Jann transformation and the D&D movie

For a long time, I've had the jann race as one of my Dark Fantasy X signature races. Like most of the demihumans, they are heavily influenced by the concept of the "planetouched" races from D&D; demihumans being in this case a situation in which humans manifest some traits related to some of the classic Outsiders. My 2002 incipient setting Bloodlines was my first exploration of this idea, where I revised the rules quite a bit, including removing most of the traditional D&D races and replacing them with the six "standard" playable outsider races: the four elemental genasi, the tiefling, and the aasimar. Although they've changed a fair bit since then, as has the setting which gives them context, you can see that of my existing non-human races, three of those go all the way back to that 2002 Bloodlines experiment. The tieflings and aasimars, which in Dark Fantasy X have evolved into the kemlings and seraphs.

The fire genasi may or may not always have been my favorite of the genasi, because I'm not sure that I really thought too much about it, but after reading The Pirates Guide to Freeport for the first time, in 2007 I was convinced. Freeport has—although I didn't know this until this time—a race of Barbary corsairs called the azhar, who are basically fire genasi. Although they were clearly a later add, and not many iconic NPCs belong to the race because the iconic PCs were already in place before they were invented, it was probably that which led me to keep the fire genasi, but none of the other genasi, who gradually evolved into the jann.

But I didn't really do much with them either. This is especially true in Dark•Heritage Mk. V, which directly became Dark Fantasy X. In previous iterations, the jann had a significant kingdom called al-Qazmir based on that jann (influenced by Freeport's Kizmir.) The jann were specifically kind of Barbary corsairs, Ottoman villains, for the most part, with an Arabian Nights like vibe to them. However, in DH5 and Dark Fantasy X, al-Qazmir disappeared and the jann were a little displaced. They still existed in the setting, but they had no proper homeland, and as the geography evolved, they went from being eastern and southern to being northern and western. Their appearance as "Oriental" probably needed to change. At best, they'd end up like pseudo-Turkified or Mongolized Slavic people; northern and exotic, but not really Middle Eastern. Their origin wasn't likely to be from the ifrit anymore or the City of Brass, since both were specifically Arabic (or possibly Persian) in origin. So where do they come from, and what are they going to be?

I'm still kicking it around, but I think that they're going to be somewhat "Icelandic"; their homeland off the map to the north and west will be a volcanic place, and that will be their supernatural origin. Rather than ifrit being the model, Muspelheim and Surtur will be the source. In fact, I'll almost certainly change the name of jann to either surtlings or surturs. And I'll probably update a few of the images that look just a little too Middle Eastern in their clothing, and re-skin the former jann to lose most of their Middle Eastern baggage. This is still a work in progress, and I've really only come around to accepting its need this last weekend, although I've been heading this direction for months.

Viking-like new imagery

Also, the D&D movie came out this last weekend. I haven't seen it yet. My wife bought tickets, but it's a couple of weeks out. I like doing this for several reasons. 1) Opening weekend is usually huge for how successful a movie is judged. I do want to see this movie, especially as the emerging consensus is that it's a pretty harmless "fantasy Guardians of the Galaxy" kind of movie, but I don't want to reward WotC or Paramount for their ridiculous behavior towards the fans, their sexist behavior towards men, or their racist behavior towards white people. Seeing the movie a little over two weeks after its opens, at matinee prices, means that I get to have my cake and eat it too. I can see the movie, in theatres, without actually contributing anything of value to the metrics that studios and box office analysts use to judge the success of a movie. 2) Plus, seeing it on a Tuesday night two weeks after it's released at matinee prices is a better experience anyway. Much lower likelihood of obnoxious fellow movie goers make the experience less. Crowds are low. Average age is up. All that jazz. I'll actually end up seeing Mario Brothers before I see D&D. That said, in spite of my lack of personal experience with the movie, I think that there's some interesting things to be said about it and its performance, and the stories that are out in its wake.

First, stories are mostly talking about how it overperformed studio estimates this weekend, at least by a modest amount. However, that's lacking context; studio expectations were lowered for various reasons from what they would have been a couple of months ago. The controversies by Wizards of the Coast (1. OGL drama, 2. no more white men drama) and Paramount (emasculated men drama) had a very material effect on the movie's performance, but the reasonably good word of mouth had a material effect too. Secondly, the virtue-signaling led many of the potential audience to assume that the movie was going to be woke, but it seems that the only wokeness really is a kind of ambient wokeness associated with the casting (one middle-aged white guy and one young white girl are merely part of an ensemble that includes a burly masculine Mexican girl, a half-black man who will pretend to be black, and a mostly white gay guy who has just enough black in him to claim that identity too.)

The result there; be careful. Studios and corporations seem to be unable to maintain any discipline about insulting their target customers these days, and then acting surprised when their target customers say, "Uh, no" to people who hate them, but want to sell to them. Shut up about controversial stuff, and by controversial I mean "Yeah, everyone in your crazy corporate bubble believes this stuff, but no normal people do at all." Controversy is in the eye of the beholder; what most journalists really mean when they say controversial are opinions that are hateful and nobody really believes them at all. But be that as it may, whomever they're trying to virtue-signal for, it is tanking their audience, and some communication discipline is called for. As much as I don't really think Jeremy Crawford is probably a good person; I'm sure he's as woke as they come, his twitter feed is—with very minor exceptions—pretty professional rather than insulting and political. Is that really so hard to do? To be professional and not say or do stupid things that will seriously turn off your audience right before the launch of your product? That used to be a pretty basic requirement of having a job.

Another interesting thing is the demographics of who saw it. According to the Hollywood Reporter article, the audience skewed young (college student aged, roughly) and male (60%). Not sure what motivated that, but there's some stuff here that is interesting. Older core D&D players seem to have avoided the movie. From what I've seen on YouTube comment sections, these are the guys who are more ticked than average about WotC and Paramount and what they've said and done. Will they be drawn in (like me) for post opening weekend viewings based on decent word of mouth? It's not clear.  In fact, WotC and Paramount both have avoided courting the core D&D market at all. Professor DungeonMaster, for instance, made a big deal out of WotC being AWOL at GenCon and other gaming conventions, and only pushing the movie at ComicCon. I'm not sure how much this matters, (Professor DM also studiously ignored the "white guys" controversy and the "emasculated men" controversy completely, so he's either being deliberately obtuse or otherwise disingenuous.) But given the fandom research that was all the rage a couple of months ago, you'd think that both Paramount and WotC would recognize that in order to snatch a broader catch, you first need to make sure that your core demographic is taken care of. The fandom study suggested strongly that your way to expand beyond the core is that the core itself provides the positive word of mouth. If you don't have the core on your side, then expanding to a more general audience is almost impossible.

So, that's another marketing fail. I saw recently a video where two industry professionals were chatting, and they suggesting that movie marketing is absolutely terrible right now, and hasn't been good since the 70s and early 80s. There's no more key imaging, or at least key imaging went pretty generic and non-informative in the 80s, starting with Flashdance and Beverly Hills Cop and a few other titles. Once that replaced the key imaging that used to precede it, the era of cookie-cutter template marketing which really serves almost no one was upon us, and now we get to the point where marketing is more like a money laundering scheme than it is anything effective.

Anyway, I wonder. It wasn't that long ago that Marvel, for example, could take B-list or C-list characters (in terms of popularity) and make A-list movies out of them, with the launch of Iron Man and Thor and Captain America. Dungeons & Dragons is a long-lived brand with plenty of IP material to draw upon. It shouldn't have been hard for them. But of course, things have changed. Marvel itself can't seem to maintain the momentum it used to have, and is a brand in trouble. Star Wars, which should have been a golden goose that required very little effort to turn in big returns is a brand in trouble, without a loyal core anymore. 

It's rather easy and shallow to say "get woke go broke" and there is at least some truth to that in the entertainment industry, if not necessarily anywhere else. But there's more going on than just that, and there's a lot of nuance involved. Failed marketing, missed opportunities to actually use recognizable IP (Prof. DM suggested that using the Dragonlance main characters like Tanis and Raistlin and Tasslehof, etc. is so obvious a move that it's bone-headed not to have done so) and yes, there was certainly some wokeness involved, even if the movie itself seems to have avoided it. (By report. Again, I haven't seen it yet.) What is going on in the movie industry? Why did movies like Shazam 2 flop so hard, and why did Antman 3 underperform if not outright flop so hard, and why did Cocaine Bear and John Wick 4 overperform, etc.?

I don't have all of the answers, or maybe even any of the answers, but there's an interesting discussion to be had there, and I think D&D is an interesting data point, because it's not a Marvel or DC movie, or part of any existing franchise at all, although it does come from a well-known brand, at least.

Curses in DH5

I often describe DH5 as a humano-centric setting,but that's not strictly speaking true.  I certainly focus more on nations made up of humans, and my expectations are that humans make up a vast majority of the individuals that you'll find unless you wander farther afield than the portions of the setting that I intend to develop and detail.  That said, there are small pockets of demihuman communities in the Hill Country and Timischburg both, and any of them could potentially be found anywhere in either country.  Most of them would arouse curiosity, especially in the smaller towns where cosmopolitanism is completely unknown, but in larger cities, especially Simashki and Waychester (and to a lesser extent, Upwater) they are relatively commonly spotted for those who are looking for them, and there are a number of permanent residents of every demihuman race.

I use demihuman quite deliberately.  I'm not quite sure what Gary Gygax meant by the term; he seems to have used it for the most anthropomorphic of the non-human races; i.e., dwarfs, elfs, halflings, etc. were demihumans, but orcs, goblins, gnolls, etc. were not, because they were more savage and less anthropomorphic in rough terms.  I use demihuman to refer to the fact that the non-human races are, in fact, mostly human—their differences are the result of either a curse or a monstrous admixture into their genetic matrix at some point in the past (with the exception of orcs and goblins, who are simply monstrous non-human humanoids).  This is usually quite minor, but it has effects that are immediately obvious on their physical appearance, and more sinister in some cases than one may think.  Few of the human populations, hillmen, drylanders, Timischers or others are truly aware of the nature of these curses, and they often only manifest at very low levels among the population; but these dark secrets are not unknown to most members of the races in question, and they often police their own very carefully to avoid having these curses manifest among mixed populations, because they would make the race unwelcome in Hill Country, or anywhere else, for that matter, if they were better known.

In terms of the game (as opposed to the setting as a place for potential fiction) I'd suggest that unless a player wants to roleplay out the effects of one of these curses, that they be seen as not affecting PC characters.  I suggest, in fact, that they not affect major NPCs either, unless it's a theme or something that you want to explore deliberately.  I'd suggest that if you needed a statistical number for how likely it is to occur, that in every case, that number is less than 1%.  However... there are considerably more than a hundred individuals (or even a thousand, in most cases) of these races in the lands that I'm detailing, so if this is something that you want to use for whatever reason, you can.  I'll have a very brief section below on all of the available demihuman races.  And folks; although DARK•HERITAGE as a label is now out of date; i.e. the reason I picked that name no longer applies, the fact that every demihuman race is cursed, and there is still a fairly strong Lovecraftian vibe in the setting means that the label still works even so.

• Cursed: The Cursed are originally from the land of Zobna which is a subset of Hyperborea, but they were chased from that home country by the invasion of the savage Inutos.  They have since established a new home in Lomar, but that is under attack as well, and refugees have been fleeing southwards for many generations.  The most likely places to find Cursed are the seaside town of Inganok, and Daikos in the far north of the Hill Country.  The Cursed have been cursed many generations ago by the gnophkeh, whom they swept aside when they conquered Lomar.  This curse, when it manifests, takes the form of an uncontrollable urge towards cannibalism.  Nobody knows for sure how many cursed are cannibals (some engage in the practice culturally whether affected by the curse or not), but those who fall under the curse must consume human flesh, or they will slowly devolve into ghouls.  For the most part, the repast must happen once per month at the least.  Some Cursed in Inganok suspect that their own people, devolved into ghouls, and then clawed their way out of savagery into sentience again are the origin of the vampires of Timischburg; although that seems unlikely that it is the only source of such, given that the land of Timischburg, especially Grozavest itself, has been laboring under a dark curse for far longer than the Cursed have lived in the area anyway.
• Kemling: The Kemlings believe that their ancestor was a daemon-lord named Chernavog, who lived for a time among mortals and fathered seed who's daemonic traits are now watered down to represent their own race.  This is pseudo-legendary; nobody knows for sure that such a person actually lived, although by tradition, Chernavog's son Hutran Kutir, the Hex-King, is the founder of Baal Hamazi, their glorious empire of the past.  Whether that's true or not, it is true that the kemlings are more likely than any other race to fall victim to the Black Choler, a kind of violent madness.  Such victims are usually quietly locked away or even put down entirely for the good of the community.  In fact, the latter is often preferred, although family members sometimes object; in the worst case scenario, someone afflicted by the Black Choler may burst open when the condition is fully ripe, and a daemon (usually merely an imp or servitor daemon, but sometimes more powerful ones are able to latch on to the bloodline and follow it to the mortal world) will claw its way out of the bloody corpse to afflict everyone around.
• Jann: Ifrits are to jann as daemons are to the kemlings; i.e., supposedly an ifrit lord, possibly Hammu Qaiyu himself, is the mythical ancestor of the entire race.  While the jann are often fiery tempered and emotionally dramatic, a trait that they somewhat ruefully blame on their distant, legendary ancestor, the truth is that there is a connection of some sort between Muspelheim and the jann.  Any jann who move to the City of Brass (a bit of a non sequitur, since leaving the mortal realm is something hardly anyone knows how to do) are immune from this curse, but every once in a while, a burning flame will find its way from Muspelheim to a jann person, who will spontaneously combust in a wild conflagration that can consume entire houses, or any nearby people.  Luckily, this is rare, but it has been known to happen, and the jann themselves have a body of lore and old wives tales about spontaneous combustion, how to avoid it, how to cause it in your rivals, etc.
• Skraeling: Skraelings, or Wendaks, are often considered to be merely a highly variable race of humans; short and often lanky; dark-skinned, but with brown hair and bright blue eyes, very broad, flat faces, etc.  The Skraelings have some connection to lost Atlantis, however—they are either the degenerate descendants of the Atlanteans, or feral former slaves of the Atlanteans, or some-such; even their own folklore is unclear.  Atlantis is the most evil civilization that ever lived, however—even more than Baal Hamazi, or so it's mostly believed, and everyone associated with Atlantis bears a curse that fell upon the land, destroying it, and even tainting the survivors who weren't on Atlantis itself when it sank into the sea, such as the Wendaks.  The technology of the Skraelings is limited by their curse.  They do not work metal, and do not even keep metal taken from their neighbors, as it will cause the Shrieking Sickness to come upon those who possess it.  Skraelings, if they encounter the hillmen or other more "modern" people are xenophobic, surly, often violent, and primitive, refusing to trade or speak with other people as much as possible, and more likely to simply attack them or flee from them, depending on the circumstances.  The exceptions are outcasts from Skraeling society, which exist for various reasons, but they are relatively rare and tend to keep to themselves and try and hide, as much as possible, their ethnic origin if they travel among the other peoples of the land.  But even they still use stone, wood or bone tools as much as possible, and possess no metal.
• Orcs and Goblins: Orcs and goblins are not a cursed human race, but rather a unique race (well, two associated races; the relationship between them is a source of much discussion, even among themselves) that, while humanoid, have obvious physical differences.  Orcs are relatively large and robustly built, much like Neanderthals would have been.  They also have inch long (or occasionally more) tusks protruding from their lower jaw, and very flat noses but large pointed ears, and grayish-olive skin but they otherwise appear human enough.  Goblins, on the other hand, are quite small and sneaky, with brownish-gray skin, pointed ears and sharp teeth, and beady eyes.  Neither are cursed per se, but their obvious inhumanity puts them at a severe disadvantage socially.  Both are also creatures that are less at home in the daylight than humans are, and find the sun both irritatingly hot and bright during the day (their home country of Gunaakt is near the sea, and almost always overcast and/or foggy.)  While there isn't any mechanical penalty in game for this nocturnal or crepuscular preference, if you want, on extremely sunny days, you could give a -1 penalty to almost every roll that these guys make; although in a crepuscular environment (they prefer this to nocturnal; they don't see in the dark, after all, like kemlings do), they might have a +1.
• Nephilim: While people see the "angel-people" as both beautiful and avatars or exemplars of the glories of celestial life, the reality is that the only reason nephilim can exist is because of fallen angels, and therefore, the nephilim, rarely appearing as they are, are just as cursed as the kemlings are by their heritage.  If you're looking for a roleplaying hook for a nephilim character or NPC, consider giving him a specific temptation or weakness that is his weakness.  Here's a page that has a big list of potential flaws to choose from, but I'd stay away from the more prosaic, "that's kinda annoying" and look more towards the, "uh... dude, that's messed up" choices on the list.  If that makes sense.  Nephilim are the kinds of characters that may seem beautiful, charismatic and glorious at first blush, but as you get to know them, most of them are sociopaths, psychopaths, perverts, sadists, or have other truly disturbing personality traits that make them off-putting.
• Wose: Woses are the descendants of werewolves, and while the potency (and chaos) of the original werewolf curse is much reduced and diluted in their blood, in many cases it goes beyond them merely having an affinity to nature and a somewhat bestial physical appearance. (See image for example.)  However, in many of them, additional flaws and aspects of the curse of werewolfism lingers; during full moons, they are at -1 to all checks (except combat, where their savagery gives them a +1) and they may take additional damage, or suffer from nausea or other symptoms when in the presence of silver.