Freeport, actual plays and music

A number of updates, some personal, some just hobby:

First, we've had several months of family drama involving my oldest son and his wife. Despite years of probably denial on my part, it took a real catastrophe in his life for me to connect the dots and admit that the two of them probably have some kind of clinical personality disorder. In any case, not only have we had tons of stress and anxiety for the last several months, but I've also been worried about our house, which they've been living in, up in Michigan where we used to live. Now, we heard finally that they decided to get out, stop paying us rent, and we've got about two weeks notice. In July, we'll have to spend some time (and luckily we have some friends to help us with that) fixing up a few cosmetic things as cheaply and quickly as we can and putting the house on the market. Everything that we're hearing is that it's a seller's market right now, and we can hope to make off relatively well, sell very quickly, unload the burden and make enough over and above what we still owe that we can put a nice down payment on another house for us, finally. Although... we literally just signed another year lease on the house we're renting, so we won't be moving right away. But if we can get the house sold, and get our finances a little bit more organized, then we should be able to get into a house again about this time next year, with a hopefully significantly lower payment, much shorter term, and a plan to get completely out of debt entirely so that I can actually afford to retire when I'm old enough to do so. I mean, I'd love to retire now, while I'm still young and healthy enough to enjoy my retirement, but after the drama and worry that I've been through the last few years, this is a good outcome for me. Still have to actually manage to sell the house, of course, but every indicator I can see looks good on that front. With at least one significant long-term worry looking to be resolved in the near term, I'm looking good going into the second half of the year.

Second, I've been listening to a few actual play podcasts. The Red Moon Roleplaying rendition of The Enemy Within, the Hideous Laughter rendition of Carrion Crown, and alongside that one, there's The Zone of Truth; a kind of OOC supplement to Carrion Crown, and Evil Interlude, a kind of weird prequel mini campaign running alongside it as well. I try to alternate these, and then in between them, I listen to my hardtrance megamixes. However, those are too long. Those are all 20 songs long, which gives them an average length of about two hours or so. I'm thinking about redoing them and instead of ten mixes two hours long each, I'll have twenty mixes about an hour long each, with ten tracks each. This will be better as interludes between my podcasts, which are also about an hour to an hour fifteen or so in length (although I play them at 1.5x speed.) That will also give me the chance to clean up some of my older mixes, which are a little bit more clumsy, sometimes. If I do it quick and dirty, I just split the files and mix in the ends and beginnings of the tracks right in the middle, but I'd like to actually redo the mixes from scratch. I might even reshuffle a bit what tracks are in which mix. We'll see.

On that, though, I'm enjoying these podcasts. I tend to say that RPGs are not a spectator sport, and I simply could not get in to Critical Role. However, I think the combination of making them shorter (about an hour rather than four) and having them be audio so I mostly only listen to them when driving, when I'm not going to be distracted by my phone, my computer or something else sitting around close at hand works. When I try to watch video actual plays, I find that my mind wanders and I get really distracted by... well, really by pretty much anything else around me. Podcasts work much better than video actual plays, at least for me. Video actual plays rarely, rarely work out for me. The only exception, although I never finished this, was wasd20's Rime of the Frostmaiden actual play.

Third, I'm about to finish the big fat Freeport book. I've only got 25-30 pages left, and I'll finish it for sure tonight. In fact, I'll make sure that I do, even if I have to stay up late to do so. In any case, that means that I'm on page 512 or whatever exactly I'm on of 540 or whatever exactly it is, and I think that I can effectively review it, or at least make a comparison to earlier products that it kind of replaces. Compared to The Pirate's Guide to Freeport, it advances the timeline and makes a few changes. I like that they took the time to make these changes, but most of them I don't actually care for or at least care about. I'm not a fan of the fact that they 1) greatly increased the population of orcs and goblinoids and made them a kind of obvious metaphor for black people and/or immigrants. Although, because they're orcs and goblinoids, they inadvertently make the conservatives' case for them, on accident without realizing that they've done so. They also play right into the hands of the narrative that it's liberals who are racist trolls who think that black people are like orcs. The whole thing is a somewhat amusing charlie foxtrot on the allegory that they kind of obviously were trying to make. 2) created new races, like the island trolls, which I have no use for and don't know why they suddenly came to prominence out of nowhere, 3) created this odd Salt Curse thing, but then it's almost just an offhand kind of thing with no explanation, and it's easily (and probably prudently) ignored. I feel like the city sections are just a bit lighter, but I really need to compare them again to see if some of the details were changes or are missing.

The mechanics stuff was substantially updated from the Pathfinder Freeport Companion, and I'd say improved significantly. Every prestige class and some of the base classes were changed to archetypes, and the Freebooter base class is all new, and is honestly one of my favorite 3.x classes, serving as a great alt.swashbuckler.

Mostly the presentation is improved; it's all color, for instance, and most of the art is new. I do miss some of the old art... but then again, I also have the old book, so "miss" isn't really the right word. There's a new adventure module at the end of the book, which is what I'm finishing up right now. It's actually quite long; 50-60 pages worth, but it's curiously kind of poorly organized, and it's not at all my type of adventure, being a scavenger hunt where you go all over town solving puzzles. It's probably my least favorite, or close to, of the modules/adventures for Freeport that I've read as part of this trawl.

It's gratifying to be (almost) finished with this. I'll only have to read the Pathfinder Bestiary, and I may skim that because I imagine that much of the material has already covered in earlier products. Then there's the Shadow of the Demon Lord Freeport Companion, which I can probably skim because, again, the companions are all pretty repetitive. The only thing really to read is the combined Return to Freeport since I'll probably skim rather than read cover to cover the remaining two titles. I expect that mostly that's repeating material. 

Once I'm done with the Freeport trawl, I'll do a big wrap-up post and maybe a high level 5x5 adaptation of it into my Curse of the Corsair Coast. And then, I'll pivot, I think, to the Eberron and Forgotten Realms trawls—although first I'm trying to finish reading the SPCM second saga about Yig and time travel, and read the next Paizo adventure path, Second Darkness. I actually brought Races of Eberron with me to work in my backpack today, although I didn't end up getting it out at lunch because I was listening to a podcast instead. I've already read a fair bit into it, so it's been started. Getting whole trawls finished and taken off of my page list (although I won't delete the pages, just the link to them.)

UPDATE: Yeah, I finished the book early. The final adventure was disappointing. The adventure included with the companions is way better. Heck, most of the adventures in Tales of Freeport were way better. Actually, most adventures period are way better. There are some good Freeport adventures. A poorly conceived scavenger hunt who's main purpose is really just to give you excuses to go to a lot of the writer's favorite haunts in the setting isn't one, though. Maybe I'll do a palate cleanser and read a short 32-page module or something before diving into whatever is next. It's Races of Eberron in physical books, although I also added the next short Pathfinder Companion book, which is Taldor, Echoes of Glory. As with the Osirion book I recently read, there's a larger, more fleshed out Pathfinder Setting book that came out later, but y'know. It was nice to have something to start with in the meantime. I'll be honest with you, though—by far my favorite parts of Golarion are Varisia and Ustalav. Most of the rest of the setting could get bent as far as I care. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I doubt I'd use it for much. I really need to start the next adventure path.

But not tonight. I'm tired.

Deadliness in RPGs

Let's talk about OSR games vs "modern" D&D games, whatever exactly that means (it's worth noting that the OSR is itself ~twenty years old, depending on exactly when you consider it to have started, and 3e is often considered a "modern" D&D game, even though it's now at least two (again, depending on how you count) editions and twenty-five years old itself, and has been out of print for over fifteen years. The OSR could maybe have been considered to have started with the publication of Castles & Crusades in 2004, but certainly by 2006-7 as Basic Fantasy, OSRIC and later Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry were published, the OSR was in full gear. No wonder there's so much confusion as to what exactly the movement even is; it's aged quite a bit, and there are people who were just little kids when it started who are now participating in it. 

One oft-referred to perception is the lethality or deadliness of old school, and the supposed occurrence of PC death. Perception isn't always reality, so it's worth exploring a few points about this.

Professor Dungeon Master made an interesting video a few years ago about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which has a reputation as a very deadly game, but he also pointed out that much of that reputation was based on the art and the tone of the text rather than on the reality of how deadly it actually was. In fact, he pointed out that B/X D&D was considerably deadlier in reality especially with Fate points and other get out of death free cards that Warhammer includes. Well... I'm not sure that there's any other such thing, other than some GM fiat in other games, but having just read the Enemy Within (Director's Cut) it's clear to me that there is at least some expectation that in in this campaigns there's character continuity. Warhammer FRPG was specifically designed to be a Call of Cthulhu in fantasy with urban investigation replacing dungeon-crawling, which was very passe in the British market in particular at the time it was published, so it is very trad style. 

But a lot of that perception of lethality in ye olden dayes could be how the games were actually played rather than anything inherent in the mechanics themselves. To some degree, early gamers, especially in the northern Midwest crowd of Arneson and Gygax, didn't particularly care about PC death, because roleplaying was a new innovation to their wargaming hobby, and they weren't really roleplaying all that much yet as we understand the concept now. Player characters were still mostly seen as game pieces in an unusual wargame where you ran a single character instead of an army or skirmish force of some kind. If your character died, well you rolled up a new one and tried again. No big deal. However, it didn't take too long for this to evolve. By the time Tom Moldvay wrote the Basic set, he said, for instance, "Sometimes I forget that [D&D] is a game and not a novel I’m reading or a movie I’m watching... A good [D&D] campaign is similar to the creation of a fantasy novel, written by the DM and the players as the adventure unfolds." The perception of the game as something other than an avant-garde spin on a wargame had set in, and it truly became a roleplaying game, at least for some groups. I'm quite sure that early gamers didn't really think too hard about lost characters, and it happened more frequently. At least, frequently relative to what came later. Not necessarily later as in "modern" rulesets, but later as in trad style gameplay, where people roleplayed their characters more, and that became the prevailing reason to play in the first place. 

I suspect that a lot of the expectations of lethality are overstated, or at least it wasn't the designers' intentions, except in some tournament or deliberately meatgrinder style modules. Many of them refer to the idea that the expectation is that the game was for a larger group than most people probably actually played in. Certainly, a module will be pretty lethal for a group of 3-5 characters if it was calibrated and designed for closer to ten.

I think once again, the OSR has taken an element that was more common in the past than it is now, taken it out of context and pinned it in opposition to "modern" games rather than to the rise of trad playstyle, which predated "modern" games by the better part of twenty years or more (depending on the group). They've also exaggerated the old school position to a caricature of what it once was in a some games and declared that this caricature is The Way Things Were and The Way Things Ought to Be™. 

It is, of course, the neo-trad style that is closer to what OSRians think "modern" games are like; the online Sims-like power-fantasy where you just noodle around with a character that's an idealized personified avatar of the player, and they don't even want to be challenged, just to experience the setting like a tourist. I've had characters die, or at least seen them, in modern games. I'm not a huge fan of plentiful character death, because I am, after all, a trad-style player who likes the whole experience to resemble a novel, like Tom Moldvay said in the intro pages of Basic, but I am old-fashioned even when I reject the precepts of "old school", and the risk of death is still important. I am, after all, also a fan of the Call of Cthulhu play paradigm. (Which also isn't as lethal as its reputation, I don't believe, but y'know. It's still considerably moreso than D&D of any version.) But as a trad player who utilizes what is, essentially, a rules-lite extreme derivation of 3e, a "modern" game, I find the neo-trad position to be just as radical and unlike what I want as the OSRians do.

I'm not sure how prevalent that style really is anyhow, or how closely tied to 5e it really is. The OSR's perception of this vast gulf of expectation between modern and old school here was, I think, pretty overstated.

As an aside, jumping back to the Warhammer reference above, I just finished reading the Enemy Within Director's Cut, including the Companion books. I have literally about 10-15 pages left in the last book, which I'll finish tonight. It's hard to take it seriously as a grim and gritty setting when they're so woke. They've obviously swapped what were originally a lot of male NPCs for female ones, who are supposed to be just as big, tough and masculine as the males. But they were a little sloppy sometimes in their editing, and occasionally the original name or pronouns will still poke through. I would never consider limiting PC choice by sex, or penalizing players for wanting to play a girl, but let's be real; women are not men, and it is really off-putting to see them treated as if they were. Just a few months ago, we had the fiasco of Olympic boxing where some men dressed like women swept the awards and actually seriously injured a few women boxers. Women are neither psychologically nor physically equivalent to men. And like I said; PCs are PCs; they're always special anyway, but if treating men and women as equivalent is prevalent throughout the setting, it seriously undermines its ability to be taken seriously. This is especially important for a setting like Warhammer which is meant to be grim, mostly serious (barring the puns) and as much of a horror/Cthulhu like setting as it is a fantasy/Tolkien like setting.

Pop culture jokes

Sigh. I'm not sure if I'm amused or annoyed. While reading of the fantasy opera of elvish singers in Middenheim for the Carnival which is the backdrop for the Power Behind the Throne module, I came across this very dated early 80s British pop culture reference.

Elven niuromaintiech music, with its complex vocal sounds, its performers’ eye-catching costumes has found an enduring audience among the other races of the Old World. The audience at this recital show their admiration of the performers by imitating their bizarrely-cut clothes, elaborate hairstyles, and lavishly-applied makeup. Those attending this recital are treated to performances by perennial favourites Adamantiel ‘Prince Charming’ Dandihyweiman, the Elven League, and the so-called ‘Wild Elves’ themselves, Duriandian Leboniel and his quintet (who plan to honour the city of Ulric with their popular ditty ‘Hungry Like the White Wolf ’).

While that's a cheeky reference to New Romantic music, it's a pretty dubious claim to have said nearly 40 years after the fact that it's found an enduring audience, or that the strange fashion and make-up affectations of the New Romantics look like anything at all these days that anyone would recognize. I'm not even sure that the references to Adam Ant and his two hits "Prince Charming" or "Stand And Deliver" (from whence the line Dandy Highwayman, referenced as a pun above) are even remembered. A reference to the Human League is more straightforward, as is about four Duran Duran references in a row "Wild Boys", Duran Duran almost said outright in the name, Simon Lebon, and of course "Hungry Like the Wolf"... but Duran Duran does at least have some enduring popularity. Heck, I saw them in concert last year, and it was pretty packed. Although the Depeche Mode concert was more packed and the tickets more expensive too. I guess they have even more enduring popularity when all is said and done.

It is somewhat ironic that the publishing house that literally brought us the word grimdark from the tagline of their futuristic variation on the game, although it applies equally well to the fantasy version, is at the same time so invested in these corny puns, but there it is. Even when the first version of this adventure was written in the 80s itself, this might have been pretty obscure. Maybe not in Britain, I suppose.

The reference the next page down to Wilhelm Pikewaver's famous play A Knight's Midsummer Dream is possibly even more ridiculous. Pikewaver? Really?

And a couple of pages after that, a reference to "What A Swell Party This Is"; holy crap, is it written for my dad? He's nearly 80, but he's always loved High Society. If he hadn't, I doubt I'd have recognized that reference.

Map styles (and new Dark Fantasy X map incoming?)

Looking at some old maps, because I'm thinking of drawing another version of the setting map. I currently have three versions of the setting map. By setting map, I mean general overviews of all of the DFX setting as a whole, as opposed to maps that I'm making specifically for campaigns. One of the maps was never meant to be more than a sketchy first draft, though, and the other was a one-off electronically generated map because I had a one month subscription to Inkarnate. But I still refer to them from time to time, and not just the later draft that replaced the sketchy draft. This new one will be a second "second draft" when I draw it.

This is an interesting approach, because rather than there being one, "canonical" map of the setting, I end up with various maps, all of which offer differences, some of them fairly significant, and I refuse to take a stand on the canonicity of any of them. The campaign specific maps are canonical for the campaigns that I'd be running, but once in another context, they would no longer be. Why would I do such a thing? Well, I like maps for their own sake so it's always fun to draw more, it's nearly impossible to get them to match up as well as I'd like anyway, so I embrace the differences, and I like having a variety of interpretations. In real life, prior to modern surveying being readily available, maps were not exact, although the mapmakers did their best to capture what they saw and measured and observed. These differences and variations offer an interesting approach, where perception of distance and scale and size could vary by the observer and the effect of having differing choices to go to could be a feature rather than a bug. Plus, my current maps prioritize a little too much the Hill Country, and I feel like Timischburg and Baal Hamazi have become somewhat shrunk from their original incarnations on the sketchy map, or even from the material that they made up before. The Boneyard and the Goldenwolds are fairly open and empty and yet take up loads of space that I kind of need for other features, which are in contrast, too crowded. 

That said, as I've said many times before, my conception of how to draw fantasy maps was hugely influenced by the Christopher Tolkien maps of Middle-earth, as I saw them in the old Ballantine copies that I first had, printed in the 80s, with the Darrell K. Sweet cover art. Although it was obvious that there were some differences between that map and the larger one in the hardcover version of Unfinished Tales, I never gave much thought to the difference until recently. Let me go through a variety of Middle-earth maps that I'm familiar with and discuss where they came from.

This is the original Christopher Tolkien map, first done in 1953 for the first edition printings, and as I said, printed in color (such as it is) with Unfinished Tales. This is often called "The General Map of Middle-earth". At some point after 1970 it was slightly modified and a few river names and other features that didn't originally feature on the first version were added to the map as it was printed subsequently.

In 1980, Christopher Tolkien redrew the map, cropped a few portions off (especially in the south) and added more features that hadn't been present in the original version of the map. Because it was completely redrawn, it has some additional stylistic changes, but otherwise looks quite similar. This was what was included in, for example, my first printings of the books that I had, and is therefore the most familiar to me. The image below is that version, although obviously my version didn't have any red ink since it was printed in a mass market paperback. This one is often called "The West of Middle-earth" and it replaced the above map as the de facto standard. Few, if any, subsequent maps don't treat this version as the canonical version to follow. Not only had a few features been added in, but a few other errors were corrected, such as the spelling of Nan Curunir, for instance.

In 1994, Stephen Raw was hired to redraw the maps yet again, although he follows this "The West of Middle-earth" prototype extremely closely, and the main difference is that this new map was formulated for clearer printing in the mass market paperback environment; Christopher's maps didn't always print well when miniaturized and printed on cheap paper with cheap ink. The point wasn't at all to change anything, just to make them technologically a little easier to deal with. I'm also not aware of Raw having used any red ink, so it appears that that iconic affectation came to an end here.

This is what you are most likely to see in any modern printing of the books, but as noted and as you can see yourself, it's similar enough to the 1980 Christopher Tolkien redrawing that you could be forgiven for not even noticing that it's not the same map.

Finally, for Peter Jackson's movies, the map was redrawn yet again, color was added, and it is perhaps a bit more decorative, but is also so similar that other than the fancy fonts and few other decorative flourishes, you could be forgiven for thinking that is merely a digital edit of the Christopher Tolkien map. 

Which, actually, I can't confirm that it isn't. I can't find any credit for who drew it. I'll throw it out there. Obviously it arrived too late on the scene to have impacted my own map drawing techniques, which were mostly crystalized in the 80s, but which I've tinkered with a little bit here and there, but there are a few things that it does well enough that I've kind of adapted them more recently in place of what I was doing. This is especially true for the coastlines. I've seen this style of coastline spread throughout the fantasy mapmaking internet in general, and I presume that this is ultimately the source for it.

There are also a couple of other maps that I have, one or two of which I'll post here, that are noteworthy. One of them is a scan of the Pauline Baynes map, which was made in the 1960s, while Tolkien was still alive. It's a poster map, made as a promotional item, and it's pretty nifty, but other than color and the little illustrations in the bubbles, doesn't add anything that the Christopher Tolkien 1980s map didn't do just as well.

The next two, I'm not sure of the provenance of them, but they're in my folder and I found them online somewhere. I highlight them merely because I want to talk about a few minor stylistic differences, not because the content is, of course, really any different.

This looks to merely be an edit of the Stephen Raw map, with a border added, some parchment looking color layer put on as well, and most of the water lines removed.

First off; again, not focusing on the content but the stylistic differences between them, let's look at what they choose to do for some of the elements.

Mountains. In almost all of them, mountains are stylized and drawn; illustrative more than cartographic. This is now the default for almost all fantasy maps; they looks like little isometric mountains with shading and stuff on them. While many fantasy maps have the light source to the West (i.e., shadows on the right) Christopher did it the other way, and that's always been my default too. The mountains are also quite exaggerated and pointy, and have a fair bit of variety. Although my own drawings of them had simple black shading, that's probably because that's all that I could see in the shrunken and cheap printings of the mass market paperbacks. I've since been a bit more detailed and "pretty" with my mountains and shading, and that actually looks more like the originals than I thought.

Hills. While largely similar to mountains except lower, some of the hills have much less defined shading; in fact, in the original Christopher Tolkien map from the 50s, many of the hills don't have any shading at all. My own hills have often been too moundlike and boring, but as I've gotten older and more experienced, they became more like some of the later versions of the mountains—just smaller and lower.

Forests. I never really liked the approach Christopher Tolkien took of drawing massive clumps of stylized individual trees. Not that it doesn't look fine; I did that on some early maps when I was in junior high, and I quickly found the process time-consuming, tedious and frustrating. I think I may be more open to it now, as my "cloud forest" approach has become fairly tedious too, just in order to get it that leafy look instead of a puffy cloudy look. I also really like the approach taken in the movie version of the map, although I've never tried to do that one myself. It doesn't look hard, and it looks pretty good. Christopher Tolkien seems to have used a similar style in a map of Beleriand that he drew, so that's probably why it was used again here. It actually has more of an old J. R. R. Tolkien drawn The Hobbit map look to it as well, so it's an interesting callback. The final version shown above has a more "dispersed tree" forest look.. Lots of maps use a similar style, but I've never been a huge fan unless your trees are dispersed but close enough together that they don't look like it, so it's very tedious with lots of trees needing to be drawn.

Coastlines. I also did coastlines like the 1980 Christopher Tolkien map for a little while until I thought that all of these extraneous lines were... well, extraneous. I didn't really pay attention before, but the original Christopher Tolkien map didn't have those, so it was an artifact of a relatively brief window of time, I suppose. But I really like the coastline approach that the movie version of the map does, which is also similar to what the bottom "wrinkled parchment" version looks like. 

Rivers, settlements and roads. All versions are pretty similar here. Rivers are thick lines, getting thicker as they get wider, settlements are usually just little icons; squares, although occasionally a triangle or little tower-like icon, and roads are dotted lines. In the movie version of the map, roads are dashed lines and done in red ink like the lettering., and each settlement is an individualized little icon... but I like the little squares or circles just fine.

Lettering. In all versions of the map, the lettering has a hand drawn look, although in the more "professional" versions below, they probably aren't actually hand drawn. The red lettering is also a unique affectation, so much so that black hand drawn maps with red lettering gives a map a distinctive Tolkienesque look.

Negative space. All of the versions of the map also make considerable use of white space, and don't overdo decorative or other details; many entire regions are detailed by nothing so much as a label, like Minhiriath, Enedwaith, Forodwaith, Harondar, etc. I've actually started filling in more of these with at least some small details, just to give the map more of a "full" feel, but I understand the appeal of the blank space map. The Lord of the Rings maps were specifically designed to showcase areas that were part of the plot of either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings or were mentioned in the appendices or in offhand references in the text. This isn't necessarily meant to imply that there wasn't anything in the empty spaces of the map, merely that there wasn't anything that was mentioned. My maps don't quite serve the same purpose, so large blank spots isn't really what I'm going for.

Very briefly, because this is already a longish post with a lot of images, here's a map of the Warhammer Old World, or at least a portion of it. I found this online, but I have the majority of this same area in an old White Dwarf from the early/mid 90s, and the vintage of the map has to be late 80s or early 90s, although I don't know who drew it or exactly when it first appeared in print. As you can see, it clearly follows most of the drawing conventions of Christopher Tolkien. A few notable comments or exceptions:

• It uses the original Christopher Tolkien coastlines style, without lines going out all the way into the water, although otherwise the redrawn 1980 map is closer in style.
• Forests are drawn a bit differently, but honestly it looks nearly as tedious regardless.
• The lettering isn't red. The khaki land and light blue water color was added, I presume, later; the original version in my White Dwarf is just black and white. The lettering is also typeface, not hand drawn in appearance. I presume the original is just black and white.
• The map is a bit fuller in general than the Middle-earth maps, with much less white space.
• The map is also more illustrative. A lot more features are drawn, not necessarily with labels, and the features are also more decorative. Look at the big ledge east of the mountains in the south, or the Plain of Bones, for example. Or even just features scattered throughout the Dark Lands in general, like the Sentinels, or the Flayed Rock.
• The images in the ocean are clearly copied and pasted from other illustrations that Warhammer had already commissioned elsewhere, and don't originally belong to the map at all. 

My redrawn setting map will probably be mostly like this Warhammer map. I'll try and do forests like they are in the movie version of LotR, as well as coastlines that way, but otherwise, the Warhammer map is the closest analog. Keeping in mind that the Warhammer map is deliberately and obviously attempting to do things like they were done by Christopher Tolkien in the first place.

I do also have a couple of 05 Pixma Micron red pens, so I'm thinking of doing the lettering in red, and everything else in black, a la Christopher Tolkien as well. 

Enemy Within Adaption

I've been adapting these D&D adventure paths, but none of them are really the kind of game that I'd like. One campaign that I probably could adapt to Dark Fantasy X and enjoy it as is without having to change the structure completely to a more freeing one is The Enemy Within, from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I'm not a huge fan of the system, but I really like the setting, and even more than the setting, I really like the tone and themes of WFRP. Along with the several other books that I'm reading concurrently (sigh. One on Kindle, one in physical form, an adventure path in Dungeon Magazine and an old 3e book on pdf) I decided to start reading the Cubicle 7 "directors cut" version of this campaign. I do have—or at least have access to—all five of the books of the campaign, as well as all five companion volumes. That's 10 books; not the thickest or biggest, even for RPG books, but still, which if I can read them all this year without getting distracted, sidetracked or delayed, will significantly help my reading goal for the year (I'm almost halfway through the year, by the way. I need to keep moving a little faster.) But I'm planning on doing it, and I'll briefly talk about each product after I read it in terms of how I'd adapt it to my setting. This will have a new tag, ENEMY WITHIN. I've renamed most of the other adventure paths, but this one is too iconic, and kind of a simple concept, so I'll just use the original campaign title for this thread or tag or series, or whatever you want to call it.

I do need to revise a few high level things right off the bat. The Empire from Warhammer is very much like the Holy Roman Empire of the latest Middle Ages, but Dark Fantasy X is more like the High Middle Ages combined with some other stuff, like the American frontier in the Hill Country, and classic Dracula-esque Transylvania in Timischburg—the latter being where I'm likely to set this. I can actually use the Germanic names if I want, given that the Timischburg aristocracy is meant to be similar to the Austrians of the Austrian Empire, with an underclass of Balkan others; Romanians, Serbians, Hungarians, etc. Chaos is also such an iconic Warhammer element that I may want to change it to something else. Depending on where I start the game, and one thing I'm thinking is having the PCs arrive in Timischburg from the east through the Eltdown Fens, I might have the chaos mutants that make an early appearance by corrupted reptile cultists, as described in my early CULT OF UNDEATH musings that I've made recently. Or... I could make them people slowly turning into ghouls for some reason. It's not that the chaos mutations are ever really explained other than "chaos is resurgent" or something, if I remember correctly, so I don't need to explain it here either. Certainly not right off the bat. Ubyr would be the obvious stand-in for Altdorf, at least in the first adventure, because it's a city that the PCs have to stop at if they're come from Eltdown, but Ubyr probably doesn't quite cut it when Mittermarkt is just beyond that. And neither is the capital of Timischburg.

But that's OK. I can make modification to various aspects of the campaign as I go through it, beyond just changing the names to be Dark Fantasy X friendly. I don't know what they are yet, as I just barely started reading it again (I read the first two books last year, I think, or possibly the year before, but then I never went on yet from there.)

Anyway, this post is mostly just to establish the tag and announce the project. We'll see how quickly or how often I update it, but it will be a major push going forward. I'll probably do it faster than I finish my long-delayed Paizo deconstructed adventure path, since this "adventure path", if you want to call it that, is much more up my alley than anything Paizo is likely to ever publish.

Reptile cultist bandit. Maybe a stand-in for Old Rolf. He's less obviously mutated than the Warhammer version, but I'm a more subtle kind of guy, I guess. (That's not really true, but whatever.)

Fantasy Yog-Sothothery

I'm really not a fan of the Age of Sigmar setting, especially because the original Warhammer world setting was so good. It also seems like a really bizarro business decision to get rid of your classic setting and move to a new untested one literally at the same time you're launching a hit video game set in the old setting in the form of Total War. 

Although from a business perspective it's a much smaller deal, the relaunching of the Enemy Within TTRPG campaign in a "director's cut" format was also at this same time. The old Warhammer world lives on, and in fact seems to live on bigger and better than ever in some ways, during the Age of Sigmar. Which, as near as I can tell, has not really been a super big hit. Maybe I'm just missing all of the Age of Sigmar lore videos on YouTube, and whatnot, but the buzz for the rebooted setting seems to be low energy, while there's still a lot going on with the old setting.

That's neither here nor there, though. The old setting is well documented, so regardless of what you think of one or other other of the Warhammer settings, the old setting is certainly useable. Warhammer sometimes suffers from confusion of tone. When its at its best, it's dark fantasy, the literal origin of the term grimdark, and works as Yog-Sothothery; literal Lovecraftian horror. Other times, it's very tongue in cheek humor, puns and silliness. Not that that doesn't have its place too, even occasionally in a dark fantasy setting, but I'll venture to say that Warhammer as a setting is much more famous and much more beloved for its horror and darkness than it is for its humor and silliness.

Of course, Lovecraft himself wrote plenty of fantasy. Here, for the fun of it, is a Lovecraftian fantasy story from Youtube, next to a Warhammer Yog-Sothothery story, again from Youtube (with a few minutes of framing, mostly after the story is over.) You'll probably note that if anything, the Warhammer story is a more effective horror story than the Lovecraft one is. Not only that, the skaven, when not silly and goofy, are a more effective horror element than something like Deep Ones anyway. I'd venture to say that most people are more icked out by rats than by fish.

Now, I'm on record as saying Lovecraft was very influential, but it's not because he was a great writer; it's because he had innovative new ideas. It's not actually shocking to me that a Warhammer story would be better than a Lovecraft story. Of course, to be fair, "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" has a similar title and similar theme to "The Doom of Kavzar"—and even a similar plot, although the latter is clearly riffing on the Pied Piper story—but Sarnath isn't really meant to be one of the horror stories either. So there is that.

Undead for Halloween

Six years ago, I wrote this Halloween themed post, describing all of the Undead troop types in the Warhammer setting (at the time) and thinking about how I could adapt them to Dark Heritage. Most of them are iconic creatures from folklore and horror stories, but a few were original and unique, especially among the Tomb Kings army.

Dark Heritage is now Dark Fantasy X, and the Warhammer setting was blown up and replaced with a much less compelling High Fantasy setting about gods and heroes that has only vague echoes of its Dark Fantasy roots. (I'm not a fan, if you can't tell. I find it incoherent and bizarre, and I actually really kind of liked the original Warhammer setting, so I'm maybe a bit resentful that it was taken away.) Of course, it's not quite as simple as this; even if its out of print, the old Warhammer stuff is still around and not hard to get. The old Warhammer world is the setting of the Total War Warhammer games, and I wonder sometimes if Games Workshop is kicking themselves that they blew up the setting and took it away only to have it be the central element of a popular computer game franchise. But despite my dislike of the Age of Sigmar setting, I do admit that it has some good ideas. (Good ideas that would have been equally good if integrated into the original Warhammer setting. But I promise... I won't mention that again.) I've, over the years, collected a lot of Warhammer army books, even though I don't actually play the game. A lot of them I got either free or cheap; my brother used to play, for instance, and I'd buy them for the fluff in outgoing editions when new editions were on their way out, or at used bookstores, ebay, etc. I have all of the old Undead army books going back to 4th edition, and I have access to the Age of Sigmar army books on Scribd. I decided that for the approaching Halloween season, I'm going to read all of these books and then make a big post over on the new Dark Fantasy X blog about what (if anything) I want to do with that, and what my impressions generally are. I can tell you already that turning Nagash into the God of Death and making him this gigantic mover and shaker in a godlike rather than sorcerer-king like way was a major downgrade in terms of accessibility and interest to the setting. I just don't think Dark Fantasy can have a High Fantasy "Gods Among Us" vibe, and that's the major disconnect that will make the newer books seem inferior to the older, even when they have really great ideas in them. Which many of them, to be fair, seem to do.)

Anyway, I'll update this post as I finish the books, and then make my analysis post over on the other blog. In the meantime, I'll add quick notes after each title as I finish it.

Undead (4e) - A phenomenal book of setting lore. The rules are relatively short, and the lore is well written, fascinating and plentiful. To be fair, much of it was repeated in the old White Dwarf 166 (or whatever exactly issue number that it was) that I read years and years ago, so it's not like it was really new. But it's really good.

Vampire Counts (5e) - The creation of the Vampire Counts (and later Tomb Kings) out of the old Undead army list was a brilliant move, but unfortunately here, the lore is rather light, and most of it is repeated, often literally word for word, from the earlier book. This means that the new vampire bloodlines get almost no lore, just rules, which is disappointing. You do have to go through the army list, though—a decent number of new troop types were added in this book that weren't in the other book, and some lore about each is present in the entries.

Vampire Counts (6e) - This book adds a fair bit more; more of the text is rewritten rather than just replicated (although plenty of that's here too); it adds a lot more lore about the four bloodlines from the 5e book, and introduces a 5th bloodline, the Strigoi Ghoul Kings. It adds another character or two as well. All in all, a good read. It seems to have more rules and modeling advice than the prior book, in spite of its increased lore as well, without being a longer book. I think the lore was written more economically, if less aesthetically. The models, by the way, are often still the same ones that the old 4e Undead era had. By the time 6e rolled around, they were looking very primitive and unsightly. That's one thing I've got to give Warhammer. Whatever else you may or may not think of it today, you've got to admit that the models are really good looking now, especially compared to what they looked like even earlier in the 2000s.

Tomb Kings (6e) - The first pass at the skeletal army of ancient "Egypt," cursed into eternal Undeath by the treachery of Nagash. (As an aside, Nagash is not a name Games Workshop came up with; it's a slightly different spelling of the Hebrew word Nachash, which means serpent and often refers to Satan.) This book adds a fair bit to the lore of the Undead and the Nehekhara region specifically. The army itself, at least at this stage, is a bit anemic, though. The later edition will add more interesting character and monster types to make it more alluring to players.

Vampire Counts (7e) - More of the text is rewritten or added to for this version, although there's still some smaller amount that is still copy/pasted. I should also point out that the art has been evolving as much as the models have; back in the 90s when 4e was coming out, the models were cartoonish and the art was often weird and bizarre, depending on the artist. 5e had a much more "tonal" consistency and looked really good, but most of the art was re-done for 6e. 7e went back to a lot of John Blanche weirdness, which has a certain appeal to grognards, but which I thought was intrinsically much less interesting than that of guys like Adrian Smith. That said, this is easily the best version since the 4e book in terms of text, even if 5e and 6e were probably a bit better in terms of art and visual design.

Vampire Counts (8e) - The first book to be all in color, instead of mostly black and white. It's interesting to see much of the same art as 7e, now in color. Several new troop types and a mostly completely renovated line of miniatures makes this certainly the most attractive of the Old World undead army books. Y'know, except for the bizarrely ugly cover art. Most of the text is very similar to the 7e version, although a few new things were written in here and there. To get the "full" experience, you don't actually need to read all of these books. The 4e Undead plus the 8e Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings will do you for the Old World.

Tomb Kings (8e) - While the original Tomb Kings book for 6e was a bit anemic, lacking very many interesting models, for 8e they obviously made an attempt to give them more. That said, I suspect that the army was never super popular until it became the focus of a DLC for the Total War: Warhammer game series. A real shame, isn't it? Sega, of all people, did more for the Old World setting than Games Workshop remained willing to do, who abandoned it in favor of attempting a new setting that has no gravitas, no resonance, and no coherence. Anyhoo... these 8e books were prettier than the previous editions, no doubt, being among other things, in full color for the first time. That said, other than a few new troop types, this book adds little that the 6e book didn't have already if you'd already read or bought that one. The design and layout is also greatly improved, making it easier to read, however.

Liber Necris - This book is nothing but fluff; from the Black Library, not Games Workshop the main company per se. There was a whole series of these; I have this one, the four Chaos books, and the Skaven book. All are excellent; they're written and presented as if they were actual tomes of lore to be found in the Old World rather than books in our world written about the Old World. After reading all of the army books of all editions of the old Warhammer setting, I thought this a fitting summary of them all before I turned to the End Times Nagash book and start the process of turning the setting from a larger than life dark fantasy with very strong horror undertones to a kind of fake mythological comic book setting. This book is highly recommended as an entertaining setting book read. I'll admit that sometimes the philosophy of souls in the Old World is a bit over-wrought, being that it was supposedly written by Mannfred von Carstein himself, it seems appropriate that he'd obsess over that a bit. And it does include some repeated text from the old 4e army book that still is a running thread through all of these books. I wonder if it predates the 4e book entirely? I don't know; I don't have anything earlier than that.

The End Times: Nagash - While I already disagree with the very premise of this book as something that should be done, the implementation and execution of it is even worse. There's a ridiculous amount of name-dropping of famous Warhammer characters, and much of what happens is bizarrely off-screen (apparently, Kislev, Estalia and Tilea are all destroyed off screen, for instance. Perhaps it happens on screen in the Skaven or Chaos books?) Most egregiously, the tone which was always the Old World's true claim to fame, is completely ignored. Characters don't act anything at all like they used to, and they are converted into comic book superheroes with absurd over-the-top nonsense. To use just two related examples: Mannfredd von Carstein is always portrayed as the most subtle and devious of the von Carstein vampires, yet here he's a chump, easily manipulated over and over again to bring Nagash back. Nagash, who was an interesting villain with a fascinating story told way back in the 4e book (see above) if not even earlier, is now ridiculously overpowered; he goes to Nehekhara, defeats the entire Tomb Kings faction by himself, eats the "Egyptian" god of the dead, even though up to this point nobody has ever suggested that mortals could interact directly with gods at all, and then flies off in his gigantic black pyramid like it's the Stargate alien space ship or something. On top of this kind of nonsense, most of the narratives read like they are poorly written expansions on battle reports of Warhammer games that the staff played against each other.

I suppose that the book did the job it was meant to, however. It destroyed the Tomb Kings faction, folding what still makes sense to use of their units into the now recombined Undead army list, led by the superhero Thanos version of Nagash, got rid of a bunch of famous characters that had been around in the setting for decades but with which the writers had no idea what to do, so throwing them away seemed like a good idea, and mangled the setting so badly that it was adequately set up for destruction, certainly. Even though the event that cascaded into the End Times in the first place was poorly explained, inadequately followed through, and poorly implemented. I really can't recommend this book for any reason at all. Even if you have no vested interest in the setting whatsoever, and don't care if it's destroyed, this is such a poorly done telling of a poorly thought out sequence of events that I can't imagine you'd enjoy it. 

Keep in mind that both the Old World as a setting and the Age of Sigmar that replaced it were both developed as the backstory for a game of miniatures warfare. The movement of armies and stuff was always at the heart of the setting, and although there were some really good Black Library novels that were a bit more traditional fantasy type plots and characters in their execution (I'm especially fond of the Matthias Thulmann witch hunter omnibus, for instance) that was kind of a spin-off or even afterthought to the setting. The same is true of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, which is a better analog in most respects for what I'm doing than the Fantasy Battles game. So I shouldn't be surprised when the setting does things that aren't optimized for me, because it was developed for a totally different kind of game than what I play. Ironically, that same focus was exactly what led to the better part of three decades of the setting being static; the developers wanted to keep their factions intact so they could still be used as army lists to drive the sales of miniatures. If as a business decision they decided that the old setting was no longer effective for that role, then it makes sense to replace it. But the slapdash, poorly organized way that they did it that took no account of the attributes of the setting itself was phenomenally unsatisfying.

At this point, we move on to the last five books in my series to review, the army books (or Battle Tomes or whatever they call them now) for the Age of Sigmar setting. These are incredibly attractive books; full color, better art than we've seen in the past, better miniatures photography of better sculpts than we've seen in the past, etc. But they also serve a high fantasy setting that I can't seem to really get my arms around, in which Nagash looms in a way that's different than he did in the old setting. Whereas before, it was his historical legacy more than anything else that made him important, now everything has to be his literal creation, forged for a specific purpose for whatever convoluted master 4-D chess plan he's got going on. This is fundamentally a much less compelling concept than the idea of the vampires or the Tomb Kings doing their own things for their own reasons. That said, the books have a ton of fantastic ideas, even if they are wed to a setting that I can't connect to and are part of a vaguely hinted at plot that I don't like. I haven't actually read all of them in advance of this review, but I have read two of the five, so I expect to find plenty to like in these books. Then, over on the Dark Fantasy X blog, as noted above, I'll digest everything that I've read and see how it might apply to the development of Undead in Dark Fantasy X. The rules I have now are basically just carryover from "regular" m20, so they are carryover from D&D. There's a few exceptions, but based in part on my review of how undead are handled by Games Workshop, I may more radically redo the undead in Dark Fantasy X as well.

Legions of Nagash (AoS) - The army list here is nothing at all new. It's basically the 8e Vampire Counts list plus the handful of new troops (elites and heroes, really) and minus the ghouls and Strigoi (which make up the Flesh-eater Courts book) introduced in the End Times rulebook. Seeing them again, without anything new, except divorced from the setting in which they belonged, is kind of jarring. The authors tried to anchor them into the new setting, but this is mostly just offhand references—name dropping—of places that are never explained and about which we never learn anything. I'm hardly suggesting that we know Nehekhara or Sylvania in detail in the Old World, but we do have maps, we have characters, we have plenty of stuff—especially if you aggregate the sources over all of the rulebooks—that grounds the monsters and characters in the setting. Here, they lack that. Plus, Nagash looms over everything; it's like nobody and nothing else is allowed to be interesting. Which, conversely, makes Nagash much less interesting than he used to be. I thought Nagash was a fascinating figure when I read the 4e material way back in the 90s (in the pages of White Dwarf magazine). Here, in spite of the best efforts—or sadly, maybe because of them—of the writers, he comes across as a kind of generic fantasy supervillain. The book is also a good deal more rulesey than most prior army books. There's not even much intent to detail a setting or how they fit into it, and there's a lot more discussion on scenarios, army construction variations, etc. There's also more artwork, or at least bigger artwork that takes up more space, as well as more full-page spreads of photography of painted miniatures. This, of course, makes everything look really cool, and the book is prettier even than the 8e book (even though many of the miniatures are the exact same) but sadly, the content doesn't measure up.

Flesh-eater Courts (AoS) - The army book of the ghouls and Strigoi, basically, who are now combined into a single army of pseudo-Undead. Other debased forms of vampires from previous editions are included, like varghulfs and vargheists, although the latter are now renamed and come in two power levels, normal and advanced. These seem to draw a blurry line between being debased vampires vs enhanced ghouls, and its not quite clear which they are. The crypt horrors are similarly "hulked out" ghouls. The defining feature of these guys is that they are all insane, although they have exactly the same insanity where they are reliving the fantasy that they are the regal court of the first Carrion King, the first Strigoi vampire (well... in the new setting, they never call them that, although a vague handwavy reference to Ushoran is given) and they don't see themselves as horrible carrion eaters but rather as noble knights and soldiers. The terrorgheist and zombie dragon are also associated with this group. There's little here that's new, other than the division of them into this particular army, the madness, the disconnect from their original Strigoi and ghoul links to the Old World, and some fine distinctions being made between power levels of the same kinds of troops. Much like the first pass at the Tomb Kings army back in 6e, this army list feels a bit impoverished, like it needs just a bit more to be a "full" list. I do like the concept of the flesh-eaters as a faction that's associated with the undead without really being strictly speaking, mostly made up of actual undead creatures, and I do like drawing a more explicit line between ghouls and vampires, so as to keep vampires from being too pretty and romanticized, however. 

Nighthaunt (AoS) - The army book for the ghost army. This is one of the first really new armies that AoS came up with that, while borrowing a few items from past Undead armies, is still really a very unique army (according to the "What's Next?" splash page at the back was the next truly new army book for the line, the Little Mermaid elves. Not as cool, even if they did try to put sharks all over them.) There's a lot of good ideas for different kinds of ghosts, phantoms, specters and haunts here. Of course... the essence of a ghost story is not a pitched battle of fantasy armies. The miniatures themselves are awesome. The idea of Nagash being personally behind the tragedy of every single miniature in the army, using them in a vast Soul War where he's fighting the forces of the other gods in the millions to claim the souls that they have is exactly the problem I have with the setting of the Age of Sigmar. Lots of names are dropped in this book, but none of them really do much to develop the setting, because they obviously come up with these names just to be a super high concept off-hand reference. I also find the oppressive, nihilistic attitude trying at times. I'm certainly a fan of dark fantasy and horror, but horror and nihilism are too different things. I find that all too many people can't tell the difference anymore, and just throw nihilism out there expecting it to be horrifying. It's not, really, it's actually kind of banal and petty. One thing that I noticed in rereading this book, which would be obvious if I played Warhammer, of course, is that this army has no monsters really; the closest thing to a monster is the winged nightmare that a couple of the generals ride. Given that that's just a winged spectral horse, that's not really in the same league as the terrorgheist or zombie dragons from the last book in terms of being big, intimidating monsters.

Ossiarch Bonereapers (AoS) - Another unique army, or at least unusual. The Ossiarchs are really almost as much constructs as they are undead, although of course, the Tomb Kings already established the idea that there isn't much difference between them. That said, they only "coincidentally" look like the bodies of dead creatures. Either way, these guys have an alien appearance that is reminiscent of the Undead, but also different. Kind of like their 40k siblings the Necrons, in a way. (Is that still an army in 40K? I'm a bit out of touch with what's going on on that side of the hobby these days.) The biggest issue I have with what is otherwise kind of a cool, or at least new and novel, idea is that, of course, these are really tied very heavily to the war of gods between Sigmar, Nagash and Archaeon. It's a shame that the backstory for these guys has to be so tightly tied to the superhero absurdly over-the-top direction that the game has taken since the end of the "world that was."

Soulblight Gravelords (AoS) - Right away, the name is an issue. What?! What the heck is a soulblight gravelord? Oh, it's just a vampire and this army book is basically the migration of the old Vampire Counts into the new, high level, throw names around randomly setting. That said, it even recreates much of the old vampire bloodlines from the past, although often with new names. The von Carsteins and Lahmians and Blood Knights are all brought back (basically). The Necrarchs get the shaft and don't appear, and Strigoi are already the focus of the Flesh-eater Courts. Two new bloodlines make their appearance, including the Vyrkos werewolf-like vampires (I used that name too, sadly, for a werewolf place in Timischburg. That's what I get for using a name that's just a translation from an Eastern European language for werewolf, I guess). The Avengorii are the newest line, and they are weird bat-like abominations, like the strange model for Lauka Vai. I had said earlier that the vargheists were renamed and adapted to the Flesh-eater courts army, but I was wrong, sorta. The actual models were, but they're still used in this army with a different paint job, different name and different stats. That's possibly even more lame than when Games Workshop releases stats for creatures or troop types but never gets around to releasing miniatures for them, like the Tomb Kings Hierotitan. So lame.

On adapting Nighthaunts to your FRPG

In the past, I've talked a bit about how to deal with Undead in DH5, specifically the Undead of Warhammer, which tend to be pretty classic, but very oversplit.  (Not that D&D doesn't of course have exactly that same problem, because it absolutely and completely does.)  But in spite of that oversplitting, there's a lot of potential value to be extracted from the material that they have, and hey, if you like having miniatures, they also tend to have pretty darn good ones.  Here's my review from this same season four years ago; back when the Tomb Kings army was still around and you could get miniatures like Necrosphinxes and Sepulchral Stalkers and whatnot.  I also decided that my way of dealing with the oversplitting was basically to create more generic rules that can be tweaked as needed, by dividing the undead up into somewhat broadish categories, to see where it makes sense to create unique monster stats.  Here's what I've done in that regard previously (the updated version.)  Let me quote myself, at least briefly:

1) Corporeal Sentient: Undead who have physical bodies, and some degree of free will and sentience as we understand it.  At the top of the heap here would be vampires and liches and maybe powerful wights and mummies  Other concepts could be incorporated here too, but they are really variations on one of those existing themes, with the possible exception of something like Frankenstein's monster. 

2) Incorporeal Sentient: Intelligent and free-willed, yet ethereal or incorporeal ghosts.  The real iconic example from fantasy fiction is the Ringwraiths.  I'm not 100% sure I want to keep the rules I have for them in Dark•Heritage 2 and Fantasy Hack because they may be too punitive to the players.  Then again, maybe not.  The rules I have are heavily based on the early episodes of the Supernatural TV show, but other iterations make sense too. 

3) Corporeal Mindless: There's a vast throng of more or less mindless creatures like skeletons, zombies, and whatnot. They are basically automatons; golems who use a human corpse instead of a constructed statue or whatnot as the corporeal element. Some creatures, like wights or even mummies, have trended more into this territory, depending on the particular interpretation. 

4) Incorporeal Mindless: There are fewer examples of this, but the ghosts of the Dresden books qualify; basically just echoes of a brief moment in time of someone that remains causing havoc, but which can only react to things in certain rather pre-scripted ways, and which don't do much else.  Haunts from my rules (adapted from Pathfinder) qualify. 

5) Undead Monsters: These guys are not specifically based on human corpses or spirits, as the other four so far discussed are, but are instead strange monsters made like the undead.  Stuff like the dracolich or zombie dragon (or fell ghast from my rules) is the perfect example.  When Harry Dresden brought "Sue" the T. rex skeleton back to unlife, cloaking it in ethereal ectoplasm and riding it into battle against the necromancers, that would qualify too. 

6) Associated Hangers-On: Sometimes ghouls, wolves, bats, and other vermin get lumped in here; they're not Undead themselves per se, but they are associated with them.  I'm going to go a slightly different direction with ghouls, which will reflect more the Flesh-Eating Courts manner of approaching them; i.e., they're just vampires who are more savage and ugly than those who've clawed their way past the madness of their condition to manage to imitate civilized behavior (at least sometimes)

The issue, of course, is that I don't really want stat proliferation.  It's something to avoid for its own sake.  But, at the same time, looking in particular at lists like we have in the Nighthaunts army book, even though they are "troop types" rather than individual monsters, each type has its own unique ghost story associated with them, and bringing that to your FRPG makes them more interesting.  I'll go through them shortly, but in the meantime, what's a good model to suggest these unique kinds of details, and how do you use them?

I actually think a good model is that show Supernatural (I hear that they just recently removed most of the seasons from Netflix.  I wonder sometimes why I still have a Netflix account at all; it's been months since I tried to watch anything on it.  Sigh.)  Anyway, the first season is the best one, and if you watch it, you'll notice that there are a bunch of episodes where they have to deal with a ghost of some kind or other; classic episodes like the pilot, "Woman in White", episode 3 "Dead in the Water", 5 "Bloody Mary", 7 "Hook Man" and many, many others show that the key to making a monster encounter interesting is not necessarily having interesting stats; it's about having enough backstory and things that need to be done to defeat it, that doing so is the focus of an entire module's worth of gaming (or TV show episode's worth of watching.)  Given that I prefer to run my games in a manner that is consistent with Chris Perkins' DM Experience column, that's a good model for me.  (As an aside, that was a great column.  It didn't fundamentally change the way I ran, so much as it put into words and spelled out in detail how to do something purposefully that I tended to do more intuitively, and because it did so, it made it easier to do it a little better than I was, because it was more deliberate.  But when I read it, it wasn't revolutionary to me; it was more like recognizing a reflection of yourself that you haven't seen in a long time, or something.  Not that I'm trying to compare the quality of the experience of playing with me to that of playing with Chris Perkins, but rather that his style of how to run and structure a long-running game was aligned with my preferences too.  Anyway, those columns are now hard to find, if you haven't already archived them somewhere, but good luck; they're probably out there on archive.is or something somewhere.  Also, here's my summary of the column, I, II and III.)

Anyway, (sorry, off-topic tangent alert.  Too late; I already did it!) I'm not suggesting that Supernatural is a great show.  I got lost in the weeds somewhere in season 4 or 5 and the only episode I've seen since is the one where they became Scooby-doo cartoons for the majority of the episode, because my wife saw it advertised and DVRed it for us to watch together, knowing that I'd get a kick out of it.  But the first two seasons really show exactly how I think monsters should be treated in your FRPG; they shouldn't be disposable, they shouldn't be part of your typical fantasy morning commute; in order to be truly monstrous and horrifying, as monsters should be, they need to take up the entirety of a module's worth of adventure.  There should be foreshadowing before you actually encounter it, and side effects of its presence that the PCs should have to deal with.  It shouldn't be the kind of thing that the PCs just fight and then it's dead and that's that; they should have a few encounters that show them that they are potentially outmatched unless they do some research or tactical something or other to figure out how to put themselves in a better position to deal with the monster rather that just shout huzzah and charge into combat.  Actually defeating it should involve some effort into even finding it, and that should involve discovering some of the story of how it came to be what it is (or at least where it is) before they kill it.

And then, it's entirely possible that the combat encounter be well done, but not necessarily super innovative (or rather, the stats of the monster don't need to be innovative.  Making the encounter itself innovative is a great idea; and check out the DM Experience column "Riot Act" for some great advice on how to do that.)  Think about how in those Supernatural ghost stories, pretty much every ghost is handled the same way once you get down to it; find the remains, salt and burn them, and then maybe find out that it's not quite so simple, because there's something else that was missed that needs to be destroyed too, often involving some kind of justice or resolution to whatever caused the ghost to be a ghost after all.  Because that's the core of many ghost stories, and certainly it's the core of every ghostly troop type in Nighthaunts; some kind of irony or great injustice that binds these spirits into a haunting.

For the most part, if you use the rules for ghosts that already exist, coupled with some haunts rules (speaking of Fantasy Hack or DH5.  Of course, you can apply this same concept to most other games; D&D, Pathfinder, etc.) you probably don't need to actually do anything differently in terms of game development; rather focus your effort on a bit of planning to make sure you've got a memorable monster for the PCs to face, and a memorable journey to figure out how to defeat it.

Anyway, let's look at the specifics and you'll see what I mean.  This stuff is just begging to be adapted to an RPG.  Honestly, it fits an RPG paradigm a lot better than a fantasy wargame with armies paragidm, but it is what it is.  I'll only quote one to show you what it's like, and if that doesn't immediately make you think of turning to your ghost stats and tweaking them to match this specific ghost story, then you probably shouldn't be GMing.  After the first one, I'll just summarize much more briefly the other characters and troop types.

LADY OLYNDER, MORTARCH OF GRIEF

The Mortarchs are Nagash’s top lieutenants – powerful undead leaders that have been granted a sliver of the Great Necromancer’s power. Each of the existing Mortarchs, of which there were three, was chosen for their unique skills. Should Nagash need corruption he would turn to Neferata, Mortarch of Blood. If he needed to make a gory example of the foe, then he would call upon Mannfred von Carstein, Mortarch of Night. For the most secretive missions and empire-building, he favoured Arkhan the Black, Mortarch of Sacrament. All commanded their own undead legions and all wished to wield still more power. Yet Nagash desired a new element, and also loyalty, for of the Mortarchs only Arkhan the Black was truly content to serve.

The tale of how Nagash scoured the underworlds for a new subordinate is a long one, for there are untold dominions of the dead. From Stygxx, the Land of Forgotten Gods, to the hidden cold-fire plains of Helstrom; from the relic-filled lands of Carstinia to Hallost, Land of Dead Heroes, no afterlife was left unsearched. Nagash fixed his baleful gaze upon many souls – champions of unconquerable tribes, tyrant-kings of long-forsaken empires, matriarchs of bloodthirsty sisterhoods. Yet Nagash sought some quality they did not possess.

It was not clever manipulation, base cunning, or well-planned military strategy that earned the armies of the dead so many triumphs during the necroquake – it was shock and terror. The most overwhelming victories had been won through the suddenness of their assaults and the wave of fear that spread before the invasions and hung heavily over all lands through which the spectral hosts passed. Nagash was impressed with the psychological effect of the Nighthaunt armies upont the fragile and superstitious minds of mortals.

In truth, Nagash had forgotten the notion of fear, for it had been ages since he had felt its tremble. Despite his supreme intellect, the Great Necromancer, in his long plans, had allowed his logical mind to strategise without factoring in the emotions of mortals. It was a rare mistake, and one he vowed not to repeat.

In all his travels across the underworlds, Nagash found none like the Veiled Lady. Here was a spectre he had punished many centuries ago with a unique curse. In life she had been Lady Olynder, a beauty famed throughout the empire of Dolorum – the largest of civilisations from the lands known since the Age of Chaos as the Screaming Wastes. She had schemed, plotted and used charm to climb socially, leaving behind a trail of ruined suitors and deaths under mysterious circumstances. So great was her appeal that she wound her way upwards, winning the hearts of nobles and then, eventually, the Dolorum prince himself. Her betrothal to the future king ended on the very night when the prince and his father, the high king, disappeared. In their absence, she became the ruler of Dolorum.

Vowing to mourn her missing prince and king, the young queen took to wearing a veil. Her people called her the Mourning Bride or the Unrequited Queen, and her public display of grief won over even the coldest of hearts. Yet it was all a lie – her shows of remorse were false, her sorrows no more than a ruse. Hidden behind her veil and deceitful sobs, she could not help but smile at her own cleverness.

Elsewhere in the realms the travails of the Age of Chaos had begun turning civilisations into ruin, although Dolorum had thus far been spared. That came to an end when the plague arrived. Soon the queen’s sorrows were for her realm, but again, all her tears were false. She was safe in her palace, and her life a dream, even as all those around her died in the agonised throes of a weeping pox. Through it all Nagash had watched the empire of Dolorum, for its people had always honoured him. Their dedications had ended with the crowning of the new queen.

Even when her lands, cities and throne room were all but empty of life, Lady Olynder felt no real grief, and she attempted to parley with the agents of Nurgle. It was then that Nagash claimed her soul as his own. So did Olynder become the Veiled Lady, a spectre burdened to feel all the miseries of the Mortal Realms and forced to haunt the ruins of Dolorum. After the passing of many centuries, during which Nagash gave not a single thought to her fate, the god was surprised at what he found when he discovered her once more.

The Veiled Lady had again risen to rule over old Dolorum, although it had become a land swarming with wraiths and spectres. During the upheavals of the necroquake, Olynder subjugated the phantasmal denizens that arose there, drawing them closer with her spreading aura of grief. So haunted were the lands that any living being that dared enter them experienced true terror. Yet rule of one underworld could not satisfy her ambition, and the Veiled Lady longed to bring more nations – living and dead alike – beneath her dominion.

Here, at last, was the leader that Nagash was looking for, and so in dark ritual the Great Necromancer granted Lady Olynder a sliver of his own divinity. He knighted her the Mortarch of Grief, and tasked his new lieutenant first with uniting the Nighthaunts, and then leading them as the vanguard of his new crusade.

She is the Mourning Bride, the Unrequited Queen, the Veiled Lady and the Mortarch of Grief. She is despair made manifest, gloom given form. She is Lady Olynder, and in her are bound all the sorrows and anguishes of the realms. 

Each of Nagash’s Mortarchs has been anointed with a portion of the Great Necromancer’s vast power. To Lady Olynder, who feigned sorrow in life, he gifted a mantle of misery – she now felt all the woes of the Mortal Realms, becoming a weaponisation of grief itself. Her power transcends the melancholic, for she exudes mind-crippling waves of purest desolation. Mortals in her presence are overwhelmed by a gloom so heavy that only the strongest willed can remain upright. Most fall to their knees, mentally battered by their own utter hopelessness. It is a sorrow and regret potent enough to cause a mother to forsake her child, a warrior to lay down his sword and accept the inevitable, to stop a beating heart. 

Lady Olynder hovers above the ground, attended by her bridesmaids, a pair of banshee handmaidens. As she advances, the thorny vines of grave-roses instantaneously sprout before her, their flowers rapidly blooming and dying in order to lay a path of fallen petals beneath her floating form. In her hands the Veiled Lady wields the Staff of Midnight, an ornate stave topped with a polished gemstone of vitrified grave-sand. The lightest touch of this staff is enough to wither a mighty oak, or kill a grown man outright. Yet it is not Lady Olynder’s deadliest weapon. 

In addition to being surrounded by an aura of absolute misery, Lady Olynder is also a powerful sorceress. With her incantations, she can direct a pall of despair to weigh upon her foes, slowing them like some unholy lodestone. Those afflicted suffer a mental burden so dire it causes even the bravest to tremble, their martial prowess lessened by leaden limbs and despondency beyond any hope of redemption. 

In the midst of this bleak atmosphere she has created, Olynder presses forward, her banshee bridesmaids shrieking a wail of the damned while slashing with spectral talons at foes who draw close. One bridesmaid bears an ensorcelled grave-sand hourglass – a gift from Nagash – that can be smashed asunder with lethal effect. Yet Lady Olynder has another, even deadlier weapon. From behind her thin shroud, the sunken eyes of the Mortarch of Grief fixate upon a foe. Deliberately she pivots to face them, before slowly and solemnly lifting her veil. What horrors they see are unknown, for none have yet lived to tell the tale. So does Lady Olynder conquer, leading the fore of Nagash’s invasion in order to bring a new age of eternal death over the Mortal Realms.

Anyway, other than Lady Olynder, we also have Kurdoss Valentian; a scheming climber who is cursed to always be the consort, never the ruler; Reikenor the Grimhailer, a sorcerer-king who sought to thwart death but now is cursed to be a reaper (ironic, given that that's Nagash's own backstory); the knights of shrouds who were generals and commanders who betrayed their own people to Nagash's undead hordes in ages past; Spirit Tormentors and Chaingheists that are eternally imprisoned souls, casting others into prison even as they long to be free; and more.

There's a lot of great material to be used here; some of it is oddly nihilistic, but even so, it's adaptable to a more psychologically healthy gamer.  I highly recommend browsing the army book (or battle tome, or whatever they're calling it these days) or even just looking over the miniatures and their descriptions on the website and making your ghosts just a bit more interesting.

Also note that my earlier Friday Art Attack post had images of Lady Olynder and Reikenor the Grimhailer, as well as a knight of shrouds and some chaingheist miniatures.

Converting Warhammer Monsters into m20 Part IV: Grand Alliance of Death

Ah, the Undead.  Along with demons, my favorite monster type, both for the same reason: because they are such classics of supernatural horror, dating back to long before the existence of the genre in folklore and mythology.  I notice that the Grand Alliance of Death is not as complete as the list was when I looked at it in even in this post earlier.  Many of the Tomb Kings Egyptian flavored miniatures are gone, like the Necrosphinx and Warsphinx, for instance, or the Ushabti, or the Sepulchral Stalkers and Necropolis Knights.  While... I don't like that, because I thought they were pretty cool miniatures, they were admittedly less "classic" and much more unique to the setting, so it's probably OK that I don't use them.  If for whatever reason I ever need something like that, I'll whip them up based on my flesh golem stats (curiously, I see that I have a flesh golem, but no other kinds of golems.  I think golems in D&D start to get pretty ridiculous, but it's not like an animated statue of some kind isn't pretty darn iconic by now.  Another minor hole to fill, I suppose.  Sigh.)

Another of my hobbies is linguistics, and it actually comes into play with the Warhammer undead army lists.  There are a number of creatures that are called -gheists: the terrorgheist, the vargheist, etc.  What is a gheist?  It's a word Games Workshop made up, but it's also obviously a derivative of the German word Geist.  Geist is a very old Germanic word that predates the German language specifically; based on *gaistaz, a proto-Germanic word that all of the daughter languages of common Germanic inherited.  This includes Flemish gheest and Dutch geest, and as you'd expect, Old English, a very close relative of those latter, has gast.  This has evolved in two directions in modern english: ghost and ghast (as in ghastly, or aghast.)  Although the fantasy genre has coined the neologism ghast as a kind of undead monster, in reality it's just the same word as ghost with a fossilized vowel, and is only used as an adjective or adverb.  Geist is well-known to English speakers too, although it's not often recognized as the same word reflected in German rather than English, and it's better known to us as part of a few conjoined words that are loanwords into English: poltergeist, for instance ("noisy ghost" or zeitgeist ("communal spirit.")  The latter shows one curious development in English; starting in the 17th century, the Latin derived word spirit became commonplace as well and although ghost and spirit can be used interchangeably in some contexts, in others they no longer can be.  The phrase "Spirit of '76" means something very different than the "Ghost of '76" would mean, but in prior times—and still in German—they did not; ghost was a word a bit more expansive in meaning and could have meant both things.

However, clearly Games Workshop just took the [h] in the English version of the word and added it to the German version of the word to get gheist.  Curiously, they also use ghast as a suffix; the morghast, for instance, uses the Tolkien prefix mor- "dark, black" which also sounds an awful lot like the Latin mortis, mortem—the word for death.  Depending on which it's meant to convey, and I doubt that they necessarily gave it too much thought and if they did, they probably enjoyed the same double entendre that Tolkien himself no doubt did with his word element mor, the morghasts are black ghosts or death ghosts.  In order to avoid trampling on Games Workshop I/P I'll need to do something similar in coming up with unique names, I suppose, but I'll figure something out as we go.

Anyway, all of this is to say, as I did in the earlier post linked above, that I think that there is a bit of a problem in fantasy monster lists, especially with regards to undead: there's too many of them, with too many unique names, that all tread on the same territory.  And although FANTASY HACK is supposed to be, compared to my other efforts with regard to m20, more specifically a conversion of D&D, I will yet hold firm to this concept.  I don't want spectres and wraiths and allips and ghosts and banshees and spooks and who knows what else as separate monster entries if they're all conceptually exactly the same.  My ghost entry, for instance, has several a la carte options for special abilities so that it can replicate any of the above as needed.  I've got plenty of corporeal undead already, and I'm not sure that creating more just to have subtle differences between them and subtle power level differences is wise.  In fact, as much fun as I've had making up new monster stat lines and adding them to my list, I'm also not completely convinced that doing so was necessarily a good move—I might have been better served by keeping most of this stuff as blog posts, or at most as a new Appendix IV: Totally Unnecessary Additional Monsters That You Could (and Should) Have Just Made Up Yourself.  Many of my "new" statlines were really just copied from already existing statlines and modified very, very little.

Well, what's done is done, now.  I'll keep them, but especially with regards to the undead, I'm going to be very judicious in terms of what I add, and I'm going to make sure that what I add is truly unique—or I'm not adding it.  I'm not going to do my usual and go through the entire list model by model (in part because I already did that in the prior post which I linked earlier) but in part because of my particular thoughts on undead especially.  Rather, I'm going to stat up three or four new critters and I'll have a little discussion about undead and categories in general, and where they would all tend to fit together.

The Grand Alliance of Death

In very general terms, undead can be divided into five categories.

Corporeal Undead—Individualists.  This is the vampire archetype; it's a person who sold his soul in a Faustian bargain and represents the temptation of such Faustian bargains.  Dracula (of Bram Stoker fame) is the epitome of it, of course, but any and every "sexy vampire" fits the same bill.  The lich represents a different kind of temptation, but generally fits the same mold.  As I've said earlier, in any kind of dark fantasy where magic is unnatural and hostile to humanity setting, as I tend to prefer, sorcerers need to overcome their natural human limitations by becoming both more and less than human.  Liches and vampires thus represent two sides of the same coin; vampires maintain the illusion of humanity while becoming monsters dependent on mortals for their sustenance, while liches simply walk away from humanity entirely and become something less.  The greatest of sorcerers (The Lady, fer instance) can overcome both weaknesses, but most are stuck with one of the two weaknesses; either a withered, corpse-like appearance from the abandonment of their humanity, or the insatiable blood-lust and dependence on humans for "food." Most of the "generals" of the Warhammer armies are one of the two: Mannfred, Neferata, Arkhan, even Nagash himself.  Necromancers are themselves the "larval" versions of one of the two; a mortal sorcerer allied with the forces of undeath but not yet advanced enough to have become either a vampire or lich. The various vampire lord "anonymous" generals fit this profile as well, although back when the Tomb Kings army was around, they tended to be more commanded by liches.  A fairly recent development in Warhammer are the Ghoul Kings, but the Ghoul Kings are really nothing more than vampires who are a little more "gross" than the traditionally attractive archetype.  Nosferatu rather than Dracula, fer instance.  Maybe mummies can also fit here (instead of the next category) depending on how you interpret them.  The fictional Imhotep is clearly an individualized corporeal undead, but the priests that are animated to fight with Brendan Frasier are more like wights and belong below.

Corporeal Undead—Savages. Some corporeal undead are a great deal more savage and "monster-like" than even the vampires or liches.  The rank and file ghouls are a good example of this; it's not even 100% clear that they're undead per se, or merely associated with them because of their charnal cannibalistic tendencies (although that depends on the setting; the origin of the word is Middle Eastern folklore, where the ghul is nothing more than an Arabic vampire.  Brought to the West during the era of peak Orientalism when novels like Vathek and 1,001 Arabian Nights were at their highest popularity, it's been a staple of many fantasy settings since as a more bestial, flesh-eating rather than blood-drinking, savage and nearly mindless kind of undead.)  The barrow-wights of Tolkien, which are borrowed from Norse mythological draugr—specifically the haugbui versions, which are confined to barrows or tombs are another great example.  These give us the wights in more recent fantasy settings.  Compared to vampires like Dracula or Nosferatu, again, these are relatively lacking in free will, and are more like mindless, hostile monstrous creatures than "characters" per se.  The folkloric traditions are really indistinguishable from those that led to the the creation of the vampire archetype as we recognize it today, although of course they've diverged from there, so this distinction is more of a spectrum than a binary.  At the lower end of this spectrum, you get stuff as simple as the lowly automatons of animated skeletons and zombies.

I've said before, but I'll reiterate; I actually like less of a Walking Dead style zombie and more of a The Serpent and the Rainbow style Haitian zombie.  I also like the concept of really dangerous zombies that are not unlike those in Herbert West—Reanimator although as that is largely a retelling of Frankenstein, it can perhaps best represent these types of zombies as very savage-acting flesh golems (this is, indeed, why I had flesh golems but no other types in the rules.)  While the former category is best represented in my FANTASY HACK rules by vampires and liches (and maybe the mummy, although I'd give them the ability to cast spells like a lich to really make them "pop" if so) this category is represented by ghouls, flesh golems, skeletons and the wight.  If you want more "shambling" type zombies, just use the skeleton stats.

Incorporeal Undead. While there's a somewhat bewildering array of these types of creatures in D&D proper: spectres, ghosts, banshees, wraiths, allips, etc. there really isn't in my opinion any need of more than one.  They're all ghosts according to my rules, and you can pick special abilities as desired.  You could even modify them to represent something as potent as a ringwraith by giving them the same lich-like spell-casting and use a number of them to represent its abilities: The Withering of the Haunter and Blasphemous Piping of Azathoth for the Black Breath, etc. A number of miniatures from the Warhammer army represent this: cairn and hex wraiths, the spirit host, the tomb banshee, and the weird ghostly forms that carry the Mortis Engine and Coven Throne.

Truly Monstrous Undead Creatures. These are more a feature of later fantasy settings rather than older tradition, but the notion of real monsters that were never human in any conceivable fashion is a pretty cool addition to the undead canon.  The whole routine where Harry Dresden reanimates "Sue" the T. rex and rides it into battle against a force of necromancers in Chicago in Dead Beat is one of my favorite scenes from a book ever written, and is a great example of a somewhat less extravagant version of the idea.  The Warhammer army list really shines in this category, although I see that my own monster list does not.  The dread abyssals, for instance, are terrible creations of pure necromancy; bone-like monsters of huge size that fly, buoyed by the souls of all those who they have devoured, who are trapped in ethereal skulls that remain stuffed into the massive, barrel-like rib cages of the monsters. The morghasts are the former heralds and psychopomps of formerly benevolent death gods, stolen and enslaved into undead servitude by Nagash—or in other words, they're undead angels. There are vargheists (and the larger varghulf) and vargoyles, and the crypt flayers, all representations of the image of vampires turning into bat-winged, harpy-like monstrosities.  I'm not 100% sure what the difference between these various monsters in Warhammer are, even after reading the entries, to be honest.  Some are vampires that devolved into ravening monsters and are unable to retain their human form, some are just ghouls with bat wings.  but honestly, conceptually I don't see that those are significantly different ideas.  Var- as a prefix is interesting; it seems to have been borrowed from the Old Norse vargr where it meant wolf, but more particularly mythological wolf creatures, such as Fenris-wolf, or Sköll and Hati.  It is Anglicized somtimes as varg, but more commonly as warg—which should be familiar to anyone who's ever read Tolkien.

Finally, there are the zombie dragons (which are pretty self-explanatory) and the terrorgheists, my favorite of the big, behemoth undead monsters—a skeletal dragon-like monster that has an aura of death about it and turns into a swarm of bats on its death (that's a great idea!)

This is where I need to add a few stats, is in this category, but like I said, when I migrate them to my FANTASY HACK document, I'll want unique names for them, not the Warhammer specific ones.

Associated Monsters.  Some creatures are not really undead themselves, but seem to be associated with undead from literature and folklore.  Wolves, werewolves, bats, even rats, etc. all seem to fit here.  From the Warhammer list, there are animated wolf skeletons and "fell bats".  It occurs to me that some kind of giant bat is a classic fantasy trope that I don't have, but then again the eagle stats work just fine, I think.  If you want really gigantic bats use the stats for a pterodactyl.

Anyway, here's a new monster stat.  I think the rest can be interpolated easily enough from existing stats:

FELL GHAST: AC: 20 HD: 18d12 (130 hp) AT: Bite +18 (2d10+4), 2 claws +18 (d10+3) STR: +12 DEX: +3 MND: -1 S: flies,undead immunities, cast at will with no penalty Blasphemous Piping of Azathoth DC 19, when the fell ghast reaches 0 hit points or less, it turns into a bat swarm as per the monster entry.