Analyzing GM Merit Badges

Well, although I've been out of the loop of RPG related message boards for several months now, an unrelated Google search brought me back to ENWorld, and I ended up browsing the front page.  On a whim, I posted the merit badges, since I couldn't see any evidence that they'd been posted already.  In fact, I made it a poll so I could generate some data for discussion.  Two things:

1) The first reply (and several subsequent ones) confirmed quickly that I'd made the right call in distancing myself from places like this.  Pedantic nitpicking, and--to use the phrase from the thread I posted--the compulsive, nerdy need to over-analyze the whimsical--not to mention a moderator's (no less) self-righteous and sadly not at all ironic smug pontification on the folly of calling them "merit badges" when they didn't have enough correspondences to the actual Scouting program of the same name very quickly reminded me of why I abandoned such banal discussions long ago.  I doubt I'll be looking to increase my involvement again anytime soon, based on this disappointing experience.

2) I know that this isn't a scientific poll, but there shouldn't be too many self-selection biases or endogeneity problems other than those which possibly plague ENWorld as a whole.  In any case, I'm not going to be submitting the poll findings to The Quarterly Journal of Economics or anything, so I'm not going to be too concerned about a strictly rigorous scientific study.  I'll talk about the results that I have so far, and speculate on them, and they are what they are, warts and all.

First off, with 42 votes over the last... oh, about 20 hours... I've got enough responses to be interesting, but I might update this yet in a few days when I have more.  Here's the raw numbers.  This includes the original 24 badges from the post, as well as the two additional ones that were added to the Cafe Press store.  Italics are my own response, which you can see both on the side of the blog and in the last post.

I found it interesting that the Interesting Story badge got such high numbers.  Suck it, sandbox fundamentalists!  Although that number as a percentage went down a fair bit with more votes, it's still by far the strongest single response.  Rule 0 was fairly high and By the Book very low, as was Likely character death.  This didn't seem to jive with my totally unscientific impression of the results looking at OSR blogs, where posting of these badges seems to have been most prevalent.  Of course, a lot of gamers would say that their impression of the OSR is that it's got a strong vibe of fundamentalism and fetishization of what the OSR crowd perceives (arguably) as the "old school" way of gaming--so, if they're (we're, honestly) right, then that's to be expected.  I suspect that this being posted somewhere like Dragonsfoot, where OSR fans are a much larger percentage of the posters, might get a different pattern of responses.

I was also... well, not exactly surprised, but disappointed nonetheless to see that Scary, PvP and Gonzo were all fairly low--although frankly, the number of folks who picked Disturbing was higher than I expected.

Most of the other results were either not surprising, or didn't turn out particularly interesting, with kinda middling numbers.

Anyway, like I said, I thought the results were interesting.  I might post an update after I get 100 responses, assuming that I get that high.  Or maybe even more, depending on how fast responses come in.  At the least, I'll note if anything makes a dynamic change after more results come in.

Tactics are an important part of my games.		21	50.00%
My games will tell an interesting story.		36	85.71%
My games will be scary.		11	26.19%
My game focuses on exploration and mystery.		27	64.29%
There will be player vs player combat allowed in my game.		11	26.19%
My games are safe and you don't need to worry about content or character death.		4	9.52%
I will mirror back player ideas that I think are interesting in game.		31	73.81%
My games use a pre-made map and pre-scripted content.		15	35.71%
The GM is in charge in my games and rule zero is in effect.		28	66.67%
My games rely on improvisation rather than pre-scripted content.		16	38.10%
My games are gonzo and can include lots of strangeness.		5	11.90%
Characters in my game are destined for greatness, not random death.		19	45.24%
I roll dice in the open and don't fudge results.		18	42.86%
My games include disturbing content.		13	30.95%
My games focus on interesting characters and drama.		21	50.00%
Player character death is likely in my games.		16	38.10%
I play by the book and rule zero is not used to alter existing rules.		7	16.67%
My games are more of a social fun "beer and pretzels" style game.		9	21.43%
My game is primarily non-combat in nature.		5	11.90%
Players in my game should be prepared to run when odds are stacked against them.		29	69.05%
My game has shared GMing responsibilty with one or more of the other players.		3	7.14%
I frequently tinker with the rules of the game.		22	52.38%
My game focuses on player skill rather than character abilities.		5	11.90%
My game is more enjoyable when I keep my GMing style unknown.		2	4.76%
My game focuses on espionage and politics.		13	30.95%
My games contain sexy content.		10	23.81%

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.