Every few years, I like to type up a retrospective of my homebrewing efforts, and how I got to where I am now. It helps me to focus to step back every three, four or five years or so and type it up again. There's not exactly a straight thru-line from my earliest homebrewing attempts to where I am today, but with a few twists and turns, you can get there starting from around 2000-2001 or so. Whatever homebrew I did before that was not organized and not preserved; I don't have any record of it, and it wasn't very systemic. It was more just me doodling with names, maps and concepts. My
first homebrew attempts, therefore, probably date back to the earliest 1980s when I used to sit in middle school doodling out Tolkien-like fantasy maps and thinking about writing stories in those settings, or putting D&D or other RPG characters in them. But alas! Whatever I did back then is long lost. Most of my earlier 2000s work is also lost, since I did a lot of that work on Geocities, which went defunct years ago and I didn't archive it. But at least I have a record of having done them!
Anyway, this will tell how we got from my more systemic homebrewing, at the very beginning of the 3e era, until now, where not only the settings, but the entire game is homebrewed and it's not really very D&D-like at all in some ways.
I'm also leaving off any dead-end setting developments. I doodled with lots of concepts and ideas, but this list only has those that ended up contributing in some way to where I am today with Old Night.
Dungeon Craft - The very first systemically organized homebrew I did was me following the methodology of Ray Winninger's old Dungeon Craft articles in Dragon Magazine. They used to be available on the WotC website, so I could read the entire run, including articles that I didn't actually own the issue. Most of them were written late in the 2e period, but they continued into the 3e era, so people coming back to D&D, like me, with 3e, found them. This was a pretty vanilla D&D setting, not terribly unlike Nentir Vale in retrospect, except without the 4e elements like dragonborn and tieflings, which I hadn't even heard of yet. I might yet have a little town map somewhere of this, but it doesn't matter; it was where I started, and nothing here is really my speed anymore. The only thing that I'd say about it is that it reminded me that I wasn't really all that into the D&Disms, and was already leaning into a much more overtly sword & sorcery, lower fantasy kind of vibe. Not exactly grimdark, but looking that direction, at least.
Faerytale - the first setting where I made significant changes to the rules and fluff; elves were now seasonal and more heavily based on faerytales (hence the name) and there were blue-skinned winter elves with white hair, golden-skinned autumn elves with red or orange hair, gold skinned summer elves with dark green hair, and paler skinned elves with pale green hair for spring, etc. The setting didn't necessarily turn into anything too different, other than the fact that it was deliberately starting to step away from D&D vanilla into something else.
Faerytale II - I decided partway through to revise the Faerytale setting, and do something a little more dramatic in terms of stepping away from D&D, and make more drastic changes. This is also where I decided that the PCs having a roving commission to investigate supernatural threats came in, where I first explicitly linked them to Fox and Mulder of The X-Files TV show, which was still on in the early 00s, but getting ready to end shortly. That, naturally, turned my setting more towards low fantasy and a darker tone. Specifically, the idea that monsters and magic might not really be believed in by "normal" people in the setting, just as they aren't in the real world, although of course the PCs would come across both much more frequently because it was their job to protect normal people from them.
This ended the first phase, as I gradually stepped out of just being "a D&D setting" because I was already starting to feel like D&D wasn't going to cut it to realize my vision. It just wasn't the right system for what I wanted. Of course, I continued to dabble in D&D or D&D-like systems for many years. It wasn't until fairly recently that I found a way to divorce myself from setting assumptions that are explicitly baked into the system of D&D, honestly.
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Bloodlines - While still working on Faerytale II, I came up with this idea. From a system standpoint, it used d20 Modern. d20 Past hadn't even been released yet, but I approximated it with a few house-rules. I also specifically didn't have any of the normal D&D races, although I did have all six types of planetouched races, which were new to me and kind of interesting still, as "exotic demihumans" relative to elves and dwarves. I also had geography that was heavily inspired by prehistoric Lake Bonneville, including perhistoric Rancholabrean fauna. It's surprising how much Bloodlines actually ended up being Old Night in many ways, just early and primitive. In spite of all of the development in the settings listed below, in many ways I just came back to Bloodlines in the end.
Dark•Heritage Mk. I - Building on the ideas of bloodlines and weird tainted heritages, I came up with the first Dark•Heritage in, oh, 2002-2003 or so. I'd just watched the DVD of Attack of the Clones and its sequence on Geonosis, which was clearly meant to look a lot like Barsoom and John Carter, given that Lucas was known to know about it and be a fan, and that was my inspiration. What if instead of a science-fiction-like tone, I'd taken the same ideas of Barsoom, Leigh Brackett's Mars, Flash Gordon, Star Wars, etc. but more fantasy. I was also influenced by what I thought steampunk was, before I realized that it was really just a cringier and nerdier version of Goth dress-up. China Miéville was probably an influence here too; I'd just read Perdido Street Station, and while it disappointed me, I liked the idea of it, at least, especially the idea of a novel, steampunk influenced Lovecraftian fantasy setting. I literally had features on my map that were inspired by Mars, though; a gigantic canyon a la Valles Marinaris and gigantic shield volcanos like Olympus Mons and the Tharsis region.
Dark•Heritage Mk. II - Mk. II went a different direction; I had a different "origin story" for the various races (although I still used the same ones) and rather than being a desert, the setting was now a shattered world with fragments floating in the aether (which was really just air that you could breathe) and you traveled around in airships. This was a radical departure, but it also was a cul-de-sac; after actually running the game for a little while, I decided that I didn't like those ideas and went back to something much more like what I was doing. I was heavily influenced, however, by darker fantasy, Cthulhu-like stuff, and all that, as the last one had been. I was firmly in the headed towards grimdark camp. (I will point out that when I actually read some real grimdark fantasy, like George "Rape Rape" Martin and Joe Abercrombie, I didn't really like it. Glen Cook's Black Company is as far in that direction as I enjoyed stuff, and honestly, I'm not sure that even then I want to go even that dark most of the time. But clearly, my direction was firmly established by now, and none of my setting development has been high magic high fantasy since at least the Faerytale II paradigm. By this point, I was much more explicitly calling out low fantasy horror-tinged alternatives in the systems and tone.
Dark•Heritage Mk. III - I had recently read the (new in 2000) book Tarim Mummies by J. P Mallory and Victor Mair, and when I abandoned the floating chunks of rock idea of Mk. II and went back to the Mk. I pseudo-Mars desert, but the maps that I drew were inspired by the Tarim Basin of the Medieval Silk Road, as described in the book. This version of the setting got quite a bit of development, and a novel outline that I never actually wrote, but it also devolved into me sperging about cultural details. I realized, at some point, that it wasn't fun anymore, so I let it sit and looked at some other things instead. Meanwhile, some tinkering in specifically non-D•H stuff ended up getting rolled into the next iteration of Dark•Heritage, so now's a good time to add a break and talk about some of the other stuff that I was also doing.
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Leng Calling - Deliberately doing something more D&D-ish, just as a break from my non-D&D design that I'd spent a lot of time with. This was just slumming for fun, but I ended up really liking it. The basic idea of the setting was that it was a gigantic Jupiter-sized planet, but the density was such that it had Earth-like gravity. This was just to give me space to do whatever I wanted, but I didn't develop the entire planet by any means. I actually had a Mediterrean-like sea in the middle of the map, with land on all sides, kind of like the Roman Empire geographically.
Demons in the Mist - Another game where I basically made it up as I was running it. The gag here was that none of the standard D&D races (except human) or any magical classes were allowed, so I had some psionics, and lots of swashbuckling types. Two characters in particular stood out, because the players gravitated towards a darker Odd Couple kind of relationship between them. One was a womanizing human swashbuckler, and the other was a hobgoblin rogue/fighter, who wanted an airship by hook or by crook. The two ended up constantly sabotaging each others efforts, but couldn't imagine life without the other. The setting was based on a weird idea that someone else was also doing at the time; that the lowlands had a cursed mist full of demons and stuff, so people had to live on mountains, plateaus, tepuis, and the like. I found a map of the British Isles if the sea level were higher, put some labels on it, and decided that the "sea" was demon-haunted misty lowlands. People traveled by long bridges, airships and the link between the island plateaus. It was fun. I made up the setting literally as I was going; I hardly had anything set before I started.
I'm not sure what I exactly borrowed from this setting other than a willingnes to be silly and gonzo, other than orcs/goblins as a mainline PC race, and the psionic soulknife as a kind of Psylocke or Jedi-like character class. I loved both ideas. And the one was, while kind of sillier than I normally run, still very much related to the darker demon-haunted stuff that I like to do.
Modular DND Setting - I found that I was reborrowing lots of setting elements in more than one setting, so I decided to archive them as modular setting elements that were, in theory, stand-alone but which I could use in any setting. This included the first iteration of Baal Hamazi, which was fairly similar to what it still is, Kurushat, which was also similar to what it is now, although based initially on being something like Eberron's Darguun and later something like the Iron Kingdon's Skorne Empire. I didn't keep it that way for long, the Kurushans became an exotic human ethnicity fairly quickly. I also had Tarush Noptii first developed here, which later became Timischburg, the Vampire Kingdom. This actually was the seed for a lot of elements that I—eventually—stopped treating as modular and just incorporated them into the developing Dark•Heritage setting when it came around to its next iteration.
Pirates of the Mezzovian Main - I also ran this for my regular home group right around the same time. I took the idea of Leng Calling (which was a tongue in cheek reference to the Falco song "Vienna Calling". I also made this up, to a great degree, as I was running it, just taking broad ideas like Cryx from Iron Kingdoms, Kurushat from my Modular stuff, etc. and throwing it into a new geography based on the Mezzovian Sea of Leng Calling. This was a lot of fun to run too, and between that and Demons in the Mist, I felt like I was softening my approach to the D&Disms a little bit, and was less interested in going out into a spergy "realistic" fantasy setting, like Dark•Heritage Mk. III was becoming. The fact that I was actually having more fun running and tinkering with Modular-DND, Leng Calling, Demons in the Mist and Pirates of the Mezzovian Main convinced me that my approach to Dark•Heritage was the wrong one and I needed to step back, take stock, reevaluate, and come up with a new Mk. IV that was significantly different than what I was doing.
Freeport Fan - The final "I threw it together literally while running it" campaign of this period was "Freeport Fan". I took Freeport, the Green Ronin city-setting, and whipped up a vaguely East Indies like geography, plopped Freeport in the middle of it, and ran this based on the same premise as The Hangover, which was pretty new at the time, so this must have been 2010 or 2011 or so, I think. It was many of the same players as Demons in the Mist, but sadly, lightning did not strike twice, and this didn't really pick up as well, and ended up fizzling before finishing. But between "Mezzovian Main" and this one, I became 100% convinced that pirates and sailing needed to be an element of Dark•Heritage, which meant, of course, that a Dune, Barsoom or Mars-like geography wasn't going to work anymore.
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Dark•Heritage Mk. IV - This version of the setting had a Mezzovian Sea, yes, taken from both the Leng Calling and the Pirates game and imported directly, into the Dark•Heritage model, surrounded by the faltering Terrasan Empire, but with a Kurushat, a Baal Hamazi, an al-Qazmiri, and a few other things all thrown in as well. This model lasted for quite a while, I drew a big map on a piece of posterboard, and I had a lot of fun developing this version of the setting. This is also the first time that I started adopting Microlite as the system of choice for the game, which, alongside the major disruption in setting assumptions, is a big part of the reason that this version of the setting required the break above. Much of this was developed online, although I did it more on these blogs than in Geocities or Wikispaces, or offline in notebooks like much of my earlier work. Most of the posts on this blog with the Dark•Heritage tag belong to this Mk. IV vintage, so the material, while not well organized in that regard, is all available literally right here. Which is a long way of saying that I eventually got around to something that resembled Bloodlines above, except almost by accident rather than on purpose.
Cult of Undeath - At one point long ago I decided that I wanted to convert the Carrion Crown adventure path by Paizo into something that I would use. When it was done, I had a campaign that had very little resemblance anymore to the original that it was supposedly based on other than a focus on Gothic horror in a fantasy setting, a new version of m20 that was a D&D knock-off rather than something more explicitly for my own setting, and a more fully developed evolution of Tarush Noptii into Timischburg, the Gothic horror setting element, now more fully realized and capable of supporting an entire campaign, just like Ustalav, which it kinda sorta was meant to replace. This is the same Timischburg that later was "eaten" by DH5—but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's just say that this is became an integral part of my current campaign setting.
Timischburg - Although originally named just for the country of Timischburg around which it was based, this was really the rest of the setting; Timischburg itself was already pretty detailed in the past phase. I added numerous new elements, although many of them were reworkings of stuff from my Modular-DND days or elsewhere. Some of these elements were later shed, but they also were the core of what would later become Old Night too. Many of them were, admittedly, peripheral parts of Old Night, like Gunaakt, which is referenced but never meant to be visited. But such is life.
Mammoth Lords - A side project meant to be Vikings in North America, but fantasy; this eventually, after a bit of mapping, and converting the "Vikings" into various European cultures like Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Celts and ... of course, also Vikings, was the geographical core of what would later become the Hill Country. Which is kind of ironic, because it started off specifically meant to be a side project unrelated to the Dark•Heritage stuff, but as I started to tire of the Mk. IV version and think that I needed a fresh take on the setting, this is what I eventually ended up looking towards.
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Dark•Heritage Mk. V (DH5) - It took a little while before I really started sketching out what this version of the setting would look like, and I have a lot of noodling around with foundational ideas before I finally settled down and started doing stuff with this. The old Mammoth Lords sketchy draft map was revised and expanded and became the Hill Country. After I had this roughed out for a little while, I decided to add Timischburg to it, and then eventually Baal Hamazi, and it became the Three Realms. Near the end of this phase, I also added the Corsair Coast, Lower Kurushat, and Nizrekh, although with less detail (so far.) Although the name changed, in reality this is just the not fully developed Old Night setting; by the time I added those last elements to the setting, it really doesn't have anything that Old Night doesn't except for the name. I also continued to develop the system from its original m20 base into basically what it is now.
Old Night - Current state. Everything was already there, but when I codified it officially, I changed the name, and that's all that differs really from DH5. It went through a bridge label, DFX, or Dark Fantasy X for a while, but again, nothing changed. Old Night crystalized a few things from DH5 and added to them but it's still essentially the same setting.
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