Cult of Undeath Supercut Add-on

At one point, I thought it would be interesting to not only have a super complete and complex 5x5 (plus add-ons) for Darkness in the Hill Country, and I created another 1x5 leg specific to the iconic characters as an example of what I'd like to do with the actual PCs, even though the actual PCs, of course, wouldn't be the iconic characters. I now think that this was not a good idea. I created some NPCs that made the iconics seems much more interesting and deep, but that means that they work better as novel characters rather than ... DM NPCs, which is what they effectively would be otherwise. Unfortunately, I think some of the NPCs that I created to be foils of these iconics are quite good, and I find myself wanting to find ways to use them. In fact, I've even made AI images for campaign use for some of them, including Vaspar Oksandros, Audley Hardwicke and a few others. One of my favorites though, and one that I initially created for Darkness in the Hill Country, but which I think would fit extremely well in Cult of Undeath is Alys. 

Alys is an agent, or support character, added to the PCs group like a cohort, but she comes from a source that is perhaps not the most trustworthy. I think that she would come up in Cult of Undeath in Gaskarfells, where she could represent the interests of either Dietmar von Hohenstahl or Roderich von Szarad. Maybe, even, she's an uneasy compromise between the two of them, who are rivals, but who both might want to convince the PCs to help with the depredations of feral vampire Velgar Tzarnik and his proto-vampire and ghoulish minions. Of course, von Hohenstahl is himself a more cultured Timischburg vampire, although the PCs wouldn't be expected to know that at first, or potentially even at all if they aren't very curious, and while von Szarad is known to be a necromancer, it's a different kind of thing in Gaskarfells, and not necessarily villainous. So yeah, they're not expected to know that von Szarad is obviously a villain himself angling at becoming a lich, no doubt at the expense of the town and the greater Timischburg population around it. Assuming that they do find out about that, it's probably not going to be surprising to eventually discover that Alys herself isn't the pretty young helpful pseudomage prodigy that she presents herself as. 

Oh, sure, she is young, pretty and probably kind of likeable. And yeah, she does offer a lot of benefit to the PC group as a potential sage to be consulted, as a non-combatant travel companion who can offer limited healing and magical buffs, as well as be consulted in all kinds of things. But she was assigned to them not only to help with the specific task of defeating Tzarnik, but also to keep an eye on the PCs, who neither von Szarad nor von Hohenstahl really trust. They also don't trust each other, and to some extent, probably not Alys neither. 

See, Alys is actually an ancient wight-witch, i.e., a wight who has access to some spells and pseudomagery (imitation of spells through magic items.) Her pleasant exterior is merely an illusion, and in certain circumstances, the PCs should have the opportunity to see through it. She's the "wife" of Tarush, the Charnel God who fell to the earth, created the first vampires (allegedly), is buried and sealed under the constant nightfall of Grozavest, and is the primary source of all undeath in the world. Although "wife" is more like the way in which Catholic nuns are considered "brides" of Christ; she's not literally his wife, of course, and she post-dates his fall to earth by many centuries. 

That said, in spite of Alys' true dark and disturbing demeanor and practices, and the casual way in which she doesn't care about most people around her and willingly and thoughtlessly sacrifices them if it helps her pursue her goals in any way, she does come to become genuinely fond of the PCs, I think. I like the idea that the PCs have an ally who is genuinely helpful and they genuinely probably want to keep around because of it, but that she genuinely creeps them out and makes them nervous too.

I may add other of these NPCs to the potential outline, i.e., Hardwicke as a corrupt fallen Shadow ranger, or Oksandros as a sinister Chersky mafia gangster, or a few of the other characters which help to make the setting a bit more rich and the plots a bit more complex. Maybe some of the former iconics who were "demoted" to cohort or NPC status, like Shule, Oisin Dughall, Dean Bannermane, etc. too.

A few more Anti-PC images

Just a few more anti-PC images, since ChatGPT reset. I still prefer their images to Nano Banana 2 (i.e. Gemini) or Grok.

And here's the entire crew.

The Anti-PCs

I'm still working on these guys, but when I first came up with them, they started getting... really nasty. As iconics, they turned into, after a few iterations, the anti-PCs. A group of PC like characters, except they're psychopathic villains, con men, murderers, rapists, daemonologists, and human sacrificers. But they pose as a group of adventurers not unlike a group of PCs.

Anyway, I'm not done with getting their iterations correct visually, but this is a good start. I'll keep giving better versions of them slowly over the next few days. I started with them as Hero Quest character models, but this is a step up.

Averell Geoffson primarily sees himself as a burgler and a thief, but he's not  above a little robbery and murder if its profitable. Originally born in Garenport, under a different name, he fled the city when it got too hot for him after murdering a minor noble during a robbery, and spent a few years in Timischburg and Simashki. Those places got a little dicey for him too, and he eventually made his way back to the Hill Country, now with a new look and a new name.

Bahram Khanwar is from the far north, but came south with his sister as a specialist spadassassin to Simashki. There, he was responsible for the spadassinicide of at least half a dozen political figures as well as many more that he killed in provoked duels, until he felt that it was no longer safe to stay in Simashki. Luckily, this is when he met Averell, and taking his sister with him, the three fled even further south, to Timischburg and the Hill Country. 

Bahram's sister, Javaira, is a beautiful woman, but she's also a sociopath and a nymphomaniac. She uses her sexuality in cons, most often, but if she's not working an angle, she needs fulfillment somewhere else, and everyone in her group has been with her, including her own brother. Her favorite con is to work with her brother to target a politician or wealthy merchant by seducing him, and then using her in flagrante delicto situation as justification for her brother to challenge him to a duel... where he's murdered and then robbed. She's psychologically quite broken and needy, and her brother frequently says that she has the soul of a true succubus trapped in the body of a mortal.

Merra Kuzulush, on the other hand, does traffic with actual daemons, including succubi, and sometimes summons them and traps them and uses them as sex slaves until the summoning ends to satisfy Javaira when everyone else isn't in the mood. In reality, she participates nearly as often as Javaira, but she does not do it for pleasure, but rather she uses the sexual energy as part of her daemonic trafficking rituals. Her preferred method of crime is to summon some kind of daemon and send it to murder someone, after which she can loot their place at her leisure. In general, people think such victims are themselves daemonologists who flubbed some summoning and were gleefully killed for their trouble. Merra and the gang even pose as witch hunters, investigating the scene (i.e., robbing it) and "dealing with the daemon" in some way or other, which is usually a staged thing. Merra is an evil genius with these types of scams, and the group has achieved some fame in the right circles as daemon hunters, although—of course—Merra is the one who summoned the daemons in the first place.

Merra is also the someone lover of Audley Hardwicke, the personal nemesis for Dominic Clevenger.

Namzo is intimidating, violent and powerful, and serves as the muscle and bodyguard for the rest of the group. He's actually well educated and extremely articulate, and well-versed in the philosophies of the old Baal Hamazi culture (which is roundly condemned even by most of its own descendants today as a daemonic, insane society with built in instability that led to its inevitable implosion.) However, in public, he portrays a nearly monosyllabic grunt. He was chased out of the Gunaakt migrant caravan route for raping orcling women, and he did the same in some small towns on the Timischburg and Hill Country borderlands, before finally falling in with this group; he rarely does this anymore, since Merra and Javaira are so insatiable. In this way, they ironically are doing a service to society, by keeping a violent rapist from preying on women around him.

The Reaper doesn't have a name that anyone knows. Nobody even knows what nation he hails from; his looks are nondescript enough that he can pass for a Tarushan, a Timischer, a Hillman, and he can easily use accents from any of those places, as well as from Simashki and other places were ethnically ambiguous or mixed humans can hail from. Not really properly a member of the group, he's a hired hit man across the Three Realms+, and has worked with this group of psychos on several occasions, and has a cool professionally friendly relationship with them.

Wow, as I started writing these guys, they got worse and worse; much more so than I intended. I can't wait to see the more heroic guys—y'know, with the lich and succubus accomplices—take these guys down and give them what's coming to them.

Although when that happens, I imagine that The Reaper, at least, escapes justice, because he's more of a loner anyway.

Struggling a little bit with some of the AIs. Here's another pass at Namzo and The Reaper.

I'm having trouble getting slight changes to Merra and Javaira, because these strangely Puritan AI models think that showing a midriff is inappropriate, even though they already generated a belly-dancer outfit to begin with. So strange. It also thinks that making Namzo's scarf a slightly brighter tone and giving him a five o'clock shadow ran up against it's guardrails on sexualization of a minor. 

And people worry that AI is coming for their jobs. In any case, I finally got it to do sorta what I wanted for an slight improvement to Merra.

Anyway, Merra is also the sometime lover of Audley Hardwicke, who is a villain from an earlier post, and the two of them together is a way to foreshadow the anti-PC group. So here's him again, just in case you needed one more. Plus, I think Audley is a great villain in his own right.

Kimnor new views

I've been busy as normal, but I finished reading the adventure portion of Princes of the Apocalypse. There are two chapters left, the first of which is 40 pages of side quests and optional things to do, including (strangely) a level 1-2 introduction (for some reason, the campaign itself begins at 3rd level), and then a page of NPC stats, magic items, and other mechanic gewgaws—for lack of a better word—associated with the module, since they didn't include any of that in the module itself but stuck it in the end. There's also a few appendices, but they look pretty short and include rules for genasi, for instance, as a PC race. So, it's not done done, but it's done; I've read the campaign itself, now it's just the supplemental chapters at the end. I'll finish it for sure in the next few days. I'm also not going to do my supercut of the Cult of Undeath most likely until the weekend, so I'll have to do it then. But I'm determined to do it this weekend. Cult of Undeath is really my first major radical reimagining of a whole adventure path into something that I could actually run and enjoy running, and although it's not quite the most developed, that really is more just a question of me assembling the material that I've already got and making sure that it all lines up. Darkness in the Hill Country, the previously completed one, isn't one that I'm favoring running right now, at least not for my current group, if actually running a new campaign is in the cards. Which isn't a given. I'm playing in a campaign that isn't going to end. There's a lot of overlap between that group and another group that I don't actually belong to, but the DM is moving out of state, and exactly what's going to happen to that group is TBD. They're making comments about trying to continue the campaign online, but honestly, I'm skeptical that that will really work out.

I'm also skeptical about running for this group at all, but I have done a one-shot for them in the past, and there are already vague comments from some of them about trying to get me to slide into the place of the outgoing DM is need me. There was even talk of me continuing his campaign, but there's no way I'm doing that. 

Anyway, no need to borrow trouble. Whatever happens here is TBD. I may end up just running a somewhat off-week campaign when the first group isn't able to assemble, since two of the players are pretty reliable and two of them are less so. Lately, though, I've been one of the less reliable ones, so who knows. We're talking about playing next week, so we'll get back on track I think and I'll know more then.

In the meantime, here's a few more Kimnor images I've generated. I'm now using three different generative AIs, both because I'm not paying for them, so I run out of images I can generate, and because I just want to see how they differ in what they offer. It's always a crapshoot if I'll get something useable or not, so having more options is always good.

These three came from Nano Banana 2 and show him in a more rogue-like outfit. I'm especially happy with how the shadow sword came out. The next ones are from Grok. In a slightly neater and slightly messier alternate.

Iconics again

I got two pretty good Kimnor images. I've got some new good Ragnar images, even though the originals were pretty good. I finally got a Dominic that doesn't have a crazy blanket over his shoulders. And although I like my images of Cailin, I simply cannot get AI to give it anything close to the correct pose. I don't know why it struggles so much with her, even when I gave it a reference mannequin. These two at least weren't the worst; the one where she had three arms was particularly absurd. UPDATE: I went to Grok rather than ChatGPT and started with a fresh prompt. Got, I think, the first Cailin results that I actually really like. And maybe getting rid of the braids is a good idea.

In addition to giving him a new background that looks like my older Ragnar images, and a more dynamic pose, he needed to be blonder so that he looked more different to Dominic.

Giving up on the wolf-fur cape and just giving him a wool one was, apparently, the trick that made Dominic work.

If I remember right, in my older Hero Forge models, I had Ragnar look dustier, and of course, Dominic was dressed for colder weather. Oh, well. They both get around a lot.

I think for Cailin, I just need to start over with a new prompt, and not specify the two knives, which is constantly throwing the stupid thing off. Just call her a D&D assassin and let the AI give her whatever weapons it decides to give her. 

I take it back; I did get one good image of her without messed up hands or grip or daggers. But I wanted another and after a dozen attempts or more, I still only have the one. Sigh. I'll try one more time tomorrow. And now that I've got Dominic working without a funky cape, I'll try and get a better pose out of him. And maybe one more Ragnar where he actually turns his head to a different angle.

Iconics iterations

The secret to getting decent AI art is patience and iterations. But you've also got to be careful, because iterations mean more AI artifacts start to mess with your image. I noticed when I finally got to do my "dark Bridgetown" on a big screen here at home that it looks like the whole thing is covered in Christmas lights; an obvious AI artifact. Anyway, that sometimes means just regenerating based on the original—maybe edited—prompt. Anyway, here's some more attempts at some of my iconics. I'm still not quite there with them, though.

Kimnor's face changed for some reason, and his silver-chrome eyes got lost. Both Grok and ChatGPT wanted to give him black hands for some reason. They kind of work as if they were gloves. What I think I need to do, honestly, is start over with a new prompt. Same for Cailin. And maybe I just need to stop trying to hard to get the wolf-pelt cape or cloak on Dominic. He'd only wear that when it's pretty cold anyway. I more regular light wool gray cloak would work more often. 

I kind of stumbled accidentally onto the swashbuckler justaucorps or frock coat for Kimnor, but now I can't imagine him any other way. It fits my vision of his personality really well too. 

These are pretty good, but still not quite there. And I'm even going to mess just a little bit with my Ragnar, even though I'm more happy with that result. I think I still want him with a bit longer hair on top, and a bit lighter blond.

COMING SOON!: A CULT OF UNDEATH supercut. I read over all my material, and I think with a bit of editing and reworking, I can actually finish off the project in a more or less 5x5 FRONT style already. If I hadn't been so busy and stressed out the last several months, I would probably have done it already. As a reminder, if I indeed ever posted this detail, my original conception was that if I turned these 5x5 fronts into novels, or at least story collections, then I'd have had Dominic and Kimnor as the stars of Darkness in the Hill Country and Ragnar and Cailin as the protagonists of Cult of Undeath. 

Of course, my second incarnation was that the 5x5 fronts were too complicated to do that with; they really needed to be two or three modest novels each, and it made more sense to split the protagonist duties, and have all four of them come together for the finale novel. 

That's a moot point. My novel writing ambitions are even more poorly realized by far than my blog posting or YouTube posting ambitions. I kind of hoped that I could get in on one of them like Sudowrite, maybe, before the tells and slop gets terrible as the AI model "advances" into uselessness, and it might assist me in making that happen, but that's just a vague idea, not really an ambition. 

In any case, I hope to do the supercut this week sometime. It'll take a few hours to write, but maybe I can do it a bit at a time.

UPDATE: Tried to generate more. Really having trouble with weird details. I can't get either of my normal AIs that I use to give Cailin a normal grip on her knives, which is really weird and frustrating. Did some new Kimnor's too, but they were only OK. One of them I had to crop; his face looked great, but they messed up his hands something fierce. I otherwise had to toss the more FUBARed poses, so I didn't get to modify Ragnar a little bit like I wanted to. For Kimnor, the floating pistol in front of his belt sash instead of tucked into it was the bigger problem; the one with the messed up hands had that too.

Also, I keep giving Kimnor a rapier and forgetting that he's a Shadow Sword. Whoops! Maybe I should just give him a rapier and make him a swashbuckler after all.

More iconics

I still can't quite get Dominic right. The wolf-skin cape is what's not really working out for me. I'll have to try a few more tomorrow. It needs to be behind him, not draped over his shoulders, I think, and have a buckskin inner lining.

I also want to make at least one more Kimnor image, even though I actually really love the Kimnor I did a post or two ago. But in the meantime, here's Ragnar, Dominic's older brother.

While they're very, very similar, the second one is better. He came out looking more like Chris Hemsworth than I expected, but still, cool, cool.

Here's Ragnar's young wife, the unfortunate victim of a vampiric attack, so that she's now a young dhampyr. Cailin Clevenger. It didn't really do her grip on the knives quite right, but it's still pretty close, and pretty good.

I like the second one better, but the grip on the left dagger is all wrong. I'll try to fix it with one more iteration tomorrow or Sunday morning.

Dominic Clevenger

I did Kimnor Rugova earlier, but he's the deuteragonist, not the protagonist. I feel like we needed to make sure we did my protagonist, namely one Dominic Clevenger. This is a pretty good rendition. Maybe not quite perfect yet, but really close. I'll probably keep tweaking my prompt to edit it a little bit over the next little bit.

I also modified my Werner Otten image. He's really bigger than he should be; I didn't expect him to be 10-12 feet tall, which is kind of what he looks like. But other than that, I wanted to break away just a little bit from the traditional Boris Karloff monster, and it worked out really well.

Anyway, just a quick post.

Kimnor Rugova

I don't know why I've made so many iterations of Revecca von Lechfeld, but I haven't done the actual iconic characters for Old Night. Anyway, here's Kimnor Rugova, iconic grisling swashbuckling shadow sword (although he also usually carries a rapier and flintlock pistol. At least he does in this image.) Tomorrow I want to get a good Dominic Clevenger.

Normally my Kimnor has a Van Dyke moustache and beard, but here's a clean-shaven version of him. I'll generate the next type when I'm available to do so (I think I need to wait almost seven hours before my limit resets.)

I've also been working on kemling variants, but I'm not yet sure who these are. The one with the mustard yellow might an NPC gangster villain, Vaspar Oksandros.

And finally, I took my old Frankenstein's monster Werner Otten, and made him look a little bit less like the movie version with the beat up old suit coat, and more like a D&D flesh golem.

UPDATE: the "real" Kimnor, with his beard and shadow sword. 

Kemling gal based sorta on the same original.

"Dark Bridgetown". I had an earlier version done like this, and I wanted to again.

An AI image that I found online. Actually, a few of them.