestal: a healer. I don't really have normal magical healing, because Old Night doesn't use that paradigm.

For the DLC only classes, there's a few more, although how "archetypal" they are is questionable, even moreso than some of the ones above:

• Flagellant: Not sure that I need to have this; as he takes damage, he gets tougher, although of course, closer to death. It's a bit of a mechanical gimmick rather than an archetype, so I'm not worried about trying to recreate him.
• Shieldbreaker: A flexible glass cannon fighter type. Just another slight tweak to the fighter. 

I've also create a Hero Forge model, and then loaded my image of it into ChatGPT and then Grok to get an iteration of it that looks more realistic. Not sure I got exactly what I wanted, but it's not bad. In high and lower contrast versions.

I also got some other images, not based on my Hero Forge original; just based on the prompt. These are OK too.

Renwick Bennett

I created a Hero Forge character for one of my NPCs, but I decided to see if Grok could make a better image of him based on my Hero Forge original. Here's a bit of the process...

This is the original. My Hero Forge model with an AI generated background The AI didn't do anything to make the model more realistic yet.

These three were attempts by me to get it more realistic. They... kinda worked, but Grok was very conservative in terms of making changes to my original model.

I finally convinced it to be a little bit more daring and make some more substantive changes, and I got these two versions.

For some reason, it turned the pouch into a pocket, but that's OK I also got the face a little bit more exaggerated and more like the original in terms of tone.

Then I asked for a few other changes, including adding the pouch that he was holding back again and having him put his foot up on the chest. But for some reason, it switched which side everything was on.

I asked it to switch sides again, and got these two nearly identical versions. The lighting is just a little bit different, but hardly enough to bother with.

Anyway, that's Renwick Bennett, a crime lord in Barrowmere and a character that the PCs would interact with in the first phase of a DARKNESS IN THE HILL COUNTRY campaign; the intro that precedes the 5x5 Fronts. 

I'm not actually 100% sure that the iterations really even improved the image, to be honest with you. Maybe. The background certainly looks good. I'll do similar things for both my iconic characters, and some other important NPCs.

Few more Old Night updates

 

Old Night images

A few images; both Hero Forge and AI, of places, peoples and creatures of the Old Night setting.

Another tcho-tcho image. Same image, really; different pose and facial expression. Plus, the knives are out.

Although I built a Drancent Hewe from scratch, I actually think that I kind of like the original (modified) library model better. I modified it recently, but I also swapped his "familiar" from the weird winged lemur to a pseudodragon. Given that Kim Rugova also had a pseudodragon in some versions of his Hero Forge representations, I wonder if I've accidentally stumbled on some world-building; Lomar has fleets? flocks? wings? of pseudodragons living in the rafters and chimneys or something. They're at least as intelligent as a smart dog, so sometimes they're domesticated.

I made this on a whim to try and look like a digital model I saw of some kind of fantasy guys. It's not perfect, and I didn't necessarily care to try and make it so; it's an impressionistic take.

Because it has the Puritan witch hunter hat, I guess this is some kind of monster hunter, or whatever.

ChatGPT isn't always the best at generating images. I asked for a D&D version of The Man With No Name from Clint Eastwood's spaghetti westerns. After a few iterations, where I had to tell it; no, didn't you even notice what I typed? I finally got this as probably the best.

Shugoran, from the excellent "modern" expanded Lovecraftian story "The Black Man With a Horn" by T."E."D. Klein.

"Traitor" Joe (misheard by unfortunate players as Trader Joe; they think it's just a pun on the name, without realizing that it's a sinister double entendre); my first ever experiment with face customizer. Nothing else about this model is particularly memorable, so I wonder if it's not due for some sprucing up.

Here's an alternate Traitor Joe too.

"The Strangers", the fantasy "aliens" that I have yet to figure out exactly how to make work, but which I'd like to work into the Cult of Undeath 5x5 Front. If not, I guess I can make them part of the Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes.

Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heresiarchs and the named campaigns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, 

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

Iconics and Contacts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last minute add; another Oisin pose