Pathfinder 1e and D&D 3.53 hybrid houserules update

I decided to use the OLD NIGHT tab for setting stuff, and the SHADOW OF OLD NIGHT for rules stuff, whether my actual rule set, or the hybrid house rules that I'm playing around with. I also just created a new tab, and I'll eventually create a series of posts that use it for a new region in the Old Night setting, that will be a bit disconnected from the rest of the setting, but which will be the place where I can develop an alternate house rule and setting strategy. This was based on a throwaway line in my last post where I said that if I wanted an exotic setting variant, I'd rather base it on the psionics stuff rather than Asian-themed, or maybe there could be some minor Asian theming in a psionic themed campaign. This wouldn't really work for my own rule set, but I could easily do this with either 3.5, or Pathfinder 1e, or my hybrid rules. I also created a tab called WORLD-BUILDING which I'm going to go back and retroactively apply to a lot of posts where I noodle on setting variants other than Old Night and its immediate predeccesors, like Dark Fantasy X or Dark•Heritage. Stuff like ODD D&D will fit here, and some of the others. Many of these experiments are just meant as high level experiments, and are not meant to be fully developed, just... explored a little bit. After all, as much as I like world-building for its own sake, I don't want to get too distracted from my "main" world building effort in Old Night. Anyway, this new tab will be EMPIRE OF THE MIND-WIZARDS, and maybe I'll have some very tenuous ties between them and my version of Atlantis, and Gothan the Mind-Wizard, a Heresiarch, and the whole Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes campaign. But they will be tenuous... I don't really envision the fact that they exist on the fringes of the setting to be anything other than an off-hand reference, much like my orcling homeland of Gunaakt. The difference here is that I'll be exploring it as if it were an alternate setting that canonically kinda sorta exists in the same world, but you're not ever at all meant to go from one to the other. For all intents and purposes, they are completely different settings, that only exist in the same world as an easter egg, if you will.

I like the title Empire of the Mind-Wizards, but I don't know that I'll actually have an actual Empire or not. My early thoughts are that I need to read a few things, and it's quite a few things which I may pull out of order, because they are all on my trawl, to see if I can integrate them or borrow from them, or at least draw some kind of inspiration from them: 

• Expanded Psionics Handbook - for the races and whatever other setting material it has. If I use 3.5 exclusively (instead of P1e classes) then I'd use these too.
• Complete Psion - sadly, I've had a physical copy of this since it was new, and while I've read parts of it, I've never read it all the way through. Again, if I use the 3.5 classes, then this will become very important, because it offers four more and makes the use of psionics without any magic, arcane or divine, a well-rounded and balanced approach.
• Ultimate Psionic - a 3pp product that adapts 3.5 psionics to P1e. But it can't do Complete Psion exactly because it isn't open content. I've not read this, but one crucial (yet small) bit of information that I've heard is that it finally creates a soulknife that doesn't suck, lol. I made one a while ago based on the Star Wars d20 Jedi, so I've got options there if needed.
• Although Ultimate Psionic was the adaptation of 3.5 psionics to P1e, P1e had its own psionic or "psychic magic" line that explored the topic in a different way. Sadly for me, that means reading four books, most of them kind of chunky, to figure out what I need to do:
• Occult Adventures - the main one, with the six classes
• Occult Bestiary - in a pinch, I don't really need to read this one in order to develop this subsetting.
• Occult Realms - setting stuff, would like to peruse, but not critical
• Occult Origins - more player customization stuff, like archetypes 

Seven books, three of them quite lengthy, one of them mid-size, and the other three more modest, especially Occult Origins which I could probably read in an hour or two tops. But wait! There's more!

Given that I talked about potentially checking out Sarlona as a template for a psionic humano-centric setting, I should probably pull ahead the Eberron book Secrets of Sarlona too, which I've read before and I've had in physical form since it was new back in the mid 00s. But I don't remember much about it, so I probably need to read that one again too, just to see if it's got anything that I'd want to use for my Empire of the Mind-Wizards. The Riedran Empire of the psionic Inspired is, for all intents and purposes, an empire of the mind-wizards, so it'd be nice to see a fairly fully fleshed out version of one to see if there's anything to borrow.

All of these are already in my various trawls, but I'd have to pull them way out of order to read them now. But I'm willing to do that; for the most part, the order doesn't matter for these products. The 3.5 books in particular don't really have an order, Eberron is a relatively short list, so I'll catch up before too long; Paizo stuff just is. Ultimate Psionic, being a 3pp is technically not on the list, but I threw it in there anyway.

Also, since I had one more image that I generated yesterday for the Oriental adventures post, which inadvertently led to this little series, I'll go ahead and add the image here anyway.

Racial Deep Dive: Humans

My understanding of history, prehistory and archaeology is intimately tied up with my understanding of linguistics and archaeogenetics, all topics that interest me greatly. Because of this, I've defaulted to a structure of human populations in Old Night that are also closely tied to ancient genetics and linguistics. Let me, therefore, go back to a post from several months ago about languages, and reiterate and slightly rewrite or edit it, and from that base, let me talk about the various populations of humans that you could find in the Old Night setting, as well as ones that you could potentially pick from if creating a character that's human in the RPG.

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Common. I like the use of the word Common, because it's understood by all and is used by both D&D and Tolkien both. For all intents and purposes, Common is the language of the Hill Country or Humberland, and is also called Humbrian. For our purposes, it is equivalent to English. Because of the presence of Humbrian colonists, traders and more throughout the region, Humbrian has become... well, Common. There have been significant inroads of the language as the native language (albeit with different accents, perhaps) throughout much of the region. While clearly not everyone speaks Common fluently, or in some remote places at all, throughout the entirety of the Three Realms+, you can usually get by pretty good if it's the only language you speak.

Anstal Tane, a classic Humbrian

Humbrian is closely associated with the Humbrians, of course, and their country, the Hill Country or Humberland. For purposes of comparison, the Humbrians should be like British Americans; essentially the same as the British, but in a newly settled frontier territory. Unlike in the real world, the Humbrians don't have access to return home, however; Humberland is their new home and there's no going back even if they wanted to, nor can they be supplemented by new arrivals or settlers from the old homeland of Culmerland (et al.) Except more Medieval rather than Colonial in dress and manners, etc.

Old Culmerian. The original language of the majority of the hillmen settlers, and the direct ancestor of Common. Hasn't been spoken in many centuries, but old texts are still around, and there's a vigorous academic interest in old Humbrian languages and languages from the Old Country before the Colonists came to the Three Realms+. Real world analog: Old English.

Normaund. While not directly closely related to Old Culmerian, a strata of Normaundish aristocrats ruled Culmer for a time. While they were eventually assimilated and integrated (mostly) their language was distinct for many years, and many old texts in this language still exist too. It also added greatly to the vocabulary and structure of Common, and the dividing line between Old Culmerian and Common is somewhat arbitrarily pinned to the start of the Normaundish influence. Real world analog: Norman French.

Brynach. A language that existed alongside Old Culmerian, and predates it in what was later called Culmer. In spite of its age and lower prestige, this stubbornly didn't die for a long time; there are still a few older people in rural parts of the Hill Country who speak or read this language, although there's not nearly enough of them to maintain a viable speaking base, and nobody speaks this as their every day language. Real world analog: Gaelic and other British Celtic languages. 

Skellish. Distantly related to Culmer, but from a neighboring Old Country kingdom called Skelldale, some of the Colonists spoke this language. While all have assimilated linguistically to Common, literature in this language is important because it maintains elements of history and myth that were analogous to what the Old Culmers would have believed, but which they themselves lost. Real world analog: Old Norse.

Timischer. The native language of the aristocracy of Timischburg. Most of them still learn it, but for various social reasons, their Tarushan subjects have resisted using it natively, and the utility of the language has faded. As more and more trade with the Hill Country has penetrated the region the last several hundred years, most people in Timischburg have learned Common, and because the Tarushans and Timischers have largely resisted using each others languages to a large degree, Common (with a German accent) has largely emerged as the consensus language that both groups already knew and were willing to use to speak to each other. Timischer is on its way to becoming a dead language; well known by the scholarly, but spoken very infrequently, even in the homes of the native Timischer nobles as of the last few generations. However, it retains prestige legal status in Timischburg; signs are written in it, and many documents, especially older ones, are written in Timischer. Timischer nobles also use it to speak with each other when they want to separate themselves by language from those around them. Many Timischers of lower social class use it as well as a kind of insider language; Timischer mercenary companies push it as the official language of their companies (although most speak it as a second language) and some Timischer criminal groups outside of Timischburg have cultivated it as a way to keep their communications more secret.

Similarly, Old Timischer, as it sounds, the language of the Timischers, but archaic. As Old Culmerian is to Common, Old Timischer is to modern Timischer. Real world analog: continental early Medieval Germanic languages, such as Low Franconian (Old Dutch) and High Franconian (Old German) which makes sense given the analog of the Timischer Old Country homeland of Carlovingia with the early Medieval Frankish kingdoms of the Carolingian dynasty.

Alpon von Lechfeld, a famous Timischer scholar, enjoying retirement in his private library.

Tarushan. Tarushan is the native language of the "aboriginal" people of Timischburg, which largely corresponds geographically with the old kingdom of Tarush Noptii. As noted above, it has no official status, but the Tarushan people still cling to it stubbornly, and many of the old Tarushan people refuse to learn or speak or read Timischer. Tarushan has less official status, but more actual use, and there are people in the rural areas, or among the Tarushan Gypsies who only speak Tarushan, with at best a smattering of Common. There are a number of older documents in a slightly archaic version of Tarushan that predate the arrival of the Timischers as well. Tarushan is clearly related to some of the other older languages in the region, although distantly, and has cultural, linguistic and presumably also genetic ties to the ancient kingdom of Kinzassal, which we'll cover later.

Claud Lupescu, a Tarushan young man

Tazittan. This is a minority language, distantly related to Tarushan but not mutually intelligible, of a number of primitive, rustic and hostile peoples deep in the wildernesses of Humberland, like the Haunted Forest, especially on the eastern slopes of the Sabertooth Mountains, and the Tazitta Badlands, of course. Although it descends from a literate society, there is no written Tazittan that anyone really uses today. For a social analog, you could consider Tazitta to be not unlike the Sioux language spoken in the 1860s or 1870s—except that there is less open conflict between the Hill-men and the Tazitta, mostly due to no resources in Tazitta territory tempting Hillmen settlement at the moment. The geographical and social limitations of this language make it one that's unlikely to be of much use for PCs, except in a campaign that features this isolated population of Tazittans, however. Although much more primitive in their dress and equipment, as befits a xenophobic and isolated population living in a hazardous and forsaken place like the Haunted Forest, physically and genetically, the Tazittans more or less resemble the Tarushans in their build and coloration; the original phenotype of the Kinzassal people who were ancestral to both.

Drylander. Spoken mostly on the Baal Hamazi peninsula, this is the native language of the area, and while not related to Tarushan and Tazittan, etc. it does seem to have borrowed from it, and some of the Drylanders have genetics that appear similar to those of Old Kinzassal. Today, as Baal Hamazi is a broken, Balkanized land of tribes and city-states, the language's status is questionable. Still spoken in many remote tribes as the only language, and the official language of some city-states such as Baal Hishutash—one of the most conservative of the city-states, or Baal Ngirsu, one of the most isolated. Otherwise, as traders and travelers from beyond have come to the land, their lingua franca, i.e., Common, has largely replaced Drylander in most of the more cosmopolitan or connected city-states, and even among many of the more nomadic Drylander tribes. 

Their language also seems to be unique, although with some odd similarities with some of the very old Humbrian Old Country languages, like Old Culmer and Skellish—some have posited that there's a link. That said, this idea is sketchy and not widely accepted. The Drylanders are usually seen as their own people, and if there is some distant connection with any other people, it's distant enough to not matter. The Drylanders are usually tall, and have pale eyes, with extremely pale gray being more common than elsewhere, although blue, hazel and lighter brown are not unusual. Their hair is usually dark, but often with a reddish tint, and their skin is ruddy, even for those who don't spend most of their time outside like the nomadic ones to.

Pretty typical nomadic Drylander

Kurushan. The language of the Kurushans and their Northlander cousins. Like Timischer or Drylander, it is more associated with past glories than the current situation; Lower Kurushat is more and more disconnected from "regular" Kurushat to the north, and the Kurushans are left to their own devices in a land where they are not the majority population. While still spoken in some northern cities, especially in old Kurushan noble houses, few indeed could function if this is the only language you speak. It still remains an important administrative language in Lower Kurushan cities, but most people on the street will be speaking Common instead. The Elementalists came out of the Kurushan population, and before they manifest their elemental natures as young teenagers, they tend to look like Kurushans; who are very similar in many ways to the Drylanders physically, although with slightly flatter faces, higher cheekbones and often epicanthic folds.

Pallaran. The final language related to old Kinzassal is Pallaran, the language of the Corsair Coast. Unlike most other regions in which a Tarushan-related language exists, Pallaran is still a pretty active language, and many people along the Corsair Coast speak it as a first and only language. That said, Common has made inroads here as well, as many traders and adventurers have come to this area, or the corsairs—and legitimate traders—from this region have sailed northwards. It is also the most divergent of the various "Tarushan" languages, as the people themselves are heavily admixed with some other population that is now anonymous other than the linguistic and genetic trace that they once existed.

A Pallaran man off of the Corsair Coast

Kinzassal. The language that stands at the heart of the Tarushan language family. While it only briefly belonged to a single political entity, and always had a variety of dialects, its importance in the romance of the Kin Twilight, and the semi-imagined legendary Golden Age of all of the splintered kin that later broke off from this brief period of near unity is hard to describe; even the Humbrians, who are not themselves descended from the Kin, are drawn to this romance. That said, although it would seem to be like Latin, and it's various descendants variously like Spanish, Romanian, Italian, French, etc. in reality there's not nearly as much textual evidence for this language as there is for Latin, and Kinzassal was a much more savage and primitive place than Rome anyway—more like the Bronze Age society; further removed and very foreign to the inhabitants of the Three Realms+ today. Most of the "texts" of this language come from weathered carvings on standing stones and other ruined places rather than from actual texts. That said, because of the various things that happened in this time, there's intense academic interest in the period of Kinzassal and its artifacts.

Nizrekh. The language of the island chain off the west coast that is the remainder of Atlantis; although Nizrekh is an unrelated language spoken by people who arrived after the fall of Atlantis. It is not related to any other language, and since the Nizrekhi are isolationist and remote, few others speak their language either.

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This next batch is made up of languages that native to demihuman populations, but since this is both a deep dive into the various human populations but also into the languages of the Three Realms+, they have to at least be noted.

Grendling. The language of the Grendlings, or Wendaks, the actual descendants of Atlanteans who were on the mainland when Atlantis fell. Because the Grendlings are themselves a debased and rapidly devolving population, super xenophobic and isolationist, few speak this language other than them, and they teach it to no one. It is—presumably—a distant descendant itself of the language of high Atlantean civilization, but even that is not for sure, and certainly they don't resemble each other much now. The Atlanteans relationship to humanity is dubious. The Grendlings are not exactly human anymore, and the Atlanteans, their direct ancestors, probably were, but were very different than any human population around today.

Thurse. The bestial language of the thurses, at least of Thursewood. Because the anatomy of thurses is very different than that of humans and demihumans, it is widely considered impossible to learn to speak this language, although it is possible to learn to understand it... assuming you can do so without being killed and eaten. 

Orcling. The language of the orcs and goblins from Gunaakt. Still widely spoken amongst that race, especially the most recent arrivals in the area, but not by much of anyone else. There are few written texts in this language, and many orclings who have been in the Three Realms+ for more than a couple of generations have lost this language and only speak it haltingly if at all. While obviously not a human language, it needs to be mentioned because it's not an insignificant one, and some scholars are taking an interest in it as the Orcling population becomes more important.

Nyxian. The language of the minority population in Hyperborean Lomar. The majority Zobnans who founded the city no longer speak their original language, and only speak Common, or whatever other trade language they've learned. The Zobnans mostly speak Common, and have no records of their former language, but it was probably a dialect of Nyxian.

Infernal. This is the primary language spoken by those from the Realms Outside such as daemons and elemental-like creatures like ifrit, although myriad other tongues exist amongst this diverse breed as well. In addition, this is the language of magic, so a smattering of it, at least, is known by any practitioner of the arcane arts. Perfect fluency in this language, on the other hand, is almost impossible for any mortal to achieve. Despite that, it was very fashionable in old Baal Hamazi, where the demonic taint of their bloodline was a source of pride to the ruling caste, to speak Infernal natively, and many noble houses took great pains to ensure that their children didn't hear any other language until they were five years of age. Some households still speak Infernal in the home, and it is still a pseudo-living language in some of the successor states to Baal Hamazi, but native speakers are few, and fewer every day.

Dagonic. This is a bizarre pre-human language, remnants of which float around on isolated and moldy standing stones and other areas. Intriguingly, it appears to have originally been a underwater language. Few people on the surface can even make an attempt to learn it, due to the challenges of speech that an underwater language had to have overcome, and the language itself is only known from very scanty and fragmentary remains, making fluency all but impossible for even the most dedicated scholar. For all intents and purposes, it is a written language only, not a spoken language, since there are no speakers that anyone knows of at all, and how to pronounce the language is anyone's guess.

Atlantean. Very little is known of this language, which was presumably the distant ancestor of the modern disappearing Grendling (Wendak) language. Because most documents, archives or carvings in this language disappeared under the sea, scholars are forced to try and interpret a very limited corpus of texts that remain, and their interpretations of what is represented is divisive and wildly divergent from each other. Really curious and foolhardy linguists could find living memory of spoken Atlantean from the Mind-wizards, like Gothan from the Heresiarchy... if they survive the experience.

Because I'm deliberately running a game that is sorta D&D-like mechanically, but which is meant to be played much more like Call of Cthulhu is played, these old languages can be very important when researching the blasphemous secret history of the Three Realms+, but unless the characters are Lovecraftian also in the sense that they are academics, sages, and professors, it's unlikely that they'd know any of those languages; it is more likely that they'd have to utilize the services of an academic contact, such as Drancent Hewe or even Professor Alpon von Lechfeld to help translate anything that they find. Or... in a really, really bad pinch, one of the ancient Heresiarchs.

Genesis of Old Night

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.

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.

Horror subgenres and Old Night

It's right there in the name; The Shadow of Old Night. My game is as much horror as fantasy, maybe even more so. It takes place in a secondary world fantasy setting, but otherwise should come across more like a Call of Cthulhu game than a D&D game (in spite of its superficial mechanical similarity to D&D.) It's definitely dark fantasy at least, which blends fantasy and horror themes and tones, probably leaning more towards the horror.

In spite of myself, I find myself using Google's AI search results quite often instead of actually looking at the search returns (probably because for years, the search returns have been sponsored or otherwise pretty useless. What in the world happened to the Internet where search engines don't do what they're supposed to because they're either monetized or ideological? I miss the days of Webcrawler in the 90s sometimes; it just gave you results and that was that.) Anyway, here's what it says about Dark Fantasy and Grimdark Fantasy, which I think is useful to distinguish between the two.

Dark Fantasy: Incorporates darker, more disturbing, and frightening themes into the narrative. 

Grimdark Fantasy: A subgenre of dark fantasy that features a cynical, amoral, violent, and dystopian tone. 

I'm not grimdark, nor do I like grimdark really. But I'm definitely dark fantasy. One could argue that grimdark is a natural evolution of dark fantasy, and that something like Glen Cook's The Black Company kinda straddles the line between the two. But I think grimdark went too far into themes that I dislike, so when I use the term, it shouldn't be seen as overly taxonomic, and just a handwavey adjective. 

I used the same thing to come up with a list of horror subgenres, and I'll suggest which of them would or could be applicable to Old Night.

Supernatural or Paranormal Horror: Features ghosts, demons, and other spiritual entities that aren't physically present. 

Absolutely yes. This is, in fact, the core theme of Old Night. That said, it's also the core theme of a lot of fantasy. This is pretty broad.

Psychological Horror: Focuses on the mental and emotional states of characters, exploring themes of reality, sanity, and dread rather than a tangible monster. 

Much less so. I think of Stephen King's Misery or The Shining as one of the most iconic examples of this, and I just don't really care for it much.

Slasher: A classic subgenre featuring a psychopathic human killer who hunts and murders a group of people, often with a bloody and violent approach. 

I won't actually focus on this, but it isn't necessarily much different than many supernatural horrors. Was Michael Myers a supernatural entity? In many respects, he seems to be.

Body Horror: Explores visceral fears related to physical violation, grotesque transformations, and mutilation of the human body. 

I'm less interested in this subgenre, but not completely so. Mutation, corruption and stuff like that is more interesting to me than torture and maiming, of course. 

Found Footage: The narrative is presented from the perspective of discovered video recordings, often through a camera. 

Ironically, I do use some of this as my preludes to most campaigns, when the transparently Scooby gang analogs are killed off to kick off every campaign. But otherwise this is specifically a film genre and can't be replicated in any other medium very well. Maybe the classic story "Call of Cthulhu" is an early example of a prototype of it.

Lovecraftian/Cosmic Horror: Focuses on vast, incomprehensible cosmic entities and the futility of humanity against them. 

This is definitely true, but I think Cosmic horror has become a kind of silly in-joke in many cases. You have to be careful with your Lovecraftian references and make sure that you do it right. Just making allusions to well-known Lovecraftian entities does not actually make anything into cosmic horror.

Folk Horror: Features elements of folklore and local traditions, with horror often arising from rural settings and isolation. 

Sure, although I think this might be too esoteric of a label. Is supernatural horror taking place in the country using a folkloric supernatural entity folk horror, just just supernatural horror? I'd consider it the latter, really.

Gothic Horror: A classic style, often set in vaguely Victorian times, with themes of romance, death, and the supernatural within decaying settings. 

Romance not in the sense of the romance genre, but in the sense of romanticizing the past. That's part and parcel of fantasy already. If Dracula is the iconic gothic horror, or Jekyll and Hyde, or Frankenstein, or even the classic haunted house of The Castle of Otranto, then this is absolutely one of the key elements of horror to show up in Old Night.

Action Horror: Blends horror elements with action-packed sequences and thrilling fight scenes. 

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Aliens in fantasy, maybe. Or The Mummy (the Brendan Frasier one) or Van Helsing with Hugh Jackman. Even the under-rated and sometimes difficult to find Solomon Kane movie. This is probably one of the elements that most makes Old Night dark fantasy rather than straight up horror; not only the secondary world fantasy setting, but also the focus on action as a theme.

Horror Comedy: Attempts to balance scary and humorous elements, though it can be challenging to find the right mix. 

I mean, this happens by default, I think, because players tend to be silly sometimes at the table. I'd never try to purposefully do this, because as the AI text notes, it tends to fall flat if not perfectly executed.

Orcs in Old Night

I've talked a bit about orcs before. For whatever reason, I kind of like orcs, but I'm always tinkering just a little bit with how I present them. This post is still more or less the last word on orcs (and goblins) in Shadow of Old Night. I have two YouTube videos on them too, but they add very little that the post doesn't; in fact, one of them is literally me reading that post and adding more images from my AI orc collection or my Hero Forge models to the mix.

https://youtu.be/f5GENXzbPn8?si=WOPomPN5rpWaoSLp

https://youtu.be/L4Ol5SBAB7g?si=yw_JFxiih4seXpvZ

I've made some minor updates to some of those images since that post and those videos, especially the Hero Forge ones, but that's just minor cosmetic improvement, not substantive change. 

I didn't want to give all of them the same face, which even with face customizer ends up being a real problem in Hero Forge sometimes, so I've started looking for shortcuts to make more orcs that look like orcs but don't just use the orc face. One of the things I've done is use the orc face but try to modify the nose a bit and use a bit of other modifications to give them a little bit of variation, but still look very orc-like. 

The following is my attempt to combine the new ape model with a few orc elements; I replaced the hairy body with a normal one, and put the orc nose on an ape, and a different hair style. I used just the basic orc theme as a shortcut, but then modified some of the colors from my library of colors. I'd say this is a pretty good example of a "typical" orc male; maybe I'll go update a few of my example orc characters to show this. Maybe. I like the look of this guy.

And not every orc needs to be scowling all the time. Maybe I can make one who's more cocky, and happy-go-lucky.

Here's an old and outdated early attempt to make an orc in Hero Forge that matched my orcs, but I've updated him at least a little, using some of the same elements.

I will say that the first one is probably a bit too green for my taste. I like my orcs to be more khaki; they're green, but it's a very brownish, more realistic green. They're not bright like aspen leaves.

I made this orc laborer; probably the most likely encounter with an orc in the Three Realms that most will have... other than the pirates on the Darkling Sea which actually make a major component of the Darkness In the Hill Country 5x5 Front. This is heavily based on the quick and dirty profile face image I made above, but expanded and remade to be a whole character. Also, he's got a serious face, but less overtly scowling.

Orc (and a few goblins) Hero Forge updates

I've updated a bunch of models, mostly named characters. For whatever reason, I've been on a jag with orcs, and a few goblins. Here's some samples.

With an updated face, and slimmer, more realistic armor (in a Roman lorica segmentata instead of a chonky breastplate), Balogh is looking a bit more orkish, and a bit more what I had in mind. I probably should have updated his ax to a newer, slimmer one too, and I just noticed that his feet still look big. Sigh. Maybe more updates in the future.

UPDATE: Here's the minor updates. Made him a little bit more primitive and Roman rather than Medieval; it has sandals instead of armored boots, etc. and I fixed the ax.

Here's his token.

I didn't actually make any new updates to Captain Taurak, but he's too cool. Plus, I did create a token for him below, which I hadn't ever done before.

Charakaz Rees and Kemish; two likeable rogues in the orcling pirate crews.

Cryn and Heren. Again, this image was re-generated, but unchanged. But I created tokens. These two sisters are meant to show that even among the orcs there can be charismatic damsels in distress.

Cryn

Guarg Dreghu, the pirate cult priest of Dagon. He's got an updated face and a new token, below.

Heren's token.

A slightly different alternate of Vrakmar Korr. And his originals below, too.

Namzo, my orc anti-PC outright villain. Not that the pirates aren't villains too, but Namzo is especially hateable. 

Made a few updates to Shule, as you can see from the top to the bottom (new and old, respectively.) I like the pose better, the face, and proportions (especially the hands) and a few other minor details. Here's the old pose with the updated details.

No updates, but here's Kazar again, in two angles and a token. He'll need to become my orc iconic. I like him too much.