New Conan animated series

https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/tv-shows/conan-the-barbarian-animated-series-genndy-tartakovsky/

Pretty terrible article and a dubious premise to begin with. Robert E. Howard wasn't a novelist, and he's credited with creating sword & sorcery not sword & sandal, which is a completely different genre. And the idea that Conan "found love" with Bêlit sounds pretty silly and out of character to me. I think a lot of low status men are anxious to "promote" her to his equal for the same reason that they love Jirel of Jorey or other girlboss female characters... even though Howard never wrote her as such. I'm more and more irritated by the trend to try and make strong women characters by low status men who get turned on by them. Why can't women just be feminine? And why can't men just be happy with that? I mean, I realize why; it's because too many creatives are low status, but man is it irritating. Howard may have been low status in his way; he seems to have been obsessed with his mother, and never had too serious a relationship with any woman (although he did, maybe, have a girlfriend for a little while) but at least he understand masculinity and femininity. It must be a generational thing.

Not that Conan hasn't already been pretty poorly treated in anything other than the original stories anyway. Starting with the oft-times questionable "revisions" updates and edits of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, the vast corpus of novels in the 80s, even the movies... even the popular one with Arnold... other than some of the comics over the years, I haven't been very impressed with Conan pastiche. Luckily, I've had the complete collection in three trade paperbacks by Del Rey for many years. In fact, I've got them "out" of their box and readily available. I might even re-read them again soon.

What is "dark fantasy?"

First off, I'm actually having a little bit better luck reading than I thought. Not nearly as much as I'd like, but slightly better than I thought. I'll likely be able to finish Buccaneers of Freeport today, and hopefully finish "Skeletons of Scarwall" before heading back home at the end of the weekend. Not a bad showing for having to travel for a very specific and very busy task that has occupied my free time a lot. I feel like the Freeport Trawl is actually getting close to finishing, although I still have some big chunks to swallow coming up. After I finish Buccaneers, I've got the companions to read. In theory, they should all be more or less the same, as they are about adapting the systemless Freeport setting book to various systems. I'll read the d20 one in detail, but probably skim all of the rest to ensure that I'm not missing anything. They also come with an included small adventure, but again, I believe it's the same for all companions. 

Then I've got I think three small Adamant Press third party adventures, the extremely thick Pathfinder update to the Freeport setting book, and the Pathfinder 1e adventure path. I've not read any of those before, but of course, much of the text of the big setting book should be lifted from the Pirates' Guide, which I've read many times. And once I finish the adventure path, I'm kinda done. Weird to think about.

I might well remove the page that marks the Freeport Trawl once I finish the trawl, since tracking progress will be moot once I'm done. There's a few other products here and there that I think are largely repeats updated to different systems, but I'll skim them to make sure. But that's about it. I have a pdf of the Pathfinder book and I always thought that it was just the Pirates' Guide plus the d20 Companion updated to Pathfinder 1e and mashed together into a single book, but I'm not sure that that's the case. I think the timeline was updated at least, as well as a few other changes that that made, such as a new Sea Lord. I don't know that that justifies me spending quite a bit of money to get a hardcover copy, but maybe it does. I can order one from the Green Ronin store, although it's $75. Quite a lot for a book that no doubt mostly reiterates stuff that I already own in hardcopy. But we'll see. If I really enjoy it and find it to be sufficiently updated to make it worthwhile, maybe I'll order up a copy for future use.

After I finish the Freeport Trawl, maybe I'll try and concentrate a bit harder on the 3e Eberron Trawl to get that one done too, since it's relatively short and finishable. Stuff like the Pathfinder Adventure Paths trawl is not; it's huge and will no doubt take me many years to finish. But I'll continue to at least finish the Adventure Path that I'm in before I turn away from it. 

<  †  >

One thing that Freeport always brings to mind, however, is the inevitable questions on tone, theme, mood and horror. While I like Freeport, and kind of always have, it also isn't really exactly what I want it to be. Nothing that I don't create myself is ever going to be exactly what I want it to be, but Freeport has some relatively big misses, and it's in the form of the words I just used. Chris Pramas, the creator of Freeport, used to work on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, and it shows. He clearly was trying to recreate in a Dungeons & Dragons milieu the same tone and themes as WHFRP, more or less. But even that wasn't always perfect. I never can tell, with either of them, if they're a darker, edgier fantasy that I'm supposed to take more or less straight, or if it's all a big in-joke full of bad puns and silly pop culture references. It's easier with the Warhammer stuff, as the Brits seem to be better at straddling the line between serious and parody and making something that kind of sort of works as both at once, depending on what aspects of it you're actually looking at. Pramas was much less subtle, and his editorial hand is all over the place, not to mention the specific products that he himself wrote. Sometimes, especially the Rob Schwalb pieces, are pretty straight at being horror-themed fantasy with a dark edginess that's pretty straightforward. Other stuff is so silly that I can't imagine it being present in any game that isn't selling itself as an overt parody a la Epic Movie or the Scary Movie series. The other problem Freeport specifically has in terms of tone is that it's so overtly D&D. In spite of the twist of adding pirates and some Lovecraft, it feels much more overtly D&D in every particular than explicitly D&D settings like Dark Sun or Eberron, or Planescape, etc. even though many of those have that same problem; i.e., they feel like D&D first, and their twist is often a distant second. And finally, of course, is the problem that all Lovecraft interpretations have, in that it usually tends to feel like a Disneyland ride through a Lovecraft country greatest hits rather than an actual horror story. Most of the Lovecraft-themed gaming material feels like this because its trying to too faithfully reproduce elements from the actual stories rather than creating new ideas, new monsters, new entities, etc. like Lovecraft and his circle actually did. Using well-known entities makes them feel like pop culture references more than anything else, and it doesn't work very well. Warhammer, perhaps ironically, does Lovecraftian fantasy better than actual Lovecraftian fantasy because while nothing is overtly Lovecraftian, it has much greater fidelity to the the tone and themes of Lovecraftian horror stories. Albeit, admittedly, without the sciencey angle that often undercuts Lovecrafts' own purposes. 

And maybe that's where I need to take a step back too and talk about what I mean by "dark fantasy"; exactly what themes and tone I want to look into and what I don't, how dark do I mean, how does this relate to the fad of grimdark (which from my perspective seems to be a spent force coasting on inertia, which I predicted would happen soon years ago already anyway.) Let me start by quoting a few of my past posts, in reverse order.

From June 2023: 

I've given plenty of thought to my own embrace—or lack thereof—of grimdark, and I've come to believe that while I like dark fantasy; what I call an equal parts hybrid of fantasy and horror, and I like low fantasy; the grubbier, sword & sorcery or even more "normal" aspect of fantasy rather than larger than life superheroes saving the world, and I like other aesthetic subgenres that are near to grimdark, that grimdark itself is a bridge too far. Two quotes from the Infogalactic article on grimdark highlight why:

Adam Roberts described it as fiction "where nobody is honourable and Might is Right", and as "the standard way of referring to fantasies that turn their backs on the more uplifting, Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealized medievaliana, and instead stress how nasty, brutish, short and, er, dark life back then 'really' was". But he noted that grimdark has little to do with re-imagining an actual historic reality and more with conveying the sense that our own world is a "cynical, disillusioned, ultraviolent place".

Roberts, Adam (2014). Get Started in: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Hachette UK. p. 42. ISBN 9781444795660.

Liz Bourke considered grimdark's defining characteristic to be "a retreat into the valorisation of darkness for darkness's sake, into a kind of nihilism that portrays right action ... as either impossible or futile". This, according to her, has the effect of absolving the protagonists as well as the reader from moral responsibility.

Bourke, Liz (17 April 2015). "The Dark Defiles by Richard Morgan". Strange Horizons.

I've written before about how much I dislike the George Rape Rape Martin style of storytelling, and how much I disliked my one novel of Joe Abercrombie's that I read. (Although I do like Glen Cook's Black Company. Maybe that's not quite all the way to grimdark, though—just a neighbor of it.)

From two separate posts just a couple of days apart in July 2014:

For much of its existence, the setting has been, to borrow an overly trite term from TV Tropes, basically a crapsack world. I've gradually lost my enthusiasm for that mode of thinking. I guess I've read a little too much of it, and now find the intellectual underpinnings of the notion unappealing. Or maybe I've just hit a few too many who are a few too free with their crapsackiness. When Glen Cook pioneered the notion in The Black Company, and with a bit of Lovecraftian flair to it, it sounded attractive. After reading a bit too much George Martin and Joe Abercrombie (and it's not actually like I read that much of either) I find the crapsack world nihilistic, dreary, and frankly... kinda whiny.

Now granted, horror fiction is still a major influence on [Old Night] and I suspect always will be. But the notion that being heroic, of doing what's right is always the wrong choice... I can't support that kind of paradigm anymore. Not sure that I ever really could, without playing it off for laughs eventually.

[,,,] 

[I]f this bleak, nihilistic, "crapsack" world fantasy is in opposition to "real" fantasy as we have known it, as we grew up on, and as we think of the genre, why is it relatively prevalent?  And why is (at least some of) it relatively popular?  

I think it's perceived by some to be more sophisticated, more mature, etc.  I think this perception is false, however.  Bleakness, nihilism, hopelessness, despair—these are not mature emotions.  This is not the perspective of an adult, it's the perspective of a whiny, angsty, bratty adolescent.  It's not sophisticated and deep, it's merely empty and soul-less.  [Besides,] is it really that popular?  Sure, GRRM is a pretty big deal, and guys like Joe Abercrombie and a few others.  But how much room for more is there?  Is there any nihilistic work that is still read 100 years after being written?  And how much of it can you stand, even if you can stand it, without needing to break for something more light, anyway?

Keep in mind, I'm referring specifically to nihilism, not tragedy.  Although they may resemble each other superficially in many respects, they are not the same.  There's no catharsis at the end of a nihilistic work.  The same is also true of most works of horror fiction—they're not nihilistic (well, some of them are) although certainly they are dark and the end is not usually happy for the protagonists.

[Old Night] is fantasy and horror, not nihilism.  The world is bleak, there are certainly issues that resemble that of a horror fiction story, but characters meet them like horror fiction protagonists. They may not triumph, they certainly don't "win" in a traditional sense, but their heroism can be seen and it has meaning.  Like the bleak fatalism of the Norse sagas, which Tolkien reflected in many ways, it's not purposeless.  It's not senseless.  It's not nihilistic.  This is part of the reason why fantasy is so fundamentally rooted in a romanticized Medievalism.  My own setting has looked in many ways to other romanticized adventurous periods; pirates and Westerns, in particular, but the end result is the same—without that romanticized adventure story baseline, the horror is just bleak nihilism.  It doesn't ring as profound as that of Norse sagas, Shakespearean tragedies, or even more modern works like Dracula or Lord of the Rings.  It would just feel like a tawdry snuff piece.

Old Night should basically have the exact same tone and feel and themes of shows like The X-files and Supernatural, or movies like The Mummy (1999) or Van Helsing. It's sword & sorcery in a kind of old-fashioned way, except modified slightly so that the protagonists aren't such superlative swashbuckling heroes and are a bit more investigative, like the Winchester brothers and Mulder and Scully. Just... set in a fantasy setting rather than the real world of the 90s (X-files) or the 00s/10s (Supernatural). Maybe my labels aren't really the right labels. Grimdark it clearly isn't, although it mingles with some of the same acquaintances. Dark Fantasy is often more or less synonymous with grimdark, but I've used it to refer to something more specifically horror-leaning but without the specific themes of grimdark. But the heroes are, in fact, heroic. They're not superheroes, and it's not a given that they'll win, or that they're better than anyone else in the setting, but they are at least heroic in their attitude, and they're doing the right things for the right reasons, even as it costs them. It's not bright, polite, overly fantastical or overly magical, and never really very whimsical. The differences to modern ideas of high fantasy are going to be pretty obvious, although the differences to older high fantasy like Lord of the Rings will be more subtle. Similarly, the differences to good old fashioned sword & sorcery are more subtle and more a case of how superlative the main characters are in their abilities, as well as more leaning into the tenseness and horror elements rather than gratuitous adventure. 

Ironically, it's more like what the OSR claims to want to be, but since it doesn't focus on dungeon-crawling and I do usually have characters who are meant to be likeable and relatable rather than narcissistic sociopaths it gets there in a way that's quite a bit different. I also think that it's much closer to what Call of Cthulhu games actually are, especially campaigns as opposed to one-shots. Honestly, the idea that many people have of PCs flaming out dying or going insane doesn't really happen all that much in campaign form CoC. It's just an investigative adventure game with some mystery and horror elements bolted in and made integral to the experience. Is "dark fantasy" the correct label for this kind of thing?

I'm honestly not sure anymore. Labels tend to be rather plastic things, especially for concepts that go viral or turn faddish, like dark fantasy and grimdark did. Maybe trying to tie my star to a faddish label was never the right approach, since I was never really completely aligned with it anyway. That's especially true now. Now that the zeitgeist is turning against dark fantasy, maybe you are saying, which would make me look like a bandwaggoner. David Sylvian, the lead singer for the UK 70s and 80s band Japan once said of the New Romantic movement, "There's a period going past at the moment that may make us look as though we're in fashion." Implying that it was just a coincidence that they were trendy in the earliest 80s. Kinda suss, as the kids say. So yeah, I could point to my posts from twelve years ago predicting the decline of grimdark because it went way too far, and reports of grimdark's death are, of course, premature and exaggerated. What can I say? I may be doing the same thing; jumping ship as a faddish label seems to be losing its steam. Then again, regardless of label or my association with or without one, I'm still doing basically the same thing that I've been doing since about 2001 or so in terms of my gaming and fantasy tastes. I've honed in more clearly on what exactly that looks like, but from a higher level, it's always been the same.

D&D as low fantasy

Given what I said yesterday about D&D never really emulating the sword & sorcery low fantasy that OSR fans claim to be such fans of, I thought it'd be good to noodle out how it could be. Ironically, some of the non-D&D OSR games actually do so in terms of mechanics vis-à-vis magic and what-not. But, of course, the OSR playstyle is heavily focused on dungeon-crawling, which is my other main complaint about the disconnect between D&D and sword & sorcery fiction. I saw someone (on ENWorld, of all places) once say that the first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark has more dungeon-crawling than the entire oeuvre of sword & sorcery fiction. That was meant to be hyperbole, but it's also not really incorrect. The best rhetoric might not be true from a literal, dialectical perspective, but it's still "true" if you know what I mean.

Anyway, what I want to talk about, as a tangent from my normal topics (not that my normal topics have been very focused for quite a long time lately anyway) is: how would I actually play D&D if I wanted it to have that kind of low magic low fantasy vibe that I do, actually, want it to have? What modifications would I make? And because 3e is the version of D&D that I know by far the best, played the most, and has the most modifications already floating out there, that's the edition that I'm going to focus on. Although everything I say here would apply equally well to 5e and probably to any edition of D&D. So, if I want that low magic, low fantasy swashbuckling dark adventure feel—and I definitely do—what changes would I make? Let me list them:

• Use E6. This is the single most important overlay or house rule to implement, as it keeps the game from ever getting out of the lower fantasy quadrants to begin with. Read the post in the link, if you need to (maybe I'll copy and paste to have my own post that "archives" it as a page, just in case, here on the blog.) But I don't think that this is sufficient by itself. WotC have reported in the past that their research indicates most "campaigns" only last seven sessions and hardly anyone plays higher than level 6-8 anyway. Higher level D&D may be aspirational gameplay for a lot of players, but it's not reality for most. If most campaigns start at level 1 and fizzle before getting more than a few levels under its belt anyway, then there's no reason to worry about it too much. Some other editions don't have the feat progression posited for 3e, but you can always just have slower leveling and shorter campaigns that never get above 6th level anyway. 
• No PC can start at first level with a spellcasting class. That is, if the class gives you a spellcasting ability at 1st level, then you have a take a level of something else first that does not. Wizards, sorcerers, clerics, etc. have to take a level of fighter, or rogue or something else like that before they can advance into their spellcasting class. Ignore the multiclassing penalty, if you use XP, for purposes of this requirement. In fact, ignore multiclassing penalties and favored class altogether. It's kind of a stupid rule anyway, and with only 6 levels to play with, just let people take levels in whatever class that they want. Note that classes like ranger or paladin that have a spellcasting progression, but one that doesn't start at 1st level aren't affected by this rule, since their spell progression doesn't come in until nearly the level cap anyway.
• Higher level spells can be at DM's discretion, converted to Incantations, which greatly limits their tactical utility, but which does allow for magic-users, especially villains, who can do all kinds of weird things with enough time and will. 5e has done something similar with Rituals, although I'm a little less familiar with them. But if you're unsure how to do this, or uncomfortable house-ruling spells as Incantations, look to the 5e Rituals rules to see if they can be used. (5e is really just a streamlined version of 3e, for the most part. Many systems work very similarly, and those that don't can usually be ported as is without any problem.)
• Higher level class abilities can be converted, if needed, into feat chains that can be accessed via the ongoing feat access of E6.
• While normally, prestige classes wouldn't really work in E6, at the DM's discretion, characters can start at 1st level of a prestige class and take it as if it were a normal class, ignoring the prerequisites. Emphasis on at the DM's discretion, and if a prestige class is too powerful for this to work (honestly, most are not, but you know your group and how they play better than I do, and power-gamers can't be given a free hand to screw up your game) the DM can either disallow it or work with you to modify it. What I would probably do is allow prestige classes to start at 2nd level, and I'd make at least some attempt to encourage PCs to take as many of the prereqs as they could during their first level, but then waive whatever's left, let them take five levels of the prestige class (2-6) at which point the E6 cap would come into play. Any additional class features could be converted to feat chains if needed.
• Full utilization of optional classes from other sources, like the Factotum (kind of smug-sounding name, but cool class) from Dungeonscape, the Complete series classes, etc. should be allowed and explicitly encouraged.
• Full utilization of alternate class features from PHB II and other books should be encouraged. If more are desired, Pathfinder 1e archetypes are exactly the same thing, and since Pathfinder 1e was built off of the SRD, much of the archetypes for Pathfinder can be used as is in D&D 3.5.
• I don't remember the psionics rules very well, honestly, so I'm a little hesitant to comment on their use, but the same concept as with spellcasting classes should be applied to "full time" psionic classes like the psion or wilder. Whether it applies to "part time" psionic classes like the soulknife or the lurk is up to the DM. I'd probably say they're OK as is. But again, my caveat is that I don't remember how psionics works very well because I haven't played or even seen played a psionic character in many, many years.
• Not strictly speaking necessary, since low fantasy is not necessarily equivalent to pseudo-horror dark fantasy, but there are a lot of fear checks, sanity systems, etc. for d20 games, and you could use one, if desired, to further mute the superhero feel of D&D vs. the low fantasy source material that you're trying to engage with. If you do, finding some way to apply it to the use of magic is desirable too, because it makes magic less utilitarian and more dangerous and edgy. I've completely changed the way magic works in my game where this is already baked into how it works. I'm not entirely sure how to do this with a modified D&D game without it drastically challenging the utility of even taking spellcasters at all, but one quick and dirty method would be to make the character roll a d20 every time they cast a spell. On a critical failure, i.e, a natural 1, the spell would fail and whatever sanity system you're using would come into play. I like this rule a lot, but that's because I want to push even further into dark fantasy rather than simply S&S low fantasy, so this isn't strictly speaking necessary for my project. 

A low fantasy party of adventurers. Although DALL-E 3 thinks that they're all Millennials, I think.

I think those things would make the game feel much more low fantasy, but in reality, the rules changes are probably less important than what you do at the table anyway. Do you have bizarre animal-people characters playing weirdo superheroes, or do you have much more grounded characters? What kinds of adventures are your ensemble cast of characters getting up to? Stuff that feels gamist and D&D-like, like dungeon-crawling, or stuff that feels similar to what characters in low fantasy S&S stories are doing? Do you have grounded realistic settings mostly full of normal people, or do magic and monsters appear on your daily commute and are commonplace? High magic and highly monstrous elements can and should certainly appear, but it's a question of context; are they routine because the game is highly fantastic, or are they stand-out set pieces because the game is more grounded and realistic?

Anyway, I did this just because it is of interest to me at the moment, and because I've been revisiting a lot of my 3e collection lately, I'm feeling more charitable towards that system than I otherwise might. It's still not my ideal way to play, but this is a method that I could happily run. As long as I also get to be handwavey about rulings, play theatre of the mind style, and tell players to avoid feats and other choices that maximize their tactical grid options, because I'm not very interested in the tactical grid style of play. If I can get rid of the tactical grid, get rid of the scourge of D&D's higher level scaling problem (which applies to every edition of D&D and many D&D-like games equally) and reduce the higher magic D&Disms in favor of a more muted, grounded approach, then the game works for me, and I'd really enjoy the many options for character customization. 

3e, and it's associated family (I really mostly mean 3.5 and even Pathfinder 1e, but I genericize the entire era into one label) is infamous as a power-gamer's paradise with all kinds of optimization combination to explore, but if you don't play with power-gamers, it can be a role-players paradise as well with all kinds of customization options to explore. But once again, what goes on at your actual table is the real deciding factor, much more important than the rules. I don't think power-gamers have a lot to work with with E6, so they'll probably stay away. Which is exactly what you want to have happen anyway.

UPDATE: Not related to making it more low fantasy, but I'd truncate the skill list somewhat like Pathfinder 1e did. Hide/Move Silently fold together into Stealth. Spot/Listen into Perception. Maybe Balance, Tumble and Jump into Acrobatics. The only problem here is that Rogue's already have so many skill points that when you consolidate skills, it arguably goes too far. Then again... I probably don't really care.

L. Sprague de Camp is a jerk

I've mentioned this before, but L. Sprague de Camp comes across as an insufferable know-it-all and gamma "smart boy." This is from the Wikipedia article on one of his series, the Pusadian Series:

Just as de Camp attempted to do for the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs with his "Krishna" stories, the Pusadian stories represent both a tribute to Howard's prehistoric "Hyborian Age" and an attempt to "get it right", reconstructing his model's concept logically, without what he regarded as Howard's anthropological and geological absurdities. Unlike Howard, de Camp brought a thorough knowledge of ancient history and geography to his project, along with a wealth of research on prior literary treatments of speculative prehistoric civilizations, as reflected in his definitive study Lost Continents (1954).

This is complete BS. Howard was extremely well-read and had as thorough a knowledge of ancient history and geography as de Camp was likely to have had. Before he—essentially—invented sword & sorcery, Howard wrote historical swashbuckling romance. Basically sword & sorcery in the real world—minus most of the sorcery. The reason he enjoyed sword & sorcery was because he was meticulous about making sure that he made no historical or geographical errors in his historical fiction, and it was both time consuming and kind of exhausting. Sword & sorcery meant he could handwave it and not have to do as much research and backchecking of details. But he was very serious about it, because he felt legitimately embarrassed to be found out in an error by a reader. Plus, he enjoyed ancient history and geography and mythology in its own right, and was quite well-read. He had both breadth and depth of historical and geographical knowledge that I simply don't believe that de Camp exceeded.

Besides, we're talking about stories about Atlantis here. It's pretty rich for de Camp to claim that his Atlantis stories are better than Howards' because he was convinced that he knew more about history and geography than Howard had twenty years earlier, without acknowledging that there's no reason to believe that there was a historical or geographic reality for Atlantis.

This is just pure and kind of obvious in retrospect gamma posturing, of the kind that we see all too much of on the internet. Attempting to position himself as some kind of "smarter than thou" know-it-all who's talents and knowledge aren't nearly as much as he personally esteems them as. De Camp can't complain about his career; he seems to have done well enough, but always been perpetually insecure and trying to push himself on everyone as some kind of expert. It's no accident that people still talk about Howard in glowing words nearly a hundred years after his death, while de Camp's works are largely forgotten only twenty five or so years after his. 

Gamma confirmed from even just this brief anecdote of his youth from his own Wikipedia page:

De Camp began his education at the Trinity School in New York, then spent ten years attending the Snyder School in North Carolina, a military-style institution. His stay at the Snyder School was an attempt by his parents, who were heavy-handed disciplinarians, to cure him of intellectual arrogance and lack of discipline. He was awkward and thin, an ineffective fighter, and suffered from bullying by his classmates. His experiences at the school taught him to develop a detached, analytical style considered cold by all but his closest friends, though he could, like his father, be disarming and funny in social situations. He would later recall these challenging childhood experiences in the semi-autobiographical story Judgment Day.

Although to be fair to de Camp; in two ways, at least, he was significantly more successful than Howard. He lived to be 92, died of old age, was married and had two children, and seems to have been happily married at that. Howard, of course, grew up with a bitter, sickly mother who clung to him, embittered him against his father, and was probably subject to mental health problems of is own; either because of his mother's smothering influence or just because people sometimes inherit those problems. Never married, and he committed suicide when his mother slipped into a coma from which she never awoke, he seems to have been a happy, healthy enough guy; athletic and charming, but clearly he had problems that de Camp did not.

What is fantasy (high concept)

By funny coincidence (probably not any coincidence at all; probably the infamous Algorithm™) I've seen two videos in the last day or two complaining about D&D of today no longer resembling Medieval fantasy, or even fantasy—it's just modern day social structures put in a cozy utopian setting with some fashion cues from the middle ages. That said, I don't think fantasy is supposed to be medieval simulationism, and while I think something like Hârnworld or Hârnmaster is an interesting idea, it's never been what I was interested in doing in my fantasy. Grounded and realistic doesn't have to look like historical simulationism. As much as I don't like "woke fantasy" or "cozy fantasy" or whatever, I do think that fantasy is at its best when it, at least partially, reflects our current society in some way, and by reflecting it in a different context, makes it more meaningful. Applicability, as Tolkien liked to call it. And he did the same thing; The Shire was very much a reflection of a romanticized rural pre-industrialized Edwardian England from his own childhood, for instance, even though most of the rest of Middle-earth reflected heroic mythic Europe. The familiar is a powerful tool to make the work more accessible to the reader, the viewer (in the case of movies and these TV shows) and the gamer in the case of RPGs.

From my perspective, fantasy at a high level is a combination of three things, and all fantasy that I have any interest in does some of this. Any fantasy that eschews any of these three doesn't really feel like the fantasy genre to me, or if it does, it's so strange that it feels way too different to really qualify as fantasy as I expect it to be.

First, as noted, it needs to be relatively modern. I like watching Modern History TV as much as the next guy, and while much of what he says is actually quite fascinating, I'm not interested in using that as the basis for my fantasy except as items here and there of local color. In order to engage or immerse your audience, either as an author or as a Gamemaster, you need to present a world that is fantastic, but it also needs to be sufficiently familiar that your audience doesn't feel too disconnected from it. They need to understand how it works at a basic level, i.e., if you travel, and stay at an inn, as with Frodo and Co. at the Prancing Pony, it's more like checking in to a modern hotel with modern English pub as a common room than it is like anything that actually happened in the real Middle Ages. The more you dig into the actual Middle Ages of Europe, the more you start to discover that they were much more foreign than you think in how they thought and how they behaved. The more the exercise feels like a smug lecture or an anthropological study on a foreign way of life, the less you can engage with it. Fantasy should be fantastic and have things that are different, but it also needs a grounded foundation that is familiar. The idea that we need to be super Medieval instead of modern is false. I think fantasy needs to be more modern than not. And even when I'm not using "Medieval inns" more like a modern Fairfield Inn, I also use modern fiction conventions. My games and stories tend to have an awful lot of hard-boiled-like influences, and modern thriller influences. I often say James Bond and Robert Ludlum are as important an influence as anything fantastic. Of course, those are pretty fantastic without belonging to the fantasy genre anyway...

Secondly, fantasy is ultimately a romanticized genre that looks backwards and romanticizes some aspect of the past. Usually the Medieval period, but as many people have pointed out, American fantasy tends to have the trappings of the Middle Ages while in many ways reflecting the culture and social structure and environment of the Old West frontier just as much. Two comments: 1) romanticizing doesn't necessarily mean making it pleasant. It could mean making it exciting, which could mean making it particularly unpleasant. So even darker, borderline horror fantasy, like some of what I dabble in, is certainly romanticized. Fantasy is idealized and larger than life. 2) I'm just as likely to hearken back to the frontier or Old West and the Golden Age of Caribbean piracy or the Musketeer era of pre-Revolutionary France as I am the actual Medieval period. The setting of Old Night should—deliberately—come across as much cowboys and mountain men, swashbuckling action like old Errol Flynn movies, and stuff like that as it does Arthurian romance or even Dark Ages post-roman early Medieval, or any other Middle Ages milieu. The European Middle Ages is our shared cultural heritage with our European cousins, because it is part of our heritage from before we split off from them, but the pirate stuff and the pushing back the frontier is a very specifically American mythology, and as a very specifically American man, it's part of my heritage and maybe a more immediate part of my heritage than the Middle Ages.

And thirdly, fantasy needs some kind of overt fantastical elements. This may seem obvious, but I think sometimes people try too hard to be grounded and forget to include this. I also don't mean that fantasy needs to be all fantastic all the time; I actually definitely prefer a more grounded fantasy that is more realistic than not, but if something fantastic and unworldly isn't an important part of the setting, and frankly, the development of the plot and scenario, I don't really consider it much of a fantasy. That said; the fantastic can be subtle, discrete, and even hidden from most people in the setting. But the PCs or protagonists, being special, are the ones who are going to interact with it the most.

UPDATE: Not worthy of its own post, but I've noticed in the last couple of years or so that whereas people always used to say RPGs, they now say TTRPGs. We used to default to the acronym RPG meant of course table-top RPGs, and if we were talking about a computer RPG, we'd say CRPG for something like, I dunno, Final Fantasy or Knights of the Old Republic or whatever. I'm not sure when the need to add TT to RPG seems to have become a thing, but mostly, people now call RPGs TTRPGs and the hobby is called the TTRPG hobby. As an old cuss who doesn't care, I of course will refuse to jump on this bandwagon, but it's a curious observation nonetheless.

Fantasy vs Space Opera

One recurring theme of my hobbyist endeavor is space opera vs fantasy. In reality, I don’t want to pit them against each other, because I like them both a lot, but one has to be a favorite that gets the more of my attention than the other. My love for space opera tends to come in waves, while my love for fantasy is more along the lines of “steady background noise.” Sometimes space opera crests high enough to rise above the level of fantasy, but other times it troughs to a point lower than fantasy. I still love space opera, but when that happens, fantasy by default comes to the fore. In contrast, I don’t think my love of fantasy is very variable. I think it’s constant. But from a practical standpoint, that’s not very different than going back and forth between the two. I have two settings that I’m nominally still developing, although I don’t do much with either anymore on a regular basis; one is a fantasy setting that’s kind of like a grubbier, darker, almost horror-like sword & sorcery; Conan combined with the X-files, maybe you could call it if you’re OK with handwavey shorthand, the other is a kind of Star Wars-like frontier zone space opera. Considering that Star Wars as a setting is quite broad, I’d suggest that from a setting perspective, its more like the Mandalorian show than the mainline movies; more toned down, more frontier and fringer focused, more aligned with a lot of the same literature that Star Wars itself synthesized than with Star Wars itself as its become since the first movie was released in the 70s.

In many respects, the difference between the two genres is less marked than you would think, and more based on superficial cues rather than major structural ones. One side effect of Star Wars is that fantasy elements in science fiction have become more mainstream than ever, and the idea of literal space wizards and monsters being fought with swords by space-faring fantasy heroes is a mainstream idea. For both genres, I’d guess that I’m more interested in telling stories, or exploring situations if we’re in an RPG environment, that aren’t unique to either genre. Intrigue, skullduggery, frontier/wilderness exploration, and thriller/mystery with a darker supernatural twist would be common to both; although it would “look” a little different in a space-faring setting than in a fantasy setting. But looking different and being different are not the same. Like the iconic and much maligned (in the past; somewhat rehabilitated today) Bat Durston story, but as likely to be a space hardboiled or a space horror story or a Cold War space spy thriller as a space western. The point is that they are plots and characters that are not unique or original to science fiction, but the setting is a science fictional setting.

I’ve also talked before about how as a kid, I wasn’t very interested in Westerns. I thought that they were an old-fashioned story from my dad’s generation. But in reality, as I’ve come to discover, it was the setting, not the tropes of the genre itself, that I struggled with. I’ve since both come to appreciate the setting of the Old West, largely driven by my many wonderful hiking trips taken over the same territory in west Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Montana, and my appreciation of the tropes of the Western as a superlatively American story about the American character. The same is true about hardboiled stories, although they are more cynical, obviously, and the Cold War spy thriller is maybe not uniquely American given that its most iconic example is James Bond, who is a British character written by a British author, but it certainly captures the zeitgeist of Western civilization including America during much of the twentieth century. Although the Cold War is over, I think most have found that the themes are still relevant with only minor adjustment. Frankly, although I dislike subversion of genres, I think in this case it makes some sense to cast the Western globalists as the villains. It was already a theme in spy novels that spies questioned the morality of their actions, and had cynical doubts about the governments that they represented, so this is maybe less of a subversion and more of an expansion of an existing theme.

This begs the question; if I’m more interested in crime stories, hardboiled stories, Western stories, spy thriller stories, etc. why not just operate in those genres explicitly? What does adding a fantasy or space opera setting add to the experience? That’s a good question. I’m not sure that I know the answer to that, but I can noodle around with some of my own thoughts. First off; I like fantasy and science fiction settings for their own sake. I like making up the details rather than having to research them, I like the exotic nature of alien planets and fantastic settings. They’re fun, and as a fan of fantasy and  science fiction, it’s a big part of why I think it’s fun. Exploring the exotic setting is a reward in its own right. Secondly, having that setting means that problems which couldn’t be an issue in a more realistic setting can be used when desired. If you’ve ever read Jeff Sutton’s First On the Moon, a Cold War spy thriller written in the late 50s involving astronauts trying to claim the Moon as sovereign territory for their respective empires pits an American astronaut vs a Soviet saboteur embedded within his crew. But the story involves astronauts in an extremely hostile environment, and technical problems involving the launch of the lander, the oxygen stores, etc. play an important part of the plot, which wouldn’t be the same if it were set in even the most hostile Earthly environment, like Antarctica or something (except possibly deep underwater.) Thirdly, the themes of those stories play a little different in different settings. Given that the actual cultural landscape has changed since Westerns were as popular as they once were, for instance, or hardboiled stories, there often has to be subtle updates to the themes too. Putting them in a different setting makes the themes stand out, and the nuance between a cowboy in space and a cowboy in 1870s or 1880s in the Territorial west is different.  It’s a bit difficult to explore a theme about culture clash with all of the baggage that our culture has heaped on the actual Old West and the specific peoples who lived there, but if you wipe the slate clean and use stand-ins to explore those same themes, it’s significantly different. Granted, I don’t mean literal stand-ins, because I dislike allegory being too strong myself, although maybe not as much as Tolkien famously did, but I’m not interested in exploring the relationship between the American homesteaders and the Sioux or Comanche, I’m just interested in exploring some similar situations, and maybe seeing how it applies to colonist Third Worlders feeling entitled to take our First World countries from us. Or just exploring the theme more generally and seeing where it  goes. And fourth, if there is any allegorical (or applicability) issue, as noted offhand just now, stripping the baggage of real history and what people believe about it due to propaganda or for whatever other reason, makes the theme more robust and applicable. It isn’t going to be very applicable if people can’t see past the real life players and their biases with regards to them.

Not that exploring cultural or political themes is really my intention with either fantasy or space opera. But you can’t help but introduce them, the same as your biases and beliefs, even if you don’t want to, so I don’t pretend to ignore them, I just don’t want to make them the major focus of anything I do. But they will certainly lurk in the background, because you can’t help but have them lurk in the  background of any type of creative work.

Taul Kajak, shown above in his very original look, just finished Belsavis (including the bonus series) and hit level 79. He's about 20% or so of the way towards level 80, just guesstimating on the green XP bar, which given that I've still got two whole planets to finish before I get to the end of his normal story, is more than enough. Given that I haven't played the planetary or bonus series on Voss or Corellia in a long time, I'm actually thinking that I might do them with Taul.

But I'm also feeling a little burned out with him for the time being, so it's time for him to tag someone else in and take a break on the bench for a little while. Playing Jedi is a bit more tedious than most because you have to engage everyone in hand to hand rather than just sitting back and plinking your enemies to death by spamming the 1 key. Which isn't exactly fun either, but it least it's not difficult or tedious, so it's to be preferred sometimes. 

On the other hand, if I wanted to finish him off, I could ignore the planetary stories entirely, just do the class stories, and be done fairly quickly, and still have no problem getting to level 80 before I'm done (and if for some reason, I'm not quite at 80, spamming the Coruscant Heroics would probably put me over the top.)

D&D and genre over time (1974-1984)

OSR types will typically tell you that the original mode of D&D is sword & sorcery of the type that was popular when Gary Gygax was writing. In other words, guys like Robert E. Howard were back in print (the famous Frazetta cover volumes), the Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser stories were popular, Jack Vance was popular, and “pastiche” writers like Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp were at their peak. In my opinion, this is both true and also untrue. It’s true that that’s what a significant portion of fantasy looked like in the early/mid 70s if you trawled through your typical bookstore or library shelf. And no doubt Gygax really liked that kind of stuff and heavily leaned on it for basic implicit setting assumptions. Famously, the Thief was supposedly based on the Gray Mouser to a great degree, and the magic system was heavily influenced by (or even copied explicitly, according to some) from Jack Vance.

However, by the time D&D came out, high fantasy had become extremely popular. The Lord of the Rings was very popular, Ursula LeGuin was popular, etc. It’s a little hard for Gygax or his OSR adherents to claim that D&D was explicitly sword & sorcery and not high fantasy when the game explicitly included elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, balrogs, rangers based on Strider and more as core, integral elements of the game. Gygax famously claimed in a column in Dragon Magazine that the inclusion of such was a bait & switch to get high fantasy fans into the game, where the fun would convince them to stay. However, this claim always struck me as disingenuous, and even if Gygax himself believed that, my experience with my friends in the 70s and early 80s was that high fantasy fans did not abandon their high fantasy preferences and play Leiber, Howard and Vance inspired settings as they adopted the game. Even Greyhawk itself didn’t feel much like the Hyborian Age or Nehwon but more like the Medieval real world with funny names and some Middle-earth elements generously sprinkled in here and there. Every setting that I ever fooled around with or played in was much more high fantasy than sword & sorcery when I was younger. And we drew maps based on the famous Christopher Tolkien map included in the copy of Lord of the Rings. True; many D&D maps from this era were hexmaps, but every novel, every story, and eventually almost every D&D map published started to resemble them as well.

Conan the Renegade. True S&S, or military fantasy pastiche?

High fantasy was always in the DNA of D&D from the very beginning, and it became more prominent very quickly as D&D absorbed more and more high fantasy fans; or at best, fantasy fans that weren’t particular between styles of fantasy and were happy incorporating any element from any style of fantasy into their game. But mostly high fantasy, because that was quickly becoming, if it hadn’t already, the default mode of fantasy that most fantasy fans thought of first. As an aside, not only was Lord of the Rings in print by this time, but so was Earthsea, Deryni, Narnia and Prydain. Shannara and Thomas Covenant would follow shortly, and before long the Belgariad and Riftwar series. Most of these were already out before AD&D itself was, but they certainly predate 2e, and clearly by the time D&D became 2e, the expectation of the game was that it more resemble those high fantasy works than anything by Howard or Leiber or Moorcock (Moorcock himself is, perhaps ironically, considered high fantasy by many critics.) But that change doesn’t mean that D&D changed from sword & sorcery to high fantasy between 1974 and 1984. Quite simply, the high fantasy was always there, although its influence and overtness grew swiftly during that decade. Gygax may have not understood why anyone would want to play a wizard or elf, but he made those options available, and they were among the most popular from the get-go.

In addition, early D&D had a lot of other stuff in its DNA besides sword & sorcery and high fantasy. Science fiction, post apocalyptic, planetary romance and horror all put their two cents in, although these gonzo elements were often novelties and had relatively low sticking power, other than a few minor elements like the displacer beast or the gorillon. Horror seems to have been the most successful, with vampires ripped straight out of Dracula, zombies pretty much straight from George Romero, and plenty of Lovecraftiana. But that stuff was always in fantasy anyway; a lot of the Howard Conan and Kull stories could be considered Cthulhu Mythos stories in their own right, and Solomon Kane was even more overtly horror-influenced. Psionics has an uneasy relationship with the rest of D&D, but it does survive from its importation into the game straight from science fiction, at least. The old gratuitous slick Heavy Metal was maybe a better description of D&D's implicit setting than anything specifically sword & sorcery. I don't know for sure what you'd call that kind of gonzo 70s van art type of fantasy, but it didn't necessarily resemble the sword & sorcery of Howard or Leiber very much.

Perhaps most jarring is that any attempt to link early D&D to sword & sorcery explicitly can only be done at the implicit setting level anyway (and as seen above, I don’t buy even that.) Nothing about D&D, especially as it was played, resembles sword & sorcery. Going into a dungeon, and then “resting” in between dungeon delves to recover, train or level up, spend your money on improvements, is completely unlike anything in sword & sorcery. The zero-to-hero leveling paradigm is also nothing like any sword & sorcery character; Conan, Fahfrd, the Gray Mouser, or Elric are all supremely competent adventurers even when striplings. And the character-driven sword & sorcery genre has little to do with the ensemble D&D adventuring party, especially as it was played in the early days with large groups and a dozen or more characters all participating at once, not to mention hirelings and other assorted followers and hangers-on. If anything, the fellowship of the Ring is a more true-to-life model for D&D parties as they were played, and no genre of fiction at all really resembles the “story” of D&D of “clearing dungeons” for loot and competency advancement.

However, now that I’ve spent all of this time attempting to debunk, or at least validate my opinion, that early D&D was never really sword & sorcery, it’s certainly worth pointing out that it was more like sword & sorcery in most respects than it later came to be. The implicit setting may have been more like a more humano-centric and overtly Medievalesque high fantasy setting, but it was more likely to feature some more overt sword & sorcery tropes than it did later, for the most part. Much of the way campaigns were expected to be structured, and for that matter, the way modules were written, would likely have resembled some sword & sorcery tropes such as punchy, action-packed short stories that weren’t necessarily meant to be stitched together into a “novel” form or over-arching campaign metastory, and the stakes were usually lower and more modest, much more like sword & sorcery. Whether or not the characters were heroic high fantasy archetypes or charismatic antiheroic roguish archetypes from sword & sorcery was, as it is today, up to the actual table and players, not the game itself; although high fantasy archetypes like the paladin were included early on. (It’s worth pointing out that antiheroes were increasingly common in American and western literature and entertainment outside of the fantasy genre during this period. James Bond and the so-called Man With No Name were already household names by 1974. Dirty Harry had been out for a few years, and Death Wish also came out in 1974. You don't need to refer back to Howard or Leiber to get antiheroes.)

James Maliszewski of Grognardia calls this period the Golden Age of D&D, and although I disagree with his assessment that this would resemble sword & sorcery, I think his delineation of its limits in time is spot on. Let me quote his brief description of it:

Golden Age (1974-1983): This is the era of D&D's ascendancy and, for me, its perfection. The argument could be reasonably made that the "pure" Golden Age ends somewhere between 1979 and 1981, depending on whether one considers the completion of AD&D or the mass marketing of the game through the Moldvay Basic Rules to have struck a heavier blow to the culture of early D&D. If one wants to make such fine distinctions, the period between 1979/1981 and 1985 (or thereabouts) is the Electrum Age, which straddles the tail end of the Golden Age and the beginning of the Silver. The Golden Age is one of "gonzo pulp fantasy," with a hodgepodge of influences, particularly Howard, Vance, Leiber, de Camp, and Pratt. The dungeon remains the linchpin of adventure design and the sandbox is the assumed role for a campaign setting.

He's correct both in that the release of AD&D and Moldvay changed the culture of D&D, but perhaps only indirectly. Both were responses to changes in the player base as the game became more popular, marginally more mainstream, and certainly attracted large numbers of new fans who simply wanted the game to pull more in the direction of their tastes and preferences, which were not the same as the  original wargaming crowd the mid-70s in Wisconsin. New focal nodes of player bases sprung up that led the game in different directions, or even experimented with abandoning D&D altogether to develop something more along the lines of what those regional players bases were looking for. By 1983 the Mentzer boxed sets were out, and the Ravenloft module was published, and by 1984 the first Dragonlance novels were in print and selling like gangbusters. By that point, none of those products very closely resembled sword & sorcery at all except in a number of superficial ways, and they set the direction for the game much moreso than what came before. But as I said, this coincides pretty well with similar movements in the fantasy genre overall; sword & sorcery was still in print, but new stuff was rare. Conan pastiche novels were being written, but arguably being novels, they had already abandoned one of the core defining elements of being sword & sorcery; they weren’t short stories with punchy, pulpy action, they were longer and focused more on more complex plots and characterizations. Eddings, Feist, Brooks, and more were what mainstream fantasy looked like by the mid-80s, not Howard, Leiber and Moorcock.

Which makes for a good stopping point for this post, and I’ll come back to 1983-4 for my next one and talk about the trajectory of D&D leading up to and through the release of 2e. The release of a new edition actually was probably driven more by business needs for more sales and the removal of “family unfriendly” elements that were causing the game bad PR than it was a marker for a change in the direction of the game, really. D&D after the release of Dragonlance was on an unbroken cultural trajectory up until TSR went bankrupt and the brand was acquired by Wizards of the Coast.

D&D:HAT

My Blu-ray copy of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves arrived this afternoon. The release date being May 30th has been known for some time, but for whatever reason until this morning, Amazon said it was going to arrive on June 20th. Surprise, surprise... here it is now. I actually probably have time to pop it in and watch it one more time tonight. In spite of the fact that fans have every reason to be unhappy with WotC, Hasbro, and even Paramount, this movie is better by far than I expected it to be. Even my wife quite liked it, and she is not a fan of D&D. My characterization of the movie as Guardians of the Galaxy meets Lord of the Rings was sufficient to get her into a mood where she wasn't just dutifully going to see it because I wanted to, but I'm sure she still wasn't expecting to actually like it very much. She did, and has in fact highly recommended the movie to all of our far-flung kids. We even went back to the theater with my daughter and son-in-law, and I'm hoping to watch it with another of my college-aged sons when he's in town in a few weeks, now that I have a copy on Blu-ray.

I do feel like D&D and I parted ways some time ago, and while we still pass each other and give each other a friendly greeting and some small talk, we're really on quite different paths. My preferred rules are very rules-lite, and should probably be called OSR adjacent, while D&D has become a game of very many rules. My settings are grim and humanocentric; a combination of old-fashioned sword & sorcery and gothic horror, like Dracula or something, complete with an X-files like conspiracy vibe and anxious tone of brooding menace. My characters are grounded and grim guys with freelance roving commissions looking to root out supernatural evil; D&D's characters are whimsical superheroes and animal people. My game has genuine risk for PCs; D&D is meant to be won, and without too much challenge, quite honestly.

I guess maybe it's fair to say that my game more closely resembles older games of D&D from the 70s and early 80s than it does D&D from now, but even that's not really accurate. It more closely resembles them in system, I suppose, but the setting, tone and themes I would explore are much more similar to something like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, or that unfortunately poorly made Van Helsing movie from a few years ago. Maybe toned down a fair bit from the over-the-top swashbuckling of that movie, but still—poorly made though it may be, it's still a close analog of the tone and theme that I shoot for in my games.

That said, there's still plenty to like about D&D-like higher fantasy. I recently re-read the original Icewind Dale trilogy by R. A. Salvatore, for instance. And the movie itself, as noted, is pretty good. Although how much it resembles the high fantasy style of D&D from the late 80s and 90s is hard to say. 

I can't be bothered to boycott every company that does something stupid or evil, since corporations, by their nature, will tend to do both routinely. Rather; I'd like to see movies like this be successful enough that more like them are made. And I'd also like to encourage people to keep their bloody opinions to themselves rather than try and foist them on their customers.

Some Hero Forge stuff

Some new and newish images I've created or found and modified in Hero Forge. These may or may not all end up in Dark Fantasy X, but I like the images anyway. A few of them I've posted before, but they're now being looked at in new context; I'm seriously considering revamping my concept of the Drylander ethnicity of Baal Hamazi. Right now, they're a unique ethnicity that bears no physical resemblance to any existing human ethnicity on Earth, although I use a lot of old Fertile Crescent names for them, like Elamite king-lists, and stuff like that. I'm considering making them a hybrid of early Slavic or even specifically Zaporozhin Cossack-like people and the Dacians, using Medieval Slavic names more often, and suggesting a continuum from Baal Hamazi down to Tarush Noptii which preceded Timischburg, and even the indigenous peoples of the old Hill Country; the Tazitta people, and the peoples of the old long-lost kindgoms of Permia, Pezhek, Halych, Leszek, Vuronezh and Kinzassal are all part of it too. For the Tarushans, I had a Romanian name-list, but Romanians have been under a lot of Slavic influence for many centuries, and many Slavic origin names are common among the Romanians. I also already had some old balshatoi names from my Dark•Heritage Mk. IV that were Slavic sounding that ended up near Baal Hamazi and in the Hill Country before the Hillmen colonized it. 

I've deliberately taken away more Latin sounding Romanian names and replaced them with old Medieval Polish and Russian names I found in a namelist, but it's supposed to be more of a vague inference rather than a one to one correspondence. In any case, assuming that I do go forward with this, I'll need to rethink the look and feel of the Drylanders; making them more white rather than having a very unique look. Slavic and Germanic peoples, and other northern Europeans in general, all have a very similar look—even the Greeks and Romans commented on the northern look, which they attributed to Celts, to Germanics, to Slavs, to Dacians and to Scythians—tall, reddish or blondish hair, and blue eyes being common. I'll probably suggest that any northern European phenotype can be present in any of the populations, but that the following are the most common:

- Hillmen; blue eyes and brown hair

- Timischers; blue eyes and blond hair

- Tarushans; dark hair and brown eyes

- Tazitta forest dwellers; dark hair and blue eyes

- Drylanders - auburn hair and hazel eyes

Those who maintain a specific Skelldale ancestry will be similar to the Timischers, although they tend to be in the Hill Country, and those who have a specific Brynach ancestry will have a stronger tendency towards red hair and freckles with very pale skin. Because these ancestries (as well as all of the others) are mixed in the Hill Country, the Hill Country has probably the most diverse set of possible northern European-like features.

Not accounting for individuals who spend all of their time outside and are thus very tan, in general the Tarushans are the darkest skinned, and the Brynachians are the palest.

Whipped this guy up. He'd be a pretty typical Drylander.

Because Hero Forge doesn't give me fine control over facial features really, this guy could easily be of any human ethnicity in the area, except probably Tarushan or Tazitta, who are both very unlikely to have light hair.

Same with him

This Cossack-like outfit is begging to be a Drylander

Could be from lots of places, but he's also got a very iconic urban Drylander thug look to him.

This more middle-aged swashbuckler is probably from Timischberg, and might be mixed Tarushan and Timischer in ancestry

This was originally designed by me to represent Artemis Entreri from the Forgotten Realms setting, but he looks like a dark haired guy from Simashki with mostly Drylander blood

This guy could represent anyone, but the Germanic or Viking-like shirt means he's probably from the Hill Country

This is another take on a Cossack-like look. Probably a Drylander.

Grabbed this from the library; it's just an alternate take on Robin Hood.

A new goblin thief I got from the library.

This vigilante looks to be a northern Hillman type. The Hillmen are much more likely to be clean-shaven and short-haired than most of the other ethnicities in the region, although that look is also not uncommon among the Timischers.

I'll probably use this revised Herne the Hunter image for my column in the CIW 5x5 that has them being hunted in the Thursewood.

Another Cossack-like guy. Sadly, there's no weapons that look that much like a falx, although maybe I could repurpose a naginata to do the job, and create more specifically Dacian-looking guys.

Although it's unlikely that they're meant to be the same character, it always struck me that both the Dresden Files and the Warhammer world had an infamous necromancer named Heinrich Kemmler. This is my take on a third version. Why not jump in on the in-joke bandwagon, amirite?

Played around with some newish elements to make a jann. They're probably due for the next racial deep dive.

I think I've posted this before, but here's the most recent kemling character I've made.

This knight uses some new elements, but I didn't actually love the new breastplate, so I used a lorica segmentata-like one. It fits really well with the faulds, actually, and is a kind of unique look for a Hillman or possibly Timischer warrior.

This guy is specifically meant to evoke the American frontier vibe that is also part of the Hillmen look.

Another one who looks like he could be from anywhere, but this was specifically designed to be an older retired Ranger from the Hill Country.

Another warrior. See how that breastplate just didn't work with the look above? This guy could be from anywhere too.

A ranger veteran, although darker than normal for a hillman. But there are dark haired hillmen too. That doesn't mean he has to have Tazitta or Tarushan blood.

Two additional characters that have a Cossack-like look in some ways, so they're looking like Drylanders to me right now.

Springheel Jack, a fictional or urban folklore character from Victorian London who I've heard called "the world's first supervillain."

Desdichado. The Disinherited One. Dressed deliberately to disguise his features and even his ethnicity, so he could pass anywhere in the Three Realms without comment.

These older urban Drylanders will still work as exactly that.

This urban ranger, with what looks like an African hunting dog animal companion, is just a really cool image, but I have no idea what to do with him yet.

A veteran warrior. Experienced, but still very hale, and not starting to struggle keeping up with the young bucks because of age yet.