GM Merit Badges

Somehow, I've managed to delete my GM Merit Badges post.  Huh?  That's what I get for trying to add a link to it in the editing screen, I guess.  Anyway, here's the original post that started it all.  And this new post of mine will have to be my reworked GM Merit Badge post.

Er... to be technical, that's the second post that started it all.  I linked to that one instead of the first one because 1) he links to the first post within the body of that post, and 2) he added a few badges.  That's the complete list.  And the link to the CafePress store, for those who are interested.

Anyway, once again around: here's my picks:

1) My game will tell an interesting Story.  That is, I don't purposefully write a story, but if an interesting story isn't somehow the product of the game experience, then I consider it to be a failure.

2) My games will be Scary. I'm a big fan of blending in lots of horror elements, and the dark fantasy genre, as vague as that label may yet be.

3) There will be Player vs. Player combat allowed in my games.  I won't exactly encourage it, but I'm not going to stop it.  I don't believe that RPGs are games about teamwork.  The teamwork is at the player level, in creating an experience that is interesting and fun.  That does not necessarily mean teamwork at the character level, and characters that do not get along are often the most interesting kinds.

4) I will Mirror back player ideas that I think are interesting in game.  Be careful what kinds of theories you discuss openly at the table; your worst case scenarios might come back to haunt you!

5) The GM is In Charge in my game and "rule zero" is in effect.  I'm a much bigger believer in rulings than in rules anyway.

6) My games rely on a lot of Improvisation rather than prescripted content.  At most, I'll have a one-page outline of what I think is likely to happen that will often last for three or four sessions.  I prefer my players to drive the game to activities that they find interesting, based on hooks that I dangle in front of them, of course.  But it's important to me that they have lots of hooks to choose from and do what they want to do.  Of course, that also means I can only plan so much, so I have to make up a lot of stuff on the fly based on how my players choose.

7) My games include lots of Intrigue.  In fact, I greatly prefer intrigue, skullduggery, and cloak and dagger affairs to "dungeoncrawls" which I hate.

8) I roll Dice in the open and don't fudge results in the game.  Mostly, anyway.  I dislike fudging, but I reserve the right to in minor ways here and there.  In fact, I struggle to think of how a good gamemaster couldn't at least reserve that right even if--like me--he prefers to exercise it very infrequently.

9) My games include Disturbing content.  Again; I like a fairly strong horror vibe.  I consider my games to be often skirting the line between PG-13 and R, at least.

10) My games focus on interesting Characters and Drama.  In fact, that's what I like about the game.  I couldn't really care less about tactics.  I approach the game from an authorial standpoint, and while I also really love the collaborative effort of working with players (either as GM or as a player myself) instead of "writing my story", at the same time, I like the game best when we're focused on trying to tell an interesting story.  And that goes hand in hand with interesting characters and drama; in fact, with interesting characters and drama, a decent story is almost an inevitable product of the game.

11) Players in my game should be prepared to Run when the odds are stacked against them.  I'm not really a fan of killing PCs, but I won't hesitate to do so if it's the obvious result of player actions.  And, once again, horror, folks.  In horror you don't always stand up to the monster and gloriously battle it to the death.  That is, you don't if you don't want really short, boring games.

12) I frequently Tinker with the rules of the game.  Well, that should be obvious, given my rather extensive houseruled system.

Did I perhaps overdo it?  The creator of the badges only picked six originally (later bulked up to nine) while I'm clocking in at twelve.  Dunno.

"Professional" DMing advice

Just as an FYI, because here's a new resource I just became aware of.

I've always been a fan of reading advice on how to run the game well.  I think some of the best published advice is in the d20 Call of Cthulhu book, and some of the second best published advice was Ray Winninger's column on the art of DMing that ran in Dungeon Magazine during the last stages of 2nd edition and the early stages of 3rd.  In fact, I've very specifically referred to Ray's advice more than a few times.

I just became aware of another column, available on the Wizards website, written by Chris Perkins.  Chris is apparently a well-respected GM, even in Renton amongst Wizards employees, who play a lot of games and are exposed to a lot of serious gamers.  He's also a "professional" gamer in the sense that he works for Wizards of the Coast (and not in a mundane capacity, like he does their Accounts Recievable or something like that) and has written tons of material for D&D over the years.  That doesn't necessarily make him an expert at GMing, of course, but he does seem to be genuinely well-respected as a good GM.  And perhaps more importantly, he seems more inclined to run the kinds of games I would like, with focus on the kinds of things that I prefer.  He doesn't proselytize for any strange or fringe DMing styles--although he does have an innovative and unusual perspective or two up his sleeve.  I think his column is a good read, and any DM can't possibly be hurt by having had a look at it.

Granted, his approach isn't nearly as systematic as Ray Winninger's was.  There's no process.  There's no "here, do this, and then you're ready to run."  There's just an awful lot of good advice, peppered with examples from one of his two concurrent groups which he's running in the same setting.  Very occasionally, he'll post something that's a definite "4e-ism" and isn't as immediately useful to anyone playing any other game... but only very occasionally.

Here, check out his column here, most recent postings at the top.  I think it's a fun read in its own right, and heck, I may even have picked up a tip or two, even though I've been running games off and on for the better part of thirty years almost.

Theme music of Dark•Heritage

I've occasionally blogged about my love of movie music soundtracks as backdrops to my game, and I like to "tailor" that soundtrack by picking stuff that fits, is diverse enough to give a broad spectrum of sounds, yet which is unified at least enough by mood that it never feels out of place.  I listen to this "soundtrack" while running the game, while working on the game, while writing stuff on the setting, while working on my novel set in the setting, and while generally tinkering with it in any way.  After some time, I've decided that I've narrowed all my various soundtracks down to a few that encapsulate the setting as I envision it.  I've divided it into "required" and "optional"--with the optional albums obviously giving a more full-bodied and diverse range of sounds and moods.  Although since Hans Zimmer features so strongly on the list, maybe there's not a lot of diversity after all.  And while I say movie soundtracks, and that's mostly true, there is one very notable video game soundtrack on the "required" list too.

Required Listening

• Red Dead Redemption -- minus the "pop country" songs at the end of the soundtrack.

• Cowboys & Aliens

• Sherlock Holmes

• Pirates of the Caribbean (in a pinch, you could just go with 4, or 4 and either 2 or 3.  I have all four, of course.  The first one is the best, but it's poorly mastered, so it actually sticks out when mixed with other soundtracks--I often leave it off.)

• The Wolfman (the newer one, by Danny Elfman, of course.  Not the older original movie soundtrack.  Which I doubt is even available.)

• Bram Stoker's Dracula -- although a bit of judiciousness about the track selection is recommended.  The Annie Lennox song really doesn't fit, and some of the more "romantic" themes are also a bit jarring.

• Indiana Jones (I've got all four, but honestly, John Williams was really phoning in the songs for Crystal Skull.  In a pinch, just use Raiders.)

• The Mummy -- again, I've got all three, but the first one is the one that's really the best.

• Prince of Persia.  Don't use the Alannis Morrisette song, obviously.

In a real pinch, if you had to narrow it down to even fewer soundtracks, I'd recommend Red Dead Redemption, Pirates 2 (or 4), Prince of Persia and The Wolfman.

Optional Adds

• Inception.
• Transformers 3 -- this actually sounds like it wants to be Inception.  The two of them together blend pretty seamlessly into each other if you aren't paying attention.
• Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.  I imagine when the third of that trilogy comes out, it'll be a good fit too.
• Stargate -- has great "adventure" themes, and a touch of dark Egyptian exotica that complements the Indiana Jones and Mummy soundtracks well.
• Last of the Mohicans -- although only the first nine tracks or so.  This CD is bizarrely bipolar.
• A few other of the recent superhero movies have a nice dark action sound to them, and could be used: either Hulk, Thor, the Spider-mans, the X-Men movies, Green Lantern, etc. 
• There's some other really good sword & sorcery like soundtracks -- the newer Clash of the Titans, 10,000 BC, Troy, Gladiator, the newer (or the older too) Conan the Barbarian, etc.
• Master and Commander
• The only point about adding too many of the optional soundtracks is that it starts to dilute the influence of the Required ones.  I'd be very judicious about adding too many of them.  In fact, I prefer to rip the entire desired soundtrack (as mp3 files) to a single CD-R, which naturally limits my ability to use too much, but also makes sure that it stays more focused on the "correct" sounds and mood.

Borrowing from anywhere

While that post title can (and you'd think would, given the content of this blog in general) be applied to setting elements quite easily and quite well, I actually am referring to game mechanics in this case.  Never be afraid to borrow a great mechanic, even if it's from a game that's very different mechanically from the one you're running.  If it fits in with the campaign you want to run, and will add significantly to the flavor and fun of it, then by all means, let's grab it and go.

DARK•HERITAGE has a number of rules options for the "base" rules, but I also have a number of house rules imported from other systems and other games.  In some cases, they come from closely related games; games built off the same d20 "engine" if you will.  But in other cases, they don't.  To whit--

Although I've got a Pathfinder and a D&D 3.5 option, my favorite and preferred system for DARK•HERITAGE is actually d20 Past, which is a campaign supplement for d20 Modern.  In addition to that, d20 Past gives you three setting models, each with slightly tweaked mechanical implications to better suit that setting.  DARK•HERITAGE uses the "Shadow Stalkers" campaign model.  I've also cherry-picked a number of elements (especially Advanced Classes) from Urban Arcana just to round it out and make the mechanics a bit more robust and create a broader buffet of options for my players.

That sounds simple enough, but right away, I'm stuck with a few needs.  Shadow Stalkers assumes a setting that is literally our earth--during a pulpy or swashbuckling era--combined with Bram Stoker's Transylvania.  It's the setting of Stephen Sommers' Van Helsing, basically, or possibly Michael Bassett's Solomon Kane, which in an unrelated aside, I'll point out that it's extremely disappointing that there still hasn't been a North American release date for that movie.  If you can get your hands on a British (or Spanish or French) import of the DVD and have the capability of watching import DVDs either on your PC or with a multiregion DVD player, I highly recommend it.  Pretty good, fun, sword & sorcery fun, with a lot of the stuff I'd like DARK•HERITAGE to have, honestly.  Not saying it's perfect, but it's a decent movie.  Quite a bit better than Van Helsing, actually.

DARK•HERITAGE, on the other hand, is clearly not our earth, even in a romanticised or pulpish iteration of it.  It's a fantasy setting that resembles, in many ways, a D&D setting as much as the real world.  So, I had to use some D&D races, some modified, some created whole-cloth.  I decided to keep the D&D equipment list and regular spending of money rather than use the Wealth system.  I also dropped the Reputation system, since I have no interest in it.  And I made a few other tweaks, including changing the rate of character advancement, and making some changes to the supernatural classes to account for the changes in character advancement and still allow them to be viable.  A handful of other minor tweaks for flavor and taste.

But D&D (3.5) and d20 Modern were already very similar systems.  What have I borrowed from other games entirely?  Three things--two of them from D&D 4e (kinda) and one of them from Call of Cthulhu.  From 4e, I borrowed the concept of healing surges.  This is especially important in DARK•HERITAGE where magical healing is pretty much non-existant.  I thought about using another varient for hit points, like maybe Wound and Vitality points or something, but decided that creating Healing Surges, using the already existing Action Point mechanics to deliver them, was good enough.

Secondly, the concept of minions.  I've already long played around with the idea that I didn't need to actually legally "stat up" every opponent the PCs faced, and so I was at least halfway to the concept of minions already by just making up stats that felt appropriate, and having the enemies die when it seemed like it was time for them to die.  The idea of characters that basically just need a single hit to go down, but which can be threatening to the PCs in numbers, because they actually have a good ability to hit and damage them (unlike standard low level D&D characters, like 1st level Warriors or Commoners or whatever) was, however, a refinement of that intuitive step I had made, and it seemed to make a lot of sense.  Plus, it's a bit more systematic and refined of a method.  I can still "make up" stats as needed for minion-type opponents (and do!) but having both me and the players understand intuitively the concept of minion foes has made that a much smoother operation than it used to be.

The third mechanic, borrowed from Call of Cthulhu is the Sanity mechanic.  In earlier iterations, I literally used the Cthulhu sanity mechanic, which is now open content and "officially" part of the d20 system (even though it's also clearly a non-native system, being based on BRP's percentile roll based system.  I've since used an adaptation that came from The d20 Freeport Companion where Rob Schwalb wrote up a "native" d20 adaptation of the concept, with very similar rules, but which felt like they belonged with the system.  This is hugely important to me in reinforcing the atmosphere and "feel" of DARK•HERITAGE, and making sure that it feels radically different from D&D--even though it mostly uses very similar rules.

In fact, that's the purpose of all three of these rules changes--they significantly impact the way the game "feels" in play, which makes the experience considerably distinct from playing D&D, or even "standard" d20 Modern.

Dark•Heritage d20 Past version character sheet

http://www.freewebs.com/jdyal/dhmodfiles/sheet.xls

There it is.  A customized character sheet for the DARK•HERITAGE, d20 Modern rules variant.

EDIT:  Remembered that the d20 Modern character sheet already assumes everyone is human, so doesn't include a race line.  That's not true for DARK•HERITAGE obviously, so I had to include one.  Lacking an obvious place to put it, I removed the Player line and put it there.  People don't really need to put their own names on their character sheets anyway, do they?  Re-uploaded the file with this correction.

EDIT 2: While statting up one of my iconics, Keisa Alamaswu, just to try it out, I also realized that the Skill Bonus box doesn't total like it should.  I had to go through and manually add the formula.  I haven't re-uploaded that yet, but I will once I'm done.

EDIT 3: For convenience, although the blank template should do this, I labelled one colum of FEATS AND TALENTS Feats and the other Talents, and kept them side by side rather than intermingling them.  Duh.  I did the same with spells and incantations.

EDIT 4: D'oh!  I removed the Wealth box, since I'm not using the d20 Modern Wealth system, but forgot to put a place for regular money to be indicated!  However, I think it's easy enough to just do that as one of the lines on your equipment list--they're plenty already.  In fact, I edited the first line on the equipment list to be a place to hold your wealth information.

EDIT 5: OK, the edited version is up, with all the corrections noted in those edits above.  Also; because the original spreadsheet, which has been on my hard drive for years from some unknown download source long ago had macros, this file asks to enable macros.  It doesn't matter what you pick; I actually removed all the macros.  Now I just need to get rid of that macro message, but I guess my Excel-fu wasn't as strong as I thought it was--I can't figure out how to get that to go away.

EDIT 6: Figured it out.  Modules removed in the VBA editor--no more macro warning.  Re-uploaded.  Again.

Also, some commentary.  It's interesting when you build characters somewhat organically.  While my earlier post on Keisa obviously spelled out how I envisioned her as a character, actually building her mechanically opened up some new dimensions.  Perhaps I should have given her some ranks in Bluff or Diplomacy, but I ended up giving her a feat for that instead of ranks.  And then I had tons of skill points that went into Forgery.  Before I knew it, she had a flyaway Forgery bonus of +18--at 6th level!  While I didn't initially envision her as a forgerer, the more I think about it, the more I actually kinda like that aspect of her.  If I'd never sat down and actually built her as a character, I'd never have "discovered" that about her either.

Paizonia

I recently just finished Paizo's Rule of Fear and Undead Revisited.  Well, technically I still have a few pages left in Rule of Fear, but I'll finish that today over lunch, and I'm anxious to talk about while I've got a few free moments this morning.

The two go together fairly well--Rule of Fear is the regional sourcebook for Ustalav, which is the Pathfinder setting's area of concentrated horror tropes and conventions.  A Paizonian Ravenloft, if you will, in many ways.  It's an interesting area, and one that I wish was even more developed, frankly, as it felt like it was barely touching on all the things that could be done there.  But that's been true of most of the Paizo sourcebooks for me; if I like them (and I do for most) I wish there were even more detail, because it's more about giving you hints and thought-starters than it is about giving you a full-fledged and highly detailed area.  I guess I could check out the recently concluded Carrion Crown adventure path for more details on parts of Ustalav, and I probably will.  Eventually.

One thing that I feared Rule of Fear would do, and it kinda did, although not as strongly nor as annoyingly as I feared, was "bunching" of recognizable tropes together.  I.e., this is the county that's like Bram Stoker's Trannsylvania.  This is the county that's Lovecraft's Arkham.  This is the county that's Phantom of the Opera.  This is the county that's Shelley's Frankenstein.  Etc.  I think the tropes could have been mixed and mingled a bit more than they were.  But that's a minor gripe.  I like horror in my fantasy, and always have, and Rule of Fear delivers a setting tailor made for exactly that.  And although I don't run published settings, as I've said often enough before, it's still fun to have a well-stocked larder of setting material that I can raid when I wish to.

I also finished Undead Revisited.  I've said before that I had higher hopes for the X Revisited series than I actually got, and that's still true.  Rather than really revisiting the subject matter, the Revisited series has mostly strengthened and reiterated the already common and prevalent D&D filtered assumptions of what it's covered.  That's OK when the subject matter is good and D&D has in general done a good job with it, which is true for some of the monsters, I suppose.  Undead Revisited, however, has an even greater hurdle to overcome, though--most of the best, most classic, most iconic and most desireable undead to cover were already done in Classic Horrors Revisited.  When you can't use vampires, ghouls, ghosts, mummies or zombies, your subsequent undead book has to focus on more esoteric and more D&Diana-themed monsters... which detracts significantly from their iconic and classic nature, in my (n)ever-so-humble opinion.  So, Undead Revisited had a few real classics left to do: wights (familiar to almost all fantasy readers thanks to the grisly inhabitants of the Barrow-downs who captured Frodo and Co.) and liches, the iconic undead master.  After that, they had to go with much more esoteric monsters, like dracoliches (renamed raveners), allips, banshees, dreadknights (renamed graveknights), nightshades, mohrgs and devourers.  And frankly, although they made a good attempt here, it felt on occasion like scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to classic undead.

Given how lightly touched the subjects have been in all the prior Revisited series, I think a nice idea would have been to go back to a few of the classics, especially the vampire, and really bulked it up even more with some more radical variants or something.  But, oh well.  I don't exactly dislike Undead Revisited, I just felt like it was a subject that had been seriously handicapped by the well-done earlier book in the series already taking the best choices out of play before this one even had a chance to get started.

I continue to mostly like the Pathfinder Campaign Setting series (formerly the Pathfinder Chronicles series) and am looking forward to a number of upcoming titles, although as some of my reviews of the series also show, I've decided to look before I buy, and only look at the titles that sound really up my alley.  For upcoming releases, I've got my eye so far on Lands of the Linnorm Kings (i.e., the "viking" sourcebook), Horsemen of the Apocalypse (the third of three fiend-centric books, and the most likely to be truly innovative and new of the three), Dragon Empires Gazeteer (the sourcebook for the Pathfinder Orient), possibly Mythological Monsters, although I'll be taking a really close look at that before I buy, Distant Worlds, the Sword & Planet sourcebook for the rest of the Pathfinder solar system, Isles of the Shackles, the Pathfinder pirate-themed area sourcebook, and Lost Kingdoms, a sourcebook on half a dozen long-lost ancient empires (and presumably whatever legacy they've left behind.)

Not a bad line-up at all, and frankly, most of what they've got on the schedule has at least piqued some interest from me.  Kudos once again to the intrepid Paizonians for some stellar setting development work.

The City of Terrasa

While Terrasa itself is larger than just the city of the same name, clearly the City of Terrasa is the most important in the region, if not in the entire Mezzovian Sea area.  Terrasa is firmly in the homeland of the Terrasan nationality, and even widely scattered and culturally divergent people like the far northeastern settlers of "North Qizmir" recognize Terrasa as a home of sorts.  Even if their ancestors came from the region hundreds of years earlier and they haven't set foot near it since, and their language has drifted to the point where they can no longer understand spoken, standard Terrasan, and their political loyalties lie more with Qizmir, all of which are true of the North Qizmiri common folk.  Terrasa is seen as the center of Mezzovian culture, and pilgrims, supplicants, and even just plain tourists pass through it in great numbers every year, to marvel at its architecture and splendor, to view the site where so many famous events of the past happened, or to meet with important secular, commercial or religious figures who make Terrasa their home.  Terrasa sometimes claims, and not without merit, to be the City at the Center of the World.

Terrasa is a sea-side port, located at the eastern end of the Tolosa Bay.  Although it slopes down to the sea, most of the city itself is built on higher ground, for the ground slopes sharply to a bluff, where the palace and the city proper is located.  It is surrounded by tamed and cultivated farmlands, olive orchards and cornfields, mostly, although hay, alfalfa, beans and even rice are grown not far from Terrasa itself, and many agricultural satellite communities, like Sènt-Gaudenç, Cambrils, Malgrat da Mare, Os Molins, and Sorollera fall under Terrasa's orbit, and provide crops, beef, mutton and more.  And of course, there is a large fishing industry throughout the area, and a vast fleet of fishing, crabbing, shrimping and other boats set out from Terrasa's harbor every day.

More livestock, as well as game, lumber, furs and other goods come from the Romeu Mountains which march almost directly southwards from Terrasa, as well as from the lodgepole pine and cedar woods of the Follà Forest to the southeast.  To the east, the land drops precipitously into the Coloma Swamp, a mangrove salt water swamp that gradually fades into fresh water marshlands.  The swamp is also inhabitated, but the Terrasan's have little to do with the swampies, and prefer not to see them or think about them too much.

The Tolosa Islands are also a contination of the Romeu Mountains, only this time with their feet underwater.  Terrasa's location is at the pivot point of the Tolosa Bay and the Chistau Sea, with easy access to most of the Mezzovian waters as well.

Despite its prosperous overlay, Terrasa conceals a darker reality, though--the Empire is weak and ineffective.  The King of Terrasa, as well as the King, Count, Duke or other titled head of most of the other states within the Empire is His Majesty Esteve Gregorio de Galdames de Rossolló.  He is a weak king, consumed with personal pursuits and indifferent to his role as leader.  Corruption, intrigue, and occasionally outright and only semi-clandestine warfare between various nobles and other interests is the order of the day in Terrasa.  Various powers shift for influence, and many feel that the Empire itself is up for grabs.  And for the most part, they appear to be correct; His Majesty seems unable or uninterested in stopping these naked power grabs, even when he is aware of them, commenting dryly that the strong always seem to prosper; why fight that natural law?

In addition to those seeking to grab power within the empire are those who harbor separatist and nationalist loyalties, those who seek to further the influence of other nations entirely, terrorists, organized crime, and more.  The climate between Terrasan and Qizmiri agents more and more starts to feel like a cordial cold war, and one of the few tasks that Qizmir demands of its independent minded tributary Sarabasca is that it recruit potential spies of Terrasan ancestry but impeccable Qizmiri loyalty to serve in Terrasa itself.  Rivals from further afield, including the scattered states of the former Baal Hamazi empire and Kurushat also make sure to keep a strong presence within Terrasa.

And there's an even darker underbelly yet; Terrasa is also known informally--at least in some circles--as the daemonologist capital of the world.  While past kings have founded Inquisitions and witch-hunting organizations, currently those are weak too, caught up in power struggles and otherwise distracted from their tasks.  Daemonologists, witches, occult and forbidden lore--they are not hard to find amongst those who seek them in Terrasa.  Many of these foment in the slums of Bricktown, a neighborhood where the narrow streets between buildings have been built over with roofs, making the entire area into a de facto gigantic tenement building.  Entire generations of poverty-striken criminals, beggers, or menials live and die their entire lives without seeing the sun.  The Watch rarely goes into Bricktown, where life is as cheap as it can be in the Mezzovian region.  As well as being the haunt of criminals and gangs, necromancers, witchs, daemonologists and other illegal occultists, rumors fly fast and furious about a number of supernatural predators who live in Bricktown (although who occasionally leave it on dark nights to haunt the rest of the town too): vampires, specters, cannibal cults and more.

Wise travelers and the experienced visitor to Terrasa will tell those who ask to keep your head down in Terrasa; watch out for dark, shadowy alleys and neighborhoods, stick to the well-beaten path, do your business quickly and don't linger where you shouldn't.

Reading bogs down...

I took inventory again of my current state of books that I own but have not yet read.  I had sixty-five.  SIXTY-FIVE!  Not only am I not making progress, but I'm falling further behind.

I dropped a few library books I had on my On Deck section, because I just wasn't making progress and I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by my collection of unread books.  Granted, I count books that I have read before but subsequently bought.  There's maybe as many as twenty of those.  That still leaves me with a LOT to read.

So my Splinter Cell novel: stopped.  My Monster Hunter International novel.  Turned back in.  I did read Dead Iron and it was OK.  I quit on the Eddie LaCrosse novels.  Time to get back to basics, finish Eisenhorn, read a few gaming books, and then jump into the rest of my unread novels and short story collections.

The Terrasan "Empire"

The Terrasan Empire is the most important polity to feature in a majority of any action that takes place in the DARK•HERITAGE setting.  However, I haven't really explained much about it yet, have I?  It's a kind of shadowy entity that hovers just out of sight while I explore regionally a bit more in depth, or talk about other polities on the fringe of the Terrasan orbit, such as Kurushat, Baal Hamazi, Qizmir or others.  It's probably time to rectify that a bit.  Before diving into the content proper, how about a little context and meta background?  OK.

When I first envisioned the Terrasan Empire, when it was part of a different setting called--unimaginatively--first Dark DnD and the later--more tongue in cheek--Leng Calling, I saw it as similar to the late Roman Empire.  A formerly powerful empire that was fading to decadence and impotency, but which still had some life left in it yet.  I transcribed that notion as is to DARK•HERITAGE when I first brought it over, but have since re-envisioned the empire as an altogether different type of thing.  I now see it as similar to the so-called Aragonese Empire, more properly called the Crown of Aragon.  The Crown of Aragon was never a proper Empire.  It started, of course, as the modest Frankish kingdom of Aragon, and as it expanded due to warfare with the taifa states as well as its rivals and to dynastic union, it grew to encompass the Kingdom of Barcelona (including the county of Provence) then later Valencia and Majorca.  This large coastline as well as an eastward looking Mediterranean outlook eventually brought, at various times, the rest of the Balearic Islands, Malta, Sardinia, Sicily, briefly Corsica, Naples (which at the time really meant the lower two-thirds of the Italian boot) and the duchy of Athens, which included large portions of the northeastern Grecian coastline.

However, for the most part, these various polities were only united in the person of the King of Aragon, who also simultaneously held the titles of Count of Barcelona, King of Sardinia, King of Majorca, etc.  They were never united into a single polity with a single administration and a united national front; rather they were separate countries who just happened to be ruled at the same time by the same single person.  And my new version of the Terrasan Empire is more like this Crown of Aragon; Esteve Gregorio de Galdames de Rossolló is the King of Terrasa, as well as being the King of Alcàsser and Segrià, the Duke of Razina, the Tolosas, Posada and Feronia, and the Count of Iclezza.  The King of Sènt-Haspar is a sworn vassal of the King of Terrasa, which brings him into the orbit as well.

This means that the politics of the Terrasan Empire are a bit byzantine and bizarre, especially as King Esteve is not a strong or particularly engaged king, being more concerned with the pursuit of his mistresses and his sports, the Empire is run by competing nobles, royals, and bureaucrats.  Each individual state within the Empire has more autonomy than at any time in the past--a development that worries those who support a strong empire--fears of total dissolution and break-up are both commonly voiced and not without merit.

Culture and language across the empire is also not consistent.  Many of the regional polities have their own culture, their own governmental traditions, their own religious persuasions, and more.  Perhaps more importantly as an impediment to unification, they have their own languages, although it is a matter of public policy to refer to all of them as regional dialects of the Terrasan language rather than to recognize the true level of diversity.  In the real world, before the advent of strong, nationalist states and mass-produced media, linguistic diversity was very strong in Europe, and even now, several generations after the advent of those features, there are a lot of minority languages floating around out there.

For simplicity's sake, I've consolidated the dialects of the Terrasan Empire into three big name lists, and I represent them with a mix of Portuguese and Catalan on for the southern shore, Italian for the northern shore and Romanian for the more easterly dialects.  In reality, a number of other more or less closely related languages should be in there two--the southern languages should be represented by a good dozen or so languages like Leonese, Portuguese, Catalan, Aragonese, Asturian, Occitan and others, the northern shore by another dozen or so languages like Sardinian, Sicilian, Piedmontese, Venetian, Corsican, etc. and the eastern dialects should show similar diversity.  Of course, in reality, it's hard enough for people wanting to find names and phrases from a region to deal with the simplified version as it is; making it as complex as verisimilitude demands it to be would be impossibly difficult.

Despite these vast differences, most of the peoples of the Terrasan Empire have a cultural link, being descended from settlers, soldiers, conquistadores or merchants who set out from Terrasa in the distant past.  While they may not have necessarily seen this expansion as a nationalist pursuit, pan-Terrasan patriotism is a jingoistic sentiment that some have attempted to cultivate and exploit amongst the constituents.  Of course, this is a dual-edged sword--some of the peoples of the Empire are not descended from that cultural and linguistic group, and strong separatist Balshatoi sentiment is a major concern in the north, and in some parts of the east, the people identify almost as much with Qizmir as with Terrasa.  Other expatriate ethnic groups within the borders of the empire also view some of these developments with trepidation.

Because of cultural and economic links, all of the Terrasan "countries" have always maintained strong political and economic ties, and intermarriage of their royal houses--which led to the state of dynastic union that exists today--had always been common.  Despite this, nationalist sentiment with the various "Terrasan" nationalities is still strong as well and demonstrations, riots, coup attempts and other civil unrest is not terribly uncommon, especially when the tax-men come around, or when Imperial soldiers start bullying the locals.  As Terrasa's strength has waned and faded, parts of the empire have either quietly gone their own way, like Calça, or been quietly influenced in the direction of a rival, as Sarabasca and a vast (and mostly unpopulated) stretch of backcountry gradually became Qizmiri, or even like Porto Liure, where an revolutionary city-state was able to force Terrasa to a military stand-off and negotiate its autonomy and independence forever.

Next DARK•HERITAGE specific post: details of the city of Terrasa itself.

Dark fantasy defined

While I don't think it's meant to be definitive or exclusive, a writer of novels called "dark fantasy" by most has taken a stab at defining what the subgenre means. It's not exactly how I would define it, but it's an interesting discussion nonetheless. Check it out!

Warhammer Undead

Although I've never really embraced the hobby, I've always been fascinated by the Games Workshop idea, and the collecting of, painting of, and playing with armies in the Warhammer and Warhammer 40k settings. The Warhammer setting is an interesting one. I've heard it described (and I'm paraphrasing) as a setting that you think is D&D, but it turns out is actually Call of Cthulhu in fantasy drag. I've been following it as a fringe member of the fanbase for many years--since at least 1994 when I started collecting a run of White Dwarfs. Although at the time, the setting was more tongue in cheek parody with cartoonish and clownishly colorful and often silly art and miniatures, the background flavor text from the darker days of the 1980s was still sufficiently evident that I could see the potential in it. That dark fantasy was naturally right up my alley, and the overt Cthulhuisms spread throughout the setting (especially the fantasy setting, but it's true for both) were kind of exciting in their new milieu. From this inauspicious--yet curiously sufficient to hook me--beginning, Games Workshop has since almost completely restored my faith in the system, the setting and everything else. The art is now very dark and evocative, since hiring artists like Adrian Smith as one of their primary stylistic leaders, revamping almost their entire miniatures line--several times, actually--and improving the look of the sculpts not only from a technical aspect but also from an artistic and stylistic perspective as well, and focusing much more on the playing the setting(s) straight rather than using them as a dumping ground for pop culture references and lame puns. I've reviewed a bit of their more recent fiction here, and I've had Eisenhorn on my reading list all summer (although sadly, my progress through it has been fairly slow as I've been distracted by a lot of other things.) I had, however, other than this fiction, dropped out of Games Workshop mainstreamiana for a variety of reasons, and considered that a past hobby that never really was, something that I was over and done with. But, for a variety of reasons, that may not be completely true, and I went out and bought 4-5 current White Dwarfs, looked over the online catalogs a lot, and even called my younger brother, who was much more invested in the hobby, and chatted with him about it for an hour or so the other night. What changed? First off, my oldest son expressed a lot of interest in acquiring some miniatures. He wasn't necessarily interested in playing Warhammer or 40k (in fact, I think he's feeling motivated to try and make up his own game rules for the minis, believe it or not) but he loves the minis and wants to have a few. Secondly, the final volume of the Nagash trilogy by Mike Lee just came out. I've had the first two since--heck, since they were new--but I haven't read them yet, because I didn't want to start and then be left hanging. Since the final volume just came out, and I just ordered it, and it should be arriving at my house within a few days, I'll be all set to put it on the docket of my reading list, cutting to near the front of the line most likely. And thirdly, after picking up the White Dwarfs--nominally for my son, but realistically I'm the one who's much more likely to read them all the way through, and when we're "done" I'm going to keep them--I was extremely impressed with the fantastic look of the newest miniatures. And fourthly, I heard rumors that Blood Bowl, the best game Games Workshop ever produced, will be re-released. Probably not in the gloriously fun and somewhat wacky state that it was shorty after the Third Edition release, but in the more "favoring the Chess-player hyper competitive mode of the Living Rulebook as its evolved in more recent years. Anyway, that's just a rumor anyway. As luck would have it, of the White Dwarfs I picked up, two of them focused on Undead. Back in the day, in my 1994 White Dwarfs, the Undead was a single army in Warhammer with no obvious counterpart on 40k. More recently, 40k got the Necrons and the old Undead army was split into the Vampire Counts and the Tomb Kings. Sadly, in my opinion, most of the "cool" stuff went to the Counts, and the Kings were left with nothing but a bunch of skeletons, skeletons with slightly more armor, skeletons on skeletal horses and skeletal chariots. In other words, they were a rather boring army. Now, two hundred issues after my first foray into the Undead, the Tomb Kings and the Vampire Counts have both been revitalized with a slew of new miniatures, including big honkin' monsters, and a lot of cool and new variety for the Kings. Now with colossal animated statues in an ancient Egyptian ouvre, strange snakelike constructs and more, the Tomb Kings have gone from being about the most drab and boring of the armies out there to one of the most vibrant and exciting. I've attached a picture of one of their Necrosphinx, a huge new monster that's basically an animated statue of sorts, but which is scary beyond all reason as a monster concept. The Vampire Counts got a new Vampire Lord on a zombie dragon that looks incredible too. In addition to that, the kit allows you to build a terrorgheist, which is probably my favorite new miniature at the moment. I'll let you GIS that one yourselves. Why do I post this? I dunno. I've long had a love for the undead. They are about as iconic in supernatural horror literature as you can possibly get. And I like to see them treated with some respect for tradition, yet with some new takes that make them fresh and exciting, and mostly I like to see them treated as object of horror and fear, not of kitsch or romanticism, as our society is fairly keen to do in pop-art these days. In addition, you may have noted that my "On Deck" shows two new Pathfinder setting supplements that deal with horror themes; the Ustalav book and the Undead Revisited book. We'll see how they go.

A few more trip pictures

Ah, what the heck. Here's a few more trip pictures. Again, ones without any people in them. Just scenery.


That's the view from the visitor's center at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, right off the interstate. We actually didn't explore that park much because we got there late in the afternoon. We poked around the visitor's center and the cool view area and then hit the road again.


That is over the cliff near Delicate Arch in Arches. I took pictures of the arch itself too, but I've got someone in all of those pictures. Plus, finding pictures of Delicate Arch online can't possibly be difficult.


Lake MacDonald in Glacier, from our hotel landing/balcony.


Back at Arches again; after you've taken the Park Avenue hike, this is the view out in the valley.

Trip report

Here's a link to the pictures of my trip on Facebook. I decided to quit trying to do the trip report posts and do this instead.

We had three cameras in action. My poor daughter's camera put out the worst pictures, but sometimes she got shots that the rest of us didn't, so I uploaded some of hers.

Here's a sample; one of the pictures without anyone in it, of the gallows at Bannack, MT that I mentioned in one of my trip report posts.

Dark•Heritage: d20 Modern rules

Well, after deciding that I wasn't going to do it, I've gone and changed my mind again and decided to finish updating this site--which is the complete d20 Modern houserules document that makes it so a lot of flipping back and forth between books, rules and printouts is not necessary. In fact, assuming an at least basic familiarity with the concept of creating and running characters in a d20 game, you shouldn't need any additional rules on hand at all really; the document is a full service stop.

Or rather; it will be. I need to do three significant sections still; Skills and Feats, Advanced and Prestige classes, and Equipment. I despaired on that front earlier because those were going to be literally the biggest sections and the biggest pains to do. But I'm feeling motivated at the moment, so I'm going to see if I can continue to make progress.

In honor of this new motivation, I've changed out my banner and adjusted my colors just a bit, to make them "harmonious" with that link. I'll probably keep them as such for some time.

Also; just found this d20 Modern houserule suggestion for the Defense bonus. Apparently, it's supposed to work better than the Unearthed Arcana version. That's probably true; the UA version had a few odd implications if you tried to game the system as written.

Steampunk in Dark•Heritage

While I'm not exactly a fan of the steampunk movement, certain elements of it have percolated into DARK•HERITAGE and left an important mark on the setting as it's developed. Before I describe this at any length, let me first define what I mean by steampunk, because I think that's a bit of a nebulous term that means different things to different people.

Steampunk was coined in the 1980s and became more well-known during the 1990s as a somewhat flippant riff on the term cyberpunk. In many ways, it's just an aesthetic, not a genre per se. Even the earliest steampunk didn't necessarily have any genre conventions; it just had a lot of references to steam and clockwork powered technology; a kind of runaway Victorian era, if you will. As steampunk has matured and evolved into this decade, that's if anything, been an even stronger focus on the movement; it's more about a sense of style, a look, an aesthetic, than it is about anything else. There's not a "steampunk worldview" or conventions of a "steampunk story" that need to be met other than an application of the aesthetic. Heck, Disney did a line of steampunk pins that illustrated this concept more than anything else; putting a mechanical monocle on Pete was nothing if not pure aesthetic overlay.

Me, however, see, I like to use steampunk as a label that's closer to its roots in cyberpunk. It's not just steam-; I also need to have a hefty dose of -punk. So to me, urbanization, dystopian societies with all kinds of social ills--a kind of exaggerated Dickensian London approach--are as important as anything else to be steampunk, not just wearing tophats and goggles. I also shy away from a pure Victoriana approach, mostly because I like fantasy that takes place in the so-called "secondary world"--an author-created world, not the real world that's been "fantasied-up." There's no Victoriana, because there's no Queen Victoria because there's no Great Britain at all.

That said, I backed off from some of my earlier approaches, where the steampunk aesthetic was fairly prominant to one in which it's fairly low-key. Rather than run-away crazy steampunk inventions, I only have a handful of clockwork and steam-powered devices, and rather than letting my stories and games and settings really hinge on them, they just provide some background and color here and there.

One way in which I've done this is to suppose that urban areas--some of them, at least--are known for having clockwork "bugs" that crawl around on the walls and streets and rooftops, taking messages from one place to another before needing to be wound up again. They don't speak; you can just fold up a parchment message, put it in a small container in the bugs chassis, and then let it go. Because these bugs are large enough to resist tampering by birds, cats, or other wildlife, yet which crawl around in areas where other people cannot easily intercept them, it is seen as a fairly secure way to send message across town without having to go in person.

Reading again

Well, I ended up finishing The Tomb of Hercules after all. Curiously, the eponymous tomb really isn't very important to the plot, nor does the search for, preoccupation with, or even the thought or mention of it make much of an appearance in the book.

Not great, by any means. Not bad. I think Hunt for Atlantis was better, even though McDermott clearly was trying to do more to develop his characters. Or, at least the two main characters, Eddie and Nina. I feel like he felt he needed to write another book but wasn't quite sure what to write about, so Tomb feels a little like a cobbled together not quite story.

My earlier almost ditching of the book wasn't really because it was bad--although clearly it also wasn't exactly good either--but was more related to the pressure I felt to read some of the other stuff in my queue. But, I persevered, finished and will (maybe) someday read the next book in the series, which if the title is any guide, has to do with the search for Excalibur (the title is The Secret of Excalibur. Not really a mystery there.)

Curiously, Excalibur and Arthurian legendry in general informs the other book I recently read--which I blasted through easily just today, but which, granted, is a bit shorter at about 350 pages. That book is Dark Jenny, which is an interesting and unusual hybrid; noir/hardboiled detective and a fantasy milieu that is very obviously borrowed from Arthuriana, but made a bit more noirish and tawdry, and with the names changed up just for good measure.

I very much enjoyed it. Alex Bledsoe (the author) clearly has a handle on the hardboiled voice. Curiously, for the fun of it, I poked around a bit and read some reviews online. For fantasy fans who read it, that was usually what they struggled with the most. "Anachronisms" (a ridiculous accusation in a fantasy setting, actually, but that's neither here nor there) "modern" names (that actually date from Medieval Saxon and Celtic extraction mostly, but readers often forget that) and a wry, cynical Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe voice from the main character (the book is written in first person) and a dark, unflinching look at the Arthurian milieu that would make even Bernard Cornwell cringe. The complaints from the online reviews reveal, in my opinion, an unfamiliarity with the conventions of noir fiction and a complete missing of the point, which just illustrates the point that I've made before that fantasy fans tend to be too insular and provincial in their tastes and need to "get out more" read some other genres a bit, and broaden their horizons.

I think at the end, Bledsoe wasn't quite sure how to end the novel, and it feels occasionally like it just stops on a slightly unsatisfying note. But be that as it may, the novel was very fun to read, and I blasted through it at a furious clip, surprising even myself to knock it out before the kids went to bed... on a workday no less. Highly recommended.

It's technically the third in a series, but each book is (apparently) standalone. I never once felt like I was missing anything by not having read the first two yet. I do, however, have the first two already checked out from the library, and they'll soon hit my On Deck list too.

Fantasy and Science Fiction in the marketplace

I just stumbled across this article, which was the cover story for the Library Journal recently, purporting to examine the trends in the science fiction marketplace--and by science fiction, I mean it as it's usually meant in bookstores and libraries; i.e science fiction and fantasy lumped together. I certainly recommend reading the entire thing; it's not that long (I printed it and took it to the john; it was about six pages printed, once I cut off the extaneous stuff at the end.) Curiously, or perhaps not, I can see many of these trends as part of a subcultural zeitgeist, if you will. They seem familiar and unsurprising to me, because in many ways, I'm personally undergoing some of those same trends.

• Epic fantasy is still really big, but it's a post-Tolkien age epic fantasy; grittier, darker, more "realistic", more pessimistic, and often pervaded with anti-heroes. The success of writers like George R. R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie, Steven Erikson and others should have made this one unsurprising; and it's probably been true for years anyway.


• Fantasy markets are not exactly moving away from the traditional eurocentric model, but other models are gaining ground, including a pseudo Arabian Nights vibe. I've blogged before about my love of this particular vibe; but again, it's not new, it's a resurgance of a very old trend. Heck; the very first modern fantasy; the sword & sorcery of guys like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, etc. were heavily influenced by the Arabian Night. Some of the novels highlighted in the article are, however, even more overtly "arabocentric."


• "Male urban fantasy" is selling like hotcakes and growing like kudzu. As a big fan of Jim Butcher, I don't find this surprising, but again, apparently the author kinda does. Considering that urban fantasy seems to have started as "romance novels for goth girls" and evolved slowly from there, maybe this is a bigger deal than it seems to me to publishers and the like. Butcher's work, and those like him, are very solidly divorced from the romance angle and targeting an entirely new market than stuff like, oh, say, the Twilight Saga or Anita Blake have done.


• Zombie kitsch, such as Pride & Prejudice & Zombies turns out to have possibly been kinda faddish, but other zombie related fiction continues to be a reasonably big element of the market, and is expected to grow, especially with the World War Z movie with Brad Pitt coming out next year.


• Steampunk continues to be important, but also continues to be more of an aesthetic overlay rather than a true "subgenre" of it's own. Lots of authors are dipping their toes into the water, including superstar Brandon Sanderson, but again--by applying it as an overlay to the subgenre that they already write in, mostly.


• Science Fiction itself struggles; in need of a renaissance. The genre is increasingly turning grim and political-minded, which means that it's not attracting the same kinds of audiences that thrilled to Star Wars when they were kids and still want exciting space-based adventure. Hard SF, on the other hand, continues to trundle onward, and possibly even grow a bit. A Tor editor noted that fantasy outsells SF 2-1, but fantasy submissions outpace SF 4 or 5-1. Is that good news or bad news? Maybe good if you're a SF author looking to break into the market; less competition and easier to differentiate yourself; but bad news if you really want to tap into the big markets--those guys prefer reading fantasy. Lots of attempts to do something new with SF seem to be on the horizon, but whether any of them will be more than minor hits is perhaps somewhat dubious.

Reading list

I'm about to drop three books off my reading list. Two of them, because I finished them. One of them because I don't think I want to.

Curiously, the two I finished were both non-fiction. Iron Kingdom, a nearly 700 page massive history of Prussia, was a fascinating read. It really explodes the inanely simplistic, yet surprisingly common notion that the only legacy of Prussia was a culture of militarism and servility. In fact, although the Nazis appealed to that myth and tried to cast themselves as the heirs of that legacy, that was just propaganda--they bore very little if any real resemblance to traditional Prussian culture (in fact, the perpetrators of the "Operation Valkyrie" plot to kill Hitler more honestly deserve that label--and Claus von Stauffenberg was descended from an old Prussian Field Marshal on his mother's side.)

And let's not forget that not everything about the Nazis was terrible. Indeed, if it was, there would be no explanation for the phenomenal success the Nazis had in the court of public opinion in Germany other than to assume that the Germans were a fundamentally evil people. The Nazis were masters of propaganda; they managed to coopt a lot of virtues and drive those home to the German people over and over again, while meanwhile glossing over many of their true intentions.

No, the legacy of Prussia is, unfortunately, a sad thing. If only William II hadn't been a completely incompetent king, the worst in Prussia's 400 year history, we might have had a very different memory of Prussia today than we do now.

The second non-fiction book I read was Left Turn by Tim Groseclose. While this didn't surprise me in any way--I had intuitively already understood exactly what he was talking about and believed it anyway--it's nice to see a scholarly treatment on the subject of media bias, and one that quantifies it (and its effects on elections!) in a way that has not been seriously challenged. True, it's been beaten back and forth by liberal bloggers, book reviewers, and others, but the seminal paper Groseclose wrote, the center of his research, which was published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics remains unchallenged on its methods, models and results after more than five years, despite the fact that its professional audience is one that has every reason to refute it if they could. Why is this? Because they can't. The methods, model and conclusions are irrefutable, and most political science professors, as much as they might wish the conclusions were not true, can find no fault with them. Only those who don't understand the methods, model and conclusions, but which clearly don't like them, lead the charge in uninformed criticism.

This, along with the documentary Media Malpractice, which I watched a few months ago, are among the most important things I've read/watched this year. True, like I said, I already intuitively believed what they were quantifying. But it's one thing to perceive something and its another to see it proven. Every American should read this book (and then also watch that documentary) and then regardless of which side of the political aisle you find yourself, you should be outraged at the serious disservice that the American media has done to the American public. In most professions, that level of disservice; whether consciously done in pursuit of an agenda, or unconsciously done due to incompetence, would mean you were out of work. In the legal profession, an attorney can be disbarred. In the medical profession, doctors can lose their licenses and be sued for malpractice. Only journalists are patted on the back and congratulated by their collegues and editors for whatever it is that they think that they're doing.

And finally, I've been reading Andy McDermott's Tomb of Hercules. While I earlier spoke fondly of the first book in this series, The Hunt for Atlantis, I'm struggling a bit more with the second. Part of it may be the timing; I feel like I need to rush through it, and I've got a lot of stuff that's time sensitive on my docket; either because I got it through Interlibrary Loan, so I have to read it before it's due, or I got it as New Books from the library, where I'm limited in my ability to renew stuff that I haven't finished. I've read a little over half of the book, but I set it aside while reading both of the non-fiction books that I just described. And just last night, I kinda paged ahead and looked at the end of the book. The plot is a bit too much of a retread of the first; the entire book feels like deja vu in too many ways, and it's just not grabbing me.

That said, I feel reluctant to give up on it so late into it; if I could just get about three solid, uninterrupted hours and the motivation to do so, I could probably finish the last 200 pages or so that I have to read. But honestly, my problem is as much motivation as anything else.

I haven't completely made up my mind yet, but I'll probably abandon Tomb of Hercules and turn to some of the other stuff on my docket. I just added an "On Deck" set of books, but I realized that one of the books I have, Dark Jenny, is the third in a series. Granted, they're all stand-alones, but still, it bothers me to read the third book in a series first. So last night, on a trip to the library to pick up the second part of Timothy Zahn's post-Return of the Jedi novel for my 9-year old son, I also grabbed books one and two of the Eddie LaCrosse series, and I brought the first one in to work with me today (along with Tomb of Hercules) so that I can decide which fo the two I really want to read when I get a chance to take a break later today.

Big cartridges

It occured to me that if I'm going to have this wild and wooly North American Pleistocene megafauna, that folks who wander the wilderness may need to have very high caliber rifles to stop charging bison bulls, or elephants or other big, mean animals that can take half a dozen "lesser" bullets and keep on moving. Elephant guns, as they're called. I didn't really give much thought to what it would be like to fire an elephant gun, though.

Here's a few youtube clips of some guys in a range firing the .577 Tyrannosaur cartridge. 220 lbs of recoil force. Holy smokes.

Panthera atrox

I've said for a long time that I have a North American Pleistocene megafauna as my baseline megafauna in DARK•HERITAGE. What does that mean exactly? Today, Africa is the only continent with a really robust and diverse megafauna. We think today that Africa has a lot of really exotic and cool big land animals. Of course, a few thousand years ago, before the Quaternary Extinction event (or perhaps protracted Holocene extinction event; I'm not necessarily convinced that 11,000-10,000 years ago was such a hard stop for all of these animals) all of the continents (except Antarctica) had equally large, sometimes exotic and cool large land animals all over them. Perhaps interacting with prehistorical peoples like the so-called Clovis peoples in North America.

One of the most notable characters to cross the stage of North America during the Pleistocene was the so-called American lion. For many, many years (although curiously, not when it was first described) the American lion was considered to be an actual true lion, Panthera leo atrox. A somewhat recently published paper called this into question.

See, all the extant pantherines (members of the genus Panthera and their closest relatives within the Pantherinae subfamily are very closely related and fairly recently separated from each other. It's very difficult to establish the relationship between just the four that are living today; fitting in extinct populations is even more difficult. It's generally believed that the tiger was the first to split off from the lineage that lead to the rest of them, then the jaguar, and the lion and leopard split from each other last. The morphological study that I'm referring to, by Per Christiansen and John Harris, suggest that the American lion is actually not a lion at all, and is most closely related to the jaguar--although not to suggest that it is a jaguar; just that it's more closely related to that animal than to other pantherines (as the modern lion is to the leopard, for instance.) This revives the notion that Panthera atrox is not a subspecies of Panthera leo but is in fact it's own animal, a separate type of cat unknown today, although similar morphologically to an extremely large lion or jaguar. Which of course are already similar to each other, just as all pantherine cats are very similar. From bones alone, it is very difficult to tell different types of pantherines from each other.

Of course, another study of mitochondrial DNA from both living and extinct populations of "lions" came to a different conclusion. Ross Barnett et al consider modern lions (of all populations), European cave lions, Berengian lions, and American lions to all be subspecies of Panthera leo. In their analysis, modern lions split from the other lineages at some time after becoming true lions, and did not mix since. This is a bit surprising, because their ranges would have bordered one another, if not in fact overlapped, but there it is. The European cave lion; the more recent version that is (Panthera leo spelaea as opposed to Panthera leo fossilis) shows remarkably little genetic diversity across it's entire range; from Portugal to the Yukon territory in Canada. In fact, it's believed that it probably underwent a genetic bottleneck, and a smaller subset of the population had to then re-establish the entire population. Of course, they actually leave off the question as to whether the American lion is a "lion" or something else; but curiously, if it is not, then neither is the European cave lion. According to their analysis, all three could be subspecies of Panthera leo or atrox could be a subspecies of a separate species Panthera spelaea or atrox could be it's own species, just most closely related to spelaea. Interesting indeed.

Panthera leo atrox, as they call it, on the other hand, shows signs of being genetically isolated from any other lion population for quite some time, despite bordering ranges with spelaea. They also come out as the closest to spelaea, indicating that atrox and spelaea came from the same population, which had no admixture with what eventually became modern lions, but separated and remained separated genetically for over 300,000 years. This is most surprising in that it completely does away with the idea that Panthera leo vereshchagini which is also called the Beringian cave lion, is a separate subspecies. But it also directly contradicts the idea that the American lion is not a true lion, and is in fact more closely related to the jaguar than to the modern lion, which in turn is more closely related to the leopard.

I've included an image that someone did of a Smilodon populator, the gigantic South American sabertooth who's just killed a peccary of some kind and is being confronted by an atrox; whether as a subspecies of lion or as its own pantherine species altogether, it would probably have looked very similar.  The two animals are considered to be the largest cats that ever lived with P. atrox a bit longer and S. populator heavier and more robust.

For my purposes, I'm going with the atrox as a separate species angle, just because, hey, I like to think the North America is special and we had our own endemic critters, not just immigrants from Beringia. American lions in DARK•HERITAGE have very faint rosettes, not unlike that of young lions, over a tawny coat. They are not heavily maned, but do have a thickening of the hair around the neck. And like jaguars (and leopards) they are often subject to melanism; the condition that causes leopards and jaguars to instead become "black panthers." Atrox does not form prides, but is more social than many other large cats, which are solitary. Atroxes often congregate in smaller family groups; a parent and cubs, along with subadults, and occasionally one of the parents siblings often hunt together. These groupings are more fluid than prides, and occasionally mature individuals will go their own way when they tire of the relationship, or wish to seek out their own mates or other group. This is based on the same imperative that drove African lions to form prides; on open grasslands, larger groups are more successful against the large packs of dire wolves, packs of saber-tooths, or bullying short-faced bears, to say nothing of the difficulty in hunting such large animals as the various species of bison.  But it's more accurately called a proto-pride rather than a true pride structure.

Atroxes in more forested regions tend to be more solitary, and have a social life not unlike that of the modern tiger.

New Ultimate Spiderman

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/new-ultimate-spider-man-brian-michael-bendis-110803.html

That's a link to an interview with Brian Michael Bendis. So, the secret's out. The new Ultimate Spider-man has been revealed. And... he's a kid nobody's ever heard of named Miles Morales.

I've gotta say, my interest has really plummeted. Who the heck is Miles Morales, and why should I care about him? See, that's why I liked Miguel O'Hara, and why apparently a lot of folks at Marvel did too. At least there was some tie to the legacy that is Spider-man, instead of just being this all new thing that you have to sell. Which, basically, retreads exactly the same things that Miguel O'Hara as the character would have. Possibly Bendis just has too much ego to do Miguel O'Hara; "No, I'm going to do basically the exact same things as Miguel, but it's going to be my character; an all new guy with an all new name. And because I'm such a rockstar, I'm not worried at all about people signing on."

Bendis is also either ridiculously stupid or ridiculously disingenious in the interview linked above. If you don't want people to think that this whole thing is just a PC Affirmative Action PR stunt, then don't make Miles Morales' ethnic background be the freakin' only thing that you're talking about! Isn't that pretty darn obvious? And Portland is a social Utopia? Please. I've been to Portland. It's a nice enough place, but that's just absurd.

Anyhoo, my interest in Ultimate Spiderman and the relaunch has pretty much completely plummeted through the floor. I'll give it a try... probably... a year or so from now when I can get the collected trade paperback from the library for free. But not before.

Marvel crossovers

Although I had lost interest in comic books (kinda) I got some lingering Interlibrary Loan books, and one of them at least prompted me to request some others. The book in particular I'm thinking of is Ultimate Power, a mini-series collected in trade paperback that takes place, mostly, in the Ultimate continuity. Written in equal parts by Brian Michael Bendis, one of the principal architects of the Ultimate Continuity (also known as Earth-1610), J. Michael Straczynski, most famous as creator of Babylon 5 but also writer of the "Supremeverse" (Earth-31916) which has the second take on the Squadron Supreme, and Jeph Loeb, famous for his work with Hulk, yet infamous as the author of The Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum, which "blew up" the Ultimate Universe in lots of ways.

One of the reasons Ultimate Power is really fascinating is that it almost links to the "regular" Marvel Universe, also known as Earth-616. It doesn't quite... but almost. Reed Richards sends some probes into the Negative Zone and from there to other dimensions. Next thing we know, Straczynski's version of the Squadron Supreme pops up to fight the Fantastic Four, and The Ultimates and the X-Men get involved as well.

A little background; the Squadron Supreme originally debuted in an old Avengers comic as an alternate universe's premier superhero team. They are quite obviously an ersatz Justice League, with transparent analogs of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, etc. The universe they come from is Earth-712. When the Squadron Supreme was rebooted, it was the darker, MAX comics line, and the characters were redesigned and rebooted in a way not too unlike the correspondances between the Ultimate Universe and the regular Marvel Universe. So, since the Avengers have a fight with the original Squadron Supreme back in the day, it makes sense that the much darker Ultimates would have a fight with the much darker rebooted Squadron Supreme here, in a correspondance/retelling of that original story.

Where it gets even more interesting, however, is that the Scarlet Witch uses her reality altering powers to pull the original Squadron Supreme in to join the fight. These guys, not expectedly, mistake the Ultimates for the Avengers, which they had met previously, and we have... almost... a connection between the Ultimate Universe and the regular Marvel Universe.

Anyway, the Squadron Supreme stuff is what I'd like to read still, and which I've now requested from Interlibrary Loan. Again; one of the interesting things about it is that it's a dark take on the Justice League, really. Marvel created at least three different ersatz Justice Leagues that I know of--including the Squadron Supreme, the Imperial Guard, and one in the Marvel Zombies universe. There's probably more that I'm not aware of; and frankly, like I said, the Squadron Supreme comes in two completely different versions. Anyway, I'll probably talk a bit about the Squadron Supreme stuff when it arrives, because hey--I'm kinda interested in it right now.

Ultimate Power was pretty good. Bendis and Straczynski's stuff was good. The end of it, which was written by Loeb, seemed a bit confused; I'm not sure that I followed exactly what was happening all the time, or thought it was clearly written, and some of the characters seemed to suddenly pop up in the middle of nowhere with relationships that I didn't get (Kitty Pryde kinda flirting with Shape, for example.) Gary Frank, the artist, is also quite good--in fact, his style reminds me strongly of David Finch's artwork. Since Frank is the normal artist for the Squadron Supreme and Finch is the normal artist for the Ultimates, either of the two of them was a good choice that felt "at home" for either of them.

Dark•Heritage: Haşhaş

Haşhaş (the ş is a Qazmiri letter that is pronounced like a really thick, whistling S or sh sound), also rendered in Terrasan as hash-hash or hashash, is a plant native to the nation of al-Qazmir, but which grows well in the Golden Peninsula. More frequently, however, when a Terrasan uses the word hashash, he's referring to the drug that is made from the plant, which can be boiled as a bitter tea to induce mild hallucinations and euphoria, or other dissociative behavior, along with signs characteristic of drunkeness, such as slurred speech, and clumsy uncoordinated use of limbs. When dried and smoked in a pipe or hooka in suffucient dosages, the effects are much stronger.

Here, the drug causes, at a minimum, a severe dissociative "out of body" experience, hallucinations, suicidal or violent tendences and paranoia. Frequent users can develop severe mental illnesses, including persistant schizophrenic tendencies, violent or suicidal lingering behavior, severe dissociation with reality, and paranoia.

While most physicians and others understand this to be an effect of the chemistry of the dried and treated plant, there remain people, occultists and other fringe members of society, who believe that the drug is a conduit to an altered state where humanity can perceive reality as it truly is; seeing the spiritual as well as the physical at the same time. The paranoia and violent or suicidal tendencies, they explain, are caused by fear of spiritual entities and daemons which surround us at all times out of sight. Because hashash users are aware of these threats at all times, they say, the paranoid behavior is entirely understandable.

Most hashash is grown in al-Qazmir; either on the island itself, or on plantations and farms in the so-called "Golden Peninsula" immediately to the west of the island. The Golden Peninsula has been largely "Qazmirized" but still retains relicts here and there of the civilization that lived there before it, which was distantly related linguistically and culturally to the more westerly Terrasans. The Qazmiri government themselves, however, forbid the use of hashash. They are more tolerant of the growing of it, as long as the crop is shipped overseas. Hashash plants are also grown as ornamental plants in some places in al-Qazmir, although in such cases the harvesting of them is negligible to non-existant.

The Terrasans have also forbidden the trade of hashash, and attempted to stop or at least limit the degree to which it spreads through the empire, although state-sponsored trading of it to non-Terrasans is not unknown. As with the Qazmiri, the dangers of the drug are the reasons for the its restriction, but selling it to foreigners, or brokering trade from al-Qazmir to other nations (such as city-states from the Baal Hamazi lands, or Kurushat, or barbarians who don't form nation-level polities) is a perfectly acceptable way to bring revenue to the state and a weakness to potential enemies.

Because of this restriction of the legal use and trade in the drug amongst local potential users, hashash is most likely to be found in black markets, smuggled in from vessels that hail from Porto Liure or Sarabasca, or even sponsored by the sinister Union of the Snake. The trade in hashash has become inseparably connected to elements of crime, especially organized crime (although small-time smugglers are hardly unheard of still) in the major urban centers of Terrasa, al-Qazmir, and elsewhere.

Curiously, possessing, or even using hashash is not illegal or restricted in Terrasa, only the sale and transport of it, which is heavily regulated to keep the drug away from the citizens of the nation who is making the regulations. Because of that, some people, especially wealthy users, occasionally openly flaunt their use of it, at least in tea-form. Smoking hashash is still done privately, both because of the danger to the user (and others nearby) and because it is socially very frowned upon as openly flaunting the norms of society.